COMM525/Class Notes

From Driscollwiki

Contents 1 Sept 2, 2009 1.1 Reaction rants 1.1.1 UCLA Comm dept shutdown 1970s 1.1.2 Defensive stance 1.1.3 American university development 1.1.4 Funding models 1.1.5 When did Comm begin? 1.1.6 Centrality of Comm? 1.2 Rhetoric in Ancient Greek 1.2.1 Plato, Socrates 1.2.2 Aristotle 1.2.3 Aristotle's Analysis of the Sources of Rhetorical Proof, Dennis Bormann 1.3 Rhetoric / Communications distinction? 2 Sept 9, 2009 2.1 Aristotelian rapid history 2.2 Canons of Rhetoric 2.3 Quintilian 2.4 Roman goes Catholic 2.5 Rennfaire 2.6 Philosophy, Rhetoric split 2.7 Protestant Reformation 2.8 Breakdown of English 2.9 Communications develops outside the Ivys 2.9.1 How do lit and rhet function differently? 2.10 Neo-Aristotelian 2.10.1 Henry Wallace example 2.11 Edwin Black 2.11.1 Hyperspecialization 2.11.2 Role of the critic 2.12 Brockriede 2.12.1 Arguments 2.13 Hollihan 2.14 McKerrow & St. John 2.15 Rostek & Frentz 2.15.1 Jeremiad 3 Sept 16, 2009 3.1 Shiavo and Perfection 3.2 Teabaggers 3.3 Politeness 3.4 Bitzer 3.5 Rhetoric of American project 3.6 Jefferson 3.7 Authorship 3.8 Stuckey 3.8.1 Racism of the time 3.9 West and Carey 3.9.1 Fantasy and reality construction 3.10 Journal article length 4 Burke, 23 Sep 09 4.1 Counterstatement 4.2 Permanence and Change 4.3 A Symbolic of Motives 4.4 Kenneth Burke Society 4.5 Burke and Christianity 4.6 Mystery, mystification 4.7 Orientation 4.8 Order 4.8.1 Pollution 4.8.2 Guilt 4.8.3 Mortification 4.8.4 Purification 4.8.5 Redemption 4.8.6 Example: Abu Gharib 4.8.7 Example: Postwar Germany 4.9 Motives 4.10 Terministic 4.11 "Casuistic Stretching" 4.12 Pentad 5 30 Sep 09 , More Burke 5.1 Definition of Man 5.2 Inventor of negative 5.3 Separate from nature by instruments of his own making 5.4 Rotten with perfection 5.4.1 Ecology 5.5 Is Burke fundamentally "Western"? 5.6 Symbols & Motives 6 Bormann in U of MN 6.1 q sort analysis 7 Fisher 7.1 Cyclical nature 7.2 MRI tangent 7.3 'Audacity' of narrative paradigm 7.3.1 Roland push back 7.3.2 Barbara Warnick 7.4 Storyability gap 8 Cheney, Theye 8.1 Stasis 9 Globalization, 14 Oct 09 9.1 UK/media studies perspective 9.2 Globalization in debate, david held, anthony mcgraw 9.3 Is globalization a new phase/concept or expansion of on-going globalism? 9.4 Measurement of globalization 9.5 Media imperialism 9.6 Digital / modern globalization 9.7 Vertical integration 9.8 Horizontal integration 9.9 Microglobalization 9.10 Diaspora 9.11 Hegemony 9.11.1 Gramsci 9.11.2 Gitlin 9.11.3 Analyzing CNN, BBC coverage of China development 9.12 Identity Negotiation and Media 9.12.1 Identity negotiation 9.13 Asiacentric paradigm (2002) 9.13.1 Relationality 9.13.2 Circularity 9.13.3 Harmony 10 Sociopsychology, Cybernetics, Systems, 21 Oct 2009 10.1 Sociopsychology 10.2 Cybernetics, systems theories 11 Culture Studies w/ Sarah Banet-Weiser, 28 Oct 09 11.1 Frankfurt School 11.2 Birmingham School 11.2.1 Raymond Williams and Marx on Culture 11.2.1.1 Some names tossed out 11.2.2 Stuart Hall 11.2.3 Angela McRobbie 11.3 Cultural studies in the US (1970s) 11.3.1 John Fiske 11.4 Kellner 12 Postmodernism, 11 Nov 09 12.1 Modernism 12.1.1 Kant's Categorical Imperative 12.2 Features of post-modernism 12.2.1 In Science 12.2.2 In Music 12.3 Post-structuralism 12.3.1 Context 12.3.2 May 1968, Situationist International 12.3.3 Lyotard 12.3.4 Derrida 12.3.5 Foucault 12.3.6 Roland Barthes 12.3.6.1 Death of the Author, 1967 12.4 Simulation, simulacra 12.4.1 Semiotics, structuralism 12.4.2 Baudrillard on Marxism 12.4.3 Simulacra 12.4.4 Critique 12.5 Feminism 12.5.1 Historicized feminism 12.5.1.1 "First wave": Women's Rights 12.5.1.2 "Second wave": Post war 12.5.1.3 Feminism and Queer theory 12.5.1.4 "Third wave": 12.6 Postmodern Methodology 13 Public sphere, 25 November 2009 13.1 Habermass' historical imagined public 13.1.1 Who is there? 13.1.2 Relationship to the state 13.1.3 Relationship to the church 13.1.4 Disintegration of public sphere 13.2 (Re)thinking the sphere 13.2.1 Material, shared activity 13.2.2 Is public sphere essentially modern? 13.2.3 Frasier, Pockets 13.3 Public sphere within authoritarian regime? 13.4 Reagan family-based, private discourse anti public sphere? 13.5 "Intolerance of intolerance is not intolerance" 13.6 Pessimism, optimism 14 Howard, new media campaigns and the managed citizen, 2 Dec 09 14.1 Tech and campaigns 14.2 50% + 1 strategy 14.3 Cost of info -based strategy 14.4 Privacy value, privacy worth 14.5 Positive views on data collection 14.6 Pushing back against hypermedia

Sept 2, 2009

Reaction rants

Crisis in self-confidence.

UCLA Comm dept shutdown 1970s

• rival disciplines questioned its necessity
• overlaps w/ other depts
• 'belt-tightening'
  • got rid of dept, grad degrees
  • kept undergrads
  • resources, interest maintained
  • discipline disgraced

Defensive stance

• Socrates eviscerating the sophists
• Comm public profile weaker than other areas

American university development

• Eastern seaboard modeled on canon
  • English model
  • Intellectual elitism
• Beyond Appalachia, more applied, skills, reason
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Land-Grant_Colleges_Act
  • Second and third sons couldn't inherit the property so they went: military, clergy, or the West
  • Wished to recreate the greatness of the East
  • Grandiose names: Athens, OH; Athens, GA
  • Citadels of learning
    • "Nebraska is the Harvard of the plains."
  • Training people for the skills that society needs:
    • Doctors, lawyers, finance
    • Agriculture, mining
  • German model
• Masters, PhD derived from European model
  • Masters was applied, preparing one to be an instructor
  • PhD preparing one for independent research
• Comm is taught in English depts, late 18th c.
  • Oral presentation, argument
  • Debate, first std org at usc
    • Key to encourage applied, engaged public participation
    • Training students into citizen actors
    • Plus: public and students ENJOYED it!
    • Public debates were attended like sporting events
    • Towns chartered trains to travel to far off debates
  • Comm, rhetoric, debate not respected by conventional English/literature faculty

Funding models

• Industry, academia research
• Value of Comm skills outside of acad
• PhD in design, engineering seemed strange until recently
• When PhDs turn to industry it can be a loss for their degree-granting institutions.

When did Comm begin?

• Aristotle?
• Shannon at Bell Labs?

Centrality of Comm?

• Do you consider communications as the organizing principle?
  • First among equals
• Arrogant?
• Essential element of being human?
• Relationships or properties?

Rhetoric in Ancient Greek

Plato, Socrates

• Known via note-takers, oral tradition
• For winning city-states with enslaved enemies, life became easy enough to permit development of arts
• Rhetoric and argument
  • Entertainment and pleasure
  • Legal dispute
  • Self-defense in courtrooms
    • Later you could hire a logographer to write your defense
• Sons trained in speech by itinerate sophists
• To differentiate services, sophists began to also offer education in virtue, wisdom
• Corax and Tisius debate regarding payment for classes
• Isocrates: sophistic edu is patriotic act, citizenship, public participation
• Plato wore a purple robe like a member of the Aristocracy
  • Blamed the mob for Socrates' death
  • Rhetoric:Cooking::Truth:Health
  • Rhetoric lacking in virtue, knowledge, protection of evil
  • Rhetoric is artisanal, merely a craft, a knack
  • Rhetoric like the shadows in the cave
• Plato, 'Phaedrus' dialogue for critique of rhetoric
  • Using the lover metaphor
  • Will the philosopher ever ravage the loved? If not, forget the philosopher?

Aristotle

• Saw himself first as empirical scientist, biologist
• Human being's place in natural, cosmological order
• Systems thinker
• Defense of rhetoric
  • Rhetorical skills enable you to combat injustice
  • When science fails, turn to rhetoric
    • Reasoned argument, debate
  • Helps to see both sides of an issue
  • Rhetoric assists self-defense
• Rhetoric must be studied systematically

Aristotle's Analysis of the Sources of Rhetorical Proof, Dennis Bormann

• Enthymeme
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enthymeme
  • syllogism
  • unstated assumption
• Aristotle privileges Ethical Proof (ethos)
  • Nothing matters like integrity
  • Speaker credibility, trustworthiness is primary
• Pathetic Proof (pathos) can inspire emotional reactions
  • Riffing off of specific characters
    • Age
    • Fortune
  • How do communities determine 'young' or 'elderly' status?
• Logical Proof (logos)
  • Forensic
    • Past
    • Justice, injustice
  • Deliberate
    • Future
  • Epideictic
    • Present
    • State of the art, paradigm
    • Shape, discuss the values of the present
    • Ritualistic functions (Inaugural address)
    • Praise, blame
    • Affirmation, commitment to values
• Reveals early interactions among Rhetoric, Philosophy

Rhetoric / Communications distinction?

• Some say rhetoric is speech, argument, etc.
• Others make no distinction

Sept 9, 2009

Aristotelian rapid history

• Greeks begin to fail
• Romans conquer
• Romans being organization, discipline

Canons of Rhetoric

Cicero, practitioner + theorist

• Invention
  • Claim you want to make
  • Evidence you gather
  • Assumptions in the audience
• Arrangement
  • Order, priority
• Style
• Delivery
• Memory

Quintilian

• Style, Delivery, Memory
• Not threatening the existing state examining the ancient cases

Roman goes Catholic

• Rhetoric without invention
• Stays this way until Rennaisance

Rennfaire

• Starts 1600s, in N Italy
• Production of capital accompanies dev of Renn
• Trade, contact w/ other groups
• Wealthy group expands, potential for new patrons
• Wealth begets wealth
• Wealth makes demand, sustanence for art activity
• Patronage shifts from Church (madonna+child) to family, home, patron
• First appears in vis arts, followed by other forms
• Rhetoric, philosophy turned loose
  • Return of Invention!

Philosophy, Rhetoric split

• Late Renaissance
• Return to Plato, captures Invention from Rhetoric
• Leaves rhetoric to arrangement, style, delivery, memory - familiar to Plato's crit of sophists.
• Why? Rhetoricians too focused on success, not enough on truth

Protestant Reformation

• Petrus Ramus, early convert and anti-Aristotelian
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrus_Ramus
• Campbell says that everyone has the ability to do rhetoric but must train.
  • Influenced by Bacon, by Aristotle, when science fails, rhetoric picks up.
  • Must teach people rhetorical, reason skills so they can enter into a rational process

Breakdown of English

After having subsumed rhetoric into english:

• Literature
• Written Comm
• Oral Comm
  • Became Speech departments

Why would today's English depts priv Lit over Comp?

• "craft"/"art" distinctions, blech.
• by this non-argument, speech an even more pedestrian "craft"

Communications develops outside the Ivys

• U Mich, etc. Midwest, ( + Cornell )
• Return to Aristotle for system and foundation
• Working in institutions that typically train people professionally
  • fundamentally more practical than older univs
• See: "Literary Criticism of Oratory", Wichelms
  • Example of "Caususitic stretching", Burke
  • Similarities, diffs betwe literary + rhetorical crit

How do lit and rhet function differently?

• "Timelessness" of great works, value is its transposition
  • Consider teaching Grapes of Wrath year in and year out
• Rhetoric essentially deals with the now, present moment
  • Rhetoric crit tends to focus on rhetoric in context rather than its ability to resonant with a timeless audience of human condition
  • Exception; Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address"
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Address
    • fulltext: http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm

Neo-Aristotelian

• Calling forth Rhetoric of Aristotle to deal with contemporary context
• Great Men Speaking
  • Single speaker addressing public audience
  • Immediacy, in the moment
  • Co-location
• Highly descriptive, constrained

Henry Wallace example

• Far-left VP for FDR
• Dumped before Pres run because of socialist leanings as revealed by a series of letters about Buddhisim and "breaking of a new day"
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace#Roerich_controversy
• Dangerous for Neo-Arist to write about because N-A is so descriptive that it would be difficult for two scholars to say something different about the same event.

Edwin Black

• End times for Neo-Aristotelian
• Black knows it's coming to the end
  • Television, radio, mass audience
  • Listening in homes rather than public spaces
  • Not producing much new knowledge
  • So narrowly focused that they are missing Burke's rhetorical writing for 2 decades
  • New areas of investigation: Interpersonal, propaganda, mass comm
  • Best students no longer going to Neo-Arist
• For humanistic crit to be relevant (and not classical!) it must borrow from social sciences, phys sciences
• Black is a 'transitional scholar'
• Call to be more "methodologically aware", fit into departments, disciplines
  • Must borrow in goodfaith that you will discover and resolve varying contexts
• Observing the fracturing of Aristotelian rationality all around him
  • Nascent anti-war movement on his campus
  • Rigor, objectivity abandoned by cultural studies

Hyperspecialization

• Critics take "ever smaller fragments of the world as their specialties"
  • Less likely to find overarching theories (like Artistotle)
  • Looking instead for 'building block' critical aparatus

Role of the critic

• Observer
• Evaluator
• Educator
• Translator
• Concerned with products of man, humanist
• Force in society

Brockriede

• Criticism is about argument
• "Useful rhet crit must be about arg"
• To have arg w/ someone is highest form of respect
  • Indicates worthiness of another person's thought
  • Arg as Platonic dialog
  • Things to be learned
  • Habermassian notion about discourse
• Human experience defined by capacity for argument
• Critic invites ppl to agree, disagree
  • Although he may convince some people of his claim
  • Even a failure in that sense allows for success in other areas

Arguments

• Evaluation
• Judgement
• Discrimination

Might include

• Classification
• Description

Swipe at the Aristotelians!

• Must evaluate moral value of outcome
  • Not against a certain morality but against SOME morality

Hollihan

• Building on Brockriede?
• Gift of critic, finding the novel in mundane
• Political comm, visible results of education

McKerrow & St. John

• Role of the public intellectual
• "must be support from within the acad for those who ... joust w/ other pub intellectuals over matters of public import" (318-319)
• Holl: all work has public implications
• Partisan scholarship
  • Why this choice of terms?
  • Partisan invokes an exclusivity, shutting-out

Disciplines cannot have impact outside of themselves until they can "produce a public intellectual."

Rostek & Frentz

Jeremiad

Apocalyptic story,

• Narrative form
  • Systematic
  • Teachable
  • Recognizable, repeatable

By deploying jeremiad in An Incon Truth, Al Gore is cast as an actor

Taking advantage of a sympathetic audience to Gore, transposing this pathos to his environ cause.

Sept 16, 2009

Shiavo and Perfection

• God's sense of perfection
• God's perfection, human imperfection
• Who can decide the course of human life?
• Perfect husband

Teabaggers

• McGee, Michael. ideograph of "public"
• Concept of the "public"

Politeness

• Decorum works in favor of those in power
• Wilson issue, why is it upsetting that the congressman interrupted the president?

Bitzer

• Black said we were finally becoming concerned with method.
• Bitzer responds, we're still focused primarily on the problems of the moment.
• Aristotle, find, discover, persuade* What is the role of the rhetor?

• Rhetoric as practical art, problem-solving

Rhetoric of American project

• Borrowing from Euro, Enlightenment tradition
• Uniquely about the practical, applied experience of America
• American exceptionalism, notions of self, self-importance

Jefferson

• Voracious collector of books, finer things (wine)
• Polymath, science, architecture
• Voltaire, Locke, Milton
• Enlightenment tradition
• Suggesting a path for life of the mind
  • self-engaged
  • self-reflective
• Disliked the aristocracy as much as the "rabble"
• Role of religion in this speech
  • religious extremists least open to democratic experience
  • expresses a kind of universal spirituality w/o adhering to a single sect
• Use of "I"
  • Intro: modesty
  • Conclusion: force, confidence
  • No divine wisdom of kings but an expression of his self-image

Authorship

• Credit for delivery, for preparation
• Greek logographers
• Ghostwriters
• Could Reagan have written his speeches?
• Could Obama write his?
• Preparing argument is just first step of rhetoric,,,
• In terms of criticism, how do you

Stuckey

• Roosevelt
• to be a great pres, you need crises or war.
• power of presidency grows

Racism of the time

• Tillman wants to make it be about race
• Wants to use this as opportunity to reify and formalize the jim crow laws in the south, open segregation
• Trying to limit black civil liberties
• Roosevelt then tries to reinvent the issue, reframe not about race
• Makes it be about military discipline

West and Carey

• Bush and frontier justice
• westerns
  • high noon
  • the searchers
  • 7 samurai / fistful of dollars
• western narrative
  • saddam went after yr dad

Fantasy and reality construction

• Ethical spectacle
• Can liberals step away from the dominance of reason, empiricism

Journal article length

• Target publishable essay 20pp?
• Is 40pp too long?
• Inefficient?

Burke, 23 Sep 09

• Not taken up by Comm scholars until later in his career

Counterstatement

• Concerned with form
  • Set of expectations about how something should appear, what it should look like
  • Conform to our expectation

Permanence and Change

• Burke as a system-builder, systemic thought
• Non-linear
• Wants you to work at it
  • Is foss, foss, trapp cheating?

A Symbolic of Motives

• Unfinished

Kenneth Burke Society

• cultish?
• http://www.kbjournal.org/kbs

Burke and Christianity

• Enamored of the concept of original sin
  • Born into it
• Process of purge

Mystery, mystification

• Declaration of independence
  • "All men are created equal..."
• Preserve mystery
  • Preserve power, hierarchy
• Re: dissertation on China shift thru Burke
  • white cat / black cat
    • regardless the color, how does it catch a mouse?
  • what happens to the mystery of communist authority?

Orientation

• Naming things, orients you toward them
  • e.g., words for the poor, creating "poverty" as a problem
• Leads to Order
  • establishing hierarchy
  • responsibility, obligation, relation
• Orientation can also establish identification
  • Teacher/student or dodgers fan/dodgers fan

Order

• Piety
  • the sense of what properly goes with what
  • entelechy
  • For Burke, bigger than religion
• Connected to Perfection

Pollution

• Order becomes frayed
• Test of faith, piety, order

Guilt

• Original sin
• Pollution
• Victimage
  • Who do you blame first?
  • Children, parents
  • Least powerful, easiest to box in
  • Can't sustain that scapegoat?
  • Blame next the individual priest, sick, fallen
  • Can't sustain that scapegoat?
  • Blame all priests

Mortification

• Blame the self
• Sense of order is fractured
• Piety keeps us committed to an order
  • Even if that order is polluted in various ways

Purification

• Rejecting the pollution

Redemption

Example: Abu Gharib

• Guilty/ Victimage
  • first, individ soldiers
  • then, their commanders
  • up the chain to Cheney
  • broadly to structural problems in the military hierarchy

Example: Postwar Germany

• Trying to own their fascism
• Nationalism purged

Motives

• shorthand for "situation"
  • contrasting feral dog, house poodle
  • "where you sit determines where you stand"
• your motives are determined by your situation

Terministic

"Casuistic Stretching"

• Struggling to stay in a frame that is no longer working
  • crazy explanations for sun movement in order to keep the earth at the center of universe

Pentad

• Act
• Agent
• Agency
• Scene
• Purpose, attitude

30 Sep 09 , More Burke

Definition of Man

Inventor of negative

• Absence
• Symbolize not just love but absence of love
  • Distinguishing among types
• Comparison
• Typology
• Loss, dissatisfaction
• Enabling "thou shalt not..."

Separate from nature by instruments of his own making

• Technical apparatus
• Symbolizing, mediating comm capacity

Rotten with perfection

• Dissatisfaction
• Ambition toward a perfection
• Material ambition

Ecology

• footnoted in the 30s
• anticipating later concern

Is Burke fundamentally "Western"?

• Difficult to connect w/ Taoism
  • re: Combs

Symbols & Motives

• Symbols are how we make sense of the world
  • Reflecting
  • Tools for making sense
• Is there a pre-symbolic form of reason or intellection?
• Alien reason?

Bormann in U of MN

• Doing small group observations
• Bales (harvard) noticed that small groups go thru processional phases
  • Stages of group development
  • Forming, Storming, Norming, Conforming
• Add'l Phase: tension release
  • get to know ya
  • jokes
  • sharing personal anecdotes
  • storytelling, fictive encounters
    • group identification w/ each other

q sort analysis

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_methodology
• Initial study in peoria
  • "how's it gonna play in peoria?"
• create 50 short foreign policy phrases to describe world politics
• software ranks the survey responses
• "symbolic convergence theory"
  • social science to validate a dramatistic orientation

Fisher

Cyclical nature

• Good reason
• Narrative

• Born into narrative

MRI tangent

• dimasio, usc
• MRI attempts to map reactions to args
• see: weston, 'political brain'
  • leftist audience
• lakoff from uc/b
  • neurolinguistics, certain word strings activate particular neural networks

'Audacity' of narrative paradigm

• Hubris
• Other rational models are subsumed under narrative
• contrasting w/ rational world paradigm
• Criticizing the discipline
• People felt as though they were brushed aside
  • despite his including so many in the text explicity
  • but comm discipline was about formal argument
• Anti-expert?

Roland push back

• Fisher makes whole world narrative
• Roland says narrative is more specific

Barbara Warnick

• Concerned about assertion that reason is in all people
• Apparently, some people aren't that rational
• She argues FOR specialization

Storyability gap

• Why do some stories/tellers get pushed to the side?
• Where is the equality?
• "Intrinsic narrative capacity"
  • not the same as skill in crafting relevant stories
  • stories must "ring true"
  • e.g. same event (9/11) retold,reconfigured

• Ward Churchill, blame the victims, little eichmans
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_9/11_essay_controversy

Cheney, Theye

• Andrew: "collapse of fidelity and probability"
• Use of Burke's "form" and "identification"

• Weakness of polling data

Stasis

• Fact: Did it occur?
• Definition: What did he do?
• Quality/Character: Did he do it on purpose?
• Jurisdiction: Legal technicalities

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventio#Stasis

Globalization, 14 Oct 09

• Defining globalization
• Role of comm and media

UK/media studies perspective

• Albrow, single world global society, 1990
• Thompson, "growing interconnectedness", 1995
• Castells, networks, 1996
• Beck, cultural, 2000
• Rantanen, media comm across space and time, 1990s

Globalization in debate, david held, anthony mcgraw

• Dissolving boundaries, death of distance
• End of nation-state, global community
• Castells, interdependence, not just trade
• North/South divide, developed/developing

Is globalization a new phase/concept or expansion of on-going globalism?

• Exponetial movement of information
• Increased sensitivity to changes
• Improved instruments for discovering effects

• Global time coordination
  • Intercontinental telegraphy
  • European train coordination

• Decline of nation-state?
  • Or un-hinging of geography from citizenship and ethnicity?

• Globalization essentially multi-disciplinary
  • Not limited to economic analysis

• Global messages: what constitutes a global event?
  • BEP having #1 single in all iTMS markets

Measurement of globalization

• Expansion of multinationals
• Economic activity targeting diasporic audiences

Media imperialism

• Homogenization/ Americanization by mass media, imagery
• Agential audience response

Digital / modern globalization

• "internet created a new world economy"
• disruptive innovations, reducing costs

• Mapping, info viz

Vertical integration

• Companies try to control means of production, distribution, exhibition

• Ben Bagdikian, Media Monopoly, 1983

• Consolidated media ownership
• Mergers, monopolies, deregulation

Horizontal integration

• Supply glut of info good, economies of scale to maintain profits
• Diversified holdings

Microglobalization

• Microstructures
  • People tied by ideology, ict rather than location

1. Lightness, flexible to change
2. Non-Weberian effectiveness, non authority, non expert, non hierarchical
3. Non-reducible to networks,
4. Temporal structures, synchronized

• Global reflex systems, scopic media systems
  • The screen is the reality, not a representation

Diaspora

• connect to Burke and dramatism?
• shared sense of space or temporality
  • eventual return, not universal?

Hegemony

• Credited to Gramsci in Prison Notebooks
• Consent v Coercion
  • Consent is buying-in to a system that suggests avenues for success (meritocracy or otherwise)
  • Coercion is by more explicit force

• Hegemony is a system of Meanings, values, beliefs, moralities
  • Maintains order for ruling elite
  • Deters thoughts of change
  • Asserts a hegemonic "common sense"

Gramsci

• Member of Italian Comm party
• Identified with Russian revolutionaries
• Became representative of Italian left
• Believed Italian democracy/socialism needed to resist Mussolini
• Arrested in 1926 by Fascist
• Trying to understand why Italian working class was not revolutionary in consciousness

Gitlin

• Hegemony narrows available views
• Operates outside consciousness
• Even competing dominant frames do not challenge hegemony
• e.g. Fairness Doctrine: FCC provides for response to partisan coverage. But not all views are provided for...

Analyzing CNN, BBC coverage of China development

• Use of poll data to distance network from messages
• "Communist" China

Identity Negotiation and Media

• Who am i?
  • self-conception, image
  • cultural, diasporic, hybrid identities

Identity negotiation

• adaptation in interaction
  • communication accomodation theory (giles)
  • co-cultural (orbe & spellers)

Asiacentric paradigm (2002)

Relationality

• Asian sense of self rooted in web of human relas, rather than Western sense of ego (ishii, 1998)

Circularity

• Transcendence in time, space
  • Time, humans exist between past ancestries and future descendants
  • Space, all continuents linked in the sea, earth is part of cosmic space, among other planets
    • Impact on public, personal space

Harmony

• Enryo-sasshi (reservce - consideration) model of Japanese interpersonal communication.
  • Among first non-Western attempts to explore and explain the mechanism of how the communicators adjust their messages to maintain interpersonal and situational harmony.
  • Non-verbal signals

Sociopsychology, Cybernetics, Systems, 21 Oct 2009

Group presentation:

• COMM525/Socialpsychological, Cybernetics, and Systems Theory

Sociopsychology

Bandura

• Using film, video to demonstrate coping mechanisms for people with phobias
• Results inspired cognitive learning behavior
• Opposed behavior psychologists
  • Reacting to models on TV not mimicry but learning
• Bridges clinical psych to media effects

Self-efficacy: belief that one's actions will result in a positive outcome

• motivational
• increased via mastery of skills, social modeling
• "empowering individuals"

Agentic perspective: autonomous individuals linked to self-organizing systems

• Bandura considers info gap, digi divide

Recent discussion of communities

• Shirky, forming group to accomplish tasks
• Benkler, networks provided fuel for info econo

Cybernetics, systems theories

See slides

Culture Studies w/ Sarah Banet-Weiser, 28 Oct 09

SBW background:

• PhD from UCSD
• Trained as feminist, historical-materialist
• Never thought of self as "cultural studies" until Annenberg
• Works
  • Political identity, citizenship, consumer culture
  • First book considers political economy via building, making culture
  • National identity via beauty pageants
  • Using textual analysis, discourse analysis, interviews, ethnography
  • Investigation of Nickelodeon
  • Concerned about branding influence on academia
• Tending to teach classes on gender, culture (grad, undergrad)
  • comm620, "consum(ing) culture from analog to digital"

Frankfurt School

Adorno, Horkheimer

• Pushing false consciousness to pseudo-individualism
  • "illusion of power"

Birmingham School

Founded by Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_Contemporary_Cultural_Studies
• Based on experience of adult education w working class adults
• Institutionalize a view of culture that challenges Adorno, Frankfurt
• Starting from Marxist point of view
  • UK engagement with Marx
  • Focused on socio-econonmic class

Cultural studies must start from an interested stance

• Must it be "progressive"?
• SBW: "semiotics must get off the page"

Raymond Williams and Marx on Culture

Marx: mode of production of material life determines cultural life

• Social existence determines consciousness
• Base: economics
• Superstructure: cultural, intellectual life
  • determined by base
• Change comes in the form of overthrowing capitalist base
  • Requires a stability on which to build such a revolution

Williams believes Marx over-determines culture

• Culture is not dictated by the economic situation
• Working class people DO have control over culture
  • Evidence is William's young life
• Adds nuance to Base/Superstructure model
  • An interrelationship, a dialectic
• Rejects programatic revolutionary result
• Cultural materialism: culture is not an after-effect of capitalism
  • Culture is owned by everybody
  • Culture requires work, creativity

Assuming there is "bad"/"stupid" stuff,

• Are you bad or stupid for watching it? Enjoying it?
• Enjoyers of "lower" musics are not "lower" people
• If people don't like "high" cult objects it isn't because they don't understand them

Is "high" culture always an import, always a curriculum?

• Is "high" culture popular to the dominant classes?

Some names tossed out

Matthew Arnold's culture: the best that's been written

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Arnold

Richard Hoggart, Uses of Literacy

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hoggart
  • "lamenting the loss of an authentic popular culture and as denouncing the imposition of mass culture by the culture industries"

Stuart Hall

Working class immigrant from Jamaica

• 
• Immigrates to UK from JA
• Earns scholarship to Cambridge
• Takes cultural studies toward identity, race

Three reading positions (Encoding/decoding)

• Dominant
• Negotiated
• Resistant/oppositional

Angela McRobbie

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_McRobbie

Brought feminism to bear on cultural studies

• Challenging masculinist tendencies

Cultural studies in the US (1970s)

Sub-field of

• literary studies
• sociology
• communication

Media studies: CS scholarship drawn to media

• Accompanying a multi-disciplinary shift
  • Away from Administrative Research, Magic Bullet, Propaganda
  • And toward audience-centered, Uses and Grats

John Fiske

Career cut short by being caricatured

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fiske_(media_studies)

Critique:

• Not enough consideration for political economy
• "Everything/Anything goes"
• Sees resistance everywhere
• Drawn from oft-cited close textual analysis of "Justify my love" Madonna

Audiences actively making meaning from texts

• Drawing on Clifford Geertz
• Challenging media effects notion of audiences as passive

One of few real challenges to Adorno and Horkheimer.

Kellner

Basic argument:

• Political economy (Frankfurt)
  • He says Fiske fails to do this
• Textual analysis (Geertz)
  • Content, semiotics
• Audience studies (Fiske)

Kellner desires progressive social change

• But his Adorno platform gives you moralism
• Lefty moralism is the stereotyping of the Right (at many levels)

Postmodernism, 11 Nov 09

• http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/postmodern.html

Modernism

• Built on / rejecting Enlightenment values
• Objective, discoverable truth "out there"
• Value of progress in society
• Hierarchy, structure, rationality
• Historically, WWI, industrialization
• Rationality, reason
• e.g. Architecture: retreating from ornament, decoration

Kant's Categorical Imperative

Groundwork for Metaphysics of morals

• Creating a morality independent of religion

Decontextualized, absolute

• Truth
• Rigid, strong, system

Features of post-modernism

Pluralism in Postmodern Perspectives, Ihab Hassan

• Participation, audiences, reading/readers
• Semiotics
• Hybridity
• Carnivalization, humor, absurd, ironic
• Loss of ego in the play of language
• Unpresentable, unrepresentable

In Science

• Physics
  • Modernism: Newtonian
  • Postmodern turn: quantum mechnics crises over light wave/particle

In Music

• Cage 4'33" shifts from composition/performer/text to listener, context

Post-structuralism

Context

Rift, tensions regarding individual, collective life

• Post-war West, capitalism
• Algeria, Vietnam
• de Gaulle's government
• Western Marxism, Existentialism, Structuralism, New Criticism

May 1968, Situationist International

• Repurposing stock footage, other films
• Narration, overdubbing

Lyotard

• "Postmodern condition"
• Collapse of the Grand Narrative
  • Ending the universality of modern thought, generalizable
  • Incredulity of meta-narratives, over-arching theories
• the Sublime
  • Mix of anxiety and awe

Derrida

• Critique of phenomenology
• Reluctant critic of structuralism
  • Felt he found a fundamental weakness in structuralism
• Deconstructionism

Foucault

• Initally structuralist
• Became more post-structuralist
• Power-knowledge

Roland Barthes

• Linguistics, semiology, literary criticism
• Associated with French New Crit
  • Moving away from authorial intent ("intentional fallacy") toward reader

Death of the Author, 1967

• Critique of structuralism, literary criticism
  • Believes struc removes human agency
• Authorial intent should not be privileged over read interpretation
• "Author vs. Scriptor"
• Text is not decipherable but created through reading

Simulation, simulacra

Baudrillard, French theorist, 1929-2007

• Popularly known for his writing about contemporary events
  • e.g. 9/11
• Epistemology
  • How to we gain, build knowledge?
• Engaging with
  • Saussre (linguistics)
  • Marx (polit eveon)
  • McLuhan (media)
  • Derrida (representation)
  • Foucault (knowledge, power)
• Approaching the study of objects within semiotic system

Semiotics, structuralism

• Signifier
  • Picture of monkey, word "monkey"
• Signified, content/meaning
  • Knowledge: concept, hairy mammal eating bananas
  • Sign exists in the relationship between signifier and signified

Andrew asks about relationship to Shannon-Weaver model

• Ben says that this is about knowledge and not function

Baudrillard on Marxism

Revises Marx's focus on mass production with mass consumption

• Reification
• Conspicuous consumption

Use value replaced by sign value

• Designer handbag

Simulacra

Simulacra, "copies without original"

• Postmodern semiotics concerns a system of signs
• No reference to outside reality, absolute truth
• In Plato's Cave, the firelight and the sunlight are difficult to distinguish

Simulation, "to simulate is to feign to have what one hasn't"

• Does not hold on to the principle of reality

Hyperreal, "more real than the real"

Radical semiurgy, when signs take on a life of their own and constitue a new social order

Critique

• Pessimism?
• Prompt for action? Nihilism?
• Where is the constructivist, agencial locus?

Feminism

"Movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, oppression"

• bell hooks
• Interrelated with other systems of domination within patriarchy

Historicized feminism

• Mary Wollenstone, education
• Abolitionists, Temperance, Suffrage
• Women's Rights movement

"First wave": Women's Rights

• 1900s-1920s
• Suffrage
• Susan B Anthony
• Tends to be majority white activists
• Read narrowly, was it historically narrow?

"Second wave": Post war

• 1960s-1980s
• Called "feminism"
• Compared with militant groups
• Exclusive to female participation, again largely white
• Institutionalized in the academy
  • Women's Studies Departments
  • Clashed, collaborated with cultural studies

Feminism and Queer theory

• 1980-1990s
• Queer consciousness in the academy
• Post-structuralist rethinking gender
• Gender studies replaces women's studies

"Third wave":

• "Stiletto"/"lipstick" feminists
• Exercising sexual power, performing femme
• re: Tina Fey, self-identified feminist
  • Playful, complex performances

Postmodern Methodology

How do we study, write, "measure"?

Social Text Affair, 1996

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

For social scientists: "Beyond modesty"?

• Empirical postmodernism
  • Has society changed?
  • Were their epistemologies and methods flawed?

Jenkins, McPherson, and Shattuc

• Study "culture that sticks to the skin", passion
• Admit your stacks rather than pursue objectivity

Multimedia, hypertext scholarship

• What form must academic writing take?

Public sphere, 25 November 2009

• McGee, We the people

Habermass' historical imagined public

Public, coffeeshop

• Historically bound
• Outside the state
• Outside the home
  • Feminine, emotional, personal
  • Conserving the interests of a small group, unit
• Interdependence of multiple interests
• Patriarchy in action
  • Men gather

Pre-news media

• Hard to know what was happening in other places
• Only a subset, travelers, could know and share information

Who is there?

Bourgeois men

• Mobility, time
• Freedom to gather
• Literacies

Relationship to the state

• How would a town council be like a public sphere?
• Making politics ordinary?

Relationship to the church

• But not to religion, religious practices?

Disintegration of public sphere

• Class-based analysis, lower classes came in
• Media communication technologies, newspaper, etc.
  • Different kinds of communication

(Re)thinking the sphere

• Edges
• Boundaries
• Continuous
• Inside, outside

• Openness
• Layered

Material, shared activity

• Is talking, verbal discourse essential?
• Putnam, emphasis on the bowling league
  • Shared goals, interests, commitments

Is public sphere essentially modern?

Frasier, Pockets

Critique of the Haber metaphor

Public sphere within authoritarian regime?

• Coded discourse
• Forums online

Reagan family-based, private discourse anti public sphere?

• Disparaged the shared interest
• Does Reaganism deny membership in public groups?
  • Rotary, Little League,
• Is economic privatization equivalent to social privatization?
• Are they intractably linked?
  • Even militia men have militias
  • Minutemen are enacting public sphere more fiercely than bourgeois right?

"Intolerance of intolerance is not intolerance"

• Intolerance precludes reasoned debate
• Importance of listening
• Debate rules of engagement, roleplay
  • No preconceived notions, beliefs, or knowledge of the world

But it is not equal if people cannot bring their religious beliefs to the debate

Pessimism, optimism

Pessimism, nothing is going to change

• Not equivalent to skepticism, nor critique

Optimism, things can improve, people are fundamentally good

Howard, new media campaigns and the managed citizen, 2 Dec 09

Tech and campaigns

• New tech enables new types of candidates
  • Railroad, telegraph, radio, film, TV, video
  • e.g., Coolidge couldn't compete in the radio age

50% + 1 strategy

• Is this the best strategy of micropolitics?
• Divide the country into niches? Battle over niches?
  • Determine how to win with stats?
• Moving away from rational world view

Cost of info -based strategy

• "Candidate selects the voter"
  • High costs
• Blessing/curse
  • Users get all kinds of other info

Privacy value, privacy worth

• Von's card v. "5% discount for data sharing"

Positive views on data collection

• Radical transparency
• Watchdog.net

Pushing back against hypermedia

• Following campaigns on msm sources on the webs
• Does hypermedia play into the msm portals?