LECTURE THREE

Unfortunatley I missed the first half of the lecture today due to work committments again and am disappointed to learn that it was on the media - a lecture which would have been much more interesting to me than computers and the internet as I am a journalism student.

From reading the lecture notes I have learned a few key points:

Media Defined

• Media can refer to a sense of 'intervening or intermediating agency or substance' (Williams, 1985).
• The basic idea is that the kind of communication you can use is determined a lot by the medium of commuication you are dealing with.
• That the 'news media' or 'mass media' is only one type of media. Through new commuication technologies we now have new forms of media such as the internet.
• Media can be seen as a conduit that allows some other process to happen.

History of Media

• The twentieth century saw the development of mass society and an explosion of broadcast media forms (newspapers, cinema, radio, and television) where messages were distributed from centralised sources to audiences around the world.
• Communication, Media and Cultural Studies were all invented to investigate issues around communication.
• Journalsim, Public Relations, Marketing, Advertising and Design were all more practically-orientated jobs which emerged from these disiplines.
• The rise of computers and other new communication technologies have prompted over fields of investigation such as New Media Studies, Cyber Studies, Internet Studies, Cyberculture Studies and Web Studies.
• All these disiplines began in France with Semiotics - the study of signs as part of social life.

New Media, Internet Studies and Cybercultural Studies

• Internet began in the early 1990's and people weren't sure what to make of it - whether it was a good or bad thing.
• Toward the end of the 1990's people began to take the internet more seriously and researchers started to look at individual contexts rather than the internet as one big whole.
• Critical cyberculture studies unfolds and explores the stories we tell about social, cultural and economic interactions online. For example, we use the terms and metaphors such as 'surf the net' to make it more approachable for those who know nothing about it.