Mediated Lives

When I first read the question "What does mass media mean?" I thought to myself I have never thought about what it meant before. When I think of those two words, I think of a large medium in society. Mass media to me is any large communication that distributes and communicates information to people. There are several means of transmitting information to people that have over time shaped our society.

I started remembering what Ian had said in one of our lectures, he said that we cannot go one day without our lives being mediated. There are six main forms of media that mediate my life more than the others; the Internet, television, radio, newspaper, books and magazines. Every day at least five out of six forms of media mediate my life. These are all extensions of my skin (McLuhan, 10); they are what make my life easier.

Mass media is also what has changed our society for the good and the bad. If you take art for example, at one point in our lives the only way to see art was to physically go to where it was located. Nowadays you just type it in on the Internet and it comes right up on your screen. Walter Benjamin argues how art has changed, “One might generalize by saying: the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence” (Benjamin, 3). Our technology can do so much that it takes away from things like art which we created to be viewed in person and have now the aura has been taken away.

Major mediators are there to make our life easier; they distracted our life from everything else around us. Walter Benjamin explains the difference between Distraction and Concentration:

“...Polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work as the way legend tells the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive.”(Benjamin, 13)

We see information in a completely different way in the 21st century. In the past we absorbed information like one would absorb art. It is like a distraction now; I am prone to multitasking while doing academic work-anything from MSN to listening to music on You Tube. Mass communicators allow us to do multiple tasks at once- we no longer concentrate at the task at hand.

Till the next time,

Sarah Young

Works cited

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
http://academic.evergreen.edu/a/arunc/compmusic/benjamin/benjamin.pdf

Marshall McLuhan, “The Playboy interview”
http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~gisle/links/mcluhan/pb.html