Week 1: Media as Nature
Culture and history and nature can not be separated
Telegraphy: nature and culture(electricity and culture)
Spirit of media, transformation through human, a term to describe a person who could
communicate with dead: spirit medium.
New media technologies could capture traces of spirit since spirits had a kind of material
presence but they were not visible to human senses but photography could capture them
Transformation of human signal
Sarah Sharma: temporality
Changes in media technologies have a cultural connection to their changes
What are time and space? Two approaches: 1) mechanical model(take time and
space as measurable properties, time pressure ect can be measured, quantitative
objective)
2)subjective models, how time and space experienced, memories of the past, imagines
of the future, a sense of place; qualitative/subjective
Time and space are the movement between the objective and the subjective, they
are background of all experiences that we take for granted
"This is water" David Foster Wallace
• Water as an invisible environment
•It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with
knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and
essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding
ourselves over and over: “This is water.”
• The message is that paying attention and being mindful of others is essential. Wallace's
speech also talked about decision making and the power of choice. Wallace's speech talked
about changing a person's perspective and attitude on others around them.
• The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline,
and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in
myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.
• Environment becomes invisible -> making thought experiment in the time and space of
media to make our media environment visible again (Dolphins)
Media governs social practices.
In these senses, media work as a technology for governing through the production,
organizing, and disciplining of space
Eg: online space, lecture hall and students in the room, reduce the distance
John Durham Peters: understanding media
People think media as an environment and surrounding
Money, power, love can also be media-media as a concept gets stretched
Internet starts to take on the quality of a basic and elemental properties lies for or water
,We are conditioned by conditions we condition, we, the created
creator, shape tools that shape us.
Media technologies make us as we make them, we are the created creators
Idea of co-evolution between humans and the things we make.
“The question of how to define nature, humans, and media are ultimately the same
question.” (Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, p. 51) -> first of all media is a concept that has
been understood as a property of the natural world and now is returning to a kind of
property of the (our) environment; the human is also part of this interpenetration
between nature and media -> human is not only using media but is shaped by it
The relationship between media and lived time?
Statement about time: we lived in a culture of speed dominated by accelerated technologies
Boundaries between separate spheres of work, leisure and sleep are increasingly blurred
Temporality is an intersectional type of social differences structured in specific political
economic and geographical contexts
Individuals habitually discipline and submit to normative time.
Recalibrate: the sense of time are changed/managed by other--cultural norms and
expectation, sometimes by force and or for lifestyle. Relationship between media and lived
time
Media alter the temporal and spatial parameters of political and social possibility.
Uniform experience
Temporality is how do technologies operate and then extend particular margins and
centers of power in time., It is about "Power"
Temporality is experienced as a form of social difference (margins) and a
type of privilege (centers).（margins)(power)--temporal differences hidden in the grand
story
Media production are tied to the reproduction of the social order and alter the
experiences
(technologies or media exacerbate temporal relationships because they give
powerful institution access to the time of another in highly gendered ways.
The temporal is about power
Helen Morgan Parmett: space
Media dislodging us, helping us navigate and producing space
simultaneously
Media such as TV and newspaper try to bridge the distance, create mobile
privatization and a global world of interconnectedness
, Benjamin: mass reproduction could divorces art from its situatedness in a particular space
and time, losing its"aura", which is uniqueness and permanence.(copyright law-regulate
travel and ownership)
Media does not collapse space as it reorganizes it, they producing new sensibilities of space
by creating new geographies, mobilities and identities.
Liberal-capitalism and suburbanization--broadcasting(new institution)-centered on the
home-new forms of social organization--also resistance
Digital media helps to connect global transnational corporations and facilitate the
flow of capital across borders and encourage new social movements which utilize
digital and social media to facilitate collective social unrest and agitate against
oppressive forces. Media reduces the distance between each nation, makes a global
connections and introduce a new social movements which allows digital medias to
facilitate collective social unrest and against capitalism.
Production of space in a materialist sense. infrastructures: railways, arcades, and
department stores
Considering media and space as co-constitutive highlights how media are
put to work by a variety of social forces to govern everyday spaces in
historically and culturally specific ways that can both reinforce and
challenge gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized norms.
Make audience adjust or change their norms and perception(media governs uses of
domestic and public space and content, context
Week 2 Infrastructure
Text reading
Media infrastructures signals a shift toward exploring issues of scale, difference and
unevenness, relationality, labor, maintenance and repair, literacy and affect.--
interdisciplinary engagements across fields
Need for a boarder imagining of infrastructual affects--generated through people's material
encounters with media infrastructures.
Shift from factory labor to " invisible" or "immaterial" forms of labor involving various social
skills, services and modes of care
Network infrastructures like the internet rely upon the affective or immaterial labor of users
to function and sustain themselves overtime. Media infrastructures' reliance on immaterial
labor
Annihilation of space and time was the early-nineteenth century characterization of the
effect of railroad travel. Shrinking of space. Alternation of spatial relationships by speed of
railway train was a dual process: diminution of space(shrinking of transport time) and cased
an expansion of transport space. It is reaction of perceptive power(subjective perception of
space-time). Make products loose their local identity
Culture and history and nature can not be separated
Telegraphy: nature and culture(electricity and culture)
Spirit of media, transformation through human, a term to describe a person who could
communicate with dead: spirit medium.
New media technologies could capture traces of spirit since spirits had a kind of material
presence but they were not visible to human senses but photography could capture them
Transformation of human signal
Sarah Sharma: temporality
Changes in media technologies have a cultural connection to their changes
What are time and space? Two approaches: 1) mechanical model(take time and
space as measurable properties, time pressure ect can be measured, quantitative
objective)
2)subjective models, how time and space experienced, memories of the past, imagines
of the future, a sense of place; qualitative/subjective
Time and space are the movement between the objective and the subjective, they
are background of all experiences that we take for granted
"This is water" David Foster Wallace
• Water as an invisible environment
•It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with
knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and
essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding
ourselves over and over: “This is water.”
• The message is that paying attention and being mindful of others is essential. Wallace's
speech also talked about decision making and the power of choice. Wallace's speech talked
about changing a person's perspective and attitude on others around them.
• The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline,
and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in
myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom.
• Environment becomes invisible -> making thought experiment in the time and space of
media to make our media environment visible again (Dolphins)
Media governs social practices.
In these senses, media work as a technology for governing through the production,
organizing, and disciplining of space
Eg: online space, lecture hall and students in the room, reduce the distance
John Durham Peters: understanding media
People think media as an environment and surrounding
Money, power, love can also be media-media as a concept gets stretched
Internet starts to take on the quality of a basic and elemental properties lies for or water
,We are conditioned by conditions we condition, we, the created
creator, shape tools that shape us.
Media technologies make us as we make them, we are the created creators
Idea of co-evolution between humans and the things we make.
“The question of how to define nature, humans, and media are ultimately the same
question.” (Peters, The Marvelous Clouds, p. 51) -> first of all media is a concept that has
been understood as a property of the natural world and now is returning to a kind of
property of the (our) environment; the human is also part of this interpenetration
between nature and media -> human is not only using media but is shaped by it
The relationship between media and lived time?
Statement about time: we lived in a culture of speed dominated by accelerated technologies
Boundaries between separate spheres of work, leisure and sleep are increasingly blurred
Temporality is an intersectional type of social differences structured in specific political
economic and geographical contexts
Individuals habitually discipline and submit to normative time.
Recalibrate: the sense of time are changed/managed by other--cultural norms and
expectation, sometimes by force and or for lifestyle. Relationship between media and lived
time
Media alter the temporal and spatial parameters of political and social possibility.
Uniform experience
Temporality is how do technologies operate and then extend particular margins and
centers of power in time., It is about "Power"
Temporality is experienced as a form of social difference (margins) and a
type of privilege (centers).（margins)(power)--temporal differences hidden in the grand
story
Media production are tied to the reproduction of the social order and alter the
experiences
(technologies or media exacerbate temporal relationships because they give
powerful institution access to the time of another in highly gendered ways.
The temporal is about power
Helen Morgan Parmett: space
Media dislodging us, helping us navigate and producing space
simultaneously
Media such as TV and newspaper try to bridge the distance, create mobile
privatization and a global world of interconnectedness
, Benjamin: mass reproduction could divorces art from its situatedness in a particular space
and time, losing its"aura", which is uniqueness and permanence.(copyright law-regulate
travel and ownership)
Media does not collapse space as it reorganizes it, they producing new sensibilities of space
by creating new geographies, mobilities and identities.
Liberal-capitalism and suburbanization--broadcasting(new institution)-centered on the
home-new forms of social organization--also resistance
Digital media helps to connect global transnational corporations and facilitate the
flow of capital across borders and encourage new social movements which utilize
digital and social media to facilitate collective social unrest and agitate against
oppressive forces. Media reduces the distance between each nation, makes a global
connections and introduce a new social movements which allows digital medias to
facilitate collective social unrest and against capitalism.
Production of space in a materialist sense. infrastructures: railways, arcades, and
department stores
Considering media and space as co-constitutive highlights how media are
put to work by a variety of social forces to govern everyday spaces in
historically and culturally specific ways that can both reinforce and
challenge gendered, raced, classed, and sexualized norms.
Make audience adjust or change their norms and perception(media governs uses of
domestic and public space and content, context
Week 2 Infrastructure
Text reading
Media infrastructures signals a shift toward exploring issues of scale, difference and
unevenness, relationality, labor, maintenance and repair, literacy and affect.--
interdisciplinary engagements across fields
Need for a boarder imagining of infrastructual affects--generated through people's material
encounters with media infrastructures.
Shift from factory labor to " invisible" or "immaterial" forms of labor involving various social
skills, services and modes of care
Network infrastructures like the internet rely upon the affective or immaterial labor of users
to function and sustain themselves overtime. Media infrastructures' reliance on immaterial
labor
Annihilation of space and time was the early-nineteenth century characterization of the
effect of railroad travel. Shrinking of space. Alternation of spatial relationships by speed of
railway train was a dual process: diminution of space(shrinking of transport time) and cased
an expansion of transport space. It is reaction of perceptive power(subjective perception of
space-time). Make products loose their local identity
