PP Notes for Dr. Strangelove's New Media Course, Summer 2008

1. New Media CMN 2170 – Summer 2008 Dr. Strangelove

16. Definitional Control

17. War over the meaning of things and events.

89. Hacking Culture: the public redefinition of private meanings

91. In capitalist societies the individual has no autonomous will or desire but rather is an integral part of the production system itself.

96. News item from 2001

104. 90 percent of children between the ages of 5 and 17 now use computers. (US 2002)

105. One of the most widespread corporate strategies is containment of the consumer – to own their eyeballs. This is what is ultimately meant by ‘convergence’.

106. The marketplace monopolizes the representation of reality.

107. New Media systems play a central role in creating normalities.

108. Media systems standardize belief and behavior.

109. Media systems are political in nature. They are systems of mass persuasion.

110. Media systems exercise influence over the possible forms of human behaviour.

111. Media systems play a role in establishing and reproducing normal behaviour.

112. Media systems help define what a desirable social order should look like.

113. Dr. Josef Goebbels, Reich Propaganda Minister

115. Cultural products, such as media texts, provide insight into the exercise of power over the nature of human nature.

116. As noted in 1934 by Ruth Benedict, we are witnessing a “standardization of custom and belief over a couple of continents,” Ruth Benedict. “Anthropology of the Abnormal,” in An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict . Margaret Mead (ed). Houghton Mifflin, 1959. 262.

117. “ The majority of mankind quite readily take any shape that is presented to them.” Ruth Benedict.

118. All behavior is influenced and shaped by cultural patterning.

120. Each society has “its own social process of creating new normalities within its next generation.” Ruth Benedict Media systems, privately-owned, for-profit consumer programming systems, are one of the primary tools for shaping new normalities within contemporary society.

121. Human nature is “far more variable than experience in any one culture would suggest.” Ruth Benedict

122. “ Because of the closeness of popular media texts to their social conditions, they provide privileged access to the social realities of their era and can thus be read to gain insight into what is actually going on in a particular society at a given moment.” Douglas Kellner, Media Culture . Routledge, 1995. Page 108.