Frankfrurt School critique & Determining or determined

Last week's topic was 'The return of the Frankfrurt School critique in the popularsation of new media' & 'Determining or determined'. Here is the summary.




•Abstract notion
•Why the Frankfurt School produced first critical perspectives on mass media and popular?

•Strinati
– elitism - view mass as passive non-discriminating consumers
•Alan Meek
– dominant kind of relationship

•Mass society critics feared four things:
– the debasement and displacement
– the erosion of high cultural traditions
– loss of the ability of these cultural traditions to comment critically on society 's values The indoctrination and manipulation

•Fascism and Stalinism : Totalitarianism
•The tyranny of market, ’mere’ consumer
•Active looking back to a pre-mass culture

•Bertolt Brecht
– The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication
– Two-way channels of communication
•Walter Benjamin
– The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

•amazing novelty of the possibilites that are opening up
•But fails to help us understand what is happening around us.




•new media : determining or determined?
•very difficult theorists of media
- Marshall McLugan & Raymond Williams

•different between McLuhan & Williams?
1)McLuhan : new media change everything
2)Williams : new media can take only effect though already present social processes and sustain existing power relations

•Mainstream of media studies
- played technological elements medium has.

•Marshall McLuhan(1911~1980)
- nationally : Canada
- Activity : editer - inovator of media

•Williams and McLuhan carried out their influential work is the 1960s and 1970s.
•McLuhan's major works
- 'The medium is the message' : like E-mail, i thought.
- 'global village' : In Korean, 'ji-gu-chon'

Old media & discursive construction of new media

The last titles were 'who was dissatisfied with old media', 'the discursive construction of new media'. Here's the first title's summary.



•Psychoanalytic theory
–Critical thoughts…
–Recast in more sociological language

•The imaginaire
–Jacques Lacan
–‘real’ & ‘symbolic’
–Not refer poetic mental faculty or the activity of fantasizing

•Apply to technology
–Role of such an ‘other’
–Social reality and desires for a better society

•Abstract notion
–Case study
–Reminding ourselves
–Considering the recurring sense

•Loss of the form that are displaced
–Photography on painting
–Television then video on cinema

•More recently
–Digital imaging on photographyGraphics software

•Understanding the conditions
–Seeing values a culture
–Understanding how the concrete object


And second title's summary.


Ø What is discourse?

“Discourses” means to construct their objects.
new media provides technological imagination

Ø A sense of repetition in how media changes

#the contextual meaning of déjà vu
- each new medium occurs technologically and socioeconomically in the same way
- the same patterns of response from the members of the culture.
#critical point
the same patterns occur in different historical and social contexts

Ø Determine a kind of media

#handmade images and still photographic images from film and cinema ->The appearance of panorama or diorama theater -> technological visual culture -> what is real?

Ø Discursive construction of new media

#Visual reality in new technology
- communication media
- enrich existing forms of consumer culture

A sense of deja vu & Conclusion

The last class' theme was a sense of deja vu & Conclusion.

According to text, two kinds of historical enquiry are relevant. the first is to be found in the existing body of media history, such as: literacy, the printing press, the book, photography, film and television. These long-standing topics of historical research provide us with detailed empirical knowledge of what we broadly refer to as earlier 'media revolutions'. Second, a more recent development has been historical and ethnographic research into our imaginative investment in new technologies, the manner in which we respond to their appearance in our lives, and the ways in which the members of a culture repurpose and subvert media in everyday use. This is the concept of the 'technological imaginary'. These two concepts were so serious and complex a bit, but interesting things at the same time. I became knowing about the concept 'deja vu of new media'.

what kind of history?

Today's topic was 'what kind of history?'.

1. Deferred future of new media

• because of technological underdevelopment?
• be used and nuderstanding according to older, existing practices and ideas
  The veiw of modernist aesthetic

2. mediun has its own kind of essence

• medium has to be genuinely new from the past and old media
• experimentalism
• imperialist
• Pictorialists
• photograhper wanna be artist. so they take pictures like a painting.
• pictorialists are would be the examples of the perceptual immperialists?
  
  

3. From cave paintings to mobile phones: In Rheingold historical scheme

4. From photography to telematics: extracting some sense from teleologies: an eight-stage historical model of the progressive development of technologies of image production and transmission

5. Seeing the limitis of new media teleologies: from an abstract system of logic, through the development of calculating machines, to the computer as a 'medium'

6. Foucault and genealogies of new media: Foucauldian perspective

change and continuity

Old media in new times? <- the solution of this is this week's purpose.
First of all, here's the summary of this week's lecture.

• 'Digital television' is not a new medium but is best understood as a change in the form of delivering the contents of the TV medium.
• New media: digital television
• Old media: immersive VR, online, interactive, multimedia
• The media of 'remediation'Jay bolter and Richard Grusin
• The digital technologies 'refashion older media'
• These older media 'refashion themselves to answer to the challengers of new media'
• New media are not born in a vanccum and, as media, would have no resources# Cultural (mis)understanding through photographs_prof. Roger Palmer

Generally, company needs revolutions. But, users don't like totally new thing. They don't hate it, they just feel constrained. So, company leave 'continuity' in new thing.
I didn't agree that. Because, I knew it's "I'm early adaptor". But, now I knew it was not true exectly.

• Polarised over the degree of new media's newness.
• Hinges upon the disciplinary frameworks and discourses
• Revolutionary - a historical perspective

1)How new or how large changes -> We need to establish from what previous states things hae changed

• Brian Winston :: observes, the concept of a revolution
• Kevin Robins :: whatever might be 'new' about digital technologies, there is something old in the imaginary signification of "imagerevolution"

2)Three possibilities
(1)how can we know that new thing is made from
(2)familiar in everyday use or consumption lose out curiosity and vigilance, ceasing to ask questions
(3)degrees of neveltynew media buzzword interactivity