This has become an important question for us to ask, one that has only been asked and explored in the past decade or so. Once considered a "Disney degree" the study of media communications has become developed into a well rounded discussion that is important for our society to have. Looking at media is very important, especially in a society where media is so central to our every day lives. Now in our culture media helps reinforce social norms and concepts. Media is central to the image of ourselves and the outside world and how we interact with it.
Now, the face of media is changing as new media and technology comes out every few years. This merging of media and instant satisfaction has become a critical turning point in how media is viewed and marketed to younger and younger audiences. Today instead of reading newspapers we can get our news on internet sites like CNN and Fox. For T.V. we can browse and interface with thousands of sites that allow us to watch tv shows that are carbon copies of the same old, same old while we spend more hours at work to afford more and more superficial luxuries.
One of the major pioneers of this study was Herbert Marshall McLuhan. For those who do not know who McLuhan is, he was a Canadian scholar who taught and studied many different subjects such as English literature and communication theory. (For a full biography of him you can refer to this and this site, for the purpose of this blog I do not want to get into a long paragraph about the man himself so I can focus on his contributions to media studies) Two of the most famous concepts that McLuhan came up with was "the medium is the message" and "global village", these concepts have become some of the cornerstones in media studies and are studied even today in many media classes through the country.
Both concepts are critical in understanding how media has such a strong impact on us and society but I'd like to focus on "the medium is the message", this revolutionary concept refers to how the medium infuses itself into the message, allowing a symbiotic relationship to form where the medium it is presented in is actually more important than the message itself. McLuhan first presented this concept in his book: Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964.
McLuhan's main point was that the medium was important to study instead of just the message it carried. That the medium was what gave the message a way to come across and that while the message was important it was really the medium and the way it delivered it in society that we should focus on. How do these new characteristics of medium affect us and what does that reflect back on us as a society.
Here is a clip in which audio of McLuhan discussing his viewpoints and exactly what he is trying to explain in his theory is "mashup" with visual images to reinforce his points. It is a bit dry but I believe that McLuhan was brilliant in his view point of the society we live in. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.
I hope in this blog I can explore more concepts of media and how specifically Mass media changes how things are explored and the way we see it. I hope that this blog also opens some people's eyes by helping them think of things differently or maybe gives them a new idea of how to interrupt things.
Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy my blog!
