MCOM 100 – What are the Media

 


 

Bogart - “What are the Media?”

Origins of “media”

 

Information and Entertainment

·         Media instruct; media divert

 

Media as Pastime

 

Why Media Unify and Differentiate

·         It is often the activity/habits and NOT the content

 

Literary, Leisure, and the Origins of the Media System

 

Packaging Ongoing and One-Shot Media

 

 

 

Bogart - “The Media System”

·         “people, content and symbolic content of media are now interchangeable”

·         synergy

 

How media interpenetrate

·         “Media are sustained by the publicity and promotion they provide each other” (p.35)

 


 

 

What is Information?

·        Knowledge (or an item) communicated concerning some particular fact, subject, or event; that of which one is apprised or told; intelligence,

 

Information Truths (from NetSavvy)

 

Information…

1.    is pervasive and invasive

2.    has a very short shelf-life

3.    has changed the technical and communications skills required for success

4.    Truths 1,2, and 3 have created information overload

 

 

1.    Acceleration of information

·         Internet - increased production/access, diversity, faster, and less expensive

2.    Information overload

·         Amount and Organization (entropy/chaos)

·         Leads to the desire for more (remember access=power)

·         Technical expertise decreases overload by using tools,

 

Definitions of the Information society

 

·        Technological

·        Economic

·        Occupational

·        Spatial

·        Cultural

 


 

Interface Culture: Preface

 

What is an interface?

 

Wired

 

Connections between technology and culture?

·         “James Joyce wrote software for Guttenberg”

 

Speed (technological change)

·         Eisenstein

 

McLuhan – Understanding Media

·         “the medium is the message”(technological determinist)

 

 

Society

Communication

Knowledge

Oral/Tribal

Presence, multiple senses, real time, e.g.-Memory Palaces

Holistic, phenomenon

Literate

Out of context, visual, fixed time and space, compression, reproduction

Abstract, science, truth, legal, systems

Electronic

Telepresence, multiple senses, mediation, fixed and fluid, reproducible

Global village, collective unconscious, sense of self

 

 

·         The Global Village

 

Luddites

 

Marx and Capital

 

Interface design and designers

·         Balzac

·         Dickens

 


 

Colonization of Cyberspace and the American West

 

Cyberspace

American West

Indigenous People

Initial Migrants

First Mass Driver

First Mass Migration

Characteristics of the first economic phase

Second Mass Driver

Second Mass Migration

Trends in Second Economic Phase

 

 

 

 

 

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