Wesley Rykalski's teaching blog of readings of media texts and guidance on media theories and concepts.
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Grammar of Twitter
• Retweet [auto] - the 'auto-retweet' function causes you to echo a tweet without editorial comment. It is the principle mechanism in twitters 'cascade-casting' [where twitter become a broadcast media - try auto-retweeting and you'll see what I mean].
• RT - the RT mark is used when manually retweeting and although originally used to simply 'cascade-cast' tweets is now, following the introduction of auto-retweet, used to comment on a tweet. An editorial retweet if you like.
• follow & followers - the follow option causes the tweets of the followed twitter user to appear in your 'tweet stream' [the flow or feed of tweets that constitutes your twitter home page] this is the whole point of twitter and it's most important mechanism. The more people who follow your twitter feed the greater the count of your follows (those who have chosen to follow you) and thus the wider your tweets are 'cascade-cast'. So far follower count has been a function of already existing fame and celebrity and noons has become famous from twitter use in the way the myspace popularity was, in at least one case, used to achieve celebrity status. [N/B follow spam is therefore a very common problem in twitter].
• lock - a privacy mechanism in twitter that restricts who can see your tweets and prevents them being retweeted.
• 'in reply to' - this is a 'threading' tool that allows one to follow the line of a twitter conversation back though the tangle of tweets that make up any given stream. As such it is a marker of conversation and conversational action.
• 140 character limit - twitter was originally conceived as a 'text-to' service that users would SMS. This required twitter to restrict the length of any tweet to 140 characters to allow the easy translation of SMS to web via their servers and thus save them server space (& costs). This limitation then became the most important mark of twitter as a media form. So a technical limitation became the convention of the form and is retained on that form basis rather than for technical reasons; as tweets could now be of any length or type what so ever.
• integrating services and clients - a wide variety of other services integrate with twitter and expand it. Twitpic, tweetlonger, wefollow, all extend the functionality of twitter. Various 'clients' (local software that sits on your computer and or phone) allow for the integration of twitter with a your local computer and a variety of services but most importantly allow for a re-ordering and presentation of the informational structure of twitter in new and different ways (see tweetdeck, osfoora, etc).
• hypertext - hypertext is the essential mark and element of the WWW. The web is a massively- multiple-distributed set of hypertext documents (that exists on the Internet, which is an ICT infrastructure) and twitter is a part of this. This means that any tweet can 'link-to' any other part of the web via hypertext and the sharing of links is one of the most common activities on twitter.
• url shorteners - The 140 character limit of twitter causes some hypertext problems as some www.addresses.of.sites. are far longer than 140 characters. As it is conventional to give web addresses as URL domain-names (www.xyz.abc) and not as IP addresses (012.345.678.910) it has become necessary to use a URL shortener such as Bit.ly to provide a reduced format URL in twitter b
• Phatic communication - phatic discourse is any kind of communication that enables, opens and/or maintains social interaction. Saying 'hello', talking about the weather, making 'small-talk', discussing shared experiences, etc, are all phatic actions. Twitter is a phatic space par-excellence because the restrictions of the form prevent overly-long statements, inhibit complex interaction (twitter arguments are very hard to conduct and even more difficult to follow), and because of its hypertextual nature encourages distraction and movement away from the main twitter space (although the coming redesign and some twitter 'clients' may address this).
Thursday, 29 July 2010
What Counts as Documentary: Redux p.s.
historypin neatly illustrates the mixed nature of the new forms of documentary appearing online. Combining the googlemaps and streetview interfaces with audience provided photographic material and comment historypin clearly displays the characteristics of Flickr and Googlemaps discussed in my previous post. historypin is not unique as the Museum of London's Street Museum offers a similar approach, although with a more interesting means of interacting with the 'augmented reality' potential of this material.
Wednesday, 28 July 2010
What Counts as Documentary: Redux
Monday, 12 July 2010
Documenting the Crisis
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
WHAT COUNTS AS DOCUMENTARY?
One on of the big problems we face is distinguishing it from other genres; especially other 'factual' genres such as news, sport, etc.
We can see that the hybrid forms of (broadcast) documentary give us some clues;
- Mockumentary (e.g. The Office, Spinal Tap, etc) shows that documentary is not comedy or satire because it has to cross with that other genre to produce this hydrid.
- Reality TV (or Banality TV - see Taylor PA, & Harris JL, Critical theories of mass media: then and now, Open University Press, 2007) (e.g. BigBrother, Survivor, Ship Wrecked, The Apprentice, etc) shows that documentary is not game show.
- Docu-Soap (e.g.The Osbournes, Driving School, Airport, etc) shows it is not soap-opera.
- Pseudo-Soap (e.g. The Hills) shows the popularity of docusoap as a form and the ease with which it can be bent to suit the needs of producers.
- Docufiction (e.g. City of God) shows that documentary is not not Cinéma Vérité (even if they are closely related). Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) is 8 hours of slow motion footage of The Empire State building composed in massive takes without editing and is clearly not documentary.
- Docudrama (e.g. United 93, The Battle of Algiers, Bloody Sunday, Battle for Haditha, Hillsborough) shows that documentary is not drama.
Things are less clear in other media, i.e ‘e-media’ & print, because most of what we might consider to be ‘documentary’ can be subsumed into journalism, photography, or other fields. The two main areas of documentary action in these media are photo-journalism & reportage and both are hybrids with journalism.
Photo-Journalism - It is hard to be certain what counts as photo-journalism and what is photography more broadly. The work of Weegee, Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Don McCullin et al was documentary but Ansel Adams, Atget, and all other photographers also documented. A very delicate modality judgement about what is to be included and what excluded is necessary and it is not always clear whether the photographic is documentary (consider the problematic nature of google street view).
Reportage - In many ways reportage is even more loosely governed and problematic than photo-journalism. The works of Ryszard Kapuściński seem emblematic of the form but Hunter S Thompson’s far more complex and literary works would also fit into this generic category (even Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas could be seen as reportage). Again it is a question of modality and judgement.
Monday, 19 April 2010
Contexts of Reception
DOCUMENTARY - BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE
NARRATIVE: STRUCTURALISM
Structuralism is an area of social & cultural theory that focused on and analysed the structures found in human society. It was very important in the early & middle C.20th and is still a very useful perspective even though there have been several more recent developments (such as Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction).
Structuralism emerged from the realisation of certain linguistic & literary theorist and anthropologist that all human societies and cultures possessed shared elements. Claude Levi-Strauss, for instance, noticed the universal prevalence of incest-taboos and binary oppositions in narratives (e.g. good/bad, man/women, young/old).
•The Death of the Author
•The ‘equilibrium’ theory of Todorov
•The ‘narrative codes’ of Roland Barthes
The Death of the Author - This is the title of an essay by Barthes on why authors are unimportant in the understanding of a text and which draws its inspiration from the remarkable finding of structuralist anthropology and literary theory that all stories contained the same or similar elements regardless of the society and/or culture they originated from. All human stories were made up from the same narrative elements (see Propp, The Brothers Grimm, the aforementioned Levi-Strauss, Todorov & Barthes (see below) and so all an ‘author’ really does it reform those existing elements into a specific (not even necessarily new) pattern. If the creators of texts are not their ‘authors’, in the sense of the originating force, then we should only think of them as writers and relegate them to the background of analysis.
The ‘equilibrium’ theory of Todorov - Todorov established that most narratives could be shown to conform to one narrative pattern and that this pattern was indicative of a conservative ideology. Equilibrium - Todorov suggests that a narrative pattern based on equilibrium - disruption - return to equilibrium - new (or re-established) equilibrium. By which we mean that this narrative pattern would present itself in a text as some form of social stability (family life, a peaceful setting, daily life, political stability) which is disrupted (murder, revolution, the return of a prodigal family member, the appearance of a super villain) this disruption needs to be worked through (by investigating the crime, the superhero struggling for good, the family mending itself, society repairing itself or being repaired) so that a new or re-establish social stability is in place for the conclusion of the text (the hero defeats the villain and his evil plan, the murderer is apprehended, the family is at peace with itself, the safety of the old order is repaired). Todorov did not contend that all narratives conformed to this pattern but that a majority of them did and that they did so for ideological reasons. Todorov shows this pattern to be an ideological tool that acts against change and in favour of the status quo.
Links for further reading:
http://www.mediaknowall.com/alevkeyconcepts/narrative.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/8332523/Narrative-theory-notes
http://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/engl/theory/narratology/
http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/structuralism.htm
http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/anthropology.htm#Structural%20Anthropology
http://www.utpa.edu/faculty/mglazer/Theory/structuralism.htm
http://web.as.ua.edu/ant/cultures/cultures.php
http://www.rlwclarke.net/Theory/PrimarySources/TodorovStructuralAnalysisofNarrative.pdf
Thursday, 25 March 2010
Meta Blog: Wordle conceptualises this blog
This is a wordle composition of this blog which shows the relative frequency of words used in these postings and so gives us a snap shot of the actual content of the blog far more effectively than a tag cloud could ever do.
Thursday, 4 February 2010
Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the World of Tomorrow
Benjamin was very interested in culture and what it could tell us. Culture here does not mean 'high culture' (art, literature, opera, etc) but the more mundane artefacts of the quotidian; posters, prints and printing, cinema, TV, and everything that one encounters in daily life. Indeed all of the ephemeral and evanescent stuff that we could absent-mindedly throw away or forget about whether it be material or conceptual (i.e. small-talk or other conversation). Indeed Benjamin's most important work - The Arcades Project - is specifically concerned with what all of this seemingly throw away stuff could tell us about the history of Paris in the 19th century and thus about the history of the 19th century more generally.
For our purposes - the study of the media and of society more generally - this concern with culture is very useful (Benjamin's concern with culture prefigures Stuart Hall and the CCCS and is therefore an essential point of contact). Benjamin was a member of the Frankfurt School and so was also concerned with the role and function of power and domination in society. This can be most clearly seen in his critical analysis of the Haussmannization of Paris in his Paris; Capital of the Nineteenth Century. This 'renovation' (we would call it 'urban regeneration' today) of Paris in the period of the Second Empire was seen by Benjamin to be a means of controlling the urban space (the great wide boulevards that Haussman's project introduced were far harder to barricade) and of policing its people by forcing the poor from the centre into the periphery.
Benjamin's most famous essay - on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - helps us to think about and understand a lot of the issues involved in the current media landscape. Benjamin's argument in this essay is simple; the ease with which 'art' can be reproduced and disseminated is democratic.
This needs some expansion;
The ease with which 'art' (which we can take to mean cultural artefacts of any kind)
can be reproduced, either mechanically (printing, photography, photocopier, cd/dvd burner) or digitally (computer, digital photography, scanner, etc),
and disseminated, again either mechanically (post, courier, etc), institutionally (library, etc) or digitally (TV, Internet, BitTorrent, etc),
is democratic (benefits the people and breaks down the structures of domination in society).
Benjamin welcomed the very problem faced by contemporary media corporations whereby they spend a great deal of money creating a media artefact that then costs nothing to digitally reproduced & disseminate (given the existence of, and access to by the participants, the astonishing communications infrastructure we call the internet).
The current political problems around the Digital Economy Bill [here, here & here] are exactly concerned with the problems that Benjamin identified. The efforts of the Big-IP combines (the big four, the big six, the other big six, etc) to turn state power to the effort to control their property and thus defend their profits against the democratizing effect of the reproducibility of culture.
Basic Media Concepts List
BASIC CONCEPTS LIST
This list of concept areas and associated ideas is a useful checklist for any work one could be doing in Media Studies. It is just an outline intended to be used to jog your memory rather than a fully fledged plan or approach to essay writing or exam practice. However, whenever you write about Media and/or Culture you should use it as a framework for thinking and planning.
MEDIATION
Media & Medium
Mediation
REPRESENTATION
Representational Nature of the media
Stereotype
Hegemony
Realism
Reality
Modality
Reality Effect [Barthes]
Hyperreality [Baudrillard]{Post-Modernism}
Discourse of realism
IDEOLOGY
Marx
Base/Superstructure Model
'opiate of the masses'
Althusser
Ideology as 'lived experience'
Ideological State Apparatus
Interpellation
Gramsci
Hegemony
Use of representations as a means of ideological control
the 'manufacture of consent'
SEMIOTICS
Sign/Signified (referent)/Signification
Arbitrary nature of the sign
Ambiguity of the sign
Polysemy
Denotation/Connotation
Denotation is the surface meaning of the sign
Connotation is the wider world of signification that we bring to the sign
Connotive Communities: Audience groups with shared connotive standards
Myth (Barthes)
the rhetorical or propaganda use of signs
Modes of Signs
Indexical
Symbolic
Iconic
Metaphor
Metaphor
Metonym
Irony
Synecdoche
Metaphoric Communities (see Connotive Communities).
INTERTEXTUALITY
Reference to and use of texts by texts
Genre, Narrative, Metaphor
intertextuality can provide a context for signs
Characters are intertextual, film stars are intertexual
Hypertext
Dimensions of intertextuality: Horizontal, vertical
Allusion
Barthes
From Work to Text
The Death of The Author
Narrative Codes
Post-Modernism
NARRATIVE
Elements of Narrative
Setting
Narration/Narrator
Plot
Characters
Focalization
Discourse
Structuralism
Structuralism
Propp
Levi-Strauss
Todorov
'Equilibrium' & ideology
Barthes
Narrative codes
Post-Structuralism
Barthes
The Death of the Author (again)
(Derrida etc)
GENRE
Codes & Conventions
what are the rules and regulations of belonging to a particular group of texts
INSTITUTIONS
Ownership and Control
'Propaganda Model'
AUDIENCE
Theory
Encoding/Decoding
Reception Theory
ambiguity and arbitrariness of signs leads to polysemy
Encoding/Decoding
What is the Audience?
Target Audience
Intended Audience
Accidental Audience
Total Audience