What is the medium?

First, the word "media" is frequently used on many occasions. When people use this word in different environments, "media" will be given different meanings. It is very unwise to make a unified definition of the meaning of "media" in various situations. The famous scholar McLuhan said that "media is information", and he defined it from the perspective of users of media content. If we look at it from another angle, not from the audience's point of view, but from the communicator's point of view, we can define the media as follows: "Media is art", and the definition of art, like that of media, is a rich and controversial focus. The author once expressed the following views in his paper: "Art is a symbolic information transmission process." Art becomes art because it uses a unique symbol system. Art has a symbol system of art, music has a symbol system of music, and movies have a symbol system of film and television. At the same time, art is a process of information dissemination, in which artists encode information and appreciators decode it. From the perspective of art, "communication is an art", and from the perspective of communication, "art is a kind of communication". Professor Hu Zhifeng of China Communication University once put forward the concept of "art communication". Media not only includes many artistic styles in art, for example, newspapers include literary styles, radio includes musical styles, and television includes artistic and musical styles. The media itself is an artistic style, an independent art with a unique symbol system. The symbol system of media includes ideology, media economy, social effect and media ethics. Ideology is inevitable in the symbol system of the media, which is the superstructure of the economic base and is bound by the economic and political systems. Media has been industrialized in the wave of globalization, and culture has been used in business, and culture has begun to make a direct contribution to economic development. To survive, the media must consider economic issues. Social effects also play a role in the media economy to some extent, such as the level of ratings. However, social effect not only refers to people's behavior of receiving information, but also includes psychological effect and action effect after using media. The "reputation" that the media is very concerned about is often directly related to this. Media ethics is called "moral judgment" to some extent. When news events involve values, the media are often good at giving their own judgments. The above four symbols are artistically implied in the information spread by the media. The audience not only accepts the information itself, but also exerts a noticeable influence on the audience. The symbol system of media is the essence of media becoming art. They take news material as the carrier and transmit information outside the news text. This information is usually deep and is the "signified" contained in the symbol with "signifier". The media literacy of the audience determines the decoding process of information. The higher the media literacy, the more media art symbols are solved. Just as ordinary audiences and art critics appreciate a painting at the same time, art critics can often interpret more hidden information. The author believes that the improvement of media literacy should first understand the artistic symbol system of the media and have a clear understanding of how ideology, media economy, social effects and media ethics play a role in the communication process. Secondly, we should be an active audience, actively use the media, and effectively use the media to extend our senses, instead of passively accepting the bombardment of various media information. In the post-modern context, under the impact of foreign culture in the wave of globalization, when new media technologies are full of tricks, it is more difficult for people to find their own direction and are easily disturbed by bad information, so it is necessary to improve media literacy. Artistic interpretation of the media can effectively improve their insight into the media, become an active audience, and feed back our information to the communicators through the media to complete the "two-way flow" in the sense of communication. Of course, the improvement of media literacy depends on the individual cultural quality and cultural environment of the audience, and cultural research also has a unique position in media theory. Second, media and cultural media can be classified into the category of culture in the past social classification, and culture is often used side by side with politics and economy. What is culture? The definition of culture is also rich and colorful. In our discussion of the media, culture can be defined as: "the way of thinking and behavior with communication characteristics formed by people in social life." For example, China has tea culture. After entering the door, the host is polite and the guests think so, so this way of serving tea spreads a specific message. Culture has the characteristics of communication, which not only enables culture itself to spread in a society with the same culture, but also promotes the spread of information in line with this culture. If the media wants to spread information more effectively, it must understand the culture of the audience, because culture is spiritual to a certain extent and it affects people's cognitive style. Information stimulates people's senses, arouses people's perception and participates in people's consciousness. This series of psychological processes all project the shadow of culture. If the communication between the communicator and the audience is based on the same culture, then the communication will become easier, the sense of identity will be strengthened, the discourse style will be highly consistent, and the emotions will be easy to sing. From the perspective of artistic semiotics, culture is the catalyst for encoding and decoding. Culture is "water" to media, and media is "fish" to culture. The importance of culture has been discussed above, and the reaction of the media to culture is also very obvious. Water without fish lacks vitality, and the media provides a broad platform for the spread and exchange of culture. Let's not discuss whether there is culture or media. Let's talk about the role of electronic media in culture. First of all, electronic media has accelerated the spread and replacement of culture. For example, through various film and television works, it is difficult to understand the minority culture in remote areas in the traditional media era. Cultural inheritance is also easier because of the long-term existence of the media, but the compatibility and variability of the media have also accelerated the cultural changes. Second, electronic media has both praise and praise in shaping culture. For example, some film and television dramas attract the audience's attention with the illusion of being out of life, and subconsciously change the audience's values. Third, electronic media has become more culturally deep in the new media technology. Every corner of life is occupied by various new media, such as mobile phone, mobile TV, building TV, network TV, digital newspaper and digital broadcasting. Culture is occupied by the media, just like there are more and more "fish" in the water, which looks fresh, but there is not enough "water" to nourish it, leading to the grassroots culture, cultural homogenization and cultural fast food. Fourth, with the help of the media, cross-cultural communication is popular. Different cultural communities share each other's cultural products. Hollywood blockbusters have swept the world like swords, but China movies have little influence in the United States, which is inseparable from the strength of the media. Fifth, the way the audience uses the media affects the development of culture. If the audience passively uses the media, the influence of vulgar content on the audience will increase. If the audience actively uses the media, it will strengthen the original culture, and the audience can use the media to develop culture under the guidance. The cultural literacy of media workers has gradually increased its influence on society. With the process of media industrialization and the wide use of media, it is becoming more and more difficult to supervise the content. In the era when media self-discipline plays an important role, higher requirements are put forward for the cultural literacy of media workers. Culture is the spiritual home of people's social life. As the guardian and disseminator of culture, the way of thinking and behavior of media workers will directly penetrate into the cultural products of the media, and it is difficult for the audience to reach the critical height of the disseminator. On the one hand, we should strengthen citizens' media literacy education, and at the same time, we should examine the dependence of culture on communicators. Communicators should not only have excellent traditional cultural literacy, but also inherit and carry forward civilization with the times, stand at the forefront of the times and grasp the direction of advanced culture. In the era of media generalization, media workers should pay attention to exploring new and good culture, enrich the content of media with the development of new media and promote the prosperity of culture. Communicators can give guidance to the audience's media use as much as possible, can do a good job in the classification, grading and professional distribution of content, guide the development of popular culture, and then feed back the cultural needs of the media, and promote the elegance, diversity and depth of culture. In content production, we should carefully use media art symbols such as ideology, media economy, social effect and media ethics, guide production with ideology suitable for national conditions, ensure good social reputation, adhere to correct ethics, guide public opinion and rationally develop media economy. The social responsibility of media workers is also one of the contents of cultural literacy. Media is the main force of mass culture communication, and culture is the superstructure of economic base. If there is no sense of social responsibility in the process of mass communication, it will eventually be abandoned by society and the public. Culture not only profoundly affects mass communication, but also affects interpersonal communication. The influence of interpersonal communication on culture has attracted more and more attention of media workers, because new media provides the possibility of communication transformation. Third, mass communication and interpersonal communication are often divided into two categories: mass communication and interpersonal communication. Mass communication is used by people to refer to the communication to a large range of people, and interpersonal communication refers to the communication between a small range of people. However, with the development of new media technology, mass communication is gradually moving towards focus communication, and "focus" communication is transitioning to interpersonal communication. The emergence of new media has promoted the gradual growth of media content. People can get the information they want from the Internet and other media. The information between audiences may be different. The audience who get personalized information can use new media to publish their own information. In the end, this information may be obtained by several individuals, and the audience will also become disseminators. The dissemination of information presents the characteristics of small-scale interpersonal communication and personalization. Mass communication develops the propaganda theory well, because the disseminator is the center of information source and radiates information outward, while interpersonal communication often misleads information in propaganda practice and affects the propaganda effect. However, people still want to know important information, such as state affairs, so when interpersonal communication mode is booming, more people choose authoritative media to obtain important information. For the media, maintaining the authority of information is the main new media strategy, while paying attention to the personalization and timeliness of information. For authoritative information publishing media, the peak time for publishing this information is mass communication, and the rest time may be interpersonal communication mode. The media is in a changeable era, which was born in the mode of mass communication and interpersonal communication. Mass communication may be a relative concept of the media. How many people are watching TV programs is not a fixed standard for TV stations to become mass media. Compared with interpersonal communication, mass communication has a huge audience, but it is completely different from the past mass communication era. For example, when a financial news is broadcast, the audience is very large, but most of them are interested in this financial news, rather than passively watching it in a few choices. At this time, mass communication can be called "focus" communication, which has more shadow of interpersonal communication, and the theory of interpersonal communication has conveniently entered the research of this communication mode. The dialogue of communication is greatly strengthened in new media, which makes the media have greater interpersonal communication color. With the support of technology, people can communicate with anyone at any place, at any time and in any way. In this case, people become active recipients of information more quickly, actively control information and feed back information at the same time. People will pay more attention to the source of information in interpersonal state and demand the authenticity of the media. Interpersonal communication used to be a typical example of the media. People can have long-distance interpersonal communication through telephone technology.