iif_kgpm_Dictionary_of_Media

introductionintense interest, not only on the part of academics and researchers, but also onthe part of virtually everyone.A seemingly different path of study was opened up in the late 1940s by thelate engineer Claude Shannon (1916–2001). Shannon was the one who laid thefoundations for investigating the relation between communication (in all itsforms) and technology. He did this by devising a theoretical framework intendedoriginally to improve the efficiency of telecommunication systems. Knownas the “bull’s-eye model,” the framework was intended originally to identify themain components of such systems and describe in precise mathematical termshow they functioned in the transmission and reception of information. In bareoutline form, Shannon’s model consisted of a sender aiming a message at a receiveras if in a target range—hence the designation bull’s-eye model. Shannonalso introduced terms such as feedback and noise into the lexicon of communicationsstudy. However, few at the time saw a connection between the studyof media and communications until a Canadian professor at the Universityof Toronto started to amalgamate the two domains in the 1950s. That professorwas the late Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), whose work on the relationbetween media and communications technologies brought to common awarenessthe fact that culture, social evolution, and technology are intrinsicallyintertwined. Ever since, the study of media and communication as an integratedphenomenon has been the rule in academia.McLuhan’s basic approach was to show that there exists a built-in synergybetween media, mass communications technologies, and culture. He claimedthat each major historical era took its character from the medium used mostwidely at the time. For example, he called the period from 1700 to the mid-1900s the “Age of Print,” because in that period printed books were the chiefmedia through which mass communications took place. But that is not all thatoccurred. The Age of Print changed the state of the world permanently, he suggested,because print literacy encouraged a radical new form of individualismand the subsequent growth of nationalism. The “Electronic Age” displaced theAge of Print in the twentieth century. The consequences of that displacementalso have been colossal. Because electronic technology has increased both thebreadth and rapidity of communication, it has radically changed how peopleinteract and behave socially. Phones, radios, computers, and instant messagingdevices have influenced the lives of everyone, even those who use them sporadicallyor who do not use them at all. The Electronic Age may in fact be leading,as McLuhan suspected, to the end of individualism and literacy-inspirednotions of nationalism generated by the previous Age of Print.In a fundamental way, the study of the media-communication nexus is anexercise in unraveling the psychological reasons why we evolve through communicationdevices and why modern economies and political systems dependso much on these devices. Without the media and its supporting mass com-xii