Responding to Mitchell & Hansen's Introduction and Response to Week 2 readings

     Texts Read (in addition to Mitchell & Hansen’s introduction to Critical Terms for Media Studies):

1. Global Media and Culture” by Mark Poster

     2. "The myth of unadulterated culture meets the threat of imported media” by Nancy Morris

     3. Craig Mattson’s review of Badaracco’s “How Media Shape Ideas about Religion and Culture” 

       

      4. Enrique Uribe-Hongbloed’s review of Wilson & Stewart’s “Global Indigenous Media:  Cultures, Poetics and Politics”

In their introduction, Mitchell & Hansen seem to be reciting for us, the reader, messages that they gave their authors when they commissioned those authors to write for this book.  First, the book will use Kittler’s statement that “media form our situation” (vii) as its fundamental and motivational basis.  Second, there are three concepts underlying Kittler’s statement that will also form the book’s building blocks: 

1/ “media form the infrastructural basis, the quasi-transcendental condition, for experience and understanding” (v, emphasis added);

2/ “media broker the giving of space and time within which concrete experience becomes possible” (vii) like Foucault’s .

3/ the way that media determine our situation is “not altogether different…from the Frankfurt School’s” description of the way the culture industry works:  “human experience and agency is…more likely ‘mere eyewash,’ the ‘optional output’ “  (xxi). 

In addition to these Kittler-related building blocks, Mitchell & Hansen also seem to have told their contributing authors that McLuhan will serve as a building block to do media studies:  McLuhan is the “source of Kittler’s media science” (xii).  And/but, McLuhan also provides an imperative and a rationale to do media studies even though there seems to be an impossibility to do media studies because media “forms the infrastructural condition of possibility for understanding itself” (xii) in that McLuhan shows that the “primacy” is held by “the coupling of the human and the technological” (xii, emphasis added) and the “body comprises the non-self-sufficient ‘ground’ for all acts of mediation” (xiii). 

(Note to self:  this is an interesting albeit partial answer to or exploration of my week 1 reflective question:  “How can one even do this?”) 

In establishing the need for their book and imploring us to elevate media studies to an academic field of study in its own right, Mitchell & Hansen lay it down and state that “[me]dia can no longer be dismissed as neutral or transparent, subordinate or merely supplemental to the information they convey….[r]ather [media] has social and cultural agency”  (vii). 

But Mitchell & Hansen carefully prescribe the ways that they want us the reader, academicians, and others to elevate media studies – especially given the nebulousness of media and therefore the study of it.  First, they say that limiting it too much and using only two conventional groupings (empirical and interpretive) is not helpful.  They do acknowledge that there is some value to be taken from these heretofore-used empirical and interpretive groupings of study.  But they also prescribe to us that we study media and do media studies by “exploit[ing] the ambiguity of the concept of media…as a third term capable of bridging, or mediating, the binaries” (viii, emphasis added) that media studies have created and used before.  Besides the literal asking of us to consider this third element in media studies, Mitchell & Hansen are themselves also doing media studies using their prescribed method – triangulation.   

This triangulation is important to Mitchell & Hansen.  For them, triangulation as a method of studying media allows us to “range across divides” (ix) and “emphasiz[e] the ‘middleness’ of media studies, its role a go-between, a mediator” (xix) of disparate fields of study that it has occupied.  And, besides being a method to study media, it is a framework for understanding media as itself being mediated and as being mediated with a triangulation of “individual subjectivity, collective activity, and technical capability” (xv) that also “allows us to resist the seductive fallacy of technical determinism” (xv). 
 

They specifically state the points of their triangular rubric that they want used:  Aesthetics, Technology, and Society.  They see these three points of their triangular rubric as “entryways into the labyrinth of media” (xix). 

Poster clearly uses all three points of Mitchell & Hansen’s triangulation in his media culture study of globalization and global and local media, their shaping and use of local culture, and the nexus of globalization with new, digital media:  aesthetics, technology, and society.  Specifically, Poster is doing a media study within a larger cultural and critical study (on globalization) and is focusing on, analyzing, and using those three entryways of technology and society and aesthetics to do so, “argu[ing] that contemporary universality arises in practices that to a great extent rely upon information machines or media, and these must be included in the  formulation of the concept and the discourse of universality” (687). 

Poster is exploring media’s role as a component of universality and the effect of globalization and seems to be trying to place media in a definition of globalization and in the workings of it.  He first enters the media study via Mitchell & Hansen’s “Society” entry point, exploring the politics of global corporate ownership of paid media sourcing and globalization’s effects on corporate ownership.  He also links Mitchell & Hansen’s “Technology” and “Society” entryways in his discussion of satellite technology’s effects on national and traditional (geographic and cultural) boundaries.    

Poster’s linking of the “technology” and “society” entryways brought two portions of the Mitchell & Hansen text to mind:  1/ “Technics, then, is of the essence, the medium for human life….The human and the technical coevolve and media….designates something of their relation” (xiii).  2/ Mitchell & Hansen say that “[M]edia studies can and should designate the study of our fundamental relationality, of the irreducible role of mediation in the history of human being” (xii).  Besides using two of the entryways to study media, Poster is perhaps demonstrating the “irreducible role of mediation” in humanness with his exploration of satellite and Internet technologies. 

Poster moves clearly into Mitchell & Hansen’s “Aesthetic” entryway with an analysis of the look & feel of analog technologies versus digital ones.   This elicited Mitchell & Hansen ‘s emphatic statement that media studies should be as concerned with “subjective, mental states” (such as memory) as technology (xviii). 

When Poster goes in this “Aesthetic” entryway, however, it seems to me that it’s harder to distinguish the Mitchell & Hansen’s three entryways.  As Poster is talking about the aesthetics of analog and digital technologies, there’s not a clear distinction or categorization of the technology and the aesthetics of the technology.  And, as Poster moves deeper into the analog/digital technology comparison and then moves into other systems operating in cultures, he also brings in the third of Mitchell & Hansen’s entry ways – society – by talking about the cultural distribution and systems of language, law, and mass media and the systemic formation of a culture’s identity, creativity, work practices and products. 

Poster’s discussion especially about “creative industries” makes the lines between the entryways seem murky – if I had to categorize or identify which of the Mitchell & Hansen entryways he’s using.  When writing about the nationalist and localized definitions of creativity and global cultural politics (a “society” entryway) and “attempts to preserve modern institutions in an increasingly hostile or antagonistic environment,” (698) Poster states:  “What is called for, then, are cognitive experiments or imaginary flights that attempt to outline new directions for institutional and practical reorganization in order to make the most of a future in which global culture is not grudgingly recognized but celebrated and embraced.  The key to such discursive innovations, I believe, is the full acknowledgment of the assemblage of humans and information machines” (698) – “technology” and “aesthetics” entryways.  Later, Poster again makes Mitchell & Hansen’s entryway distinctions murky when he states that “[t]his shift involves an ‘intimacy’ with information machines that cannot be ignored.” 

Though Morris  does not adhere as closely to Mitchell & Hansen’s prescription for studying media or media culture via the three entryways as does Poster, she does other things in this text that rather comply with Mitchell & Hansen’s ways to do it.  Morris approaches questions of global/local and media by using the “society” entryway (describing especially language and systems and mass media) the most but does also lightly use the “technology” entryway to explore the ways that digital technologies work differently now than they did before.  Hers is more of a straight cultural study than poster, albeit on a more nuanced topic in the cultural study of globalization.  Morris is describing and questioning the effects of imported media on cultures and indeed whether such a thing as “imported” media can even occur under globalization.  I suppose that one could say that she ventures even more lightly into the “aesthetics” entryway of media study when she describes the ways that clothing is affected by globalization because she is discussing globalized and local media effects on the aesthetics of clothing. 

In her text, Morris attends more closely to different aspects of Mitchell & Hansen’s request of us to study media under certain parameters.  Besides outlining these three critical entryways to study media, Mitchell & Hansen also state that human beings “evolve by passing on their knowledge through culture” (xiii).  Morris is brining to life some significant instances of this mediated evolution.  She is also bringing to life Mitchell & Hansen’s conceptualization of media as an “environment for the living” (rather than a “narrowly technical entity or system,” xiii) when she studies culture media through her critical look at the myth that culture can be unmediated.  Like Mitchell & Hansen’s example of California’s election of Arnold Schwartzenegger as governor, Morris explores the ways that “distinctive (ix) sets of political mediations” (ix)promote different effects.  Finally, Mitchell & Hansen call for a “mediarology” that “would track the pressure systems and storm fronts that crisscross the man-made world of symbols we have created” (xiv) and to apply this “mediarology” to a time period longer than the past 20 years and to also use “mediarology” to understand spatiality and temporality of media history (xix).  The Morris text does that – it is a mediarological look at globalization and the influence of non-local media on local cultures that also accounts for spatiality and temporality because it takes a long, historical look at it. 

The two reviews seem to take-up media study texts as their own study of media.  This using a media study to do a media study seems most apparent to me in the Mattson review.  Mattson performs some of the triangulation that Mitchell & Hansen call-for when he states that “religion proclaims an unchanging truth, but does so with the help of ever-changing media.  The media try to create a secular public sphere, only to find that the public is intransigently religious.  Perhaps what is needed is not so much attention to the interaction of religious truth and mediated democracy as to a third factor:  social imagination” (553, emphasis added.)  He also enters his media study (of a media study) via the aesthetics entryway by focusing on the “weary desperation of media consumers” as they “turn to media producers in order to sate ‘the human thirst for improvisation, imagination, and recognition of otherness’ “ (554).