In William Merrin’s blog post Studying Me-dia: the Problem of Method in a Post- Broadcast age he puts a great focus on contrasting the methods which are problematic today vs. things that were not so problematic pre-broadcast age.
He labels and explains each of the problems of…
Volume
Dispersal
Ephemerality
Access
Discovery
Content
Ethics
Production
Audience
Generalisability
Accumulation
Before last weeks lecture I would not have thought to raise any issue with what message was being presented by this post.
But what was raised to us is that he doesn’t acknowledge the fact that we don’t always have a choice in what kind of media we consume. This initiated my thought that we all like to believe we have the ability to choose or often expect the ability to choose what media we consume, but this isn’t always the case.
As Merrin suggests the media out there today compared to a pre-broadcast age has highly increased and this media is often private media, expressed through personal messages or private pages. Not only is there lots of media content but he explains this media content as ephemeral- meaning it exists only briefly before it is replaced something else or forgotten.
This not only makes it hard to track the media content, but it also makes it hard to control what media we do in fact consume. This brings me to my final point of noticing.
We often don’t even notice the media that we are immersed in as we are often the ones producing it. This is why we often don’t have the ability to choose what we consume and to assume that we do would be ignoring a very large aspect of method in the post broadcast age.