class: title, smokescreen, shelf, no-footer background-image: url(julius-drost-oC66vXsqnc8-unsplash.jpg) -- # Media in Everyday Life, Part I ## November 2, 2022 --- class: img-right-full # Baudrillard Review  * Orders of Simulation -- * Hyperreal -- * Collapse of structuring binarisms: appearance/reality; true/false; use value/exchange value ---    --- class: center, fit-h1 # Critique of Postmodern "Break" from Political Economy  ??? Thoughts/critiques of Baudrillard? * Excessive pessimism * Feeling of being stuck * not granting much agency to "the people" * Assertion that political economy still matters --- class: compact, col-2 # Critique of "Hermeneutics of Suspicion" Gramsci: "Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." (echoed by Stuart Hall) Lawrence Grossberg: > ...that is what I want to suggest: that we need to think—more and better. That we have to find an **optimism of the intellect** Mirzoeff's **"the right to look"** Fred Moten's "Black Ops" and **"affirmative politics of fugivity"** Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?": > The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who **assembles**. The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naive believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to **gather**. Eve Sedgewick: **"reparative critical practices"** against the hegemony of "paranoid critical practices" --- class: title # media ??? Brainstorm --- # media * "the media" -- communications industry - print media, publishing, news media, cinema, broadcast (radio/television/cable tv), advertising, networks, multi-platform companies (“mass media”) -- * plural form of medium -- * Latin: "middle" -- * biological medium (growth medium): media as environment for life -- * spiritual medium -- * Any means to store or transmit data --- class: col-2 # Haunted Media   --- # Medium Specificity * Storage Capacity - Friedrich Kittler * Transmission: Channel as Affordance * "The Medium is the Message" - Marshall McLuhan <iframe width="45%" height="45%" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ImaH51F4HBw?start=118&end=171" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> --- class: img-right-full  # Media as "Extensions" of Human Sensorium Marshall McLuhan > The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception. ??? Media and sensory perception Key concept: The medium is the message in McLuhan’s own words [play clip] Message / Massage / Mass Age It’s not the content, but the medium that matters (the content of a medium is always another medium anyway -- The content of radio is text; of text --> speech, of television --> film, etc McLuhan is concerned about how media affects our “total situation” . . . particularly our senses. Media alters our relationships to each other and ourselves. --- class: center, no-footer ## Media and Extension <iframe width="85%" height="85%" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/t1axnba_Ueg?start=1409&end=1444" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe> ??? Media alters our sense ratios -- Put another way, McLuhan wants to highlight media as extensions of the human body, of human sensorium [Play clip] Ask students to think of extensions that are also amputations Automobile --> reduction in walking culture, effect on city form (no sidewalks in Durham), pollution --- class: title # Discuss:<br />Can _anything_ be media? --- class: img-left  # Medium Specificity vs. Convergence Media Convergence (Henry Jenkins) ??? A term used to refer to the combination of media together into one point of access or one conglomerate form. The combination of formerly different technologies such as telephone, email, camera, and musical listening system into one device (a “smart” phone) is an example of media convergence. --- class: center # Convergence towards an audience of one? Mass Media, 1920s-1980s<br />(Broadcasting) ↓ Niche Media (e.g. cable television, web 1.0), 1980s-2000s<br />(Narrowcasting) ↓ User Profiling (e.g. Netflix, Web 2.0, suggestion engines)<br />2000s - Present --- # Media Infrastructures (and Logistics) * Nicole Starioleski, _The Undersea Network_ (2015) * Lisa Parks, _Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual_ (2005) * Alex Galloway, _Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization_ (2004) * Tung-Hui Hu, _A Prehistory of the Cloud_ (2015) * Parks & Starioleski, _Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures_ (2015) * Hockenberry, Starosielski, & Zieger, _Assembly Codes: The Logistics of Media_ (2021) ??? The Undersea Network examines the cultural and environmental dimensions of transoceanic cable systems, beginning with the telegraph cables that formed the first global communications network and extending to the fiber-optic infrastructure that carries almost international Internet traffic. In Cultures in Orbit, Lisa Parks suggests that the convergence of broadcast, satellite, and computer technologies necessitates an expanded definition of “television,” one that encompasses practices of military monitoring and scientific observation as well as commercial entertainment and public broadcasting. The contributors to Assembly Codes examine how media and logistics set the conditions for the circulation of information and culture. They document how logistics—the techniques of organizing and coordinating the movement of materials, bodies, and information—has substantially impacted the production, distribution, and consumption of media. At the same time, physical media, such as paperwork, along with media technologies ranging from phone systems to software are central to the operations of logistics. --- # Elemental Media * Jussi Parrika, _A Geology of Media_ (2015) * John Durham Peters, _The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media_ (2016) * Melody Jue, _Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater_ (2020) * Yuriko Furuhata, _Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control_ (2022) * Melody Jue & Rafico Ruiz (Editors), _Saturation: An Elemental Politics_ (2021) --- # Media and Everyday Life * Shift from _what do media do to people?_ to _what do people do with media?_ * Practices of everyday life * de Certeau's **tactics** of everyday life vs **strategies** of dominant power * quotidian, everyday, mundane, ordinary --- # History of Media Criticism Alongside media history is an history of media criticism, including: * Horkheimer & Adorno's critique of "sameness"/mass culture * Stuart Hall's "decoding positions" * John Fiske's readerly "culure from below" * James Scott. "arts of resistance" * Guy Debord and the Situationists - art and everyday life * Nestor Garcia Canclini's "hybridity" --- # For Friday * Blog Post #2 due by start of discussion sections (12:00 PM)