Introduction to media studies
Early foci
• Mass communication
– Journalism
– Print
– Radio/TV/Film
– Propaganda/political communication
– Information campaigns
More recent foci
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Ideology/Framing
Popular culture/cultural change
Advertising/consumerism
Identity/Disadvantaged groups
Meaning making
McQuail’s list of themes and issues
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Time
Place
Power
Social reality
Meaning
Causation and determinism
Mediation
Identity
Cultural difference
Let’s apply them to a few concerns of
media studies
• Political communication
– The Healthcare debate
– The death of Ted Kennedy
• Gender communication
– Pornography/Erotica
– Treatment of female athletes on
television
• Online video
– Hulu
– YouTube
McQuail’s ‘kinds of theory’
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Social scientific theory
Cultural theory
Normative theory
Operational theory
Everyday or common-sense theory
Alternative traditions
• Structural
• Behavioural
• Cultural
“Elements that produce distinctive
configurations of application and significance in
the wider life of society”
• Certain communicative purposes, needs, or uses;
• Technologies for communicating to many at a
distance;
• Forms of social organization that provide the
skills and frameworks for production and
distribution;
• Organized forms of governance in the ‘public
interest’
Media features
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Senses engaged
Industry structure
Audience characteristics
Uses and gratifications
Economics
Regulation
Terms of media debate
• Power of the new media
• Social integration or disintegration
they might cause
• Public enlightenment
Mass society
• Disintegration of social bonds as a result
of industrialization
– Working conditions
• Factory structure
– Urbanization
– Immigration
• Move from bonds of personal affiliation to
bonds of legal responsibility
Mass society
• Alienation
– End of ties to work, production of entire
article
– Rootlessness
– Anomie (normlessness)
‘Mass communication’
Mass communication process
Mass audience
Large-scale distribution and
reception
Large numbers
One-directional flow
Widely dispersed
Asymmetrical relation
Non-interactive and
anonymous
Impersonal and autonomous
Heterogeneous
Calculative or market
relationship
Not organized or self-acting
Standardized content
An object of management or
manipulation
Lasswell’s outline
Schramm’s basic communication
model
Schramm’s conversation
Schramm’s model of mass
communication
Schramm’s conditions of success
What position is privileged in Schramm’s analysis?
Hall’s Encoding/decoding model