During our discussion about Media Worlds, I was particularly interested by the way we can think about media’s ability to convey meaning/ideas/concepts to an audience and possibly communicate the direct motivations by the media creator. First question I had was–is this even possible? Can media truly translate the creator’s exact meanings/feelings/messages/purpose for creating this media to an audience? Or is there something innate about media as a method of communication, such as its representational nature (like the added “noise source” in Shannon’s communication diagram, or the added glitches or lack of face to face communication described in the “Why Zoom Is Terrible” NYT article) that gets in the way or makes it difficult for audiences to fully understand the true messages/intentions that are trying to be communicated by the media creator?

This topic made me think about a conversation I had in my music major junior seminar the other day when we pondered how composers are able or not able to convey the original meaning/intention behind their compositions to an audience when it is being played by another performer. Is the composer able to fluidly convey meaning to an audience directly through the performer, or is this a more fragmented process where meaning can get lost/shaped differently through the medium of the performer? And even from the performer to the audience — is the audience truly passive and therefore do they receive the meaning from the performer exactly as the performer had intended for them to? Personally, I see the communication of musical meaning/purpose from composer, to performer, to audience as a fractured one–and so, naturally, this made me then think– is there a similarly fractured communication of information from media creator, to media, to audience? My inclination is to say that communication is similarly fractured through media in the same way that it is from composer-performer-audience (like the game of “telephone” that I mentioned in class)–but at the same time, a media creator has more control over the media that they create, than a composer who, instead, has another performer playing their music to an audience. In that vain, the performer is certainly more of a “noise source” to an audience than media is. Unless, of course, the person who comes up with the intention behind the media is different than the person who actual creates the media, such as in a movie where there is a screenwriter who may have their intentions for writing the script and then a director who may have a different vision of how the story will be communicated through the media.

I think I am leaning towards the idea that communication through media is generally fragmented but that some creators can be more successful than others in conveying their intended meanings to audiences–this is of course a continually developing idea which I hope to continue to flesh out and think about further is we continue this course.