Oral Exam Thesis Statements

1. We study the media because the world is always-already mediated, because issues of inclusion and exclusion abound, most especially in the stories that they tell about distant others—stories that enable or disable the way we see, hear, and touch.

2. Moving away from concerns with accuracy, reach, and speed of the transmission model of communication, John Durham Peters (1999) highlights two contrasting ethics of communication with the dialogue and dissemination models. Dialogue emphasizes soul-to-soul communication while dissemination stresses an asymmetric relation between self and others.

3. The scholars working within the Effects Tradition moved from conceiving the media as having (a) direct effects, (b) to limited effects, (c) to minimal effects, and finally (d) to powerful effects. Although distinct from one another, these approaches all subscribe to a positivist epistemology.

4. Stuart Hall’s (1979) Encoding/Decoding model eschews both the notion of a powerful media and a powerful audience and instead argues that there is a skewed but dialectical relationship between the two. Audiences take different decoding positions as elaborated by a variety of reception studies.

5. The study of representations is a matter of life and death. Using a constructivist, rather than simply a reflectionist, perspective, we gain a more critical understanding of how particular discourses, or regimes of truth, become prominent in how we think about a) race/nation, and b) gender/sexuality.

6. Edward Said’s (1985) discussion of Orientalism elaborates on how different practices of representation, such as scholarship, art and literature, form a racialized knowledge of the Other deeply implicated in the operations of power, namely that of imperialism.

7. It is in the “space of appearance” that we first, if not also exclusively, get to know about the Other. In this light, the media is at the heart of our moral future if we are to sustain a relationship with the Other based not just on reciprocity but on responsibility. This grand moral challenge can be best summed up by Roger Silverstone’s (2006) notion of proper distance, “a relationship that is both close and far”.

8. The Frankfurt School elaborates on how cultural forms sustain capitalist ideology. By manufacturing false needs and hiding individuals’ true needs, the culture industry distributes products that ultimately oppress, inhibit thinking, and control. In this view, power is located solely in media institutions—a view that audience studies scholars have argued against.