Media, Communication, Culture (A Global Approach)

Author: (American) Luo Er, translated by Dong Hongchuan
Publisher:
Publishing Date: Not available
Features: Anthropological research shows that the fundamental difference between humans and animals lies in human undifferentiation, hence humans have the ability 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 follows: Humans are animals of symbols and culture. Humans create culture and are, in turn, created by culture. Thus, humans are both the subject and object of culture. Humans exist in the world, which means they exist in culture. This complex dependence can perhaps be expressed by slightly modifying Kant's famous formula: "I am in culture, and culture is in me." Culture always manifests itself as various symbols, including human tools, utensils, behavioral patterns, and even ideas, all of which are symbols or texts of culture. To some extent, the creation of culture is also 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 intentions and what is represented, 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 communication 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 transcends spatial and temporal limitations but also undermines traditional authority. Since readers and authors are not in the same space and time, 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 communication, profoundly changing the way culture is disseminated, altering the very form of culture, and even transforming the lives of humans living within it. Without a doubt, throughout history, no medium has had as profound an impact on 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 affected by distant events through "long-distance action"; on the other hand, the awareness of localization and nationalism has become particularly prominent. Categories such as "us-other," "local-foreign," and "nationality-world" are no longer abstract concepts but have permeated our daily lives. Second, electronic media have centralized culture while also inevitably causing fragmentation and disintegration. Third, while electronic media expand the boundaries and scope of the public sphere, drawing more people into it, they also secretly shrink and weaken potential critical spaces through one-way communication, information monopolies, and programmed formats. Fourth, with their powerful "symbolic violence," electronic media dismantle 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, appeals to market principles, and relies on universal, non-personalized audiences. In summary, medium culture integrates 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 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. In the context of globalization, the author skillfully connects mainstream theories of global cultural integration with the latest trends, offering important critical perspectives on contemporary cultural and information studies.