Despite the fact that the innovations of the 21st century have shifted the role of TV in people’s lives into the background, many still find the traditional media appealing. As a result, people are affected by the phenomena of translation and circulation, which are an integral part of television. According to Wagman and Urquhart (2012), there is a rather basic difference between translation and circulation. While the former is typically rendered as the interpretation of a specific message that a certain type of media sends to the target audience (Wagman & Urquhart, 2012), circulation, in its turn, can be identified as a recurrent appearance of the message in question on-air (Wagman & Urquhart, 2012).
When it comes to defining the ways, in which the authors distinguish between the two modes mentioned above, the fact that the circulation mode does not allow for the creation of meaning, which the translation model presupposes, needs to be brought up. Indeed, according to the authors, in most cases with media industries, two key stages of developing media content need to be passed in order to come up with a product aimed at a specific audience.
Particularly, the creation of meaning and its further adaptation towards the needs and demands of the target audience must occur (Wagman & Urquhart, 2012). At this point, the fact that the process of circulation is traditionally referred to as the final step of the media production needs to be mentioned. In other words, translation can be viewed as the process of creating the message that the audience will presumably applaud to or, at the very least, consider worth focusing on. The circulation process, in its turn, is typically rendered as the stage of launching the message and making it a current trend for public discussion (Wagman & Urquhart, 2012).
The contemporary media displays the tendency for the circulation process to be gaining momentum in modern society quite rapidly. The abundance of modern media and social networking platforms for discussions of the contemporary and topical events have contributed to a major boost of the circulation process, allowing more people to join the conversation and, therefore, contribute to the interpretation of the initial message and its significance.
Although the enhancement of circulation may have its problems, it has mostly had a major positive effect on the evolution of social, cultural, economic and political awareness within the society. Therefore, circulation is most likely to address the lack of understanding of a certain complicated social or political issue. As a result, circulation combined with pluralism may lead to peaceful reconciliation between the parties that are currently in different cultural, political or social camps (Youmans & York, 2012).
Unfortunately, circulation cannot be viewed as the silver bullet for addressing every major social or political issue. Particularly, the process of circulation is unlikely to have any tangible effect on promoting the actual plurality of opinions. While certain messages do spark a heated debate, most of them frame the problem in question so that it could be viewed for a specific perspective. Therefore, while the circulation of a message may contribute to raising awareness, it can hardly promote objectivity in regard to the issue under discussion. Thus, additional efforts for suggesting alternative ways of looking at a certain topic need to be made by the state citizens with the help of social networks and the related tools.
Reference List
Wagman, I. & Urquhart, P. (2012). Cultural Industries.ca: Making sense of Canadian media in the Digital Age. Toronto, ON: Lorimer. Web.
Youmans, W. L. & York, J. C. (2012). Social media and the activist toolkit: User agreements, corporate interests, and the information infrastructure of modern social movements. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 315–329. Web.