“American Media History is the story of a nation. It is the story of events in the long battle to disseminate information, entertainment, and opinion in society. It is the story of the men and women whose inventions, ideas, and struggles helped shape the nation and its media system.”(Fellow) The evolution of media has influenced countless societal and cultural changes leading to the present day. But it didn’t get this far over night. It is estimated to have begun more than 30,000 years ago through the process of cave painting. (Crewe) Following cave painting, came the invention of books being printed on blocks “The Diamond Sutra”, the Gutenberg printing press, newspapers in 1640, photographs, the radio in 1894, television, and recently computers; which lead all the way to modern day social media. Through the hard work of multiple inventors the media was able to reach where it is today. It has changed the way people communicate with each other, mostly for the better.“ The way people experience the meaning, how they perceive the world and communicate with each other, and how they distinguish the past and identify the future.” (Gitelman) Or as we know it as: a new way of communicating information from person to person. Media history focuses on numerous topics, with one of its most dynamic being collective memory. A relatively new term defined by 1. “Ability of a community to remember events. 2. The collection of memories shared by a group of people. 3. Beaudry 2 The process of remembering a certain event.” (Dictionary) It has become a huge part of history today. In the journal Collective Memory: What is it? written by Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, “Today it is almost impossible to read a text in history that does not mention the term collective memory.” It is used everyday to recall traumatic events, life lessons, or simply remembering how to tie a shoe. Memory is such an
Media, the plural form of medium, describes various ways in which we communicate in society. A phone call, email, radio, computer, news on TV, etc. are all forms of media. In our society today, the media plays a significantly large role in influencing society negatively, twisting one’s perspective of the truth. In author Brooke Gladstone’s, The Influencing Machine, she discusses how media is looked at as an “influencing machine,” that’s controlling the mind of its viewers. Throughout the reading, Gladstone guides her readers through perceptions of media and how it influences them to get readers to understand the truth about media and the manipulation behind it.
The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld is an original work, a highly researched yet highly accessible survey of all things media from the history of media/journalism beginning in ancient Rome through the Mayan scribes to the First Amendment press freedoms of the U.S. Constitution and beyond and how the media 's mission and its means have advanced through history. At the same time, Gladstone debunks claims of the media 's nefarious influence on people from mind control and presumed biases to "moral panics," recurring historical charges of cognitive distraction, intellectual diminishment, and social alienation, now lodged against the likes of Google, video games, and the virtual world in general as digital culture stakes
What associations arise in our head when we talk about memory? First of all, this is the memory of generations, historical and cultural memory. These concepts correlate with the development of society, with the greatest values and events within the whole world, the state or some individual nations.
Michael Joseph Jackson, or as most people know him The King of Pop, was a
Lebow, Richard Ned. "The Future of Memory." American Academy of Political and Social 617 (2008): 25-41. JSTOR. Web. 21 Apr. 2014.
Coming from nothing and working his way up to a chart-topping career, he makes his mark but does he hold the same effect today? Michael Jackson grew up in an abusive home but talent filled Michael found a way to work past the abuse and found a way to make a career that put the world in awe. Jackson has, needless to say, a heart-shattering past, an amazing music career, and an interesting way out of it all that still leaves people wondering: who really is Michael Jackson?
Memory is a marvelous aspect of who we are as human beings. It can produce delight, warning, affection, thought, sentimentality, and feelings of commitment. When memory is invoked, we are called to attention. The past becomes present and we become present to events in the past in a way that pushes us into the future. Memory is the way past events and commitments “live” for us and continue to touch us in a very real way.
Michael Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana on August 29, 1958. He was the son of Katherine and Joseph Jackson. Michael had eight siblings. They all had their share in the music industry. His father was a crane operator but had a passion for music. The children heard music all the time. Joseph put together a musical group called The Jackson 5. Katherine Jackson noticed that Michael had an incredible talent in music. Michael loved dancing and singing. Michael became the lead vocalist at the age of five. Michael became the center of attention. (Rolling Stone) Joseph became violent with his sons; pushing them to be the best they could. He would make them practice for hours a day. If they made a mistake, Joseph would verbally abuse them. Joseph would
Collective memory is commonly defined as “shared individual memories” but in the source Collective Memory from a Psychological Perspective, it is better defined as “publicly available symbols maintained by society” (Coman et al.). The article went on to explain how collective memory differs from an individual memory in the sense that “an individual restructures the world” so that one can better remember, whereas in collective memory, the memory is restructured by society. In this case, the photograph from atop Mount Suribachi is most definitely a symbol that has been passed on from person to person, family to family, newspaper to newspaper since the day it was taken. It was printed in papers all over country, used as a means of gathering funds
Michael Jackson inspired the world with his music, also with the way he dressed, he changed millions of lives with his attitude. Michael Jackson has change the pop chart because no African American artist has ever achieved a high level of success like him. Also he change the way people view music and clothes. Michael Jackson change society by his music, some of his music was to inspired humans to do something about the world. He also help a lot of people, but some of the things he did didn’t make it to the headlines.
For years, the population has been exposed to different forms of media. Newspapers, magazines, television, films, radio, and more recently the Internet are ways of promoting ideas, spreading news, and advertising products.
Memory is the tool we use to learn and think. We all use memory in our everyday lives. Memory is the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experiences. We all reassure ourselves that our memories are accurate and precise. Many people believe that they would be able to remember anything from the event and the different features of the situation. Yet, people don’t realize the fact that the more you think about a situation the more likely the story will change. Our memories are not a camcorder or a camera. Our memory tends to be very selective and reconstructive.
Hence, the power of media has touched its apex in today’s age. Its societal, political and economic functions reflect its unparallel capacity to affect the human life in all spheres.
The Mass Media is a unique feature of modern society; its development has accompanied an increase in the magnitude and complexity of societal actions and engagements, rapid social change, technological innovation, rising personal income and standard of living and the decline of some traditional forms of control and authority.
Forgetting has a negative image, like erosion. Memory does not always make one happy. There can be traumatic memories as well. For example: there is a debate among researchers how to recover people from the trauma of Holocaust, nuclear bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Vietnam war, various massacres, crimes committed in the past etc. These deals with the past involving power and exclusion and sometimes they extend to such limit that they are beyond the reach of human reason. It is therefore, important to find equilibrium to fight the past and attempt to forget. We have talked about collective memory above and it is important to note that collectivity includes a dialogue in which individuals take part in it. As we discussed earlier that we cannot go back to the past but in order to understand it in a better way the nature of dialogue has to be considered. Memories can be in dialogical form because of ontological properties of telling the truth. Memories are created and formed by individuals who interact with each other. For instance two people might have different reasons for one cause. As halbwach will call to be an individual who is not alone and the people will make distinction with the help of history and memory. While Pierre Nora would say that there are different ways of looking at the past where time plays an important part and we involve activities like celebrations etc in the society we live in and archive it in the modern society. It is not easy to archive and store memory. There are ongoing political struggles in relation to preservation of data which dates back to period of domination and violence of human beings. For example: victims of totalitarian government wanted to preserve their memory as the event was forgotten in