MST 100 - Defining the Field

What counts as media?

• Book

• TikTok

• Radio

• Map

• Telephone

• Advertisement

• Photograph

• Spotify

• Road sign

• Video game

• Money

• AI chatbot

What is media studies?

Media Studies asks how media are:

• Made

• Organized

• Represented

• Circulated

• Used

• Interpreted

• Regulated

• Contested

…and how media shape social and cultural life.

What are the four ways of looking at media?

• culture/content

• technology

• production/institutions

• audiences

medium

Something through which communication, meaning, or experience is mediated

media

Technologies, online spaces, institutions, and practices through which communication occurs

mediation

How our relationship to the world is shaped by media

media studies

The study of how the media works and its relation to culture and society

• scale

• forms of communication that allows things to spread on a larger scale

legacy media

Newspaper, magazines, cinema, television, radio, books, and movies

• not used much today

digital media

Media spread through digital technology

• produced, stored, and circulated through digital channels

Convergence

The bringing together of voice, video, data and other communication media

what is communication?

The act of making something common between 2 or more people

• Something people actually do

• Form of social action; involves 2 or more people in a process of creating, sending, receiving or interpreting messages or ideas.

models of communication

gives us a way to think about something that might be hard for us to see

The Shannon Weaver-Model of communication (a mathematical model)

Noise - interference with the successful transmission of a message

The social model of communication

• Helps us understand that communication takes place within a social context

• The process of interpretation is happening.

• Meaning inst contained inside a message, it has to be interpreted by the audience

social model explanation

transmission → the social model

did the message arrive? → how did it come to mean something?

Why media matters - as individuals

• Central to the way in which we understand the world and each other in it.

• They impact:

  • All aspects of our lives - work, education, thinking about politics, etc.

  • They “frame our focus on the world”

Why media matters - as collectives

• Central to larger organizations and how society functions

• Helps bind communities together with common identities and understandings

  • The concept of “imagined communities” comes in

• Major for gov and citizens/residents

media are constructed

media don’t just simply show us the world

• they

  • select

  • organize

  • represent

  • frame

  • circulate

can media make a nation?

yes

• ex. a sports team

Media can also be contested

Media as resistance

• Zines

• Community radio’alternative media

• DIY media

• Counter-representations

• Media activism

The media environment is changing

• Platforms

• Algorithms

• Datafication

• AI

• Misinformation