Blog 1 Media in Everyday Life

The first time I read Media in Everyday Life, I was still reeling from my two weeks vacation (early finals are awesome), and was not entirely focused on reading the article or... critical thinking; now that I have had a few weeks to adjust, I actually took the time to consider the points made in the article. For a definition of mass media, I looked to the author's commentary on the media industry's relationship with consumers (pg 4) and John Fiske's critique of mass media (pg 15), and concluded that mass media is “a form of media designed to change the dynamics of the flow of information by: 1) reaching a large audience perceived to have shared interests, and/or 2) reaching a variety of smaller, niche groups with specific interests.” Concerning the public sphere, I chose to combine Emile Durkheim's idea of “the masses” forming a collective consciousness (pg 2-3) and Michael Warner's idea of free-thinking social space (pg 25), to define the public sphere as “a collective consciousness of public opinions that makes up a 'social space' of strangers, in which ideas may be exchanged freely and circulated”; Warner also observes how the Internet is responsible for speeding up this circulation of ideas. Convergence was not difficult to describe, because the author gives a definition of the word from the 1990s as “the coming together of media forms” (pg 10). However, I would to like clarify this definition with an example: the cellular phone, a wireless, mobile communication device, has been transformed through the addition of a built-in still camera, a video camera, texting (instant messaging), and access to the Internet, all in the last couple of years; these five media sources were combined to create a conveniently compact hand-held media device. As for critique, I decided to use the author's own critique of media (pg 14), and include an observation of my own after reading the article, to say: “in terms of mass media, a critique it is an observation, of how the media industry, which reaches people 'nationally and globally', wields 'a significant amount of power' through mass media, and how this wielding of power affects the public sphere."

While reading this article, I could not help but think of the saying, “We live in the Age of Information.” However, I believe that Jean Baudrillard put it better when he called the storm of information forming over our heads “the cyberblitz” (pg 5), which described “the escalation of images and information that have “bombarded” the US in postmodern society” (pg 5). Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams (pg 8) examined television and film as primary clouds of information in this raging storm. McLuhan observed how television and film while similar, are still separate mediums because of how they present us with information; this is applicable to all forms of media, in that nowadays, the media industry has a medium for every profitable consumer type. Williams goes on to say how media forms, like television, have “a continuity that weaves into the patterns of daily experience; which means, that the information is so well integrated (or hidden) within the public sphere, that consumers hardly even notice the hundreds of subliminal messages around them.