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Understanding Media: Karlshochschule International University Karlsruhe, December 9, 2009 Dr. Cornelia Hegele-Raih
Understanding Media: Karlshochschule International University Karlsruhe, December 9, 2009 Dr. Cornelia Hegele-Raih
1. Be polite!
2. Listen!
3. Know your message!
4. Know your public!
5. Offer your public a clear benefit!
6. Communicate wise and with passion!
7. Be clear and be careful!
8. Get feedback!
9. If you dont succeed, try again in a different way!
10. Stop communicating, if any rule is violated!
In one sentence:
Be respectful!
Rationality
Strategy
Consistency
Truth
Clearness
Certainty
Simplicity
People orientation/Dialogue
Crisis management
Social Media
Corporate Social Responsibility/Ethics
Dr. Cornelia Hegele-Raih: Understanding Media
Corporate Communication the ideal
6
Outside USA:
In U.K., France and Germany, trust in Business was already at a
low level of 36% among the audience of 35-64-years olds and
stayed there.
The only EU-countries where business made a notable gain in
trust were Netherlands and Sweden
All this is not the whole story: The erosion of the reputation
of so many institutions is a constant process, which has
already started in the 1960s
Values
Knowledge
Techniques
Experience
You can find a lot of material about McLuhan e.g. on the website:
http://www.mcluhanmedia.com
If more people had read his books, many errors could have been
prevented and many of todays phenomenon could have been
anticipated; but nowadays his thoughts dont play the role in media
science discourse that they should deserve. He was often rejected
by Real scientists.
He tried hard to find evidence for his thesis of the medium is the
message, i.e.: the medium matters not the content. In the end, he
found some evidence in experiments he conducted at General
Motors. Today, brain research proves a lot of his arguments to be
true.
A lot of people seemed to have big problems with his convoluted
syntax, flushy metaphors and word-playful one-liners. Its more art
than science. However, his basic theses are relatively simple and
very clear.
This is a typical rumor; for all those quotes (also the one from
IBM-CEO Thomas Watson that there is no need for more
than 5 computers on earth) there are usually no hints for
actual existence! Nevertheless, the quote above contains
some truth we can seldom estimate the real extent with
which a new medium changes the world
Hot Cool
Influence on High definition Low definition
senses Low participation High participation
Enhances only one or few senses Stimulates several senses
Examples Movie TV
Photography Comics
Radio Abstract art
Lecture
Speech
Dr. Cornelia Hegele-Raih: Understanding Media
The impact of hot and cold media
47
Unclothed people use 40% more energy. Cloths enables human beings to
spread themselves in unfriendly areas and to protect themselves in fights
But the wheel was of little use without streets (the Roman
Empire was built on streets and papyrus)
After the fall of the Roman Empire, it took centuries until
the streets were in a suitable condition again.
In the 15th century they were used for the first time for
private postal services (Thurn & Taxis) and commercial
business (Fugger Family)
Repeatability:
Margaret Mead has reported that when she brought several
copies of the same book to a Pacific island there was great
excitement. The natives had seen books, but only one copy
of each, which they had assumed to be unique.
Their astonishment at the identical character of several books
was a natural response to what is after all the most magical
and potent aspect of print and mass production.
Homogeneity :
De Tocqueville (1805-1859) explained in his work on the French
revolution how it was the printed word that, achieving cultural
saturation in the 18th century, had homogenized the French
nation.
Frenchman were the same kind of people from north to south.
The typographic principles of uniformity, continuity, and linearity
had overlaid the complexities of ancient feudal and oral society.
The revolution was carried out by the new literati and lawyers
Homogeneity:
De Tocqueville (1805-1859) remarked that the American Society
was more homogenized by print than England and much more than
Europe in general:
In America all laws derive in a sense from the same line of
thought. The whole society, so to speak, is founded upon a
single fact; everything springs from a simple principle. One could
compare America to a forest pierced by a multitude of straight
roads all converging on the same point. One has only to find the
center and everything is revealed at a glance. But in England,
the paths run criss-cross, and it is only by travelling down each
one of them that one can build up a picture of the whole.
Homogeneity:
Homogeneity of regions and nations (nationalism was
unknown to the Western world until the Renaissance when
Gutenberg made it possible to see the mother tongue in
uniform dress, e.g. Martin Luther translated the bible from
Latin to German)
Homogeneity imposed pressure toward correct spelling,
syntax and pronunciation, right interpretation of standard
works and uniformity in speech and writing in general
Homogeneity in clothing and all aspects of life
William Whyte: Organization man (1951)
Homogeneity:
When European used to visit America before the Second War
they would say But you have communism here! What they
meant was that we not only had standardized good, but
everybody had them.
It was easy for the retribalized Nazis to feel superior to the
American consumer. The tribal man can spot the gaps in the
literate mentality very easily. On the other hand, it is the
special illusion of literate societies that they are highly aware
and individualistic
Fragmentation/Efficiency:
In the World War I an II, the U.S. accumulated enormous
amounts of wealth which was the basis for big business
(Fordism and Taylorism arose from the big North American
plants) => first assembly lines, efficiency craze
- Chaos -
- Contrast -
- Confusion -
What Indian eyes see!
What Indian eyes see!
- Change -
- Challenge -
- Confidence -
Typography the advantages of literacy
96
It was the world of the medieval monasteries, with their need for
a rule and for synchronized order to guide communal life, that
the clock got started on its modern developments. Time
measured not by the uniqueness of private experience but by
abstract uniform units gradually pervades all sense life, much as
does the technology of writing and printing. Not only work, but
also eating and sleeping, came to accommodate themselves to
the clock rather than to organic needs.
Clock in/out
The case of Orson Wells famous The War of the Worlds (broadcasted on 30.10.1938)
Some listeners heard only a portion of the broadcast, and in the atmosphere of tension
and anxiety leading to World War II, took it to be a news broadcast. Newspapers
reported that panic ensued, people fleeing the area, others thinking they could smell
poison gas or could see flashes of lightning in the distance.
Richard J. Hand cites studies by unnamed historians who "calculate[d] that some six
million heard the CBS broadcast; 1.7 million believed it to be true, and 1.2 million were
'genuinely frightened'". While Welles and company were heard by a comparatively small
audience (in the same period, NBC's audience was an estimated 30 million), the uproar
was anything but minute: within a month, there were 12,500 newspaper articles about
the broadcast or its impact, while Adolf Hitler cited the panic, as Hand writes, as
"evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy.
Later studies suggested this "panic" was less widespread than newspapers suggested.
During this period, many newspapers were concerned that radio, a new medium, would
make them defunct. In addition, this was a time of yellow journalism, and as a result,
journalists took this opportunity to demonstrate the dangers of broadcast by
embellishing the story, and the panic that ensued, greatly.
Just prior 1914, the Germans had become obsessed with the
menace of encirclement. Their neighbors had all developed
elaborate railway systems that facilitated mobilization of
manpower resource. Encirclement is a highly visual image that
had great novelty for this newly industrialized nation. In the
1930s, by contrast, the German obsession was with
Lebensraum. This is not a visual concern, at all. It is a
claustrophobia, engendered by the radio implosion and
compression of space.
The German defeat had thrust them back from visual obsession
into brooding upon the resonating within. The tribal past has
never ceased to be a reality for the German psyche.