Media Technology and the Cinematic Milieu Flashcards
What are spirit mediums?
The first historically discovered medium
- a person making a connection between spirit world and human world
What is the latin root of ‘medium’ and what does it mean?
‘medius’: middle
What are the definitions of a medium?
- Means of doing
- Intervening substance
- Storage material
- Artist’s material/form
- Spirit medium
- Middle quality, state between 2 extremes
What are the common themes around the medium?
- Convey
- Transmit
- Act at distance
- Intervening
What characterises the medium?
- Acts as 3rd element that transmits/conveys meaning between 2 other elements
- It’s not neutral, but rather crisscrossed by technology and energy infrastructures, labor, economic interests, local social practices
Does the medium replicate content/meaning?
No
What is the process of mediation?
Taking something that’s present and representing it somewhere else
- new re-presentation in a new context
What is the relationship between signifier and signified according to Saussure’s Semiotics?
Arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified
What is a sign in Saussure’s Semiotics?
Sign = signifier + signified
What does Marshall McLuhan mean by “Medium is the message”?
- Medium shapes how we relate to the message (content)
- Forms of media shape not only what we think (message) but the habits and senses with which we perceive and make sense of the world
What are the gaps around the medium?
- The thing and its representation
- How media works here vs how media works there
What does Brian Larking proposes about the Cinematic Milieu?
In cinemas around the world:
-technology is a standardising force that erodes local particularities
- media tech. vs autonomous forces that reorganise the environment around them to accommodate their own technological needs
-> media technologies constitute modern subjects across contexts
- their effects can only be understood from local vantage points
What is the central idea of comparative media?
Neither technical autonomy nor milieu dominate
But they exist in reciprocal interaction with each other
What is the role of the ethnographer in comparative media?
The ethnographer tries to understand the reciprocal interaction between technical autonomy and cinematic milieu
What composes the cinematic milieu?
- Economic development
- Cultural contingency
- Technological development
- Local articulations of technology
