Independent Media And Situation The Evolution Meyrowitz Theory In The Network Age

Media has played an important role in the history of human development, especially in the evolving social situation, media innovation has a profound impact on political situation, economic trends, social interaction and even human culture. The research about media has a long history, the empirical school which rise in the early20th and the Critical School emerged in the1960’s begun to analyze the effect and influence of media from the perspective of "media content". Starting with Innis, including Mcluhan and Baudrillard, they pioneered a new way which is start from the media itself to explore its impact on society and people’s lives.In the meanwhile, Joshua Meyrowitz of America introduced the sociological theory and from "media situation" perspective, specifically studied media and human causes and effects of interaction mechanisms. He not only created the media theory and everyday social life combining research ideas answered how the media affects people’s behavior and even lead to changes the social structure, also his later "Contextual Theory","Generalized Elsewhere","Glocality" and "The Three Metaphors" showed that this is an evolving theory developed all the time when the circumstances changed.In the internet age,based on the computer technology, internet technology, virtual reality technology and mobile communications technology, life become more and more networked. Fusion Media situations not only lead to changes in group identity but also spawned a sub-culture of minority culture and personality. Audience as an important element of the media situation began to make a difference through the open new media platform. This paper is based on Meyrowitz’s "situation theory of media" and combined with the new features of new media analyzed the UGC (User Created Content) mo virtual community members interaction problem, Virtual communities,"being inside and outside at the same time", the sense of LBS (Location Based Services) etc. At last the paper reflected on the shortcomings and deficiencies about Meyrowitz’s theory, trying to analyze media situation theory on the objective point of view, in order to enhance the new media literacy to the general public and provide guidance.