Why Study the Media: The Texture of to the possibilities, of communication, both
Experience by Roger Silverstone within and against the taken-for-granted in our
> Why do we use media?
● We use media for pleasure,
information, comfort, security,
continuity of experience, and
intensity of the experience.
> Surface of the Media Culture:
● It is sufficient for those concerned to
sell.
● The surface is often insufficient if we
are interested in what media do, as well
as what we do with media. It is also
insufficient if we wish to grasp the
intensity and insistence of our lives with
our media.
> Media are central to our everyday lives that we
must study them
● Study them as social and cultural, as
well as political and economic
dimensions of the world.
● Study them in their ubiquity (the ability
to be anywhere) and complexity.
● Study them as contributors to our
variable capacity to make sense of the
world, to make and share its meanings.
> We should study media in Isaiah Berlin’s
terms, as part of the “general texture of
experience” — A phrase that touches the
grounded nature of life in the world, those
aspects of experience which we take for granted
and which must survive if we are to live and
communicate with each other.
> The media are now part of the general texture
of experience.
>If we are to include language as a medium, this
would ever be so, and we might wish to consider
the continuities of speech, writing print and
audiovisual representation as indicative of the
kind of answers to the question I am seeking for;
that without attention to the form and contents,
everyday lives, we will fail to understand those
lives.
> Berlin’s characterization is principally a
methodological one; the “why” necessarily
involves the “how.”
> History is to be a humane undertaking, not
scientific in its search for laws, generalizations
or theoretical closure, but an activity premised
on the recognition of difference and specify and
a realization.
> There are other metaphors in the attempts to
grasp the media’s role in contemporary media;
conduits (a channel for conveying water or
other fluid/ like a pipe.) They offer more or less
undisturbed routes from message to mind.
● We can think of them (conduits) as
languages, providing texts and
representations for interpretation.
● We can also approach them as
environments, enfolding us in the
intensity of media culture, cloying,
containing, and challenging in turn.
> McLuhan sees media as extensions of a
man—like prostheses. Although it enhances
both power and reach, it is also both disabling
and enabling as become progressively entwined
in the prophylactically social.
> Metaphors (that are used to understand
communication) are useful but we need to go
beyond them.
> The answer to my question will involve
tracing media through the ways in which they
participate in contemporary social and cultural
life which involves an examination of media as a
process.
>To understand media as a process, involves a
recognition that the process is fundamentally
and eternally social, is to insist on the media as
historically specific.
> Media(s) are changing and have changed
radically.
>To understand the media as a process also
involves a recognition that the process is also
fundamentally political or strictly politically
economic.
> Meanings that are offered and made through
the various communications that flood our
everyday lives have emerged from institutions
increasingly global in
Their reach and in their sensitivities and
insensitivities.
> The power of these institutions, the power to
control the productive and distributive
dimensions of contemporary media, and the
correlative and progressive weakening of
national governments to control the flow of
words, images and data within their national
borders, is profoundly significant and
unarguable.
> There’s a constant tension between the
technological, the industrial and the social, a
tension between the technological— a tension
that must be addressed if we are to recognize
media as indeed a process of mediation.
> Institutions do not make meanings, they offer
them. Institutions do not change evenly; they
have different life cycles and different histories.
> We study media because we want to answer
the questions like who mediates the media? How
do we understand media as both content and
form? Etc.
> There is no single theory of media to be had.
(it is a terrible mistake to look for one.)
>What we want is to apply what we have come
to understand, to engage with those w who
may respond and encourage reflexibility and
responsibility.
> Study of media must be a relevant and humane
science. Therefore, the answers to the questions
earlier will be premised on a sense of
complexities that are substantive,
methodological, and moral.
> Media are daily; constantly present in our
lives. (Radio, newspaper, telephone, etc.)
> In the mundane world, media operates most
significantly in such a way that they filter and
frame everyday realities through different
representations, by providing touchstones
(fundamental parts), references, and
maintenance of common sense.
> Common sense is where we must begin,
neither singular nor undisputed
> The media depend on common sense; they
reproduce it, appeal to it, but also exploit and
misinterpret it.
> It is through common sense that we are
enabled; to share and distinguish our lives from
others.
> Our lives as human beings constantly move,
and as we do these things every day, we are
always accompanied by media; watching tv.
Reading newspapers, etc. And these media
activities links us altogether who also do the
same things.\
> Our experiences with media are often fleeting .
(quick, easy to disappear)
> What Silverstone is trying to say is contrary to
what Manuel Castells (1996) which is “space of
flows” in simpler terms it means that it is a
space that is organized and created by the
constant movement of people, goods and
information over large distances. The space of
flows is not so much organized to move things
from one place to another, but to keep them
moving around. In the space of flows, arrival
becomes elusive, virtually indistinguishable
from departure.”
> For Silvester, we (humans) move too in media
spaces both in reality and fiction. And to
STUDY THE MEDIA is to study these
movements in space and time to study their
interrelationships.
> To study media is to study them in their
contribution to the general texture of
experience, then certain things must follow:
● > The first one is to recognize the
reality of experience, for they are real
including media experiences.
> We must be able to distinguish reality
from fantasies that are brought by
media.
> this is where we can say that our
common sense as media users is
challenged.
● > The second one is to enquire more
deeply into what constitutes experience
and its shaping.
> Experience is shaped, a matter of both identity
and difference. It is unique, shareable, physician
and psychological.
> Experience is:
1. Framed by prior agendas and past
experiences.
2. Ordered according to norms and
classifications that have stood the tests
of time and society.
3. Interrupted by unexpected events like a
catastrophe, its own vulnerability, or by
its own inevitable lack of coherence.
4. Acted out and acted upon.
> Kirsten Hastrup suggests that “imagination
springs from the body as well as from the mid.”
Which implies that the body is the material basis
for experiences. (As stated earlier, media is like
an extension of our body.)
> Psychoanalyses are:
● Forceful - disturbing and non-rational
● Blurs reality and fantasy/fiction/troubles
● Shift from clinical theory and practice to
cultural critique
● Way to think about feelings
● Cognitive in orientation
● Behavioural in content
● Challenges sociological reduction
● An approach to reinforce a sense of
complexities of media and cultural
without closing them down.
> Experience, both mediated and media,
emerges at the interface of the body and psyche.
> Our stories, our conversations are present both
in the formal narratives of media (news reports,
documentaries, etc.) and everyday tales (gossips,
rumours, casual conversation, etc.)
> Media are central to the process of making
distinctions and making judgments; they mediate
the dialectic between the classifications that
shape experience and experience that colours
classifications, then we must enquire into the
consequences of such mediation.
“We must study the media.”