CTS LECTURE 5 - New Media and Visual Culture

Characteristics of new digital media

• Literacy
• we're living in the late age of print
• 'age of print' began around 1450
• Guten Berg' printing press
• Start of mass prints of literature
• people become educated
• people have access to news on a level they didn't have before
• print was invented - print develops - computers were invented - computers develop and printing becomes more obsolete
• the role of the reader - an emergence of the role of the reader and the decline of the author
• idea of the 'E Book' - challenges the concrete nature of the book and the power of the author
• technology such as 'E Books' are democratic allowing us to change the things and the way we read

Computer media

• the way we read has changed because of
• hypertext
• hypermedia - many media, pictures, sounds, etc.
• example - Wikipedia (in some ways we lose out from reading this)
• books allow us to slow down and lose ourselves
• Internet stimulates information and knowledge gives us a felling of power
• new technology changes society

Definition of mass media - Modern systems of communication and distribution supplied by relatively small groups...(inconclusive)

negative criticism of mass media

1. superficial, uncritical, trivial - attempting to be populous
2. viewing figures and measuring success
3. audience is dispersed
4. audience is disempowered
5. encourages the status quo (its conservative) resistant to change
6. encourages apathy
7. power held by the few motivated by profit of social control (propaganda)
8. bland

positive criticism of mass media

1. not all mass media is of low quality
2. social problems and injustices are discussed by the media
3. creativity

Artists use of mass media

• book - John A. Walker
• Oliviero Toscani Benneton campaign
• traded on images of unity
• traded on images of horror
• traded on images of war victims
• politics are not of social control but one of concrete effect
• key questions
• can art be autonomous? (exist on its own in a vacuum)
• should art be autonomous?
• Jackson - the epitome of art above mass media and social purpose
• Picasso - used mass media, exploited it
• Richard Hamilton - using mass media representing the modern but using mass culture
• people dismiss pop art in the same way they dismiss mass media
• negative effect is bombardment of images
• once repeated they lose their shock value.