Vorlesung

A Sociology of the Media

Prof. Dr. Joost van Loon

Institut für Soziologie, LMU

Nottingham Trent University, U.K.

Details

• Sprechstunde: Di 10-12,

• Konradstraße 6, Zi. 205

• Email: joost.vanloon@soziologie.uni-muenchen.de

Outline of the lecture

1. Media as Ubiquitous

2. Media as Black Box

3. Media as Phenomena

4. Technology as Ordering

5. Overview of Lectureseries

Media as Ubiquitous

• Our world can be characterized by an increase in mediatization

• Mediated communication is something we do rather than think about.

• Main focus has been on understanding media in service of something else, e.g. power, capital accumulation, ideology, social interaction, popular culture.

Media as Ubiquitous

• Studies that have tried to explore media-as-media, in terms of:

• (a) media corpporations, e.g. organizational practices (e.g. Cottle, 1993; Hall et al, 1978; Harrison, 2000; Schlesinger, 1987; Tuchman, 1978);

• (b) media products (primarily in the field of semiotics and screen theory and mainly concerned with media-content)

• (c) media-technologies, mainly by scholars associated with McLuhan

Phenomenology of Media

• Media-use

• Technological agency

• The strength of a phenomenological approach to media is that it problematizes exactly that which most communication studies approaches take for granted: the medium.

Media as Black Box

• Media studies has focused on either:• (a) context (production, organization, distribution)• (b) content (products, interpretation, consumption)

• And has by and large ignored the process of mediation.• Black box

– between context and content– between production and consumption– between intention and interpretation

Media as Phenomena

• As different from– Marxism/functionalism (e.g. political economy

of media)– Public Sphere Theory (Habermas)– Liberal Pluralism (e.g. uses and gratifications

theory, cultivation theory, audience studies)– Semiotics

– Closer associations with new media theory

Mediation as

• … politics

• … social interaction

• … cultural reproduction

Technology as Ordering

• Technologies ‘enframe’ the world; that is they order them in the double sense of (a) providing a structure and (b) commanding specific actions.

• This ordering constitutes the essence of mediation.

Vorlesungsprogramme (1)Introduction

• 17.10.2007 Introduction (1): ubiquitous media• 24.10.2007 Introduction (2): towards a phenomenology of mediation

Approaches to Media Analysis• 31.10.2007 Political Economy• 07.11.2007 Semiotics14.11.2007Audience Research

Media Forms• 21.11.2007 Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin)• 28.11.2007 Electronic Reproduction (Williams)• 05.12.2007 Digital Reproduction (Baudrillard)

Vorlesungsprogramme (2)

Media Histories• 12.12.2007Media Evolutions (Innis)• 19.12.2007 Media Revolutions (McLuhan)

Media Cultures• 09.01.2008 Everyday Life and Domestication• 16.01.2008 Identity and Subjectivity• 23.01.2008 The Public Sphere

Media and the Body• 30.01.2008 Perception and Sensibility• 06.02.2008 Media and (Dis)Embodiment: gendered and

networked being