Media and culture are interrelated concepts that frequently overlap. Another concept related to these two is design. All of them coexist and have a significant impact on society. Thus, culture is a link between individuals and their society that provides this society with shared values. In its turn, or rather mass media, media provide instruments for circulation and spread of these values. This paper aims to analyze the concepts of media, culture, and design and the meaning of aesthetics for them.
The Concept of Media and Culture
The concept of culture has many definitions, but the most general one is as follows. Culture is a combination of expressed and shared values, attitudes, beliefs, and practices of a social group, organization, or institution. Still, it is a complex issue that is treated differently by people. From the sociological point of view, culture is referred to as “a shared system of beliefs and knowledge, more commonly called a system of meaning and symbols; a set of values, beliefs, and practices, and shared forms of communication” (Klinberg, 2017, p. 120). Culture has the power to shape the collective identity. Culture is both the product of society and its moving power. On the whole, culture comprises aesthetics and morals, activities and products, communication and mass media, and symbols and their meaning. Consequently, culture is a complex concept covering every sphere of life.
Also, culture exists at different levels. The broadest one is the national level that comprises the culture of the whole nation. The regional level includes cultural peculiarities of ethnic, linguistic, or religious groups within a nation. Other levels of culture are gender, generation, social class, and corporate ones, with their peculiarities typical of the layer they correspond. Therefore, culture can be level-specific, and its representations will correspond to each layer.
Media also has some controversial definitions. As a broad concept, media comprises such subdivisions as mass media and mass communication. While mass media is usually explained as the method of information dissemination, mass communication is the act of information dissemination to the public. Baran (2014) provides a simple definition of communication and claims it is “a transmission of a message from a source to a receiver” (p. 4). When a method or a medium of information dissemination is involved, it is expected to produce some effect on the receiver of information. In this context, mass communication can be treated as a process of creating shared meaning between mass media and their audiences (Baran, 2014). Thus, the aspects of shared meaning and shared values that are attributes of media and culture respectively add to similarities between these two concepts.
Currently, sociologists discuss the issue of a mediated culture that implies a significant impact of mass media on culture. Hjarvard (2013) discusses the mediatization of culture and society as integral processes of the present-day society. Mediatization includes the bombarding of individuals and communities with diverse messages from all media sources such as newspapers, magazines, television, the Internet, and others. These messages contain promotion of products, ideas, attitudes, the sense of the importance of some concepts, and meaningfulness of the others. Thus, influencing society, media has the power to alter the culture and values it produces. Also, culture is a frequent subject in media studies (Sommier, 2014). Some of them support the idea that media influences the perceptions of common cultural sense, values, and ideologies.
Designing Beauty and Function: The Aesthetics of Design
The concept of design is sometimes discussed in relation to culture. In fact, the term “design” can be attributed to nearly any object created by humans because creators decide on the way their final product will look. Speaking of design, there is a long-lasting dispute about the importance of beauty or aesthetics versus function in design (Klein, 2017). The initial aim of creating a product is to fulfill some functions. Therefore, it is expected that the product is useful and does what it is expected to do. Nevertheless, human beings are usually attracted to something they consider beautiful. That is why beauty appears as an integral component of design in addition to function. Still, Klein (2017) concludes that functionality is prior to beauty because the object needs to work to be desired by consumers. Therefore, beauty is frequently treated as an added value to the functionality of the design.
The Importance of Aesthetics in Media and Culture
With media becoming an integral component of culture, the issue of the aesthetic significance of these concepts arose. It is evident that aesthetics and culture are closely interrelated. Certainly, not every cultural object is beautiful because culture is a too complex concept comprising every sphere of life. When it comes to media, aesthetics occupies a particular place. There cannot be a single definition of media aesthetics since it is a multidisciplinary and heterogeneous concept (Hausken, 2018).
Zettl (2014) introduces the concept of applied media aesthetics. It is defined as a process allowing examination of a number of media elements such as light and sound and their interaction as well as their impact on the spectators’ perception. Moreover, applied aesthetics treat art not as an isolated concept stored in museums but as a component of life. Also, Zettl (2014) speaks about the power of context that guides and sometimes even dictates people’s perceptions.
The mentioned ideas related to aesthetics of media and culture can become powerful tools for the solution of cultural, media, and communication problems. Thus, the use of a particular design approach that differs for nationalities or social groups can be helpful in solving the mentioned problems. Therefore, the selected design should be appealing to the target audience. In the national context, for example, the same magazine distributed in different countries sometimes has a different cover that is expected to attract customers. Such decisions are usually made with the consideration of the cultural peculiarities of the target population. This issue is particularly evident in brand advertising when companies develop different advertising campaigns for different regions and even can alter the company logo in case there is a threat it would not be accepted by the population of a certain region. Consequently, aesthetics in media and culture is significant. In fact, it is frequently more important than the content because media and cultural objects are first seen or heard and then understood.
Conclusion
To summarizing, it should be mentioned that both media and culture are integral to contemporary society. Design is related to these concepts in a way that both media and cultural objects are designed to reach the target audience and have the desired impact. Therefore, the choice of design is frequently decisive because it determines how this or that object will influence the audience. Moreover, aesthetics is crucial for media and culture because the way the object looks or is presented determines both the reaction of the audience and its potential to influence people’s perceptions, knowledge, beliefs, and values.
References
Baran, S. J. (2014). Introduction to mass communication: Media literacy and culture (8th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw Hill.
Hausken, L. (2018). Media aesthetics. Oxford Bibliographies Online Datasets. Web.
Hjarvard, S. (2013). The mediatization of culture and society. New York, NY: Routledge.
Klein, M. (2017). Function & aesthetics in design – Is it necessary? Medium. Web.
Klinberg, E. (2017). Culture, media, and communication. In J. Manza & K. Kramar (Eds.). The sociology project: Introducing the sociological imagination (pp. 118-139). North York, Canada: Pearson.
Sommier, M. (2014). The concept of culture in media studies: A critical review of the literature. The French Journal of Media Studies, 5. Web.
Zettl, H. (2014). Sight sound motion: Applied media aesthetics (7th ed.). Boston. MA: Wadsworth.