Tonight we will get to know each other and find out the course goals and requirements. I will go over the syllabus and highlight some important dates and assignments to come. Then, we’ll get to know our classmates.
- Syllabus and course requirements
- Canvas Overview
- Class Introductions
- Tonight’s Readings from Canvas
- New Media, Gender, Rhetoric, and Technical Writing
Your Story
I want us to get to know one another briefly tonight. Usually, in face-to-face classes, I’d pair you up with a neighbor and have you answer the following questions, but, for tonight, Let’s just get to it! Take a few minutes to read over and jot down answers to the questions below. You’ll be posting this on Canvas as your first Weekly Discussion.
- Name (pronouns)
- Year (don’t put 2021–year in the program)
- Degree and Concentration
- Hometown(s)
- Job/Future Job
- Favorite Book
- Favorite TV Show
- Favorite Movie
- What do you expect in this graduate-level course?
- What do you want to know about New Media and Cultural Studies?
- What are your educational plans?
Asimov’s “A Cult of Ignorance”
Let’s discuss the article you read for tonight. Areas to start or get to…
- Anti-intellectualism
- Elites
- Right to know
- Credibility and trust
- Reading scores
- Drop in magazine readership
- “true concept of democracy”
Why not trust the experts? Also, what’s wrong with highway signs having pictures instead of words?
21st Century Examples of Celebrating Ignorance
Richard Conniff’s “In the Name of the Law”
This reading was more amusement, but, as you think about it, where (out there in the world) do you read/see/hear arguments that compare one group or another to NAZIs? If you’ve never noticed this, tell me what you think after reading David Mervin’s piece from yesterday.
- “Godwin’s Law…holds that the longer an argument drags on, the likelier someone will stoop to a Hitler or Nazi analogy” (emphasis mine, para. 2)
- Discussions of genocide…why don’t speakers go back further and point to the genocide of indigenous cultures in the Americas?
- Prepackaged, ready-made arguments: “These little laws [e.g., Godwin’s Law] allow us to sound intelligent without having to do any homework” (para. 3)
- What other prepackaged arguments do you hear?
- You can never trust the government.
- Taxes hurt businesses and economic growth.
- Environmental regulations kill jobs.
Marshal McLuhan
- p. 7: “the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium–that is, of any extension of ourselves–result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
- p. 8: “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.”
- Message of the electric light (p. 9): Look to the structure that brings electricity to a household/community. Electric lighting communicates the fact that the society has a system of electric power, a grid. It shows modernization, industrialization, and progress. More importantly, though, electric lights extend or change what we can do in the dark.
- p. 16-17: Our concept of literacy is socially constructed. We (members of a culture) have biases towards conventional ways of doing things. The norm in culture is seen as truth, and those not conforming are seen as lesser or weird. They don’t understand the “grammar” of the system; they don’t fit our patterns (e.g. a person without a cell phone is a pariah).
- Fixed charges regarding commodities (p. 21): Societies have commodities that are, for lack of a better term, givens. The community accepts (it doesn’t have to be conscious) these commodities as givens, which “create the unique cultural flavor of any society.”{i.e. NASCAR is a given in Charlottean culture…pasta is a given in Italian culture…oil, cable TV, smart phones are givens in American culture}
- Jung quote image: Keith Herring’s Free South Africa drawing.
Here’s a good 2-page explanation of McLuhan’s theory.
New Media, Gender, Rhetoric, and Technical Writing
There’s no way we’re going to exhaust the discussion on any of the above topics tonight (or during the semester), but, time permitting, we’ll see how far into this we can get. I’d like to share with you some ideas (musings) on Database Culture.
If you’re expecting to find “database culture” in any of our readings, I assure you it isn’t there. The structure of a computer database will help us think about *New Media* as delivering information and entertainment by assembling packets together in (usually) coherent ways. In a way, you could consider these “pre-packaged” referents that symbolize or point to ideas, events, concepts, etc.
This is one definition (and I’m briefly explaining it), but what makes new media different from old media is that new media is assembled to produce the illusion of continuity (there are other principles–let’s just focus on this one). Take film for example, the sequences and sound tracks and CGI are all elements that comprise a film. Digital technology lends itself very well to new media delivery, but digital technology isn’t the defining aspect of new media. Again, this is debatable and, more importantly, an academic definition–you won’t get many people thinking about new media in this way. For a very detailed (yet dated) discussion of this, please check out Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (MIT Press, 2001). It’s a difficult read, but he goes through the history of media to explain “new media.”
Think about all the Search Engines you’ve used. Our Information Age is dependent on, well, information. We consume sound bites, narratives, and ideas through our interactions with media. Below are some questions I’d like us to begin to answer regarding database culture:
- What do search engines produce?
- What does it mean to be a part of a database culture?
- What is cafeteriazation? In what ways are we a cafeteria-style culture?
Thinking a bit more about a textual configuration…
I know I didn’t assign this reading, but I added David Frike’s “The E Street Band Keep Rolling in ’09” on Canvas, which is a short, one-page reading I use in many classes to make various points. For our purposes, I want to focus on Fricke’s way of assembling references of other musicians to convey a representation of a Springsteen album.
Fricke’s article is a series of prepackaged ideas that carry his discussion of the Springsteen album. Phrases such as “pop stomps loaded with Beatlesque guitar jangle,” “1966-Beach Boys vocal harmonies,” and “pedal steel guitar a la Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline” (para. 3) are loaded with information–hypercompressed–and are references requiring readers to know them.
Consider audience, purpose, and situation (context):
- Do these references mean the same thing to every reader?
- Which readers will understand Fricke’s references? What might a reader need to know to get the most from this review?
- Comparing this to McLuhan’s argument, is Fricke providing us with an inside-outside perspective like cubism, or is this more linear?
- Imagine hypertext or links to the various sounds Fricke references.
- What else does Fricke communicate with references to other musicians?
- By the way, I’m an English professor with a Bob Dylan poster in my office. Cliché? Why or why not?
- New Media isn’t really new; it’s an extension of configurations and constellations of different media. Content isn’t irrelevant, but it isn’t the entire body of critique; likewise, our use of technology isn’t irrelevant to cultural studies, but it also doesn’t hold the entirety of meaning.
Good luck solving the cubism-linear question. This is what grad school is all about, so welcome to the first night of class.
Define Technology
What is technology? Let’s get started thinking about technology/ies broadly.
Ubiquity of Rhetoric
You’d think that with such a rich history, rhetoric would be introduced to students long before college. Well, it is, but not necessarily as a pillar of Western Civilization. The term comes up when politicians or their critics denounce an opponent’s speech as empty; therefore, “rhetoric” is often associated popularly with “empty speech,” non-contributing verbiage, or fluff.
But the study of rhetoric is much more complicated. Just as each discipline has its own epistemology–the study of knowledge, its foundations and validity– each discipline’s communication has a rhetoric. And rhetoric isn’t limited simply to disciplines: Movements, Social Norms, Technology, Science, Religion, etc. have a rhetoric. I often define such analyses into “rhetorics of…” as common factors surrounding the power or belief in a particular area. In other words, beliefs, attitudes, values, and practices are rhetorics of prevailing social ideology: One’s acceptance of cultural “truth” is based largely on one’s immersion into the culture’s myths and beliefs. Therefore, this definition of rhetoric requires us to recognize the relationship among sender-receiver-mediator. Of course, for our discussion, the “mediator” is culture. There is no concrete, definitive transmission of rhetorically pure communication. Sender and receiver filter the message(s) based on their experiences. Lucky for us, we can locate prevailing patterns in messages because culture mediates them. When doing a rhetorical analysis, you have to ask what are common ways particular ideas are conveyed in a culture. There are plenty of examples in new media.
For instance, what’s the rhetoric behind Hollywood movies that end in marriage and/or babies? Well, getting married and having children is a major cultural practice, so that gets “played out” in films. Additionally, women are often consider babymakers in search of a man to donate the necessary ingredient, so female characters in Hollywood films have traditionally not been *complete* until they marry and have children or somehow fulfill a woman’s socially constructed “proper” role according to prevailing attitudes. Because our culture (remember, this is a generalization) favors families as opposed to singles, the rhetoric of our entertainment–the power behind acceptance or enjoyments of a film–conforms to the cultural value of privileging families.
A brief Introduction of Rhetoric–From another class Web site.
Locating American Values
Because this course is a theoretical exploration of how we can locate a society’s values by “reading” its technologies, we ought to think about what those values are. This page asks you to think about American values–it’s from a different class, so don’t get too attached. The goal of this next exercise is to identify values that we might be able to “read” in technologies from American society.
Keep up With the Reading
You readings for the semester are on Canvas. If I haven’t shown you how to access them, let me do that now. Keep up with the reading, so you don’t get behind. If I didn’t mention it already, there’s a lot of reading in this class–lots!