MASS COMMUNICATION
Objective of the lesson :
The objective of this lesson is to assist you in
- Understanding the meaning of mass communication
- Understanding the concept of Mass Media
- Have an overview of mass communication
- Understand the elements of mass communication
- Gain an overview of important media theories
Structure of the lesson :
- Introduction to Mass Communication
- The Mass Media
- Elements of Mass Communication
- Important mass media theories
- Media Organisation
- Summary
- Technical Terms
- Model Questions
- Refernce Books
Mass communication occurs when a small number of people send messages to a large annonymous and usually heterogeneous audience through the use of specialized communication media.
The units of analysis for mass communication are the messages, the mediums, and the audience. Mass Communication represents the creation and sending of a homogeneous message to a large heteroge- neous dience through the media. Mass communication studies the uses and effects of the media by many as opposed to the study of human interaction as in other communication contexts.
Mass communication media make it possible to deliver messages to millions to millions of people at roughly the same time. The authors of these messages are usually organizations, and the audiences are composed of individuals.
- The telephone : speech without
- The phonograph : music without
- The photograph : museum without
- The electric light : space without
- The movie, radio and TV : classroom without
The development and widespread use of printed text in Europe in the 1500s produced a brand new form of communication. For the first time a single message could be duplicated with little error and distributed to thousands of people. First used to propagate religious texts and arguments, this “mass” approach to communication quickly caught on and was soon being used to distribute news, entertainment, and govern- ment regulations.
From these first primitive pamphlets, the “mass media,” as they are often called, have grown to include the print media of books, newspapers and magazines, the electronic media of television, radio, and audio/ video recording, and the new media of computers and computer networks. While these media differ in many ways, they will share the characteristics by which scholars define mass communication:
Mass communication messages are produced by organizations. The medium for these messages permits accurate duplication. The messages are distributed to large audiences at roughly the same time. Face- toface communication occurs on many channels, with many opportunities to send and receive messages, and with much complexity in the communication process.
Yet, the situation becomes even more complex, when the many media organizations with their production and distribution of millions of messages are considered. Media may be received by millions of people, all of whom are also engaged in face-to-face communication. The intersection of these two types of commu- nication makes for a picture that must include all communicatiors and their interactions with one another.
The individual parts of this model are described in more detail. The parts include.
- Channels of Distribution
- Audiences
- Mass Media Organizations
- Other Organization And Social Institutions
- Content
CHANNELS OF DISTRIBUTION
Scholars tend to identify the various mass media by their distribution channels. Books, newspapers, and magazines are often called the “print media,” while radio and television are often called the “electronic” or “broadcast” media. Two other electronic channels of distribution are also recognized as very important: “electronic recoded” media which include such as CDs, cassette tapes, video tapes, and the like – these are electronic in nature but are sold and delivered much in the same way as books – and “film” or “movies” which are similar to television but which are delivered in special buildings called “theaters.”
Telephones are electronic media, but telephones have not traditionally been included in the “mass media” because telephones are used mainly in person-to-person communication. Similiarly, computers, especially large computer networks, have the potential to be used as mass communication media, however, these are so new that their uses are still developing. Although they have no true category as yet, computers are sometimes referred to as the “new” media.
The figure above illustrates the most common way of organizing the distribution channels of the mass media. As was noted above, telephones and computer networks have been omitted because at the present time they are mostly used as person-to-person, rather than mass, media, and some channels that might have been included posters, flyers, memoranda, filmstrips, slide shows, and video games, for example – have been omitted not because they are unimportant, but because they are not as widely studied as the primary media. A mass medium’s distribution channel “aims” a “flow” of messages in the direction of a particular audience.
Target Audiences
Some media are best fitted to an audience that consists of individuals, each of whom is more or less alone when the message arrives. Other media are better fitted to an audience that gathers in groups.
Books, newspapers, magazines and direct mail are usually read by individuals. Film, on the other hand, is shown in theaters which gather audiences together in fairly large groups. Radio, television, and recordings are often delivered in group settings, but these groups are usually smaller than those who attend the showing of a film, and the three are also often used by individuals.
The relationship between the target audience and the delivery medium are especially important to com- mercial media organizations because they must compute the cost and effectiveness of their media prod- ucts. In the case of print media, for example, the price of each book, newspaper or magazine plays a part in a person’s decision to join or not join the audience. Although many people like to read books, for ex- ample, it was only when inexpensive “paperback” books became available that the audience jumped to its present size.
Media organization that use advertising to offset their costs must pay particular attention to their target audiences because their advertisers are often interested in presenting their ads to particular groups of people. For example, the recent trend in magazine publication has been towards an increase in the number of different magazines each of which appeals to a narrow audience that is desirable to a particular set of advertisers.
Media Access and Availability
In order to receive messages from a particular mass communication medium, an audience member must be able to “connect up” to the reception end of the channel. For example, television is not available to people who do not own television sets; CDs are useless to people who do not own CDs players, and so on. The extent to which an potential audience is able to make use of mass medium is called its availability.
Availability includes more than equipment. Language also plays a role, as does geographic locaton and economic class. A radio broadcast in Spanish, for example, is only available to those who speak Spanish, Similarly, printed media are only available to those who are able to read, and cable television will not be available to those who cannot afford the monthly fee. Media access refers to the ability of members of the society to make use of a particular medium to send message of their own. Print media is relatively more accessible than broadcast media. For example, anyone who can write can, at relatively little expense, print up and distribute a flyer or newsletter.
Access to television and radio broadcast channels, however, is tightly regulated by the government. Even when a channel is provided, as with public access cable television, it is much more difficult and expensive to produce video than to produce print. Access to television and radio broadcast channels, however, is tightly regulated by the government. Even when a channel is provided, as with public access cable televi- sion, it is much more difficult and expensive to produce video than to produce print.
Newspapers and magazines traditionally provide public access by means of “letters to the editor” or “editorial pages. “Television and radio news do not traditionally offer this kind of access. In recent times, however, radio and television shows featuring listener and viewer “call-ins” have become popular, and this provides access to a large number of people.
Access and availability have become increasingly important with the advent of cable television and the new computer networked media. We might argue that our society’s decision to require all children to attend school and learn to read has the effect of making the important documents of our society available to them. Similarly, our society’s insistence that everyone learn to write and our belief in “freedom of the press” encourages citizens to access the print media.
As the electronic media have begun to replace the print media as the major channels for public informa- tion, critics have begun to question whether this social availability and access will be continued. Govern- ment control of the broadcast channels limits access to these media to large corporations, and cable television is available only to those who are able to afford the relatively high cost of connection. These issues are now being widely debated in the United States.
AUDIENCES
An audience is a group of people who are receiving or have received a particular mass communication message. In some cases all members of the audience are paying attention to the medium at the same time – as, for example, the television audience that tuned in just after the space shuttle Challenger ex- ploded.
In other cases, however, the attention, of the audience is spread out over time – the audience for a particu- lar magazine, for example, may consist of people who read copies of the magazine at various times over
the period of a month or more.
And, in some cases, the attention of the audience may be spread over a very long period of time. The audience for Shakespeare’s plays, for example, is very large and hundreds of years in duration.
In the early days of mass communication research, the audience was believed to be very passive and innocent. It was supposed that members of the audience believed whatever they read in the newspapers or heard on the radio.
As studies of the relationship between the audience and the mass communication organizations have progressed, the researches’ view of the audience has changed. Nowadays, the audience is believed to be active and sophisticated. That is, the audience chooses the media that it attends to, and the audience is critical of the messages that are delivered to it by the media.
The Magic Bullet theory
The earliest theories of mass communication imagined that mass media had very strong effects on their audiences. The Shannon/Weaver model illustrates how these theories saw the media message as a kind of “magic bullet.”
Sent out by the organization, the magic bullets “hit” the members of the audience in their “minds” and changed “magic bullet.”
One of the first pieces of evidence that the Magic Bullet Theory was too simplistic came to light during research that was conducted in the wake of Orson Welles’ famous Mercury Theatre of the Air “Martian invasion” radio broadcast in 1938. [Note] According to the theory, anyone who listened to the broadcast should have believed that invaders from the planet Mars had landed in southern New Jersey.
Yet, although some did believe it, most did not, and the ways in which they came to not believe were very interesting.
Some listeners switched channels to see if the news was being carried else where; some picked up the phone and called friends to see if they were listening and if so, to ask what they thought about it; some paid enough critical attention to the show to recognize that it was fiction.
It was clear from these responses that most people did not accept the media message at face value. Rather, they took it under consideration and gave it meaning by comparing it to their prior experiences, and in many cases by talking it over with their families and friends.
The bullet theory assumed that an audience was passive, waiting for the media to shoot a propaganda message into it, and would roll over in a state of docile surrender when hit, as long as the bullet was sufficiently powerful. Accordingly, researches did not bother to study the audience.
Instead, they analyzed the content of the messages, assuming that content was the secret of a successful propaganda bullet. However, the researchers were due for a surprise. The audience obstinately declined to fall under the spell of the messages. Sometimes they reached in ways that were opposite to the propagandist’s intentions, or enjoyed the bombardment without allowing it to change their opinions in the slighest. Once the Magic Bullet Theory was seen to be false, researches began to propose alternative theories and design experiments to test them out. This led to the creation of new research methods, and to a sizable growth in the study of mass communication.
Interpersonal Diffusion
Studies that followed the “Martian Invasion” broadcast began to focus on the fact that members of the audience also engaged in face-to-face communications with family, friends and coworkers.
Theorists hypothesized that certain members of the audience, called “opinion leaders,” would be more influential than other members. In theory the opinion leaders would make up their minds as to what the
media messages meant and then tell their friends and neighbors.
Research studies conducted to test this hypothesis did find that certain members of the audience were opinion leaders. However, different members were the opinion leaders on different subjects. Because of this, it was (and continues to be) very difficult to find a simple explanation for the spread, or diffusion, of the content of media messages, through a society.
Another finding that contributed to the difficulty of explaining diffusion came from the study of rumors, Researches found that the accuracy of a statement spread by word-of-mouth decreases very rapidly as it travels through a population. Thus, it is hard to see how messages sent to opinion leaders via the mass media could be passed on with my accuracy.
These studies resulted in the conclusion that face-to-face communication is much more important to the process whereby people from and change their opinions than the content of mass media messages.
Uses and Gratifications
One current approach to mass communication studies argues that because mass media products are highly available in the society, its audiences tend to “use” it much as they would use any other product or service. The appearance of this approach marks an important change in the way media researchers think about the audience. Previously, they saw the audience as passive – made up of people who simply ac- cepted whatever was put in front of them. In these models the audience was a captive of the media organizations.
In the uses and gratifications approach the audience is active. Audience members are seen as consumers of a media product, and as with consumers of other goods and services, they shop around, consider alternatives, and make choices. The earlier approaches assumed that the content of the media must be having some kind of an effect on the audience members, and researchers spent their time trying to locate and measure those choices.
The earlier approaches assumed that the content of the media must be having some kind of an effect on the audience members, and researches spent their time trying to locate and measure those effects.
However, few substantial effects were ever found, perhaps because the model for the audience was too simplistic. The uses and gratifications approach seems to provide a richer way of looking at the audience. Instead of asking, “how does the media change our minds?” the uses and gratifications researchers ask “what is the role of media in our lives?”
Here are some examples of the uses of which the media are put:
- Getting the “news”
- Getting information about available products and services
- Starting the day in the morning or ending it at night
- Establishing common topics to talk about with friends
- Creating a substitut for having friends
- Providing a way to feel connected to other members of the audience
- Providing a way to escape from the day’s problems and worries
- Hearing someone else support our own values and In this view media becomes just one of many cultural influences in our environment, and far from the most important.
In face-to-face communication the participants are easily identified – the same is not true for mass commu- nication. The mass media message is created by a team of people, and it is sometimes difficult to estab- lish exactly who is responsible for what.
For example, the author of a book, may produce the initial set of words, but an editor (or editors) will review and alter those words, designers, and graphics specialists will choose type faces, create illustra- tions and organize the format of the text, production specialists will manufacture the book, and marketing and sales specialists will oversee its distribution. Althought it is traditional to assign “authorship” to the
person who wrote the original text, all of these people play a part in the communication process.
Electronic media are even more complexly organized. In a television production, for example, there will be one or more scriptwriters, a number of actors, a producer, a director, camera operators and other technical crew, and a host of others. A television show is truly a group project, with no single “author.”
Yet, to say that mass communication is produced by an organization is not to say that it is random or “neutral” in terms of the ideas and opinions that are expressed. Readers encounter “liberal” and “conser- vative” newspapers, for example, or religiously-oriented television programming, or politically-oriented music. Thus, a discussion of mass communication must investigate the nature of the organizations that produce it, and it must also investigate the social, political and economic relationships that might exist among the media organizations and their audiences.
With the recognition of the active audience has come the realization that the content of the mass media is actually a product. No less than soap or breakfast cereal or automobiles, mass communication is pro- duced and distributed for human consumption.
This means, of course, that the mass media organizations have somethings to sell, and that the audiences are their customers. Thus, one approach to the study of mass communication is to focus on the econom- ics of media production. Consider, for example, this outline of the economics of commercial television.
Notice that the members of the audience buy products from corporation. The remainder of the system has to do with distributing some of that revenue for the purpose of bring the corporations products to the attention of the audience.
Gatekeeping
The media product passes through many levels of organizational processing on its way to the audience, and at each step in the process, the original data is filtered – reduced in length, edited for style, censored, and so on. Each step in the process can be thought of as a gate through which the data must pass on its way to the consumer, consequently this situation is known as gatekeeping.
Suppose, for example, that a network television news team is sent to the midwestern United States to cover the heavy rains and flooding that are occuring there. The gatekeeping on this story begins with the observation of the event by the news team.
The flood may extend over hundred of square miles and affects the lives of millions of people, but the team will have time to record only a very small portion of this. Let us say that the team decides to focus on damage being done to the corn crop. This decision filters the available data by including data relating to the corn crop and excluding data relating to other crops and other types of damage.
Within the news organization many people will contribute to the production of this “story.” Editors will select the bits of video to be used in the final presentation; writers will create a script for the commentator to read; graphic artists will create titles, maps, animations and other video enhacements; musicians may create a musical score for the piece and so on. Other editors will decide which evening the story will “run,” and where the story will come in the sequence of stories, advertisements, and other material running that night. An anchorperson will introduce the story and various technicians will insure that it gets “on the air.”
During its stay in the flood zone, the news team may have shot hours of video tape, gathered many facts and interviewed many people. Yet the story as broadcast, if it is broadcast at all, will be only minutes in length. And, each gatekeeper will have had an effect on the content and style of the story. Each person will have added to or subtracted from the original data, and in his or her own way each person will have helped to formulate this particular communication product.
Agenda Setting
The failure of the “Magic Bullet” theory left mass communication researchers with a puzzle. On the one hand, studies continued to find little reason to believe that mass communication was able to change people’s opinions and beliefs. On the other hand, mass communication plays such a large role in the day- to-day lives of industrial societies that it seemed that it must have some kind of large impact on what
people think.
In recent decades media researches have been able to demonstrate an indirect, but nonetheless powerful, connection between what the news media presents and what people think. This connection has been dubbed agenda setting.
In investigating the relationship between the top stories in the news and “what people are talking about,” communication researchers found that stories tend to appear in the news somewhat prior to their becom- ing widely discussed among the public at large.
The conclusion we might draw from this is that the media tend to set the “agenda” – the list of items that people will be discussing. Thus, the power of the media may lie not in its ability to sway people’s opinions, but rather in its role of determining what issues will be considered important enough to discuss.
Agenda setting connects the constant use of the media in our society with the results of studies that show that most people form their opinions and beliefs based on face-to-face communication with others. It has become a widely accepted theory of mass communication.
CONTENT
The term “content” refers to the message that is distributed by the mass media organization by means of the mass communication channel. In American channel. In American television, for example, the content includes such as entertainment, advertisements, station-breaks, news, and “infomercials.”
These categories of content may be further divided. Entertainment, for example, might be divided into “genres” such as situation comedies, detective shows, soap operas, sports, and so on.
The content of each medium is subject to analysis and criticism by its readers. “Literary criticism,” “film criticism,” and “television criticism” are all well established fields of academic study, and some members of mass media organizations make their livings by publishing their critical views.
Because most readers will have been exposed to literary criticism in school, and because many critiques of film and television content are widely available, the topic will not be pursued further in this tutorial.
Typically, mass communication operates as a “one way street” – messages flow from the media organiza- tions to their audiences in a way that allows for very little immediate feedback. However, because those who work in media organizations are themselves a part of the society within which their audience exist, there is a path by which audience response to mass communication messages can feed back to the producers of the messages.
For example, the person who edits a newspaper story may be in the audience of a radio broadcast. The radio technician may be in the television audience. The television producer may read the newspaper. And, all of these people may talk to one another about what they have watched and heard and read.
Thus, “mass communication” and “interpersonal communication” seem to merge into one another.
Mass communication occurs when a small number of people send messages to a large anonymous and usually heterogeneous audience through the use of specialized communication media. Mass Communica- tion represents the creation and sending of a homogeneous message to a large heterogeneous audience through the media. Mass communication media make it possible to deliver messages to millions of people at roughly the same time.
Mass communication messages are produced by organizations. The medium for these messages permits accurate duplication. The messages are distributed to large audiences at roughly the same time. Scholars tend to identify the various mass media by their distribution channels. Books, newspapers, and magazines are often called the “print media,” while radio and television are often called the “electronic” or “broadcast” media. Two other electronic channels of distribution are also recognized as very important: “electronic recorded” media which include such as CDs, cassette tapes, Video tapes, and the like these are electronic in nature but are sold and delivered much in the same way as books and “film” or “movies” which are
similar to television but which are delivered in special buildings called “theaters.”
Some media are best fitted to an audience the consists of individuals, each of whom is more or less alone when the message arrives. Other media are better fitted to an audience that gathers in groups. In order to receive messages from a particular mass communication medium, an audience member must be able to “connect up” to the reception end of the channel. For example, television is not available to people who do not own television sets; CDs are useless to people who do not own CD players, and so on.
The extent to which an potential audience is able to make use of a mass medium is called its availability. An audiences. The Shannon/Weaver model illustrates how these theories saw the media message as a kind of “magic bullet.” Sent out by the organization, the magic bullets “hit” the members of the audience in their “minds” and changed their thoughts.
The failure of the “Magic Bullet” theory left mass communication researchers with a puzzle. On the one hand, studies continued to find little reason to believe that mass communication was able to change people’s opinions and beliefs. On the other hand, mass communication plays such a large role in the day- today lives of industrial societies that it seemed that it must have some kind of large impact on what people think. The conclusions we might draw from this is that the media tend to set the “agenda” the list of items that people will be discussing.
Thus, the power of the media may lie not in its ability to sway people’s opinions, but rather in its role of determining what issues will be considered important enough to discuss.
Typically, mass communication operates as “one way street” message flow from the media organizations to their audiences in a way that allows for very little immediate feedback. However, because those who work in media organizations are themselves a part of the society within their audiences exist, there is a path by which audience response to mass communication messages can feed back to the producers of the messages.
For example, the person who edits a newspaper story may be in the audience of a radio broadcast. The radio technician may be in the television audience. The television producer may read the newspaper. And, all of these people may talk to one another about what they have watched and heard and read.
Mass Media : Media that reach heterogenous audience at various geographical locations at the same time.
Magic Bullet : A theory of mass communication which propounds that media had very strong effects on the audience.
Diffusion of Innovation : A theory of mass communication which postulates that media serve to diffuse innovations in society.
Agenda setting : Another theory which stresses that media set the agenda for public opinion.
Gatekeeping : A function in mass media organisations whereby message to be printed/broadcast is selected.
- What is mass communication?
- Define the elements of mass communication?
- What are the important features of mass
- Briefly enumerate various theories of mass
- Differentiate between interpersonal and mass
