The 'Theory' in Media Theory: The 'Media-Centrism' Debate
In: Media Theory Vol. 1 | No. 1 | 2017
In: Media Theory Vol. 1 | No. 1 | 2017
SSRN
In: Peace review: peace, security & global change, Band 8, Heft 1, S. 113-117
ISSN: 1469-9982
In: Journalism quarterly: JQ ; devoted to research in journalism and mass communication, Band 68, Heft 4, S. 894-895
ISSN: 0196-3031, 0022-5533
In: Media, Culture & Society, Band 45, Heft 2, S. 406-412
ISSN: 1460-3675
Beginning in 2020, the Crosscurrents section of this journal featured 10 provocative essays on the theme of "Encounters in Western Media Theory." These essays stemmed from scholars' engagements with various canonical texts in media, cultural, and communication studies that took the Anglophone Global North as a taken-for-granted site for making sweeping theoretical claims. In this editorial, we reflect on the critiques and arguments that scholars have developed to move past debates about "internationalizing" and "de-westernizing" the field of media, communication, and cultural studies. Taken together, the essays published in this themed section grapple with the shifting terrain of academic knowledge production and the potential for redefining practices of reading, citation, and teaching.
In: RSUH/RGGU Bulletin. "Literary Theory. Linguistics. Cultural Studies" Series, Heft 9, S. 116-125
This article introduces the concept of "digital light" into the Russian-language space of media theory, and also offers its conceptualization as a distributed network medium that transforms cultural practices. The article substantiates the need to distinguish digital light as a separate concept. Unlike the concept of "electric light" introduced by McLuhan, the content of the concept of "digital light" is based on the constructive and physical features of this medium, and not on abstract ideas about "pure information". This article describes the media properties of digital light, determined by its semiconductor structure and the property of sampling the electrical signal. It substantiates the productivity of considering these structures in the context of a broad concept of digital light, rather than individual technological forms or software solutions. Considered not as a separate technological form, like a light bulb or a screen, but as covering the entire set of radiating and controlling means, and as a dynamic developing network, the elements of which can be both visible to a person and invisible to him (as a part of the infrastructure), digital light creates various situations of multi-channel exchange of electrical signals, eliminating the boundaries between its own digital structure and the illuminated objects of the environment. In particular, digital light allows interactive digital installations to exist and can process and visualize big data in real time. Digital light, understood in this way, turns out to be a medium with its own "message", which overcomes McLuhan's claim of electric light as a "medium without a message".
In: Asian journal of communication, Band 10, Heft 2, S. 1-13
ISSN: 0129-2986
In: International journal of media & cultural politics, Band 10, Heft 2, S. 125-128
ISSN: 2040-0918
Abstract
In: Nineteenth century prose, Band 39, Heft 1-2, S. 137-173
ISSN: 1052-0406
In: Asian journal of communication, Band 10, Heft 2, S. 1-13
ISSN: 1742-0911
In: Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung: ZMK, Band 7, Heft 1, S. 9-25
ISSN: 2366-0767
In: International journal of media & cultural politics, Band 2, Heft 2, S. 115-129
ISSN: 2040-0918
A continuing debate regarding public intellectuals consistently involves a narrative of decline. This declinist position rests on an assumption that the media are central to the public intellectual role, though the declinists focus strictly on institutional explanations, to the neglect
of the role played by the media. This paper explains how the application of media theory to this debate will give us a better understanding of the public intellectual. I suggest five avenues for the integration of communication theory into the study of public intellectuals. First, there are
fruitful comparisons to be made between public intellectuals and journalists. Second, the ritual dimension of public intellectual communication is worth exploring. Third, we should consider the roles played by media organizations and institutions as they shape the public intellectual role.
Fourth, recent developments in the sphere of public intellectuals demonstrate the need to examine public intellectuals across all media. Fifth, we should be careful to analyse the authority at work in public intellectual communication.
In: Thesis eleven: critical theory and historical sociology, Band 107, Heft 1, S. 47-52
ISSN: 1461-7455, 0725-5136
This article follows the recurrent theme in Friedrich Kittler's 40 years of prolific academic writing, which is of course the media-related production of discourse. Five heuristic principles are identified in his work: enabling, reduction, historization, the abolishment of the 'two cultures', and post-hermeneutics. The paper closes with criticism of the intrinsic limits of Kittler's point of view.
In: Thesis eleven: critical theory and historical sociology, Band 107, Heft 1, S. 47-53
ISSN: 0725-5136
In: NBER Working Paper No. w19807
SSRN
Working paper
In: Media, Culture & Society
ISSN: 1460-3675
The global pandemic threw the world in all its asymmetries and diversities into a limit situation without known coordinates. This article suggests that in its aftermath there is actually a call and an opportunity for more than rethinking existing keywords in the field. It argues that the crisis was "improbable" in the meaning of the word offered by Amitav Ghosh who traces a common sense forged by probabilistic science, that expelled the unthinkable from the modern imaginary. Tracking down this regime of certainty, the essay offers a discussion on the place or displacement of the disorderly, the uncertain, and the disruptive in media theory. It submits that reawakening to the improbable, in light of Karl Jaspers' philosophical anthropology of the limit situation, offers a fruitful conceptual avenue ahead. Apart from introducing the concept of the (digital) limit situation, the article offers a conversation between existential media studies, critical disability studies, feminist STS, and the environmental humanities, by also inviting an extended family of unruly concepts, including dismediation and deferral. It concludes that limit situations can be transformative also for media theory, if we dare to seize them, by means of existential modes of transversal listening to ghostly pasts never fulfilled.