Recently, I signed on to teach a course in the Fall on Media and Technology at Goucher College. The course will explore how new media technologies have shaped and complicated our culture and society while bearing in mind, as Lisa Gitelman has noted, that all media were once new. It will consider new media of today and yesterday, including print, sound recording, radio, film, television, and online multimedia. The critical goals of the course are twofold. Students will be expected to apply the tools of critical content analysis to a range of media prevalent today. Through the analysis of narrative, visual form, sound design, and interactivity, students will address issues of cultural representation and identity construction as they have shifted over the course of different media epochs and as they are evolving today in a rapidly changing media environment. Beyond this, the course will explore macro issues of how media affect the lived social environment in ways related to but not always centered on their content, such as ownership, labor, and the material transformations of architectures and infrastructures.
This latter objective is, to my mind, one that deserves far wider attention in media studies today. The analytical tools of the critical tradition, such as rhetorical analysis and semiotics, which have been used to great effect in studying content, are also especially well suited to studying technologies that themselves have been treated practically in terms of their own “grammars.” It is worthwhile to consider how critical analysis might be expanded for “parsing” the languages of machines, whether mechanical, electronic, and symbolic. This will be on my mind for SCMS 2016.
This latter objective is, to my mind, one that deserves far wider attention in media studies today. The analytical tools of the critical tradition, such as rhetorical analysis and semiotics, which have been used to great effect in studying content, are also especially well suited to studying technologies that themselves have been treated practically in terms of their own “grammars.” It is worthwhile to consider how critical analysis might be expanded for “parsing” the languages of machines, whether mechanical, electronic, and symbolic. This will be on my mind for SCMS 2016.