Reflcetion after theme 2 - Critical media studies

I found the theme and the reading materials this week a lot easier to deal with compared to the previous week, even though it still was quite hard to understand. In order to prepare for this week’s theme, critical media studies, i read the assigned texts and answered the question according to them. After i finished reading the papers by Benjamin and Adorno & Horkheimer there were still some questions i was pondering about, but the lecture with Henrik was really satisfying and it felt like everything fell into its place. Next up was the seminar and i prepared myself by reading the notes from the lecture one more time and summarized my answers to the questions.

At the seminar Henrik talked about the concept nominalism once more since it was the term that everybody still had some concern about. We discussed the idea behind nominalism and the fact that it is, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, something that’s only used to describe things, not to question and criticize it. The example with the cave was really effective and visualizing and I think the entire group really understood the concept after that. I think nominalism needs to be assembled with other methods in order to be effective, because the concept as alone is quite useless.

We also talked about the revolutionary potential of culture and how new inventions through the history have changed the way people understand and look at things, for example the “new” way to look at the horse. Before the camera was invented people thought that a horse always had their four feet on the ground at the same time, but the camera proved something else.

I liked the way we were divided into smaller groups in order to discuss some questions together because it was interesting and exciting to hear how other students reflected about these concepts that the text’s provided. At the same time, it was nice to grasp that i’m not the only one who’s struggling reading these texts.