Everyday Media

An everyday blog about media by everyday blogger Louise Alice Wilson.

Category: Lectorial (page 2 of 2)

Are You Media Blind?

I’m not sure if it’s ironic or poignant that my first blog post will be about the over saturation of media in our everyday lives, who knows, maybe we’ll know by the end.

Everyone knows that media has become more present in the everyday lives of us 21st century humans but how pervasive media is, is seriously underestimated. When people say media these days most people think of mobile phones, laptops and mobile phones. In a sense we’ve almost become so used to other forms of media, that we develop a kind of ‘media blindness’ and fail to see how prevalent media is in our urban landscapes.

Therefore us media students decided we should do a little experiment and we even used paper and pens, to be truly ‘scientific’.  We grabbed our stuff then we marched off to the State Library of Victoria to take note of all the media we encountered and here it is in all its glory (in neatly divided sub-headings for ease of perusal):

Up High

  • Cultural Diversity Week advertising banners
  • State Library advertising posters
  • The Australian flag
  • The ME Bank logo
  • Nike advertisement poster

On The Ground

  • Vans
  • Nikes
  • Birkenstocks
  • Marlboro Cigarettes

Mid-Ground

  • Recycling sign
  • Adidas T-shirt
  • People using smartphones

Back-Ground

  • Little Shop of Horrors tram advertisement
  • AMF bowling tram advertisement
  • Fuji Xerox car advertisement
  • Hungry Jacks sign
  • Telstra advertisement
  • Telstra phone box
  • TV at the Asian Beer Cafe
  • San Churros advertisement

Foreground

  • People using smartphones
  • Voss water bottle
  • Pupa Health t-shirt

In Your Hand

  • Textbook
  • Smartphone

I know lists are boring, but i’m glad you kept reading because heres the payoff. Media is EVERYWHERE and not only is it everywhere but it was quite difficult for us to even ‘see’ this media. We almost had to force ourselves to notice advertisements, branding and smartphone use, because we have become so complacent to it. As mentioned above media comes in many forms and most of the forms we saw were not the commonly thought of mobile phones and laptops. So next time your out, or even at home, don’t be media blind, think about how much media your consuming through all its forms and you will be truly astonished.

Now go watch Netflix, you deserve a break after all this reading.

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

It’s All About ME-dia

Or is it all about TREE-dia?

Proposition: Media is not A THING out there.

The media is not so much things out there, but rather places which most of us inhabit, according to Brian Morris. As such media texts are more realistically “sites where meanings are generated through the manipulation of materials and codes”. Media texts are no longer simply ‘pictures’ or ‘reflections’ of a reality where meaning resides, we must see them as more complex and deeper than that. In this day and age the relationships, actions and interactions afforded through social media or ‘texts’ are essential to our current social landscape and thus define our sense of self and lifestyle. Just because an interaction is occurring through a modern media, does not reduce it’s impact upon and within a persons life.

Debates about Mediated vs Unmediated communication:

  • Pre-modern society: social world predominantly experienced through face to face interactions and direct experience.
  • Modern society: Predominantly through media/texts; maps, books and newspapers.
    Is one experience more authentic than the other? Surely not.

We live in a day and age where communities are created within and around media texts, or social media platforms. These texts and platforms also seek to facilitate new types of social interactions and imaginings, that are more complex than what has ever existed prior. Such as the ‘imagined communities’ constructed by modern mass media technoligies through rituals of media. An example could be newspapers: when someone buys The Age they feel a sense of connection through the belief that other people are doing the same thing at the same time. This in turn reinforces their own behaviour and begins to define what it means to be a member of that social group (i.e. Melbournian, Australian or an Age Reader).

We are beginning to move away from the model of the broadcast era:

Media and Communication: Sender > Medium > Message > Receiver

Which assumes a fairly linear one directional flow as we begin to move into a post-broadcast era that focusses on the individual (ME-dia). The flow of information in the modern age is much more multi-faceted and inter related, like a tree with singular trunk, we are singular beings, but we have many roots through which we source our information and we have my branches through which we share our own information, leading to a much more complicated model of media communication.

But I like trees, so I’m pretty happy about it,

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

 

Take Me Home

A home is a place where people live, often with family or loved ones, it’s the place where you grow, learn, discover and express yourself. In a sense this degree functions like a home, but before we were let inside the home, we were asked this question: “What are 10 things you want to be better at by the completion of this degree?”  Here’s the list for my future self:

  1. Filming
  2. Cinematography
  3. Editing
  4. Textual analysis
  5. Music video production
  6. Networking
  7. Social Media
  8. Up-to-the-minute media knowledge
  9. Defined media identity
  10. Sound Engineering

With our future goals guiding us we walked through the front door, where we were met with the house rules:

  1. Don’t be late.
  2. Each lectorial, workshop, reading and activity is important.
  3. Catch up on anything you miss.
  4. Keep in touch, with the appropriate email etiquette.
  5. Be familiar with the course guide.
  6. Be familiar with the fine print regarding the blog and project briefs.

As we looked around at the soft furnishings (the yellow lamp was a nice touch) we got to learn that media & communication studies co-exists and overlaps with media production & practice and that these fields of knowledge both sit within humanities as a broader disciplinary formation.

Meaghan Morris, a famous Australian scholar in the field of cultural studies gives us a broader overview of the notion of a home: “I use these text here to create what Deleuze and Guattari call a home. In their sense of the term,  “home does not pre-exist”; it is the product of an effort “to organise a limited space”, and the limit involved is not a figure of containment but of provisional (or working) definition. This kind of home is always made of mixed components, and the interior space it creates is a filter or a sieve rather than a sealed-in consistency; it is not a place of origin, but an “aspect” of a process which it enables […] but does not precede-and so it is not an enclosure, but a way of going outside.” (Morris, 1992).

This offers us an interesting interpretation of the place/s we know as home; this place does not pre-exist, it is the result of an effort to organise limited space, not a representation of containment, but of the mixed components making up our everyday life, that we have chosen from the outside world. It is a space where  chosen aspects of the outside world exist inside our own chosen, organised world.

Overall this suggests, that home is a place which people create and define, through a process of filtration,  encouraged by inherent and pre-existing human motives. In a sense this same process of filtration is what defines our personalities, constructs films or other forms of media and is what will allow us to push forth in this degree. Media is the home for our practise and theory, a place of experimentation, individual customisation and inherent filtration and workshopping of all that is presented to us.

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson

References:

Morris, M. (1992) Ecstasy and Economics (A Portrait of Paul Keating). Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture: Vol. 14: Iss. 3, Article 1.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/discourse/vol14/iss3/1

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