Category Archives: Readings

Media 1, Readings

Textual analysis is my jam

This week in Media 1 our readings were about textual analysis, which is defined in Beginner’s Guide to Textual Analysis by Alan McKee as follows:

“When we perform textual analysis on a text, we make an educated guess at some of the most likely interpretations that might be made of that text.”

Textual analysis has been an interest of mine for a number of years – at least in an informal way. I’ve been reading and writing cultural criticism (particularly cinema and music) for a number of years, and have built up a working knowledge of the basics of textual analysis even though I never had a grounding in the fundamental terms and definitions. So this week’s readings have been particularly enjoyable.

Textual analysis is a methodology of reading and interpreting works (texts), but it’s less rigorous than the methodologies used in science. Using a standardised, repeatable set of tools and methods work well when considering questions/topics of the natural world, i.e. those that only have one answer, but in artistic fields there are multiple meanings that can be interpreted – and all of them can be correct simultaneously.

This is because there’s no such thing as a single “correct” interpretation of any given text we analyse. Meaning isn’t inherent in the text, it’s assigned by the interpreter based on context.

The accuracy or inaccuracy of a text is irrelevant to its interpretation, because viewers interpret texts as “accurate” only when they conform to the viewer’s world view, making this an unreliable measure by which to judge texts. Similarly, as we’ve learned in past weeks, editing is a process in which decisions are made, and therefore even seemingly objective or “truthful” works (like documentary films) go through a process where someone decides whether to include or discard certain elements. Therefore all media is subjective, even documentaries, because they reflect the point of view of their author just as much as works of fiction do.

There are three levels of context that can be helpful to use when analysing a particular text:

  1. The rest of the text – i.e. the self-contained “universe” of the text. Some things make sense and are meaningful in the contexts of some texts but would be baffling or incongruent in others, depending on whether the text itself has been set up as an environment in which that thing could exist.
  2. The genre of the text – conventions and expectations based on the type of text being analysed. This relies on the interpreter’s familiarity with conventions of genre – i.e. characters breaking into song during a musical. This can also include eschewing conventions of genre to build meaning, such as a song appearing in a non-musical film (e.g. Magnolia).
  3. The wider public context in which the text is being interpreted – societal and cultural norms and cues that inform how texts are interpreted. I’ve explored this particular analytical context in the post Textual analysis, artistic intent and feminist film theory.

Within these contexts, semiotics is a way of labelling and making sense of different elements within a text (in semiotics these elements are called signs). Signs exist within a code, which can be thought of as the contextual language in which the signs are interpreted. Depending on the code, signs can be analysed in isolation, in terms of their place among surrounding signs, within a wider context that includes the signs found in other texts, or a combination of all of these.

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Media 1, Readings

Perspectives on sound

As I’ve found true for many topics we’ve explored in Media 1 so far, perspective and distance in audio/sound mixing are things you don’t really notice until you make a concerted effort to study them. When discussing visual media it’s easy to grasp perspective and distance – because we’re such visual creatures, we already have useful analogies for discussing and approximating the two dimensions involved:

  • Distance is achieved by the “size of the frame”, i.e. whether a close-up, medium shot or wide shot is used, and the relative size of the subject within this frame
  • Perspective has two axes, each of which defines a part of the relationship between the subject and the viewer:
    • Vertical axis determines power, e.g. top-down perspective places power with the viewer, bottom-up perspective places the subject in the position of power
    • Horizontal axis determines the level of “directness” in the relationship

But when it comes to sound, the mechanics of achieving perspective and distance are much more nuanced. For starters, as Theo van Leeuwen says in this week’s reading Speech, music, sound, audio is a “wrap-around medium” with no real concept of frontal or side-on sounds, or, in other words, no equivalent of the visual “frame” to mediate perspective. Though spatial positioning can be approximated in stereo environments with panning, hierarchically we perceive sounds as more or less equal regardless of the direction we perceive them coming from.

Distance, therefore, becomes much more important in determining the importance of sounds, with three levels of distinction:

  • Figure – the main focus of interest (also called the foreground or immediate sound)
  • Ground – the immediate setting or context in which the Figure sits (also called the midground or support sound)
  • Field – the background, sits at the furthest distance from the listener

Whether a sound is in the figure, ground or field dictates the perspective of the listener, and can be manipulated to mediate the audience’s experience in much the same way that visual distance and perspective can be. I’ve noticed this many times in the past, but didn’t have the language to adequately describe it, so I’m looking forward to paying closer attention to this in the future.

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Media 1, Readings

Learning by doing

If you had to teach someone to play guitar, would you just hand them a book on the history of guitar music and say “off you go”, without letting them ever actually touch an instrument?

It seems obvious and self-evident that if you’re attempting to teach someone a practical skill (such as media production) that you would teach them by doing, by actually using that practical skill, rather than by relying solely on theory and history. This is the main idea in this week’s reading, a pair of blog posts and a video by academic David Gauntlett.

Gauntlett argues that the traditional backwards-looking mode of studying media – characterised by study of institutions, productions, audiences, and texts – is, today, essentially useless and not at all reflective of the current media landscape. There are two “peaks” of activity that Gauntlett describes as coming along with the rise of DIY, lo-fi media production, one positive and one negative:

  1. Optimistic – people empowered through technology to make media, for marginalised voices to be heard, democratisation of media production and consumption, etc.
  2. Pessimistic – exploitation and capitalism, Big Data, government and private surveillance, etc.

But the part of Gauntlett’s posts that most resonated with me is that media studies is a field particularly suited to learning by doing. Theory and history are valuable, but what’s really going to get you somewhere is to just start making things. This ties into our readings from a previous week about the passion trap, and how important dedicated practise is, which I discuss more in the blog post Passion.

It also ties into the ideas of the filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, neither of whom ever went to a formal film school to learn their craft but who are now universally regarded as masters of their form. Though they each clearly had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the foundations of cinema to begin with (gained through years of watching thousands and thousands of films), in interviews they both say that what really helped get their careers as filmmakers off the ground was to simply start making films.

As the directors of two of the all-time greatest debut feature films in American cinema history (Reservoir Dogs and Hard Eight, respectively), and possessors of immense natural talent, they are surely exceptional examples of this theory and therefore may not necessarily be representative. I definitely wouldn’t assume that their success is easily replicable. But their success also proves that what makes someone a good maker is not necessarily theoretical knowledge.

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Lectorials, Media 1, Readings

Michael’s extreme closure

Part of the reading this week, the comic Blood in the Gutter by Scott McCloud, explains that people are very good at filling in the blanks when given partial or incomplete information. For example, if in one image we see a woman riding a bicycle, and then in the next image the bicycle is upturned and the woman is lying on the ground, we can infer that between the two images the woman fell off the bicycle, even if we don’t actually see this part of the scene occurring. This is called closure.

Closure is a really intriguing phenomenon, and when reading McCloud’s piece I was reminded of an incredible example I discovered at the Melbourne International Film Festival a few years ago.

The film is called Michael, it’s a relatively obscure Austrian film from 2011 that follows an insurance salesman as he quietly and unassumingly goes about his mundane daily existence. It’s all very boring, but for the fact that he has a 10-year-old boy, Wolfgang, locked in his basement. The relationship between Michael and Wolfgang, on screen at least, is basically parental: they have breakfast together in the morning, Michael goes to work (having locked Wolfgang away), they play musical instruments together at night, watch television, etc.

The film never actually portrays Michael abusing Wolfgang in any way, but that is clearly the subtext of what’s going on. Amazingly, this aspect of the story happens entirely in the mind of the audience. The viewer has to realise and understand what’s happening off screen, and how awful it is, using closure. And because of this, in many ways Michael is a far more disturbing film than if it had shown the abuse on screen.

This is an extreme example, obviously, but it’s interesting how editing can force a viewer to imagine things in their own mind against their will.

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Media 1, Readings

Focus and attention

The second reading for this week, Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes by N. Katherine Hayles, explores the difference between two modes of focus and makes the argument that current and future students will default to hyper attention mode, in which they take in multiple sources of information and favour stimulation over deeply focussing on a single object (which is how students of previous generations operated).

Despite generally living in a mode of hyper attention – I often listen to music and a podcast at the same time, for example – when I’m sitting down to achieve a particular task, such as writing something or reading a long-form article, I find that my productivity suffers unless I can enter deep focus, removing all distractions.

I think I prefer a mixture of both hyper and deep attention, and I’m pretty good at switching between the two depending on context. A poll in our workshop this week demonstrated that most students in my class consider themselves either hyper attentive or, at worst, somewhere between the two. Very few people considered themselves deeply attentive. This was not surprising considering the reading discussed the fact that younger people prefer hyper attentive modes, and so as today’s young students grow up to become adults deep attention will start to become quite rare.

This is a result of multiple factors, some well-defined and some not at all, but a major one is the proliferation of technology and the internet – young people are now accustomed to having an entire world of knowledge and entertainment at their fingertips 24 hours a day, so learning material has to be engaging and varied or students will just tune it out.

It also strikes me that even deep attention has to, by necessity, involve some of the techniques associated with hyper attention. When reading a long text (for example a novel), it’s very rare to actually consume such a text in one sitting – so your brain already has to be able to re-focus and re-familiarise itself with its content each time the book is picked up. This ability will only be developed further the more one practices hyper attention.

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Media 1, Readings

Passion

The first week’s Media 1 readings asked a significant amount of self-reflection.

First, a series of blog posts by computer scientist Cal Newport discuss what the author terms the “passion trap”: the idea that society’s default formulation of the key to a fulfilling career (summed up as “first figure out what you’re passionate about, and then go find a job to match”) is not only backwards but actually harmful, and the more self-imposed pressure one feels to love their work, the more unhappy they will be when they don’t.

When reading this passage I found myself thinking of some of my friends who have recently graduated from university and are struggling to enter the job market in their chosen field. They put so much pressure on themselves to find the perfect graduate job (so that their degree isn’t a “waste”) that when they don’t immediately find that elusive perfect job they feel like failures before their career has really even begun. This will then necessarily lead to a decrease in confidence, which itself adversely affects their ability to find a job, and the cycle repeats itself.

Newport offers an alternative way to think about workplace satisfaction, one that places high emphasis on craftsmanship and deriving pleasure through expertise. In other words: people enjoy doing things they’re good at, so if a person gets really good at something they’ll feel satisfied doing it regardless of what the activity actually is.

But how does one get good at something? By coincidence I recently finished reading a book that Newport cites in one of his posts, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which argues that to master a given skill or activity – such as playing a sport, or performing a job – you generally have to have devoted at least 10,000 hours to it. Only those with the dedication and drive to obsessively pursue something for much longer than others (and, in the early part, to be really bad at that thing) are able to truly master it.

But Newport also points out an important caveat to the 10,000 hour rule, and it’s that while work or study is necessary to become successful, it’s not by itself sufficient. It has to be the right kind of practice, a specific form termed “deliberate practice”, with specific attributes that orient it towards developing one’s skills to a point beyond that possible with ordinary practice.

And so, taken together, these posts suggest that the key to a successful career is to systematically attain the skills to become a master in a particular field, and then train yourself to find value in just doing the work. Luckily, the media and creative industries are fields where, thanks to the democratisation of the internet and technology, it’s possible to continue to engage in the activity even if it’s not your job.

This sounds both reassuring and scary, and seemed an interesting choice of reading given that so many students must have chosen Media because it’s their passion.

 

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