Medium refers to anything that is used by humans to communicate some kind of message. McQuail states that there are four elements that determine the emergence of a mass medium:Purpose or need for communication.Technology for public communication.Social organization for production and distribution.Governance in the public interest.McLuhan argued that it is not possible to separate medium and message. He also argued that media can be seen as an extension of man as a medium can be seen as any phenomenon that changed the way we go about the world (e.g. electric light). This means that a medium is a phenomenon that changes meaning of something in the world. According to McLuhan, each medium that emerges needs to be treated as an entirely new cultural phenomenon. Before the twentieth century, the newspapers emerged which were fixated on advertisements, followed by the development of magazines, which were also fixated on advertisements. After the twentieth century, radio, television and telephones emerged, which were new forms of mass media. New media distinguishes computer-based media from broadcast media (e.g. radio). There are two phases of web technology; web 1.0 and web 2.0. Web 2.0 refers to media that appeared in the mid to late 2000s (e.g. social networking sites). Media literacy refers to sorting out reliable, useful information from junk, marketing and lies. Media blindness refers to being unable to locate the source of the information we acquire and confuse our actual experiences with mediated experiences.The media effects approach in research focusses on the effects media imposes on the individual. It is mostly based on experimental research. There are two objections to the media effects approach:Low ecological validityThis type of research has a low ecological validity as it removes context from media.Not fully developed theoretical rationaleThis type of research often does not have a fully developed theoretical rationale...