Hannes Mandel is a Lecturer in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests range between German literary, cultural, and media studies, with a focus on the popular, anthropological, and epistemological dimensions of media. He is currently working towards the publication of his PhD thesis titled Readers’ Lore: Media, Literature, and the Making of Folk-Lore.
Authors | Hannes Mandel
Articles on Amodern by Hannes Mandel
MEDIA-IN-USE
On the Usefulness of the Concept of Media Usage
Concepts of techniques and practices have figured prominently in German media studies of the past few decades. A recent encyclopedic project, the Historisches Wörterbuch des Mediengebrauchs [Historical Dictionary of Media Usage], provides an alternate approach that is perceptive to the less theorizable, more customary, yet creative and perhaps all the more significant uses of media technologies: their “Gebrauch” (i.e. German for “use,” “usage,” “practice,” and “custom” alike). Contextualizing the concept, the article introduces the dictionary, as well as the following three original translations from the project, and reflects on both its epistemological and pedagogical potential.