Within the Heart of the Media

The Definition of Mass Media

When asked about Media people automatically think television, phones, Internet but what I have recently discovered with the help of Ian Riley’s Mass Communications class is that there is so much more to media than just that. The readings and teachings of Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes and Scott McCloud (to name a few) help us understand the extents that media can take us today.

Marshal McLuhan in the Playboy Interview brings up five important points about media, one of these five points is Media Extensions. This is explained as the idea that media is an extension of us and how the media allows us to extend our senses. For example take the actions of riding a bike or watching television, the bike is the extension of our feet while the television is the extension of our eyes. So with this we are able to look at everything that is around us as a form of medium that further makes up a media.

The medium that I have most recently become more involved with is photography which Roland Barthes says to be “a magic not an art” in his book La Chambre Clair. This shines a new light on photography for me, and allows me to explore it in a new way. Just like the Mass Communications class has shone a new light on media and allowed me to understand it better.

Scott McCloud in “Understanding Comics, The Invisible Art” also talks about media extensions, only this time explaining that we can extend our identities through objects. “Our ability to extend our identities into inanimate objects can cause pieces of wood to become legs, pieces of metal to become hands, pieces of plastic to become ears and pieces of glass to become eyes.”

Theorists like Scott McCloud and Marshal McLuhan have taught me many things about the media, so from my previous view of media being the small scale from television to Internet I know understand that it surrounds our everyday lives in ways we do not even know it does. Which I think makes our lives more interesting and more full of depth than we knew our lives to be.

Works Cited:
McLuhan, Marshall. “The Playboy Interview.” Interview with Playboy Enterprises, Playboy. Mar 1960. Oct 6. 2008

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics The Invisible Art. New York, USA: HarperCollins Publisher Inc, 1993.

posted by Brittany Pacitti's Mass Communications @ 6:53 PM