THE ROLE OF MEDIA
Can you imagine life without media? How do the media play a vital role in our lives? When we experience media, we can say that media fulfills some basic roles in our life. From the time we wake up until the moment we sleep, we may encounter media and use it basically as a source of information and entertainment. Studying how media works in our life can be a basic foundation of knowledge on how people interact with each other. The study of how media developed is vital when one wants to understand how society and people worked before and why the media evolved as time passed by.
One may look back at the history of media in order to understand how it developed for the benefit of society. As Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi suggests in her article, “Forms of Media as Ways of Knowing,” if we have the capacity to think about the past, we may have the ability to see how far the media will innovate. If we understand how media begins, it is easy for us to be grateful and enjoy the forms of media we have today.
The importance of media can be defined in so many ways. The historical significance of the media can be found in the different components of human history. Before, media was basically the nature of oral communication. Media started as a face-to-face interaction where the speaker and the audience were in the same place (Downing, 1995). In the Greek civilization, especially Athens, “rhetoric” denotes the civic art of speaking which is a concept of the power of words and their influence to affect a situation (Kennedy, 1994). This kind of communication is limited to a number of people so it brought changes in human perception. The development of the phonetic alphabet made way to the invention of printing. The print had a powerful economic effect which created new jobs (MOHAMMADI, 1995). Also, the advent of print becomes a cornerstone of national identity through unifying national languages by the production and codification of the books in different languages (Kovarik, 2011).
From Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, he analyzed the phase of literacy in human social communication and civilization. He was examining the effects of mass media but he was not talking about the content, he was explaining about the form because if we don’t understand the form, we can’t understand the message. The meaning of media doesn’t change at all. It is still the plural form of medium, a platform to connect different people and societies. But as time passed by, it also became a tool to create information.
The reading about “How are media born and developed?” has given me some concepts about how media innovated and why media is powerful today. I realized that different forms of media today are a collaboration of the early forms of media which came from different kinds of societies. A technical change can be achieved by thinking of why a change occurs at a particular time (Winston, 1995). This document describes different techniques for how technologies and media are interconnected. One of the historical documents that Winston describes is technological determinism which explains that the development of technology pushes society to move forward. Another method is cultural determinism which examines the social context of the technology, how it affects the economic history of the society (Winston, 1995).
For me, the evolution of media has many advantages if we use it wisely. It opens many opportunities, develops the life of humanity, it creates jobs, and may strengthen the connection of people in different parts of the world.
SOURCES:
Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age — Bill Kovarik
A New History of classical rhetoric — George Kennedy
Understanding Media — Marshall MacLuhan.
