Media Studies 2.0 v The Postmodern Father + After the Media

Lots of DIFFERENT IDEAS on this. Very much a CONTESTED view. Presented here as a paradox.

Quite a busy slide.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzkiRIDsj3s

POWER

Did ‘the media’ ever exist?

Premise(s)

Who / what are ‘the media’?

How are they in transition?

So what, for you?

In what role did you answer the last question? Student? Producer? Consumer? Fan?

What has facilitated the transition the most? Caused the transition or …. what?

The internet?

Transition

Transition

Claims

• Is New Media transforming culture?• Rise of interaction and networking• Production = less centralised and more

fluid• Shift from production to produsage, or

consumer to prosumer• Audience shift from passive to active• Interactive or also more DEMOCRATIC?

Claims

• Generation Y, Digital Immigrants, Google Generation, Screenagers…

• Rise of Generation C (Bruns)– Content, Control, Creativity, Celebrity

• Intercreativity (Time Berners-Lee)• Pro-ams

– Amateurs working to professional standards

• End of the artefact?• End of the artefact as a finished construct?

– Mash-ups, etc

Claims

• “The print media company and the TV network are hierarchical organisations that reflect the values of their owners. New media, on the other hand, give control to all users. The distinction between bottom-up and top-down organisational structure is at the heart of the new generation. For the first time ever, young people have taken control of critical elements of a communications revolution.” (p21)

Fan 2.0 Categories (Fraser, 2012)

Acting OutExtended StorytellingMachinimaPasticheLego http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IybHfbQWrJo

RemixFan Art

Shannon and Weaver, 1949 Merrin / Gauntlett, 2011

…. and lots of theory in between, of course!

RE-APPRAISAL

Media 1.0

• Celebrates key texts produced by media moguls and celebrated by well-known critics

• Vague recognition of internet and new digital media, as an 'add on' to the traditional media

• A preference for conventional ideas where most people are treated as non-expert audience 'receivers', or, if they are part of the formal media industries, as expert 'producers'.

Media 2.0

• Interest in the massive 'long tail' of independent media projects such as those found on YouTube and many other websites, mobile devices, and other forms of DIY media

• Recognition that internet and digital media have fundamentally changed the ways in which we engage with all media

• Media now more democratic through people making and connecting

http://www.merj.info/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/MERJ-2.1-Editorial.pdf

But …

• Many scholars very much against the media 2.0 hypothesis

• Celebrates the “power of active users” , ignoring the commercial structures that help to shape those powers

• Ignores real material and cultural constraints?– Gender inequality?– Poverty?– Who’s online?

FALLING APART AND COMING TOGETHER

FRIVOLISTRIBUTION?

FLATTENED TEXTUALITY

So – for Media Studies: WHAT COUNTS?

Relativism Now?

New frameworks?

).

Apply new framework to:

Lego MovieTalking dogVine media

Your two choices of media 2.0 viral

Merrin (2014)

Mass media and computing converged at the end of the 20th century with material, ecological, cultural and personal transformations. What are these, for you?

Media Studies is a product of the analogue, broadcast era, emerging in the early 20th century as a response to the success of newspapers, radio and cinema and reflecting that era back in its organisation, themes and concepts.Does it seem this way to you? If so, how? If not, why not?

Digitalisation takes us beyond this analogue era (media studies 1.0) into a new, post-broadcast era. This era demands an upgraded academic discipline: one reflecting the real media life of its students and teaching the key skills needed by the 21st-century user. Media 2.0 demand a media studies 2.0.What do you think this would look like?

If digital media are the result of the meeting and merger of computing and mass media then we need to teach our students computing to enable them to produce software and products for themselves. One thing at least is certain: filling students’ time by teaching them how to use a video camera or making them pretend to be a newsreader in a fake studio is a waste of their fees and an inadequate training for the 21st century.What about your fees, then?

Merrin (2014)

Print, radio, cinema and television have been transformed in their material basis, ecological position and relationships, cultural production, distribution and consumption and their individual use. Each medium has had to Realign itself to meet the demands of a different era and different market conditions, changing their economic models, content creation, modes of distribution, relationship with other forms and even their own idea of what they are doing and how their forms will be used. Apply to television - discuss.

Whilst media studies 2.0 privileges digital media as a revolutionary force in consuming older forms and practices and creating new modes of media experience, it isn’t an uncritical celebration of these forms or these modes. McLuhan commented how ‘ many people seem to think that if you talk about something recent, you’re in favour of it’ and discussions of digital media attract the same reaction.

Manovich already argued in The Language of New Media (2001) that ‘ new media calls for a new stage in media theory’ , suggesting that ‘ to understand the logic of new media, we need to turn to computer science. It is there that we may expect to find the new terms, categories and operations that characterise media that became programmable.’ Computing can serve as a key research tool for the digital environment, with data visualisation software allowing the analysis of large collections of information.

In order to be able to write media today our students need to know how to produce software, how to employ or create digital tools and platforms, and how to navigate and use the digital ecology. ‘ Media practice’, therefore, needs to be reorientated towards training students in computing and the digital ecology. Today’ s user needs up-to-date, practical knowledge of how to best take advantage of digital technologies and, like the hacker, how to secure their communications, anonymise or hide their activities and delete and control their digital footprint. These may well be the most important ‘ practice’ skills of the 21st century.How are we doing here?

After the Media?

Literature | The Media – same effect (The Big Other)

Online exchanges simply bring into focus what was already there.

Media, people and everyday life are not separate.

Media, literature, drama, art, videogames, clothes, dancing, eating are connected – textual practices (‘doing text’).

Insulation between academic subjects is artificial and inhibits the deeper study of the textual life – of ‘doing culture’.

After the Media?

If media – audience is now a blurred boundary, then so too must be media teacher (expert) - media student (inexpert).

So a Media Studies 2.0 would have to be differently taught / learned, rather than just being about different things or different skills.

The construct of ‘the media’ as a ‘big other’ imposes a distributive model of social capital whereby the currency is acquired in relation to its normative gaze – social capital achieved through the academic modality – being critical about ‘the media’, or through the ‘vocational modality’ – working within its idioms to gain access. The ‘in between space’ will be a community of practice in which texts, events and exchanges are produced in the practice but ‘the media’ are ignored.

After the Media?

Questions about subjectivity, about students’ sense of their own identity, are inextricable from the ways in which they read and use media… We need to provide opportunities for students to explore their emotional investments in the media in their own terms, rather than attempting to replace these by rigorous ‘rational’ analysis. (Buckingham, 1990: 224).

More than twenty years on, and firmly into the ‘digital age’, these questions remain. Media Studies needs a pedagogy of the inexpertLearning = curation of porous expertise (semi-permeable membrane)

Lived experience, media and the act of curation can be brought together by new pedagogical models that move away from ‘fixed’ boundaries between home and education, learning and play, types of text, media and people and most importantly, expert and learner.

Learning media production moves away from either confirming or challenging the conventions of ‘real’ texts from ‘the media’ and becomes an auto- ethnographic making of textual meaning and, ultimately, of knowledge (of the self).

THE POSTMODERN FATHER

• What does your textual experience look and feel like?

• What different spaces and places are there for consuming and producing textual meaning?

• What does it mean to be a producer and consumer in these spaces and places?

• What different kinds of textual associations and affiliations do you make, with whom and for what?

• What is an author and what is being creative?

• How do you represent yourself in different spaces and places?

• What is reading, what is writing, what is speaking and what is listening and what is learning?

Curation Porous Expertise