MediaStudies.com | Media Cartography | Mapping Culture
The Media Cartography Model - La Mode Retro
Saltspring Island PD Workshop. Ganges, BC. Feb. 17/06
DRAFT ONLY
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Media History | Critical Thinking | Corporate Media Education
Media Cartography Print Resources | Mass Media Collections Policy | -MediaStudies.com-
Due to the close relationship between mass media and popular culture, post-WW II society has become an increasingly mass-mediated culture, a society of culture consumers as well as media consumers. The challenges of unraveling and making sense of post-War media history and culture is a central task of media studies. Indeed, the analysis of individual media texts is meaningful only within this wider cultural context.
What is Media Cartography ?
Media studies incorporates elements of history, and sociological and cultural theory, and there are many different approaches both to its study and teaching. This makes it a challenging interdisciplinary field in which to produce guidelines, curricular, and teaching materials. While many school boards, teachers, and individual schools have a fair degree of autonomy in creating curriculum, a general organizational and analytical framework is possible for the development of programs, courses and individual teaching units. The Media Cartography model of media studies curriculum and resource development is such a framework.
Media Cartography promotes critical analysis through historical tracking, reconstruction, and evaluation of mass media. This model allows for the examination of media texts (magazines, popular music, television) from 1945 to the present and encourages their organization by year, medium, and genre into a historical (and cultural) context. Its goal is to build and maintain a concrete frame of reference which allows for the identification of media products and their relationships to culture by identifying and analyzing media materials and trends year by year and therefore within the context of the period. In so doing, the interplay of mass media with contemporary popular culture can be analyzed along with consumer patterns, technology, and values.
The Media Cartography Model is a framework for reconstructing the post-War histories of mass media forms and for mapping out popular culture along the way. In so doing, the project also allows for the examination of the structure and development of ideology in popular culture materials from the Second World War to the present. By comparing developments across media, as well as across time, teachers and students can then determine the wider and ongoing historical links between mass media and modern culture. These links, such as that between the culture of the audience and media programming, are essential to the development of an enlightened critical awareness of media. Thus, the study of the mass media should begin with the construction of a thorough historical framework which can then be subjected to different strains of critical analysis.
The process of genealogical tracking of mainstream media involves examining, where possible, original sources (old magazines ranging from ‘Life’ and ‘Ladies Home Journal,’ to ‘Guns and Ammo’ and ‘Soldier of Fortune.’ A wide range of magazines provides examples of communicating with various types of readers - social stratification. You can also use old records such as ‘Pink Floyd’ and ‘Gary Glitter’. Archival videotape of TV shows including news and entertainment are also great sources for insights into the culture of the times.
The emphasis in genealogical research is on identifying and documenting when new types and styles of media appeared and the various hybrids that have developed from them. Post-War history, from each year and decade provide cultural reference points in the search to identify and analyze the various media texts and how they affect the orienting boundaries of our mass mediated culture. A major emphasis of Media Cartography is on the collection of primary media resources from the 1940s to the present, in particular, magazines, popular music, television and radio broadcasting.
For information about the rationale for collecting post-War media texts for in-class use, see Why Primary Resources ?
For web-based guidance in the process of tracking mass media development, see the following links.
Media History - Reconstruction
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Critical Thinking (Under construction)
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Corporate Media Education - Threats and Contradictions (Under construction)
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© 2006. Peter R. Clayton, M.A.