Page 163 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

MODERN/MODERNISM/MODERNITY

associated with high-budget drama series, precisely to set apart such
(filmed) shows from the ‘cheaper’ look of studio (video) productions.
Hartley and Montgomery (1985) found the term motivation useful
to distinguish between different kinds of news camerawork. Motivated
news filming is where the camera ‘defers’ to the action and
participants, following their movements by panning, reframing, etc.
Unmotivated news camerawork, conversely, imposes itself on the
scene without reference to what participants are actually doing. Often
this is by means of a close-up shot on an apparently insignificant detail,
followed by a reframing zoom-out/pan to a wide shot of the main
action. Where both motivated and unmotivated news camerawork are
co-present in one news item, and applied to opposing parties in an
industrial dispute, the argument is that this is a form of visual bias,
producing an ideological preference for those treated ‘deferentially’.

Further reading: Hartley (1992a); Hartley and Montgomery (1985)

MODERN/MODERNISM/MODERNITY

Modernity may be thought of as a period, modernism as an
ideological attitude towards that period. Like all historical phenomena,
modernity developed unevenly. It ‘began’ at rather different times over
about half a millennium, depending on the area under scrutiny.
. Economic modernity began in the 1400s in the city-republics of Italy,
with the invention of banking, joint-stock companies, international
trade and, therefore, of capitalism.
. Technological modernity may be traced even further back to ‘early
modern’ inventions that were made in medieval times, but without
which modernity could not have taken the course that it did. These
included the plough, the compass, gunpowder and printing in
Europe from the 1200s to 1450s. Technologies of exploration,
mapping and navigation, associated with a range of maritime
nations from the 1400s to 1600s – Genoa, Portugal, Spain, the
Dutch, England – were also ‘modern’ applications of medieval
technologies.
. Literary modernity began with secular drama presented to an
unknown audience for profit (Shakespeare), the novel (Cervantes)
and realism (both journalistic and literary); these developments
occurred at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
. Scientific modernity began with the scientific revolution of the
seventeenth century, associated with Galileo and Francis Bacon, and

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