Media 01 2015 incomplete
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Marshall McLuhan 1964
Transcript of Media 01 2015 incomplete
Marshall McLuhan 1964
The Media is the Message
Now what does THIS mean?
Media themselves, not the content they carry, should be
the focus of study.
For instance, a light bulb has no content, yet it creates space; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. They can read at night.
McLuhan wrote about this term in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962). His book describes how electronic mass media collapse space and time barriers in human communication, enabling people to interact and live on a global scale. In this sense, the globe has been turned into a village by the electronic mass media.
Today, the global village is mostly used as a metaphor to describe the Internet and World Wide Web. The Internet globalizes communication by allowing users from around the world to connect with each other. Similarly, web-connected computers enable people to link their web sites together. This new reality has implications for forming new sociological structures within the context of culture.
The Frankfurt School
Baudrillard
Television does not just “represent” the world to us, it increasingly defines what the
world in which we live actually is.
(From Giddens et al, 2005
The O.J. Simpson Trial
It became a spectacle. It did not happen in the courthouse so much as it did on the television.
Baudrillard calls this hyperreality—the reality that is only seen on TV.
He stated that the Gulf War cannot happen.
Then, after the war, he stated that the Gulf War did not happen.
And of course it all happens again!
John Thompson describes it:
1 Face to face interaction
2 Mediated interaction: a letter or a phone call
3 Mediated quasi-interaction: social relations created by the mass media—does NOT link individuals directly
Is monological (like TV being one-way)
Mass media changes the balance between the
PUBLIC
And the
PRIVATE
Blogs
Wikis
Mass Texting
YouTube
Vimeo
Slideshare
The Culture Industry discussion
