1. Critically Thinking about Digital Media

2. Basic Media History Gutenburg Movable type, c. 1439 (before? … ) Newspapers / magazines Telegraph (1844) / telephone (1876) / photograph (1839) Radio (1895) / television (1800s / early 1900s) / cable (1940s) / satellite (1960s) Vacuum tubes / transistors / integrated circuits / computers

3. New media are associated with… A shift from modernity to postmodernity Intensifying globalization processes A replacement (in the West) of an industrial age of manufacturing by a post-industrial information age A decentring of established and centralized geo-political orders

4. How are the media changing? Institutions Constant flux of ‘new media’ Ideological connotations of ‘the new’ Inclusive – ‘interactive media’ … ‘computer mediated communication’ … virtual reality … non-linear communication …

5. Discussion How is each made? Why is each made? How is each distributed? What role do you have in the communication process? How would these products be different if you lived in –China? – Saudi Arabia? -Cuba?

6. Communication Context Theories and Models (paradigm) Relationships and Power Economics Nature and Nurture How can you evaluate a system in which you are intricately involved? What is real? How do you know?

7. Shannon’s (1948) Model

8. Mediated Communication

9. Interactive Communication

10. A Transactional Model

11. Critical / cultural study Ideological analysis Narrative Analysis Semiotics Cultural analysis Political economy Psychoanalytic theory What are theories and models? What is a myth? Scientific method? Quantitative vs. qualitative study

12. Analysis of media content Newspapers Magazines Tabloids Blogs Video games Radio programming TV programming Online video (YouTube, Hulu, etc.)

13. Assumptions You already have done some media analysis Being critical stand back from the hype and investigate the nature of change Not reduce everything to being capitalist scams Not assume everything has changed; not assume nothing has changed Knowing some of the important scholars…

14. Marshall MacLuhan (1911-1980) His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory. McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message" and the "global village” The subject that would occupy most of McLuhan's career was the task of understanding the effects of technology as it related to popular culture, and how this in turn affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities.

15. Raymond Williams (1921-1988) One of the first in Britain to develop the discipline of Cultural Studies Tried to understand literature and related cultural forms (including media) not as the outcome of an isolated aesthetic adventure, but as the manifestation of a deeply social process that involved a series of complex relationships Evaluated relationships between ideology and culture, and the development of socialist perspectives in the communicative arts

16. Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) Many consider Bush to be the Godfather of our wired age, often making reference to his 1945 essay, "As We May Think." Bush described a theoretical machine he called a "memex," which was to enhance human memory by allowing the user to store and retrieve documents linked by associations. This associative linking was very similar to what is known today as hypertext.

17. Others… Gottfried Leibniz (math, logic, philosophy) Charles Babbage ( invented first mechanical computer) Alan Turing (father of computer science and artificial intelligence) Ted Nelson (hypertext) Roland Barthes (structuralism, semiotics) Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Jaron Lanier? Tim Berners-Lee? Who else?