Understanding the Media Ch1 - Part 1

In the first few weeks of class we started reading about the media and how much it has affected - everything. We started with the fact that The Medium is the Message as was written in Marshall McLuhan’a book, Understanding Media. I felt like reading the first chapter of this book helped me truly see just how much the mediums we have in the world today, from TV to radio - every kind of medium is telling us something. One of the opening lines states, “This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” I think in a nutshell this is saying that we learn new things and ideas from all different kinds of new technologies. And because of all of this we than change our ideas after receiving a message from the medium.
Now after starting to read Understanding the Media by Eoin Devereux we started to look more into the study of not how the medium is the message as much as how much that message is affecting us. I liked in the reading how it talked about images playing a big part in how much we took in what the media was trying to tell us. As much as we listen to what the media is telling us, like through the radio or when we are just listening to the TV, it is the images we see when watching TV, looking at a newspaper, or reading a magazine that can capture our attention and really stick with us. As the old phrase goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. I believe this to be true and I know from personal experience that images in the media grab my attention much faster than the words in a title of an article or headline. In addition to this point on images another one was on how in mass media we are all communicating through a means of a “sender” and a “receiver”. I think this point is very true in that all communications know matter how it takes place there is always a sender which the information is coming from and a receiver who is taking in all that is being communicated. Now whenever I communicate I will be thinking more about how someone will receive a message and not just how I send it. There were many other interesting points in the reading but I felt like these ones hit me the most. Maybe the others will more as I discuss them with others inside and outside of class.