Communication and Media

Hallo everyone, I’d like to start my today’s seminar by reading the following piece:

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The clock radio jars you awake. It’s the Dave Matthews Band, the last two bars of “I Did It.” The laughing deejay shouts at you that it’s 7:41 and you’d better get going. But before you do, he adds, listen to a few words from your friends at Fry’s Electronics, home of fast, friendly, courteous service – “We will beat any competitive price!”

In the living room, you find your roommate has left the television on. You stop for a moment and listen: The Supreme Court has refused to hear an affirmative action appeal, your U.S. representative is under investigation for sexual harassment, and you deserve a break today at McDonald’s. As you head toward the bathroom, your bare feet slip on some magazines littering the floor – Wired, Rolling Stone, Newsweek. You need to talk to your roommate about picking up!

After showering, you quickly pull on your Levi’s, lace up your Nike cross-trainers, and throw on a FUBU pullover. No time for breakfast; you grab a Nature Valley granola bar and the newspaper and head for the bus stop. As the bus rolls up, you can’t help but notice the giant ad on its side: Die Hard IX – Kill Before You’re Killed. Rejecting that as a movie choice for the weekend, you sit down next to a teenager listening to music on his headphones and playing a video game. You bury yourself in the paper, scanning the lead stories and the local news and then checking out Doonesbury and Dilbert.

Hopping off the bus at the campus stop, you run into Chris from your computer lab. You walk to class together, talking about last night’s Simpsons episode.

It’s not yet 9:00, and already you’re awash in media messages.

This piece is an extract from “Introduction to Mass Communication: Media Literacy and Culture” written by Communication Professor Stanley Baran in 2003. Question: What do you think he wanted to illustrate with it? Reaction.

Prof. Baran continues his chapter by citing one of the most influential cultural and media critic Marshal McLuhan, “Does a fish know it’s wet?” The answer, Marshal McLuhan would say, is “No.” The fish’s existence is so dominated by water that only when water is absent is the fish aware of its condition. So it is with people and media. The latter fully saturate our everyday lives. In comparison with 2003 when this piece was written we are even more absorbed by media, and I am sure you can add your list of the digital media you daily use and encounter, and they will be as numerous as the more traditional ones mentioned by Prof. Baran. Yet, we are often unconscious of media presence (imagine that you have to live without them! Would you feel like a fish without water?). We are also unconscious of media influence: they inform us, entertain us, delight us, annoy us, they move our emotions, challenge our intellects, and insult our intelligence. Media often reduce us to mere commodities for sale to the highest bidder. Media help define us; they shape our reality. However, media do none of this alone. They do it with us as well as to us through communication, and they do it as the central cultural force in our society.

I am reading this course for the second time, so it is still a pilot. In short, I would like to draw your attention to the process we usually do not seriously think in our everyday life, as, in fact, we are involved in it, namely, media communication. At our three meetings we will try to think about the nature of media (traditional and new ones) and their influence, we will try to be researchers in “reading” them in order to understand how they work, how language works in them, and who we are as representatives of contemporary media culture.

Let’s outline our today’s seminar:

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Outline

1. Communication Defined

2. Communicative Situation

3. Media Defined

4. “The Society of Spectacle”

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