Overview of English Language & Multimedia Communication: Media, Modes, & Changes Over Time, Appunti di Lingua Inglese

Scarica Overview of English Language & Multimedia Communication: Media, Modes, & Changes Over Time e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! Lesson #1 ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND MULTIMEDIA COMMUNICATION  COMMUNICATION o Somebody (producer) who sends a message to somebody else (receiver) -- to do that we need a channel that establishes a contact between the two agents (text producer and text receiver) and a code (English language + visual code, especially used in different types of media)  MULTIMEDIA = literally “many media” o “Media” = plural of Latin medium: it means the physical channel or technical system through which messages are transmitted to people so that they interact one another and with the world around them ex. Print media (such as newspaper or magazines or broadcasts) -- “Institutions of communication” (like the newspaper or the radio…) with their own conventions of producing texts of different types: - mass media: whose technicalities allow for the delivery of messages to a large amount of people (one to many address) - digital media (computer or web mediate communication): allows different types of address o “Multimedia”: can be paraphrased as the discourse of various media sources/outlets (we can refer to their processes and products: the different types of texts that we can obtain thanks to the “institutions of communication”) with traditional and new hybrid forms of communication brought about by technological innovation - there is another definition that links it to computing and refers to the use of sounds, pictures, and text on the screen, but these are modes (set of semiotic resources or codes for meaning making: they contribute meaning to a message) rather than media  we can have different types of modes… 1. Linguistic mode: through the written/spoken word 2. Visual mode: through images, diagrams, colors, dimension… 3. Audio/oral mode: it manifests itself through the rhythm of music, or volume of the voice etc. 4. Gesture mode: we can communicate a lot of things through the facial expression 5. Spatial mode: it has to do with the arrangement of objects and space (like the layout of a page or the organization of the images of a page) 5. (due to recent developments in technology) Haptic mode: related to the sense of touch, w/ different types of vibration = Different modes may be used in different types of media at the same time o Media are the physical source that make communication possible through the use of different modes/semiotic resources/codes MEDIUM  MODES - ex. medium of the Radio: spoken word, sound effects, music (= audio/oral mode that convey a meaning) - ex Photograph: images, color, if people are included we can have the posture or the facial expression (=visual mode) - ex. Newspaper: written words, colors, presence of pictures, layout etc. (= visual mode) - ex. Television: moving images, spoken & written words, music, sounds, gesture if people are involved = these are different examples of media and the different modes that can be used in each case  The “INTERNET REVOLUTION” has: 1. increased media convergence, making more possible to use different types of media and devices at the same time  exemplified by multiple media integration into single devices, like the smartphones which combines camera, web browser etc. + we can think to news websites, which combines features of print newspapers, but we can also think to news proposed through television 2. moved media language towards multimodal kinds of textual organization: it is often the case that different modes combine and function together  contemporary multimedia communication has become highly multimodal  MEDIA ACROSS TIME : important watersheds whenever a major event happens it always brings about consequences for societies and the way people interact with one another and relate to the world o writing (invention that dates back to the 3200 BC) altered the way of communicating information: passage from context linked to the oral modality to more decontextualized settings, allowing for a communication with people over long distances + time (writing  preservation of documents across centuries) o Invention of printing in China and development of moveable type of the printing press in Europe in the 15th century (advent of the so called “print media”, which allowed to the communication of the information to a larger number of people in an easier way): - regarded by some scholars as the cause for the rise of Reformation in Europe back in the 16th Century - regarding the English language, the printing press was one of the causes for the genesis of the first dictionaries, which enabled the standardization of the language: fixing the type of spelling that had to be used as a modal in the official documents  first real dictionary of English by Samuel Johnson (published in 1755), based on a collection of authentic language (= quotations from the famous scholar literary authors of the preceding Century) o electronic media (like the television): enabled people to communicate over a distance in real time and to a large number of people at the same time o digital media (computer, smartphone…): which started in the 20th Century and reached the major achievements in the 21th and has given us the possibility of accessing the information from anywhere and at any time, allowing a new kind of interaction through the web  with web 2.0, media consumers have had the ability to create their own content Media changes over the last 20 years exemplified by … 1. the general decrease in print media vs increase in social media use, largely based on the visual mode instead 2. emotions of serious news outlets, intended as coming from professionals, so based on professional standards, in favor of the so called “citizen journalism” in which everybody can become a source of information (positive but also negative aspects to be considered)  search for truth in the news has been overshadowed by the marketing-oriented-logic of what is appealing, interesting, entertainment = media outnumbered by many sources of fake news  MEDIA MATERIALITIES o AFFORDANCES: things that media features allow people to do ex. portability: some devices are like an appendix of the human body, because of their size o CONSTRAINTS: limitations imposed to our actions ex. screen size of a certain device, which represents a limitation if the size is really small ex. characters limit in text messaging or twitter o Media materialities affect media text in different ways: 1. what we communicate and the modes we can use in each case (emergency: we use sth like an instant messages app rather than an e-mail) 2. whom we communicate with, how many people we can reach at the same time (communication one to one/individualized, one to many/centralized, many to many)