CONVERGENCE, GLOBALIZATION, POSTMODERNITY, SIMULATION - Miljana Isailović

To understand the terms CONVERGENCE, GLOBALIZATION, POSTMODERNITY, and SIMULATION, we have to understand the meaning of MASS MEDIA. In my personal understanding, mass media is a communication device that has the potential to reach an extremely large audience in remote parts of the world. Media's development through paper media, motion picture and sound recording, broadcasting media, and now to new media, a very loosely defined category, we shift from a very limited scope of reach into the digital age known by it's more scholarly name as postmodernity. Postmodernity is characterized by an economic shift from commodity-based manufacturing to the current, most significant form of service: information-based. With all of these changes in the economy, a huge development in technology that affects the way we consume media after the shift from modernity to postmodernity, convergence becomes almost a standard. All previous categorizations shift from separate platforms into one, an example being the way we can access media such as movies, music, and news on our phones or laptops, not needing separate devices for each. Here mobility comes into play, after advancements in data compression we can now take our information anywhere. We can watch the same movie both in a hotel and a cafe, not needing to go to a theatre or be in our living room where our TV is and for instance we can carry our entire music library with us on a morning jog without being tied to a record player or having to deal with the impracticality of CD players and CDs. And as all of this gets more and more intertwined with our lives the media we consume becomes even more personal. This phenomenon is called fragmentation. It becomes more tailored to our tastes and preferances over time. But even if the content we consume is more personal, we are, now more than ever, globally connected which is a massive feature of social media, the current, most dominating form of media in my perspective. This connection of political, economic, and social forces is called globalization, a very controversial but still persistent force. With globalization comes a mixture and blurring of cultures and economies, that if unregulated could lead to cultural imperialism (A case in which a specific culture dominates, in many cases this being the USA or the political west as an example) and multinational companies which seek to dominate the market (FACEBOOK is a good example of a culturally imperialistic company and platform that dominates a lot of the market, buying out smaller competitors and stifling competition when it comes to social media on the global scale.) As our engagement with media becomes more integrated with our personal lives we might notice that media can have moments where it portrays a version of reality that has no basis in reality itself. Whether that be a depiction of family life in movies or fueling a certain political climate for sensationalism that has no real basis, mass media creates a simulation of reality that influences our own. It can be described as a shifting of media from its original image of being a good representation of external reality, to a distorted representation of external reality and then to a mask that conceals the absence of a basic reality. In the end, it's image bearing no relation to any reality at all.  Understanding these phenomena gives us a clearer understanding of our social environment and climate. Mass media influences every aspect of our day to day and I feel, after learning about these terms and their meanings and significance, I can take a closer look into my own media consumption even if it is only the beginning of my education on the topic at hand.

- Miljana Isailović