New Media: Gender, Culture, Technology » August 19: Introduction to the Course

August 19: Introduction to the Course

Today we will go over the syllabus and highlight some important dates and assignments to come. Then, we’ll get into what to expect in the course.

Your Story

If I haven’t already mentioned this, you have weekly discussion posts to do, and the first one is an introduction of yourself. You’ll be posting this on Canvas as your first Weekly Discussion.

  • Name (pronouns)
  • Year (don’t put 2024–year in the program)
  • Degree and Concentration
  • Hometown(s)
  • Job/Future Job
  • Favorite Book
  • Favorite TV Show
  • Favorite Movie
  • Favorite Video Game
  • 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?

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?

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 necessary 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 rhetorics. 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.

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 enjoyment of a film–conforms to the cultural value of privileging families.

*I might define rhetoric here as what happens to be governing the viability, believability, and motivation of the text, in this case, a film or film genre.

American Culture

I have other course pages devoted to this listed below, so check them out for more information. Don’t worry about getting this all at once; we’ll be exploring American culture all semester, and you’ll be arguing for (or against) what seem to be essential American qualities in your writing. Although it might seem that American culture in monolithic, it isn’t. However, we will often focus on the hegemonic aspects of American culture.

More Discussion on Our Semester’s Topics

Locating American Values

Because this course is a theoretical exploration of how we can locate a society’s values by “reading” its texts, 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.

Are You Normal?

According to the US Census Bureau…

2022 and 2024 Updates (read critically and closely)

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!