Traditional Media vs. New Media

In 20th century, every human being on the earth is familiar with television, internet and other form of media. We can see the effect of these forms of the electronic media in our daily life.

With the advent of information technology, the ways different aspects of life work and operate have changed a great deal. Media has always had a great influence in molding the culture of a society. There was a point of time when television and radio were invented and when computer was invented and there was little connection between the two. Time then travelled fast then through the age of cassettes, records, VCDs, DVDs, flash drive and then the internet. Media also started to go satellite on a massive scale and there came a point of time when media and digital communication systems became closely integrated with one another, opening the dimensions to digital media.

Jenkins talks about how the consumption of media products is a collective process, in other words, the collective intelligence is seen as an alternative source of media power. He describes how within popular culture, the collective meaning making is shaping and changing the ways religion, education, laws, politics, advertising and how the military operate (4). Jenkins discusses a process called “convergence of modes”, he explains that media and communication are becoming interconnected like the telephone and television.

In today’s society, media is a part of everyone’s lives, whether people want it to be or not. One of the most openly disliked components of the media is the thin, ideal, hour-glass figure that is

Knowledge has come about through many different forms throughout history and has constantly changed along with the times. To equate media to epistemology is to say how media relates to how we understand knowledge. In this chapter, Neil Postman discusses how modern media has created an epistemological shift and whether it has affected us for better or for worse. Postman argues that this shift has altered the structure of discourse no differently than how every new medium before it has always done.

The course provides an introduction to the most prominent forms of media that influence and impact social, business, political, and popular culture in contemporary America. It explores the unique aspects of each medium as well as interactions across various media that combine to create rich environments for information sharing, entertainment, business, and social interaction in the U.S. and around the world.

    The form of communication created by the television is not only a part of how our modern society communicates, but is has changed public discourse to the point that it has completely redefined it, argued Neil Postman in his convincing book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He viewed this as very harmful, and additionally so because our society is ignorant of it as they quickly becomes engulfed in its epistemology. When faced with the question about whether the television shapes or reflects culture, Postman pointed out that it is no longer applicable because "television has gradually become our culture" (79). What kind of culture is this? Postman warned that it is one in which we

When Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message” back in 1967, we were facing a very different society than we are today. His focus was of course on the mediums of the time: radio, newsprint and television. Mark Federman, a Chief Strategist for the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology asserts in his article, What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message? (2004), McLuhan was not speaking directly about the medium itself. His thought process went to a deeper level. Federman “note[s] that it is not the content or use of innovation, but the change in inter-personal dynamics that the innovation brings with it” that is the issue. In a world that we can now access hundreds of thousands of bits of information in milliseconds, we can certainly see a shift in media influence. Today we can actually watch events as they unfold, whether they are events for a greater good or events of horrific acts of terrorism, technology has enabled society to be omnipresent. Melody Thompson (2011) refers to Jaron Lanier in discussing how technology shapes our relationship to itself. She notes that Lanier believes technology imposes on us its own viewpoint and that shapes our decisions. In a world where we live with a 24 hour news cycle and news stations that can skew their reporting to send the message they want their viewers to hear, it is quite prophetic when Lanier states “it

Neil Postman’s novel Amusing Ourselves to Death seeks to look at media and how it shapes and defines culture. Postman has been cited as one of the major media theorists and a great philosopher of his time. To understand the book fully it is important to remember where it came from. The idea was born out of a speech Postman gave about the book 1984 and A Brave New World. It takes the ideas behind these novels and looks at them in a contemporary light, where the “Big Brother” is our own television sets. Television is obviously a form of media and it delivers a message. However, that message and media has its own agenda, to above all entertain. Postman believes that television has become the primary media-metaphor and by that definition

The role of media has often been a subject of much debate, particularly in terms of its role in portraying and conveying truth to the target audience. Some argue upon its utility as a means to disseminate information and to rectify perceptions and facts in the minds of the viewers; while others squabble on the amount of misrepresentation which is often adopted by media as a means to project baseless arguments which lead to severe impact on the minds, especially those who are unlearned and uneducated. In today’s burgeoning era, the role of media still remains a largely disputed topic but fragmentation of media has become a broadly accepted and also, widely noticed phenomenon. Not only have new

3. Flew, T. (2008). New Media An Introduction. South Melbourne. 3rd Edition. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

As a polysemic text, television has the power to inspire a range of interpretations according to the encoding of the producers and the decoding of the televisual consumer. As first described by Stuart Hall in Encoding/Decoding, and then by Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch in Television as a Cultural Forum there exist three basic categories of potential readings of a singular text within the broad range of potential interpretations: dominant or preferred, negotiated, and oppositional, each of which depends on the ideological, political, and social position of the interpreter, as well as their experiences, which makes them, according to Newcomb and Hirsch cultural interpreters, or cultural bricoleurs. As such, Documentary Now! elicits three

Postman (1987) claims that television is an evil that destroys the purpose and complexities of public discourse. He argues that important issues are oversimplified and drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Chaffee and Metzger (2001) confirm this assumption by remarking the evolution of print and radio into television and television into new media. Establishing the similarities between Postman’s chief complaints about the television medium and the new media then rearing its ugly head. Chaffee and Metzger indicate the shift in the denotations of mass, media, and communication. With technological advancements, it is impossible to ignore the new media and its impact on modern culture.

In Hall’s encoding and decoding model he argues that encoding and decoding the meaning of media is not a single-sided process but one shared by both the producers and the audience. The producers encode their preferred meaning into the media using frameworks of knowledge, relations of production, and technical infrastructure (Hall, 1997). Frameworks of knowledge are the producers’ beliefs and what they assume about the audience’s beliefs. Relations of production are the needs of the financial side of the industry. Technical

Information and entertainment today are usually spread through the development of technology. Due to this, various medias enable us to give and receive information. Media can be divided into traditional media and new media (Christian, 2014). While it is easy to pinpoint the differences of the two medias, there are also some similarities that tie both medias together.