Mass Communication

1. Mass Communication John A. Cagle

2. Innis, McLuhan, and Carpenter: Communication, Technology, and Culture • History is directed by the dominant media at each age. • Communication media are tools which extend human faculties. • Hot media are filled with information and we become passive observers. Print. • Cool media require audience to fill-in information and we become involved. TV. • The medium is the message. • Media affect the ratio balances among the senses.

3. Walter Lippmann & others:Agenda Setting • Society responds to the pseudo environment created by media, creating the perception of what the environment around them is. • Agenda-setting establishes the salient issues or images in the minds of the public. • Agenda setting occurs because the press is responsible for what we as a people are allowed to hear. • In order for an agenda to be set, there is a three-part linear process that must occur. • First, the media agenda must be set; next, the public agenda is created; then, finally, in response, the policy makers/political leaders must make a policy agenda. • In the simplest model, the media agenda directly affects the public agenda which directly affects the policy agenda.

4. George Gerbner: Cultivation Analysis • Cultivation analysis is a theory dealing with the total impacts of mass communication on cultures over time. • Television, through commercials, the news, drama and comedy, send common images to the viewing masses. • Gerbner explains television as a "homogenizing" or "mainstreaming" agent, because it sends general images and presents a common way of viewing things. • Cultivation analysis is concerned with the total, not individual, impacts of communication through television. Where people used to learn socialization and cultivate their predisposition’s from experience, they now obtain through television. The danger lies in the fact that television does not generally present a realistic view of the world.