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It’s just the matter of time. Sooner or later, what we are up to right now, will move into newer things and culture. However, this culture will be still being categorized as “Pop Culture”.

Here’s a short description about Pop Culture from wikipedia : -

“Popular culture (commonly abbreviated as pop culture) is the totality of distinct memes, ideas, perspectives and attitudes that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture. Heavily influenced by mass media (at least from the early 20th century onward) and perpetuated by that culture’s vernacular language, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of the society. Popular culture is often viewed as being trivial and “dumbed-down” in order to find consensual acceptance throughout the mainstream. As a result of this perception, it comes under heavy criticism from various scientific and non-mainstream sources (most notably religious groups and countercultural groups) which deem it superficial, consumerist, sensationalist and corrupted.

It is manifest in preferences and acceptance or rejection of features in such various subjects as cooking, clothing, consumption, and the many facets of entertainment such as sports, music, film and literature. Popular culture often contrasts with a more exclusive, even elitist “high culture”, that is, the culture of ruling social groups. The earliest use of “popular” in English was during the fifteenth century in law and politics, meaning “low”, “base”, “vulgar”, and “of the common people”; from the late eighteenth century it began to mean “widespread” and gain in positive connotation. (Williams 1985). “Culture” has been used since the 1950s to refer to various subgroups of society, with emphasis on cultural differences.”‘

In fact, people recently are being shaped from the mass media, that gradually transforming one culture to the other, up-to-date culture. I think it’s a good thing to being up-to-date. However, excessively, and too fond of the culture might not be something good. It’s still best for people to be  moderate all the time.

Our job on that day was to hand in our assignment. After the submission, we all went to have our brunch before attending the Maths class.

I have to admit that media imperialism is too powerful that it has the power to shape one’s mindset. It has to be used correctly, else divergence would occur and things may turn out nasty. We should expose ourselves more to what is real, what is the thing behind the scene, behind what we could see usually. Luckily, we have internet these days, that actually providing us  another chance to expose to things that usually could not be controlled by the government.

Part 3 of the documentary was “Shadow in the cave”. It was about Bush, ex-president of the USA, creating a fake impression that all Afghans are terrorists, and also using that to siege war on Afghanistan. He was controlling the media, could not stop repeating the incident of 911 to the Americans, causing them to worry and fear of terrorism. Hence, forming a special unit that anti terrorism, performing the anti terrorism campaigns throughout the United States. 

Not only that, he was assuming that Osama was on the Memo Cave in Afghanistan. He claimed that Osama’s base was at Memo Cave.  That special force even illustrated the cave and saying that Osama and his troops were storing ammos and foods in that cave.  Ordering soldiers to conquer the mountain, and bombing any cave that the soldiers saw was all he could do.  

In fact, he was chasing something that doesn’t even exist. Sacarstically, nothing was found on the cave, and in fact, all the caves found and bombed at that particular mountain, none has what he claimed to be true on the media.

I had done some researches on Media Prima Berhad. One thing I found out was it isn’t just a simple company that owns the media, but they are involving in stocks as well.

You can have a look on their website - http://www.mediaprima.com.my/

Using the Tetrad of media effects by Marshall McLuhan, I am going to explain how internet affects us.

1. What does the medium(internet) enhance?

– Internet itself is an advanced technology with almost no delay in transferring information and data amongst the users. It could update information in just a blink of time; it allows messages to be sent across spontaneously; and it is cheap until almost free. 

2. What does the medium(internet) make obsolete?

– With its speed, and fees, people opt internet instead of using telephone calls, mailing, buying newspapers, and etc. Most of all, with current technology, voice over internet protocol, allows people to see each other through the internet and speak to each other spontaneously, which apparently, telephone calls would not allow people to do that. Practically, internet kills telephone.

3. What does the medium(internet) retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?

– Telegraph, Morse code, Older version of telephone, radio, casette recorder are the media that had been obsolesced after the presence of internet.

4. What does the medium(internet) flip into when pushed to extremes?

Web 1.0 fliped into Web 2.0 which is a perceived second generation of web development and design, that facilitates communication, secure information sharing,interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.

 ”Generally speaking, a tetrad is any set of four things. In Laws of Media (1988) and The Global Village (1989), published posthumously,Marshall McLuhan summarized his ideas about media in a concise tetrad of media effects. The tetrad is a means of examining the effects on society of any technology/medium (put another way: a means of explaining the social processes underlying the adoption of a technology/medium^[1]) by dividing its effects into four categories and displaying them simultaneously. McLuhan designed the tetrad as a pedagogical tool, phrasing his laws as questions with which to consider any medium:

1. What does the medium enhance?
2. What does the medium make obsolete?
3. What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier?
4. What does the medium flip into when pushed to extremes?

The laws of the tetrad exist simultaneously, not successively or chronologically, and allow the questioner to explore the “grammar and syntax” of the “language” of media. McLuhan departs from his mentor Harold Innis in suggesting that a medium “overheats”, or reverses into an opposing form, when taken to its extreme.^[2]

Visually, a tetrad can be depicted as four diamonds forming an X, with the name of a medium in the center. The two diamonds on the left of a tetrad are the Enhancement and Retrieval qualities of the medium, both Figure qualities. The two diamonds on the right of a tetrad are theObsolescence and Reversal qualities, both Ground qualities.^[3]

• Enhancement (figure): What the medium amplifies or intensifies. For example, radio amplifies news and music via sound.
• Obsolescence (ground): What the medium drives out of prominence. Radio reduces the importance of print and the visual.
• Retrieval (figure): What the medium recovers which was previously lost. Radio returns the spoken word to the forefront.
• Reversal (ground): What the medium does when pushed to its limits. Acoustic radio flips into audio-visual TV.”

Hot & Cool Media

“In the first part of Understanding Media, McLuhan also stated that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be “hot”, intensifying one single sense “high definition”, demanding a viewer’s attention, and a comic book to be “cool” and “low definition”, requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.^[39]

“Any hot medium allows of less participation than a cool one, as a lecture makes for less participation than a seminar, and a book for less than a dialogue.” ^[40]

Hot media usually, but not always, provide complete involvement without considerable stimulus. For example, print occupies visual space, uses visual senses, but can immerse its reader. Hot media favour analytical precision, quantitative analysis and sequential ordering, as they are usually sequential, linear and logical. They emphasize one sense (for example, of sight or sound) over the others. For this reason, hot media also include radio, as well as film, the lecture and photography.

Cool media, on the other hand, are usually, but not always, those that provide little involvement with substantial stimulus. They require more active participation on the part of the user, including the perception of abstract patterning and simultaneous comprehension of all parts. Therefore, according to McLuhan cool media include television, as well as the seminar andcartoons. McLuhan describes the term “cool media” as emerging from jazz and popular music and, in this context, is used to mean “detached.” (See: CBC Radio Archives)

This concept appears to force media into binary categories. However, McLuhan’s hot and cool exist on a continuum: they are more correctly measured on a scale than as dichotomous terms.^[6]“

^{Source: wikipedia.org}

Through the tetrad of media effects, you can consistently question yourself how media involves from ancient times to current times. What had obselete and what haven’t yet continues its evolution. 

Media evolves through the affects of surrounding, time and social. They are like human civilization. None of them could evolve in a blink of time. Everything happens slowly, and gradually, involving every single detail from time to time.

This topic isn’t easy, and requires an in depth analysis, and critical thinking in order to understand it.