Media Studies, or "Ways of Seeing"

This entry originated as a discussion board post this afternoon--it's Opening Day for a two-week Intersession section of Foundations of Media Studies. I usually say something like this to my new media studies students at the beginning of every semester...

One of the fascinating things about teaching media studies is that, on the one hand, everyone I work with is already an expert! Think about it: each and every one of you can go deeper than me in terms of these online games, or those YouTube vlogger stars, or that television series, or whatever. I'd be an idiot to pretend otherwise! It's this kind of deep knowledge (and passion!) that makes media studies courses instantly vital.

What, then, does a professor like me have to offer You The Students?

To riff on my man John Berger, I would say that a course like this invites you to consider "ways of seeing" media that you might not have fully considered before. Others might call this a set of theoretical "lenses" through which we might look through to understand our media-saturated world.

Example from today's reading: the colors of a stop light. Why does the color red mean "stop"? SPOILER ALERT: It's a social construction. In Chapter 1, we start to think about "meaning" as sets of inter-related, socially constructed sign systems. As goes stoplights, so goes language, visual communication, montage, soundscapes, you name it.

And this week, here's our "ways of seeing" short-list: semiotics, narrative, genre, representation, globalization, ideology, and industry. That's a heck of a week, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Anthropologists describe what they do as "making the familiar strange." And while on the one hand we're all experts, on the other hand we all can benefit from understanding our world through new perspectives. It's part of the reason why I like having my US students reading a UK textbook. One more small way to make the familiar strange...

"Time really is moving faster"

These days, the vast majority of my library time is spent in the Children's Section--it's rare that I have a little time to poke around and browse the stacks anymore.

But today I was running errands during nap time, and so I snuck a look around, and found a thin volume co-written by Douglas Coupland (Generation X et al.) and Hans Ulrich Obrist (o he of the interview books I picked through @ the VDU library) called The Age of Earthquakes (2015). [For now, I plead ignorance on Shumon Basar.]

It turns out that this is something of an update of our man Jon Berger's Ways of Seeing (1972)--the authors are working to link our media-saturated NOW in ways not readily apparent to climate change, the 1%, political atrophy, the loss of the Social, and so on. And they do so in a way that not only touches on Berger, but clearly also Generation X (1991) as well.

What would happen if I led off my accelerated Media Literacy course on-Cape this fall with something like THIS? What kinds of initial conversations might this jump-start? What would it foreclose? What are some other new titles that need considering?

Tarkovsky

One of my go-to end-of-semester palate cleaners has been Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy--how many dozens of times have I enjoyed returning to those films? But for whatever reason, this winter has been a little bit different.

This time, I find myself working through Tarkovsky: Mirror (1974), Nostalgia (1983), and currently Solaris (1972). (Just about everything is available on YouTube w/ English subtitles--the poor man's Hulu strikes again!)

I'm in no position to offer up anything profound yet, but my initial note is that I remember Dina Iordanova first introducing me to Tarkovsky in 1993--and that I really wasn't ready for him yet. The long takes and the decidedly poetic cinematic craft were not in sync with what I was looking for at the time, I guess. Still: I read and loved Sculpting in Time, and I did watch most [if not all] of his seven films in Austin.

Middle age? A more conscious need to slow things down? A desire to revisit a key auteur from the region? Make of it what you will--this year's model is Andrei Tarkovsky.