Readings For Week 2

Crogan (Tracing the Logics of Contemporary Culture)
Poster (Global Media and Culture)
Liebler (Media Culture: Cultural Studies Review)
Jongbloed (Global Indigenous Media Review)

In the articles I found a few words with interesting terms that I am going to try and weave into the
Wiki tonight or tomorrow.

Words of interest
Cosmopolitan
–adjective
1.free from local, provincial, or national ideas, prejudices, or attachments;
2.of or characteristic of a cosmopolite.
3.belonging to all the world; not limited to just one part of the world.
4.Botany, Zoology . widely distributed over the globe.
–noun
5.a person who is free from local, provincial, or national bias orattachment; citizen of the world; cosmopolite.

Node
–noun
1.a knot, protuberance, or knob.
2.a centering point of component parts.
3.Anatomy . a knotlike mass of tissue: lymph node.
4.Pathology . circumscribed swelling.
5.Botany.
a.a joint in a stem.
b.a part of a stem that normally bears a leaf.
6.Mathematics. knot ( def. 12 ) .
7.Geometry. a point on a curve or surface at which there canbe more than one tangent line or tangent plane.
8.Physics. a point, line, or region in a standing wave at whichthere is relatively little or no vibration.
9. Astronomy. either of the two points at which the orbit of a heavenly body intersects a plane, especially the plane of the ecliptic or of the celestial equator. Compare ascending node, descending node.
10.Linguistics . an element of a tree diagram that represents a constituent of a linguistic construction.

Poster uses the term cosmopolitan in his articles and it raised more questions for me while reading the article than not. To be cosmopolitan (free from prejudices in general) is incredibly complex to think about. Throughout the article Poster show how the internet is seemingly free space is under constant scrutiny and constraints by the government and/or the private corporations that have purchased sites such as You-Tube and MySpace. Poster seems to view media studies through a sociological criteria and how the government and privates spheres shape those societies. Poster also implies that technology is a runaway machine that cannot be stopped. Poster is all over the place though from politics, to culture , to everything in between. So poster seems to show the diversity of Media Studies and how it can be a universal lens to critique many different lines of culture and media.

Crogan’s article provided me with an anchor point for other ideas. I had a class the summer before last on the ethics on nuclear war. That explained how the development of the star wars program helped bring about nuclear treaties. So that was interesting to put next to Crogans article because it shows how much society has benefited from nuclear product, and not just nuclear power. This articles is also along my lines of thinking, and Mitchell/Hansen’s, it looks at the beginning source of technology and watches it come forward through time. It does focus on one singular source of technology though rather than media per say. The development of the Sage program is one of the things we do owe our current communication abilities to and directly shaped how media and different mediums developed.

I had trouble with the media reviews. The Jongloed seemed to argue alongside/for the book being reviewed as where Libler was working against the topics being proposed. What I really took away from these two pieces is that depending on the reviewers stand point they can change the way the book is presented. Either aiding in bring a discourse to the surface or negating it and trying to bury it because they do not believe it is just. It is a medium working against a medium that is distorting media cultural studies the same way Mitchell/Hansen see the narrow views of some scholars affecting it.