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Discipline(s) : Anglais

Histoire des Media et de l'image 1

Crédits ECTS 3
Volume horaire total 18h
Volume horaire TD 18h

Langue(s) d'enseignement

Libellé inconnu

Responsables

M. John Dean
john.dean@uvsq.fr

 

Objectifs

The varied effects of mass media and telecommunications on our modern world.

Contenu

Since World War Two mother earth has experienced an embarrassing wealth of rapidly developed and diffused new technologies. In this course we shall study how mass media and telecommunications' key set of new technologies have shaped individuals and their national cultures. This is a tall order rich with delicious challenges. 
 
Way back in 1946 the American writer Gertrude Stein argued that ”everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” And that was before the tsunami wave of television, internet, text-messaging and outer-space satellite systems  hit our modern world.  Was Miss Stein right?  Do you feel senseless?  Or is the truth of the situation closer to the fact that if "technology is to a medium as a brain is to a mind" then each new technology is a tool shaped by the hand that uses it and we've all developed octopus-like? (As media theorist Neil Postman claimed.) Our individual and collective minds have expanded.  Thus mass media's many messages and massive technology and telecommunications one -on-one -- plus the power of media convergence! -- are intensifiers rather than modifiers.
 
Big questions need to be addressed that we shall try to answer. Has the world been expanded and condensed into a coherent, allied "global village" -- as the US-Canadian Cultural Historian Marshall McLuhan first contended in the late 1960s?  So that we are all closer and more ecologically intertwined?  And earth's many people are joined as never before into an ever-growing and well-functioning economically, politically and socially interdependent world?  Or is this too quick, too easy -- and obviously blind to the powers of nation-states and religions --  an explanation?
 
To try to figure out these perplexing facts of contemporary civilizations we shall examine a set of the top mass media and telecommunications technologies since World War Two and see how they have affected some of earth's outstanding nations.  Among the fascinating machinery and applications of science for industrial, commercial and cultural objectives under our collective microscope shall be television, the cell phone, the photocopy machine, satellite communications, the computer (personal & otherwise), the internet & world wide web (plus its attendant techno-societies), along with a few electrical and transistorize others.
 
You are invited to attend.

Bibliographie

The following book is compulsory :
Understanding Media in the Digital Age
Dennis & DeFleur 2010 edition | Pearson | Paper; 464 pp | ISBN-10: 0205595820 | ISBN-13: 9780205595822
(Part of series: "MyCommunicationKit" Series)

Contrôles des connaissances

Les modalités seront précisées lors de la première séance.