understanding media studies "mapping the field" presentation

1Daniel K. Wallingford, A New Yorker’s Idea of the United States of America, 1939

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Saul Steinberg, View of the World from 9th Avenue, 1976

Saul Steinberg, View of the World from 9th Avenue, 1976

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Joyce Kozloff, Stars Over Manhattan IV (City of New York, 1864), 2002

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Nina Katchadourian, Austria, 1997

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Mark Lombardi, George W. Bush, Harken Energy, and Jackson Stevens, ca. 1979-90,

1999

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Guy Debord, Naked City, 1957;Constant Nieuwenhuys, Symbolische voorstelling van New Babylon, 1969

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10Howard Horowitz, Manhattan, 1997

11Tibor Kalman

12Carte du Tendre

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…there is a kind of education in which parents should have their sons trained not because it is necessary, or because it is useful, but because it is liberal and something good in itself

To aim at utility everywhere is utterly unbecoming to high-minded and liberal spirits

-Plato, Politics, Book VIII

16Rafael, School of Athens, 1509-10

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Laurentius de Voltolina, Liber ethicorum des Henricus de Alemannia, Einzelblatt,

14th c.

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Mass Society Criticism: 1920s-50s:

•Mass media are a negative and disruptive force in society and should be controlled

•Mass media have the power to directly influence the attitudes and behavior of ordinary people

•People are vulnerable to the power of mass media b/c they have become isolated and alienated from traditional social institutions

•Social changes brought about by disruptive influence of mass media will result in advent of more authoritarian and centrally controlled societies

•Mass media bring about decline in cultural standards and values (Williams 29)

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Michael Delli Carpini, Dean, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania:

growth of mass media, fear of their propagandizing effects, concern about the stability of democracy, emergence of new technique for studying social phenomena; draws on traditions from humanities (e.g., rhetoric), social science (e.g., political science and anthropology), sciences (e.g., information technology, cybernetics, psychology) and professions (e.g., law, policy, journalism)

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Ron Rice, UCSB: concerns about propaganda from WWI and WWII; rise of audience research with introduction of radio; influx of European sociologists and social psychologists after WWII; growth of urban studies and concern over transformation of communities and rise of mass society; rise of grad education w/ GI bill; influx of immigrants

Barbie Zelizer, Penn: post WWII, development of social science research councils, gravitation toward funded research on media effects, increasingly present role of media as new actor in public sphere

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Magic Bullet Theory as a point of departure – informed by Darwinian models, which portrayed media audiences as “irrational creatures guided more of less uniformly by their instincts” (Lowery & DeFleur 13)

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Landmark Effects Studies

•Payne Fund Studies

•Radio Panics: War of the Worlds

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Landmark Effects Studies

•People’s Choice: Media in a Political Campaign

•Audiences for Daytime Radio Serials: Uses & Gratifications

•Experiments with Film Persuading the American Soldier in WWII: Frank Capra’s Why We Fight

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Landmark Effects Studies

•Persuasion: The Search for Magic Keys (Yale Program of Research on Communication and Attitude Change)

•Personal Influence: 2-Step Flow (Katz & Lazarsfeld)

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Landmark Effects Studies

•Project Revere: Leaflets as a Medium of Last Resort

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Landmark Effects Studies

•Television in the Lives of our Children (Wilbur Schramm)

•Agenda-Setting (McCombs & Shaw)

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Landmark Effects Studies

•Violence and Media

First 50 years of research contributed to : demise of Magic Bullet Theory; Uses and Gratifications Theory; Agenda Setting Theory; Adoption of Innovation Theory; 2-Step Flow and Diffusion of Info; Limited Effects; Modeling Theory (people act out patterns of behavior – these depictions serve as imitable models); Social Expectations Theory (can learn norms, roles and other components of social organization from media); Cultivation Theory (e.g., heavy viewers see world as more violent) (Lowery & DeFleur)

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1979 Int’l Federation of Film Archives conference in Brighton, England: new film historians – looked into “production histories, stylistic trends, the period’s reception,… effectively breaking with the teleological trends of the past by re-positioning this body of films simultaneously as the culmination of various nineteenth-century representational efforts, and as a catalogue of unexpected possibilities or a yet-to-be disciplined medium”

embraced “media dispositif (a concept which links apparatus, the cultural imagination, and constructions of public)”

(Uricchio 28-9)

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Film “medium was positioned within intertextual and intermedial networks” – “Scholars began to situate cinema within representational systems with longer histories than the cinema’s such as the theater, the magic lantern and photography” – considered “how publics constructed themselves around dime museums, fairgrounds, and scientific spectacles” (Uricchio 29)

“shift from medium-specific histories – film’s history in particular – to media history” – “Film’s own history and developmental trajectory, and its assumed agency with regard to ‘derivative’ media such as television, have been recast in the light of an array of precedent technologies, practices, and notions of mediation”

(Uricchio 23)

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“Key figures of pragmatism, social research, and Western Marxism converged in one place…. Social philosophy, empirical social research, and critical social theory all converged on a common intellectual problem: how to understand new centralized forms of symbolic control over populaces.” (Peters 135)

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“Katz and Lazarsfeld do social science; Carey and Dewey do social philosophy; Hall and Gramsci do social critique. The first pair studies influence, the second pair theorizes participation, the last unmasks domination. The core object for each is, respectively, the media and minds, democracy and culture, and ideology and power.” (Peters 138)

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“Liberal, social democratic, and Marxist political philosophies have roots in the 19th century but have not, until recently, been placed side by side as live options in communication research…. [W]e must see how the institutional field shut down fruitful paths of inquiry into the place of communication in modern life and society.” (Peters 138)

“Hopefully, the range of forefathers – and foremothers – will grow as inquiry is freed to take the best ideas from anywhere, regardless of provenance.” (Peters 138)

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Dewey, Walter Lippmann, George Herbert Mead, Lewis Mumford, Kenneth Burke, Margaret Mead, Robert Park, Harold Lasswell, Floyd Allport, Robert Lynd, Edward Bernays, Robert Merton, Lazarsfeld, I.A. Richards, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Rudolf Arnheim, Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Leo Lowenthal, Antonio Gramsci

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Douglas Kellner:

The boundaries of the field of communications have been unclear from the beginnings. Somewhere between the liberal arts/humanities and the social sciences, communications exists in a contested space where advocates of different methods and positions have attempted to define the field and police intruders and trespassers. Despite several decades of attempts to define and institutionalize the field of communications, there seems to be no general agreement concerning its subject-matter, method, or institutional home. In different universities, communications is sometimes placed in humanities departments, sometimes in the social sciences, and generally in schools of communications…..

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… But the boundaries of the various departments within schools of communications are drawn differently, with the study of mass-mediated communications and culture, sometimes housed in Departments of Communication, Radio/Television/Film, Speech Communication, Theatre Arts, or Journalism departments. Many of these departments combine study of mass-mediated communication and culture with courses in production, thus further bifurcating the field between academic study and professional training, between theory and practice” (Kellner 1995).

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Meyrowitz (1994): “no common understanding of what the subject matter of the field is” (qtd Williams 4)

Golding and Murdock (1978): “embracing a staggering and often unbounded range of interests and topics’ (qtd Williams 4)

Levy and Gurevitch (1994): impression of a field that is everywhere and nowhere” (qtd Williams 4)

Beniger (1993): “field’s insularity from developments outside its institutional boundaries, its belated and grudging acknowledgment of European social and literary theory notwithstanding, has been the utter lack of interest in communication – the field, not the subject – by the leading scholars of other disciplines” (18)

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Rather than lament that communication isn’t one of the six social sciences, we should regard it as a “newer, nascent way of organizing inquiry” (Peters 132)

“…we cannot succeed in academia by imitating the established fields. We have to boldly strike out in a popular and interdisciplinary manner that runs directly counter to the dominant trends in the academy” (McChesney 100)

Move from 3R’s – reading (input, decoding), ‘riting (output, encoding), ‘rithmetic (computation or processing) – rooted in post-war pedagogical models, to 4C’s: cognition, culture, control, communication” (Beniger 23)

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“disciplines are defined not by cores of knowledge (i.e., epistemologies) but by views of Being (i.e., ontologies) (Shepherd 83)

“…it is precisely the nature and purpose of disciplines and their disciples to forward a unique view of Being among all the alternatives and say, ‘There is something primary, or essential, about this particular view.’ Disciplines depend on disciples acting as advocates for the ontology they forward, making implicit and explicit arguments that their view ‘matters.’” (Shepherd 84)

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Our fields are defined less and less by the professional passport we bear than by the literatures we read, teach, and contribute to.” (Peters 133)

Fields are defined through their practice.

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Henry Jenkins:

New media literacies include the traditional literacy that evolved with print culture as well as the newer forms of literacy within mass and digital media…. [We] must expand [our] required competencies, not push aside old skills to make room for the new.

Beyond core literacy, students need research skills…. Students also need to develop technical skills…. Yet, to reduce the new media literacies to technical skills would be a mistake on the order of confusing penmanship with composition….

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…As media literacy advocates have claimed during the past several decades, students must also acquire a basic understanding of the ways media representations structure our perceptions of the world; the economic and cultural contexts within which mass media is produced and circulated; the motives and goals that shape the media they consume; and alternative practices that operate outside the commercial mainstream (Jenkins 19-20)

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“If we continue to view ‘making’ and ‘analyzing’ as mutually exclusive categories, then our students will never receive the full benefits of what media studies as a field of practices and knowledges has to offer.” (Hershfield & McCarthy 112)

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Beyond “Training”

“Flexibility must be a valued characteristic of communication workers, and generating flexibility requires a different sort of education than that needed to train somebody to fill a slot. The need for increased critical thinking skills cannot be underestimated…. It is the ability to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate information that will allow communicators to train themselves to take on future jobs…. We must give our students a general communication education with a large conceptually based core of classes. There will still be a place for classes that give students technical skills for entry-level jobs, but these must be subordinate to classes that teach critical thinking, law, history, mass media and society, international communication, and so on.” (Pamela Shoemaker 150-1)

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Gerald O’Grady, Founder of Media Study @ Buffalo:

Media studies = “the exploration of the creation, the aesthetics, and the psychological, social, and environmental impact of the art forms of photography, cinematography, videography, radio, recordings, and tapes within the broad framework of general education in the humanities”

Media studies = the “new humanities”

(O’Grady 116-7)

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John Culkin, Founder of Center for Understanding Media /

Media Studies @ The New School:

“…the fact of the present is that the moving image is being used in an ever-increasing way to convey information and to shape attitudes and values. Our culture is too close to what is happening to be able to gauge the extent of influence

The sheer amount of time spent with film and television is impressive enough to forestall the need for conjuring up fear-filled threats about the effects of the new media. The consumers are there already. The images touch on their political and economic decisions; they comment incessantly on the very style and meaning of what it means to be human. Intelligent and critical consumers are likely to end up as the best kinds of humans...

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John Culkin, Founder of Center for Understanding Media /

Media Studies @ The New School:

“Media studies represents the arts and humanities in a new key.”

Sir Ken Robinson, “Do Schools Kill Creativity” TEDTalks, 2006

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From Network Map to Itinerary….

Map your connection to others within the field

Orgnet

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I am an unashamed pluralist who uses multiple methodologies as part of an evaluation scenario which has the clear intention of providing answers to the questions my colleagues want answered. I use multiple methods to give greater rigor, reliability and depth to the work I do. Each element is designed both to test and to complement the findings of other elements. The different methods add layers of information but also provide a means of identifying inconsistencies and weaknesses. (Sarah Bicknell, “Here to Help: Evaluation and Effectiveness” In Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Ed., Museum, Media, Message (Museum Meanings) (Routledge, 1999): 283-4).

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C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”:

“…you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it. In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you may work. To say that you can ‘have experience,’ means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman. But how can you do this?….”

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C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”:

“One answer is: you must set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist’s way of saying: - keep a journal….In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you are experiencing as a person.

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C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual

Craftsmanship”:

“Here you will not be afraid to use your

experience and relate it directly to various works in progress. By serving as

a check on repetitious work, your file also

enables you to conserve your energy. It also

encourages you to capture ‘fringe-thoughts’: various

ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatched of conversations overheard on the street,

or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these

may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to

more directed experience.”

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C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”:

“By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whether you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The file also helps you build up the habit of writing. You cannot ‘keep your hand in’ if you do not write something at least every week. In developing the file, you can experiment as a writer and thus, as they say, develop your powers of expression.”

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C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”:

“Under various topics in your file there are ideas, personal notes, excerpts from books, bibliographic items and outlines of projects…. [S]ort all these items into a master file of ‘projects,’ with many subdivisions. The topics, of course, change, sometimes quite frequently…

“the use of the file encouraged expansion of the categories which you use in your thinking. And the way in which these categories change, some being dropped and others being added is an index of your intellectual progress and breadth.”

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James R. Ackerman & Robert W. Karrow, Jr. Maps: Finding Our Place in the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

Janet Abrams & Peter Hall, Eds., Else/Where Mapping: New Cartographies and Territories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006)

Minna Aslama, Kalle Siira, Ronald Rice, Pekka Aula, “Mapping Communication and Media Research in the U.S.” Communication Research Centre, University of Helsinki, Research Report (February 2007).

James Beniger, “Communication – Embrace the Subject, not the Field” Journal of Communication 43:3 (Summer 1993): 18+

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Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York; Verso, 2002)

John Culkin, “Why Study the Media?” excerpt from doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Education (1964): http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article430.html

Brenda Dervin and Mei Song, “Communication as a Field – Historical Origins, Diversity as Strength/Weakness, Orientation Toward Research in the Public Interest: 54 Brief Ruminations from Field Grandparents, Parents, and a Few Feisty Grandchildren” International Communication Association Annual Meeting May 27-31, 2004, New Orleans, LA.

Katharine Harmon, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).

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Joanne Hershfield & Anna McCarthy, “Media Practice: Notes Toward a Critical Production Studies” Cinema Journal 36:3 (Spring 1997): 108-112.

Henry Jenkins, “Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century” [white paper] Building the Field of Digital Media and Learning (MacArthur Foundation, 2006).

Klaus Bruhn Jensen, “The Humanities in Media and Communication Research” In Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Ed., A Handbook of Media and Communication Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies (New York: Routledge, 2002): 16-39.

Klaus Bruhn Jensen, “Media Reception” In Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Ed., A Handbook of Media and Communication Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies (New York: Routledge, 2002): 156-170.

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Douglas Kellner, “Media Communications vs. Cultural Studies: Overcoming the Divide” Communication Theory 5:2 (1995): 162-177.

Shearon A. Lowery and Melvin L. DeFleur, Milestones in Mass Communication Research: Media Effects, 3rd Ed. (White Plains, Longman, 1995).

Robert McChesney, “Critical Communication Research at the Crossroads” Journal of Communication 43:4 (Autumn 1993): 98+

C. Wright Mills, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” Appendix to The Sociological Imagination (Oxford University Press, 1959).

Graham Murdock, “Media, Culture and Modern Times: Social Science Investigations” In Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Ed., A Handbook of Media and Communication Research: Qualitative and Quantitative Methodologies (New York: Routledge, 2002): 40-57.

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Gerald O’Grady, “The Preparation of Teachers of Media,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 3:3 Special Issue: Film, New Media, and Aesthetic Education (July 1969): 113-134.

John Durham Peters, “Genealogical Notes on ‘The Field’” Journal of Communication 43:4 (Autumn 1993): 132-.

David Rumsey Map Collection: http://www.davidrumsey.com/gmaps.html

Grace Roosevelt, “The Triumph of the Market and the Decline of Liberal Education: Implications for Civic Life” Teachers College Record (2006): http://www.tcrecord.org/

Gregory Shepherd, “Building a Discipline of Communication” Journal of Communication 43:3 (Summer 1993): 83+

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Pamela J. Shoemaker, “Communication in Crisis: Theory, Curricula, and Power” Journal of Communication 43:4 (Autumn 1993)

William David Sloan, Makers of the Media Mind: Journalism Educators and Their Ideas (Lawrence Earlbaum, 1990).

William Uricchio, “Historicizing Media in Transition” In David Thorburn & Henry Jenkins, Eds., Rethinking Media Change: The Aesthetics of Transition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 23-38.

Kevin Williams, Understanding Media Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).