Theme 2: Critical media studies - post reflections

The text this week was hard to get trough for different reasons. Honestly I did not find the text or theme very interesting. And, just like I mentioned in the text I wrote before the seminar, I got a feeling that the authors are old and because of that they are set in their ways and are having a hard time thinking outside their own box.  

The authors talked about terms like enlightenment and mass media. I do find that some of the terms that Adorno and Horkheimer are discussing does have the potential to be interesting but the authors are not at all able to present it in a way that catch my attention.

The seminar did not contribute to a lot in the sense that it did not give me a deeper understanding about the text nor what the authors tried to communicate. But there were a couple of interesting toppings that came up. 

For example we did discus art, and what is art. And who are to say if it's art or not. It is up to the viewers to say if it is art or not? Or should it be decided by the law? These are difficult questions and we could not agree on one answer. My personal opinion is that it should not be the law that decides everything but there has to be a limit when it is not possible to blame what you did on art. But to make the decision on where to draw the line is hard, take for example the line between art and vandalism. On one hand I would say that it should be illegal to cause damage on other person’s property, for example spray paint a train. But on the other hand, that would mean that graffiti should be illegal, and in many places, graffiti is a big part of the culture in the city. I do think it is important to acknowledge that art has a very wide spectra and the street art are just as much art as Mona Lisa, even thou it is not as famous. But now I have decided what art is, and who am I to do that? 

The question about art also got us talking about if it is our assignment, as media technology students, to decide and define what it actually is. Nor in this question we were able to agree of one answer. Personally I think that the question is to complex for us to decide this. And I am not even sure that I think that someone should be able to decide and tell the rest of the world what art is and not. Because, in the end, I do think that art is something very subjective.

In the beginning of the seminar we were discussing the text in smaller group. One of the topics that we talked about then was the fact that it is easy to see that the book is not written today and that is also in some ways are very out of date. The authors are very critical of the fact that they think that the media, when they wrote the book, is a one-way communication. The audience has no opportunity to respond to what the media is saying. I do find that times have changed and even if TV is bigger today than ever there is still one media that exist only because of two way communication, namely social media.

To sum it all up: the seminar contributed with some interesting discussions but I do believe that it could have been even better if another text would have been chosen for us to read.