Media plan: Different types of media

media need superheroes in science just as in every sphere of life, but there is really a continuous range of abilities with no clear dividing line.” 

What is social media?

Social media is a collective of online communication channels where communities interact, share content and collaborate.
Websites and apps dedicated to social networking, microblogging, forums, social bookmarking, wikis and social curation are examples of some types of social media.
The most famous social networking companies are Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram.
Just twenty-one years ago, very few people across the world knew what the Internet was. Today it has become a part of our lives. It is destined to become the number 1 channel for communicating with the world’s population. (Data Source: internetworldstats.com)

Media ‘is’ or ‘are’?

If media is the plural of medium, then one would think that it should be used grammatically in the plural – the verb that follows it should be in the plural form, shouldn’t it?
However, in most literature it is used as a singular noun, and is interpreted as a collective singular, similar to other collective nouns such as ‘team’ or ‘group’. Therefore, to write the ‘media is’ is perfectly acceptable today. Some people may insist it is wrong, but it is still acceptable – languages are constantly evolving.
According to Collins Dictionary, media is:
“The means of communication that reach large numbers of people, such as television, newspapers, and radio.”

It all started thousands of years ago

Human communication through designed channels – not through speech or gestures – dates back to many tens of thousands of years ago when our ancient ancestors painted on the walls of caves.
The cave paintings at Lascaux in southwestern France, estimated to be over 17,000 years old, are no less viable expressions of media than our current TV shows and magazines.
The Persian Empire – c. 550–330 BC – played a major role in the history of human communication through designed channels. Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great (c. 550 BC) developed the first ever real postal system. It was an effective intelligence-gathering apparatus, called Angariae, a term that later indicated a tax system.
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher claimed in the 1830s that the printing press created the modern world by destroying feudalism. Many historians say that the advent of the printing press was the birth of what we know today as media.
The term media in its current application relating to channels of communications was first used by Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), a Canadian professor, philosopher, and public intellectual who said: “The media are not toys; they should not be in the hands of Mother Goose and Peter Pan executives. They can be entrusted only to new artists, because they are art forms.”
By the mid-1960s, the term spread to general use in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Media is a key term of the Toronto School of Communication Theory. This is a plural form derived from the Latin medium, translated as "medium" or "intermediary". It means a substance through which power or any other influence is transmitted, it is mainly used in the context of spiritualism and a number of spiritual and esoteric practices.

At present, the means of communication is a broad concept that includes the entire set of technological means and methods of communication that serve to transmit an information message to a specific consumer in one form or another: text, music, image.

As for the term "media" introduced into the Russian language - and this required appropriate financial resources and political influence - as evidenced by the appearance of departments in Russian universities in the name of which this word appears - it is more often a part of such neoplasms as media text, mass media, media space, media competence, media data, media message, media addiction, new media, alternative media, social media and so on. Due to their initial vagueness, they create difficulties for people using them to understand the objects they are talking about.

It is not surprising that people who do not know English well and are poorly versed in communication issues often uncritically combine the word "media" into a single whole with such concepts as mass media, telecommunications, etc.

This can already be seen, for example, from the following reasoning:

1. The concept of media is much broader than each of these terms or their combination. Media includes subjects that in the usual sense are not at all related to the means of communication. Clothing, architecture or the wheel can also be considered media[1].

2. The influence of the media on the message they convey is essential and no less important than the message itself. The media, on the other hand, is considered solely as a tool or channel of communication that does not affect the meaning of the message being transmitted..
Among the founders of the development of the concept of "media" (artifacts as means of communication) are the employees of the University of Toronto Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan. M. McLuhan paid great attention to the study of cultural, psychological and physiological results of the impact of means of communication[2], while Innis was engaged in its socio-economic, cultural and material consequences[3].

The subject environment of a person and the space created by him has been studied as a means of communication since at least the 1960s (we note the work of Marshall McLuhan and other representatives of the ecology of means of communication). In this regard, we are usually talking about the electronic information and communication space.

A prominent researcher of this approach is Neil Postman. In his work "Entertainment to Death" the author considers the ever-increasing "entertainment" influence that the media have on the broadcast information. The author concludes that the media put the satisfaction of the need for leisure and entertainment in the first place, pushing the quality of information into the background. According to the book, the image of a person or object in the media is no less significant than reality itself. According to him, due to the development of technology at this stage, even voters pay more attention to the image of a politician, rather than his actual activities.[4]

Within the framework of the system-active approach[5], "media space" is understood as a product of two environments - cultural and social, fulfilling its role both in ensuring the balance and internal homeostasis of the system, and in overcoming it.

All authors attached great importance to the impact of artifacts as a means of communication. They perceived it as a factor that forms a person's ideas about the world around him and about himself. With the change in the dominant type of communication, society as a whole is changing radically. The turning points in the history of the development of means of communication were the creation of the printing press (the European method of printing) by I. Gutenberg and the electric telegraph, which marked the beginning of electronic communications.

Neil Postman noted that the high authority of M. McLuhan prevent criticism of his ideas and have a serious impact on how these ideas are perceived in society. In his opinion, "Laws of Media: The New Science" became the best book by M. McLuhan, as it clearly spells out the evidence base.[6]

Among the critics of M. McLuhan were D. Carrey[7], S. Finkelstein[8], D. Miller[9], they reproached the author for his penchant for technical determinism and repetition of other people's ideas, which, in turn, indicates a misunderstanding by them essence of McLuhan's approach.

The work of Marshall McLuhan's predecessors, in particular Harold Innis, was well received by critics. But while their contributions were highly valued, the ideas themselves were not widely shared.