Final

Theme 2: According to Joshua Meyerowitz, certain electronic media provide us with the illusion of a face-to-face interaction, leading to the creation of what he called ’para-social relationships.’ A para-social relationship is a belief that you know someone intimately because of your exposure to them via some form of media. Radio was the first form of electronic media to do this. From 1936 to 1955, Mary Dyck, a woman living in rural Kansas kept a diary which showed the important role that radio played in her life and the lives of other women in rural communities who were isolated and didn’t interact with other people frequently. Radio provided not just information and entertainment. The women who listened to certain radio personalities on a regular basis came to look forward to these ‘visits.’ The fact that they couldn’t see these radio performers probably helped the process because listeners were able to project desired personality traits onto them. Television, which offers even more of an illusion of reality and therefore made it really seem like TV personalities, celebrities or even the president was in your living room, was even more likely to foster the belief that the viewer had an intimate relationship with these people. According to Meyrowitz, this was especially true for more isolated members of the population, such as older people who were stayed home a lot because of their health. Meyrowitz’s theory predicts the social implications of media like Facebook or Twitter. Through Newsfeed and tweets, people are constantly being updated on developments in the lives of other people. Even if they don’t know them that well, this kind of constant feedback fosters give them impression they do. Ambient awareness is a term used by Clive Thompson. He said that for example, as Twitter users process the stream of information provided by tweets, they begin to feel like they are picking up information about their friends’ mood. The wealth of information makes them feel like they have the same information as one would get from being physically close. These kinds of social networks have dynamically increased the number of casual or para social relationships we have. People from across the country or the world have made connections with people they don’t know through instant messaging and these have led to actual hook-ups. I know people who have communicated online with people from France or England for years although they have never met.


Theme 4- In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan made the radical statement that the “medium is the message,” by which he meant the vehicle by which information is transmitted has a powerful impact on how we perceive and process its content. What he was saying was that technology eventually transform how we think and process information, and this is proving to be the case. In Nicholas Carr’s article, he argues that the use of Google may, in fact be making us stupid. By providing a vast wealth of information and ready-made interpretations. it is changing us into a nation of skimmers who don’t have to dig deep to get the information that we need. In Carr’s article, he expresses his concern people are moving away from reading which involves deep, concentrated processing. It is like the Internet has trained us to seek information in a more superficial way and so reading is on the decline. In Brad Stone’s article, “Old Fogies by their 20s,” he predicts that because technology is changing so rapidly, it might result in mini-generation gaps in terms of ‘technologies of choice’ for the ‘net’ and ‘i’ generations. There is also the concern that the multi-tasking and constant disruption that has become part of our media experience is having a negative impact on our thinking process and is causing our minds to operate less efficiently. David Myers, an expert on multitasking, said that people can’t really multi-task. Instead they actually switch between different channels and that makes them more likely to make mistakes. Here is a question for discussion: does the problem of multi-tasking explain why people who drive and use cell phones are more likely to have accidents, even if they are talking on a speaker phone? Is this a problem of channeling? Do you think that drivers are visualizing the people to whom they are speaking and this distracts them from paying attention to what’s on the road ahead of them? Also what are the unique features of the ipad and how might they change the ways we process or interpret information?

Theme 1- In Webster and Phelan’s paper, they discuss the concept of the mass audience. Early electronic media, such as television and radio, lead to the idea that these media served a mass audience. The mass audience was described as coming from all walks of life, of being composed of anonymous individuals who were unknown to each other and didn’t communicate with each other, with the result that they couldn’t have an impact as a group. Researchers began to study the concept of the mass audience especially in respect to the effect of advertising, they found that the media audience is not totally undifferentiated, but was actually made up of what Webster and Phelan calls “taste segments.” In other words, audience was not just a mass but composed of groups to which certain programs or types of advertising might appeal more. Studies of demographics or statistical data of populations such as income, education and age groups, showed there were different taste groups that could be cultivated into audiences for specific media types. For example, for several hours after children get home from school, there is children’s TV programming with advertising oriented to appeal to this market. In the case of FM radio in the mid 1960s, this social media ended up creating a unique audience which included college students, minority groups and members of the counterculture. It did not appeal to everyone. The audience population for any media can be thought of as being distributed according to a normal distribution. Whereas in the past, media or entertainment industries just concentrated on the popular choices of the audience clustered at the center of the curve, today they are realizing that appealing to the less popular tastes of the audiences that fall into the tails of the distribution can be just as profitable. This is discussed by Chris Anderson in his article, The Long Tail. For example, Joyce Carol Oates’ book, Dear Husband is ranked 270,607 on Amazon.com which means a copy is sold maybe every few months. Jodi Picoult’s book, House Rules, which is on the NY Times bestseller list is ranked #113. However, with online selling, industries are realizing appealing to choices that fall out of the mainstream can add up to big business and it doesn’t matter if there is only an audience of one for a media experience. Also, online sites made it possible for buyers to communicate with each other by reviewing their purchase, has also made the concept of a mass audience an outdated one. Here is a question for discussion. By what other means can members of the long tail communicate with each other? Do you know of any online discussion groups that cater to the long tail?

Theme 3- Every form of technology that has become digital has been transformed by the process and by its audience. This particularly holds true for the newspapers. Newspapers have always been available in hard copy by subscription or on the newsstands. Today newspapers are becoming a dying breed because people read the news online. Almost every week there is a story about some long-standing newspaper going out of business. The process of reporting news has been changed by its becoming digital. People seem to want to read shorter stories so it seems that only the choicest bits of information are being reported. In Katutani’s article, Text Without Context, she spoke about the blurring between news and entertainment and how celebrity is rapidly becoming the new art. Popularity, the desire to have written the most read article, is changing what editors and writers produce. People have a growing interest in hyper local news, as shown by the interest in AOL’s new hyper local news website, PATCH.Com, which gives each town its own unique website devoted to very local news.
Books are also becoming a thing of the past in the sense that people can read books on their Kindles, iphones or listen to audio books. Ann Kirschner discussed this on her pod cast, For the Love of Reading, where she spoke about how her experience of reading the Charles Dickens’ classic, Little Dorrit, differed depending on the medium. It is a different kind of experience to read a book on a Kindle where you are not actually turning the pages. It is certainly not the same experience as you would get from reading a copy of a book that you had enjoyed before because using the actual book would bring back old associations and memories. Reading a book digitally, by eliminating certain physical associations ( turning the page, smelling the pages of the book, etc.) makes reading a more passive process. Perhaps readers are less likely to return to a previous page when they are using the Kindle or the iphone. Also, the use of digital media would seem to have an effect on popularity, because not all books would be available electronically. How do you think reading this way has impacted your experience?

Watching a movie on a computer or through some other digital means also alters that experience. In the movie theater, people experience a film as part of an audience and on a large screen, and I think both these features add tremendously to the viewing experience. Watching a film on a laptop or on a computer screen makes it more of a solitary experience and it is more passive. Seeing a film on a laptop or a computer screen is less likely to draw you into the action or adventure of the film. However for many people, having the convenience of watching any film at any time outweighs these disadvantages. I think that all the digital media forms that I discussed( Kindles, online newspapers and the digital viewing of films) all have promising futures because of their convenience. As I said, you can watch a film on a laptop any place or any time, and you have a vast selection. The iphone also makes for great convenience because it serves many purposes and for many people, one of them is reading. People are oriented to selecting digital devices that can serve many purposes. I don’t see digital newspaper reporting as dying out because this is the direction in which news is moving. People like getting their news on TV, which summarizes the most important points and focuses on the most important stories. Online newspapers ‘predigest” news in a similar way.