Complex webs of
interaction:
a mediological analysis of Reality TV Viewing practices
What do you Watch?
Survivor fan practices:
- Fan Fiction
- Office Pools
- Amateur Survivor Shows
- Message Boards
- Blog Comments
- Intro Remixes
- Tweeting with Jeff Probst
- Spoiler Sites
Traditional approaches to television in cultural and media studies
Frankfurt School
-
Adorno and Horkheimer
Birmingham School
- Stuart Hall
Audience Studies
- Morley and Fiske
Reception VS. Action/Production
What is mediology?
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Mediology is a synthesis and critique of received media and technology theory that opens up a larger network model of mediation by focusing on social, political, and economic institutions of transmission and the cultural embeddedness of all technologies.
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Mediology asks questions in parallel interdependent ways: how does an idea become a material force, and what are the social and institutional mediations that give media and communication technologies their cultural power?
Key Elements of Debray's
mediological method
- Resists overly abstract notions of ideology
- Examines how our representations of the world are transformative and have lived consequences
- Emphasizes research practices in context
- Situates everyday practices in relation to larger historical and cultural structures
- Non-deterministic view of technologies
- Knowledge changes depending on the tools used to produce it
- Rejects unilinear mode of communication
Melinda Turnley's
"Toward a mediological method"
- Technological
- Social
- Economic
- Archival
- Aesthetic
- Subjective
- Epistemological
