Here's a summary of week 2 lecture:

• The twentieth century saw the development of mass society and an explosion of broadcast media forms (newspapers, cinema, radio, and television) where messages were distributed from centralised sources to audiences around the world. Theorists struggled to keep up. A number of sometimes competing, sometimes compatible academic disciplines have sprung up to investigate issues around communication.
• In the last decade, the rise of computers and other new communications technologies have spawned new areas of investigation:
  New Media Studies
  CyberStudies
  Internet Studies
  Cyberculture Studies
  Web Studies
• Understanding Media, first published in 1964, focuses on the media effects that permeate society. McLuhan's starting point is the individual (because he defines media as technological extensions of the body) so he frames media effects as 'hot' to 'cool' in terms of the intensity of different media on the physical senses - radio and cinema are hot because their dense information consumes the audience, telephone and television are cool with less intense information so the audience has more sensory participation. This invariably entails a psychological dimension.
• 'Culture' is wrested from that privileged space of artistic production and specialist knowledge (high culture) and into the lived experience of the everyday.
• "Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies. The sound film, far surpassing the theatre of illusion, leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience, who is unable to respond within the structure of the film, yet [who is also unable to] deviate from its precise detail without losing the thread of the story; hence the film forces its victims to equate it directly with reality."(Adorno, T & Horkheimer, M Dialectic of Enlightenment Verso London 1979 p126)
• The tangle of communication theory that has emerged in the last century cannot be resolved by one side winning, it can only be resolved by accomodation (powersharing). Political economy seeks to do that by grounding their analysis in the economic base of society while appreciating the force of the dialectic between the economic base and the cultural superstrucure

To be truthful, not highly entertaining and some information was a little hard to retain, but it's information that needs to be learnt I guess!