Arozin - Critical media studies, reflection

After this weeks lecture and seminar, I came to the conclusion that I had interpreted the assigned texts pretty good. but one thing that I had a hard time getting a grip of, was the term nominalism. But after the seminar, where we discussed it, I realized that I knew it’s meaning all along.

Nominalism only preserves what we see, and doesn't question that which is observed is a pretty harsh way of looking at something. I think that nominalism in it self is a bit useless, but when paired with other methods can be quite effective,especially when u start to questions something which you look upon.

Another thing we discussed during the seminar was the meaning and use of culture and if it have any revolutionary potentials. My group came to the conclusion that there are two different kinds of culture.

Firstly, we have aesthetic culture which is purely subjective. Culture such as music, arts, film lies within its boundaries, and have one thing in common, that someone else have created it, created its aura and meaning, and leaves very little room for the human mind to expand and build her own conclusions and define what she are observing.

Secondly we have what our group called societal culture, which is what outsiders define as our culture. It can be our political standings, our food culture, our educational system, everything and anything that define us as a community and society. The difference between aesthetical culture and societal culture as we saw it was that aesthetical culture were created for our consumption and to please the crowd, where societal culture were defined by others based on our actions, society and in some ways also our aesthetic culture.

I think culture have a revolutionary potential, both directly and indirectly, for example if you take a look on the James Bond and Indiana Jones movies from the sixties to the eighties, the villains were always the Soviets or the Nazis which, at the time, were enemies if the Americans, and therefore perceived as bad guys. Today the Nazis and Soviets equivalents are mainly terrorists from different part of the world, which are defined as the enemies of modern times.

This is an indirect way for the producers of culture and aesthetics to deliver an underlying message of the truth, or at least the truth as they see it.

Another thing I had a hard time with was understanding the difference between political aesthetics and aesthetic politics, but we came to a conclusion during the seminar. Political aesthetics were the usage of aesthetics and culture to show the society how it would look like. We compared to fascism and today's North Korea.

And why are this an important view on todays media? why should we as students and future Media engineers even bother to understand this?

Information is power, and with great power comes great responsibilities, and to create the future we have to know our past to avoid traps and dangers. We always have to criticize media and the usage of it, since it’s todays media that molds the perception and opinion of our society which is defined by others.

We also have to know the power that lies within the usage and creation of media and culture, to be able to detect dangers and threats when they appear.