Croteau/Hoynes: Media/Society, 5th Edition
Chapter 9: Media Technology
Discussion Questions
1. How do you differentiate between new media and traditional media? What are the
criteria?
a. What are the characteristics of television, print media, and digital technologies?
b. How do media construct time and space? How have new networks changed your
sense of time and space?
2. Explain the differences between technological determinism and “medium theory.” How
do theorists in each camp view social change?
3. What is a pseudo event? In what way (s) has the construction of pseudo events changed
our concept of reality?
4. How have electronic media altered altered social roles and social space?
5. How and why did radio develop into a mass media industry? How can the evolution of
radio from a form of point-to-point communication to a form of mass media be compared
to the evolution of the Internet?
6. How was television made into a domestic technology in the 1950s? How was television
gendered?
7. How have regulations, cultural norms, and commerce influenced the Internet? Do these
forces help create a more diverse or more homogenized Internet culture? Why/why not?
8. What are the connections between virtual communities and physical locations? How are
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