Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Few would deny media's increasingly central role in the everyday lives of most individuals, particularly in first and second world countries. And increasingly, few would deny media's rhetorical influence in how people come to understand themselves and those around them. News media shape the way individuals see their communities as well as those on the other side of the planet (→  news ). Television sitcoms offer representations of individual characters that frame how one sees others of differing national, ethnic, or economic backgrounds (→  Situation Comedies ). Movies offer narratives filled with violence and crime, which often leads people to overestimate the occurrence of such acts in real life (→  Cultivation Effects ). Media play a central role in shaping the way many people perceive themselves and the world around them (→  Media Effects ; Media and Perceptions of Reality ). In →  rhetorical studies , media have been most commonly understood as technologically mediated forms of communication. This way of defining media places an emphasis on media such as →  Photography , →  Radio , →  Television , film (→  Cinema ), and the →  Internet. The primary reason for these media being seen as differing from other types of media is the basic assumption that the technology somehow alters communication in fundamental ways, something that the German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1968) ... log in or subscribe to read full text