Vorlesung A Sociology of the Media Prof. Dr. Joost van Loon Institut für Soziologie, LMU Nottingham Trent University, U.K.

Details Sprechstunde: Di 10-12, Konradstraße 6, Zi muenchen.de

Outline of the lecture 1.Media as Ubiquitous 2.Media as Black Box 3.Media as Phenomena 4.Technology as Ordering 5.Overview of Lectureseries

Media as Ubiquitous Our world can be characterized by an increase in mediatization Mediated communication is something we do rather than think about. Main focus has been on understanding media in service of something else, e.g. power, capital accumulation, ideology, social interaction, popular culture.

Media as Ubiquitous Studies that have tried to explore media-as- media, in terms of: (a) media corpporations, e.g. organizational practices (e.g. Cottle, 1993; Hall et al, 1978; Harrison, 2000; Schlesinger, 1987; Tuchman, 1978); (b) media products (primarily in the field of semiotics and screen theory and mainly concerned with media-content) (c) media-technologies, mainly by scholars associated with McLuhan

Phenomenology of Media Media-use Technological agency The strength of a phenomenological approach to media is that it problematizes exactly that which most communication studies approaches take for granted: the medium.

Media as Black Box Media studies has focused on either: (a) context (production, organization, distribution) (b) content (products, interpretation, consumption) And has by and large ignored the process of mediation. Black box –between context and content –between production and consumption –between intention and interpretation

Media as Phenomena As different from –Marxism/functionalism (e.g. political economy of media) –Public Sphere Theory (Habermas) –Liberal Pluralism (e.g. uses and gratifications theory, cultivation theory, audience studies) –Semiotics –Closer associations with new media theory

Mediation as … politics … social interaction … cultural reproduction

Technology as Ordering Technologies ‘enframe’ the world; that is they order them in the double sense of (a) providing a structure and (b) commanding specific actions. This ordering constitutes the essence of mediation.

Vorlesungsprogramme (1) Introduction Introduction (1): ubiquitous media Introduction (2): towards a phenomenology of mediation Approaches to Media Analysis Political Economy Semiotics Audience Research Media Forms Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin) Electronic Reproduction (Williams) Digital Reproduction (Baudrillard)

Vorlesungsprogramme (2) Media Histories Media Evolutions (Innis) Media Revolutions (McLuhan) Media Cultures Everyday Life and Domestication Identity and Subjectivity The Public Sphere Media and the Body Perception and Sensibility Media and (Dis)Embodiment: gendered and networked being