Theory of media influences

L 3

Ing. Jiří Šnajdar 2014

Marshall McLuhan is the most widely read literary theorist and is best known for his claim "the medium is the message".

McLuhan believed that we should observe not only the media itself but 'the ways in which each new medium disrupts tradition and reshapes social life' .

McLuhan believed that the social impact of the media was that they became 'an extension of our senses, and alter our social world‚.

In his book The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) he argued that when new media technologies were introduced into society, the balance of our senses were reworked, highlighting some at the expense of others. For example, print intensified the visual and separated it from our other senses; in particular sound. "McLuhan even argued that print media helped create a sensory environment that produced Western capitalist societies - an environment that was bureaucratic and organized around mass production, an ideology of individualism, and a commitment to the nation-state as the fundamental social unit."

Medium theory has always been criticized by its Technological determinism. Raymond Williams is one of the most ardent critics of this concept.

He believe that technological determinism 'emerges' from Technical study and experiments and then changes the sector or society in which it emerged from.

Which means that we adapt towards the new technologies that arise because it is the new modern way of doing it.

Although McLuhan strongly believes that the introduction to any new media will change the way we live, Williams argue that the new technology in itself has no real significance to social value unless it has been adapted to existing social and economic conditions.

Mass communication is the study of how 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, magazine, and book publishing, as well as radio, television and film, as these mediums are used for disseminating information, news and advertising.

Mass communication differs from the studies of other forms of communication, such as interpersonal communication or organizational communication, in that it focuses on a single source transmitting information to a large group of receivers.

The study of mass communication is chiefly concerned with how the content of mass communication persuades or otherwise affects the behavior, attitude, opinion, or emotion of the person or people receiving the information.

Mass communication is "the process by which a person, group of people, or large organization creates a message and transmits it through some type of medium to a large, anonymous, heterogenous audience."

Mass communication is regularly associated with media influence or media effects, and media studies. Mass communication is a branch of social science that falls under the larger umbrella of communication studies or communication.

The history of communication stretches from prehistoric forms of art and writing through modern communication methods such as the Internet.

Mass communication began when humans could transmit messages from a single source to multiple receivers.

The study of mass communication is often associated with the practical applications of journalism (Print media), television and radio broadcasting, film, public relations, or advertising.

With the diversification of media options, the study of communication has extended to include social media and new media, which have stronger feedback models than traditional media sources.

While the field of mass communication is continually evolving, the following four fields are generally considered the major areas of study within mass communication.

Communication researchers study communication through various methods that have been verified through repetitive, cumulative processes.

Both quantitative and qualitative methods have been used in the study of mass communication.

The main focus of mass communication research is to learn how the content of mass communication affects the attitudes, opinions, emotions, and ultimately behaviors of the people who receive the message.

The public is bribed with popular radio, television and newspapers into an acceptance of the biased, the misleading, and the status quo.

The media are not, according to this approach, crude agents of propaganda. They organize public understanding.

However, the overall interpretations they provide in the long run are those most preferred by, and least challenging to, those with economic power.

Theorists such as Louis Wirth and Talcott Parsons have emphasized the importance of mass media as instruments of social control.

In the 21st century, with the rise of the internet, the two-way relationship between mass media and public opinion is beginning to change, with the advent of new technologies such as blogging.

It is this which led Marshall McLuhan in the 1960s to say that "the medium is the message", and to suggest that mass media are increasingly creating a "global village".

For example, there is evidence that Western media influence in Asia is the driving force behind rapid social change.

Although a sizable portion of mass media offerings – particularly news, commentaries, documentaries, and other informational programmes – deal with highly controversial subjects, the major portion of mass media offerings are designed to serve an entertainment function.

These programmes tend to avoid controversial issues and reflect beliefs and values sanctified by mass audience. This course is followed by Television networks, whose investment and production costs are high.

The relation of the mass media to contemporary popular culture is commonly conceived in terms of dissemination from the elite to the mass.

The concentration of ownership and media control has led to accusations of a 'media elite' having a form of 'cultural dictatorship'.

Thus the continuing debate about the influence of 'media barons' such as Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch.

Modern politics are increasingly shaped by the dynamics of public communication. As a consequence, the success of governments that historically are interconnected to the State in general, is to a large extent dependent on their ability to communicate effectively to the broader public. In significant are the EU Publicity and Promotion Community Directives, which oblige the national governments to increase their communication with the Public/ the citizens.

The Media are now playing an active part in the political field.

Political communication is perhaps the most “encephalic combination of art and science”. Countries all over the world are becoming the land of the “politics overbuying” (Keriakakis, 2000). The offspring of the latter is the notion of political communication to be always current.

The study of political communication is a branch of contemporary communication studies that began at the turn of this century.

Although this notion is not an invention of the 20th century and its origins can be traced back many centuries e.g. Aristotle’s and Plato’s works in ancient Greece, as a cross-disciplinary field of study it began to emerge in the 1950s.

Traces of the evolution of political communication and a greatest amount of scholarship can be found in the all the areas of the world, America; Europe; Britain and Germany, and Asia; China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan.

Political communication has emerged as a focal point to scholars in political science, communications, and allied social sciences.

The label political communication first appeared to describe an intervening process by which political institutions and citizens interact with each other and political influences are mobilized and transmitted.

Over the past 30 years, there has been a widespread sense among political communication scholars and researchers, and so, have the mounting evidence presented, that “political communication is undergoing rapid, perhaps profound changes in many countries of the world and that the character of these changes might be worrisome” (Swanson, 1999).

In general terms, many of the earliest contemporary communication studies were generated by analyses of propaganda / persuasive messages, mass media effects on voting and public opinion of political and social issues. (Lee Kaid, 2004)

Politics, as an ongoing conversation about social issues, encompass a broad scope of political communication and demonstrate the ubiquity of political communication in contemporary life and in non-electoral periods.

Internal and external political communication channels are the nerves of government.

Political system can not function without effective networks of such channels capable of transmitting political messages.

Hence, there is much concern about political communication such as an inactive and uninformed public at the societal level, as most political action and power relationships operate at that or other systemic levels; the latter leads to the seeking of a more properly functioning democracy.

Moreover, this new DNA of political communication, clearly a product of the second half of the 20th century, with television situated in the centre of today’s politics, is the reason for many to support that today’s “politics have entered a world, which usurps cultural values, a world that changes its face like a chameleon, which peculates miscellaneous identities”. (Kathimerini Newspaper, 2000)

The objective of public communication is to transmit messages targeting the public and enabling it to have an overall view, while at the same time is able to retain its distance from the general strategy and the central messages being transmitted by government so that to achieve its goals and policies.

This way allows the public to discover the connection between the politics of the Ministries and other public institutions or organizations and the central politics of government; regardless it impresses it as either positive or negative.

The public space includes the state and semi-state owned institutions, whereas the private refers more, to the economic and market oriented organizations.

Communication practices and technologies have come to dominate media – government relations. This systematic professional control of strategic public communication applies to democracies on both sides of the Atlantic. (Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999)

Media control is widely thought to be essential for governing. Politicians and officials use publicity to make news, to get the attention of other policymakers, to set agendas, and to help persuade others into action.

This link between governing and publicity in all political institutions has news media as the facilitator for enabling politicians to accomplish their policy goals. (Cook, 1998)

Moreover, more sophisticated news management operations that enable officials to retain control of key political messages, restoring the media – government balance in favor of government, arise.

So, there is more to the story of media – government relations and the political content of news media than simply that the media are dependent upon official sources.

(Bennett & Livingston, 2003)

Political action is apprehensible and tangible through the relationship among political institutions, the public and the media.

The media constitute a societal carrier for managing politically the public sphere.

They act politically within the framework of the broader societal system, and today their interposition in the polity’s operation with the development and the constant evolvement of the technology, is powerful.

A fundamental element of the centrality of the media to today’s politics is the near-instantaneous delivery of political events and issues by television and Internet.

By any objective standard, the media are critically important to government and politics.

Most significant is the extent to which politicians use various methods to communicate with their constituencies, which renders the media to a linkage institution.

The media may be key elements, or objectively important to government and politics since they constitute a vast economic power.

This concentration of economic power is likely to be accompanied by political power as well. (Leighley, 2004)

Moreover, the media have a critical role in the communication of the government with the public. Thus, considering they might shape public opinion, they have a share also in the shaping of the political will.

The media have several responsibilities within a democratic society. Among others are:

a)to inform and educate the public accurately and completely and

b) to independently investigate claims made by biased sources, most notably the government.