Mass Media

The way one understands the term "Mass Media" is defined by the way one understands the words themselves; whether we understand the words based on their connotation or their denotation.
The denotation, of the “mass” portion is interesting. Does mass refer to the innumerable quantities of media and therefore information transmission? Exemplified by cellphones emergence everywhere. Or does mass refer to the vast scope and reach of said transmission? Such as TV's ability to reach so many. In both cases the final approximation is really the same. The main idea is that the “mass” portion of the phrase refers to the ability to be able to reach as many people as possible.
From this we can take that for a medium to be categorized in the “Mass Media” bracket, it has to be a medium that is designed to reach the largest possible amount of potential viewers.
That is, as I see it, the denotation of the term. The connotation is a bit different. Our cultural views, as a society, seem to put a very negative light on things with “media” attached to it. Mass media has become something painfully inseparable from definition of “the media”. That quaint little term people use for defining anything news (and thus “media”) related.
That’s because people don’t see media as technology, the cellphone they use, or the TV they watch. Instead they understand media and by extension mass media only as the organization that brings news to the masses. Mostly people of that opinion are those that don't know (or perhaps even care)about the denotation of a term that is defining us as a society today.

Immersion

When in class one day an interesting topic came up. We were discussing the book John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" which is a wonderful series of essays based around how cultural and societal views are shaped by art of the time. While discussing this book, we arrived at the topic of oil paintings. Oil paintings were a huge leap forward at the time because of their realism.
Oil paintings were not only realistic because of the skill of the artist in drawing lifelike images. They were realistic because they added another sense to the equation, the sense of touch, as well as further exemplifying the sense of sight. With oil paintings, texture became noticeable. The viewer could feel really connected to that image more so then with any other art form at the time.
With such realism, the viewer is able to feel as if they are part of the image, they become lost in it. This is the same type of escape our own culture looks for through video games. One could argue movies or books for the same purpose, but I have to disagree. With video games the action is focused solely on you the player. You often see through the eyes of your character, and people speak directly to you. This is often far more immersive then other media.
Video games are a form of media that was probably first introduced purely for entertainment purposes, video games at that time were far too primitive to be really immersive. Since then advances in technology, and writing in video games have given rise to an immersive medium unique to our culture. Video games are a medium which now allows people to escape to a perfected reality.
I believe that our society will never stop searching for some type of immersion, some escape from the real world. I don’t believe it’s because people necessarily dislike their current lives, but instead that people become bored with being complacent.They strive for excitement and a break from the normal.
In the future technology will no doubt further itself to the point where people can use virtual reality for their form of escape. However, as fascinatingly close as that may put us to the level of once science fiction-like utopias, the more control we give our technology over our lives, the closer we come to a science fiction dystopia as well.

Academic Blogging

Hello, I am Grant Tabler.

I am a student at the University of Guelph-Humber. This is technically an academic blog and will be graded as such. That doesn't mean that it is only for my professor and colleagues. There is a chance, albeit an unlikely one, that someone outside this rather exclusive sphere of intellectual endeavours will stumble onto this blog and be profoundly enlightened. I will attempt to write to this unlikely, possibly imaginary, viewer.

This blog will be based on assigned topics I have been given, but will be elaborated on through the books I'm reading in class. I will take a moment to familiarize you with some of the figures I may be making reference to.

Marshal Mcluhan: A Canadian professor of English literature. He is incredibly important to media studies because of his work on the theories that govern our understanding of media and its effect on us.

Neil Postman: An American author. He made a book called "Amusing ourselves to Death" and like Mcluhan had many theories relating to media's effect on our culture.

John Berger: A British author and art critic. In his book "Ways of Seeing" which is a series of essays, he examines societal perceptions. As well as the effect art has on our view of the world.

Throughout the course of this blog I will endeavour to pass on any knowledge I can, to whatever community I am able to broadcast to. My role is to broaden the scope of the education being given to me, so that it is able to enlighten more than just my classroom. So that my knowledge, and by extension all the knowledge I have access to, will be at the disposal of anyone who has a medium to access it with.

First Wiki posting

My first post on the course's Wiki, a creative sharing website created for the course by our professor. The post reflects on Marshall McLuhan being interviewed in Playboy magazine. Often merely called "The Playboy Interview" http://www.nextnature.net/2009/12/the-playboy-interview-marshall-mcluhan/. This was the first work we read in our mass communications course and I encourage all of you to read it as well, at least with this blog post you will have a bit of help filtering through McLuhan's dense language and ideas. Just remember, it will make more and more sense as the interview goes on, don't give up early if you don't understand it right away.

The matrix is a system

I have looked at the matrix a number of ways throughout the years, from being just a good action movie, to being a perfect modern representation of Kafkaesque ideals. More recently I’ve started thinking of it in a whole new light thanks to McLuhan. 

I’m not sure if the Wachowski brothers were students of McLuhan’s ideals, but it seems like they took a certain inspiration from them. When McLuhan talks about media being like the water that a fish is swimming in, how it doesn’t realize it’s there, reminded me of the matrix. 

The technology, the media that we are merged with in our daily lives becomes so normal to us we become desensitised to its very presence. It’s just a natural thing, checking email, voicemail, calling people on cell phones, using our laptops, using the internet; it’s all just common practice. We do these things by instinct. McLuhan’s idea was that we need to detach ourselves from these processes and examine what’s happening to us because of them, before they consume us. His interview was a lot like a scene in the matrix called “the matrix is a system”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXQozTxQSiE

Morpheus (McLuhan) is informing the interviewer (Neo) about the way technology has taken over our lives so completely. He says “these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so immerged[1], so helplessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.”  This sounds directly in line with McLuhan views, in that people in our society today could not survive without the technological connection that we have become so unwittingly dependent on. If someone were to come along and try to break the system to try to release these people from the media which controls them, people would not accept it and would fight against this person who is attempting to give them freedom.

We would see this person as an anarchist trying to hinder society, trying to undermine our vast array of technological advancements that make us who we are. But where does the technology stop being part of a computer and start being part of our consciousness? If we think of our email and our cell phones as an “extension” of ourselves, kind of an extra perception, a more efficient way of gathering information from others, faster. Then really that cell phone, that email, voicemail, etcetera, are as much a part of us as our eyes and ears. We use them as if they were merely another sense, that’s how natural they’ve become to us. 

This whole topic has just been something that struck me whilst sitting in last Tuesday’s lecture. I suppose it could be a blog post [EDIT: it now is] but I decided to post something on our rather sparsely populated Wiki. This was mostly to give people another inference or perspective on McLuhan’s media consumption ideas.

 

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[1] Defined interestingly enough as: to disappear by entering into any medium, as the moon into the shadow of the sun