MECM90015 History and Philosophy of Media 2012

4: Research Methods in History and Philosophy of Media

stylistics

technologies

political economy

audiences

history of stylistics

history of technologies

historical political economy

institutions, national media

workplace media

film, TV, internet, wirless

media/ICT4D

convergence, globalisation

standards / regulation

technique

interpretation

statistical

ethnographic

affordances

Media and CommunicationsGeneral Topics

Venus of Willendorf c. 24,000-22,000 BCE, Oolitic limestone, 43/8 inches (11.1 cm) high

some basic periods:

prehistory: rock art and carving, ritual and dance, cities and ar-chitecture . . .

writing, the alphabet and mathe-matics; tablets, scrolls and books

printing

global telecommunications

broadcast media

network media

Cubeiform script, Sumer, c.26th century BCE (2600)

detail of tablet measuring 9.2×9.2×1.2 cm.

Inscriptions on tomb in Yang he, Uixian County, Shan dong Provincec.2500 BCE

Manuscript of Archimedes, c.200 BCE Dead Sea Scroll, Ist centurey BCE

Gutenberg 42-line Bible c. 1455

The Great Eastern arriving in Heart’s Content, Newfoundland in 1866 with first successful transatlantic telegraph cable (after failures in 1858 and 1865)

Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adven-turously go traveling.

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of its Me-chanical reproduction, XIII, 1936

Walter J. Ong, S.J., 1912-2003Orality and Literacy: The Technolo-gizing of the Word, 1962

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J 1881-1955The Phenomenon of Man 1955

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living - Karl Marx

Those who do not understand history are condemned to repeat it - George Santayana

Marshall McLuhan 1911 - 1980

The Mechanical Bride (1951)The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962)Understanding Media (1964)

The Medium is the Massage (1967)War and Peace in the Global Village (1968)

Harold Adams Innis (1894-1952)We can perhaps assume that the use of a medium of com-munication over a long period will to some extent deter-mine the character of knowledge to be communicated and suggest that its pervasive influence will eventually create a civilization in which life and flexibility will be-come exceedingly difficult to maintain and that the ad-vantages of a new medium will become such as to lead to the emergence of a new civilization (Bias 33)

Empire and Communications - (1950)The Bias of Communication - (1951)

RAYMOND WILLIAMSTelevision: Technology and Cultural Form (1973)

‘technology is the product of a particular so-cial system’ - symptomatic technology

televisual flow - also segmented (Feuer) and interruptable (Doane) – as a culturally specific use of television

Marxist theory of technology as means of production, controlled in any era by the ruling class who own the means of production and or-ganise the mode of production in their own interests. Such technologies can be reorganised and remade in the interests of a different class, a statement also important to other Marxist media critics notably Bertolt Brecht (on radio) and Hans Magnus Enzensberger (on video)

H.261 CodecSTRUCTURE ‘a hierarchical structure with four primary layers. From top to bottom the layers are: Picture; Group of Blocks, or slice, or video picture segment; Macrob-lock; Block’ (ITU 2005:13

COLOUR YCbCr, which codes for luminance (Y) and two chro-ma channels (C), blue and red, on the principle that the panchromatic Y channel captures the necessary detail, while the absence of green (as used in almost all colour film, television and high-end storage media like DVD and Blu-Ray) minimises redundancy be-cause the green channel overlaps with both red and blue, especially in the yellow segment of the spec-trum. This is a variant of 8-bit colour graphics, which allows a range of 256 colours

KEYFRAMESuncompressed frames which are used as a reference for filling in compressed frames that come between them. In Flash vector animation, a similar process is

used to do the ‘in-betweening’, extrapolating from first and last frames the action needed to move from one to the other. This information is encoded not as full-frame animation but as an instruction set, which requires far fewer lines of code. As the Flash Video white paper notes, ‘A lower keyframe rate (such as one keyframe every six seconds) will result in a softer or blurrier image but reduces the band-width demand’ (Macromedia 2004: 13).

VECTOR PREDICTIONVectors predict movement based on sequence from an initial image. Encoding artefacts are increasingly likely in hand-held sequences when the prediction system is more likely to predict wrongly or as the Flash Video white paper has it, ‘If your camera is not steady, most of the image moves, causing a high per-centage of pixels in the video to change from frame to frame. A steady camera reduces the number of pixels that change from frame to frame, giving you better quality at higher compression rates (lower data rates’ (Macromedia 2004: 11).

Perioodisation: emergent themes

1. UNIT ENUMERATION = commodity equivalence, exchangability2 AVERAGING = biopolitical management of probabilty3. PREDICTIVE SCANNING = protocological control => Database Economy

Consideration - of the actually existing situation in its unique complexity (History, Past)

Wonder - at the specific unexpected details, readiness to question previous habits and assumptions (Phenomenology, Present)

Hope - for a ‘difference that makes a difference at some later time’ (Bateson); (Hermeneutics, Future)

Methodological Principles

OBJECTMETHOD

KNOWLEDGE