Blog Post 2:

 For this week's discussion post I chose to further analyze the medium theory and its impacts on space and time bias media, discussed by Harold Innis. The medium of communication plays a crucial role in our everyday lives, as what people think and what they think about is altered by the medium form they use. I find this quite interesting because Innis emphasizes the importance of both time and space-biased media to appropriately balance a society, and the internet has created a new medium that impacts this stance. In this new medium, the internet/web greatly impacts the importance of time and space bias because it is a highly individualized medium.

Due to the internet and its platform's ubiquitous nature, the importance of time and space bias has been greatly impacted. The internet is a mass medium that is used by individuals across the globe. It facilitates the exchange of information globally, extending meaning across distances to help disseminate information, favouring space bias media. Since this medium has become a device used globally, it has appropriated forms of time bias media such as images, written documents or even oral presentations which have morphed with the digital world, broadening the range of space bias media. This medium has created an imbalance of time and space bias in our society, which goes against the arguments made by Harold Innis. In spite of the importance of time-biased media in the early days of media, space bias has allowed for greater expansion and development of human media, resulting in space bias media being a more widely used approach though in the age of digital technology and the internet. I have come up with a discussion question and would love to hear some feedback or further input!

  • Do you think that the value of time-biased media, like cultural documents or oral stories shared in communities, has diminished since the internet was invented?

Comments

  1. KeenanOctober 6, 2022 at 8:59 AM

    Hey Maggie,

    I like your example of the Internet creating an imbalance between space and time bias. Your discussion question is fascinating, too; I think it would be pretty naive to say that the Internet has caused a departure from oral traditions and time bias forms of communication. I find it challenging to incorporate a technological determinist perspective, meaning that technology is the driving or shaping force on humanity, and similarly, to think that humanity is the only reason technology develops. Instead, I think it is an equal partnership using your example of the Internet; when it was first invented, its purpose was to speed up and globalize communication. Now, it's a medium with search engines, video games, streaming capabilities and more advanced communication styles, such as zoom. Blaming the Internet for delegitimizing orality is unfair to answer your discussion question. Instead, I think diminishing orality is a sacrifice society makes in the name of progress. While I do not particularly agree that more efficient ways of communication, such as texting or e-mail, necessarily progress in any moral sense, I think it is the opposite in many respects driving human beings to two more individualistic tendencies instead of relationships; most people define technological progress on efficiency and not morality. Faster is not always better; sometimes, I feel more reflection should be focused on what we lose when equating speed with progress.

    Great discussion question. It made me think.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ashley Di PernaOctober 7, 2022 at 9:19 AM

    Hi Maggie,

    You came up with a great and thought provoking question! I do think that the value of time biased media has diminished in our current Internet era, but you can also make the argument that these stories that were once preserved in time biased media has now been transferred over to space biased media. For example, many of us grew up reading fairytales in books that could be considered time biased. Now, many kids are learning these same fairytales, but are learning them through Youtube videos, which is more space biased. I do think that a number of these cultural documents and oral stories will still live on in this space biased media world, they will simply be accessed in a different manner. Space biased media can be especially beneficial for oral stories that are from cultures that don't utilize written stories, as these stories can be recorded, then shared throughout the world.

    Thanks again for the great post.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post #4: Applying McLuhan's Hot and Cool Theory to Podcasting

Image
  Hi everyone!  For this blog post, I am interested in outlining Marshall Mcluhan’s Hot and Cool media theory. In particular, this post will use his theory to dissect the similarities and differences between how radio and podcasting are typically consumed in contemporary culture. Ultimately, the goal of this post is to illustrate how modern-day podcasting’s technological affordances allow for a more cool communicative method in comparison to traditional radio broadcasting.   McLuhan's Hot and Cool media theory categorizes different media forms based on how the receiver experiences its content. Specifically, for McLuhan, different media forms demand varying degrees of audience participation which impacts how one extracts meaning. Hot media is largely defined by its “high definition” as it focuses on one singular sense (ex: auditory, visual, etc). This intensification of a single sense facilitates the demand of a viewer’s attention as it does not leave much context to ...
Read more

The Freedom Convoy as Hot or Cool Media / Zach Tyrrell

A prominent idea in Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 book Understanding Media is looking at media as either hot or cold. Hot media demands a viewer's attention whereas cold media requires conscious participation by the medium’s consumer. Examples of hot media include; photographs, print, and radio. On the contrary cold media includes the; telephone, seminars and television. To reiterate, the differentiating factor between the two is audience involvement.  The freedom convoy took the nation by storm in early 2022. As most of you probably know, the freedom convoy was a nationwide protest against the vaccine mandate instituted by Trudeau’s government. The convoy made its way to Ottawa as hundreds protested outside of the Parliament building for a number of weeks. So, is the freedom convoy hot or cold media? I personally feel that it is difficult to categorize the convoy as one or the other which therefore makes it a combination of both. As we know hot media demand’s a viewer's attention a...
Read more

Blog Post #5

Image
Hi everyone!  Before I answer this week’s blog prompt, I want to establish a few key points of McLuhan’s medium theory in order to predict how he would interpret social media as a communicative medium. As we have discussed in our class, McLuhan’s approach to interpreting different media forms focuses on how they construct a social environment that can vary the meaning and sense of the information that is being communicated. Particularly, McLuhan explains that a medium can be seen as an extension of our human senses. This causes different media to favour certain senses which influences how we interpret meaning within the barriers of that sense. For example, since radio privileges the sense of hearing, this then causes receivers of its message to perceive its message within the limitations of hearing. Thus, this idea of media as an extension of human senses has certain implications regarding how different media can shape our social environments and cultural communicative practices....
Read more