“The medium is the message”, Marshall McLuhan (1964) contended in his masterpiece “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man”. This quote has then served as an important perspective as people intend to deepen their insight into the interaction between media, society and culture, or more specifically, how society, culture and civilization are molded through the lens […]
Understanding the relationship among medium, content, and culture has always been crucial for, not only media researchers, but also media content creators and many designers as well as developers of various media platforms. The heated discussion goes on. Some praise the power they gain through innovative use of new mediums while others hold to the […]
In the January of 1996, Bill Gates published an article on Microsoft website called “Content is King”. No doubt, this phrase has a tremendous impact on the traditional media industry. However, the media landscape has changed rapidly due to new technologies which have also led to globalization as well as culture homogenization. Recent years argues […]
In the year of 1941, television was first licensed for commercial broadcasting. Since then, a broad array of new ways to entertain have been introduced to ordinary Americans’ lives (Gentzkow, 2006). Criticizers and researchers condemned that it fashions an entertaining culture which ruins public discourse. As Postman(1985) argued in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death, […]
When the television was first showing up in people’s houses, nobody knew how much this little box will affect everyone’s life. By 1960, 87 percent of American households had television sets, and they were watching an average of five and a half hours per day. (Gentzkow, 2006) It is undoubtable that new media made […]
In a world of globalization, homogenization, McDonaldization, and all the other –izations that have been created to signify the “sameness” of cultures around the world, does content and culture affect how we use our technology? According to the Apparatgeist paradigm devised by Katz and Aakhus (2002), people and media technology are in a cyclical relationship […]
The development of human civilization has always been inseparable from the effective communication of thoughts and ideas. Saying has it that two minds are greater than one. If information is extremely controlled and manipulated by a few people on the top, dawn of the true enlightenment and civilization will hardly come. On the contrary, when […]
Television was first licensed for commercial broadcasting in 1941. On the contrary to the early predictions saying that Television would bring “infinite broadening of the democratic process”(Mickelson, 1960), Gentzkow pointed out that “the entry of television in a market actually coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio, and in political […]
On December 15, AOL Instant Messenger will be shutting down for the final time after 20 years of service. AOL Instant Messenger, AIM, was created in 1997 by AOL accidentally and became the leading instant messenger online chat system in North America. Available from only a desktop computer, it was one of the first instant chat […]
When the public mobile phone was first invented in the 1940s (Farley, 2005) it did not have the advanced design and capabilities that it has now. Additionally, due to the restrictions that the early mobile phone faced imposed by the Federal Communications Commission (Farley, 2005), commercial use of the mobile phone by […]