INTRO TO COM (MAGREVIEW KA NAMAN LEX) WHAT IS MASS MEDIA?

WHAT IS COMMUNICATION? 1. Medium – the channel through which a message travels

from the source to the receiver.
It is a social process in which individuals employs symbols to
establish and interpret meaning in their environment. 2. Media vehicle – single component of mass media (ex.
Newspaper, TV, radio)
Key Words:
#social #process #symbol #meaning #environment • Mass media is not limited to the channels (or equipment)
but also to the people, policies, and organizations that
COMMUNICATION MODELS produce or distribute mass communication.
• LASWELL MODEL OF COMMUNICATION • SCHRAMM’S MODEL OF COMMUNICATION
Who? Says what? Through which?

• SHANNON AND WEAVER MODEL

Linear Model of Communication

MASS COMMUNICATION CHARACTERISTICS

1. A message is sent out on some form of mass

NOISE – Distortion in channel not intended by the source
1. Semantic Noise – linguistic influences on reception of
message
2. Physical – external influences
3. Psychological – cognitive influences (biases, prejudices)
4. Physiological – biological influences
• OSGOOD AND SCHRAMM’S MODEL OF
COMMUNICATION
communication system (Internet, Broadcast, print).
2. The message is delivered rapidly.
3. The message reaches a large group of different
kinds of people simultaneously or within a short
period of time.
KEY CONCEPTS TO REMEMBER
1. The mass media is a profit centered business.
2. Technological development changes the way mass media
are delivered and consumed.
3. Mass media both reflect and affect politics, society, and
culture.

WHAT IS MASS COMMUNICATION?

• Process of creating shared meaning between the mass

media and their audiences.

• Mass communication refers to the process by which a

complex organization, with the aid of one or more
machines, produces and transmits public messages that
are directed at large, heterogeneous, and scattered
audiences.
 EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION
Different Communication Era / Period COMMUNICATION HISTORICAL PERIODS

ORAL AND WRITTEN ERAS

• In the ancient societies – information and knowledge

circulated through oral tradition. (poets, teachers, and
tribal storytellers).
• Written word emerged.
• Documentation by philosophers, monks, stenographers.

THE PRINT REVOLUTION

• Paper and block printing developed in China.

• 15th Century – printing press spread throughout Europe.
Initially, printed materials are large, elaborate, and
expensive.
• Printing press made books available to more people.

THE ELECTRONIC ERA

• 1840s – Information Age started with the development of

the telegraph.
• Telegraph led to future technological development of
wireless telegraphy, fax machine, and cellular phone.
• 1920s rise of film and development of radio.
• 1950s-60s. – arrival of television.

THE DIGITAL ERA

• Digital communication – converting images, sounds, or

texts into electronic signals.
• New technology like cable TV and internet were
developed.
• Social Media – digital reinvention of the oral culture.
 COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE FIVE AREAS OF CONCERN ABOUT THE SO-CALLED LOW
CULTURE
TWO WAYS OF LOOKING AT CULTURE
1. An inability to appreciate fine arts contemporary
1. Culture as a skyscraper. movies, television, and music distracts students
2. Culture as a map. from serious literature and philosophy. Popular
films are made for profit and cannot be
CULTURE AS SKYSCRAPER experienced as valuable as artistic experience as
the more elite forms today.
One view of culture is as a hierarchy with supposedly
superior products at the top and inferior ones at the
2. A tendency to exploit high culture
bottom.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s “Frankenstein”
(1818) was transformed into multiple popular
forms.
Today, it can also be remembered as:
• 1931 film version
• 1974 Mel Brooks comedy “young Frankenstein”
• 1960 “The Munster” sitcom
• Sugar coated cereal

3. A throw-away ethic
Popular culture have a short lifespan.
• Average newspaper circulates 12-24 hours
• Top 40 songs on the radio lasts 1 month
• Website blogs are visited the doom to oblivion
Higher forms of culture have more staying power.

4. A diminished audience for high culture popular

culture has inundated the cultural environment,
driving out higher forms and cheapening public
life.
• 8-hour / day TV time = exposure to trivial TVC,
violent crime dramas, superficial reality program
• numerous choices leave less chance of finding
refined form of culture

5. Dulling our cultural taste buds

A. HIGH CULTURE • visual forms undermine democratic ideals and
reasoned argument
• identified with good taste,
• popular media inhibit rational thought and social
• higher education,
progress
• supported by wealthy patrons and corporate donors
• media companies make large profits and distract
• associated with fine arts
citizens from examining economic disparity and
• available in libraries, theatres, museums.
implementing change
B. LOW CULTURE
• Big Mac theory – addiction to mass media produced
• “questionable” tastes of the masses menu loses discriminating taste.
• commercial junk
• circulated by the mass media
 CULTURE AS A MAP
Culture is an ongoing and complicated process rather than
a high/low vertical hierarchy.
• In this model, form of culture are judged as good or bad
based on combination of personal taste and aesthetic
judgements that the society makes in a particular time.
• Attraction to and choice represent how we make our lives
meaningful.
• Culture offers conventional, familiar, comforting.
• Also innovative, unfamiliar, challenging.
• THE COMFORT OF FAMILIAR STORIES
Cinderella
Sarah Crew
(or Sarah ang Munting Prinsesa)
There is comfort in predictability of the story.
• INNOVATION AND THE ATTRACTION OF “WHAT’S NEW”
Despite the comfort of familiarity, we also seek cultural
adventure new places, new stories, originality, complexity.
• WIDE RANGE OF MESSAGES
People have complex cultural tastes, needs and interest
based on different backgrounds and dispositions.
• CHALLENGING THE NOSTALGIA FOR A BETTER PAST
• Some critics assert that society was better off before the
latest development in mass media.
• Fear of change or of cultural differences.
• 19th century – rise in literacy rate created fear among
intellectuals.
CULTURAL VALUES OF THE MODERN PERIOD
“FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION”
Cultural responses and critiques of modern efficiency often
manifested themselves in the mass media.
Ex. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (1932)
Modern Times – Charlie Chaplin (1936)
Modern Print media allowed ordinary readers to engage in
new ideas.
• New form of hierarchy
• Educate and help build and maintain an organized social
framework
• Valuing the ability of logical and scientific minds
SHIFTING VALUES IN POSTMODERN CULTURE
• Postmodern culture represents a way of seeing a new
condition of the human spirit.
• Values or features that change with media and culture:
populism, diversity, nostalgia, paradox.
• POPULISM
Populism – a political idea that tries to appeal to ordinary
people by highlighting or creating an argument between
“the people” and “the elite”.
Postmodern culture blurred border between high and low
culture.
Bohemian Rhapsody – Queen (1975)
Andy Warhol’s pop art paintings
Other forms of postmodern style blur involves art and
commerce as well as fact and fiction
• Infotainment
• Infomercials
• reality shows (real and staged)
• the Daily show (fake news program-insightful new
stories with satires)
• DIVERSITY & FRAGMENTATION
Diversity and fragmentation – wild juxtaposition of old and
new cultural styles.
• a shopping mall with MAC, Watsons, and Bench store and
a nearby food court offering Italian, Mexican, or Thai
cuisine; playing 1960’s protest music.
• films adapted from books or short stories, or video games.
 • NOSTALGIA MEME

Nostalgia – rejecting rational thought as the answer or • gene – basic unit of heredity
solution to social problem. • phoneme – basic unit of language
• bit – basic unit of information
• Rather than seeing science as enlightened thinking that
• kine – basic unit of body language
relies on evidence, some people criticize modern values.
• Meme – basic unit of culture
• In popular culture, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed,
“Replicating information patterns that use minds to get
Lost, The X-Files – offer mystical and supernatural
themselves copied much as a virus uses cells to get
responses to evils of daily world.
themselves copied.” –Richard Dawkins
• PARADOX

(willingness to accept) Paradox – integrating retro beliefs

and contemporary culture.

Ex. Religious movements promote outdated traditions but

use the internet to recruit and spread the message.

Conservative politicians uses Twitter, Facebook, and

social media ad campaigns.

FUNCTIONS AND EFFECT OF CULTURE

• Culture is the world made meaningful; it is socially

constructed and maintained through communication. It
limits as well as liberates us; it differentiates as well as
unites us. It defines our realities and thereby shapes the
way we think, feel, and act.

MASS COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE

• Mass Media as Cultural Storytellers.

A young man walks through chest deep flood after

looting a grocery store in New Orleans....

VS

Two residents wade through chest-deep water after

finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after
Hurricane Katrina came through the area...

^(EXAMPLE OR RACISM.)^

• Mass Communication as a Cultural Forum.

A giant courtroom where we discuss and debate our

culture.

Single motherhood, labor unions, nursing homes,

successful, beautiful, honest, moral...

The forum is only as good as those who participate in it.

 MASS MEDIA TRENDS MULTIPLE PLATFORM

Emerging Media Trends • The strategy is to make the content available to

consumers using a number of delivery methods to a
1. Audience segmentation number of receiving devices.
2. Convergence • Newspaper and magazines have digital version.
• We are close to “having everything available
3. Increased audience control everywhere”
4. Multiple platforms USER GENERATED CONTENT
5. User-generated content • UGC is what we refer to as Web 2.0 – or second
generation web-based service.
6. Mobile media
• Web 1.0 – about companies
7. Social media
Web 2.0 – about communities
AUDIENCE SEGMENTATION
• Web 1.0 – about downloading
• Reader’s Digest has a circulation of 18 million in 1976; Web 2.0 – about uploading
today it’s down to 10 million. Web 3.0 – a more intelligent Web 2.0

• In 1950s I Love Lucy was a top-rated TV show with 50% • Youtube

viewers tuning in. In 1980s The Cosby Show was number • Instagram
one with 33% ratings. In 2009 top-rated CSI got about 12% • Twitter
• Citizen journalists
• In 1960s, 3 of 4 adults read the newspaper; today it’s 1 of
2. • Digital cameras dropped price
• User friendly platforms
Reasons:
1. People’s time has been scarce leaving less time for MOBILE MEDIA
media.
• Modern mass communication involves people looking at
2. There are more media to choose from.
screens.
3. Advertisers turned from mass to target marketing.
• TV and computer screens had an addition – the cell
CONVERGENCE phone, PDA, iPod, or laptop computer.
• Mass media have become “mobile”
Convergence – the process of coming together.
SOCIAL MEDIA
A. Corporate convergence – trend started in 1980s,
known as synergy. • Online communications that use special techniques that
Companies that provides content like movie studios involve participation, conversation, sharing, collaboration,
and record labels acquired distribution channels. and linkage.
As digital technology emerged, synergy turned to
• Traditional media companies have incorporated the
convergence.
techniques of social media.
B. Operational convergence – when owners of several
media properties in one market combine their • Businesses use the social media to market their products.
separate operations into a single effort.
C. Device convergence – combining functions of
devices into one mechanism.

INCREASED AUDIENCE CONTROL

• Technological advances have given more power to the

consumer.

• “mass communication has gone down from a sit-down

dinner with a fixed menu to a Vegas-style buffet.”