Media Theory

As we continue to learn about and develop new mediums for communication and media, we attempt to find more effective ways of transporting information from various sources to an individual or group of people. The more difficult accessing the information is, the less likely large sums of people are to use the methods at hand. In fact, they’re more likely to find their own ways of obtaining information, whether it be word of mouth rather than reading a newspaper or hand signals rather than deducing the intricate sounds of Morse code. Marshall McLuhan mad an interesting observation. He stated that “The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” This one sentence encapsulates the essence of the evolution of communication. We went from handwriting pages, to typing them, to simply speaking them as a means of developing more efficient mediums for communication and media. In more modern times, we have numerous ways of communicating or receiving information to and from a wide variety of sources in the palms of our hands with smart phones. We no longer will be searching through the Sunday news specials to find out our news but rather Google search it or see what happens to be trending on Twitter at the moment. The information is so immediate that it seems almost obsolete to want to check anything else other than the handheld mediums we hold today. In fact, we may not even be using desktop computers if we continue on this path. The only reason many young people even consider these larger mediums is for school, work, or maybe needing stronger hardware for video games. However, we spend much of our time with media in particular on our phones and we typically prefer to do things on our phones. We don’t like to purchase calculators or check the news channel for weather because we have nearly instant access to all this information in our pockets. Soon, we may not want to wait for the booting up process of a desktop or the constant repairs needed for an old laptop when we can simply reply to an email through our Gmail app. Slowly but surely older mediums are going to become a thing of the past and only the past.

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