Compare TV shows and the cultural impact of today’s society. Why do we want to get more likes? Social media industries: how s

CHAPTER 1Mass Communication

A Critical Approach

On March 24th, 2018, a demonstration led by student survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School mass shooting gathered more than 1.2 million people to advocate for stricter gun control laws.

· CULTURE AND THE EVOLUTION OF MASS COMMUNICATION

· THE DEVELOPMENT OF MEDIA AND THEIR ROLE IN OUR SOCIETY

· SURVEYING THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE

· CRITIQUING MEDIA AND CULTURE

AFTER THE 2018 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where fourteen students and three staff members died, the Washington Post compiled a twenty-first-century list of U.S. school shootings: “Since 2000 . . . there have been more than 130 shootings at elementary, middle and high schools, and 58 others at colleges and universities.” 1  But something happened after Parkland that did not happen after the murders of twenty schoolchildren and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, or the 2017 Las Vegas mass murder of fifty-eight concertgoers.

After the Parkland tragedy, young people took to social media and sustained an online debate over gun control and gun violence that lasted much longer than those following previous shooting tragedies, in which social media and TV news reports usually died down after a couple of weeks. Take a look at the story leads from several newspapers from around the world after Parkland:

“Florida students have turned social media into a weapon for good. Teenagers’ use of Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram is social media at its best—a cudgel against political discourse that desperately needs to change.” —Guardian, 2/21/18

“A spontaneous show of anger from the survivors of the Friday school shooting has suddenly morphed into a national movement of young Americans calling for gun control.” —Australian, 2/23/18

“Teenage survivors of the Parkland . . . shooting [have] amassed huge followings on social media in the weeks since the gunman attacked their school, assembling powerful social media tools in the national debate over guns and mass shooting.” —The Hill, 3/3/18

The Hill reported at the time that one survivor of the shooting, senior Emma Gonzales, had more than 1.1 million followers on Twitter, compared to just 600,000 for the NRA (National Rifle Association), which exerts powerful sway over the nation’s lawmakers. 2  In describing the social media storm after Parkland, the Guardian noted: “It took teenagers with smartphones and . . . confronted with injustice to jostle us out of that studied complacency.” 3

The question remains, however, whether the use of social media by young people can actually change laws and swing elections. Two months after the Parkland shooting, NPR and Marist pollsters offered this report: “While almost half of all registered voters (46 percent) say a candidate’s position on gun policy will be a major factor in deciding whom to vote for, that number is down 13 points from February [when the Parkland shooting occurred].” 4

In the end, Darrell West from the Brookings Institution noted in the months after Parkland that at the congressional level, efforts to pass reasonable gun control laws had “gone nowhere.” However, West noted that if more young people turn out to vote in serious numbers on issues they care about—like gun control—they could determine an election that could change a law. “In 2010, when Republicans gained 63 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and six in the U.S. Senate,” West writes, “only 21 percent of young voters between the ages of 18 and 24 cast ballots. This was well below the 61 percent turnout for senior citizens and the overall total of 45 percent for the eligible population.” According to West, “These turnout numbers were devastating for Democrats because young people are more liberal than the population as a whole and more likely to support meaningful action on gun violence.” 5

In a democracy, we depend on eligible voters to vote, and we rely on newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian to provide information and analyses to help us make good decisions about our laws and leaders. And as Parkland demonstrated, we are seeing the power of social media to confront wrongdoing and organize a movement that might make things better. Despite their limitations, the media—from Twitter to the Times—serve as watchdogs, monitoring the social landscape and bringing problems to light. It is all of our jobs to point a critical lens back at the media and describe, analyze, and interpret news stories, political opinions, and social movements, arriving at informed judgments about the media’s overall performance. This textbook offers a map to help us become more media literate, critiquing the variety of media that surround us, not as detached cynics or rabid partisans but as informed citizens with a stake in the outcome and with the power to effect change.

SO WHAT EXACTLY ARE THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF NEWSPAPERS AND MEDIA IN GENERAL? In an age of economic and social upheaval, how do we demand the highest standards from our media to describe and analyze complex events and issues? At their best, in all their various forms—from mainstream newspapers and radio talk shows to blogs—media try to help us understand the events that affect us. But at their worst, media’s appetite for telling and selling stories leads them not only to document tragedy but also to misrepresent or exploit it. Many viewers and critics disapprove of how media, particularly TV and the Internet, hurtle from one event to another, often dwelling on trivial, celebrity-driven content.

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Visit LaunchPad for Media & Culture and use LearningCurve to review concepts from this chapter.

In this book, we examine the history and business of mass media and discuss the media as a central force in shaping our culture and our democracy. We start by examining key concepts and introducing the critical process for investigating media industries and issues. In later chapters, we probe the history and structure of media’s major institutions. In the process, we develop an informed and critical view of the influence these institutions have had on national and global life. The goal is to become media literate—to become critical consumers of mass media institutions and engaged participants who accept part of the responsibility for the shape and direction of media culture. In this chapter, we will:

· Address key ideas, including communication, culture, mass media, and mass communication

· Investigate important periods in communication history: the oral, written, print, electronic, and digital eras

· Examine the development of a mass medium from emergence to convergence

· Learn about how convergence has changed our relationship to media

· Look at the central role of storytelling in media and culture

· Discuss the skyscraper and map models for organizing and categorizing culture

· Trace important cultural values in both modern and postmodern societies

· Study media literacy and the five stages of the critical process: description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement

As you read through this chapter, think about your early experiences with the media. Identify a favorite media product from your childhood—a song, book, TV show, or movie. Why was it so important to you? How much of an impact did your early taste in media have on your identity? How has your taste shifted over time? What do your current media preferences indicate about your identity now? Do your current tastes reveal anything about you? For more questions to help you think about the role of media in your life, see “ Questioning the Media ” in the Chapter Review.

CULTURE AND THE EVOLUTION OF MASS COMMUNICATION

One way to understand the impact of media on our lives is to explore the cultural context in which media operate. Often, culture is narrowly associated with art—the unique forms of creative expression that give pleasure and set standards about what is true, good, and beautiful. Culture, however, can be viewed more broadly as the ways in which people live and represent themselves at particular historical times. This idea of culture encompasses fashion, sports, literature, architecture, education, religion, and science, as well as mass media. Although we can study discrete cultural products, such as novels or songs, from various historical periods, culture itself is always changing. It includes a society’s art, beliefs, customs, games, technologies, traditions, and institutions. It also encompasses a society’s modes of  communication : the creation and use of symbol systems that convey information and meaning (e.g., languages, Morse code, motion pictures, and binary computer codes).

Culture is made up of both the products that a society fashions and, perhaps more importantly, the processes that forge those products and reflect a culture’s diverse values. Thus,  culture  may be defined as the symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and societies use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values. According to this definition, when we listen to music, read a book, watch television, or scan the Internet, we are not usually asking “Is this art?” but trying to identify or connect with something or someone. In other words, we are assigning meaning to the song, book, TV program, or website. Culture, therefore, is a process that delivers the values of a society through products or other meaning-making forms. For example, the American ideal of “rugged individualism”—depicting heroic characters overcoming villains or corruption—has been portrayed on television for decades through a tradition of detective stories and police procedurals, such as PBS’s Sherlock and Endeavor and CBS’s Elementary and various incarnations of NCIS.

Culture links individuals to their society by providing both shared and contested values, and the mass media help circulate those values. The  mass media  are the cultural industries—the channels of communication—that produce and distribute songs, novels, TV shows, newspapers, movies, video games, Internet services, and other cultural products to large numbers of people. The historical development of media and communication can be traced through several overlapping phases or eras in which newer forms of technology disrupted and modified older forms—a process that many critics and media professionals began calling convergence with the arrival of the Internet.

These eras, which all still operate to some degree, are oral, written, print, electronic, and digital. The first two refer to the communication of tribal or feudal communities and agricultural economies. The last three feature the development of  mass communication : the process of designing cultural messages and stories and delivering them to large and diverse audiences through media channels as old and distinctive as the printed book and as new and converged as the Internet. Hastened by the growth of industry and modern technology, mass communication accompanied the shift of rural populations to urban settings and the rise of a consumer culture.

Oral and Written Eras in Communication

In most early societies, information and knowledge first circulated slowly through oral traditions passed on by poets, teachers, and tribal storytellers. As alphabets and the written word emerged, however, a manuscript—or written—culture began to develop and eventually overshadowed oral customs. Documented and transcribed by philosophers, monks, and stenographers, the manuscript culture served the ruling classes. Working people were generally illiterate, and the economic and educational gap between rulers and the ruled was vast. These eras of oral and written communication developed slowly over many centuries. Although exact time frames are disputed, historians generally consider these eras as part of Western civilization’s premodern period, spanning the epoch from roughly 1000 BCE to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.

Early tensions between oral and written communication played out among ancient Greek philosophers and writers. Many philosophers who believed in the superiority of the oral tradition feared that the written word would threaten public discussion. In fact, Plato sought to banish poets, whom he saw as purveyors of ideas less rigorous than those generated in oral, face-to-face question-and-answer discussions. These debates foreshadowed similar discussions in our time in which we ask whether TV news, Twitter, or online comment sections cheapen public discussion and discourage face-to-face communication.

The Print Revolution

While paper and block printing developed in China around 100 CE and 1045, respectively, what we recognize as modern printing did not emerge until the middle of the fifteenth century. At that time in Germany, Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of movable metallic type and the printing press ushered in the modern print era. Printing presses and publications spread rapidly across Europe in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Early on, the size and expense of books limited their audience to the wealthy and powerful, but as printers reduced their size and cost, books became available and affordable to more people.

Books eventually became the first mass-marketed products in history because of the way the printing press combined three necessary elements. First, machine duplication replaced the tedious system in which scribes hand-copied texts. Second, duplication could occur rapidly, so large quantities of the same book could be reproduced easily. Third, the faster production of multiple copies brought down the cost of each unit, making books more affordable to less-affluent people.

Since mass-produced printed materials could spread information and ideas faster and farther than ever before, writers could use print to disseminate views counter to traditional civic doctrine and religious authority—views that paved the way for major social and cultural changes, such as the Protestant Reformation and the rise of modern nationalism, as people began to think of themselves as part of a country whose interests were broader than local or regional concerns. Whereas oral and written societies had favored decentralized local governments, the print era supported the ascent of more centralized nation-states.

Eventually, machine production became an essential factor in the mass production of other goods, which led to the Industrial Revolution, modern capitalism, and the consumer culture of the twentieth century. With the revolution in industry came the rise of the middle class and an elite business class of owners and managers who acquired the kind of influence formerly held only by nobility or clergy. Print media became key tools that commercial and political leaders used to distribute information and maintain social order.

As with the Internet today, however, it was difficult for a single business or political leader, certainly in a democratic society, to gain exclusive control over printing technology (although many leaders tried). Instead, the mass publication of pamphlets, magazines, and books in the United States helped democratize knowledge, and literacy rates rose among the working and middle classes. Industrialization required a more educated workforce, but printed literature and textbooks also encouraged compulsory education, thus promoting literacy and extending learning beyond the world of wealthy upper-class citizens.

Just as the printing press fostered nationalism, it also nourished the ideal of individualism. People came to rely less on their local community and their commercial, religious, and political leaders for guidance. By challenging insulated tribal life and rituals, the printing press “fostered the modern idea of individuality,” disrupting “the medieval sense of community and integration.”6 By the mid-nineteenth century, the ideal of individualism affirmed the rise of commerce and increased resistance to government interference in the affairs of self-reliant entrepreneurs. The democratic impulse of individualism became a fundamental value in American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  instantaneous—unencumbered by stagecoaches, ships, or the pony express.7 Second, in combination with the rise of mass-marketed newspapers, the telegraph transformed “information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought or sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”8 By the time of the Civil War, news had become a valuable product. Third, the telegraph made it easier for military, business, and political leaders to coordinate commercial and military operations, especially after the installation of the transatlantic cable in the late 1860s. Fourth, the telegraph led to future technological developments, such as wireless telegraphy (later named radio), the fax machine, and the cell phone, which ironically resulted in the telegraph’s demise: In 2006, Western Union telegraph offices sent their final messages.

The rise of film at the turn of the twentieth century and the development of radio in the 1920s were early signals of the electronic phase of the Information Age, but it really boomed in the 1950s and 1960s with the arrival of television and its dramatic influence on daily life. Then, with the coming of ever more communication gadgetry—personal computers, cable TV, DVDs, DVRs, direct broadcast satellites, cell phones, and smartphones—the Information Age passed into its digital phase, where old and new media began to converge, thus dramatically changing our relationship to media and culture.

The Digital Era

In  digital communication , images, texts, and sounds are converted (encoded) into electronic signals—represented as varied combinations of binary numbers (ones and zeros)—that are then reassembled (decoded) as a precise reproduction of, say, a TV picture, a magazine article, a song, or a telephone voice. On the Internet, various images, texts, and sounds are digitally reproduced and transmitted globally.

New technologies, particularly cable television and the Internet, developed so quickly that traditional leaders in communication lost some of their control over information. For example, starting with the 1992 presidential campaign, the network news shows (ABC, CBS, and NBC) began to lose their audiences to cable channels and partisan radio talk shows. By the 2012 national elections, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites had become key players in news and politics, especially as information resources for younger generations who had grown up in an online and digital world.

Moreover, e-mail—a digital reinvention of oral culture—followed by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat (among other social media), assumed many of the functions of the postal service and is outpacing attempts to control communication beyond national borders. Furthermore, many repressive and totalitarian regimes have had trouble controlling messages sent out over the borderless Internet. In the old snail mail days, it was easier for governments to monitor communication coming in and going out of a country.

In reinventing oral culture, social media have enabled people from all over the world to have ongoing online conversations, share stories and interests, and generate their own media content. This turn to digital media forms has fundamentally disrupted traditional media business models, the ways we engage with and consume media products, and the ways we organize our daily lives around various media choices.

The Linear Model of Mass Communication

The digital era also brought about a shift in the models that media researchers have used over the years to explain how media messages and meanings are constructed and communicated in everyday life. One older and outdated explanation of how media operate viewed mass communication as a linear process of producing and delivering messages to large audiences. According to this model, senders (authors, producers, and organizations) transmitted messages (programs, texts, images, sounds, and ads) through a mass media channel (newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, or the Internet) to large groups of receivers (readers, viewers, and consumers). In the process, gatekeepers (news editors, executive producers, and other media managers) functioned as message filters. Media gatekeepers made decisions about what messages actually got produced for particular receivers. The process also allowed for feedback, in which citizens and consumers, if they chose, returned messages to senders or gatekeepers through phone calls, e-mail, web postings, talk shows, or letters to the editor.

But the problem with the linear model was that in reality, media messages—especially in the digital era—do not usually move smoothly from a sender at point A to a receiver at point Z. Words and images are more likely to spill into one another, crisscrossing in the daily media deluge of product ads, TV shows, news reports, social media, smartphone apps, and everyday conversation. Media messages and stories are encoded and sent in written and visual forms, but senders often have very little control over how their intended messages are decoded or whether the messages are ignored or misread by readers and viewers.

A Cultural Model for Understanding Mass Communication

A more contemporary approach to understanding media is through a cultural model. This concept recognizes that individuals bring diverse meanings to messages, given factors and differences such as gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, and occupation. In this more complex model of mass communication, audiences actively affirm, interpret, refashion, or reject the messages and stories that flow through various media channels. And audiences can assign completely opposite meanings to the same message. For example, when President Trump has referred to CNN or the New York Times as “fake news,” his supporters have interpreted such language as a justified attack on elite out-of-touch news media, whereas his critics have viewed this kind of unsubstantiated generalization as an attack on the First Amendment and the news media’s essential job to report on government leaders.

While the linear model may have shown how a message gets from a sender to a receiver, the cultural model suggests the complexity of this process and the lack of control that senders (such as media executives, moviemakers, writers, news editors, and ad agencies) often have over how audiences receive messages and interpret their intended meanings. Sometimes the producers of media messages seem to be the active creators of communication, with audiences serving merely as passive receptacles. But as the Trump example illustrates, research shows that consumers and citizens in general shape media messages to fit or support their own values and viewpoints. This phenomenon is known as  selective exposure : People typically seek messages and produce meanings that correspond to their own cultural beliefs, values, and interests. For example, studies have shown that people with political leanings toward the left or the right seek out blogs or news outlets that reinforce those preexisting views.

In addition, a cultural approach to media focuses us on how meaning is produced rather than on how messages are transmitted. Under this model, a key point is understanding that meaning emerges at the tangled intersection of (1) the creator’s vision, usually conveyed in story form; (2) the industry’s control of production and distribution processes, or the telling and selling of stories; and (3) audiences’ fragmented responses—that is, why we choose and enjoy particular stories (and not others), how we use and consume various media, and how we impose our own varied meanings on the array of media available.

The rise of the Internet and social media has also complicated the communication and meaning-making process. While there are still senders and receivers, the borderless, decentralized, and democratic nature of the Internet means that anyone can become a sender of media messages—whether it’s by uploading a video mash-up to YouTube or by writing a blog post. The Internet has also largely eliminated the many gatekeepers. Although some governments try to control Internet servers, and some websites have restrictions on what can and cannot be posted, the Internet for the most part allows senders to transmit content without obtaining approval—or undergoing editing—from a gatekeeper. For example, some authors who are unable to find a traditional book publisher for their work turn to self-publishing on the Internet. And musicians who don’t have deals with major record labels can promote, circulate, and sell their music online.

EARLY BOOKS

Before the invention of the printing press, books were copied by hand in a labor-intensive process. This beautifully illuminated page is from an Italian Bible made in the early fourteenth century.

The Electronic Era

In Europe and the United States, the impact of industry’s rise was enormous: Factories replaced farms as the main centers of work and production. During the 1880s, roughly 80 percent of Americans lived on farms and in small towns; by the 1920s and 1930s, most had moved to urban areas, where new industries and economic opportunities beckoned. The city had overtaken the country as the focal point of national life.

The gradual transformation from an industrial, print-based society to one grounded in the Information Age began with the development of the telegraph in the 1840s. Featuring dot-dash electronic signals, the telegraph made four key contributions to communication. First, it separated communication from transportation, making media messages instantaneous—unencumbered by stagecoaches, ships, or the pony express.7 Second, in combination with the rise of mass-marketed newspapers, the telegraph transformed “information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be bought or sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”8 By the time of the Civil War, news had become a valuable product. Third, the telegraph made it easier for military, business, and political leaders to coordinate commercial and military operations, especially after the installation of the transatlantic cable in the late 1860s. Fourth, the telegraph led to future technological developments, such as wireless telegraphy (later named radio), the fax machine, and the cell phone, which ironically resulted in the telegraph’s demise: In 2006, Western Union telegraph offices sent their final messages.

The rise of film at the turn of the twentieth century and the development of radio in the 1920s were early signals of the electronic phase of the Information Age, but it really boomed in the 1950s and 1960s with the arrival of television and its dramatic influence on daily life. Then, with the coming of ever more communication gadgetry—personal computers, cable TV, DVDs, DVRs, direct broadcast satellites, cell phones, and smartphones—the Information Age passed into its digital phase, where old and new media began to converge, thus dramatically changing our relationship to media and culture.

The Digital Era

In  digital communication , images, texts, and sounds are converted (encoded) into electronic signals—represented as varied combinations of binary numbers (ones and zeros)—that are then reassembled (decoded) as a precise reproduction of, say, a

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