Lecture 12: Mass Media and Communication

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

• The concept of mass media is relatively new

• The entire history of humans as a species is just like a drop in the bucket

Mass Media: Eurocentrism

• Communication studies is a very European, Eurocentric discipline

• Media timeline is limited to Eurocentric and European histories

Popularization of Compulsory mass media

1. Protestant reformation

2. Democratic movements

3. Capitalist or Industrial Revolution

Protestant reform and Eurocentrism

• Moveable type of printer press

• Created pamphlets for mass distribution

• European people relied on priests to tell them what was in the bible

• Mass distribution created mass literacy around the world

Democratic movements

1. Marked by examples as American and French Revolution and overthrow monarchy

2. Mass media promotion was rise of political democracy

3. Wanted representation in government and furthered literacy, which made newspapers grow

Capitalist/Industrial revolution

1. Increased mechanization of product goods, influx from rural-urban areas

2. Increased production = rapid communication

3. Communication and mass media were formed as way to efficiently meet goals

4. Realization that industrialization means educated workforce

Media/Technological Determinism: Functionalism

• Theoretical branch of communication and media theory

• Big in UOFT

• Follows through how media shapes technology, how people think, feel and act

• Technology works to shape social structures

Innes: Space-biased media

• Argues that media is modes of communication and endured overtime

• Mobile across geographical space

• Promotes strong tradition & customs, religious beliefs and power

• Focuses on territorial expansion

Different types of Society

1. Oral

2. Literacy

Oral

• based on oral tradition and story-telling

• Knowledge is invested in few communities (i.e., books & institutions)

• Allegory of Platos cave

• Socratic method: the 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

Technology & Functionalism: Nationwide

1. Important agents of socialization

2. Social control (news-outlets, crime stats, etc)

3. Provide entertainment

Marshall McLuhan: Media

1. Mass media changes experience of things and perception of politics

2. Idea of oral literate, literate to electronic concepts

3. Cultures become more visually orientated

4. Allowing rationalization and individual knowledge

5. Expand capacity, info gatherm transmission and make people more aware of activities around the world

Conflict Theory: Mass Media

• Mass media broadcasts beliefs, values, and ideas that create widespread structure on society (including, injustice and inequality)

• Bell Canada, Roger’s, 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

Herman and Chonky: Manufacturing Consent

1. Media machine = filter

• Ownership, ads, media elite, flack and agreed upon-enemy

2. Viewer-broadcaster relationship is the equal to consumer-producer

3. Propaganda and selected information via “information bubbles” (controlling ideologies of consumers)

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Community

1. Development of written language was essential in creating current borders

2. People who communicate orally from one to another and have other-standing of anther persons language

3. Common media for people with energy or ground food areas communicate with another

4. Unequal distribution of media ownership in politics

Types of Manufactured consent

1. Ads (where revenue is earned)

2. Sourcing (new-gather methods, agreed on press releases, interviews by large govs, organizations)

3. Flack (people & entities, who are defamed or not given access to power because it threatens ownership)

Media voluntarism

• School of thought that holds that we are free to choose the media message that suits us

• Decisions to who we are, which imagined communities we will join; the mass media just offers us options

Stuart Hall: Mass Media

People are not empty vessels into which mass media pour a defined assortment of beliefs

Voluntaristic Theories

1. Representation

2. 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., helps us to make sense of masculinity, femininity, gender relations, and sexuality

Cultural studies: Conflicting frames and analysts

• Argument that the mass media provides dominant interpretive frames that conflict with dominant representations

• The mass media are properly understood as sites of struggle over cultural meanings

Feminist Approach: Mass Media

• Initial 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, and more)

• Four distinct categories women consume and focus opinions on

4 Distinct Categories

1. Pro-life women from all social classes

• abortion is never justified, reject mass media justifications for abortions

2. Pro-choice women in the working class who think of themselves as members of the working class

• Adopt view as survival strategy

3. Pro-choice women in the working class who aspire to middle-class status

• abortions aren’t for them, and other “responsible women”

4. Pro-choice women in the middle class

• Individual 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

1. Democratization

2. Afford new ways of connecting to others

3. Play an important role in contemporary social activism

Democratization

Result of interactive, decentralized nature in media

Contemporary social activism

• Creating awareness for various causes

• Mobilizing support for political action

Downsides to social media

1. Digital divide

2. Seeks to facilitate interactions

3. Concentration and commercialization

4. Surveillance issues

Digital divide

1. The gap between who has access to control/consume the media and who doesn’t

2. Canadian radio telecommunication commission (2016) published that high speed internet is a necessity

Unhelpful/Dangerous social media interactions

1. Cyberbully/cyber harassment

2. Circulation of bench porn

3. Toxic online communities

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 is looking at your online activity?”

• Bottom-up surveillance (being surveyed by institutions, but they used to survey each other)

• Top-down surveillance