106-009 Media Histories and Cultural Studies

50 points of first-year arts including at least 25 points from a specified list of subject areas, see Prerequisites.

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.