SOCI 210 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Vosges, Imagined Communities, Gfk Entertainment Charts

• School: McGill University
• Department: Sociology
• Course: SOCI 210
• Professor: Matthew Lange

Document Summary

Some sociologists are interested in what determines/shapes the media: recognize that it depends on social relations. Social relations promote technologies, and media depends on technologies painting, writing, printing press, record player, banners behind airplanes, radio, television, dvd, internet, etc. Form and content of media depends on the economic system: capitalism: expansion of media for profits, communism: use of media for political control. Impact of the media: most sociologists focus on the social impact of media. Believe the media is an influential socializing agent: shapes our norms, values, perspectives, identity. Spreads information that patterns social relations in additional ways. The impact of media on nationalism offers one of many possible examples. Family, neighborhood: historically, collective identities were limited to the people you knew and interacted with, media helped create imagined communities , abstract ideas of communities of strangers, able to spread abstract ideas among large populations. Benedict anderson: newspapers and nationalistic novels helped create ideas of imagined.