Reading Summary
Greg Smith poses the question of, “what difference does the definition of a medium make?”. The answer he gives is that the definition of a medium is big. People have different experiences with each medium. TV is something someone would watch at home and have the distractions of that, while Movies are something you are supposed to watch in silence at a theater in a crowded room of people. He explains the example with photography, and theater, and painting as well. The reason the definition matters is because the definition depends on the varied experiences of the person. This leads to a difference in what the technologies perception is. The functions of each medium evolve and grow, thus changing the definitions and the way people experience these mediums. Radio for example was supposed to be point to point contact, but has now turned into a corporate driven medium used to promote records and play commercials. It was originally deemed a failure based on its original purpose. These purposes emerge from the social adoption of the medium due to what one unique characteristic that medium has. An invention might have one original purpose, but social adoption gives it another. Mediums also share and blend their purposes together sometimes. This stems from the problem that people get caught up envisioning the mediums past rather than its future. A medium is more than just it’s technology, and a mediums definition changes with technology and audience participation. These changes affect how society thinks of media.
Source: Smith, G. (2011). What media classes really want to discuss. Chapter 7, pages 117-134.
Outside Example
The first thing that comes to mind is net neutrality. Net neutrality is when there are government regulations in place that prohibit corporations from controlling the internet and allows everyone equal access to the internet. Some of the things that net neutrality protects internet users from is: 1. Corporations want it to where you have to pay to access their website. They want you to have to pay them every time you use a certain website. Think about it as the way you pay for channels on cable television. You pay for a package of channels you can access, but you can’t access the other channels without having to pay extra. 2. Your internet provider can be paid by other companies to throttle certain websites and slow them down. An example would be, lets say you have comcast as your internet provider. Yahoo wants people to use google less. Yahoo goes to comcast and pays them X amount of money to slow down your internet every time you use Google. Google notices this and goes to Comcast and pays them X amount of money to slow your internet down every time you use Yahoo. That leaves you with slow internet no matter who you choose and leads to a corporate internet cold war. 3. Say you are a small company that wants to make a website. You want your website to be open for anyone to access so you can sell more close and reach more people. Well the internet providers can say your not apart of the basic internet package and charge their users every time they go to your website. Then, lets say your competitor is walmart, Walmart can pay the internet providers X amount of money to make it where no one is allowed to access your site. It leads to unfair competition among businesses and a closed off internet for the users. Welcome to oligopolies.
Read More About It Here: https://www.wired.com/story/guide-net-neutrality/
Reading Connection
The reason I bring up net neutrality is because the government in the U.S. has slowly been peeling away at it for years. Mainly the FCC Chairman, thou who shall not be named, because he receives large corporate backing from, you could guess it, internet providers who lobby a lot. This is similar to how radio changed and became regulated, except the internet has a way of making a lot more money and is a lot more accessible than radio broadcasting. We are currently the only democratic country going backwards right now (My opinion, but if you look it up you would probably agree). The connection is that the internet as a medium has changed since its original purpose. It originally was created for the military as a way to communicate locations and coordinates. It now is a very diverse and unique medium that is home to a lot of virtual content. The future for it currently looks very different. Smith said that people don’t envision the mediums future, but the future of the internet looks much different right now than the present and the past.
Comm 2302 Spring 20 
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