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Media Studies Quotes

Browse 17 quotes about Media Studies.

Media Studies Quotes

“Critical pessimists, such as media critics Mark Crispin Miller, Noam Chomsky, and Robert McChesney, focus primarily on the obstacles to achieving a more democratic society. In the process, they often exaggerate the power of big media in order to frighten readers into taking action. I don't disagree with their concern about media concentration, but the way they frame the debate is self-defeating insofar as it disempowers consumers even as it seeks to mobilize them. Far too much media reform rhetoric rests on melodramatic discourse about victimization and vulnerability, seduction and manipulation, "propaganda machines" and "weapons of mass deception". Again and again, this version of the media reform movement has ignored the complexity of the public's relationship to popular culture and sided with those opposed to a more diverse and participatory culture. The politics of critical utopianism is founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. As with previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more empowered, not when they are at their weakest.”

RevolutionEmpowermentOptimismMedia Studies
Book:Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
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“The first draft of the op-ed was generated by ACLU Communications Strategist Robin Shulman, who sent it to Amber and her team for review. Robin wrote Amber in an email, “I tried to gather your fire and rage and interesting analysis and shape that into op-ed form—with mentions of a few policies and a growing movement. I hope it sounds true to you.” She continued, “Your lawyer should review this for the way I skirted around talking about your marriage.” Earlier drafts included the words “restraining order,” “marriage,” and “divorce,” which were later scrapped. Eventually, the team settled on these eleven fateful words: “Two years ago I became a public figure representing domestic abuse.”

JournalismMetooMetoo MovementMedia StudiesJohnny DeppAmber HeardWashington PostAcluCelebrity TrialDomestic Abuse Alllegations
Book:Hollywood Vampires: Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, and the Celebrity Exploitation Machine
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“When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them, they are also cut off from the historical circumstances that shape them, and it becomes difficult to perceive the changing context within which they must be viewed.”

Historical PerspectiveMedia StudiesContextualization
Book:The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe
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“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”

SociologyDigital AgeSurveillance SocietyMedia StudiesDigital Culture
Book:From Cliche to Archetype
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“Freedom of the press can never be the licence to say anything one desires. Freedom of the press is not the freedom to slander and attack and must never be used to fight other people’s wars. It does not mean manipulating a story into speaking your views. One might think it common sense but in the world of journalism a lot of what makes sense is lost to the lure of favouritism, greed and fame. Sadly, in this truth-telling business truth is hard to find.”

MediaJournalismFreedom Of The PressArab SpringMedia StudiesArab Media
Author:Aysha Taryam
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“Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.”

PhilosophyMusicMediaCinemaDigital MediaMedia StudiesInterfaceMedia TheoryUser Interfaces
Author:Alexander R. Galloway
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“What is Camille Paglia doing, writing that an actress as gifted as Anne Heche has the mental depth of a pancake? How many pancake brains could do what Heche did with David Mamet's dialogue in Wag the Dog? No doubt Heche has been stuck with a few bad gigs, but Paglia, of all people, must be well aware that being an actress is not the same safe ride as being the tenured university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.”

PeopleWritingWellsHas BeensArtHumanityBrainStudyDoubtMediaDogSafeDepthUniversityActressesStuckDialogueNo DoubtProfessorsGiftedGigsPhiladelphiaPancakesWagsWag The DogUniversity ProfessorsCamilleMedia Studies
Author:Clive James
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