Test point analysis column:
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This article is compiled and discussed every night at Miyou Xinchuan Professional Reading Club
Today’s knowledge point: McLuhan’s view of media and his evaluation
Subjects: Communication Studies
Common test types: term explanations, short answers, essay questions, case analysis questions
Knowledge point: Understand the relationship between media and people and its impact on society from a technical perspective
1. The medium is the message
1) Meaning: The medium itself is the truly meaningful message. That is, only when humans have a certain medium can they engage in communication and other social activities that are suitable for it.
2) From the perspective of the long development process of human society, the truly meaningful and valuable "message" is not the communication content of each era, but the nature of the communication tools used in this era, the possibilities it creates and the social changes it brings.
3) Media is the basic driving force for social development and a symbol that distinguishes different social forms. Every new media creates a new way for humans to perceive and understand the world. Changes in communication change human feelings, change the relationship between people, and create new types of social behaviors.
4) Media is the decisive factor in social development and changes in social form. Oral media (tribal society) – printed media (de-tribal society) – electronic media (global village) confirm this.
2. Media: extension of people
1) Any medium is nothing more than an expansion or extension of human feelings and senses. (Text and print media are extensions of human visual abilities, radio is an extension of hearing abilities, and television is a comprehensive extension of visual, auditory, and tactile abilities.) This illustrates the impact of communication media on human sensory centers.
2) The history of the development of media and society is also the history of human sensory abilities from "synthesis" – "differentiation" – "re-synthesis".
① Prehistoric people: Auditory culture is sensory integrated;
② The visual culture of civilized people, which is dominated by text and print media, focuses on details and differentiates and abstracts details from the whole. The shift from spoken language to writing and printing actually expanded a sense that was separated from the bundle of human sensations. This kind of sensory separation caused by the division of sensory fields can promote people's abstract and deep understanding of things. At the same time, alienating other senses and focusing only on vision will also cause emotional separation, which will reduce people's overall sensory ability.
③ Modern electronic media, especially television, are changing the situation in which civilized people are dominated by vision. They not only expand vision and hearing, but also expand human touch due to the strong sense of presence and contact. Modern people are retrieving the long-lost "feeling totality" and returning to a state of sensory balance.
3) Flaws: This view is not the conclusion of rigorous scientific investigation, but a speculative inference based on "insight".
3. “Hot Medium” and “Cold Medium”
Hot medium – the message conveyed is relatively clear and clear, and the recipient does not need to mobilize more sensory and associative activities to understand. (It is "hot" in itself, and people do not need to perform "warm-up exercises" when processing information. Such as: books, newspapers, radio, silent movies, photos.)
Cold media – the information conveyed is small and vague, requiring the cooperation of multiple senses and rich imagination to be understood. Such as: comics, audio movies, TV, etc.
There is a logical contradiction in the classification. But it gives us inspiration: different media affect people in different ways, and the psychological and behavioral responses they cause have different characteristics. Research on media should take these factors into consideration.
4. The significance and limitations of McLuhan’s theory:
(1) Significance: It opens up the perspective of observing the development of human society from the perspective of media technology, and emphasizes the social and historical role of media technology.
(2) Limitations:
① He is a technical naturalist whose theory is extreme and one-sided. Treat media technology as the only determinant of social development and change, ignoring the role of various complex social factors.
② People’s subjectivity and initiative cannot be seen. People seem to be completely dominated by the media technology or tools they invented.
③The entire basis of the theory focuses on the impact of media tools on the central sensory system. It is one-sided to explain all human behavior. Feeling is important, but people have rationality. This rational activity will in turn have an active restrictive effect on feelings and their extended forms of media.
④ Pan-mediaization – infinitely expanding the scope of media, even considering "stones" as media.
Direction of thinking: Media and technology are inseparable, and technological progress promotes the evolution and development of media. What we need to consider is not only the convenience brought by media technology, but also the tendency-metaphor contained in media technology, which determines the direction of our reshaping of the modern news communication system.
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