Lecture 3: Major Debates in Cultural Theory Pt 2

-The digital turn of cultural studies
-The role of digital technology and social media in defining:
              -Contemporary Media events
              -The structure of feelings informing digital cultures and information society.
              -Interaction between and within a complex network of media events.
              -Users = consumers - producers of media events
Emphasis of media spectacles and virtual reality.

Facebook Parody:
-Is technology neutral or does it change the way we interact with eachother?

It looks like you can have a neutral technology.

-When a technology happens, does it affect the way in which the medium is constructed? Twitter Vs Tv etc.
-Where does this highly sophisticated technology (Facebook) connect with very primitive ideas (The Wall)
-Very visual
-Global appeal, everyone around the world can access it.

Context: Digital Cultures
-Circulation and mobility of material and symbolic production on a global scale.
-Connectivity - Proximity - more conflict?
-Erosion of cultural boundaries and social spheres.
-A sense of being close to people all the time (Proximity)
-Indicators of time and space have been entangled and are confused.
    >Public and private spheres have merged (telephone example)
    >Now (instant)

Interaction and participation:
-How their personal opinion can change an event
-How the same event may be portrayed in different forms of media (convergence and diversion)
-New form of labour and new definitions of leisure and 'free' time. Are we participating into social media and are not getting paid? Are we taking our office home with us? Net Slaves?

Guy Debord
"Society of a spectacle" - are we seeing everything through a spectacle?

Lecture 2: Major Debates in Cultural Theory

Keywords:
- culture/society/ideology/hegemony/popular culture/folk culture/mass culture.

Where do media events take place?
SOCIETY
CULTURE
ECONOMY
POLITICS

These are the spheres that class the information that is given. It also gives a distinction between entertainment and politics.
But do these overlap and intertwine? Or do they simply stick to one area of media?

Integration of the seperate spheres: Case study: Torches of Freedom
- Trying to connect a product with an idea or thought was what Bernays wanted to do.
- Edward Bernays was the boss of a cigerette company and they noticed that cigerettes were only being sold to men, and they wanted this to expand to women too.
- Bernays thought if you added a product to an already existing emotion, thought or idea it would help to sell the product.
-He insisted to portray women who smoked with women who wanted liberation from men. He linked the two so that people would believe smoking would liberate them from men. These were given the nickname 'Torches of Freedom'.

Lecture 1: What is an event?

- We are immersed in an age of information, where access to information is up to date, instant and easily accessible. We are surrounded by it all the time.
-Keeping in mind the keywords such as time/accelaration/quantity/quality/space
-Is our world getting smaller?

But what is an event?
-Something that affects people
-Something staged to generate publicity
-Something that interrupts the day to day life of people.

How do we identify media events? - ref: News of the World: Goodbye Issue
-Media events are created by the media for the media
-Not conspirisy theories
-Creates publicity
-Planned/organised/staged/expected/anticipated e.g: sports events/anniversarys/birthdays.

Jean Baudrillard:
-A theorist who stated that we no longer have 'real events' and we live in a world which is going round in perpetual motion with nothing to look forward to.
-All events have been recycled and have been done before.
-But after 9/11 occurred, Jean Baudrillard  had a shift of thought, he now said that we are living in the 'Hell of Power' and a world where health and safety and prevention of all kinds of measures are being taken place to try to prevent natural events happening.

Non Events:
-These so-called 'events' represent media which has now fallen under the category of events, yet does not really fit the criteria of an event.

-The non-event is not when nothing happens. It is, rather, the realm of perpetual change, of a ceaseless updating, of an incessant succession in real time, which pro­duces this general equivalence, this indifference, this banality that characterizes the zero degree of the event.

Questions for further discussion:

•Are all events manipulated, controlled, policed and turned into non-events?

•Are all events predictable?

•Are all events crises, malfunctions, accidents, pseudo-events, staged dramas…etc?

•Which “events” never get reported or are not “covered”?

•How do audiences, prosumers, social media users redefine events?