Discharged Masses - On the Crisis of a Concept
Department: Film and Media Studies
Date and Time: March 13, 2015 | 3:00 PM-4:30 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 1010
Event Details
DISCHARGED MASSES - ON THE CRISIS OF A CONCEPT
FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2015
3:00 PM IN 1010 HUMANITIES GATEWAY
Wolfgang Hagen, Professor of Media Studies at Leuphana University Lueneburg in Germany, is currently the Max Kade Visiting Professor at UCSB. He retired as head of the national radio station Deutschland Radio Kultur. Hagen has published 7 books and close to 100 articles on media history and theory, with an emphasis on radio and broadcast history.
Abstract
"Discharged masses" - On the crisis of a concept. The “masses”: a term, a concept, an idea and a historical phenomenon of the 20th century - framed initially in the context of the first major industrial mass strikes before the First World War (i.e. in the German Ruhr Valley and in St Petersburg, Russia) and further defined by the mass demonstrations of 1989 that signaled the final dissolution of the socialist bloc. Across the political spectrum, the masses of the 20th century engendered the idea of something innovative, a new force, a trans-capitalistic crucible for the emergence of a New Man. Emphasizing less the historical context than the conceptual and epistemological
perspective, the lecture will delineate how the concept of the masses has developed along with the history of media, which should allow us to understand its crisis - and how the masses could be reshaped in terms of the networked conditions of articulation and perception in the era of the Internet.