The ultimate guide to acing your midterms! (Will be able to get you through the midterms without going to the lectures or seminars, or even reading the texts) Answered questions proposed in seminars and lectures. Contains weeks 1 to 3, as required for the midterm.
Doesn't help with exam at all. Notes are vague and hard to understand. Do not purchase!
By: wlh • 4 year ago
Ok if you failed the exam I feel bad for you but don't blame the notes! :)
By: changhyunwoo19 • 4 year ago
Didn't fail hahaha. Not blaming the notes either. Just an honest opinion based on how well they correspond to the course material. I'm sure you spent a lot of time on the notes. But personally, they didn't help that much for the midterms. Could be due to a change in the new course. Who knows. Just info for the future buyers. Don't waste your money!
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Content preview
Week 1: Medium
The aim of the course is to gain a critical understanding of media theory.
What is Media Theory?
Theory: A system of ideas intended to explain something on general principles
● Nomothetic type of knowledge
○ Aims at generalizations and formulation of laws
○ Natural sciences
○ “Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius”
○ From observations to general law
○ Theory as falsifiable
● Ideographic type of knowledge
○ Aims at understanding the meaning of contingent, unique and often cultural or
subjective phenomena
○ Humanities
○ “How were property relations organized in Ancient Greece”
○ Theory as a toolbox
● Normative
○ How the world is
● Critical
○ What is wrong with the world
● Endogenous
○ Within the discipline
● Exogenous
○ Interdisciplinary influences
Theory encourages discussions → Comes out of a national, poltical, or economic context.
Influences the theories,
Theory is a process, it’s never finished: ‘I am not interested in Theory, I am interested in going
on theorising’ (Hall, 1996).
Theories come out of national, political, economic context and it influences these theories
There are also travelling theories and productive cross-pollination → Exchange of ideas and
adaptation of foreign theories to domestic cultures or different time eras
Stuart Hall → Theorizing as an open horizon
, ● Descriptive (this is how the world works) versus critical (this is what is wrong with the
world) → Administrative versus critical theory (Lazarsfeld)
● Endogenous versus exogenous media theory → From within the discipline versus
interdisciplinary influences.
Reflexive Nostalgia → Artifical cultural construct
● Example: Mad Men, glamorization, highlighting “ideals” (cynicism) of the 1950s
○ Presents a version of the fifties, both aware of its artificiality and an object of its
nostalgic politics
○
○ Ravizza engages with Jameson's concept of nostalgia as mere pastiche and
argues that in Mad Men something else is at play.
○ Provocative: Jameson wants to shock people by saying that culture is exhausted.
● What makes Jameson and Ravizza’s analysis ideographic is that they do not create a
generalized theory of nostalgia but instead argue that the nostalgia enacted in American
Graffiti or Mad Men takes a particular form. In other words, both bring out what is unique
or specific to these respective films/series. But, equally important, they do so in a
context, where one theorist reacts against another.
What is a medium?
Raymond Williams etymology in keywords:
1. The general sense of an intervening or intermediate agency or substance (it mediates)
2. The conscious technical sense as in the distinction between print and sound and vision
as media
3. The specialised capitalist sense, like newspaper is a medium or material forms-
television, radio
The medium is focused now more on the technical side.
McLuhan → Medium is any intervening substance between communication
McLuhan associates media as an extension of a human body. (Not exactly the most original,
was already explored)
● Age of Anxiety: Anxious about what we’re seeing, stressed due to so much information
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