1: Culture Industry / Spectacle

• Modern media helps to drive technological enabled institutionalized rationality (Adorno, Debord), with one-way broadcast communication reflecting an essential asymmetry of power;
• There's a plot to control of the consumer, commodify the world (of Nature and feeling), resulting in the "open-air prison" of an "administrated world."
• The spectator finds themselves separated from the spectacle that engulfs them.

Example: 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.
Theorists: Adorno & Horkheimer, Mulvey, Debord, Weber, Baudrilliard

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"
• 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.
Example: The idea of the Internet circa 1994 (WWW as global forced liberation)

3: Cultural Studies / Cultural History

• 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]
• 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]

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.
Examples: Gay camp appropriations of Betty Davis and Toni Curtis; Teens using beepers; Napster as software invention and user-led practice.
Theorists/ practitioners: Lyn Sigel (on TV), Start Hall

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