Media & Technology Course

Media and Technology

part 1. introduction and first questions

There are several traditions of making sense of media and*or technology. The course is aimed at considering these traditions and putting them into the contexts of what we know and how we practice our understanding.

I suppose that we already have some tacit knowledge and can problematise it and

a_ find ways to develop this knowledge

b_ focus on particular approaches and use them as frames that activate and prohibit particular ways of thinking

So, to start we should choose between the technologies (a variety of) and The Technology (as a concept, something grasping the variety of meanings). The same with media: there are some types of media and The Media as a concept.

By making this virtual circle, we can concentrate together, problematise the terms and make them instruments of your own research and critical projects.

Here I advice you to focus on your role as researchers.

The conceptual fields so far become the instruments = metaphors to develop the argument and the key ideas.
Why metaphors? It is one of the ways to think about theory, but not the only one. It can be useful to include and exclude some other ways of making sense of technologies and media.

Example 1

Thinking of a technology as a body modification, we concentrate on personal functions we already have. Technologies are interpreted as something that makes us stronger and*or smarter.

However, it is not the same as treating technology as a social institution that is universal to anybody.

Question 1

Can you think of some particular examples of such technologies in your everyday life? Does it work with your individual experience? Or do some collective beliefs work at the same time? Or do you need other metaphors for them?

Please, you can write any ideas here.

Example 2

If the technology is an innovation, it is not connected to a person, but it is elaborated by particular people/organizations and can be used by others.It produces a distinction between the users and the inventors, developers or owners of the technology. This way also considers that there is a part of the world(s) being transformed by technology (nature, human or society affected).

Question 2

What are the political implications of such understanding? Does it work for you as a critical thinker? Does it give you some kind of encouragement to become the inventor?
Do you reflect yourselves as users of some technologies? Which ones?

Please, you can write any ideas here.

Example 3

Now we think about media in different ways. One of the ideas is that media is a social institution that connects and disconnects people in different ways. For instance, what we call "broadcasting media" enables the relationships between audience and producers. Or, on the other hand, media can connect people without these distinctions, making them peers.

Contrary to this, the broad understanding of media is close to the technology. We can think about almost anything as a media: a book, traffic lights, a cup of coffee, your body and clothes. Everything that has a message is a media (an innuendo to Marshall McLuhan).

Question 3

How do you use the broad and narrow understanding of media? Which one was important for you when you have chosen this MA programme?

Please, you can write any ideas here.

Our aim throughout the course will be to comprehend how the different types of understanding media and technology have developed in several intellectual fields and communities. We'll focus on it in November, while in December you'll have an opportunity to discover how they work in interdisciplinary and more or less applied research: about the city and the internet.

In order to do it, I'll ask you to present the approaches you find most interesting and figure out what problems and issues they produce.

The problems are the combination of intellectual objects and questions that are problematized in particular intellectual context. The examples of those are the power relations, the masculine VS feminine approach, the status of communication and hierarchy.

The issues are particular situations where+when we distinguish media and technology as something visible and problematic. They might be the algorithmization of journalism, mediated religious practices, self-tracking or smart city instruments to capture us in the public transport.

The task for the next class is to choose one issue per student/small group and figure out what what the problems are and how we can approach them, what are the intellectual instruments that might help with it?

issues + problems

You can start thinking of your own examples here and we can make a decision about the particular form of dealing with them in the class.

It will be the key task during all the course, so you can start now.

Finally, let's think about you as researchers and think about the role of the research in dealing with technologies.

I can suggest several framings for this role:

Researcher as a critical figure (e.g. Geert Lovink)
Researcher as a participant of media+technologies production (Genevieve Bell)
Researchers as those who experience media+technologies themselves and reflect this experience (Laureen McCarty)
Researcher as a part of an academic community who summarises and presents in a disciplinary field different ways of understandings (Barry Wellman)
Researcher as translator*bridge between different ways of dealing with media+technologies (danah boyd)

researcher +

Can you maybe suggest another role of the researcher or go beyond the ones I suggested?

If you have some ideas, please share.

The idea of this course is to choose one of these ways to do your own research and observe how things change. At the first few synchronous classes we'll try to find the foundations of your tacit knowledge and set your own objectives for the course.

You can start here by writing down what you want to learn and experience. At the end of the course we'll have a conversation with each of you to understand what went well and wrong, how to evaluate this and what to do further.