Reflections: Part 1

Before this course, I understood media as a means of message delivery.  With a background in advertising, PR and magazine journalism, media meant the tools with which one communicated with an audience. Media implied a tool – one that sometimes (necessarily) shaped or constrained the message it would convey, but I understood media to be fairly neutral. I think this understanding was that of an undergraduate and practitioner. A deeper perspective comes from critical examination, which is what this class encouraged. 

Through the readings and discussions in this class, I’ve expanded that understanding quite a bit, and much of that expansion involves complicating factors. I still understand media as a tool, but I'd have to ask about the context, audience, and what the message the medium is intending to carry before I could even start to answer that question. There were many examples of those complicating factors from the theory we examined these few months, but the following came quickly to mind.

Benjamin’s idea that media degrades the artistic qualities and uniqueness of art because of it ability to be easily reproduced; “the quality of its presence is always depreciated,” and “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” (4) Media changed peoples' perception of art, transforming it into a purchasable commodity, rather than an original item.

Barthes idea of myth helps explain the quick images that function as shorthand to our audience. He discusses the signifier, signified and the sign as analogy. “Myth plays on the analogy between meaning and form, there is no myth without motivated form.” (9) We use media to project such images, and our advertisements and popular culture are full of them, accurate to life, or not.

Adorno and Horkheimer discuss what and who are working to bring such myths to the media consuming public. He is, of course, concerned with the motivations at play, and the potential to manipulate the public, creating the demand for the material they produce. “Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into and ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce” (2) “Furthermore, it is claimed that standards were based on in the first place on consumers’ needs, and for that reason were accepted with so little resistance. The result is the circle of manipulation and retroactive need in which the unity of the system grows ever stronger.“ (2) So mass media had to deliver the same content everywhere, and it had to be produced in a certain way, under certain (expensive) conditions. This enabled a whole culture industry to develop -- and create demand for its own products.

The shape of the technology device itself can influence how a media consumer uses or accepts the content that device delivers. Acconici’s discussion of the television as furniture “specialized furniture: the position of sculpture” (373) as normalizing science and technology “television (as well as stereo equipment, etc.) is science turned into a pet. The viewer/consumer can have part of what NASA has, what Bell Telephone Labs have: science becomes democratized.” (373). Personal technologies designed for the home, made science familiar and acceptable.