culture

One of the overarching themes that developed over the course of the conference was the gap between the field of electronic literature and mainstream digital culture. In her keynote, Claudia Kozak refered to this as “The Great Divide” between highbrow culture and lowbrow culture, where electronic literature is considered too experimental for mainstream media because of its use of technology. Kozak says we should not abandon the experiment, but rather bridge the gap, for instance through fan fiction, which she considers to function at the intersection of experimentalism, anti-authorship, and mass culture.

In Reciting America, Christopher Douglas examines the discursive facility of the “American dream” as the fundamental cliché that “America,” as a national, historical, and social body, uses to talk of itself to itself. Douglas by no means assumes a monolithic vision of “America” as a geopolitical and cultural entity, nor does he delineate a singular narrative or genealogy of the American dream. Rather, what he rightfully brings to the fore is the extent to which the discourse of the American dream, like other ideals of American national exceptionalism (liberty, justice, right of self-determination, self-reliant individualism), functions as a national ideology, as individuals past and present invoke its vocabulary, myths, and ideals to map themselves as American citizen-subjects, economic-subjects, and literary-subjects. Hence Reciting America explores the linguistic, semiotic, and most importantly, the social significance of reciting American clichés.

In Always Already New, Lisa Gitelman explores the newness of new media while she asks what it means to do media history. Using the examples of early recorded sound and digital networks, Gitelman challenges readers to think about the ways that media work as the simultaneous subjects and instruments of historical inquiry. Presenting original case studies of Edison's first phonographs and the Pentagon's first distributed digital network, the ARPANET, Gitelman points suggestively toward similarities that underlie the cultural definition of records (phonographic and not) at the end of the nineteenth century and the definition of documents (digital and not) at the end of the twentieth. As a result, Always Already New speaks to present concerns about the humanities as much as to the emergent field of new media studies. Records and documents are kernels of humanistic thought, after all―part of and party to the cultural impulse to preserve and interpret. Gitelman's argument suggests inventive contexts for "humanities computing" while also offering a new perspective on such traditional humanities disciplines as literary history. Making extensive use of archival sources, Gitelman describes the ways in which recorded sound and digitally networked text each emerged as local anomalies that were yet deeply embedded within the reigning logic of public life and public memory. In the end Gitelman turns to the World Wide Web and asks how the history of the Web is already being told, how the Web might also resist history, and how using the Web might be producing the conditions of its own historicity.

Source - amazon.com

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering study in media theory. McLuhan proposes that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study. He suggests that the medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered through it, but by the characteristics of the medium. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as an example. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. The book is the source of the well-known phrase "The medium is the message". It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists.