Visual Culture Flashcards
Three Key Ideas
- Media profoundly affect our understanding of space and time
- The form of old media becomes content of new media
- Old media ←affect→ new media
Examples of Key Ideas
• Typographical script imitating the human hand
• The Kennicott Bible
o 3-dimensional representation of an orignal book
o recycled; REMEDIATION or RE-MEDIATE
• new media forms remediate old media forms
• they change the way we think
• eBook - Alice for the iPad
o film and literature brought together in a new form
o more interactive
o address the need for different learning styles
o decrease intellectual capacity (limits imagination)
o unity
• the form (orality) became content in new literacy technologies (the alphabet)
• pages on websites
Newspapers
Weakening of “the public sphere”
Societal powers take over political functions
- privileged people
- mostly male
- class-based
Coffeehouses
During the long eighteenth century
Brought about profound cultural transformations in English society.
Much of the evidence for this view comes from printed satires and plays and histories of the period, many written anonymously
provided a forum for exchanging views and nurturing public opinion across the social spectrum.
plays also celebrated the role of this place in circulating gossip, scandal, rumour and subversion.
Coffeehouses in the past
VS Starbucks
• commodified
• franchised
• working class people and university students (not too many younger customers)
Cafes now
Different Understandings of Reading Emerged
CRITICAL READING - satirists made fun of people who believed everything they saw in print
DANGEROUS READING – reading acted as a tranquilizer; dangerous especially when practiced by subordinate groups (such as women and “the common people”)
CREATIVE READING - Texts can be read in ways contrary to the author’s intention. Ironies offered by Jonathan Swift, for example, not understood by many (“A Modest Proposal” (1729) http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html )
EXTENSIVE READING - At first, reading was intensive—before 1750, books were few. After 1750, more books and printed material was available, and so reading shifted towards the practices of skimming, browsing, and chapter-hopping in seeking information.
PRIVATE READING - Part of the rise of individualism and also of empathy or “psychic mobility” – Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (1958)
Gutenberg Galaxy = the accumulated body of recorded works of human art and knowledge, especially books.
McLuhan studies the emergence of what he calls “Gutenberg Man”, the subject produced by the change of consciousness wrought by the advent of the printed book.
Apropos of his axiom, “The medium is the message,” McLuhan argues that technologies are not simply inventions which people employ but are the means by which people are re-invented. The invention of movable type was the decisive moment in the change from a culture in which all the senses partook of a common interplay to a tyranny of the visual. (Compounded further with the invention of photography)
He argued that the development of the printing press led to nationalism, the domination of rationalism, automatization of scientific research, uniformity and standardization of culture, and the alienation of individuals
.
The book popularized the term “global village”.
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962)
The Age of Photography
1839 - 1982
Meaning of PHOTOGRAPHY
Photography = Light Writing (literally)
About Photographs: (3 Things) I.S.I.
Photographs are ICONIC signs (they resemble the thing photographed)
Photographs are SYMBOLIC signs (they have connotations beyond the image itself)
Photographs are INDEXICAL signs (they have an “existential” relationship between the thing photographed and the photograph itself)
Photographic Truth
= Myth
The Objective/Subjective in photography is always in dialectic tension
Photography historically associated with realism. (OBJECTIVE)
Always involves some degree of subjective choice through selection and framing. (SUBJECTIVE)
Even automated systems—surveillance cameras, for example—are programmed to record a particular part of space and to frame that space in a particular way.
Digital cameras hide aesthetic choices such as focus and depth of field, but these choices are in fact a decision of the human designers of these cameras.
Despite these subjective aspects, an aura of machine objectivity clings to mechanical and electronic images because photography captures light rays reflecting off objects that then pass through the lens of the camera. The photons are registered on silver halide film or a digital chip.
Media profoundly affect our understandings of ____ and ____
time and space
Canada in Comparison with the United States
Canada in Comparison with the United States
Despite many market similarities, Canada and the US appear to be following different trend curves at the moment regarding reading. For example, looking at the 2005 Department of Canadian Heritage (PCH) study and the American Census Bureau’s 2002 Reading at Risk study:
- Canadians’ reading rate remained virtually constant over the past two decades, while Americans’ declined.
- Where 87% of Canadians read a book in a 12-month time frame, 57% of Americans had.
- Where 79% of Canadians read literary materials in a 12-month time frame, 47% of Americans had.
- Where one-half of Canadians read virtually every day, almost half of Americans read an average of less than one book per year.
Example:
The form (orality) became content in the new literacy technology (the alphabet)
The form of old media becomes content in new media
The Internet
Mark Poster, the Public Sphere, and the Internet
Regarding Habermas’ theory, Mark Poster argues, “the age of the public sphere as face-to-face talk is clearly over: the question of democracy must henceforth take into account new forms of electronically mediated discourse.”
These new electronic forms of discourse include sites such as YouTube and Blogger, interactive sites that incite discussion
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962); published in English 1989.
“Öffentlichkeit” – publicity, in the general sense of “making public”
“public opinion” (as concept) in French, 1750
in English, 1781
in German, 1793
Jürgen Habermas
Habermas wrote extensively on the concept of the public sphere, using accounts of dialogue that took place in coffee houses in 18th century England
Habermas developed the normative notion of the public sphere as a part of social life where citizens can exchange views on matters of importance to the common good, so that public opinion can be formed. Following the formation of public opinion, the public will then incite political action
Habermas further showed how the public sphere was cultivated through media and how the public was able to influence politics and society
Habermas emphasizes the critical role of the media in the public sphere, distinguishing between the early press who highlighted political controversy and the more recent development of media that commodify the news
Habermas believed the commodification of news and other media has led to the weakening of the public sphere
He argues, “in post-industrial, capitalist mass democracy the public and private domains interlock leading to a refeudalization of the public sphere in which societal powers take over political functions.” (Habermas 97)
the public sphere
defined as a space for critical public debate, was first advanced by German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in 1962.
public sphere
