Theory and Cultural History of 20th Century Media
ENGL 236 - Winter 2002, William Warner
Mon, 1/7
Introduction: media theory versus the cultural history of media
Recommended Readings: “Media and the Social World,” from Media / Society: Industries, Images, and Audiences, David Croteau and William Hoynes. Thousand Oaks, California: Pine Forge Pr., 2000. 3-31. R, 1-15
Print
Mon, 1/14
Print and the Enlightenment: From Oral Communication to Alphabetic Writing to Print
Location: South Hall 2509: Transcriptions Studio
Print: the first global transformation of media was the transcription of speech into writing, the second, the transcription of manuscript writing into print. When the Internet came along, and especially after the developing of the World Wide Web, media critics and historians seized upon the striking parallels between the late 15th century migration of manuscripts into print, and the late 20th century migration of print to the Web. Because of the historical importance of the print revolution, and because print continues to have a central role in our media culture (many of the reports on National Public Radio, or news coverage on TV, still originate with a news article in the New York Times; the HTML source code for this web page is written in an extended set of ordinary letters), we will begin this course with a brief overview of the debate about the “impact” of print on culture. While our course will focused upon electronic rather than print media, print provides a point of departure for understanding the debates around the “media determinism thesis,” the argument that “media determines cultures.” Readings by Elizabeth Eisenstein and Marshall McLuhan make the case for the way print shapes or “makes” “typographical man”; Michael Warner counters with an argument for what he calls “the cultural mediation of the print medium,” that is, the idea that culture is operating prior to, and in every phase of the production and use of media. The Agency of Print: Examples from Pre-Revolutionary and 20th Century America
Readings Due:Media Theory versus a Cultural History of Media
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam Books, 1967. Selection, 26-43. R, 17-26
Marshall McLuhan, selections from The Guttenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: U of Toronto Pr., 1962. 11-47. R, 27-46
Marshall McLuhan, “Woman in a Mirror.” Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Boston: Beacon Press, 1967 [1951]. In The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. By Nicholas Mirzoeff. London: Routlege, 1998. 130-132. R, 47-49
Elizabeth Eisenstein. “Cultural Impact of Print”, Oxford Encyclopedia of Communications. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. IV: 366-370. R, 51-55
Michael Warner, “The Cultural Mediation of the Print Medium.” The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America . Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1990. 1-26. R, 57-70
John Adams, Canon and Feudal Law, September 30, 1765, Boston Gazette, Papers of John Adams. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard UP, 1977. Volume I:118-123. R, 71-73
Basic HTML editing in Dreamweaver
Workshop: making a web page (as new medium):
· understanding tags
· composing a page, with basic formatting commands;
· downloading media off the web (around the media form that interests you);
· uploading your page up to the web
Jennifer Jones is the Transcriptions RA who will be helping students in this class with their Web pages.
Her drop in hours this Quarter are:
Monday, 11:30-2pm
Thursday, 2-4:30pm
Feel free to write Jennifer if you would like to schedule some help time, during these times, or at some other time that works for both of you.
Email: jjj0@umail.ucsb.edu Brief overview of the History of the Web according to Tim Berners-Lee
Film: at the turn of the 20th century, moving pictures emerged as the most influential form of entertainment since the rise of the novel in the 18th century. As a medium, cinema was a hybrid form: part electronic (light), part chemical (photograph) and part mechanical (projector). Cinema in America started as an a secondary part of vaudaville entertainments, flourished in Nichelodeons patronized by the working class, and emerged as an ambitious narrative medium with D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, to the point where by the 1930s, the average American city dweller went to the movies three times a week. The century-long popularity of film gives it a central role in 20th century media theories: from Benjamin’s concept of the loss of the aura and the rise of reception in the mode of “distraction”; for the Frankfurt school, film is central to the industry that, by producing mass desire for the celebrity, invades everyday life with the logic of the commodity (how can I get muscles as large as his?, legs as pretty as hers?); and Lev Manovich, in The Language of New Media, demonstrates how the movement of the image into digital code, allows us to operate upon photorealistic images with the same freedom with which used to be only possible in the animated film.
Lead Question: Given new technology of reproduction –in Work, represented most powerfully by film—given modern capitalist economy (which has created massive cities, and displaced the social role of the artist), and a dangerous new political system (Fascism makes its aesthetically inviting pitch to the masses), how can we translate (preserve but transform) the concept of the aesthetic within an age of mechanical/ technical reproduction?
Readings Due: Walter Benjamin from Illuminations. Edit by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 1969.
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
"On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (with intensive consideration of section V)
"The Storyteller"
Daniel Czitrom, “American Motion pictures and the New Popular Culture, 1892-1918.” Media and the American Mind: From Morse to McLuhan , Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Pr., 1982. 30-59. R, 75-90Useful Links
Some basic (somewhat reductive) background on Benjamin
Best translation of “The Work of Art” (based on the new Harvard Press collected writings)
Nice collection of
secondary literature on Benjamin
Recommended Readings:To a passer-by
Charles Baudelaire
(a literal translation) The deafening road was roaring around me.
Long, slender, in deep mourning and majestic sorrow,
A woman passed, with a dignified hand
Raising, balancing the fringe and the hem.
Graceful and noble, with her statue’s leg.
Me, I was drinking, convulsed like a mad man,
From her eye, a livid sky where a hurricane geminates,
The sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.
Lightning …then the night! --Fugitive beauty
Whose gaze has suddenly caused me to be reborn,
Will I never see you again except in eternity?
Elsewhere, very far from here! too late! Never perhaps!
For I do not know where you are fleeing, you don’t know where I am going,
O you who I would have loved, and you who knew it.
Radio
Mon, 2/4
Radio and the broadcasting of the “media event”: War of the Worlds
Radio: in the 1920s, wireless transmission of information, first designed for communications between ships at sea by the navy, and then picked up by ham radio hobbyists for voice transmission, was developed into a form of mass entertainment. David Sarnoff, the young President of RCA, plays an important role in promoting radio as a mass medium; though his later attempt to present himself as the father of radio is problematic. The emergence of radio as a mass medium, in between 1921 (with the Dempsey-Carpentier prize fight) and 1947 (the first year of American television), transforms the American media sphere: it allows for the rise of the American national networks (NBC, CBS, ABC), which broadcast “free” programming supported by advertising; radio makes possible live reception in America of the huge Nazi rallies at Nurenberg, President Roosevelt’s fire side chats; radio brings live coverage of the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions, the 1938 Munich crisis as it unfolds, as well as of the Battle of Britain in 1940. The development of many of the media forms of radio later moved to television (from the variety show, quiz show, soap opera, situation comedy, detective show, etc.). Within all countries (whether fascist and democratic), radio technology helped to promote national unity. While print required the ability to read, radio relied on nothing more than the ability to understand the language of the radio transmission. And if all listened to the same voice at the same time (whether it is that of Edward R. Murrow covering the Battle of Britain or Frank Sinatra crooning), then one could believe that one shared a common experience, and "imagined community" of radio listeners.
Readings Due: Daniel Czitrom. Media and the American Mind, From Morse to McLuhan, Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Pr., 1982. Chapter 3, “The Ethereal Hearth: American Radio from Wireless through Broadcasting, 1992-1940”, 60-88. R, 111-126.
Haward Koch, The Radio Play of "War of the Worlds", October 30, 1938 [handout]
David Sarnoff, from Looking Ahead: the Papers of David Sarnoff , New York: McGraw Hill, 1968. “Radio Broadcasting” 29-65. R,91-110. The Mercury Theatre: "The War of the Worlds", October 30, 1938: Original Broadcast
Mon, 2/11
Frankfurt school reads mass culture
The Frankfurt School brought together a group of European Marxists at a privately endowed Institute in Frankfurt. The "critical theory" they invented built upon the Marxist interpretation of the factory's rational organization of labor under capitalism, the way exchange value supervenes over use value, producing a "fetishism of the commodity," as well as a sense that the emergence of modern mass media, as economic and technological formations, closely tracked the workings of Capital as analyzed by Marx. For them, the "mass deception" achieved by the culture industry ironically took the form of "enlightenment," leisure, and fun. In focusing our class on the "Culture Industry" chapter of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, we will be seeking to understand and evaluate their critique of the culture industry (understood by Horkheimer and Adorno to be an impossible oxymoron). Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectalce offers a post-televiision extension and synthesis of Frankfurt school themes around the concept of "the Spectacle." Mark Crispin Miller's essay on a contemporary ad campaign suggests how this critique can be applied to televion ads. As you read Adorno and Horkheimer, and the other readings associated with it, I invite you to assess the explanatory power or limitations of this interpretation of modern media culture. Capra's Meet John Doe, appears at the same time, and seeking to analyze some of the same phenomena (fascism, big media) as the "culture industry" chapter. We will use Capra's film as a test case for a Frankfurt reading of Mass Culture.
Readings Due: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry Enlightenment as Mass Deception”. From The Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum, 1944. R, 127-150
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle. Detroit: Black and Red, 1983. Section I: “Separation Perfected”R, 151-156
Mark Crispin Miller. “Massa, Come Home.” From Boxed In-The Culture of TV, Chicago: Northwestern UP, 1988. 31-41.R, 157-162. Meet John Doe, editor Charles Wolfe. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989.
”Authors, Audiences, and Endings,” 1-29 and Capra, “Five Endings in Search of an Audience,” 205-215. R, 163-176
Recommended Readings: This authoritative history of the Frankfurt School is Martin Jay's The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Instittue fof Social Research, 1923-1950, New York: Little Brown, 1973.
Television: American television started regular broadcasting in 1947, and by 1955 2/3rds of all American homes had made room for television in their lives and living rooms. The rapid expansion of live network television is partly explained by the agility with which the radio networks transferred their whole commercial and cultural formula to television: live network broadcasting; free programming interrupted by ads from our “sponsors;” all the generic categories of radio, and even specific popular shows like “Ames and Andy” and “Gunsmoke". Even FCC regulation followed radio into televsion. The rapid acceptance of television by Americans—television may be the most popular medium since speech—resulted in part from American affluence and the movement from urban centers, where live entertainment was plentiful, to the suburbs, where it was not. In the half century since the beginning of live television broadcasts, television has changed under the influence of the arrival of color, the remote control, the VCR, cable, satellite transmission, and the DVD. Each change in the technological infrastructure of television made new media forms possible (for example, cable enabled MTV and CNN.) In the 1960s, there develops a broad recognition that television had won a leading and decisive role in the modern media sphere. Guy Debord calls this new, superficially unified televisual world, “the society of the spectacle.” [Is it a world prepared for terrorism.] The enormous cultural influence of television provokes Marshall McLuhan into developing a general theory of media; in his optimistic moments, he summons us toward the a powerful new form of oral-electronic culture, what he calls “the global village.”
“Ten Years of Look” Look Magazine, October 29, 1946. R, 177-184
Sigel, Lynn : Making Room for TV, Chicago: U of Chicago Pr.,1992. ”Introduction,” 1-10; “Television in the Family Circle,” 36-72. R, 185-210.
Mon, 2/25
McLuhan, Cultural Studies and Cultural History, and the Frameworks for Interpreting 20th Century Media
Readings Due: Stuart Hall, "Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse"
The Digital Mutation
Mon, 3/4
Computable culture and The Matrix
After the Digital Mutation: the computer was developed in the 1940s as a machine for increasing the speed of command and control: for decoding German encryption quickly, for targeting missiles in real time. In the decades since the 1940s the computer, and the software algorithms that lie as the center of its operational power, was applied to data processing for business and government; were made into the hubs and routers of communications networks (telephones, local area networks, the Internet), and finally appeared in the form of the personal computer on our desks and laps in the last quarter of the 20th century. In order to make information computable it must be turned into 0s and 1s; but the information the computer contains and operates upon, can become resident in many media forms: as paper tape, punch cards, magnetic tape, hard drives, screens, sound, etc. In fact, the ductility and plasticity of information has enabled us to translate all of our earlier natural and electronic media forms onto the computer. This has led Lev Manovich to describe the computer as the “universal media machine.” This is at once insightful and misleading. For there is a very real sense in which software code is free of any necessary relation to any medium; it is an a-media, that can be invested with many different media forms (as screen image; as sound; as print; as film; etc.) This has threatened to transform the media ecology, a change that corporations will resist (c.f. Napster).
Jeremy Douglass Presentation: Weiner
Helena Jackson Presentation: Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto"
Lisa Swanstrom Presentation: Manovich, "Principles of New Media"
Sarah Bacon Presentation: Manovich, "The Interface"
Jennifer Stoy Presentation: Manovich: "What is Digital Cinema?"
Weiner, Norbert. Selected articles for a popular audience. Norbert Weiner: Collected Writings, Volume 4. Ed. P. Masani. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.
“Cybernetics”, Scientific American. 1948. 784-789.
“Men, Machines, and the World About,” 1950. 793-799. R, 211-224
Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” (Selection) from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature . New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-182.R, 225-228
Nicholas Negropante. Being Digital . New York: Vintage, 1996.
“The DNA of Information”, 11-20
”Debunking Bandwidth,” 21-36. R, 229-242
Manovich, Lev. Selections from The Language on New Media, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001
“Principles of New Media,” 27-48;
“The Interface,” 63-93;
“What is Digital Cinema?” From The Digital Dialectic. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. 172-192. R, 243-297
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