Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often compared to George Orwell's 1984 (1949).
Media ecology theory is the study of media, technology, and communication and how they affect human environments. The theoretical concepts were proposed by Marshall McLuhan in 1964, while the term media ecology was first formally introduced by Neil Postman in 1968.
Neil Postman was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed digital technology, including personal computers, mobile devices, and cruise control in cars, and was critical of uses of technology, such as personal computers in school. He is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995).
Infotainment, also called soft news as a way to distinguish it from serious journalism or hard news, is a type of media, usually television or online, that provides a combination of information and entertainment. The term may be used disparagingly to devalue infotainment or soft news subjects in favor of more serious hard news subjects. Infotainment-based websites and social media apps are gaining traction due to their focused publishing of infotainment content, e.g. BuzzFeed.
Screen-Free Week is an annual event where children, families, schools and communities are encouraged to turn off screens and "turn on life". Instead of relying on television programming for entertainment, participants read, daydream, explore, enjoy nature, and spend time with family and friends. Over 300 million people have taken part in the turnoff, with millions participating each year.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan, in which the author proposes that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study. He suggests that the medium affects the society in which it plays a role mainly by the characteristics of the medium rather than the content. The book is considered a pioneering study in media theory.
The NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language is an award given since 1975 by the Public Language Award Committee of the National Council of Teachers of English. It is awarded annually to "writers who have made outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse."
"Bread and circuses" is a metonymic phrase referring to superficial appeasement. It is attributed to Juvenal, a Roman poet active in the late first and early second century AD, and is used commonly in cultural, particularly political, contexts.
A post-literate society is a hypothetical society in which multimedia technology has advanced to the point where literacy, the ability to read or write, is no longer necessary or common. The term appears as early as 1962 in Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy. Many science-fiction societies are post-literate, as in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, Dan Simmons' novel Ilium, and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story.
"The medium is the message" is a phrase coined by the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan and the name of the first chapter in his Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, published in 1964. McLuhan proposes that a communication medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be the primary focus of study. He showed that artifacts such as media affect any society by their characteristics, or content.
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television is a 1978 book by Jerry Mander, "who argues that many of the problems with television are inherent in the medium and technology itself, and thus cannot be reformed".
Medium theory is a mode of analysis that examines the ways in which particular communication media and modalities impact the specific content (messages) they are meant to convey. It Medium theory refers to a set of approaches that can be used to convey the difference in meanings of messages depending on the channel through which they are transmitted. Medium theorists argue that media are not simply channels for transmitting information between environments, but are themselves distinct social-psychological settings or environments that encourage certain types of interaction and discourage others.
Lance A. Strate is an American writer and professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University. He was the 2015 Margaret E. and Paul F. Harron Endowed Chair in Communication at Villanova University, and in 2016 lectured at the School of Journalism and Communication at Henan University, in Kaifeng China.
Slow reading is the intentional reduction in the speed of reading, carried out to increase comprehension or pleasure. The concept appears to have originated in the study of philosophy and literature as a technique to more fully comprehend and appreciate a complex text.
Joshua Meyrowitz is a professor of communication at the department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. He has published works regarding the effects of mass media, including No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, an analysis of the effects various media technologies have caused, particularly television.
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology is a book by Neil Postman published in 1992 that describes the development and characteristics of a "technopoly". He defines a technopoly as a society in which technology is deified, meaning “the culture seeks its authorisation in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology”. It is characterised by a surplus of information generated by technology, which technological tools are in turn employed to cope with, in order to provide direction and purpose for society and individuals.
The information–action ratio was a concept coined by cultural critic Neil Postman in his work Amusing Ourselves to Death. In short, Postman meant to indicate the relationship between a piece of information and what action, if any, a consumer of that information might reasonably be expected to take once learning it.
The Plug-In Drug: Television, Children, And The Family is a book of social criticism written by Marie Winn and published in 1977 by Viking Press. In it, Winn brought the communications medium of television under withering fire, accusing it of wielding an addictive influence on the very young.
In television studies, B-television or B-TV is the term used as an analogy to "B-movie" to describe such traits of commercial television as shallowness, lack of originality, sensationalism, preponderance of escapist entertainment to serious news, personalization and dramatization.
