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Summary Media landscape notes - book
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Week One: What makes media products unique?Book chapter one
Medium theorists the properties of communications technologies can have profound social
and cultural impacts and the understanding of these impacts should be pivotal to any quest to
make sense of media
Classical medium theorists
McLuhan
McLuhan argued that the study of media content was of little significance compare
dot the analysis of communications technologies, ‘the medium is the message’ – the medium
is more important than the message – the capacities of media hardware, rather than the details
of particular examples of content, that have real social significance and impact.
He argues, it is not the detail of the content the broader fact that particular modes of
communication are made possible. Each media technology enables a different extension of
our communication. That as a result of the ease with which we can communicate across the
world through electronic media, we increasingly inhabit a ‘global ‘village.’
Different forms of media involve 2 categories
1. Hot media high definition and data intensive with a large amount of information
conveyed
a. Books, radio
b. One sense
2. Cool media low in information-intensity and high in audience participation
a. Television
b. Combine sound and moving pictures
Most important comparison was between print media (hot media) and electronic
media (cool media). He argues that the ability of mass-produced books and newspapers
precited an end to the age of oral, informal, face-to-face communication and its replacement
by society so dominated by standardized print media that the human sense became
fragmented because everything was reduced to and dictated by the format of the written
word. Ultimately, the capacities of coo, informal medium are deemed pivotal to the
increasing development of a global village.
Kill your television
Postman is fond of the age print media; it is a range of social ills brought about by
developments in electronic and visual communications. Newspapers offer detailed, localized
and, relevant source of communication, filled with rich, coherent information of direct
significance to the lives. The level of concentration required from readers is deemed to have
encouraged a rational, serious engagement with local issues and it was important to the
development of informed, reasoned critical discussion and political engagement. Such
engagement has been undermined by technological developments.
The development of Morse lead to people being able to report stories form distance
places without inconvenience and time delays. In Postman’s view, ‘the dazzle of distance and
, speed’ prompted and increasing emphasis on the superficial reporting of a multitude of
enticing stories form elsewhere. Telegraphy is deemed to have been suited only to ‘the
flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up to date message.’
The two points that are blamed for a reorientation of mass media towards empty spectacle:
- The ability to produce photograph was a further step in the direction of superficiality.
Printed text provided depth and context, encouraging critical thinking, whereas
photograph reduce the complexity of issues to particular fragments, encouraging
emotional, voyeuristic captivation.
- The desire of image-based journalism is deemed to have affected news priorities
themselves, the inclusion of issues increasingly based not on importance but visual
appeal. This made photographs the idea counterpart for the emphasis created by
telegraphy on exciting shored lived stories.
Societal impact of television: Postman regarded the small screens as having concentrated
all the worst tendencies of the alliance of telegraphy and photography, ‘raising the interplay
of image and instancy to an exquisite and dangerous perfection.’ Television’s emphasis on
moving pictures is deemed dot have extended the emotionally enticing qualities of the
photograph, combined with sound, and in doing so intensified the domination of
communication by voyeurism and spectacle. In place of the depth and coherence once
provided by text-based media, the technological properties of televisions ‘suppress the
content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest.’
Now this tendency – whereby content rapidly shits the attention of the viewer between an
array of unrelated subject matter, has resulted from the inherent bias of television as a
medium – its ‘predispositions towards being used in some ways and not others.’
Also relates to the ubiquity of televisions – its dominance of lives and imaginations across
boundaries of class, age, gender and ethnicity. Consequence, television’s in-built emphasis on
superficiality is deemed to have had a profound impact on culture and society of the screen;
‘Television is our culture’s principal mod of knowing about itself. How television stages the
world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.’
Attack on social impacts of TV screens share features with Four Arguments for the
Elimination of Television in which Mander asserts that technological biases of television
make attempts to regulate it use futile. Mander argues, television consumption makes us
believe that we understand the world: ‘because of television we believe we know more, but
we know less.’
In contrast to McLuhan's insistence that television would undo the centralised of the
top-down culture created by print, Mander also asserts that television is itself inherently a
hierarchical, one directional mode of communication which empowers an elite minority,
whilst distracting and disorienting a passive mass audience.
Technological determinism
Hot, cool or both?
Generalisation and reflection
Technologies and social contexts
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