Stephen Jenkins's List: culture studies

• What really interests me is the stories that older media (including television and the on-line versions of print media) tell about social networking, and the slightly nutty fervour that so often drives the telling.
• since all media are mixed in their cultural make-up and social uses, it behoves me as a student of history in popular culture to observe how the tales being told of new media at any given time draw on familiar generic and rhetorical reserves that help render change intelligible to us as a mode of continuity.
• • Metonymy: Reference to something or someone by naming one of its attributes. (from meta , "change" and onoma, "name").cf. Syndecdoch. Examples:The pen is mightier than the swordThe pen is an attribute of thoughts that are written with a pen; the sword is an attribute of military actionWe await word from the crown.
• journalists often draw on their rich professional reserves of reductively metonymic realism (‘setting the scene', the ‘character sketch') to cast social network users as types whose ways of acting are symptomatic or productive of diverse social ills: alongside terrorists and sexual predators there are always students uploading their mobile pics of boorishly drunken parties, ‘stupid girls' sharing every detail of their vapid daily routines, and workers who boast about bludging but forget that they've friended their boss. As in folklore, each of these figures is sustained by a dense field of concrete examples both stellar (Hugh Grant and Bono for Facebook party uploads, MySpace's Paris Hilton or Twitter's Ashton Kutcher for cosmic triviality) and ‘it-could-be-you' mundane (Kyle Doyle's ‘SICKIE WOO' Facebook status update).² Simultaneously grounded in and abstracted from the real history of on-line culture, such figures ‘stick' in media memory, powerfully eliciting recognition (the party animal, the princess, the slack worker) while drawing attention away from a myriad other practices thriving on the sites. Stereotypes are forms of apprehension rather than bad representations, and their force is to mobilize familiar knowledge to explain and absorb unfamiliar experience (Morris, Identity 143-44).

  • Excellent insightful paragraph.  bludging - 1 definition - Aimlessly lying about with no direct purpose in life.

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