Just Outside The Zeitgeist

Week 12 Lectorial Reflection

The following sentence is not against Dan’s lecture as he always presents a very engaging and informative presentation but, I have to admit to getting a bit lost throughout this week’s lectorial. The conceptual ideas that were being discussed are inherently interesting and provoked a dense and keen minded reflection. This all could be on the fact that I am running on very little sleep at the moment but the idea of media materialism will take a while to fully sink into my brain. Dan highlighted the three main areas of the concept: Technology, culture and technique. Technology is said to be the constellation of knowledge and products, not just a tool for human use but an all encompassing ideology coupled with cultural values.  Culture is centred around identifying sub groups within a population and the creative expressionism that stems from each group such as art, theatre and cinema. Technique are the traits and skills that are uniquely human such as using our brains to understand the written word, languages and how to use tools.

Another interesting concept Dan introduced was that of technology determinism, that technology as a concept is almost sentient, that it can determine its own path. Murphie & Potts state that it “refers to the belief that technology is the agent of social change” and in the era of Web 2.0 and society’s dependance on social media, technology can certainly be seen as driving social changes. Social media has become ingrained in the lives of a large majority of the millennial generation, the ease at which individuals can achieve a global connectedness in a matter of seconds ensures that the evolution of technology will dictate how society evolves as the further embrace and rely upon the machines.

Week 11 Lectorial Reflection

Dan’s lecture on remixes was extremely engaging as it showed how media can evolve into different forms of art.  His question on how reproducing something changes it and whether it is seen as legitimate is core at most debates over remixing as copyright laws and ownership of art makes many remixes are not seen as legitimate by the original artist. Yet I feel that people who make remixes of content does so to honour the original work, especially fans of some televisions, movies, and music.

The Girl Talk remix “This is the Remix” is a fantastic example of how a combination between many different songs creates something new while showing how diverse and great the music landscape is. Dan asked us to listen to it a pick out the songs we could hear and I walked away with a total of… two, The Jackson Five and the Beastie Boys. The rest of the class fared better, a cumulative effort revealing these other bands.

• DMX
• Cecilia
• INXS
• Lil’ Jon
• Salt n Pepa
• Lady Gaga
• Ace of Base
• Busta Rhymes
• The Clash
• Rick Ross
• B.O.B.
• U2

It was said in the lecture that remixes rely on the audiences knowledge of pop culture to understand a specific mash up and that is what I think is so great about remixes. Appreciators of a certain remix can come together as fans an understand what makes the mash up great, allowing each individual part of the new whole to be reflected on and honoured.

Week 10 Lectorial Reflection

I have never really reflected on media institutions as a concept before this lectorial, my love of the content trumping how it was made from a studio side of things. Yet having Brian use marriage, a social institution to provide context for how media institutions are seen gave a clear and concise entry point for me into this topic. A group brainstorming session on how marriage is an institution yielded responses such as

• Governed by expectations
• Values/monogamy
• Legal framework/ regulatory
• Meta-institutional frame
• Widely accepted/practice
• Cultural ‘rules’
• Rituals, symbolic
• Community recognition
• Social
• Reproduce social relations, expectations
• Historical continuities
• Superstitions
• Romantic love – cultural narratives
• Economic cultural

Having associated the term institutions with companies such as the BBC and Facebook, I never realised that the news and journalism could be considered institutions. This opened my eyes to the collaboration between institutions that have become more prevalent in today’s society. On page 152 of the Dijck & Poell reading, the mention the BBC issuing a policy report embracing digitisation, and this a prime example of how ingrained social media has become in other institutions. Television shows more often than not, nowadays, have hashtags at the bottom of the screen to invite the audience to start a conversation on a global scale, thus keeping the content in the zeitgeist for longer than its airtime. Events from natural disasters to movies are made popular by the global conversations on Twitter, ensuring social media is an institution that as become a necessity in the media landscape.

Week 9 Lectorial Reflection

The difference between audiences in the broadcast era and the post-broadcasts era is the ease in which audiences can communicate with each other.  Social media especially plays a central role in this communication, as it allows for an immediate global reaction to a media. Audiences also have a large ability to effect media and its creation, from reality television to Kickstarter, they can play an important role in some aspects of certain media. With a media landscape brimming with countless content, creators are looking to make texts that are more personal to their target audiences. In Rethinking ‘Rethinking Convergence/ Culture’, Henry Jenkins states that their are “significant shifts are occurring which are providing the people greater voice and influence in the decisions that impact their everyday lives” and this helps to show the change broadcasters have had when approaching audiences. The term mass public is longer seen as depicting a media audiences because they have many ways in which to showcase their individuality and opinions.

Another aspect of the lectorial I found interesting was the fact in which audiences were not considered as made up of individual people as much as during the post-broadcast era. Now it is clear that personal biases/experiences/life views shape how people respond to texts and with the introduction of social media into the media landscape it made it impossible to ignore this fact any longer.