Archive for April, 2009

German Media Theory II – Yes we can

Published
by
Theo Röhle
on April 24, 2009
in Tagungen and Theorie
. 0 Comments

Well, sometimes it’s good to be proven wrong. Contrary to my recent rant about the self-induced isolationism of German media studies, some people actually do seem to care about exploring international connections. The conference “Media Theory on the Move. Transatlantic Perspectives on Media and Mediation” (21-23 May in Potsdam, PDF-Programme) brings together a host of interesting people from Germany, the US and other countries in order to “establish a conversation between the different cultures of thinking about media theory”. Sounds Promising.

Geert Lovink has a good summary of the “German Sonderweg” event in Siegen.

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Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era

Published
by
Theo Röhle
on April 23, 2009
in Social Media
. 0 Comments

Brilliant:

ENG 371WR:
Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era
M-W-F: 11:00 a.m.–12:15 p.m.
Instructor: Robert Lanham

Course Description

As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no longer need to feel encumbered by the paper cuts, reading, and excessive use of words traditionally associated with the writing trade. Writing for Nonreaders in the Postprint Era focuses on the creation of short-form prose that is not intended to be reproduced on pulp fibers.

Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new “Lost Generation” of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.

[…]

Week 6:
140 Characters or Less

Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets come alive with shallow wit. They’ll learn how to construct Facebook status updates that glitter with irony, absurdity, and dramatic glibness. When tweeting, for instance, that “John is enjoying a buttery English muffin,” why not add a link to an image of a muffin with butter oozing from its nooks and crannies? Or why not exaggerate a tad and say that there’s bacon on that muffin, even if there’s not? It’s called poetic license when writers do it! Students will be encouraged to show honesty and vulnerability in their tweets: “Lydia is lounging about in her underwear at 401 Park Street apartment #2, feeling guilty about telling her boss that her uncle died but enjoying the day off.” There’s no such thing as oversharing when you’re a writer.

The complete syllabus is here: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2009/4/20lanham.html

German Media Theory: Too shy to admit its own greatness

Published
by
Theo Röhle
on April 10, 2009
in Academia and Theorie
. 4 Comments

First thought: „Wow, what a great line-up.“ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Friedrich Kittler, Geert Lovink, Irmela Schneider, Erhard Schüttpelz and Hartmut Winkler – they will all be at the University of Siegen on April 22.

Second thought: „Wow, what a great nonsense.“ All these brilliant people are actually coming together in order to discuss whether German media studies are on a „Sonderweg“ – a way that somehow sets it apart from media studies in other countries. The most pressing problem German media studies are faced with according to the announcement: Although „scholars all over the world measure themselves against German publications […] German media scholars have troubles acknowledging their own supremacy.“

Ever since I moved back from Sweden to Germany, the peculiarities of German academia have never ceased to amaze me. Especially the fact that Germany seems to voluntarily shut itself off a lot of the international discussions. Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK, the US, even Austria – they all appear to be engaged in a productive common discourse, but Germany proceeds on largely independent trajectories. Only sometimes, someone decides to translate some text and the discourses are joined for a moment, only to drift off into different directions again.

A good example is Ganaele Langlois’ excellent dissertation “The Technocultural Dimensions of Meaning”, where she develops a „mixed semiotics“ framework inspired by Guattari in order to analyse Amazon and the MediaWiki software. In her argument, she covers a lot of theoretical ground by referring to Kittler and Gumbrecht (and Heidegger), but for the more concrete and up-to-date discussions, she moves on towards Latour, Galloway, Lessig and Manovich – as one would expect in the international discourse.

Obviously, there are plenty of potential points of connection between her argument and current debates in German media studies. It would certainly be interesting to see the fruitful discussions evolving out of such encounters. But what stands in the way for them is simply the lack of English translations of current German texts. Talk about German “supremacy” hardly seems like the right kind of attitude to make these encounters happen. It appears to me that it is not so much the false modesty of German scholars that is at the root of this gap but rather the self-induced isolationism of German academia.

The announcement in its entirety (as my own limping attempt at translating the entwined German academic language):

Without exaggeration the research areas ‘Mediengeschichte’ [media history] and ‘Medientheorie’ [media theory] can be described as idiosyncratic developments of the German ‘Kulturwissenschaften’ [cultural studies]. Therefore, scholars with related interests all over the world measure themselves against German publications. Despite this, there is a persistent belief at German universities that media theory’s ‘Mecca’ just has to be somewhere abroad. For Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford University) this inadequate modesty is a display of the effects of, among others, intercultural provincialism. For if German media scholars are already having troubles acknowledging their own supremacy, they would probably consider it outright unthinkable that a research direction that fascinates them does not even exist in many other national academic cultures.

The iconography of the poster is certainly worth a visual culture-inspired study in its own right.

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