 Greetings, and welcome to this introduction to critical media studies. This is an important and interesting area of exploration, especially in a moment of human history when media is so pervasive in our everyday lives. There is something that I should be clear about right up front, though, at the start of this journey. Critical media studies is not about the media. It's not even really about communication, weird, right? I know, I mean, the word media is right there in the phrase, and I'm a communication professor, so yeah, those are both valid points. We will definitely dive deep into an exploration of the media, and it absolutely falls squarely in the academic discipline of communication. I would still maintain that's not what critical media studies is about, though. That it's core critical media studies is about learning how to think, and that analytics agency Zenith Media projects that media consumption, meaning mobile internet, desktop internet, radio, television, magazines, and newspapers for adults in the United States in 2021 would average 666 minutes per day. That's 11.1 hours per day. Let that number sink in for just a moment. Yes, there's some multitasking in there where you're watching TV and browsing TikTok at the same time, but still, now let me ask you the most important question of this discussion. How much critical thought do you actually apply to the 11.1 hours of media per day that you consume? Think about the last song you heard. What was it about? Was that what it's objectively about or just what that's about to you? Who's the artist? I mean, who is the artist? Where are they from? What is their story? What circumstances led to them writing that song? What does it represent for them? Do they have a dominant perspective that would have influenced the creation of that particular song? What does it represent to you? How does your own personal life experience inform your interpretation of the song? How is the broader interpretation, acceptance and popularity of that song affected by the social, economic and historical context surrounding its release? Did any of those questions come up for you as you listened to that song? Could you answer them now? These are the types of things that form the foundation of critical media studies. Critical media studies is actually an umbrella term for a variety of theoretical perspectives used to examine media artifacts of all forms and style. These critical lenses include things like cultural analysis, rhetorical analysis, Marxist analysis, psychoanalytic analysis, feminist analysis, ecological analysis, and many more. We will get into these and other critical theories in separate videos. We'll also take a more in-depth look at what we mean by criticism in the context of critical media studies. For now though, let's take a look at the media aspect of critical media studies. We need to start by defining media. What does that word mean? Well, media is very simply a plural form of the word medium, referring to the channel or means of communicating. You see here a basic model of the transactional model of communication with all the different elements represented. Medium is another word for channel, meaning how we are communicating. Media just means multiple forms of channels or multiple ways in which we are communicating. If we refine it a little bit more, we can, in contemporary culture, we often use the term mass media. So let's take a moment to define that as well. Mass media is simply a means of communication intended to reach or influence people widely, meaning we're trying to reach the broadest possible audience that we can through any of these multiple channels or multiple mediums that we can access. Today that could mean television, radio, the internet, through a megaphone or a snapshot, Instagram, whatever we're trying to use, mass media comes in lots of different shapes and forms. And so we broadly categorize mass media in a couple of different ways. So it started with, initially, we had print media. The invention of the printing press allowed us to mass produce these things and get them into lots of hands and increase literacy, did all these things, but it all started with the print media, meaning books and leaflets and then eventually newspapers and things like that. So we have print media that we use. Then that developed, as technology developed, into motion pictures and sound recording. So movies and music and ways to communicate through mass media in that way beyond just print media. And then we ventured into broadcast media. And so you had things like the television, radio and broadcast companies that were sending these different messages and programming things. And so we had broadcast media. Now we're into an era where we just kind of broadly and loosely defined new things as new media. New media and new media just kind of generally means anything that uses a microprocessor. So your phones, your tablets, your computers would all be new media. And we can see that there's lots of spillover between these categories. And we'll discuss that type of thing eventually, but we see, you know, you get your broadcast media a lot of times through something now that would be new media. So there's lots of crossover in that regard. And we use different tools using new media that would have lots of spillover between these different categories. So they're not able to be as neatly categorized as just simply saying it's this or that. But we, you know, see this development through history and it's a way for us to kind of conceptualize these things. The term that we need to define for the purposes of what we're going to be studying in these discussions is post-modernity, post-modernity. And post-modernity is different than post-modernism. So we got to distinguish a little bit between those things, but post-modernity essentially is the historical era starting in the 1960s in which the primary economic production model of Western societies shifted from commodity-based manufacturing to information-based services. Stay with me, I know this is a really, you know, exciting stuff, right? But essentially what we're saying here is that starting in the 1960s, our primary economic model shifted. And so shifted to this format. We make less stuff in favor of selling ideas, expertise, and convenience. If you look back pre-1960, America in the Industrial Revolution period was all about making stuff. We made cars. We made tractors. We made, you know, all these products. We manufactured things. We were a manufacturing society. Then in the 1960s, we hit post-modernity, which means now we make less stuff. We don't manufacture as much stuff in the United States as we used to. We've outsourced all that in favor of selling ideas, expertise, and convenience. Think about the phone that you inevitably have in your pocket or on your desk or wherever it's at or you're watching this on it right now. Your smartphone was, you know, conceptualized here in the United States. We kind of came up with the idea of putting all these different functions together in one thing and kind of made it happen. But your smartphone almost certainly was not made and manufactured here in the United States. We don't make stuff like that here anymore. We outsource it. We come up with the idea. We outsource it. And then we build upon it, right? We sell ideas, expertise, and convenience through things like apps. We develop apps here in the United States now. We don't make the phone. We come up with ideas or ways you can use the phone, hopefully, to your benefit. Maybe not. Sometimes to your detriment. But anyway, we come up with the ideas that you can use on those things. We don't make the things ourselves. And that's an important distinction that has taken place, again, since about the 1960s here in the United States and a lot of other Westernized cultures. So what does that matter? The media has, of course, a big role to play in the development of post-modernity, first of all, but also is affected and impacted by post-modernity and the way that we work as a culture and the way that we kind of do things. So we need to take a look at how that media has impacted this and how it has been impacted by post-modernity. So the media in our current era of post-modernity, first of all, is impacted by convergence. We have a convergence. Again, we have that spillover. We have lots of things. Your paper may be available to you by somebody throwing it onto your doorstep in an actual paper form, but it's probably also available in digital form online. It may only be available in digital form online at this point. The way the way press is going, it's possible that that's the only way you can get it. So we have the convergence and spillover between those different categories of media. We also have convergence in the sense of media conglomeration, for example. So just think about ESPN, for example. ESPN is a big organization. They have a very specific thing that they do, but they're also connected. They have sister stations like ABC, right? Because they're owned by the same company as ABC. So you see a lot of crossover. You see ESPN Monday Night Football on ABC, right? Or Sunday Night Football on ABC or whatever it is. And so you see a lot of crossover and borrowing of things between companies that are owned now through that kind of convergence. And of course, they're all owned by Disney. So you see ESPN events happening at Disney. And Disney, of course, doesn't just do media. They have theme parks and all kinds of stuff. So you have this huge convergence of companies reaching out into different areas, but also converging under kind of one umbrella as an impacted media in a massive way through convergence since post-modernity. We also see a massive shift toward mobility. When I was a kid, if you wanted to watch a TV show, you basically had to plant yourself in front of your TV at a specific time on a specific night. And if you didn't do that, you weren't going to see it, right? It wasn't going to be available to you. Now we expect to have the ability to watch what we want, where we want, how we want on our phones, on our tablets, on our computers. And to have it, if I don't want to watch it when it's on Thursdays at eight, I want to watch it when I want to, right? So we have the mobility of that media across platforms and across times. And we expect to be able to take it with us and have it in our pocket and then pull it out whenever we want, right? We have that mobility of media that we did not have before post-modernity. And it's been affected by that. We also have significant audience fragmentation. When you only have three TV channels, which is what we had grown up on a good day in my house, we had three TV channels. If the weather was just right, we could get that third one over our antenna. And so everybody was kind of watching the same thing. And you didn't have much choice and you were watching one of those channels, probably, right? If you were watching TV, and that was pretty much our media intake. But now we have significant audience fragmentation with people watching specifically what they want geared to their interests. And divided up audiences into very specific components, right? So just in a broad level, for example, you used to have the nightly news. And you watched one of those three nightly news shows, probably, if you were going to watch the news on one of those three major networks. And it was kind of all the same, had different anchors, but it was kind of all covering the same thing and doing the same kind of thing. But, and all had kind of a neutral outlook. And that's all there was. The advent of cable and things like that really allowed us to fragment an audience. Now we have a 24 hour news cycle. It's not an hour on every weeknight. Now it's 24 hours a day. There are multiple news channels, right? Now we're up to, I don't know how many, six, seven, eight, that are full time, 24 hour news channels, right? And the three major ones, so we've seen what they've done. The three major ones have fragmented their audience so they can appeal to a specific audience and draw that particular audience in. So Fox News, for example, focuses on really conservative audience. On the opposite end of things, MSNBC focuses on really liberal viewers. They tend to appeal to them more. CNN's kind of in the middle. They veer to the left just a little bit, but they're kind of moving back to the middle. They try and be straddle at middle and be kind of a neutral thing. But we have these audiences that are fragmented. I mean, you watch one of those things. And if you tell me what news channel you watch, that tells me a lot about you, right? And I can, based on knowing something about you, I can probably guess what news channel you watch and reverse. The same is true for all media. You don't just have broad magazines anymore. You don't just have a life magazine that kind of tried to appeal to everybody. You have specific magazines for specific audiences. Very detailed. We get a lot of craft and like home and garden magazines at our home because my wife enjoys those things, so she gets those magazines. And we don't get magazines that cover just everything, right? We get specific magazines that are geared toward a specific audience around here, right? So fragmentation has happened amongst media, too. Again, benefits and also consequences as a result. But that's the reality of where we're at in post-modernity. We have a globalization effect as well in post-modernity. Companies are reaching across the globe. You're no longer confined to just your local news and local area and reaching your local audience. You can reach anybody anywhere and you can get products to them. And that's the biggest thing. You can sell products anywhere. So that means you need to be able to reach people anywhere. There's huge globalization in the sense of media as well. And simulation has taken on new meaning. We want experiences that tell us what it's like to be there. We want to, you know, when we watch something, we want to be able to fly in a fighter jet if that's what we're watching. We want it to feel like that. We want it to know what it's like to be on the planes of Africa with all the different animals, right? And so we can do that. We can use media to experience those things without actually going there and having to do those things. That's what we mean by simulation. So we expect media more and more to provide that simulation experience for us. Okay. So now we've covered kind of what we're looking at in terms of, you know, critical media studies, what's the foundation for that? And what is the media aspect? So now that we have a basic understanding of the media portion of critical media studies, be sure to check out the next video in this series, which is going to break down what it means to be critical of media and the components of critical media studies in that regard. And I certainly hope to see you there. I hope that this has answered some of your questions about what is critical media studies and how does media factor into that and went for lots more exciting information as we continue our journey studying critical media studies.