Critique on chapter 4 - Essay Example

Critique on Chapter 4. (Time This chapter is moderately difficult in terms of the vocabulary and sentence structure used. There are some technical terms such as the levels of measurement nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio (p. 6) and phrases like mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive (p. 6)which seniors in media studies will probably have heard of, but may not be able to define exactly. The text provides very clear explanations of what they mean in the context of media and communication, and there are excellent examples which help the reader to remember them well.

The text proceeds at a fast pace, and although the tone and language are accessible, some of the ideas are quite profound, for example the different ways that communication can take place asynchronously and the implications that can follow from these different contexts. The majority of the concepts used are abstract, and this makes the chapter somewhat more difficult to follow than the previous chapter.2 There are several new ideas in this chapter, and they make the reader think more deeply about time, not just in the sense of the historical time when films or books are produced, for example, but the time that passes by while a person reads or listens to or views a work of art or a piece of communication.

This time factor is so obvious that it is often taken for granted and overlooked, even by academic experts, but it is important because it can be a huge variable which influences greatly how a message is interpreted. Generally, the more time distance, and also cultural distance, between the entity giving out the message and the entity receiving it, the more chance there is that the intended and received meanings will be different. This makes the reader think more about past, present and future reception of media texts, and what changes could take place in the gaps between these times, some of which can be nano seconds, and others can be centuries.

This broadened my usual frame of thinking about media.3 The chapter ended rather suddenly, and the connection between time and culture gap was not very clear. There perhaps should have been more explanation of the last section on culture. I would like also to have had more exact definition of the words, for example asynchronous to show what the Greek parts of the word mean.4 I thought that the examples given in the book in chapter four were generally adequate. One example that could have been used is that of a person watching a film for the first time, when it is first released, perhaps when still a child, and then that person watching the same film some time later, as a young adult, when it must seem dated, and then once again as an older person.

The passage of time in this example affects both the historical context, making the film appear strange, but also the psychological development of the person. The older person will receive the same original message each time, but the meaning will surely be different. Time changes everything because everything in the world is in a different relationship with everything else.5 This chapter was quite philosophical, and perhaps too much so. I would suggest shifting it more to concrete examples like films and books rather than “brain like entities”.

6 This chapter is better than the previous one on space, because it at least hangs together well, but it is not as good as chapter 2. The book should decide if it is meant to be practical or theoretical –at the moment it is shifting between the two, and the reader does not know where the focus is.