 Hey everyone, welcome, bienvenido 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. However, there's something that I should clear up right at the start of this journey. Critical media studies is not about the media. It's not really even about communication. Weird, right? I mean the word media is right there in the phrase, I'm a communication professor, so yes, both of those are valid points. We will absolutely dive deep into an exploration of media. And it absolutely falls squarely in the academic discipline of communication. I would still maintain, however, that that's not what critical media studies is about. At its core, critical media studies is about learning how to think. Analytics agency Zenith Made Media projects that media consumption, that is mobile internet, desktop internet, radio, television, magazines and newspapers for adults in the United States in 2021 will average 666 minutes per day. That's 11.1 hours. Let that number sink in for just a minute. Yes, there's some multitasking going on where you're watching TV and browsing Instagram at the same time, but still. Now let me ask you perhaps 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? Is that what it's objectively about? Or is it just what it's about to you? Who's the artist? Where are they from? What's their story? What circumstances led to them writing this 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 for 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 these questions come up for you as you listened to that song just recently? Could you answer them now about that song? These are the types of things that will form the foundation of our examination of critical media studies. Now, 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, and ecological analysis, just to name a few. We'll get into these and many other critical theories in separate videos. We'll also take a more in-depth look at what we mean by criticism in this context. For now, though, let's take a look at the media aspect of critical media studies. Let's start by defining the term media. And media, in essence, truly is just a plural form of the word medium. It refers to the channel or means of communicating. So you may be familiar with the transactional model of communication, which is simply illustrated here. And there you see the word channel. And the channel is just, again, the means through which we communicate. It's the method through which that message and feedback and everything else are being sent. You know, are we talking face to face? Are we talking on the phone? Are we using text? Are we over the computer or whatever? Those are all different channels. Now, another word for channel is medium. So we use that word to describe the channel as well, medium. And so media just implies multiple channels, that there are multiple channels. And that word has kind of become synonymous with the various aspects of technological communication over the years. We'll get into those categories here in a minute. But basically, it's become a kind of a generalized term that we use for the different aspects of communicating to a broader audience. And along those same lines, in contemporary culture, we often use the term mass media. So let's take a moment to define that as well. What do we mean by mass media? These are things that are going to be important to our discussion here of critical media studies. So mass media simply means a means of communication intended to reach or influence people widely. That's a general description. There are some other details involved here, but basically that's it. Mass media is media or channel or channels that are intended to reach as wide an audience as possible. That's different from when you're having a one-on-one conversation with somebody or when you're speaking to a small group or even to a public audience. But that's limited in scope. When we're using mass media and we refer to mass media, we're talking about ways that we can reach people as broad an audience as possible and as large an audience as possible. Through whatever techniques we have, whatever channels we can use to do that. But that's the intent is to have that message be sent to as broad an audience as possible and as widely as possible. So that's what we mean by mass media. Now there are different categories of mass media that have developed over the years and these kind of follow along a historical perspective. We could trace these back to different periods of time. So just briefly the different categories of mass media began really with print media, with the invention of the printing press and on through modern technologies here through which we use print media. And despite all the rumors, it's not dead yet. Anyway, it's not dead yet. We still have newspapers, we have magazines, we have books, we have all kinds of print media that we utilize. So that's one category of mass media. The next category would be motion pictures and sound recording, which have a long history as well. They go back a ways here for motion picture and sound recording. So we're talking about your movies, we're talking about musical releases, we're talking about your favorite album, your favorite song, whatever. Those are category, that's a category of its own, a mass media uses a different kind of technology, represents an advancement in a sense of technology. And so we have these motion pictures and screen recordings, which have their own characteristics and category here. There's also broadcast media, which developed and after these motion pictures and sound recording, we have broadcast media. So here we're talking about your radio, talking about television as we would have it in kind of what we would call the olden days, right? We had three or four channels that you would get in broadcast media and broadcast over the airwaves. And so even things like telegraph could be considered broadcast media in a sense. So, and following that category of mass media, but we had the advent of broadcast media. And then we get into more contemporary phase here with what we call new media. And new media is kind of a fuzzy term, what falls into it, what doesn't. So new media really, the simplest way to define it, and this is really an oversimplification, but as the simplest way to define it is, new media is any kind of mass media that would involve really a microprocessor. So contemporary electronics, your phone, your computer, your tablet, things like that, all involve a computer essentially. They're all essentially computers of one sort or another. They all use a microprocessor. So new media really relies on that kind of technology to reach an audience. So generally, broadly speaking, we could define new media as anything that uses a microprocessor. Now we should note that there's plenty of spillover between all of these categories. We'll discuss that momentarily a little bit, but as we know, you have films that you watch via your phone or your computer or whatever. So is that motion pictures or is that new media? Well, yes, it's kind of both. There's spillover, none of these are absolutely clear and clean, but what we use is just kind of define and talk about each of them as they all have different characteristics then. So understanding that there are different types of mass media and they generally fall into these four categories. For now, that's where we're gonna leave it. Now, one other term that we need to define is what we call post-modernity. Post-modernity, which I should note is different than post-modernism. That's a different concept. Post-modernity though is defined as 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, okay? So those of you who are thinking, oh my gosh, what does that mean, that's really what we're talking about here. A simple, again, oversimplification, but the simple definition and post-modernity here is that in contemporary times, we make less stuff in favor of selling ideas and expertise and convenience. So what do we mean by that? That's really a shift in not just an economic model, but the way we reach each other and the way we interact with one another and the way we view our place in the world, the way we view media. Media has influenced this change and has been influenced by this change. So it's a really important distinction here to note that we're living in post-modernity. So in essence, what we mean by this is we don't make phones here in the United States, really. We don't manufacture phones in the United States, do we? Those come from other parts of the world where they're manufactured and they're built and things like that. But what we do here is we utilize those phones and we create the apps and we create the services that can be used via those phones and we create more and more tools for those things. So we create ideas and offer expertise in these areas and we sell convenience for people in using these things. We don't make the stuff anymore. We make the stuff that helps you use the stuff more effectively when we sell those ideas. So that's the world kind of in which we live in westernized societies in the United States in particular. That's our mindset as much as anything. We don't really make stuff anymore. We make ideas and we sell ideas and expertise and convenience, right? So with that in mind, it's had an impact on the media. Now again, media has been influenced by this and it has influenced this change both. It's been on both sides of this, but so media in post-modernity and the era of post-modernity has seen these types of things. First of all, convergence. I alluded to this a minute ago, but there's a lot of spillover not only between those categories of media where we see a lot of crossover in terms of we see newspapers and electronic film. We see films that are available in new media and so forth, but we also see the convergence in these types of organizations and companies working across platforms. So it's no longer just HBO. It used to just be a satellite television station, for example, well, not anymore. Now they're not only on cable and satellite, but now they are on your phone. You can access it and they have a streaming service. They have all these things. And that's true for most any company that you can think of. There's this convergence and we broaden that scope out even further. HBO is owned by AT&T. So AT&T really is not only in the phone service business, they're also in whatever business HBO is in and they're on direct TV and they're in all these things. So there's a lot of convergence, a lot of ways that these media are working across platforms and across the different media and just really wishing a lot of confluence of these different medias. So we have this sense of convergence. We also have the increased importance of mobility that we ought to be able to take these media wherever we go. I go back far enough that for me, Netflix started as a DVD rental service, essentially, and they would mail you DVDs, right? So, and that was, but I was kind of limited to an eye. I could take the DVD to wherever I had a DVD player. I could watch DVDs or whatever. But now, of course, Netflix is available everywhere. It's available on my TV because we have a smart TV. It's available on my phone. It's available on my computer. It's available anywhere that I wanna take it and anywhere that I wanna go. And that's true of, you know, most modern media that it has this increased sense of mobility that we ought to be able to access and utilize this media wherever we go. That's fine. We also see fragmentation, despite the fact that we have this interest in availability. We also have intense fragmentation of the audience, right? So instead of, you used to have Life Magazine, for example, which is a very generalized magazine. It tried to appeal to everyone, right? But now magazines, what magazines there are, are really appealing to one specific subset of audience. You don't have Life Magazine so much more. You have specific magazines for gun people. There are a variety of magazines for people who are interested in guns and ammunition and things like that. We get all kinds of magazines here that have to do with crafting. My wife is very interested in crafting. So it's a very specific type of magazine though, right? That has to do with those types of things. And the same is true for media. I mean, think about, you know, we used to have the Nightly News. So you had all the major networks had a Nightly News program, but now we have not only a news channel, started with CNN, right? Which was the first full-time 24-7 news channel. Now we have multiple news channels that appeal to specific audiences. If you were to talk to people, they would say Fox is far right. I mean, they're appealing to the far right crowd, you know, hardcore Republicans and things. CNN tends to be more in the middle, a little bit to the left, right? They lean a little bit to the left, but they're basically the middle MSNBCs on the left. They're basically the anti-Fox in other words. So we have this fragmentation. I mean, which news service do you watch? That tells us a little bit about you, right? This fragmentation of the audiences divided even more and more as we get into newer media. And that's an aspect of media in post-modernity. There's also this globalization, not just of what's available or where things are available, but the specific appeal of businesses to want to go global, right? These organizations are thinking more global. Netflix, for example, to go back to Netflix is not just offering programming in English, right? They're offering program, Napoleon programs from all around the world and subtitling them and things, but they're also doing that to try and appeal to a worldwide market. They're thinking globally. They're trying to make things available that would be of interest to people in other countries that aren't just necessarily in English. So globalization is something that's on the mind of every organization, really because they have access to that global market now where you didn't before with the advent of the web. You can make and sell things and provide things to people all over the earth from wherever you're at. So, and then simulation, we've become very interested in this idea of simulation. We want to experience things. We want to be in the experience, not just read about it or see it or whatever. We want that experience. We want to feel like we are engaged in whatever is happening. The most extreme example is virtual reality and things like that, but even through video games that have, they're role-playing games and things like that, but simulation is a new part of the media in post-minerity. We ought to feel like we are a part of it, that we are experiencing that. We live in an experience-oriented culture and we want that simulation experience. So these are some of the things that we see in media as a result of, again, living in the era of post-minerity, these are things that we see are evident in the media as it exists in this era. Okay, so now that you have a basic understanding of the media portion of critical media studies, be sure to check out the next video in this series. We'll break down what it means to be critical of media and the components of critical media studies. I sure hope to see you there. In the meantime, if you have any questions about this content, about anything related to critical media studies, please feel free to shoot me an email. I'd love to hear from you and love to chat with you about this topic. So feel free to send me an email. In the meantime, get out there and start really being critical about what it is we're seeing in the media.