MCM 733:
Communication Theory
Chapters 10, 11, 12
CH 10: Media and Society
• Information/Innovation diffusion theory: explains how
innovations are introduced and adopted by various
communities
– First, awareness raising
– Second, adopted by early adopters (people who adopt
techs early, without all the consumer info)
– Third, opinion leaders adopt it based on early adopters
experiences
– Fourth, opinion leaders spread it to their constituencies
– Fifth, laggards adopt it
– Change agents: those wo directly influence the adoption
process
CH 10: Media and Society
• Media System Dependency Theory:
– The more people use media, the more they
become dependent on it and the more influence
the media will have in their lifes
• Knowledge Gap Theory:
– There are systematic gaps between better
informed and less-informed members of a
population. This is a demonstration of the power
of systems theory
CH 10: Media and Society
• Agenda Setting Theory:
– Communicators don’t tell people what to think,
rather they encourage them to prioritize their
values.
– Priming: media draw attention to some aspects of
political life at the expense of others
– Agenda Building: collective process in which
media, gov’t and the citizenry reciprocally
influence one another in areas of public policy
CH 10: Media and Society
• Elements of Agenda Setting Theory:
– Mass comm has a huge effect on setting people’s
priorities
– Vividness of presentation
– Position of a story
– priming
CH 10: Media and Society
• Framing Theory: the idea that people use sets of
expectations to make sense of their social world
and media contribute to those expectations
• Second-order agenda setting: media set the
public’s agenda at a second level or order – the
attribute level, where the first order was the
object level.
• Frame: a specific set of expectations used to
make sense of some aspect of the social world in
a specific situation and time
CH 10: Media and Society
• Spiral of Silence Theory: people holding views
contrary to dominant views are moved to keep
them to themselves for fear of rejection
• Three factors that lead to Spiral of Silence:
– Ubiquity: the media are virtually everywhere as
sources of information
– Cumulation: the various news media tend to repeat
stories and perspectives across their different
individual programs, or editions, across the different
media themselves
– Consonance: the similarity of values held by
newspeople influences the content they produce
CH 10: Media and Society
• New Production Research: the study of how the
institutional routines of news production
inevitably produce bias or distorted content
– Personalized News: most news stories center around
people
– Dramatized News: storylines dominate
– Fragmented news: news is made up of a lot different
fragments
– Normalized News: adding th threat of disaster to a
sense of normalcy
– Objectivity rituals: rituals that ensure objectivity but
reinforce the status quo
CH 10: Media and Society
• Media Intrusion Theory:
– The idea that the media have taken over politics
to the extent that politics have become subverted.
• Social Capital
– Membership in certain social groups confers
status and prestige to an individual
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Symbolic Interactionism: people give meaning
to certain things and those meanings end up
controlling them
• Social behaviourism: view of learning that
focuses on the mental processes and the
social environment in which learning takes
place
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Applications of Symbolic Interactionism
– People’s interpretation and perception of the
environment depend on communication
– Communication is guided by and guides the concepts
of self, role, and situations. These concepts generate
expectations in and of the environment
– Communication consists of complex interactions
“involving action, interdependence, mutual influence,
meaning, relationship, and situational factors.”
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Social Constructionism: individuals’ power to
control or change their environment is limited
• Social construction of reality: we construct
meaning together in an on-going fashion
because people share a common sense of its
reality
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Some concepts for social interactionism and
constructionism:
– Signals: artificial signs that produce predicable
responses
– Signs: something represents something else
• Artificial signs: made by people
• Natural signs: thunder, lightning, etc.
– Symbols: artificial signs for which there is less
certainty of response
– Typifications: mental images that allow people to
quickly classify objects and actions and then structure
their own actions in response.
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Framing and Frame Analysis
– Framing: people use expectations to make sense of everyday life
– Social cues: info in the environment that signals a shift or
change of action
– Frame: a specific set of expectations used to make sense of a
social situation at a given point in time
– Downshift and upshift: to move back and forth between more
or less serious frames
– Hyper-ritualized representations: media content constructed to
highlight only the most meaningful representations
– Primary reality: the real world in which people obey
conventions and laws
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Cultivation Analysis: media cultivates a reality,
that may be untrue, but becomes reality
because people believe it to be so
• Violence Index: annual content analysis of a
sample week of network television to measure
amount of violence contained in it
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Cultural Indicators Project: periodic examinations of
television programming and the conceptions of social
reality cultivated by viewing
– Television is different from all other forms of mass media
– TV is the central cultural arm of today’s society
– Audience consciousness is cultivated by keying into basic
assumptions about the “facts of life” and “common sense”
rather than “high concept” ideas
– TV’s major cultural function is to stabilize social patterns,
to cultivate resistance to change
– The observable, measurable independent contributions of
television to the culture are relatively small. It is rather it’s
stable contribution that matters (Ice Age Hypothesis)
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Products of Cultivation Analysis
– Message systems analysis: detailed content analysis of TV
programming to assess recurring and consistent messaging
– Cultivation: television’s contribution to the creation of a
culture’s frameworks or knowledge and underlying general
concepts
– Mainstreaming: the process, especially for heavier
viewers, by which TVs symbols monopolize and dominate
other sources of info and ideas about the world
– Resonance: when viewers see things on TV that are
congruent with their own everyday realities
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Mean World Index: a series of questions about
the incidence of crime and violence, the answer
to which can be used to differentiate heavy and
light viewers
• The Three B’s of TV:
– Television blurs traditional distinctions of people’s
views of their world
– TV blends their realities into TV’s cultural mainstream
– TV bends that mainstream to the institutional
interests of television and its sponsors
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Commodification of Culture:
– When elements of everyday culture are selected for
repackaging, only a very limited range is chosen and important
elements are overlooked or consciously ignored
– The repackaging process involves dramatization of those
elements of culture that have been selected
– The marketing of cultural commodities is undertaken in a way
that maximizes the likelihood that they will intrude into and
ultimately disrupt everyday life
– The elites who operate the cultural industries are generally
ignorant of the consequences of their work.
– Disruption of everyday life takes many forms – some disruptions
are obviously linked to consumption of deleterious content,
other are subtle and take a long time.
Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories
• Media Literacy Movement
– An awareness of the impact of the media on the
individual and society
– An understanding of the process of mass
communication
– The development of strategies with which to analyse
and discuss media messages
– An awareness of media content as a “text” that
provides insight into our contemporary culture and
ourselves
– The cultivation of an enhanced enjoyment,
understanding and appreciation of media content
Ch 12: The Future of Media Theory
and Research
• The End of Mass Comm Theory and the
Beginning of Media Theory
– Web 2.0
– iPhone/Blackberry
– Virtual reality
– Artificial intelligence
– Cognitive neuroscience
– Globalization