The Media Concept
The Media Concept
Overview
Before the consolidation of the media concept in the middle of the 20th century, “the media” had no name. One spoke of “mass culture,” “the public sphere,” “propaganda,” or “the press,” but the constellation of industries that ostensibly spoke to and for a mass audience held no singular alias. This project uses computational tools to trace the entrance of the term “media” into the vernacular — and its reification into a concept — in the United States. Using word-embedding models on a corpus of American magazines (Time, The New Yorker, The Economist, Ebony, Jet, Vogue, and ArtNews) between 1950 and the present, I track the evolution of the media concept across 20th-century publics, tracing its necessary but non-identical relationship to other overdetermined concepts: technology, ideology, culture, and environment. Demonstrating when and where these concepts shift in their relationship to each other, I trace how the semantic confusion around “media” has been mobilized for various political and artistic ends.
This project is made possible by the generous support of the Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory, Professors Amy Hungerford (Yale University) and Richard So (McGill University), and the ingenuity of Kent Chang, Gaurav Pathak, and Zachary Kitt.
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