Chapter 12 Flashcards
What are “the media”?
• The media are essentially all forms of broadcast and interactive communication
available to the public that are used to entertain and inform
• Media institutions play a significant role in shaping understanding of the world by
shaping ideas, world views, and, ultimately, realities
• They shape society and culture and, in doing so, their responsibility is immense
Historical Evolution of the Media
Story tellers vs Prophets
• From earliest recorded times, story tellers were individuals in social groups who stood out for criticizing the behaviour of others
• Those who dared to speak about behaviour that might be changed and what should be, were called “prophets” (focused more on the present and future, predicting future events)
• These ways of telling about the past, present, and future were preserved, first, in oral traditions that formed religious beliefs and practices
Historical Evolution of the Media
Oral Traditions
• Oral traditions were recorded in various forms and held sacred by the societies that created them
-> theatre in ancient Greece was storytelling that tried to preserve the important give-and-take of discussions
Historical Evolution of the Media
• Theatrical stories took three forms:
->drama that ended tragically in the death of the central character in the story
->comedy that made its points about human behaviour and interactions that allowed the characters to go on living
->satire that held up certain kinds of behaviour to ridicule
Historical Evolution of Media:
The Public Sphere
Civilizations all over the world were following similar trajectories:
-> formulating stories about the past and present
-> designating particular individuals as storytellers and dramatists
-> dealing with power struggles and forms of government
->developing religions that answered essential human questions in similar ways
Historical Evolution of Media: The Public Sphere
“spread of ideas causes these things”
• This tumultuous spread of ideas ushered in the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution
Historical Evolution of Media: The Public Sphere
Shift in thinking with inventions
• Shifts in thinking coincided with the invention of the
Gutenberg printing press in 1450 and the invention of glass as a magnifier
->the use of small magnifiers “spectacles”
(eyeglasses) in the 1300s, which started in Italy, moved to the
Netherlands, and soon stretched across Europe
Historical Evolution of Media: The Public Sphere
Printing literature
• The ability to print Bibles, books, political pamphlets, and newspapers in masses —and the ability of a much broader public to read them—began to create the social revolution of
universal literacy, allowing ideas and news to be shared and interpreted quickly and widely
Historical Evolution of Media: The Public Sphere
The ability to print Bibles, books, political pamphlets, and newspapers in masses help gathered people?
The mass dissemination of these sources of information—
newspapers, particularly in the 1700s—gathered people into
town squares or the salons of the upper classes to discuss, debate, and develop ideas about government, politics, religion, arts and culture, and society in general
Historical Evolution of Media: The Public Sphere
This sharing of ideas was pivotal to the development of changes in
religious belief, modern democracy, and innovative political thought
->Newspapers were the main source of political, economic, and
cultural information—for the rising middle class and became the fundamental guide of public opinion
Historical Evolution of Media: The Public Sphere
The 4 Estate
During the eighteenth century, when democracy began to take shape,
journalism became known as the “Fourth Estate” with a social responsibility of advocacy and an implicit ability to frame political issues
->The first three estates (from the Middle Ages=the Church (clergy), Nobility (knight-warriors), and Commoners (peasants and nuns)
Historical Evolution of Media: The Public Sphere
fewer sources of news and information in the past
• Until the late 1900s, fewer sources of news and information made debates more likely to be two-sided, specific, and less confusing than what we experience from today’s multiple media
Historical Evolution of Media:
The Public Sphere
Current news media
Current news media remain bound to the objectives of the
Fourth Estate, but find it increasingly difficult to maintain
them in a time when media are converging
• Previously independent media companies are being purchased
to create larger, more powerful, competing media entities with
complex ownership structures
Historical Evolution of Media:
The Public Sphere
Journalists
• Journalists became responsible not only for informing the public of relevant events—war, economics, local issues, politics, health, and culture—but for ensuring that their reporting was free from personal biases and the biases of those who owned the newspaper presses or who provided
information and expert opinion
Historical Evolution of Media:
The Public Sphere
The fifth Estate
Internet-based media sometimes are distinguished as “The
Fifth Estate”
Media, Nation Building, and Collective Consciousness
Governments, institutions, and private interest groups have used various media to shape the consciousness and identities of nations and society
• Media are used to inform public opinion about issues that meet national objectives of identity, security, population health, and economic growth
Media, Nation Building, and Collective Consciousness
John A. MacDonald example
i.e In much the same way that John A. Macdonald used the transcontinental railway to link Canada together as one economic nation in the 1880s, broadcast radio has been used to further nation-building by linking together ideologies through the airwaves
Media, Nation Building and Collective Consciousness
prime ministers William Lyon Mackenzie King and R.B. Bennett example
For example:
• 1930s: radio broadcasts began to forge a common Canadian consciousness to the country’s population
• In creating a common source of news and information for all Canadians regardless of
their location, prime ministers William Lyon Mackenzie King and R.B. Bennett believed the radio broadcast would help unify Canadians and protect the blossoming national identity from the influences of American neighbours
• This objective remains a Canadian broadcast policy to this day
Canadian Content
• Ninety per cent of Canadians live within 160 kilometres of the
United States border
->this distribution ratio of population to geography means
that American media production companies spend much less to
distribute their productions than Canada does as it tries to reach
the 50 per cent of Canadians living north of the corridor of
major urban centres
• Cost of production and distribution divided by the number of outlets that distribute those productions is lower for American producers (more outlets to share the burden of the costs)
Canadian Content
Economies of scale:
• Canadian producers must carry a higher burden of distribution cost, so it is less expensive if they carry American productions than Canadian ones
->Canadians have been exposed to more American than Canadian media content
• Canadian content (CanCon) regulations and policies were put in place to protect the Canadian national identity and to ensure a market for Canadian creative and production industries
Canadian Content in Radio and Television Production
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is the
federal organization that, among other functions, is responsible for regulating the amount of “Canadian content” on radio and television
Canadian Content in Radio and Television Production
Radio
• Canadian content in radio is determined by the MAPL system: M = music, A = artist, P = performance (recorded or live), L = lyrics
• In 1971, Canadian content rules were first established, at 25 per cent of airplay
(raised to 30 per cent in the 1980s and to 35 per cent in 1999)
Canadian Content in Radio and Television Production
• Canadian content in television has been a bit more difficult to monitor and manage
• Current Canadian content percentages are:
-> radio airplay is 40 per cent (with partial exceptions for some specialty formats such as classical) versus
-> broadcast television is 55 per cent yearly or 50 per
cent daily (CBC has a 60 per cent CanCon quota;
some specialty or multicultural formats have lower percentages)
-> at least 50 per cent of programming aired daily in “prime time ” i e from 6pm until midnight
Canadian Content in Television and
Movie Production
The public network CBC devotes the vast majority of its prime- time broadcasting to Canadian content
-> One way that the private networks, CTV, Global, and
CityTV, have reached quota is by relying on news (twice
nightly) and on information programs that are considered to be
Canadian
-> Canadian versions of unscripted shows, such as game shows, reality shows, and baking shows, are other ways of making a low investment in Canadian content
Canadian Content in Television and
Movie Production
Canadian Movies
• The federal body for funding and promoting Canadian films is
called Telefilm Canada
What is Canadian Content in Terms of
Story Themes?
• Canadian content is fairly well-defined in terms of Canadian
involvement in the making or production of music, a television
show, or a movie
• The other side to Canadian content is the telling of a
“Canadian story,” one that reflects Canadian history,
identifiable places, culture, values, its diversity, etc.
• While Canadian settings frequently stand in for American
locations in films, less frequently do Canadian locations
become “the third character” in the plots
Aboriginal Peoples Television Network
In 1991, TVNC (Television Northern Canada) started delivering shows to communities in Canada’s North
APTN began broadcasting on January 21, 1999, developed from
that former platform
-> was first network in the world dedicated to a Indigenous people and is a founding member of country’s the World
Indigenous Television Network
-> not largely government-funded, but is a non-profit charity organization (funds from subscribers, commercials, various partnerships)
->85% Canadian content is broadcast in English (56%),
French (16%), and Indigenous languages (28% being heard only on this network)
Is the Medium the Message?
Global Village
The proliferation and innovation of media technology around the world has created
what Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) called the
global village
Is the Medium the Message?
Marshall McLuhan belifs
• McLuhan remains one of the best-known critics and theorists of modern media
-> has been described as a media “prophet” and technological determinist (someone who believes that technology can determine how humans act and think)
->believed that technology has the power to determine social structures
Is the Medium the Message?
• One of McLuhan’s (1964) most famous claims concerning the media is that “the medium is the message”
-> the medium—whether television, radio, print, tweets, memes, TikTok videos, whiteboards, or performance whiteboards, or performance,art—has a causative effect on the way human groups think, act and organize socially
The importance of any medium is how it affects the way people interpret its messages, behave as a result of them, and how it “shapes and controls the scale and form of human
association and action,” beyond the specifics of its content (McLuhan, 1962)
The Internet and Social Media
In The Power Elite (1956), C. Wright Mills identified two main sociological characteristics of mass media:
(1) very few people control the communication of a great number of people and
(2) the audience has no truly effective way to communicate back to those in control
The Internet and Social Media
• Mills argued that the mass media were inherently undemocratic
->Governments, media outlets, and large corporations able to dominate the public consciousness with greater broadcast powers than small groups/individuals
->Traditionally, there was no effective way people could speak back to power
The Internet and Social Media
Tim Berners-Lee
-> British computer scientist and professor of computer science at
Oxford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
-> developed what would become the modern World Wide Web, the Internet
->In 1989, his intention was to create a global information- sharing platform that would democratize information—that would give people at all levels of society around the world a tool to freely access, share, and benefit from all forms of knowledge and information, including those traditionally controlled by institutions of power
The Internet and Social Media
The true democratization of information and debate would take the form of
media that would be broadly social
• Content sharing and storage sites (Wikipedia, JStor, WikiLeaks)
• 1990s music-sharing platforms (Napster)
• Personal blogging (Tumblr and Medium)
• Personal website platforms (WordPress)
• Social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok)
• News media to online platforms with public comment sections
The Internet and Social Media
Search engines and mail systems
• All of these online sources were made accessible by global
search engines dating back to the early 1990s:
->Netscape, Ask Jeeves, AOL, Yahoo!, Internet Explorer, and, more recently, Google and Bing
• Sharing all of this information between individuals was made
possible by the creation of electronic mail systems, such as Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL, and news aggregators known as RSS (really simple syndication) feeds
The Internet and Social Media
The first social media site
The first social media site launched in 1997 when SixDegrees.com invited users to create profile pages, contact lists, and send messages within the network
The Internet and Social Media
SixDegrees was followed by
SixDegrees was followed by Friendster in 2002, MySpace in 2003, Facebook in 2004, and then a wave of social media sites in 2005 and 2006 including LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and the blogging platforms WordPress and Tumbler
• Emergence of social games like FarmVille and CandyCrush and, online dating services such as LavaLife, Match, eHarmony, JDate, okcupid, Tindr, Ashley Madison, and Grindr
AI and Algorithms:
The Dangers of Convenience
• Social media platforms and search engines, driven by algorithms and artificial intelligence, have been co-opted by government and private institutions to monitor, measure,
categorize, predict, and change the behaviour of the people who use them
• Access to this data is then sold to institutions, corporations, and private interest groups who capitalize on insights gained to create targeted advertising
• Able to deliver only ads and messages that are (or may be) of interest to users and filter out content that is not
Social Construction of Reality
Gate keeping
• C. Wright Mills believed that gatekeeping is the heart of media’s power, claiming that those who are in charge of the
media are in charge of ideas
• Gatekeeping, as a tool of power and authority, is the act of deciding who is allowed access to knowledge and in what
ways—and who is not
• Those who control production also control the narratives that inform the public on the issues that shape what we know and believe about the world
Media: Social Construction of Reality
Terms and definition
- Production and ownership: Who has the means and funds to produce the content?
- Language: Is the content in plain language everyone can understand rather than complex, verbose, academic, or technical language?
- Access: Is it easily accessed by the public or is it kept behind paywalls, subscriptions, or other controls?
- Dissemination: How widely is the information shared with the public?
Filter Bubbles
What causes it
• The media have always been major contributors to political and social polarization
• Our families and communities instil in us certain beliefs about the world and the people around us
• We seek information and other people to confirm and uphold those beliefs (confirmation bias)
• Such a predisposition leads us to associate with people who hold similar beliefs, to read, view, and listen to news media that support those beliefs, and to participate in activities and groups that support those beliefs
Filter Bubbles
• These philosophical (and sometimes physical) spaces we create for ourselves that
preserve our belief systems are known as filter bubbles (and existed long before the
age of social media)
• For the most part, people have surrounded themselves only with people who are alike
and have always sought information and entertainment that confirms or reaffirms
belief systems
The Attention Economy and News as Spectacle
Media in Canada:
• Funded by two main income streams:
1) subscriptions and 2) advertising
• Online news media has compromised the subscription revenue model for both print and television media outlets, pushing them to produce more content online (much of it at no cost to the public) and to rely on advertising models for much-needed funding
The Attention Economy and News as Spectacle
Demand and and integrity of news
• Demand has increased the sensationalized and rapid-fire style of news reporting
• The need to publish first (instead of factually) has decreased the integrity of news reporting
• The rise of citizen journalism and rampant public opinion on
social media mean that media outlets compete for attention - journalists report live news events, along with everyday
people posting photographs and video
The Attention Economy and News as Spectacle
• News looks like advertising and advertising now looks like the
news
• Bold, pithy headlines accompanied by dramatic photos and
videos are meant to capture attention and commodify the
news, social media platforms, and those who use them
• Content of the 24-hour news cycle has become fractured by
commodification = becoming unable to distinguish news from entertainment
and from advertising
The Attention Economy and News as Spectacle
Guy DeBord argued:
society has become a spectacle that distracts us from the important issues that inform democracy: reality is made surreal or unreal, which threatens our ability to perceive reality or to understand the issues facing us.
Fake News:
Who Can You Trust?
• Much like filter bubbles, polarization, and ownership biases, fake news also did not
arrive with the Internet and social media
-examples throughout history from the eras of the Enlightenment, the colonial
period, and Nazi Germany’s Center for Information Technology and Society
Two Types of Fake News
According to the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), there are
two main types of fake news
Misinformation and Disinformation
Two Types of Fake News
Misinformation
Misinformation is false, but is not created or shared with the intention of causing harm
➢ i.e during COVID-19 pandemic, the belief that taking ibuprofen led to complications if taken to treat symptoms of COVID-19
➢ i.e the absence or erasure of information from the news cycle, we tend to forget about its
existence even if it hasn’t been resolved
Two Types of Fake News
Disinformation
• Disinformation is
deliberately created to
mislead, harm, or
manipulate a person, social
group, organization, or
country ex) ‘take back alberta’.
Social Media and Its Effects on Society
Private corporations that own platforms such as Facebook,
Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Google only survive because of
advertising revenue
->highly lucrative advertising models are built on data collection and algorithms that analyze data related to personal
online behaviour and create profiles (or identities) and categories for every one of their users
->predictions are made according to what users might be interested in
->access to this information is sold to product manufacturers, service providers, and content producers who
want to promote their products, services, and ideas
Impact:
Algorithms and Social Inequality
Social construction of reality
In producing knowledge about users,
corporations and institutions use online
behavioural data and algorithms to determine
not only which products and services one might
be interested in, but which opportunities are
made available to the user and what
information is served to the user, ultimately
playing a role in shaping one’s life.
Effects of Social Media on the Individual
George Herbert Mead’s generalized other
• symbolic interactionism says Social media influences what we think of ourselves and how
we want to be seen by the world around us (ideal world, ideal
people, and our ideal self)
• What arises from this constant stream of unattainable
perfection is constant tension—a gap between the place where
we are and the place where we think we could or should be.
Effects of Social Media on the Individual
Erving Goffman
would consider each social media platform to be one of the stages on which we perform ourselves, each representing a different context (where we are)
and audience (who we’re with)
Effects of Social Media on the Individual
Charles Cooley
would consider social media to be the looking glass through which
we see ourselves in the eyes of our imagined audience
Effects of Social Media on the Individual
Anthony Giddens on identity
considered identity to be a “project” that we work on throughout our lives, building our identities and
setting ourselves apart from others through the media we consume, the clothes we wear, and how we manage the appearance of our bodies through exercise, diet, cosmetics, and surgery
The Self and Society
Social media construct our identities and
the realities associated with them
• Despite the fact that social media provide people with tools to create and perform
their desired identities, they continue to reproduce ideas of what society deems to be
“normal” or “idealized,” specifically, accomplished, attractive, fit, and educated
• In these ways, social media further construct reality what we believe to be normal or acceptable in society, how we fit into those ideals, and how we perceive ourselves
