Media and Information: Living Information 2016-2017
Course Manual
W1: Introduction.............................................................................. Fout! Bladwijzer niet gedefinieerd.
Readings: Mark Deuze (2011) “Media Life” and Mark Deuze (2012/2016) “Media Life Preface”
Viewing this week: The Truman Show (1998).
W2: Material life ..................................................................................................................................... 3
Reading: Leah Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (2006) “The Social Shaping and Consequences of ICTs”
and Mark Deuze (2012/2016) “Living in Media, Living Information”
W3: Material life 2.0 ............................................................................................................................... 7
W4: Media life......................................................................................................................................... 8
Reading: Robert A. Papper Michael E. Holmes, and Mark N. Popovich (2004) “Middletown Media
Studies” (study sections: Methodologies, Results, Implications & Discussion)
W5: connected life .................................................................................................................................. 9
Reading: Barry Wellman (2002) “Little boxes, glocalisation, and networked individualism”.
Recommended additional reading: E.M. Forster (1909) “The Machine Stops”
Viewing this week: 20/9 The Matrix (1999).
W6: Public Life ...................................................................................................................................... 12
Readings: Jeremy Bentham (1787) “Panopticon”; Kevin Kelly (2014) “Why You Should Embrace
Surveillance, Not Fight It”; Shoshana Zuboff (2016) “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism”.
Recommended additional reading: danah boyd (2010) “Public by Default, Private when Necessary”
Viewing this week: 27/9 Minority Report (2002).
W7: Public Life ...................................................................................................................................... 15
W8: Love life ......................................................................................................................................... 16
Readings: Samuel Butler (1863) “Darwin among the machines”; Judith Donath (2007) “Signals in
Social Supernets”; Robin Dunbar (2010) “You’ve Got to Have (150) Friends”. Warmly recommended
additional reading: Charles Darwin (1859) “Recapitulation and Conclusion”
W9: Produce Life ................................................................................................................................... 21
Readings: Henry Jenkins (2004) “The cultural logic of media convergence”; Mark Deuze (2009) “The
Media Logic of Media Work”
W10: Real Life ....................................................................................................................................... 24
Readings: E.T.A. Hoffman (1816) “The Sandman” (20 pages, PDF Blackboard); Gary Genosko (2004)
“The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur Interview With Jean Baudrillard”. Recommended
additional reading: Edgar Allen Poe (1839) “The Man That Was Used Up”
W11: Zombie Life .................................................................................................................................. 28
Readings: Robert A. Heinlein (1960) “All You Zombies” ; Mark Deuze (2015) “Living as a Zombie in
Media is the Only Way to Survive
W12: Informational life ........................................................................................................................ 29
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,Reading: John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (2002) “Local Knowledge: Innovation in the Networked
Age”
W14: Digital Life.................................................................................................................................... 32
Reading: Niels Brügger & Niels Ole Finnemann (2013) “The Web and Digital Humanities
W1: Introduction
Mediapolis: a mediated public space where media underpin(ondersteund) and overarch the
experience and expressions of everyday life.
Comfort with technology:
o Taken for granted ends up running your life.
o Pervasive and ubiquitous> ontzichtbaar, maar altijd aanwezig (can’t switch of)
o We become blind what shapes us the most
o Media are everywhere and there for nowhere
Convergence culture: media recognition of new human condition
Recognition: not explaining why or effect of the increasing invisibility of media but research the way
people use media and the taken for-granted technology with everyday life.
Real virtuality: media is a playground for search meaning and belongings
- online world of appearances becomes part of everyday lived experience instead of just existing on
our computer and televisions screens.
We live in a media culture:
1. Consuming information about other people and also producing our lives.
2. Nothing is private vs. the need to share our lives (balancing act)
- we create the balance to make ourselves prettier. (share and be private not the real u)
Key: Understand what’s in that performance what kind of version of u is produced.
- when your noticing that u behaving according to the version of u that u made on media.
Balancing act: reality on basis of a constant moving in between
Idealism: what we perceive
Materialism: what apparent
- edit, remix both perceptions and appearance of reality
Critique: people don’t recognize habits they’re part of media what shapes they’re identity, so u can
conscious seek the balance.
Mass self-communication: media is invisible and the identity, experiences of media reality is modified
(beinvloed) by it.
Life in a day key inside:
- were used as free labour by industries
Devine machines: seeing and being seen in media
1. Universal compressing machine: Sharing info: comparing yourself with anybody not only
famous people
2. Machines for secrets: Show things we shouldn’t be expose to. (murder) each other
secrets as intimate secrets. (pregnancy)
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,Truman show delusion: thinking your life is your own world and you’re the big the star
- when Truman became aware the world adapts himself to him, people figure new strategies to keep
him in line (media life: booking a flight getting a different price)
note: accept the truth die ons word aangerijkt, maar het wordt Truman opgedwongen
Narcissism or self-expression?
a. Narcissism: unpredicted cultural triggers pressure of living in large community can trigger unlike
sides of people. The social media and social space are the same encourage physiological processes.
b. Self-exposure: Its pathological product of our instable appetite for self-exposure
- amplification of distinct sense of uncertainty and unsettlement
- sense of urgency about one’s life project of self-identity
- acknowledge the end of the story Truman can’t escape, but stays and tell his own story
Plato’s allegory of the cave:
- Truman was unwhere of another lifestyle, just like media life. (note: escape is impossible)
- Plato says that the need to be seen makes us human.
Media life: networked devices that immediatize and immortalize life experience as they mediatize it.
- Key qualities of media: Recording and storing everything we do with them
- Media always remediation’s of earlier technologies and society, never the same always similar.
The loss of sense of ego and individuality
- Watching the same tv, global network
- Stop being special (like zombies)
> het lijkt of het niet collectief is, maar we gebruiken het allemaal
Need compulsive of media like zombies
- zombies are driven and nothing can stop them, but the danger is privacy.
Key: Understand what you post on media and ask yourself if you’re still the same.
Evolutionary process needs: awareness of how we interconnect and require responsibly to ourselves
and others beyond the real or perceived.
1. 1980 B. Latour: Way we separate from technology is silly, should embrace tech as part of us.
2. 1890 G. Tarde: We and tech built of the same components and have the same evolution.
3. 1859 Darwin: Sociology never be the same evolution applies to humans as apes.
1714 Gottfried Leibniz: us and the cosmos and everything in between is made out of an invisible
substance called monnets and monnets have their own way of doing things and we think that were
human beings but we’re not.
Key: none of the things happening today are happening because of fb or google, they are just
symptoms of a phenomenon that is as old as human beings.
W2: Material life
Media and information are:
1. Ubiquitous and pervasive (ontzichtbaar en doordringend)
- people forget media use, exposed to multiple media at the same time and use it in
combination with other activities working, hanging and eating.
2. Intimate and personal
- Post and sharing is personal, but also the device is personal
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, 3. Special and ordinary
- we hardly notice them and take it for granted
4. Messy secret exposure machine (let us in to life of other media expose us to secrets)
- Utopian: iPhone makes life better
- Dystopian: Whole culture dies and controls your life
Social psychology:
- micro ordination of everyday life (meeting a friend arranging it by media, social arrangement)
1970: social presence and telepresence
1980: projective devices (users can control many aspects of self-presentation and interaction)
Old/new media?
first thought of media transformation evolution mass society to information society
Research connect media with social structure:
- Bell’s post-industrial society
- Habermans theory of public sphere
- Giddens theory of structuration
Separate media doesn’t exist:
1990: information society latest stage of industrial capitalism not radical departure of past
> Research face new challenge wider playing field as social, political, economic, globalisation
Social shaping position: how the government and organizations are shaping and get shaped by
technological development in fields of new media.
Social shaping of new media:
1. Point-to-point network: social and technical organizations (network metaphor)
2. Now you’re sender and receiver of information
Limited internationalisation
new media studies developed diffused according to different time and scales in different places
- not a matter of economy
What is new media:
channel characteristics parallel human sensory perception
o Simplex (one way transmission)
o Duplex (two way transmission)
- Little media: inexpensive, small scale
- Big media: large complex, expensive infrastructures and arrangement
Internet/media evolution (not new)
• Bundle of different media and modalities (email, websites, new media remediation)
• This different modes and devices have own communication
- economics, social use, history and where made in several decades.
• Old or new media are both an instrument or product of social shaping
• They have both social consequents
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