DB questions

Culture and the Evolution of Mass Communication

Although culture is most often associated with “fine art,” it can be more broadly defined to include the entire spectrum of ways people express themselves in a particular time and place. This spectrum includes art, beliefs, customs, games, technology, and all of the communication (the creation and use of symbol systems to convey information and meaning) that surrounds these items and events. In fact, mass media – the cultural industries and channels of communication – can be seen as both artifacts and distributors of culture.

Communication can be understood to have gone through five phases of development – oral, written, print, electronic, and digital — with previous phases continuing and adapting as new technologies introduced new techniques for communicating. The last three phases represent the development of mass communication, the process of creating cultural messages and stories and delivering them to large and diverse audiences. Johannes Gutenberg’s development of a movable type printing press in the fifteenth century ushered in an age of true mass communication, with the ability to reproduce printed works faster and for far less expense than handwritten methods.

The invention of the telegraph in the middle of the nineteenth century heralded the start of the electronic age, which eventually expanded into such media as film and radio, and hit its full stride in the 1950s and 1960s with the development of television. With the commercial development of the Internet in the 1990s, digital communication allowed images, text, and sound to be converted into electronic signals and transmitted globally. The current digital era is marked by a nearly free flow of information: Internet bloggers are now a key element in news and social media has taken off. Developments in the electronic and digital era, along with other social and legal changes, have led to ever–increasing media convergence, the merging of content across different media channels. It has also led to an increase in cross platform convergence, that is, the consolidation of different media holdings under one conglomeration, as large corporations seek to increase profits and lawmakers have relaxed rules about how much a single media company can own.

Mass Media and the Process of Communication

Many new forms of mass communication start out as creators try to solve specific problems during the novelty or development stage. During the following entrepreneurial stage, an inventor or company finds a way to turn the invention into a marketable item. Finally, once it catches on with the general public, the product enters the mass medium stage.

After decades of study on how people use forms of mass communication, and perhaps how creators of mass media use them, scholars have developed two different approaches to understanding mass media. One is the linear model of mass communication. This model sees mass communication as a straight line, with a sender sending a message through a mass media channel to the audience or receiver. In the process, gatekeepers, such as news editors, function as message filters. While this model allows for some feedback, it does not capture the complexity of how people truly use mass communication. In contrast, a cultural approach to mass communication is a more complex process that examines the various meanings audiences attach to media messages, whether or not those meanings were ever intended. The cultural model also suggests that senders shape media messages to fit or support their own viewpoints. This is known as selective exposure. To use the cultural model is to understand that our media institutions are in the narrative (or storytelling) business. Large portions of media resources now go toward studying audiences to determine what kind of narratives they want to hear, and what will fit into their set of values and beliefs.

Chapter 1 Summary

Surveying the Cultural Landscape

Scholars have devised various models to describe mass media in order to develop a framework for studying the culture in which the forms of mass media exist. In the twentieth century, critics and audiences created a hierarchy of high and low culture. This idea could be understood as a “skyscraper," with pop culture, video games, and popular music near the bottom, and ballet, classical literature, and art museums at the top. In contrast, culture could be viewed as a map, or an ongoing and complicated process that better accounts for diverse individual tastes. This model recognizes that people can appreciate a range of cultural experiences without ranking them from high to low.

The values by which American society judged culture underwent a major shift around the 1950s. The first half of the twentieth century is often referred to as the modern period. Four major values of the modern period were (1) working efficiently, (2) celebrating the individual, (3) believing in a rational order, and (4) rejecting tradition/embracing progress, a trademark of the Progressive Era from the 1890s to the1920s, typified by politicians like Theodore Roosevelt. But, by the last half of the twentieth century, what is called the postmodern period had started, with its main values of (1) celebrating populism, (2) diversifying and recycling culture, (3) questioning science and revering nostalgia, and (4) acknowledging paradox.

Critiquing Media and Culture

Having a cynical view of mass media is not the same thing as having a thorough understanding of cultural and historical context that allows for a more complex critical perspective. One way to gain a better grasp of media complexity is to attain media literacy using a critical process. Using the following five steps of a critical process will help you recognize both the strengths and weaknesses of media forms, while minimizing the impact of personal likes, dislikes, and cultural prejudices on your final conclusions.

Developing a critical perspective involves five stages: description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement.

• Description: paying close attention, taking notes, and researching the subject under study. This involves examining the media closely, looking for recurring ideas or themes, noting from what perspective a particular account is given, figuring out what is missing from media accounts, and considering other ways to tell a given story.

• Analysis: discovering and focusing on significant patterns that emerge from the description stage.

• Interpretation: asking and answering the “What does that mean?” and “So what?” questions about one’s findings. Here you determine the meanings of the patterns you have analyzed.

• Evaluation: arriving at a judgment about the value of the subject through subordinating personal taste to the critical assessment resulting from the first three stages. Here, you make critical, informed judgments.

• Engagement: taking some action that connects our critical perspective with our role as citizens to question our media institutions, adding our own voice to the process of shaping the cultural environment.

Chapter 1 Summary