Traditions of communication theory
-multiple theorys and perspectives shapes the field
Cybernetic theory
Useful for:
-Researching how as a designer your work makes effective communication.
Limitations:
-is is a linear process and is not concerned with the production of meaning itself which is a socially nediated process.
Three levels of communication problems:
Level 1 - TECHNICAL
-Accuracy
-Systems of encoding and decoding
-compatablity of systems/ need for specialist equipment or knowledge.
Level 2 - SEMANTIC
-Precision of language
-How much of the message can be lost without meaning being lost?
-What language to use?
Level 3 - EFFECTIVENESS
- Does the message affect behaviour the way we want it to?
-What cn be done if the required effect fails to happen?
Systems theory
BARB (Broadcastings' Audience Research Broad)
Semiotics - thre basic concepts
Semiantics - adresses what a sign stands for
Syntactics - the relationships among signs
Pragmatics - studies the practical use and effects
Semiotics
Useful for:
-Researching how we make meaning within any given situation
- Teaches us that reality can be read as a system signs and can assist us to become more aware of reality as a construction and of the roles played by ourselves and others in constructing it.
Limitations:
-Prioritises verbal/linguistic structires over embodied knowledge.
No language, even, if its a visual one, is self explanatory. Languages have to be learnt.
The phenomenological tradition
-The process of knowing through direct experience
-Refers to the appearance of an object, even or condition in ones perception.
-Makes actual lived experience the basic data of seality
- A failure in communication can be seen as an absence of, or failure to sustain, authentic human relationships.
The embodied mind
Communitcation seen as an extention of the nervous system. It starts with an awareness of the body. Language is seen as part of that system existing of neuronal pathways that are linked within the brain, the key is a physciological classification of coding and encoding.
- the process of interpretation is central.
-We are interested in what is real for the person
Rhetoric
personification as rhetoric is mostly used to humanise inanimate objects or ideas, such as rhetoric itself. It is a type of 'rhetoric trope' such as
-hyperbole
-irony
-personification
Rhetoric - How do I look powerful, physical
Rhetoric - language being used
Useful for thinking through how you are going to achieve certain effects on the 'reader' or audience.
limitations:
-Only learned through practice. Intervention in a complex syatems involves technical problems rhetorical cant grasp.
Originally used as a rhetorical trope, metaphor enables us to grasp new concepts and remember things by crealing associations.
The sociopsychological tradition
-The study of the individual as a social being
-three key areas
-Behavioural
-cognitive
-Biological
Core process:
RC material - Exposure - Attention - Comprihension - Confirmation - acceptance - Retention - Realisation
Useful for: Deep analysis of the moment of communication
Simple changes in spacing can dramatically change meaning - Gestalt theory
The sociocultural theory
-in defining yourself in terms of your identity with terms such as fathers, catholic etc. You are defining yourself in terms of your identity as part of a group and this group frames your cultural identity.
-looks at how these cultural understandings, roles and rules are worked out interactively in communication.
Context is seen as being crutial to forms and meanings of communication
Sociolinguistics is the study of language and culture
Critical communication theory
-a synthesis of philosophy and social science.
-Critical theory approaches to communication examine social conditions
-postrolonial theory refers to the study of all cultures affected by the imperial process.
Thursday 25 November 2010
Saturday 20 November 2010
Lecture 3 - The gaze
- Call of duty allowes you to chose 1st person or 3rd person perspectives.
Control how much we engage with death and violence.
- Psycocoanalysis is the analysis of the options and controls that we chose.
Laura Mulvey, 'visual pleasures and narrative cinema' (1975)
-Hollywood films is sexist in that it represents 'the gaze' as powerful and male.
-Scopophilia - The pleasure of looking at others bodies as objects.
- Instinctual desire to look
(Freudian theories)
-Narcissistic identification - (for Mulvey, spectators identify with the male hero in narrative films)
- Jacques Lacan - The mirror stage
- projected notion of 'ideal ego' in image reflected.
- Childs own body is less perfect than its reflection
-scopophilia = sexual stimulation by sight
- narcissistic = identification with the image seen.
Cinema thrives on this contradiction
- The male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.
Extending Mulvey's theory:
Suture
-spctators look through eyes of the actors in the film.
-we are able to follow 'their' gaze without feeling guilty.
-suture can be broken eg. when an actor speaks out to us.
-this form of 'gaze' invites is to be part of the scene.
The spectators gaze
gaze of a viewer at an image.
Intra diagetic gaze
A gaze of one depicted person at another within an image.
Extra diagetic gaze
This is the direct address to the viewer.
Intra diagetic gazes defer our guilt - someone else is hurting that person.
-visual culture employs different forms of the gaze to evoke structures of patriarchy.
-Different forms of the gaze evoke different structure of power.
-we can objectify and identify.
Control how much we engage with death and violence.
- Psycocoanalysis is the analysis of the options and controls that we chose.
Laura Mulvey, 'visual pleasures and narrative cinema' (1975)
-Hollywood films is sexist in that it represents 'the gaze' as powerful and male.
-Scopophilia - The pleasure of looking at others bodies as objects.
- Instinctual desire to look
(Freudian theories)
-Narcissistic identification - (for Mulvey, spectators identify with the male hero in narrative films)
- Jacques Lacan - The mirror stage
- projected notion of 'ideal ego' in image reflected.
- Childs own body is less perfect than its reflection
-scopophilia = sexual stimulation by sight
- narcissistic = identification with the image seen.
Cinema thrives on this contradiction
- The male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification.
Extending Mulvey's theory:
Suture
-spctators look through eyes of the actors in the film.
-we are able to follow 'their' gaze without feeling guilty.
-suture can be broken eg. when an actor speaks out to us.
-this form of 'gaze' invites is to be part of the scene.
The spectators gaze
gaze of a viewer at an image.
Intra diagetic gaze
A gaze of one depicted person at another within an image.
Extra diagetic gaze
This is the direct address to the viewer.
Intra diagetic gazes defer our guilt - someone else is hurting that person.
-visual culture employs different forms of the gaze to evoke structures of patriarchy.
-Different forms of the gaze evoke different structure of power.
-we can objectify and identify.
Saturday 13 November 2010
Lecture 2 - Critical positions on the media and popular culture
What is culture?
- 'one of the two or three most complicated words in the english language'
- General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time.
- A particular way of life.
- Works of intellectual are especially artistic significance.
Marx'x concept of Base and Superstructure
Base - forces of production - material, tools, workers, skills etc.
- relations of production ( master/slave etc) - employer/employee, class
Superstructure - social institutions - legal, political, cultural
- forms of consciousness - ideology
'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles' (Marx, communist manifests)
Determines content and forms of
Base superstructure
Reflects form of and legitimises
The state
' But a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoise' (Marx and Engels - 1848)
Ideology
1. System of ideas or beliefs ( eg beliefs of a political party)
2. Masking, distorting or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creations of 'false consciousness'.
Raymond Williams (1983) 'keywords'
4 deffinitions of 'popular':
- well liked by many people
- inferior kinds of work
- work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
- culture actually made by the people themselves.
Caspar David Friedrich (1809)
Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane (2005)
E.P Thompson (1963)
Matthew Arnold (1867) 'culture and Anarchy'
Culture is:
- 'the best that has been thought and said in the world'
- study of perfection
- attained through disinterested reading, writing and thinking
- the persuit of culture
- Seeks 'to minister the diseased spirit of our time'
Leavism - F. R Leavis and Q.D Leavis
'Still forms, a kind of repessed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country'
-Leavis sees a cultural decline in the 20th century.
- 'culture has always been in minority keeping'
- collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democrocy (anarchy)
Frankfurt school: Thodore Anorno and Max Horkheimer
- Reinterpreted Marx, for the 20th century - era of "late capitalism"
- Defined " the culture industry":
2 main products - homogeneity and predictability.
- cultural commodities
- Negation = depriving culture of "it's great refusal" = cultural appropriation
ACTUAL DEPOLITICISES THE WORKING CLASS
gAuthestic culture vs Mass culture
Qualities of authentic culture:
-Real
- european
-multi-dimensional
-active consumption
- individual creation
- imagination
- negation
- AUTONOMOUS
walter Benjamin - 'the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' 1936
Hebidge, D (1979) 'subculture: the meaning of style'
- incorporation
- ideological form
- commodity form
Althusser (1970)
Society = economic, political and ideological
Ideology is a practice through which men and woman 'live' their relations to the real conditions of existance.
Ideology offers false, but seemingly thrue resolutions to social imbalance.
Social authority mantained by:
R.S.A - repessive state apparatus
I.S.A - ideological state apparatus
The media as ideological state apparatus
- a means of production
- Disseminates the views of the ruling class (dominant hegemonic)
- Media creates a false consciousness
- The individual is produced by nature; the subject by culture (Fiske 1992)
- 'one of the two or three most complicated words in the english language'
- General process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development of a particular society, at a particular time.
- A particular way of life.
- Works of intellectual are especially artistic significance.
Marx'x concept of Base and Superstructure
Base - forces of production - material, tools, workers, skills etc.
- relations of production ( master/slave etc) - employer/employee, class
Superstructure - social institutions - legal, political, cultural
- forms of consciousness - ideology
'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles' (Marx, communist manifests)
Determines content and forms of
Base superstructure
Reflects form of and legitimises
The state
' But a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoise' (Marx and Engels - 1848)
Ideology
1. System of ideas or beliefs ( eg beliefs of a political party)
2. Masking, distorting or selection of ideas, to reinforce power relations, through creations of 'false consciousness'.
Raymond Williams (1983) 'keywords'
4 deffinitions of 'popular':
- well liked by many people
- inferior kinds of work
- work deliberately setting out to win favour with the people
- culture actually made by the people themselves.
Caspar David Friedrich (1809)
Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane (2005)
E.P Thompson (1963)
Matthew Arnold (1867) 'culture and Anarchy'
Culture is:
- 'the best that has been thought and said in the world'
- study of perfection
- attained through disinterested reading, writing and thinking
- the persuit of culture
- Seeks 'to minister the diseased spirit of our time'
Leavism - F. R Leavis and Q.D Leavis
'Still forms, a kind of repessed, common sense attitude to popular culture in this country'
-Leavis sees a cultural decline in the 20th century.
- 'culture has always been in minority keeping'
- collapse of traditional authority comes at the same time as mass democrocy (anarchy)
Frankfurt school: Thodore Anorno and Max Horkheimer
- Reinterpreted Marx, for the 20th century - era of "late capitalism"
- Defined " the culture industry":
2 main products - homogeneity and predictability.
- cultural commodities
- Negation = depriving culture of "it's great refusal" = cultural appropriation
ACTUAL DEPOLITICISES THE WORKING CLASS
gAuthestic culture vs Mass culture
Qualities of authentic culture:
-Real
- european
-multi-dimensional
-active consumption
- individual creation
- imagination
- negation
- AUTONOMOUS
walter Benjamin - 'the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction' 1936
Hebidge, D (1979) 'subculture: the meaning of style'
- incorporation
- ideological form
- commodity form
Althusser (1970)
Society = economic, political and ideological
Ideology is a practice through which men and woman 'live' their relations to the real conditions of existance.
Ideology offers false, but seemingly thrue resolutions to social imbalance.
Social authority mantained by:
R.S.A - repessive state apparatus
I.S.A - ideological state apparatus
The media as ideological state apparatus
- a means of production
- Disseminates the views of the ruling class (dominant hegemonic)
- Media creates a false consciousness
- The individual is produced by nature; the subject by culture (Fiske 1992)
Saturday 6 November 2010
Task 1
One aspect of contempory culture that, in my opinion is panoptic is the Census. The Census is an account that holds information about all the people and households in the country. This is collected for the government and local authorities. It is to be taken every ten years and invloves around twenty-five million households. In my eyes the Census is a form of Foucalt's theory of a 'disciplined society'.
Foucalt claimed 'this surveillance is based on a system of perminant registration'. Putting this into contempary context, we are being made to answer personal questions about ourselves and so giving the higherarchy more information to do with as they wish.
We fill out the Census without question even though we have never actually been told the 'punishment' for not doing so. We are self-regulating ourselves. 'power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection'.
The Census is panoptic because we are filling out personal details about ourselves and posting it to the government and not hearing any more from it. They have our details but we know hardly anything about them. Foucalt calls this 'a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad'.
By using the Census the higherarchy are keeping track and monerting the population in our country. there is constant surveillance which has been said to be 'the utopia of the perfectly governed city'.
Foucalt claimed 'this surveillance is based on a system of perminant registration'. Putting this into contempary context, we are being made to answer personal questions about ourselves and so giving the higherarchy more information to do with as they wish.
We fill out the Census without question even though we have never actually been told the 'punishment' for not doing so. We are self-regulating ourselves. 'power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection'.
The Census is panoptic because we are filling out personal details about ourselves and posting it to the government and not hearing any more from it. They have our details but we know hardly anything about them. Foucalt calls this 'a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad'.
By using the Census the higherarchy are keeping track and monerting the population in our country. there is constant surveillance which has been said to be 'the utopia of the perfectly governed city'.
Thursday 4 November 2010
Lecture 1 - Panopticism - Surveillance and society
The Panopticon was designed in 1791.
Michel foucalt (1926-1984) wrote 'Madness and civilisation' and 'Discipline'
The great confinement (late 1600)
'House of correction' to curb unemployment and ideleness, sinlge pregnent women, drunkards etc.
- way of improving thir moral fiber.
- Hid away devience, repression.
- Began to be seen as an error. Everyone corrupting eachother inside, the mad corrupting the sane.
- Asylum for the mad. People were mentally controlled rather than physically controlled.
The emergence of forms of knowledge - biology, mdeicine etc. Legitimise the practice of hospitals, doctors and psychiatrists etc.
- The Pillory - Criminals are visably shown as devient and humiliated.
Discipilinary society and disciplinary power
Discipline is a 'technology' to reform people and make them responsible for themselves = Panoptisism.
- Panoptic prisions in Cuba and London. Guard is sat in the middle with a view of all prisioners as the building is round. Opposite to dungons.
The panopticon internalises in the indervidual the conscious state that he is ALWAYS being watched.
- Self regulation
- Psycological torture?
-Allows scrutiny
- Allows supervisers to experement on subjects
- Aims to make them productive
- Reforms prisoners
- Helps treat patients
Panopticism is the mode of power that controles society.
Panopticism is everywhere - New pubs and bars, google maps/streets, offices.
Survailence cameras everywhere. Always being watched.
Being constantly recorded and monertered makes us constantly react.
Relationship between power, knowledge and the body.
(foucault)
Power relations have an immediate hold upon the body, they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks.
Disciplinary society produces what Foucault calls 'Docile bodies'.
- Self monitoring
- Self-correcting
- OBEDIENT bodies
Panoptic gym.
Regulated health to stay able to work and not become useless to society.
TV = docile meconism - Being controlled, not going out and doing things for ourselves - passive.
Foucault and power
- His deffinition is NOT a top-down model as with Marxism
- Power is not a thing or capacity people have - it's a relation between different individuals and groups and only exists when it is being excercised.
- The excercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be RESISTED.
- 'Where there is power there is resistance'.
Facebook is performing for an institutional and panoptic gaze.
Michel foucalt (1926-1984) wrote 'Madness and civilisation' and 'Discipline'
The great confinement (late 1600)
'House of correction' to curb unemployment and ideleness, sinlge pregnent women, drunkards etc.
- way of improving thir moral fiber.
- Hid away devience, repression.
- Began to be seen as an error. Everyone corrupting eachother inside, the mad corrupting the sane.
- Asylum for the mad. People were mentally controlled rather than physically controlled.
The emergence of forms of knowledge - biology, mdeicine etc. Legitimise the practice of hospitals, doctors and psychiatrists etc.
- The Pillory - Criminals are visably shown as devient and humiliated.
Discipilinary society and disciplinary power
Discipline is a 'technology' to reform people and make them responsible for themselves = Panoptisism.
- Panoptic prisions in Cuba and London. Guard is sat in the middle with a view of all prisioners as the building is round. Opposite to dungons.
The panopticon internalises in the indervidual the conscious state that he is ALWAYS being watched.
- Self regulation
- Psycological torture?
-Allows scrutiny
- Allows supervisers to experement on subjects
- Aims to make them productive
- Reforms prisoners
- Helps treat patients
Panopticism is the mode of power that controles society.
Panopticism is everywhere - New pubs and bars, google maps/streets, offices.
Survailence cameras everywhere. Always being watched.
Being constantly recorded and monertered makes us constantly react.
Relationship between power, knowledge and the body.
(foucault)
Power relations have an immediate hold upon the body, they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks.
Disciplinary society produces what Foucault calls 'Docile bodies'.
- Self monitoring
- Self-correcting
- OBEDIENT bodies
Panoptic gym.
Regulated health to stay able to work and not become useless to society.
TV = docile meconism - Being controlled, not going out and doing things for ourselves - passive.
Foucault and power
- His deffinition is NOT a top-down model as with Marxism
- Power is not a thing or capacity people have - it's a relation between different individuals and groups and only exists when it is being excercised.
- The excercise of power relies on there being the capacity for power to be RESISTED.
- 'Where there is power there is resistance'.
Facebook is performing for an institutional and panoptic gaze.
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