Mass Communication

Mass communication is the term used to describe the academic study of the various means by which individuals and entities relay information through mass media to large segments of the population at the same time. It is usually understood to relate to newspaper and magazine publishing, radio, television and film, as these are used both for disseminating news and for advertising.

The terms 'Mass' and 'Communication'

The term 'mass' denotes great volume, range or extent (of people or production) and reception of messages.[4] The important point about 'mass' is not that a given number of individuals receives the products, but rather that the products are available in principle to a plurality of recipients.[5] The term 'mass' suggests that the recipients of media products constitute a vast sea of passive, undifferentiated individuals. This is an image associated with some earlier critiques of 'mass culture' and Mass society which generally assumed that the development of mass communication has had a largely negative impact on modern social life, creating a kind of bland and homogeneous culture which entertains individuals without challenging them.[6] However, with the advancement in Media Technology, people are no longer receiving gratification without questioning the grounds on which it is based.[7] Instead, people are engaging themselves more with media products such as computers, cell phones and Internet. These have gradually became vital tools for communications in society today.The aspect of 'communication' refers to the giving and taking of meaning, the transmission and reception of messages. The word 'communication' is really equated with 'transmission', as viewed by the sender, rather than in the fuller meaning, which includes the notions of response, sharing and interaction. [8] Messages are produced by one set of individuals and transmitted to others who are typically situated in settings that are spatially and temporally remote from the original context of production. Therefore, the term 'communication' in this context masks the social and industrial nature of the media, promoting a tendency to think of them as interpersonal communication.[9]Furthermore, it is known that recipients today do have some capacity to intervene in and contribute to the course and content of the communicative process.[10] They are being both active and creative towards the messages that they are conveyed of. With the complement of the cyberspace supported by the Internet, not only that recipients are participants in a structured process of symbolic transmission[11], constraints such as time and space are reordered and eliminated.'Mass communication' can be seen as institutionalized production and generalized diffusion of symbolic goods via the fixation and transmission of information or symbolic content. It is known that the systems of information codification has shifted from analog to digital.[12] This has indeed advanced the communication between individuals. With the existence of Infrared, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, cell phones are no longer solely a tool for audio transmission. We can transfer photos, music documents or even games and email at any time and anywhere. The development of media technology has indeed advanced the transmission rate and stability of information exchange.

Characteristics of Mass Communication

Five characteristics of mass communication have been identified by Cambridge University's John Thompson. Firstly, it "comprises both technical and institutional methods of production and distribution"[13]. This is evident throughout the history of the media, from print to the Internet, each suitable for commercial utility.Secondly, it involves the "commodification of symbolic forms",[14] as the production of materials relies on its ability to manufacture and sell large quantities of the work. Just as radio stations rely on its time sold to advertisements, newspapers rely for the same reasons on its space.Mass Communication's third characteristic is the "separate contexts between the production and reception of information",[15] while the fourth is in its "reach to those 'far removed' in time and space, in comparison to the producers".[16]Finally, Thompson notes a fifth characteristic of mass communication, which involves "information distribution". This is a "one to many" form of communication, whereby products are mass produced and disseminated to a great quantity of audiences.[17]
(Source:From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Media Studies

Media studies is one of several titles under which academic programs approach the content, history, meaning and effects of various media. Media studies scholars vary in the theoretical and methodological focus they bring to mass media topics, including the media's political, social, economic and cultural roles and impact.

Media studies draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, and overlap in interests with related disciplines mass communication, communication, communication sciences and communication studies. Researchers develop and employ theories and methods from disciplines including cultural studies, rhetoric, philosophy, literary theory, psychology, political science, political economy, economics, sociology, social theory, social psychology, media influence, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, museum studies, art history and criticism, film and video studies, and information theory.

Scholars may focus on the constitution of media and question how they shape what is regarded as knowledge and as communicable. The related field of media psychology concerns itself with the psychological impact of the media on individuals and cultures

Key themes in media studies

In addition to the interdisciplinary nature of the academic field, popular understandings of media studies encompass:
•media content production
•audience studies and media influence
•mass communication
•journalism
•political economy
•interpersonal communication
•cultural sociology

Most production and journalism courses incorporate media studies content, but academic institutions often establish separate departments. "Media studies" students may see themselves as observers of media, not creators or practitioners. These distinctions vary across national boundaries.

Separate strands exist within media studies, such as audience studies, producer studies, television studies and radio studies. Film studies is often considered a separate discipline, though television and video games studies grew out of it, as made evident by the application of basic critical theories such as psychoanalysis, feminism and Marxism.

Critical media theory looks at how the corporate ownership of media production and distribution affects society, and provides a common ground to social conservatives (concerned by the effects of media on the traditional family) and liberals and socialists (concerned by the corporatization of social discourse). The study of the effects and techniques of advertising forms a cornerstone of media studies.
Contemporary media studies includes the analysis of new media with emphasis on the internet, video games, mobile devices, interactive television, and other forms of mass media which developed from the 1990s. Because these new technologies allow instant communication across the world (chat rooms and instant messaging, online video games, video conferencing), interpersonal communication is an important element in new media studies. Another factor influencing contemporary media studies is globalization: the debate of globalization as a historical event or as a social construction rages on [1].

It has been argued that media studies has not fully acknowledged the changes which the internet and digital interactive media have brought about, seeing these as an 'add-on'. David Gauntlett has argued for a 'Media Studies 2.0' which fully recognises the ways in which media has changed, and that traditional boundaries between 'audiences' and 'producers' has collapsed.


Political communication and political economy

From the beginning, media studies are closely related to politics and wars (Guo & Wu, 2005, p. 276) such as campaign research and war propaganda. Political communication mainly studies the connections among politicians, voters and media. It focused on the media effects. There are four main media effects theories: magic bullet, two-step flow of communications (Lazarsfeld, 1948), limited effects (Lang & Lang, 1953), and the spiral of silence (Noelle-Neumann, 1984). Also, many scholars studied the technique of political communication such as rhetoric, symbolism and etc. Much of this research has been developed in journals of mass communication and public opinion scholarship.

In the last quarter century, political economy has played a major part in media studies literature. The theory gained notoriety in media studies particularly with the publication of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, published in 1988. In the book, the authors discuss a theory of how the United States’ media industry operates, which they term a “propaganda model.” The model describes a “decentralized and non-conspiratorial market system of control and processing, although at times the government or one or more private actors may take initiatives and mobilize co-ordinated elite handling of an issue." [2]

Media Studies in Germany

In Germany two main streams of Media Studies can be identified. The older stream and dominant stream is comparable to Communication Studies. Pioneered by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in the 1940s this stream studies mass media, its institutions and its effects on society and individuals.

Since the 1980s a second stream of Media Studies has developed. Emerging from Germanic and Literature Studies and pioneered by Friedrich Kittler, Hartmut Winkler, Georg Christoph Tholen, Norbert Bolz and Bernhard Siegert Media are investigated as means of representation of knowledge. Often applying historical research and utilizing and criticizing post-structuralist French theory media are investigated in their structural function in enabling and forming knowledge and its communication. Discourses are analyzed for their underlying medial a priori (German: 'mediales apriori')

This stream of Media Studies has become institutionalized during the second half of the 1990s when numerous departments for media studies and media history have been established at German universities.

Media Studies in the USA

Mass communication, communication studies or simply communication may be more popular names for academic departments in the United States, but the focus of such programs sometimes excludes certain media -- film, book publishing, video games, etc. The title "media studies" may be used alone or in combination like "media studies and communication" to bridge this gap, or to emphasize a different focus or combined department. Examples: Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago, Rhetoric and Media Studies at Willamette University.

Media Studies in India

The media industry is growing in India at the rate of 20 percent per annum. Together, entertainment and media form the country's sixth biggest industry, with 3.5 million people working in it. Within the next 4-5 years, the industry is expected to gross eighty thousand crores (800 billion rupees) annually.[citation needed] Additionally, the third biggest media institute of the world, the Asian Academy Of Film & Television, is also based in India.[citation needed]

Media Studies in the UK

In the UK, media studies developed in the 1960s from the academic study of English, and from literary criticism more broadly. The key date, according to Andrew Crisell, is 1959:when Joseph Trenaman left the BBC's Further Education Unit to become the first holder of the Granada Research Fellowship in Television at Leeds University. Soon after in 1966, the Centre for Mass Communication Research was founded at Leicester University, and degree programmes in media studies began to sprout at polytechnics and other universities during the 1970s and 1980s.[3]


Cultural Studies

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was founded by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall at the University of Birmingham in 1964. As the appeal of Marxism waned in the 1960s, the CCCS took critical theory in new directions, raising questions about media and power. There was the shift of paradigm from ethnography to Hall's semiology. The CCCS was pivotal in developing the field, producing a number of key researchers. Under the directorship of Stuart Hall, who wrote the seminal Encoding/Decoding model, the centre produced key empirical research about the relationship between texts and audiences. Amongst these was The Nationwide Audience by David Morley and Charlotte Brunsdon.[4] Cultural studies revamped the definition of culture. The definition of culture changed from culture being viewed as good/bad to an overall view of social interests and relations.[5]

Media Studies and Media Psychology

An EdD concentration in Media Studies, grounded in Media Psychology and a PhD program in Media Psychology were launched at Fielding Graduate University in 2002 by Bernard Luskin. These programs advanced Media Studies in acknowledging the importance of human behavior. The PhD program in Media Psychology is the first in any Criticism of Media Studies in the UK Media

In the UK, Media Studies is regularly the victim of jokes and cynical attitudes, often being labelled as a Mickey Mouse subject.[6][7] It receives many of the criticisms directed at sociology scholars during the 70s and 80s.[8]
In 2000, England's Chief Schools Inspector, Chris Woodhead suggested that media studies is a "one way ticket to the dole."

(Source: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

Communications

Communication is the process of conveying information from a sender to a receiver with the use of a medium in which the communicated information is understood by both sender and receiver. It is a process that allows organisms to exchange information by several methods. Communication requires that all parties understand a common language that is exchanged, There are auditory means, such as speaking, singing and sometimes tone of voice, and nonverbal, physical means, such as body language, sign language, paralanguage, touch, eye contact, or the use of writing. Communication is defined as a process by which we assign and convey meaning in an attempt to create shared understanding. This process requires a vast repertoire of skills in intrapersonal and interpersonal processing, listening, observing, speaking, questioning, analyzing, and evaluating. Use of these processes is developmental and transfers to all areas of life: home, school, community, work, and beyond. It is through communication that collaboration and cooperation occur.[1] Communication is the articulation of sending a message, through different media [2] whether it be verbal or nonverbal, so long as a being transmits a thought provoking idea, gesture, action, etc.
Communication happens at many levels (even for one single action), in many different ways, and for most beings, as well as certain machines. Several, if not all, fields of study dedicate a portion of attention to communication, so when speaking about communication it is very important to be sure about what aspects of communication one is speaking about. Definitions of communication range widely, some recognizing that animals can communicate with each other as well as human beings, and some are more narrow, only including human beings within the parameters of human symbolic interaction.

Nonetheless, communication is usually described along a few major dimensions: Content (what type of things are communicated), source, emisor, sender or encoder (by whom), form (in which form), channel (through which medium), destination, receiver, target or decoder (to whom), and the purpose or pragmatic aspect. Between parties, communication includes acts that confer knowledge and experiences, give advice and commands, and ask questions. These acts may take many forms, in one of the various manners of communication. The form depends on the abilities of the group communicating. Together, communication content and form make messages that are sent towards a destination. The target can be oneself, another person or being, another entity (such as a corporation or group of beings).

Communication can be seen as processes of information transmission governed by three levels of semiotic rules:
1.Syntactic (formal properties of signs and symbols),
2.pragmatic (concerned with the relations between signs/expressions and their users) and
3.semantic (study of relationships between signs and symbols and what they represent).

Therefore, communication is social interaction where at least two interacting agents share a common set of signs and a common set of semiotic rules. This commonly held rule in some sense ignores autocommunication, including intrapersonal communication via diaries or self-talk.

In a simple model, information or content (e.g. a message in natural language) is sent in some form (as spoken language) from an emisor/ sender/ encoder to a destination/ receiver/ decoder. In a slightly more complex form a sender and a receiver are linked reciprocally. A particular instance of communication is called a speech act. In the presence of "communication noise" on the transmission channel (air, in this case), reception and decoding of content may be faulty, and thus the speech act may not achieve the desired effect. One problem with this encode-transmit-receive-decode model is that the processes of encoding and decoding imply that the sender and receiver each possess something that functions as a code book, and that these two code books are, at the very least, similar if not identical. Although something like code books is implied by the model, they are nowhere represented in the model, which creates many conceptual difficulties.
Theories of coregulation describe communication as a creative and dynamic continuous process, rather than a discrete exchange of information.

Language

A language is a syntactically organized system of signals, such as voice sounds, intonations or pitch, gestures or written symbols which communicate thoughts or feelings. If a language is about communicating with signals, voice, sounds, gestures, or written symbols, can animal communications be considered as a language? Animals do not have a written form of a language, but use a language to communicate with each another. In that sense, an animal communication can be considered as a separated language. Human spoken and written languages can be described as a system of symbols (sometimes known as lexemes) and the grammars (rules) by which the symbols are manipulated. The word "language" is also used to refer to common properties of languages. Language learning is normal in human childhood. Most human languages use patterns of sound or gesture for symbols which enable communication with others around them. There are thousands of human languages, and these seem to share certain properties, even though many shared properties have exceptions.
There is no defined line between a language and a dialect, but the linguist Max Weinreich is credited as saying that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy". Constructed languages such as Esperanto, programming languages, and various mathematical formalisms are not necessarily restricted to the properties shared by human languages.

Dialogue

A dialogue is a reciprocal conversation between two or more entities. The etymological origins of the word (in Greek διά(diá,through) + λόγος(logos, word,speech) concepts like flowing-through meaning) do not necessarily convey the way in which people have come to use the word, with some confusion between the prefix διά-(diá-,through) and the prefix δι- (di-, two) leading to the assumption that a dialogue is necessarily between only two parties.

Nonverbal Communication

Nonverbal communication is the process of communicating through sending and receiving wordless messages. Such messages can be communicated through gesture, body language or posture; facial expression and eye contact, object communication such as clothing, hairstyles or even architecture, or symbols and infographics. Speech may also contain nonverbal elements known as paralanguage, including voice quality, emotion and speaking style, as well as prosodic features such as rhythm, intonation and stress. Likewise, written texts have nonverbal elements such as handwriting style, spatial arrangement of words, or the use of emoticons.A portmanteau of the English words emotion (or emote) and icon, an emoticon is a symbol or combination of symbols used to convey emotional content in written or message form.

Non-Human Living Organisms

Communication in many of its facets is not limited to humans, or even to primates. Every information exchange between living organisms — i.e. transmission of signals involving a living sender and receiver — can be considered a form of communication. Thus, there is the broad field of animal communication, which encompasses most of the issues in ethology. On a more basic level, there is cell signaling, cellular communication, and chemical communication between primitive organisms like bacteria, and within the plant and fungal kingdoms. All of these communication processes are sign-mediated interactions with a great variety of distinct coordinations.

Animals

Animal communication is any behaviour on the part of one animal that has an effect on the current or future behavior of another animal. Of course, human communication can be subsumed as a highly developed form of animal communication. The study of animal communication, called zoosemiotics' (distinguishable from anthroposemiotics, the study of human communication) has played an important part in the development of ethology, sociobiology, and the study of animal cognition. This is quite evident as humans are able to communicate with animals especially dolphins and other animals used in circuses however these animals have to learn a special means of communication. Animal communication, and indeed the understanding of the animal world in general, is a rapidly growing field, and even in the 21st century so far, many prior understandings related to diverse fields such as personal symbolic name use, animal emotions, animal culture and learning, and even sexual conduct, long thought to be well understood, have been revolutionized.

Plant And Fungi

Among plants, communication is observed within the plant organism, i.e. within plant cells and between plant cells, between plants of the same or related species, and between plants and non-plant organisms, especially in the rootzone. Plant roots communicate in parallel with rhizobia bacteria, with fungi and with insects in the soil. This parallel sign-mediated interactions which are governed by syntactic, pragmatic and semantic rules are possible because of the decentralized "nervous system" of plants. As recent research shows 99% of intraorganismic plant communication processes are neuronal-like. Plants also communicate via volatiles in the case of herbivory attack behavior to warn neighboring plants. In parallel they produce other volatiles which attract parasites which attack these herbivores. In Stress situations plants can overwrite the genetic code they inherited from their parents and revert to that of their grand- or great-grandparents.[3]
Fungi communicate to coordinate and organize their own growth and development such as the formation of mycelia and fruiting bodies. Additionally fungi communicate with same and related species as well as with nonfungal organisms in a great variety of symbiotic interactions, especially with bacteria, unicellular eukaryotes, plants and insects. The used semiochemicals are of biotic origin and they trigger the fungal organism to react in a specific manner, in difference while to even the same chemical molecules are not being a part of biotic messages doesn’t trigger to react the fungal organism. It means, fungal organisms are competent to identify the difference of the same molecules being part of biotic messages or lack of these features. So far five different primary signalling molecules are known that serve to coordinate very different behavioral patterns such as filamentation, mating, growth, pathogenicity. Behavioral coordination and the production of such substances can only be achieved through interpretation processes: self or non-self, abiotic indicator, biotic message from similar, related, or non-related species, or even “noise”, i.e., similar molecules without biotic content


(Source:From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)