Or is it all about TREE-dia?

Proposition: Media is not A THING out there.

The media is not so much things out there, but rather places which most of us inhabit, according to Brian Morris. As such media texts are more realistically “sites where meanings are generated through the manipulation of materials and codes”. Media texts are no longer simply ‘pictures’ or ‘reflections’ of a reality where meaning resides, we must see them as more complex and deeper than that. In this day and age the relationships, actions and interactions afforded through social media or ‘texts’ are essential to our current social landscape and thus define our sense of self and lifestyle. Just because an interaction is occurring through a modern media, does not reduce it’s impact upon and within a persons life.

Debates about Mediated vs Unmediated communication:

  • Pre-modern society: social world predominantly experienced through face to face interactions and direct experience.
  • Modern society: Predominantly through media/texts; maps, books and newspapers.
    Is one experience more authentic than the other? Surely not.

We live in a day and age where communities are created within and around media texts, or social media platforms. These texts and platforms also seek to facilitate new types of social interactions and imaginings, that are more complex than what has ever existed prior. Such as the ‘imagined communities’ constructed by modern mass media technoligies through rituals of media. An example could be newspapers: when someone buys The Age they feel a sense of connection through the belief that other people are doing the same thing at the same time. This in turn reinforces their own behaviour and begins to define what it means to be a member of that social group (i.e. Melbournian, Australian or an Age Reader).

We are beginning to move away from the model of the broadcast era:

Media and Communication: Sender > Medium > Message > Receiver

Which assumes a fairly linear one directional flow as we begin to move into a post-broadcast era that focusses on the individual (ME-dia). The flow of information in the modern age is much more multi-faceted and inter related, like a tree with singular trunk, we are singular beings, but we have many roots through which we source our information and we have my branches through which we share our own information, leading to a much more complicated model of media communication.

But I like trees, so I’m pretty happy about it,

Catch you later, Louise Alice Wilson