Media Forms Communcation

There are many characteristics of electronic media that shape the form and context of communication, take this blog as an example. Writing this information in the form of an essay wold lead to a completely different feel for the reader and a completely different topic path for me, the writer. It's undeniable that the platform you read your news on changes the way it is read, reading your news from a newspaper versus reading it from a news congregation cite such as Reddit will often lead to completely different biases and beliefs about certain issues. In Jeffery Sconce's 2000 paper Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television Sconce mentions the idea of the "telegraphic imagination" (56). This idea was the thought process behind drawing a connection between the telegraph allowing people in different places to communicate without being physically present and spiritualist talking to the dead. While there are obvious differences between these two types of connections it's easy to see how people who aren't educated about new technologies and don't understand how it works to think the two technologies work in the same way.

In both of the circumstances its easy to see that though the messages being portrayed are important it's more about the medium of communication than it was about what was actually being portrayed. This is especially important in the spiritualist movement because though the people that were asking questions felt as if they were important it was more about the communication with those have passed away then it was about the questions they were asking them. For these people having the connection with those who had left their lives was the ultimate goal and being able to connect with them (even if it wound up being false) gave them closure that otherwise their lives may have missed out on.

Another important idea brought up by ProPublica and their research on different pricing for different people was the fact that with the new mediums that we have today corporations have the ability to selectively price the services that they provide. ProPublica found this specifically with the pricing of their review for SAT prep courses but it is surely being used in other mediums and services around the world -- corporations know that certain demographics are more or less certain to buy certain items and with the mediums and tracking abilities we have today it's trivial to charge people more or less depending on a corporation's certainly that they will be interesting in what they're offer. In this type of scenario the medium in a huge part because with the computer being able to do what it does this type of scenario wouldn't be able happen. In this way the media that these companies receive show them that certain portions of society (Asian people in the NPR talk) are more likely to buy their services so they use these new knowing to change their way of communication to make them more money. In this way the media and their knowledge about trends are more important than the method of connecting to people.