Critical Terms

Questions:
Mitchell and Hansen are discussing "media studies" as opposed to "media culture." How do they define "media" and "media studies"? What matters for them in doing media studies? What do they hope we will attend to in doing media studies?

Notes:

“Media Studies” embraces researchers who study virtual reality environments, hypertext fiction, materialist anthropology and culture, the history of information theory, precinematic devices, the institution of print, and word frequency in Greek literature.” (VIII)
“It seems clear that media as collective singular noun is somehow tied to the emergence of mass media.”(xi)

“Following the morphing of medium into focus for itself: thus media studies can and should designate the study of our fundamental relationally.” (xii)

“one of the most conspicuous features of media studies, considered a singular field, has been its failure to communicate across the borders that divide the technophiles, the aesthete, and the sociopolitical theorist.”(xvi)

“Our aim is to take the field back beyond the “digital revolution” of the last twenty years to its deeper origins of antiquity and early modernity, and to think of media history as highly differentiated both spatially and temporally.” (xix)

Ideas/ Answers:

Media seems to have become a blanketing term to cover any and all mediums in which media is composed. No matter what device is used to present and image, an argument, or a text it still falls under the singular term Media. Yet, under this blanket term a complex world of studies exist that spread across a multitude of fields that may or may not intersect. Yet, given the current state of the world, the internet, and social interaction in general one would assume that these fields of study would have more interaction. This is not the case according to Mitchell and Hansen. As they state on xvi the sociopolitical theorist and the technophiles have nothing to do with each other; even though, the production of technology in itself has shaped the world of socio and bio politics.

By not looking at the work of those to the left and right of them would the researchers, scholar, or philosopher not be ignoring the same things that they are trying to study?

This is one of the points that Mitchell and Hansen want the reader to look at. The other is the development of media studies in general. They want to go back beyond the past twenty years and looks at the development of media studies and look at the history of media. Which is something I am very curious about because if a person and a society is a sum of all of its parts then media then media has played a huge part in the shaping of us as individuals and as society as a whole.