CAT 1: Media Seductions - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

CAT 1: Media SeductionsMind and Machine

Elizabeth

Losh

http://

losh.ucsd.eduSlide2

How’s My Driving?Please CAPE This Course!

A link should have been sent to your .

ucsd

accountSlide3

Mixtape Madness!Slide4

Advice Moving Forward

Reach out and make contact with your professors

Take advantage of being a Sixth College student!

Plan ahead!Tackle projects in stages (with the Writing Studio if need be)

Know that original arguments don’t have to be hard to defend as you become researchers yourselves!Slide5

Writing Studio Pizza Party Tonight!

5:30-7:30 Writing Studio Finale for the Quarter!

You can talk about how to apply the last rubric!Slide6

Suggestions from Kyle Wilson

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/video/2009/feb/11/satanic-verses-rushdie-fatwa-khomeini

Sections like

2:54-3:32 

5:20-5:46

7:45-8:12Slide7

The Final Paper

Reflections from Classmate

Zuhayr

Haq

General Feelings about the Book I:

As a Muslim student in Media Seductions, I felt that reading

The Satanic Verses

was difficult but necessary. I believe it is important to understand and consider one’s arguments before condemning and speaking out against the arguments of others. While I do agree with Rushdie’s views regarding racism against immigrants and the forgetting of one’s culture, I disagree with the medium used to communicate them.

I guess in this case, I side with the McLuhan argument about the importance of the vessel of the information over the directly communicated concepts; to me, the vessel had a much more powerful impact than the message itself. I understand that it may be difficult for non-Muslims to understand why the book is offensive; there don’t seem to be explicit attacks on the fundamental concepts of Islam itself.Slide8

The Final Paper

Reflections from Classmate

Zuhayr

Haq

General Feelings about the Book II:

There are plenty of subtleties that disturb me as a reader, however. Saladin, who is considered a very noble figure amongst Muslims, is undermined as submissive to British culture. Many readers probably wouldn’t catch on to the fact that while his last name,

Chamcha

, means “spoon” in Hindi/Urdu, it is also slang for “lackey.”

Gibreel

Farishta

(

Farishta

means “angel” in Hindi/Urdu) is an allusion to Angel

Jibreel

in Islam. His role as a

Bollywood

actor completely undermines the angel’s role in Islam, as one who is consistent subservient to God.Slide9

The Final Paper

Reflections from Classmate

Zuhayr

Haq

General Feelings about the Book III:

One of the most offensive fabrications is the story of Muhammad. There are several instances in the novel where

Mahound

does things that are inconsistent with what we are taught as Muslims.

It struck me when

Mahound

compared “writers” to “whores,” because in the Quran we are taught that we should should strive to gain and spread knowledge. Slide10

The Final Paper

Reflections from Classmate

Zuhayr

Haq

About the Controversy:

I disagree with Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie. Islam does not endorse vigilantes; Muslim must respect the laws of the religions in which they reside. Also we are taught as Muslims that the Prophet himself loved those who were opposed to him. Slide11

The Final Paper

Reflections from Classmate

Zuhayr

Haq

Other Thoughts:

I feel that just because it may be in one’s power to use media to depict controversial things, they do not have to be depicted.

The Satanic Verses

and

Piss Christ

deal with the very sensitive issue of religion and have the potential to incite violence.

Although they are within legal bounds, they may be the cause of that which is not within legal bounds. Religion is a sensitive thing. Still though, I feel that it is necessary to understand these works before expressing opposition to them. Slide12

Charting Out Works

Synthesizing Information for the Final Exam

Losh

Thesis/Theses

Medium/Media . . . about Medium/Media

Level of vividness and interactivity

Genre(s

)

Historical Context (especially with regard to culture, art, and technology)

Scholarly disciplines weighing in on media influence

Moral panics, censorship, or prohibitions on what can be represented

Physical impact of media on the body or on the senses (how do horror, melodrama, etc. work physiologically)

What does this work say about questions of audience? Who is vulnerable to a particular kind of media experience?

Attitudes about nurture vs. nature (including race and gender)

Narrative Features (captivity, conversion, etc.) Slide13

Theories of Media Influence

History

Communication

Philosophy

Literary and Film Theory

Art History and Aesthetics

Psychology

Social Psychology

Behaviorism

NeuroscienceSlide14

The Biology of ReadingWhat travels at 30 miles per hour?

We’ll come back to vision tracking in the next lecture.Slide15

Ask Dr. Stella Debode of UCLA

about brain plasticity.

Slide16

What is a hemispherectomy?

Slide17

UCSD’s V.S. Ramachandran

(1951-)

Pages 29-30 of

The Shallows

In addition to studying phantom limb syndrome, he also studies

Capgras

delusion,

synesthesia

, and how mirror neurons might explain autism.Slide18

Nurture vs. Nature(Carr 28)

John Locke Immanuel Kant

Tabula Rasa Mental TemplatesSlide19

How do we try to design the the world?

How do our technologies design us?

How can we think about the ethics of technology? (45)

How do we understand the relationship between determinism and instrumentalism? (46)Slide20

Carr’s Anxieties about the Internet

Internet access may actually constrict the scope of our memory

Internet habits of reading may cause our attention to become more superficialSlide21

The Five Canons of Classical Rhetoric

Invention

Arrangement

StyleMemoryDeliverySlide22

What have you memorized?

Slide23

CAT Important Questions

How can you apply them to reading Carr?

In the twenty-first century, how do we shape the world, and how does the world shape us?

What ethical questions are raised by designed objects, environments, and interactions?

How do cultures manage change?

Why does the historical context of a given technology or commodity matter? How far back in time should we look? Which factors should we weigh most heavily?

How do we understand media on a global scale?

How is sensory experience mediated?

What forms of production and consumption do we take for granted in contemporary life?

How do new solutions sometimes create new problems? Slide24

What is the book as a medium?

Why is genre not important? (72)

Would the

Thorpes and the Tilneys agree?Slide25

Back to Plato and Writing as a Technology

Carr 53-57

Greeks invented the phonetic alphabet relatively recently

The shift from oral culture to literary culture

Plato’s arguments about “implanting forgetfulness in our souls” if we rely on “external marks”Slide26

Why are hyperlinks different from other finding aids?

Page 90: “Links are in one sense a variation on the textual allusions, citations, and footnotes that have long been common elements of documents. But their effect on us as we read is not at all the same. Links don’t just point us to related or supplemental works; they propel us toward them.” Slide27

The Concept of Deep Reading

“In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made up their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply” (65)Slide28

Obviously I think reading challenging books is important . . .

Did you spend Thanksgiving with a 500-page plus book?Slide29

. . . and I accept that technology often has unintended consequences

Do text readers for the blind have unintended consequences? Are we losing Braille literacy?Slide30

Plus Nicholas Carr seems like a nice enough guy . . .

Remember his e-mail from the beginning of class?Slide31

“fuller context of intellectual history” (115)Slide32

Thesis of the Week

Although

Nicholas Carr makes a more compelling argument about the decline of reading than Mark Bauerlein, author of

The Dumbest Generation

, Carr doesn’t always accurately represent arguments from the historical past about media influence or current findings about the intersection of culture, art, and technology in contemporary neuroscience. Slide33

Slide34

Print Culture and Social Media

Robert

DarntonSlide35
Slide36

Print Culture: Copyright, Piracy, and the Instability of Truth and Authorship

Adrian JohnsSlide37

Misreading

What does it mean to use Marshall McLuhan and Walter J.

Ong

in an argument critical of electronic media and secondary orality?Slide38

Overreaching

Is his description of the death of Alan Turing on page 81 accurate?Slide39

Why might two distinguished Duke professors disagree with Carr?

Katherine

Hayles

Cathy DavidsonSlide40

They would agree that Carr’s arguments have some merits

Davidson agrees about brain plasticity

Hayles

agrees about technogenesisSlide41

Hayles Questions the Science

The chain of assumptions that led Small, for example, to conclude that brain function changed as a result of Google searches can go wrong in several different ways (see Sanders (2009) for a summary of these criticisms). First, researchers assume that the

correlation

between activity in a given brain area is

caused

by a particular stimulus; however, most areas of the brain respond similarly to several different kinds of stimuli, so another stimulus could be activating the change rather than the targeted one. Second,

fMRI

data sets typically have a lot of noise, and if the experiment is not repeated, the observed phenomenon may be a chimera rather than a genuine result (in Small’s case, the experiment was repeated later with eighteen additional volunteers). Because the data sets are large and unwieldy, researchers may resort to using sophisticated statistical software packages they do not entirely understand. In addition, the choice of colors used to visualize the statistical data is arbitrary, and different color contrasts may cause the images to be interpreted differently. Finally, researchers may be using a circular methodology in which the hypothesis affects how the data is seen (an effect called

nonindependence

). When checkers went back through

fMRI

research that had been published in the premier journals

Nature

,

Science

,

Nature Neuroscience

,

Neuron

and the

Journal of Neuroscience

, they found interpretive errors resulting from

nonindependence

in 42 percent of the papers (cited in Sanders 2009:16). Slide42

Hayles Goes Back to the Primary Sources

Relying on summaries of research in books such as Carr’s creates additional hazards. I mentioned earlier a review of hypertext experiments (

DeStefano

and

LeFevre

2007) cited by Carr, which he uses to buttress his claim that hypertext reading is not as good as linear reading. Consulting the review itself reveals that Carr has tilted the evidence to support his view. The authors state, for example, that “[

t]here

may be cases in which enrichment or complexity of the hypertext experience is more desirable than maximizing comprehension and ease of navigation,” remarking that this may be especially true for students who already read well. They argue not for abandoning hypertext but rather for “good hypertext design” that takes cognitive load into account “to ensure hypermedia provide

at least as good

a learning environment as more traditional text” (

DeStefano

and

LeFevre

2007:1636; emphasis added). Having read through most of Carr’s primary sources, I can testify that he is generally conscientious in reporting research results; nevertheless, the example illustrates the unsurprising fact that reading someone else’s synthesis does not give as detailed or precise a picture as reading the primary sources themselves. Slide43

HaylesHyperattention

How might this have been a survival mechanism?Slide44

DavidsonAttention Blindness

How many basketball passes can you count?