CCT 300: Critical Analysis of Media

1. CCT 300:Critical Analysis of Media Class 2: Media Analysis

2. Media Analysis • Analysis of media form and genre • Technological determinism • Critical political economy • Cultural Studies

3. Brainstorming Genre • What defines a genre? • How can we break down definitions to increase analytical precision? • What benefits exist in doing so? To whom? And when do we hit a point of ridiculousness in doing so? • What genres exist?

4. Principles to consider.. • All media can be classified into genres (some deliberately or inadvertently bridge or mix forms) • All media involve technology (in the broadest sense of the word) • All media have economic, political and cultural consequence • Holistic understanding of media systems leads to a more grounded, less biased understanding

5. Mass/Public Media & Society • Institutionalization of mass society and its shaping of mass media • Media as sociotechnical system - less cause/effect than mutual causation, driven by technical and social change

6. Public v. Mass (C.W. Mills) • Localized culture • Horizontal power structure • Relatively equal ratio of leaders/followers • “Jack of all trades” • Global culture, with little individuation • Centralized power structures • Few leaders, many followers • Specialization and division of labour

7. Implications for Media Form • Mass media for mass audiences in mass societies • Quantity of eyeballs base economic driving force • Mass media as central bonding experience • Mass media as centralized cultural control

8. Demassification • Rise of the postmodern / postindustrial / information age • Individuals and localized communities reemerge and gain in importance • Media as tools of creation and expression, not simply passive channels of reception • Examples?

9. Manovich’s LNM • Language of New Media - distilling the core essence of new media into eight propositions • More of a technological, first principles definition • N.B. “New Media” is not a chronological term (although contemporary media are more likely to be “new”)

10. New Media vs. Cyberculture • Proposes a distinction - new media studies new media forms and codes vs. social use (e.g., media use studies, cultural studies…)

11. New Media as Distribution • Looks at new media explicitly as channel - digital transmission, in whatever form • Representation in digital form is increasingly common - examples?

12. New Media as Software Controlled • Use of data structures, modularity, automation to create the cultural form • Digital photography/video as example; due to common technical standards for coding and manipulation, media objects can be shared and manipulated (sometimes automatically) with ease • Other examples - e.g., data driven web pages, Google AdSense

13. Cultural conventions • Uneven development - just because you can represent and manipulate something in digital form doesn’t mean it will work will in practice (e.g., digital actors?) • “morph” or “composite” - earlier conceptual models survive transition to new media and impact its form (e.g., desktop metaphor vs. alternatives)

14. Aesthetics of New Media • New media technologies create their own established aesthetics • Example: DV movies and cheaper amateur production (e.g., http://48hourfilm.com/), YouTube, vblogging, etc.

15. New Media as Efficient • Computing technology executes various tasks considerably faster - e.g., 3D animation, composite photography • Efficiency opens up new possibilities that were not present before

16. New Media as Metamedia • New media repurposes old media, combines existing media sources (e.g., photo montage, mashups, music sampling) • Not a new phenomenon, (e.g., 1920s avant-garde film) but much easier done

17. New Media as Nexus of Art and Computing • Computing becomes a more right-brain, creative process - a tool to represent and create new realities vs. simply crunch numbers (although there’s lots of that still required…)

18. Ex: Computer Graphics • How are computer graphics created? • 1980s - bitmap graphics - information of every pixel required • Now - vector graphics - what you see is computed on the fly • Computationally intense in real-time (why graphics is a subsystem on most gaming systems…)

19. McLuhan - Laws of Media • Universal dynamic of media change • Represented as tetrad - four intersecting concomitant influences • Grouped into two forces - ground (historical/cultural convention) and figure (emergent forces/media)

20. Four Forces • Enhancement (positive change, amplification) • Retrieval (recovery of past forces) • Reversal (new or resurgent challenges jeopardizing new media) • Obsolescence (erosion of older values/forces)

21. Next week… • More on Laws of Media - think of how this applied to media genres! • Media genres as defined by Agre.