This week we continued along the traces of Marshall’s McLuhan’s studies with the key focus of the week’s lecture being based around how mediums are extensions of ourselves. However this week we dived deeper into the internet and industrial paradigms and the key differences between legacy media and emergent media. Legacy media is media that audiences can only engage with the final product. The writers and producers of the content are able to filter their content to allow only specific information they want to be seen by their audiences. They also have complete control over the distribution of their content. This form of media is prone to propaganda and manipulation and has a high risk of failure due to the high cost required to ideate, produce and distribute the content. Emergent media acquires hardly any filters, low production cost and distributing as well as having the audience participate in all the steps required.
Throughout the lecture Ted showed us examples of the industrial paradigm and that products produced must have no iteration and experimentation. The products are all conceptualised before starting. The internet paradigm however allows for changes to be made during the process of making the product. For example updates, which shows that iteration is a feature of the internet paradigm. An example of this that Ted gave us was that gmail was released in beta and they allowed for people’s criticism and feedback before the full version was completed.
In this week’s lecture we were talking about Marshall McLuhan’s famous statement of “The medium is the message”. This proved to be quite daunting because for the last couple of weeks we had just been learning about memes. Sitting in the lecture listening to Ted explain the concept on the “The medium is the message” blew me away at just how deep and meaningful conversation is and the medium that goes with the message communicated.
The term “The medium is the message” refers to the subject of how the information is received is determined by the way in which the message is presented. This could be anything, ranging from a t-shirt to a text message from someone. Interpretation is everything when it comes to communication. A good example of this would be Mcluhan’s book named “The medium is the massage” not the “The medium is the message”. A lot of people would look over that sentence and interpret it as “The medium is the message” because it makes sense and people tend to read things in their mind that makes sense without thinking twice about whether the word is spelt wrong or differently.
“Each medium, independent of the content it mediates, has its own intrinsic effects which are its unique message.” Is a great quote said by Mcluhan which represents that mediums contain an independent message to the message being intentionally told. The medium also has its own unique effect on the audience and creates its own message to be interpreted and decoded by the consumer.
Marshallmcluhan.com. 2020. Commonly Asked Questions About Mcluhan – The Estate Of Marshall Mcluhan. [online] Available at: <https://www.marshallmcluhan.com/common-questions/> [Accessed 23 March 2020].
In this weeks lecture we looked closely at how exactly the distributed media network functions and how it differs from a centralised network. Distribution networks work extremely well in that they can both scale up and easily maintain low coordination costs are there is no pronounced hub. A hierarchical and vertically integrated network with a central hub will experience high coordination costs as it scales up. The more nodes joined will overthrow the central node if not. There is also a lot of pressure on the one central node to deliver content.
In this day people don’t want to respond to inert content they want to engage and challenge the content, which doesn’t sit well for monological media as their main process in gaining information includes framing an event in their own hands. Framing is extremely important in the process of telling a story as it gives the perception, point of view and propaganda to the audience. Compared with dialogical media you have the audience participating in all stages of framing and telling the story. This might be through filming the story via phone or taking notes themselves.
Memes are the building blocks of distributed media. Memes act as perception modulators. Influence the way people see reality. In distributed media a propaganda exchange looks like meme warfare. A lot of memes and meme warfare originate from 4chan. The reason for this is 4chan is a site with no filter and users don’t identify themselves so there is no negative output of posting. This creates an extremely fast feedback loop, if an idea fail and gets rejected there is immediate feedback.
Here is a video I made talking about the evolution of memes with an example.
The public sphere theory was formatted by german philosopher Jurgen Habermas 1962. When Habermas first created the public sphere theory in 1962 he imagined to play out how a coffee shop would have in the 18th century. The basic premise being that it was a social space in which different opinions could be said by everyone in the room and that everyone was free and could be free to talk about relevant issues.
The definition of a theory states that it is a system of ideas with amendments being made to it throughout time. This is evident with the public sphere theory as it has become held online in a virtual world rather than in a physical situation. “the concept of the public sphere is constantly developing”. The number one reason for this is social media and the internet. Social media increases opportunity for political communication and enables democratic capacity for political discussion within the virtual public sphere. There are infinite public spheres online for example group chats, discussion forums and so on. A big part of my public sphere and where I engage in political discussion is on reddit.
Reddit is a great app that unites people across the globe to talk about common interests and post content and share to an audience who can relate to them and understand their feelings. It operates through subreddits which are groups that anyone can join and discuss and post content related to this topic of the subreddit. A lot of different subreddits are based for posted news related materials and there are entire subreddits based around political discussion. However in recent times a lot of subreddits have become more mediated in that there are more strict guidelines and criteria that users have to obey and keep in mind when producing content on subreddits. A lot of subreddits have implemented Auto moderator bots that are designed to filter content that doesn’t comply with the rules of the subreddit. This is a great example of how social media has affected the public spheres and users ability to express and open opinion without having to worry about censorship.
Almost anyone can access reddit if they have internet and a device of some sort and an internet connection. Although it may seem at first like reddit is a completely inclusive app that allows anyone to post content within the subreddits this is not necessarily the case. A lot of subreddits have been set so that users require a certain amount of Karma points (Points you can gain from posting and commenting) to post something in the subreddit. This is mainly to stop spam but it takes away the freedom of a public sphere as anyone can participate in the discussion.
Hi everyone my name is Dale and I’m going to be blogging and sharing my experiences as a Marketing student at University of Wollongong. I am currently doing a semester abroad studying at the University of Kansas in which I have had an incredible time experiencing the different culture and environment Kansas has to offer. I am from the beautiful town of Ulladulla which is around approximately a 2 hour drive south of Wollongong and have recently moved up to study for university. Prior to me starting the course I had never made or even thought about making a public blog, so this blog is going to be a big learning experience and challenge for me but i’m excited nonetheless to be able share my experiences openly.
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