CCT 300:Critical

Analysis of Media

Class 2: Media Analysis

Media Analysis

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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?

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”)

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…)

New Media as Distribution

• Looks at new media explicitly as channel - digital transmission, in whatever form

• Representation in digital form is increasingly common - examples?

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

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)

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.

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

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

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…)

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…)

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)

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)

Next week…

• More on Laws of Media - think of how this applied to media genres!

• Media genres as defined by Agre.