Week 12

Nov 15:

“That night, 48 million Americans would watch the scene in their living rooms, and a few days later Martin Luther King Jr. would lay bare the movement’s core media strategy. “We will no longer let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners,” he said. “We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.”

“Televised footage of well-dressed white people heckling black children as they walked to school were powerful because they were so public, says Lisa Nakamura, a professor of media and race at the University of Michigan. “But when that happens on Twitter, it’s really, really private.” Any given tweet might be public, but online threats are disembodied and anonymous. Bystanders don’t seem to take them as seriously. Plus, the full experience of receiving a thousand threats may only really be felt by the recipient. Even in the panopticon of social media, mobs aren’t all that visible.”

” the media of the time helped establish a “new common sense” about race in America” (Stephen).

References

Stephen, Bijan. 2015. “How Black Lives Matter Uses Social Media to Fight the Power.” Wired, October 21. https://www.wired.com/2015/10/how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/.

“I’m An Addict”

“Within this larger and multidisciplinary conceptual framework of social construction and symbolic interactionism, we can say that young people’s everyday articulations are built from and also feed into largescale cultural discourses – what Lyotard called “grand narratives”4 These help youth situate their lives, but may also be a source of confusion and tension, as young people negotiate their subject positions within and between many overlapping, possibly conflicting grand narratives.” (2).

How do you construct your self on social media?

“Which discourses do [you] reproduce, resist, or possibly rework?” (2)

The authors mention “recurring worries” “about how digital media impact our identities and relationships.” in the form of “concerns about authenticity, quality of relationships, and veracity of information” (2).

Tiidenberg, Katrin, Annette Markham, Gabriel Pereira, Mads Rehder, Ramona Dremljuga, Jannek K. Sommer, and Meghan Dougherty. 2017. “‘I’m an Addict’ and Other Sensemaking Devices: A Discourse Analysis of Self-Reflections on Lived Experience of Social Media.” In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society  – #SMSociety17, 1–10. Toronto, ON, Canada: ACM Press. doi:10.1145/3097286.3097307.

From Lev Manovich’s “Visual Semiotics, Media Theory, and Cultural Analytics.”

“Does this mean that the computational analysis and modeling of cultural data with their similarly systematizing and formalizing motivations will also eventually lose their energy and attraction – because we will realize the inability of these approaches to fully account for richness and individually of cultural artifacts and interactions? Or will they allow us to go beyond limitations of semiotics in 20th century?” (4).

Manovich, Lev. “Visual Semiotics, Media Theory, and Cultural Analytics.” Manovich.Net, 2017, http://www.manovich.net.

Week 11

Thursday!

Today we read together.

The story: The Purloined Letter.

The idea:

1. Log on to CUNY.MANIFOLDAPP.ORG.
2. Read the ten page story.
3. Comment as you go. If something doesn’t make sense — make a note. If something is weird: make a note. If someone else has said something and you want to comment– make a note!
4. We will talk about how we read together in digital spaces.

https://manifoldapp.org/docs/reading/sharing.html

Tuesday

IDLE TALK vs LAW

who is inside the conversation? who is outside?

1. NAME a situation in which an IMPORTANT conversation is happening. Who is inside? Who is out?
2. DESCRIBE IMPLICIT and EXPLICIT rules of that conversation. What are the rules of communication around that conversation? Who gets to talk? Who doesn’t?
3. WHOSE WORDS LAST

Rity Raley TXTual Practice

“not products but processes” (9)

“no durable object to recover” (9)

Week 10 Questions and Quotations

“idea of the lack of serious studies of local expressive cultures”(Ochoa Gautier 1).

“the aural is not the other of the lettered city, but a force that seeps through its crevices demanding the attention of its listeners” (5)

“By controlling the heritage of words and popular expressions through the proper selection of their genealogy and origin, etymo ogy became a technique for a eugenesis of the tongue, attached to a project of national sovereignty.” (19).

“if in the new nations all were to be deemed citizens and therefore had to be politically defined as persons, then what counted as a proper human voice?” (30).

Reference:

Ochoa Gautier, Ana María. Aurality: Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. Duke University Press, 2014.

Winston and Technologies of Sound

Records:

“The real supervening social necessity was not the office but the amusement requirement of the urban masses” (Winston 63).

“The gramophone extended social circumstances in which music could be consumed” (Winston 63).

Radio:

“Although there is some doubt as to exactly when he did this, there is no question that he understood that within the culture music was listened to collectively and radio would have to allow for that if it were to become a mass medium” (Winston 76).

“The radio rapidly became a major patron of music and musicians” (Winston 84).

McLuhan and Media is the Massage

“Now all the world’s a sage” (McLuhan 14).

Citations:

Brian Winston. “Wireless and Radio.” Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, 1998.

Brian Winston. “The Capture of Sound.” Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. Routledge, 1998.

Marshall McLuhan on sound, from the medium is the MASSAGE: An Inventory of Effects , produced by Jerome Agel. Penguin Books, 1967.

Week 7 Questions:

“The world of paper is at least unified and compatible. Objects can be easily mixed and matched. Books, manuscripts, and notes can be stored on the same shelf, opened on the same desk” (Literary Machines 0/3).

“I’ve written this like a letter to a nephew, chatty and personal” (Computer Lib/Dream Machines 303).

“THE TECHNICALITIES MATTER A LOT, BUT THE UNIFYING VISION MATTERS MORE” (Computer Lib/Dream Machines 305).

“Technology is an expression of man’s dreams. If man did not indulge his fantasies, his thoughts alone would inhibit the development of technology itself” (Computer Lib/Dream Machines 307).

Nelson, Theodor H. Computer Lib ; Dream Machines. Rev. ed, Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1987.    http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-21-nelson.pdf

Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines: Edition 87.1. Published by the author), 1987.

Week 6 Questions:

BENJAMIN —

What is Mechanical Reproduction?

“Since the eye perceives more swiftly than the hand can draw, the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech” (Benjamin 3).

What does this acceleration do? What does illustration the speed of speech mean?

Last week, I asked you to think about how sending pictures lets you share perspective with friends. Think about how your different your world would be if you could not zoom in or out. Imagine how you might alert attention or how you might communicate. How does our ability to write in pictures without training the hand (but training the eye) change the way we tell stories? What visual skills have you developed from the stories you have seen? Think about the types of picture books you had as kids, the movies you watch, the art you like. Where have you developed your visual vocabulary? How much of that reading has come through more conventional education situations?

“that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art.” (Benjamin 4).

BUSH

“prophecy based on extension of the known has substance, while prophecy founded on the unknown is only a doubly involved guess” (Bush 18).

Week 5 Questions:

What did you learn about printing from Eisenstein?

Why do we care about printing?

How does printing and making books relate to ORALITY LITERACY COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY?

more on The Gutenberg Printing Press.

Questions of context:

“It should be noted at the outset that my treatment is primarily (though not exclusively) concerned with the effects of printing on written records and on the views of already literate elites. Discussion centers on the shift from one kind of literate culture to another (rather than from an oral to a literate culture). This point needs special emphasis because it runs counter to present trends. When they do touch on the topic of communications, historians have been generally content to note that their field of study, unlike archeology or anthropology, is limited to societies which have left written records. The special form taken by these written records is considered of less consequence in defining fields than the overriding issue of whether any written records have been left.” (Eisenstein xvi)

Reference:

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed., Canto classics ed., Cambridge University Press, 2012.

9/27

“The discovery of the book is, at once, a moment of originality and authority, as well as a process of displacement that, paradoxically, makes the presence of the book wondrous to the extent to which it is repeated, translated, misread, displaced.” (Bhabha 144).

“For it is in between the edict of Englishness and the assault of the dark unruly spaces of the earth, through an act of repetition, that the colonial text emerges uncertainly” (Bhabha 149).

References:

Bhabha, Homi K. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12, no. 1, 1985, pp. 144–165. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1343466.

Week 4 Questions:

1. How do you understand McLuhan’s idea of “extensions of man”? Name some things you see extending man.
2. “But our detachment was a posture of noninvolvement” (McLuhan 20). Think back to Plato’s Thamus and Theuth and the idea that the writing separated the idea from the humans who wrote it. How do you see the “increasing specialism and alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies” (McLuhan 20)?
3. Fragmentation and totalization — how do these poles work together and individually in the context of technology?
4. What do you see as the difference between Carey’s transmission and ritual modes of communication?

Or comment on one of the following quotes:

“Western man acquired from the technology of literacy the power to act without reacting” (McLuhan 20).

“The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy, and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology” (McLuhan 21).

”

Week 3 Questions:

1. What do you think Battiste means by “continuing cognitive imperialism in modern education”? What happens when Battiste uses language like “mythic projection justified” and “killer language”?
2. Name one of the examples Battiste gives of non-written literacies. How do you understand these alternative means of invoking and passing knowledge in relation to writing?
3. Think about how Plato, McKenzie, and Battiste all talk about how writing in relation to memory and performance. How would you describe the interaction of memory, performance, words on paper, and knowledge exchange?

“I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.” (Plato 275)

“Orality, literacy and print can of course be so ordered as the primary, secondary and tertiary stages of a (perhaps misleadingly) progressive sequence in the history of civilization; and we may as bibliographers study them as distinct phases — each with its own ‘impact’ and forms of record — in the evolution of western society. But we must also, 1 think, recognize more frankly the diverse nature of each of those stages and their persistive interaction” (McKenzie 205)

References

Battiste, Marie. “Print Culture and Decolonizing the University: Indigenizing the Page: Part 1.” The Future of the Page . University of Toronto Press, 2004.

McKenzie, D. F. “The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy, and Print in early New Zealand.” The Book History Reader . eds. David Finkelstein, Alistair McCleery. Routledge, 2006.

Plato. “Thamus and Theuth” Phaedrus 274b–278d. (370 BC). From Source: Jowett, Benjamin. The Dialogues of Plato in Five Volumes. 3rd ed. Oxford University, 1892. Vol. 1, pp. 483–489.

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