1Introducing Critical Media Studies
How We Know What We Know
Everything we know is learned in one of two ways.1 The first way is somatically. These are the things we know through direct sensory perception of our environment. We know what some things look, smell, feel, sound, or taste like because we personally have seen, smelled, felt, heard, or tasted them. One of the authors of this text knows, for example, that “Rocky Mountain oysters” (bull testicles) are especially chewy because he tried them once at a country and western bar. In short, some of what we know is based on first‐hand, unmediated experience. But the things we know through direct sensory perception make up a very small percentage of the total things we know. The vast majority of what we know comes to us a second way, symbolically. These are the things we know through someone or something, such as a parent, friend, teacher, museum, textbook, photograph, radio, film, television, or the internet. This type of information is mediated, meaning that it came to us via some indirect channel or medium. The word “medium” is derived from the Latin word medius, which means “middle” or that which comes between two things: the way that BBC’s Planet Earth production team might come between us and the animals of the Serengeti, for instance.
In the past 30 seconds, those ...
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