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The Power of Technology & the Mass Media

It is difficult to argue with the notion that a society of advanced technology is unnatural and superficial. It may well be the case that the technology-driven "Medium shows us what our new needs are--how often, without it, we should not have known!--and it shows us how they can be satisfied by buying something" (Jarrell 421). It may also be the case that Medium is preeminently commercial and both manipulative and exploitative of the psychology of emotion and need and consumption, and that this fosters a kind of superficiality that ignores the great chain of being in favor of the "great chain of buying" (421). Low-pitched as it is intellectually and philosophically, the Medium is nevertheless powerful because of its immediacy and the ability, especially of television, to create an impression of the truth of viewed experience. This is deceptive, and it fosters a superficial experience of life because it is at one remove from "being there." Media technology, whether in the form of printed or broadcast or cyberspace medium, enables the recipient/consumer to engage with while being insulated from fire and flood and war, and possibly become desensitized to their impact. Jarrell also cites the insatiable quest for novelty in a culture dominated by the Medium, in which "all that is deserves to perish and to have something else put in its place" (Jarrell 425). In other words, technology makes everything, including human experience and emotion and belief, disposable.

Jarrell establishes his perspective as that of the "artist-of-a-sort," who cultivates and was cultivated by access to and appreciation of the fine arts and historical perspective. From that perspective, he looks at what the technology-driven Medium, as he calls it, has fostered in the culture, to control and dominate the culture so much that it actually becomes the experience of culture. "Commercial and scientific progress" has overtaken its opposite, which is "the world of the ...

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The Power of Technology & the Mass Media. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 13:00, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1690619.html