1: Culture Industry / Spectacle

• Modern media helps to drive technological enabled institutionalized rationality (Adorno), with one-way broadcast communication reflecting an essential asymmetry of power;
• The analysis is "top-down" (from power down to the deluded masses)
• There's a project to control of the consumer through their desires; to commodify the world (of Nature and feeling), to create an "open-air prison" of an "administrated world" where you believe you are free
• The spectator finds themselves separated from the spectacle that nonetheless engulfs them.

Examplary Objects: Advertising; the Hollywood Film Industry; the Radio and Television Networks

Dominant moods and posture: pessimism; indignation; profound irony

Example:

• Oceana as envisioned by Orwell in 1984
• the hip irony of TV as a way to offer an enlightened surpassing of all positive values;
• the Mall as the enlightened remaking of the World according to TV, Muzak, and comprehensive security systems; what's lost? the Street as a publics space for politics, dirt, resistance in a space which no one (everyone) owns
• One company in Texas, Clear Channel, owning most of American local radio .

Slogans: "Big Brother is You, Watching"; "You are what you watch"

Theorists: Benjamin (some), Adorno & Horkheimer, Orwell, Miller, Weber, Chompsky

2: McLuhan's Media Theory

• Each medium is a "total" environment, invisible but pervasive, and thus processes "that change the content totally"
• Each medium reshapes the sense ratio of those who inhabit that media environment, rewiring the world as a "global village"
• Historical narrative: from the intuitive aural to visuality of print back (through electronic media) to the tactile, aural, and intuitive
• Development: McLuhan begins with a critique of American advertising as an appallingly total system, then reinterprets this unity as an effect of media carrying a strongly religious potential (of myth, of unity, of harmonization through a return to the {oral, tactile} Africa within us all)

Comparative: McLuhan braids together propositions that that resemble the ideas of 1st framework (involuntary capture, invisibility, efficient totalizition) with a mythos (retribalization; new sense ratios) that puts new media on the side of (potential) liberation.

Characteristic objects of study: TV; adverting

Mood and postures: optimism; evangelical; "wake up and see the media"

Examples:

• The world has become a "global village" where we feel and experience what is happening on the other side of the globe.
• Cinema creates a new kind of experience and a new version of the aesthetic (Benjamin);
• Media changes everything: you, family, neighbourhood, religion, etc.
  

Theorists: Marshall McLuhan, Benjamin (some)

3: Cultural Studies / Cultural History

• Big media does not own culture
• A bottom-up analysis begins with popular culture (NOT mass culture), seeking to understand what individuals and groups made of media images
• An analysis of a media from the side of production can never account for the debt to culture at large owned by media producers (directors, actors, writers, etc.) working for big media.
• Whatever the messages "encoded" at the site of production, consumer-users exercise their cultural bias, critical perspective, boredom and distraction to decode and reproduce media within a reading that may be "dominant or hegemonic"; "negotiated," or "oppositional" [Stuart Hall]
• The coming of TV is not imposed from above (whether through a cunning manipulation of the desires of the audience or by political fiat), but instead it is "negotiated" with those many social agents who make room for TV in their homes and lives, and shape what gets produced by what they buy and how they use it. [Lynn Spigel]

Comparative: Resisting the economic determinism of framework 1 and the techno-media determinism of framework 2, the cultural studies framework understands culture to be a "strong" and informing term, and history to carry considerable momentum into every mutation of media.

Characteristic objects: punk style; teen culture; fan culture; ethnicity; race; class

Moods and postures: hip; qualified optimism; hopeful; appreciation

Examples:

• Gay camp appropriations of Betty Davis and Toni Curtis
• Teens using beepers
• Napster and Kazaa as software inventions and user-led practice
  
  Theorists/ practitioners: Daniel Czitrom, Lyn Sigel (on TV), Start Hall, Dick Hebdige

4: Computable Culture; or, the Internet Network Paradigm

• By translating analog media into digital code, it becomes computable, liquid, variable, storeable.
• Because software can emulate the function of many media technologies, the Computer becomes the Univeral Media Machine (incorporating telephony, radio, TV, print, photography, film, etc.)
• The Internet moves the user/viewer/ audience from a position of abject powerlessness (the end of a distribution process) to the vital center of two-way, interactive computer communication where he/she can create as well as consumer, build as well as receive

Comparative: While the Internet paradigm comes out of computer science departmetns and the university and government labs, it quickly, like the radio, ecomes the focus of amateurs (hacker/ geeks), who invent new uses (and ways to abuse) computing. (e.g. viruses and worms)

Mood and Posture: euphoric and ecstatic (at least for the 1990s); the improbabe geek revolutionary; the hype and the sell

Slogan: "Everything has changed!"; "There is a technological solution to this..."

Examples:

• Sean Fanning, using Napster software and servers, is able to realize the overturning of a big media system only dreamed by cultural studies
• The 1984 Apple MacIntoch Big Brother ad
• What Tivo does to TV
  
  Theorists/ practitioners: Bill Gates, Nikolas Negraponte, Alan Liu, Lev Manovich

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(Department of English, UC/ Santa Barbara, 2003)