MCM 733: Communication Theory

1. MCM 733: Communication Theory Chapters 10, 11, 12

2. CH 10: Media and Society • Information/Innovation diffusion theory: explains how innovations are introduced and adopted by various communities • First, awareness raising • Second, adopted by early adopters (people who adopt techs early, without all the consumer info) • Third, opinion leaders adopt it based on early adopters experiences • Fourth, opinion leaders spread it to their constituencies • Fifth, laggards adopt it • Change agents: those wo directly influence the adoption process

3. CH 10: Media and Society • Media System Dependency Theory: • The more people use media, the more they become dependent on it and the more influence the media will have in their lifes • Knowledge Gap Theory: • There are systematic gaps between better informed and less-informed members of a population. This is a demonstration of the power of systems theory

4. CH 10: Media and Society • Agenda Setting Theory: • Communicators don’t tell people what to think, rather they encourage them to prioritize their values. • Priming: media draw attention to some aspects of political life at the expense of others • Agenda Building: collective process in which media, gov’t and the citizenry reciprocally influence one another in areas of public policy

5. CH 10: Media and Society • Elements of Agenda Setting Theory: • Mass comm has a huge effect on setting people’s priorities • Vividness of presentation • Position of a story • priming

6. CH 10: Media and Society • Framing Theory: the idea that people use sets of expectations to make sense of their social world and media contribute to those expectations • Second-order agenda setting: media set the public’s agenda at a second level or order – the attribute level, where the first order was the object level. • Frame: a specific set of expectations used to make sense of some aspect of the social world in a specific situation and time

7. CH 10: Media and Society • Spiral of Silence Theory: people holding views contrary to dominant views are moved to keep them to themselves for fear of rejection • Three factors that lead to Spiral of Silence: • Ubiquity: the media are virtually everywhere as sources of information • Cumulation: the various news media tend to repeat stories and perspectives across their different individual programs, or editions, across the different media themselves • Consonance: the similarity of values held by newspeople influences the content they produce

8. CH 10: Media and Society • New Production Research: the study of how the institutional routines of news production inevitably produce bias or distorted content • Personalized News: most news stories center around people • Dramatized News: storylines dominate • Fragmented news: news is made up of a lot different fragments • Normalized News: adding th threat of disaster to a sense of normalcy • Objectivity rituals: rituals that ensure objectivity but reinforce the status quo

9. CH 10: Media and Society • Media Intrusion Theory: • The idea that the media have taken over politics to the extent that politics have become subverted. • Social Capital • Membership in certain social groups confers status and prestige to an individual

10. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Symbolic Interactionism: people give meaning to certain things and those meanings end up controlling them • Social behaviourism: view of learning that focuses on the mental processes and the social environment in which learning takes place

11. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Applications of Symbolic Interactionism • People’s interpretation and perception of the environment depend on communication • Communication is guided by and guides the concepts of self, role, and situations. These concepts generate expectations in and of the environment • Communication consists of complex interactions “involving action, interdependence, mutual influence, meaning, relationship, and situational factors.”

12. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Social Constructionism: individuals’ power to control or change their environment is limited • Social construction of reality: we construct meaning together in an on-going fashion because people share a common sense of its reality

13. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Some concepts for social interactionism and constructionism: • Signals: artificial signs that produce predicable responses • Signs: something represents something else • Artificial signs: made by people • Natural signs: thunder, lightning, etc. • Symbols: artificial signs for which there is less certainty of response • Typifications: mental images that allow people to quickly classify objects and actions and then structure their own actions in response.

14. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Framing and Frame Analysis • Framing: people use expectations to make sense of everyday life • Social cues: info in the environment that signals a shift or change of action • Frame: a specific set of expectations used to make sense of a social situation at a given point in time • Downshift and upshift: to move back and forth between more or less serious frames • Hyper-ritualized representations: media content constructed to highlight only the most meaningful representations • Primary reality: the real world in which people obey conventions and laws

15. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Cultivation Analysis: media cultivates a reality, that may be untrue, but becomes reality because people believe it to be so • Violence Index: annual content analysis of a sample week of network television to measure amount of violence contained in it

16. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Cultural Indicators Project: periodic examinations of television programming and the conceptions of social reality cultivated by viewing • Television is different from all other forms of mass media • TV is the central cultural arm of today’s society • Audience consciousness is cultivated by keying into basic assumptions about the “facts of life” and “common sense” rather than “high concept” ideas • TV’s major cultural function is to stabilize social patterns, to cultivate resistance to change • The observable, measurable independent contributions of television to the culture are relatively small. It is rather it’s stable contribution that matters (Ice Age Hypothesis)

17. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Products of Cultivation Analysis • Message systems analysis: detailed content analysis of TV programming to assess recurring and consistent messaging • Cultivation: television’s contribution to the creation of a culture’s frameworks or knowledge and underlying general concepts • Mainstreaming: the process, especially for heavier viewers, by which TVs symbols monopolize and dominate other sources of info and ideas about the world • Resonance: when viewers see things on TV that are congruent with their own everyday realities

18. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Mean World Index: a series of questions about the incidence of crime and violence, the answer to which can be used to differentiate heavy and light viewers • The Three B’s of TV: • Television blurs traditional distinctions of people’s views of their world • TV blends their realities into TV’s cultural mainstream • TV bends that mainstream to the institutional interests of television and its sponsors

19. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Commodification of Culture: • When elements of everyday culture are selected for repackaging, only a very limited range is chosen and important elements are overlooked or consciously ignored • The repackaging process involves dramatization of those elements of culture that have been selected • The marketing of cultural commodities is undertaken in a way that maximizes the likelihood that they will intrude into and ultimately disrupt everyday life • The elites who operate the cultural industries are generally ignorant of the consequences of their work. • Disruption of everyday life takes many forms – some disruptions are obviously linked to consumption of deleterious content, other are subtle and take a long time.

20. Ch 11: Media and Culture Theories • Media Literacy Movement • An awareness of the impact of the media on the individual and society • An understanding of the process of mass communication • The development of strategies with which to analyse and discuss media messages • An awareness of media content as a “text” that provides insight into our contemporary culture and ourselves • The cultivation of an enhanced enjoyment, understanding and appreciation of media content

21. Ch 12: The Future of Media Theory and Research • The End of Mass Comm Theory and the Beginning of Media Theory • Web 2.0 • iPhone/Blackberry • Virtual reality • Artificial intelligence • Cognitive neuroscience • Globalization