Ch 6 Synopsis

Nearly everything we do these days involves some sort of medium. We spend hours watching TV, surfing the web, or reading magazines. We take in so much media that it simply becomes a part of our life; we take in all this media without even realizing it. Chapter 6, “Media in Everyday Life”, outlines the ways media enters our lives and how it shapes our understanding of what goes on in the world.
In order to understand “mass media”, it is important to define what the word “mass” means. In historical medial theory, “the masses” is a word that “has been used to characterize audiences as undifferentiated groups of people, individuals who are passively accepting and uncritical of media practice and messages authored by corporations with profit motives, whose messages support dominant ideologies and ruling class and/or government interests.” (p 225) This definition of “the masses” best describes the society created in the mid-twentieth-century, when urbanization the once small-scale sense of community. As the population grew and the people moved closer together, they became an undifferentiated mass. The mass media present during this time period were radio, TV, film, and the press. Since there were not a lot of available outlets for the media, the message they were sending had to please a very large number of people. However, once the digital age took over, many things in mass media changed.
With the creation of things like the internet, digital television, and satellite radio, the media was able to aim their messages towards smaller, “niche” audiences. In a given household, hundreds of television channels can be watched and endless websites can be visited. If a person has an unusual interest, they no longer have to settle for the things that everyone else is interested in, as they can find it somewhere, thanks to the expansion of media. This model is known as the narrowcast model (p 233), which allowed for community-based programming targeted to niche audiences.
With all these new forms of media, it has become hard to distinguish which mediums are reliable. The same information can be found on a news website, a newspaper, a national news broadcast, a local news broadcast, or a news blog, yet each one is ranked differently in reliability. Factors ranging from the racial identity of the newscaster to the speed of transmission can determine how the message is taken in.
While one may think that the narrowcast model was driven by a desire to meet the needs of underrepresented audiences, television scholar Timothy Havens discovered otherwise. His studies in 2006 show that “only a few thousand professionals are responsible for the acquisition and distribution decisions of television markets around the world and that these professionals base their decisions not on audience tastes but on institutional incentives” (p 237). While media appeared to be democratizing, it was in fact coming under the control of fewer and fewer persons.
Despite all of this, the power behind what exists in media shifts hands often. Businesses and governments may regulate what is put out, the audiences determine the success of the messages. The people also have the right to make their own media, with user-generated content on the internet being one of the biggest trends today. However, it seems that it is still the businesses making the profit in the long run. Media is everywhere in our lives; it is nearly unavoidable. The more we are aware of this presence, the more we can control how it impacts our lives, an ability very important in maintaining individual lifestyles. We do not want to become one big “mass”.