ClassInfo

What are the media, and what to they do? How do mediations of all sorts (from cable news to Instagram, to newspapers, cameras, microphones, films, printing presses, and even the simple use of tools) - How do these media devices structure our sensory world? How do they allow us to think? To act politically? To behave? Indeed, how do they define us as human (or make us feel like zombies?) This class is a "deep cut" into the philosophical, historical, artistic, and political emergence of the modern media. We begin with a question central to the study of human culture, technology, and society: What is a tool, and how can it serve as a medium for action, communication, and expression? We will then turn to a set of historically significant media apparatuses that dramatically altered the transmission and reception of words, images and sounds: the printing press, the phonograph, radio, amplification, photography, and techniques of the moving image. We will develop a technical understanding of the inventions themselves while placing them in dialogue with often competing interpretations by historians, philosophers, and novelists. In the second half of the course, we will shift to the modern media age since World War II that has seen the rise of television, Hollywood, the record industry, the modern news media, corporate media conglomerates, and the internet. We will approach this modern "culture industry" of the recent media of the digital age in light of historically relevant economic, political, cultural, and geographic systems.