Class Response - How TV Took Over the World (and/or caused many forms of media to demassify)

     The invention of television in 1927 changed mass communication massively. Previous forms of mass communications--newspapers, magazines, radio, and movies--were all forced to demassify after the incredibly quick growth of television. See below how each type of media was affected.

Newspapers
     As TV grew more popular, newspapers quickly became old news (pun intended). TV took both newspapers' audience and their advertisers. TV provided news faster than newspapers. Since TV reached a broader audience for a far cheaper price, businesses favored TV for advertising, which meant less money for newspapers. Magazines had a similar problem--TV did not actually take their audience, just their advertisers.

Radio
     Television, as with newspapers, took radio's audience. For radio, however, TV also took much of the radio's talent. Most major radio stars were easily convinced to jump in the bandwagon and become television stars, where their faces could be seen along with their voice.

Movies
     TV also took much of the movie industry's audience. It allowed the same entertainment, but from the comfort of your own home, and for free.

Class Response - Movies

     Movies were invented in 1888 by William Dixon, who worked for Thomas Ediso. He was the first person to take motion pictures. His motion pictures captured both sight and sound, by taking not just one picture but many pictures each second to provide the video. However, Dixon's invention could not easily be played back, and could not be played on a large screen for an audience. It required a carousel.
     However, the 1891 invention of flexible film, which allowed film to be put on a reel, played, and projected, fixed this problem. The Lumiere brothers were the ones to figure out how to project these flexible film reels onto white screens, in 1895.
     It wasn't until 1922 that Fox Studios managed to figure out how to project film and sound in sync. This allowed for movies with sound--known as "talkies", at the time. 1927 introduced the most popular talkie, called The Jazz Singer.
     Movies, especially the talkies, grew incredibly popular. By 1930, there were over nine thousand theatres with sound. Already, silent films were becoming a thing of the past.
     Movies in general made a large impact on media. People had never seen anything like it, even when it was just black and white. The idea of moving pictures was astounding and all new.

Class Response - Radio's Introduction and Growth

     Radio was the first form of mass communication that was live. This was a huge innovation--live communication allowed for truly "breaking news". Prior to radio becoming popular, you could not hear about an event almost immediately after it occurred. Newspapers had to be written, printed, and distributed, taking at least a few hours after an important news story before the people could hear about it. This did not only change news, however. Radio provided entertainment for very cheap. A wide range of stations were available to many, all at the same time, through the one object.
     While radio in general contained a wide variety of different stations, each different station was targeted toward a niche audience. With the many stations available, there was something for everyone on the radio.
     Radio had fairly speedy growth. In 1922, there were about one hundred thousand radios and five hundred different stations. Two years later, in 1924, the number of stations had tripled to fifteen hundred stations. By 1947, there were over forty million radios.

Class Review and Response: Conglomeration Pros and Cons

     Conglomeration, which is when one big company buys may small companies in order to become even larger and wealthier. All you hear these days seems to have to do with one of those huge companies, like Disney. This is because of conglomeration. In class we had a big visual map displaying which mega companies owned which smaller company, and none of us could think of a single well-known American company that was not actually owned by a larger company. 

     There are several pros and cons to conglomeration, which I will discuss briefly.

Pros: Why is Conglomeration Good?

     Conglomeration makes a lot of money, for one thing. This is, of course, the main reason for doing it. It's also much more efficient, and gets rid of redundancy.

Cons: Why is Conglomeration Bad?

     Conglomeration causes a loss in jobs when one company buys another. The main problem, however, is that it gets rid of diversity. Whereas previously there would be a large variety of merchandise, news, media, etc., after conglomeration, the many companies owned by the mega corporation are all doing something similar. Conglomeration causes a monopoly.

Class Review and Response: Internet and Music

 In class recently, we discussed how the introduction of recordings changed the music industry. We talked about how, before recordings, music was used to spread news and information. It could only be heard live, could not be distributed, and was spread from person to person. Because of this method of spreading the music, it was often distorted. Inventions such as the phonogram and gramophone introduced recordings. We discussed this thoroughly in class, but what other technology, primarily the internet, has had an effect on music?

Internet
     The internet became a whole new way to share information and media. With these new methods of exchanging information, music and music distribution were changed greatly. Below are various websites and services that had an effect.

Legal Digital Downloads (iTunes, etc.)
      iTunes and other digital download services provided an all new way to access music. Now, you don't have to purchase a whole album; you can download as much or as little as you want for a low price, directly onto your phone or MP3 player, from your home.

Illegal Digital Download (Music Sharing Sites)
      Of course, the internet isn't all necessarily good. The internet also provides a way to share and access a variety of music for free downloading. It is illegal, but is widely used nonetheless.

YouTube
     YouTube is a way to listen to music as well as multitudes of other videos. It created an easy way to see official music videos, lyric videos, and new artists. With YouTube, aspiring artists don't have to have a record deal to gain fame. Many people are well known just from homemade videos of themselves covering a popular song. They receive fame in the form of millions of views and payment from advertisements.

Classmate Response: Florida Boy Finds Ancient Canoe While Scuba Diving

      Skye Spalding's blog recently had a post critiquing an article about a seven year old boy who found a canoe. Skye does well in pointing out that the article isn't completely newsworthy, saying that it doesn't impact a lot of people for a long period of time. After reading the article, I definitely saw her point. While it was sort of interesting, it didn't have any information that would affect many people. If the canoe was anything that potentially significant historically, it would have been important. However, it was just a plain canoe. The only thing of interest was that it is being tested to see what type of wood it is made from and how old it is. Whatever information is determined will still not have any lasting effect. Skye showed this very well. I did have one critique, which is that she failed to include the link to the original story in her blog post. The link is, however, in the comments of that post.

Media Critique: I'd Tell You to Get to the Point but There isn't One

     I was looking through different news websites and found this article about smartphone shipments and couldn't resist the opportunity to write a media critique on the article.

Smartphone Shipments to Surpass One Billion for First Time By Jennifer Booton 

     I felt that this "news" article deserved a critique because it ignores both one yardstick of journalism and one basic principle, both having to do with the same main problem. That problem is:

     What is the point of this article?

     Exactly. There isn't one. It probably won't come as a surprise to you that this article was brought to you by Fox News.

     Anyway, one of the yardsticks of journalism, titled "Newsworthiness", makes it clear that any and all stories should have a "direct and lasting...informational impact on a wide audience". This just means that any article that you are thinking about writing should only take up your time and energy if it will actually affect a large amount of people over a long period of time. Otherwise, the so-called "news" is just pointless. This article just has a few random statistics that someone somewhere might possibly find vaguely interesting, but has no effect on anyone for any length of time, let alone six or more months.

     Related to that yardstick of journalism, this story completely ignores the basic principle of journalism that we know as "Make the Important Interesting". The main idea of this principle is to make important things seem interesting, rather than making interesting things that have no effect on anyone outside of the event seem important. This article clearly does the latter, making an interesting story into something more important than it is. There's still a problem in saying that, however, because this article is neither interesting, nor important. Nobody cares, and nobody needs to know this.

     Normally I wouldn't be this hard on (or sarcastic toward) an article, except for the fact that this absolutely irrelevant and pointless article was on the top of Fox News' United States front page.

     I kid you not. Was there anything in this article that was even remotely newsworthy, let alone enough for it to be one of the first things you see when you go to the U.S. news.

     I can't honestly say I'm surprised. After all, this is coming from the same organization that had this beauty:

Fox News: The most important news that is always relevant always and is definitely not pointless ever.

So it seems that the struggle against bad journalism continues.