Central Concepts
Central Media Studies and Literary Concepts
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Archive: An archive (from the Greek archon; "beginning, origin, first place") was historically the place where documents and historical objects were stored. These documents were economic, legal, and political sources for the rules and codes that governed a society and culture. An archive gives historical and material support to the “now” by offering a physical location and material objects as justification.
Foucault, in his description of how objects come into being, positions the archive as a metaphorical “face of a period” that can only be recognized through the historical traces that remain. Here he shifts from the physical location of the storehouse of documents to the embodied patterns of signification by which we can know anything at all. If one does not already possess the archive in which particular inscriptions are made, untangling the “tangle of traces” of any object would be impossible. See also Text, Discourse
Artefact: an object that has been made, shaped, or influenced by human activity. Historically, intentionality is invoked in relation to artefacts to distinguish that which is “artificial” verses that which is “natural,” or already there. However, more recent studies by Latour and others dispute the self-conscious creation of artefacts. Instead, they focus on artefacts as by-products, excesses, or differences that arises from the very technology and media used to create such an object. What’s more, since “nature” itself cannot be known outside of human activity, all of nature is thus artificially structured based on the tools and media by which knowledge is formed. See also Object, Materiality
Author: a category that appeared in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance to assign responsibility for the production of written and printed texts. An author needed to be distinguished from a scribe, who merely copied others writings. This responsibility for written and printed works took on both positive and negative characteristics for creator (author), the material object (book), and its effects. Political, legal, and economic discourses merged with artistic, creative, and rhetorical strategies to give the author a distinct place in society. In the mid-20th century, Foucault and Barthes questioned the role of this category as no-longer functional.
Body (Embodiment): a body is any material object that takes up space and exists in time. This ancient definition of a body (or object) is opposed to an idea, which is immaterial and eternal (outside of time and space). More recent studies of objects, bodies, and materiality emphasize the patterns of signification through which bodies become possible. All bodies are the embodied-ment of ideas, or patterns of signification that only appear through a specific medium. If the patterns of signification change (i.e. if one substitutes one medium for another), the body also changes. The change could be slight, or it could be radical in the sense that a body can appear or even disappear. See also Artefact, Object, Materiality
Categorization: Categorization asks the question, “What is it?” For example, at its most basic level, language, specifically names, is a form of categorization: “The word ‘dog’ is ‘x’ and not ‘y’.” As far back as Aristotle, the relationship between language and thought was seen as imitative (mimetic), which in turn represented the “real” world. If one categorized correctly (logically, or without contradiction), language and thought could make truthful statements about the “real” world. However, different media (speech, writing, television, radio, cinema, computer, mobile phone, etc.) offer alternate forms of representation and categorization, making it impossible to distinguish the “real” world from the world of representation. This problem of representation and categorization has been taken up in philosophy (Derrida and differance), cognitive studies (Lakoff and Johnson and “embodied metaphors”), as well as in media studies (McLuhan and “the medium is the message”).
In literary studies, genre is a classic form of categorization: the statement, “a poem is not a short story,” is based on categories of similar and difference in relation to the form and content. However, if one focuses on the medium (i.e. speech for poetry and print for the short story), genre categories begin to break down in relation to the various codes of a particular media. If a short story is spoken, it becomes poetry, or at least poetic. If a poem is written, it looses it “poetic” quality and becomes narrative, more story-like.
Channel: a channel is simply what carries the message; in other words, the channel is intended as the perceivable modality (e.g. airwaves for radio message, or touch when tapping a friend’s shoulders) used to convey the message to the intended audience. Any communication act, in fact, is made possible by some form of concrete reification of the message, which, at its most elementary level, must abide by physical laws to exist and take shape (Schulz).
From this consideration, we can take at least two perspectives to discuss the general notion of channel, one passive and one active. On the one hand, a channel can be considered a fundamentally ‘limiting’ factor on the communication process, an objective constraint that we cannot remove, but to which we must submit our communication effort. On the other hand, the necessity of using a channel can be considered an ‘exalting’ factor in human communication. Using a specific channel (e.g., talking, writing an email, writing a text message, calling, or using an instant messaging system) can be considered an intentional condition which enables us to clarify, fulfill, and give coherent shape to thoughts and ideas, which would be otherwise unformed, scattered, and inaccessible first and foremost by the sender (Schulz).
Code: a systematic set of rules by which representations can stand for something else. Code is one of the most used yet unclear terms in media and cultural studies. Codes can appear in any material form: coded sounds become speech; coded marks becoming writing; coded bodies become ritual, theater, dance; coded electricity (by way of telegraph, radio, television, and computer technologies) becomes information; the code for bio-matter becomes genetics). For communication to occur, there must be an encoder and a decoder, or sender and receiver and a material that assumes the pattern. Since the material world is difficult to define without codes, media and cultural theorists often focus on the code(s), or systematic pattern(s) that shape both mental life, bodily life (sensorium), and social and cultural life.
Cognition (Embodied/Embedded/Situated): any analysis of “thinking” or “cognition” must include the body and environment of an organism. In embodied cognition, “thinking” is not reducible to a singular agent, the mind, or brain in a Cartesian dichotomy of “mind” or “body.” Whether one studies robots and artificial intelligence, language and metaphors, or literature and history, embedded cognition assumes that the dualist approach to mind and body is inadequate given the adaptive character of thought to the environment. Bodies, and the various tools (technologies), media, and environments in and by which our bodies act, shape the very thoughts we have.[1]
The limit of thought is the limit of the thinkable, and by thinkable, Andy Clark is referring to the tools and social networks we have through and with which we think. Thought is not separate from and in control of, but embedded in and through the activity of working with tools. For example, the meaning of a hammer is not separate form the process of hammering; the “meaning” of a book is not separate from the process of reading; technologies allow us to think in a certain way, which is both limiting (we have to use the codes of the tools) and revealing (new technologies allow us to think in ways old technologies do not).
Communication Theory: In its most basic form, communication offers linear movement by which Sender-Message-Receiver can share information. Early communication theories used this circuit model whereby the sender sends a message to a receiver, who in turn uses the same or similar channels to send a message back. Each participant alternates between sender and receiver, keeping the circuit active.
However, the simplicity of this formula has been questioned when critics examine each of the parts closely. The sender can be speaker, writer, artist, (or nation, state, military, corporation, or computer) who relies on a specific set of signs by which to signal the message. The message can be further divided into content or meaning that requires a specific channel or medium (gesture, paint, ink, sound, light, electrons, etc.). The channel requires a common code so that the signal of “message/content/meaning” can be decoded by the receiver and distinguished from noise. The receiver can be an individual or a larger audience, depending on the medium (speech, radio, television, internet) as well as a passive receiver or active interpreter. The initial structure of Sender à Message à Receiver, though useful, is thus influenced by a myriad of factors such as ideology, technology, material, politics, class, gender, race, etc.
Computation: from “compute,” which historically meant to “count, reckon, or separate and join.” Computation is the process by which the diverse spatial and temporal phenomena of the world can be reduced and represented by sequential units. Computation can happen through both analog and digital means. Analog computation brings together “real” red apples (join) and then represents them through red tokens (separate), whereby the tokens resemble the apples. Digital computation occurs through discrete units that have no resemblance to the thing represented (digit comes from “finger” or to count on one’s finger that can isolate and represent anything). Whereas analog computation is continuous (through resemblance), digital computation breaks up this continuity through isolation of the individual representations. Historically, computation has been reserved for the realm of logic, science, and mathematics, as opposed to the esoteric and abstract domain of art and literature. However, Hayles (2004) describes how language itself is a form of computation, regardless of whether it is mathematical (binary code) or literary (Moby Dick). Oral language computes analogically (by resemblance of sound to object) whereas written and printed language computes digitally (through discrete images—letters—that represent sounds and words).
Convergence: Newer media do not simply replace older media. Convergence is the process by which previously distinct media technologies come to share tasks and resources. A cell phone that also takes pictures and video is an example of the convergence of digital photography, digital video, and cellular telephone technologies. An extreme, and currently nonexistent (ideal) example of technological convergence would be the so-called “black box,” which would combine all the functions of previously distinct technology and would be the device through which we’d receive all our news, information, entertainment, and social interaction.
The human body is also a place of convergence, where the distinct senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell are brought together. Ideally, convergence creates a balance whereby all media technologies share in information exchange. However, following McLuhan, media technologies have different advantages and disadvantages, causing one or more to dominate at any given time. In oral cultures, sound and touch dominate, whereas in visual cultures, sight becomes the dominant sense.
Culture can also be the site of convergence, where geographically distant cultures influence one another despite the distance that physically separates them. The advantage of global convergence is access to a wealth of cultural influence; its downside, some critics posit, is the threat of cultural imperialism, defined by Herbert Schiller as the way developing countries are “attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating center of the system.”
CULTURE
Culture: The production and circulation of sense, meaning and style of signification. The sphere of meaning, which unifies the spheres of production (economics) and social relations (politics). In other words, culture is the sphere of reproduction and representation.
If you are planning to use the term ‘culture’ as an analytical concept, or if you encounter its use, it is unlikely that you will ever be able to fix on just one definition that will do for all such occasions. It will often be impossible to use or read the word clearly and without controversy or ambiguity: Welsh culture, youth culture, a cultured person, Victorian culture, working-class culture, intellectual culture; or even a cultured pearl, bacterial culture, agriculture, cultivation of the soil. The trouble arises when you notice that even in these examples the term culture seems to mean half-a-dozen different things. What on earth do all these things share that can be encompassed by the single term?
The answer is that there is no necessary connection. The term culture is multi-discursive; it can be mobilized in a number of different discourses. This means you cannot import a fixed definition into any and every context and expect it to make sense. What you have to do is identify the discursive context itself. It may be the discourse of nationalism, fashion, anthropology, literary criticism, Marxism, feminism, cultural studies or even common sense. In each case, culture’s meaning will be determined relationally, or negatively, by its differentiation from others in that discourse, and not positively, by reference to any intrinsic, self-evident or fixed properties. A way around this problem is to focus on an object, practice, or network as “cultural” and explore the various discursive contexts in which the object or practice occurs. See also cultural techniques; discourse.[2]
Cultural Techniques: Cultural techniques-such as writing, reading, painting, counting, making music-are embodied patterns of signification. These techniques are always older than the concepts that are generated from them. People wrote long before they conceptualized writing or alphabets; millennia passed before pictures and statues gave rise to the concept of the image; and still today, people sing or make music without knowing any thing about tones or musical notation systems. Cultural techniques are encoded in the body itself, not a theory about how the body is encoded.
Cultural techniques include what Marcel Mauss termed "body techniques"; that is, the use cultures make of bodies, including rites, customs, and habitual acts as well as training and disciplinary systems, diet, or hygienic practices. From this ethnological point of view, reading, writing, and counting are physical rather than mental acts (or mental acts are simply the reflection of a physical activity). They are the result of drilling what Foucault calls “docile bodies” (Siegert).
Popular Culture: Of people in general; for people in general; well-liked by people in general. ‘Popular’ is often synonymous with ‘good’ in ordinary conversation, but this is an inversion of its earlier pejorative connotations. In its 19th century form, popular was used to distinguish the mass of the people (not ‘people in general’) from the titled, wealthy or educated classes. Not surprisingly, since most writers on the subject were either members or clients of the latter three classes, its synonyms were gross, base, vile, riffraff, common, low, vulgar, plebeian, cheap (OED).
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Discourse: In the renaissance, discourse meant the combination of rhetoric and logic, or to speak at length about, discourse about, a certain topic in formal speech and writing. In the 20th and 21st centuries, discourse was (and is still) used in linguistics to refer to verbal utterances of greater magnitude than the sentence. Discourse analysis is concerned not only with complex utterances by one speaker, but more frequently with the turn-taking interaction between two or more persons, and with the linguistic rules and conventions that are taken to be in play and governing such networked interactions in their given context.
In addition, the concept of discourse has also developed, separately, out of post-structuralism and semiotics. Based largely on the writings of Michel Foucault, discourse refers to a sign’s limited and fixed potential signified meaning within the structure of social relations which prevails in a given time and place. From the potentially infinite senses any language system is capable of producing, it is the codes of these social relations, or discourses, that create the possibility of distinct meanings. For instance, codes of class, gender, nation, ethnicity, age, family and individuality are woven together to produce specific meanings. Foucault focused on “power” as a key concept that governs the circulation of signifiers within networks of signification. See also Text; Archive
Gender: from the Latin genus, “kind, or category.” Historically, gender was a classification of grammatical categories (masculine, feminine, neutral). In the 19th century, gender was intimately tied to biological sex through social, scientific, and cultural discourses. Since the 1960s, this identity between sex and gender has been questioned: gender is now a form of categorization for a spectrum of masculine and feminine characteristics. Gender is now differentiated from biological sex and the male, female, or transsexual body, becoming a category for social and cultural performance, whether by force or by volition. When the Women’s Liberation movement emerged at the end of the 1960s, this distinction between biological sex and socially constituted gender provided an intellectual basis for repudiating biological determinism, and a platform for envisioning a future different from the past and the present. This platform often associates gender with power, where masculinity (and the phallus, which symbolizes the patriarchal system) stands for power and femininity for lack or absence of power (Bennett). Much of gender and media focuses on the representation of gender in media (television, advertisement, cinema, radio) through a criticism of stereotypes, social roles, and biological determinism. Much is yet to be done to analyze the form of media and its relationship to gender categories.
Hegemony: the ability in certain historical periods of the dominant classes to exercise social and cultural leadership, and by these means – rather than by direct or violent coercion of subordinate classes – to maintain their power over the economic, political and cultural direction of the nation (Gramsci). Hegemony occurs through ideology and culture (cultural or ideological hegemony) as the patterning of thought and action. In media studies, those who control the medium or media offer a form of control over those who use it by way of the patterns of communication, regardless of the content of communication—National or State media corporations (TRT, BBC, NBC, etc.) in the early 20th century or multi-national or private corporations (Samsung, Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.) in the 21sth century. The concept of hegemony emphasizes that people consent to be subject to the rules of media, thus giving the artificial the appearance of the natural (Hartley).
Hybridity: The state of being mixed; the combination or crossing of codes from differing conceptual domains. The most common hybrid structures in relation to literature and media are emblems, which combine “words and images.” There can be biological hybrids, technological hybrids, or media hybrids. Common examples of media hybrids are modern cinema, which combine sound and image.
Ideology: Knowledge and ideas characteristic of or in the interests of a class. In cultural/ communication studies, ideology is seen as the practice of reproducing social relations of inequality within the sphere of signification and discourse.
Ideology as a theoretical concept comes from Marxism. In classic Marxism, the forms, contents and purposes of knowledge, representations and consciousness are not understood as abstracted from the material and social activities of production and class antagonism. On the contrary, the activity of production gives rise directly to knowledge of nature, and this knowledge of nature is directed towards further and increasing production by bringing all its myriad aspects as closely into line with general natural ‘laws’ as possible.
The contention that social being determines consciousness gives rise to the Marxist notion of false consciousness. In the case of the ruling class itself, false consciousness occurs when that class imagines that its position in society is determined by the laws of God or nature – as in the doctrine of the divine right of kings for feudal monarchs, or the doctrine of individualism and the conception of society as a social contract in bourgeois philosophy (Hartley). In this case, one’s ideology is taken to be natural, which is false.
Imagination: In the ancient world, the imagination was the mental ability (faculty) to “represent that which is absent as if it were present.” Though this definition has changed over time, media theorists emphasize the role of media to both limit and enhance that which one can not only imagine, but also perceive. Speech, writing, and electronic technologies all influence that which one can perceive, which in turn limits and expands that which one can imagine. Not only do media pattern the body, they also pattern thought.
For example, the problems of speech are all about the possibilities and limits allowed by sound (organizing small groups, ritual). This both limits and expands solutions one can imagine to oral problems. However, an alternate medium will introduce alternate problem/solution binaries. Writing solves the problem of memory and storage, yet it introduces problems that are “unimaginable” (thus unthinkable) in oral cultures: large cities, sewage, disease (from travel), etc. Trains and automobiles were media solutions to the problem of transportation in the 19th and 20th centuries, yet the problems brought with them would have been unimaginable to a society whose only means of transportation were walking or horse and carriage.
Immutable Mobile: Rather than pursue grand revolutionary ideas, Latour describes social and cultural changes through the mundane concept of two tendencies in media: that which is more immutable and mobile is more likely to convince others of its value, and thus convince others to use the medium for her/his own uses. Namely, a medium’s ability to endure (speech is lost much quicker than writing) and be mobile (writing can travel greater distances that speech) has a rhetorical advantage over those that are more mutable and less mobile.
INSCRIPTION
Absence/ Presence (of inscriptions): Inscriptions are materially present, yet they always represent that which is absent. This play between absence/presence is at play in all representations, which are also inscriptions.
Inscription: the act of inscribing, or “to mark, write, engrave, or print” a lasting record. Traditionally, inscriptions have been a understood as form of recording memory through mimesis (a copy of, a representation of, or an imitation of something else). The goal and method of engaging inscriptions was through hermeneutics, or interpretation. This process of interpretation always situated the signifier (a representation, whether visual images or words) in relation to a real signified, or absolute idea.
However, in the twentieth century, this mimetic definition of inscriptions has been questioned, beginning with Benjamin, through Adorno, Derrida, and Latour, among others. Inscriptions are themselves material, which no longer allow for the movement between signifier and signified. As material, inscriptions are both a representation and an interpretation (of some absent thing), which continually delays the arrival of meaning (the meaning of an inscription is another inscription).
Quantity and velocity (of inscriptions): One quality of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the increase in the amount (quantity) and speed (velocity) of inscriptions. This increase has led to several consequences: a reorganization of inscriptions through the archive (See Archive); the incessant dissemination of images and words that replaces interpretation with fascination; the mechanically reproduced over the singular (Benjamin); the loss of the “real”, which is replaced by simulacra (Baudrillard).
Trace (as inscription): a sign of something that is no longer present, i.e. a representation. Footprints in the sand, sound of a speaker’s voice, written books, or photographs are all traces (that which is present) of that which is absent.
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Interface: a point, surface, or time where two systems, subjects, organizations, etc. meet and interact. An interface is a material location whereby codes of one system merge with the codes of another system. In relation to media, the computer screen is an interface where human perception (sight) meet mechanical and electrical circuitry; a web browser (or any application) is an interface where human and machines have contact; a touch screen offer a tactile interface; the surface of the printed page is the interface between a mechanically produced object and human kinesics and perceptions.
Literacy: The social institution of writing; by extension, the social institution of communication by any means other than speech. See also Orality.
Mass communication: The practice and product of providing leisure entertainment and information to an unknown audience by means of corporately financed, industrially produced, state-regulated, high tech, privately consumed commodities in the modern print, screen, audio and broadcast media, usually understood as newspapers, magazines, cinema, television, radio and advertising; sometimes including book publishing (especially popular fiction) and music (the pop industry). Mass communication began as broadcast media but has now shifted to the stage of post-broadcast producer/audience interaction.
Materiality: The state of being material. Material is that which can be encoded, or situated within a network of signification. Since ancient Greece, there has been a tendency to describe the world as created of a binary of matter and form, material and idea. This led to the radical split of Idealists and Empiricists in the 17th century. However, since Kant in the late 18th century, this binary has been questioned. The “real” or material world is out of human mental and physical “reach”: all knowledge is based the human senses and mental representation. We only know how the world is “mediated” or “encoded” not how it actually is. Recent studies emphasize the interplay of media and knowledge, whereby materiality is re-conceptualized as the interplay between an object’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies, a move that entwines instantiation and signification at the outset (Hayles). One must include the medium through which one knows the material world in one’s definition and experience of that very material world. See also body; object; cognition (embodied).
Meaning: The import of any signification; the product of culture. In the context of communication studies, meaning is the outcome of communication, and therefore is an immaterial object of study, not a given or self-evident quantum that exists prior to analysis. Hence meaning should not be assumed to reside in anything, be it text, utterance, program, activity or behavior, even though such acts and objects may be understood as meaningful. Pre-modern/Modern/Post-modern theories of meaning follow that in pre-modern societies, meaning was fixed by God. In modern theories, meaning was located in texts and in post-modern times, meaning is located in the reader or audience.
MEDIA
Analog versus Digital media: The word ‘analog’ is used to describe that which is ‘analogous to the original’. Digital technology converts analogue (continuous) information into a binary language. This language consists of discrete ‘bits’ (short for ‘binary digits’) of information in the form of 1s (an ‘on’state) and 0s (an ‘off’ state).
Media archeology: Based on the archeological work of Foucault and Benjamin of the early to mid-twentieth century and Kittler in the late twentieth century, an archeology of media assumes that all technical media have an unconscious, historical, and embodied past (i.e. a use value). “The Present” is not a necessary or natural outcome of these historical situations; how we use media today appears through choices, situations, geographies, material, and historical and cultural factors often buried under how a new technology appears. Rather than simply “use” media—which is governed by global, political, economic, and social values—a media archeologist examines the present conditions of existence as an embodiment of past iterations of media. An excavation of past media and their networks can offer insights into how contemporary media come to be the way they are as well as offer alternative presents.[3]
Bio media: A wide range of activities falls under the rubric “biotechnology.” Our techno-scientific vocabulary is replete with metaphors, tropes, and figures combining biology and information. But this integration extends also to the artifacts, tools, and technologies that populate the life science research lab. All of this culminates in “big science” endeavors such as the Human Genome Project, spearheaded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy in the late 1980s. It is important to ask how the concept of a genetic code conditions attitudes toward “life itself” and its attendant scientific, social, technical, and cultural effects. In this sense, there is indeed a history of the genetic code, one characterized by divergence, fits and starts, and conceptual exchanges. Biomedia assumes that the “uses” of the genetic code need to be explored through critical and artistic means since the concept of a genetic code appears through the values of postindustrial, postmodern societies (Mitchell).
Broadcast media: analogue media that send signals from one to many (television, radio). The organization of this media technology is usually centralized and standardized so that the public (audience) becomes a passive receiver of content.
Media Colonialism: Borrowing from McLuhan’s famous quotes “The Medium is the Message” and “Media is the extension of man,” his student Tom McPhail connected the media habits of certain societies and the effects of these habits on individuals and larger cultural activities. In order to become useful, media have to dominate and redefine patterns of other media: speech is not useful unless everything is spoken; books are not useful unless everything is printed, and the computers are not useful unless everything is digitized. Media colonialism happens at the level of the individual, but also society as a whole and the interactions among different societies and cultures. In this way, media is closely related to empire and imperialism where overt military, political and economic power (money, propaganda, and bombs) are part of the same media culture (language, literature, and society). In a more radical view, culture is merely the name by which media and technology are dispersed and eventually embodied in human activity: media always colonize and leave traces in the bodies that use them.
Effects of media: the effects model of media theory seeks to show causal links between media form, content and individual behavior. One of the most-important methodological frames is to shift from the “meaning” of a message to the individual, social, and environmental effects of a medium.
Electronic media: communication that occurs through the patterning of electrons. Electronic media began in the 19th century with the telegraph, and continues today with satellites and personal computers.
Media Imperialism: The concentration of more powerful media technologies in wealthy nations that take over media of less-developed nations. When increasingly larger quantities of media outputs are in the control of a few people, companies, or nations. As metaphors borrowed from global changes in the 20th century, media imperialism is closely tied to media colonialism, the difference is the relationship of time: whereas imperial is related to the now and the process of reshaping the media configurations of smaller countries by larger countries, colonialism is related to the effects of the process. When the bodies, politics, and cultures of smaller nations have been the victim of imperialism, what new configurations appear that did not exist under the regime of a prior medium.
Mechanical media: from “machine” or device, human creation. The transformation of a “living” cultural process into discrete and sequential steps that can be completed with minimal human supervision or interaction, i.e. automatic.
Medium/media: technology used for communication; any material through which something else may be transmitted.
Post-broadcast media: Post-broadcast media allow for users rather than consumers, and through interactivity allow those users to produce or ‘write’ in the given application (from games to web sites, video-streaming to online journals), whereas broadcast-era ‘literacy’ confined audiences to ‘read-only’ status. Post-broadcast media are digital, dispersed, usually many-to-many, customized, and private that emphasize active users (Understanding Media and Culture).
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Memory: In its most basic form, memory is an impression (representation) of something that can be used at a later time. Intuitively, memory implies an impression of the past, but memories need not always be “of the past.” Memory can be studied on the level of the individual (with various physiological and cognitive theories explaining how individual memory works or doesn’t work) or society, or how a group creates “collective memory” through language, rituals, monuments, and other shared and public representations.
Memory is closely connected to media and the technology used to both store the impression and retrieve it for use at a later time. Frances Yates chronicles the historical usages of memory and rhetoric in her article Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art of Memory, which became her now-famous book The Art of Memory. Utilizing a spatial conceptualization of mnemonic processes, Roman rhetoricians were capable of recounting lengthy orations with little difficulty or error. When language and speech becomes the primary codes by which memory is stored and recalled, the body of the speaker and audience are thus shaped by the capabilities of this medium.
The ability to store “memory” outside the body—particularly writing and later communication technologies—has reshaped how we think about and use memory. In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates argues against writing for those who write "will not use their memories, they will trust to the external written characters and not remember themselves." Here, human thought shifts from a container for memory “storage” to the ability to organize and search through external data. For example, few of us remember all the phone numbers on our phone but we remember how to search for them.
Returning to our initial definition of memory as an impression (representation) of something, recent studies of memory reveal that this “neutral” sounding term of nature “impressing” and “representing” and memory simply “recording” these impressions is misleading—such language was used to argue for the use of photography as a memory tool since it simply “records”. Memory-as-representation assumes there is interpretation involved and the medium by which a representation is made is part of that interpretation process. In the same way there is also no neutral representation, there is no “neutral” memory.
Metaphor/Metonym: from “meta” and “phor”, literally “to carry over, across,” a metaphor is a rhetorical term where one thing is represented in terms of another. A metonym (metonymy, or “a change in name”) is term from rhetoric where one name stands in for another name. Along with metaphor, metonym was thought by the linguist Roman Jakobson (1960) to be a fundamental mode of meaning-creation. Where metaphor works though choice substitution (“ice” for “diamonds” within a paradigm or category), metonym works along the chain of signification (“book” stands for a larger cultural “sequence” of terms, the syntagm, as opposed to the paradigm).
In relation to media studies, metaphors and metonyms (conceptual, embodied, technology metaphors/metonyms) have become the fundamental codes of cognition (selection and substitution) and the embodiment of media. For example, speech and writing use sound and ink as substitutions for certain objects, emotions, and ideas; gesture assumes the body is coded and sequential movements stand in for some absent object, emotion, or idea. The emphasis on metaphor and metonym in communication assumes that the present (media) is essential and can never completely reconstruct or communicate the absent (object, emotion, or idea). Media always only offer a representation and interpretation of that which is absent, while at the same time shaping the cognitive process by which we think and communicate.[4]
Media are also metaphorical in that they both emphasize their ability (metaphor) in order to conceal their inability (metonym). Metaphors also rely heavily on the dominant media of an age until another media supplants or weaves itself into networks of older media: for example, the human body was the orienting metaphor for all space and time. To start, think of the parts of the book, names of which come from the body: Caput/Chapter (Head), Body, Spine, Footnotes, etc.. Electronics and computing changed the language with which we talk and write about the world and the way we talk and write about the world influenced the language of computing (i.e. software/hardware, “dead” battery, scroll, mouse, memory, trash, cloud storage, etc.).
Narrative: Narrative is a linking of fragments into a continuous whole. Narrative has two facets. The first is the chain or plot, or the temporal aspect of the event in question. The second facet of narrative involves choice or presentation – the way the story is realized or told. It is this facet, and the devices and surprises chosen in it, that are often the focus of textual analysis.
Narratives are understood to reveal the work of ideology and discourse in both plot and presentation, chain and choice, sequence and selection, to continue with alteration. In literature, linguistic fragments are linked together based on a shared set of assumptions about the codes of language; In photography, image fragments can be linked into a whole, or narrative.
Nationalism: Nationalism is the emphasis and promotion of a particular view of the nation based on one of the traits mentioned below. The word nation itself derives from the Latin nasci (to be born) through nationem (a breed or stock), and its early usage referred to a distinct aggregate of people associated with each other by common descent or history, or to a number of persons drawn from such an aggregate. In medieval universities, for example, it referred to a body of students from a particular region, country, or group of countries. By the end of the 18th century, the more political connotations invoked by Bentinck and Sieye`s had come to the fore. In some more recent uses – the Nation of Islam or Queer Nation – the term has lost much of its earlier association with common descent.
The image of the nation as “a large-scale solidarity” reflects an aspiration which has played a significant role in many nationalist movements, but, since people who belong to the same nation often have radically different views about its past and its future, it is no more successful in defining a nation than the a list of objective attributes. A different version of the idea that nations exist in the minds of their members appears in Benedict Anderson’s observation (1983) that nations are “imagined communities”: nations, like other large collectivities, must be imagined because they exist on too large a scale to be directly experienced by their members. Vernacular languages, similar phenotypical appearances, the fabricated rituals and traditions, the newspapers and journals, shared time-zones, the administrative and tax-gathering apparatuses, border controls, currency, maps, postage stamps, and other artifacts which seduce and cajole the most diverse individuals and groups into imagining that they belong together in the one nation. Nothing in these conditions requires those who experience themselves as members of the one nation to have the same image of the imagined community to which they all claim to belong.[5]
Noise: Noise refers to the interference that is experienced during the transfer of information between a sender and a receiver. Noise is the opposite of signal, which is a code by which to organize the transfer of information. Noise is used as a concept in speech, as well as writing and electronic media, giving evidence to the endurance of orality in contemporary cultures. What’s more, media theorists attempt to explore and eventually reclassify noise through experimentation with media (Parikka).
Object: etymologically, object meant “throwing before, putting against or opposite, opposing.” Objects have been thought to be self-evident, that which is hard to make go away, stable and enduring. Through our sensorium, objects force themselves on our sense of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. However, alternate media (if we assume the senses are media) allow objects to both appear (bacteria “appeared” in the 19th century through the microscope, scientific methods, and laboratory space) and disappear (demons and witches have mainly disappeared in the modern world of visual evidence) if they cannot be represented in a culture’s dominant medium. See also Artefact, Materiality.
Orality: That which characterizes speech; a culture characterized by the primacy of speech over other forms of signification. Usually opposed to literacy, orality refers to those aspects of a culture’s way of life that are attributable to its investment in the resources of spoken language.
Walter Ong proposed a form of Secondary Orality, which appeared in the 19th century with the ability to represent, store, and recreate sound through an external medium (phonograph, radio, ciema, television, etc.). This ability to mechanically reproduce sound and image restructured how humans organized not only society, but also one’s own thoughts.
PSYCHOLOGY/PSYCHOANALYSIS
Psychology: In media studies, psychology refers to the habits by and through which animals (including humans) engage media and technology. “Mind” is simply a category of a particular media’s effect on an organism (speech, gestures, tools). Human psychology can only refer to the tools and environments in which people live and work, not a “thinking thing” in the Cartesian sense. While psychologists are primarily focused on results that can be reproduced in the laboratory, practitioners of media studies attempt to include the tools and environments in the development of media and psychological theories. See embedded cognition.
Marxism and psychology: Marxism demonstrated how individuals were subject to conditions not of their own making (Hall, 1994: 120). Marxist theory undermined the notion of universal essence to mankind (soul, subject) by arguing instead that individuals were products of social relations such as those required to accommodate the expanding force of capitalism. Marxism’s refusal of essential human nature and subjective thought suggested that cognition, ethics, and morals could no longer be thought of as being universal; rather they were acquired or produced by the material conditions of one’s position in society, and indeed had a political functionality in maintaining those positions.
Freudian psychology/psychoanalysis: Freud’s discovery (or creation) of the unconscious (Hall, 1994: 121) has been reinterpreted, through media studies, as the discovery of the power and limits of speech and in relation to human embodiment. Freud argued that an infant’s being is formed in relation to others, suggesting that human psychology appears not as an innate essence (mind), but as a negotiation (learning) between body and language. The “unconscious” is that which cannot be mediated and “imagination” appears as the power to test the relationship between a medium’s use value and its possibilities or impossibilities. For example, a child learns that words have specific referents, i.e. the word “bottle” refers to a glass container with a nipple. Imagination plays a role in both testing whether or not this is true as well as internalizing the social pressure to repeat the word in relation to an object. Artistic (aesthetic) pleasure appears in reshaping this categorical imposition. Although psychoanalysis is often criticized for studying an object that is irrecoverable (the unconscious, or “that which cannot be mediated”), it has been enormously influential in theorizing subjectivity and human psychology, not least because it was the first to show how reason (conscious thought) does not rule the human imagination.
Lacanian psychology/psychoanalysis: Building upon Freud, Lacan argued that children develop through recognition of the “other” (mirror stage where the external image is “whole” and complete) and their initiation into the realm of the imaginary, which is the internalization of this “complete other” by the embodied subject, which includes the impossibilities of the body achieving the ideal completeness. The symbolic realm appears as the organization of the body in terms of language, which is necessary but can never be complete. This realization leads to the real, that which is beyond representation in language: this “real” is pre-mirror, pre-imaginary/symbolic, and completely outside the realm of representation in a particular medium. This is perhaps the source of the most contention within theories of media in that media itself can only point at the real but never embody it, never be it. In Lacanian terms, the imaginary-symbolic-real forms a trio of intrapsychic realms which comprise the various levels of psychic phenomena. They serve to situate subjectivity within a system of perception and a dialogue with the external world.[6]
The role of language in human psychology has become increasingly important in media studies and the inability for language, as a medium, to represent that which is claims to represent. Borrowing from Saussure, Lacan shows that human thought is linguistic, and this linguistic structure reveals the inability of the subject to represent the self, the other, and offers the impossibility of unified psychic (mental) life within the symbolic world of language. Lacan focuses on the primacy of signifier over what is signfied in the unconscious, where the signifier is situated within a particular grammar/syntax that cannot be accounted for in the inaccessible signified.
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Public: The concept of public derives from Greek and Roman conceptions of the rightful members of polities. Its philological roots lie in the Latin poplicus, of the people, which shifted to publicus apparently under the influence of its restriction to pubes, adult men. This persists into modern usage, in which ‘‘public’’ is increasingly opposed to ‘‘private,’’ and denotes most prominently, and in varying combinations: (a) the people, interests, or activities which are structured by or pertain to a state; (b) anything which is open or accessible; (c) that which is shared, especially that which must be shared; (d) all that is outside the household; and (e) knowledge or opinion that is formed or circulated in communicative exchange, especially through oratory, texts, or other impersonal media (Calhoun, 2001).
Newspapers and other media support public discussion as much as physical spaces of the market, salon, public house, or even parliament do. The public sphere is a place of exchange, both of information and of goods or capital. Traders thus serve the public; shops are open to the public – as indeed are pubs (public houses, which are important not only as businesses but as places for members of the public to meet). Buying, selling, and entering into contracts may be activities of private persons, but they have public effects through the aggregation accomplished by markets.
Habermas has shown that informed public debate depends also on public access to information. His (1989) famous phrase "structural transformation of the public sphere’’ refers to the process in which expansion of the public sphere achieved democratic enlargement at the expense of the rational quality of discussion (and thus its ability to identify the best policies for the public interest). During the course of the 19th and early 20th, the idea of public opinion stopped referring to opinion that had been adequately tested in public debate, and thus deserved the assent of informed citizens, and began to refer to whatever happened to be believed by individuals collected into "the mass of people," regardless of the grounds for their beliefs.The transformation of the notion of public opinion into an aggregate of private opinions was influenced by the rise of liberal individualism and especially of market society and social theories derived from markets.[7]
Governments are said to act on behalf of the public, but it is a challenge to reconcile the different views of many different groups each of which may engage in its own public communication. Moreover, publics do not stop at the borders of states. There is growing reference to international public spheres – of Islam or Christendom, of human rights activists or global media.
Recursion: The characteristic of recurrence or repetition, in particular when a pattern repeats itself and thus becomes self-defining. Fragments of orality appear in graphic cultures (written and printed poetry structured in dialogue form) in the same way that fragments of graphic culture appear in digital media (Ebooks represent images on the screen as “pages” and “bookmarks”). Recursion is a useful concept in media studies to understand how old or embedded patterns of media use influence the adaptation to new media. Recursion is also heavily related to metaphor and metonymy in that only parts, fragments, or scripts of media signification are carried over to a new medium: no media can entirely mediate the context created by another medium.
Representation: Representation (also, mimesis) as a classical term emphasizes the imitation or appearance of some absent thing (Aristotle). That is, the representation is a copy (speech, painting, writing), an imitation, of some thing that is not present. Thus, the content, the meaning, is always absent. However, per Aristotle, if one is accurate in one’s representation, the “absent” thing can be known
In semiotics, a representation is the concrete form (signifier) taken by abstract concepts (signified), otherwise stated, something present that stands for something that is absent. In language, semiotics, media and communication, representations are words, pictures, sounds, gestures, stories, etc., that “stand for” ideas, emotions, facts, objects, etc. Representations rely on existing and culturally understood signs and images, on the learnt reciprocity of language and various signifying or textual systems. It is through this “stand in” function of the sign that we know and learn reality. Because representations (parole) rely on a previously existing set of signs (langue), they both “stand in” for what is absent, but also interpret that absent thing within a new context. See also Inscription, Metaphor/metonym
Semiotics: Semiotics is the study of signs. It seeks to understand how language is made meaningful and how meaning can then be communicated in society. Semiotics is not to be found in the text itself, but rather it should be understood as a methodology. Accordingly, it is not a discipline in its own right, but its influence on institutionalized ways of approaching media texts has been considerable.
Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure is often considered to be the founder of modern semiotics (though semiotics or semiology has existed for centuries) along with other figures such as the American philosopher of language C. S. Pierce, the Italian semiotic theorist Umberto Eco and the Soviet theorist of language Valentin Volosinov (who may have been the literary writer Bakhtin).
In its effect, the emphasis on the 3-part sign (the sign, the signifier and the signified) opened both the object of interpretation and practitioner to more than just linguists, philosophers, and literary critics. Barthes used semiotics to analyze both literary and popular cultural texts, particularly via his Mythologies (1973). He led the way for those working in media and cultural studies to begin to apply semiotic terms to the analysis of everything from advertising to ideology. "Meaning" was not independent of the 1) The codes and systems into which signs are organized. Codes involve ‘choice and chain’, paradigm and syntagm and 2) the culture within which these signs and codes operate. Meaning is dependent upon shared structures of understanding.
Signal: "sign, indication," from Old French signal, seignal "seal, imprint, sign, mark." A signal is the mark of communication that leads to a sign. It is the very mark of difference in a medium or channel, from waving a hand to an electron travelling on a copper wire. A signal indicates difference through a specific channel, that is, its only signified is that the channel is not the same. Otherwise stated, a signal is an interruption in the normal flow of data in a cultural network. In electronics, a signal is the measurable difference in electro-magnetism. A steady stream of signals transforms the individual difference into signs. An analog signal (hand gesture, sound, writing) is continuous, or a relation between sender and receive by material proportion, whereas digital signals (letters, binary code) are discrete, isolated units.
Sensorium: This is the sum of an organism’s sense-ability. McLuhan emphasized the changes the human sensorium undergoes through the adaptation to new media. The elimination or reduction of one sense often results in the emphasis on or domination of another sense. Whereas orality emphasized the sense of sound in context of the other senses (smell, touch), visual culture emphasizes sight at the expense of other senses (smell and touch are reduced). The perception of bodily motion in the early 20th century (trains, cars, film, airplanes) caused a sudden redistribution of the human sensorium that emphasized “fast” and “new” as good and “slow” and “old” as bad. Studying the effects of media will inevitably lead one back to a shift in an individual’s and culture’s sensorium, which will offer potential explanations for social, moral, political, and social shifts. See also Media effects, Embodied cognition, Media imperialism
Technology: the tools, machinery, and systems that are used for getting things done (Green, 1994). This includes the knowledge by and through which we use and live with these tools, machinery, and systems. All media are a form of technology, but not all technology are necessarily media.
Text: etymologically, a text is anything that is woven together. Only in the 20th century did “text” begin to stand for written or printed work. Through semiotics, Roland Barthes emphasized not the individual work (a book) and its relationship to the author and reader, but the “text” or signification possibilities that a material work allowed. “Text” here refers to a network or tapestry of cultural signification (discourse/archive) within which a work can be determined to be meaningful. Outside of a text, a work is meaningless.
Derrida, in his refutation of structuralism, shows that the meaning of any inscription is always “textual.” That means, it is always differed because it is inscribed in a text, or “a chain or a system within which it refers to the other, to other concepts, by means of a systematic play of differences.” For Derrida, the presence of a trace or inscription appears only through “movement according to which language, or any code, any system of referral in general, is constituted ‘historically’ as a weave of already existing differences.” See also Archive.
Utility: an object or behavior’s “use-value.” Utility has been central to the discussion of any medium and subsequently work of art since the mid-eighteenth century, or even longer. Can a literary work of art have a use value for education, religion, pleasure, entertainment, propaganda, etc.)? Or, is it purely aesthetic, a sensible experience? For Kant, he argued no: if a work of art is useful, one’s valuation of it is always interested (I use/like/dislike it) and no absolute judgment could be made about it.
Media critics have picked up on the problem of utility and art, particularly Andy Clark and Marshall McLuhan. Media technologies always emphasize particular uses, while at the same time they deemphasize other possible uses. Speech and audio-technologies emphasize sound, temporality, and the ability to communicate over a range distances while deemphasizing space; Sight emphasizes optical consistency and space while deemphasizing time. Use-values are developed by individual and groups based on particular patterns of embedding technologies (culture) to show the difference between “natural” and “artificial” uses. Critical theories analyze an object’s use-value (embeddedness in a culture). Artists attempt to explore the limits of a medium and thus move beyond its utility. See also Culture, Value
Value: The concept of value, according to some ancient authorities, was once a simple and straightforward economic concept: “‘value’ meant the worth of a thing, and ‘valuation’ meant an estimate of its worth” (Frankena, 1967: 229). But the very same authorities also note that question of value was already debated in ancient philosophy in relation to questions of justice, morality, virtue, pleasure, utility, and happiness. Current debates about value are situated around either a search for an “ultimate value” with a generalizable theory or value as a judgment (estimation or evaluation). That is, value is either “in the world” or “given to the world.” This has led to various theories of “absolute-value,” “use-value” and “exchange-value” from Plato to Marx. Nietzsche’s approach to a “transvaluation of all values” emphasizes the historical quality of value of an object, idea, or practice that can and will necessarily change (because it is historical). One of the effects of media is to shift cultural values based on increasing the possibilities and reducing limits of a particular medium.
Virtuality: from virtue, “masculine, power.” The definition that emphasized effect over reality appeared in the 16th century. The application to computer technologies appeared in the 1960’s with the ability to produce the effect through software that does not exist in hardware. A cyborg phenomenon, experienced by the individual whose identity is extended or manipulated through her/his interaction with technology. Underlying the concept of virtuality is the presumption that technology can take us out of ourselves, produce effects that are not in the original material. Virtual worlds allow users to create new identities by manipulating information to wander through landscapes that are divorced from the material reality that one usually inhabits.
Speech and writing are no less virtual than a computer game: we have simply become so used to the effects of speech and writing that we accept this technology as natural rather than a product of technology.
Visuality: The state of being visual; an emphasis on sight as the dominant medium in the human sensorium. The introduction of linear perspective and typography in the Renaissance not only emphasized and valued sight over sound, but introduced a myriad of social effects that are still being experienced and understood today. Here are only a few effects of visuality and visual culture: whereas speech tends to synthesize, vision tends to divide; whereas orality emphasizes the present moment and repetition through ritual, visuality emphasizes discrete units of representable time that can be organized sequentially into past, present and future; whereas orality emphasizes touch and density of space, visuality emphasizes rational space, precision, and reproducibility. For example, imagine and compare the open market and narrow streets of a medieval city with the city plan of Washington D.C.: a medieval city is organized through use and bodies in motion while Washington D.C. was designed and planned on paper before it was actually constructed.
The term visual culture—made popular by S. Alpers in her book, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the 17th Century—emphasizes all the social, economic, religious, psychological, and political effects of valuing sight as the dominant sense in the transformation. Latour argues that visible inscriptions—immutable mobiles—brought about major shifts in European culture in the 16th and 17th centuries.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, the invention of new means of image production and reproduction, from the stamping of coins to the printing press to lithography, photography, film, video, and digital imaging reveals that not only has vision become the dominant means of knowledge, but the overabundance of images also conceals technological advances in audio production, storage, and re-production (phonograph, radio, microphone, cassette, CD, and portable digital audio MP3/4). Visuality is now only part of the hybrid configuration of modern and post-modern cultures (Mitchell). See also orality; sensorium
Bibliography of Key Words and Concepts
Hartley, John. Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts. 3rd Ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Bennett, Tony, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, editors. New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Mitchell, W.J.T. Theories of Media: Glossary of Key Words, University of Chicago, 2002. http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/navigation.htm
Mitchell, W.J.T. and Mark B. N. Hansen, editors. Critical Terms for Media Studies. The University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Schulz, Peter J. and Paul Cobley, editors. Theories and Models of Communication. Handbooks of Communication Science, Vol. 1. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013.
Works Cited
Anonymous. Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2016.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Clark, Andy. “Reasons, Robots and the Extended Mind,” Mind and Language 16:2, (2001).
Derrida, Jacque. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
Du Gay, Paul and Stuart Hall, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage Publications, 1997.
Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock, 1972.
Gramsci, A. Extracts from Prison Notebooks. London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1971.
Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Latour, Bruno. “Visualizing Cognition: Drawing Things Together.” Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1988),
Parikka, Jussi. What is Media Archeology. Cambridge: Polity, 2012.
Siegert, Bernhard and Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. “Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Studies.” Grey Room, No. 29, New German Media Theory (Fall, 2007), pp. 26-47.
Yates, Francis. The Art of Memory. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966.
Footnotes
[1] Andy Clark, “Reasons, Robots and the Extended Mind,” Mind and Language 16:2, (2001).
[2] Du Gay, Paul and Stuart Hall, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: Sage Publications, 1997, 8-40.
[3] Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archeology, (Cambridge: Polity, 2012) 1-18.
[4] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
[5] New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
[6] Amanda Loos, “symbolic, real, imaginary” In Theories of Media: Glossary of Key Words, University of Chicago, 2002), http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/navigation.htm
[7] New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
