YOUR SMARTPHONE'S RADIO ALARM SINGS YOU AWAKE.
It's Beyoncé, the last few bars of "Hold Up." The upbeat DJ shouts at you that it's 7:41 and you'd better get going. But before you do, she adds, listen to a few words from
...
YOUR SMARTPHONE'S RADIO ALARM SINGS YOU AWAKE.
It's Beyoncé, the last few bars of "Hold Up." The upbeat DJ shouts at you that it's 7:41 and you'd better get going. But before you do, she adds, listen to a few words from your friends at Best Buy electronics, home of fast, friendly, courteous service—"Expert Service. Unbeatable Price!"
Before you get up, though, you take a quick pass at Facebook and Instagram. But you've gotta get going now. In the living room, you find your roommate has left the television on. You stop for a moment and listen: The economy is showing stronger signs of rebounding, brightening the employment picture for new college grads; several states are considering providing free high-speed Internet to all students to improve their access to the digital world; chaos continues to sweep across the Middle East; and you deserve a break today at McDonald's. As you head toward the bathroom, your bare feet slip on some magazines littering the floor—Wired, Rolling Stone, People. You need to talk to your roommate about cleaning up!
After showering, you quickly pull on your Levi's, lace up your Nike cross-trainers, and throw on an Under Armour jacket. No time for breakfast; you grab a Nature Valley granola bar and your tablet and head for the bus stop. As the bus rolls up, you can't help but notice the giant ad on its side: another Transformers movie. Rejecting that as a film choice for the weekend, you sit down next to a teenager listening to music on his Beats headphones and playing a video game. You fire up your tablet and bury yourself in Snapchat, Twitter, and your favorite news app, scanning the lead stories and the local news and then checking out Doonesbury and Garfield.
Hopping off the bus at the campus stop, you run into your friend Chris. You walk to class together, talking about last night's The Walking Dead episode. It's not yet 9:00, and already you're involved in mass communication. In fact, like 60% of Americans, you're involved with media on your smartphone first thing in the morning, even before you get out of bed (Hunter, 2014).
In this chapter we define communication, interpersonal communication, mass communication, media, and culture and explore the relationships among them and how they define us and our world. We investigate how communication works, how it changes when technology is introduced into the process, and how differing views of communication and mass communication can lead to different interpretations of their power. We also discuss the opportunities mass communication and culture offer us and the responsibilities that come with those opportunities. Always crucial, these issues are of particular importance now, when we find ourselves in a period of remarkable development in new communication technologies. This discussion inevitably leads to an examination of media literacy, its importance, and its practice.
What Is Mass Communication?
"Does a fish know it's wet?" influential cultural and media critic Marshall McLuhan would often ask. The answer, he would say, is "No." The fish's existence is so dominated by water that only when water is absent is the fish aware of its condition.
So it is with people and mass media. The media so fully saturate our everyday lives that we are often unconscious of their presence, not to mention their influence. Media inform us, entertain us, delight us, annoy us. They move our emotions, challenge our intellects, insult our intelligence. Media often reduce us to mere commodities for sale to the highest bidder. Media help define us; they shape our realities.
A fundamental theme of this book is that media do none of this alone. They do it with us as well as to us through mass communication, and they do it as a central—many critics and scholars say the central—cultural force in our society.
Communication Defined
In its simplest form, communication is the transmission of a message from a source to a receiver. For more than 70 years now, this view of communication has been identified with the writing of political scientist Harold Lasswell (1948). He said that a convenient way to describe communication is to answer these questions:
Who?
Says what?
Page 5Through which channel?
To whom?
With what effect?
Expressed in terms of the basic elements of the communication process, communication occurs when a source sends a message through a medium to a receiver, producing some effect. This idea is straightforward enough, but what if the source is a professor who insists on speaking in a technical language far beyond the receiving students' level of skill? Obviously, communication does not occur. Unlike mere message-sending, communication requires the response of others. Therefore, there must be a sharing (or correspondence) of meaning for communication to take place.
A second problem with this simple model is that it suggests that the receiver passively accepts the source's message. However, if our imaginary students do not comprehend the professor's words, they respond with "Huh?" or look confused or yawn. This response, or feedback, is also a message. The receivers (the students) now become a source, sending their own message to the source (the offending professor), who is now a receiver. Hence, communication is a reciprocal and ongoing process with all involved parties more or less engaged in creating shared meaning. Communication, then, is better defined as the process of creating shared meaning.
Communication researcher Wilbur Schramm, using ideas originally developed by psychologist Charles E. Osgood, developed a graphic way to represent the reciprocal nature of communication (Figure 2). This depiction of interpersonal communication—communication between two or a few people—shows that there is no clearly identifiable source or receiver. Rather, because communication is an ongoing and reciprocal process, all the participants, or "interpreters," are working to create meaning by encoding and decoding messages. A message is first encoded, that is, transformed into an understandable sign and symbol system. Speaking is encoding, as are writing, printing, and filming a television program. Once received, the message is decoded; that is, the signs and symbols are interpreted. Decoding occurs through listening, reading, or watching that television show.
The Osgood-Schramm model demonstrates
the ongoing and reciprocal nature of the communication process. There is, therefore, no source, no receiver, and no feedback. The Page 6reason is that, as communication is happening, both interpreters are simultaneously source and receiver. There is no feedback because all messages are presumed to be in reciprocation of other messages. Even when your friend starts a conversation with you, for example, it can be argued that it was your look of interest and willingness that communicated to her that she should speak. In this example, it is improper to label either you or your friend as the source—who really initiated this chat?—and, therefore, it is impossible to identify who is providing feedback to whom.
Not every model can show all aspects of a process as complex as communication. Missing from this representation is noise—anything that interferes with successful communication. Noise is more than screeching or loud music when you are trying to work online. Biases that lead to incorrect decoding, for example, are noise, as is a page torn out of a magazine article you want to read or that spiderweb crack in your smartphone's screen.
Encoded messages are carried by a medium, that is, the means of sending information. Sound waves are the medium that carries our voice to friends across the table; the telephone is the medium that carries our voice to friends across town. When the medium is a technology that carries messages to a large number of people—as the Internet carries text, sounds, and images and radio conveys the sound of music and news—we call it a mass medium (the plural of medium is media). The mass media we use regularly include radio, television, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, sound recordings, cell phones, and computer networks. Each medium is the basis of a giant industry, but other related and supporting industries also serve them and us—advertising and public relations, for example. In our culture we use the words media and mass media interchangeably to refer to the communication industries themselves. We say, "The media entertain" or "The mass media are too conservative (or too liberal)."
Mass Communication Defined
We speak, too, of mass communication. Mass communication is the process of creating shared meaning between the mass media and their audiences. Schramm recast his and Osgood's general model of communication to help us visualize the particular aspects of the mass communication process (Figure 3). This model and the original Osgood-Schramm model have much in common—interpreters, encoding, decoding, and messages—but it is their differences that are most significant for our understanding of how mass communication differs from other forms of communication. For example, whereas the original model includes "message," the mass communication model offers "many identical messages." In addition, the mass communication model specifies "feedback," whereas the interpersonal communication model does not. When two or a few people communicate face to face, the participants can immediately and clearly recognize the feedback residing in the reciprocal messages (our boring professor can see and hear the students' disenchantment as they listen to the lecture). Things are not nearly as simple in mass communication. In Schramm's mass communication model, feedback is represented by a dotted line labeled "delayed inferential feedback." This feedback is indirect rather than direct. Page 7Television executives, for example, must wait a day, at the very minimum, and sometimes a week or a month, to discover the ratings for new programs. Even then, the ratings measure only how many sets are tuned in, not whether people liked or disliked the programs. As a result, these executives can only infer what they must do to improve programming; hence the term inferential feedback. Mass communicators are also subject to additional feedback, usually in the form of criticism in other media, such as a television critic writing a column in a newspaper. The differences between the individual elements of interpersonal and mass communication change the very nature of the communication process. How those alterations influence the message itself and how the likelihood of successfully sharing meaning differs are shown in Figure 4. For example, the immediacy and directness of feedback in interpersonal communication free communicators to gamble, to experiment with different approaches. Their knowledge of one another enables them to tailor their messages as narrowly as they wish. As a result, interpersonal communication is often personally relevant and possibly even adventurous and challenging. In contrast, the distance between participants in the mass communication process, imposed by the technology, creates a sort of "communication conservatism." Feedback comes too late to enable corrections or alterations in communication that fails. The sheer number of people in many mass communication audiences makes personalization and specificity difficult. As a result, mass communication tends to be more constrained, less free. This does not mean, however, that it is less potent than interpersonal communication in shaping our understanding of ourselves and our world.
Media theorist James W. Carey (1975) recognized
this and offered a cultural definition of communication that has had a profound impact on the way communication scientists and others have viewed the relationship between communication and culture. Carey wrote, "Communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired and transformed" (p. 10).
Carey's (1989) definition asserts that communication and reality are linked. Communication is a process embedded in our everyday lives that informs the way we perceive, understand, and construct our view of reality and the world. Communication is the foundation of our culture. Its truest purpose is to maintain ever-evolving, "fragile" cultures; communication is that "sacred ceremony that draws persons together in fellowship and commonality" (p. 43).
What Is Culture?
Culture is the learned behavior of members of a given social group. Many writers and thinkers have offered interesting expansions of this definition. Here are four examples, all from anthropologists. These definitions highlight not only what culture is but also what culture does:
Culture is the learned, socially acquired traditions and lifestyles of the members of a society, including their patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. (Harris, 1983, p. 5)
Culture lends significance to human experience by selecting from and organizing it. It refers broadly to the forms through which people make sense of their lives, rather than more narrowly to the opera or art of museums. (Rosaldo, 1989, p. 26)
Culture is the medium evolved by humans to survive. Nothing is free from cultural influences. It is the keystone in civilization's arch and is the medium through which all of life's events must flow. We are culture. (Hall, 1976, p. 14)
Culture is an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbolic forms by means of which [people] communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. (Geertz, as cited in Taylor, 1991, p. 91)
Culture as Socially Constructed Shared Meaning
Virtually all definitions of culture recognize that culture is learned. Recall the opening vignette. Even if this scenario does not exactly match your early mornings, you probably recognize its elements. Moreover, all of us are familiar with most, if not every, cultural Page 8Page 9reference in it. Transformers, Rolling Stone, McDonald's, Under Armour, Garfield—all are points of reference, things that have some meaning for all of us. How did this come to be?
Creation and maintenance of a more or less common culture occurs through communication, including mass communication. When we talk to our friends, when a parent raises a child, when religious leaders instruct their followers, when teachers teach, when grandparents pass on recipes, when politicians campaign, and when media professionals produce content that we read, listen to, or watch, meaning is being shared and culture is being constructed and maintained.
Functions and Effects of Culture
Culture serves a purpose. It helps us categorize and classify our experiences; it helps define us, our world, and our place in it. In doing so, culture can have a number of sometimes conflicting effects.
LIMITING AND LIBERATING EFFECTS OF CULTURE A culture's learned traditions and values can be seen as patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. Culture limits our options and provides useful guidelines for behavior. For example, when conversing, you do not consciously consider, "Now, how far away should I stand? Am I too close?" You simply stand where you stand. After a hearty meal with a friend's family, you do not engage in mental self-debate, "Should I burp? Yes! No! Arghhhh. ..." Culture provides information that helps us make meaningful distinctions about right and wrong, appropriate and inappropriate, good and bad, attractive and unattractive, and so on. How does it do this?
Obviously, it does so through communication. Through a lifetime of communication, we have learned just what our culture expects of us. The two examples given here are positive results of culture's limiting effects. But culture's limiting effects can be negative, such as when we are unwilling or unable to move past patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting or when we entrust our "learning" to teachers whose interests are selfish, narrow, or otherwise inconsistent with our own.
U.S. culture, for example, values thinness and beauty in women. How many women endure weeks of unhealthy diets and succumb to potentially dangerous surgical procedures in search of a body that for most is physically unattainable? How many women are judged by the men and other women around them for not conforming to our culture's standards of thinness and beauty? Why is the expression "fat shaming" in our language? Why are 40% to 60% of girls aged 6 to 12 concerned about their weight or about becoming too fat? Why do 42% of girls in first, second, and third grade want to be thinner, and why are 81% of 10-year-olds—girls and boys—afraid of being overweight? Why do over one-half of teenage girls and nearly one-third of teenage boys use unhealthy weight control behaviors like skipping meals, fasting, smoking cigarettes, vomiting, and taking laxatives (National Eating Disorders Association, 2016)? Why do almost 1.3 million adolescent girls in the United States have anorexia (Pai & Schryver, 2015)?
Now consider how this situation may have come about. Our parents did not bounce us on their knees when we were babies, telling us that thin was good and fat was bad. Think back, though, to the stories you were told and the television shows and movies you watched growing up. The heroines (or, more often, the beautiful love interests of the heroes) were invariably tall, beautiful, and thin. The bad guys were usually mean and fat. From Disney's depictions of Snow White, Cinderella, Belle, Jasmine, and Pocahontas to the impossible dimensions of most video game and comic book heroines, the message is embedded in the conscious (and unconscious) mind of every girl and boy: You can't be too thin or too beautiful! As it is, 69% of women and 65% of girls cite constant pressure from advertising and media to reach unrealistic standards of beauty as a major factor fueling their anxiety about their appearance (Dove, 2016). And it does not help that these messages are routinely reinforced throughout the culture, for example in the recent explosion of day spas for girls as young as 3 that "honor the feminine" while the little misses are treated "like a Kardashian" (Turkewitz, 2015, p. A1).
This message and millions of others come to us primarily through the media, and although the people who produce these media images are not necessarily selfish or mean, their motives are undeniably financial. Their contribution to our culture's repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting is most certainly not primary among their concerns when preparing their communication.
Culture need not only limit. That media representations of female beauty often meet with debate and disagreement points out the fact that culture can be liberating as well. This is so because cultural values can be contested. In fact, today, we're just as likely to see strong, intelligent female characters who save the day like Brave's Merida, Mulan's Fa Mulan, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs's Sam Sparks as we are movie princesses who need to be saved by the hero.
Page 11Especially in a pluralistic, democratic society such as ours, the dominant culture (or mainstream culture)—the one that seems to hold sway with the majority of people—is often openly challenged. People do meet, find attractive, like, and love people who do not fit the standard image of beauty. In addition, media sometimes present images that suggest different ideals of beauty and success. Actresses Sofia Vergara, Dascha Polanco, and Mindy Kaling; singers/actresses Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez; and comedian Amy Schumer all represent alternatives to our culture's idealized standards of beauty, and all have undeniable appeal (and power) on the big and small screens. Liberation from the limitations imposed by culture resides in our ability and willingness to learn and use new patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting; to challenge existing patterns; and to create our own.
Have you ever made the mistake of calling a dolphin, porpoise, or even a
whale a fish? Maybe you have heard others do it. This error occurs because when we think of fish, we think "lives in the water" and "swims." Fish are defined by their "aquatic culture." Because water-residing, swimming dolphins, porpoises, and whales share that culture, we sometimes forget that they are mammals, not fish.
We, too, are defined by our culture. We are citizens of the United States; we are Americans. If we travel to other countries, we will hear ourselves labeled "American," and this label will conjure up stereotypes and expectations in the minds of those who use and hear it. The stereotype, whatever it may be, will probably fit us only incompletely, or perhaps hardly at all—perhaps we are dolphins in a sea full of fish. Nevertheless, being American defines us in innumerable important ways, both to others (more obviously) and to ourselves (less obviously).
Within this large, national culture, however, there are many smaller, bounded cultures (or co-cultures). For example, we speak comfortably of Italian neighborhoods, fraternity row, the South, and the suburbs. Because of our cultural understanding of these categories, each expression communicates something about our expectations of these places. We think we can Page 12predict with a good deal of certainty the types of restaurants and shops we will find in the Italian neighborhood, even the kind of music we will hear escaping from open windows. We can predict the kinds of clothes and cars we will see on fraternity row, the likely behavior of shop clerks in the South, and the political orientation of the suburb's residents. Moreover, the Page 13people within these cultures usually identify themselves as members of those bounded cultures. An individual may say, for example, "I am Italian American" or "I'm from the South." These smaller cultures unite groups of people and enable them to see themselves as different from other groups around them. Thus culture also serves to differentiate us from others.
In the United States, we generally consider this a good thing. We pride ourselves on our pluralism, on our diversity, and on the richness of the cultural heritages represented within our borders. We enjoy moving from one bounded culture to another or from a bounded culture to the dominant national culture and back again.
Problems arise, however, when differentiation leads to division. All Americans are traumatized by horrific events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the 2016 mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, but those tragedies are compounded for the millions of Muslim Americans whose patriotism is challenged simply because they belong to a particular bounded culture. Not only are the number of cases of violence against Muslims in America at an all-time high (Lichtblau, 2016), but the Department of Homeland Security reports that incidents of Muslim American terrorism continue to be far less common than right-wing or antigovernment terrorism, and cooperation from the Muslim American community has been essential in its efforts to investigate domestic threats (Shane, 2016); still we continue to see examples of overt discrimination. For example, in the wake of a serious increase in hateful online and public commentary following the release of its 2015 film American Sniper, movie studio Warner Bros. felt compelled to issue a statement declaring that it "denounces any violent, anti-Muslim rhetoric, including that which has been attributed to viewers of American Sniper. Hate and bigotry have no place in the important dialogue that this picture has generated about the veteran experience" (Mandell, 2015). Muslim Americans' religion, skin color, and clothing "communicate" disloyalty to the United States to many other Americans. Just as culture is constructed and maintained through communication, it is also communication (or miscommunication) that turns differentiation into division.
Yet U.S. citizens of all colors, ethnicities, genders, nationalities, places of birth, economic strata, and intelligence levels often get along; in fact, we can communicate, can prosper, and can respect one another's differences. Culture can divide us, but culture also unites us. Our culture represents our collective experience. We converse easily with strangers because we share the same culture. We speak the same language, automatically understand how far apart to stand, appropriately use titles or first or last names, know how much to say, and know how much to leave unsaid. Through communication with people in our culture, we internalize cultural norms and values—those things that bind our many diverse bounded cultures into a functioning, cohesive society. Culture is the world made meaningful; it is socially constructed and maintained through communication. It limits as well as liberates us; it differentiates as well as unites us. It defines our realities and thereby shapes the ways we think, feel, and act.
Mass Communication and Culture
Despite the fact that culture can limit and divide, it can also liberate and unite. As such, it offers us infinite opportunities to use communication for good—if we choose to do so. James Carey (1975) wrote:
Because we have looked at each new advance in communication technology as opportunities for politics and economics, we have devoted them, almost exclusively, to government and trade. We have rarely seen them as opportunities to expand [our] powers to learn and exchange ideas and experience. (pp. 20-21)
Who are "we" in this quote? We are the people involved in creating and maintaining the culture that defines us. We are the people involved in mass media industries and the people who compose their audiences. Together we allow mass communication not only to occur but also to contribute to the creation and maintenance of culture.
Everyone involved has an obligation to participate responsibly. For people working in the media industries, this means professionally and ethically creating and transmitting content. For audience members, it means behaving as critical and thoughtful consumers of that content. Two ways to understand our opportunities and our responsibilities in the mass communication process are to view the mass media as our cultural storytellers and to conceptualize mass communication as a cultural forum.
Mass Media as Cultural Storytellers
A culture's values and beliefs reside in the stories it tells. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? How many of your childhood heroines were even slightly overweight? How many good guys dressed in black? How many heroines lived happily ever after without marrying Prince Charming? Probably not very many. Our stories help define our realities, shaping the ways we think, feel, and act. "Stories are sites of observations about self and society," explains media theorist Hanno Hardt (2007). "These fictional accounts are the constitutive material signs of a shared conversation" (p. 476). Therefore, the "storytellers" have a responsibility to tell their stories in as professional and ethical a way as possible.
At the same time, we, the audience for these stories, also have opportunities and responsibilities. We use these stories not only to be entertained but also to learn about the world around us, to understand the values, the way things work, and how the pieces fit together. We have a responsibility to question the tellers and their stories, to interpret the stories in ways consistent with larger or more important cultural values and truths, to be thoughtful, and to reflect on the stories' meanings and what they say about us and our culture. To do less is to miss an opportunity to construct our own meaning and, thereby, culture.
For example, Women's Health recently joined a host of other publications, promising to ban expressions like "bikini body" and "drop two sizes" from its covers (McNiel, 2016), and lingerie company Aerie vowed to no longer use photoshopped models in its ads (and saw sales surge; Mosbergen, 2016). Brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev discontinued its promotion of Bud Light as "the perfect beer for removing 'no' from your vocabulary for the night" (Schultz, 2015). And in 2016, toy maker Mattel announced that it would begin selling new versions—curvy, petite, and tall—of its formerly anatomically impossible fashion doll Barbie, all in a variety of skin tones, eye colors, and hairstyles (Abrams, 2016). In each case, the cultural conversation—on social media, among friends, and in the mass media—demanded a different, and better, way of talking about women and girls.
Mass Communication as Cultural Forum
Imagine a giant courtroom in which we discuss and debate our culture—what it is, and what we want it to be. What do we think about welfare? Single motherhood? Labor unions? Nursing homes? What is the meaning of "successful," "good," "loyal," "moral," "honest," "beautiful," or "patriotic"? We have cultural definitions or understandings of all these things and more. Where do they come from? How do they develop, take shape, and mature?
Mass communication has become a primary forum for the debate about our culture. Logically, then, the most powerful voices in the forum have the most power to shape our definitions and understandings. Where should that power reside—with the media industries or with their audiences? If you answer "media industries," you will want members of these industries to act professionally and ethically. If you answer "audiences," you will want individual audience members to be thoughtful and critical of the media messages they consume. The forum is only as good, fair, and honest as those who participate in it.
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Scope and Nature of Mass Media
No matter how we choose to view the process of mass communication, it is impossible to deny that an enormous portion of our lives is spent interacting with mass media. On a typical Sunday night, about 40 million people in the United States will tune in to a prime-time television show. Video viewing is at an all-time high and accounts for more than half of all adult Americans' leisure-time activity. Ninety-six percent of all U.S. homes have at least one set, and 95% of those homes have high-definition sets (Television Advertising Bureau, 2017). Seventy percent of TV viewers admit to binge viewing, watching five or more episodes of a series in one sitting, and 93% multitask while watching (Sharma, 2016), meaning the average American actually enjoys 31 hours and 28 seconds of activity in any given day (Ault, 2015). On Facebook alone, 1.8 billion people daily watch more than 100 million hours of video (Constantine, 2016). We listen to nearly four hours of music every day (Ault, 2015), and we spend more than $11 billion a year at the movies, buying just over 1.3 billion tickets (Barnes, 2017). If Facebook were its own country, its 1.8 billion monthly active users would make it the largest in the world. Facebook alone accounts for 6% of all the time the world's Internet users spend online (Smith, 2015). Sixty-three percent of American households are home to at least one person who plays video games three or more hours a week, and half of all U.S. homes have a game console, averaging two per home (Entertainment
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