Media Criticism. Issue One

Author: Jiang Yuanyun and Zhang Ning, Editors
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-07-01
Features: Media culture is an important component of social and cultural life. In a sense, contemporary people live in the midst of mass media. Media Criticism aims to critique current mass culture and fashion from the perspective of media studies, examining the interactive relationship between media and sociocultural dynamics, and providing analytical methods. The Media Criticism series is published biannually, offering critical practices from the perspective of media studies on culture, exploring the interactive relationship between media and sociocultural dynamics, and providing analytical methods. Today, mass media are transforming our lives more rapidly than ever before. It is not an exaggeration to say that media culture is an important component of social and cultural life. In a sense, contemporary people live in the midst of mass media. The establishment of the Media Criticism series aims to critique current mass culture and fashion, to gain a clear understanding of the relationship between media culture and contemporary social life, and to reveal the specific pathways between them. The moment we open our eyes, information floods us. The media that carry this excessive information are ubiquitous—utility poles, bus stop signs, walls along major roads, city streets, neon signs, overpasses, restrooms, cultural T-shirts, women's bodies—and more. There are also dominant media: hundreds of official television stations broadcasting entertainment programs, interviews, dramas, and quiz shows day and night; thousands of official newspapers with increasingly expanded pages; hundreds of thousands of official and private websites overwhelming us with information; and so on. Indeed, we have a sense of being besieged by media and information. Media forms are constantly evolving, and there is a trend toward everything being mediated. The type of media determines the type of media criticism. "Everything is mediated" means that the inherent meaning of things has lost its self-sufficiency; they have become merely media or tools for other things, an "other." Television and newspapers, as media, are indeed objects of media criticism. When a city is considered a medium, it becomes an object of media criticism. When a person's (such as a model's) body becomes a medium, it too is an object of media criticism. The method of criticism is not aesthetic or formalist (though this method can also be used under certain conditions), but rather semiotic—or what might be called "semiotic political economy." An important task of media semiotic research and criticism is to conduct semiotic analysis of the production, dissemination, and consumption patterns of the state's super media factories, including criticism of the internal structure and production models of state super media. It must also conduct semiotic research and criticism of another super medium—the city. Everything in the city (including the details of the human body, their hairstyles, fashion, nails, posture, expressions, and various cultural symbols, etc.) is being mediated. They are not only objects of contemporary cultural semiotics but also objects of micro-sociology, or what might be called "close reading of the text." The subject of this issue's special feature is the semiotic secrets of the sound systems and programmatic structures in various communication forms within mainstream media—or, in other words, their semiotic political economy secrets. This is merely a beginning.