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Critical Perspectives: Media IssuesMedia Theories Explained

+ Media Theory

It is very important for the exam that you understand contemporary media theory and are able to apply it to your media areas (i.e. television) and your specific media texts (i.e. Who wants to be a Millionaire)

The next few slides attempt to summarise some key media theories that you then need to try to apply to your own examples on your blogs.

+Charles Leadbetter and ‘We-Think’ Leadbetter argues that the way we think and

make sense of ‘knowledge’ is fundamentally shifting in the online age.

Open-access knowledge building communities on the web allow ideas to be shared and tested more quickly and effectively.

This leads to more creativity and innovation, a creativity and innovation separate from insitutional constraints.

+ Benedict Anderson & ‘Imagined Communities’

The imagined community is a concept coined by Benedict Anderson which states that a nation is a community socially constructed, which is to say imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group.

An imagined community is different from an actual community because it is not (and cannot be) based on everyday face-to-face interaction between its members. Instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity—for example, the nationhood you feel with other members of your nation when your "imagined community" participates in a larger event such as the Olympics.

+‘Imagined Communities’ continued As Anderson puts it, a nation "is imagined because the

members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion".[1] Members of the community probably will never know one another face to face; however, they may have similar interests or identify as part of the same nation. The media also create imagined communities, through targeting a mass audience or generalizing and addressing citizens as the public.

+Chris Anderson – ‘The Long Tail’ In 2006 Chris Anderson wrote an article for ‘Wired’

magazine about how the internet has transformed economics, commerce and consumption.

As broadband internet allows more people to look for and share or buy a wider variety of material and products, what happens is that people buy less of more. Niche is no longer an expensive luxury.

“The theory of the Long Tail can be boiled down to this: Our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve, and moving toward a huge number of niches in the tail. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare”

+ Irvine and Global Media Irvine offers this example of how global digital media

transform the social world: ‘At the extreme, modern media simply dissolve time,

distance, place and local culture that once divided the globe. Perhaps the best examples are computer games and pop videos. Routinely their content blurs boundaries of history and geography in a mix that denies the specificities of actual locations and particular chronological periods. In effect, we are putting all our cultural eggs in on basket.’

Some see this as a negative thing, others see it as positive. It is now easier to disseminate cultural products around the world and to use technology to communicate with people across the world. Is this new ‘global village’ a good or bad thing?

+ Tapscott & Williams – ‘Wikinomics and its Big Ideas’

Peering – the free sharing of material on the internet – is good news for businesses when it cuts distribution costs to almost zero, but bad news for people who want to protect their creative materials and ideas as intellectual property (IP). So ‘collaborative culture’ will change economics beyond recognition, and corporations are forced to respond or perish.

Free creativity – is a natural and positive outcome of the free market, so attempting to regulate and control online ‘remix’ creativity is futile. Look up ‘creative commons’ as a way around this regulation nightmare.

+ Democracy – The media is democratised by peering,

free creativity and the we media journalism produced by ordinary people.

Digital Natives – young people are described as digital natives, they have grown up in a collaborative virtual world which to them is natural and instinctive. The opposite side to that argument is that some young people feel just as left behind and alienated by Web 2.0 as they did before.

Wikinomics argument = Mass collaboration changes everything? But does it – consider just how much of the population of the world has internet access.

+ Tim O’Reilly and Web 2.0

The term Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2004) is associated with web applications that facilitate interactive systemic biases, interoperability, user-centered design, and developing the World Wide Web.

A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as consumers of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (prosumers) are limited to the active viewing of content that they created and controlled.

Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.

+ Dan Gillmor & ‘We Media’

Dan Gillmor wrote a book entitled We Media in 2004, its central idea is that for years ‘Big Media’ i.e. corporations such as Sky, Google and the BBC, have had control over who produces and shares media, therefore there has been a concentrated choice of media. The people who own these large corporations are not representative of the diversity of society.

Gillmor sees the internet as a catalyst for challenge to this due to the use of it by ordinary citizens to share their own news, hence citizen journalism.

The audience is now the producer.

+ Henry Jenkins & Participatory Culture

As Henry Jenkins argues, “participatory fan cultures” have been around long before the web, but the advent of the internet has just served to expand those communities and extend the opportunities they have to exchange knowledge, skills and ideas across limitless geographical boundaries.

YouTube teaches us that a participatory culture is not necessarily a diverse culture. As John McMuria has shown us, minorities are grossly under-represented -- at least among the most heavily viewed videos on YouTube, which still tend to come most often from white middle class males. If we want to see a more "democratic" culture, we need to explore what mechanisms might encouraged greater diversity in who participates, whose work gets seen, and what gets valued within the new participatory culture.

+ YouTube has emerged as the meeting point between a

range of different grassroots communities involved in the production and circulation of media content. Much that is written about YouTube implies that the availability of Web 2.0 technologies has enabled the growth of participatory cultures. I would argue the opposite: that it was the emergence of participatory cultures of all kinds over the past several decades that has paved the way for the early embrace, quick adoption, and diverse use of platforms like YouTube. But as these various fan communities, brand communities, and subcultures come together through this common portal, they are learning techniques and practices from each other, accelerating innovation within and across these different communities of practice. One might well ask whether the "You" in YouTube is singular or plural, given the fact that the same word functions for both in the English language. Is YouTube a site for personal expression, as is often claimed in news coverage, or for the expression of shared visions within common communities? I would argue that the most powerful content on YouTube comes from and is taken up by specific communities of practice and is thus in that sense a form of cultural collaboration.

+Ruskin and Creativity

Ruskin argued that human creativity should be unleashed, and must dare to risk failure and shame, so that the richness of humanity can be properly expressed. Today we have the tools to easily experiment, and to share our haphazard innovations with others. We should push ourselves in the direction of diverse and unusual experimentation, rather than the risk-averse version of ‘professionalism’ which prefers bland competence.

+ David Buckingham & ‘After the Death of Childhood’

Buckingham discusses the effects of the media on childhood but also how the media represents childhood and the rights of children. Buckingham breaks up children’s rights into active and passive.

Passive rights include: the Right to Protection and the Right to Provision. In terms of provision Buckingham believes that current discourses about children or for them are predominantly produced by adults, which is obviously problematic from a representation standpoint. In broadcasting there is a need to create a dialogue in which children’s voices will be heard.

+ Active rights include: the Right to Participation and the

Right to Education. In terms of the right to participation there are some tensions inherent within it. Access to media is seen as synonymous with access to knowledge and power, particularly to three key areas that are seen to be belonging to the adult world, these are:

Morality (sex and violence) Commerce Citizenship This is why the media is so often blamed for the death of

childhood because it opens up the gates to these realms. QUOTE: ‘We cannot return children to the secret garden

of childhood, or find the magic key that will keep then forever locked within its walls. … The age in which we could hope to protect children from that world is passing. We must have the courage to prepare them to deal with it, to understand it, and to become active participants in their own right’.