Mass Media... What is it?....Well this is what i think...

The term mass media is very bold. When hearing this term and then being asked to define it, one would say several of these words: books, newspapers, magazines, recordings, radio, movies, television and the Internet. These are all apart of mass media because they are all ways of getting information. The mass media could also be seen as an information source for the world. It is how we live and how we stay connected with the rest of the world. Mass media also depends on business because it is businesses, in most cases that feed these media sources. Our world today has become very connected. In Marshall McLuhan's book called Understanding Media, published in 1964, he talks about the world being a “Global Village” because of all the technological advancement, which take place. Benjamin Symes from Aberystwyth University does an analysis on McLuhan’s book and says this about McLuhan’s thoughts on the “Global Village”:

“The basic precepts of his view are that the rapidity of communication through electric media echoes the speed of the senses. Through media such as the telephone, television and more recently the personal computer and the 'Internet', we are increasingly linked together across the globe and this has enabled us to connect with people at the other side of the world as quickly as it takes us to contact and converse with those who inhabit the same physical space (i.e the people that live in the same village).”

I believe that the term “Global Village” best relates to the mass media because we are a large village completely connected with one another. I think that McLuhan is 100% correct when he talks about how quick information travels from one part of the world to the other. Also through the mass media our eyes and ears have been extended to see and hear things that we could not get without the mediums of the media. Mass media is what makes our world stayed connected and without it we are lost. We are lost because we are so connected to it and we don’t know life without it. McLuhan is very right. All of these technologies have become one with us, and it is hard for us to live without them. We have become dependant on our so-called “Global Village.”

Works Cited

Symes, Benjamin. "Marshall McLuhan's 'Global Village'." (26th May 1995): n. pag. Web. 4 Oct 2009. <http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/bas9401.html>.