Media and Society in a digital world

1. NAME: FATIMA MURITALA REG NO: SPS/18/MMC/00014
MEDIA/ SOCIETY IN A DIGITAL WORD
Media as the being the most important tool for communication has affected the lives of
individuals, and its importance in society can be seen by the widespread adoption of many
different media devise.
A world without social media would make the people in it feel empty, the only information they
see and activities they engage in would be directly from their experience, people would only
develop more intense local relationship while losing touch with people who are physically
farther away.
Media affect the lives of people whether indirectly or indirectly, media has made the
connectedness of people easier whether near or afar, people easily communicate, transact,
educate, and interact nationally/globally. Media as made it easy to communicate, be one-to-one,
be one-to-many, involve a potentially large and unknown audience. Human are inquisitive, they
want to know what’s happening around them, what’s new around them, and media has covered
that bridge, media has made it easy to have a social interactive society, so an extent that
individuals cannot imagine a society without media .
A sociological perspective encourages us to see and understand the relationship between
individuals and the broader social context in which they live (Croteau and Hoynes 2019)
individuals are from different social background and social context who in turn study their
environment, activities, expectations, and effect their social behavior with their social
environment and media has made it easy to have a sociable community which interact with one
another, monitors the life style of one another. Social construction of reality depends on the
individual, and people are the medium through which media content and technology affect each
other.
Movement itself was a part of the social world interacting with the media process, the media
industry also had an impact on the civil right movement, media participated in sending out the
message of a movement to a large number of people and the movement indirectly affect the
media users, making them participate and support the effort of their social environment, even
though the medium used at that time seems ancient by today’s standards, media was able to pass
information and participate in movements.
Media and the society are two pair which are inseperatable, they both need each other to achieve
aims and objectives, if there is a message to be passed on to large number of people, the media
must be involved, without events happenings, situations, there would be nothing to broadcast,
inform and entertain society.

2. PART 2: TECHNOLOGY
One way to tell the story of media is through the history of its technology (Brigs and Burke
2009) communication in the early days was conducted using the face-to-face, oral tradition, then
it followed with art work on cave walls, carvings in stone, impression on clay tablets, and marks
on bamboo or papyru and later communication was carried out using paper in china, overtime the
printed process was improved, but for 1,000 years print was media technology.
In the 19th century industrialization drastically increase the pace of technological innovation and
technology in the 21st century has enabled new social transformations by integrating digital
multimedia platforms into all aspects of our lives. The invention of a new media technology
doesn’t eradicate the existence of old media technology, instead, they accumulate and their effect
in our lives continues.
Technology itself causes changes and people decide to use or not use technology, and it is argued
that technology has being used to reduce stress, for e.g the invention of automobile. Apart from
keyboards, screens, phones, paper and the likes, there are more to media materiality which
includes data, which exist on hard drives and servers and the storage capacity of computers has
contribute to a change in how computers can be used. Scholars have long noted that technology
can take on a life on its own, even though people created an use it, that technology is
autonomous because is somehow out of control by human agency.
The media has been perceived by some negativity, in which it made an entire generation
addictive with its properties, most media scholars have focused on media industries, the content
they produce, and the user that consume it, rather than on technology printing and the
corresponding growth in literacy helped democratized learning by making books more affordable
and widely available.
In the era of print media, news could only travel as fast as people could physically carry it,
within the presence of broadcast media and internet, people can receive information regardless of
their bearings.
In the last century a series of disruptive innovations in communications technology, incudes the
telegraph, telephone, radio, film, television, and the internet. Media scholar Tim Wu (2011)
argues that there is some similarity to the evolution of these new technologies. The introduction
of an innovation begins a period of idealistic experimentation, often the new technology is touted
as providing significant beneficent or even utopian (unrealistic) benefits for society.

3. PART 3: UNDERSTANDING NEW MEDIA
It has being discussed by several scholars that understanding media includes understanding
humanity, all that we are, he claims is determined by the media (Kittler) the media plays a
central explanatory role in the shifts and transformation in human history and the picture of
society cannot be taken out when understanding media and technology.
In other to understand the relationship between technology and society, Darin Barney (2004)
classification of theories of technology is used which include: instrumentalism substantivism,
and social constructivism.
Instrumentalism: views technology as neutral, technological innovation signifies progress and
must be thought of as good (Barney, 2004). If technology is made to serve bad ends, then it is not
technology that should be blamed, but rather those who use it in these ways.
Subtantivism: All technological outcomes entail this logic, and there is no way to distinguish
between ‘bad’and ‘good’ ones, they are all more or less equivalent and all display the dominant
technological logic of instrumental rationality and efficiency.
Social constructivism: technological outcome must be seen as the products of a complex
interplay of social, political, cultural,economic, but also technological factors. Each technology
interact