Sunday, February 8, 2009

Marcus' questions for week four

Hey y'all,

Here are my thoughts for this week. I tried to extend the discussion on previous posts while also including my own thoughts, which will hopefully promote discourse a bit more.

1) My reaction to “Revisiting the Classics” was similar to Gabino's, and I think "rubbed me the wrong way" applies to me as well. I felt like Baudrillard and Fukuyama were seeing only what they wanted to see, and it did seem like the subscribed to a kind of revisionist history that is not at all set in stone. I realize that everyone does that to a degree, but I still feel like they were pretty enthusiastic about it. Have they responded to historical criticism in other writings about their data? Am I missing something, or did anyone else feel like the support was a bit gerrymandered?

2) Gabino also made the point that the authors encourage postmodernity because modernity is dead. I agree with the reading, but I'd challenge the author's assertion - declaring an entire movement, or an entire interpretive field, to be "dead" is remarkably self-serving. As an artistic critique, it doesn't really work - artists today replicate works from every imaginable field, and since we're still educating our youth about them, it's hard to call them "dead." The same goes for media. Is news radio "dead" because of television, or did news radio "fail" because of television? Of course not. Declaring modernity a "failure" requires a universal scale and a context of vision that we simply do not have, especially when those espousing that view squarely support another ideology with failings of its own. My question would be, does it really matter - why insist something is dead instead of accept possible diversity of theory?

3) In response to Brian Goss' writing, I'm inclined to agree with David - the critique was lucid, well constructed and effective. But who cares, really? Goss is attacking opinion commentators and trying to establish a link between the media and general and punditry. I'd argue that "journalism" and "punditry" are fundamentally different, and I'd argue that improper connections between the two are a big part of why so many Americans are jaded with the media. By all means, dissect Will and Krugman and Joe Klein and Paul Burka and Sean Hannity and all the rest of them, but it's not at all fair to use them as a benchmark for an umbrella "media." Yes, many of them are Republican, and yes, many others have a special reverence for Marx. I'm willing to bet, even, that somewhere out there is a lonely neo-marxist that voted for George W. Bush ... but they're talking heads, and that's what they do. That's not what the media at large tries to do, even if it sometimes fails.

4) World War II was a popular starting point for several cultural study readings, and I can understand why. I also agree with Yukun that many of those writings emphasized a passive audience, if not an outright bullet theory. But I think they're under-emphasizing something - it's not entirely that German audiences were passive, or that their economy and political structure was bankrupt by the time the Nazis came to power. It's that film, particularly with audio, was still pretty new for most Germans - and "Triumph of the Will" was a very powerful example of new media use. Citizens were awed by the technology itself, not just the message. It's the same principle that game the Islamic Revolution in Iran such fervor - these little tape decks could transport ideas across the world, and most folks had no exposure to that kind of technology. It sounds weird calling movies or tape decks "new media" in 2009, but it's true, and I think it gets overlooked. So where should researchers draw the line - is it audience passivity, or is it awe at new technology? I doubt a tape deck could topple a government these days, but the internet maybe? Or, arguably, did Obama already do just that?

5) Chantal Mouffe's assertions concerning hegemony are interesting, especially his commentary about cultural schizophrenia. She also establishes counter-arguments that perhaps the media is not so much establishing hegemony, but simply reflecting societal norms. While I can understand the logic behind both arguments, I wonder how anyone could measure that distinction, qualitatively or quantitatively. Is this one of those chicken-and-the-egg situations that we can never really categorize, or am I missing something?

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