CCT 300:Critical Analysis

of Media

Class 2: Media Analysis

Media Analysis

• Analysis of media form and genre• Technological/media effects determinism• Critical political economy• Cultural studies

Media form and genre

• Analysis of essential elements – e.g., today’s Manovich reading, McCloud’s first chapter on “what is comics?”

• Attempts to define classificatory boundaries and identifies canonical and ideal type constructions

• Little consideration of consumer/producer impact – culture often deliberately left out

• More on genre construction next week

Media effects determinism

• Media as pervasive causal force• Can be done intelligently – McLuhan did as much

(and we’ll look briefly at that too) but often quite reductionist in scope (e.g., X media consumption causes Y social effect)

• Objectively hard to prove since most connections aren’t really as simple as X->Y

• Adaptations such as two-step model and cultivation theory try to qualify simplicity, but effects are complex to measure

Critical political economy

• More of an economic determinism – capital and ownership structure determines media

• Often Marxist based, but libertarian/capitalist models also qualify

• Often similarly reductionist – does everything boil down to simple financial considerations?

Cultural Studies

• Analysis of media in context of use – producers, consumers alike

• More about the complexity of interactions among stakeholders in particular contexts vs. precise measurement or investigation of global principles

• Interesting stories, but are they generalizable? (not scientifically, but transferable, perhaps)

Mass/Public Media & Society

• Media as sociotechnical system - less cause/effect than mutual causation, driven by technical and social change

• Emergence of industrial society and its effect on the shaping of communication forms

• Radio as example – a potentially decentralized medium of production was rationalized into a mass medium

Public v. Mass (C.W. Mills)

• Localized cultural practices

• 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 as basic economic force in

private media markets• 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?• Problems?

A worthwhile read…

• Maich, S. & George, L. (2009). The Ego Boom: Why the World Really Does Revolve Around You. Toronto: Key Porter Books.

• A (somewhat disturbing) look at You in an mediasphere increasingly shaped by mass customization and narrowcasting

Manovich’s LNM

• Language of New Media - distilling the core essence of new media into eight propositions

• More of a media form/genre 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 forms and codes vs. social effect (e.g., media use studies, cultural studies…)

• Acknowledges cyberculture as interesting but a different field entirely

New Media as Distribution

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

• Representation in digital form is increasingly common - examples?

• Limitations of this approach?

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., dyanmic 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., collage, 1920s avant-garde film) but much easier done with digital objects

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…)

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