The relations between technology and innovation in media theories: theoretical and methodological principles for a digital media study

• Grant number: 12/21841-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: August 01, 2013
• End date: July 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications - Theory of Communication
• Principal Investigator: Massimo Di Felice
• Grantee: Antonio Rafele
• Host Institution: Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The research intends to build an analytical model which aims to define the typical con-cepts and processes of technological innovation, offering a complex set of concepts based on a historical investigation about the media, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, as well as a series of theoretical and methodological statements for the study and understanding of the quality of ongoing transformations in digital practices. The construction of this paradigm will be held from the return to a tradition of study established in the works of Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan, which will in particular focus on the relationship between everyday experience and the methodological range, relations between medium and territory, medium and perception , medium and social structures, medium and history.This model aims to fill out some of the epistemological limits of scientific literature on communications, shaping a different perception of the relationship established between subject and object, as well as a particularly effective method for the study of certain aesthetic, social and political aspects of contemporary media