This link has been bookmarked by 6 people . It was first bookmarked on 26 Oct 2008, by my serendipities.
-
01 Jun 17
-
06 Jan 11
-
Mediology (alternate spelling, 'Medialogy'), broadly indicates a wide-ranging method for the analysis of cultural transmission in society and across societies, a method which challenges the conventional idea that 'technology is not culture'. The mediological method pays specific attention to the role of organisations and technical innovations, and the ways in which these can ensure the potency of cultural transmission - and thus the transformation of ideas into a civilisational worldview capable of sustained action.
-
-
01 Oct 10
-
method for the analysis of cultural transmission in society and across societies
-
role of organisations and technical innovations, and the ways in which these can ensure the potency of cultural transmission
-
section of his book Le pouvoir intellectuel en France
-
The term was first coined and introduced in French as "médiologie" by the French intellectual Régis Debray in the "Teachers, Writers, Celebrities"
-
he English form of the term became more widely known and respected in the English-speaking world with the publication of the key text on mediology in English, Debray's Transmitting Culture (University of Columbia Press, 2004).
-
"would like to bring to light the function of medium in all its forms, over a long time span - since the birth of writing. And without becoming obsessed by today's media"
-
Debray is generally critical of some of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan
-
technologically determinist
-
and of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
-
-
08 Jun 10
-
Transmitting Culture (University of Columbia Press, 2004).
-
the role of organisations and technical innovations, and the ways in which these can ensure the potency of cultural transmission - and thus the transformation of ideas into a civilisational worldview capable of sustained action.
-
The practice of mediology is not a science, and thus is able to range across academic disciplines. The main areas involved are those of longitudinal history (the history of technologies, the history of the book, the histories and theories of aesthetics) and also research in communications and information theory.
-
mediologists study the cultural transmission of religions, ideologies, the arts and political ideas in society, and across societies, over a time period that is usually to be measured in months, decades or millennia
-
Debray argues that mediology... "would like to bring to light the function of medium in all its forms, over a long time span - sin
-
ce the birth of writing. And without becoming obsessed by today's media" [1]
-
the methods used for the memorising, transmission, and displacement of cultural knowledge in any milieu
-
with an equally close study of our individual modes of belief, thoughts, and competing social organisations
-
such transmission is not simply happening within a lofty linguistic or textual discourse, but that transmission takes an equally valid concrete form in which "material technologies and symbolic forms" [2] combine to produce things such as rituals, architecture, flags, special sites, customs, typefaces and book bindings, smells and sounds, bodily gestures and postures, all of which have a potent anchoring role in cultural transmission among ordinary people.
-
the role in transmission of all manner of non-media technical-cultural inventions, especially those of new forms of transportation.
-
A mediologist might thus make an examination "within a system" (e.g. of systems of book production, of authors and publishers), or of "the interaction between systems" (e.g.: how painting and early photography influenced each other), or even of "the interactions across systems" (e.g.: the ways in which symbolic transmission of systematic knowledge is brought to intersect with the material history of actual transportation - such as desert trading routes and ancient religion, telegraph and railroad, the radio and airplanes, television and satellites, mobile phones and cars).
-
Debray is generally critical of some of the ideas of Marshall McLuhan (whom he sees as being overly technologically determinist), and of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He also tries to step beyond Antonio Gramsci, in that he suggests that an ideology cannot be comprehended in ideological terms alone.
-
"traces of a strong, vulgar Marxist school of thought".
-
the similarities of some aspects and directions of mediology to Birmingham School cultural studies ranging from "Raymond Williams through Stuart Hall". Nayor also notes that recent philosophers and historians of science - he cites Bruno Latour, Eugene Thacker and Dwight Atkinson - have also examined science in relation to "intersecting cultural, ethnic, economic and iconographic 'bases' of the transmission of culture"
-
Maris also notes that mediology "predates much of the [current academic] interest in networked cultures and new media".
-
-
26 Oct 08
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.