Media ecology essay

Media Ecology

Essay

The relationship between media and audiences is changing drastically. Media ecology aims to describe how diverse media environments shape today's society and our everyday lives. The theory's overall core is how the content's communication isn't as nearly impactful as the way it is being consumed. It focuses on media, environments, and environments as media, with an explicit concern for their evolution, effects, and forms. It is the aim to increase awareness of the complex relationship between technology and humans. I agree with the fact that media is constantly changing and the way it is being consumed can have an altering effect on audiences. The way audiences consume media is an ever-changing phenomenon that has been introduced to different generations. New ways of consuming media are being introduced daily. In the last year, 4 new streaming video on demand platforms have been introduced, which I will explain in detail later on.

Marshall McLuhan came up with the media ecology theory in 1964 and was officially coined in 1968 by the media theorist Neil postman. McLuhan was the first to suggest that studies should be focused on the type of media rather than the message being communicated. "Our behavior in media has been changed by the medium rather than the media", in this sense the medium is the technology on which the media is being consumed on whether it is a smartphone, laptop, TV, etc, it is almost like the middle man that gets forgotten about between people and what they are consuming digitally. It suggests that the environment inevitably affects our perceptions, feelings, values, and beliefs.

Fragmentation shows the trend of the increasing choice of how audiences consume media in terms of different platforms or channels, for example, linear TV, streaming video on demand (SVOD), or things such as social media platforms i.e Instagram or Facebook. In 2020, 95% of teens have access to a smartphone and 45% say they are online 'almost constantly. In today's date, nearly half of the teen population aged from 13 to 17 say they use Facebook (2004), less compared to platforms such as Instagram (2010), and Snapchat (2011), which were released later. Surveys were used to determine different social standings and somewhat 40% of these respondents have said that social media has had a positive impact because it helps them keep in touch and interact with others. An increase in fragmentation amongst households has occurred because of the COVID-19 pandemic that was introduced to the world in 2019. People used devices to escape from their reality and used things such as laptops and smartphones to work from home or for young kids to go to school virtually. This is where McLuhan's theory may be criticized or challenged in terms of the way we consume has a larger effect than what we consume, because, in terms of COVID, the content being consumed by young minds will have a longer-lasting effect in the future rather than them looking at the screen. Nuclear families no longer watch linear TV together, but rather watch their own platforms on their own devices. While 42% of families in the USA were nuclear families 50 years ago, just under 22% are being shown as your typical family figure.

In 2019 a survey was conducted to measure how many adults still went to cinemas in the USA. It was found that 14% of adults said that they go to the cinemas at least once a month or more, around 46% said that they would go to the cinemas maybe once or a few times a year. This shows the slow decline of the use of cinemas. People state that they go for the experience that you can’t get at home. Streaming videos on demand has changed the ways in which we consume media, it also relates to the concept of fragmentation. People are now able to subscribe to different streaming platforms such as Netflix, Youtube, Neon etc. In the last 2 years alone, already 4 new streaming services have been released by monopolies in the media industry, Apple TV, HBO Max, Peacock, and Disney+. Because of the massive range that is available to watch media and the development of technology, kids are able to watch whatever they want freely without regulatory boundaries unless parents are aware and change settings so that kids are only able to see certain content. Between 2019-2020, the number of global subscriptions increased by 26% reaching 1.2 billion subscribers in the year 2020. In this year the Film and TV industry experienced unprecedented growth. Disney+ has already gained over 100 million subscribers since its launch in November 2020.

Audience demand constantly grows and spending on content production continues to ramp up. In 2020 there was a record-breaking $220.2 billion spent on making and acquiring new feature films and TV programming. Disney has encountered some issues with certain actors who are paid off box office sales, where Disney releases films in both cinemas and on Disney+ so people don't have to necessarily go to the theatre to watch a new movie, which is causing certain actors such as Scarlett Johansson distress as the recent release of Black Widow was released on Disney+ in July 2021 and was only a couple days later after the cinema release.

A version of the Fandom theory was first seen in the 1960s when the first-star trek was released. Henry Jenkins was the one who released this theory explaining different fan cultures and communities built around the shared enjoyment of a particular movie or TV series. An example of this is when a fan page was made for Stranger Things, released in 2016, but fans were so critical to characters and actors that it started affecting the cast and the people helping to make the series so it was shut down. This is an extreme version where simple fandom has been turned into extreme criticism and involvement. The way people interact with the media is drastically and almost rapidly changing. In the early 1930s watching TV was a rare commodity that wasn't seen as an essential part of life, compared to now in 2021 we have had massive reliability upon technology and media. Without online websites and the introduction of web 2.0 in 1999, people would still be relying on paper newspapers to get their information or daily news. Now we are able to actively engage with others online as well as have our input in the world by creating websites, uploading our own media, and streaming others. Has this changed the world we live in for the better or for worse?