Objects of Media Studies
By Amelie Hastie
Design by Raegan Kelly
Editors' Introduction
From my Elvis-O-poly board game to my Dukes of Hazzard TV dinner tray to a R.E.M. 45 I can no longer play, my office and home overflow with various artifacts of popular media culture. We might see these things simply as the detritus of the relentless commercialism of the culture industries, ephemeral stuff now rescued from obscurity through various expeditions to thrift stores and E-bay, but Amelie Hastie and her collaborators here invite us to understand these objects differently. Both in their materiality and in the affective chains of pleasure and desire that they do (or do not) activate, such objects point the way to new directions for media studies. In her evocative exploration of a seventy-year-old powder box, one of eight object ‘biographies’ in Objects of Media Studies, Mary Desjardins sketches new interpretative paradigms for the stuff of culture. Following her insights, my board game, taken seriously, just might “help us capture and understand the dream factory's relation to the self in modernity.” However, OMS does not restrict its analyses of the objects of media studies to the souvenir or the collectible. Instead, across its many screens and avenues of reading, OMS surveys a diverse array of ‘media objects,’ some perhaps expected, others quite surprising.
Editors' Introduction Continued
|
Project Technologies
Plug-in(s) you will need to view this project:
TEST FOR PLUG IN
Browser application providing fluid vector-based graphics and interface
Development and data handling applications:
Open-source relational database
PHP Hypertext Preprocessor
|
