Mass Comm Test 1 Review - Korpi

The first public message sent by the Morse telegraph in the United States was:

What hath God wrought?

Most of us are convinced the mass media have tremendous impact on people, but when it comes to ourselves as individuals, we believe that we make free rational choices based on facts (and the media do not have much of an effect on us).

True

Media research presents a convincing case that most of us are probably wrong in our estimates of how media affect other people and ourselves.

True

Most people understand quite well the role media play in our lives and the lives of others.

False

One explanation for our relative ignorance or naivete regarding media's impact on us is due to how common and pervasive it is—we simply tend not to think about it.

True

In order to control the impact of the media on us, we can ignore the media themselves and just focus on rhetorical strategies.

False

Which of the following is NOT considered by the authors of your textbook to be one of the four dominant institutions influencing people's lives?

Military

The creators of media messages—like journalists, producers, and advertisers—have far more control than you do over the information and meanings that you get from the media

False

The mass media often operate relatively independently of each other, and therefore your use of them and their influence on you operate independently as well.

False

The authors of your textbook argue that understanding media as a ________, and from the vantage point of a _________, will help you understand individual media in different and more useful ways than you did before.

system, receiver

The authors of your textbook consider all of the following to be reasons to study media communication. Which do they argue is the most important?

media greatly influence you and your life

With the appropriate knowledge you can easily control media's uses and their effects on society as easily as you can your personal uses and their effects.

False

The impact of the media does NOT depend solely on what media gatekeepers send through the pipeline.

True

The world that you create in your head is a direct result of the actual content of the message; the medium itself is neutral.

True

Each medium has unique traits (they are after all "different" media), but the media also share many important characteristics.

True

For the purpose of distinguishing between them, it is accurate to say that "communications" is a process that characterizes much of human interaction, and that "communication" is things, messages.

False

employs technology to produce and distribute symbols to large numbers of people; to whom it may concern

mass communication

are things, messages, like articles, books, movies, and so on

communications

the process of creating shared meaning

communication

employ mechanical, chemical, or electronic channels

communication mechanism

a large people group sharing the same geographical or social territory

society

what we know about ourselves and our world

culture

a set of related explanatory statements

theory

a useful causal chronology

history

Why do large media firms produce commodities in large volumes?

To pursue economies of scale

Economic determinists would take the position that:

Newspapers are organized the way they are because that form has been found to be most profitable.

Why is ownership control probably more of a problem today than it was forty or fifty years ago?

More media have been taken over by giant, international corporations that have financial interests in many of the issues the media report on.

According to technological determinism, society guides the media and its development.

False

Enabling technologies:

are the inventions or innovations that make a new communication medium possible

Our media technologies and environment are constantly changing.

True

Media technologies are converging (because of computers and digital), but media jobs and media businesses are not (because they are in the analog world).

False

Information is a resource just like coal, oil, iron ore, timber, and hydro-electric power are resources.

False

Even though most adults in our society spend a tremendous portion of their lives watching television, they can easily reduce this consumption dramatically or eliminate it altogether.

False

On average, about what percentage of their leisure time do Americans spend with the mass media?

>50%

In recent years total daily media use has been decreasing slightly.

False

Becker and Roberts describe four worlds in which each of us lives. Which of the following is NOT one of those worlds?

Your social world, the world made up of what the people with whom you associate know and believe.

Which of the four worlds has the greatest influence on the way you vote in national elections?

Your fourth world.

The First World is the world in your head.

False

By a combination of circumstance and choice, you are exposed to a highly selective sample of the bits of information about any particular topic.

True

You must have complete information in order to have a complete idea about something.

False

Your understanding of war has a one-to-one relationship with all of the bits of information about war you have encountered in your lifetime, since these are the bits that make up your fourth world.

False

Because most of us in America have had relatively similar experiences, we will tend to construct the same meanings from news stories we encounter in the media.

False

On almost any important issue, as time goes on you are exposed to a steadily increasing number and variety of bits of information, as well as encountering some of the same bits many times.

True

Which one of the following worlds varies the most from one person to another?

Fourth

Who or what is most responsible for the kinds of information to which you are exposed?

You

We have a great deal of control over our exposure to bits of information, but we cannot control all of it.

True

A model can describe everything about communication.

False

An "uncertain analogy" is:

The most interesting property of a model because it leads to new predictions that can be tested.

The scientific study of communication is alone in its dependence on models.

False

Which of the following is NOT true of models?

Tend to draw ones attention to specific instances.

In assessing scientific models, we are primarily concerned with simplicity.

False

The Source-Message-Channel-Receiver model of communication suggests that a source sends a message through some channel to a receiver who absorbs it in just the way in which it was sent. In other words, the source or sender is in control of what the receiver learns.

True

The Source-Message-Channel-Receiver model of communication grossly distorts the great differences among individuals in patterns of exposure and ways of processing the information they receive.

True

The Source-Message-Channel-Receiver model and the Westley-MacLean model are essentially the same.

False

The Westley-MacLean model points up the fact that, in any form of mass communication, information goes through a series of gatekeepers.

True

The most important function of feedback is to:

Help sources adjust their communication to their audience.

The mosaic model is based on the idea that:

the communication environment is like a vast mosaic of information bits

According to the authors of your text, none of the traditional models of mass communication provides an adequate picture of the contemporary world of communication that you and others experience.

True

The mosaic model can be seen as representing our second world, that is, our entire communication environment.

True

In the mosaic model, the mosaic represents:

one topic, and the bits of information and sources of information available for this topic

In the mosaic model, each row represents a bit of information.

False

The filled in squares in the mosaic model represent:

Third or Fourth world

In what sense do the sources to which you are exposed in your communication mosaic interact?

Each affects your interpretation of information from the others.

The third dimension of the communication mosaic is:

topics for which you have information

Our interpretations of information are primarily topic dependent. That is, the meaning we construct for one topic is independent of our interpretations of other topics.

False

Time is an important dimension in the communication mosaic because:

Both you and the mosaic are constantly changing.

How many dimensions are there in the mosaic model?

4

One important effect of time is its tendency to make our perceptions of issues, events, and people simpler and clearer.

False

Having a complete idea requires complete information.

False

If one accepts the validity of the mosaic model of communication, which of the following best describes the role in the communication process of people who read newspapers, watch television, listen to the radio, and so forth?

Participants

What do we mean when we say that meanings are not in words or pictures, that meanings are in people?

Individuals do not receive meanings, they construct them.

Few, if any, of your meanings were constructed on the basis of information from a single message in isolation.

True

Once you have constructed a meaning for something, it would be highly unusual for you to change it.

False

Except in extremely unusual cases, any one bit of information about a topic has only an imperceptible effect on the world in your head.

True

Since your fourth world is your mental representation of the real world, you build it almost exclusively from facts.

False

The differences between entertainment content in the media and news or information content is not nearly as important as most people believe in explaining how and why people construct the worlds in their heads.

False

No two people go through their environments in precisely the same way; therefore, no two people encounter or attend to all of the same bits of information.

True

The particular path you take through the mosaic is related to which bits of information you encounter, but it has little to nothing to do with the context for these bits.

False

What are "gaps" in the mosaic?

Important information about a topic that we did not notice or that was not in any of the messages we received.

We routinely fill information gaps without even being aware that we are doing so.

True

The media industries do nothing without reason. Therefore, it is unlikely that you will find unintended bits of information in your communication mosaic.

False

What are the "unintended bits of information" in the mosaic?

Bits of information from a source with which we construct a message not intended by the source.

Whether you experience fear, anger, or excitement depends on your interpretation of your physical state.

True

Which of the following best describes "scripts" or "schemata"?

Stereotyped sequences of events in memory that are activated by observations or experiences in the present.

Scripts or schemata are the structures of the newspaper stories, television programs, or other media products to which you are exposed.

False

In what sense is it valid to say that you cannot tell people anything they do not already know?

People cannot perceive or understand anything unless they can relate it in some way to prior experience.

If people are watching a television news story, set or expectation tends to have the greatest effect on their perception when:

They have a well-established script or schema for that type of situation.

Assuming you read with equal care, you are most likely to spot typographical errors when:

You have no expectations about the material.

Expectations generally help you process, comprehend, and remember the bits of information you sense from your communication mosaic.

True

Consistency theory:

Explains why people are uncomfortable if their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors disagree.

Variety theory helps to explain why some people:

Seek new kinds of information.

Variety-seeking and conflict-avoidance behaviors can interact. Considering high vs. low variety-seeking and high vs. low conflict-avoidance results in how many possible categories of behavior?

4

The tendency to interpret or perceive information in a way that makes it consistent with one's prior knowledge, attitudes, and behavior is called:

selective perception

It takes less effort to perceive a message that is contrary to the way you see the world or that is different than what you expect.

False

What you perceive depends in part on your psychological needs.

True

People tend to process or perceive the information they encounter in a way that is relevant to the needs they feel most strongly at that moment.

True

How do reference groups affect our processing of information?

We tend to test our interpretations of what we read, hear, and see on our family, friends, and others with whom we associated.

According to the theory of intersubjective reality:

Our beliefs about the world are shaped in part by comparing them to the beliefs of other people.

Our beliefs and interpretation of information, even our definitions of words and other symbols, are influenced by the people with whom we interact. Communication scholars refer to this phenomenon as:

The social construction of reality.

The degree to which people are unable to perceive or evaluate information independent of their prior attitudes, beliefs, and needs is labelled by communication scholars as:

Dogmatism