/ Week 12 – Lectorial Reflection /

Wow… well it’s the last lecture for Semester one. Crazy to think how quickly this semester has come and gone.

Today in the last lecture we discussed Media Materialism.

Some notes I took:

Culture

  1. identifying subgroups within population – youth group etc.
  2. the world as culture, humankind – think about humanity as a whole/we are a human culture
  3. art, theatre, cinema: creative expression – what you would find in the newspaper under culture.
  • Culture is multiple – different classes/races/ages
  • Messy, unpredictable, confused.
  • Brian Eno – “culture is everything we do not have to do” – we don’t need to have certain cuisines or clothing but we need to be clothed and need to eat. (we could survive without them)
  • Culture is something that we do, but also something that we are.

Technological Determinism: Technology determines its own path – each development has a preconceived course

  • – Invention of the Walkman – shut out oral cues of the world, we could shape our own music.

Social Constructivism: we control it

  • No matter how radical the innovation is, we ultimately have control.
  • Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
  • It is not a straight line, it is unpredictable.

 

It is interesting to consider the idea of culture and the way in which it is alive within the media. This lecture confused me a little as I am quite exhausted from a long semester. However it was interesting to hear of the different ideas in culture focused on the theory that technology is pre-determined and has a direct path compared with the theory that we control everything and technology is unpredictable (social constructivism).