Theories of Media Change: Graphing Revolutions in Telecommunications & Information Technology

Garnet Hertz


California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, 07 November 2006

These are slides from a public lecture given 11am on Tuesday November 7th 2006 at Calit2, as part of the Emulex Fellows lecture series. This was my first public presentation related to "Theories of Media Change".

This presentation uses a positioning statement of the institute - the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology - as a reference point to discuss general theories of media change. Exponential models of growth, like Moore's Law (1965), are explained and questioned. Gartner's Hype Cycle Theory (2005) is then proposed as a model for articulating unrealistic expectations of new media. Paul Duguid's Futurological Tropes (1996) of transparency and supercession are introduced within the context of hype, and Hype Cycles are problematized as being consumer-product-centric. Lastly, McLuhan's Tetrads (1989) are introduced as a model for the analysis of media research & development.


(Slides - PDF Format, 2.4M)
(Slides - PowerPoint Format, 3.5M)
(Slides - MOV Format, 37.8M)
(Slides - Flash Format, 15.6M)
(Slides as 1024x768 inline PNGs on webpage)
(Also available as a Flickr Photoset)


More information about this research project can be found at http://conceptlab.com/change/. More information about Garnet Hertz can be found at http://conceptlab.com/.


Page last modified 09 November 2006