What is Mass

Communication?
What is the term "mass media“?
• Refers to various audiovisual culture
industries that send content from a
particular source to a wide audience—
• For example, recorded music and
television.
 • A means of public
communication reaching
a large
audience.
• Mass media denotes - as a class, that
section of the media specifically conceived
and designed to reach a
very large audience (typically at least as
large as the whole population of a
nation state).
• Coined in the 1920s (with the advent of
nationwide radio networks, mass-
circulation newspapers and magazines),
although mass media was present
centuries before the term became
common.
• The term public media has a similar
meaning: it is the sum of the public mass
distributors of news and entertainment (:
NEWSPAPERS, TV and RADIO, BOOK
(publishers), etc.
• To this have been added more recently
the INTERNET, PODCASTING,
BLOGGING
• All of these public media sources have
better informed the general public of what
is going on in the world today.
• The mass-media audience has been viewed by
some commentators as forming a MASS
SOCIETY with special characteristics, which
render it especially susceptible to the influence
of modern mass-media techniques such as
ADVERTISING and PROPAGANDA
• It is also gaining popularity in the blogosphere
when referring to the mainstream media (MSM).
• The mass-media audience can be easily
persuaded one way or another (depending on
the subject of discussion) whether or not they
want to believe the media.
• Mass media can be one of the hardest
forms of media to decipher what is true
and what is not.
• Mass media are tools for the
transfer of information, concepts,
and ideas to both general and
specific audiences.
• They are important tools in
advancing public goals
• The twentieth century in the United States was
characterized by the transformation of artisans, local
hobbies and small businesses into highly centralized,
rationalized industries working like production lines, and
the entertainment and informational media were no
different.
• In the process, pleasure was turned into profit.
• And when governments occasionally intervened to
regulate, or alternative technologies destabilized
established forms and interests, ways were found of
accommodating threats or capitalizing on others'
innovations, resulting in renewed corporate control over
each medium.
• For instance, when newspapers were confronted with
radio and then TV, they bought into these sectors as
quickly as possible, where cross-ownership laws
permitted.
• Even the Internet, initially celebrated as a source of
freedom from centralized control, has gradually come
under corporate domination.
• These tensions are played out in the history of radio and
motion pictures.
• Radio began in the 1920s as a means of two-way
communication, a source of agricultural stock-price and
weather information, a boon to military technology, and a
resource for ethnic cultural maintenance.
• Then radio became a broadcast medium of networked
mass entertainment dominated by corporations in the
1930s that was confronted with wartime censorship and
the advent of television as an alternative in the 1940s.
• Grew in the 1980s and 1990s & carrying on in 21st C
• Using mass media can be
counterproductive if the channels used are
not audience-appropriate, or if the
message being delivered is too emotional,
fear arousing, or controversial.
• Undesirable side effects usually can be
avoided through proper formative
research, knowledge of the audience,
experience in linking media channels to
audiences, and message testing.
 Types and Functions of Mass
Media
• The mass media are capable of facilitating
short-term, intermediate-term, and long-
term effects on audiences.
 Short-term Objectives are:
• Exposing audiences to concepts
• Creating awareness and knowledge
• Altering outdated or incorrect knowledge &
• Enhancing audience recall of particular
advertisements or public service
announcements (PSAs), promotions, or
program names.
 Intermediate-term objectives
include:
• All of the earlier ones, as well as
changes in attitudes, behaviors, and
perceptions of social norms.
 Long-term Objectives include:
• all of the earlier tasks, plus focused
restructuring of perceived social norms,
and maintenance of behavior change.
• Evidence of achieving these three tiers of
objectives is useful in evaluating the
effectiveness of mass media.
 Mass media performs three key
functions:
• Educating
• Shaping public relations &
• Advocating for a particular policy or point
of view.
• As education tools, media not only impart
knowledge, but can be part of larger efforts (e.g.,
social marketing) to promote actions having
social utility.
• As public relations tools, media assist
organizations in achieving credibility and respect
among public health opinion leaders,
stakeholders, and other gatekeepers.
• Finally, as advocacy tools, mass media assist
leaders in setting a policy agenda, shaping
debates about controversial issues, and gaining
support for particular viewpoints.
 TV
• TV is a powerful medium for appealing to
mass audiences—reaches people
regardless of age, sex, income, or
educational level.
• TV also offers sight and sound, and
makes dramatic and lifelike
representations of people and products.
(AUDIO+VIDEO)
• For audiences of the late 1950s, the
1960s, and the 1970s, TV presented or
reinforced certain health messages
through product marketing.
• Some of these messages were related to
toothpaste, hand soaps, multiple vitamins,
fortified breakfast cereals, and other items.
 Radio
• Radio also reaches mass and diverse audiences.
• The specialization of radio stations by listener age, taste,
and even gender permits more selectivity in reaching
audience segments.
• Since placement and production costs are less for radio
than for TV, radio is able to convey public health
messages in greater detail.
• Thus, radio is sometimes considered to be more
efficient.
• Radio requires somewhat greater audience involvement
than television, creating the need for more mental
imagery, or "image transfer."
• Thus radio can reinforce complementary messages
portrayed in parallel fashion on TV.
• However, the large number of radio stations may
fragment the audience for message delivery.
 Internet
• The Internet places users in firmer autonomous
control of which messages are accessed and
when they are accessed.
• It is possible to put virtually anything on-line and
disseminate it to any location having Internet
access, but the user has little control over quality
and accuracy.
• Internet search engines can direct users to tens
of thousands of web sites after the user's
introduction of one or more keywords.
 Newspapers
• Estimate that newspapers are read daily in 70
percent of U.S. households, and in as many as
90 percent of high-income households.
• Newspapers are available in daily and weekly
formats, and local, regional, and national
publications exist.
• In addition, there are numerous special
audience newspapers (e.g., various ethnic
groups, women and feminist related, geography-
specific, neighborhood).
• In India?
 Magazines
• Magazines form three varieties: consumer (e.g.,
Reader's Digest, Newsweek, People), National
Hog Farmer, Beef), and business (professional,
industrial, trade, and general business
publications).
• Magazines have several strengths, including
audience selectivity, reproduction quality,
prestige, and reader loyalty.
• Magazines have a relatively long shelf life—they
may be saved for weeks or months, and are
frequently reread, and passed on to others.
• Magazine reading also tends to occur at a less
hurried pace than newspaper reading.
 Other print Media
• Pamphlets, brochures, and posters constitute other print
media used to disseminate health messages.
• Though widely used, their actual utility is infrequently
evaluated (e.g., units distributed vs. changes in
awareness, cost analysis).
• Until the 1990s, few of these print media were developed
with the assistance of target audiences, and few
contained varied messages, were culturally tailored, or
employed readability and face validity techniques.
• The extent to which persons read, reread, and keep
these devices—or circulate them to other readers—is not
well evaluated.
• Thus, their permanence is unknown.
 Outdoor
• Outdoor media include billboards and
signs, placards inside and outside of
commercial transportation modes, flying
billboards (e.g., signs in tow of airplanes),
and skywriting.
• Commercial advertisers such as
Goodyear, Fuji, Budweiser, Pizza Hut, - all
make extensive use of their logo-bearing
blimps around sports stadiums.
 Media Effects
• Decades of studies on the consequences
of mass media exposure demonstrate that
effects are varied and reciprocal—the
media impact audiences and audiences
also impact media by the intensity and
frequency of their usage.
• The results of mass media for promoting
social change, especially in developing
countries, have become important.
• Identified three effects, or functions, of
media:
(1) the knowledge gap,
(2) agenda
setting, and
(3) cultivation of shared public
perceptions.
 Knowledge gap
• The impact of mass media on audience
knowledge gaps is influenced by such
factors as the extent to which the content
is appealing, the degree to which
information channels are accessible and
desirable, and the amount of social conflict
and diversity there is in a community.
 Agenda setting
• The selective nature of what members of
the media choose for public consumption
influences how people think about issues,
and what they think about them
• The extent to which the media set the
public's perception
• Where mass media can be especially valuable is
in the framing of issues.
• "Framing" means taking a leadership role in the
organization of public discourse about an issue.
• Media, of course, are influenced by pressures to
offer balance in coverage, and these pressures
may come from persons and groups with
particular political action and advocacy positions.
• “Groups, institutions, and advocates compete to
identify problems, to move them onto the public
agenda, and to define the issues symbolically"
 Cultivation of Perceptions
• Cultivation is the extent to which media exposure, over
time, shapes audience perceptions.
• Television is a common experience, and serves as what
a "homogenizing agent."
• However, the effect is often based on several conditions,
particularly socioeconomic factors.
• Prolonged exposure to TV or movie violence may affect
the extent to which people think community violence is a
problem, though that belief is likely moderated by where
they live.
• However, the actual determinants of people's
impressions of violence are complex, and consensus in
this area is lacking.
• Various debates about the mass media have recurred
since the beginning of the twentieth century.
• Most of the U.S. population learned to read with the
spread of public schooling.
• At that point, newspapers divided between those
appealing to the middle and ruling classes (today's
broadsheets) and the working class (today's tabloids).
• Ever since, there has been controversy about appeals to
popular tastes versus educational ones (that the press
will print, and people will prefer rap versus opera and sex
crime versus foreign policy).
• This division is thought to exacerbate distinctions
between people who have power and knowledge and
other groups.
• There has also been a debate about
concentration of media ownership, which has
often generated conflicts of interest and
minimized diverse points of view.
• The most consistent disagreements have been
about effects on audiences.
• This concept assumes that what people read,
hear, and see has an immediate and cumulative
impact on their psyches.
• Beginning with 1930s panics about movies
affecting young people, this perspective became
especially powerful with the advent of television.
• There have been vast numbers of academic
studies and public-policy debates on the topic of
violence in the media ever since.
• The twentieth century saw the U.S. mass
media multiply in their technological
variety but grow ever more concentrated
in their ownership and control.
• The twenty-first century promises more of
the same, with an aggressively global
strategy to boot.
• Mass Media and the Consumer?
• Mass Media and Politics?
• Mass Media and education?
• Mass Media & Health?