Chapter 6
MEDIA IN EVERYDAY LIFE- Visual culture has an interesting way of needing to include others into the processes of technologies.
- ex. going to the movie theaters - watching a film in a large room with other people
- the feeling of a misplaced cell phone - the loss of possible communication devices
- think about this in comparison to the past... How has this caused changed?
- How media forms have now changed our way of living
THE MASSES AND MASS MEDIA
- "the masses" - 19th century describes changes in society through industrialization and a large working class. This has influence of opinion and social practice
- Emile Durkhiem - the masses and crime
- collective evaluation and judgement of actions of people determining crimes
- the mass response shapes classification of laws, judgement, etc
- Media theory - masses was negative; people that are undifferentiated accepting and uncritical of media practices and messages from cooperations
- Modernity - the industrial of the urban environment. People becoming less inclined to interact with one another (family setting), their personal identity becomes the identity of the large company they work for
- People of members of mass society - changes the way the broadcast forms are viewed
- Monolithic mass culture - a result of television broad casts and the importance of the news paper to receive information
- Mass Media - used since the 1920's to describe medial forms that reach large audiences
- Primary forms; radio, network and cable TV, cinema, and press
- VISUAL IMAGES WERE PRIMARY SOURCE OF INFO
- The technology changes from 80's to the 00's have increased the many facets people can get their information from; altering the view of how people can consume information and shows that they are not a large group but smaller groups that have similar interests (people now seem to have say)
- Social impacts of this; literacy has changed. Originally the written word was a primary way of communication (showing only those with education could be privileged to know whats going on). Critics argue that radio and TV control this more by restricting authorship through production and consumerism
- Jean Baudrillard - cyberblitz (unpredictable media forms)
- Robert Rauschenberg - 1963 silkscreen and tension between imagery. Juxtaposition of imagery in one piece to create the tension and frame what Kennedy was doing to make his point ( Retroactive 1)
- Shepard Fairey - iconic image of Barack Obama was created with him in similar position to Kennedy in most of the imagery that was used for him. This becomes now a reference to the political party
MEDIA FORMS
- Medium - a means of mediation or communication - a neutral or intermediary form through which messages pass. Also refers to specific technologies through which the messages are transmitted
- Media - group of communications industries and technologies that together produce and spread public news, entertainment, and information. An extension of the body (a car)
- Marshall McLuhan - 1960's medium is any extension of ourselves through a technological form
- Not possible to separate info, messages, and meanings from the media technologies that convey them
- Thinking about watching a film at the movies and then watching the DVD at home
- Television - the medium of distraction
- Watching TV as a social activity that is in constant change depending on the viewer and the spaces it is located. Many people could participate in watching TV
- Judging the media based on the position the medium stands in relation to older and newer median and on cultural assumptions about reliability and whether a network or show is primarily oriented toward entertainment
- Perception of TV can be based on many cultural opinions and ideals and they affect how we see and judge the information as the viewer
- How reality TV has changed perception - what that is doing
- The change of information shift from monolithic to a more centralized form of understanding
BROADCAST, NARROWCAST, AND WEBCAST MEDIA
- Broadcast - one central source broadcasting a signal to many venues. Post WW2 era was a broadcast system
- Narrowcast - targeted audience via cable or other means. Heading into the 70's and 80's, community- based programing after 20 years of near absence; specialty cable channels
- Providing more networks isn't the same thing are more venues for different voices and opinions. There is the issue of stereotyping
- The addition of the internet turned into multidirectional communication and people are now "users" and not passive viewers
- ex. YouTube and the views a video that someone posted could accumulate
- This leads to people posting videos and large companies picking people up and hiring them to create something for their company
- Appropriated images are now common and are bending around laws
- Majority taste - your popularity or the popularity of the appropriated image can gain fame
- Developing programs for charity because of the web and media to help students learn in poorer area's have more access to knowledge/ media
THE HISTORY OF MASS MEDIA CRITIQUES
- Mass media grew with industrialization, caused growth in urban centers; causes theorists to state that identity becomes centralized through technology
- Mass media function as a tool of cultural imperialism with political ethos being advertised through the airwaves
- embrace and promote the political system through media system
- Mass broadcasting is born - same message across national boundaries
- Timothy Havens; market drives decisions about program choices to viewers globally
- John Fiske; pop culture and mass media changed the flower of information to make it more available for non-literate people.
- Ien Ang; the media will continue to lump people into mass groups of interests but they will not fully understand the identity of the person watching
- Robert McChesney; new technologies serve as powerful tool for propaganda
- the US had the television become a private device that people enjoyed in their homes
- Most other countries, at the intro of television, had TV only in public spheres to be viewed with others
- "Hypodermic needle": direct and immediate effect the media has on audiences
- Spectacle - an event or image that is particularly striking in the visual display to the point of inspiring awe in viewers
- spectacle as a metaphor for society - how we live is an ongoing spectacle
- "Cultural industry"is an entity that bot creates and caters to a mass public that no longer sees the difference between the real and the illusory world that media generates
- Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno critique high and low culture of mass media and fine art in contrast to each other
- the media is forcing the people to obey the dominant social order of things to allow capitalist growth
- Frankfurt School: culture is now a commodity that creates pseudo-individuality
- they also set up the high and low culture separation of media and art, claiming that even high art is low because of the mass media production
- There is no longer one mass audience but sub audiences that change change the industry
MEDIA AND DEMOCRATIC POTENTIAL
- The positive side to media - communications could be used to empower the people and strengthen the idea of democracy
- public access cable television - 3 required channels set in 1972
- Challenges the idea of mass media
- Marshall McLuhan argues television and radio are just extensions of the person, allowing them to access more information
- "the medium is the message" - listening or watching can give a sense of empowerment\
- guerilla television - showing the opposing side to popular political view
- Web 2.0 - the blog and trade sites such as eBay change information retrieving to a person-to-person interaction
MEDIA AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
- The viewing public, national public, and global public, interconnected through media
- Michael Warner a "public" can be defined as " a space of discourse, which involved a relation among strangers. in which public speech is both personal and impersonal, a social space constituted in 'reflexive circulation of discourse'.
- With the web information spreads at a much faster rate
- The public and private market separate from the political market
- To a degree the political market is always present
- separation of gender, race, and class must be rethought
- women in the home and men in public business, commerce, political arena
- A public sphere is a space - physical social setting or media setting - where citizens can come together and debate about society
- Walter Lippman; the idea is a "phantom" people cannot keep in-tune to the political sphere with constant industrial change
- Jurgen Habermas: the ideal public sphere from bourgeois society; private persons coming together to discuss public interest that is mediated over by the state
- the public sphere is compromised by other forces within society; consumer culture, mass media rise, and intervention of state, family, and home
- public space where private interests are inadmissible
- The public sphere is not real because it is partially based on exclusion of other races, genders, and ethnicity's other than white male
- Oscar Negt and Alexander Kluge wrote critique of Habermas to include media; industries and alternative. They also focused more on the "working class"
- Contemporaries propose the idea of multiple public spheres and counter spheres
- Nancy Fraser - the feminist counter-sphere
- counter-public - subordinate in some way to the dominant public sphere but can still speak up in some way
- they can overlap one another
NATIONAL AND GLOBAL MEDIA EVENTS
- Benedict Anderson; 1983 wrote that " modern nation-state is an imagined political community - limited and sovereign
- imagined because most people wont know their fellow members
- television is central to national identity
- sense of participation in events
- the importance of experiencing events at the same time
- the event of 9/11
- the quickness of the media knowing the information
- the connection between the passengers on the plane and the internet
- the connection between the passengers and their families
- the videographer
CONTEMPORARY MEDIA AND IMAGE FLOWS
- Newspapers, magazines, television and web are owned by major media conglomerates
- Results in direct censorship of images
- Specific stories could reflect negatively on the companies/countries
- boundaries of opinion
- Censorship of peoples faces within possible political imagery of the faces of soldiers
- Constant negotiation of power
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