David Gauntlett’s Twin(?) Peaks
In Week 3 included in our readings was a Video of David Gauntlett. Gauntlett in the video was going over the main points of his book Making Media Studies. David Gauntlett makes his points and opinion on how Courses can improve on the way they teach Media to Students by focusing on the Creativity and Making side (peak 1) rather than Theory, Surveillance, and Capitalism (peak 2) 1 . Gauntlett expresses that both are important but they currently they do not work together well. Gauntlett describes Media as something that is used to make things happen. Media is a place of conversation, exchange and transformation. Media is a set of messy networks; some inciting new meaning and conversation and some fading away into the abyss of the internet.
I agree with this portion of Gauntlets ideas. A great product of Gauntletts theory on what Media and Media studies is/should be is Joseph Gordon Levitt’s HitRecord.org. HitRecord is a site that allows people to post items of media/art they have created and allows other members of the community to work with them and create something new. I was very active on this forum in high school (’10-’12).
In a small segment of the Gauntlett video he goes off topic and discusses how the expression “to share” has been oversaturated due to Facebook; that the Facebook option of “sharing” is not the same as how he sees media exchange. I beg to differ. When someone “shares” something on facebook it does exactly what Gauntlett says Media exchange/sharing should do. It can start a conversation, it can inspire a thought, and it can even transform into something new. Now I’m not saying every link or article ‘shared’ on Facebook accomplishes all or even 1 of these things. But to completely disregard Facebook and other social media platforms as an important facet of his first peak of media – I find to be an extremely pretentious notion.
