Chapter Six

Chapter 6: Media in Everyday Life

In the 19th century, the term “the masses” arose in order to describe the structure and changes in societies that were undergoing industrializations and the rapid growth of a working class. Because this group of working class people was so large, the they were seen as having influence on the opinions of a society and on societal practices. Karl Marx used the concept of the masses to explain how the working class fit into industrial capitalism. Sometimes, this term is met with a pejorative connotation. The negative connotation comes from the idea of seeing the “masses” as an undifferentiated group of people who are basically sheep who passively accept what they are told by the media and who can be easily manipulated.

A criticism that arose in the 20th century in respect to the idea of the masses was that the sense of community and belonging diminished with the rise of urban populations and a more homogenous and isolated worldview. There was also the criticism that there was a decline in family and community life due to urban sprawl and suburban life.

The term “mass media” has existed since the 1920s and is used to describe the forms of media that reach large audiences with shared interests. In the 20th century, most forms of mass communication were visual, with some exceptions such as radio, and with the rise of electronic and digital media consumers of media devices such as computers, cell phones, the Internet, are likely to view themselves not only as consumer but also as partial producers in information and media.

Before the radio, when literacy rates were also low, only an educated minority could read and write, and, therefore, they controlled the exchange of information beyond the level of word of mouth. As literacy rates rose and new forms of media arose that did not involve reading, this began to change more and more.

When we talk about the “media” we usually refer to a plural for of medium but also to a unified and singular group of ideas and messages. The different forms of media used to convey a message can heavily influence how that message is received by an audience.

When looking at how our society judges the media, we can look at how they gather their information about news and politics. According to the book: “We might consider news parodies to be more reliable sources because their biases are explicit, and there is no pretense of neutrality.” I know that I’ve read statistics before that say a surprising number of young adults use parody news shows (such as the Daily Show and the Colbert Report on Comedy Central) as their only or major source of news and political information. While I think that sometimes major news networks can be biased towards the news they portray, I’m not sure that I would go so far as to say that parodies of the news are any less biased because of their supposed neutrality. To solve the problem of biased news, I suppose that my suggestion would be to check several different sources for news and information, rather than just relying on one source, let alone a parody of other sources.

There is an interesting idea that mass broadcasting fosters “conformity to dominant ideas about politics and culture,” which I would agree with in a sense. Rather than conforming to one dominant idea, I think that mass media leads to the polarization of ideas, where the middle ground is less populated than ideological extremes on either end of a spectrum. People tend to listen to others who share their ideas while sometimes neglecting the views of others. And there are different methods of mass media that appeal to different groups of people, therefore, polarizing their ideas even further.

“Public” can be defined in several ways, but as the term applies to media, is refers to the space of discourse where people can exercise personal and impersonal public speech in a social situation that allows for the “circulation and exchange of ideas.” This public space can be a physical space, a social setting, or a media arena—any “place” where people can come together to discuss the “pressing issues of their society.”

The idea of the traditional networks and news organizations—such as the BBC and CNN—being displaced and encountering competition for worldwide audiences from relatively new and influential news networks from the Middle East and Latin America is a very interesting scenario. In the coming years we will no doubt be able to see the continued effects that these new and different news powerhouses will have on global opinion and differing worldviews.