New MediaCMN 2170 – Summer 2008Dr. Strangelove

Why is this important?

• The holocaust of capitalism

• The situation is disputed• Unequal power to define the situation

What is Culture?

• Patterns of meaning that organize patterns thought and action

• The ‘code’ to social order

Definitional Control

War over the meaning of things and events.

Definitional Control

• Gained through control of media

• Subverted through uncontrolled speech

Two Types of Production

• Things and Meaning• Capitalism depends on definition of consumption as good and as the path to happiness

Social Trends in Media Culture

• Increased interaction with corporate media

• Increased interaction with amateur culture

Social Trends in Media Culture

• Increased surveillance and information gathering

• Increased programming of consumption

• Hyper-consumption

Social Trends in Media Culture

• Increased legal control over intellectual property

• Decreased actual control over intellectual property

Hacking Culture:the public

redefinition of private meanings

“It is not necessary to construct a theory ofintentional cultural control. In truth, the strength ofthe control process rests in its apparent absence.The desired systemic result is achieved ordinarilyby a loose though effective institutional process.”

HS p8.

In capitalist societies the individual has no autonomous will or desire but rather is an integral part of the production system itself.

News item from 2001

90 percent of children between the ages of 5 and 17 now use computers.

(US 2002)

One of the most widespread corporate strategies is containment of the consumer – to own their eyeballs. This is what is ultimately meant by ‘convergence’.

The marketplace monopolizes the representation of reality.

New Media systems play a central role in creating

normalities.

Media Media systemssystemsstandardize standardize belief belief and and behavior.behavior.

Media systems are political in nature. They

are systems of mass persuasion.

Media systems exercise influence over the possible forms of human behaviour.

Media systems play a role in establishing and reproducing

normal behaviour.

Media systems

help define what a desirable social order should look like.

Dr. Josef Goebbels, Reich Propaganda Minister

Cultural products, such as media texts, provide insight into the exercise of power over the nature of human nature.

As noted in 1934 by Ruth Benedict, we are witnessing a “standardization of custom and belief over a couple of continents,”

Ruth Benedict. “Anthropology of the Abnormal,” in An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict. Margaret Mead (ed).

Houghton Mifflin, 1959. 262.

“The majority of mankind quite readily take any shape that is presented to them.” Ruth Benedict.

All behavior is influenced and shaped by cultural patterning.

What Role Does Reason Play?What Role Does Reason Play?

“People are little constrained by logic.”Ann Swidler. Talk of Love: Why Culture Matters. University of Chicago Press, 2001. 189.

Each society has “its own social process of creating new normalities within its next generation.” Ruth Benedict

Media systems, privately-owned, for-profit consumer programming systems, are one of the primary tools for shaping new normalities within contemporary society.

Human nature is

“far more variable than experience in any one culture would suggest.”

Ruth Benedict

“Because of the closeness of popular media texts to their social conditions, they provide privileged access to the social realities of their era and can thus be read to gain insight into what is actually going on in a particular society at a given moment.”Douglas Kellner, Media Culture. Routledge, 1995. Page 108.