Critical Media Studies

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Matteo Wong’s Dec. 9th article in The Atlantic, “The GPT Era Is Already Ending.”  They trace the algorithmic shift from Chat GPT to 01 and discuss whether this transition gets any closer to genuine intelligence.   We encourage you to listen to the previous episode on Benjamin Labatut’s “The Gods of Reason” as a primer for this one.

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Benjamin Labatut’s essay, “The Gods of Logic: Before and After Artificial Intelligence. In tracing his historical approach to the development of AI, Barry and Mike highlight the unpredictability of language as opposed to the certainty of mathematics.Link to article.

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Jodi Dean’s book, “Blog Theory.” They focus on her notion of “communicative capitalism,” treating the book as a time capsule of sorts.  They take her arguments from 2010 and suggest their relevance to our current situation in 2024. 

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss chapter one of Bolter and Grusin’s book and attempt to define their foundational term, remediation.

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s introduction to their 1999 Media Studies book, Remediation.  In particular, they discuss the four key concepts that Bolter and Grusin introduce: mediation, remediation, immediacy, and hypermediacy. 

In the follow up to their previous episode, Barry and Mike discuss how Kember and Zylinska use Steigler’s notion of an “originary technicity” to articulate a third position between the philosophy Raymond Williams and Marshall McLuhan. 

This is the first of two episodes on Kember and Zylinska’s essay “Mediation and the Vitality of Media” from their book, Life after New Media:  Mediation as a Vital Process (2012).  Barry and Mike discuss the problems with and reasons for the binary divisions in media theory, particularly the way in which the field understands the relations between “old” and “new” media.  Kember and Zylinska note that the contradictions in the field stem from unresolved tensions in the McLuhan/Williams debate.  We discuss their attempts to overcome the binary.

Barry and Mike discuss Bruno Latour’s essay, “On Actor-Network Theory: A few clarifications.” They work through his key terms in an attempt to better understand the new meanings he ascribes to actors and networks and what this theory allows us to do with media theory. 

In this episode Barry and Mike continue their discussion of William Burroughs’ cut-up method.  They introduce Alex Kitnick’s arguments about the Media is the Massage from his book Distant Early Warning: Marshall McLuhan and the Transformation of the Avant-Garde in order to illuminate Burroughs’ practice. 

In this episode Barry and Mike discuss William Burroughs’ 1963 manifesto “The Cut-Up Method.”  We worry over some contradictions and tensions in his “new” method of writing.