In medias res: Semiology of Batman, economics of attention, hypodermic needles, magic bullets and more

So I've decided to headline these posts with interesting (to me) media-related content from around the web "In medias res". Not very original, I know, but "in the middle of things" seems appropriate.

• I came across the semiotics-centric site Semionaut via this post: "Semiotics and non-verbal communication". It looks to have a practitioner-oriented angle but they have some interesting analysis up.
• In other semiotics news check out this post on Arkham City art direction and semiotics from the site How Not to Suck at Game Design.

Following the semiotics goals I defined earlier, we will explore the complex network of sign language of AAA games, comic books, the Batman universe and related pop-culture, we will explore the narrative themes behind it all and we will examine how Rocksteady implemented said sign language using semiotic principles.

• I've come across what appears to be a blog for a graduate course in new media and an assignment centered on exploring new media via Marshall McLuhan.
• Some folks at the site Communication Steroids recently posted a podcast discussing the Attention Economy.
• Recently I've been delving into the literature on the political economy of communication, and that means I've been reading Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller. This blog post by Safiya Noble discusses the continued relevance of Herbert Schiller.

Schiller elaborates on the ways in which, "Corporate speech has become the dominant discourse...While the corporate voice booms across the land, individual expression, at best, trickles through tiny constricted public circuits. This has allowed the effective right to free speech to be transferred from individuals to billion dollar companies which, in effect, monopolize public communication (pg. 45)." Privatization, deregulation and the expansion of market relationships are cited by Schiller as the environment in which the national information infrastructure has been eroded (pg. 46).

• Tomi Ahonen, apparently the person who declared mobile technology the 7th mass medium (who knew?), has declared augmented reality the 8th mass media. The list of media, in order of appearance:

1st mass media PRINT - from 1400s (books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, billboards)

2nd mass media RECORDINGS - from 1890s (records, tapes, cartridges, videocassettes, CDs, DVDs)

3rd mass media CINEMA - from 1900s

4th mass media RADIO - from 1920s

5th mass media TELEVISION - from 1940s

6th mass media INTERNET - from 1992

7th mass media MOBILE - from 1998

8th mass media AUGMENTED REALITY - from 2010

• This New York Times article about the acquisition of Instagram by Facebook asks: With the advent  and adoption of smartphones, who needs the web?
• Henry Giroux wrote an op-ed for truthout about the war on youth wherein he borrows a phrase from Virilio: "the Suicidal State".
• The excellent media ecology blog Figure/Ground Communication has posted an interview with media ecologist (and coordinator of the upcoming MEA convention at Manhattan College) Thom Gencarelli. The interview follows Figure/Ground's recurring format of focusing on the interviewees academic background and thoughts on the tenure system.
• Blog Literary Theory and Anglo-American Culture has a post analyzing Chris Nolan's film The Prestige through a Baudrillardian lens.
• I came across this blog post of a video intercutting the poster's commentary with a video by Sut Jhally titled Deconstructing Dreamworlds (btw, Jhally and Mark Crispin Miller appear in Morgan Spurlock's newest documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. It's worth a watch, and made me want to go to Sao Paulo).
• Sherry Turkle is quoted in this USA Today article that confirms: geek is officially chic. Which I guess means it is no longer cool.
• Finally, I noticed some mentions of old-school theories of media effects in a couple of recent articles. This piece at Arab Media & Society titled Technology Cannot a Revolution Make mentions the "magic bullet" theory in discussing how Western media researchers have analyzed the Arab Spring movements.

The return to the “magic bullet” theory has led many Arab and Western media scholars to focus on the study of the role of social media in developing popular movements. Little or no attention is paid to folk and traditional communication outlets such as Friday sermons, coffeehouse storytellers (“hakawati”), and mourning gatherings of women (“subhieh”). These face-to-face folk communication vehicles play an important role in developing the Arab public sphere as well as in introducing change.

And this piece about a new sex-advice show on MTV mentions the "hypodermic needle" theory:

When you talk about "young viewers" as helpless victims who are targeted by a message and instantly fall prey to it, you are positing a pre-World-War-II era mass communications theory known as the hypodermic model.

This model saw mass media as a giant hypodermic needle that "injected" messages into our brains. And no brains were more susceptible to the injections than those of children.

Media Coverage: Turkle talk, more Debord, learning to code and more...

• A couple of weeks back I linked to the Guardian's discussion of Debord's Society of the Spectacle, and I just came across another article from their site that I had overlooked: "What Debord can teach us about protest":

The danger with this reading – the spectacle as a retroactive name for the social alienation of modern media culture – is that it turns Debord into a prophet who simply confirms everything we already know and further cements its inevitability. In other words, it is to make The Society of the Spectacle into precisely the kind of spectacle that Debord warns us of in thesis five, where he insists that the spectacle is not a simple product of mass media, but "a weltanschauung that has been actualised, translated into the material realm – a world view transformed into an objective force".

The author, Meghan Sutherland, comments on the diminishing funding for humanities departments in her discussion of resistance to the spectacle:

It will also require that we redouble our efforts to challenge the systematic elimination of philosophy departments and humanities funding from university programmes all over the world – a project of austerity economics that deems the study of ideas simultaneously elitist, irrelevant to the "real" world and without market value. For as Debord makes clear, when we allow the pleasures of living and acting to become severed from the pleasures of thinking and looking, The Society of the Spectacle can mean only one thing. And it will do so until we learn to reconnect them.

• An Atlantic article by Scott Meslow titled "Boys can love 'Titanic,' too" quotes an older interview with media effects researcher Mary Beth Oliver discussing sex differences in responses to sad film:

"There are certain arenas where male crying is deemed appropriate, like the loss of a favorite sporting team, the death of a parent, or war," said Mary Beth Oliver, a media professor at Penn State, in 2010 interview with the BBC about the tear-jerking effects of a different film. "For many men, there is a great deal of pressure to avoid expression of 'female' emotions like sadness and fear. From a very young age, males are taught that it is inappropriate to cry, and these lessons are often accompanied by a great deal of ridicule when the lessons aren't followed."

• Sherry Turkle's TED talk that I posted over the weekend has sparked a number of articles: io9: "Do you feel more lonely after using your smartphone?"; Christian Today: "Is our connected world just getting lonelier?"; and tangentially-related NYT: "Voice technology: A real conversation starter".
• Variety ran a review of a new documentary (that apparently premiered at SXSW) called "Welcome to the Machine":

Every generation uses the technology of its time as a metaphor to better understand itself, and in the zeitgeist-examining docu-essay "Welcome to the Machine," director Avi Zev Weider ponders the degree to which man's present and future are dominated by his inventions. Philosophically speaking, it's fascinating stuff, though film hardly seems the most conducive way for Weider to present his arguments, with an overreliance on baby photos and the failure to deliver a key interview making the whole inquiry feel smaller than it is.

• Co. Create published an interview with Douglas Rushkoff in advance of an upcoming keynote address in NYC. His comments on the function of the artist echo McLuhan:

I think the artist, even more than government, has become the one who is doing long-term thinking about what’s happening, what are the implications, what are we doing to ourselves? And they’re some of the only ones, really. An artist’s job is to sit outside what’s happening and reflect back to us where the human is in this. I think it’s a very valuable exercise. It’s just the opposite exercise of what most people probably think it is. It’s not for technologists to realize the visions of artists. It feels much more like it’s for artists to contextualize the visions of technologists.

• One of my goals for summer 2012 is to learn a programming language. Multiple factors motivated this decision, one of them being Rushkoff's articles on coding and his recent book "Program or be programmed". Turns out I wasn't the only one: I learned about web site Codeacademy from a post by Juliet Waters titled "My code year, so far":

I was hooked by the headline of an article by Douglas Rushkoff on CNN.com. “Learn to Code, Get a Job!”  Coding, he argued, was a skill that not enough people had,  and companies were paying big money to find people who were “code literate.”

Media matters: Alone Together @ TED, fear in the attention economy, Chomsky tweets and more

• Sherry Turkle expounds on her Alone Together thesis in a recently released TED talk video:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Xr3AsBEK4&w=560&h=315]

• Danah Boyd considers the culture of fear and the attention economy (click here for Vimeo link).

• I recently came across this Salon article by UMD doctoral student Nathan Jurgenson from last year where he argues that Noam Chomsky is wrong about Twitter. Both Chomsky's and the author's statements about new media forms are extremely interesting from a medium theory perspective. Jurgenson cites the role of social media in the Arab Spring protests as evidence that new media aren't as shallow and superficial as Chomsky believes:

In fact, in the debate about whether rapid and social media really are inherently less deep than other media, there are compelling arguments for and against. Yes, any individual tweet might be superficial, but a stream of tweets from a political confrontation like Tahrir Square, a war zone like Gaza or a list of carefully-selected thinkers makes for a collection of expression that is anything but shallow. Social media is like radio: It all depends on how you tune it.

• Finally, Shelly Palmer at SYS-CON Media wrote an article titled Always On: Proof consumers are enslaved and the consequences for brands.

In responding to calls, emails, texts, social media, etc, our electronic devices play to a primitive impulse to react to immediate threats and dangers.  Our responding to that call, email or social media post provokes excitement and stimulates the release of dopamine to the brain.  Little by little, we become addicted to its small kick in regular, minute doses.  In its absence, people feel bored.