Name : Lutviah

NIM : 209000034

Department : Communication

Subject : Contemporary Media Theory

Medium Theory

Most of the question that engage media researchers and popular observers of the media focus
only on one dimension of our media environment: the content of media messages. Medium
theory focuses on the particular characteristics of each individual media or of each particular
type of media. Medium theorists argue that such variables influence the medium’s use and its
social, political, and psychological impact.

Medium question are relevant to at least two social levels: the micro, individual-situation
level, and the macro, cultural level. On the micro level, medium questions ask how the choice
of one medium over another affects a particular situation or interaction. On the macro level,
medium questions address the ways in which the addition of a new medium to an existing
matrix of media may alter social interactions and social structure in general. The most
interesting and most controversial medium theory deals with the macro level.

The medium theorists are significance because they suggest that media are not simply
channels for conveying information between two or more environments, but rather shapers of
new social environmets themselves.

FIRST GENERATION MEDIUM THEORISTS

The best–known and most controversial medium theorist are Harold Adams Innis and Herbert
Marshall McLuhan. Innis argues that one way in which social and political power is wielded
is through control over communication media. Information monopolies can be broken,
however, by new media.

Innis argues that elites can more easily control some media than others. On the other hand, a
medium that is easily accessible to the average person is more likely to help democratize a
culture.

Innis also argues that most media of communication have a “bias” either towards lasting a
long time or towards being moved easily across great distances. He claims that the bias of a
culture’s dominant medium affects the degree of the culture’s ability to take over and govern
a large teritory.
McLuhan analyses each medium as an extension of one or more of human senses, limbs, or
processes. He suggest that the use of different technologies affects the organization of the
human senses and the structure of the culture. He devides history into three major periods:
oral, writing/printing, and electronic. He also suggests that each medium requires its own
style of behavior.

Walter Ong, Edmund Carpenter, Tony Schwartz, and Daniel Boorstin have looked at the
ways in which electronic media have altered thinking patterns and social organization.
Carpenter and Schwartz are generally McLuhanesque in content, method, and style, but they
add many fresh insights and examples. Ong and Boorstin present more traditional scholarly
analyses that support McLuhan’s basic arguments but also go beyond them. Ong describes
the similarities and differences between the “primary orality” of preliterate societies and the
“secondary orality” that results from the introduction of electronic media into literate
societies. Boorstin describes how new media “mass-produce the moment” makes experience
“repeatable”, and join many other recent technological inventions in “leveling times and
places”. He also compares and contrasts political revolution with technological revolutions
and discusses the impact of new technologies, including electronic media, on our conceptions
of history, nationality, and progress.

THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATIONS FROM A MEDIUM-THEORY PERSPECTIVE

Broadly speaking, these theorists works cohere into a shared image of three phases of
civilizations matched to three major forms of communicating: the move from traditional
oral societies to modern print societies to an electronic global culture.

Global Electronic Culture

Ironically, print culture come to its full power just as the seeds of its destruction are planted.
Electronic media bring back a key aspect of oral societies: simultaneity of action, perception,
and reaction. Sensory experience again becomes a prime form of communicating.

While print allows for new ways of sharing knowledge, and industrialization enables the
wide-scale sharing of products, electronic media tend to foster new types of shared
experience.

While written and printed words emphasize ideas, most electronic media emphasize feeling,
appearance, mood.

Electronic Conceptions of Group Identity, Socialization, and Hierarchy

The telephone, radio, and television make the boundaries of all social spheres more
permeable. One can now “witness” events without being physically present; one can
communicate “directly” with others without meeting in the same place. As a result, physical
structures no longer fully mold social identity.
We still live in and interact in segregated physical locales. But television and other electronic
media have broken the age-old connection between where we are and what we know and
experience. Television blurs the line between public and private by bringing the public sphere
into the home, and by emphasizing the personal and emotional dimensions of public actions
through its intimate close-ups of human faces.

Television has lifted many of the old veils of secrecy between children and adults, men and
women, and politicians and average citizens. Television has fostered the blurring of social
identities, socialization stages, and ranks of hierarchy.

RELATIVE STRENGTHS AND LIMITS OF MEDIUM THEORY’

Medium research is most helpful when looking at broad structural patterns over a long period
of time. But medium theory is not terribly useful in short-term analyses of how to use a
communication technology and whether and how to regulate it.

Medium theorists focus on the characteristics of media has tended to lead to another
weakness.

The medium theory view of the unique features of global electronic media gives us
tremendous insight into the power and potential of our new technologies.

Ultimately, medium theory is most helpful when it is used not to supplant content concerns
but to add another dimension to our understanding of the media environment.

USES OF THE MASS MEDIA

Rubin (1994) has argued that audience activity –the deliberate choice by users of media
content in order to satisfy their needs−is the core concept of the uses and gratifications
approach.

The uses and gratifications approach involves a shift of focus from the purposes of the
communicator to the purposes of the receiver.

BEGINNINGS OF THE USES AND GRATIFICATIONS APPROACH

The uses of gratifications approach was first described in an article by Elihu Katz (1959).
Basic aspect of the uses and gratifications approach –different people can use the same mass
communication message for very different purposes.
USES AND GRATIFICATIONS IN AN ELECTION CAMPAIGN

People used the political broadcasts as a source of information about political affairs. Other
data from the survey indicated that one of the specific purposes of this surveillance was to
find out about campaign promises and pledges.

CLASSIFYING INDIVIDUAL NEEDS AND MEDIA USES

Katz, Blumler, and Gurevitch (1974) pointed out that the studies were concerned with: (1) the
social and psychological origins of (2) needs, which generate (3) expectations of (4) the mass
media or other sources, which lead to (5) differential patterns of media exposure (6) need
gratifications and (7) other consequences, perhaps mostly unintended ones.

This elements by two swedish researchers are:

1. The audience is conceived of as active, that is, an important part of mass media use is
assumed to be goal directed
2. In the mass communciation process much initiative in linking need gratification and
media choice lies with the audience member
3. The media compete with other sources of need satisfaction

McQuail, Blumler, and Brown (1972) based on their research in England, suggested the
following categories:

1. Diversion, escape from routine and problems; emotional release

2. Personal relationship, social utility of information in conversations; substitute of the
media for companionship
3. Personal identity or individual psychology, value reinforcement or reassurance; self-
understanding; reality exploration; and so on
4. Surveillance, information about things which might affect one or will help one do or
accomplish something

Katz, Gurevitch, and Haas (1973) see the mass media as a means used by individuals to
connect themselves with others (or disconnect). They listed thirty-five needs taken “from the
(largely speculative) literature on the social and psychological functions of the mass media”
and put them into five categories:

1. Cognitive needs, acquiring information, knowledge, and understanding

2. Affective needs, emotional, pleasurable, or aesthetic experience
3. Personal integrative needs, strengthening credibility, confidence, stability, and status
4. Social integrative needs, strengthening contacts with family, friends, and so on
5. Tension release needs, escape and diversion

Perse and Courtright (1993) identified eleven needs that might be satisfied by mass,
interpersonal, or computer-mediated communication: to relax; to be entertained; to forget
about work or othe things; to have something to do with friends; to learn things about myself
and others; to pass the time away; to feel excited; to feel less lonely; to satisfy a habits; to let
others know i care about their feelings; and, to get someone to do something for me.

NEW TECHNOLOGY AND THE ACTIVE AUDIENCE

Researchers have only begun to study the ways that cable television and other new media
offering expanded user choices relate to the user’s pursuit of uses and gratifications. A few
studies done so far provide clues concerning the impact of new technology on how people
use the mass media.

Cable television provides new media diverse opportunities for the audience to become active.

Levy (1980) argues that using a VCR to time-shift programs is a demanding task and that
viewers who take the trouble to do it must be among the most active members of the
television audience.

Perse and Courtright (1993) found in a 1998 survey that computers ranked lowest among
twelve types of mediated and interpersonal communication for satisfying communicaton
needs such as relaxation, entertainment, self-awareness, and excitement. People using
computers for electonic communcation were satisfying the following needs: learning,
entertainment, social interaction, escapism, passing the time, and out of habit.

RECENT DEVELOPMENT IN USES AND GRATIFICATIONS RESEARCH

One recent development has been a movement away from conceptualizing audiences as
active or passive to treating activity as a variable (Rubin, 1994).

CONCLUSION

The uses and gratifications approach reminds us of one very important poin, people use the
media for many different purposes. This approach suggests that to a large extent, the user of
mass communication is in control. The uses and gratifications approach can serve as a
healthy antidote to the emphasis on passive audiences and persuasion that has dominated
much earlier research.

The uses and gratifications approach may make a significant contribution to our
understanding of media effects as we move further into the digital age and media users are
confronted with more and more choices.
 MASS COMMUNICATION AND PARASOCIAL INTERACTION:
OBSERVATIONS ON INTIMACY AT A DISTANCE

One of the striking characteristics of the new mass media is that they give the illusion of face-
to-face relationship with the perfomer. The conditions of response to the performer are
analogous to those in a primary group. The most remote and illustrious men are met as if they
were in the circle of one’s peers; the same is true of a character in a story who comes to life
in these media in an especially vivid and arresting way. This seeming face-to-face
relationship between spectator and performer calls a parasocial relationship.

The more the performer seems to adjust his performance to the supposed response of the
audience, the more the audience tends to make the response anticipated. This simulacrum of
conversational give and take may be called parasocial interaction.

Parasocial relations may be governed by little or no sense of obligation, effort, or

responsibility on the part of the specatator. The crucial difference in experience obviously lies
in the lack of effective reciprocity, and this the audience cannot normally conceal from itself.

Radio and television, however are hospitable to both these worlds in continuous interplay.
They alternately public platforms and theatres, extending the parasocial relationship now to
leading people of the world of affairs, now to fictional characters, sometimes even to puppets
anthropomorphically transformed into “personalities”, and finally to theatrical stars who
appear in their capacities as real celebrities.

THE ROLE OF PERSONA

This persona is the typical and indigenous figure of the social scenepresented by radio and
television. They “know” such a persona in somewhat the same way they know thier chosen
friends: through direct observation and interpreation of his appearance, his gestures and
voice, his conversation and conduct in a variety of situations.

The persona offers, above all, a continuing relationship. His appearance is a regular and
dependable event, to be counted on, planned for, and integrated into the routines of daily life.
His devotees “live with him” and share the small episodes of his public life and to some
extent even of his private life away from the show. This bond is symbolized by allusions that
lack meaning for the casual observer and appear occult to the outsider.

The persona may be considered by his audience as a friend, counselor, comforter, and model;
but, unlike real associates, he has peculiar virtue of being standardized according to the
“formula” for his character and performance which he and his managers have worked out and
embodied in an appropriate “production format”.
THE BOND OD INTIMACY

It is an unvarying characteristic of these “personality” programs that the greatest pains are
taken by the persona to create an illusion of intimacy. We call itu an illusion because the the
relationship between the persona and any memberof his audience is inevitably one-sided, and
reciprocity between the two can only be suggested.

Most characteristic is the attempt of the persona to duplicate the gestures, conversational
style, and milieu of an informal face-to-face gathering.

In addition to creating an appropriate tone an patter, the persona tries as far as possible to
eradicate, or at least to blur, the line which divides him and his show, as a formal
performance, from the audience both in the studio and at home.

Because the relationship between persona and audience is one-sided and cannot be developed
mutually, very nearly the whole burden of creating a plausible imitation of intimacy is thrown
on the persona and on the show of which he is the privot.

THE ROLE OF THE AUDIENCE

The general outlines of the appropriate audience role are perceived intuitively from
familiarity with the common cultural patterns on which the role of persona is constructed.
These role are chiefly derived from the primary relation of friendship and the family,
characterized by intimacy, sympathy, and sociability. The audience is expected to accept the
situation defined by the program format as credible, and to concede as “natural” the rules and
conventions governing the actions performed and the values realized. It should play the role
of the loved one to the persona’s lover, the admiring dependent to his father-surrogate; the
earnest citizen to his fearless opponent of political evils.

THE COACHING OF AUDIENCE ATTITUDE

The typical program format calls for a studio audience to provide a situation of face-to-face
interaction for the persona, and exemplifies to the home audience an enthusiastic and
“correct” response.

A similar model of appropriate response may be supplied by the professional assistants who
though technically performers, act in a subordinate and deferential reciprocal relation toward
the persona. The audience is schooled in correct responses to the persona by a variety of other
means as well.

The audience, in its turn, ise xpected to contribute to the illusion by believing in it, and by
rewarding the persona’s “sincerity”with “loyalty”. The audience is entreated to assume a
sence of personal obligation to the performer, to help him in his struggle for “success” if he is
“on the way up”, or to maintain his success if he has already won it.
VALUES OF PARASOCIAL ROLE FOR THE AUDIENCE

The media present opportunities for the playing of roles to which the spectator has a
legitimate claim, but for which he finds no opportunity in his social environment. This
function of the parasocial then can properly be called compensatory, inasmuch as it provides
the socially and psychologically isolated with a chance to enjoy the elixir of sociability.

EXTREME PARASOCIABILITY

For the great majority of the audience the parasocial is complementary to normal social life.
It provides a social milieu in which the everyday assumptions and understandings of primary
group interaction and sociability demonstrated and reaffirmed.

The new mass media are obviously distinguished by their ability to confront a member of the
audience with an apparently intimate, face-to-face association with a performer.

Seen from this standpoint, it seems to follow that there is no such discontinuity between
everyday and parasocial experience as is suggested by the common practice, among
observers of these media, of using the analogy of fantasy or dream in the interpretation of
programs which are assentially dramatic in character.

As a matter of fact, it seems profitable to consider the interaction with the persona as a phase
of the role-enactments of the spectator’s daily life.

In this connection, it is relevant to remark that there is atradition that spectators, whether at
sports events or television programs, are relatively passive.