Mass Communication Talk

A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE ON MASS COMMUNICATION LEADS TO THE EMERGENCE OF THE LIMITED-EFFECTS PERSPECTIVE Mass society notions were especially dominant among social theorists beginning in the mid-1800s and lasting until the 1950s. Since then these ideas have enjoyed intermittent popularity whenever new technology has posed a threat to the status quo. In 2005, for example, conservative religious leaders attacked cable television’s cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants for promoting “the homosexual agenda” (Olbermann, 2005), and in 2007 film critic Michael Medved accused Happy Feet, the digital animation film about penguins, of containing “a bizarre anti-religious bias,” an “endorsement of gay identity,” and a “propagandist theme” of condemnation of the human race, support for environmentalism, and exaltation of the United Nations (quoted in Hightower, 2007, p. 3). During the 1930s, world events seemed to continually confirm the truth of mass society ideas. In Europe, reactionary and revolutionary political movements used media in their struggles […]

Technophiles have been hailing convergence, the erasure of distinctions among media, ever since the introduction of the personal computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates heralded its full arrival in 2004 at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. Convergence, he told his listeners, doesn’t happen until you have everything in a digital form that the consumer can easily use on all the different devices. So, if we look at the three types of media of greatest importance—we look at photos, we look at music and we look at video—the move toward giving people digital flexibility on them is pretty incredible on every one of them. It’s been discussed for a long, long time. And now, it’s really happening. (quoted in Cooper, 2004, p. 1) In fact, it’s happening today in ways that Gates might not have anticipated those many long years ago (in Internet time). We […]

WHAT’S YOUR QUESTION? WHAT’S YOUR APPROACH? Social networking site Facebook hit the Internet in 2003. Five years later it had 100 million users; by mid-2010 it had half-a-billion members networking in 40 languages (Kang, 2010). Half the teenagers using Facebook check in at least once a day, but the greatest growth in members has been among adults aged 35 to 54. These grown-ups spend nearly four hours a day on Facebook, more than any other age group (Orenstein, 2009). What questions do these few facts raise for you? One obvious question is, “Who are these social networkers?” Does the growth in the number of “older” social networkers surprise you? Why or why not? What about the amount of time they spend networking? What about networkers’ gender? Does that play a factor? Where do they access these sites? Why would middle-aged people be such heavy users of a new technology almost […]

“The scholarship about the mass media has grown so large and become so fragmented,” argues W. James Potter, “that it is very difficult for scholars to understand, much less appreciate, the incredible array of great ideas and findings that have been produced” (2009, p. xiv). You’ll see these “great ideas and findings” throughout this text and discover how in their harmony and dissonance they have shaped the discipline’s thinking. For now, though, let’s take this example, the impact of video violence, and see how different social scientists might approach it.Do you believe that watching televised or videogame violence can cause kids to act more aggressively? Surely this must be an easier thing to demonstrate than the existence of an ever-expanding universe. This link has been theorized ever since the first silent-movie hero slugged the first silent-movie villain. What is the most useful way to study the complex relationship between this specific […]

Now that you’ve been introduced to the four broad categories of social scientific theory, you might have guessed another reason that those who study the social world often don’t get the respect accorded their physical science colleagues. Sociologist Kenneth Bailey wrote, “To this day you will find within social science both those who think of themselves as scientists in the strictest sense of the word and those with a more subjective approach to the study of society, who see themselves more as humanists than as scientists” (1982, p. 5). In other words, and as you’ve just seen, not all who call themselves social scientists adhere to the same standards for conducting research or accepting evidence. But complicating matters even more is the fact that social science researchers and theorists often blend (or mix and match) categories as they do their work (Benoit and Holbert, 2008). To some observers, especially committed postpositivists, this seems unsystematic. It also generates disagreement among social scientists, not […]