Approximately five hundred years ago a new form of communication arose. This
"mass" communication process, which makes use of permanent text that can be made
available to millions of people at the same time, has quickly become an
important factor in the lives of many human beings.
By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space. - Walter J. Ong For much of human history speech and body language were the only available forms of communication. This changed when writing was developed, probably around the year 3000 BC in the area of the world that we now call the Middle East. The most obvious difference between writing and speech is in their media. Whereas speech is carried by sound waves in the air, writing is usually carried by one substance impressed upon another, as, for example, ink on paper. Even in its simplest form, the invention of writing produced significant changes in human communication.
The next major change came with the discovery of printed text in Europe in the late 1500s. Whereas written documents could only be produced by individuals, one document at a time, printed documents could be mass produced. The phenominon that we now call mass communication dates from the invention of print. Some scholars argue that the next great change occurred in or around 1950 with the discovery of the computer. However, while digital data processing certainly has brought changes to our society, we are perhaps too close to the date of its birth to evaluate it clearly.
Text-using societies tend to be visually oriented, whereas speech-using societies tend to be aurally oriented. Thus, when scholars initiated the study of text, they discovered that communication not only helps shape individual relationships, but it also plays a role in defining the social environment. Those who study communication disagree as to the exact definition of the term, "text." In its broadest sense text is "that which is perceived by the reader," however, this conceivably could be any data that is taken in by the eye, and to many this seems to be too broad a concept. This section of the tutorial will limit the discussion to the narrower definition of text as "print," by which is meant marks made in one substance upon another.
TEXT AND MEANING
As was shown earlier, the Shannon/Weaver Model describes communication as a process that includes a transmitter who initiates the communication, a signal that moves through a medium, a receiver who notices the signal, and noise that may alter the signal.
In terms of this model, text can be seen as being created by the writer and
then moving 
through time and
space until it is encountered by the reader. The medium is light waves, and the
signal is formed as light bounces off of the paper and ink and into the reader's
eyes. While the text is in transit, noise may act to make it less understandable
-- the writing may fade, for example, or pages may be torn or missing.
This is accurate as far as it goes, but it does little to demonstrate how
text relates to meaning. However, it is possible to produce a somewhat different
model that is more amenable to the discussion of meaning.
In this model the reader, the writer 
and the text exist in the world, which is their environment and with
which they interact. The reader and the writer interact directly with the text,
and indirectly with one another by means of the text, which itself becomes a
medium of communication. Thus, reader, writer and text are seen as an
interconnected system.
One way to interpret this model is to imagine that the writer, who has
thoughts to communicate, expresses them by creating a text. The reader and the
writer share a language code, and so when the reader encounters the text, he or
she becomes the receiver of the writer's thoughts.
But this description leads to a number of perplexing questions. For example:
Attempts to answer these and similar questions have produced four basic approaches to explaining the relationship between text and meaning. Not surprisingly, these conflict with one another. As each is examined in turn, keep in mind this question: Which of these is most responsible for the meaning of a text:
when Herman
Melville wrote Moby Dick, he intended for us to read the book and understand his
thinking on the subject.
From this point of view, the focus is on what the writer meant to say, and the reader's task is to discern the author's thoughts. Thus, when we consider what it might mean that the protagonist whale in Moby Dick is colored white, the question we must ask is, "Why did Herman Melville choose to make his whale a white one?" Military orders are an example of a kind of text that is well described by this approach. In a "military order" the intention of the writer is paramount. There is no doubt that he or she intends that a particular meaning be conveyed, and if the reader has any uncertainty of the meaning of the text, that ambiguity must be resolved by attempting to understand what the writer was trying to say. The reader has no leeway for interpreting the text on his or her own.
When the reader encounters such a text, he or she cannot be completely certain as to which of these meanings the writer intended. Further, the reader has led
a life which
contains different experiences that of the writer. Consequently, the reader is
likely to make of the text something other than what the writer might have
expected.
In fact, those who adopt this approach point out that the reader need have no
knowledge of the writer at all. Nor does the reader need to be concerned as to
the writer's intentions. When the reader draws a meaning from the text, then
that meaning is the reader's and the reader's alone.
Anonymous text fits this approach well, but in fact, any text that is read
without knowledge of its author lends itself to the reader-oriented
approach.
For example, consider this quotation:
"And she understood that the hour had come to herself." - The Author
Certainly, this sentence is understandable and will have meaning to most of
its readers, even if the meaning is only "this is a quote from somewhere." But,
with no knowledge of the author, and without the context of the rest of the
document, how can we say that the author's intended meaning comes through? "We
cannot," argue the proponents of the reader-oriented approach -- "meaning is in
the mind of the reader."
This approach is adopted most frequently by those who study sacred texts. These, having been created by a deity, are taken to be composed entirely of truths, and in fact, it is not unusual for such texts to assert this as a primary fact. For example: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. - John 1.1, Harper Study Bible, Revised Standard Version Every Word of God proves true... - Proverbs 30.5, Harper Study Bible, Revised Standard Version And similarly: The basic book of Islam is the Koran. This is believed to be the divine law of God as uttered by Allah himself in revelations to Mohammed, and passed on by the Prophet through word of mouth.... The authority of the Koran is believed by good Moslems to be absolute. It is without any question the most influential, and the most widely read book in all Arabic literature, and probably the most faithfully read scripture in the world. - The Portable World Bible, ed. Roberto Ballou, Penguin Books, 1986. If a text is taken in and of itself to contain the truth, then neither the intentions of its human writers nor the interpretations of its readers are relevant. The meaning is in the text, and if two readers disagree, then they must consult the text further in attempting to resolve the disagreement. There is no other authority. A telephone directory is a good example of a text that lends itself to this approach. A book that contains only names and phone numbers, and assuming that there are no errors, contains only the truth. As readers, we consult the book and take what it says as fact.
Text As EnvironmentAlthough each of the previous approaches works well for some varieties of text, none of them works entirely well for all text. In fact, most of the text that we encounter was written by someone who intended to say something; most readers extract meanings that the writer did not intend; most text contains some truth. Given this, scholars continue to argue as to which of the three approaches is the most effective.
A fourth approach attempts to resolve this dilemma by considering text as part of the human social environment. According to this approach, each author adds to the "communication environment," and each reader takes meanings from it. When considered from this point of view, the text is not separate from the world, but is part of it. Writers and readers, who are also part of the world, participate in the "textual experience."
As an example, consider the text called a "newspaper." Because many writers and editors contribute to each edition, there is no way to identify a single "author." As readers read the paper, they compare what they read to their experience in the world, and they discuss what they read with other readers. The meanings that readers take from the newspapers become the raw material of other texts, including such as the television and radio news of the day, and the next day's newspapers. The text of the newspaper is stored in libraries and other archives where it can be referenced at any time. Thus, the text becomes part of the fabric of the life of a society. This goes deeper than the simple thought that "everyone reads more or less the same text." Because the codes by which humans communicate are shared by all members of the society, they, too, are part of the communication environment. This means that the texts, the people, the interpretations, and the rules that govern the interpretations are all mutually interactive. For example, we might again consider the quote that was presented earlier: And she understood that the hour had come to herself. While readers may have no knowledge of the author of this quotation, they are not completely free to interpret the text however they might wish. The language codes that constrain the interpretation insist that the person referenced in the sentence be identified as female; that she be seen as thinking about her personal situation; and that her thoughts be considered as having something to do with time. In the same way that readers of this tutorial will share these particular meanings, all members of any particular society share a tremendously rich environment of other meanings which derive from their common codes and their common reservoirs of text. The fourth, or cultural approach points out that these resources are applied in different ways at different times. Sometimes humans express their intention as authors, sometimes they develop unique connotations as readers, sometimes they search for eternal truths. Thus, the common ground of text is found in the two complementary faces of human communication: the society and the self.
DATA AS TEXT
An even broader definition of the term "text" arises from considering the maxim that "you can't not communicate." An the words of Anthony Wilden:
Let it be emphasized that the communication of information does not necessarily imply the use of language, nor consciously perceived sending or receiving, nor consciously intended communication, nor consciously noted understanding. As already noted, every act, every pause, every movement in living and social systems is also a message; silence is communication; short of death it is impossible for an organism or a person not to communicate.Wilden 124 Thus, those who accept the existence of the communication environment, are driven to conclude that any source of information might be considered as text. For example, natural phenomena can be "read" -- a red sunset tells the watcher that it might rain tomorrow, flocks of geese flying south indicate that winter is near, and so on. In terms of this approach, scholars may view the physical world as a large, complex text which communicates a part of reality to its human readers. This notion is similar to the text-oriented approach that was described above -- the world is a text whose meaning is "true," and as observers, humans must try to puzzle out its meaning.
THE MASS MEDIA
Mass communication media make it possible to deliver messages to millions of people at roughly the same time. The authors of these messages are usually organizations, and the audiences are composed of individuals.
The telephone: speech without walls.
Face-to-face communication occurs on many channels, with many opportunities to send and receive messages, and with much complexity in the communication process.
Yet, the situation becomes even more complex when the many media organizations with their production and distribution of millions of messages are considered. Media may be received by millions of people, all of whom are also engaged in face-to-face communication. The intersection of these two types of communication makes for a picture that must include all communicators and their interactions with one another.
The individual parts of this model will be described in more detail. The parts include:
Scholars tend to identify the various mass media by their distribution channels. Books, newspapers, and magazines are often called the "print media," while radio and television are often called the "electronic" or "broadcast" media. Two other electronic channels of distribution are also recognized as very important: "electronic recorded" media which include such as CDs, cassette tapes, video tapes, and the like -- these are electronic in nature but are sold and delivered much in the same way as books -- and "film" or "movies" which are similar to television but which are delivered in special buildings called "theaters."
Telephones are electronic media, but telephones have not traditionally been included in the "mass media" because telephones are used mainly in person-to-person communication. Similarly, computers, especially large computer networks, have the potential to be used as mass communication media, however, these are so new that their uses are still developing. Although they have no true category as yet, computers are sometimes referred to as the "new" media. The following chart illustrates the most common way of organizing the distribution channels of the mass media. As was noted above, telephones and computer networks have been omitted because at the present time they are mostly used as person-to-person, rather than mass, media, and some channels that might have been included -- posters, flyers, memoranda, filmstrips, slide shows, and video games, for example -- have been omitted not because they are unimportant, but because they are not as widely studied as the primary media.
A mass medium's distribution channel "aims" a "flow" of messages in the direction of a particular audience. The next two sections will discuss two important aspects of this media "flow.
In order to receive messages from a particular mass communication medium, an audience member must be able to "connect up" to the reception end of the channel. For example, television is not available to people who do not own television sets; CDs are useless to people who do not own CD players, and so on. The extent to which an potential audience is able to make use of a mass medium is called its availability.
Availability includes more than equipment. Language also plays a role, as does geographic location and economic class. A radio broadcast in Spanish, for example, is only available to those who speak Spanish. Similarly, printed media are only available to those who are able to read, and cable television will not be available to those who cannot afford the monthly fee. Media access refers to the ability of members of the society to make use of a particular medium to send messages of their own. Print media is relatively more accessible than broadcast media. For example, anyone who can write can, at relatively little expense, print up and distribute a flyer or newsletter. Access to television and radio broadcast channels, however, is tightly regulated by the government. Even when a channel is provided, as with public access cable television, it is much more difficult and expensive to produce video than to produce print. Newspapers and magazines traditionally provide public access by means of "letters to the editor" or "editorial pages." Television and radio news do not traditionally offer this kind of access. In recent times, however, radio and television shows featuring listener and viewer "call-ins" have become popular, and this provides access to a large number of people. Access and availability have become increasingly important with the advent of cable television and the new computer networked media. We might argue that our society's decision to require all children to attend school and learn to read has the effect of making the important documents of our society available to them. Similarly, our society's insistence that everyone learn to write and our belief in "freedom of the press" encourages citizens to access the print media. As the electronic media have begun to replace the print media as the major channels for public information, critics have begun to question whether this societal availability and access will be continued. Government control of the broadcast channels limits access to these media to large corporations, and cable television is available only to those who are able to afford the relatively high cost of connection. These issues are now being widely debated in the United States.
AUDIENCES
An audience is a group of people who are receiving or have received a particular mass communication message. In some cases all members of the audience are paying attention to the medium at the same time -- as, for example, the television audience that tuned in just after the space shuttle Challenger exploded. In other cases, however, the attention of the audience is spread out over time -- the audience for a particular magazine, for example, may consist of people who read copies of the magazine at various times over the period of a month or more. And, in some cases, the attention of the audience may be spread over a very long period of time. The audience for Shakespeare's plays, for example, is very large and hundreds of years in duration. In the early days of mass communication research, the audience was believed to be very passive and innocent. It was supposed that members of the audience believed whatever they read in the newspapers or heard on the radio. As studies of the relationship between the audience and the mass communication organizations have progressed, the researchers' view of the audience has changed. Nowadays, the audience is believed to be active and sophisticated. That is, the audience chooses the media that it attends to, and the audience is critical of the messages that are delivered to it by the media.
The Magic BulletThe earliest theories of mass communication imagined that mass media had very strong effects on their audiences. The Shannon/Weaver model illustrates how these theories saw the media message as a kind of "magic bullet." Sent out by the organization, the magic bullets "hit" the members of the audience in their "minds" and changed their thoughts.
One of the first pieces of evidence that the Magic Bullet Theory was too
simplistic came to light during research that was conducted in the wake of Orson
Welles' famous Mercury Theatre of the Air "Martian invasion" radio broadcast in
1938. According to the theory, anyone who listened
to the broadcast should have believed that invaders from the planet Mars had
landed in southern New Jersey. Yet, although some did believe it, most did not,
and the ways in which they came to not believe were very interesting.
Some listeners switched channels to see if the news was being carried elsewhere; some picked up the phone and called friends to see if they were listening and if so, to ask what they thought about it; some paid enough critical attention to the show to recognize that it was fiction. It was clear from these responses that most people did not accept the media message at face value. Rather, they took it under consideration and gave it meaning by comparing it to their prior experiences, and in many cases by talking it over with their families and friends.
Jeremy Campbell summarizes this result: The bullet theory assumed that an audience was passive, waiting for the media to shoot a propaganda message into it, and would roll over in a state of docile surrender when hit, as long as the bullet was sufficiently powerful. Accordingly, researchers did not bother to study the audience. Instead, they analyzed the content of the messages, assuming that content was the secret of a successful propaganda bullet. However, the researchers were due for a surprise. The audience obstinately declined to fall under the spell of the messages. Sometimes they reacted in ways that were opposite to the propagandist's intentions, or enjoyed the bombardment without allowing it to change their opinions in the slightest. - Campbell, 197 Once the Magic Bullet Theory was seen to be false, researchers began to propose alternative theories and design experiments to test them out. This led to the creation of new research methods, and to a sizable growth in the study of mass communication.
Interpersonal DiffusionStudies that followed the "Martian Invasion" broadcast began to focus on the fact that members of the audience also engaged in face-to-face communications with family, friends and coworkers.
Theorists hypothesized that certain members of the audience, called "opinion
leaders," would be more influential than other members. In theory the opinion
leaders would make up their minds as to what the media messages meant and then
tell their friends and neighbors.
Research studies conducted to test this hypothesis did find that certain
members of the audience were opinion leaders. However, different members were
the opinion leaders on different subjects. Because of this, it was (and
continues to be) very difficult to find a simple explanation for the spread, or
diffusion, of the content of media messages through a society.
Another finding that contributed to the difficulty of explaining diffusion
came from the study of rumors. Researchers found that the accuracy of a
statement spread by word-of-mouth decreases very rapidly as it travels through a
population. Thus, it is hard to see how messages sent to opinion leaders via the
mass media could be passed on with any accuracy.
These studies resulted in the conclusion that face-to-face communication is
much more important to the process whereby people form and change their opinions
than the content of mass media messages
.
Uses and GratificationsOne current approach to mass communication studies argues that because mass media products are highly available in American society, its audiences tend to "use" it much as they would use any other product or service.
The appearance of this approach marks an important change in the way media
researchers think about the audience. Previously, they saw the audience as
passive -- made up of people who simply accepted whatever was put in
front of them. In these models the audience was a captive of the media
organizations.
In the uses and gratifications approach the audience is active.
Audience members are seen as consumers of a media product, and as with consumers
of other goods and services, they shop around, consider alternatives, and make
choices.
The earlier approaches assumed that the content of the media must be having
some kind of an effect on the audience members, and researchers spent
their time trying to locate and measure those effects. However, few substantial
effects were ever found, perhaps because the model for the audience was too
simplistic.
The uses and gratifications approach seems to provide a richer way of looking
at the audience. Instead of asking, "how does the media change our minds?" the
uses and gratifications researchers ask "what is the role of media in our
lives?"
Here are some examples of the uses to which the media are put:
For example, the author of a book, may produce the initial set of words, but an editor (or editors) will review and alter those words, designers and graphics specialists will choose type faces, create illustrations and organize the format of the text, production specialists will manufacture the book, and marketing and sales specialists will oversee its distribution. Although it is traditional to assign "authorship" to the person who wrote the original text, all of these people play a part in the communication process. Electronic media are even more complexly organized. In a television production, for example, there will be one or more scriptwriters, a number of actors, a producer, a director, camera operators and other technical crew, and a host of others. A television show is truly a group project, with no single "author." Yet, to say that mass communication is produced by an organization is not to say that it is random or "neutral" in terms of the ideas and opinions that are expressed. Readers encounter "liberal" and "conservative" newspapers, for example, or religiously-oriented television programming, or politically-oriented music. Thus, a discussion of mass communication must investigate the nature of the organizations that produce it, and it must also investigate the social, political and economic relationships that might exist among the media organizations and their audiences. With the recognition of the active audience has come the realization that the content of the mass media is actually a product. No less than soap or breakfast cereal or automobiles, mass communication is produced and distributed for human consumption. This means, of course, that the mass media organizations have something to sell, and that the audiences are their customers. Thus, one approach to the study of mass communication is to focus on the economics of media production. Consider, for example, this outline of the economics of commercial television.
Notice that the members of the audience buy products from corporations. The remainder of the system has to do with distributing some of that revenue for the purpose of bring the corporations' products to the attention of the audience. GatekeepingThe media product passes through many levels of organizational processing on its way to the audience, and at each step in the process, the original data is filtered -- reduced in length, edited for style, censored, and so on. Each step in the process can be thought of as a gate through which the data must pass on its way to the consumer, consequently this situation is known as gatekeeping.
Suppose, for example, that a network television news team is sent to the midwestern United States to cover the heavy rains and flooding that are occurring there. The gatekeeping on this story begins with the observation of the event by the news team. The flood may extend over hundreds of square miles and affect the lives of millions of people, but the team will have time to record only a very small portion of this. Let us say that the team decides to focus on damage being done to the corn crop. This decision filters the available data by including data relating to the corn crop and excluding data relating to other crops and other types of damage.
Within the news organization many people will contribute to the production of this "story." Editors will select the bits of video to be used in the final presentation; writers will create a script for the commentator to read; graphic artists will create titles, maps, animations and other video enhancements; musicians may create a musical score for the piece and so on. Other editors will decide which evening the story will "run," and where the story will come in the sequence of stories, advertisements, and other material running that night. An anchorperson will introduce the story and various technicians will insure that it gets "on the air." During its stay in the flood zone, the news team may have shot hours of video tape, gathered many facts and interviewed many people. Yet the story as broadcast, if it is broadcast at all, will be only minutes in length. And, each gatekeeper will have had an effect on the content and style of the story. Each person will have added to or subtracted from the original data, and in his or her own way each person will have helped to formulate this particular communication product. Agenda SettingThe failure of the "Magic Bullet" theory left mass communication researchers with a puzzle. On the one hand, studies continued to find little reason to believe that mass communication was able to change people's opinions and beliefs. On the other hand, mass communication plays such a large role in the day-to-day lives of industrial societies that it seemed that it must have some kind of large impact on what people think.
In recent decades media researchers have been able to demonstrate an indirect, but nonetheless powerful, connection between what the news media presents and what people think. This connection has been dubbed agenda setting. In investigating the relationship between the top stories in the news and "what people are talking about," communication researchers found that stories tend to appear in the news somewhat prior to their becoming widely discussed among the public at large. The conclusion we might draw from this is that the media tend to set the "agenda" -- the list of items that people will be discussing. Thus, the power of the media may lie not in its ability to sway people's opinions, but rather in its role of determining what issues will be considered important enough to discuss.
Agenda setting connects the constant use of the media in our society with the results of studies that show that most people form their opinions and beliefs based on face-to-face communication with others. It has become a widely accepted theory of mass communication. CONTENTThe term "content" refers to the message that is distributed by the mass media organization by means of the mass communication channel. In American television, for example, the content includes such as entertainment, advertisements, station-breaks, news, and "infomercials."
These categories of content may be further divided. Entertainment, for example, might be divided into "genres" such as situation comedies, detective shows, soap operas, sports, and so on. The content of each medium is subject to analysis and criticism by its readers. "Literary criticism," "film criticism," and "television criticism" are all well established fields of academic study, and some members of mass media organizations make their livings by publishing their critical views. Because most readers will have been exposed to literary criticism in school, and because many critiques of film and television content are widely available, the topic will not be pursued further in this tutorial. SOCIAL INSTITUTIONSTypically, mass communication operates as a "one way street" -- messages flow from the media organizations to their audiences in a way that allows for very little immediate feedback. However, because those who work in media organizations are themselves a part of the society within which their audiences exist, there is a path by which audience response to mass communication messages can feed back to the producers of the messages.
For example, the person who edits a newspaper story may be in the audience of a radio broadcast. The radio technician may be in the television audience. The television producer may read the newspaper. And, all of these people may talk to one another about what they have watched and heard and read. Thus, "mass communication" and "interpersonal communication" seem to merge into one another. The next section of tutorial takes up the discussion of this situation.
By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space. - Walter J. Ong For much of human history speech and body language were the only available forms of communication. This changed when writing was developed, probably around the year 3000 BC in the area of the world that we now call the Middle East. The most obvious difference between writing and speech is in their media. Whereas speech is carried by sound waves in the air, writing is usually carried by one substance impressed upon another, as, for example, ink on paper. Even in its simplest form, the invention of writing produced significant changes in human communication.
The next major change came with the discovery of printed text in Europe in the late 1500s. Whereas written documents could only be produced by individuals, one document at a time, printed documents could be mass produced. The phenominon that we now call mass communication dates from the invention of print. Some scholars argue that the next great change occurred in or around 1950 with the discovery of the computer. However, while digital data processing certainly has brought changes to our society, we are perhaps too close to the date of its birth to evaluate it clearly.
TEXT
The fact that writing remains in existence long after it has been created is
so remarkable that we give a special name, text, to the visible remains.
Humans receive textual messages via their eyes. It has been argued that this
visual aspect of text is important in and of itself because it shapes the way
human beings pay attention to their environment, and this shapes the way that
they think about themselves.
Text-using societies tend to be visually oriented, whereas speech-using societies tend to be aurally oriented. Thus, when scholars initiated the study of text, they discovered that communication not only helps shape individual relationships, but it also plays a role in defining the social environment. Those who study communication disagree as to the exact definition of the term, "text." In its broadest sense text is "that which is perceived by the reader," however, this conceivably could be any data that is taken in by the eye, and to many this seems to be too broad a concept. This section of the tutorial will limit the discussion to the narrower definition of text as "print," by which is meant marks made in one substance upon another.
TEXT AND MEANING
As was shown earlier, the Shannon/Weaver Model describes communication as a process that includes a transmitter who initiates the communication, a signal that moves through a medium, a receiver who notices the signal, and noise that may alter the signal.
The Shannon/Weaver Model
through time and
space until it is encountered by the reader. The medium is light waves, and the
signal is formed as light bounces off of the paper and ink and into the reader's
eyes. While the text is in transit, noise may act to make it less understandable
-- the writing may fade, for example, or pages may be torn or missing.
This is accurate as far as it goes, but it does little to demonstrate how
text relates to meaning. However, it is possible to produce a somewhat different
model that is more amenable to the discussion of meaning.
In this model the reader, the writer and the text exist in the world, which is their environment and with
which they interact. The reader and the writer interact directly with the text,
and indirectly with one another by means of the text, which itself becomes a
medium of communication. Thus, reader, writer and text are seen as an
interconnected system.
One way to interpret this model is to imagine that the writer, who has
thoughts to communicate, expresses them by creating a text. The reader and the
writer share a language code, and so when the reader encounters the text, he or
she becomes the receiver of the writer's thoughts.
But this description leads to a number of perplexing questions. For example:
- What if the writer is dead? Can a dead individual somehow be said to be
communicating with the living?
- There are many examples of anonymous text? Who, exactly, is the writer in
these cases?
- What if the code is only partially known to the reader, and he or she misunderstands the text? Is communication meaningful if it is based on mistakes and errors?
Attempts to answer these and similar questions have produced four basic approaches to explaining the relationship between text and meaning. Not surprisingly, these conflict with one another. As each is examined in turn, keep in mind this question: Which of these is most responsible for the meaning of a text:
- the writer's intention,
- the reader's interpretation,
- the text itself, or
- the society in which the reader and writer live?
The Writer's Intention
Perhaps the most familiar approach takes the point of view that the writer of the text, who is often called the author, created the text with the intention of communicating meaningfully with the reader. This is the approach that many of us encountered in our high school literature classes where we were taught, for example, that when Herman
Melville wrote Moby Dick, he intended for us to read the book and understand his
thinking on the subject.
From this point of view, the focus is on what the writer meant to say, and the reader's task is to discern the author's thoughts. Thus, when we consider what it might mean that the protagonist whale in Moby Dick is colored white, the question we must ask is, "Why did Herman Melville choose to make his whale a white one?" Military orders are an example of a kind of text that is well described by this approach. In a "military order" the intention of the writer is paramount. There is no doubt that he or she intends that a particular meaning be conveyed, and if the reader has any uncertainty of the meaning of the text, that ambiguity must be resolved by attempting to understand what the writer was trying to say. The reader has no leeway for interpreting the text on his or her own.
The Reader's Interpretation
Text is composed of symbols, and as ws discussed in an earlier section of this tutorial, the transmission of symbolic messages requires that the sender and receiver share a code by which the sender encodes and the receiver decodes the message. In military orders this code is very narrow -- the words "attack" and "withdraw," for example, have very specific meanings -- in order to insure that the sender will not be misunderstood. But the codes used in literature, and the texts of everyday life such as newspapers and magazines, are very broad and ambiguous, with many words having more than one possible meaning.When the reader encounters such a text, he or she cannot be completely certain as to which of these meanings the writer intended. Further, the reader has led
a life which
contains different experiences that of the writer. Consequently, the reader is
likely to make of the text something other than what the writer might have
expected.
In fact, those who adopt this approach point out that the reader need have no
knowledge of the writer at all. Nor does the reader need to be concerned as to
the writer's intentions. When the reader draws a meaning from the text, then
that meaning is the reader's and the reader's alone.
Anonymous text fits this approach well, but in fact, any text that is read
without knowledge of its author lends itself to the reader-oriented
approach.
For example, consider this quotation:
"And she understood that the hour had come to herself." - The Author
Certainly, this sentence is understandable and will have meaning to most of
its readers, even if the meaning is only "this is a quote from somewhere." But,
with no knowledge of the author, and without the context of the rest of the
document, how can we say that the author's intended meaning comes through? "We
cannot," argue the proponents of the reader-oriented approach -- "meaning is in
the mind of the reader."3: The Text Itself
The text-centered approach argues that because the text was brought into the world by a writer who lived in the world, the text must contain essential truths about the world. As these truths are permanently embedded in the text, the reader, who is also living in the world, ought, with sufficient effort, to be able to discern them.This approach is adopted most frequently by those who study sacred texts. These, having been created by a deity, are taken to be composed entirely of truths, and in fact, it is not unusual for such texts to assert this as a primary fact. For example: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. - John 1.1, Harper Study Bible, Revised Standard Version Every Word of God proves true... - Proverbs 30.5, Harper Study Bible, Revised Standard Version And similarly: The basic book of Islam is the Koran. This is believed to be the divine law of God as uttered by Allah himself in revelations to Mohammed, and passed on by the Prophet through word of mouth.... The authority of the Koran is believed by good Moslems to be absolute. It is without any question the most influential, and the most widely read book in all Arabic literature, and probably the most faithfully read scripture in the world. - The Portable World Bible, ed. Roberto Ballou, Penguin Books, 1986. If a text is taken in and of itself to contain the truth, then neither the intentions of its human writers nor the interpretations of its readers are relevant. The meaning is in the text, and if two readers disagree, then they must consult the text further in attempting to resolve the disagreement. There is no other authority. A telephone directory is a good example of a text that lends itself to this approach. A book that contains only names and phone numbers, and assuming that there are no errors, contains only the truth. As readers, we consult the book and take what it says as fact.
Text As EnvironmentAlthough each of the previous approaches works well for some varieties of text, none of them works entirely well for all text. In fact, most of the text that we encounter was written by someone who intended to say something; most readers extract meanings that the writer did not intend; most text contains some truth. Given this, scholars continue to argue as to which of the three approaches is the most effective.
A fourth approach attempts to resolve this dilemma by considering text as part of the human social environment. According to this approach, each author adds to the "communication environment," and each reader takes meanings from it. When considered from this point of view, the text is not separate from the world, but is part of it. Writers and readers, who are also part of the world, participate in the "textual experience."
As an example, consider the text called a "newspaper." Because many writers and editors contribute to each edition, there is no way to identify a single "author." As readers read the paper, they compare what they read to their experience in the world, and they discuss what they read with other readers. The meanings that readers take from the newspapers become the raw material of other texts, including such as the television and radio news of the day, and the next day's newspapers. The text of the newspaper is stored in libraries and other archives where it can be referenced at any time. Thus, the text becomes part of the fabric of the life of a society. This goes deeper than the simple thought that "everyone reads more or less the same text." Because the codes by which humans communicate are shared by all members of the society, they, too, are part of the communication environment. This means that the texts, the people, the interpretations, and the rules that govern the interpretations are all mutually interactive. For example, we might again consider the quote that was presented earlier: And she understood that the hour had come to herself. While readers may have no knowledge of the author of this quotation, they are not completely free to interpret the text however they might wish. The language codes that constrain the interpretation insist that the person referenced in the sentence be identified as female; that she be seen as thinking about her personal situation; and that her thoughts be considered as having something to do with time. In the same way that readers of this tutorial will share these particular meanings, all members of any particular society share a tremendously rich environment of other meanings which derive from their common codes and their common reservoirs of text. The fourth, or cultural approach points out that these resources are applied in different ways at different times. Sometimes humans express their intention as authors, sometimes they develop unique connotations as readers, sometimes they search for eternal truths. Thus, the common ground of text is found in the two complementary faces of human communication: the society and the self.
DATA AS TEXT
An even broader definition of the term "text" arises from considering the maxim that "you can't not communicate." An the words of Anthony Wilden:
Let it be emphasized that the communication of information does not necessarily imply the use of language, nor consciously perceived sending or receiving, nor consciously intended communication, nor consciously noted understanding. As already noted, every act, every pause, every movement in living and social systems is also a message; silence is communication; short of death it is impossible for an organism or a person not to communicate.Wilden 124 Thus, those who accept the existence of the communication environment, are driven to conclude that any source of information might be considered as text. For example, natural phenomena can be "read" -- a red sunset tells the watcher that it might rain tomorrow, flocks of geese flying south indicate that winter is near, and so on. In terms of this approach, scholars may view the physical world as a large, complex text which communicates a part of reality to its human readers. This notion is similar to the text-oriented approach that was described above -- the world is a text whose meaning is "true," and as observers, humans must try to puzzle out its meaning.
THE MASS MEDIA
Mass communication media make it possible to deliver messages to millions of people at roughly the same time. The authors of these messages are usually organizations, and the audiences are composed of individuals.
The telephone: speech without walls.
The phonograph: music
without walls.
The photograph: museum without walls.
The electric light:
space without walls.
The movie, radio and TV: classroom without walls.
-
McLuhan,
248
The development and widespread use of printed text in Europe in the1500s
produced a brand new form of communication. For the first time a single message
could be duplicated with little error and distributed to thousands of people.
First used to propagate religious texts and arguments, this "mass" approach to
communication quickly caught on and was soon being used to distribute news,
entertainment, and government regulations.
From these first primitive pamphlets, the "mass media," as they are often
called, have grown to include the print media of books, newspapers and
magazines, the electronic media of television, radio, and audio/video
recording, and the new media of computers and computer networks. While
these media differ in many ways, they all share the characteristics by which
scholars define mass communication:
- Mass communication messages are produced by organizations.
- The medium for these messages permits accurate duplication.
- The messages are distributed to large audiences at roughly the same time.
Face-to-face communication occurs on many channels, with many opportunities to send and receive messages, and with much complexity in the communication process.
Yet, the situation becomes even more complex when the many media organizations with their production and distribution of millions of messages are considered. Media may be received by millions of people, all of whom are also engaged in face-to-face communication. The intersection of these two types of communication makes for a picture that must include all communicators and their interactions with one another.
Overview of Mass Communication
The individual parts of this model will be described in more detail. The parts include:
- Channels Of Distribution
- Audiences
- Mass Media Organizations
- Other Organizations And Social Institutions
- Content
Scholars tend to identify the various mass media by their distribution channels. Books, newspapers, and magazines are often called the "print media," while radio and television are often called the "electronic" or "broadcast" media. Two other electronic channels of distribution are also recognized as very important: "electronic recorded" media which include such as CDs, cassette tapes, video tapes, and the like -- these are electronic in nature but are sold and delivered much in the same way as books -- and "film" or "movies" which are similar to television but which are delivered in special buildings called "theaters."
Telephones are electronic media, but telephones have not traditionally been included in the "mass media" because telephones are used mainly in person-to-person communication. Similarly, computers, especially large computer networks, have the potential to be used as mass communication media, however, these are so new that their uses are still developing. Although they have no true category as yet, computers are sometimes referred to as the "new" media. The following chart illustrates the most common way of organizing the distribution channels of the mass media. As was noted above, telephones and computer networks have been omitted because at the present time they are mostly used as person-to-person, rather than mass, media, and some channels that might have been included -- posters, flyers, memoranda, filmstrips, slide shows, and video games, for example -- have been omitted not because they are unimportant, but because they are not as widely studied as the primary media.
| BOOKS |
RADIO |
| NEWSPAPERS |
TELEVISION |
| MAGAZINES |
FILM |
| DIRECT MAIL |
TAPE AND DISC RECORDINGS |
A mass medium's distribution channel "aims" a "flow" of messages in the direction of a particular audience. The next two sections will discuss two important aspects of this media "flow.
- Target Audiences
Some media are best fitted to an audience that consists of individuals, each of whom is more or less alone when the message arrives. Other media are better fitted to an audience that gathers in groups. Books, newspapers, magazines and direct mail are usually read by individuals. Film, on the other hand, is shown in theaters which gather audiences together in fairly large groups. Radio, television, and recordings are often delivered in group settings, but these groups are usually smaller than those who attend the showing of a film, and the three are also often used by individuals. The relationship between the target audience and the delivery medium are especially important to commercial media organizations because they must compute the cost and effectiveness of their media products. In the case of print media, for example, the price of each book, newspaper or magazine plays a part in a person's decision to join or not join the audience. Although many people like to read books, for example, it was only when inexpensive "paperback" books became available that the audience jumped to its present size. Media organizations that use advertising to offset their costs must pay particular attention to their target audiences because their advertisers are often interested in presenting their ads to particular groups of people. For example, the recent trend in magazine publication has been towards an increase in the number of different magazines each of which appeals to a narrow audience that is desirable to a particular set of advertisers.
In order to receive messages from a particular mass communication medium, an audience member must be able to "connect up" to the reception end of the channel. For example, television is not available to people who do not own television sets; CDs are useless to people who do not own CD players, and so on. The extent to which an potential audience is able to make use of a mass medium is called its availability.
Availability includes more than equipment. Language also plays a role, as does geographic location and economic class. A radio broadcast in Spanish, for example, is only available to those who speak Spanish. Similarly, printed media are only available to those who are able to read, and cable television will not be available to those who cannot afford the monthly fee. Media access refers to the ability of members of the society to make use of a particular medium to send messages of their own. Print media is relatively more accessible than broadcast media. For example, anyone who can write can, at relatively little expense, print up and distribute a flyer or newsletter. Access to television and radio broadcast channels, however, is tightly regulated by the government. Even when a channel is provided, as with public access cable television, it is much more difficult and expensive to produce video than to produce print. Newspapers and magazines traditionally provide public access by means of "letters to the editor" or "editorial pages." Television and radio news do not traditionally offer this kind of access. In recent times, however, radio and television shows featuring listener and viewer "call-ins" have become popular, and this provides access to a large number of people. Access and availability have become increasingly important with the advent of cable television and the new computer networked media. We might argue that our society's decision to require all children to attend school and learn to read has the effect of making the important documents of our society available to them. Similarly, our society's insistence that everyone learn to write and our belief in "freedom of the press" encourages citizens to access the print media. As the electronic media have begun to replace the print media as the major channels for public information, critics have begun to question whether this societal availability and access will be continued. Government control of the broadcast channels limits access to these media to large corporations, and cable television is available only to those who are able to afford the relatively high cost of connection. These issues are now being widely debated in the United States.
AUDIENCES
An audience is a group of people who are receiving or have received a particular mass communication message. In some cases all members of the audience are paying attention to the medium at the same time -- as, for example, the television audience that tuned in just after the space shuttle Challenger exploded. In other cases, however, the attention of the audience is spread out over time -- the audience for a particular magazine, for example, may consist of people who read copies of the magazine at various times over the period of a month or more. And, in some cases, the attention of the audience may be spread over a very long period of time. The audience for Shakespeare's plays, for example, is very large and hundreds of years in duration. In the early days of mass communication research, the audience was believed to be very passive and innocent. It was supposed that members of the audience believed whatever they read in the newspapers or heard on the radio. As studies of the relationship between the audience and the mass communication organizations have progressed, the researchers' view of the audience has changed. Nowadays, the audience is believed to be active and sophisticated. That is, the audience chooses the media that it attends to, and the audience is critical of the messages that are delivered to it by the media.
The Magic BulletThe earliest theories of mass communication imagined that mass media had very strong effects on their audiences. The Shannon/Weaver model illustrates how these theories saw the media message as a kind of "magic bullet." Sent out by the organization, the magic bullets "hit" the members of the audience in their "minds" and changed their thoughts.
Some listeners switched channels to see if the news was being carried elsewhere; some picked up the phone and called friends to see if they were listening and if so, to ask what they thought about it; some paid enough critical attention to the show to recognize that it was fiction. It was clear from these responses that most people did not accept the media message at face value. Rather, they took it under consideration and gave it meaning by comparing it to their prior experiences, and in many cases by talking it over with their families and friends.
Jeremy Campbell summarizes this result: The bullet theory assumed that an audience was passive, waiting for the media to shoot a propaganda message into it, and would roll over in a state of docile surrender when hit, as long as the bullet was sufficiently powerful. Accordingly, researchers did not bother to study the audience. Instead, they analyzed the content of the messages, assuming that content was the secret of a successful propaganda bullet. However, the researchers were due for a surprise. The audience obstinately declined to fall under the spell of the messages. Sometimes they reacted in ways that were opposite to the propagandist's intentions, or enjoyed the bombardment without allowing it to change their opinions in the slightest. - Campbell, 197 Once the Magic Bullet Theory was seen to be false, researchers began to propose alternative theories and design experiments to test them out. This led to the creation of new research methods, and to a sizable growth in the study of mass communication.
Interpersonal DiffusionStudies that followed the "Martian Invasion" broadcast began to focus on the fact that members of the audience also engaged in face-to-face communications with family, friends and coworkers.
.
Uses and GratificationsOne current approach to mass communication studies argues that because mass media products are highly available in American society, its audiences tend to "use" it much as they would use any other product or service.
- Getting the "news"
- Getting information about available products and services
- Starting the day in the morning or ending it at night
- Establishing common topics to talk about with friends
- Creating a substitute for having friends
- Providing a way to feel connected to other members of the audience
- Providing a way to escape from the day's problems and worries
- Hearing someone else support our own values and opinions.
MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS
In face-to-face communication the participants are easily identified -- the same is not true for mass communication. The mass media message is created by a team of people, and it is sometimes difficult to establish exactly who is responsible for what.For example, the author of a book, may produce the initial set of words, but an editor (or editors) will review and alter those words, designers and graphics specialists will choose type faces, create illustrations and organize the format of the text, production specialists will manufacture the book, and marketing and sales specialists will oversee its distribution. Although it is traditional to assign "authorship" to the person who wrote the original text, all of these people play a part in the communication process. Electronic media are even more complexly organized. In a television production, for example, there will be one or more scriptwriters, a number of actors, a producer, a director, camera operators and other technical crew, and a host of others. A television show is truly a group project, with no single "author." Yet, to say that mass communication is produced by an organization is not to say that it is random or "neutral" in terms of the ideas and opinions that are expressed. Readers encounter "liberal" and "conservative" newspapers, for example, or religiously-oriented television programming, or politically-oriented music. Thus, a discussion of mass communication must investigate the nature of the organizations that produce it, and it must also investigate the social, political and economic relationships that might exist among the media organizations and their audiences. With the recognition of the active audience has come the realization that the content of the mass media is actually a product. No less than soap or breakfast cereal or automobiles, mass communication is produced and distributed for human consumption. This means, of course, that the mass media organizations have something to sell, and that the audiences are their customers. Thus, one approach to the study of mass communication is to focus on the economics of media production. Consider, for example, this outline of the economics of commercial television.
Notice that the members of the audience buy products from corporations. The remainder of the system has to do with distributing some of that revenue for the purpose of bring the corporations' products to the attention of the audience. GatekeepingThe media product passes through many levels of organizational processing on its way to the audience, and at each step in the process, the original data is filtered -- reduced in length, edited for style, censored, and so on. Each step in the process can be thought of as a gate through which the data must pass on its way to the consumer, consequently this situation is known as gatekeeping.
Suppose, for example, that a network television news team is sent to the midwestern United States to cover the heavy rains and flooding that are occurring there. The gatekeeping on this story begins with the observation of the event by the news team. The flood may extend over hundreds of square miles and affect the lives of millions of people, but the team will have time to record only a very small portion of this. Let us say that the team decides to focus on damage being done to the corn crop. This decision filters the available data by including data relating to the corn crop and excluding data relating to other crops and other types of damage.
Within the news organization many people will contribute to the production of this "story." Editors will select the bits of video to be used in the final presentation; writers will create a script for the commentator to read; graphic artists will create titles, maps, animations and other video enhancements; musicians may create a musical score for the piece and so on. Other editors will decide which evening the story will "run," and where the story will come in the sequence of stories, advertisements, and other material running that night. An anchorperson will introduce the story and various technicians will insure that it gets "on the air." During its stay in the flood zone, the news team may have shot hours of video tape, gathered many facts and interviewed many people. Yet the story as broadcast, if it is broadcast at all, will be only minutes in length. And, each gatekeeper will have had an effect on the content and style of the story. Each person will have added to or subtracted from the original data, and in his or her own way each person will have helped to formulate this particular communication product. Agenda SettingThe failure of the "Magic Bullet" theory left mass communication researchers with a puzzle. On the one hand, studies continued to find little reason to believe that mass communication was able to change people's opinions and beliefs. On the other hand, mass communication plays such a large role in the day-to-day lives of industrial societies that it seemed that it must have some kind of large impact on what people think.
In recent decades media researchers have been able to demonstrate an indirect, but nonetheless powerful, connection between what the news media presents and what people think. This connection has been dubbed agenda setting. In investigating the relationship between the top stories in the news and "what people are talking about," communication researchers found that stories tend to appear in the news somewhat prior to their becoming widely discussed among the public at large. The conclusion we might draw from this is that the media tend to set the "agenda" -- the list of items that people will be discussing. Thus, the power of the media may lie not in its ability to sway people's opinions, but rather in its role of determining what issues will be considered important enough to discuss.
Agenda setting connects the constant use of the media in our society with the results of studies that show that most people form their opinions and beliefs based on face-to-face communication with others. It has become a widely accepted theory of mass communication. CONTENTThe term "content" refers to the message that is distributed by the mass media organization by means of the mass communication channel. In American television, for example, the content includes such as entertainment, advertisements, station-breaks, news, and "infomercials."
These categories of content may be further divided. Entertainment, for example, might be divided into "genres" such as situation comedies, detective shows, soap operas, sports, and so on. The content of each medium is subject to analysis and criticism by its readers. "Literary criticism," "film criticism," and "television criticism" are all well established fields of academic study, and some members of mass media organizations make their livings by publishing their critical views. Because most readers will have been exposed to literary criticism in school, and because many critiques of film and television content are widely available, the topic will not be pursued further in this tutorial. SOCIAL INSTITUTIONSTypically, mass communication operates as a "one way street" -- messages flow from the media organizations to their audiences in a way that allows for very little immediate feedback. However, because those who work in media organizations are themselves a part of the society within which their audiences exist, there is a path by which audience response to mass communication messages can feed back to the producers of the messages.
For example, the person who edits a newspaper story may be in the audience of a radio broadcast. The radio technician may be in the television audience. The television producer may read the newspaper. And, all of these people may talk to one another about what they have watched and heard and read. Thus, "mass communication" and "interpersonal communication" seem to merge into one another. The next section of tutorial takes up the discussion of this situation.
