What difference does a medium make?

Reading Summary

Chapter 7 of What Media Classes Really Want to Discuss talks about how technology has changed the medium throughout the years. It also talks about how society decides how we should be using each type of medium such as television is for viewing tv shows and movies at home with family and each individual can be doing various activities while watching television. But if you are at a movie theater you are expected to sit quietly and focus all your attention to the movie and not disrupt anyone. The chapter also talks about how certain technologies have impacted other existing technologies such as the radio being affected by television. With this, society also decides what technology should be used and it depends on how each new technology is presented to society and if it’s too confusing society might decide to not adopt the invention. One example of this is when VHS and Betamax were introduced, people decided to use VHS even though it had worse image quality. The chapter also talks about how some mediums have been inspired by existing media such as folders, mail, and desktops on computers so society can easily transition to using the new mediums with knowledge of older mediums.

Outside Example

Reading this chapter made me think of how this pandemic might change the way we see movies in the future. With all the movie theaters being closed now, there are many films that have been postponed. Some of these movies that are finished but weren’t able to be released such as Black Widow, James Bond: No Time to Die, and A Quiet Place 2 might look into different ways of reaching their audiences and decrease the affect the pandemic has creating on the revenue of each studio. I really wanted to go watch these 3 movies but now it’s unknown when we will be able to see theses movies with the huge increase in numbers of people infected in the United States and the announcement from Donald Trump saying that we can expect to have people in sport stadiums in August or September.

Reading Connection

While reading this chapter I found it really interesting how new inventions affected previous technologies such as how radio was affected by the invention of television. Instead of being a live medium where bands would play live, it became a medium where pre-recorded music would be played. Now can be a new change in the movie theater industry where movies might shift to making movies premiere on a streaming service or as a pay-per-view event similar to boxing matches. I think this hasn’t been done because it might be worse for studios in the long run but as we have seen in history, new inventions have always affected other technologies and we have to constantly adjust to this fast changing world.