Clay Shirky: How social media can make history | Video on TED.com

Clay Shirky: How social media can make history | Video on TED.com


Hi Media Sociologists,

I think this is an excellent video about how the media is shifting. Shirky uses a similar model of understanding media to that of the circuit of culture.
What does this tell us about Media Sociology? Do you think that what he is saying is very different to how media works? What I find is that although his ideas take the circuit a step further, he still holds to a traditional idea that media has, till now, promoted a discourse or set of discourses which have been unquestioningly taken up by the general population/ audience. As we know from reception studies, people have been producers of meaning for a lot longer, although his point about the interaction within the audience community is probably the mitigating factor here. What do you think?

Media Sociology Blog

Hi people, found a new blog I would like to share which has a lot of great media insights, and wonderful photos:
The Kisseloff Collection

Also a link to a New Yorker article about tv which is just peachy. The writer is Jeff Kisseloff, and he has written a number of books about media/tv...

Including : The Box: an oral history of television

Which looks great, sort of a combination of audience studies and cultural memory. Available on Fernleihe...enjoy...

Does Dropping iPods and not Bombs Actually Work?

The Internet and especially the blogosphere have been widely heralded as new, extremely effective tools of free speech, of spreading democracy or revolting against tyrannies. Most notably in the case of the recent protests in Iran, sometimes called the "Twitter Revolution".
Evgeny Morozo, however, does not agree at all. He even claims that the Internet can help keep dictators in power and that for every "Cyper-activist" there is a Cyber-captive". This speech is about 12 min. long and I do not agree with everything he says, but it is an interesting and discussion-worthy opinion:

Lecture on Camp; "Popliteratur"

Some of you might be interested in this taped lecture by Stefanie Roenneke on the subject "Adieu Tristesse! Wieviel Camp steckt in Popliteratur". The lecture was given at the University of Hamburg as part of the lecture series "Poetik der Oberflächlichke: Die deutschsprachige Popliteratur der 1990er Jahre".

In this German language lecture, Roenneke briefly discussed a notion of camp based on Jack Smith and Susan Sontag and then discusses the German pop lit. book Tristesse Royale.

Longer abstract, bibliography and the video available here.

The Media Education Foundation.

(We had a lively discussion elsewhere and I briefly commented on it on my personal blog, yet I decided that it would make sense to repost this on this blog for future reference and for those not involved in the earlier discussion)

The Media Education Foundation is a website and production company producing documentaries to " to inspire critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media." Most of these documentaries on a large number of topics are related to our field of study and are available as full-length Internet previews for personal home use (the university license/ DVD is quite expensive). For example, there are lectures and speeches by bell hooks or Stuart Hall. Below is a trailer for the documentary that brought the site to our attention, Sut Jhally's Dreamwolds 3: Desire, Sex & Power in Music Video.

Little Helpers.

Probably all of us have heard of Zotero, the research tool and bibliography management extension for Firefox. If you haven't already, do check it out. You need to get used to it, but then it's really helpful to get and stay organized.

I found another helpful add-on for Firefox: You can add Google Scholar to the Firefox search bar (upper lefthand corner). That way you can, after selecting the Google Scholar option, simply highlight a term and run a Google Scholar search with a right-click. Pretty convenient.
Haven't found an add-on for our library catalog or the MLA/EBSCO database - yet.

Gaze & Phychoanalysis etc.

Hey you potential perverts,

Here's a link to Daniel Chandler's website, which has more sections concerning 'the Gaze' (e.g. Mulvey's female gaze we talked about in the Auto-Tutorial).

And here's Dino Felluga's website. It has stuff on psychoanalysis (though some of the info is a bit contradictory I would say comparing to some other sources we had a look at for the presenation so look with your own discretion), marxism, narratology, postmodernism, new historicism and gender and sex.