Handling Media: Living With New Technologies and Communicating About Media
CHAPTER 12 Handling Media: Living With New Technologies and Communicating About Media
Q: What country in the world has the fastest rate of growth of cell phones?
A: Zimbabwe, with over 800% growth in 1999, compared to 24% in the U.S. and 70% in Europe. Developing countries with poor telephone infrastructure and long waiting lists for phone service have found cell phones much more reliable and attractive. In numerous countries like Botswana, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Paraguay, and Venezuela, cell phone users outnumbered conventional phone users by 2000 (Romero, 2000).
Q: What was Mexican soap opera star Veronica Castro doing in Moscow in September 1992?
A: Being entertained by President Boris Yeltsin and Russian Parliament members. Her triumphal tour was in celebration of the success of the Mexican telenovela The Rich Also Cry in Russia. It had recently drawn 200 million daily viewers, 70% of the nation’s population, making it the most watched TV series in the history of the world (Kopkind, 1993).
Q: How often do teens visit web sites with antisocial content?
A: According to Tarpley (2001), 44% have visited an adult sex site, 25% a site promoting hate groups, and 12% a site with information on how to buy a gun.
Q: What was the major impetus to turning the cattle ranches (fazendas) of southwestern Brazil’s Pantanal into ecotourist vacation havens?
A: The 1994 Brazilian hit telenovela Pantanal, set in the Pantanal, the world’s largest freshwater wetlands, which were up until that time largely empty and unknown to the outside world. (Grzelewski, 2002).
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In this book we have examined the way that the perceived reality that we create from the media often deviates substantially from the real world. Although media are not the only source of knowledge about the world, our perceived reality of what the world is like is often far more heavily influenced by the media than we realize. It greatly affects our attitudes and behavior when we implicitly assume that the world of the media faithfully reflects the real world.
One of the most difficult aspects of assessing the portrait of media versus reality in contemporary life is that technological advances are changing the face of media at an unprecedented, indeed almost alarming, rate. A generation ago mass communication meant print media (newspapers and magazines) and broadcast media (radio and TV). Although all four of those media are alive and well, albeit continually changing, the overall picture is more complex today The traditional lines between mass communication and personal communication, on the one hand, are being blurred, as are the distinctions between media and entertainment. Is e-mail (personal or spam varieties) mass media? Are films on video or DVD and music downloaded off the Internet entertainment or mass media? The answers are not simple ones.
In this final chapter we begin by examining some of the new technologies that have transformed traditional media and given us totally new media, most notably the various types of computer-mediated communication. In the second half of the chapter, we turn our attention to various ways that we can actively respond to media, These include everything from individual expression of opinion to political strategies designed to induce change in media. Next, we look at the way that the reporting of news about the media in the press may affect the perceived reality constructed in the minds of the public. Finally, we conclude with some integrative thoughts on mass communication and the world it creates.