Sources

Part 1. Media Effects <new>CHAPTER 1. The Relationship of Media and Society 1.1. Harold D. Lasswell, from "The Structure and Function of Communication in Society," in Lyman Bryson, ed., The Communication of Ideas "A convenient way to describe an act of communication is to answer the following questions: Who, Says What, In Which Channel, To Whom, With What Effect?" <new>1.2. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, from "Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action," in Wilbur Schramm and Donald F. Roberts, eds., The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, rev. ed. "It is clear that the mass media reach enormous audiences... Knowledge of consumption data in the field of mass media remains far from a demonstration of their net effect upon behavior and attitude and outlook." 1.3. Kurt Lang and Gladys Engel Lang, from "The Mass Media and Voting," in Eugene Burdick and Arthur J. Brodbeck, eds., American Voting Behavior "The vagaries of research lead us away from a principal concern with the impact of press, radio, television, and magazines, but nothing would seem to have banished our not yet empirically demonstrated beliefs that the mass media are more influential than we would sometimes wish." 1.4. Elihu Katz, from "The Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-to-Date Report on an Hypothesis," Public Opinion Quarterly "Given the image of the atomized audience which characterized so much of mass media research, the surprising thing is that interpersonal influence attracted the attention of the researchers at all." <new>1.5. Jonathan Cohen, from "Parasocial Relations and Romantic Attraction: Gender and Dating Status Differences," Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media "One of the ways people integrate media into their social lives is by establishing symbolic, or parasocial, relationships (PSR) with media characters... Much research has advanced our understanding of why and how these relationships develop, but there are mixed results regarding the ways in which PSR relate to social relationships." CHAPTER 2. Functionalism, Uses, and Gratifications 2.1. Charles R. Wright, from Mass Communication: A Sociological Perspective, 3rd ed. "As a social process, communication is essential to society and to human survival. Every human society--so-called primitive or modern--depends on communication to enable its members to live together, to maintain and modify working arrangements about the social order and social regulation, and to cope with the environment. Participation in the communication process establishes a person as a social being and as a functioning member of society." 2.2. Elihu Katz, Jay G. Blumler, and Michael Gurevitch, from "Utilization of Mass Communication by the Individual," in Jay G. Blumler and Elihu Katz, eds., The Uses of Mass Communications "The last few years have witnessed something of a revival of direct empirical investigations of audience uses and gratifications, not only in the United States but also in Britain, Sweden, Finland, Japan, and Israel... Taken together, they make operational many of the logical steps that were only implicit in the earlier work." <new>2.3. Richard C. Vincent and Michael D. Basil, from "College Students' News Gratifications, Media Use, and Current Events Knowledge," Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media "The objective of the current study is to explore patterns of use of news media by college students and the relationship among traditional news gratifications functions." <new>CHAPTER 3. Long-Term Effects: Cultivation 3.1. George Gerbner et al., from "The 'Mainstreaming' of America: Violence Profile No. 11," Journal of Communication "The 'mainstream' can be thought of as a relative commonality of outlooks that television tends to cultivate. By 'mainstreaming' we mean the sharing of that commonality among heavy viewers in those demographic groups whose light viewers hold divergent views." 3.2. Michael Morgan, from "Television and Democracy," in Ian Angus and Sut Jhally, eds., Cultural Politics in Contemporary America "As mass media become more centralized and homogeneous, the cultural currents become narrower, more standardized, and more sharply defined, and mass communication becomes a more effective mechanism of social control." <new>CHAPTER 4. Communication and the Political Process 4.1. Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, from "The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media," Public Opinion Quarterly "While the mass media may have little influence on the direction or intensity of attitudes, it is hypothesized that the mass media set the agenda for each political campaign, influencing the salience of attitudes toward the political issues." <new>4.2. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, from Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising, 3rd ed. "Political advertising is now the major means by which candidates for the presidency communicate their messages to voters." Part 2. The Media of Communication CHAPTER 5. Media Bias and Sense Extension 5.1. Marshall McLuhan, from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man "'The medium is the message' means, in terms of the electronic age, that a totally new environment has been created." 5.2. Neil Postman, from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business "Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it. If television is a continuation of anything, it is of a tradition begun by the telegraph and photograph in the mid-nineteenth century, not by the printing press in the fifteenth." 5.3. Joshua Meyrowitz, from No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior "The homogenized information networks fostered by electronic media offer individuals a comparatively holistic view of society and a wider field within which to measure their relative lot." <new>CHAPTER 6. Regulation and Control <new>6.1. David Easter and Jarice Hanson, from "Deregulation and the Information Society: Assessing the Marketplace Philosophy," in Jarice Hanson, ed., Advances in Telematics, vol. 2 "Since the 1970s, the United States has embraced the theme of deregulation as a means of opening markets for competition while restricting government intervention in business affairs. While the free market philosophy may be better suited to some businesses than others, the attempt to create a deregulated marketplace in telecommunications has caused controversy in Congress, federal agencies, communications industries, and among groups of concerned citizens." <new>6.2. Robert W. McChesney, from Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy "Since 1992 there has been an unprecedented wave of mergers and acquisitions among media giants, highlighted by the Time Warner purchase of Turner and the Disney acquisition of Cap Cities/ABC. Fewer than ten colossal vertically integrated media conglomerates now dominate U.S. media." Part 3. Media as Popular Art <new>CHAPTER 7. Cultural Products <new>7.1. Dwight MacDonald, from "A Theory of Mass Culture," in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, eds., Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America "The historical reasons for the growth of Mass Culture since the early 1800's are well known. Political democracy and popular education broke down the old upper-class monopoly of culture." <new>7.2. John G. Cawelti, from "Popular Culture/Multiculturalism," Journal of Popular Culture "To begin with, popular culture and multiculturalism both claim a more direct relationship with 'the people' than elitist or canonic culture." Part 4. Critical Theory and Mass Media CHAPTER 8. Mass Media, Power, and Ideology 8.1. Herbert I. Schiller, from The Mind Managers "By using myths which explain, justify, and sometimes even glamorize the prevailing conditions of existence, manipulators secure popular support for a social order that is not in the majority's long-term real interest." 8.2. Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, from Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media "Most of the top network sponsors are powerful multinational corporations... They exert tremendous leverage over the media industry because they are its principal source of revenue." CHAPTER 9. Advertising, Media, and Society 9.1. Stuart Ewen, from Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture "Within a society that defined real life in terms of the monotonous insecurities of mass production, advertising attempted to create an alternative organization of life which would serve to channel man's d esires for self, for social success, for leisure away from himself and his works, and toward a commoditized acceptance of 'Civilization.'" 9.2. Dallas W. Smythe, from Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada "Audience power work for Consciousness Industry produces a particular kind of human nature or consciousness, focusing its energies on the consumption of commodities, which Erich Fromm called homo consumens--people who live and work to perpetuate the capitalist system built on the commoditization of life." 9.3. Sut Jhally, from "Image-Based Culture: Advertising and Popular Culture," The World and I "As we head toward the twenty-first century, advertising is ubiquitous--it is the air that we breathe as we live our daily lives." Part 5. Media, Culture, and Society CHAPTER 10. Mass Communication as Cultural Process 10.1. James W. Carey, from Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society "[C]ommunication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed." <new>10.2. Raymond Williams, from Television: Technology and Cultural Form "The most precise and discriminating local study of 'effects' can remain superficial if we have not looked into the notions of cause and effect, as between a technology and a society, a technology and a culture, a technology and a psychology, which underlie our questions and may often determine our answers." CHAPTER 11. Cultural Criticism of Mass Media 11.1. Stanley Aronowitz, from "Working Class Culture in the Electronic Age," in Ian Angus and Sut Jhally, eds., Cultural Politics in Contemporary America "I will show that there are no longer direct representations of the interactions among workers in American television, but that these have been refracted through the police shows that still (in 1988) dominate prime time." <new>11.2. Rosalind Williams, from "The Dream World of Mass Consumption," in Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, eds., Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies "The exposition of 1900 provides a scale model of the consumer revolution. The cultural changes working gradually and diffusely throughout society were there made visible in a concrete and concentrated way." <new>11.3. Reebee Garofalo, from Rockin' Out: Popular Music in the USA "In the eyes of most observers, the emergence of mass culture was accompanied by a subtle but important shift in orientation from a culture of the people to a culture for the masses. In this deceptively simple change there was a profound transformation of meaning." <new>CHAPTER 12. Media, Gender, and Sexual Identity 12.1. Molly Haskell, from From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies "The big lie perpetrated on Western society is the idea of women's inferiority, a lie so deeply ingrained in our social behavior that merely to recognize it is to risk unraveling the entire fabric of civilization." 12.2. Elayne Rapping, from Media-tions: Forays into the Culture and Gender Wars "The reemergence of the strong heroine in the 1970s was not, as is sometimes assumed, a great leap forward, although the 'new woman' was presented differently, reflecting the influence of the newly visible women's movement, the changes in family life brought about by feminism, and changes in the economy and women's place in it." <new>12.3. Larry Gross, from "Out of the Mainstream: Sexual Minorities and the Mass Media," in Ellen Seiter et al., eds., Remote Control: Television, Audiences, and Cultural Power "Sexual minorities differ in important ways from the 'traditional' racial and ethnic minorities; they are, in an interesting sense, akin to political minorities (so-called radicals and 'fringe' groups)." CHAPTER 13. Media and Race <new>13.1. bell hooks, from Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations "Manning Marable warns: 'There is a tendency to drain the radical message of a dynamic, living activist into an abstract icon, to replace radical content with pure image.'" 13.2. Michael Eric Dyson, from Reflecting Black: African-American Cultural Criticism "As it became obvious that rap was here to stay, a permanent fixture in black ghetto youths' musical landscape, the reactions changed from dismissal to denigration, and rap music came under attack from both black and white quarters. Is rap really as dangerous as many critics argue? Or are there redeeming characteristics to rap music that warrant our critical attention?" Part 6. Media and Globalization CHAPTER 14. Perspectives on Development 14.1. Everett M. Rogers, from "Communication and Development: The Passing of the Dominant Paradigm," in Everett M. Rogers, ed., Communication and Development: Critical Perspectives "Theoretical writings about modernization in this period after World War II generally followed an 'individual-blame' logic and may have been overly narrow and ethnocentric in a cultural sense." <new>14.2. J. Martin-Barbero, from Communication, Culture, and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, trans. Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White "The fact that Latin America's access to modernization was through political-economic dependency revealed its processes of 'unequal development,' the basic inequality on which capitalist development rests. This dependency also revealed the contradictions of its 'simultaneous discontinuities' in which Latin America lives and carries out its modernization." <new>CHAPTER 15. The Homogenization of Culture <new>15.1. Anthony Smith, from "Media Globalism in the Age of Consumer Sovereignty," Gannett Center Journal "In many countries today--including some in Central Europe--information media are passing into the hands of non-residents... Whole sections of the entertainment industry, traditionally part of national, city, local, regional, or ethnic political and social life and manners, are passing into the control of managements whose outlook is exclusively global." 15.2. Ali Mohammadi, from "Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Identity," in John Downing, Ali Mohammadi, and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, eds., Questioning the Media: A Critical Introduction, 2d ed. "What was valuable in the traditional culture was defined, effectively, as anything that did not impede the growth of Western capitalist endeavors; what had to change culturally was anything that interfered with this process."