Path to Development

People born, grow, live and die.  While passing these steps, other people join them sharing their moments. In this life cycle, they aim for things, make preferences and work for their targets. The social environment they belong is as important as their own effort to make their wishes come true. To accomplish what they want, they have to influence people about their claim to make it valid. Media comes up at this point and help them introduce, argue, change or improve their idea. For this reason, I think that medium is a social tool, which both helps and stands as an obstacle at the same time for people working for their aims, by creating interaction and information sharing between them.

There are many channels of media. Some of them provide people visual information while some of them create influence just by words. When one channel offers concrete evidence, the other addresses the same issue in an abstract way. However they are all ways of expressing yourself to many people and a way of expanding social perspective. Through these channels, people learn each other’s opinion and either gain more or add more things to the opinion. The popularity of the topic can bring more researches and develop the idea. With this way, the argument becomes stronger with everyone’s contributions. As an example, when a new technology about a cell phone comes up, many people start discussing it through media channels. Every idea can bring new points and the potential buyers of that cell phone can decide the right thing for them accordingly. In a way, media stands as the leader of a group work who tries to gather everyone’s work and perform a valid project at the end.

On the other hand, media can be at the opposite side and gather people who disagree with your opinion and create a stronger claim against yours. For instance, a media can be a big obstacle to pass to a pop star doing an illegal work. All channels of media can bring comments about her behavior and put distance between her and her fans. In this case, media helps the community interact about an issue while it causes problem to the star.

Like McLuhan says; “It is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (9). In both cases, media helps the community gather. In some ways it’s like a carousel carrying everyone on the same track, but in different ways as like different horses; still connecting them to each other. Each one follows the other, like an idea bringing a new vision to the previous one in the community. While some people ride those channels, some people prefer to watch and observe.

In another way, it’s like a vegetable soup. Like each vegetable having its own flavor, all media channels carry their own messages but their combination brings a totally different, stronger flavor; message.

For this reason, media, the communication system of humans, yields humanity to the development.