Group Three.

I am a morning routine person. If I don't get to go through my routine when I wake up, I spend my whole day feeling just a little...off. It's not a complicated scenario, and it goes like this: I wake up. I make coffee. While the coffee is brewing, I turn on my computer. As soon as that coffee is ready, I check two things online. My email, and the BBC. I read every article that seems important or interesting in each global area, then I change to CNN. After CNN comes the NY Times- and then maybe if I'm feeling adventurous I'll look at the Korea Times, Le Figaro and Le Monde. I may have a second cup of coffee. Only after I finish my "morning paper(s)" can I go on to get ready for my day.

My news obsession began the first time I left the United States in 2006. I was studying abroad in France, and staying in a home with no computer and no internet. They did have a tv, but the only station they got was one that played reruns of a show called "Charmed". I found myself strangely cut off from the rest of the world. I had a phone card, and I called my parents about once a week, but if I wanted to check my email or go on Facebook, I had to use a local internet cafe... to the tune of or 5 euros per hour. It also took me a half hour to walk there, assuming I didn't get lost (I usually did). It was the first time in a long time where I wasn't being inundated with tv... radio...advertisements... and I also went weeks at a time without having any idea what was happening in the world. As a result, every time I actually made the trek to the cybercafe, I found myself almost hypnotized by the world I found at my fingertips. CNN wasn't just an annoying tv channel my grandparents had blaring 24/7... it was a window to home. The language, the news. These were places I knew, I understood. I found myself drawn to the cafe not for Facebook, but for the local and national news.

The readings this week discussed different theories of communication. In the Carey reading, he discusses transmission communication as "the giving of information to others...for the purpose of control." This is not a new idea for many people. In  fact, in class we also discussed the idea of propaganda, which is, for better or for worse, to control which information is released in order to achieve a desired effect. What was new for me was the idea of ritual communication. Carey explains that "a ritual view of communication is directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs." One of his examples of this is the newspaper. Carey talks about how reading the newspaper is akin to attending a mass. It is a way of bringing together the members of a society, to reinforce ideas already present, and keep everyone on the same page. Carey explains that news isn't actually anything "new", and that readers are not surprised by what they read in the headlines, but rather that "news is a historic reality. It is a form of culture invented by a particular class at a particular point of history..."  What Carey is saying is that people don't read the news every day because they have no idea what is going on around them. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this is true. Every once in a while there is something out of the ordinary, but usually the news includes financial news...there are good days and bad days. Some people did terrible things, and a smaller number of people did something good. There are mining accidents, banks with problems, floods, earthquakes, etc. Perhaps it really is the "hunger for experience" that drives me to wake up and read the news every morning, even if I am late for an appointment.

I think it is important to also note that just because the news may or may not be an important aspect of ritual communication, it does not mean that there isn't also transmission communication at play as well. After all, there are editors and news teams out there deciding which of these stories make the websites and which do not. Giving information and withholding other information? Hm sounds like information control to me. However, even armed with this information that I have fallen right into this information overload, and am being subjected to the will of the people with the monopolies of power, I still have every intention of waking up tomorrow and enjoying my coffee with a side of CNN. At least now I can tell myself I am participating in our societies "digital mass".