#3558 Created 02/12/2014 Updated 11/21/2015
NERONE
..the unruly tribe of communication theories...
Media histories ... tend not to have a body of theory that they call their own...At this moment there is no standard version of media theory. Nor is there a stasndard list of communication rtheories. Media historians often look like historical sociologiests.....
common set of problems...
The problem of empire (studies of writing aned comm in ancient world)
Tjhe problem of circuit of meaning (histories of print culture, dwell on how ideas were disseminated through production, distribution and consumption of texts)
The problem of the public gives urgency to journalism history and the history of freedom of expression and communication policy
The problem of the local and global informs the study of the movement of message through space and across borders cultural imperialism...hybirdity...moderinations
The problem of representation re. analysis of media content.
The problem of capitalism appears in accounts of media commercialization, media ownership, consumerism, and advertising support. \ The problem of modern and postmodern invites studies of how media forms hail people into configuration as readers or as audience members or as hybrid producer/consumers, and how media institutions and media professionals won and then lost the ability to stabilize meanings.
Throughout this history, ordinary people inflected developments continually: as consumers, as fans, as crowds, as voters, and arguably as cultural citizens in a cinematic public sphere (Hansen 1991). a complex negotiation among many different actors 9
Initially coined by raymond williams (1971) to describe the vector behind the social construction of television, mobile privatization denotes the deep drive in modern capitalist societies to reconfigure practices so that people can engage in them as private individuals or nuclear families moving freely through social and geographical space.
The "technology of oppression" version of mobile privatization, runs along two tracks, which we might call Foucualt and Marx. The Foucault track sees the private individual as the ideal subject of neoliberal governmentality, deploying the tools of digital communication to render oneself visible to surveillance and at the same time better self-disciplines. IN the Marx track, mobile privatization accelerates the expropriation and accumulation of wealth, in large part by capturing unpaid labor that people mis-recognize as play or leisure. The latter is Smythe's (1994) argument in his famous "Blindspot" essay. It is also the argument of numerous critics of Facebook.
