As a media ecologist, Marshall McLuhan’s main claim is that the media through which we contact reality actually exert effects on our perceptions of that reality. For this essay, you, much like McLuhan did in The Medium is the Massage, will be charting those effects for a certain topic that is currently relevant in the realm of media studies.
For this essay, you will create an argument that describes and analyzes the effects of media on one or more of the following cultural aspects:
This list is not exhaustive, so you can choose another topic as long as it has current news stories being charted in popular or alternative news outlets (beware of fake news and conspiracy theories!). You can choose to chart and examine the progression of the effects on one of these aspects over multiple media or through a single medium. For example, a paper can address how society treats sexual harassment in the internet age OR it can address how society’s treatment of sexual harassment has changed during the transition from old media to new media.You may also find that analysis of one of these areas requires you to analyze another, e.g. perhaps you want to argue that fake news has its roots in the emergence of reality TV as a mainstream genre, so “mission creep” is admissible. As the subtitle from The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects suggests, you will be trying to accomplish the same as McLuhan was in this text: charting the effects of media, tracing their causes from the composition of those media and speculating about the societal consequences.
There will be two major parts of the essay:
Requirements
The following are MANDATORY guidelines. Not following any one of them will lose you 5 pts.: