【Term Paper】Media is connecting or misleading【副本】

Media Are Connecting Or Misleading?
Before we actually talk about the influence of media to our life, it’s not a waste of time to define the key word “media”. There are more than 10 entries about media in the Wikipedia, including Communications, Computing, Fine art, and Life sciences, Locations, Music and Ships. And each entry further includes several items. For instance, the Communications include advertising media, broadcast media, digital media, etc. (https:///wiki/Media) Here comes a more specific example that the broadcast media is defined as communications delivered over mass electronic communication network.
But this is the official definition, which means a distance away from the reality and that it wouldn’t be changed in a time to a large extent. Thus, it will be more meaningful to define “media” based on our intuitionistic perception without any constraint from the official ones and moreover why I suggest perceiving it in this way is that it provides rationality for our talking about “media”. In our daily life, when it comes to media, we mostly refer to things like newspaper, television, broadcast in the past and nowadays social network and cellphone. In our universal comprehension, media means tools to gain visual and audio materials which we are unable to gain directly by ourselves. It seems to be too simple, but it does make sense that it perfectly reveals that most people’s prior requirement for media is to get some useful information. Here, it's
not harmful to quote a description about “media”. “Communications media is not merely a kind of tool for our aspiration and project, but a definite way of living. It’s a kind of organism, an epitome of the contradictions hiding in the mixture of our thoughts, our actions and our social circles.” (James W. Carey Communication as Culture) As we can see, obviously, “communications media” is a relatively abstract and extensive concept. What it focuses on is media’s impact to the society as a kind of form, but not what is being spreading.
How we define “media” decides how we make use of media, and it further decides how media impact our life and have an effect on what happens in the world. So after we reach a consensus on the definition of “media”, I'd like give some examples to clarify how people make use of media and are influenced by media in the old days and in the present days.。