Lecture 12: Mass media and communication Flashcards
media facts
- movable printing press was invented by Johan Gutenberg in the 1450s and was originally powered by humans.
- The local hand in hand, the industrial revolution, and how things get recognized over time
- This concept of mass media is relatively new.
- The entire history of humans as a species is just like a drop in the bucket
eurocentrism
- communications studies is a very European, Eurocentric discipline
- This media timeline is limited to Eurocentric and European histories
3 diff. historical moments in time led to the kind of popularization of compulsory mass media
■ Protestant Reformation
■ Democratic Movements
■ Capitalist or Industrial Revolution
Protestant Reformation and eurocentrism
- moveable type of printer press
- created pamphlets for mass distribution
- european people relied on priests to tell them what was bible
- mass distribution created mass literacy around the world
democratic movements
- marked by examples as american and french revolution and overthrow monarchy
- mass media promotion was rise of political democracy
- wanted rep in gov. and furthered literacy making newspapers grow
capitalist/industrial revolution
- increased mechanization of product goods, influx from rural-urban areas
- increased production = rapid communication
- communication and mass media were formed as way to efficiently meet goal
- realization that industrialization means educated workforce
theoretical branch of communicatin and media theory
media/technological determinism: functionalism
media determinism & canada
- big in UOFT
- follows though that media shapes technology, how ppl think, feel and act
- tech works to shap social structures
Innes: space-biased media
argues tat media is modes of communication and endured overtime
- mobile across geographical space
- promotes strong tradition + custom, religious beliefs and power
- territorial expansion
different types of society
- oral
- literacy
oral
- based on oral tradition and story-telling
- knowledge is invested in few communities (books + institutions)
- allegory of cave: plato
- socratic method (way of learning when people speak and ask questions)
literacy
- developed, written or portable written media (websites, digital books etc)
- extends globally
- way societies all progress
- creates progression
tech + functionalism nation wide
- important agents of socialization
- social control (news-outlets, crime stats, etc)
- provide entertainment
marshall McLuhan
- mass media changes exp of things, and perception of politics
- idea of oral literate, literate to electronic concept
- cultures become more visually orientated
- allow rationalization and individual knowledge
- expand capacity, info gatherm transmission and make people more aware of activities around the world
conflict theory
- mass media broadcasts beliefs, values, and ideas that create widespread structure on society (including, injustice and inequality)
- bell canada, rogers, telus, shaw, and quebecor control 82% of broadcasting + telecoms
- heavy on media bias in ads, sourcing, and flak
- 37% of newspaper editors been influenced by ads, 63% haven’t
manufacturing consent: Herman and Chonky
- media machine = filter
(ownership, ads, media elite, flack and agreed upon-enemy) - Viewer-broadcaster relationship = consumer-producer
- propaganda and selected
information via ”information bubbles”
(Controlling ideologies of consumers)
imagined community: benedict anderson
- development of written language was essential in creating current borders
- ppl who communicate orally from one to another and have other-standing of another persons language
- common media for people w/ energy or ground food areas communicate with another
- unequal distrubution of media ownership in politics
types of manufactured consent
- ads (where revenue is earned)
- sourcing (new-gather methods, agreed on press releases, interviews by large govs, organizatins)
- flack (people & entities, who are defamed or not given access to power bc it threatens ownership)
media voluntarism
- school of thought that holds that we are free
to choose the media messages that suit us - decisions to who we are, which imagined communities we will join;
the mass media just offers us options.
Stuart Hall
people are not empty vessels into which
mass media pour a defined assortment of beliefs
Voluntaristic theories
- Representation
- selective and evaluative
Representation
the use of signs for the purpose of conveying
meaning.
* People produce meaningful communication by employing signs to represent objects, people,
events, and ideas
selective and evaluative
form of interpretative frames
e.g., help us to make sense of masculinity,
femininity, gender relations, and sexuality.
cultural studies: conflicting frames and Cultural studies analysts
argue that the mass media provides
dominant interpretive frames and interpretive frames that conflict
with dominant representations.
* The mass media are properly understood as sites of struggle over
cultural meanings.
feminist approach
- initially assumed audiences are passive
- women are portrayed more submissively and in home-taker roles then men
- news rarely mentioned issues of importance to women (wage discrimination, paid labour force, sexual abuse, childcare problems + more)
- four distinct categories women consume and focus opinions on
four distinct categories
- pro-life women from all social classes
(abortion is never justified, reject mass media justifications for abortions) - Pro-choice women in the working class who think of themselves as members of the working class
(adopt view as survival strategy) - Pro-choice women in the working class who aspire to middle-class status
(abortions aren’t for them, and other “responsible women”) - Pro-choice women in the middle class
(individuals feelings can determine if abortion is right or wrong in their case)
social media
apps and websites that allow people to interact, create, and share content via mobile phone networks
social media’s potential
- Democratization
- Afford new ways of connecting to others.
- Play an important role in contemporary social activism
Democratization
result of their interactive, decentralized
nature
contemporary social activism
- Creating awareness for various causes.
- Mobilizing support for political action.
downsides to social media
- Digital Divide
- social media seeks to facilitate interactions
- to concentration and commercialization.
- surveillance issues
Digital Divide
1 - - gap between who has access and who doesn’t
2- - Canadian Radio Telecommunications Commission published.
3 - - They stated in 2016 that high-speed internet is a necessity
how social media seeks to facilitate interactions not all are helpful
cyberbullying and cyber harassment, the circulation of bench porn.
Online communities can become very toxic
concentration and commercialization
Dominated by large corporations.
*Commodification of user data.
*Data is mined, organized, packaged, and sold to advertising and marketing companies
surveillance issues
Who’s looking at your online activity?
- bottom-up surveillance
(you being surveyed by institutions, but they used to survey each other)
- top-down surveillance
