Digital Media Society

Media I believe that the media exerts tremendous power on people. I certainly subscribe to McLuhan's view that media allows humans to perceive the world differently. The world in which we live is rich with media, and most of our interactions with the world are today governed by some form of media. In McLuhan's day it was television, radio, newspapers, and telephones. Today, those are one device, and we might have three or four of them in our houses, and at least one on our person at any given time.

Even face-to-face communications are governed, interrupted and sometimes even mediated through media. The information that we receive about the world almost always comes via media. If not, it comes from another person who did receive it from the media. McLuhan's point was that our world today is much different than the pre-technology era with respect to media. For most of human history, people more or less only knew what they could see, touch or hear themselves. Many were illiterate, unable to consume what media did exist.

As technology has proliferated, there are more media forms, and they provide us with more information. Arguably, almost everything a 21st-century person knows about the world has been mediated through one form of media or another. If media is ubiquitous, and for most of us it is, then it has to change the ways in which we perceive the world. This was one of Stone's (1996) main premises -- that people do not necessarily view each other the same way, when identities are anonymous.

This can sometimes remove barriers to free communication, as people do not focus on differences. It can, of course, also erect barriers to communication, as the basic respect we normal afford others can disappear when we fail to associate the bits on our screens with the living, breathing humans behind them. As to our beliefs, we absorb knowledge via media, and have for a long time. When holy books were our sole media, they managed to have a profound influence on our perceptions of the world.

Today, when we consume media, it can be difficult to discern fiction from fact, as both are presented the same way. Both are, sadly, transferred to us via the same screens, and the same printed pages. Our beliefs about the world need not be grounded in any sort of reality at all, as evidenced by the state of our political discourse and how uncritical too many people are when consuming such discourse.

We have a lot of media, but not much media literacy, so yes, our beliefs about the world can be very much influenced by the messages that arrive to us via various media forms. 2. Boyd argues that networked publics are characterized by certain dynamics. Such publics will each of their own codes of behavior, but often there is little official policing, leaving members of the group vulnerable to outsiders.

Each public has come together on the basis of its shared values or interests, and these social contexts are critical to differentiating between publics. People can also enter or exit from a public at any given time, and may be a member of multiple publics (Boyd, 2007). To some extent, social networks will mirror the real world publics. The barriers between participants are different.

While geography, race, class and gender are less conspicuous than would be the case in person -- and this is true among adults let alone among teenagers -- other elements online can form barriers. Membership is self-selected to a point, but many communities will keep out those who do not fit in, placing greater emphasis on codes of behavior. Those codes of behavior can be broken, however, and this is where the free nature of these publics can be quite different from other communities.

Cyberbullying has emerged as a significant social problem. Young people become so engrossed in their networked publics that they can barely conceive of a world order outside of these publics. Thus, they may often seem unaware of the recourse that they might have to enforce social order -- using a real world technique to solve a networked public problem almost seems unreasonable to many, because to do so would violate the unique nature of the community. 3.

Shirky (2008) is correct in noting that transaction costs are much lower for organizing group efforts. In a free, Western, society, organizing pre-Internet would at the minimum entail phoning people. Messages would take more time to be passed around, and would reach fewer people. Indeed, with the phone there was always the chance that a telephone game effect would occur. Today an email or a text can reach thousands of people or more, simultaneously, and each receiving the exact same message. So the time cost and effort cost are lower.

In most cases, the financial cost is basically the same, and the cost of acquiring someone's contact information is lower because it is easier for people to self-select membership in a given group. Thus, organizing with organizations has lower transaction costs.