Theories Of Mass Media

Joshua Meyrowitz attempts to organize and distinguish theories associated with mass media by separating the schools of thought into three main categories. The three main categories are medium as a vessel, medium as a language and medium as a environment. Medium as a vessel refers to the idea “That media are more or less neutral containers for content” (Littlejohn, Foss 2011). With reference to television, it doesn’t matter what the focus of the information presented is but rather that the “television brings across all information unbiased in the same demeanour” (Bobbitt, 2011). Medium as a language reflect exactly what it sounds like, different mediums will express themselves in different ways, with different slang or grammar to define the

His classification of media takes into account two factors: participation and information. Medium that is low in participation and high in information content is categorized as hot. A medium that is high in participation but provides low information is cool. Examples of hot media are print, lectures, photograph and film, they provide high definition data, and cold media are speech,cartoon,telephone,television,seminars, they provide low definition data.The medium is also categorized into hot and cool based on how much we depend on the certain medium, in a certain society. Media tend to interact with one another, when new medium are introduced it can change the way in which the other older media are used. Mcluhan states “no medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media”(McLuhan, 1997) and “media as extensions of our senses institute new ratios, not only among our private senses, but among themselves, when they interact among themselves. Radio changed the form of the news story as much as it altered the film image” (Bobbitt, 2011). McLuhan also states that television changed the way we use radio, which Mcluhan notes when he writes: “One of the many effects of television on radio has been to shift radio from an entertainment medium into a kind of nervous information system” (Bobbitt, 2011). With that we can say that a medium’s impact on society is not linear and static, but multi-dimensional and dynamic as that medium interacts with other media and as the society changes how it uses the medium. Media overtime can heat up, McLuhan once described television in the 1960’s as a cool medium, but we couldn’t say the same for today. Since the 1960’s, television has heated up due to it becoming more high definition and more ubiquitous. The way in which we view television is also different, there used to be only one television