// a response to 1,8,9 & 10 // Media and Culture

"high and low culture" - where do I begin? do I believe it in? I do think that to some extent certain groups of people are more educated in culture and different forms of art and media. It doesn't take much time or much intelligence to watch an episode of 'The Hero's', as appose to watching and enjoying the performance of a ballet or an opera. The reason why there are only groups of people that appreciate ballet is because of the understanding of the art. Poetry is also a very complicated, and intelligent form of literature, but you cannot stop to appreciate it if you do not understand it. And to understand it comes a great deal of time spent learn about it - so one is able to react to it open-heatedly without being educated and having a background to what it is all about. It doesn't mean to say that those to like opera and ballet cannot enjoy an episode of 'Greys Anatomy' or 'Dancing with the stars' - but I do feel that there is a level or culture. This doesn't however mean that these certain groups of people have an upper-hand, or in other words feel that they are intellectually and culturally superior, it just shows that some people have given more time and effort to learn about great forms of art, that have been around centuries. Another fact is that others may not choose to engulf their time into arts such as these, in which case they just have not allowed themselves to experience different forms of media for themselves to truly judge.

The fact that there is so much media out there it is scary to know that a lot of it funnels from one place. Much of the media is owned by so few companies, one person for instance that owns a vast amount of it is Rupert Merdock. Every single person has a mind of their own. Every single person is entitled to their own opinion, judgment, views. So with that in mind, the fact that single person is in charge or so much media that spreads out across the country is a little worrying because I feel that you will not get many side of views. You may perhaps get biased opinion, a narrowed-minded opinion - it's a controversy!

Chapter eight and newspapers. Newspapers go all the way back to the letter-press, when everything was manually done. In the late 18th century newspapers were made on hand produced expensive paper with newly made mechanical machines to produce the paper. This led to the fact that only the upper-class men were able to afford it due to the increase of price in the paper. The industrial revolution kicked in, creating many many jobs for the middle class people that took over much of this news-printing production. That being said, there was cheaper paper with larger quantities which meant that the 'newspaper' was now much more affordable and much larger group of people were reading. This also meant that it wasn't only a certain, 'selected' group of people reading the news anymore - it was all sorts. Upper-class, middle class, some lower-class - the next percentage of readers naturally became the women. Women started to becomes more educated that this meant that they were able to take part in conversation and could judge and have opinions about what was going on. More advertisements started coming in - which was quite often marketed towards women. Due to the evolution of printing the speed of the transfer of info has increased dramatically throughout the decades.

How has this affected our ability to process information? Well for one, we don't read as much. We watch far too much TV, and we are drawn to the Internet which may not always be for educational purposes and more commonly for entertainment. Newspapers and advertising in particular has changed because of that. Stories are shorter, headlines are bigger, pictures are huge - all in hand - because we have such short attention spans. We are very easily distracted by things like 'facebook', 'Twitter', 'e-mail' that there isn't much time to read a full body copy on an advertisement - like they some of the great 60s ads back in the day. An Ad now, has to catch your attention within 3 seconds of looking about it. If not. You just turn the page. Media, such as Newspapers, Magazines, and Books all have changed according to the most important Media - "The Television".