英语课文_unit_1.doc

Mass mediaMass media is a word used to describe all media created to reach a mass audience. The term was first used in 1920 when nationwide radio allowed news and commentary to be transmitted on a broad scale. The intended audience of mass media is usually the population of a nation, if not the entire population of the world. Some have said that the mass media is responsible for the creation of a mass culture, which is influenced by the media, but disengaged from local society. The mass media creates a platform that allows views to be spread to a wide audience. There have been concerns that this opens the door to mass manipulation of the populace with propaganda, unscrupulous advertising or disinformation. Usage of Mass Media Generally, when someone uses the word media, he or she is referring to the mass media. The word itself, media, is shorthand for the phrase, media of communication literally-the stuff of communication. This stuff with which we communicate includes magazines, newspapers, movies, television, radio, the Internet, books, CDs, DVDs, billboards, tapes, and all other stuff that is published or made widely available to the public. Mass media is mass-produced information for a mass audience. The History of Mass Media Mass Communication grew out of technology. The precursor to mass media was the movable type Printing press, invented by Johann Gutenberg in 1450s Germany. The press allowed books to be printed much more cheaply than traditional woodblock-printed and hand-copied books. These texts were inexpensive enough to be distributed to the masses. As the availability of books and newspapers increased, so did literacy rates, causing greater demand and thus a greater rise in printer output. In the 20th century, radio, television, and later the Internet, allowed communications to reach an ever-wider audience. The reach of the media was also increased by cheaper printing methods, computer typesetting, and the advent of analog and digital recording. Writers, musicians, actors and visual artists could make millions on cheap reproductions of their work. They also began to achieve fame on a national or international scale, leading to the rise of celebrity culture. Mass media also gave rise to the news media, or journalism. Journalism is the section of mass media that reports the news. It is distinguished from entertainment in that the content it provides is informative and generally describes current or recent events. Often, when people refer to the media, they are referring to Journalism, especially to mainstream news.Media Distribution The media can be broadcast on radio, television, or on the web. It can also be printed in books, magazines or newspapers. CDs, tapes, and DVDs are cheaply produced copies of audible or visual content. Floppy disks and CD-Rs are used to transmit information to and from computers. The Internet serves all of these functions, allowing print, video and sound to be shared around the world in seconds. The web also allows people to publish their own content, with the aid of blogs, and the Peer-to-Peer, Open source and Open publishing movements. II. Supplementary Reading Material for Information Age (6 articles)Source: www.WInformation AgeInformation Age is a name given to a period after the industrial age and before the Knowledge Economy. Information Age is a term applied to the period where information rapidly propagated, more narrowly applying to the 1980s onward. Under conventional economic theory, the Information Age also heralded the era where information was a scarce resource and its capture and distribution generated competitive advantage. Microsoft became one of the largest companies in the world based on its influence in creating the underlying mechanics to facilitate information distribution. One could argue, though, that it actually began during the later half of the 19th century with the invention of the telephone and telegraphy. It is often used in conjunction with the term post-industrial society. When information ceased being scarce, the Knowledge Economy commenced. The Knowledge Economy started around 1992 and continued to approximately 2002. The current economic era is defined as the Intangible Economy. In the Intangible Economy, four factors of production - knowledge assets (what people know and put into use), collaboration assets (who people interact with to create value), engagement assets (the level of energy and commitment of people), and time quality (how quickly value is created) are the four key resources from which economic activity and competitive advantage are primarily derived and delivered today. It is helpful to understand that Google is now a serious competitor to Microsoft as it relies on Intangible Economy principles to run its operations.Early Information AgeIn 1837 Samuel Morse created a device which converted physical movement into electrical impulses that could travel over large distances. In 1844, telegraphy was used to transmit data along an experimental telegraph line from Washington, DC to Baltimore, Maryland. Slightly more than twenty years later, the first telegraph cables were stretched across the Atlantic Ocean, in 1858, but failed to stay in operation; however, uninterrupted service began in 1866.This invention set off a stream of devices used for the processing of information, the typewriter, the mechanical calculator, and finally, the telephone in 1876. Informationalization of previous devices occurred, such as the steam organ.The ability to distribute large runs of printed material had created the means for information transmission to change economic and social behavior. Telephones and ticker tape machines would be part of the infrastructure for the growth of stock markets, as well as the ability to trade precious metals, such as gold. It was the telegraph that allowed the news of Krakatoas explosive eruption to spread around the world rapidly.Recording added a new means of distribution: namely that of sound. However, the distribution was either person to person, as in the telegraph, or through the distribution of a physical object. Since physical objects cannot be transported as quickly as electrical signals, the next stage of information technology was to be able to transmit pure information, as the telegraph did, but with mass reception.BroadcastingThe information technologies of the 19th century allowed faster and wider dissemination of information than previously possible. However, ultimately such information had to be reduced to the same form which had been the final form for centuries: paper, whose analogs go back to stone and clay tablets. With the development of what was called wireless transmission, when combined with the ability to transmit voice and sound from the telephone, and recording technology, a new medium began to be born, which placed a different final result in the hands of the individual. These technologies would eventually become radio.Television followed, allowing video to be displayed with sound. While radio brought the worlds events to our homes, it was television that brought the first pictures of the world to many people. TVs were first used as a way to get information and news from other places, but quickly became a very important entertainment device, as well as a useful tool for learning. Unlike radio, television brought with it a whole new industry of content delivery, mainly Cable television providers. Not only were stations producing and broadcasting their own shows, but the broadcasting industry allowed homes to receive more and more channels. With the later advances in technology, direct services such as cable and satellite television provided increasingly diverse amounts of content.Information technologyWith recording technologies, transmission, and with early computers, it didnt take very long for scientific advances to merge together into the new field of Information Technology. Information technology is the use of technology to enhance the speed and the efficiency of the transfer of information.The information age continues to this day, and technological advances such as mobile phones, high speed connections, Voice Over IP have changed lifestyles around the world and spawned new industries around controlling and providing information.The Personal ComputerAt first, computers were big, costly, and available only to universities and big corporations. Before the 1990s, most discoveries in information technology were driven by full time researchers having access to the high priced equipment.In the 1980s however, small computers started to become available. A personal computer or PC is generally a microcomputer intended to be used by one person at a time, and suitable for general purpose tasks such as word processing, programming, editing or playing a personal computer game, and is usually used to run purchased or other software not written by the user. Unlike minicomputers, a personal computer is often owned by the person using it, indicating a low cost of purchase and simplicity of operation. The user of a modern personal computer may have significant knowledge of the operating environment and application programs, but is not necessarily interested in programming nor even able to write programs for the computer.The term PC was popularized by Apple Computer and soon after many other companies began offering personal computers. International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) developed the first open standard Personal Computer (IBM PC launched in US markets in 1981, the first deliveries to European markets were in 1982 and 1983), which standardized the software development. For the first time in the world history we had PCs that used the similar operating systems that allowed the computers users to communicate by using the same platform.Soon after, we saw the birth of what we know as current information technology: personal computers in our own homes, using communication devices known as modems, to access information on remote servers. The first incarnation of those were BBS servers, setup by education facilities or even individual people, to store both information and allow discussion with chat and messages.The InternetThe Internet was originally conceived as a distributed, fail-proof network that could connect computers together and be resistant to any point of failure. It was created mainly by DARPA; its initial software applications were email and computer file transfer.With the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, the Internet really took off as a global network. Now, the Internet is the ultimate place to accelerate the flow of relevant information. Digital RevolutionThe Digital Revolution is a recent term describing the effects of the rapid drop in cost and rapid expansion of power of digital devices such as computers and telecommunications (e.g mobile phones). It includes changes in technology and society, and is often specifically used to refer to the controversies that occur as these technologies are widely adopted.Technological breakthroughs have revolutionized communications and the spread of information. In 1875, for example, the invention of the telephone breached distance through sound. Between 1910 and 1920, the first AM radio stations began to broadcast sound. By the 1940s television was broadcasting both sound and visuals to a vast public. In 1943, the worlds first electronic computer was created. However, it was only with the invention of the microprocessor in the 1970s that computers became accessible to the public. In the 1990s, the Internet migrated from universities and research institutions to corporate headquarters and homes.All of these technologies deal with information storage and transmission. However, the one characteristic of computer technology that sets it apart from earlier analog technologies is that it is digital. Analogue signals work by having a signal (usually electric) where the voltage is proportional to some variable. Digital technology however converts everything into binary values that are either 0 or 1. This is the universal language of nearly every modern device.To use an analogy, a digital world is a world united by one language, a world where people from across continents share ideas with one another and work together to build projects and ideas. More voluminous and accurate information is accumulated and generated, and distributed in a twinkling to an audience that understands exactly what is said. This in turn allows the recipients of the information to use it for their own purposes, to create ideas and to redistribute more ideas. The result is progress. Take this scenario to a technological levelall kinds of computers, equipment and appliances interconnected and functioning as one unit. Even today, we see telephones exchanging information with computers, and computers playing compressed audio data files or live audio data streams that play music over the Internet like radios. Computers can play movies and tune in to television. Some modern homes allow a person to control central lighting and air-conditioning through computers. These are just some of the features of a digital world.III. Supplementary Reading Material for Marshall McLuhan (5 articles)Marshall McLuhanSource: www.BHerbert Marshall McLuhan (born July 21, 1911, Edmonton, Alta., Can. died Dec. 31, 1980, Toronto, Ont.). Canadian communications theorist and educator. He taught from 1946 at the University of Toronto and became popular for his aphorism the medium is the message, which summarized his view of the potent influence of hot media television, computers, and other electronic information disseminators in shaping styles of thinking and thought, whether in sociology, art, science, or religion. He regarded the printed book, a cool medium, as fated to disappear. His highly influential works include The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media (1964), and The Medium Is the Massage (with Q. Fiore, 1967).Marshall Mcluhan Quotes: Source: www.QuotationsBIdeally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. Advertising is the greatest art form of the twentieth century. The modern little red riding hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objections to being eaten by the wolf. Appetite is essentially insatiable, and where it operates as a criterion of both action and enjoyment (that is, everywhere in the Western world since the sixteenth century) it will infallibly discover congenial agencies (mechanical and political) of expression. Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen. As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes. McLuhans influenceSource: www.WAfter the publication of Understanding Media, McLuhan received an astonishing amount of publicity, making him perhaps the most publicized English teacher in the twentieth century and arguably the most controversial. This publicity had much to do with the work of two California advertising executives, Gerald Feigen and Howard Gossage, who used personal profits to fund their practice of genius scouting.Much enamoured with McLuhans work, Feigen and Gossage arranged for McLuhan to meet with editors of several major New York magazines in May 1965 at the Lombardy Hotel in New York. Philip Marchand reports that, as a direct consequence of these meetings, McLuhan was offered the use of an office in the headquarters of both Time and Newsweek, any time he needed it.In August 1965, Feigen and Gossage held what they called a McLuhan festival in the offices of Gossages advertising agency in San Francisco. During this festival, McLuhan met with advertising executives, members of the mayors office, editors from the San Francisco Chronicle and Ramparts magazine.Perhaps more significant, however, was Tom Wolfes presence at the festival, which he would later write about in his article, What If He Is Right?, published in New York Magazine and Wolfes own The Pump House Gang. According to Feigen and Gossage, however, their work had only a moderate impact on McLuhans eventual celebrity: they later claimed that their work only probably speeded up the recognition of McLuhans genius by about six months.In any case, McLuhan soon became a fixture of media discourse. Newsweek magazine did a cover story on him; articles appeared in Life Magazine, Harpers, Fortune, Esquire, and others. Cartoons about him appeared in The New Yorker. Playboy magazine published a lengthy interview with him.During his lifetime and afterward, McLuhan heavily influenced cultural critics, thinkers, and media theorists such as Neil Postman, Camille Paglia, Timothy Leary, William Irwin Thompson, Paul Levinson, Douglas Rushkoff, Jaron Lanier, Joshua Meyrowitz, Lance Strate, John David Ebert and French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, as well as political leaders such as Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jerry Brown.McLuhan in popular cultureSource: www.WAs a result of the enormous publicity McLuhan received in the early 1960s, references to him began to appear in the popular culture. Some examples:The late-1960s television program Laugh-In featured Goldie Hawn or Henry Gibson reciting a couplet from time t