Mass Communication

Sociology provides insights into how societies are structured, how individuals interact within these structures, and how communication influences social relationships. In mass communication, sociological theories help us understand the impact of media on society, the ways in which information is disseminated, and the role of media in shaping culture and public opinion. Studying sociology can enhance our understanding of the complex dynamics between mass media and society.

Nobody discovered the telegraph, they invented it.

The inventor of the telegraph was Samuel Morse, who first made it in 1837. This device he invented was very small, and was used for communication. With this people were able to spread news faster and hold long distance relationships/communications with someone in a different city. They would transmit the message as a series of dots and dashes called "Morse Code."

For example, the Morse Code for "SOS" would translate as: "Dot, dot, dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot" (... _ _ _ ...)

A more complex sentence would appear as the following:

It is going to rain tomorrow, shall we cancel the meeting?

.. _ .. ... __. ___ .. _. __. _ _ _ _ ._. ._. .. _. _ _ (continuation for a few lines longer)

If there was a break in the sentence it would look like the following:

How are you? I'm fine. _.. _ _ _./ _ _ _ ._. .._

People were trained to decode these messages quickly in case of urgency.

There are a number of modern inventions that helped spread information more quickly, such as radio, television, and the internet. But also, automobiles and airplanes helped too, since they enabled people from one city or country to travel to distant places and interact with those from different cultures or societies.

Part of communicating to a mass audience involves finding out what that audience wants: what they like, what they dislike, what interests them, what offends them, etc. Subjects like marketing and public relations can teach you how to better relate to diverse groups of people. These days, everything from hit songs and TV shows to political parties to advocacy issues (like helping the homeless or protecting endangered species) uses marketing. Nearly every candidate or political policy requires a marketing plan to make sure the information gets out to the right audience, in a way that people will find both understandable and compelling. The more you know about how a message is created, shaped, disseminated, and publicized, the more effective you will be as a communicator.

I think what you are trying to say is that film is an "example of" mass communication. In other words, film (or movies) is one of the mass media. A mass medium sends out a message to a large and often distant and anonymous audience; we don't know who is listening to our radio show or who is reading our book, and the audience could come from anywhere. (And by the way, "medium" is singular-- radio is a mass medium. Radio and television are mass "media," plural.) Examples of mass media are radio, TV, movies, books, magazines, the internet, and newspapers. All of these are in the category known as "mass communication."

The "inverted pyramid" comes from journalism. It is a style of writing in which you organize your facts so that the most important piece of information comes first, and then the rest follow in descending order of importance. Years ago, news stories were written so that the reader had to get through five or six paragraphs before knowing what the story was actually about. The inverted pyramid changed all of that: it encouraged a style where the main facts were up front, in the first paragraph. The remainder of the essay would then elaborate on these basic facts. Nobody can say for certain when this style got started: many historians believe it emerged after the civil war, in the 1850s. But it did not really become popular until the early 1900s.

It was not so much an improvement as another perspective on the same question. In the 1940s, a number of scholars began to focus their attention on the study of mass communication (which until then had generally been ignored by academia), as well as doing more analysis on how communication occurred between friends, in groups, at work, etc. Harold Lasswell created his theory in 1948: he reduced the process of communication to how the message was transmitted: "who says what to whom, via what channel, and to what effect?" In other words, who (the sender) says what (the message) to whom (the receiver), via what channel (the word "channel" does not mean a TV channel-- it means the medium or manner in which the communication has occurred, such as by voice, by telephone, by a sign or signal, by writing a letter, etc), and to what effect (what was the purpose of the message, and did it produce the effect the sender hoped for).

Then, in 1949, Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver produced a somewhat simpler mapping of how communication occurs-- it too focused on transmission: The SRC theory, where S was the source or the sender of the message, R was the receiver, and C was the channel (or by what means the message was sent). The problem with both of these theories was they did not take into account a person's culture or socialization or gender or age or the context under which the communication was attempted. It treated all senders and receivers as isolated individuals and tried to come up with an all-purpose formula for describing communication. Still, these two theories were important because they were the beginning of what became a growing and influential field of study that to this day is producing some very interesting theories and ideas about the way humans (and also animals) communicate.

First, it should be noted that Denis McQuail does not have just one theory. He is a well-respected professor, researcher, and author, and his best-known book is called "Mass Communication Theory." It is now in a 6th edition, and is worth owning. In this very thorough book, McQuail explains nearly every modern theory about how mass communication occurs, and he also examines how mass communication affects society. His own research is included: for example, he discusses the role of politics and political rhetoric in mass communication, how globalization has affected mass communication, and the role of new media (including social media) as a factor in what the public believes.

Actually, this theory was around as early as 1922, when Walter Lippmann wrote his famous book "Public Opinion." At that time, the theory did not have a name, however. It acquired a name in the early 1940s, based on research by social psychologist Kurt Lewin. In the early 1950s, two theorists named Bruce Westley and Malcolm S. MacLean Jr. developed further research about gatekeepers and their role in mass communication-- their study was an expansion of earlier research (1948) done by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver, who looked at how messages are disseminated to the public. Westley and MacLean were perhaps the first theorists to look at the role of the editor in which messages are included in a newscast and which are not.

specialize reporting been defined by WEAL. R 1949 is an account of what happened, told as factually and as accurately as a trained reporter could make it

Gatekeeping is an expression referring to someone (or something) that intentionally changes a communication. In other words, a message is very often altered before it reaches its intended audience. Sometimes, gatekeeping is totally benign: let's say I wrote a book and I submitted my manuscript. My editor thought one chapter was not very clearly written and she asked for a number of changes to it. Or, I'm a radio news reporter and I come back to the station with a great story, but the news director says it's too long and it needs to be shortened. These are two examples of gatekeeping that are well-intended. Editing is a form of gatekeeping. Time can be a gatekeeper too (on radio and TV, stories can only be a certain number of minutes, whether the reporter likes that or not).

But some gatekeeping is not benign-- the most common form of gatekeeping that is negative is censorship. I write a high school graduation speech that is polite but it is critical of certain things at my school. The headmaster says I cannot read it unless I remove the criticisms. Or, I am a cirizen and I am upset about a policy the governor recently implemented; I try to discuss it at a town hall meeting the governor is holding, but he shuts my microphone off and orders me to leave. Throughout history, presidents, prime ministers, kings, and dictators have resisted listening to criticism; some have even tried to prevent the public from hearing any dissent. There have been instances where a controversial documentary was not shown on TV, or a news report was suddenly eliminated because a sponsor complained.

Encoding refers to the creation of, or the production of, a message (something you are trying to communicate). Decoding refers to the listener, or audience, interpreting and deriving the meaning of that message. So, in a commercial for a breakfast cereal, the company that is trying to persuade you to buy it will create an ad and you will see or hear it on TV and radio. You will then interpret, and hopeful, understand, what has just been said in that ad. British communication scholar Stuart Hall is one of the best known proponents of the theory of encoding and decoding.

Traditionally, a bullhorn, PA (Public address) system, electronic 'chase' boards are a few.

mass communication study is so difficult study so i not want to study this