Framing: Food for thought

At Wonkette, two photos from AFP and AP are presented showing people with shopping bags making their way through a flooded New Orleans. One of the photos is captioned to indicate that the person was "finding bread and soda from a grocery store," and the other that the person had been "looting a grocery store." See if you can find differences aside from the captions.

Weblogs report on the hurricane

Print and broadcast media outlets are not necessarily the fastest in getting information out about the effects of the hurricane that has hit the Gulf Coast. There is a good practical reason for this: the continuing danger, plus the fact that many areas have been mostly evacuated, mean that there are not so many people on the spot, and that government agencies which provide damage reports have not been able to do their surveys immediately. CNet offers some details on some of the different ways that weblog writers and contributors are stepping into the void, either by aggregating the information available from different local media or by publishing on-the-spot reports from "citizen journalists." It might be thought of as a window into ways in which technologies like the internet are changing the boundaries of access to information, and also expanding the ability of people to act as sources of information.

Problems with the McQuail book

Some students have pointed out to me that their editions of the McQuail book have some serious printing problems -- missing or partial graphics. I have contacted Sage Publications to let them know, and will keep you informed about any response that I get.

Expanding the boundaries of authorship

By now all of the people in the course should have received an automatically generated message from Blogger inviting you to become co-authors of the weblog. This means that you have the ability to post, to comment, and generally to participate in online discussion. I have also altered the settings so that only people who are members of the group can post comments.

If you should have received an invitation but did not, please let me know. Also let me know if you should not have received one but did. Either way, I will fix it.

We can talk a bit about guidelines for posting if you care to. Although a lot of it seems self-evident (what you post should be substantive and related to the course, should advance discussion, and of course should hold to standards of etiquette), our commonly understood guidelines will probably develop more or less naturally as we go along.

The interface of Blogger is fairly intuitive, but people wanting a walk through can contact me or try the Blogger help page which addresses most common questions.

Can television dramas cause terrorism?

That was the topic of an exchange between the novelist Salman Rushdie and British politician George Galloway. Galloway told the audience:

...TV executives had to be "very sensitive about people's religion" and if broadcasters did not show sufficient sensitivity they "had to deal with the consequences".
He said: "You have to be aware if you do [offend people's beliefs] you will get blowback. You should do it very carefully, especially if you are a public service broadcaster."

Rushdie, subject to death threats since the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989, responded to objections to a hypothetical TV adaptation by saying:

"The simple fact is that any system of ideas that decides you have to ringfence it, that you cannot discuss it in fundamental terms, that you can't say that this bit of it is junk, or that bit is oppressive ... we are supposed to respect that?"

Pay attention to the structure of the argument: controversial material will cause anger, and then violence. Although Galloway accepts the hypothesis and Rushdie rejects it, neither one of them is disputing the logic of it.

Explaining media content

There is a mildly provocative little story in The Guardian on the escalating antics in one of those so-called "reality" shows (you know these: film clips showing tiny portions of the interactions between carefully chosen people under heavily controlled conditions).

Journalists Lorna Martin and James Robinson ask the inevitable question, "Has TV become too sexually permissive?" You'll find their tentative answer if you read the story, but what may be more important is who is giving the answers. They come from three types of sources: 1) the personalities who appear in the shows, 2) the producers of these programs, and 3) the agency that regulates the programs. So two out of three from employees of the media industries, and the third from an organization closely associated with them. The criteria for giving answers seem to be: 1) does it contribute to the internal honesty of the text, and 2) is it likely to attract an audience.

The text in question is a newspaper article rather than a research study, but it will not be hard to appreciate the difference between the journalists' approach and the one used in the Payne Fund Studies conducted between 1929 and 1932, the first major effort to produce an empirical account of media effects. Their questions were built around the effects of popular films on the behavior of children. The equivalency between the Payne researchers several decades ago and the Guardian reporters does not have to be so strong for it to be clear how different levels of analysis lead to different answers.

The McQuail companion site

Sage Publishers offers a companion site to McQuail's Mass Communication Theory. At the online readings page there are links to texts not in the McQuail reader (some of them we are using for the course, and some we are not), and come exam time some people might enjoy the flash card glossary, a nice little definitions game. The site also includes a fairly comprehensive set of links to online sources on media research.

How the future looked

The introduction of new media technologies have always been accompanied with high hopes and widespread fears. Here are some quotations (there are more in the article) from a piece by Peter Edidin in today's NY Times giving examples of early responses to radio and television (the NYT site also has some multimedia samples, and at the end of the piece is a list of sources for the quotations):

RADIO

1921
Velimir Khlebnikov, Russian poet, "The Radio of the Future."
The Radio of the Future - the central tree of our consciousness - will inaugurate the new ways to cope with our endless undertakings and will unite all mankind.
The main radio station, that stronghold of steel, where clouds of wires cluster like strands of hair, will surely be protected by a sign with a skull and crossbones and the familiar word "Danger," since the least disruption of radio operations would produce a mental blackout over the entire country, a temporary loss of consciousness.

1922
Bruce Bliven, "The Ether Will Now Oblige," in The New Republic.
There will be only one orchestra left on earth, giving nightly worldwide concerts; when all universities will be combined into one super-institution, conducting courses by radio for students in Zanzibar, Kamchatka and Oskaloose; when, instead of newspapers, trained orators will dictate the news of the world day and night, and the bedtime story will be told every evening from Paris to the sleepy children of a weary world; when every person will be instantly accessible day or night to all the bores he knows, and will know them all: when the last vestiges of privacy, solitude and contemplation will have vanished into limbo.

1923
J. M. McKibben, "New Way to Make Americans."
Today this nation of ours is slowly but surely being conquered, not by a single enemy in open warfare, but by a dozen insidious (though often unconscious) enemies in peace. Millions of foreigners were received into the country, with little or no thought given to their assimilation. But now the crisis is upon us; and we must face it without a great leader. Perhaps no man could mold the 120 million people in a harmonious whole, bound together by a strong national consciousness: but in the place of a superhuman individual, the genius of the last decade has provided a force - and that force is radio.

1924
Waldemar Kaempffert, "The Social Destiny of Radio."
It so happens that the United States and Great Britain have taken the lead in broadcasting. If that lead is maintained it follows that English must become the dominant tongue. Compared with our efforts at mass entertainment and mass education, European competition is pathetic. All ears may eventually be cocked to hear what the United States and Great Britain have to say. Europe will find it desirable, even necessary, to learn English.

TELEVISION

1939
David Sarnoff, the chairman of RCA, at the televised opening of the RCA Pavilion at the World's Fair in New York.
Now we add sight to sound. It is with a feeling of humbleness that I come to this moment of announcing the birth, in this country, of a new art so important in its implications that it is bound to affect all society. It is an art which shines like a torch in a troubled world.

New York Times editorial
The problem with television is that people must sit and keep their eyes glued to the screen; the average American family hasn't time for it. Therefore the showmen are convinced that for this reason, if no other, television will never be a serious competitor of broadcasting.

1946
Thomas Hutchinson, "Here is Television: Your Window on the World."
Television means the world is your home and in the homes of all the people of the world. It is the greatest means of communication ever developed by the mind of man. It should do more to develop friendly neighbors, and to bring understanding and peace on earth, than any other single material force in the world today.

The predictions are fascinating, not just in the sense that we can say now which ones were right and which ones were wrong, but also because of the awareness (sometimes inflated!) that the "prophets" had that new technologies would have an impact on the ways in which people live and think. Another point to keep in mind here: many if not most media technologies were developed for a purpose other than the one for which they eventually came to be used -- telephones were thought of as a broadcast technology, the phonograph as a medium for dictation and, famously, the internet as a means for government officials to communicate in case of a disastrous war.

Welcome

This is an experiment to see how well this fine blog technology can be integrated into education. If it works, I will keep this site around for future media courses, and see what can be done with other courses. Those of you who are interested in Balkan societies, cultures and politics are welcome to have a visit to my other blog.