Skill Spotlight: Media

Skill Spotlight: Media

Defined

Media is the plural form of the word medium. A medium is a means of sending a communication to an intended audience. Throughout most of human history, people communicated through three main media: speech, drawing, and writing. But in the middle of the 19th century media options suddenly exploded. The invention of photography, and then the telegraph and the telephone, changed the world. Within a century, radio, motion pictures, and television followed.
 
Today new media are being invented at a much faster pace than ever before. We still see films in theaters, but now we also make our own videos with smartphones. We chat, we text, we tweet, and each of these forms of online communication has its own “language” and creates its own experience.
 
Meanwhile, our stories and ideas change as they are translated from one medium to another. For example, a dialogue between two characters in a novel becomes very different when it is delivered by actors in a film—with close-ups, sound effects such as music, and other elements unique to the medium of film itself. Consequently, examining and comparing how different media affect the content and ideas of our communications is a very important 21st-century skill.

Identification and Application:

• Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment.
• Identify the medium and its features.The same subject can receive completely different treatment in different media. Some media examples include:
  • Novels and short stories, which present a subject in the form of fiction.
  • Photography, drawing, sculpture, and painting, which present a subject through images manipulated by the artist.
  • Film, television, and theater, which rely on dialogue and images, as well as elements such as sound, lighting, and actors, to present a subject.
  • Animation, either live action or in the form of comics or graphic novels, which presents a story through text and artistically rendered panels or scenes.
• Determine if the content is informational—a lecture or a documentary, for example—or fictional. Some content, such as documentaries that include “re-enactments” of events, is both.
• Look for sources. A story about a historical event might refer, directly or indirectly, to letters, paintings, plays, or photographs from the same place and time as the event.
• To better understand how a subject is presented, identify what is emphasized and what is left out of each medium’s version of events.