Blog 1

This week’s reading looked at pragmatism, rhetorical theory, and cultural theory. Pragmatism is involved less with the theoretical and more with the actual consequences of ideas in day to day life. The pragmatism of media studies relates to government regulations of the media. The chapter discussed issues of television monopoly (and really, after reading the last chapter, it doesn’t seem like much has changed!), intellectual property, national interest and the balance of regulation/control, diversity of opinions, managing morality, including profanity, indecency, and the rating system, and ensuring accuracy by controlling libel and slander.

The chapter then moved to a case study of pragmatic controls and issues with violence in the media, an issue which probably encompasses just about all of the previous issues in some way, but especially morality and the rating system. It seemed that the author favored pragmatic analysis for its, well, pragmatic applications and possibly its American origin. At any rate, there did not seem to be a lot of skepticism of the current system.

The reading then moved on to part II! Rhetorical analysis reminded me a lot of the rhetorical theory class, especially in the section on sign and signifier, and then sign, object, and interpretation. It is interesting to think that all these language signs are arbitrary. There are other theories that suggest language creates meaning, and other signs or sign systems create fundamentally different understandings of the objects. I wish the chapter had included a bit about that.

There are different types of rhetorical structure (associated with Kenneth Burke) are clusters, form, and genre. I wonder why the author chose to use a full page ad of a naked woman. Critically, I would say these men are perpetuating the objectification of women in the media. Surely there was another option to analyze besides a naked woman wanting to have sex. Finally the chapter discussed affect and aesthetics, which could probably fall under the “visual cues” category of Huckin’s CDA article.

The final chapter today was cultural analysis, which I found to be the most interesting and the most relevant to some of our previous class discussions on CDA. The chapter opened with a story about a female surgeon. I had heard this before but this time, the father died. It seemed a little callous. Perhaps this person has never had a loved one actually die in a car crash. The authors moved on to defining culture, both physical and rhetorical. Then the chapter moved on to ideology, which seems to be what critical studies are fundamentally confronting, trying to reshape our notions of myth, doxa, and hegemony. We discussed class and race, but sexism did not get its own section in the chapter. Then authors brought up exclusion and othering.