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Media Crit Spr2010 Session22

Jean Baudrilliard and Postmodern Criticism

Is fascinated and repulsed by American culture
- and has written about it: America and Cool Memories
- good at cultural sound bites:
  - the whole art of politics today is to stir up popular indifference.
  - The compact disc. It doesn't wear out, even if you use it. Terrifying. It's as though you'd never used it ... If things don't get old anymore, that th's because it's you who are dead.
  - Since the media always make you out to say the opposite of what you say, you should have the courage always to say the opposite of what you think.
Espouses a consumerism based on recognition of the hyperreal
- Human needs, in today's world, are driven by the media
  - accumulation of goods
  - a consumption society
  - our media ensure that consumption does not equal satisfaction
- We substitute the false for the real in creating the hyperreal
  - Examples:
    - Disneyland
    - Mouthwash
    - The Television Family
    - The Nuclear Family
    - Neighborhoods that are absent of the old, the handicapped, and the poor.
    - Wars that do not have the characteristics of war.
Let the media consumer beware.

Postmodern Criticism: a methodological approach

View your body of content
Select a sign/symbol that recurs across "episodes"
Identify all of the possible meanings that appear to be invoked through that sign
Select a subset of those meanings appropriate to the length of the paper you are writing
Discuss the sign and the various meanings it evokes in its various uses

Mini-Lecture: Medium as Message Criticism

Everyone a publisher

The assumptions of the context-centered approach may be challenged by new Internet-based media
- when anyone can produce content
- power becomes an interaction between creators and consumers
- and intermediaries become less important
  - censors
  - gatekeepers
  - the whole mechanism of intermediaries
an auteur with a DV camera, a computer, and a web site really can do it all to some extent
- and the web site is the cheap part. You can run one for as little as $60 a year.
- One whacked piece of video: http://www.freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon.php
  - Notable here primarily as an example of how anyone might reach a mass audience using web technology
  - There are questions here:
    - is this video a hoax; an effective piece of propaganda?
      - is the eye-witness testimony credible?
      - are the pictures real and correct?
    - or are there legitimate questions here?
      - That is for you, and people who double check the facts, to decide
    - For our purposes it is enough to note that anyone can create content on the Internet that has wide reach.
I get real conflicted about that
- I'm writing a book
- It was accepted by a publisher but I didn't like the contract
- Now I own the book title as a URL
- I'll probably still publish, but I'm a lot pickier about terms now. I don't need them to reach an audience.
So the content production industry is fighting back
- Led by the music industry and RIAA
- In the name of preventing piracy
- they are now preventing distribution from private individuals
- They have allies who are using the opportunity
  - Universities who are reducing bandwidth costs by turning off ports
  - ISPs who are turning music download into a value added business
- But the small end to end producer is the loser in this
  - the garage band
  - the artist who has a niche audience that's too small for the big producers
Here we get to a strength of production-context analysis
- It gives us a vocabulary for talking about how the structure of the medium affects the message
- And the ways in which that structure is negotiated by participants

Distributed Control in the Global Village

This power to self-publish is consistent with McLuhan's "decline of the center" (see Levinson, Chapter 7)
- The idea that we are moving from centralized control of content to decentralized control
- And there are unresolved problems
  - Big media is bigger than ever
  - Wide distribution of Internet content creation doesn't necessarily resolve cost issues
We have, in this, a dialectic
- centralization versus decentralization
- centralized control versus distributed control
- government versus anarchy
- nations versus villages
- monopoly versus competition
Orwell worries about one direction - control - in 1984
McLuhan proposes that the other direction is ascendant - distribution of power
These are powerful dialectics that aren't readily resolved except in finding balance
Persig's "Metaphysics of Quality" tries to do this
Rokeach's value scales give us a way to look at it.
- http://davis.foulger.info/oswego/Fall2002/CommunicationEthics/valuesScale.htm
- http://davis.foulger.info/presentations/measuringFractalDecisionSpaces/index.htm
- There are fundamental values that most of us agree are important
- but there are no perfect decisions
- We are frequently required, in our ethical decision making, to make forced choices between values that we might believe to be equally important.
- Hence people with essentially the same values can make very different choices under the same circumstances.

Light On versus Light Through

Right concept, wrong metaphor
A better metaphor is the difference between a photograph and an x-ray
- A photograph only shows surfaces
- An x-ray, which records on the same film, reveals what is hidden
Hence television and movies are "light on", but can be light through
Books, with their enhanced ability to talk to state of mind, are more often light through
In truth, McLuhan has the right idea, but applies it at the wrong level
- Light on versus light through is mostly about what we do with a medium
  - reveal surface
  - reveal hidden depth
- But some media are better adapted to revealing hidden detail and others are better adapted to hiding that detail

Media Hot and Cool

Hot and Cool is McLuhan's most famous distinction
- It is a way in which the medium is the message
The metaphor is rooted in music
- The "hot" brassy big band jazz that overwhelms the senses
- The "cool" and breezy jazz combo sound that pulls you into the conversation
It is easy to make too much of the distinction
- It works better as a relative gauge for comparing media that share the same mix of modalities
  - Telephone and radio
  - Face-to-face conversation and persuasive speech making
  - Television and movies
  - Poems and prose description
- it confuses things by operationalizing a production characteristic using a psychological effect
  - Hot, high definition, media are recognized by their ability to overwhelm a passive participant
  - Cool, low definition, media are recognized by their ability to turn the consumer into an active participant
It can be confusing
But it also works
- Movies really are "hotter" on the big screen than on a television (even a big screen TV)
  - Effects that overwhelm on the screen aren't fully visible on TV
  - Scenic detail disappears
  - Signs disappear
- Novels really are "hotter" than poems
  - Poems are far more likely to have endless interpretive possibilities
  - They invite extended conversations where novels end as a good read
- But by other measures all are hot
  - Novels and poems both fix words to paper
  - Television and movies are both recorded and reproduced
- And by other measures their temperature changes over time
  - Media "evolve under pressure of human usage and invention"
  - Today's cool medium may be tomorrow's hot medium
In the end, Hot and Cool are better applied to content
- You can create
  - Cool movies or hot television
  - Cool radio (easy listening and some talk radio) or hot telephone (telemarketing)
  - Cool novels or hot poems
  - Hot conversation (yelling) or cool epideictic speeches
- But hot media encourage hot content
- And cool media encourage cool content
Hot and cool may be most interesting as a way of thinking about how a medium becomes the message
- What is the interaction between the participants in a medium, its organization, and its content?
- Here's one answer to that question (Foulger, 2004):

Emergent Role Structure in Media

The roles from Foulger, 2002 are analyzed here for 167 media
Seven clusters emerge
In an interaction effect created by:
- The number of roles associated with the medium
- The presence of a director
A facet structure organized around three kinds of complexity
- Parallel complexity, in which many parallel roles require both production skills and direction skills
- Serial complexity, which may or may not require subassemblies but which certainly requires some measure of production
- Contention, in which a director provides floor control for many individuals who may or may not form subassemblies

-- Last edited April 28, 2010

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Unless otherwise noted, the contents of this page were written by participants on the Media Space Wiki, operated by Davis Foulger, and should be cited accordingly. For example (APA):
Foulger, D. and other participants. (April 28, 2010). Media Crit Spr2010 Session22. MediaSpaceWiki. Retrieved on from http://evolutionarymedia.com/wiki.htm?MediaCritSpr2010Session22.