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My Introduction to Electronic Media class was cancelled this afternoon because only three people had registered.
This figures because I had just finished the syllabus and announced its availability earlier today.
The class was cancelled on August 23, due to low enrollment.
The syllabus for Introduction to Electronic Media, at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, is now available on my professional website.
From the course description:
The course surveys the development of radio, television, cable/satellite, and digital media, including the Internet. In it, we will focus on how technology and industrial control of the electronic media shape their content.
One of the reasons I liked this course is because we draw very close connections between the hardware and software of electronic media. It is also one of the few courses where we examine closely the history of each electronic medium and trace the evolution to how contemporary media industries use them.
Talk about timing!
Today, I discussed digital convergence to my Introduction to Electronic Media class at Fordham. It’s one of those concepts that’s challenging to discuss as part of a single class because it is like explaining the role of money in a capitalist society.
One of the ways that digital convergence impacts electronic media is that it has added a new that could potentially replace the existing distribution of television programming. Whereas the only way to receive a video was to receive a television signal over radio using an antenna, the Internet provides another conduit for accessing television programming. The Business, a weekly radio program on KCRW in Santa Monica, covered the topic of video streaming for consumers. While the discussion reviews the pros and cons of the available gadgets to stream video over the Internet, they also address the possibility for this system replacing traditional cable/satellite distributors as our main gateway to video.
And to their credit they do not once use the word “disrupt.” I really hate that word.
In this morning’s Introduction to Electronic Media class, which one member of the university staff referred to as my “volunteer job” without even the slightest sense of irony, we covered American network television. The topics involved the networks’ competition and a bit of its style over the 1960s, 1970s and into the 1980s. It’s a lot to cram into a one-hundred fifty minute section, but I like to make sure students can see a bit of what television looked like some decades ago.
One of my favorite programs to screen from the 1960s is an episode of Dragnet from 1968. In this episode Joe Friday and Bill Gannon stumble upon an epidemic: youngsters taking LSD. In the clip I screened in class, Joe and Bill go to an abandoned house only to find several youngsters tripping on acid. The representation of the hallucinating kids is a bit over the top. One guy holds a paintbrush and proceeds to put it in his mouth. A woman takes to climbing a wall, although her feet never leave the ground.
As a way to disorient the viewer when entering this mind-altering den, the cinematography establishes the room in an unconventional way, at least for the television medium. We see a very wide-angle shot with several planes of action. The most string element is the placement of the colored lightbulbs throughout the room. There is even one in the front and center of the frame. The framing does not last very long. The subsequent shots are of the officers’ bewildered expressions and then of the kids tripping. It’s not the most innovative message: kids taking drugs is bad. It does however take advantage of the visual form to make the audience trip a little without resorting to unnecessary effects.
It’s hard to say anything new about Miami Vice that hasn’t been said, especially concerning its form. But I wanted to share a very different shot than the Dragnet example. While the shot of the kids tripping on LSD is a wide shot, this is the opposite: a telephoto lens that collapses the planes into one flattened image.
In this shot, we see Crocket call his estranged wife before heading out on a potentially fatal mission to take down a Miami drug lord. As he and Tubbs speed to their mission, Crocket stops the car and pulls it over at a phone booth. (Yes, this is slightly before “car phones”.) The shot shows this neon sign, which we see earlier in the episode, the phone booth, and the marina. Because of the telephoto lens, it makes Crocket seem very distant. Moreover, it is also disorienting because of the unconventional use of the flattened space. Subsequent shots show close-ups of Crocket and of his wife and reestablishes the conventional focal length to revert the television style back to “normal.” Normal focal length…normal television style…normal action-packed episode.
Having students locate articles in media trade press publications, such as Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, Broadcasting and Cable, and others, is a exercise I like to assign my students, especially when teaching classes on contemporary media industries. It not only introduces them to what members of the media industries read about their industry, but it also exposes students to online research resources beyond simple web searches.
In this video, I demonstrate how to find trade press articles using ProQuest and LexisNexis, two popular research databases available to members of Fordham University and most post-secondary educational institutions.
The syllabus for Introduction to Electronic Media, at Fordham University, Lincoln Center, is now available on my professional website. This is the second syllabus I’ve posted this week.
I last taught the course three years ago, and this year’s course will remain very similar to the Fall 2009 iteration.
From the course description:
The course surveys the development of radio, television, cable/satellite, and digital media, including the Internet. In it, we will focus on how technology and industrial control of the electronic media shape their content.
One of the reasons I liked this course is because we draw very close connections between the hardware and software of electronic media. It is also one of the few courses where we examine closely the history of each electronic medium and trace the evolution to how contemporary media industries use them.
A few weeks ago, while trying to find clips of old radio variety shows, I found an episode of the Royal Gelatin Hour, featuring multi-talented entertainer Rudy Vallee, who interviews a young girl from Brooklyn and tries to understand soft-ball.
Some highlights include Vallee not understanding how softball is supposed to be played, that the ball can be pitched fast from an underhanded delivery, and that companies sponsor teams. He also doesn’t understand why the girl wouldn’t stop playing ball in favor of chasing boys. Oh that Vallee! The reference to the Connecticut Yankees refers to Vallee’s own band, which evidently have their own team.
You can listen to the entire episode on the wonderful Internet Archive.
