Foundational Concepts
Define culture
Culture is both a verb and a known that represents a set of beliefs and values, a form of power-knowledge that maps the social world, creates a “moral space” where people work towards the “good life”, creates a habitus which is a durable set of “inculcated dispositions” that enact and embody beliefs/values, takes on ritualistic structures.
What emerged because of the rise of urbanized, industrialized, mass society?
The mass culture industry
Who invented the phonograph?
Thomas Edison
When initially developed in the late 19th and early 20th century, radio was thought of as a means of point-to-point, person-to-person communication, and therefore was considered a form of:
Wireless telegraphy
Who designed the first automatic computing engines?
Charles Babbage
Define communication
Distinctive social actions and practices, deploys signs and symbols in social interactions (gestures/words spoken and written/visual representation/non-verbal interactions), produces a shared or common symbolic understanding of the world through the sharing of culture that makes the world meaningful, creates the social or society in the form of shared intersubjectivity or sense of social reality
Who argues that the entire history of communication practices and media technologies can be divided into two types: time-biased media where the basis of communication is ritual, and space-biased media where the basis of communication is transportation/transmission.
James Carey
What is the earliest audio recording?
A snippet of “Au Claire de la Lunce” recorded on the phonautograph in 1860 by inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville.
What are the two key concepts Susan Douglas offers that are specific to the particularities of radio as a medium of sound?
Exploratory listening and technologically produced aurality.
What is the primary purpose of computers?
Their primary purpose was to enable managerial control of production processes of businesses through the control of information via calculation.
Define power
Power as coercion: compelling people to action against their will or choice, Power as influence: controlling the parameters of a situation so that the goals of other people become one’s means to accomplish a goal, Power as hegemony: the ability to shape the values that people use to determine their goals, Power as affordance: accounts for the ways that technological artifacts or platforms privilege, open up, or constrain particular actions and social practices
Define what tele-presence is and explain the unique outcomes of this form of communication.
Tele-presence is the ability to project presence at a distance through media technologies based upon the transmission of information. It creates a new virtual space where personal and social identities can be developed. It produces new imagined communities of belief, belonging, and propinquity (intimacy). Is related to the terms topos (place of habitation) and socius (bond/interactions between friendly individuals).
What are the Recording Angels and what are they a metaphor for?
Recording Angels are angels in Judaic, Christian, and Islamic angelology. God assigns them with the task of recording the events, actions, and prayers of each human. These include bad sins and good deeds. This is a metaphor to evoke the distinctive power of phonography as techne - the power to record the evanescent medium of sound as an event in time for all time (time biased).
Define Marshall McLuhan’s concept of acoustic space and how it relates to sound.
A key concept for McLuhan in understanding the social and psychic spaces of radio is that of “acoustic space” (space of sound) or “auditory space” (space of hearing). Acoustic space is a perfect sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose margins are nowhere. The essential part of sound is that it has no location but fills a space.
What did the introduction of Graphical User Interface (GUI) allow for?
With the invention of the GUI and the mouse, one could interact haptically (use of technology that stimulates the senses of touch and motion) with digital media. Computing became less about the command and control of information and more about the creation of new digital spaces and places for communication and socialization.
Define technology
Tools that extend human capacities, can be an artifact or an object (material or immaterial), there is a certain technique or “know how”that must be understood when using technology, techne is the power of technology as the symbolic and material practice of casting the world into sense, "Technology- practice" by Pacey - how technologies are embedded in organizations and practices that can lead to positive or negative outcomes
What is the concept of the carnivalesque and how does it relate to modern events such as the CNE?
Developed by Russian literary/cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, the carnivalesque is a vulgar and excessive, flatulent and promiscuous, proudly and explicitly profane form of consumption/entertainment. The CNE relates to this idea because the spirit of a carnival is to digress from normal hierarchies and practices of power in everyday life. The CNE provides opportunities to celebrate forms of entertainment/consumption deemed as lower status and less valuable (e.g. crazy food offerings that people would usually be disgusted by).
What is the difference between telegraphy and phonography, and how has their usage supported technological advancements?
Telegraphy refers to the transmission of messages that became possible due to the telegraph. The telegraph marked the separation of transportation and communication, allowing messages to be send across great distances. Phonography refers to the use of the phonograph, a technology that combined aspects of previous communication machines, to transcribe sound on a vibrating plate. Phonography allowed for the public forms of mass entertainment to come into the privacy of homes, making it the first mass media to bridge mass culture with domestic consumption.
What are the differences between “listening out” and “listening in”? How do these in turn create listening publics?
Listening out entails being in a “state of anticipation” where we are actively attending to the possibilities of listening to a specific kind of radio broadcast or programming. Lacey therefor conceptualizes “listening out” as “attentive and anticipatory disposition.” Listening in occurs as a consequence of “listening out”; when we ”listen in” we are paying attention to a particular broadcast or program and find a connection with it. Listening in is a receptive and mediated communication practice. Listening publics are created through the shared, collective experience of listening in to a particular instance of broadcast radio content.
Describe what TCP/IP is and how the two layers of this program differ from each other.
TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is the basic communication language or protocol of the Internet. TCP/IP is a two-layer program. The higher layer, Transmission Control Protocol, manages the assembling of a message or file into smaller packets that are transmitted over the Internet and received by a TCP layer that reassembles the packets into the original message. The lower layer, Internet Protocol, handles the address part of each packet so that it gets to the right destination. Each gateway computer on the network checks this address to see where to forward the message.
What is Innis’s concept of medium theory? Define the three main changes that occur to culture concerning mediums that he highlights in this theory.
Innis’s concept of medium theory is the idea that the material/technological attributes of a medium can influence the message. Changes in symbols and material properties of media forms (what people think with) alter the structure and dynamics of a society’s interests (what people think about) which foster different “imagined communities” of interest/moral proximity and their arenas/locations (where and with whom people do their thinking).
Explain the ways that telegraphy relates to capitalism and the spread of commodities.
Carey said that the transmission logic of communication entails the deployment of media technologies to exert control over people and material objects (and their movement) in space across great distances. This allows the command and control of the movement of people and goods to align with the accumulation of wealth and thus power. Mixing telegraphy with the railroad system, the idea that the price of a good was dependent on the place it was in was undermined. The cost of commodities was now determined by time (how much it would cost at one point of the year vs. another).
Define Ong’s theory of orality and explain how it creates a bond between a listener and speaker.
Ong argues that because sound is a disappearing medium, it demands active, engaging attention that bonds listeners to speakers. This bond is restricted through time (must communicate in a certain time frame) but is no longer constrained by space (listener can engage with speakers from anywhere).
Explain Peters concept of the metaphor of broadcasting and how it relates to the Parable of the Sower.
The exact root origins of the term ”broadcasting” as it applied to radio are unclear. But Peters argues that the term has an agricultural meaning that refers to the “scattering of seeds.” The meaning of metaphor of broadcasting as a cultural practice of communication, according to Peters, is expressed in the Biblical Parable of the Sower. Jesus tells of a farmer who sows seed indiscriminately. Some seed falls on the path (wayside) with no soil, some on rocky ground with little soil, some on soil which contains thorns, and some on good soil. In the first case, the seed is taken away; in the second and third soils, the seed fails to produce a crop; but when it falls on good soil, it grows and yields thirty-, sixty-, or a hundred-fold. Jesus later explains to his disciples that the seed represents the Gospel, the sower represents anyone who proclaims it, and the various soils represent people's responses to it. In relation, broadcasting is a form of communication that is provided by a particular group, absorbed by a variety of people, and receives varying responses.
What is HTML and what was the significant influence that came with the introduction of this on the WWW (World Wide Web)?
HTML is Hypertext Markup Language, and is the building block of the WWW. HyperText Markup Language is a coding language that web browsers use to interpret and compose text, images and other material into visual or audible web pages. The unique part of HTML is that the code is freely available to everyone. This means that in addition to being consumers of the Internet, users also have the tools to become producers of content.