Everything we know is learned in one of two ways.1 The first way is somatically. These are the things we know through direct sensory perception of our environ- ment. We know what some things look, smell, feel, sound, or taste like because we personally have seen, smelled, felt, heard, or tasted them. One of the authors of this text knows, for example, that “Rocky Mountain oysters” (bull testicles) are especially chewy because he tried them once at a country and western bar. In short, some of what we know is based on first‐hand, unmediated experience. But the things we know through direct sensory perception make up a very small percentage of the total things we know. The vast majority of what we know comes to us a second way, symbolically. These are the things we know through someone or something, such as a parent, friend, teacher, museum, textbook, photograph, radio, film, television, or the internet. This type of information is mediated, meaning that it came to us via some indirect channel or medium. The word “medium” is derived from the Latin word medius, which means “middle” or that which comes between two things: the way that BBC’s Planet Earth production team might come between us and the animals of the Serengeti, for instance.

In the past 30 seconds, those readers who have never eaten Rocky Mountain oysters have come to know that they are chewy, as that information has been communicated to them through, or mediated by, this book. When we stop to think about all the things we know, we suddenly realize that the vast majority of what we know is mediated. We may know something about China even if we

1 Introducing Critical Media Studies

KEY CONCEPTS

CONVERGENCE CRITICAL MEDIA STUDIES FRAGMENTATION GLOBALIZATION MASS MEDIA

MEDIUM MOBILITY POSTMODERNITY

SOCIALIZATION THEORY SIMULATION

Ott, Brian L., and Robert L. Mack. Critical Media Studies : An Introduction, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5992887. Created from du on 2020-09-14 17:12:12.

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2 Introduction

have never been there thanks to Wikipedia; we may know something about Winston Churchill despite our never having met him thanks to Darkest Hour (2017); we may even know something about the particulars of conducting a homicide investigation even though we have likely never conducted one thanks to the crime drama CSI. The mass media account, it would seem, for much of what we know (and do not know) today. But this has not always been the case.

Before the invention of mass media, the spoken or written word was the primary medium for conveying information and ideas. This method of communication had several significant and interrelated limitations. First, as the transmission of information was tied to the available means of transportation (foot, horse, buggy, boat, locomotive, or automobile, depending upon the time period), its dissemination was extraordinarily slow, especially over great distances such as across continents and oceans. Second, because information could not easily be reproduced and distributed, its scope was extremely limited. Third, since information often passed through multiple channels (people), each of which altered it, if only slightly, there was a high probability of message distortion. Simply put, there was no way to communicate a uniform message to a large group of people in distant places quickly prior to the advent of the modern mass media. What distinguishes mass media like print, radio, and television from individual media like human speech and hand‐written letters, then, is precisely their unique capacity to address large audiences in remote locations with relative efficiency.

Critical Media Studies is about the social and cultural consequences of that revolutionary capability. Recognizing that mass media are, first and foremost, communication technologies that increasingly mediate both what we know and how we know, this book surveys a variety of perspectives for evaluating and assessing the role of mass media in our daily lives. Whether listening to Spotify while walking across campus, sharing pictures with friends on Instagram, receiving the latest sports scores via your mobile phone, retweeting your favorite YouTube video, or binge watching popular Netflix series like Stranger Things or 13 Reasons Why, the mass media are regular fixtures of everyday life. But before beginning to explore the specific and complex roles that mass media play in our lives, it is worth looking at who they are, when they originated, and how they have developed.

Categorizing Mass Media

As is perhaps already evident, “media” is a very broad term that includes a diverse array of communication technologies, such as cave drawings, speech, smoke signals, letters, books, telegraphy, telephony, magazines, newspapers, radio, film, television, smartphones, video games, and networked computers, to name just a few. But this book is principally concerned with mass media, or those communication technologies that have the potential to reach a large audi- ence in remote locations. What distinguishes mass media from individual

Ott, Brian L., and Robert L. Mack. Critical Media Studies : An Introduction, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/du/detail.action?docID=5992887.