Producers, Texts, Readers
Marshall McLuhan would say that it is not what we are watching that defines the message of media, but it is how we are watching it. Back in the Golden Age of Radio, there was an outbreak of people who responded negatively to the radio program War of the Worlds. Staged as a news broadcast, people of the time had so much faith in the information that the radio provided, they had no other choice but to believe that New York really was destroyed by aliens. They didn’t have images to support the fake news broadcast and the entertainment was taken out of context. Stuart Hall discusses the Encoding and Decoding of media, how texts can carry a series of meaning possibilities, and the connection between the Texts and the Readers is formulated by the Producers and decoded in varying degrees dependent upon personal backgrounds of the Readers. Mediums bring key points of change in how man has viewed the world and how these views are changed by the adoption of new media.
The Medium is the Message tells us that the dominant communication media of our time will shape the way humans think, act, and ultimately perceive the world around them – that modern media is an extension of the human senses. Today, we have multiple means of finding news. With websites such as CNN.com, or even the CNN 24-hour news channel on television, people are constantly up-to-date on what is going on in the world. That has become our go-to. Print Journalism is fighting to stay alive, while the introduction of the Internet has slowing taken over as prime news source. Even inventions such as DVR and TiVo have changed the viewing experience of entertainment. In the Age of Radio, families would gather around to hear updates of the first and second World Wars – it brought them together. Even the television played a crucial role in the Vietnam Wars, bringing direct images from the front lines and causing a backlash against the war. Now we can watch whatever we want at our own leisure.
Durham, Meenakshi G., and Douglas Kellner. Media and cultural studies keyworks. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.
