As a journalism major, I have constantly been forced to think about the effect different mediums have on people. If you want to reach a broad range of people from different socioeconomic levels, broadcast journalism, or TV news, may be the best way. In TV news, the point of communication is basically the raw facts. Also, it is meant to entertain and keep the listener/watcher involved in the story long enough to understand exatly what happened, but not much else. In contrast, if I want to compare and contrast one story to another, analyze, and therefore reach a more-educated audience, I may write a newspaper article. Newspaper articles take much longer to write than lets say a 30 second news story. The writer takes time, coming up with a good opening lead to draw the reader in while at the same time informing them on what has happened. They take time to quote others who have something to say about what has happened and their opinions and views. Additionally, when they are finished writing the story, they can go back, rethink what they have written, and change ideas and concepts or even just the wording of certain sentences to make their message different.
Learning to write for broadcast journalism, an exercise we use is taking lead sentences from newspaper stories and try to break them down into general sentences that tell you the story, without the large/confusing words and unnecessary information. For example, in class we took the lead sentence "A rarely used treatment that pumps cancer drugs directly in the abdominal cavity add 16 months or more to the lives of many women with advanced cases of ovarian cancer, doctors are reporting". Woah, that's a mouthful. So for broadcast news, we took that sentence, got rid of the unnecessary info, and made it, "Women with advanced ovarian cancer may be able to add over 16 months to their lives with a new treatment". There, simple and concise yet we still basically understand what has happened and why. This way of getting the same message across to people in completely different ways made me begin to think.
As Leslie mentioned in her post, it is often where your message comes from that means more than the actual message itself. As an example, I was angry with a good friend the other day because she had been rude to me one night. I was angry and my way of letting her know that was by NOT talking to her. Sometimes, NOT saying something can have just as must of an impact as if you WERE to say something. Well, that's what I thought at least. So she called me within the next day or so, and acted as if nothing had happened. Being a person who tries to avoid confrontation as much as I can, instead of coming out and telling her I was mad, I was short with her, not showing much emotion and not being warm with my words. I thought for sure she would understand that I was mad and appologize to me. Well, she had no idea and talked to me as if nothing was different. When I hung up the phone, I was upset that she had not even the slightest clue how upset I was with her. I then decided that to avoid confrontation and get her to understand that I was upset, I would write her an email. The email gave me a chance to think through what words I would use with her and how I would express my anger. I wrote it in a way that I wasnt angry with her, just more hurt about the way she was acting (although I was just pretty pissed). She responded with guilt and sadness, appologizing for the way she had acted. Because I approached the situation with email and could think through my words, we settled the controversy nicely and that was that. If i had just began to yell at her and tell her how much I didn't like her at that moment, she may have become defensive and yelled right back, causing the fight to grow even larger. This was a time in which the medium I chose to communicate made all the difference.
But like Chris mentioned in his post, we don't all write exactly what we feel because we have time to think and pick the specific words and stucture of our sentences. From previous experience, we know generally what we can expect when we write one thing as compared to another. In comparison, when you speak, you are communicating in that EXACT moment. While you have time before you being speaking to put together what you would like to say, speaking is more about emotion more than anything. Often, when you are angry with someone and you are speaking to them, you may raise your voice, express your feellings with harsh words, and try to get your opponent to see your side while injecting your emotion into your argument. I would argue that writing is less an emotional way of communicating and more of a knowlesgeable way, giving you time to think and expect how it will be interpreted and therefore how your listener will respond. As Jake pointed out, only the creator REALLY knows what the message is saying and what it is suppoed to do to the listener.
McCluhan says in his article, The Medium is the Message, "All media are extensions of our human senses" and I would agree with that. Especially with the abundance of types of media available to us today, one medium may appeal to one sense while another medium may appeal to a difference sense, making us interpret the same message in a different way. With broadcast news, mainly sight and sound are used, exciting our visual senses with pictures and our hearing with certain sounds. As opposed to newspaper stories that only TELL the story, broadcast stories SHOW the story. So if we are talking about a fire that broke out in a downtown residential building, a newspaper story may tell us the details of when and where and who was involved. It may mention names of victims and quote certain people. With this, we can visualize who was involved and how they were feeling. With broadcast news, we get to SEE who exactly was involved, how injured they were. We get to hear the crackling sounds of the fire popping and the roaring engines of the fire trucks. So I would feel completely different learning about the fire reading it in a newspaper story as I would watching it as a news program on TV.