This presentation revisits the intersection of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies during and following 1980s. It reexamines the historical inroads and appropriations of cultural studies in Communication and Media Studies, particularly the significance of James Carey’s account of “communication as culture,” which became a prominent point of reference for cultural studies from and in communication/media theory and research. The presentation devotes special attention to the understanding of terms such as “media” and “information” in Carey’s and others’ formulation that communication is cultural, asking how the preferred definitions of communication, culture, media, and information have shaped research, and asking whether these definitions and perspectives are useful any longer in understanding and analyzing forms of Artificial Intelligence, robotics, Smart Objects, & the Internet of Things. At its edges, the presentation addresses how the historical conceptions of freedom, power, and control (particularly mentalities of Liberalism) have informed theories and models of communication, media, and information, asking whether and how 20th-century conceptions of communication and media as cultural help us understand the current contradictions and non-human-centric features of the technological regime for exercising Liberal subjectivity, citizenship, governmentality, and control environments.
강연자 소개:James Hay is a Professor in the Institute of Communications Research and the Department of Media & Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign. He served as the Director and Director of Graduate Studies of the ICR for many years. He also is the former Editor of the journal, Communication & Critical Cultural Studies. His most recent publication is “Virus Government: A 21st-century Genealogy of the ‘Dusk Mask’ as Biopolitical Technology, The Cultural Politics of COVID-19, ed. John Erni & Ted Striphas, Routledge, 2022.
