Here is a document of my notes from the lectures of week 2 to week 7 of Media, Culture and Society. They are detailed and quite thorough, I used them to prepare for the exam.
Issues that smartphone arises:
- Questions of privacy, ethics, measuring the self
- Overuse and addiction
- Changes how we consume content
Approaches to technology:
1. Technological determinism: Marshall McLuhan – 1960-70
2. Cultural materialism (cultural studies): Raymond Williams – 1970-90
3. Structuralism & Culturalism (encoding/decoding): Stuart Hall – 1970-80
4. Social construction of technology (SCOT): Wiebe Bijker – 1980-90
5. Actor network theory (ANT): Bruno Latour – 1990s
6. Mediation theory (mix of technology and ethics): Peter Paul Verbeek – 2000
1. Technological Determinism: Marshall McLuhan
- Technology plays the most important role in shaping our society
- Technological determinism is a reductionist theory that presupposes that technology
steers society
- “The medium is the message” - famous quote by Marshall McLuhan
- We all become connected in a Global Village (he’s not talking about the internet, it’s
around the 1960s, he’s talking about the telephone, mail etc.)
- He think that because of these technologies we become closer, and thinks that soon the
world will become a village with the technology evolving
Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1980): (also determinist)
-Print media offer rational, serious engagement with local issues
-The rationality is undermined
Television:
*Postman: empty, skeptical
*McLuhan: connects the society
How to understand the relationship between dating apps and our society?
- It shapes according to people’s needs
- There’s a need for technology also in dating
- After corona it kind of peeked, because people were used to being alone and dating
apps can be considered in their comfort zone (on their phones)
, 2. Cultural materialism (cultural studies): Raymond Williams
- A line of media studies that starts with the premise of immaterial context (text, image)..
- Williams’ critique of McLuhan
- 1. Williams countered the determinist and essentialist ideas of McLuhan
- 2. Williams placed the central emphasis on material culture: the TV apparatus reflects
the (ideological) organization of society
- 3. Compared the ‘form and content’ of American (commercial) TV with that of British
public broadcasting: analyzed differences in ‘flow’ - how many advertising you will see
based on the income - the british tv, BBC, will have more support from the government
- TV is formatted in the way we are used to now
- For example netflix doesn't have ads because we already pay them and they don’t need
the money from the ads
3. Encoding/Decoding
- Structuralism & culturalism
- Encoding - kind of giving a meaning and inputting something , decoding -
- Encoding is not just a message, it’s also not pure information
- Challenge the mass communication on model:
- *meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender
- *the message is never transparent;
- *the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning
- 3 types of relationship between the sender and the audience:
- 1. The dominant-hegemonic position
- 2. The negotiated position - when you start to question, try to come up with a different
idea but also take in the most of it
- 3. The oppositional position - the sender gives a completely different idea to you - I do
not accept what you told me and I have a completely different idea
4. Social constructivism
5. Actor-Network Theory (ANT)
- A material-semiotic theory that analyzes special phenomena as networks
- It questions the opposition between humans and technology; technologies also have
agency, which can be translated by users
- Scholars follow the human and technological actors to interpret translations
- Affordances - a certain function or action you are able to do (when you look at a door,
you know what to do with it - it opens closes etc)
- Affordances have certain limitations but you can kind of extend them - for example a
desk is for studying etc. but you can stand on it if you want to
- Affordances of technologies - technologies tell you what you can and can't do with it
- When you use a certain technology - it comes with certain ideologies and beliefs
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