Week #2 - Critical Media Studies (post-reflection)

Week #2 differed greatly from week #1, in the sense that we had a lecture as well as a seminar to complement the reading. The theme was Critical Media Studies, mainly focused on the work of Frankfurt School's Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Even though it's a lot to read, I do like the flipped classroom idea of being more prepared when coming to the lecture. The seminar was focused mainly on Adorno and Horkheimer's theories on mass media and the culture industry, and how valid their theories are in our present day. A lot of voices were critical against the author's dictating rhetorics, and most agreed that their lack of humility as well as critical thinking was very unsympathetic. Also, because of the massive changes in media industry since they released "Dialectic of Enlightenment", a lot of their ideas could be discarded, while some remained valid.

The culture industry, which was in the 40s forming, has not ceased to exist - and while the threshold of producing and distributing media has lowered immensely during the last decade, due to Internet, I brought forth how the culture industry has refined and honed it's ways of delivering the promise of pleasure Adorno and Horkheimer speak of. I want to draw a parallell to a TED Talk from a math professor named Dan Meyer, who in turn quotes David Milch, saying that certain types of mass media a lot of consume causes us to develop "an impatience to irresolution". Basically saying that a lot of us are becoming neurally hard-wired to be impatient. It's a good talk, and I recommend you watch it if you have ten minutes to spare. Which most people probably do. Anyway - these theories and ideas are becoming less and less controversial each day - the text "Is Google Making us Stupid"* from 2008 by Nick Carr basically proposes the same ideas, and these theories were far from questioned when this theme occupied the Proint seminars two years ago.

Needless to say - the seminar sparked some pretty interesting discussions, and I do look forward to coming seminars.

* It's pretty profound and kind of proves the point how the second proposed Google search for the phrase "Is google making us stupid" is "Is google making us stupid summary". Also, the book "The Shallows" from the same author is recommended, if one finds these things interesting.