The traditional ecosphere of media is one of consumption, response, and making. In the past, responses were isolated yet global, and making was a private affair for publication. Today, response to media has become another form of media production, breaking out of television and radio into the domain of video on the internet, made possible through democratized tools of making that have migrated from corporate media into the realm of homemade media. Response to events, news stories, entertainment, politics, and consumerism have made the current of mass media, more amplified, and therefore more massive in terms of reproducing subjects and increasing the possibilities of information flow.


There is another kind of response to media activity - media studies. The response that comes from Media Studies, are academics, who coolly remove themselves from the real world, to study the character of society, technology, and communication as type of philosophy. When the field of Media Studies was new and bourgeoning in the 1960’s, it’s collective response in the arts and humanities was in the form of essays, exhibitions, lectures, and documentary film/video. Today the field still exists but is arguably struggling to keep up with the impact of emerging technologies, information networks, and the flood of publication. The task of responding to systems of communication and media consumption, has become an assault on all sides through mobile devices, online platforms, and production driven by consumerism. What then has media studies achieved when so much production still perpetuates a reality that is informed out of late-stage capitalism? Media studies dialogue is somewhere between hard and soft science, certainly interdisciplinary, but not easily known. The level of response by Media Studies scholars is theoretical. Media theory is run on a circuit for only some interested parties interested in the dynamics of media and communications to some ends.


What then is media theory for? Who is media theory for anyway?

The technical lens of experts (engineers, public relations, and marketers) view media as production: print, recording, transmission, UI/UX, etc. Engineers consider the circuitry, wiring, and mechanisms for devices, programs, and processes used for designing and creating discrete messages in the form of electronic image and sound. Communications experts examine media in terms of campaign performance, metrics, viewership or listernership in a wholistic approach in terms of sending messages through mass media. The technical gadgetry and utility for understanding of media are knowing the circumstances and modes for achieving fast, efficient, and optimal deliverance of well designed media, created by professionals and enthusiasts alike.
 

Media Theory on the other hand are the inquiries and analysis that connect the technical aspect of media with the way media affect the real world. Theoreticians, critics, and creatives consider the effects that media content, formats, instruments, and systems have on the social fabric and ecology of societies, nations, institutions, and individuals. Theoretical analysis is often rendered in the form of written discourse by academic thinkers, whose views seek to comprehend the technological and social mechanisms that irreversibly alter the development on lived experience; culture, labor, and leisure. This frame work of looking at media as a real social force began with Marshal McLuhan whose views on understanding media were tied to literacy and technological transformation of messaging. McLuhan’s ideas were tied to the inability of human cognition for recognizing the altered state of content produced in a medium, because of invisibility of communication mediums. McLuhan also infamously noted that the technologically driven nature of humanity was the result of a reciprocal relationship between humans and our tools, endlessly shaping the other. Media theory is not just an explanation of what media are but what they do technologically and sociologically. Media theory (in theory) should always be an act for drawing attention to how certain modes of communication make us think, and change us by literally programming us.



Mass media was and still is an engineering of the masses. The masses were generated, when industrialization caused a new urban migration, and people began living in dense quarters. Guy Debord described in his book Society of the Spectacle, that a loss of public space and commons was replaced by the space of mass media. A new society in which people cannot not know everyone another required a new common area contained in the socialized space formed by radio, newspapers, magazines, movies, and television. The commodified image of products, leaders, performance, and celebrities united a new urbanized working class.  According to Debord also stated that this cruel and seemingly unjust replacement of cultural and physical connections was actually a necessity. That the making mass society was impossible without simultaneous control through an atomizing lived experienced in which manufactured experiences were enjoyed in private and then used to re-connect people with talk at a “water cooler.” But these realizations of control and lack of agency produce unpopular sentiments.


It is one thing to know the rules and another to state the presence of invisible rulers. We may be exposed to media and come under its influence regularly but surely it is still us, the individual mind, who is in control of our own decisions and destiny. We want to believe that ideology does not exist when it comes to media, since people do not like considering that their thoughts are not their own making. That individual actions are determined by the presence of technology and information streams of indexes, menus, diagrams, playback, and live broadcasts that engulf everyday experience. But if individuals and the whole or masses of society were to have a moment of realization – a mass epiphany about the system of control rendered through media, it would not provoke dismantlement. We are very dependent on mass communication as means of providing services, security, and knowledge, that we cannot break away from the governance of telecommunications and technocracy. Confronting the belief of control only results in frustration with the omnipresent power of information networks that are too big to understand. The observable resistance to media is a disbelief in faked information – and fundamental rejection of reality.


Media theory therefore is not useful to the average person. It does not enhance their engagement with media, it theorizing the implications and impact of media is too complex to be understood as an outside observer to media empires. The information networks of Television, Film, Radio, Publishing, Video Games, appear totally accessible through open information the Internet and its Websites, allowing users to toy around with digital tools. However, the advertisers, politicians, news moguls, entrepreneurs, and technocrats dislike that such knowledge be exposed. Media theory often scrutinizes enterprises that rely on media messaging. Private authority dislikes academic circles who draw awareness to the secrecy of power behind the communications done by the government and capitalist organizations. I feel that because of the dominance of media in connection to the power of government and industry, media theorists are always locking horns with the private power ownership of media and production. The powers that render capitalist messaging about consumerism, entertainment, politics, render such commodities as our only possible reality perpetualy.  


Media Theory it seems is firmly in the hands of intellectuals that derive ideas from the disciplines of the humanities, social sciences, the technical data of communications, and the artistry of filmmakers, animators, and media artists. These intellectuals historically, wanted to challenge the influence of mass media while rallying for independent creation of alternative media content. This mobius endeavor even includes architecture, ubiquitous computing, computer science, programming, and broadcasting. This movement for questioning the dominance of media also include the alternative lenses of Feminist, Marxist, Continental Philosophy, Theater, Dance, Music, and Literature are all absorbed into this mesh, since media can reproduce and re-present the other arts and sciences. Media theory is the greatest interdisciplinary undertaking because it is a discipline that mediates all forms of knowledge and allows us to inspect the process of mediation. This inspection would create an awareness of the changes to human perception when new technologies take over is also an awareness of control which McLuhan sought to make known.


However, the dream of breaking away from corporate and state media control has not happened through alternative methods of making media. Inquiry in past and present forms of media technology and democratized modes of creativity with digital tools have not carved out a resistance. In fact, the instructiveness of media, expands into more copying and making within the cultural language of a particular medium, as in the norms of certain platforms. Intellectual pursuits are most often just an end game of pleasurable imagining and conceptualizing life. Media theory is a certainly a pleasurable realm set aside for the specialists who are obsessed with reformations of communication technology. And thinkers who want to understand media to better develop persuasive messaging, that will sway thought and control action. It is a closed circle of study shared by activists and propagandists alike.


The masses do not need the theory to enjoy media, in the same way that a viewer does not need to know physics to enjoy the luminance of a sunset. Private industry and corporations do not need media theory since real engineering and marketing outperforms the flowery idealism of what media could be, and therefore create alternatives to unsettle capitalism through de-colonial, neo-Marxist, and critical theory. By revealing the influential effects of control be media, media theorists should aim to make systems of information a public utility. But at the same token, can media theory ever unseat the dominance of private ownership and control? Like other social sciences and humanities disciplines, media theory can make all the justifications for change by revealing systems of control and cultural dominance done through media production. Yet, the systems of power and control do not need to take into account the alternatives provided by media theorists. Who then is media theory for if we cannot enact what it really can do?