MediaSpace Wiki

Media Criticism Fall2006 Session09

Index Card Assignment due today

View one episode from your body of content. What perspectives are are presented and how? Document one way in which time is manipulated.

Assignment due on Tuesday

First Annotated Bibliography. Find four references that talk about your body of content. Use APA format (see ManualOfStyle) to document the reference. The annotation is a sentence or two, just below each reference, that summarizes, in your own words, what the reference has to say about your body of content. (see MediaCriticismQuestions and http://library.brooklyn.cuny.edu)

Note

There is class tomorrow.

Sense, Anthropotropism, and Discarnate Man

• We've been talking about semiotics, which studies language
• But language occurs with the context of media
  • different media enable different channels
    • our senses (production and reception, always matched)
      • direct senses like touch and taste
      • indirect senses like sight, sound, and smell
    • extended senses (the alphabet)
      • abstraction via the alphabet
      • we are the ultimate abstraction of language
      • discarnate man
  • and with them, different codes and languages
    • aural codes and languages
    • visual codes and languages
    • languages, like music, that convert touch and gesture to sound
  • including artificial languages
    • light and camera angle

The Global Village

• "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village." (McLuhan, 1962)
• Levinson: At utterance an incomplete metaphor
  • a village crier set the village agenda
    • but could also take questions
  • radio and television set a "global village" agenda
    • but do not take questions
    • indeed, enable great power
      • Radio is credited with creating the central figures of WWII and their power
      • Television, by contrast, is more of a "voyeur's medium"
        • that has mixed sex and power in unexpected ways
• The Internet makes the global village real
  • Interactive
    • but contentious
    • and non-authoritative
      • at least for the moment, gossips rule
  • Severely challenges central power
    • such that the Internet is truly at war with several media
      • television
      • newspapers
      • magazines
      • recordings
  • The issue of power is one we will be coming back to repeatedly now
    • Innis asserts that new media upset existing power structures
    • He repeatedly shows how media create "priesthoods" who work to retain their power
    • We're seeing a lot of this now
      • Attempts by the media industry to "buy" the Internet
        • Time-Warner, Disney, and the difficulties in doing so
      • Attempts by the media industry to make Internet media illegal or unusable
        • RIAA lawsuits
      • Mega-mergers
      • The concept of "media convergence"
        • Hard to make work outside of the interface ... and even there its hard

Short Paper 1 due at Session 10 (next time)

Pick one of the analytic approaches we have been learning about (Semiotics or Narrative Theory). Briefly analyze some aspect of your body of content using this method. Use TheFiveParagraphEssay form to structure your essay. Bring two copies of your essay to class. Details of the method you should follow are located in MediaCriticismSpring2005ShortPaper1Detail.