Bryannn   My blog!

1. What are the three transportation media? What is the difference between a transport medium and a transport vehicle?

   – The three transportation media are land, water, and sky. The difference between a transport medium and a transport vehicle is that a transportation medium is a way to be transported, i.e. land, air, or water. A transport vehicle is just that – a vehicle by which to travel within the transportation medium, i.e. a car on land, plane in air, or boat in water.

2. What are the three communication media? Give examples of communication media vs communication vehicles. Email uses which communication medium?

   – The three communication media are one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. An example of one-to-one communication would be simply talking to someone. People have created tools to help them communicate, such as a telephone call or a letter in the mail. An example of one-to-many communication would be a newspaper or television broadcast of the news. Many-to-many would be something like the internet, perhaps a forum where anyone can post and communicate with everyone else on the board. Email could be all three media. You can send an email to one person, to many people, or have many people all responding to a single email. It depends on the situation.

3. What are the advantages/disadvantages of interpersonal communication? Of broadcast communication?

   – The advantage of interpersonal communication, or one-to-one, is that each person in the conversation can personalize it. They have the ability to give their input and change how the communication plays out. The disadvantage is that there are only two people in the conversation, so if it were a large idea being communicated, it would have to be done many times, for each person. The advantage of broadcast communication, or one-to-many, is that you can get an idea to a very large number of people at once. The disadvantage is that the “many”, the people watching the broadcast, don’t have any input in the communication, they can only watch.

4. What are the characteristics of the New Medium? Is a many-to-many communication possible without the new technology of laptop, iphone, and internet?

   – The New Medium is many-to-many. Lots of people can get their ideas to many other people, with everyone having the ability to provide feedback. I don’t think there were many ways to experience many-to-many communication before the new technology of laptop, iphone, and internet, because talking, the most widely used communication vehicle, was either one-to-one or one-to-many, there was no room there for many-to-many.

Now that I think about it, it does make sense that things like newspapers, magazines, or televisions aren’t media, just vehicles used to convey information within a medium. To me, that makes it even harder to define “New Media” in a single sentence or two. We learned about the three main media in NMD100 freshman year, but I had forgotten about them until I read this. Before this “new media” like the internet, there were no opportunities for many-to-many communication. The problem with this, in my opinion, is that because there is equal control in the conveying of information, it turns to chaos very quickly. There is no authority, so people can say whatever they want, and there’s very few ways to keep control of the situation. For example (this isn’t many-to-many specifically, but is connected to “new media”), take a look at any comments under a political news article, and most of the comments are hateful, or made by people who assume they can run the country better than everyone else, regardless of whether or not their comment even makes sense. There was never this problem with traditional media, because normal people normally couldn’t make comments on stuff like the news.