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YouTube Beyond Technology and Cultural form
- Edited by Jan Teurlings, Marijke de Valck
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- Book:
- After the Break
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 22 December 2020
- Print publication:
- 15 July 2013, pp 147-160
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Summary
Introduction
In his seminal work Television: Technology and cultural form (1974), Raymond Williams described television as a medium to be understood in its various dimensions: as a technology (‘broadcasting’), as a social practice (‘watching television’) and as a cultural form (‘programmes’). Williams deployed this multiple view of television to scaffold two broader concepts: the concept of ‘flow’ – an endless stream of concatenated programmes that glued the viewer to the screen – and the concept of ‘mobile privatization’ – referring to the way in which mass media makes mobility an endeavour that can be pursued in the privacy of one's own home, allowing people to see what happens in the world without having to leave their living room. Williams’ theory has long been held up as a model of nuanced thinking: his perspective accounted for television's technology, in both its institutional and commercial manifestations, for its social use, regarding viewers as both active and passive subjects, and he connected these two aspects to the specific forms of audiovisual content. Albeit implicitly, Williams also tied in these developments to television's regulatory, hence political, context, as he compared American commercial television to British public broadcasting service (the BBC).
Williams, in 1974, could have never predicted the emergence of a novel ‘tube’ thirty years later. When YouTube was introduced in 2005, the media landscape was still dominated by television. The new platform that allowed people to share their self-produced videos online, was conceived in a Silicon Valley garage by Chad Hurley and his friends. Even if the technology was not as revolutionary as broadcast television was in the early 1950s, YouTube rapidly developed into the biggest user-generated content (UGC) platform available on the web 2.0. Five years after its start, YouTube, now a subsidiary of Google Inc., is the third most popular internet site in the world, boasting two billion videos a day and attracting ‘nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined’. Millions of users contribute and watch self-made videos, short TV-clips, music trailers, compilations, etc. on a daily basis. In a very short time, YouTube has become a significant presence in the global media landscape.
Evidently, Raymond Williams’ theory far predates YouTube's emergence, and yet his basic model for understanding a novel media phenomenon is still useful today as a starting point.
Chapter Ten - Sound Technologies and Cultural Practices: How Analogies Make us Listen to Transformations in Art and Culture
- Edited by Judith Thissen, Robert Zwijnenberg, Kitty Zijlmans
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- Book:
- Contemporary Culture
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 10 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 15 July 2013, pp 139-154
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Summary
Since World War II, an impressive series of new sound technologies has entered the scene: the reel-to-reel recorder, the cassette recorder, the compact disk, the mp3 player, sampling software on personal computers and music-sharing facilities on the Internet. How did such sound technologies affect transformations in the cultural practices of listening to and making music in Western Europe? Which shifts did they trigger in the traditional boundaries between active and passive participation in music culture? What was, for instance, the impact of the tape recorder on the boundaries between producing and consuming music, listening and creating, copying and editing music? And what did such changes mean for the roles of the creator, technician, producer and distributor of music?
These were the questions that originally fuelled our research into sound technologies and cultural practices. One of our wider aims was to study the impact of technologization, particularly the impact of digital technologies, on art and culture. The original phrasing of our questions suggested a one-way arrow from technology to musical practice – technology being the agent of change in the world of music. Our actual way of working, however, maximized the options for analyzing the effect of existing cultural practices on the use of new technologies. In other words, while our wording was still cast in technological determinist terms, our research design and analysis helped us to leave that behind. We did so by focusing on analogies in cultural practices – “cultural practices” meaning the ways in which people habitually give meaning to and act upon the world surrounding them, and “analogies” meaning similarities in the ways of understanding and acting between different cultural practices. The next section explains why analogies between cultural practices may lead to new insights in transformations in arts and culture. We use analogies to understand how musical practices change when those who pursue these practices appropriate new sound technologies.
The analogies approach will be illustrated by describing two sets of examples. First, we examined how a 1950s manufacturer of a new sound technology, the reel-to-reel recorder, projected the recorder's future use as a “family sound album” by creating an analogy with the already established cultural practices concerning the family photo album.
Preface
- Wouter Hanegraaff, Joyce Pijnenburg
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- Book:
- Hermes in the Academy
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 20 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 21 August 2009, pp 7-8
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Summary
Creative innovation in the humanities is usually not a top-down but a bottomup phenomenon. It happens when individual scholars begin to ask questions that have not been asked before, and come up with new approaches that challenge the academic status quo. But, in order to be successful, not only do such new perspectives have to be recognized as fruitful by the wider academic community, they also need to become embedded in institutional contexts, which allow them to actively participate in scholarly debate and educate new generations of students. The chair group for History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents (GHF) is a perfect example of such a successful combination of scholarly innovation and academic institutionalization. As documented in this anniversary volume, over the last ten years it has established itself as the leading center of a new field of international research, referred to as the study of Western esotericism.
By the end of the 1990s, that term still caused some eyebrows to be raised. It was not yet so clear to everybody that, far from being a synonym for New Age, the label “Western esotericism” covered a wide range of important and influential currents in intellectual history from the Renaissance to the present, with roots in Late Antiquity; and there were still some suspicions, here and there, that scholars of esotericism might in fact turn out to be closet esotericists… But as the high quality of research in this domain became evident, such doubts quickly began to vanish. GHF has been consistent in setting standards of excellence through the many publications of its staff members, with the two-volume Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Brill, 2005) as a highlight that deserves to be mentioned here in particular. As documented in this anniversary volume, the study of Western esotericism has succeeded in becoming a normal presence on the international academic scene, with professional research organizations, peer-reviewed journals and monograph series, many conferences and, of course, teaching programs. The field is generating great enthusiasm and commitment not only among established scholars, but also among students and burgeoning academics, many of whom have received their education in this field at GHF and are now pursuing Ph.D. projects both in Amsterdam and at other universities worldwide.
Digital Cadavers and Virtual Dissection
- Edited by Maaike Bleeker
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- Book:
- Anatomy Live
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 10 February 2021
- Print publication:
- 04 March 2008, pp 29-48
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Summary
Anatomical dissection is considered an essential ingredient of medical training. By looking at and cutting into dead bodies, future doctors learn to distinguish between healthy and diseased tissue in living bodies, while also gaining an understanding of the three-dimensional shape of organs, veins, and bones. Anatomical dissection literally means to separate the body into pieces; this systematic disassembling of the physical body is justified because it results in an entirely new body – a body of knowledge. More generally, the confrontation with human cadavers functions as an important initiation rite for medical students: not until they have familiarized themselves with the face of death can they embark on a long educational journey that ends with a solemn dedication to life – the Hippocratic oath. Anatomy, from the outset, has been surrounded by sacral and secular symbolism; to this very day, the medical specialty has a morbid public image, associated as it is with the smell of decay and the aura of death.
Cadaver dissection does not provide the only occasion for students to become acquainted with human organic architecture. Anatomical illustrations help them conceptualize the form and structure of various organs before they actually touch them. Without these two-dimensional representations, a thorough understanding of the body's physiology would be inconceivable. Ever since the fifteenth century, knowledge derived from close observation of cutup cadavers has been recorded in drawings and anatomical atlases. To convey their empirical findings, anatomists depended on the precision and craft of their illustrators. Accordingly, anatomical illustration is commonly viewed as mediated knowledge. Even the most sophisticated anatomical drawings, like those by Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius, were considered a derived form of knowledge – idealized representations of real bodies.
From the early days of anatomy, then, anatomical training has relied on a combination of learning to dissect bodies and learning to read anatomical illustrations. But this basis has become too limited, argue the initiators of the Visible Human Project (VHP), who in the 1990s developed a new instruction tool that will purportedly revolutionize anatomy (Ackerman, 1999, pp. 667-70).
1 - Capturing the Family: Home Video in the Age of Digital Reproduction
- Edited by Patricia Pisters, Wim Staat
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- Book:
- Shooting the Family
- Published by:
- Amsterdam University Press
- Published online:
- 23 January 2021
- Print publication:
- 16 February 2005, pp 25-40
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Summary
Upon returning home from work, a colleague of mine was buoyantly greeted by his ten-year-old daughter. She begged him to fetch his camcorder and come to her room, where she was playing with two other girls – a karaoke of sorts in which they combined song and dance with typical kid's fits of laughter and fun. “You need to tape us because when we’re famous they’ll show this on TV,” his daughter explained, with a sense of urgency. The two girls’ motivation for being filmed betrayed a sophisticated reflexivity of the camcorder as a tool for producing future memories. This awareness was most likely triggered by contemporary television programs – anything from so-called reality TV and lost-relative shows to dating shows and celebrity interviews – that deploy home video footage to represent a person's past life. The girls not only grasped the significance of moving images as a memory tool, but they also showed a complex understanding of the nature of mediation: whereas the camcorder registers their private lives, in the context of television these images may also help shape their public identity. Even at this young age, children apprehend the constructedness of mediated experience: the camcorder and television camera construct family life simultaneously and by the same means as they construct our memory of it.
In his excellent study of the home video, James Moran has theorized the historical and cultural specificity of the “home mode” – the place of home movies/videos in a gradually changing media landscape. Rather than identifying the home movie or home video according to its ontological purity or as a technical apparatus, Moran rethinks the “home mode” as a historically changing effect of technological, social, and cultural determinations, a set of discursive codes that helps us negotiate the meaning of individuals in response to their shared social environment. The “home mode” is not simply a technological device deployed in a private setting (the family), but is defined by Moran as an active mode of media production representing everyday life, a “liminal space in which practitioners may explore and negotiate the competing demands of their public, communal, and private personal identities”.