No Sense of Place/Youtube and You: Effect of electronic media on the understanding of self.

Wesch's description of his research in 2007 in the YouTube community of Vloggers points to a collective feeling of humanity and personhood, yet at the same time the act of vlogging can be understood as a "loose" tie to those one is communicating to. I say "to" because much of the time, importantly in this research, it is not that people are communicating "with" others, which suggests a more mutual form of interaction. Instead, this media allows for a feeling of shared human experience much like the feeling one gets when watching a reality television show or delving into the personal lives of celebrities. The exciting range of emotions that come with sharing deeply personal and private thoughts are attainable without having to risk loosing one's public "face", the way others see them and their actions.

I read chapter 2 of Joshua Meyrowitz's book "No Sense of Place", in which he discusses what he refers to as "medium" theory in the context of media environments and social changes. This theory is "a more historical and cross-cultural approach to communication technologies" (pg.16)
and understands the importance of the characteristics of a particular media itself rather than only focusing of information conveyed via certain media. I love his analogy between the study of the industrial revolution and the new electronic media now so pervasive in our everyday lives. Meyrowitz says: "Few who have studied the effects of the industrial revolution, for example, would claim that the only important things to study are the specific goods that the new machines produced".

This analogy is great because it looks at electronic communications media today and relates it to something that we still study in the social sciences using more of the "medium" theory. Social scientists must apply an integrative approach to understanding cultural and societal changes related to new digital media, just as they have for every major technological revolution that has taken a new place in history. In both of these readings it is argued that as new media are applied in the world, they don't just simply replace other mediums of communication, but they create something entirely different, which must be studied on those new terms of interaction, yet still understanding how they got there in the first place (a holistic description).

Most importantly for my research is that by looking at the history of technological change, and thus media development, we can see that with each revolution comes drastic changes in communication and culture, and that the next media to come along is remarkably more complex than its predecessors, integrating them into a "database" of collective human knowledge (that was only for the the educated). Now, our media technology has so much surpassed everything we had before, that nearly anyone has access to all of our knowledge. This is not something that could about if we simply invented fresh new media tools and said "good day" the old ones. It IS something that comes from a collective, historical building of media technology that integrates what we knew before and morphs it all into something that fits our most recent developments.