WTF is a media culture...and why should I give a rats?

MEDIA CULTURES 1 :: WTF IS MEDIA CULTURE...?

WHAT IS A MEDIA CULTURE AND
WHY SHOULD I GIVE A RAT’S?

Los Angeles, 2019
Image: ©The Blade Runner Partnership/
courtesy Warner Home Video Los Angeles, 2019
Image: ©The Blade Runner
Partnership/courtesy Warner
Home Video

SHIRALEE SAUL : 2010


Teenage boy’s report scares
world’s media bosses,
The Age 19th July 2009
http://business.theage.com.au/business/teenage-boys-report-scares-worlds-media-bosses-20090718-dozb.html


KULCHA



“We don’t know who
discovered water, but
we’re certain it wasn’t
a fish.”

John Culkin
(qtd. in Edmund Carpenter’sThey Became What They Beheld )



CULTURE?



“Culture means the total body of tradition borne by a society
and transmitted from generation to generation. It thus refers to
the norms, values, standards by which people act, and it includes
the ways distinctive in each society of ordering the world and
rendering it intelligible. Culture is...a set of mechanisms for
survival, but it provides us also with a definition of reality. It is
the matrix into which we are born, it is the anvil upon which
our persons and destinies are forged.”
Robert Murphy. Culture and Social Anthropology: An Overture.

(1986: 14)


‘BIG’ CULTURE IS
MADE UP OF LOTS
OF SMALLER
CULTURES
These are the cultures that emerge from specific contexts:
i.e the shared understandings, conventions and behaviors of

people in that context.


THEN...

High-brow, Low-brow, Middle-brow: These “The thing that burns up high-brows like me is
are three basic categories of a new U.S. that the dominant feature of our mental and
social structure, and the high-brows have spiritual life is the overwhelming flood of cultural
the whip hand sewage that is manufactured especially for the
tastes of the low-brow and lower middle-brow.
“According to Editor Russel Lynes in article It is difficult even for a high-brow to escape its
in Harper’s Magazine, the whole of US social influence. Only eternal vigilance keeps it from
structure can now be divided into three types. converting us into 100% low-brow people. This
Gone, he says, are the days when social flood exists for only one reason. The oafish
position was determined by birth, wealth or classes, being overwhelmingly numerous, are
political eminence. Instead he points out that the biggest consumers of everything from salad
true prestige now belongs only to scientists, to music, and an investment in their tastes
writers, critics, commentators and thinkers is correspondingly profitable. They therefore
of global thoughts. We have a society of the dominate taste in nearly all our big industries
intellectual elite, run by the high-brows.” where taste is factor, the most horrible examples

Life magazine, 1949 in point being the radio and Hollywood movies.”
Winthrop Sargent ‘In Defense of the High-brow’
(Life ‘resident high-brow’)

NOW
Subcultures can be conscious and ‘exclusive’,
eg footballers, bodycon, goths, bikies, gamers, cosplayers.

Membership of these subcultures defines,
at least in part, the member.


We aren’t always conscious of our
‘literacy’ of a specific culture. Some-
times they are so embedded in our
everyday life that we aren’t even http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgzbhEc6VVo

aware of them, yet they pervade
our experience and actions.

Media cultures are a good example
of this. Whilst they may be as explicit

as the famous ‘Mac vs PC’ divide:


...they are often as ubiquitous, yet complex and nuanced,
as the way that we use our phones...



“The obvious
is usually
invisible...”
Marshall McLuhen



Media and culture are so intertwined that many be-
lieve that they have become copies of each other...
hyperreal...

simulacra
A common definition of the ‘simulacrum’ is a copy of
a copy whose relation to the model has become so
attenuated that it can no longer properly be said to
be a copy. It stands on its own as a copy without a
model.

Fredric Jameson cites the example of photorealism.
The painting is a copy not of reality, but of a photo-
graph, which is already a copy of the original.

Modern French social theorist Jean Baudrillard
argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real,
but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xL6mB1y_20I


MEDIA?
CULTURE?

Wonder Girls’ New Album Self-made superstars
http://starberriipopteen.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/wonder-girls- http://www.smh.com.au/news/relationships/selfmade-super-
new-album/ stars/2008/06/25/1214073324481.html


“Media is a commodity. Media is something that is sold to us. Media can be
something that we are sold to, even. Media is an everyday thing. You can buy
bandwidth in job lots. You can watch television, buy books, videos, records,
CDs, but that’s not it. That’s not what’s interesting.

Media is an extension of the senses.
Media is a mode of consciousness.
Media is extra-somatic memory. It’s a crystallization of human thought that
survives the death of the individual.
Media generates simulacra. The mechanical reproduction of images is media.
Media is a means of social interaction.
Media is a means of command and control.
Media is statistics, knowledge that is gathered and generated by the state.
Media is economics, transactions, records, contracts, money and the records
of money.
Media is the means of civil society and public opinion. Media is a means of
debate and decision and agitpropaganda.”

Bruce Sterling “The Life and Death of Media”, Speech at Sixth International Symposium on
Electronic Art ISEA ‘95Montreal Sept 19 1995


Media
matters
because it
changes us
and our world

THIS VIEWPOINT IS KNOWN AS ‘TECHNOLOGIC AL DETERMINISM’


“Any technology tends to create a
new human environment...
Technological environments are not
merely passive containers of people
but are active processes that
reshape people and other
technologies alike.”

Marshall McLuhen


Canadian media theorist and a political economist, Harold
Innis (1894-1952) is a seminal figure in media theory.

Before, digital technology, media extended communication:

• Through space (telephone, radio, telegraph, paper
musical instruments), or

• Through time (e.g. inscriptions, alphabetical writing,
movable type printing, musical notation, painting etc).

Digital is the first media which extends communications
through both of these dimensions simultaneously; it allows
the extension of communication:

• Through time in its role as a storage mechanism, display
device/s etc., and

• Through space particularly through the Internet, digital
telephone networks, etc.
http://www.media-studies.ca/articles/innis.htm


Innis claimed that the dominant media in a society
determined what kind of society it was.

Time-based media are durable, but also difficult to
move about. They encourage societies that are:
• hierarchical,
• religious,
• conservative,
• long-lasting,
• Expand slowly.
• exemplified by ancient Egypt

Space-biased media are light and portable. They are
associated with
• secular ,
• territorial,
• spatially expansive,
• socially mobile ,
• Exemplified by Ancient Rome -- or Revolutionary

France


Innis believed that stable societies were able to

achieve a balance between time- and space-biased

communications media.

He also believed that change came from the margins

of society, since people on the margins invariably

developed their own media.

The new media allow those on the periphery to

develop and consolidate power, and ultimately to

challenge the authority of the centre.

Latin written on parchment, the medium of the

Christian Church, was attacked through the secular

medium of vernaculars written on paper.


Marshall McLuhen Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (1964)

‘the medium is the message’
“This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any
medium - that is, of any extension of ourselves - result from the new scale
that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any
new technology.”

McLuhen points out that a medium does not have to have interpretable
content - a message as such. He describes the “content” of a medium as
a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the
mind.

He meant that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, but
in the process, miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced
subtly, or over long periods of time.

As the society’s values, norms and ways of doing things change because of

the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the
medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical
precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or
tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of.

NEXT WEEK... MEDIA CULTURES 1 :: WTF IS MEDIA CULTURE...?

“Media is an
extension of the

?
senses.”



EXERCISE :
Subcultures are people too...
In small groups or individually
1. Identify a (real) subculture -- some examples: Emos, Elvis fans, polo players, ballerinas, headbangers, elderly Turkish
men.
2. What are the specific conventions, etc. that define that subculture. These might include (but are not limited to):
* age
* gender
* ethnicity
* clothing codes
* behavior and speech codes
* income
* geography
* entertainment or other venues that ‘belong’ to that subculture
* special events or rituals

3. Devise a new iphone or iPad app for this subculture. Research existing apps that may be similar to ensure that you’re
developing something new. Write a synopsis and a feature list for the proposed app. Explain why you think that this app
would appeal to your target marget.

4 Short class presentation in which your group presents the subculture (include pictures if possible) and the app you have
invented. Post to Ning and place copy on server.

WTF is a media culture...and why should I give a rats?

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