MDSA02H3 Chapter 1: Mass Communication: A Critical Approach (Entire Section)
Chapter 1: Mass Communication - A Critical Approach
• Roles and Responsibilities of the Media:
o At their best, in all their various forms, from mainstream newspapers and radio talk shows
to blogs, the media try to help us understand the effects that affect us.
o But, at their worst, the media's appetite for telling and selling stories leads them not only to
document tragedy but also to misrepresent or exploit it.
o Many viewers and social critics disapprove of how media, particularly TV and cable, seem to
hurtle from one event to another, often dwelling on trivial, celebrity-driven content.
• Past-Present-Future: The "Mass" Media Audience:
o In the sixties, seventies, and eighties - the height of the TV Network Era - people watched
many of the same programs, such as The Cosby Show.
o Today, however, younger generations are more favourable toward the Internet, their
smartphones, social media, and blogs, which guides different people to like much different
things.
o It is with the notion of customizable media that the notion of truly "mass" media may no
longer exist.
▪ The former mass audience is morphing into individual users who engage with ever-
narrowing politics, hobbies, and entertainment.
▪ As a result, media outlets that hope to survive must appeal not to mass audiences but
to niche groups - whether these are conservatives, progressives, sports fans, history
buffs, or reality TV addicts.
• Culture and the Evolution of Mass Communication:
o Culture encompasses a society's modes of communication: the creation and use of symbol
systems that convey information and meaning (e.g., languages, Morse code, motion
pictures, and one-zero binary computer codes).
o Culture may be defined as the symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and societies
use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values.
▪ It is a process that delivers the values of a society through products or other meaning-
making forms.
▪ Culture links individuals to their society by providing both shared and contested
values, and the mass media help circulate those values.
o The mass media are the cultural industries - the channels of communication - that produce
and distribute songs, novels, TV shows, newspapers, movies, video games, Internet services,
and other cultural products to large numbers of people.
▪ The historical development of media and communication can be traced through
several overlapping phases or eras in which newer forms of technology disrupted and
modified older forms - a process that many academics, critics, and media
professionals began calling convergence with the arrival of the Internet.
▪ These era, which all still operate to some degree, are oral, written, print, electronic,
and digital.
• The first two eras refer to the communication of tribal or feudal communities
and some agricultural economies.
• The last three phases feature the development of mass communication: the
process of designing cultural messages and stories and delivering them to large
and diverse audiences through media channels as old and distinctive as the
printed book and as new and converged as the Internet.
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▪ Hastened by the growth of industry and modern technology, mass communication
accompanied the shift of rural populations to urban settings and the rise of a
consumer culture.
• Oral and Written Eras in Communication:
o In most early societies, information and knowledge first circulated slowly through oral
traditions passed on by poets, teachers, and tribal storytellers.
o As alphabets and the written word emerged, however, a manuscript, or written, culture
began to develop and eventually overshadowed oral communication.
▪ This culture served the ruling classes.
▪ Working people were generally illiterate.
▪ This era's beginning and end is debated, but is estimated to have begun from roughly
1000 BCE and ended around the mid-fifteenth century.
o Many philosophers who believed in the superiority of the oral tradition feared that the
written word would threaten public discussion by offering fewer opportunities for the give-
and-take of conversation.
o The abandonment of face-to-face communication was feared, especially by Plato who
sought to banish poets.
• The Print Revolution:
o Paper and block printing developed in China around 100 CE and 1045, respectively.
o What we recognize as modern printing did not emerge until the middle of the fifteenth
century.
▪ At that time in Germany, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of movable metallic type
and the printing press ushered in the modern print era.
▪ Printing presses and publications then spread rapidly across Europe in the late 1400s
and early 1500s.
▪ Books were typically large, elaborate, and expensive, typically only owned by the rich,
church leaders, merchants, and politicians.
▪ Gradually, printers reduced the size and cost of books, making them more readily
accessible.
▪ Books eventually became the first mass-marketed products in history.
o The printing press combined three elements necessary for mass-market innovation.
▪ First, machine duplication replaced the tedious system in which scribes hand-copied
texts.
▪ Second, duplication could occur rapidly, so large quantities of the same book could be
reproduced easily.
▪ Third, the faster production of multiple copies brought down the cost of each unit,
which made books more affordable to less affluent people.
o Since mass-produced printed materials could spread information and ideas faster and
farther than ever before, writers could use print to disseminate views counter to traditional
civic doctrine and religious authority - views that paved the way for major social and cultural
changes (e.g., the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern nationalism).
o Print media became key tools that commercial and political leaders used to distribute
information and maintain social order
o Mass production of books influence mass production of other goods, which lead to the
Industrial Revolution, modern capitalism, and the consumer culture in the twentieth
century.
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o Industrialization required a more educated workforce, but printed literature and textbooks
also encouraged compulsory education, thus promoting literacy and extending learning
beyond the world of wealthy upper-class citizens.
o The printing press also nourished the idea of individualism, which became a huge value in
American society.
• The Electronic Era:
o The Europe and the United States, the impact of industry's rise was enormous: Factories
replaced farms as the main centers of work and production.
o During the 1880s, roughly 80% of Americans lived on farms and in small towns; by the late
1920s and 1930s, most had moved to urban areas, where new industries and economic
opportunities beckoned.
o City had overtaken country.
o The gradual transformation from an industrial, print-based society to one grounded in the
Information Age began with the development of the telegraph in the 1840s.
▪ Featuring dot-dash electronic signals, the telegraph made four key contributions to
communication.
• First, it separated communication from transportation, making media message
instantaneous - unencumbered by stagecoaches, ships, or the pony express.
• Second, the telegraph, in combination with the rise of mass-marketed
newspapers, transformed "information into a commodity, a 'thing' that could be
bought or sold irrespective of its uses or meaning."
• Third, the telegraph made it easier for military, business, and political leaders to
coordinate commercial and military operations, especially after the installation
of the transatlantic cable in the late 1860s.
• Fourth, the telegraph led to future technological developments, such as wireless
telegraphy (later named radio), the fax machine, and the cell phone, which
ironically resulted in the telegraph's demise: In 2006, Wester Union telegraph
audiences send their final messages.
▪ The rise of film at the turn of the twentieth century and the development of radio in
the 1920s were early signals, but the electronic phase of the Information Age really
boomed in the 1950s and 1960s with the arrival of television and its dramatic impact
on daily life.
▪ Then came personal computers, cable TVs, DVDs, DVRs, direct broadcast satellites, cell
phones, smartphones, PDAs, and e-mail.
• The Digital Era:
o In digital communication, images, texts, and sounds are converted (encoded) into electronic
signals (represented as varied combinations of binary numbers - ones and zeros) that are
then reassembled (decoded) as a precise reproduction of, say, a TV picture, a magazine
article, a song, or a telephone voice.
o New technologies, particularly cable television and the Internet, developed so quickly that
traditional leaders in communication lost some of their control over information.
▪ For example, starting with the 1992 presidential campaign, the network news shows
(ABC, CBS, and NBC) began to lose their audiences, first to MTV and CNN, and later to
MSNBC, Fox News, Comedy Central, and partisan radio talk shows.
▪ By the 2004 national elections, Internet bloggers - people who post commentary on
cultural, personal, and political-opinion-based Web sites - had become key players in
news.
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Document Summary
First, machine duplication replaced the tedious system in which scribes hand-copied texts. Industrial revolution, modern capitalism, and the consumer culture in the twentieth century. 1920s and 1930s, most had moved to urban areas, where new industries and economic opportunities beckoned: city had overtaken country, the gradual transformation from an industrial, print-based society to one grounded in the. Information age began with the development of the telegraph in the 1840s. Featuring dot-dash electronic signals, the telegraph made four key contributions to communication. First, it separated communication from transportation, making media message instantaneous - unencumbered by stagecoaches, ships, or the pony express. For example, starting with the 1992 presidential campaign, the network news shows (abc, cbs, and nbc) began to lose their audiences, first to mtv and cnn, and later to. Social media allow people from all over the world to have ongoing online conversations, share stories and interests, and generate their own media content: the linear model of mass communication:
