PUBLISHING MANAGEMENT

Lecture 1/ Part 1:

Ing. Jiří Šnajdar 2014

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A History of Communications advances a new theory of media that explains the origions and impact of different forms of communication – speech, writing, print, electronic devices, and the Internet on human history in the long term.

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New types of media are pulled into widespred use by historical trends and ones in widespread use, these media push social institutions and beliefs in predictable directions. This view allowes us to see for the first time what is truly new about the Internet, what is not, and where it is taking us.

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Marshall McLuhan, Jack Goody and others devoted to the study of media and their effects. These early communications theorists made all kinds of of fscinating claims about the impact of the media on well, everything. More recent media theorists proposed that the internet was incomprehensible by the lights of older theories because it was new.

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First we spoke. Than we wrote. Than we printed. Then we listened to the radio and watched TV. And we surf Internet. Each of these media was different from others, but all of them were one piece of tools that we used to send, recieve, store, and retrieve messages.

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The Internet has changed the way we work, what we consume, how we play, whom we interact with, how we find things out, and myriad other details about the way of life. Yet we do not have a good way to understand where the Internet came from and what is doing to us, so we are to some degree adrift. We need to look two theories about media in general and the Internet in particular.

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The first endeavors to explain why successive media – speech, writing, print, audiovisual devices, and the Internet – arose when they did.

The second endeavors to explain what these media did and are doing to the way we organize ourselves and what we belive.

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Marshall McLuhan – any discussion of media theory must begin with him, if only because its most famous expression – „ the medium is the message“

McLuhan was an adventurous, inventive, and imaginative thinker. Explaining „the medium is the massage“ in 1964.

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„ In a culture like ours, long accustmed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extention of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affeirs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.“

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How should we understand this passage? We can find the central hypothesis of media studies – that media do something to us.

McLuhan made a crucial contribution to media studies. He separated the medium from message and, in so doing, founded the program of modern media studies, that which attempts to describe and explain the effects of media on the human mind and human groups.

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The Mentalists Walter Ong, Eric Havelock, Jack Goody – are united in the conviction that media in general and litracy make people think differently. Learning to read and write, rewiers the brain and enables new cognitive abilities.

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We live in a media – created world where representations only refer to other representations, we do not realize we are brains in vats. It rests on a solid empirical foundation: people are sometimes fooled into thinking that representations are real.

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Media are powerful, but they are not all-powerful. Most people have no difficulty distiguishing reality from representation. The key question is this: How effective are different media qua media are diceiving people, at prompting them to confuse representation from reality?

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Harold Innis: Mc Luhan pointed media studies in the right direction by telling us that media themselves - not the information they convey – do something to us. Harold Innis research led him in a new and unforeseen direction, he was economist and his hypothesis in respect to two questions: How do new media arise? What do different media do?

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Why media arise : Inns proposed that new media were pulled into use by rising demand, not driven by rising supply. Demand comes first and supply follows. This theory has been validated by scholars studying the more proces of technical innovation, adoption and dissemination. Thanks to their work we know rules governing new media.

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1. Groups of thinkers discover new technologies.

2. Thinkers can only discover the technologies in their technome.

3. Technological supply does not produce technological demand.

4. Technological demand, if unfocused, does not produce technological supply.

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5. Only organized interests can produce the demand necessary to pull new technology into mass use.

6. When it comes to technological adoption, organized interests are reactive and not proactive.

7. Organised interests are most likely to adopt new tools in response to fundamentally new economic conditions.

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What media do: Innis argued that the attributes of media push societies and ideas in new directions. We can re- formulate it as follows: Medium Attributes – Social Practices – Values. Media, networks and cultures each have their own type – specific attributes.

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Medium Attributes: Medium is a tool for sending, receiving, storing and retrieving information. A handy medium would be inexpensive to obtain and easy to use. These considerations suggest the following media atributes are significant from the perspective user:

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• Accessibility: the availability of a media itself

• Privacy : the covertness with which data can be transmitted in a medium

• Fidelity: the faithfulness with which data can be transmitted in a medium

• Volume: the quantity in which data can be transmitted in a medium

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• Range: the distance over which data can be transmitted in a medium

• Persistence: the duration over which data can be preserved in a

medium

• Searchability: the efficiency with which data can be found in the medium

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• Social Practices and Values: Our hypothesis is this – media networks engender certain social practices and these social practices engender related values.

• Human nature and media networks constitute the circumstances that shape social practices, and social practices give rise to commesurate values. Let us return to the above stated eight attributes.

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Thank you for your attention