68378_01p.pptxWhyStudyMediaStudies.pptxMediaHistory.pptx
 

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Before you begin this assignment, please view the PowerPoint Slide Shows: Media History, Why Media Studies, and Chapter 1 by clicking on the PowerPoint Tab. Web search: John Dewey; Harold Innis; Walter Ong; Marshall McLuhan; Robert W. McChesney; Neil Postman. 1) After researching Dewey, McLuhan, and McChesney, please discuss whether their ideas are similar or divergent. 2) Do you believe, like Dewey, that media make community? What is your prognosis for the future of media and society? 3) Using specific examples, how media developments affected human societies over the past 500 years? 4) What do you think is the most important invention of your generation and why? Of the last 50 years and why? Of the last hundred years and why? 5) How much of your daily life is spent engaging in media activities and how do they affect your life? Give examples. Which forms of Mass Media could you live without? 6) Explain how the influence of mass media extends beyond what we know to include how we relate to the social world. 7) What do sociologists mean by the terms structure and agency? Use an example from your own media use habits to examine how these terms can be applied to media. 8) What are the key defining characteristics of “mass media”? In what ways are digital media forms similar to and different older forms of mass media? 9) How do you think the presence of television changed family life? How is the Internet changing family life in similar and different ways to television? 10) How interactive do you think the Internet is? How much do you and your friends do to take advantage of the Internet’s potential for interactivity? 11) What social or political issues do you care about passionately? How does media coverage affect your politics?

Media and the Social World

Chapter 1

© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

1

Overview
Importance of Media in Contemporary Society
The Rise of Mass Media
Mass Media in Socialization and in Social Relations
Sociology of Media
Structural Constraint and Human Agency
A Model of Media and the Social World
Key Questions
What are the key characteristics of media? How did they develop historically, and how are they evolving today?
How does the presence of media affect our life?
What is a sociological approach to the study of media?
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

Importance of Media
Pervasiveness of Media in Contemporary Society
Radios in 99% and TVs in 96% of U.S. homes
Adults spend more than 5 hours a day watching TV
Cell-phone adoption, 2013—91%
Broadband Internet access at home, 2013—65%
Young people’s media use is even more extensive
More than 7.5 hours of entertainment media use per day
Media have become the dominant social institution today
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

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Rise of Mass Media
Social Construction of Reality
While reality exists, media users negotiate the meaning of that reality.
The same media product may mean very different things to different people.
Example: A music video may elicit different responses from a 15-year-old fan of the band and a parent concerned about stereotypically sexist images that may be present in the video.
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

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Rise of Mass Media: Print
Milestones in Print Media
Printing technology began in the 15th century
Cast metal type, Korea, early 15th century
Movable type, Johannes Gutenberg, 1450
Early printing reflected the power of the Church in Europe
Print as only means of reaching wide audiences from a distance for centuries
Invention of the telegraph and telephone in the 19th century allowed instantaneous communication over long distances
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

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The Rise of Mass Media: Sound and Film
Milestones in Sound Recording and Film
1877—Phonograph developed by Thomas Edison
1895—Cinematograph developed Lumiére brothers
1948—LP record launched by Columbia Records
1920s—Magnetic tape introduced
1960s—Personal cassette tapes become popular
1970s—VCRs become popular, allow movie purchase and rental and home recording
1980s—CDs make music digital
1990s—MP3, DVD, and other digital formats emerge
1990s-present—Websites and streaming services emerge
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

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Rise of Mass Media: Broadcast Media
Milestones in Broadcast Media
Radio became the first broadcast medium in the early 20 century.
For the first time in history
Communicators could cast a media message broadly.
Producers did not have to make physical products.
Audiences did not have to travel.
First television sets introduced in the 1940s; TVs in 65% of U.S. households by 1955
1998—Digital TV broadcast began
Broadcasting fundamentally created the possibility of a largely privatized and individualized media experience.
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

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Rise of Mass Media:
Digitization, the Internet and Mobile Technologies
Media converge in digital form; distinctions between media are blurred.
Changes in media production
Internet provides global platform for media distribution and consumption
Greater interactivity between media users and contents
Technologies become smaller and more mobile
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

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Media and Society
Mass Media in Socialization
“Socialization”—The process whereby we learn and internalize the values, beliefs, and norms of our culture and, in so doing, develop a sense of self
Today, mass media serve as a powerful socializing agent
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

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Media in Social Relations
Media are bound up with the process of social relations
Media affect how we learn about our world and interact with one another
Media can create moral panics
Mass-mediated politics
Most of our political knowledge is based on mass media
Participate in politics through media
Mass-mediated social interactions
“Electronic hearth”
Media products are connected to the ways we interact with other people on a daily basis
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

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Sociology of Media
Importance of Social Relations
“Sociological imagination” (C. Wright Mills)
“Looking-glass self”
Our activities take place within larger groups and institutions
Relationships between institutions
Interactions between media industry and government
Relationships within an institution
Relationships between media producers and studios
Relationship between institutions and individuals
Relationships between media products and audiences
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

11

Structural Constraint and Human Agency
“Structure” and “Agency” are core concepts of sociology
Structure
Any recurring pattern of social behavior
Examples: family structure, educational system
Structure limits the human agency
Agency
Intentional and undetermined human action
Example: students under an educational system
Structure limits the agency, but agency reproduces and changes social structure
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

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Structure and Agency in Media
Relationships Between Media and Other Institutions
Social, economic, and political institutions set certain limits on the media
Researchers need to look at how social structures external to media affect the media industry and how the media affect other social institutions
Relationships Within the Media Industry
Internal workings of mass media and processes of professional socialization
Researchers need to investigate the structure of media institutions, roles and practices in media production, professional norms, and how much autonomy media personnel have
Relationships Between the Media and the Public
How readers or users interact with media products
Researchers need to investigate how media contents are actively interpreted by readers and users.
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014

A Model of Media and the Social World
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014
Social
World

Readers / Audiences

Technology

Media Industry

Media Message / Product

Applying the Model: The Civil Rights Movement
© SAGE Publications, Inc., 2014
Media messages about the movement affect audience
Audience interprets the meaning and significance of the message
Audiences use new technology to access media messages
Specific formats of technology influence audience’s media use
Technology affects industry practices
Industry makes use of new technology to cover the event
Industry creates messages about the event
Norms of news influence media personnel
Civil Rights Movement

Readers / Audiences

Technology

Media Industry

Media Message / Product

Media Studies

Why do we teach/study about the media? What are the pros and cons?

Media Studies cont’d.
Media Studies analyzes the role of the media in society and studies media technologies, institutions, and the production, consumption, circulation, and content of media texts.
“Television had shrunk the world and had, in the process, become a great weapon for eradication ignorance and promoting democracy.” N. Mandela

Media Studies cont’d.
Pros:
1) Huge range of information
2) People are better educated/informed
3) Media can inspire and develop us
4) Media are truthful and informative
5) Media contribute to democracy and social accountability

3

Media Studies cont’d.
6) Media enable free thought and speech
7) Media are shrinking the globe (global village according to McLuhan)
8) Media give space/voice to different social groups and cultures
9) Media are agents for social change

Media Studies cont’d.
Cons:
1) Media offer worthless trivia aimed at lowest intellectual abilities
2) Media make us passive observers
3) Media corrupt children, desensitize emotions, and encourage violence and immoral sexual behavior.
4) Media serve minority political interests via false constructions

Media Studies cont’d.
5) Media principally serve worldwide commercial interests
6) Media control who we are and how we think
7) Make make us all the same
8) Media are a form of cultural imperialism
9) Media maintain the status quo

Media Studies cont’d.
Political economy: the media are determined by a combination of economic, social, and political factors, particularly ownership and control.
Cultural imperialism: domination of the world thru the dissemination of cultural products over traditional cultures and the intrusion of Western culture and values such as consumerism.

Media Studies cont’d.
Media homogenization: media products become similar, standard, and uniform due to financial pressures
Agenda setting: media producers set up the issues that the media will focus on and that audiences will subsequently perceive as important.
Newsworthiness: conflict, relevance, locality prominence, novelty, magnitude.

Media and Society

Media History

JOHN DEWEY – 1859-1952

Harold A. Innis
1894-1952

Marshall McLuhan – 1911-1980

Walter J. Ong, S.J.
1912-2003

Robert W. McChesney – 1952-

Three Historical Narratives:
Oral to Electronic Culture
Oral Culture – all interactions take place in face-to-face discussions.
Written Culture – a shared system of inscription in a literate society exists so that communication can take place outside of face-to-face discussions across time and space.
Print Culture – an expansion of Written Culture that encompasses the consequent social and cultural changes that result from the proliferation of printer material.
Electronic Culture – communication transcends time and space.

There is a different sense of time in Oral Culture, according to Ong.
Since there are no records, memory cannot be recorded. History
can only reside in the present, in the telling of the story. Memory
is thematic and formulaic. The story may vary very little from telling to
telling over time, but the words and phrases used may differ.
Performance is the key to authorship. Every time a story is told or a work is
performed, it is shaped by the performer and provides a new model for future performances.
Oral cultures are relatively homogeneous with respect to knowledge and social norms but public and shared across generations.

Written Culture, according to McLuhan , has been the means of creating
‘civilized man.’
According to Innis, written communication allowed societies to persevere through time by creating durable texts which could be handed down and referred to. This allowed for control of knowledge by certain hierarchies and also allowed for centralized control to expand over a wider area.
Audiences could be remote in time and space, and the communicator could guarantee that the message received is identical to the one sent without having to rely on the memory of the messenger. The communicator could reach a wider and more disparate audience.

Print Culture – the ability to mechanically reproduce text freed writing
from its reliance on an elite group of individuals and guaranteed that
each copy of the text would be identical to every other copy.
Printing was instrumental in the development of a secular society and in the establishment of a democracy among the upper classes in early
modern Europe, according to historian, Elizabeth Eisenstein.
Printing reinforced the sense of individuality and privacy and makes
Introspection possible.
Printing enabled the emergence of the newspaper and the novel, and
altered the very structure of human consciousness and thought.

Electronic Culture – the telegraph reorganized people’s perception of space and time; it enabled the transmission of messages across space, and it fostered a rational reorganization of time. The telegraph also separated transportation from communication.
According to Innis, electronic culture allows for a new form of empire expanded across space; information beamed across space becomes more difficult to control. It reinforced the sense of individuality and privacy to create new forms of what McLuhan called the ‘global village.’
Awareness of space and time have been transformed: space could be measured in temporal terms and time could be fractured and discontinuous.
Information and power can be both centralized and decentralized at the same time.

Technological Determinism: the belief that technology is the principal, if not the only, cause of historical change. McLuhan, for example, believed that people’s normal use of technology necessarily modifies their consciousness, that the forms of communication technology (oral, print, electronic) available to people at a particular historical moment determine the ways in which they can perceive reality and the logic they use to understand it. To McLuhan, the content of the media, the actual messages, are irrelevant, thus “The Medium is the Message.”
According to Raymond Williams, however, communications technologies have been sought in the context of solving particular social needs and that technological determinism ignores the active role of people and social institutions.

Theories of the Masses
from Social Relationship to Culture
Mass society theory holds that as a result of various social changes,
including industrialization, both the nature of social life and the form of
social interaction were fundamentally altered for the worse.
The Industrial Revolution prompted a transformation from a rural, agrarian society in which people knew each other intimately and personally (Gemeinschaft) to an urban, mechanical society in which people did not know their neighbors except in terms of professional function (Gesellschaft).
In the Gesellschaft, rather than being bound to one another by tradition and custom, mutual regard, and understanding, people now constitute a society only by formal, contractual relations – the individual becomes part of a mass.

from Culture to Society
Two totalitarian societies: Germany under Hitler’s Nazism and the Soviet Union under Stalin’s communism.
The United States emerges as a mass society after WWII – can it be a totalitarian society?
What is the relationship between a mass culture and a democratic society? How do we define the United States in terms of a mass society? The most popular response to these questions defined American society as fundamentally liberal due to the diversity of American culture and the plurality of audiences for a range of cultural products: high culture, mass culture, popular culture, folk culture, middlebrow culture

from Modernity to Postmodernity
When did the Modern period begin?
Modernization describes the broad spectrum of interrelated historical forces
that radically changed the world since the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution, capitalism, and colonialism in Europe and America.
Modernism refers to the cultural forms, discourses, practices, and relations –
both elite and popular. Both commercial and folk – with which people attempted to make sense of, represent, judge, rail against, surrender to, intervene into, navigate through, or escape from the new worlds of modernization.
Modernity refers to the changing structure and nature of the lived social realities
to which modernism and modernization responded and which were themselves shaped by both modernism and modernization.

The Postmodern
When did the Postmodern period begin?
The commercialism of culture and communication characterized by the return to the small and the flexible, the commitment to maximizing profit by developing systems of production and distribution that can respond quickly to the different demands of smaller groups of consumers, and the construction and celebration of identities as multiple, fragmented subjects defined entirely by consumer and lifestyle choices; the increasing mobility of human populations around the world; the rapid development of new communication technologies, particularly the computer and other information media. In the postmodern text, only surfaces matter, only images are real.