About Media Studies

Media Studies is the home of expanded definitions of reading (defined as decoding) and writing (defined as encoding). It is the place where reading images and sounds is as important as reading books, and where writing in video is as important as writing papers. As a formal discipline, Media Studies is a relatively recent addition to the Liberal Arts. In its formal iterations it has been decidedly multi-media oriented (the initial establishment of field as a formal area of study roughly coincides with the rise of television). 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 talked extensively and explicitly about (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.Possibly the most important single thing to remember about Media Studies is that the word 'media' means in the middle. In some ways, therefore, Media Studies literally means the study of that which is in the middle or in-between.Our exploration of Media Studies will continue to be guided by James Webb Young's sage advice to stick to method and principles rather than "rapidly aging facts". We will derive principles for our conversational method of learning about Media Studies from a highly selected group of Liberal Artists.

In effect, and in keeping with our theme of conversation, we will friend or add a few prominent thinkers to our conversation. In Plato's Symposium, there are several speakers in the dialog, each of whom has a different philosophy of love. In our case we will gather together a group of Media Studies luminaries and add them to our own symposium or seminar. From each we will derive a different philosophy or principle of Media Studies.

Macomber would shock folks by claiming to be a great fan of CliffsNotes (same as SparkNotes only earlier). He also referred to the compendium-model Introduction to Western Civilization course at UCSB as "Western sieve". But why would an exquisitely trained professor, someone who would have been required to read very long books by very difficult authors (i.e., Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Thomas Acquinas, and the like) be a fan of CliffsNotes or its latter-day variant SparkNotes?

Again it was matter of Macomber's insight or genius (which I guess could be defined as the capacity to consistently generate insights). His insights in this instance went to how people learn, and where the fun is in it. It may have in part been simple observation of his colleagues and himself that fueled the insight. I mean Liberal Artists love to talk, love to argue, and Philosophy departments (where Macomber hung out) are full of chatterboxes. It's fun. It's an art. Kids love to talk, too. Have you ever considered how odd it is that, instead of building on the obvious joy children take in conversation, formal schooling typically negates that, and then demands that kids sit still, shut up, and learn how to write? "Egads!" Socrates might exclaim. In order to talk, people really don't need much information (consider gossip --zero information, lots of talk :) So, all we really need are a few well-chosen items to play with to have an elevated, Higher Education type of conversation. This is what informed Macomber's priorities.

So, he assigned a single, very manageable text for us to read for an entire term (we had to read only 150 pages during the entire10 week term). And even the text itself was in the form of a conversation (this is where the "well-chosen" aspect makes a difference). As mentioned elsewhere in these pages, the text he selected was all about love (something that college freshmen are pretty interested in --so once again, a well-chosen element, and another sort of well-duh insight from Mr. Genius :) Plato's Symposium was the text (it is now available for free online thanks to MIT). Dr. M. wanted us to talk about ideas, because through talking he knew we would construct new knowledge in the only way this ever occurs: by building on what we already knew, by creating bridges conversationally between what we already know, couched in metaphors we are familiar with, and the new content and metaphors that are being presented. Same as it ever was. This building on the already-know is a universal principle of learning. In this model, long texts are not really needed, but well-chosen principles to discuss are indeed required. The details are produced in the interaction of the well-chosen elements.

Referring back to James Webb Young's emphasis on principles and method, what principles can we use to sparknote our conversation, so to speak? In what follows I will present outline just a few principles, associated with key thinkers in the Media Studies field, that I think can be used --within a conversational methodology-- to generate a whole lot of knowledge about media (and its subset digital media). Becoming conversant with the following people and principles is the single, manageable task I am presenting us with. There are LOTS of people writing in the field of Media Studies who are generating LOTS of rapidly aging facts (and indeed the speed with which facts age seems to be ever-increasing thanks to digital immediacy) so the following narrative selects for key foundational concepts. If you understand the concepts contributed by the handful of Liberal Artists discussed below, 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.

"The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them..." --Alfred North Whitehead

If we were to substitute the name Marshall McLuhan for Plato in the above quote, the same statement would apply pretty well to the field of Media Studies. The "wealth of general ideas" McLuhan scattered throughout the field continues to be explored and is often reiterated (knowingly or not) by other thinkers. McLuhan was an interesting and unique character. He is an example of what people sometimes now refer to as a "public intellectual" in that his ideas and presence extended beyond the higher education context in which he worked (he was a professor at the University of Toronto for most of his career) out into the larger culture and society. In some ways he was a "pop culture" figure in his day. He made appearances on television talk shows to strut and promote a persona that was engagingly cryptic (this was at the time very unusual as it was way before politicians and experts of all stripes began appearing on morning shows and all the rest, in the kind of reality-tv world we now swim in). He also made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen's Annie Hall. In some ways he treated his persona as an artwork in itself --much as Andy Warhol did at roughly the same time. In fact Pop Art (an interesting art movement of the sixties renaissance period) probably owes something to McLuhan. Rather than seeing the flood of advertisements, commercial-speak, and television programming as insignificant background, McLuhan and the Pop Artists instead brought such materials front-and-center so that folks might re-consider and examine the significance and grammar of such things more deeply. So we see that McLuhan was a classic Liberal Artist in that he articulated the vertical axis, but he was unique, particularly for his time, in perceiving that deep insights needed to be put into circulation in the larger society in order to have any impact beyond the world of academic publishing.

The most famous utterance McLuhan's used to take his message to the street and call attention to the importance of 'background' media was, "The medium is the message." It is a classic example of McLuhan using the rhetorical strategy of exaggeration in order to be heard within the din of the background noise he was, in effect, calling attention to. In other words he created sound-bites that functioned much like advertisements, circulating somewhat freely in society, pulling people into a more careful consideration of his work. So, for example, the sound-bite "the medium is the message" contains on closer inspection a deep insight into the the way human subjectivity itself is shaped by the the container or medium that a message or subject is expressed in. The most common recognitions of McLuhan's insight are embedded in comparisons we make between a book and a movie made from the same book, or between a film and a dramatic production of the same story. When we engage in these types of comparisons we are recognizing that McLuhan was right about the medium being the message. But we can also see the exaggeration in it: the medium, in more balanced terms, is only part of the message. The story or message itself remains part of the message. Why the exaggeration? Other than to create a good sound-bite, I think McLuhan was also struggling to find ways to bring some sort of awareness to the impact of the medium of television, which was in some ways quite difficult to describe because there was nothing to compare it to --and also different because it tends to be used sometimes quite literally and emphatically as a background medium, which gives it a fairly unique profile and dynamic.

One of the interesting things about Media Studies is that it also intersects areas of the non-academic world in areas such as marketing research. Marketers definitely know that television is often used as a background medium, and messages are framed to take this into account (i.e. the audio and image 'tracks' of television ads tend to function independently so that something in the the audio track will jump out of the background even if a viewer is not actually looking at the tv screen, and also so that the message will be communicated visually in cases where viewers mute the ads). In some ways McLuhan's goal --and again this is one of the goals of Media Studies in general-- is to make citizens as savvy about the kind of thinking and research that goes into advertisements and content programming as the advertisers and content producers are themselves. Eric Mazur is a Harvard researcher who has used "the head tracker" to explore one of the tools marketers use. George Lakoff is a U.C. Berkeley researcher who looks closely at how specific words are market-tested for highest acceptance.

In this way McLuhan

Len Masterman created a historical framework with which to understand how the field of Media Studies has evolved or developed. He identified three sequential paradigms.

Greg Desilet created what I think can be correctly be thought of as a fourth historical paradigm -- cultural/rhetorical/structural one.

Marshall McLuhan generated some of the earliest and most powerful ontologically-charged concepts and root metaphors within the field of Media Studies.

Bruce Mazlish contributed a crucial piece of Media Studies by placing the relationship of humans to technology in a physical anthropological framework.

Walter Ong produced possibly the single most powerful conceptual tool for understanding the changes occasioned in human affairs by digital media: Secondary-orality.

Marcos Novak created some of the most powerful image-metaphors for the digital realm, reminding us of Rorty's insight about pictures.

Sherry Turkle contributed psychological studies that documented the effects of media on human subjectivity. Also extends our knowledge about the role of pictures.

Donna Haraway also contributed pictures... and a key manifesto.

Lev Manovich produced key pieces of the history of computation, and (among other things) identified the key unique conceptual features of digital media.

We will look to Len Masterman to feed our conversation about the history of Media Studies built on a principle of evolving paradigms. Bruce Mazlish will add an anthropological principle that asserts a deep and unavoidable relationship between humans and their tools. mediatedness(for a deep-historical view of the role of technology in general in human affairs). Marshall McLuhan (for a philosophical angle on media), Walter Ong (for a cultural-linguistic reading of media technologies), Lev Manovich (for specific principles about new-media art).

chapter on principles from his Language of New Media book, McLuhan's book Understanding Media, a segment of Mazlish's book, Ong's book Secondary Orality, Desilet's book Our Faith in Evil, Novak's Liquid Architecture article, and something on the basic components of rhetoric.

In terms of

More recently, there was quite a bit of interest in studying the medium of propaganda after the first world war, even though there was still no formal discipline called Media Studies at that time. So, the establishment of Media Studies as a formal discipline, coinciding roughly with the rise of electronic media including television and the internet, is a fairly recent development as a formal discipline, but it has existed in highly skilled Liberal Arts conversations for a very long time.

Len Masterman

Headtracking Harvard guy

• 1. Do the cascade from ways of knowing to higher ed to liberal and fine arts --down to media studies.

  2. Outline Len Masterman's three paradigms.

  3. Add another paradigm (stress that this is a contemporary project with many trying to imagine a new paradigm) --a cultural-rhetorical approach-- that segues to Manovich's technological principles of new media, McLuhan and Mazlish's ontological principles, Marcos Novak aesthetic principles, Walter Ong's communication principles, Gregory Desilet's narrative structure principles, and standard rhetorical principles including understanding the grammar of media.

  4. Reference Masterman's foreward to the Andrew Hart book, Manovich's chapter on principles from his Language of New Media book, McLuhan's book Understanding Media, a segment of Mazlish's book, Ong's book Secondary Orality, Desilet's book Our Faith in Evil, Novak's Liquid Architecture article, and something on the basic components of rhetoric.

  5. Connect the "principled" approach to James Webb Young's advice to stick to principles and method. What is the method of the new paradigm? A literacy methodology: ability to read and write in a variety of media. The DMA course starts with reading and moves on to writing. We'll make art in text, image, audio, and video --on the theory that if you can make art in a medium you can do anything else you want to in it. It's a convenient theory anyway ;)

To a reasonable extent, Marshall McLuhan is to Media Studies as Plato is to Philosophy. McLuhan...

Media Studies in higher education draws mainly on the intellectual way of knowing, and the skills of the Liberal Artist, although it also includes strands of the aesthetic and scientific ways of knowing.

The aesthetic strand of Media Studies is attached to the fact that much media content is encoded in pictorial, aural, or motion media --and all of these media-types are traditionally cross-tied to the Fine Arts and the Liberal Arts. One of the ways in which Media Studies at UNCSA makes sense is that art schools such as this one have been multimedia places right from the beginning. Digital media simply re-states the array of media options that already exist here. One of the questions we get to ask is what the unique capabilities of each media are. If you have an idea in mind, why would you choose to make a film rather than a play or a piece of music? In digital media times, we have the option --given just a bit of training-- to express ourselves in a variety of media.

The scientific strand of Media Studies attaches, for example, to sociological and psychological study of the effects of media on humans, human-interface research, sensors and nano-technologies, and so forth. Technologies are in some ways the material propositions of science.