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FMST 131 Final Concept Map:
Digital media prioritizes immediate…
FMST 131 Final Concept Map:
Digital media prioritizes immediate connectivity over meaningful engagement, effectively flattening cultural differences and stripping media practices of their social and historical depth.
Escape - from our own reality: digital media encourages mediation through screens, making experience feel more immediate while also distancing us from lived social worlds
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Enlightenment as Mass Deception:
We use television and digital media/ consumerism as an escape from our daily working lives
Rotting / Brain Rot: terms created by Gen Z to define what endless scrolling means and the type of content present in endless scrolling. It is literal brain rot. We just keep scrolling because it's addicting and helps us escape reality. We don't have to make any choices as the algorithm does it all for us.
Slop / AI Slop: Also present in endless scrolling. Defines non human made content that is meaningless, but is part of our endless scroll that entertains our brain
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Laura Mulvey Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image: pausing, rewinding, and rewatching turn moving images into objects for detached looking, which shifts viewing away from lived time and into controlled, isolated attention
We don't just enjoy the media anymore; we become a part of it and completely control when it starts and stops. We exit the flow of time of experiencing the film with others and experience it on a completely individual level.
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Information Overload - overwhelming amount of information at our fingertips: the database logic of digital culture turns culture into endless access, but not necessarily meaning.
Lev Manovich The Language of New Media: digital culture becomes database logic: endless retrieval, circulation, and accumulation replace linear narrative or stable meaning
Raymond Williams Programming: Distribution and Flow: The stream is endless, a continuous flow that is devoid of meaning and just happens. It no longer has a distinctive meaning, it keeps flowing
Mary Ann Doane Information, Crisis, Catastrophe on information: crisis, and catastrophe show us how media saturate us with urgent data that feels all-consuming
"The content of information is ever-changing, but information…is always there, a constant and steady presence, keeping you in touch. It is, above all, that which fills time on television, using it up." (Doane 251-52)
It is pretty awful to scroll through Twitter. It's part celebrity news, global news, and catastrophe, and just nonsense. You get everyone's voice on the app while you scroll, and it is completely overwhelming.
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Marshall McLuhan Television: television’s “cool” form and environment-based media logic help explain why media can surround us without necessarily deepening understanding
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Lost Media - disregarded mediums and lost social practices: when media are disregarded or replaced, their material forms and social practices get erased.
Photography
Alan Trachenberg Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans:
The importance of war photography during the Civil War and how it helped show the daily life of soldiers and the horrors of war to the general public for the first time
Replaced by televised video of war, a constant stream of terror rather than individual photogrpahs
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Raymond Williams From Media to Social Practice: Williams treats media as social practice, so ignoring the medium means ignoring the habits, institutions, and bodily practices that sustain it
Social Practice: constitutive human activity - work on a material for specific purposes within necessary social conditions
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Will Tavlin Casual Viewing: casual viewing shows how, after the novelty of television and film wore off, the culture changed - the development of a social practice of watching rather than just the content being watched.
Andre Bazin The Ontology of the Photographic Image, The Evolution of the Language Cinema, The Virtues and Limitations of Montage: Bazin goes in depth into the importance of distinct and impressive films and photography. He discusses how each medium has a distinctive ontology and relation to reality that matters
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Decline of cinemas
Cinemas and movie theaters have been disappearing across the country, especially since COVID. Viewers would rather watch and stream films at home than engage in the social practice of going to a movie theater. We are facilitating a more isolated and less meaningful engagement
Radio
Simply replaced by television and the digital age. Used to be a social practice of listening and imagining what was happening. Television shows you and tells you what happens, making radios obsolete.
Merging Media - from medium-specific to inter- and infra-medium: remediation and intermedia blur boundaries between forms, so media increasingly refer to and absorb one another, eventually becoming a constant amalgamation.
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Medium specific
Clement Greenberg Modernist Painting: believes all media have to be distinct and separate, and that they all have features that define them as being different. For example, flatness is what defines a painting, and all media have to be separated to exist as its own medium.
"each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself"
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Sameness - the similarity of media through post-medium culture: the post-medium condition can make difference feel collapsed into a generic digital equivalence, even when media seem diverse.
Music industry
Historical music
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Sting, The Soul Cages (1991)
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Modern day music
Katseye, Taylor Swift: lacks any meaning behind their own lyrics. Sometimes they are barley any songs, and they mean nothing. Their songs are meant to be catchy, popular, and profitable rather than to represent something.
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Rosalind Krauss A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition: the post-medium condition seems to dissolve medium specificity into generalized artistic or technical equivalence
Feels similar to the concept that every child needs to be important and equal. Give everyone participation trophies so no one is left out when all art is not technically equivalent. It needs to mean something or be something.
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Lev Manovich The Language of New Media: where database forms and software platforms make different media feel interchangeable - Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads, Snapchat are all practically the same
Adorno and Horkheimer Enlightenment as Mass Deception: the culture industry standardizes experience, so apparent variety often hides sameness.
We all experience entertainment, but all entertainment is rooted in sameness, flattening cultural difference and making everyone the same
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Nationalism-less - the loss of nationalism / imagined community: print helped form nation-based communities, but digital circulation loosens stable shared publics and identities.
Print media helped produce the nation as an “imagined community,” meaning shared identity depends on mediated forms of simultaneity and common reading.
Our phones let us pick our news, giving us immediate connectivity - but we lose this social practice and sense of nationalism immedietly
John Durham Peters Mass Media: "networked media fragmented older national coherence into multiple, unstable publics".
There are so many groups you can be part of online now, and distinctions you can make between people. You can make friends online who are exactly like you, ignoring people who may be different from you. We have no general community anymore, just the people we handpicked out who are similar enough to us.
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