Description
I need you to read chapter 9 in the text book and the article “Poynter Opinion”(both attached). Then I need you to answer the discussion question based on the two readings. Discussion Question/instructions: Read Chapter 9 in your textbook.Read Poynter Opinion by Vanessa Otero.Complete Assignment #5 and post to designated Discussion Board thread by due date.Assignment #5Newspapers and digital news are discussed in Chapter 9 of your textbook. Drawing on this information as well as that from The Media Bias Chart, choose one news program from the Hyper-Partisan or Skews Left sections and one from the Hyper-Partisan Right or Skews Right sections. Read a newspaper and/or watch a broadcast from each then make a list of the topics covered and the ways in which they were reported. Did you notice a difference? If so, what were the differences? If not, how were they similar? Do you agree with Vanessa Otero’s observations about the news media? Why or why not? Be sure to include your lists in your posting.Link to Poytner Opinion: https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2023/why…
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MEDIA, SOCIETY, CULTURE AND YOU
MEDIA, SOCIETY,
CULTURE AND YOU
AN INTRODUCTORY MASS
COMMUNICATION TEXT
MARK POEPSEL
Media, Society, Culture and You by Mark Poepsel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
International License, except where otherwise noted.
Contents
1. Media, Society, Culture and You
2. Digital Culture and Social Media
3. Media Literacy and Media Studies Research
4. Film and Bricolage
5. Television through Time
6. Music Recording, “Sharing” and the Information Economy
7. Radio Broadcasting, Podcasting and “Superbug Media”
8. Digital Gaming
9. Newspapers and Digital News
10. Advertising, Public Relations and Propaganda
Glossary
Accessibility Assessment
Review Statement
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1
Media, Society, Culture and You
“Society not only continues to exist by
transmission, by communication, but it may
fairly be said to exist in transmission, in
communication.” — John Dewey in Democracy and
Education, 1916
Bronze bust of John Dewey sculpted by Jacob Epstein,
1927. Photo by user known as Cliff, CCBY. Source:
Flickr.
The purpose of this chapter is to define media, society
and culture broadly. Additionally, the term
“communication” is defined in its many forms.
Chapters 2 and 3 deal with communication theory in
more detail. Digital culture is covered in depth in
Chapter 2. We will discuss media literacy and media
studies in Chapter 3, but we have to learn to walk
before we run, as the saying goes.
The Role of Mass Media in Society
More than one hundred years ago, John Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education that society is not
only supported by various forms of communication but also enveloped in communication. Dewey
reiterated what philosophers and scholars had noted for centuries: small groups, larger communities
and vast institutions — all the things that make up a society — function in relation to how
communication flows within and between groups.
There are different forms of communication. At the broadest level, communication is an exchange
of meaning between people using symbols. The most common symbols we use are verbal and written
words, but there are also many forms of nonverbal communication such as American Sign Language.
What sign language, verbal communication and written communication have in common is the use
of abstract symbols to convey meaning. Whether you say “thank you” in face-to-face communication,
send someone a card with the words “thank you” written on it, or use nonverbal cues to express thanks,
the meaning is the same.
1
2 Media, Society, Culture and You
Interpersonal communication generally refers to
the exchange of meaning between two or more
people on a personal, often one-on-one, level.
Interpersonal communication can be verbal or
nonverbal. Most often, it happens in face-to-face
settings. It differs from mass communication,
which involves sharing meaning through symbolic
messages to a wide audience from one source to
many receivers. Sometimes, particularly in
computer-mediated
communication, messages
conveyed using computers, it can be difficult to tell
the difference between interpersonal communication
A boy smiles as he stands next to a Christmas tree.
and mass communication because individuals can
send messages intended only for other individuals that might quickly reach large numbers of people.
Social media platforms are often structured in ways that allow interpersonal messages to “go viral” and
become mass messages whether the original sender intended to address a mass audience or not.
It is not the type of message that determines interpersonal or mass communication. It is the way the
message is distributed and the relationships between sender and receiver(s). This text will continue
to grapple with the overlap of interpersonal communication and mass communication structures on
networked communication platforms, but first, another form of communication commonly studied in
academic settings should be introduced.
Organizational communication is the symbolic exchange of messages carrying specific meaning for
members belonging to formal organizations. In practical terms, it is the internal communication that
helps governments, businesses, schools and hospitals to run.
People working together in organizations get usually things done by communicating directly with
one another or in small groups. Organizations cannot function without communication.
Organizational communication effectiveness can influence the success or failure of businesses and
other social institutions. Thus, communication does not merely happen within organizations; it is an
essential part of the way they are structured. Organizational communication is a separate field of study,
introduced well in this YouTube video.
Successful communication, whether intended for personal use, for use within an organization, or for a
wide audience, can help people to understand each other and to get things done.
If good organizational communication is necessary for groups to function with a formal purpose, mass
communication is essential for societies to function. Societies are made up of formal organizations of
various sizes. Usually, the larger the group, the more complex its communication structures.
Communication structure refers to a combination of information and communication technologies
(ICTs), guidelines for using those technologies, and professional workers dedicated to managing
Media, Society, Culture and You 3
information and messages. In the mass communication field, communication structures are more than
computers and transmission networks. The guidelines for using networks to create and distribute
messages for mass consumption are a matter of corporate policy as well as law.
It has been noted that a society is made up of small groups, larger communities, and vast institutions.
A more complete definition of the term comes from the field of sociology. A society is a very
large group of people organized into institutions held together over time through formalized
relationships. Nations, for example, are made up of formal institutions organized by law. Governments
of different size, economic institutions, educational institutions and others all come together to form a
society.
By comparison, culture — the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of groups large and small — is not
necessarily formalized. Culture is necessary for enjoying and making sense of the human experience,
but there are few formalized rules governing culture.
Mass communication influences both society and culture. Different societies have different media
systems, and the way they are set up by law influences how the society works. Different forms
of communication, including messages in the mass media, give shape and structure to society.
Additionally, mass media outlets can spread cultural knowledge and artistic works around the globe.
People exercise cultural preferences when it comes to consuming media, but mass media corporations
often decide which stories to tell and which to promote, particularly when it comes to forms of mass
media that are costly to produce such as major motion pictures, major video game releases and global
news products.
More than any other, the field of mass communication transmits culture. At the same time, it helps
institutional society try to understand itself and whether its structures are working.
The Mass Media Dynamic
The mass media system is an institution itself. What sets it apart is its potential to influence the thinking
of massive numbers of individuals. In fact, the ideas exchanged in organizational communication and
interpersonal communication are often established, reinforced or negated by messages in the mass
media. This is what it means for societies “to exist in transmission, in communication.” Different types
of communication influence each other.
But the mass media are also shaped and influenced by social groups and institutions. This is the nature
of the mass media dynamic.
Individuals and groups in society influence what mass media organizations produce through their
creativity on the input side and their consumption habits on the output side. It is not accurate to
say that society exists within the mass media or under mass media “control.” Social structures are too
powerful for mass media to completely govern how they operate. But neither is it accurate to say that
the mass media are contained within societies. Many mass media products transcend social structures
to influence multiple societies, and even in societies that heavily censor their mass media the news of
4 Media, Society, Culture and You
scandals and corruption can get out. The mass media and society are bound together and shape each
other.
Almost everything you read, see and hear is framed within a mass media context; however, mere
familiarity is no guarantee of success. Products in the mass media that fail to resonate with audiences
do not last long, even if they seem in tune with current tastes and trends.
The Mass Communication Origin Story
In his book, John notes how, in the early 20th century, the mass media were beginning to connect
large institutions in new ways. The production of mass media messages accelerated with the
development of the telegraph and the popular newspaper. The spread of telegraph technology that
began in the mid-1800s continued through the early 1900s to network the globe with a nearly
instantaneous information transmission system. Much of the growth of newspapers occurred as a result
of improvements in telegraph technology.
Thus, a primary function of the global mass communication
system is to save time. People have a need to understand what is
going on in the world, and they desire entertainment. Global
electronic telecommunication networks collapse space by
transmitting messages in much less time than the older, physical
delivery systems.
The dynamic between society and mass media that is so
prevalent today developed throughout the 20th century. Starting
near the end of the 1800s, communication flows began to move
at electronic speeds. More people knew about more things than
ever before, but scholars are quick to point out that
communication is not synonymous with understanding.
Dewey wanted to focus on educating people so that they could The television station’s webpage at
live and work well in societies heavily shaped by global KOMU, a local affiliate owned and
telecommunication networks. For him, education was the operated by the University of Missourimeaning of life and the global information and communication Columbia, is constantly on display in the
system needed to be molded into an educational tool. Many of newsroom.
us still hold out hope for Dewey’s educational goals, but as ICTs
have advanced over the past century or two, it has become clear that the mere existence of global mass
communication networks does not ensure that societies will learn to coexist and thrive.
This can be difficult for people to acknowledge. Shortly after the widespread dissemination of the
telegraph, the radio, broadcast television and public internet access, some form of communication
utopia was imagined or even expected. The telegraph collapsed space. Radio enabled instantaneous
mass communication. Television brought live images from one side of the globe to the other for even
larger mass audiences, and internet access gave individuals the power to be information senders, not
Media, Society, Culture and You 5
just receivers. At each step hope and imagination flourished, but social and cultural clashes persisted.
Communication systems can be used as weapons. The evolution of mass communication tools is the
story of increased capacity to do the same good and evil things people have always done in societies
and between them.
Looking beyond technological utopianism — the idea that new technologies (particularly ICTs) will
lead to greater social understanding and better conditions for the global population — we are left with
a tedious but massively meaningful project. We must find ways to coexist with other societies even
as we are constantly aware of our differences and of possible threats that may have existed before but
now are much easier to see.
Perhaps if we are to make the best of our digital global communication network, it would help to
track the evolution of different forms of mass communication. This text very briefly touched on the
continuum from telegraph to widespread internet adoption, but the first mass medium was ink on
paper.
The First Mass Medium
The first global medium, besides the spoken word, was neither the internet nor the telegraph. In fact,
it was not a mass medium at all. It was paper. Via trade routes, messages in the form of letters moved
around the world in a matter of weeks or months. It was global communication, but it was slow.
The development of a global telegraph network made it possible for messages to spread in minutes.
When the telegraph was wed to mass-consumed newspapers, the world saw the rise of fast, global, mass
communication that had the power to potentially influence large groups of people at once.
Books transmitted messages widely and inspired literacy, but they did not establish a channel for
consistent, timely communication meant for mass audiences. After the Gutenberg printing press was
developed around 1440, the Gutenberg Bible was slowly mass produced and disseminated around
the Western world. It opened up access to sacred texts that had been bound up for centuries by
large institutions like the Roman Catholic Church, and its dissemination helped fuel the Protestant
Reformation. Still, it was an outlier. Most other books, even those that were mass produced from
around the 1500s to the 1800s were not disseminated as widely as the Gutenberg Bible. They were
simply too expensive.
Nevertheless, mass literacy slowly paved the way for mass newspaper readership to emerge in the
20th century. After the telegraph was invented and developed for wide-scale use and after the cost of
printing newspapers dropped, publishers could share news from around the globe with mass audiences.
The newspaper, specifically the penny press, was the first mass medium.
6 Media, Society, Culture and You
What distinguished the penny press was
affordability. These papers were published in tabloid
format, which used small-sized pages and was
cheaper to produce. Penny papers were written for
and read by working class audiences starting in about
the 1830s. They covered all manner of current events.
Soon, major institutions such as political parties and
unions developed their own papers to cover the
topics that suited their agendas and to promote the
cultural values that they held dear.
The front page of the Cincinnati Penny Paper from
Monday, May 16, 1881. From: George Edward Stevens’
article “From Penny Paper to Post and Times-Star: Mr.
Scripps’ First Link” in the Cincinnati Historical Society
Bulletin No. 27, 1969, public domain. Source:
Wikimedia Commons.
Mass Media Growth and Consolidation
As mass production of all sorts of manufactured goods
grew during the 20th century, so did advertising
budgets and the concept of brands. Brand advertising
became fuel for the mass media, and as profitability
rose, newspapers were bought up and organized into
chains throughout the 20th century. Many newspapers grew their audience as they merged.
Partisan papers gave way to a brand of news that strived for objectivity. The profit motive mostly
drove the change. To attract a mass audience, newspapers had to represent various points of view. This
pushed some of the most opinionated citizens, particularly strong advocates for workers, to the fringes
of mass discourse. Some advocates developed alternative media offerings. Others went mostly unheard
or plied their craft directly in politics.
At the same, throughout much of the 20th century, the journalism workforce became more
professionalized. Professional norms, that is the written and unwritten rules guiding behavior decided
on by people in a given field, evolved. Many full-time, paid professional journalists stressed and
continue to stress the need to remain detached from the people they cover so that journalists can
maintain the practice and appearance of objectivity. Journalists emphasized objectivity in order to
remain autonomous and to be perceived as truthful. The norm of objective reporting still strongly
influences news coverage in newspapers as well as on most mainstream radio and television news
networks.
That being said, the practice of maintaining objectivity is being called into question in our current
hyper-partisan political media environment. Other strategies for demonstrating truthfulness require
journalists to be transparent about how they do their work, about who owns their media outlets, and
about what investments and personal views they may have. Chapter 9 covers news norms and their
evolution in greater detail.
At the heart of the ethical discussion for professional journalists is a sort of battle between the need to
be autonomous to cover news accurately with minimal bias and the need to be socially responsible.
Media, Society, Culture and You 7
Social responsibility in the study of journalism ethics is a specific concept referring to the need for
media organizations to be responsible for the possible repercussions of the news they produce. The
debate goes on even as more and more platforms for mass communication are developed.
Beyond advancements in ink-on-paper newspapers (including the development of color offset
printing), technological developments have contributed to the diversification of mass media products.
Photography evolved throughout the 20th century as did motion picture film, radio and television
technology. Other mass media presented challenges and competition for newspapers. Still, newspapers
were quite a profitable business. They grew to their greatest readership levels in the middle-to-late
20th century, and their value was at its high point around the turn of the 21st century. Then came the
internet.
Stewing in our Own Juices
With the rise of global computer networks, particularly high-speed broadband and mobile
communication technologies, individuals gained the ability to publish their own work and to
comment on mass media messages more easily than ever before. If mass communication in the 20th
century was best characterized as a one-to-many system where publishers and broadcasters reached
waiting audiences, the mass media made possible by digital information networks in the twenty-first
have taken on a many-to-many format.
For example, YouTube has millions of producers who themselves are also consumers. None of the
social media giants such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Qzone and Weibo (in China), Twitter,
Reddit or Pinterest is primarily known for producing content. Instead, they provide platforms for
users to submit their own content and to share what mass media news and entertainment companies
produce. The result is that the process of deciding what people should be interested in is much more
decentralized in the digital network mass media environment than it was in the days of an analog oneto-many mass media system.
The process of making meaning in society — that is, the process of telling many smaller stories that add
up to a narrative shared by mass audiences — is now much more collaborative than it was in the 20th
century because more people are consuming news in networked platforms than through the channels
managed by gatekeepers. A mass media gatekeeper is someone, professional or not, who decides what
information to share with mass audiences and what information to leave out.
Fiction or non-fiction, every story leaves something out, and the same is true for shows made up of
several stories, such as news broadcasts and heavily edited reality television. Gatekeepers select what
mass audiences see, and then edit or disregard the rest. The power of gatekeepers may be diminished
in networks where people can decide for themselves what topics they care most about, but there is
still an important gatekeeping function in the mass media since much of what is ultimately shared on
social media platforms originates in the offices and studios of major media corporations.
On social media platforms, media consumers have the ability to add their input and criticism, and this
8 Media, Society, Culture and You
is an important function for users. Not only do we have a say as audience members in the content we
would like to see, read and hear, but we also have an important role to play in society as voting citizens
holding their elected officials accountable.
If social media platforms were only filled with mass media content, individual user comments, and
their own homegrown content, digitally networked communication would be complex enough,
but there are other forces at work. Rogue individuals, hacker networks and botnets — computers
programmed to create false social media accounts, websites and other digital properties — can
contribute content alongside messages produced by professionals and legitimate online community
members. False presences on social media channels can amplify hate and misinformation and can stoke
animosity between groups in a hyper-partisan media age.
Around the world, societies have democratized mass communication, but in many ways, agreeing on
a shared narrative or even a shared list of facts is more difficult than ever. Users create filter bubbles
for themselves where they mostly hear the voices and information that they want to hear. This has the
potential to create opposing worldviews where users with different viewpoints not only have differing
opinions, but they also have in mind completely different sets of facts creating different images about
what is happening in the world and how society should operate.
When users feel the need to defend their filtered worldviews, it is quite harmful to society.
De-massification
The infiltration of bots on common platforms is one issue challenging people working in good faith to
produce accurate and entertaining content and to make meaning in the mass media. De-massification
is another. Professionals working on mass-market media products now must fight to hold onto mass
audiences. De-massification signifies the breakdown of mass media audiences. As the amount of
information being produced and the number of channels on which news and other content can be
disseminated grows exponentially, ready-made audiences are in decline.
In the future, it is anticipated that audiences, or fan bases, must be built rather than tapped into.
One path to growing audiences in digital networks is to take an extreme point of view. Producers
of news and entertainment information on the right and left of the political spectrum often rail
against mainstream media as they promote points of view which are more or less biased. This kind of
polarization along with the tendency of social media platforms to allow and even encourage people to
organize along political lines likely contributes to de-massification as people organize into factions.
The future of some mass communication channels as regular providers of shared meaning for very
large audiences is in question. That said, claims that any specific medium is “dead” are overblown. For
example, newspaper readership, advertising revenue and employment numbers have been declining
for about 25 years, but as of 2018, there are still more than 30 million newspaper subscribers. Mass
audiences are shrinking and shifting, but they can still be developed.
Media, Society, Culture and You 9
Convergence
As mass audiences are breaking up and voices from the fringe are garnering outsized influence, the
various types of media (audio, video, text, animation and the industries they are tied to) have come
together on global computer and mobile network platforms in a process called convergence.
It is as though all media content is being tossed into a
huge stew, one that surrounds and composes societies
and cultures, and within this stew of information,
people are re-organizing themselves according to the
cultural and social concerns they hold most dear.
According to one hypothesis, in a society dominated
by digital communication networks, people gather
around the information they recognize and want to
believe because making sense of the vast amount of
information now available is impossible.
A somewhat unappetizing stew. Photo by Jason
Cartwright, CCBY. Source: Flickr.
This text covers several mass media channels
including social media, film, radio, television, music
recording and podcasting, digital gaming, news, advertising, public relations and propaganda because
these are still viable industries even as the content they produce appears more and more often on
converged media platforms.
What we see emerging in networked spaces is a single mass media channel with a spectrum of possible
text, photo, audio, video, graphic and game elements; however, the sites of professional production
still mostly identify as one particular industry (such as radio and recorded music, film, television,
cable television, advertising, PR, digital advertising or social media). Some of these are “legacy” media
that have existed as analog industries prior to convergence, while others originated in digital media
environments.
For the foreseeable future, we should expect legacy media producers to continue to hold formidable
power as elements of larger media conglomerates, which acquired many media companies as a result
of industry deregulation. We should also expect audiences to continue to fragment and digital media
start-ups trying to build audiences out of fragmented communities to be common even if they are
difficult to sustain.
What this means for social structures and for cultural production is disruption, limited perhaps by
legacy media traditions and corporate power.
Melding Theories
The world of mass media has witnessed the convergence of media content on digital platforms,
the ability of individuals to engage in one-to-many communication as though they were major
broadcasters, and the emergence of structures that allow for many-to-many communication. These
10 Media, Society, Culture and You
developments force us to rethink how separate interpersonal, organizational and mass communication
truly are.
From a theoretical standpoint, these are well-established approaches to thinking about
communication, but in practice, certain messages might fit into multiple categories. For example,
a YouTube video made for a few friends might reach millions if it goes viral. Is it interpersonal
communication, mass communication or both? Viral videos and memes spread to vast numbers of
people but might start out as in-jokes between internet friends or trolls. The message’s original
meaning is often lost in this process. In a networked society, it can be difficult to differentiate between
interpersonal and mass communication. For our purposes, it will be helpful to consider the message
creator’s intent.
As a user, it is essential to realize the possibility that interpersonal messages may be shared widely. As
professionals, it also helps to realize that you cannot force a messge to go viral, although most social
media platforms now engage in various kinds of paid promotion where brands and influential users
can pay to have their content spread more widely more quickly.
We must also understand that advertisers treat digital
communication platforms much the same way
whether they appear to users to be interpersonal or
mass media environments. Users can be targeted
down to the individual on either type of platform,
and advertisers (with the help of platform creators),
can access mass audiences, even when users are
intending only to participate on a platform for
purposes of interpersonal communication.
Two women discuss a record album selection in a music
shop in Amora, Portugal. Photo by Pedro Ribeiro
Simões, CCBY. Source: Flikr.
Scholars are still working to define how these
platforms mix aspects of interpersonal and mass
communication. Here is one takeaway: If you are not
paying to use a platform like Facebook, Twitter,
YouTube (Google), Instagram or Snapchat, you are
the product. It is your attention that is being sold to
advertisers.
The Big Picture
Society functions when the mass media work well, and we tend not to think about the technologies
or the professionals who make it all possible. Interpersonal communication can function with or
without a massive technological apparatus. It is more convenient, though, to be able to text each
another. When interpersonal communication breaks down, we have problems in our relationships.
When organizational communication breaks down, it creates problems for groups and companies. But
when mass communication breaks down, society breaks down.
Media, Society, Culture and You 11
Cultural Production
There is another way of looking at the mass media that needs to be mentioned after looking in some
depth at the structural changes going on in and around the field of mass communication. Mass media
channels are also huge engines of cultural production. That is, they make the entertainment that
helps us define who we are as large and small groups of people. To quote from Dead Poets Society:
“We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race, and the human race is filled
with passion. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain
life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” If you replace “reading and
writing poetry” with “creating culture,” you get a sense of the importance of cultural production. We
can define culture as a collection of our knowledge, beliefs and practices. In practice, culture it how
we express ourselves and enjoy life’s experiences.
In media, there are three main types of cultural works, those associated with “high” culture, popular
culture and folk culture. (Some scholars discuss “low” culture, but it is argued here that “low culture”
is just another way of describing the low end of pop culture.)
High culture is arguably the best cultural material a society has to offer. Economic class often comes
into play in defining what is “high culture” and what is not.
Pop culture is the vast array of cultural products that appeal to the masses.
Folk culture refers to cultural products borne out of everyday life identifiable because they usually
have practical uses as well as artistic value. It is often associated with prehistoric cultures, but that is
because the folk culture, pop culture and high culture of prehistoric peoples were often one and the
same. Their best art may also have been an everyday object like a bowl or a basket or a doll or a mask.
Don’t confuse prehistoric art with modern folk art.
Modern folk art has the specific quality of trying to capture what is both beautiful and useful in
everyday life.
Folk music tends to rely on “traditional” sounds and instruments. Topically, it focuses on the value of
everyday existence. Folk music is often built around narratives that carry morals much the same way
fairy tales do. Fairy tales are probably the best example of folk literature.
So much of the interpretation and the value of cultural production is culturally relative. This means
that an object or work’s value is determined by perceptions of people in different cultural groups.
In modern society, mass media often drive our perceptions. It is important to recognize that different
cultures have different moral values and to acknowledge that some practices should be universally
abhorred and stopped, even if they are partially or wholly accepted in other cultures.
The relationship between culture and mass media is complex; it is difficult to distinguish modern
culture from how it appears in the various mass media. Culture in the developed world is spread
12 Media, Society, Culture and You
through mass media channels. Just as society forms and is formed in part by messages in the mass
media, so it goes with culture. Cultural products and their popularity can influence which media
channels people prefer. Conversely, changes in media and ICTs can lead to changes in how we
produce culture.
When we discuss digital culture in the next chapter, we will continue to break down different levels
of culture and the relationship between cultural forms and mass communication in the networked
communication age. To begin to understand the mass media, their role in society and how they
shape culture and are shaped by cultural preferences, it helps to think about how the mass media may
influence you.
2
Digital Culture and Social Media
