106-009 Print to Pixels: Cultural Histories

Credit Points

HECS Band

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Usually 25 points of first year English.

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

The subject will explore the intimate connections between media technologies and changing understandings of culture in the 20th century. It focuses on how innovations in print and photographic technologies, telegraphy and telephony, sound recording, radio, film exhibition, TV and video, and the transformation of analogue by digital technologies, have enabled changing visions of culture. It studies terms such as mechanical reproduction and the culture industry, the optical unconscious and trauma, massification and broadcast, public sphere and media literacy, fragmentation and globalisation. Students will be encouraged, and given the confidence, to move between cultural histories and cultural studies. They will be introduced to the histories of key media technologies, and they will examine attempts to theorise the significance and influences of those technologies within cultural studies. As a result students should have, on completion of the subject, a strong critical knowledge of how histories of media technologies are central to contemporary culture.

Assessment

Class participation, and written work totalling 4000 words.

Prescribed Texts

A subject reader will be available.