Transcript Mass Communication in Society

Mass Communication in Society
Swimming in the Media Sea
First Impressions
• Any major things that came up in the reading
that you want to talk about right away…
Fun Facts
• The average American spends 15 of their typical
39 hours of “Free Time” watching television.
• Everyday people worldwide spend over 3.5
BILLION hours watching television.
• Half the time the TV is turned on, it is not for the
sole purpose of watching it.
• Baywatch was the most popular U.S. television
export of the mid-1990’s.
What is Mass Communication
• The audience is large and anonymous, and often
very heterogeneous.
▫ Individual viewers, listeners, readers or even
groups of individuals can be targeted, but only
with limited precision.
• Communication sources are instutional and
organizational.
▫ TV networks, newspapers chains, wire services or
the conglomerates that own such businesses are
among the largest and richest private
corporations.
Mass Communication Cont.
• The basic economic function of most media in
most nations is to attract and hold as large an
audience as possible for the advertisers.
▫ The bottom line of commercial mass media is
money.
 Money that comes from advertisers at rates directly
determined by the audience or readership size and
composition, which in turn determines the content.
Mass Communication Cont.
• So what does this mean?
▫ There is tremendous pressure for media to be as
entertaining as possible to as many people as possible.
▫ This principle also holds true for non-entertainment
content like news.
▫ Often, economic and political pressure influence the
content of the media.
 For example, magazines that accept tobacco
advertisements print fewer stories about health risks of
smoking than those that have no cigarette ads.
 ABC, which is owned by Disney, has killed news stories
reflecting negatively on Disney theme parks.
Communication in
Mass Communication Cont.
• We all “communicate” with the media.
• The response that we show or display towards
something we view, read, or see is our “part of
the conversation”.
• A TV movie that depicts rape will have a
different effect on a viewer who is a rape victim
compared to someone with no such personal
experience.
Communication in
Mass Communication
• The environment in which we experience media
also plays a part.
• Watching television or listening to the radio may
be done alone or in small groups. Reading
newspapers or magazines or using a computer is
typically a solo activity.
• The social situation of who else is watching,
listening, or reading a how they react greatly
affects the media consumption experience.
• Can anyone think of an example?
Media Use: Television
• Television was essentially unknown by the
general public at the end of WWII in 1945.
• .02% of U.S. homes had TV in 1946, 9% in 1950,
23.5% in 1951, and 90% by 1962.
• By 1980, televisions were found in about 98% of
U.S. homes.
• How many TV’s do you have in your home?
▫ There is an average 2.2 TV sets in each U.S. home.
▫ By 2000, 60% of U.S. adolescents and 30% of
preschoolers had a television set in their bedroom.
Media Use: Television Cont.
• The number of TV sets per 1,000 people
worldwide doubled from 117 to 234 between
1981 and 1997.
• A TV set is on in the average U.S. household over
7 hours each day; over 8 hours if you have cable.
• The typical child age 8-18 watches 3 hours per
day.
• We spend more time watching television than
doing anything else except working at our jobs
and sleeping.
Media Use: Television Cont.
• The average U.S. child sees nearly 15,000 sexual
references, innuendos, and jokes per year; only
1.1% of those deal with abstinence, birth control,
pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases.
• By age 18, he or she has seen over 200,000
televised acts of violence.
Media Use: Television Cont.
• Group Differences
▫ The amount of television viewing changes through
your lifespan.
▫ Which age-groups watch the most?
 2-4 year olds watch from about 15 minutes to 2.5
hours daily.
 Levels off until about age 8. Age 12 it peaks at
around 4 hours.
 During high school, college and young adulthood,
the number starts to fall. Why?
 Elderly adults watch more TV than most groups.
Media Use: Television Cont.
• Time-of-Day Differences
• Think of your favorite show…what time is it on?
▫ Largest audience during “prime time”(8-11pm)
▫ Highest advertising charges and greatest investment
and innovation in programming during these hours
▫ “Sweeps Weeks”—February, May, November
 Nielsen audience size over a 4-week span is used to
calculate advertising charges for the next several months.
 Networks try to outdo themselves presenting blockbuster
movies, specials, and landmark episodes of top-rated
series.
 Examples?
Media Use: Radio
• Rapidly permeated society in the 1920’s as much
as television would do 30 years later.
• The current network TV format of entertainment
programming was borrowed from radio, which
reorganized into a primarily music-and-news
format in the 1950s following the advent of TV.
• More than TV, radio is highly age and interestsegmented (pop, rock, country, etc.)
• By late 1996, there were over 12,000 AM and FM
radio stations in the United States.
Media Use: Radio Cont.
• Teenagers listen to music on radio or CD 3 to 4
hours per day, more than the 2 to 3 hours they
spend watching TV.
• Worldwide, radio is the most available medium.
• It is crucially important in isolated societies,
because it depends neither on literacy nor on the
purchase of a relatively expensive television set.
• Compared to television or print media,
programming is very inexpensive to produce,
especially talk and music formats.
Media Use: Newspapers
• In 1995, there were 1,532 daily newspapers in the U.S. The number
has been falling ever since.
• Even as the number of dailies continues to fall, the number of
weekly newspapers keeps growing, up to 7,654 in 1996.
• The percentage of adults who read a paper daily fell from 78% in
1970 to 59% in 1997 with only 31% of young adults ages 21 to 35
reading a daily paper.
▫ Why?
• In the U.S. newspapers are almost totally regional, with the
exception of USA Today, although large national papers are the rule
in many nations.
• In spite of their regional character, newspapers are becoming
increasingly similar, a trend attributable to a consolidation of media
ownership to fewer and fewer sources and also an increasing
reliance by most newspapers on a few international wire services
like Associated Press (AP) and Reuters.
Media Use: Newspapers Cont.
• What section of the newspaper is commonly most read?
• Groups who read more newspapers are generally those
groups who are light TV viewers: they are older, male,
Caucasian, better educated, and have higher
socioeconomic status.
• Newspaper readers are generally engaged in many other
activities and like to keep up on the news.
• They are more likely than non-readers to also watch TV
news.
• Those who consume news usually use multiple sources;
alternatively, those who do not read newspapers usually
do not watch TV news either.
Media Use: Magazines
• Most narrowly targeted of all the media, having become increasingly
so after an earlier period of popular general-interest magazines
(Life, Look, Saturday Evening Post) ended in the 1960s.
• An estimated 11,000 magazines were published in the United States
in the mid-1990s, mostly devoted to special interests.
• For girls, certain magazines such as Seventeen and later Glamour,
Vogue, and Cosmopolitan are an important part of the female
adolescent experience and are probably major contributors to the
socialization of girls as women in the Western society.
▫ The emphasis tends to be on fashion, attractiveness, romance and sex.
▫ There really are no comparable gender-role socializing magazines for
boys, although many of them read Sports Illustrated.
• Why are magazines popular?
▫ Combine the newspaper’s permanence and opportunity for greater indepth coverage with television’s photographic appeal.
Computer-Mediated Communication
• Cinema, videos, fax machines, the Internet, and the
World Wide Web all have some but not all
characteristics of mass media.
• Movies play a similar role as mass communication
in popular culture and especially now that video
technology allows them to viewed on television.
• As of 2000, 42% of U.S. households had home
Internet access.
▫ 73% of teens ages 12-17 are active users.
▫ The most common use of the Internet are for e-mail,
playing games, surfing, accessing databases, and
interpersonal activities like chat rooms, instant
messaging, and discussion groups.
Computer-Mediated Communication
Cont.
• A 2003 study by Yahoo! Actually found that
people ages 13-14 spend more time per week
online (16.7 hours) than watching television
(13.6 hours).
• iPods?
• Wikis
• WebPages
• Social Networking
• RSS Feeds
• Any others?