Materiality (social sciences and humanities)

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In the social sciences, materiality is the notion that the physical properties of a cultural artifact have consequences for how the object is used. [1] Some scholars expand this definition to encompass a broader range of actions, such as the process of making art, and the power of organizations and institutions to orient activity around themselves. [1] The concept of materiality is used across many disciplines within the social sciences to focus attention on the impact of material or physical factors. Scholars working in science and technology studies, anthropology, organization studies, or communication studies may incorporate materiality as a dimension of their investigations. Central figures in the social scientific study of materiality are Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan.

Contents

Communication studies

Communication studies scholars use theories of materiality when investigating the impact of media such as newspapers, radio, television, personal computing and the Internet. Collectively, these are termed “media effects” studies. [1] In conjunction with materiality, some communication scholars make use of the concept of affordance: the idea that the features of a particular technology may encourage certain behaviours from the technology's users. [1] Other scholars explore how technologies and the communities that use them may be mutually determining (the way users respond to technology tends to drive both features and cultural norms among users of that technology) or they may behave as co-creators (the abilities and limitations of a technology may make it a part of the works created using that technology). [1]

Science and technology studies

Although science and technology studies (STS) are typically associated with a social constructivist viewpoint, some STS scholars (e.g. Langdon Winner) incorporate materiality into their studies of technology and explore how the affordances of technology may shape or even control their use. Actor-network theory, or ANT, is an example of an STS theory which incorporates both social and material interactions. [1]

Toronto School

The Toronto School view of materiality, also known as the ‘medium’ view, includes the intellectual legacies of Innis and McLuhan, who focused attention on the consequences of the medium, on what authors communicate and on what audiences experience. [1] [2] Innis explored the broad historical consequences of time-bound media (e.g. transportable but fragile media such as papyrus) and space-bound media (e.g. hard-to-transport but longer-lasting media such as stone tablets). [2] [3] Different cultures have used various media to store information and its availability and transportability through time impacts its use. In an extension of Innis' ideas, McLuhan wrote, “The medium is the message”, that is, the way people transmit ideas is consequential in and of itself. [4] The influence of the medium can be invisible and difficult to characterize. [4] [1]

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harold Innis</span> Canadian academic (1894–1952)

Harold Adams Innis was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada's culture, political history, and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fish, lumber, wheat, mined metals, and coal. The staple thesis dominated economic history in Canada from the 1930s to 1960s, and continues to be a fundamental part of the Canadian political economic tradition.

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<i>Understanding Media</i> 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tetrad of media effects</span>

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The alphabet effect is a group of hypotheses in communication theory arguing that phonetic writing, and alphabetic scripts in particular, have served to promote and encourage the cognitive skills of abstraction, analysis, coding, decoding, and classification. Promoters of these hypotheses are associated with the Toronto School of Communication, such as Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Walter Ong, Vilém Flusser and more recently Robert K. Logan; the term "alphabet effect" comes from Logan's 1986 work.

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Harold Adams Innis was a professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on Canadian economic history and on media and communication theory. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada's culture, political history and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of staples such as fur, fish, wood, wheat, mined metals and fossil fuels. Innis's communications writings explore the role of media in shaping the culture and development of civilizations. He argued, for example, that a balance between oral and written forms of communication contributed to the flourishing of Greek civilization in the 5th century BC. But he warned that Western civilization is now imperiled by powerful, advertising-driven media obsessed by "present-mindedness" and the "continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity."

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New media studies is an academic discipline that explores the intersections of computing, science, the humanities, and the visual and performing arts. Janet Murray, a prominent researcher in the discipline, describes this intersection as "a single new medium of representation, the digital medium, formed by the braided interplay of technical invention and cultural expression at the end of the 20th century". The main factor in defining new media is the role the Internet plays; new media is effortlessly spread instantly. The category of new media is occupied by devices connected to the Internet, an example being a smartphone or tablet. Television and cinemas are commonly thought of as new media but are ruled out since the invention was before the time of the internet.

Feminist science and technology studies is a theoretical subfield of science and technology studies (STS), which explores how gender interacts with science and technology. The field emerged in the early 1980s alongside other relativist theories of STS which rejected the dominance of technological determinism, proposing that reality is multiple rather than fixed and prioritizing situated knowledges over scientific objectivity. Feminist STS's material-semiotic theory evolved to display a complex understanding of gender and technology relationships by the 2000s, notable scholars producing feminist critiques of scientific knowledge and the design and use of technologies. The co-constructive relationship between gender and technology contributed to feminist STS's rejection of binary gender roles by the twenty-first century, the field's framework expanding to incorporate principles of feminist technoscience and queer theory amidst widespread adoption of the internet.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Lievrouw, Leah (2014). "2: Materiality and Media in Communication and Technology Studies: An Unfinished Project". In Gillespie, Tarleton; Boczkowski, Pablo; Foot, Kirsten (eds.). Media technologies : essays on communication, materiality, and society. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. pp. 21–51. ISBN   978-0-262-52537-4.
  2. 1 2 Innis, Harold (1951). The bias of communication . Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN   978-0802068392.
  3. Alleyne, Mark (2009). "International Communication Theories". In Littlejohn, Stephen W.; Foss, Karen A. (eds.). Encyclopedia of communication theory. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sage. ISBN   9781412959377.
  4. 1 2 McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding media : the extensions of man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN   978-0262631594.