Screen and Media Histories

This subject has the following teaching availabilities in 2010:

The subject will explore the intimate connections between screen and media technologies and changing understandings of culture in the 20th century. It focuses on how innovations in print and photographic technologies, telegraphy and telephony, sound recording, radio, film exhibition, TV and video, and the transformation of analogue by digital technologies, have enabled changing visions of culture. It studies terms such as mechanical reproduction and the culture industry, the optical unconscious and trauma, massification and broadcast, public sphere and media literacy, fragmentation and globalisation. Students will be encouraged, and given the confidence, to move between cultural histories and cultural studies. They will be introduced to the histories of key media technologies, and examine attempts to theorise the significance and influences of those technologies within cultural studies. As a result, students should have, on completion of the subject, a strong critical knowledge of how histories of media technologies are central to contemporary culture.

Students who successfully complete this subject will:

• have a sound understanding of the cultural histories of post-print media technologies;
• have a strong critical understanding of how cultural critics have interpreted, and been influenced by media histories;
• have the ability and confidence to produce cultural studies of media history.

An essay of 1000 words 25% (due mid-semester) and a second essay of 3000 words 75% (due at the end of semester).

Note: Assessment submitted late without an approved formal extension will be penalised at 2% per day. Students who fail to submit up to 2-weeks after the final due date without a formal extension and/or special consideration will receive a fail grade for the piece of assessment.

A subject reader will be available.

• A Social History of the Media (2nd ed) (Asa Briggs & Peter Burke), Polity, 2005

This subject potentially can be taken as a breadth subject component for the following courses:

• Bachelor of Biomedicine
• Bachelor of Commerce
• Bachelor of Environments
• Bachelor of Music
• Bachelor of Science
• Bachelor of Engineering

You should visit learn more about breadth subjects and read the breadth requirements for your degree, and should discuss your choice with your student adviser, before deciding on your subjects.

• have advanced research and analysis skills;

• show critical and ethical self-awareness;

• have the ability to develop and communicate effective arguments in both oral and written form;

• develop advanced skills in media and information literacy and management.

Formerly available as 106-009 Print to Pixels: Cultural Histories and as Media Histories and Cultural Studies. Students who have completed 106-009 are not eligible to enrol in this subject. This subject is available to students enrolled in the BA prior to 2008 at either 2nd or 3rd year level and can be credited to a major in either Cinema or Cultural Studies.