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, Debord, Heiddeger, early Foucault, 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, unity, harmonization)

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. [Sigel]
• 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" [Hall]

Comparative: Resisting the economic determinism of framework 1 and the techno-media determinism of framework 2, this 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: Michel DeCerteau, Start Hall, Michael Warner (on print), Lyn Sigel (on TV)

Comparative: Beyond the enlightenment context explicit or implicit in frameworks 1-3: what if media brings neither enslavement nor liberation? What if media does not serve the brutal clarity of communication (by which, in the transmission model, an idea travels from point a to point b; but neither does it get detoured from its proper meaning by a cunning, tactical, resistant reader-user)?
Questioning the failed themes, incompleteness, or contradicctions of the previous 3 frameworks:
Spectacle and control (what is the function of the idea of the modern world as a single spectacle (Big Media's self-serving self-narrative? Spectacle theory's bad dream) );
Adorno on Jazz and Hollywood;
how is a "detournment" even possible;
ads sordid but vivid, witty, fun, and thick with cultural meanings;
negoitate with media for what? (what do the people who use media really want?)

4: Media Materialities/ Phenomenologies of Media

• The new media of the last two centuries entail an expansion of the technical modalities and material resources of mediation.
• New media bring news phenomena and new phenomenologies:
• decentralized connectivity (or networking);
• the experience of noise or interference;
• the intricate indirectness made possible by new circuits of communication;
• effects of autonomous feedback (that are surprising, bracing, disconcerting).
• Within this critical narrative, modernity experiences new forms of (media)tion as fuzzy, messy, semi-autonomous theater of circuitized agency;
• This is a new human rather than a rationalistically inhuman or alien; it entails networks of humans and non-humans within a narrative that is neither "modern" nor "anti-modern" but "nonmodern" (Bruno Latour)

Example: The Matrix: Within the seamless distopia of a (digital, virtual) "present" of the matrix's consenual hallucination, the film capitalizes upon the fetishized aura of the old technologies of the phone in order to give the characters and viewer new phenomenologies of transport and mobility.
Theorists: Friedrich Kittler; Bruno Latour; David Wellbury

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