Mass Media Forms Essay

Submitted By DNguyen13
Words: 3576
Pages: 15

Chapter 6
Media in Everyday Life

1

The Media is pervasive
• Screens are everywhere
• Both public and private spaces
• We multitask
• When they fail we are “anxious”
• Shift away from “mass” to narrow markets
2

The Masses and Mass Media

• Emile Durkheim
• Karl Marx - concept of the masses
• Media Theory - concept of the masses
• Term Mass Media
3

Emile Durkheim (French sociologist) - in industrial societies, collective sentiments and a collective conscience of the masses came to determine what constituted a crime, the action is deemed a crime because society collectively evaluates and judges the action.
Its the mass response in itself that shapes classification, laws and judgment about actions.
Karl Marx - uses the concept of the masses to describe the working class during the rise of industrial capitalism. Media Theory - concept of masses has generally had negative connotations, groups of people passively accepting and uncritical of media practices and messages authored by corporations with profit motives, whose messages support dominant ideologies and government interests.
Term of Mass Media came into use in World War II era, a period marked by broadcast television throughout the world Mass Media replaced real connections • Modernity - Increased industrialization
• Monolithic mass culture
• 20th Century Mass Media Forms
• Transformation of Mass Media

4

Increased industrialization, populations consolidated around urban centers. Large corporations, factories, replaced small scale local economy. Urban centers lost their sense of community and political belonging. Civic involvement waning. Corporate workers alienated from owners, assembly line production. Workers who migrated from rural places were despondent. Family and community life eroded.
The concept of film, television, consumerism and cheap amusement rose to provide some semblance of social connectedness among lonely, tired people.
Monolithic mass culture linked to the period of modernity. National newspapers and television broadcast media rose and dominated through periods of monopoly and corporate growth. Mass media is a term to describe those media forms designed to reach large audiences perceived to have shared interests. These mass media forms were: radio, network and cable television, the cinema and the press (including newspapers and magazines): visual images were primary but not the sole elements of mass media at this time.
1980’s, 1990’s, and 2000s changed the mass media landscape: electronic and digital media, internet, the web, cellphones, wireless communication devices, narrowcast television programming (cable and satellite)Since the 1980’s consumers have increasingly been recognized by media producers as occupying smaller, niche audiences that must be addressed by their interests, tastes and language. Consumers are also potential producers - Youtube

Who own’s it?
• Restricting authorship
• Jean Baudrillard
• Artists engaged with media overload

5

Some critics of the media have argued that radio and television furthered control of mass media by restricting authorship of information to those that with access to t he means of media production (media corporations), creating a society of producers who represent the interest of the government or ruling class. Consumers are duped by these mass media messages to accept the views of the government.
Baudrillard (French philosopher) used the term cyberblitz to describe the escalation of random and unpredictable media forms, images and information that have bombarded us in modern society.
Artists engaged in media overload - Robert Rauschenberg (tension between images and painting techniques, comments on news, history in modern life and the complexity of media culture’s layered meanings. Media President

• Kennedy
• Iconic images
6

Kennedy was the first media president to be subject to the media coverage of television to a full