How Television and The Internet Have Changed The World

1570 Words4 Pages

The newspaper can be considered the original form of media that allowed physical boundaries to be crossed and addressed information that was of public interest. Newspapers created a sense of perceived timelessness, the idea that information could be read by anyone at any time. It reflected the issues of the day and gave a medium for which society could discuss these issues, no matter their physical setting. It extended ideas of community, giving the public a sense of identity while satisfying societies need for information of events whether they were there or not. Newspapers provided a certain freedom for society. Members of the family could congregate around, for example, the dining room table and discuss the issues of the event. This allowed the event to be recreated by members of the private through their re-telling of the story, allowing engagement and a sense of presence of the event.
The newspaper, limited in how it was able to pluralize space within society, nonetheless provided the foundations of what was to be a whole new way in how we occupy our space within the world, and how society was to give and receive information through media broadcasting.
The televisions impact has been so great it’s become a normative in society. Almost all households own a television; we build entire rooms just to accommodate them. In many ways we have built our lives around the television. And yet, if we consider the television from a media standpoint, it can be argued the television has being built around us.
The television did what the newspaper could never; the live, uninterrupted broadcasting of events. Television has an immediacy that enables information flows to stream more freely. And it was through the development of television that ...

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...was none in a social space, creating what is now a blurred boundary between the public and the private.
This growth in electronic media has allowed entire cultures to exist online. Younger generations have absorbed these cultures into part of their everyday lives, and demonstrates their ability to participate online while retaining awareness of physical surroundings.
It is possible for this space to be multiplied even further, by watching T.V, surfing the web and texting on the mobile all at the same time. Whether or not this may overwhelm a person’s spatial awareness to the point of a negative impact is almost entirely subjective depending on the individual, the ability to do many roles and be in many places at the same time has created opportunities for connectedness we have never experienced before, and has allowed our world to become quite literally pluralized.

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