The rise of media is primarily an event of the 1900s into the 2000s due to the growth of technology and the numerous ways in which it facilitates communication, especially mass communication. Essentially media are anything used to send a message from one entity to another, whether it be person to person, businesses to people, social institutions to people, or the inverse of any of these relationships. These relationships are only examples though and in no way reflect media’s limitations of senders and recipients of messages. In the text, Croteau and Hoynes discuss how media developed after many years of only print media. At the time, messages between people in different places took as long as physical travel between these places. However, the text’s authors also note that media’s complex and intertwined relationship with technology has dramatically changed this in the last 200 years, starting with the advent of the telegraph through to the modern proliferation of the internet.
It should also be noted that telephone calls, text messages, emails, correspondence, and other communications between two people are forms of media: “…but scholars generally do not consider these to be mass media because messages in such media have a single, intended, known recipient” (Croteau and Hoynes 7). This class focuses on mass media, and so will this paper.
The broad definition of media must also be considered. For most things it is not useful to define them so broadly but truly anything used to send a message can be media. Media really can be anything used to “facilitate communication between… the sender of a message and the receiver of that message” (7). Because the definition includes sending a message, some objects have the potential to be media but are not necessarily used that way. For example, a solely blue tee shirt sends no message to the masses except about its wearer’s fashion choice. However, the same tee shirt with a business logo and slogan or recording artist’s image sends a distinct marketing message to anyone that sees the shirt. It promotes the business or artist and sends a message to viewers about it/them, making it a form of mass media that a blank tee shirt would not have been.
This tee shirt example also helps to define mass media. It is not intended to be seen by a specific audience, rather the tee will infer to anyone and everyone who lays eyes upon it that the business is respectable or the artist ‘cool,’ or any other message an entity wants to send about itself.
People, scholars, and the text “generally recognize…print, film, radio, television, sound recordings, and the internet” (7) as mass media. Although all these things are accepted as the most common forms of mass media, many other things can constitute a single medium. The tee shirt above is one example, while there are a myriad of other items which can function as media whether they carry a brand logo, advertisement, slogan, or generally a message. A desk calendar full of advertisements and coupons, an arguably less common medium, has the potential to be functionally superior to typical advertisement media such as television or the internet. This shows the broad range of what can be considered media. This example also shows how nearly anything that can be seen by a large number of people has the potential to function as mass media.
Once again, the desk calendar and tee shirt examples show that any object, despite not fitting into the typical view of what media are (television, print, radio etc.), can function as a medium as long as it delivers some kind of message. Whether it is also mass media simply depends on the scope of its intended audience. In this way, the message makes something a medium.
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