COMM Assignment 2 Yingquan Wang
1. Oral Culture (p.2) -no forms of written communication, all interaction takes place in face-to-face situations. -can be public and shared across generations. Notions of privacy and individuality are less important.
2. Writing culture (p. 2) -a literature society in which a shared system of inscription, or writing, exists so that communication can take place outside of face-to-face situations, across time and space -comes with a mindset for exactitude and precision, which also affected speech.
3. Print culture (p. 2) -an expansion of writing culture, also encompasses the consequent social and cultural changes that result from the proliferation of printed matter. -some argue printing was instrumental in the establishment of democracy because it took control of the Church. -reinforced the sense of individuality and privacy
4. Electronic culture (p. 2) -transcend time and space without physically moving the same object from one place to another. -creates larger audiences for particular messages and highly selective audience segments organized around particular tastes
5. Technological determinism (p. 7) -the belief that the technology is the principal cause of historical change -assume that future is the result of the necessary and inevitable unfolding of the consequences of the past and present
6. Theory of Mass Society (p. 9-10) -held that as a result of various social changes, including industrialization, both the nature of social life and the form of social interaction were fundamentally altered for the worst.
7. High culture (p. 10) -professional art, considered both spiritually and formally more developed than other forms of culture -largely the art of the European, White, male, upper and middle classes
8. Folk culture (p. 10) -refers to cultural products and forms that can be traced to a particular community of socially identifiable group, an expression of the experiences of this group -non-professional, not distinguishable from the general population
9. Popular culture (p. 11) -speaks to a large public audience that cannot be simply described by a single social variable, such as class or gender or age; does not assume anything about the artist. -the artist can be formally trained or an amateur -the audience is diverse and complicated
10. Mass art (p. 11) -to be purely and entirely commercially motivated, comes from the top down, given to people whether they like it or not -manipulative, attempting to force its audience to interpret its texts according to the interests of those who produced them
1. Consider the ways in which communication forms contributed to shifting concepts of time, space, consciousness and social relationships throughout history from oral culture to writing culture to print culture to electronic culture. While we're still technically in the "electronic culture" era today, we've had a huge number of advances in forms of communication since the invention of the telegraph, the radio, and even television. With the advent of the internet, the mobile phone, and social media, one could argue we're in a *new* type of electronic culture. How might these new forms of communication and media be