CCT 300: Critical Analysis of Media

Class 3: Laws of Media and Genre Analysis

Administrivia

• Avrim Katzman moving on to build gaming curriculum

• Mike Jones to take over lectures• Kevin Eldred to co-teach labs and help with

evaluation

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

McLuhan - Laws of Media

• Universal dynamic of media change• Represented as tetrad - four intersecting simultaneous

influences• Grouped into two forces - ground (historical/cultural

convention) and figure (emergent forces/media)• Possible to understand future of media form by analyzing

what it changes and what forces will ground change

Four Forces of Tetrad

• Enhancement (positive change, amplification)• Retrieval (recovery of past forces)• Reversal (new or resurgent challenges jeopardizing new

media)• Obsolescence (erosion of older values/forces)• Again, all operate in concert simultaneously – one does not

necessarily trump others

Genre as Community (Agre)

• Similar people working on similar topics in a similar way

• Distributed cognition and communities of practice

• In postmodern world, genres can become quite specific and localized – arguably more similar to public vs. mass genres

Elements of Genre

• Agre - various elements that define genre• McCloud - examples from comics/graphic

novels as specific genre (notes from both Understanding and Reinventing Comics…)

Breadth

• Genre definitions can be narrowly or broadly construed

• Differences between “all print material” and “Canadian political posters of the 19th century”

• Generally, focused genres have more analytical value

Breadth in Comics

• “All sequential art” as broad definition, but not all that useful beyond a general definition of comics as medium

• Many subgenres of comics that themselves can be dissected (e.g., subtypes of manga) – different subgenres are different literary, artistic and cultural spaces

Genre, Audience and Activity

• Genre implies community of practice and community of consumption

• Specific media meets specific audience needs (e.g., reading pulp fiction vs. literature - done for different purposes and in different contexts, even by same consumers…)

Comic Audience/Activity

• Historical roots of comics - storytelling (e.g., hieroglyphics, temple art, stained glass)

• Contemporary history - entertainment, largely child oriented (e.g., newspaper strips, superhero) with underground alternative strain

• Emerging directions – a broader range of themes and structures (including more serious efforts) in a broader range of forms (e.g., web comics, graphic novels, etc.)

Producer/Consumer Relationship

• Producer and audience relationship important• One-to-many (mass) vs. decentralized and

interactive (public) relationships – dependent on media genre

• Immediacy and impact of feedback loops – what roles do consumers play in relationship?

Consuming comics

• Creators create worlds and characters • Details filled in by reader (Gestalt principles,

specifically closure) lead to engagement• Immediate feedback usually absent, although

web comics change that somewhat

Genre as Grouped Objects

• One instance does not a genre make - must be multiple incidents for a category to have semantic value (e.g., Family Guy is an instance of a sub-genre (e.g., animated TV sitcom, popular culture satire, etc.), not a genre itself…)

• Leverages precedents and expectations - norms and routines formed

Comic Genres

• McC - various subgenres in comics, with distinct idiomatic and structural forms

• Social expectations can frustrate new efforts (e.g., comics as “kid lit” or radical/perverse constrained mainstream exploration politically and culturally)

Genre Bending

• Rules and bounds of genre are not absolute• When rules are broken, interesting things happen –

often new sub-genres emerge• When rules are broken, it might be too interesting

for the audience to accept • Genre bending and economic concerns – innovation

vs. risk

Comic Genre Bending

• Alternative comic genres lead to new applications of craft beyond “men in tights”

• Serious comics like Maus may become mainstream as form of literature, consequentially allowing space for other serious autobiographical works (e.g., Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis)

• But – initial iteration of Maus was alternative press work, critically acclaimed in niche market but not at all accepted mainstream

Multiplicity of Genres • We are intuitively familiar with many genres• We act with multiple genres simultaneously without

great confusion – although it can frustrate analytical thinking at times

• Instances fall into multiple genre categories simultaneously – e.g., Daily Show/Colbert Report wins Emmys in established genre, but can be seen as political/news satire, even (increasingly?) as serious public affairs programming

• We can integrate genres to create new forms of expression

Comics and multiplicity

• Comics share relations to similar media (e.g., graphic novels of historical events; movies made from graphic novel roots, relation between manga and anime, etc.)

• Integration of non-visual information - done figuratively in text-based comics, more potential for integration in web comics?

Genres are historical

• Change in form evolves over time• Influences from inside craft (e.g., changes in craft,

form, idiom) and outside (e.g., economics, regulation, other media)

Comic History

• Comics emerging from “kid lit” to return to more serious pictographic communication

• New media (as outlined by Manovich last week) = digital creation and distribution create new forms of expression, new opportunities for distribution

• Still influenced by ground though – e.g., McCloud’s Making Comics is digitally created, but still conforms to style used in analog Understanding Comics

Economics of Genre

• Money makes the world go round - and certainly does impact how media are structured, how genres evolve

• Costs involved in maintaining and sustaining producer/consumer community – without some return on investment or covering of costs, community may suffer

Fixed and Marginal Costs

• Fixed = infrastructural costs, without which genre cannot exist

• Marginal = costs incurred as audience grows• Can apply to both production and consumption• McC - costs in distribution chain changes with new

technology – potential for more direct interactions with consumers, skipping middlemen

Specialization and Branding

• Singular creators are rare, esp. in complex media

• Collectively created media -> media branding • McC - “comic houses” and brand identity - and

changes that emerge with more independent creators

Time, Duplication and Value

• Value of media product often changes over time - some more than others

• Digital distribution creates own challenges in value of information

• McC - historical value of comics, the value and problems of sharing, the notion of micropayments to support industry

Next week…

• Unpacking McCloud’s Understanding Comics in depth (it will really, really help if you’ve read the book by then…)