Communications and Media

    choose ONE of these questions for your essay: 1. What are the most crucial points of contrast between characteristics of digital and analogue media? Use specific examples to illustrate your answer, and discuss the technical and social aspects of the characteristics you identify. 2. Promises of ‘the new’ surrounding digital media technologies often tap into desires and ideas that exceed the technology’s actual function. Discuss this idea in relation to the promotional discourses surrounding a specific digital media technology as well as the technology itself. (Attach adverts to your essay where appropriate.) 3. Digital technologies have changed conventional approaches to understanding cultural fields such as music, film, or photography. These changes have ambivalent effects. While digital technologies enable greater access to, and distribution of, information, they also generate anxieties over the ‘truth’ content of images, or raise issues about copyright and ownership. Discuss some of these ambivalent effects in relation to one digital form of music, film, or photography. Use specific examples to make your case. 4. Virtuality is one of the key characteristics of digital media. Discuss this concept in the context of the relationship between materiality and immateriality. Use one specific ‘virtual space’ (often also referred to as ‘augmented reality’) or technology as a case study to exemplify your points. 5. “The dominant functions and processes in the information age are increasingly organised around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture” (Manuel Castells 1996). Discuss this statement by referring in detail to one specific new media technology or platform.