Life in Media - Media Life
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Slides for the book (and course) Life in Media: A Global Introduction to Media Studies (The MIT Press 2023). Designed by Mark Deuze, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
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Life in Media - Media Life
- 1. Living Information 01 Media Life UvA_LI
- 4. media are pervasive and ubiquitous
- 5. media have long (complex) histories
- 6. media raise ethical issues
- 7. media are a source of pleasure and fun
- 8. people are comfortable with media
- 9. people are confident about media
- 11. people work for media
- 13. 1. everything is mediated
- 14. 2. media are difficult and complex
- 16. 3. media involve profound ethical dilemmas
Editor's Notes
- World Press Photo 2013 – John Stanmeyer – Signal https://www.worldpressphoto.org/collection/photo-contest/2014/john-stanmeyer/1 Source: 26 February, 2013 African migrants on the shore of Djibouti City at night raise their phones in an attempt to catch an inexpensive signal from neighboring Somalia—a tenuous link to relatives abroad. Djibouti, at the narrow southern entrance to the Red Sea, has become a gateway for migrants from the Horn of Africa heading to the Gulf States and beyond. This photo was taken as part of a project to ‘walk the world’ following the ancient paths of human migration, from Africa to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. When the image became World Press Photo of the Year it sparked surprise because it was different from previous winners, which often show conflict or historic moments. Instead, it is nuanced, poetic yet instilled with meaning. Kim Hubbard who commissioned the story for National Geographic said: “John managed to distill our entire story into one beautiful, moonlit image: modern day migration meets the universal desire for connection.” Comment: We do not live with media, but in media. Media are everywhere, and cannot be switched off. This is not a new situation, nor is a life in media unique to our time. Media are fun, complicated, and offer plenty of ethical dilemmas, which three issues are at the heart of media studies for a life in media.
- LIFE IN A DAY FILM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaFVr_cJJIY 2010 and 2020
- http://www.youtube.com/user/lifeinaday Life in a Day is a crowdsourced drama/documentary film comprising an arranged series of video clips selected from 80,000 clips submitted to the YouTube video sharing website, the clips showing respective occurrences from around the world on a single day, July 24, 2010. the intention of giving voice to people who weren't part of the “elite” and to show the intricacy and strangeness of the seemingly mundane. about 75% of the film's content came from people contacted through YouTube, traditional advertising, TV shows, and newspapers; the remaining 25% came from cameras sent out to the developing world. Director Kevin Macdonald said he saw the movie "as a metaphor of the experience of being on the Internet. ... clicking from one place to another, in this almost random way…following our own thoughts, following narrative and thematic paths."
- 8 Key insights informing media studies for a life in media media are pervasive and ubiquitous: media cannot be switched off, everything is mediated, media exposure is concurrent media have long histories that are complicated; media raise all kinds of ethical issues; media are a source of profound pleasure and fun; people seem to be increasingly comfortable with media; people seem to be relatively confident about their media; people seem to accept surveillance as familiar, and ordinary; and people seem to have little concern about doing the work for media.
- 8 Key insights informing media studies for a life in media media are pervasive and ubiquitous; media have long histories that are complicated; Newer media therefore do not replace older media – they adopt and remix features of older media while becoming increasingly intuitive to operate and use, which in turn contributes to their ubiquity. media raise all kinds of ethical issues; media are a source of profound pleasure and fun; people seem to be increasingly comfortable with media; people seem to be relatively confident about their media; people seem to accept surveillance as familiar, and ordinary; and people seem to have little concern about doing the work for media.
- 8 Key insights informing media studies for a life in media media are pervasive and ubiquitous; media have long histories that are complicated; media raise all kinds of ethical issues; A life in media therefore inevitably calls for an ethical stance: what do we want from this mediated life, and how are we going to take responsibility for it? Is our digital environment and economy solely about (the extraction and monetization of) data, energy, and attention, or can we expect more from the various media industries, technology companies, and telecommunications corporations that provide us with their products and services? media are a source of profound pleasure and fun; people seem to be increasingly comfortable with media; people seem to be relatively confident about their media; people seem to accept surveillance as familiar, and ordinary; and people seem to have little concern about doing the work for media.
- 8 Key insights informing media studies for a life in media media are pervasive and ubiquitous; media have long histories that are complicated; media raise all kinds of ethical issues; media are a source of profound pleasure and fun; It is hard to imagine participating in anything joyful without you or someone else mediating it (enabling ‘ghost’ as well as dark participation) people seem to be increasingly comfortable with media; people seem to be relatively confident about their media; people seem to accept surveillance as familiar, and ordinary; and people seem to have little concern about doing the work for media.
- 8 Key insights informing media studies for a life in media media are pervasive and ubiquitous; media have long histories that are complicated; media raise all kinds of ethical issues; media are a source of profound pleasure and fun; people seem to be increasingly comfortable with media; As people ‘mass self-communicate’, we continuously strike the uneasy balance between mass media and self-communication people seem to be relatively confident about their media; people seem to accept surveillance as familiar, and ordinary; and people seem to have little concern about doing the work for media.
- 8 Key insights informing media studies for a life in media media are pervasive and ubiquitous; media have long histories that are complicated; media raise all kinds of ethical issues; media are a source of profound pleasure and fun; people seem to be increasingly comfortable with media; people seem to be relatively confident about their media; While there is a digital divide (with compound effects), todays’ mobile consumer tech enables everyone to make media people seem to accept surveillance as familiar, and ordinary; and people seem to have little concern about doing the work for media.
- 8 Key insights informing media studies for a life in media media are pervasive and ubiquitous; media have long histories that are complicated; media raise all kinds of ethical issues; media are a source of profound pleasure and fun; people seem to be increasingly comfortable with media; people seem to be relatively confident about their media; people seem to accept surveillance as familiar, and ordinary; and The two films showcase the everydayness of massive mutual monitoring via media, making us aware of our own participation in global systems of surveillance. people seem to have little concern about doing the work for media.
- 8 Key insights informing media studies for a life in media media are pervasive and ubiquitous; media have long histories that are complicated; media raise all kinds of ethical issues; media are a source of profound pleasure and fun; people seem to be increasingly comfortable with media; people seem to be relatively confident about their media; people seem to accept surveillance as familiar, and ordinary; and people seem to have little concern about doing the work for media. the product of media is life as expressed through personal information packaged as data
- so, what do we do about/with all of this in MEDIA STUDIES? we start with the premise that EVERYTHING IS MEDIATED (instead of talking abou EFFECTS) we accept that media are COMPLEX and DIFFICULT (so never assume they mean the same for different people/contexts) we explore profound ethical dilemmas: between privacy and security, access and participation, individual versus state, information/misinformation, etc.
- When we study the media (and the digital environment in particular), we must start from their sheer pervasiveness and ubiquity. This comes into clear focus when: examining our own media use, finding how every single aspect of our lives is enmeshed in media; acknowledging how we feel about (our) media, and how much we enjoy and love media; considering the research on how people around the world spend their time, showing that we use media more than doing anything else in life (including being asleep); exploring the ‘black box’ of technology and production techniques that make media work, seeing how they are designed to keep us engaged and to monetize that engagement. VIDEO: compilation of HER
- The second analytical step we can take, is to deal with their past, present and (possible) futures, while recognizing how complex media are. We can establish this by: looking beyond media as shiny new toys to see what people are actually doing with (their) media; documenting how all media are versions of each other, both in terms of their design and content, as well as relating to the various ways in which people use media; acknowledging that media, if anything because of their combined everywhereness and everydayness, are hard to see and think about critically; respecting the fact that it is therefore never easy to use, understand and make sense of media – neither as a scholar or student of media, nor in everyday life. VIDEO: Sony piece of shit
- The second analytical step we can take, is to deal with their past, present and (possible) futures, while recognizing how complex media are. We can establish this by: looking beyond media as shiny new toys to see what people are actually doing with (their) media; documenting how all media are versions of each other, both in terms of their design and content, as well as relating to the various ways in which people use media; acknowledging that media, if anything because of their combined everywhereness and everydayness, are hard to see and think about critically; respecting the fact that it is therefore never easy to use, understand and make sense of media – neither as a scholar or student of media, nor in everyday life. VIDEO: Sony piece of shit
- A final step in the study of media involves developing and taking up ethical positions vis-à-vis the phenomena and experiences people have in media, based on research past and present. Recurring themes and issues here include: all the different ways in which people use, accommodate, or resist the media; struggles over access and participation in the media; which people, values and ideas get represented and promoted via media, and which identities and voices are marginalized or unheard; the ownership, business models, and control of the media (including the technology and telecommunications sectors); how the key institutions of society – such as politics and the state, security forces and the police, healthcare, education and schools, families and households, and the media as an industry function under the influence of media; how the media, telecommunications and technology sectors can or should be regulated; and what the role is of (increasing) automation in the inner workings of media devices and industries, specifically when it comes to processes governed by algorithms (that is: automated instructions), or more complex sets of algorithms working largely independent of human intervention (as in the case of applications involving machine learning and artificial intelligence).
- debate: uncritical narcissism versus authentic self-expression debate: privacy versus exposure question: are we special or mundane? VIDEO: complilation of influencers filming on the street
- Overall idea in Living Information/Life in Media: in and through media, we collectively create the illusion that reality is open source. But… what if it is, and we actually have agency and power? What would we do with this power? How will we take responsibility for what we want from this world?