SOC 3116 Lecture Notes - Cultural Studies, Technological Determinism, Noam Chomsky
4 Jul 2018
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Topic 3-2: Traditional Media & Contemporary Society
ROLES OF TRADITIONAL MEDIA
Metaphor of the Mirror
What you see in the media is really just a reflection of yourself.
Metaphor of the Window
The idea in saying that media are like a window, that when you watch or read the news, it is like
a window where you see beyond your immediate environment and can view the world.
There are both problematic because what is portrayed in the media isn’t an objective reality;
instead it is skewed. The suggestion that the media is a transparent conduit for relaying
information (i.e. information isn’t distorted when reported) is not entirely true.
The reality is the production of news has been subjected to a variety of constraints, many of
which are unrelated to the objective of conveying information in a comprehensive or transparent
manner.
3 CONSTRAINTS THAT AFFECT PRODUCTION OF NEWS
SPEAKS TO HOW TRANSPARENCY IS NOT ACCURATE
The productions of news have been subjective to a variety of constraints many of which are
related to the production of comprehensive and transformation information. This is not a
conspiracy but related to some kind of institutional analysis.
Format
The development of the particular ways of presenting information h at favour some kinds of
information and not others. Can be understood with the deadlines that journalists
work on. Noam Chomsky provides concision (concise) “there exists a format in which TV news
is presented, called concision. Concision involves news being presented in two forms.
He argues that the time window available for news (on TV for instance) isn’t enough to
provide evidence to back up the news being disseminated. Hence, what we see on the news is
made up of things that reflect our social realities and any other thing will be deemed
unbelievable. The format indirectly tells us what we won’t see.
If you want to say something new/different, it is reasonable to expect people to want evidence to
back it up (not believable cause no time to present). New is something that challenges what we
think we know.
Routines
Has its origin in the idea of timeliness. The official stories are the reflection of the routines of the
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Document Summary
What you see in the media is really just a reflection of yourself. The idea in saying that media are like a window, that when you watch or read the news, it is like a window where you see beyond your immediate environment and can view the world. There are both problematic because what is portrayed in the media isn"t an objective reality; instead it is skewed. The suggestion that the media is a transparent conduit for relaying information (i. e. information isn"t distorted when reported) is not entirely true. The reality is the production of news has been subjected to a variety of constraints, many of which are unrelated to the objective of conveying information in a comprehensive or transparent manner. The productions of news have been subjective to a variety of constraints many of which are related to the production of comprehensive and transformation information. This is not a conspiracy but related to some kind of institutional analysis.
