SOC 1305 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Mass Media, Bertelsmann, Profit Motive
Document Summary
Direct experience- five senses (you were there); low need for trust. Mediated experience- communicated through a channel (you weren"t there); high need for trust. Memory- recorded past versions of the above two. > most knowledge in modern societies is mediated. Most mediated information is a commercialized product (bought and sold). > mass media as social institution, communicating news or entertainment to large numbers of people simultaneously (t. v, newspaper, radio, magazines) Disney, time warner, vivendi, universal, news corp. , viacom, and. Cause or reflection of society? (if something goes bad) : violence, sexual behavior: how media shape reality. > media shape perception of the world in two ways. Selection/exclusion- defines what is out-there (exclusion hard to measure because it"s not there) Tone/equality- positive or negative language, annotations, images, implications: news media and democracy. > most americans believe that u. s news media are biased but do not agree on how. > roughly equal numbers say bias is liberal or conservative.
