Convergences 2-24

When I first turned through the pages of our reading I had no idea what message, method and medium were, but as I started to read the section I began to recognize everything. I see message more as a summary than anything else. Such as in the book when it speaks about breaking down a ten page paper to its main points rather than leaving in the unneeded details or summarizing a crime up in a few words rather than many. As I kept on reading I saw that when talking about message you can't just state the subject or theme, you have to be more specific than that. When reading about method I never knew it covered such a broad subject. The subjects that made it seem broad were things such as different ways to say hello or asking someone what they were doing. Also I found it interesting that method can be made by many different sources, by speaking, videos, photos and any other way you could possibly think. Method can also be changed by a simple turn of a camera or change of an angle. Medium was the easiest concept to grasp because all it is is the subject through which you communicate, computer, phone, TV, or even paintings. Reading "Message, Method, Medium: Will You Marry Me?," really helped group the three M's together. It showed that there isn't just one way to do something there's millions of different ways. In the book it showed that asking someone to marry you could be done by simply using words on a billboard, using scrabble pieces to spell it out or mowing the letters in a field.

As for audience, purpose and context, those were a different story. I thought I knew everything about these topics but as I read on I figured out I was wrong. For the audience section I expected it just to say that it was the people who subscribe to your product, but in the book it went into more detail. It began talking about how there are many types of audiences and how producers spend lots of money each year to research what the audience is interested in. Purpose is the aim or goal of the producers. When the book explained purpose it talked about how you shouldn't look at a poem or news story in the same ways because they have different purposes. Context was the only topic that didn't go into lots of detail. Context is the meaning of the story as a whole so, when a person would pull a sentence from a paper they wouldn't get the meaning of it As it states in the book, "pulled from context," is when a quote is pulled from a story and distorts the meaning that people intended. This is what I learned about in the reading.