Media Studies Development Project
Registrar's Office: N118 Main Building, Phone: (845)
437–5270
180a. Approaches to Media Studies (1)
This course explores concepts and issues in the study of media, attentive
to but not limited by the question of the "new" posed by new media technologies.
Our survey of key critical approaches to media is anchored in specific
case studies drawn from a diverse archive of media artifacts, industries,
and technologies: from phonograph to photography, from cinema to networked
hypermedia, from typewriter to digital code. We examine the historical
and material specificity of different media technologies and the forms
of social life they enable, engage critical debates about media, culture
and power, and consider problems of reading posed by specific media
objects and processes, new and old. We take the multi-valence of "media"-
a term designating text and apparatus of textual transmission, content
and conduit-as a central problem of knowledge for the class. Our goal
throughout is to develop the research tools, modes of reading, and forms
of critical practice that help us aptly to describe and there by begin
to understand the increasingly mediated world in which we live. Ms. Brawley
and Mr. Lipton
Open to all classes