Media and Method: Media Literacy as a True Multimodal Narrative

• In Event: 35.079 - Sheraton Roundtable Session Five - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 35.079-1 - Digital Media, Manipulation, and Critical Thinking

Abstract

The contribution presents results of a three-year project in which the relationship between practice and homeostasis was examined by an analysis of the complete works of the founder of Media Education as an academic discipline, Dieter Baacke. The question of whether a given system, e.g. that of capitalism, brings itself into an singlemodal equilibrium, or whether the activity of actors is necessary to create multimodal culture, is researched. To do so, all the writings of Baacke were digitized and analyzed in a mix of close and distant reading methods. Results show, that Baacke’s concept of media literacy is bases on an updated historical materialism that connects of Foucault’s “materialism of the incorporeal” and Bourdieu’s “doubled materialism” in a dialectical multimodal narrative

Authors

• Christian Johannes Swertz, University of Vienna

• Alessandro Barberi, University of Vienna