Quick Review of The Study of The Internet

Hi all,

Another day has passed and another lecture topic covered. Today we were covering the history of how the study of the media has evolved over time.

It started with a quick review of the various definitions of Media. The various meanings ascribed to the word media are surprisingly quite varied. To begin with Raymond Williams alerted us to the fact that media can also refer to a '...sense of an intervening or intermediating agency or substance...', in a way this statement refers to the fact that the way in which we communicate is dictated by the medium that we choose.

We then looked at media in reference to the entity known as The Media, in the sense of the reporters and camera people that gather and report the news, also known as the Mass Media or The Press.

Then we looked at the term media in the physical sense of the way in which information is transmitted, such as cassettes, CD's, DVD's and the telecommunication infrastructure that transmits the information.

All of the various definitions all point back to the single combining element of being 'the 'conduit' that allows some other process to happen.'

Therefore we can now define technology as being the scientific study of mechanical arts and their application to the world, and a medium is the specific cultural use of technology, to communicate information...that is interpreted as meanings thanks to specific cultural and social contexts that we encounter in our daily lives.

The next part of the lecture was dedicated to the history of the study of the media in it's various forms. Beginning in the USA in the 1920s with Bullet Theory (Maximum Effects) which basically stated that the media was capable of influencing our decision making processes. The field then progressed through the 1930s towards the statistical study of the effects of media, over in Europe at the same time a man called Walter Benjamin theorised that that the advent of techniques of reproduction have a liberating effect on the populous, and then in the 1940s researchers hypothesised that the media actually has very little effect on the decision making processes of people through their research into the effects of propaganda on the wider population.

In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan published a book called Understanding Media, which focused on the the media effects that permeate society. He theorised that 'the invention of the alphabet and the resulting intensification of the visual sense in the communication process gave sight priority over hearing. but the effect was so powerful that is went beyond communications through language to reshave literate society's conception and use of space.'

We covered other academic writters that have had various theories over time through to Baudrillard who's ideas were a driving force behind the movie 'The Matrix'. He stated that 'The real was represented, now the hyperreal was simulated... this is the world we live in.

The study of New Media has been broken down over time into three phases, with studies beginning with at focus on the Popular Cyberculture, as time when on the studies became more focused into Cyberculture Studies and now more recently academics have become subdividing or twigging the field of study down into individual areas of study using the term Critical Cyberculture Studies.