Structural Constraints

Improved Essays
People in society greatly affect the development of media technology. I will be looking at the structural constraints in terms of social construction. Structure is defined as “the values and beliefs in society, such as gender, government, education, and family”. (Croteau, David, and William Hoynes. Media/society: Industries, Images, and Audiences. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2012. Print.). People organize these different structures. Structural constraints are “preexisting structures that enables and can also limit one’s agency”. (Croteau, David, and William Hoynes. Media/society: Industries, Images, and Audiences. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2012. Print.) These constraints are structures through guidelines and affects an individual’s …show more content…
In order to have communication, people and industries try to improve technology. Hoynes and Croteau argue that media technology mediates human communication. In the idea of mediation, technology is in the middle of media and the people in society. Different media technologies have different properties which impacts how people behave and act. Old and new (digital) have different capacities which impact the way people think and communicate. For example, when the internet was first created during the Cold War, there was a clear distinction between the producers and the consumer because the producer would only be able to create the type of content that was seen of the internet and the government would be able to regulate content on the internet in order to collect data about other people (due to Soviet Union threat). Consumers would be only able to view the particular content. In the new digital media, there is no distinction between the producer and consumer and very interactive. Today, many people surf the internet and use different social media sites such as Facebook and are able to create their own type of content. The idea od mediation and different capacities have an impact on human communication because technology enables people to be able to talk to others around the world online through the internet. Mediation can also limit human communication because media technology interferes with face to face …show more content…
Social norms placed in society cause social change for the people in society. Individuals use these social norms to organize themselves in society. Social media websites such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter are examples of how people identify in order to organize themselves in society. on these websites, people are able to communicate with friends and family members from different areas, like and post certain pictures. This enables agency because individuals are able to put what they want on their profiles. Although the internet and social media sites were established to promote diversity and to shift power from the business interest to the users, government regulation and commercial interest threaten this goal. There is a tug-of-war relationship between commercial interest, government regulation, and user habits to the development and application of new media”. (Croteau, David, and William Hoynes. Media/society: Industries, Images, and Audiences. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2012. Print.). This relationship conveys what media should be used for development and how people use it (the relationship between businesses and users). For example, the social media site, Facebook, undergoes this relationship. The goal of Facebook is to allow for an increase in diverse content through the different posts and likes people use and create. Facebook also allows for a

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