 "Always design a thing by considering
it in its next largest context --a chair in a room, a room in a house,
a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." --Eliel Saarinen The "next largest context" for a course in media studies is the liberal and fine arts. I started this text with the above quote from Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen to immediately underscore the crossover of creativity and intellect involved in media studies and digital/new media, and the crossover or combined-context it exists within. The recipient of a BFA degree needs to attain mastery in both the liberal arts and the fine arts. In order to achieve this it is necessary to work hard, and more importantly to work smart --which means learning principles and methods with a focus on skills. From recent cognitive science, we have a pretty good idea about how people with expert or terminal-level knowledge in their fields operate --and what we now know is quite in line with what one of my heroes, William Macomber, in fact did. It seems that experts in any field reference their work to principles. In a significant way, everyone who is an expert is a fan of CliffsNotes or SparkNotes in the sense that they operate from principles rather than details and memorization. Novices, again in any field, typically try to put forth a kind of mechanical mastery of procedural and/or informational details. Find immediately below a quote from John Bransford et al's free (available entirely online), superb, groundbreaking book How People Learn. "In
an example from physics, experts and competent beginners (college
students) were asked to describe verbally the approach they would use
to solve physics problems. Experts usually mentioned the major
principle(s) or law(s) that were applicable to the problem, together
with a rationale for why those laws applied to the problem and how one
could apply them (Chi et al., 1981). In contrast, competent beginners
rarely referred to major principles and laws in physics; instead, they
typically described which equations they would use and how those
equations would be manipulated (Larkin, 1981, 1983). perceive problem
solving in physics as memorizing, recalling, and manipulating equations
to get answers. When solving problems, experts in physics often pause
to draw a simple qualitative diagram—they do not simply attempt to plug
numbers into a formula. The diagram is often elaborated as the expert
seeks to find a workable solution path (e.g., see Larkin et al., 1980;
Larkin and Simon, 1987; Simon and Simon, 1978). Experts'
thinking seems to be organized around big ideas in physics, such as
Newton's second law and how it would apply, while novices tend to
perceive problem solving in physics as memorizing, recalling, and
manipulating equations to get answers. When solving problems, experts
in physics often pause to draw a simple qualitative diagram—they do not
simply attempt to plug numbers into a formula. The diagram is often
elaborated as the expert seeks to find a workable solution path (e.g.,
see Larkin et al., 1980; Larkin and Simon, 1987; Simon and Simon,
1978)." Expert-level work involves using principles to understand situations, solve problems, or complete tasks. In other words, expert-level work is organized around big ideas. So if we want to develop expertise in the liberal and fine arts, and in media studies or DMA , we are on the right track if we focus on principles, methods, and skills (including conceptual and rhetorical skills in addition to procedural and technical skills).  Len Masterman has a wonderfully clear view of the history of Media Studies that is highly regarded in the field. He describes the trajectory of Media Studies (or Media Education as he calls it) as a movement from 'protection' to 'empowerment', and identifies three historical phases in this movement: 1) an initial "inoculation phase" that "had its origins in a deep-seated distrust of media themselves, which were often viewed as agents of cultural decline and seducers of the innocent." 2) a "popular arts phase" that had as its main goal the teaching of critical skills to help people discriminate between 'good' and 'bad' media programming. In other words, one did not need to protect oneself or others from all media, only some forms of media, nor all media programs, only some. Yet, in Masterman's words "the Popular Arts movement was still essentially protectionist. In spite of its name, the movement generally sought to undermine the genuinely popular tastes of pupils in favour of the more "serious" media preferences of their teachers." 3) an "investigative phase" that moved away from a focus on separating the good from the bad media and towards a goal of understanding how media products are researched, funded, produced, and disseminated. Again in Masterman's words "this movement away from appreciation towards understanding did not completely dispose of the "value question" however. The question "Precisely how good or bad is this newspaper or television programme?" was, in some circumstances, still a question worth asking." So in some ways the three main historical phases of the field are additive in the sense that the third phase adds changes in content and approach while also continuing valuable aspects of the first two phases. A question currently being debated in the field concerns the contours of a possible fourth phase. Masterman touches on this in describing the full contours of his third phase. He claims that part of the phase-three ethos was that "it would no longer be good enough to subordinate pupils to the dominance of the text or of the teacher. Pupils' responses had to be taken, perhaps for the first time, very seriously indeed. The movement from appreciation to understanding, then, involved a transformation in the role of the pupil from being a passive recipient of already formulated textual meanings to an active maker of meanings." Arguably, this constitutes a fourth phase of the field --an "empowerment phase"-- that again builds on and also edits all three previous phases. The key difference, with high relevance to the current generation raised on the internet so to speak, is that individuals experience themselves as producers of media as well as consumers. My understanding of Media Studies favors the idea that we are currently in an empowerment-based fourth phase. I agree with Masterman that there has been a sea-change with regard to how students are regarded, and I also think this sea-change is closely related to developments in the media sphere itself: We now live in an era where students often have full access to information and perspectives (peer as well as expert) and full access as well to a host of media tools to produce and publish content. In other words, since the 1980s when Masterman wrote the booklet referred to above, the theme of empowerment has become even more important and its effects more pronounced. Yet as indicated above there are still, as always, critical questions to ask about the ways user-produced content is being understood, framed, and/or marketed and co-opted by hosting sites and so forth. So the history of Media Studies can be seen as having distinct phases which are inclusive and cumulative. (The quotes in the above summary are from a booklet Masterman wrote entitled The Development of Media Education in Europe in the 1980's. You can read the short introduction and other segments of the booklet online via Google Books.)  We will be exploring the content and principles of Media Studies within Masterman's basic historical framework outlined above. In particular we will be operating within a fourth phase that emphasizes critically and creatively informed intelligence when it comes to understanding and producing one's own content. With regard to context outlined above, as a formal discipline Media Studies is a relatively recent addition to the Liberal Arts. However, serious attention to issues and concerns related to media is anything but recent among Liberal Artists. In ancient Greece and other parts of the ancient world Liberal Artists debated and in some cases lamented the introduction of the then-new media of writing! In fact many of the current worries expressed about the corrosive effects of the internet, texting, and related media precisely echo worries that the ancients had about writing. Our exploration of key Liberal Artists within the field Media Studies will be guided by James Webb Young's sage advice, mentioned elsewhere and repeated here: "Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up
of what Dr. Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles
and method are everything." --James Webb Young (1965). A Technique for Producing Ideas. New York, NY: Mcgraw-Hill  There are LOTS of people writing in the field of Media Studies, some of whom are generating principles, others of whom are producing and/or reciting LOTS of rapidly aging facts! My selection of people to consider in a course such as this is unavoidably partial and is in part made for the purposes of brevity. If you come to understand the concepts contributed by the handful of Liberal Artists / Media Studies experts included herein, I think you will be able to understand a LOT of facts and also predict with better than average odds which facts will persist in memory and experience. In many ways this illustrates one of the major premises of Higher Education; namely, verticality. What you learn in higher education, at a university or college, should not only be higher, it should also be deeper. Understanding a few things on the vertical axis will enable you to explain and/or talk about many, many things with intelligence and creativity on the horizontal axis. |
 Media-Studies: A Field Guide, by Bob King is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |
Overview of the field |