Technology and Media
By J. Richard Stevens, Ph.D.
A presentation to Michael Tracy's Contemporary Mass Media class, November 5, 2009.
Considering Periods of Transition
Periods of Transition (Western Media)
- Media Transformation #1: Oral to written culture (Socrates to Aristotle and Plato)
- Media Transformation #2: Written to Print (The birth of Mass Culture)
- Media Transformation #3: Analog to Digital (The birth of Network Culture)
Considering Adoption/Diffusion
Considering the language differences between encoding platforms.
- Oral – contextual conversation, collaborative output
- Written – isolated text, individual interpretation
- Mass Production – reduction of complexity, uneven diffusion of meaning
- Network Dissemination – reconceptualized text created for parallel contextual conversations, collaborative output
Understanding Digital Language/Culture
Analog - comprised of continuous variable information (wavelength)
Digital - comprised of discrete units (on/off)
Advantages
Examining Our Terminology
Media Defined
me-dia (Latin,"the space between," "the substance between")
Advertising Defined
ad-ver-tis-ing
(Middle English, "the action of calling something to attention")
Journalism Defined
JOUR-nalism (French, "the accounting of the day")
JOURNALism ("the act of recording the events of the day")
Journalism (the post-1920s industry that serves the social function of surveillance, watchdog of the government and corporate institutions and the primary interface between citizen and society)
"The news of the day as it reaches the newspaper office is an incredible medley of fact, propaganda, rumor, suspicion, clues, hopes, and fears, and the task of selecting and ordering that news is one of the truly sacred and priestly offices in a democracy." Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News, 1920
Citizens in the right place ...
The South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami Blog
Knights for Free Water (facebook)
Virginia Tech Journalism Student Jamal Albarghouti
Advantages of Multimedia - CONTEXT
El Mundo’s coverage of the Spanish train bombing
The New York Times’ Tsunami coverage
Map Mashups
New York in the Movies
GawkerStalker Mashup
AP Mashup
Cabspotting
Presenting Data
Is it better to buy or rent? (NYT)
Can a President tame the business cycle?
Faces of the Dead (NYT)
Bad Context Example
Word Associations
Election reaction (NYT)
Reader response analysis of Obama Administration (NYT)
Inaugural words (NYT)
"News you can use"
Battle of the Bags (MSNBC)
Seattle Transportation grid (Seattle Post-Intelligencier)
Intertextuality/Remixing
Read My Lips (Mashup Commentary)
Challenge of the SuperDuperFriends
Sunday Bloody Sunday by George W. Bush
Hillary's Baggage
Obama Girl - “I Got a Crush ... On Obama!”
The Future?
History Commons 9/11 Timeline Mashup
The Annotated New York Times
OhMyNews! (South Korea)
Uganda Witness
Student projects
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