What Does Media Do for Us?

(A brief historical context.)

Media fulfills several basic roles in our society. One obvious role is entertainment.
Media can act as a springboard for our imaginations, a source of fantasy, and an
outlet for escapism. In the 19th century, Victorian readers disillusioned by the
grimness of the Industrial Revolution found themselves drawn into fantastic worlds
of fairies and other fictitious beings. In the first decade of the 21st century, American
television viewers could peek in on a conflicted Texas high school football team in
Friday Night Lights; the violence-plagued drug trade in Baltimore in The Wire; a
1960s-Manhattan ad agency in Mad Men; or the last surviving band of humans in a
distant, miserable future in Battlestar Galactica. Through bringing us stories of all
kinds, media has the power to take us away from ourselves.
Media can also provide information and education. Information can come in many
forms, and it may sometimes be difficult to separate from entertainment. Today,
newspapers and news-oriented television and radio programs make available stories
from across the globe, allowing readers or viewers in London to access voices and
videos from Baghdad, Tokyo, or Buenos Aires. Books and magazines provide a more
in-depth look at a wide range of subjects. The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has
articles on topics from presidential nicknames to child prodigies to tongue twisters
in various languages. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has posted
free lecture notes, exams, and audio and video recordings of classes on its Open
Course Ware website, allowing anyone with an Internet connection access to world-
class professors.
Another useful aspect of media is its ability to act as a public forum for the discussion
of important issues. In newspapers or other periodicals, letters to the editor allow
readers to respond to journalists or to voice their opinions on the issues of the day.
These letters were an important part of U.S. newspapers even when the nation was
a British colony, and they have served as a means of public discourse ever since. The
Internet is a fundamentally democratic medium that allows everyone who can get
online the ability to express their opinions through, for example, blogging or
podcasting—though whether anyone will hear is another question.
Similarly, media can be used to monitor government, business, and other
institutions. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the miserable
conditions in the turn-of-the-century meatpacking industry; and in the early 1970s,
Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered evidence of
the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, which eventually led to the
resignation of President Richard Nixon. But purveyors of mass media may be
beholden to particular agendas because of political slant, advertising funds, or
ideological bias, thus constraining their ability to act as a watchdog. The following
are some of these agendas:
✓ Entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination
✓ Educating and informing
✓ Serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues
✓ Acting as a watchdog for government, business, and other institutions
It’s important to remember, though, that not all media are created equal. While some
forms of mass communication are better suited to entertainment, others make more
sense as a venue for spreading information. In terms of print media, books are
durable and able to contain lots of information, but are relatively slow and expensive
to produce; in contrast, newspapers are comparatively cheaper and quicker to create,
making them a better medium for the quick turnover of daily news. Television
provides vastly more visual information than radio and is more dynamic than a static
printed page; it can also be used to broadcast live events to a nationwide audience,
as in the annual State of the Union address given by the U.S. president. However, it
is also a one-way medium—that is, it allows for very little direct person-to-person
communication. In contrast, the Internet encourages public discussion of issues and
allows nearly everyone who wants a voice to have one. However, the Internet is also
largely unmoderated. Users may have to wade through thousands of inane comments
or misinformed amateur opinions to find quality information.
The 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan took these ideas one step further,
famously coining the phrase “the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964).” By this,
McLuhan meant that every medium delivers information in a different way and that
content is fundamentally shaped by the medium of transmission. For example,
although television news has the advantage of offering video and live coverage,
making a story come alive more vividly, it is also a faster-paced medium. That means
more stories get covered in less depth. A story told on television will probably be
flashier, less in-depth, and with less context than the same story covered in a
monthly magazine; therefore, people who get the majority of their news from
television may have a particular view of the world shaped not by the content of what
they watch but its medium. Or, as computer scientist Alan Kay put it, “Each medium
has a special way of representing ideas that emphasize particular ways of thinking
and de-emphasize others (Kay, 1994).” Kay was writing in 1994, when the Internet
was just transitioning from an academic research network to an open public system.
A decade and a half later, with the Internet firmly ensconced in our daily lives,
McLuhan’s intellectual descendants are the media analysts who claim that the
Internet is making us better at associative thinking, or more democratic, or
shallower. But McLuhan’s claims don’t leave much space for individual autonomy or
resistance. In an essay about television’s effects on contemporary fiction, writer
David Foster Wallace scoffed at the “reactionaries who regard TV as some malignancy
visited on an innocent populace, sapping IQs and compromising SAT scores while we
all sit there on ever fatter bottoms with little mesmerized spirals revolving in our
eyes…. Treating television as evil is just as reductive and silly as treating it like a
toaster with pictures (Wallace, 1997).” Nonetheless, media messages and
technologies affect us in countless ways, some of which probably won’t be sorted out
until long in the future.
 Summary
o Media fulfills several roles in society, including the following:
• Entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination,
• Educating and informing,
• Serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues, and
• Acting as a watchdog for government, business, and other institutions.
o Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press enabled the mass
production of media, which was then industrialized by Friedrich Koenig in the
early 1800s. These innovations led to the daily newspaper, which united the
urbanized, industrialized populations of the 19th century.
o In the 20th century, radio allowed advertisers to reach a mass audience and
helped spur the consumerism of the 1920s—and the Great Depression of the
1930s. After World War II, television boomed in the United States and abroad,
though its concentration in the hands of three major networks led to
accusations of homogenization. The spread of cable and subsequent
deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s led to more channels, but not necessarily
to more diverse ownership.
o Transitions from one technology to another have greatly affected the media
industry, although it is difficult to say whether technology caused a cultural
shift or resulted from it. The ability to make technology small and affordable
enough to fit into the home is an important aspect of the popularization of
new technologies.
 References
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