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Schedule
Jan 6: Introduction:
Theorizing Media, Culture, and Media Culture
Introduction
to Media Culture (Slide Lecture)
I.
Film and the Culture Industry
Film: at the turn of the 20th century,
moving pictures emerged as the most influential form of
entertainment since the rise of the novel in the 18th
century. As a medium, cinema was a hybrid form: part electronic
(light), part chemical (photograph) and part mechanical
(projector). Cinema in America started as an a secondary
part of vaudaville entertainments, flourished in Nichelodeons
patronized by the working class, and emerged as an ambitious
narrative medium with D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of
a Nation, to the point where by the 1930s, the average
American city dweller went to the movies three times a
week. The century-long popularity of film gives it a central
role in 20th century media theories: from Benjamin’s concept
of the loss of the aura and the rise of reception in the
mode of “distraction”; for the Frankfurt school, film
is central to the industry that, by producing mass desire
for the celebrity, invades everyday life with the logic
of the commodity (how can I get muscles as large as his?,
legs as pretty as hers?); and Lev Manovich, in The
Language of New Media, demonstrates how the movement
of the image into digital code, allows us to operate upon
photorealistic images with the same freedom with which
used to be only possible in the animated film.
A
famous photograph quiz |
Jan 8: The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Introduction
to Walter Benjamin (Slide Lecture)
Reading:
Media text: Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954)
Web Exhibition: Alfred
Hitchcock Presents: Celebrating the Centenary of Britain's Greatest
Filmmaker;
The Bill Douglas Centre, University of Exeter, UK
Jan
13: Benjamin, film and Visualization
Film
and Visualization: the case of Rear Window (slide lecture)
- Media text: Hitchcock, Rear Window (1954)
Assignment due Jan 13: Write
a 2-page essay on Benjamin's , "The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Choose from one of these topics. Develop
a coherent essay supporting a clear thesis about how Benjamin's
essay invites us to think about ONE of these three topics:
- The image in the age of mechanical reproduction, OR
- The actor in the age of mechanical reproduction ,
OR
- Film as art for the modern, urban, masses
|
Jan
15: The Institution of Cinema: the case of The Birth of a
Nation (1915)
The
General Traits of Film (slide lecture)
Reading:
- Daniel
Czitrom, "American Motion Pictures and the New Popular
Culture, 1892-1918"
- Media text: D. W. Griffiths, The Birth of a Nation
Workshop
on Editing Web Pages with Dreamweaver
Things to figure out how to do:
Your can get help at "Getting
Started with Dreamweaver"
- Doing a Dreamweaver Site
definition
- Create
a page by setting page properties: background color;
title of page; etc.
- Inserting a Table with its properties
- Link within your page; link to web pages
- Insert an image (after you have borrowed one?)
- Copy text from word processor or other web sites into
your page
- Scan an physical image by using the scanner
- Try out all the features that interest you.... (Play!)
- "Upload
the Page" [Later you will publish to our Transcription
course site.]
Warner's
"Brief History of the Web"
in the words of Tim Berns-Lee |
Jan 20: The Frankfurt School and
the Culture Industry: the example of Celebrity
The
Culture Industry (a slide lecture)
Reading:
- Max
Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception” Reader
- Questions for reading "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment
as Mass Deception"
Assignment: Formation
of teams: bring topics that might interest you; we will use
a random access session to finalize the 8-10 teams
Jan 22: George Orwell, 1984
Reading: Orwell's, 1984 [Required text]
Workshop (part II): Working as a team on 12 computers; research
on topic using he web; preliminary design ideas.
Jan
27: 1984 (continued)
George
Orwell: 1984 (slide lecture)
Reading: Mark Crispin Miller, "Big Brother
is You, Watching"
Media text: Apple's 1984 "Big Brother"
ad
Assignment
due Jan 27: Write a 2-page response essay to Miller's
interpretation of the implications of Orwell's 1984 for
our understanding of modern media.
II.
Radio, Fascism and Propaganda
Radio: in the 1920s, wireless transmission
of information, first designed for communications between
ships at sea by the navy, and then picked up by ham radio
hobbyists for (morse) code transmission, and only later
voice transmission, was developed into a form of mass entertainment.
David Sarnoff, the young President of RCA, plays an important
role in promoting radio as a mass medium; though his later
attempt to present himself as the father of radio is problematic.
The emergence of radio as a mass medium, in between 1921
(with the Dempsey-Carpentier prize fight) and 1947 (the
first year of American television), transforms the American
media sphere: it allows for the rise of the American national
networks (NBC, CBS, ABC), which broadcast “free” programming
supported by advertising; radio makes possible live reception
in America of the huge Nazi rallies at Nurenberg, President
Roosevelt’s fire side chats; radio brings live coverage
of the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions,
the 1938 Munich crisis as it unfolds, as well as of the
Battle of Britain in 1940. The development of many of the
media forms of radio later moved to television (from the
variety show, quiz show, soap opera, situation comedy, detective
show, etc.). Within all countries (whether fascist and democratic),
radio technology helped to promote national unity. While
print required the ability to read, radio relied on nothing
more than the ability to understand the language of the
radio transmission. And if all listened to the same voice
at the same time (whether it is that of Edward R. Murrow
covering the Battle of Britain or Frank Sinatra crooning),
then one could believe that one shared a common experience,
and "imagined community" of radio listeners.
Useful links :
Thomas H. White's authoritative United
States Early Radio History, with overview and links
to many key documents and articles about early readio.
Halper's
History of Radio, with brief clips of the 1938 Munich
crisis and Roosevelts "fireside chats" |
Jan 29: The Institution of Radio
Reading:
- Daniel
Czitrom, “The Ethereal Hearth: American Radio from Wireless
through Broadcasting, 1992-1940”, Media and the American
Mind, From Morse to McLuhan, Chapel Hill:
U of North Carolina Pr., 1982. Chapter 3, 60-88.
- Susan J. Douglas: captioned photos from Listening In
- Text
of radio play of The War of the Worlds (1938)
Screen: War of the Worlds radio
show: The Mercury
Theater of the Air: The War of the Worlds (October
30, 1938)
Feb 3: The "public mission"
of Radio versus radio commerce: the Case of David
Sarnoff
The
Emergence of Radio Broadcasting in the US (slide lecture)
Reading:
- David
Sarnoff, from Looking Ahead: the Papers of David Sarnoff
, New York:
McGraw Hill, 1968. “Radio Broadcasting” 29-65.
- Marshall McLuhan, "American Advertising" (1947),
Ed. Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone, Essential McLuhan,
New York: Basic Books,
1995, 13-20.
- Links:
Hitler, Roosevelt, Churchill, Edward R. Murrow: Halper's
History of Radio
Film screening: Frank Capra (dir.), Meet John Doe
Feb
5: Radio: the FCC and controlling "bad" media
content
| "the broadcast media have established a uniquely
pervasive presence in the lives of all Americans."
--Justice Stevens |
Indecency
in Media (slide lecture)
Reading:
- FCC
v Pacifica Radio (George Carlin '7 Dirty Words' Case), Jerry
Kang [R]
Visitor (possible): Jerry Cornfield, creator
of "The Voice of Santa Barbara"
Feb 10: Media
as Propaganda System
Propaganda
and a Free Press (slide lecture)
Reading:
- Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, “A
Propaganda Model” [R]
Screen and discuss: Documentary
about Chompsky
Assignment due (Feb 10): 2-page essay
on Chompsky-Herman essay addressing the question, "How
can a society with a 'free press' practice propaganda?"
III.
Television and the emergence of the Media Theory paradigm
| Television: American television started
regular broadcasting in 1947, and by 1955 2/3rds of all
American homes had made room for television in their lives
and living rooms. The rapid expansion of live network television
is partly explained by the agility with which the radio
networks transferred their whole commercial and cultural
formula to television: live network broadcasting; free programming
interrupted by ads from our “sponsors;” all the generic
categories of radio, and even specific popular shows like
“Ames and Andy” and “Gunsmoke". Even FCC regulation
followed radio into televsion. The rapid acceptance of television
by Americans—television may be the most popular medium since
speech—resulted in part from American affluence and the
movement from urban centers, where live entertainment was
plentiful, to the suburbs, where it was not. In the half
century since the beginning of live television broadcasts,
television has changed under the influence of the arrival
of color, the remote control, the VCR, cable, satellite
transmission, and the DVD. Each change in the technological
infrastructure of television made new media forms possible
(for example, cable enabled MTV and CNN.) In the 1960s,
there develops a broad recognition that television had won
a leading and decisive role in the modern media sphere.
Guy Debord calls this new, superficially unified televisual
world, “the society of the spectacle.” [Perhaps, it Is a
world prepared for terrorism.] The enormous cultural influence
of television provokes Marshall McLuhan into developing
a general theory of media; in his optimistic moments, he
summons us toward the a powerful new form of oral-electronic
culture, what he calls “the global village.” |
Feb 12: Institutionalizing Televsion:
Comedy and Violence 
Televsion
as a Technology of War (slide lecture)
Making
Room for Televsion (slide lecture)
Media
Morphing: Superman and I Love Lucy
(slide lecture)
Reading:
- Lynn
Sigel, Making Room for TV, Chicago: U of Chicago
Pr.,1992. ”Introduction,” 1-10; “Television in the Family
Circle,” 36-72. [R]
- Samuel Weber, "The Media and War" (Gulf War I)
- Newton Minow, "Television
and the Public Interest" (the vast wasteland speech)
Screening-discussion:
Feb 17: The Medium is the Message/
Massage: the Rhetoric of Marshall McLuhan
Marshall
McLuhan: Inventor of Media Theory, or a Mythology about Media?
(slide lecture)
Reading:
- Marshall
McLuhan, from The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial
Man. New York: Vanguard Press, 1951. "Woman in a
Mirror", 80-82. "The Mechanical Bride", 98-101.
"Freedom-- American Style", 117-117. [R]
- Marshall McLuhan, "The Medium is the Message"
[R]
- Marshall
McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: an inventory
of effects. [Required text]
Feb
19: Marshall McLuhan (continued)
Assignment for Thursday,
Feb 19: Write a 2-page response paper that weaves
together these three elements:
1) Choose one significant strand of McLuhan’s argument about
contemporary
media in Medium is the Massage (1967) and offer a brief summary
of the idea
2) Develop a critical response to the idea by agreeing with,
qualifying, or
disagreeing with the idea.
3) To support your argument, offer examples from contemporary
media to
apply, test, extend, or refute McLuhan’s idea about media.
Feb 24: The Popular Culture Paradigm: the
British
School of Cultural Studies
Reading:
Assignment due Feb 24: Team
project web page with 5 elements: overview page, annotated links,
annotated bibliography, timeline of your topic, digitized media.
Feb 26: Birmingham School: Style as Critique
Stuart
Hall and the Cultural Study of Media: Slide Lecture
Reading
- Dick
Hebdige, "From Culture to Hegemony"; "Subculture:
the Unnatural Break", Durham & Kellner, 198-216.
Visitor: Professor of Art and Film Studies,
and Director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB,
Dick Hebdige
Assignment: 1-page: attempt to apply Hebdige's thesis to a
popular culture style that you know well. Do you agree that
style can function as a critique of culture?
IV.
New Media and Computable Culture
| After the Digital Mutation: the computer
was developed in the 1940s as a machine for increasing the
speed of command and control: for decoding German encryption
quickly, for targeting missiles in real time. In the decades
since the 1940s the computer, and the software algorithms
that lie as the center of its operational power, was applied
to data processing for business and government; were made
into the hubs and routers of communications networks (telephones,
local area networks, the Internet), and finally appeared
in the form of the personal computer on our desks and laps
in the last quarter of the 20th century. In order to make
information computable it must be turned into 0s and 1s;
but the information the computer contains and operates upon,
can become resident in many media forms: as paper tape,
punch cards, magnetic tape, hard drives, screens, sound,
etc. In fact, the ductility and plasticity of information
has enabled us to translate all of our earlier natural and
electronic media forms onto the computer. This has led Lev
Manovich to describe the computer as the “universal media
machine.” This is at once insightful and misleading. For
there is a very real sense in which software code is free
of any necessary relation to any medium; it is an a-media,
that can be invested with many different media forms (as
screen image; as sound; as print; as film; etc.) This has
threatened to transform the media ecology, a change that
corporations will resist (c.f. Napster). |
March 2: After the Digital Mutation:
Promoting the New Media Paradigm
The
Networked Computer as New Media: Slide lecture
Reading
- Bill
Gates, "The Beginning of the Informaiton Age" from
The Road Ahead. [R]
- Nicholas
Negroponte, "Being Digital" [R]
- J.P Barlow, "A
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" http://www.eff.org/Publications/John_Perry_Barlow/barlow_0296.declaration
- Recommended: Jerry Klang, "The Nature of Cyberspace"
and "What is the Internet?" [R]
Visitor: Professor of English, Alan Liu:
New Elements of Communication and the War of Metaphors
for Accounting for the Internet
March 4: Defining Computable
Culture & Exam Review
What
Computable Media Is
Hacking
Hollywood to Liberate Film
Reading:
- Manovich,
Lev. Selections from The Language on New Media, Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press, 2001, “Principles of New Media,” 27-48. [R]
Exam review: Frameworks
for Studying 20th Century Media Culture
March 9: Exam: matching,
quote identification, 2 short essays
Recommended steps in studying for the exam, which functions
as the course's check on how well you have understood the reading.
- Read each assigned essay in the class
- Use your class notes and the on-line slide lectures to focus
in on key passages
- Outline
the central concepts and themes of the main theorists we have
read: Benjamin, Frankfurt school, Habermas, Chopsky, McLuhan,
Hall, Weber
- Reading the text on our web site (along with the assigned
writings of Czitrom, Sarnoff, Spigel, and Gates) identify
the main steps by which film, radio, television and the Internet
become influential media institutions.
- Develop examples of these concepts from the media texts
of the course ("The War of the Worlds"; "I
Love Lucy"; 1984, Rear Window, etc.)
March 11: Cyborgs
'r Us; End our Class Lunch
Have
we become cyborgs? Discussion of Donna
Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century.” [R]
Media texts: Robocop, Terminator, Blade Runner,…
Time scheduled
for project team work
Team Project Presentation:
Tuesday March
16, 2004: 12:00-3:00
PM
- Final Team Project Presentations will
take place during this scheduled "final exam" time
slot
- A printed copy of each student's final
5-paper is also due this day.
- Evaluation
of your fellow team members contribution
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