Course Introduction CMS.801 Media in Transition, Fall 2004

RAVEL: CMS.801 is a required course for master's students in the Comparative Media Studies Program. They ideally take it in the first semester of their second year. And the goal of the class is to provide them with some historical depth and perspective on media change. In other words, most of these students come to the program with some background in a media industry or with an undergraduate degree in which they have majored in a series of studies that is relevant to CMS. But many of them don't have that kind of historical perspective. And the goal of the class is to look at earlier points of media change. In the version of the class that I teach, we began with the transition from scrolls to codex books, in other words, the book as we know it today, which takes place around 400 AD. And we move forward through the advent of the printing press in Europe. In the 19th century, we talk about the beginnings of photography, radio, various sound technologies. And, in the version of the course that I taught, we end with early film. And the point is for students who are hyper-aware of media change today, as a result of the digital revolution, to have a comparative perspective so they can get a better sense of what really is new, revolutionary, radical and what has been seen and done before. It is kind of the historian's conceit. I am a historian by training, and it is kind of the historian's conceit to say there are no new things under the sun. Students in this class are evaluated based on their class participation. It is a three hour a week seminar, and it met in the evenings in the fall of 2004. And class participation is absolutely vital. This is not a lecture class. In some instances, particularly in earlier historical periods where students might not have much background, I will provide maybe a ten or fifteen minute mini-lecture to give them the historical context for the readings that we have done. But, by and large, it is a discussion. So part of the evaluation method is simply their contribution to the class discussion. Each student also has the opportunity, either by themselves or sometimes in tandem with another classmate to lead a discussion. That is probably not the right term. To make a presentation based on that week's readings which will both summarize and also pose provocative questions to get the discussion rolling. The presentations were often quite interesting, involved PowerPoint presentations or the use of websites. They were multi-media experiences themselves. And then finally, in addition to class participation and the one presentation, the students wrote a 20 page paper at the end of the semester. I offered them the opportunity to submit a final project in some format other than the traditional hardcopy paper. Interestingly enough none of the students took me up on that this term. My goal, in teaching the class, was always to respect the integrity and the totality of the past to try to place media change in as much context as possible. And, in so doing, to think about similarities and differences, not just between the media change itself, but also between the cultural, social, political, economic context in which these media changes were taking place. Course material of CMS.801 fits into the CMS, the Comparative Media Studies program in the following way. First of all, remember that this is a graduate level course. By the time the students come to this class they have already taken, done a year of coursework at MIT, and they have had required courses in media theory and practice. And I believe also in some technological aspects of various media industries. So my goal is really to complement the more contemporary aspects of the class by providing historical dimension. That is not to say the class is atheoretical. We began as browsers of the website, we will see, by reading the book by Walter Ong, "Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word." In that same week we read Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media [Change?]." Two very different perspectives on media but using them in an effort to provide a kind of theoretical framework or, in some cases, just punching bags for us to bounce off and be in dialogue with for the rest of the term. Well, the sort of day-to-day life of CMS.801, I really actually prefer to think of it in sort of weekly units. We have an email discussion list. And, in some weeks during the fall 2004 semester, that discussion list was quite active with people exchanging ideas about readings or passing on URLs of articles and things they would come across online that they thought were relevant to our class discussion. So the discussion continues at perhaps a less intense level outside of the three hours that we meet every week as well. Within the three hour class, the pattern typically is I will begin with a few administrative announcements, and then I turn things over to the student or students who are presenting that material that week. And it was very interesting the pattern that student presentations took during the course of the term. As the semester went on the presentations got lengthier and lengthier. And, in response, the rest of the students and myself also began to intervene in the presentations to ask questions to say, well, how does this relate to what we read two weeks ago? And, by the end of the term, the presentations basically were the whole three hour session. And it was very hard for the presenters to get a word in edgewise after they had begun their initial presentation. So it was that kind of a class dynamic.