COM111 Topic 1 to 3 Notes
Summary Topic 1
Define communication, mass communication, mass media, and culture.
Communication is the process of creating shared meaning.
Mass communication is the process of creating shared meaning between the mass
media and their audiences.
Mass media is the plural of mass medium, a technology that carries messages to a large
number of people.
Culture is the world made meaningful.
It resides all around us; it is socially constructed and maintained through
communication. It limits as well as liberates us; it differentiates as well as unites us. It
defines our realities and shapes the ways we think, feel, and act.
Describe the relationships among communication, mass communication,
culture, and those who live in the culture.
Mass media are our culture’s dominant storytellers and the forum in which we debate
cultural meaning.
Evaluate the impact of technology and economics on those relationships.
Technological determinism argues that technology is the predominant agent of
social and cultural change. But it is not technology that drives culture; it is how
people use technology.
With technology, money, too, shapes mass communication. Audiences can be either the
consumer or the product in our mass media system.
List the components of media literacy
Media literacy, the ability to effectively and efficiently
comprehend and use any form of mediated communication,
consists of eight components:
1. A critical thinking skill enabling the development of independent judgments
about media content.
2. An understanding of the process of mass communication.
3. An awareness of the impact of the media on individuals and society.
4. Strategies for analyzing and discussing media messages.
5. An awareness of media content as a “text” providing insight into contemporary
culture.
6. A cultivation of enhanced enjoyment, understanding, and appreciation of
media content.
7. The development of effective and responsible production skills.
8. The development of an understanding of the ethical and moral obligations of
media practitioners.
Identify key skills required for developing media literacy.
1. The ability and willingness to try to understand content, to pay
attention, and to filter out noise.
2. An understanding of and respect for the power of media messages
3. The ability to distinguish emotional from reasoned reactions when responding
to content and to act accordingly
4. The development of heightened expectations of media content
5. A knowledge of genre conventions and the recognition of their mixing
6. The ability to think critically about media messages
7. A knowledge of the internal language of various media and the ability to
understand its effects.
Summary Topic 2
Summarize broad current trends in mass media, especially concentration of
ownership and conglomeration, globalization, audience fragmentation,
hypercommercialization, and convergence.
Encouraged by the Internet and other digital technologies, content producers are
finding new ways to deliver content to audiences.
All of the traditional media have begun to see either flattening or declines in audience,
yet overall consumption of media is at all-time highs.
Five trends are abetting this situation—convergence, audience fragmentation,
concentration of ownership and conglomeration, globalization, and hypercommercialism.
Convergence is fueled by three elements—digitization of nearly all information,
high-speed connectivity, and advances in technology’s speed, memory, and power.
Describe in broad terms how the mass communication process
itself will evolve as the role of the audience in this new media
environment is altered
Content providers can now be lone individuals aided by low cost of entry.
Messages can now be quite varied, idiosyncratic, and freed of the producers’ time
demands.
Feedback can now be instantaneous and direct, and, as a result, audiences, very
small or very large, can be quite well known to content producers and distributors.
Summary Topic 3
Outline the history and development of the publishing industry
and the book itself as a medium
Although the first printing press came to the colonies in 1638, books were not
central to early colonial life. However, books and pamphlets were at the heart of
the colonists’ revolt against England in the 1770s.
Developments in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as improvements in printing, the
flowering of the American novel, and the introduction of dime novels, helped make
books a mass medium.
Describe the cultural value of books and the implications of
censorship for democracy.
Books have cultural value because they are agents of social and cultural change;
important cultural repositories; windows on the past; important sources of
personal development; sources of entertainment, escape, and personal reflection.
mirrors of culture; and because the purchase and reading of a book is a much
more individual, personal activity than consuming advertiser-supported or heavily
promoted media.
Censorship, both formal and in the form of people’s own aliteracy, threatens these
values, as well as democracy itself.
Explain how the organizational and economic nature of the
contemporary book industry shapes the content
of books.
Convergence is reshaping the book industry as well as the reading experience itself
through advances such as e-publishing, POD, e-books, e-readers, smartphones and
tablets, and several different efforts to digitize most of the world’s books.
Conglomeration affects the publishing industry as it has all media, expressing itself
through trends such as demand for profit and hyper-commercialization.
Demand for profit and hyper-commercialization manifest themselves in the
increased importance placed on subsidiary rights, instant books,
“Hollywoodization,” and product placement.
Book retailing is undergoing change; large chains dominate the business but
continue to be challenged by imaginative, high-quality independent booksellers.
Much book buying has also gravitated to the Internet.
Act as a more media-literate consumer of books, especially in
considering their uniqueness in an increasingly
mass-mediated, media-converged world.
The wild success of the Harry Potter series holds several lessons for media-literate
readers, not the least of which is that people value quality media content.
Important Terms
Topic 1
1. Communication
2. Feedback
3. Interpersonal Communication - the process of exchange of information, ideas and feelings
between two or more people through verbal or non-verbal methods.
4. Encoding
5. Decoding
6. Noise
7. Medium
8. Mass Medium
9. Mass Communication – what happens between mass medium and audiences.
10. Inferential feedback- in the mass communication process, feedback is typically indirect
rather than direct; that is, it is inferential. Like TV ratings, reviews and etc.
11. Cultural definition of communication – process of creating shared meaning
12. Culture
13. Dominant culture - cultural practice that is dominant within a particular political,
social or economic entity, in which multiple cultures co-exist.
14. Bounded culture - limited by or valid only within a particular culture intelligence tests
are commonly culture-bound to some degree.
15. Binge viewing – watching in longer time span. Episodes
16. Technological determinism - the belief that technology is the principal initiator of the
society's transformation.
17. Media literacy – effectively and efficiently comprehend and make use of media comm
18. Literacy – knowledge of specific area
19. Multiple points of access - approaching media content from a variety of directions and
deriving from it many levels of meaning
20. Third-person effect – hypothesis; individuals will perceive media messages to have
greater effects on other people than on themselves
Topic 2
1. Media Multitasking – Divided attention
2. Convergence – portable mergence of media into one
3. Concentration of ownership – cancels the media pluralism out, monopolizing media
4. Conglomeration – monopolizing diff forms of media?
5. Oligopoly – small firms control increase share of media
6. Globalization - the spread of the flow of financial products, goods, technology, information, and
jobs across national borders and cultures.
7. Narrowcasting - towards a small number of people who are most likely to be interested in that
content.
8. Niche marketing - targeted marketing strategy aimed at small, specific and well-defined
portions of the population
9. Hyper-commercialism - is when a television show or movie sells an advertisement built right into
the show or scene of the film. For profit.
10. Zone-casting – localizing?
Topic 3
1. Dime Novels - inexpensive, usually paperback, melodramatic novel of adventure
popular in the United States roughly between 1860 and 1915;
2. Pulp Novels – sensational.
3. Censorship - limit freedom of thought and expression by restricting spoken words, printed
matter, symbolic messages, freedom of association, books, art
4. Aliteracy - Aliteracy is a form of self-censorship
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Linotype – used in printing
Offset Lithography - transferring
E-publishing Cottage Industry - out of a home rather than a purpose-built facility.
Subsidiary Rights - the right to produce or publish a product in different formats based on
the original material.
10. Instant Books - a term used in publishing to describe a book that has been produced and
published very quickly to meet market demand.