GEK1061 - Emergent Media & Multimodal Communications

Description
 

Does the Internet lead to more diverse, global communities, or to greater isolation? Is it an engine of productivity, or distraction?

 

While these questions circulate frequently in contemporary culture, they’re hardly new. Such inquiries are common when media first emerge and begin to take shape in the public imagination. How did cinema transcend its working class, “dangerous” origins and become a part of middle-class leisure? How did the introduction of television in the home provide new avenues for household labor and gender relations? What does contemporary nostalgia for the dying form of the local video store suggest about our relationship to residual media? How did pirated DVDs affect local film cultures in Southeast Asia?  Where do our outdated electronic media go when we transition to new replacements? What are the social and environmental repercussions of this culture of media consumption?

This module examines the origins of cinema, television, the VCR, DVDs, and the Internet, analyzing the ways that new media interact with culture. Producing online essays, screencasts, and presentations, students will employ these historical frameworks to investigate their own media use and critically reflect on current cultures of technological transition.

Objectives

Students will gain a broad understanding of transitional media and culture not only through engagement with module content, but also through developing written, oral, and visual communication strategies. Thus, analysis of course readings will allow students to:

• Synthesize complex concepts in a coherent and logical manner.
• Develop critical thinking skills by assessing a range of readings and evaluating authors’ arguments, evidence, and assumptions.
• Examine how varied cultural contexts yield divergent perspectives on a single topic.
• Recognize patterns across diverse historical periods.
• Apply theoretical frameworks to real-world experience.

 

Building from this historical and theoretical understanding of media cultures, assignments will cultivate practical comprehension of media by allowing you to convey ideas about class content using multiple forms of communication. This will enable you to:

• Combine video, still images, audio, and text to convey complex, academic investigations in a clear and creative manner.
• Utilize online environments for critical inquiry and discussion.

 

Assignments

Online essay (20%)
Screencast (25%)
Oral presentation (45%) 
Participation (10%)

Example Readings

Brian Winston, “How are Media Born?” in Questioning the Media: A Critical Introduction, Eds. John Downing, Ali Mohammadi, and Annabelle Sreberney-Mohammadi (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1990).

David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, “Toward an Aesthetics of Transition,” in David Thorburn and Henry Jenkins, Eds. Rethinking Media Change, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004), 1-18.

Russell Merritt, “The Nickelodeon Theater, 1905-1914,” in Film: The Exhibition Reader (London: Routledge, 2002), 21-27.

Lynn Spigel, “Women’s Work,” Make Room for TV:  Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago, U of Chicago Press, 1992), 73-98.

Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell, “E-Waste: The Elephant in the Living Room,” FlowTV, 2 December 2008, http://flowtv.org/2008/12/e-waste-elephant-in-the-living-room-richard-maxwell-queens-college-cuny-toby-miller-uc-riverside/

Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: pitching out corrupts within (CT: Graphics Press, 2003).

 

Semester Schedule

Weeks 1-2: Concepts
Content:

• The idea of “technology” and culture
• Cultural versus technological determinism
• Media in transition: revolution or evolution?

Method:

• Defining multimodal communications
• The online essay: genre, audience, authorship
• Iconography, typography, layout
• Visual grammar

 

Weeks 3-4: Cinema
Content:

• Early film aesthetics and spectatorship
• The early cinema theater, race and class

Method:

• Visual organization of written texts
• Showing comparisons and causality
• Integrating words, numbers, and images
• Scale and detail

 

Week 5: Television
Content:

• Early television, gender, and consumerism
• Early television, gender, and domestic labor

Method:

• Multimodal communications in the humanities
• Interviewing techniques

 

Weeks 6-7: The VCR
Content:

• The early video store as a “Third Space”
• Technology and nostalgia
• Residual media

Method:

• Properties of visual arguments
• Editing and juxtaposition

 

Weeks 7-8: DVDs
Content:

• The pirated DVD in Southeast Asia
• Piracy and culture in the Philippines
• DVDs and independent film distribution in Thailand

Method:

• Orality and images
• Presentation skills
• Arguments for and against PowerPoint

 

Weeks 9-11: Internet
Content:

• YouTube and democracy
• Electronic waste

Method:

• Group presentation skills

 

Weeks 12-13: Presentations