Lessons about media and culture from our discussions and reading presentations of media ethnography.

• media making entails imagining and producing the audience as a discrete “thing”
• media producers are also media audiences
• media ethnography “de-massifies” mass media/global media; audiences are not passive recipients of media
• top-down imperial or colonial interpretations of media texts and technologies don’t make sense from an ethnographic stance of particular social contexts
• in a global context, culture and difference emerge in hybrid forms
• media making can entail a self-conscious awareness of culture
• media analysis must look beyond the text as a discrete isolable object
• media has material dimensions: both as sensory experience and as an assemblage of different material signifying systems (language, visuals, sound)
• media technologies are not inherently “Western” – but can be incorporated into cultural systems
• “authenticity” is culturally relative
• representation is a social fact.
• Please feel free to comment and add to this list.