Edmund Carpenter, Marshall McLuhan (eds.): Explorations in Communication: An Anthology (1960)
Filed under book | Tags: · communication, communication technology, language, mass media, media, media theory, print, technology, television
“This book explores the form and dynamics of communication to discover how it works – how human beings exchange feelings, facts, fancy. What makes words, sentences and grammars meaningful? What is the difference between the private world of reading and the instant “togetherness” of television audiences? How does the inner structure of communication vary from society to society?
These essays by world-famed scholars and artists cover the whole range of communications media — from skin touch to voice inflection, from newsprint to electronic devices, from primitive grammars to films. Here we step outside the various media by examining one through another. Print is seen from the perspective of electronics; television is analyzed through print — and thus literacy’s role in shaping man is brought into sharp new focus.
The contemporary revolution in the packaging and distribution of ideas and feelings makes a new view of communication imperative. To give voice to such views, the journal Explorations was begun in Toronto in 1953, financed by the Ford Foundation and the Toronto Telegram. From the start, the magazine won high praise from the academic world. The articles in this book, all of which appeared in Explorations, represent some of the most original research now in print on problems that will confront us for many years to come.” (from front flap)
With contributions by Ray L. Birdwhistell, Edmund Carpenter, H. J. Chaytor, Lawrence K. Frank, Northrop Frye, Arthur Gibson, Sigfried Giedion, Stephen Gilman, Robert Graves, Stanley Edgar Hyman, Dorothy Lee, Fernand Léger, Marshall McLuhan, David Riesman, W. R. Rodgers, Gilbert Seldes, Jean Shepherd, Daisetz T. Suzuki, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt.
Publisher Beacon Press, Boston, 1960
Issue 218 of Beacon series in Contemporary Communications
210 pages
via Archive.org
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John McMillian: Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, alternative media, counterculture, journalism, mass media, new left, publishing
How did the New Left uprising of the 1960s happen? What caused millions of young people-many of them affluent and college educated-to suddenly decide that American society needed to be completely overhauled?
In Smoking Typewriters, historian John McMillian shows that one answer to these questions can be found in the emergence of a dynamic underground press in the 1960s. Following the lead of papers like the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, and the Berkeley Barb, young people across the country launched hundreds of mimeographed pamphlets and flyers, small press magazines, and underground newspapers. New, cheaper printing technologies democratized the publishing process and by the decade’s end the combined circulation of underground papers stretched into the millions. Though not technically illegal, these papers were often genuinely subversive, and many of those who produced and sold them-on street-corners, at poetry readings, gallery openings, and coffeehouses-became targets of harassment from local and federal authorities. With writers who actively participated in the events they described, underground newspapers captured the zeitgeist of the ’60s, speaking directly to their readers, and reflecting and magnifying the spirit of cultural and political protest. McMillian pays special attention to the ways underground newspapers fostered a sense of community and played a vital role in shaping the New Left’s highly democratic “movement culture.”
Deeply researched and eloquently written, Smoking Typewriters captures all the youthful idealism and vibrant tumult of the 1960s as it delivers a brilliant reappraisal of the origins and development of the New Left rebellion.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2011
ISBN 0195319923, 9780195319927
304 pages
review (Dan Berger, International Journal of Communication)
review (Kirkus Reviews)
review (Russ Smith, The Wall Street Journal)
interview with the author (video, 48 min)
Internationale situationniste n°1-12 (1958-1969) [French]
Filed under journal | Tags: · capitalism, consumerism, everyday, life, mass media, situationists, spectacle
L’Internationale situationniste produit ses travaux théoriques dans sa revue Internationale situationniste. La revue fut également rédigée par Guy Debord, Mohamed Dahou, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Maurice Wyckaert, Constant, Asger Jorn, Helmut Sturm, Attila Kotanyi, Jørgen Nash, Uwe Lausen, Raoul Vaneigem, Michèle Bernstein, Jeppesen Victor Martin, Jan Stijbosch, Alexander Trocchi, Théo Frey, Mustapha Khayati, Donald Nicholson-Smith, René Riesel, René Viénet, etc. 12 numéros furent publiés entre 1958 et 1969. Cette revue était un terrain d’expérimentation discursif et également un moyen de propagande.
Bulletin central édité par les sections de l’international situationniste
Director: G.-E. Debord
Rédaction: Paris
via La Bibliotheque Fantastique
Numéro 1, Juin 1958, 32 pp.
Numéro 2, Décembre 1958, 36 pp.
Numéro 3, Décembre 1959, 40 pp.
Numéro 4, Juin 1960, 40 pp.
Numéro 5, Décembre 1960, 52 pp.
Numéro 6, Août 1961, 44 pp.
Numéro 7, Avril 1962, 56 pp.
Numéro 8, Janvier 1963, 68 pp.
Numéro 9, Août 1964, 48 pp.
Numéro 10, Mars 1966, 84 pp.
Numéro 11, Octobre 1967, 72 pp.
Numéro 12, Septembre 1969, 116 pp.
View online (museumjorn.dk)
Stephen Harper: Beyond the Left: The Communist Critique of the Media (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · capitalism, communism, democracy, fascism, journalism, left, marxism, mass media, migration, neoliberalism, politics, television, wikileaks
Attacking the cherished assumptions of liberal media criticism, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.
The ideological distortions of the conservative media, from Fox News to the Daily Mail, are widely acknowledged and often denounced among contemporary critics and commentators. But what if The Guardian newspaper and BBC news, in fact, constitute the most insidious forms of capitalist propaganda? In a wide-ranging and erudite polemic, Beyond the Left analyses capitalist news and current affairs media from a radical perspective. The book rejects the liberal and pluralist paradigms that often underpin critiques of the media, showing how media texts reflect and reinforce the material interests of the ruling class and arguing that the principal ideological menace today is posed not by the right wing, but by the left-liberal media, as it co-opts and obscures radical political positions and reinforces a range of mystifications, from anti-fascism and humanitarian war to green politics. Drawing on the work of radical media critics as well as the writings of revolutionary communist groups and considering the recent reporting of war, industrial action, immigration and the environment, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.
Publisher Zero Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2012
ISBN 1846949769, 9781846949760
114 pages
review (Laura Cooke, Socialist Review)
Comment (0)Jenna Burrell: Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana (2012)
Filed under book | Tags: · actor-network-theory, africa, electronic waste, internet, mass media, net neutrality, networks, spam, web, youth
The urban youth frequenting the Internet cafés of Accra, Ghana, who are decidedly not members of their country’s elite, use the Internet largely as a way to orchestrate encounters across distance and amass foreign ties–activities once limited to the wealthy, university-educated classes. The Internet, accessed on second-hand computers (castoffs from the United States and Europe), has become for these youths a means of enacting a more cosmopolitan self. In Invisible Users, Jenna Burrell offers a richly observed account of how these Internet enthusiasts have adopted, and adapted to their own priorities, a technological system that was not designed with them in mind.
Burrell describes the material space of the urban Internet café and the virtual space of push and pull between young Ghanaians and the foreigners they encounter online; the region’s famous 419 scam strategies and the rumors of “big gains” that fuel them; the influential role of churches and theories about how the supernatural operates through the network; and development rhetoric about digital technologies and the future viability of African Internet cafés in the region.
Burrell, integrating concepts from science and technology studies and African studies with empirical findings from her own field work in Ghana, captures the interpretive flexibility of technology by users in the margins but also highlights how their invisibility puts limits on their full inclusion into a global network society.
Publisher MIT Press, 2012
ISBN 0262017369, 9780262017367
Acting With Technology series
236 pages
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Comment (0)Shanthi Kalathil, Taylor C. Boas: Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · censorship, e-government, human rights, internet, mass media, politics
As the Internet diffuses across the globe, many have come to believe that the technology poses an insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule. Grounded in the Internet’s early libertarian culture and predicated on anecdotes pulled from diverse political climates, this conventional wisdom has informed the views of policy makers, business leaders, and media pundits alike. Yet few studies have sought to systematically analyze the exact ways in which Internet use may lay the basis for political change.
In Open Networks, Closed Regimes, the authors take a comprehensive look at how a broad range of societal and political actors in eight authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries employ the Internet. Based on methodical assessment of evidence from these cases—China, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—the study contends that the Internet is not necessarily a threat to authoritarian regimes.
Publisher Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington DC, 2003
Global Policy Books series
ISBN 0870031945, 9780870031946
217 pages
Stan VanDerBeek: Violence Sonata / The History of Violence in America (1969-70)
Filed under artist book | Tags: · art, collage, early media art, education, machine, mass media, media, participation, performance, technology, television, violence
Stan VanDerBeek was part of the “Rockefeller Artists-in-Television” residency program at Boston public television station WGBH from 1969–1970, during which time he produced the simulcast television program Violence Sonata. The program, directed by David Atwood and Fred Barzyk, was transmitted simultaneously on both Channels 2 and 44 on January 12, 1970, with the suggestion that viewers place two television sets side-by-side. Following sonata form, the piece is composed of three segments: “Man,” “Man to Woman,” and “Man to Man.” The simultaneous broadcast consisted of material VanDerBeek composed from previous films, archival and newsreel footage, video shot in Boston for the show, and filmed collages, further manipulated and enhanced through overlays and color saturation. Sections of the broadcast were played before a live studio audience, with actors also performing a play written by VanDerBeek for the show. Home viewers were encouraged to call in their responses to the program between the acts. The series of collages entitled, The History of Violence in America was conceived as layouts for reproduction and publication in a booklet to accompany the broadcast.
video excerpt (Violence Sonata)
Download (Violence Sonata – script, photo documentation, sketches, collages, reviews)
Download (The History of Violence in America, 22 pages)
