1. Critically Thinking about Digital Media

2. Basic Media History Gutenburg Newspapers / magazines
Movable type, c (before? … )
Newspapers / magazines
Telegraph (1844) / telephone (1876) / photograph (1839)
Radio (1895) / television (1800s / early 1900s) / cable (1940s) / satellite (1960s)
Vacuum tubes / transistors / integrated circuits / computers

3. New media are associated with…
A shift from modernity to postmodernity
Intensifying globalization processes
QEP
A replacement (in the West) of an industrial age of manufacturing by a post-industrial information age
A decentring of established and centralized geo-political orders

4. How are the media changing?
Institutions
Constant flux of ‘new media’
Ideological connotations of ‘the new’
Inclusive – ‘interactive media’ … ‘computer mediated communication’ … virtual reality … non-linear communication …

5. Discussion How is each made? Why is each made?
How is each distributed?
What role do you have in the communication process?
How would these products be different if you lived in –China? –Saudi Arabia? -Cuba?

6. Communication Context
Theories and Models (paradigm)
Relationships and Power
Economics
Nature and Nurture
How can you evaluate a system in which you are intricately involved?
What is real? How do you know?

7. Shannon’s (1948) Model

8. Mediated Communication

9. Interactive Communication

10. A Transactional Model

11. Critical / cultural study
Ideological analysis
Narrative Analysis
Semiotics
Cultural analysis
Political economy
Psychoanalytic theory
What are theories and models?
What is a myth? Scientific method?
Quantitative vs. qualitative study

12. Analysis of media content
Newspapers
Magazines
Tabloids
Blogs
Video games
Radio programming
TV programming
Online video (YouTube, Hulu, etc.)

13. Assumptions You already have done some media analysis Being critical
stand back from the hype and investigate the nature of change
Not reduce everything to being capitalist scams
Not assume everything has changed; not assume nothing has changed
Knowing some of the important scholars…

14. Marshall MacLuhan ( )
His work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory.
McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message" and the "global village”
The subject that would occupy most of McLuhan's career was the task of understanding the effects of technology as it related to popular culture, and how this in turn affected human beings and their relations with one another in communities.

15. Raymond Williams ( )
One of the first in Britain to develop the discipline of Cultural Studies
Tried to understand literature and related cultural forms (including media) not as the outcome of an isolated aesthetic adventure, but as the manifestation of a deeply social process that involved a series of complex relationships
Evaluated relationships between ideology and culture, and the development of socialist perspectives in the communicative arts

16. Vannevar Bush ( )
Many consider Bush to be the Godfather of our wired age, often making reference to his 1945 essay, "As We May Think."
Bush described a theoretical machine he called a "memex," which was to enhance human memory by allowing the user to store and retrieve documents linked by associations.
This associative linking was very similar to what is known today as hypertext.

17. Others… Gottfried Leibniz (math, logic, philosophy)
Charles Babbage (invented first mechanical computer)
Alan Turing (father of computer science and artificial intelligence)
Ted Nelson (hypertext)
Roland Barthes (structuralism, semiotics)
Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Jaron Lanier?
Tim Berners-Lee?
Who else? 

18. Others…
Vint Cerf With Bob Kahn, designed the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)
Doug Engelbart, best known for inventing the computer mouse (in a joint effort with Bill English)

19. Others
Herman Hollerith, widely regarded as the father of modern machine data processing. Invention of the punched card evaluating machine marks the beginning of the era of automatic data processing systems.
Founder of The Tabulating Machine Company, consolidated in 1911 with 3 other companies to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, later renamed IBM.

20. Grace Hopper (1906-1992) Programmed UNIVAC
Pioneered work on the necessity for high-level programming languages, which she termed automatic programming, and wrote the A-O compiler, which heavily influenced the COBOL language.

21. Henry Edward ‘Ed’ Roberts (1941-2010)
MITS Altair
Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft founders) joined MITS to develop software and Altair BASIC was Microsoft's first product.
Roberts sold MITS in 1977 and retired to Georgia where he farmed, studied medicine and eventually became a small-town doctor living in Cochran, GA
father of the personal computer’

22. Shockley, Brattain, Bardeen
Bill Shockley
Walter Brattain
John Bardeen

23. Bill Shockley Shockley Semiconductors Traitorous 8
in 1956 the first establishment, in what came to be known as Silicon Valley, to work on silicon semiconductor devices.
Traitorous 8
Fairchild Semiconductors
…led to

24. Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce - Intel
Gordon Moore ‘Moore’s Law’
Robert Noyce

25. And who else? List…(?) Key ideas:
What we are doing is an evolution of what has come before. Knowing how things have developed improves our own insight.
How we think of things – theories and models -- Knowing how things ‘fit’ improves our own insight.
What’s next?