“But Dad, I can’t stay without them!”
My daughter Judy and I had been yet again locked in the conflict over screen time, and we are now acquainted with many of today’s dads and moms and substantial others. We had turned an afternoon of errands into some father-daughter time with some fun diversions, and I was hoping she might emerge from her monitors long enough for us to experience it.
Although her plea became not as heartfelt as Nilsson’s 1971 power hit, “Without You,” Judy was quite critical of no longer being able to live without her screens.
My oft-rehearsed “don’t be so dramatic” speech turned into on the tip of my tongue when it hit me: perhaps she is proper. With me at the back of the wheel and her at the back of a display, we had results easily checked off errand after errand, leaving us with greater time to comprehend our day together.
Pocket-sized portals to pervasive media
Judy got directions through Waze, checked store hours with Google, compared charges for a hairdryer she needed on Amazon, observed a great taco vicinity for lunch through Yelp, helped me install a brand new key fob battery with YouTube, searched LinkedIn to advise her brother on resume access, crammed a prescription at CVS.Com, selected a film and theater on Fandango and amused us in the course of together with her friends’ Instagram posts and my Facebook feed.
Without our digital media monitors, we probably could have spent most of the day on the smartphone with diverse customer support representatives, pouring through newspaper opinions, traveling retail region after region (arriving at times too early or too late), and grumbling simultaneously.
If we now depend a lot on displays as people, can we function without them?
Our smartphones and tablets are cellular portals to the virtual media realm, where tools and resources traditionally found in separate spheres are brought together under a single roof. Though media has long played a role in particular social interactions, digital media consolidates nearly all social alternate domains in a previously unthinkable manner.
In the virtual age, media is not merely the realm of entertainment or records; it’s now pervasive, touching each element of our being, from how we live to how we work, play, speak, connect—and even discover love. We literally can’t live without media.
But wait, what precisely is media?
“Media” (sing. Medium) is derived from the Latin word Medius, which means “middle.”
Even in these days’ digitally-pushed utilization, this connotation persists: media are the creative and bodily infrastructure that connects content material, manufacturers, and clients. Media can be more granularly understood as a mediation procedure, whose tiers regularly encode, after which decode content material “programs” as they circulate from manufacturer to customer.
Imagine writing a letter with your hand, placing it in an envelope, and sending it (loopy, right?). You take your thoughts and turn them into written phrases, which you package in a shape the postal service can deliver. The recipient must then invert the process: opening the envelope to read the letter and decoding the written phrases back into the notion.
Though undoubtedly more complicated, all media undertake a similar challenge. It configures content to be correctly transferred to and fed via the recipient. Variations of this procedure have facilitated alternate leisure and information for millennia, but the last century’s era-driven shifts profoundly multiplied media’s function in society.
Back in the day, media turned into just for fun!
Since the beginning of history, media has acted almost completely as an automobile for data and amusement, playing a novel and discrete role in people’s everyday lives. The earliest testimonies enthralled their audiences and imparted social values—much as they did later through community primetime—even as town criers. In the end, newspapers kept people informed.
