CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 3
6
Culture and the
Evolution of Mass
Communication
10
The Development of
Media and Their Role
in Our Society
17
Surveying the Cultural
Landscape
30
Critiquing Media
and Culture
Communication
A Critical Approach
In August 2013, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon
.com, plunked down $250 million of his own
money and bought the 135-year-old Washington
Post, a journalistic institution whose legacy
includes historic investigative reporting on the
Watergate scandal that ended the Nixon presidency.
The purchase was a symbolic shift of
sorts—a major New Media player buying a dying
Old Media icon. The daily circulation for the storied
Post had peaked back in 1993 at 832,000
and had fallen to 474,000 by 2013; the paper
had lost $53.7 million in 2012 and another
$49 million in the first half of 2013.1
At the time
of the purchase, Bezos wrote: “The Internet is
transforming almost every element of the news
business: shortening news cycles, eroding longreliable
revenue sources, and enabling new kinds
of competition, some of which bear little or no
news-gathering costs. There is no map, and charting
a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to
invent, which means we will need to experiment.”2
It sounded like Bezos was up for an adventure—
one that may lead to an inventive new way of
doing business for an old conventional medium.
4 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
Many economists and media watchers
seemed baffled that a smart investor
would bet on old print media in a
digital age. But this convergence of
print and digital media does have some
precedents. Amazon used the book—
the world’s oldest mass medium—as
the primary initial offering for what
would become the world’s largest
online retailer, offering everything
from appliances to watches. Bezos
also seemed to follow the lead of
investing wizards like Warren Buffett,
who bought twenty-eight papers in
2012 and kept buying them in 2013
(see Chapter 8). On that same weekend
that Bezos bought the Post, hedge
fund investor and Boston Red Sox
owner John Henry paid $70 million for
the Boston Globe, a paper that the
New York Times Company bought in
1993 for $1.1 billion.
What sets Amazon’s newspaper purchase
apart is the willingness of Bezos
and his company to step into the
content and story creation business,
similar to their move into original TV
programming for their online streaming
network. In our digital era, people
still want information and stories, and
newspapers have long been in the
storytelling and information-gathering
business—giving them a competitive
edge. Indeed, Warren Buffett has discussed
his views on the importance of
news: “Newspapers continue to reign
supreme . . . in the delivery of local
news. If you want to know what’s going
on in your town—whether the news
is about the mayor or taxes or high
school football—there is no substitute
for a local newspaper that is doing
its job.”3
Despite the limitations of our vari-
ous media, that job of presenting our
local communities and the world to
us—documenting what’s going on—
is enormously important. But we
also have an equally important job to
do. We must point a critical lens back
at the media and describe, analyze,
and interpret the information and
stories we find, and then arrive at
informed judgments about the media’s
performance. This textbook offers a
map to help us become more media
literate, critiquing the media not as
detached cynics watching billionaires
buy up old media but as informed
audiences with a big stake in the
outcome.
“Some billionaires like cars,
yachts and private jets.
Others like newspapers.”
—COLUMNISTANDREW ROSS SORKIN
ON THE BEZOS DEAL, NEW YORK
TIMES, AUGUST 2013
SO WHAT EXACTLYARE THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF NEWSPAPERS AND MEDIA
IN GENERAL? In an age of highly partisan politics, economic and unemployment crises, and?
upheaval in several Arab nations, how do we demand the highest standards from our media to
describe and analyze such complex events and issues—especially at a time when the business
models for newspapers and most other media are in such flux? At their best, in all their various
forms, from mainstream newspapers and radio talk shows to blogs, the media try to help us
understand the events that affect us. But, at their worst, the media’s appetite for telling and
selling stories leads them not only to document tragedy but also to misrepresent or exploit it.
Many viewers and critics disapprove of how media, particularly TV and cable, hurtle from one
event to another, often dwelling on trivial, celebrity-driven content.
In this book, we examine the history and business of mass media, and discuss the media as
a central force in shaping our culture and our democracy. We start by examining key concepts
and introducing the critical process for investigating media industries and issues. In later chapters,
we probe the history and structure of media’s major institutions. In the process, we will develop
an informed and critical view of the influence these institutions have had on national and
global life. The goal is to become media literate—to become critical consumers of mass media
institutions and engaged participants who accept part of the responsibility for the shape and
direction of media culture. In this chapter, we will:
• Address key ideas including communication, culture, mass media, and mass communication
• Investigate important periods in communication history: the oral, written, print, electronic,
and digital eras
• Examine the development of a mass medium from emergence to convergence
• Learn about how convergence has changed our relationship to media
• Look at the central role of storytelling in media and culture
• Discuss two models for organizing and categorizing culture: a skyscraper and a map
• Trace important cultural values in both the modern and postmodern societies
• Study media literacy and the five stages of the critical process: description, analysis, interpretation,
evaluation, and engagement
As you read through this chapter, think about your early experiences with the media. Identify
a favorite media product from your childhood—a song, book, TV show, or movie. Why was it so
important to you? How much of an impact did your early taste in media have on your identity?
How has your taste shifted over time to today? What does this change indicate about your identity
now? For more questions to help you think about the role of media in your life, see “Questioning
the Media” in the Chapter Review.
Past-Present-Future:
The “Mass” Media Audience
In the sixties, seventies, and eighties—the height of the TV
Network Era—people watched many of the same programs,
like the Beverly Hillbillies, All in the Family, the Cosby Show, or
the evening network news. But today, things have changed—
especially for younger people. While almost all U.S. college
students use Facebook or Twitter every day, they are rarely
posting or reading about the same news or shared experiences.
In a world where we can so easily customize our media
use, the notion of truly “mass” media may no longer exist.
Today’s media marketplace is a fragmented world with
more options than ever. Prime-time network TV has lost
half its viewers in the last decade to the Internet and to
hundreds of alternative channels. Traditional newspaper
readership, too, continues to decline as young readers
embrace social media, blogs, and their smartphones.
The former mass audience is morphing into individual
users who engage with ever-narrowing politics, hobbies, and
entertainment. As a result, media outlets that hope to survive
must appeal not to mass audiences but to niche groups—
whether these are conservatives, progressives, sports fans,
history buffs, or reality TV addicts. But what does it mean for
us as individuals with civic obligations to a larger society if
we are tailoring media use and consumption so that we only
engage with Facebook friends who share similar lifestyles,
only visit media sites that affirm our personal interests, or
only follow political blogs that echo our own views?
6 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
One way to understand the impact of the media on our lives is to explore the cultural context
in which the media operate. Often, culture is narrowly associated with art, the unique forms of
creative expression that give pleasure and set standards about what is true, good, and beautiful.
Culture, however, can be viewed more broadly as the ways in which people live and represent
themselves at particular historical times. This idea of culture encompasses fashion, sports, literature,
architecture, education, religion, and science, as well as mass media. Although we can
study discrete cultural products, such as novels or songs from various historical periods, culture
itself is always changing. It includes a society’s art, beliefs, customs, games, technologies, traditions,
and institutions. It also encompasses a society’s modes of communication: the creation
and use of symbol systems that convey information and meaning (e.g., languages, Morse code,
motion pictures, and one-zero binary computer codes).
Culture is made up of both the products that a society fashions and, perhaps more important,
the processes that forge those products and reflect a culture’s diverse values. Thus
culture may be defined as the symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and societies
use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values. According to this definition,
when we listen to music, read a book, watch television, or scan the Internet, we usually
are not asking “Is this art?” but are instead trying to identify or connect with something or
someone. In other words, we are assigning meaning to the song, book, TV program, or Web
site. Culture, therefore, is a process that delivers the values of a society through products or
other meaning-making forms. The American ideal of “rugged individualism,” for instance,
has been depicted for decades through a tradition of westerns and
detective stories on television, in movies and books, and even in
political ads.
Culture links individuals to their society by providing both shared
and contested values, and the mass media help circulate those values.
The mass media are the cultural industries—the channels of
communication—that produce and distribute songs, novels, TV shows,
newspapers, movies, video games, Internet services, and other cultural
products to large numbers of people. The historical development of
media and communication can be traced through several overlapping
phases or eras in which newer forms of technology disrupted and modified
older forms—a process that many academics, critics, and media
professionals began calling convergence with the arrival of the Internet.e
These eras, which all still operate to some degree, are oral, written,
print, electronic, and digital. The first two eras refer to the communication
of tribal or feudal communities and agricultural economies. The last
three phases feature the development of mass communication: the
process of designing cultural messages and stories and delivering them
to large and diverse audiences through media channels as old and distinctive
as the printed book and as new and converged as the Internet.
Hastened by the growth of industry and modern technology, mass communication
accompanied the shift of rural populations to urban settings
and the rise of a consumer culture.
Culture and the Evolution
of Mass Communication
CULTURAL VALUES AND
IDEALS are transmitted
through the media. Many
cosmetics advertisements
show beautiful people using
a company’s products; this
implies that anyone who buys
the products can obtain such
ideal beauty. What other
societal ideas are portrayed
through the media?
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 7
Oral and Written Eras in Communication
In most early societies, information and knowledge first circulated slowly through oral traditions
passed on by poets, teachers, and tribal storytellers. As alphabets and the written word
emerged, however, a manuscript, or written, culture began to develop and eventually overshadowed
oral communication. Documented and transcribed by philosophers, monks, and stenographers,
the manuscript culture served the ruling classes. Working people were generally illiterate,
and the economic and educational gap between rulers and the ruled was vast. These eras
of oral and written communication developed slowly over many centuries. Although exact time
frames are disputed, historians generally consider these eras as part of Western civilization’s
premodern period, spanning the epoch from roughly 1000 B.C.E. to the mid-fifteenth century.
Early tensions between oral and written communication played out among ancient Greek philosophers
and writers. Socrates (470–399 B.C.E.), for instance, made his arguments through public
conversations and debates. Known as the Socratic method, this dialogue style of communication
and inquiry is still used in college classrooms and university law schools. Many philosophers who
believed in the superiority of the oral tradition feared that the written word would threaten public
discussion by offering fewer opportunities for the give-and-take of conversation. In fact, Socrates’
most famous student, Plato (427–347 B.C.E.), sought to banish poets, whom he saw as purveyors
of ideas less rigorous than those generated in oral, face-to-face, question-and-answer discussions.
These debates foreshadowed similar discussions in our time regarding the dangers of television
and the Internet. Do aspects of contemporary culture, such as reality TV shows, Twitter, and
social networking sites, cheapen public discussion and discourage face-to-face communication?
The Print Revolution
While paper and block printing developed in China around 100 C.E. and 1045,
respectively, what we recognize as modern printing did not emerge until the
middle of the fifteenth century. At that time in Germany, Johannes Gutenberg’s
invention of movable metallic type and the printing press ushered in the modern
print era. Printing presses and publications then spread rapidly across Europe
in the late 1400s and early 1500s. Early on, many books were large, elaborate,
and expensive. It took months to illustrate and publish these volumes, and they
were usually purchased by wealthy aristocrats, royal families, church leaders,
prominent merchants, and powerful politicians. Gradually, however, printers reduced
the size and cost of books, making them available and affordable to more
people. Books eventually became the first mass-marketed products in history.
The printing press combined three elements necessary for mass-market
innovation. First, machine duplication replaced the tedious system in which
scribes hand-copied texts. Second, duplication could occur rapidly, so large
quantities of the same book could be reproduced easily. Third, the faster production
of multiple copies brought down the cost of each unit, which made
books more affordable to less affluent people.
Since mass-produced printed materials could spread information and
ideas faster and farther than ever before, writers could use print to disseminate
views counter to traditional civic doctrine and religious authority—views
that paved the way for major social and cultural changes, such as the Protestant
Reformation and the rise of modern nationalism. People started to resist
traditional clerical authority and also to think of themselves not merely as
members of families, isolated communities, or tribes, but as part of a country
whose interests were broader than local or regional concerns. While oral
EARLY BOOKS
Before the invention of
the printing press, books
were copied by hand in a
labor-intensive process. This
beautifully illuminated page
is from an Italian Bible made
in the early 1300s.
8 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
and written societies had favored decentralized local governments, the print era supported the
ascent of more centralized nation-states.
Eventually, the machine production of mass quantities that had resulted in a lowered cost
per unit for books became an essential factor in the mass production of other goods, which led
to the Industrial Revolution, modern capitalism, and the consumer culture in the twentieth
century. With the revolution in industry came the rise of the middle class and an elite business
class of owners and managers who acquired the kind of influence formerly held only by the
nobility or the clergy. Print media became key tools that commercial and political leaders used
to distribute information and maintain social order.
As with the Internet today, however, it was difficult for a single business or political leader,
certainly in a democratic society, to gain exclusive control over printing technology (although
the king or queen did control printing press licenses in England until the early nineteenth century,
and even today governments in many countries control presses, access to paper, advertising,
and distribution channels). Instead, the mass publication of pamphlets, magazines, and
books in the United States helped democratize knowledge, and literacy rates rose among the
working and middle classes. Industrialization required a more educated workforce, but printed
literature and textbooks also encouraged compulsory education, thus promoting literacy and
extending learning beyond the world of wealthy upper-class citizens.
Just as the printing press fostered nationalism, it also nourished the ideal of individualism.
People came to rely less on their local community and their commercial, religious, and political
leaders for guidance. By challenging tribal life, the printing press “fostered the modern idea of individuality,”
disrupting “the medieval sense of community and integration.”4
In urban and industrial
environments, many individuals became cut off from the traditions of rural and small-town life,
which had encouraged community cooperation in premodern times. By the mid-nineteenth century,
the ideal of individualism affirmed the rise of commerce and increased resistance to government
interference in the affairs of self-reliant entrepreneurs. The democratic impulse of individualism
became a fundamental value in American society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Electronic Era
In Europe and the United States, the impact of industry’s rise was enormous: Factories replaced
farms as the main centers of work and production. During the 1880s, roughly 80 percent of
Americans lived on farms and in small towns; by the 1920s and 1930s, most had moved to urban
areas, where new industries and economic opportunities beckoned. The city had overtaken the
country as the focus of national life.
The gradual transformation from an industrial, print-based society to one grounded in the
Information Age began with the development of the telegraph in the 1840s. Featuring dot-dash
electronic signals, the telegraph made four key contributions to communication. First, it separated
communication from transportation, making media messages instantaneous—unencumbered by
stagecoaches, ships, or the pony express.5
Second, the telegraph, in combination with the rise of
mass-marketed newspapers, transformed “information into a commodity, a ‘thing’ that could be
bought or sold irrespective of its uses or meaning.”6
By the time of the Civil War, news had become
a valuable product. Third, the telegraph made it easier for military, business, and political leaders
to coordinate commercial and military operations, especially after the installation of the transatlantic
cable in the late 1860s. Fourth, the telegraph led to future technological developments, such as
wireless telegraphy (later named radio), the fax machine, and the cell phone, which ironically resulted
in the telegraph’s demise: In 2006, Western Union telegraph offices sent their final messages.
The rise of film at the turn of the twentieth century and the development of radio in the
1920s were early signals, but the electronic phase of the Information Age really boomed in the
1950s and 1960s with the arrival of television and its dramatic impact on daily life. Then, with
the coming of ever more communication gadgetry—personal computers, cable TV, DVDs, DVRs,
“We are in great
haste to construct
a magnetic
telegraph from
Maine to Texas;
but Maine and
Texas, it may be,
have nothing
important to
communicate. . . .
We are eager to
tunnel under the
Atlantic and bring
the old world some
weeks nearer
to the new; but
perchance the
first news that will
leak through into
the broad flapping
American ear will
be that Princess
Adelaide has the
whooping cough.”
HENRY DAVID
THOREAU, WALDEN,
1854
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 9
direct broadcast satellites, cell phones, smartphones, PDAs, and e-mail—the Information Age
passed into its digital phase where old and new media began to converge, thus dramatically
changing our relationship to media and culture.
The Digital Era
In digital communication, images, texts, and sounds are converted (encoded) into electronic
signals (represented as varied combinations of binary numbers—ones and zeros) that are then
reassembled (decoded) as a precise reproduction of, say, a TV picture, a magazine article, a
song, or a telephone voice. On the Internet, various images, texts, and sounds are all digitally
reproduced and transmitted globally.
New technologies, particularly cable television and the Internet, developed so quickly that
traditional leaders in communication lost some of their control over information. For example,
starting with the 1992 presidential campaign, the network news shows (ABC, CBS, and NBC)
began to lose their audiences, first to MTV and CNN, and later to MSNBC, Fox News, Comedy
Central, and partisan radio talk shows. By the 2004 national elections, Internet bloggers—
people who post commentary on cultural, personal, and political-opinion-based Web sites—had
become key players in news.
Moreover, e-mail—a digital reinvention of oral culture—has assumed some of the functions
of the postal service and is outpacing attempts to control communications beyond national
borders. A professor sitting at her desk in Cedar Falls, Iowa, sends e-mail or Skype messages
routinely to research scientists in Budapest. Yet as recently as 1990, letters—or “snail mail”—
between the United States and former communist states might have been censored or taken
months to reach their destinations. Moreover, many repressive and totalitarian regimes have
had trouble controlling messages sent out over the borderless Internet.
Further reinventing oral culture has been the emergence of social media, such as Twitter
and in particular Facebook, which now has nearly one billion users worldwide. Social media
allow people from all over the world to have ongoing online conversations, share stories
and interests, and generate their own media content. This turn to digital media forms has
fundamentally overturned traditional media business models, the ways we engage with and
consume media products, and the ways we organize our daily lives around various media
choices.
The Linear Model of Mass Communication
The digital era also brought about a shift in the models that media researchers have used over
the years to explain how media messages and meanings are constructed and communicated in
everyday life. In one of the older and more enduring explanations about how media operate,
mass communication has been conceptualized as a linear process of producing and delivering
messages to large audiences. Senders (authors, producers, and organizations) transmit
messages (programs, texts, images, sounds, and ads) through a mass media channel (newspapers,
books, magazines, radio, television, or the Internet) to large groups of receivers (readers,
viewers, and consumers). In the process, gatekeepers (news editors, executive producers,
and other media managers) function as message filters. Media gatekeepers make decisions
about what messages actually get produced for particular receivers. The process also allows for
feedback, in which citizens and consumers, if they choose, return messages to senders or gatekeepers
through letters-to-the-editor, phone calls, e-mail, Web postings, or talk shows.
But the problem with the linear model is that in reality media messages, especially in the
digital era, do not usually move smoothly from a sender at point A to a receiver at point Z.
Words and images are more likely to spill into one another, crisscrossing in the daily media deluge
of ads, TV shows, news reports, social media, smartphone apps, and—of course—everyday
10 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
conversation. Media messages and stories are encoded and sent in written and visual forms, but
senders often have very little control over how their intended messages are decoded or whether
the messages are ignored or misread by readers and viewers.
A Cultural Model for Understanding Mass Communication
A more contemporary approach to understanding media is through a cultural model. This
concept recognizes that individuals bring diverse meanings to messages, given factors and
differences such as gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, and occupation. In this model of
mass communication, audiences actively affirm, interpret, refashion, or reject the messages and
stories that flow through various media channels. For example, when controversial singer Lady
Gaga released her nine-minute music video for the song “Telephone” in 2010, fans and critics
had very different interpretations of the video. Some saw Lady Gaga as a cutting-edge artist
pushing boundaries and celebrating alternative lifestyles—and the rightful heir to Madonna.
Others, however, saw the video as tasteless and cruel, making fun of transsexuals and exploiting
women—not to mention celebrating the poisoning of an old boyfriend.
While the linear model may demonstrate how a message gets from a sender to a receiver,
the cultural model suggests the complexity of this process and the lack of control that “senders”
(such as media executives, movie makers, writers, news editors, ad agencies, etc.) often have
over how audiences receive messages and interpret their intended meanings. Sometimes,
producers of media messages seem to be the active creators of communication while audiences
are merely passive receptacles. But as the Lady Gaga example illustrates, consumers also shape
media messages to fit or support their own values and viewpoints. This phenomenon is known
as selective exposure: People typically seek messages and produce meanings that correspond
to their own cultural beliefs, values, and interests. For example, studies have shown that people
with political leanings toward the left or the right tend to seek out blogs or news outlets that
reinforce their preexisting views.
The rise of the Internet and social media has also complicated the traditional roles in both
the linear and cultural models of communication. While there are still senders and receivers, the
borderless, decentralized, and democratic nature of the Internet means that anyone can become
a sender of media messages—whether it’s by uploading a video mash-up to YouTube or by writing
a blog post. The Internet has also largely eliminated the gatekeeper role. Although some governments
try to control Internet servers and some Web sites have restrictions on what can and cannot
be posted, for the most part, the Internet allows senders to transmit content without first needing
approval from, or editing by, a gatekeeper. For example, some authors who are unable to find a
traditional book publisher for their work turn to self-publishing on the Internet. And musicians
who don’t have deals with major record labels can promote, circulate, and sell their music online.
The Development of Media
and Their Role in Our Society
The mass media constitute a wide variety of industries and merchandise, from moving documentary
news programs about famines in Africa to shady infomercials about how to retrieve
millions of dollars in unclaimed money online. The word media is, after all, a Latin plural form
of the singular noun medium, meaning an intervening substance through which something is
conveyed or transmitted. Television, newspapers, music, movies, magazines, books, billboards,
radio, broadcast satellites, and the Internet are all part of the media; and they are all quite
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 11
capable of either producing worthy products or pandering to society’s worst desires, prejudices,
and stereotypes. Let’s begin by looking at how mass media develop, and then at how they
work and are interpreted in our society.
The Evolution of Media: From Emergence to Convergence
The development of most mass media is initiated not only by the diligence of inventors, such
as Thomas Edison (see Chapters 4 and 7), but also by social, cultural, political, and economic
circumstances. For instance, both telegraph and radio evolved as newly industrialized nations
sought to expand their military and economic control and to transmit information more
rapidly. The Internet is a contemporary response to new concerns: transporting messages
and sharing information more rapidly for an increasingly mobile and interconnected global
population.
Media innovations typically go through four stages. First is the emergence, or novelty, stage,
in which inventors and technicians try to solve a particular problem, such as making pictures
move, transmitting messages from ship to shore, or sending mail electronically. Second is the
entrepreneurial stage, in which inventors and investors determine a practical and marketable
use for the new device. For example, early radio relayed messages to and from places where
telegraph wires could not go, such as military ships at sea. Part of the Internet also had its roots
in the ideas of military leaders, who wanted a communication system that was decentralized
and distributed widely enough to survive nuclear war or natural disasters.
The third phase in a medium’s development involves a breakthrough to the mass medium
stage. At this point, businesses figure out how to market the new device or medium as a consumer
product. Although the government and the U.S. Navy played a central role in radio’s
early years, it was commercial entrepreneurs who pioneered radio broadcasting and figured out
how to reach millions of people. In the same way, Pentagon and government researchers helped
develop early prototypes for the Internet, but commercial interests extended the Internet’s
global reach and business potential.
Finally, the fourth and newest phase in a medium’s evolution is the convergence stage.
This is the stage in which older media are reconfigured in various forms on newer media.
However, this does not mean that these older forms cease to exist. For example, you can still
get the New York Times in print, but it’s also now accessible on laptops and smartphones via
the Internet. During this stage, we see the merging of many different media forms onto online
platforms, but we also see the fragmenting of large audiences into smaller niche markets.
With new technologies allowing access to more media options than ever, mass audiences are
morphing into audience subsets that chase particular lifestyles, politics, hobbies, and forms of
entertainment.
Media Convergence
Developments in the electronic and digital eras enabled and ushered in this latest stage in the
development of media—convergence—a term that media critics and analysts use when describing
all the changes that have occurred over the past decade, and are still occurring, in media
content and within media companies. However, the term actually has two different meanings—
one referring to technology and one to business—and has a great impact on how media companies
are charting a course for the future.
The Dual Roles of Media Convergence
The first definition of media convergence involves the technological merging of content across
different media channels—the magazine articles, radio programs, songs, TV shows, video
games, and movies now available on the Internet through laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
12 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
Such technical convergence is not entirely new. For example, in the late 1920s, the Radio
Corporation of America (RCA) purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company and introduced
machines that could play both radio and recorded music. In the 1950s, this collaboration helped
radio survive the emergence of television. Radio lost much of its content to TV and could not
afford to hire live bands, so it became more dependent on deejays to play records produced
by the music industry. However, contemporary media convergence is much broader than the
simple merging of older and newer forms. In fact, the eras of communication are themselves
reinvented in this “age of convergence.” Oral communication, for example, finds itself reconfigured,
in part, in e-mail and social media. And print communication is re-formed in the thousands
of newspapers now available online. Also, keep in mind the wonderful ironies of media
convergence: The first major digital retailer, Amazon.com, made its name by selling the world’s
oldest mass medium—the book—on the world’s newest mass medium—the Internet.
A second definition of media convergence—sometimes called cross platform by media
marketers—describes a business model that involves consolidating various media holdings, such
as cable connections, phone services, television transmissions, and Internet access, under one
corporate umbrella. The goal is not necessarily to offer consumers more choice in their media
options, but to better manage resources and maximize profits. For example, a company that
owns TV stations, radio outlets, and newspapers in multiple markets—as well as in the same
cities—can deploy a reporter or producer to create three or four versions of the same story for
various media outlets. So rather than having each radio station, TV station, newspaper, and
online news site generate diverse and independent stories about an issue, a media corporation
employing the convergence model can use fewer employees to generate multiple versions of the
same story.
Media Businesses in a Converged World
The ramifications of media convergence are best revealed in the business strategies of digital
age companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and especially Google—the most profitable
company of the digital era so far (see Chapter 2). Google is the Internet’s main organizer and
aggregator because it finds both “new” and “old” media content—like blogs and newspapers—
and delivers that content to vast numbers of online consumers. Google does not produce
any of the content, and most consumers who find a news story or magazine article through a
Google search pay nothing to the original media content provider nor to Google. Instead, as the
“middleman” or distributor, Google makes most of its money by selling ads that accompany
search results. But not all ads are created equal; as writer and journalism critic James Fallows
points out, Google does not necessarily sell ads on the news sites it aggregates:
MEDIA CONVERGENCE
In the 1950s, television
sets—like radios in the
1930s and 1940s—were
often encased in decorative
wood and sold as stylish
furniture that occupied
a central place in many
American homes. Today,
using our computers, we can
listen to a radio talk show,
watch a movie, or download
a favorite song—usually
on the go—as older media
forms now converge online.
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 13
Virtually all of Google’s (enormous) revenue comes from a tiny handful of its activities: mainly the
searches people conduct when they’re looking for something to buy. That money subsidizes all the
other services the company offers—the classic “let me Google that” informational query (as opposed
to the shopping query), Google Earth, driving directions, online storage for Gmail and Google Docs,
the . . . YouTube video-hosting service. Structurally this is very much like the old newspaper bargain,
in which the ad-crammed classified section, the weekly grocery-store pullout, and other commercial
features underwrote state-house coverage and the bureau in Kabul.7
In fact, Fallows writes that Google, which has certainly done its part in contributing to the
decline of newspapers, still has a large stake in seeing newspapers succeed online. Over the last
few years, Google has undertaken a number of experiments to help older news media make
the transition into the converged world. Google executives believe that since they aren’t in the
content business, they are dependent on news organizations to produce the quality information
and journalism that healthy democracies need—and that Google can deliver.
Today’s converged media world has broken down the old definitions of distinct media
forms like newspapers and television—both now available online and across multiple platforms.
And it favors players like Google, whose business model works in a world where customers
expect to get their media in multiple places—and often for free. But the next challenge ahead in
the new, converged world is to resolve who will pay for quality content and how that system will
emerge. In the upcoming industry chapters, we take a closer look at how media convergence is
affecting each industry in terms of both content production and business strategies.
Media Convergence and Cultural Change
The Internet and social media have led to significant changes in the ways we consume and engage
with media culture. In pre-Internet days (say, back in the late 1980s), most people would watch
popular TV shows like the Cosby Show, A Different World, Cheers, or Roseanne at the time they
originally aired. Such scheduling provided common media experiences at specific times within
our culture. While we still watch TV shows, we are increasingly likely to do so at our own convenience
through Web sites like Hulu and Netflix or DVR/On-Demand options. We are also increasingly
making our media choices on the basis of Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter recommendations
from friends. Or we upload our own media—from photos of last night’s party to homemade videos
of our lives, pets, and hobbies—to share with friends instead of watching “mainstream” programming.
While these options allow us to connect with friends or family and give us more choices,
they also break down shared media experiences in favor of our individual interests and pursuits.
The ability to access many different forms of media in one place is also changing the ways
we engage with and consume media. In the past, we read newspapers in print, watched TV
on our televisions, and played video games on a console. Today, we are able to do all of those
things on a computer, tablet, or smartphone, making it easy—and very tempting—to multitask.
Media multitasking has led to growing media consumption, particularly for younger people. A
recent Kaiser Family Foundation study found that today’s youth—now doing two or more things
at once—packed ten hours and forty-five minutes worth of media content into the seven and a
half hours they spent daily consuming media.8
But while we might be consuming more media,
are we really engaging with it? And are we really engaging with our friends when we communicate
with them by texting or posting on Facebook? Some critics and educators feel that media
multitasking means that we are more distracted, that we engage less with each type of media
we consume, and that we often pay closer attention to the media we are using than to people
immediately in our presence.
However, media multitasking could have other effects. In the past, we would wait until
the end of a TV program, if not until the next day, to discuss it with our friends. Now, with the
proliferation of social media, and in particular Twitter, we can discuss that program with our
14 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
friends—and with strangers—as we watch the show. Many TV shows now gauge their popularity
with audiences by how many people are “live-tweeting” it, and by how many related trending
topics they have on Twitter. In fact, commenting on a TV show on social media grew by 194 percent
between April 2011 and April 2012.9
This type of participation could indicate that audiences
are in fact engaging more with the media they consume, even though they are multitasking.
Some media critics even posit that having more choice actually makes us more engaged media
consumers, because we have to actively choose the media we want to consume from the growing
list of options.
Stories: The Foundation of Media
The stories that circulate in the media can shape a society’s perceptions and attitudes. Throughout
the twentieth century and during the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for instance,
courageous professional journalists covered armed conflicts, telling stories that helped the
public comprehend the magnitude and tragedy of such events. In the 1950s and 1960s, network
television news stories on the Civil Rights movement led to crucial legislation that transformed
the way many white people viewed the grievances and aspirations of African Americans. In the
late 1960s to early 1970s, the persistent media coverage of the Vietnam War ultimately led to a
loss of public support for the war. In the late 1990s, news and tabloid magazine stories about
the President Clinton–Monica Lewinsky affair sparked heated debates over private codes of
behavior and public abuses of authority. In each of these instances, the stories told through a
variety of media outlets played a key role in changing individual awareness, cultural attitudes,
and public perception.
While we continue to look to the media for narratives today, the kinds of stories we seek
and tell are changing in the digital era. During Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and
1940s, as many as ninety million people each week went to the movies on Saturday to take
in a professionally produced double feature and a newsreel about the week’s main events.
In the 1980s, during TV’s Network Era, most of us sat down at night to watch the polished
evening news or the scripted sitcoms and dramas written by paid writers and performed by
seasoned actors. But in the digital age, where reality TV and social media now seem to dominate
storytelling, many of the performances are enacted by “ordinary” people. Audiences are
fascinated by the stories of finding love, relationships gone bad, and backstabbing friends on
such shows as Jersey Shore, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, and the Real Housewives series.
Other reality shows like Pawn Stars, The Deadliest Catch, and Duck Dynasty give us glimpses
into the lives and careers of everyday people, while amateurs entertain us in singing, dancing,
and cooking shows like The Voice, Dancing with the Stars, and Top Chef. While these shows areff
all professionally produced, the performers are almost all ordinary people (or celebrities and
professionals performing alongside amateurs), which is part of the appeal of reality TV—we are
better able to relate to the characters, or compare our lives against theirs, because they seem
just like us.
Online, many of us are entertaining each other with videos of our pets, Facebook posts
about our achievements or relationship issues, photos of a good meal, or tweets about a funny
thing that happened at work. This cultural blending of old and new ways of telling stories—told
both by professionals and amateurs—is just another form of convergence that has disrupted
and altered the media landscape in the digital era. More than ever, ordinary citizens are able to
participate in, and have an effect on, the stories being told in the media. For example, in 2011
and 2012, professional news reports and amateur tweets and blog posts about the Occupy Wall
Street protests across the United States and the world led to important debates over income disparity,
capitalism and power, government, and modern democracy. In fact, without the videos,
tweets, and blog posts from ordinary people, the Occupy Wall Street movement might not have
gotten the news media coverage that it did.
“We tell ourselves
stories in order to
live.”
JOAN DIDION, THE
WHITE ALBUM
“Stories matter,
and matter deeply,
because they are
the best way to
save our lives.”
FRANK MCCONNELL,
STORYTELLING AND
MYTHMAKING, 1979
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 15
Our varied media institutions and outlets are basically in the narrative—or storytelling—
business. Media stories put events in context, helping us to better understand both our daily lives
and the larger world. As psychologist Jerome Bruner argues, we are storytelling creatures, and
as children we acquire language to tell those stories that we have inside us. In his book Making
Stories, he says, “Stories, finally, provide models of the world.”10
The common denominator, in
fact, between our entertainment and information cultures is the narrative. It is the media’s main
cultural currency—whether it’s Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, a post on a gossip blog, a Fox
News “exclusive,” a New York Times article, a tweet about a bad breakfast, or a funny TV commercial.
The point is that the popular narratives of our culture are complex and varied. Roger
Rosenblatt, writing in Time magazine during the 2000 presidential election, made this observation
about the importance of stories: “We are a narrative species. We exist by storytelling—by
relating our situations—and the test of our evolution may lie in getting the story right.”11
The Power of Media Stories in Everyday Life
The earliest debates, at least in Western society, about the impact of cultural narratives on daily
life date back to the ancient Greeks. Socrates, himself accused of corrupting young minds, worried
that children exposed to popular art forms and stories “without distinction” would “take
into their souls teachings that are wholly opposite to those we wish them to be possessed of when
they are grown up.”12
He believed art should uplift us from the ordinary routines of our lives. The
playwright Euripides, however, believed that art should imitate life, that characters should be
“real,” and that artistic works should reflect the actual world—even when that reality is sordid.
In The Republic, Plato developed the classical view of art: It should aim to instruct and
uplift. He worried that some staged performances glorified evil and that common folk watching
might not be able to distinguish between art and reality. Aristotle, Plato’s student, occupied
a middle ground in these debates, arguing that art and stories should provide insight into the
human condition but should entertain as well.
VIETNAM WAR PROTESTS
On October 21, 1967,
a crowd of 100,000
protesters marched on the
Pentagon demanding the end
of the Vietnam War. Sadly,
violence erupted when some
protesters clashed with the
U.S. Marshals protecting
the Pentagon. However, this
iconic image from the same
protest appeared in the
Washington Post the next
day and went on to become
a symbol for the peaceful
ideals behind the protests.
When has an image in the
media made an event “real”
to you?
VideoCentral
Mass Communication
bedfordstmartins.com
/mediaculture
Agenda Setting and
Gatekeeping
Experts discuss how the
media exert influence over
public discourse.
Discussion: How might
the rise of the Internet cancel
out or reduce the agendasetting
effect in media?
16 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
The cultural concerns of classical philosophers
are still with us. In the early 1900s, for example,
newly arrived immigrants to the United States
who spoke little English gravitated toward cultural
events (such as boxing, vaudeville, and the
emerging medium of silent film) whose enjoyment
did not depend solely on understanding English.
Consequently, these popular events occasionally
became a flash point for some groups, including the
Daughters of the American Revolution, local politicians,
religious leaders, and police vice squads,
who not only resented the commercial success of
immigrant culture but also feared that these “low”
cultural forms would undermine what they saw as
traditional American values and interests.
In the United States in the 1950s, the emergence
of television and rock and roll generated several points of contention. For instance, the
phenomenal popularity of Elvis Presley set the stage for many of today’s debates over hip-hop
lyrics and television’s influence, especially on young people. In 1956 and 1957, Presley made
three appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show. The public outcry against Presley’s “lascivious” hip
movements was so great that by the third show the camera operators were instructed to shoot
the singer only from the waist up. In some communities, objections to Presley were motivated
by class bias and racism. Many white adults believed that this “poor white trash” singer from
Mississippi was spreading rhythm and blues, a “dangerous” form of black popular culture.
Today, with the reach of print, electronic, and digital communications and the amount of time
people spend consuming them (see Figure 1.1), mass media play an even more controversial role in
society. Many people are critical of the quality of much contemporary culture and are concerned
about the overwhelming amount of information now available. Many see popular media culture
as unacceptably commercial and sensationalistic. Too many talk shows exploit personal problems
for commercial gain, reality shows often glamorize outlandish behavior and sometimes dangerous
stunts, and television research continues to document a connection between aggression in children
and violent entertainment programs or video games. Children, who watch nearly forty thousand TV
commercials each year, are particularly vulnerable to marketers selling junk food, toys, and “cool”
clothing. Even the computer, once heralded as an educational salvation, has created confusion.
Today, when kids announce that they are “on the computer,” many parents wonder whether they
are writing a term paper, playing a video game, chatting on Facebook, or peering at pornography.
Yet how much the media shape society—and how much they simply respond to existing
cultural issues—is still unknown. Although some media depictions may worsen social problems,
research has seldom demonstrated that the media directly cause our society’s major afflictions.
For instance, when a middle-school student shoots a fellow student over designer clothing,
should society blame the ad that glamorized clothes and the network that carried the ad? Or are
parents, teachers, and religious leaders failing to instill strong moral values? Or are economic
and social issues involving gun legislation, consumerism, and income disparity at work as well?
Even if the clothing manufacturer bears responsibility as a corporate citizen, did the ad alone
bring about the tragedy, or is the ad symptomatic of a larger problem?
With American mass media industries earning more than $200 billion annually, the economic
and societal stakes are high. Large portions of media resources now go toward studying audiences,
capturing their attention through stories, and taking their consumer dollars. To increase their revenues,
media outlets try to influence everything from how people shop to how they vote. Like the air
we breathe, the commercially based culture that mass media help create surrounds us. Its impact,
FIGURE 1.1
DAILY MEDIA
CONSUMPTION BY
PLATFORM, 2013
Source: “Media Consump-
tion Estimates: Mobile > PC;
Digital > TV,” Marketing Charts,
www.marketingcharts.com/wp
/wp-content/uploads/2013/08
/eMarketer-Share-Media
-Consumption-by-Medium-2010
-2013-Aug2013.png.
38.1%
TV
12.1% Radio
4.5% Print
1.0% Other
5.1% Digital-Other
Total Digital = 44.4%TT
19.5%
Digital-
Online
(PC)
19.8%
Digital-
Mobile
(non-voice)
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 17
like the air, is often taken for granted. But to monitor that culture’s “air quality”—to become media
literate—we must attend more thoughtfully to diverse media stories that are too often taken for
granted. (For further discussion, see “Examining Ethics: Covering War” on pages 18–19.)
Surveying the
Cultural Landscape
Some cultural phenomena gain wide popular appeal, and others do not. Some appeal to certain
age groups or social classes. Some, such as rock and roll, jazz, and classical music, are popular
worldwide; other cultural forms, such as Tejano, salsa, and Cajun music, are popular primarily
in certain regions or ethnic communities. Certain aspects of culture are considered elite in one
place (e.g., opera in the United States) and popular in another (e.g., opera in Italy). Though categories
may change over time and from one society to another, two metaphors offer contrasting
views about the way culture operates in our daily lives: culture as a hierarchy, represented by a
skyscraper model, and culture as a process, represented by a map model.
Culture as a Skyscraper
Throughout twentieth-century America, critics and audiences perceived culture as a hierarchy
with supposedly superior products at the top and inferior ones at the bottom. This can be
imagined, in some respects, as a modern skyscraper. In this model, the top floors of the building
house high culture, such as ballet, the symphony, art museums, and classic literature. The
bottom floors—and even the basement—house popular or low culture, including such icons
as soap operas, rock music, radio shock jocks, and video games (see Figure 1.2). High culture,
identified with “good taste,” higher education, and supported by wealthy patrons and corporate
donors, is associated with “fine art,” which is available primarily in libraries, theaters, and
museums. In contrast, low or popular culture is aligned with the “questionable” tastes of the
masses, who enjoy the commercial “junk” circulated by the mass media, such as reality TV,
celebrity gossip Web sites, and violent action films. Whether or not we agree with this cultural
skyscraper model, the high-low hierarchy often determines or limits the ways in which we view
and discuss culture today.13
Using this model, critics have developed at least five areas of concern
about so-called low culture.
An Inability to Appreciate Fine Art
Some critics claim that popular culture, in the form of contemporary movies, television, and
music, distracts students from serious literature and philosophy, thus stunting their imagination
and undermining their ability to recognize great art.14
This critical view pits popular culture
against high art, discounting a person’s ability to value Bach and the Beatles or Shakespeare
and The Simpsons concurrently. The assumption is that because popular forms of culture are
made for profit, they cannot be experienced as valuable artistic experiences in the same way
as more elite art forms such as classical ballet, Italian opera, modern sculpture, or Renaissance
painting—even though many of what we regard as elite art forms today were once supported
and even commissioned by wealthy patrons.
A Tendency to Exploit High Culture
Another concern is that popular culture exploits classic works of literature and art. A good
example may be Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s dark Gothic novel Frankenstein, written in 1818
B
y early 2012, as the
United States withdrew its
military forces from Iraq and
the Afghanistan war continued into its
eleventh year, journalistic coverage of
Middle East war efforts had declined
dramatically. This was partly due to
news organizations losing interest in
an event when it drags on for a long
time and becomes “old news.” The
news media are often biased in favor
of “current events.” But war reporting
also declined because of the financial
crisis—twenty thousand reporters
lost their jobs or took buyouts between
2009 and 2011 as papers
cut staff to save money. In fact, many
news organizations stopped sending
reporters to cover the wars, depending
instead on wire service reporters,
foreign correspondents from other
countries, or major news organizations
Covering War
like the New York Times or CNN for
their coverage. Despite the decreasing
coverage, the news media confront
ethical challenges about the best way
to cover the wars, including reporting
on the deaths of soldiers, documenting
drug abuse or the high suicide rate
among Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans,
dealing with First Amendment
issues, and knowing what is appropriate
for their audiences to view, read,
or hear.
When President Obama took office
in 2009, he suspended the previous
Bush administration ban on media
coverage of soldiers’ coffins returning
to U.S. soil from the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars. First Amendment
advocates praised Obama’s decision,
although after a flurry of news coverage
of these arrivals in April 2009,
media outlets quickly grew less interested
as the wars dragged on. Later,
though, the Obama administration
upset some of the same First Amendment
supporters when it withheld
more prisoner and detainee abuse
photos from earlier in the wars, citing
concerns for the safety of current U.S.
troops and fears of further inflaming
anti-American opinion. Both issues—
one opening up news access and one
EXAMINING
ETHICS
closing it down—suggest the difficult
and often tense relationship between
presidential administrations and the
news media.
In May 2011, these issues surfaced
again when U.S. Navy SEALs killed
Osama bin Laden, long credited with
perpetrating the 9/11 tragedy. As
details of the SEAL operation began
to emerge, the Obama administration
weighed the appropriateness of
releasing photos of bin Laden’s body
and video of his burial at sea. While
some news organizations and First
Amendment advocates demanded
the release of the photos, the Obama
administration ultimately decided
against it, saying that they did not
want to spur any further terrorist actions
against the United States and its
allies.
Back in 2006, then-President George
W. Bush criticized the news media
for not showing enough “good news”
about U.S. efforts to bring democracy
to Iraq. Bush’s remarks raised ethical
questions about the complex relationship
between the government and
the news media during times of war:
How much freedom should the news
media have to cover a war? How much
control, if any, should the military have
IMAGES OF WAR
The photos and images that news
outlets choose to show greatly
influence their audience members’
opinions. In each of the photos below,
what message about war is being
portrayed? How much freedom do
you think news outlets should have
in showing potentially controversial
scenes from war?
over reporting a war? Are there topics
that should not be covered?
These kinds of questions have also
created ethical quagmires for local
TV stations that cover war and its
effects on communities where soldiers
have been called to duty and then
injured or killed. In one extreme case,
the nation’s largest TV station owner—
Sinclair Broadcast Group—would not
air the ABC News program Nightline in
2004 because it devoted an episode
to reading the names of all U.S. soldiers
killed in the Iraq war up to that
time. Here is an excerpt from a
New York Times account of that event:
Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of
the largest owners of local television
stations, will preempt tonight’s
edition of the ABC News program
“Nightline,” saying the program’s
plan to have Ted Koppel [who then
anchored the program] read aloud
the names of every member of the
armed forces killed in action in
Iraq was motivated by an antiwar
agenda and threatened to undermine
American efforts there.
The decision means viewers in
eight cities, including St. Louis
and Columbus, Ohio, will not see
“Nightline.” ABC News disputed
that the program carried a political
message, calling it “an expression
of respect which simply seeks to
honor those who have laid down
their lives for their country.”
But Mark Hyman, the vice president
of corporate relations for
Sinclair, who is also a conservative
commentator on the company’s
newscasts, said tonight’s edition of
“Nightline” is biased journalism. “Mr.
Koppel’s reading of the fallen will
have no proportionality,” he said in
a telephone interview, pointing out
that the program will ignore other
aspects of the war effort.
Mr. Koppel and the producers of
“Nightline” said earlier this week
that they had no political motivation
behind the decision to devote
an entire show, expanded to 40
minutes, to reading the names
and displaying the photos of those
killed. They said they only intended
to honor the dead and document
what Mr. Koppel called “the human
cost” of the war.1
Given such a case, how might a local
TV news director today—under pressure
from the station’s manager or
owner—formulate guidelines to help
negotiate such ethical territory? While
most TV news divisions have ethical
codes to guide journalists’ behavior
in certain situations, could ordinary
citizens help shape ethical discussions
and decisions? Following is a general
plan for dealing with an array of ethical
dilemmas that media practitioners
face and for finding ways in which
nonjournalists might participate in this
decision-making process.
Arriving at ethical decisions is a
particular kind of criticism involving
several steps. These include (1) laying
out the case; (2) pinpointing the
key issues; (3) identifying the parties
involved, their intents, and their potentially
competing values; (4) studying
ethical models and theories; (5)
presenting strategies and options; and
(6) formulating a decision or policy.2
As a test case, let’s look at how local
TV news directors might establish
ethical guidelines for war-related
events. By following the six steps
above, our goal is to make some ethical
decisions and to lay the groundwork
for policies that address TV
images or photographs—for example,
those of protesters, supporters, memorials,
or funerals—used in war coverage.
(See Chapter 13 for details on
confronting ethical problems.)
Examining Ethics Activity
As a class or in smaller groups, design
policies that address one or more
of the issues raised above. Start by
researching the topic; find as much
information as possible. For example,
you can research guidelines that local
stations already use by contacting local
news directors and TV journalists.
Do they have guidelines? If so, are
they adequate? Are there certain
types of images they will not show?
If the Obama administration had
released photographic evidence of
bin Laden’s death, should a local station
show it? Finally, if time allows,
send the policies to various TV news
directors and/or station managers;
ask for their evaluations and whether
they would consider implementing the
policies.
How much freedom should the news
media have to cover war?
20 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
Finnegans WakeWW
ballet
Verdi’s Aïda
New York TimesTT
MiMileless DaDa iviss
Meet the Press
Modern Family
Harryr Potter
Justified
The Colbert Report
Star Wars
WalkingWW Dead
Super Bowl
Rolling Stones
Kanye WestWW
Dancing with
the Stars
Fifty Shades
of Grey
Taylor Swift
TeenTT Mom
Grand Theft Auto
ultimate fighting
Hamlet
Emily Dickinson poem
HiHighgh
Culture
Low
Culture
National Galleryrr of Art
Beethoven symphony
Citizen Kane
Game of Thrones
MaMarryyrrr ShShelelleley’y ss FrFranankekensnsteteinin
National Public Radio
Downton Abbey
CNN
The VoiceVV
TwilightTT
The Girl with the Dragon TattooTT
Adele
The Big Bang Theoryr
TMZ.com
Duck Dynasty
paparazzi coverage
of Lindsay Lohan
The Real Housewives
of New Jersey
FIGURE 1.2
CULTURE AS A
SKYSCRAPER
Culture is diverse and
difficult to categorize. Yet
throughout the twentieth
century, we tended to think
of culture not as a social
process but as a set of
products sorted into high,
low, or middle positions on a
cultural skyscraper. Look at
this highly arbitrary arrangement
and see if you agree or
disagree. Write in some of
your own examples.
Why do we categorize or
classify culture in this way?
Who controls this process?
Is control of making cultural
categories important?
Why or why not?
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 21
and ultimately transformed into multiple popular forms. Today, the tale is best remembered by
virtue of two movies: a 1931 film version starring Boris Karloff as the towering and tragic monster,
and the 1974 Mel Brooks comedy Young Frankenstein. In addition to the movies, television
turned the tale into The Munsters, a mid-1960s situation comedy. The monster was even resurrected
as sugar-coated Frankenberry cereal. In the recycled forms of the original story, Shelley’s
powerful themes about abusing science and judging people on the basis of appearances are
often lost or trivialized in favor of a simplistic horror story, a comedy spoof, or a form of junk
food.
A Throw-Away Ethic
Unlike an Italian opera or a Shakespearean tragedy, many elements of popular culture have a
short life span. The average newspaper circulates for about twelve hours, then lands in a recycle
bin or lines a litter box; a new Top 40 song on the radio lasts about one month; and most new
Web sites or blogs are rarely visited and doomed to oblivion. Although endurance does not
necessarily denote quality, many critics think that so-called better or “higher” forms of culture
have more staying power. In this argument, lower or popular forms of culture are unstable and
fleeting; they follow rather than lead public taste. In the TV industry in the 1960s and 1970s, for
example, network executives employed the “least objectionable programming” (or LOP) strategy
that critics said pandered to mediocrity with bland, disposable programs that a “regular”
viewer would not find objectionable, challenging, or disturbing.
A Diminished Audience for High Culture
Some observers also warn that popular culture has inundated the cultural environment, driving
out higher forms of culture and cheapening public life.15
This concern is supported by data
showing that TV sets are in use in the average American home for nearly eight hours a day,
exposing adults and children each year to thousands of hours of trivial TV commercials, violent
crime dramas, and superficial reality programs. According to one story critics tell, the prevalence
of so many popular media products prevents the public from experiencing genuine art.
Forty or more radio stations are available in large cities; cable and/or satellite systems with
hundreds of channels are in place in 70 percent of all U.S. households; and Internet services
and DVD players are in more than 90 percent of U.S. homes. In this scenario, the chances of
audiences finding more refined forms of culture arguably become very small, although critics
fail to note the choices that are also available on a variety of radio stations, cable channels, and
Web sites. (For an alternate view, see “Case Study: The Sleeper Curve” on pages 22–23.)
EXPLOITING HIGH
CULTURE
Mary Shelley, the author of
Frankenstein, might not recognize
our popular culture’s
mutations of her Gothic
classic. First published in
1818, the novel has inspired
numerous interpretations,
everything from the scary—
Boris Karloff in the classic
1931 movie—to the silly—
the Munster family in the
1960s TV sitcom and the
lovable creature in the 1974
movie Young Frankenstein.
Can you think of another
example of a story that has
developed and changed over
time and through various
media transformations?
I
n the 1973 science fiction comedy
movie Sleeper, the film’s director,
Woody Allen, plays a character who
reawakens two hundred years after being
cryogenically frozen (after a routine
ulcer operation had gone bad). The
scientists who “unfreeze” Allen discuss
how back in the 1970s people actually
believed that “deep fat fried foods,”
“steaks,” “cream pies,” and “hot fudge”
were unhealthy. But apparently in 2173
those food items will be good for us.
In his 2005 book, Everything Bad Is
Good for You, Steven Johnson makes a
controversial argument about TV and
culture based on the movie. He calls
his idea the “Sleeper Curve” and claims
that “today’s popular culture is actually
making us smarter.”1
Johnson’s ideas
run counter to those of many critics
who worry about popular culture and
its potentially disastrous effects,
particularly on young people. An
influential argument in this strain of
thinking appeared nearly thirty years
ago in Neil Postman’s 1985 book,
Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman
The Sleeper Curve
argued that we were moving from the
“Age of Typology” to the “Age of Television,”
from the “Age of Exposition” to
the “Age of Show Business.”2
Postman
worried that an image-centered
culture had overtaken words and a
print-oriented culture, resulting in “all
public discourse increasingly tak[ing]
the form of entertainment.” He pointed
to the impact of advertising and how
“American businessmen discovered,
long before the rest of us, that the
quality and usefulness of their goods
are subordinate to the artifice of their
display.”3
For Postman, image making
has become central to choosing our
government leaders, including the way
politicians are branded and packaged
as commodity goods in political ads.
Postman argued that the TV ad has
become the “chief instrument” for
presenting political ideas, with these
results: “that short simple messages
are preferable to long and complex
ones; that drama is to be preferred
over exposition; that being sold solutions
is better than being confronted
with questions about problems.”4
Across the converged cultural landscape,
we are somewhere between the
CASE
STUDY
Age of Television and the Age of the Internet.
So Johnson’s argument offers
an opportunity to assess where our visual
culture has taken us. According to
Johnson, “For decades, we’ve worked
under the assumption that mass culture
follows a path declining steadily
toward lowest-common-denominator
standards, presumably because the
‘masses’ want dumb, simple pleasures
and big media companies try to give
the masses what they want. But,
the exact opposite is happening: the
culture is getting more cognitively
demanding, not less.”5
While Johnson
shares many of Postman’s 1985
concerns, he disagrees with the point
from Amusing Ourselves to Death that
image-saturated media are only about
“simple” messages and “trivial” culture.
Instead, Johnson discusses the complexity
of video and computer games
and many of TV’s dramatic prime-time
series, especially when compared with
less demanding TV programming from
the 1970s and early 1980s.
As evidence, Johnson compares
the plot complications of Fox’s CIA/
secret agent thriller 24 with Dallas,
the prime-time soap opera that was
America’s most popular TV show in the
early 1980s. “To make sense of an episode
of 24,” Johnson maintains, “you
have to integrate far more information
than you would have a few decades
ago watching a comparable show.
Beneath the violence and the ethnic
stereotypes, another trend appears:
To keep up with entertainment like 24,
you have to pay attention, make inferences,
track shifting social relationships.”
Johnson argues that today’s
DALLAS (1978–1991)
audience would be “bored” watching a
show like Dallas, in part “because the
show contains far less information in
each scene, despite the fact that its
soap-opera structure made it one of
the most complicated narratives on
television in its prime. With Dallas, the
modern viewer doesn’t have to think
to make sense of what’s going on, and
not having to think is boring.”
In addition to 24, a number of contemporary
programs offer complex
narratives, including Mad Men, Breaking
Bad, True Blood, Dexter, Game of
Thrones, The Good Wife, Revolution,
The Newsroom, and Girls. Johnson
says that in contrast to older popular
programs like Dallas or Dynasty, the
best TV storytelling today layers “each
scene with a thick network of affiliations.
You have to focus to follow the
plot, and in focusing you’re exercising
the parts of your brain that map
social networks, that fill in missing
information, that connect multiple narrative
threads.” Johnson argues that
younger audiences today—brought
up in the Age of the Internet and in an
era of complicated interactive visual
games—bring high expectations to
other kinds of popular culture as well,
including television. “The mind,” Johnson
writes, “likes to be challenged;
there’s real pleasure to be found in
solving puzzles, detecting patterns
or unpacking a complex narrative
system.”
In countering the cultural fears expressed
by critics like Postman and
by many parents trying to make sense
of the intricate media world that their
children encounter each day, Johnson
sees a hopeful sign: “I believe that the
Sleeper Curve is the single most important
new force altering the mental
development of young people today,
and I believe it is largely a force for
good: enhancing our cognitive faculties,
not dumbing them down. And yet
you almost never hear this story in
popular accounts of today’s media.”
Steven Johnson’s theory is one of
many about media impact on the
way we live and learn. Do you accept
Johnson’s Sleeper Curve argument
that certain TV programs—along with
challenging interactive video and
computer games—are intellectually
demanding and are actually making
us smarter? Why or why not?
Are you more persuaded by Postman’s
1985 account—that the word has
been displaced by an image-centered
culture and, consequently, that popular
culture has been dumbed down by
its oversimplification and visual triviality?
As you consider Postman, think
about the Internet: Is it word based or
image based? What kinds of opportunities
for learning does it offer?
In thinking about both the 1985 and
2005 arguments by Postman and
Johnson, consider as well generational
differences. Do you enjoy TV shows
and video games that your parents
or grandparents don’t understand?
What types of stories and games do
they enjoy? What did earlier generations
value in storytelling, and what is
similar and dissimilar about storytelling
today? Interview someone who
is close to you—but from an earlier
generation—about media and story
preferences. Then discuss or write
about both the common ground and
the cultural differences that you dis-
covered. 
MAD MEN (2007– )
“The Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper,
thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like Lost or Alias is dissected with an intensity usually
reserved for Talmud scholars.”
— Steven Johnson, 2005
24 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
Dulling Our Cultural Taste Buds
Another cautionary story, frequently recounted by academics, politicians, and TV pundits, tells
how popular culture, especially its more visual forms (such as TV advertising and YouTube
videos), undermines democratic ideals and reasoned argument. According to this view, popular
media may inhibit not only rational thought but also social progress by transforming audiences
into cultural dupes lured by the promise of products. A few multinational conglomerates that
make large profits from media products may be distracting citizens from examining economic
disparity and implementing change. Seductive advertising images showcasing the buffed and
airbrushed bodies of professional models, for example, frequently contradict the actual lives of
people who cannot hope to achieve a particular “look” or may not have the money to obtain the
high-end cosmetic or clothing products offered. In this environment, art and commerce have
become blurred, restricting the audience’s ability to make cultural and economic distinctions.
Sometimes called the “Big Mac” theory, this view suggests that people are so addicted to massproduced
media menus that they lose their discriminating taste for finer fare and, much worse,
their ability to see and challenge social inequities.
Culture as a Map
The second way to view culture is as a map. Here, culture is an ongoing and complicated
process—rather than a high/low vertical hierarchy—that allows us to better account for our
diverse and individual tastes. In the map model, we judge forms of culture as good or bad based
on a combination of personal taste and the aesthetic judgments a society makes at particular
historical times. Because such tastes and evaluations are “all over the map,” a cultural map suggests
that we can pursue many connections from one cultural place to another and can appreciate
a range of cultural experiences without simply ranking them from high to low.
Our attraction to and choice of cultural phenomena—such as the stories we read in books
or watch at the movies—represent how we make our lives meaningful. Culture offers plenty of
places to go that are conventional, familiar, and comforting. Yet at the same time, our culture’s
narrative storehouse contains other stories that tend toward the innovative, unfamiliar, and
challenging. Most forms of culture, however, demonstrate multiple tendencies. We may use
THE POPULAR HUNGER
GAMES book series,S
which has also become a
blockbuster film franchise,
mixes elements that have,
in the past, been considered
“low” culture (young-adult
stories, science fiction) with
the “high” culture of literature
and satire. It also doubles
as a cautionary story about
media used to transform and
suppress its audience: In the
books and films, the media,
controlled by a totalitarian
government, broadcast a
brutal fight to the death
between child “tributes,”
fascinating the population
while attempting to quash
any hope of revolution.
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 25
online social networks because they are both comforting (an easy way to keep up with friends)
and innovative (new tools or apps that engage us). We watch televised sporting events for their
familiarity and conventional organization, and because the unknown outcome can be unpredictable
or challenging. The map offered here (see Figure 1.3) is based on a familiar subway grid.
Each station represents tendencies or elements related to why a person may be attracted to different
cultural products. Also, more popular culture forms congregate in more congested areas
of the map, while less popular cultural forms are outliers. Such a large, multidirectional map
may be a more flexible, multidimensional, and inclusive way of imagining how culture works.
The Comfort of Familiar Stories
The appeal of culture is often its familiar stories, pulling audiences toward the security of repetition
and common landmarks on the cultural map. Consider, for instance, early television’s
Lassie series, about the adventures of a collie named Lassie and her owner, young Timmy. Ofe
the more than five hundred episodes, many have a familiar and repetitive plot line: Timmy, who
arguably possessed the poorest sense of direction and suffered more concussions than any TV
character in history, gets lost or knocked unconscious. After finding Timmy and licking his face,
Lassie goes for help and saves the day. Adult critics might mock this melodramatic formula, but
many children find comfort in the predictability of the story. This quality is also evident when
night after night children ask their parents to read them the same book, such as Margaret Wise
Brown’s Good Night, Moon or Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, or watch the same
DVD, such as Snow White ore The Princess Bride.
Innovation and the Attraction of “What’s New”
Like children, adults also seek comfort, often returning to an old Beatles or Guns N’ Roses song,
a William Butler Yeats or Emily Dickinson poem, or a TV rerun of Seinfeld ord Andy Griffith. But
we also like cultural adventure. We may turn from a familiar film on cable’s American Movie
Classics to discover a new movie from Iran or India on the Independent Film Channel. We seek
new stories and new places to go—those aspects of culture that demonstrate originality and
complexity. For instance, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) created language anew and chal-e
lenged readers, as the novel’s poetic first sentence illustrates: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s,
Classical Music
Televised
Sporting Events
Shakespeare
Legend
Familiar
Unfamiliar
Comforting
Challenging
Conventional
Innovative
Hollywood
Films
Harry
Potter
Franchise
Children’s
BooksOnline
Social Networks
TV
Dramas
FIGURE 1.3
CULTURE AS A MAP
In this map model, culture
is not ranked as high or low.
Instead, the model shows
culture as spreading out in
several directions across
a variety of dimensions.
For example, some cultural
forms can be familiar, innovative,
and challenging like the
Harry Potter books and movies.
This model accounts for
the complexity of individual
tastes and experiences. The
map model also suggests
that culture is a process
by which we produce
meaning—i.e., make our lives
meaningful—as well as a
complex collection of media
products and texts. The map
shown is just one interpretation
of culture. What cultural
products would you include
in your own model? What
dimensions would you link to
and why?
26 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation
back to Howth Castle and Environs.” A revolutionary work, crammed with historical
names and topical references to events, myths, songs, jokes, and daily conversation,
Joyce’s novel remains a challenge to understand and decode. His work demonstrated
that part of what culture provides is the impulse to explore new places, to strike out in
new directions, searching for something different that may contribute to growth and
change.
A Wide Range of Messages
We know that people have complex cultural tastes, needs, and interests based on
different backgrounds and dispositions. It is not surprising, then, that our cultural
treasures, from blues music and opera to comic books and classical literature, contain
a variety of messages. Just as Shakespeare’s plays—popular entertainments in his day—
were packed with both obscure and popular references, TV episodes of The Simpsons
have included allusions to the Beatles, Kafka, Teletubbies, Tennessee Williams, talk
shows, Aerosmith, Star Trek, The X-Files, Freud, Psycho, and Citizen Kane. In other
words, as part of an ongoing process, cultural products and their meanings are “all
over the map,” spreading out in diverse directions.
Challenging the Nostalgia for a Better Past
Some critics of popular culture assert—often without presenting supportive evidence—that
society was better off before the latest developments in mass media. These critics resist the
idea of reimagining an established cultural hierarchy as a multidirectional map. The nostalgia
for some imagined “better past” has often operated as a device for condemning new cultural
phenomena. This impulse to criticize something that is new is often driven by fear of change
or of cultural differences. Back in the nineteenth century, in fact, a number of intellectuals and
politicians worried that rising literacy rates among the working class might create havoc: How
would the aristocracy and intellectuals maintain their authority and status if everyone could
read? A recent example includes the fear that some politicians, religious leaders, and citizens
have expressed about the legalization of same-sex marriage, claiming that it would violate older
religious tenets or the sanctity of past traditions.
Throughout history, a call to return to familiar terrain, to “the good old days,” has been a
frequent response to new, “threatening” forms of popular culture or to any ideas that are different
from what we already believe. Yet over the years many of these forms, including the waltz,
silent movies, ragtime, and jazz, have themselves become cultural “classics.” How can we tell
now what the future has in store for such cultural expressions as rock and roll, soap operas,
fashion photography, dance music, hip-hop, tabloid newspapers, graphic novels, reality TV, and
social media?
Cultural Values of the Modern Period
To understand how the mass media have come to occupy their current cultural position, we
need to trace significant changes in cultural values from the modern period until today. In
general, U.S. historians and literary scholars think of the modern period as beginning with the
Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and extending until about the mid-twentieth
century. Although there are many ways to define what it means to be “modern,” we will focus
on four major features or values that resonate best with changes across media and culture: efficiency,
individualism, rationalism, and progress.
Modernization involved captains of industry using new technology to create efficient
manufacturing centers, produce inexpensive products to make everyday life better, and make
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
AND ZOMBIES is a famous
“mash-up”—a new creative
work made by mixing
together disparate cultural
pieces. In this case, the
classic novel by Jane Austen
is reimagined as taking
place among zombies and
ninjas, mixing elements of
English literature and horror
and action films. Usually
intended as satire, such
mash-ups allow us to enjoy
an array of cultural elements
in a single work and are a
direct contradiction to the
cultural hierarchy model.
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 27
commerce more profitable. Printing presses and assembly lines made major contributions
in this transformation, and then modern advertising spread the word about new gadgets to
American consumers. In terms of culture, the modern mantra has been “form follows function.”
For example, the growing populations of big cities placed a premium on space, creating
a new form of building that fulfilled that functional demand by building upwards. Modern
skyscrapers made of glass, steel, and concrete replaced the supposedly wasteful decorative
and ornate styles of premodern Gothic cathedrals. This new value was echoed in journalism,
where a front-page style rejected decorative and ornate adjectives and adverbs for “just the
facts.” To be lean and efficient, modern news de-emphasized complex analysis and historical
context and elevated the new and the now.
Cultural responses to and critiques of modern efficiency often manifested themselves in
the mass media. For example, Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World (1932), created a fictionald
world in which he cautioned readers that the efficiencies of modern science and technology
posed a threat to individual dignity. Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936), set in a futuristic
manufacturing plant, also told the story of the dehumanizing impact of modernization and
machinery. Writers and artists, in their criticisms of the modern world, have often pointed to
technology’s ability to alienate people from one another, capitalism’s tendency to foster greed,
and government’s inclination to create bureaucracies whose inefficiency oppresses rather than
helps people.
While the values of the premodern period (before the Industrial Revolution) were guided
by a strong belief in a natural or divine order, modernization elevated individual self-expression
to a more central position. Modern print media allowed ordinary readers to engage with new
ideas beyond what their religious leaders and local politicians communicated to them. Modern
individualism and the Industrial Revolution also triggered new forms of hierarchy in which
certain individuals and groups achieved higher standing in the social order. For example, those
who managed commercial enterprises gained more control over the economic ladder, while
an intellectual class of modern experts acquired increasing power over the nation’s economic,
political, and cultural agendas.
To be modern also meant valuing the ability of logical and scientific minds to solve problems
by working in organized groups and expert teams. Progressive thinkers maintained that
the printing press, the telegraph, and the railroad, in combination with a scientific attitude,
would foster a new type of informed society. At the core of this society, the printed mass
media—particularly newspapers—would educate the citizenry, helping to build and maintain an
organized social framework.16
A leading champion for an informed rational society was Walter Lippmann, who wrote the
influential book Public Opinion in 1922. He distrusted both the media and the public’s ability to
navigate a world that was “altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance,”
and to reach the rational decisions needed in a democracy. Instead, he advocated a
“machinery of knowledge” that might be established through “intelligence bureaus” staffed by
experts. While such a concept might look like the modern “think tank,” Lippmann saw these as
independent of politics, unlike think tanks today, such as the Brookings Institution or Heritage
Foundation, which have strong partisan ties.17
Walter Lippmann’s ideas were influential throughout the twentieth century and were a product
of the Progressive Era—a period of political and social reform that lasted roughly from the
1890s to the 1920s. On both local and national levels, Progressive Era reformers championed social
movements that led to constitutional amendments for both women’s suffrage and Prohibition,
political reforms that led to the secret ballot during elections, and economic reforms that ushered
in the federal income tax to try to foster a more equitable society. Muckrakers—journalists who
exposed corruption, waste, and scandal in business and politics—represented media’s significant
contribution to this era (see Chapter 9).
28 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
Influenced by the Progressive movement, the notion of being modern in the twentieth
century meant throwing off the chains of the past, breaking with tradition, and embracing
progress. For example, twentieth-century journalists, in their quest for modern efficiency,
focused on “the now” and the reporting of timely events. Newly standardized forms of frontpage
journalism that championed “just the facts” and events that “just happened yesterday”
did help reporters efficiently meet tight deadlines. But realizing one of Walter Lippmann’s fears,
modern newspapers often failed to take a historical perspective or to analyze sufficiently the
ideas and interests underlying these events.
Shifting Values in Postmodern Culture
For many people, the changes occurring in the postmodern period—from roughly the midtwentieth
century to today—are identified by a confusing array of examples: music videos,
remote controls, Nike ads, shopping malls, fax machines, e-mail, video games, blogs, USA
Today, YouTube, iPads, hip-hop, and reality TV (see Table 1.1). Some critics argue that postmodern
culture represents a way of seeing—a new condition, or even a malady, of the human spirit.
Although there are many ways to define the postmodern, this textbook focuses on four major
features or values that resonate best with changes across media and culture: populism, diversity,
nostalgia, and paradox.
As a political idea, populism tries to appeal to ordinary people by highlighting or even creating
an argument or conflict between “the people” and “the elite.” In virtually every campaign,
populist politicians often tell stories and run ads that criticize big corporations and political favoritism.
Meant to resonate with middle-class values and regional ties, such narratives generally
pit Southern or Midwestern small-town “family values” against the supposedly coarser, even
corrupt, urban lifestyles associated with big cities like Washington or Los Angeles.
In postmodern culture, populism has manifested itself in many ways. For example, artists
and performers, like Chuck Berry in “Roll Over Beethoven” (1956) or Queen in “Bohemian
Rhapsody” (1975), intentionally blurred the border between high and low culture. In the visual
arts, following Andy Warhol’s 1960s pop art style, advertisers have borrowed from both fine art
and street art, while artists appropriated styles from commerce and popular art. Film stars, like
Premodern Modern Industrial Postmodern
Trend (pre-1800s) Revolution (1800s–1950s) (1950s–present)
WorkWork hierarchieshierarchies peasantspeasants/merchants//merchants/ factory workers/managers/ temp workers/global CEOsfactory workers/managers/ temp workers/global CEOs
rulers national CEOs
Major work sites field/farm factory/office office/home/”virtual” or mobile office
Communication reach local national global
CommunicationCommunication oral/manuscript print/electronic electronic/digitaloral/manuscript print/electronic electronic/digital
transmission
CommunicationCommunication storytellers/elders/ books/newspapers/ television/cable/Internet/multimediastorytellers/elders/ books/newspapers/ television/cable/Internet/multimedia
channels town criers magazines/radio
Communication at home quill pen typewriter/office computer personal computer/laptop/smartphone/social networks
Key social valuesKey social values belief in natural individualism/belief in natural individualism/rationalism/rationalism/ antihierarchy/antihierarchy/skepticism (about science, business, gov-skepticism (about science, business, gov
or divine order efficiency/antitradition ernment, etc.)/diversity/multiculturalism/irony & paradox
JournalismJournalism oral & print-based/partisan/ print-based/”objective”/ TV & Internet–based/oral & print based/partisan/ print based/ objective / TV & Internet based/opinionated/opinionated/
controlled by political efficient/timely/controlled conversational/controlled by globalcontrolled by political efficient/timely/controlled conversational/controlled by global
parties by publishing families entertainment conglomerates
TABLE 1.1
TRENDS ACROSS
HISTORICAL PERIODS
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 29
Angelina Jolie and Ben Affleck, often champion oppressed groups while appearing in movies
that make the actors wealthy global icons of consumer culture.
Other forms of postmodern style blur modern distinctions not only between art and
commerce but also between fact and fiction. For example, television vocabulary now includes
infotainment (Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood(( ) and infomercials (such as fading celebrities
selling antiwrinkle cream). On cable, MTV’s reality programs—such as Real World andd Jersey
Shore—blur boundaries between the staged and the real, mixing serious themes with comedic
interludes and romantic entanglements; Comedy Central’s fake news programs, The Daily Show
with Jon Stewart andt The Colbert Report, combine real, insightful news stories with biting satires
of traditional broadcast and cable news programs.
Closely associated with populism, another value (or vice) of the postmodern period
emphasizes diversity and fragmentation, including the wild juxtaposition of old and new
cultural styles. In a suburban shopping mall, for instance, Gap stores border a food court with
Vietnamese, Italian, and Mexican options, while techno-digitized instrumental versions of
1960s protest music play in the background to accompany shoppers. Part of this stylistic
diversity involves borrowing and transforming earlier ideas from the modern period. In
music, hip-hop deejays and performers sample old R&B, soul, and rock classics, both reinventing
old songs and creating something new. Critics of postmodern style contend that such
borrowing devalues originality, emphasizing surface over depth and recycled ideas over new
ones. Throughout the twentieth century, for example, films were adapted from books and
short stories. More recently, films often derive from old popular TV series: Mission Impossible,
Charlie’s Angels, and The A-Team, to name just a few. Video games like the Resident Evil franchise
and Tomb Raider have been made into Hollywood blockbusters. In fact, by 2012 morer
than twenty-five video games, including BioShock and the Warcraft series, were in varioust
stages of film production.
Another tendency of postmodern culture involves rejecting rational thought as “the
answer” to every social problem, reveling instead in nostalgia for the premodern values of small
communities, traditional religion, and even mystical experience. Rather than seeing science
purely as enlightened thinking or rational deduction that relies on evidence, some artists,
critics, and politicians criticize modern values for laying the groundwork for dehumanizing
technological advances and bureaucratic problems. For example, in the renewed debates over
evolution, one cultural narrative that plays out often pits scientific evidence against religious
belief and literal interpretations of the Bible. And in popular culture, many TV programs—such
as The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer,rr Charmed, Angel, Lost, and Fringe—emerged to offer
mystical and supernatural responses to the “evils” of our daily world and the limits of science
and the purely rational.
In the 2012 presidential campaign, this nostalgia for the past was frequently deployed as a
narrative device, with the Republican candidates depicting themselves as protectors of tradition
and small-town values, and juxtaposing themselves against President Obama’s messages of
change and progressive reform. In fact, after winning the Nevada Republican primary in 2012,
former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney framed the story this way: “President Obama
says he wants to fundamentally transform America. We [Romney and his supporters] want
to restore to America the founding principles that made the country great.” By portraying
change—and present conditions—as sinister forces that could only be overcome by returning to
some point in the past when we were somehow “better,” Romney laid out what he saw as the
central narrative conflicts of the 2012 presidential campaign: tradition versus change, and past
versus present.
Lastly, the fourth aspect of our postmodern time is the willingness to accept paradox.
While modern culture emphasized breaking with the past in the name of progress,
30 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
postmodern culture stresses integrating—or converging—retro beliefs and contemporary
culture. So at the same time that we seem nostalgic for the past, we embrace new technologies
with a vengeance. For example, fundamentalist religious movements that promote
seemingly outdated traditions (e.g., rejecting women’s rights to own property or seek
higher education) still embrace the Internet and modern technology as recruiting tools or
as channels for spreading messages. Culturally conservative politicians, who seem most
comfortable with the values of the 1950s nuclear family, welcome talk shows, Twitter, Facebook,
and Internet and social media ad campaigns as venues to advance their messages
and causes.
Although new technologies can isolate people or encourage them to chase their personal
agendas (e.g., a student perusing his individual interests online), as modernists warned, new
technologies can also draw people together to advance causes or to solve community problems
or to discuss politics on radio talk shows, on Facebook, or on smartphones. For example, in
2011 and 2012 Twitter made the world aware of protesters in many Arab nations, including
Egypt and Libya, when governments there tried to suppress media access. Our lives today are
full of such incongruities.
FILMS OFTEN REFLECT
THE KEYSOCIAL VALUES
of an era—as represented by
the modern and postmodern
movies pictured. Charlie
Chaplin’s Modern Times
(1936, above left) satirized
modern industry and the
dehumanizing impact of
a futuristic factory on its
overwhelmed workers.
Similarly, Ridley Scott’s Blade
Runner (1982, above right),r
set in futuristic Los Angeles
in 2019, questioned the
impact on humanity when
technology overwhelms the
natural world. As author
William Romanowski said
of Blade Runner inr Pop
Culture Wars, “It managed to
quite vividly capture some
postmodern themes that
were not recognized at the
time. . . . We are constantly
trying to balance the promise
of technology with the
threats of technology.”
Critiquing Media
and Culture
In contemporary life, cultural boundaries are being tested; the arbitrary lines between information
and entertainment have become blurred. Consumers now read newspapers on their computers.
Media corporations do business across vast geographic boundaries. We are witnessing
media convergence, in which televisions, computers, and smartphones easily access new and
old forms of mass communication. For a fee, everything from magazines to movies is channeled
into homes through the Internet and cable or satellite TV.
“A cynic is a man
who, when he
smells flowers,
looks around for a
coffin.”
H. L. MENCKEN,
AMERICAN WRITER
AND JOURNALIST
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 31
Considering the diversity of mass media, to paint them all with the same broad brush
would be inaccurate and unfair. Yet that is often what we seem to do, which may in fact reflect
the distrust many of us have of prominent social institutions, from local governments to
daily newspapers. Of course, when one recent president leads us into a long war based on
faulty intelligence that mainstream news failed to uncover, or one of the world’s leading media
companies—with former editors in top government jobs—engages in phone hacking and privacy
invasion, our distrust of both government and media may be understandable. It’s ultimately
more useful, however, to replace a cynical perception of the media with an attitude of genuine
criticism. To deal with these shifts in how we experience media and culture and their impact,
we need to develop a profound understanding of the media focused on what they offer or produce
and what they downplay or ignore.
Media Literacy and the Critical Process
Developing media literacy—that is, attaining an understanding of mass media and how they
construct meaning—requires following a critical process that takes us through the steps of
description, analysis, interpretation, evaluation, and engagement (see “Media Literacy and
the Critical Process” on pp. 32–33). We will be aided in our critical process by keeping an open
mind, trying to understand the specific cultural forms we are critiquing, and acknowledging the
complexity of contemporary culture.
Just as communication cannot always be reduced to the linear sender-message-receiver
model, many forms of media and culture are not easily represented by the high-low model. We
should, perhaps, strip culture of such adjectives as high, low, popular, and mass. These modifiers
may artificially force media forms and products into predetermined categories. Rather
than focusing on these worn-out labels, we might instead look at a wide range of issues generated
by culture, from the role of storytelling in the mass media to the global influences of
media industries on the consumer marketplace. We should also be moving toward a critical
perspective that takes into account the intricacies of the cultural landscape. A fair critique of
any cultural form, regardless of its social or artistic reputation, requires a working knowledge of
the particular book, program, or music under scrutiny. For example, to understand W. E. B.
Du Bois’s essays, critics immerse themselves in his work and in the historical context in which
he wrote. Similarly, if we want to develop a meaningful critique of TV’s Dexter (where the
protagonist is a serial killer) or Rush Limbaugh’s radio program or a gossip magazine’s obsession
with Justin Bieber, it is essential to understand the contemporary context in which these
cultural phenomena are produced.
To begin this process of critical assessment, we must imagine culture as more complicated
and richer than the high-low model allows. We must also assume a critical stance that
enables us to get outside our own preferences. We may like or dislike hip-hop, R&B, pop, or
country, but if we want to criticize these musical genres intelligently, we should understand
what the various types of music have to say and why their messages appeal to particular audiences
that may be different from us. The same approach applies to other cultural forms. If
we critique a newspaper article, we must account for the language that is chosen and what
it means; if we analyze a film or TV program, we need to slow down the images in order to
understand how they make sense and meaning.
Benefits of a Critical Perspective
Developing an informed critical perspective and becoming media literate allow us to participate
in a debate about media culture as a force for both democracy and consumerism.
On the one hand, the media can be a catalyst for democracy and social progress. Consider
the role of television in spotlighting racism and injustice in the 1960s; the use of video
32 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION
MASS COMMUNICATION1
technology to reveal oppressive conditions in China and Eastern Europe or to document
crimes by urban police departments; how the TV coverage of both business and government’s
slow response to the Gulf oil spill in 2010 impacted people’s understanding of the
event; and how blogs and Twitter can serve to debunk bogus claims or protest fraudulent
elections. The media have also helped to renew interest in diverse cultures around the
world and other emerging democracies (see “Global Village: Bedouins, Camels, Transistors,
and Coke” on page 34).
countries that get covered more often than
events in other areas of the world. Or we
could focus on recurring topics chosen for
front-page treatment, or the number of
quotes from male and female experts.
3 
INTERPRETATION. In the interpretive
stage, we try to determine
the meanings of the patterns we have analyzed.
The most difficult stage in criticism,
interpretation demands an answer to the
“So what?” question. For instance, the
greater visual space granted to 60 Minutes
reporters—compared with the close-up
shots used for interview subjects—might
mean that the reporters appear to be in
control. They are given more visual space
in which to operate, whereas interview
subjects have little room to maneuver
within the visual frame. As a result, the
subjects often look guilty and the reporters
look heroic—or, at least, in charge.
Likewise, if we look again at the New York
Times, its attention to particular countries
could mean that the paper tends to cover
Media Literacy and
the Critical Process
1 
DESCRIPTION. If we decide to
focus on how well the news media
serve democracy, we might critique
the fairness of several programs or individual
stories from, say, 60 Minutes or
the New York Times. We start by describing
the programs or articles, accounting
for their reporting strategies, and noting
those featured as interview subjects. We
might further identify central characters,
conflicts, topics, and themes. From the
notes taken at this stage, we can begin
comparing what we have found to other
stories on similar topics. We can also
document what we think is missing from
these news narratives—the questions,
viewpoints, and persons that were not
included—and other ways to tell the story.
2 
ANALYSIS. In the second stage
of the critical process, we isolate
patterns that call for closer attention. At
this point, we decide how to focus the critique.
Because 60 Minutes has produced
thousands of hours of programs in its
nearly forty-five-year history, our critique
might spotlight just a few key patterns.
For example, many of the program’s
reports are organized like detective stories,
reporters are almost always visually
represented at a medium distance, and
interview subjects are generally shot in
tight close-ups. In studying the New York
Times, in contrast, we might limit our analysis
to social or political events in certain
It is easy to form a cynical view about the stream of TV
advertising, reality programs, video games, celebrities, gossip
blogs, tweets, and news tabloids that floods the cultural
landscape. But cynicism is no substitute for criticism. To
become literate about media involves striking a balance
between taking a critical position (developing knowledgeable
interpretations and judgments) and becoming tolerant
of diverse forms of expression (appreciating the distinctive
variety of cultural products and processes).
A cynical view usually involves some form of intolerance and
either too little or too much information. For example, after
enduring the glut of news coverage and political advertising
devoted to the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, we
might easily become cynical about our political system.
However, information in the form of “factual” news bits and
knowledge about a complex social process such as a national
election are not the same thing. The critical process
stresses the subtle distinctions between amassing information
and becoming media literate.
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 33
On the other hand, competing against these democratic tendencies is a powerful commercial
culture that reinforces a world economic order controlled by relatively few multinational
corporations. For instance, when Poland threw off the shackles of the Soviet Union in the late
1980s, one of the first things its new leadership did was buy and dub the American soap operas
Santa Barbara and Dynasty. For some, these shows were a relief from sober Soviet political
propaganda, but others worried that Poles might inherit another kind of indoctrination—one
starring American consumer culture and dominated by large international media companies.
nations in which the United States has
more vital political or economic interests,
even though the Times might claim to be
neutral and evenhanded in its reporting of
news from around the world.
4 
EVALUATION. The fourth stage
of the critical process focuses on
making an informed judgment. Building
on description, analysis, and interpretation,
we are better able to evaluate the
fairness of a group of 60 Minutes or New
York Times reports. At this stage, we can
grasp the strengths and weaknesses of
Developing a media-literate critical perspective involves
mastering five overlapping stages that build on one another:
• Description: paying close attention, taking notes, and
researching the subject under study
• Analysis: discovering and focusing on significant patterns
that emerge from the description stage
• Interpretation: asking and answering “What does
that mean?” and “So what?” questions about one’s
findings
• Evaluation: arriving at a judgment about whether
something is good, bad, or mediocre, which involves
subordinating one’s personal taste to the critical “bigger
picture” resulting from the first three stages
• Engagement: taking some action that connects our critical
perspective with our role as citizens to question our
media institutions, adding our own voice to the process of
shaping the cultural environment
Let’s look at each of these stages in greater detail.
the news media under study and make
critical judgments measured against our
own frames of reference—what we like
and dislike, as well as what seems good
or bad or missing, in the stories and
coverage we analyzed.
This fourth stage differentiates the
reviewer (or previewer) from the critic.
Most newspaper reviews, for example,
are limited by daily time or space constraints.
Although these reviews may
give us key information about particular
programs, they often begin and end
with personal judgments—“This is a
quality show” or “That was a piece
of trash”—that should be saved for
the final stage in the critical process.
Regrettably, many reviews do not reflect
such a process; they do not move much
beyond the writer’s own frame of reference
or personal taste.
5 
ENGAGEMENT. To be fully
media literate, we must actively
work to create a media world that
helps serve democracy. So we propose
a fifth stage in the critical process—
engagement. In our 60 Minutes and New
York Times examples, engagement might
involve something as simple as writing
a formal or e-mail letter to these media
outlets to offer a critical take on the
news narratives we are studying.
But engagement can also mean participating
in Web discussions, contacting
various media producers or governmental
bodies like the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) with critiques and
ideas, organizing or participating in public
media literacy forums, or learning to construct
different types of media narratives
ourselves—whether print, audio, video, or
online—to participate directly in the creation
of mainstream or alternative media.
Producing actual work for media outlets
might involve doing news stories for a local
newspaper (and its Web site), producing
a radio program on a controversial or
significant community issue, or constructing
a Web site that critiques various news
media. The key to this stage is to challenge
our civic imaginations, to refuse to sit back
and cynically complain about the media
without taking some action that lends our
own voices and critiques to the process.
U
pon receiving the Philadelphia
Liberty Medal in 1994, President
Václav Havel of the Czech
Republic described postmodernism as
the fundamental condition of global culture,
“when it seems that something is on
the way out and something else is painfully
being born.” He described this “new
world order” as a “multicultural era” or
state in which consistent value systems
break into mixed and blended cultures:
For me, a symbol of that state is
a Bedouin mounted on a camel
and clad in traditional robes under
which he is wearing jeans, with a
transistor radio in his hands and
an ad for Coca-Cola on the camel’s
back. . . . New meaning is gradually
born from the . . . intersection of
many different elements.1
Many critics, including Havel, think that
there is a crucial tie between global
politics and postmodern culture. They
contend that the people who overthrew
governments in the former Yugoslavia
and the Soviet Union were the same
people who valued American popular
Bedouins, Camels, Transistors, and Coke
culture—especially movies, pop music,
and television—for its free expression
and democratic possibilities.
Back in the 1990s, as modern communist
states were undermined by the
growth and influence of transnational
corporations, citizens in these nations
capitalized on the developing global
market, using portable video, digital
cameras and phones, and audio technology
to smuggle out recordings of
repression perpetrated by totalitarian
regimes. Thus it was difficult for political
leaders to hide repressive acts from
the rest of the world. In Newsweek,
former CBS news anchor Dan Rather
wrote about the role of television in the
1989 student uprising in China:
Television brought Beijing’s battle for
democracy to Main Street. It made
students who live on the other side
of the planet just as human, just as
vulnerable as the boy on the next
block. The miracle of television is that
the triumph and tragedy of Tiananmen
Square would not have been any
more vivid had it been Times Square.2
GLOBAL
VILLAGE
This trend continues today through
the newer manifestations of our
digital world like Facebook, Twitter,
and YouTube. As protestors sent
out messages and images on smartphones
and laptops during the Arab
Spring uprisings in 2011 and 2012,
they spread stories that could not be
contained by totalitarian governments.
At the same time, we need to examine
the impact on other nations of the influx
of U.S. popular culture (movies, TV
shows, music, etc.), our second biggest
export (after military and airplane
equipment). Has access to an American
consumer lifestyle fundamentally
altered Havel’s Bedouin on the camel?
What happens when Westernized popular
culture encroaches on the mores of
Islamic countries, where the spread of
American music, movies, and television
is viewed as a danger to tradition?
These questions still need answers. A
global village, which through technology
shares culture and communication, can
also alter traditional customs forever.
To try to grasp this phenomenon, we
might imagine how we would feel if the
culture from a country far away gradually
eroded our own established habits.
This, in fact, is happening all over the
world as U.S. culture has become
the world’s global currency. Although
newer forms of communication such as
tweeting and texting have in some ways
increased citizen participation in global
life, in what ways have they threatened
the values of older cultures?
Our current postmodern period is doublecoded:
It is an agent both for the
renewed possibilities of democracy
and, even in tough economic times, for
the worldwide spread of consumerism
and American popular culture.
CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION 35
This example illustrates that contemporary culture cannot easily be characterized as one
thing or another. Binary terms such as liberal and conservative ore high and low have less meaning
in an environment where so many boundaries have been blurred, so many media forms
have converged, and so many diverse cultures coexist. Modern distinctions between print
and electronic culture have begun to break down largely because of the increasing number of
individuals who have come of age in what is both a print and an electronic culture.18
Either/or
models of culture, such as the high/low approach, are giving way to more inclusive ideas, like
the map model for culture discussed earlier.
What are the social implications of the new, blended, and merging cultural phenomena?
How do we deal with the fact that public debate and news about everyday life now seem as
likely to come from The View, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, or bloggers as from the Wall Street
Journal, NBC Nightly News, or Time?19
Clearly, such changes challenge us to reassess and rebuild
the standards by which we judge our culture. The search for answers lies in recognizing
the links between cultural expression and daily life. The search also involves monitoring how
well the mass media serve democracy, not just by providing us with consumer culture but by
encouraging us to help political, social, and economic practices work better. A healthy democracy
requires the active involvement of everyone. Part of this involvement means watching over
the role and impact of the mass media, a job that belongs to every one of us—not just the paid
media critics and watchdog organizations.
communication, 6
culture, 6
mass media, 6
mass communication, 6
digital communication, 9
bloggers, 9
senders, 9
messages, 9
mass media channel, 9
receivers, 9
gatekeepers, 9
feedback, 9
selective exposure, 10
convergence, 11
cross platform, 12
narrative, 15
high culture, 17
low culture, 17
modern period, 26
Progressive Era, 27
postmodern period, 28
media literacy, 31
critical process, 31
description, 32
analysis, 32
interpretation, 32
evaluation, 33
engagement, 33
COMMON THREADS
• Developmental stages of mass media. How did the
media evolve, from their origins in ancient oral traditions
to their incarnation on the Internet today? What
discoveries, inventions, and social circumstances
drove the development of different media? What roles
do new technologies play in changing contemporary
media and culture?
• The commercial nature of mass media. What role do
media ownership and government regulation play in
the presentation of commercial media products and
serious journalism? How do the desire for profit and
other business demands affect and change the media
landscape? What role should government oversight
play? What role do we play as ordinary viewers, readers,
students, critics, and citizens?
• The converged nature of media. How has convergence
changed the experience of media from the
print to the digital era? What are the significant
differences between reading a printed newspaper
and reading the news online? What changes have to
be made in the media business to help older forms of
media, like newspapers, in the transition to an online
world?
In telling the story of mass media, several plotlines and major themes recur and help provide the “big picture”—the
larger context for understanding the links between forms of mass media and popular culture. Under each thread
that follows, we pose a set of questions that we will investigate together to help you explore media and culture:
• The role that media play in a democracy. How are
policy decisions and government actions affected
by the news media and other mass media? How do
individuals find room in the media terrain to express
alternative (nonmainstream) points of view? How do
grassroots movements create media to influence and
express political ideas?
• Mass media, cultural expression, and storytelling.
What are the advantages and pitfalls of the media’s
appetite for telling and selling stories? As we reach
the point where almost all media exist on the Internet
in some form, how have our culture and our daily lives
been affected?
• Critical analysis of the mass media. How can we use
the critical process to understand, critique, and influence
the media? How important is it to be media literate
in today’s world? At the end of each chapter, we will
examine the historical contexts and current processes
that shape media products. By becoming more critical
consumers and engaged citizens, we will be in a better
position to influence the relationships among mass media,
democratic participation, and the complex cultural
landscape that we all inhabit.
CHAPTER
REVIEW
KEYTERMS
The definitions for the terms listed below can be found in the glossary at the end of the book. The page numbers
listed with the terms indicate where the term is highlighted in the chapter.
36 CHAPTER 1 ○ MASS COMMUNICATION