MEDIA

MEDIA IN GLOBAL AGE

• In 1865, the actor John Wilkes Booth assassinated US President Abraham Lincoln in a
Washington theatre. It took 12 days before the news reached London. A smaller boat off the
south coast of Ireland met the ship carrying the message from the United States and the news
was telegraphed to London from Cork, beating the ship by three days. It was not until the
1950s that a dedicated trans-oceanic cable existed to carry telegraphs instantly across the
Atlantic - although long-wave radio transmission between continents became possible in the
early twentieth century. On 11 September 2001, terrorists hijacked three planes and used
them to attack sites in Washington and New York. When the second plane crashed into the
Twin Towers in New York, some 20 minutes after the first tower had been struck, it is
estimated that a global audience of two billion people watched the attack on television in
real time.
• In the twenty-first century, communication technologies enable information to be shared
instantaneously and simultaneously with many millions of people almost anywhere around
the world. Communication, the transfer of information from one individual or group to
another, whether in speech or through the mass media in modern times - is crucial to any
society.
 MASS MEDIA: TRADITIONAL AND
NEW MEDIA
• Mass media refers to the technology, organization and products involved with
communication with large mass audience without any face to face personal contact.
• Traditional Media: Traditional media refers to those media that communicated in a one way process
to very large mass audiences. This is type of media associated with traditional broadcasting, like the
terrestrial television channels and radios and newspapers.
• The New Media: The new media refers to those media using new technology which first emerged in
the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries spreading content using screen based, digital
(computer technology). These include computers and the Internet, electronic e-books; digital cable
and satellite TV; digiboxes and DVD recorders enabling customized, individualized television
viewing with a choice of hundreds of television channels; digital media like CDs, DVDs and mp3
players, user generated media content through websites like facebook, myspace and youtube; and
interactive video/computer games through Play Stations.
 DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE
TRADITIONAL AND NEW MEDIA
• New media is digital. This means using computers, whereby all data are converted
into computer code which can be then saved distributed and picked up via screen-
based devices, like mobile phones, digital TVs and computers.
• New media is interactive. This means consumers have and opportunity to engage or
interact with the media, creating their own material, and customizing the media to
their own wishes, with much greater choice compared with the passive consumption
and ‘take it or leave it’ feature of the traditional media.
• New media is dispersed. This means it is less controlled than traditional media, and
more adopted to individual choice.
 MEDIA AND SOCIALIZATION
• The media are now major influences in socialization.
• The new media have become a key agency of secondary socialization and informal
education, as they become ever more important sources of information,
entertainment and leisure activity for large numbers of people.
• Use of the new media is now a feature of everyday life, and they play and important
role in secondary socialization.
 SOCIALIZATION AND MEDIA
STEREOTYPING
• The media can contribute to the formation of impressions about other groups. These impressions are
often created by the media presenting stereotypes of different groups, and such stereotyping is a
common feature of media coverage of events.
• A stereotype is a generalized, oversimplified view of the features of a social group allowing for few
individual differences between its members.
• Stereotyping often distorts and exaggerates some characteristics of some individuals in a group, and
assumes they apply to everyone in that group.
 THE MASS MEDIA, PUBLIC
OPINION AND SOCIAL CONTROL
• The mass media provide for many people the only source of information about
events, and therefore distort people’s attitudes and give a misleading impression of
some groups.
• Most people will base their opinions and attitudes not on personal experience, but on
evidence and knowledge provided by newspapers, television, the Internet and other
media.
• Indeed, if the media didn’t report an event, or distorted it, or totally made it up, the
only people likely know about it would be those who were actually involved.
• For most of us, the mass media are our only sour of evidence, and they color, shape
and even construct our view of the world.
• Do the mass media inform us about
everything and do they stress certain
things in more favorable ways than
others? Do they give false impressions
of what is happening in society?
• If most of our opinions are based on knowledge obtained second hand through the mass media, then
it raises the important issue of the power of the mass media to influence our lives.
• The mass media play a key role in providing the ideas and images which people use to interpret and
understand much of their everyday experience, and they actively shape people’s ideas, attitudes and
actions.
• The mass media therefore have an important role in forming public opinion.
• The pressure of public opinion can be a significant source of social control.
 MEDIA AND SOCIAL CONTROL
• The mass media can be said to act as an agency of social control. They carry out in three ways:
agenda setting and gate keeping and norm setting.
• Agenda setting refers to the process whereby the media selects the list of subjects to report and
bring to public attention. Agenda setting is the idea that, if you don’t believe the media tell us what
to think, it does tell us what to think about.
• Gate keeping refers to the media’s refusal to cover some issues. Such issues are frequently those
potentially most damaging to the values and interests of upper class.
• Norm setting is the process whereby the mass media emphasize and reinforce conformity
to social norms, and seek to isolate those who don’t conform by making them the victims of
unfavorable public opinion.
• This is achieved in two main ways: (1) Encouraging conformist behavior such as not going
to strike, obeying the law, being brave, helping people etc. (2) Discouraging non-conformist
behavior
 THEORIZING THE MEDIA
• Functionalism:
• In the mid-twentieth century, functionalist theorists focused on the ways in which the media helps to integrate and bind societies
together. There are several important social functions of the media that may work to stabilize the social system.
• 1. Information: The media provides us with a continuous flow of information about our society and the world, from webcams and
radio reports alerting us to traffic jams, to rolling weather reports, the stock market and news stories about issues that might affect
us personally.
• 2 Correlation: The media explains, and helps us to understand the meaning of the information it gives us. In this way the media
provides support for established social norms and has an important role in the socialization of children, providing a shared
framework for the interpretation of events.
• 3 Continuity: The media has a certain function in expressing the dominant culture, recognizing new social developments and
forging common values.
• 4 Entertainment:The media provides amusement, a diversion from the stresses of work and acts to reduce social tensions. This is
essentially the function of a release valve for society, allowing people to set aside their problems and conflicts, at least temporarily.
• 5 Mobilization: The media can be used to encourage people to contribute to economic development, to support and uphold moral
rules and to mobilize the population in times of war. This can be through very direct public campaigns, but also in much more
subtle ways, such as the moral tales within soap operas or films, for example.
• In recent decades, functionalist theories of the media have fallen into decline. Because:
• First, the theory appears to do little more than describe the media's current roles rather than
explaining why they are necessary.
• Second, functionalist accounts have had little or nothing to say about the audience reception
of media products. They tend to assume that people are relatively passive recipients, rather
than active interpreters of media messages.
• Third, the functions above appear wholly positive, but others have seen the media as a much
less useful force within societies.
 CONFLICT THEORY
• Conflict approaches influenced by Marxism see the modern mass media as destructive of
society's cultural vitality. Within conflict approaches, we look at political economy
approaches and culture industry.
• Political economy approaches view the media as an industry and examine the way in
which the major means of communication have come to be owned by private interests.
• The ownership of the media has often been concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy
media magnates.
• In our increasingly global age, the ownership of media crosses national borders and media
magnates now own transnational media corporations, giving them international recognition
and influence.
RUPERT MURDOCH
Perhaps the best known of these is Australian-
born Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Sky Digital,
Fox Broadcasting Company and other media
institutions. Advocates of a political economy
view argue that, as in other industries, economic
interests in media ownership work to exclude
those voices that lack economic power.
Moreover, the voices that do survive are those
that are least likely to criticize the prevailing
distribution of wealth and power.
• The culture industry
• Members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory such as Theodore Adorno (1903- 69),
were highly critical of the effects of mass media on the population and culture. The
Frankfurt School was established in the 1920s and '30s, consisting of a loose group of
theorists inspired by Marx who nevertheless saw that Marx's views needed radical revision.
Among other things, they argued that Marx had not given enough attention to the influence
of culture in modern capitalist societies.
CULTURE
INDUSTRY
Members of the Frankfurt School argued that
leisure time had effectively been industrialized.
Their extensive studies of what they called the
'culture industry' - such as the entertainment
industries of film, TV; popular music, radio,
newspapers and magazines - have been very
influential in the field of cultural studies
(Horkheimer and Adorno [1947]). They argued
that in mass societies, the production of culture
had become just as standardized and dominated
by the desire for profit as other industries.
• The concept of a mass society suggests that cultural differences have become levelled down
in the densely populated developed societies, where cultural products are targeted at the
largest possible audience.
• In a mass society, the leisure industry was used to induce appropriate values amongst the
public: leisure was no longer a break from work, but a preparation for it.
• Members of the Frankfurt School argued that the spread of the culture industry, with its
undemanding and standardized products, undermined the capacity of individuals for critical
and independent thought. Art disappears, swamped by commercialization - 'Mozart's
Greatest Hits', for example, or student posters of the great works of art - and culture is
replaced by simple entertainment.
• Sociological theories of the various forms of media show us that they can never be assumed
to be politically neutral or socially beneficial.
• For many people, a key problem is the increasing concentration of ownership of different
types of media within large conglomerates that have come to be known as 'supercompanies'.
•
 GLOBAL MEDIA ORDER
• In their work on globalization, David Held and his colleagues (1999) point to five major shifts that have contributed to
bringing about the global media order:
• 1. Increasing concentration of ownership. The global media is now dominated by a small number of powerful corporations.
The small-scale, independent media companies have gradually been incorporated into highly centralized media conglomerates.
• 2. A shift from public to private ownership. Traditionally, media and telecommunications companies in almost all countries
were partially or fully owned by the state. In the past few decades, the liberalization of the business environment and the
relaxing of regulations have led to the privatization (and commercialization) of media companies in many countries.
• 3. Transnational corporate structures. Media companies no longer operate strictly within national boundaries. Likewise,
media ownership rules have been loosened to allow cross-border investment and acquisition.
• 4. Diversification over a variety of media products. The media industry has diversified and is much less segmented than in
previous times. Enormous media conglomerates, such as Time Warner Inc . produce and distribute a mix of media content,
including music, news, print media and television programming.
• 5 A growing number of corporate media mergers. There has been a distinctive trend towards alliances between companies in
different segments of the media industry. Telecommunications firms, computer hardware and software manufacturers, and
media 'content' producers are increasingly involved in corporate mergers as media forms become increasingly integrated.
MEDIA
IMPERIALISM
The chief position of the industrialized
countries, above all the United States, in the
production and diffusion of media has led many
observers to speak of media imperialism.
According to this view, a cultural empire has
been established. Less developed countries are
held to be especially vulnerable, because they
lack the resources to maintain their own cultural
independence.
 RESISTANCE AND ALTERNATIVES TO THE
GLOBAL MEDIA

• While the power and reach of the global media are undeniable, there are forces within all
countries that can serve to slow down the media onslaught and shape the nature of media
products in a way that reflects local traditions, cultures and priorities. Religion, tradition and
popular outlooks are all strong brakes on media globalization, while local regulations and
domestic media institutions can also play a role in limiting the impact of global media
sources.