Wow… well it’s the last lecture for Semester one. Crazy to think how quickly this semester has come and gone.
Today in the last lecture we discussed Media Materialism.
Some notes I took:
Culture
- identifying subgroups within population – youth group etc.
- the world as culture, humankind – think about humanity as a whole/we are a human culture
- art, theatre, cinema: creative expression – what you would find in the newspaper under culture.
- Culture is multiple – different classes/races/ages
- Messy, unpredictable, confused.
- Brian Eno – “culture is everything we do not have to do” – we don’t need to have certain cuisines or clothing but we need to be clothed and need to eat. (we could survive without them)
- Culture is something that we do, but also something that we are.
Technological Determinism: Technology determines its own path – each development has a preconceived course
- – Invention of the Walkman – shut out oral cues of the world, we could shape our own music.
Social Constructivism: we control it
- No matter how radical the innovation is, we ultimately have control.
- Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.
- It is not a straight line, it is unpredictable.
It is interesting to consider the idea of culture and the way in which it is alive within the media. This lecture confused me a little as I am quite exhausted from a long semester. However it was interesting to hear of the different ideas in culture focused on the theory that technology is pre-determined and has a direct path compared with the theory that we control everything and technology is unpredictable (social constructivism).
