Post Modern Style of Mass Communication Essay Example

Post Modern Style of Mass Communication Essay Example Post Modern Style of Mass Communication Essay Post Modern Style of Mass Communication Essay This paper discusses about the changing styles of mass communication with the advancement of technology. The paper traces the evolution of mass media from primitive times to the ultramodern techno savvy modern media of mass communication along with the progression of stylistics of presentation, language, content. For the sake of convenience the history of mass media is divided into five stages viz. Pre-printing media, Print media, Radio Films, Television Ultramodern Media. All these media have developed their own style of communication with masses and technology was instrumental for this change. Prologue Communication is an inevitable aspect of life. And each living being has its own style of communication. Human communication is the most complex out of all these communications. Technology added to it made it more effective, rapid, and continuous with the wide reach. Development of language was the most essential factor of human civilisation. Certainly language proves to be an important medium of human communication. Primitive civilisations had developed the techniques to communicate to the large number of people but those techniques were fundamentally the techniques of group communication, till the invention of printing technology. Printing technology was responsible to start the new genus of communication titled mass communication. Experiments on sound and transmission of sound waves from one corner of the world to another opened the new horizons to mass communication. These gradual progressions helped the mankind to evolve with new civilisation and life style which we name as information era. It is really interesting to plot and study the graph of technological development of mass communication and its co-relation with the changing styles of communication. Hence the author has selected this topic for her paper presentation. The word Style is defined in various ways. The dictionary meaning is as follows: Style: i. A kind or sort especially in regard to appearance and form; ii. A manner of writing or speaking or performing; iii. The distinctive manner of a person or school or period, especially in relation to painting, architecture, furniture, dress, etc. ; iv. The correct way of designating a person or thing; A superior quality or manner; v. A particular make, shape, or pattern[1] Similarly Stylistics[2] is defined as: The study of literary style. A branch of modern linguistics devoted to the detailed analysis of literary style, or of the linguistic choices made by speakers and writers in non-literary contexts. Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose (1996)[3]. The term Mass Communication is referred to as: A process in which professional communicators use media to disseminate message widely, rapidly and continuously to arouse intended meanings in large diverse audience in attempt to influence them in a variety of ways. 4] While reviewing the above definitions it is clear that without developing specific styles the professional communicators cannot communicate with masses. The author went through the history of media development and deduced some interesting result. For the sake of convenience she divided the time period into five slots: Pre-printing era, Printing era, Radio and Films era, Television Era and Post Modern Era of Interactive Media. The Th eme The medium is the integral part of communication process hence important element of media study. The medium plays key role in defining the form, pattern and style of the message to be communicated. With the evolution of human race the expression and communication styles vary along with the medium used. The brief account of the above phenomenon is given below. Pre-printing media: The folk media were the only means of group communication then. The genera of mass communication were missing in the society. These folk media were without any technology and the tradition of verbal communication was very strong. Therefore, the era gave first preference to language as it was the only mean of communication to allure the public. It helped in developing language as a basic and fundamental skill of human socio-psyche. Syntax, grammar, etymology, phonetics and other aspects of linguistics evolved. Vocabulary Synonyms, antonyms, idioms and phrases, spellings were the most important elements of this skill. Among all these folk media Drama is the most popular one even today. If it is considered as an example of group media without technology then the style followed by it is referred to as four dimensional style of communication. The stage where the drama is performed has length, breadth and height, the sets and the property used also have these three dimensions and the artistes performing too. The fourth dimension is the time. The artistes and the audience share the same time frame and hence the style of communication is the Four Dimensional one. All the live performances predominantly follow this style. Secondly the total body of the presenter speaks in the presentation along with the stage ambience, costume and drapery, the proximics among co-artistes and audience, usage of stage, set property, timing. The style of these media involves both the performers and the audience as it gives a wholistic approach. Print media: Around 1040, the first known movable type system was created in China by Bi Sheng out of porcelain. Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg introduced what is regarded as an independent invention of movable type in Europe (see printing press), along with innovations in casting the type based on a matrix and hand mould. Gutenberg was the first to create his type pieces from an alloy of lead, tin and antimony – the same components still used today. 5] The print media are the language dependent media which further helped the languages to have concrete and formal development. The added the elegance and richness to the lingual expressions and literary glitterati. The style used in the lingual interaction was very flowery, well-designed, robust and more descriptive. Thus style was of slow, lengthy and specious. The print media used various genera for expression of thoughts, the style used was very serious as regard to precision and placement of words which was precisely non-personal in nature. The writer and the reader have one to one communication without sharing the time and meeting each other. The process of codification and concretization took place during this phase of time. Print media especially the newspaper took up a peculiar style for news writing which labeled as ‘Inverted Pyramid Style of Writing’. The most important point is the to be focused first and the least important at the last. This is exactly opposite of story telling where climax appears at the last. Inclusion of 5 ‘Ws’ who, where, when, what, why and 1 ‘H’ how are to be answered in the news and stick to them. Now with the profuse growth of electronic media i. e. News Channels the element ‘I’ means impact of the event is also mentioned in the news report. No verbosity and extra information is to be included is the golden rule followed by the news writers. Phrases like ‘information received from reliable resources or as reported by so and so news agency.. conflict between two racial groups etc. ’ are frequently in use. The news reports are the factual reports written with precision, clarity, accuracy and brevity with out any ambiguity and mystery. The first paragraph of the news is known as ‘intro’. The stalwarts of news reporting developed various styles of ‘intro’ e. g. bullet intro, summery intro, figurative intro, quotation intro, descriptive intro etc. [6] Radio Films: The media which took over next were truly technology based and definitely revolutionary in nature. The miracle to transmit voice from one part of the earth to another was possible due to the uninterrupted efforts of physicists like Graham Bell, Jagdish Chandra Bose, Morse, Herzt Marconi, etc. The first ever techno-based medium was audio and thus again verbal communication was stressed upon. Since it was advanced as regard to that time period it had elite, urban and sophisticated monotonous style. Only monologue, standardized, formal language symbols were in use although the radio professionals pretended to be colloquial in lingual usage. This was also a non-personal presentation based on phonetics, voice modulation, diction and clarity. Using microphone with best efficiency and efficacy with the time bound presentation, were the essential qualification and here starts the blending of technology in the mass communication process. Phrases like ‘due to some unavoidable reasons we are unable to. or this is So So station and you are listening to. you were just listening to . ’ were repeatedly in use creating monotony. Encompassing all the subjects to cater to all the listeners the radio had adopted its own style of presentation through audio images only. Thus the styled can be named as Audio Imagery style of presentation. Cinema: The first non personal audio-visual presentation with the help of motion pictures was magic of science and art together. A two dimensional medium projected on the screen had bigger images never seen before. The ideas that can be transformed into visual images are presented visually and the rest verbally. The words have less to narrate, hence language, for the first time in the history of communication became secondary in nature. Audio-visual presentation made the things easy to say but complex to present. Being the director’s medium, cinema soon became the most popular medium in the communication story. ‘Writing in motion’ is the most commonly used term for cinema. Every director molded the medium in his own style by camera angles, movements, dialogues, sequence, music and back-ground score, location and editing. Apart from the directorial style cinema has ‘Larger Than Life Audio Visual Imagery’ style which is found as common characteristic of the medium. A stereotypical example of Indian Cinema in 40s and 50s is – not showing the death of the character directly on the screen but symbolizing it with the extinguishing flame of the oil lamp due to the blow of storming wind coupled with a sad tune of string instrument like violin or sarangi and human scream. The visual image of the extinguished lamp and the audio of stormy wind plus sad tune and human scream together facilitate the director to tell the audience about the sad demise of the character in a very subtle and aesthetically strong way. This audio-visual feel is certainly more universal and general than that of literary feel thus named as ‘larger than life audio visual imagery’. Television: The small screen is the true modern mass communication medium. The medium which is available inside the home, can provide audio-visual information wrapped in the entertainment and most important, it is user friendly. The 24 hrs access to TV transmission is another main facet to make this medium the most popular one. Every strata of the society is hooked by this ‘idiot box’ for its never ending entertainment programmes. Although cinema and TV both are audio visual media the technology differs. Cinema is the projection medium, serious in nature. The audience have to make up their minds to go to the theatre, buy the tickets and sit in the chair for nearly 3 hrs with one interval of about 5 to 10 minutes, whereas, TV is the transmission medium, and very casual in nature. Apart from the technological differences, style of presentation is also different. Both the media are Two dimensional but the aspect ratio of the dimensions differ hence the style. TV is a close-up medium and it is also referred to as editor’s medium. It has a short lived effect and the approach of the audience towards this medium is very informal. Many a times TV programmes provide background score and nothing much. At the same time the ambience in which TV is watched is almost the same for each family as the decor is changed hardly once a year or so. Thus to avoid monotony external appearance of this medium more and more excitement is inserted in the content of the TV programmes. The efforts put in to create excitement do not prove to be successful every time leading it to non-serious, superficial presentation. The speed of transmission had added new dimension to the style of TV presentation. The private channels especially news channels using satellites for telecasting their programmes had developed BBC and American style of news presentation. Indian news-casters follow American style of news-casting which is predominantly focusing on shallow issues blown up disproportionately with unwanted repetitive details told in crispy language and loud tone. Purity of language and selection of words are at stake. For example to create excitement for hooking the audience and keeping them glued to the same news-channel, the words which were used only in emergency like breaking news, exclusive news are being used so often that these words lost their importance in the journalistic parlance. The style of entertainment channels is glossy, gaudy and extravagant visuals of rich and high class society with cliche scene and dialogues aimed to propagate consumerist approach of life style. Market forces and materialistic trends coated in the Indian culture, add to the formation of this strange style. Most of the time communication of the content is the prime concern and not the language, therefore, usage of words borrowed from English are frequently found in almost all the genera of Television programmes of vernacular languages. The presenters of Phone in Programmes and even news-casters use the language which apparently looks informal, friendly, colloquial giving a feel of closeness to the unknown listener or viewer but actually maintain distance. Thus the style can be referred to as ‘Pseudo-informative style’. Ultramodern Media: Internet and mobiles are the latest gadgets well equipped with modern technology. This technology is well accepted as Information Technology which makes all kinds of information gathering, processing and transporting feasible with finger stroke. The young generation who is proficient in using this technology is now living in information era. The information is flowing at the speed of light covering every nook and corner of the world. Both these gadgets are the interactive media and are responsible to make the whole society media dependent. The first and the most prominent impact of this post modern mass communication media is the changed life style. The people are well connected and well informed. Marshall McLuhan explained this phenomenon as ‘Information Explosion and Implosion. ’[7] The Internet is the most popular medium for information access as it provides the facility of random access and the individual can reach the desired topic within a very short span. The effect of this random access can be seen in the reference books also by the addition of subject index with bibliography. The impact of this facility can be observed as the people using it do not go through the whole text of the book or the webpage but directly reach the required point. It is certainly a time saving activity but one looses the opportunity to go through context and related information. The information is huge in quantity but in-depth knowledge and wisdom is in paucity. The language symbol usage is the at the minimal level as the visuals – graphics and animations are available in ready-to-use forms. The spellings like you, we, before, to, please, thank you are abbreviated to u, v, b4, 2 pl, tq and are so much in use that soon they will be seen in the formal correspondence as a regular feature. The usage of SMS is growing leaps and bounds and the users are habituated to express every thing into 160 characters only chopping off all the unnecessary alphabets. Use of emoticons for expressions [pic] = happy, [pic]= sad etc. is the latest style to use minimum symbols for maximum expression. To support the communication not only written words but also pictures, music and animated images are used in these multi media gadgets giving the opportunity to use all possible way to communicate with maximum delimitation. Thus this style can be referred to as ‘Delimiting Style’ of post modern communication. The Epilogue The inference of above discussion is put forward in brevity as The technology has deep and everlasting impact on the styles of communication especially mass communication. The style change is directly proportional to the change and advancement of technology. The mass communication in post modern era has turned out to be interactive communication in ‘Delimiting Style’ with usage of minimal language symbols in combination with audio and visual clips.