Reflection Series: Critical Thinking

Moving on to the next topic of the CDLC001 course is Critical Thinking.

In week 2 we were introduced to digital publishing, such as building a website on Wix to prepare for our assignment, discussing the media culture and the definition of culture in cultural studies, exploring media ecology and lastly, the media effects that clarifies the connections between media, culture and technology as they have certain impacts to one another.

The term culture is broad and complex as people shape their identities and societies through creation and reproductions, and media culture is a new form of culture that also includes in the process of forming the society and a person’s uniqueness, according to Kellner (2020). Based on Kellner’s article (2020), we know that the media has been using multimodality to express and create the culture, and it is dominant in daily life in our society such as millions of people are active and using Youtube or Facebook everyday. However, the dominance of political ideologies on the media can affect the media users so they should be educated about media culture in order not to be manipulated in their thinking.

Moreover, we approached the concept of media ecology. We learnt to see the media as an environment with different elements that layers on top of each other, just the same as nature, which creates an ecosystem. Through the definitions of media ecology of Hearn and Forth and Neil Postman, we understand that it contains different layers and the affection of the media on human beings as a communication tool. Then, the link connects with the last bit of content, which is the media effects and the proposal of the connection between media, culture and technology. The Tetrad Analysis of McLuhan was introduced through Islas (2016) reading so that we are able to analyse a new medium or mode of communication as these new inventions can propose a change in society and culture as well.

Reference:

1. Kellner, D. (2020). Introduction to Media Culture. Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity, and Politics in the Contemporary Moment, 1-6. Routledge.

2. Islas, O. (2016). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), the foundations of Marshall McLuhan’s tetrad. Explorations in Media Ecology, volume 15(1), 81-91.