Media, Communication, Culture -- A Global Path

Author: (USA) Luo Er
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-11-24
Features: Anthropological research indicates that the fundamental difference between humans and animals lies in human undifferentiation, allowing humans to transcend nature through culture. Philosophers firmly believe that humans not only live in the physical world but also in the symbolic world. Therefore, Aristotle's classic definition, "Man is the animal of logos," can be reinterpreted as: "Man is the animal of symbols and culture." Humans create culture, and in turn, are created by culture. Thus, humans are both the subject of culture and its object. Human existence in the world means existence within culture. This complex interdependence can perhaps be expressed by slightly modifying Kant's famous formula: "I am in culture, and culture is in my heart." Culture always manifests as various symbols, including human artifacts, behaviors, and even ideas, all of which are symbols or texts of culture. To some extent, the creation of culture is the creation of symbols. From the perspective of symbols, their basic function lies in representation. Symbols are created to convey certain meanings to people. Therefore, fundamentally, representation involves both the complex relationship between symbols themselves and their intent and the represented object, and is closely related to communication, dissemination, understanding, and interpretation in specific contexts. From this perspective, culture, in its essence, is human behavior that conveys meaning through symbols. Thus, some cultural scholars insist that the core of culture lies in the creation, communication, understanding, and interpretation of meaning. In any sense, culture is inseparable from communication, like two sides of a coin. Cultural historians have meticulously divided the long history of cultural dissemination into three distinct stages: oral culture, print culture, and electronic culture. In the oral culture stage, face-to-face interaction and context make communication bidirectional and interactive, while also maintaining traditional authority. In the print culture stage, information no longer depends on presence; it is stored in portable media (print materials), making non-presence communication possible. The emergence of print culture not only transcended spatial and temporal limitations but also shook traditional authority. Since readers and authors are not in the same time and space, reading activities tend to be more critical, skeptical, and inclined to "rewrite" the original compared to face-to-face communication. The emergence of electronic media in this century has been a revolutionary event in the history of cultural dissemination, profoundly changing the way culture is spread, altering the very form of culture, and even changing the lives of those who live within it. Without a doubt, throughout history, no medium has as profoundly affected society as electronic media. Electronic media have led to a series of new phenomena. First, they have accelerated the processes of globalization and localization. Through time-space separation or time-space condensation, the "global village" has emerged. On one hand, local life is increasingly influenced by distant events through "long-distance effects"; on the other hand, local and national identities have become particularly prominent. Categories such as "us-other," "local-foreign," and "nationality-worldliness" are no longer abstract concepts but have permeated our daily lives. Second, electronic media have promoted cultural centralization while inevitably causing fragmentation and atomization. Third, while electronic media expand the boundaries and scope of the public sphere, involving more people, they also secretly shrink and weaken potential critical spaces through one-way communication, information monopolies, and programmed formats. Fourth, electronic media, with their powerful "symbolic violence," have destroyed all traditional boundaries, leading to cultural homogenization and typification, while also providing some possibilities for the growth of heterogeneous factors. Finally, the combination of electronic media and the market inevitably forms a consumerist ideology and passive cultural behavior, which seems distinctly different from oral and print cultures. Recent influential studies advocate linking the keywords "medium" and "culture," or calling it "medium culture" or "mediated culture." This is a new form of culture that constructs our daily lives and ideology, shapes our concepts of ourselves and others, constrains our values, emotions, and understanding of the world, and constantly utilizes high technology, appealing to market principles and universal, depersonalized audiences. In summary, medium culture unites communication and culture into a dynamic process, enveloping everyone in it. Thus, medium culture becomes the ritual and landscape of our contemporary daily lives. This is the cultural reality we face, and clearly, we know very little about it. In light of this, this series of books focuses on translating and introducing representative works from recent Western studies in communication and culture, aiming to broaden perspectives, deepen understanding, and advance localized research. This book is an introductory reading on media and cultural studies. The author demonstrates how modern mass media interact and influence ideology, emotions, hegemony, social norms, power, thought, and culture. Against the backdrop of globalization, the author skillfully connects mainstream theories of global cultural convergence with the latest trends, offering important critical perspectives on contemporary cultural and information studies.