In general, the perception of media is such that, the first thing that people think of when they think of media is what they see on television, what they hear on the radio and the other visual attractions that are generally associated with the entertainment industry. In fact, that is only a very small proportion of what media actually contains, according to Marshal McLuhan media is anything that man can relate to any of his five different senses as well as the form of the media itself to convey the message to its public. There are several ways to think about the what media does to the world but media itself is simply a way to convey a message from one community to another.
Many things have evolved into the most efficient forms of their being over time, similarly, it can be thought that the definition of media through different media theorists could have evolved into the most efficient definition, from McLuhan's definitions in 1964 to Croteau and Hoynes' definition in 2003. Croteau and Hoynes delve into the actual word media and split it apart into its root forms to get a definition that seems the most accurate for our times. They find that "Media is the plural of medium" which is "derived from the Latin word medius, which means middle" (Croteau & Hoynes, 2003) and they come to the conclusion that media is nothing but the way of communicating a message and the transference occurs through the medium. In current times, this is the most prevalent in areas of business such as marketing and advertising, as well as the entertainment industry. Marketing and advertising is built on getting a message through to their target market or niche market in order for their product or service to be known and purchased. In order for them to accomplish this task they have to find the most effective way of communicating with their selected audience. In this modern world, the media is often exploited for monetary benefit, there are numerous examples where by using a medium, communities have been helped in certain situations, the UN uses mediums to create awareness and many different other NGO's use mediums to create awareness and ask for assistance. Therefore, Media is combination of ways to convey a message across to different communities of people, as defined by Croteau and Hoynes.
Nearly 5000 years ago, the world was granted a sacred religious text called the Vedas. "The Vedas are the primary texts of Hinduism," (Sacred-Texts1) these are the texts that used to govern life in India thousands of years ago and these are the religious guidelines everyone usually adheres to. The way the Vedas were born was that the Hindu priests used to believe that they heard the prayers from around their lives. They used to hear it in the wind, they used to hear it when they prayed, and soon enough they were learning these new prayers through their sense of hearing. Through their sense of hearing they used to say the prayers, transferring from one sense to another. Marshal McLuhan's perception of media contains the method in which the Hindu priests were able to learn the sacred Hindu prayers because "Media [are] the extensions of Man." (McLuhan 1964) and therefore Man uses the extensions of himself, his senses, to absorb any and all messages that are transferred to him and around him. Also, McLuhan's second perception of media was that "the medium is the message" (McLuhan 1964) and the Vedas, the message, were the medium through which they were created because the medium was the sound that was heard, which was the prayers, and the prayers were the sound, therefore the Vedas (the prayer) was the message.
Croteau and Hoynes have the most efficient definition of media that encompasses all its uses in the modern world and the corporate world where mediums are used for entertainment and advertising, to create the well known word we know today, "The Media", while McLuhan gives perceptions of the media that are linked to everyday life where messages are passed through anything and everything, including our own body's senses. Therefore, media, simply put, is an information transfer highway where messages are sent and received through various different mediums.
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