Summary Of Burton Speakman's Research

The builder of this seventeen room Greek revival mansion was Stephen S. Speakman. In the early 1840s, the elderly Speakman fell in love with a much younger woman, Sarah Bush, whose father owned a slave-holding plantation in Kentucky. Upon asking her hand in marriage, his bride-to-be refused to marry him unless he built her a southern plantation-style mansion. In 1845, with the use of his father-in-law’s slaves, Speakman erected his mansion on a five hundred acre plot next to Loughery Creek with every brick baked on site (Historical Marker Project).

Assignment: As the documentary Miss Representation explains, “The media is now the message and the messenger.” Every day, we take in countless hours of media that influence how we view others and in turn how we view ourselves. It is our responsibility to consume media in an intelligent way AND fight back against negative messages put forth by the media.

Opening the book, Postman explains how he will fulfill showing that a “great media-metaphor shift has taken place in America, with the result that content of much of our public discourse has become dangerous nonsense” (pg. 16). There are two major points First: under the printing press, discourse In America was different from what it is now—generally coherent, serious, rational. Second: under the governance of television, it has become withered. This made me think about how much media affects us on a daily basis.

The discourse community of broadcast journalists is a broad community, but can be narrowed down to smaller groups. As a discourse community journalist come in as novices, but carry the opportunity to ascend in their profession, to become an anchor for a national news network. The fundamental goal of journalists is to educate the public with events that take place daily, both domestically and internationally. With this fundamental goal at hand, news networks run astray, to where they begin to host biased opinions, with means to draw in a certain audience. These biases are presented by the networks reflect a political bias, religious bias, and social bias that can impact the facts of the story

Postman furthers the above points using a metaphor: “ To call a train an ‘iron horse,’ as we once did, may be picturesque, but it obscures the most significant differences between a train and a horse-and-buggy. To use the term an ‘electronic town-hall meeting’ similarly obscures the difference between an eighteenth-century, face-to-face gathering of citizens and a packaged, televised pseudo-event.”(53-54) The use of this metaphor furthers this argument perfectly. Postman’s metaphor presents the idea that social media’s idea of “community” and “conversation” is skewed to the point of falsity. Social media and the Internet view these two words as an idea that simply cannot exist properly.

The audience is society as a whole especially those that think that connection with media can overcome lack of conversation

1)  McNeill (2013) writes that, "It is important to understand that our lifestyles are based on social networking, and the media and the digital stream are now considered to be a defiance of time and space.”  What is your reaction to this statement?  How does the digital stream impact our definitions of community, identity, and/or networks?

Communities are all about groups of individuals who share something in common. This makes going on the internet seem like an odd way to find more communities, form new ones, or strengthen pre-existing ones. The internet however is full of communities. Communities can be based upon religion, location, ethnicity, an interest, or a personal matter. The internet itself is “a global distributed data communications network” (Kirmayer, Raikhel, & Rahimi, 2013, p. 166). This is what makes the internet so full of communities because communication is the key to putting multiple individuals with commonalities into communication, which is the basis of any community. Online communities differ from communities that exists off the web in a couple of

According to our textbook, community is defined as “people bound either by geography or by webs of communication, sharing common ties, and interacting with one another” (Hutchison, p. 298, 2012). Communities are all around us whether it be a school setting community or a social media community such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. This community can also be broken into two categories: One is territorial community, meaning the community has territory that it is on, and the other is relational community, meaning the community does not have a territory. When examining the theoretical approaches to community there are five theoretical approaches to community: “contrasting types approach, spatial arrangements approach, social systems approach, social capital approach, and conflict approach” (Hutchinson, p. 301, 2012). All of these approaches show how the communities around an individual can affect them physically and mentally. Out of the

50), as community building typically requires face-to-face interactions and physical symbols through which people can associate and find shared experience. Though from the advent of the internet, humans began building online communities to connect with like-minded people across the globe, Krotoski suggests the threads binding these communities together are tenuous in the absence of tangible interactions. This quality makes online communities “difficult to measure and therefore to define objectively” (p. 51) implying that digital interactions within a community provide less substance for other members to adhere. Krotoski suggests this thin state of community provides little in social capital in that online, and people only know us by the information we provide, and not information passively gleaned from physical, non-verbal

Audience research has often been associated with semiotics, cultural studies, audience reception studies and ethnography research. What it used to be taken as a one-way information flow process has recently been considered a transmission belt between the senders – as the starting point that forms our individual perceptions reflected in our actions, thoughts, and conversations – and the receivers. The emergence of blogs and social media platforms has encouraged scholars to ponder whether the idea of the audience still implies a passive community. In addition to the role of blogs, online discussion forums have also expanded the dimensions of audience theories in terms of enhanced user interaction and participation that advances many-to-many communication. With online forums, traditional journalistic gatekeeping is largely subsided; anyone can post or respond to a topic without prescreening of the messages. However, one may argue that audience building is a rather different process than community building in the context of online groups as we often discuss. In marketing communication, audiences are constructed as customers in the metaphorical sense, yet in the socially connected media environment where we all inhabit, individuals establish connections based on common interests and consuming habits. It seems as though there should be a more prosperous existence of audience as a community, bridging its consumerism function and group identity.

Social network sites (SNSs) such as such as Friendster, CyWorld, and MySpace allow individuals to present themselves, articulate their social networks, and establish or maintain connections with others (Ellison, 2007). These sites could be used for work related situation, romance, connecting with individuals with shared interest, or creating a connection amongst college students. Facebook enables its users to present themselves in an online profile, accumulate ‘‘friends’’ who can post comments on each other’s pages, and view each other’s profiles (Ellison, 2007). Individuals can write on the wall of friends, send private message, comment on posts, as well as chat via instant messaging. Much of the early research on online communities assumed that individuals using these systems would be connecting with others outside their pre-existing social group or location, liberating them to form communities around shared interests, as opposed to shared geography (Ellison, 2007).

In today’s world, peoples’ communication has changed drastically comparing to the last centuries. The development of technologies and media have allowed us to build our own network and acquaintances, as well as to find people who share the same interests as you, creating “virtual communities”. As told by Brym and Lie, virtual communities are “the associations of people scattered across the world, who communicate via computer and about a subject of common interest” (2018: 64). In this essay, I will demonstrate the example of me being involved in a virtual community and how it connects with a sociological theory; symbolic interactionism.

Does the change in the meaning of social networking noted above have an impact on the traditional community and on youth? Despite the differences between community and social networking, they are intertwined, and

The research for this article was conducted within a framework of Framing theory. The theory was first put forward by a Canadian-American sociologist Erving Goffman. Media framing, to put it bluntly, is a term that points to a presence of a certain bias in any media outlets’ output. All choices made in a newsroom collectively form the frame through which media decides to show the world to the audiences. Everything matters: Covering one event and ignoring another, covering one event more than the other, deciding what words to use to cover an event, what photographs or video clips to include, whom to give a voice, etc. At the same time, framing theory goes far beyond newsroom policies. Framing is not necessarily a delibirate choice. Journalists themselves look at the world through frames: their education, upbringing, gender, ethnical background, knowledge of the issue, and so on. Audience members apply their own frames as well, not just to media content, but to everything they hear and see.