Posts - nicholas carah

The mass circulation of media goes hand in hand with industrial forms of production. Without factories to produce goods that needed to be bought and to pay wages to workers who would buy those goods, there would be nothing to advertise and nothing to fund the emergence of commercial media. Media technologies and institutions are critical to the organisation of day to day life, markets and political institutions in the mass society.

There are perhaps two important points to derive from Lippman’s story then. The first is the way humans use symbols to create ‘pictures’ of how the world is. Lippman’s story illustrates that how the world is represented matters because it shapes how humans vunderstand the world. And, how humans understand the world affects how they act in the world. The second is that these pictures are created and disseminated via material infrastructure. In the case of Lippman’s story, news travels on a ship.

The study of media then is, like other social and cultural fields of study, about examining the social structures and technologies we invent to orchestrate a shared life in the world with other humans, animals and the natural environment. To get started at least, there are two basic building blocks. Meaning: the human capacity to use our bodies to communicate with one another. Media: the human capacity to create material structures, tools and institutions that alter our lived experience and the world around us in durable ways.

Media have at least two functions that play a critical role in our social world. We might call this their ‘cultural’ and ‘technical’ functions. At the cultural level: media enable the creation and distribution of information, images, sounds, symbols and narratives. At the technical level: they collect, store, process and distribute process information.