Media Studies Quotes

“Fandom, after all, is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn't fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn't frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it.”
― Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

“It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. Tranquilizers and anesthetics, private and corporate, become the largest business in the world just as the world is attempting to maximize every form of alert. Sound-light shows, as new cliché, are in effect mergers, retrievers of the tribal condition. It is a state that has already overtaken private enterprise, as individual businesses form into massive conglomerates. As information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves. The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we exist.”
― Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype

“It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.”
― Norbert Wiener

“For all the talk about the merging of film and video game, and for all its inevitability, perhaps the secret of true convergence lies not in an external reality , but in an internal truth: What kids seek from video games is what we all seek from our own distractions--be they movies, radio, comic books, literature, or art: an escape from the mundane to the sublime, where our imaginations make of us heroes, lovers, warriors, and gods.”
― Devin C. Griffiths, Virtual Ascendance: Video Games and the Remaking of Reality

“Critical pessimists, such as media critics Mark Crispin Miller, Noam Chomsky, and Robert McChesney, focus primarily on the obstacles to achieving a more democratic society. In the process, they often exaggerate the power of big media in order to frighten readers into taking action. I don't disagree with their concern about media concentration, but the way they frame the debate is self-defeating insofar as it disempowers consumers even as it seeks to mobilize them. Far too much media reform rhetoric rests on melodramatic discourse about victimization and vulnerability, seduction and manipulation, "propaganda machines" and "weapons of mass deception". Again and again, this version of the media reform movement has ignored the complexity of the public's relationship to popular culture and sided with those opposed to a more diverse and participatory culture. The politics of critical utopianism is founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. As with previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more empowered, not when they are at their weakest.”
― Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

“Treat your mind like a museum, not a warehouse”
― Ignassen Mather , The 30 Day Media Diet

“Shifting the frame only slightly, the choice of a theory from among the range of always ideologically founded theories is itself necessarily ideologically motivated. Positioning is unavoidable; positioning is the result of choice from among a range of possibilities; that choice is socially meaningful - it is ideological.”
― Gunther Kress, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication: Exploring Contemporary Methods of Communication

“When ideas are detached from the media used to transmit them, they are also cut off from the historical circumstances that shape them, and it becomes difficult to perceive the changing context within which they must be viewed.”
― Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change

“If you're too young to remember the Time Before Pong, then you probably can't appreciate the momentousness of its arrival. Bear in mind the game emerged in a very different world. It was a time before home computers, cable television, cell phones, game consoles, the Internet--everything we take for granted today. For many of my formative years, we still watched TV in black and white, and had to get up to change the channel. This was the technological Dark Ages. Had we been less culturally enlightened, we would have denounced Pong as witchcraft and burned its inventors at the stake. For those of us who were there--who had never played, let alone seen, a video game--we knew we were witnessing something extraordinary, a groundbreaking achievement in home entertainment. However, none of us knew that we were participating in the birth of a revolution.”
― Devin C. Griffiths, Virtual Ascendance: Video Games and the Remaking of Reality

“Freedom of the press can never be the licence to say anything one desires. Freedom of the press is not the freedom to slander and attack and must never be used to fight other people’s wars. It does not mean manipulating a story into speaking your views. One might think it common sense but in the world of journalism a lot of what makes sense is lost to the lure of favouritism, greed and fame. Sadly, in this truth-telling business truth is hard to find.”
― Aysha Taryam

“Say what you wish about media in the Arab world, but say it knowing that no media channel in the world is absolutely free.”
― Aysha Taryam

“Students of media are persistently attacked as evaders, idly concentrating on means or processes rather than on 'substance'. The dramatic and rapid changes of 'substance' elude these accusers. Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social drama, with a fixed, unchangeable point of view - the witless repetitive response to the unperceived.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Scientists are aware that all the lab-rat tests in the world, once compiled, can tell us only how lab rats act when tested, and that is how we must begin to view school: all that you can learn in a school classroom is what goes on inside a school classroom.”
― Anne Elizabeth Moore, The Manifesti of Radical Literature

“The (nation) state's concern had been the development of citizens - social subjects whose identity was shaped by the goals of the state - and the preparation of a labour force serving the needs of a national economy and administration. That state was interested in cohesion, integration and homogeneity - however imperfectly realized. The globally framed interests of current versions of the market are neither about citizenship - shared social values, aspirations, dispositions - nor about the preparation of a labour force.....”
― Gunther Kress, Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication: Exploring Contemporary Methods of Communication

“Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.”
― Alexander R. Galloway

“The 'knowing field'... denotes a place that is both inside each of us, and something notionally shared by everyone else in the fan base.”
― Mark Duffett, Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture

“As fandom scholars who are also music lovers, we have focused on the noon heat of passion, not the ways in which fandom can wax and wane. Even the precise reasons why any particular individual's fandom might end have rarely been examined and are poorly understood. Fandom always just seems there. Our relative blindness to its beginnings, endings and history is endemic to the field.”
― Mark Duffett, Fan Identities and Practices in Context: Dedicated to Music

“An understanding of media’s effects constitutes a civil defense against media fallout”
― Marshall McLuhan