Media A

• The media are often divided into 'new' and 'traditional' media.
• Traditional media refers to those mass media that communicated uniform messages in a one-way and non-interactive process to the very large mass audience, associated with broadcasting like TV channels and newspapers.
• New media refers to interactive screen-based, digital technology involving the use of images, text, and sound, emerging in the late 20th century and early 21st centuries, including computers and the internet, e-books, digital cable, satellite TV, DVD recorders, internet downloads, films, videos, and music downloads, social media, and interactive video or computer games like PlayStation and Xbox.
• Information is provided by media, providing a constant flow of information about our society and world.
• Continuity in media theory is about expressing the dominant culture (mainstream culture), recognizing new social developments, and creating common values.
• Mobilization in media theory can encourage people to contribute to the economic development in society, support moral values, and make people aware of wars.
• Entertainment in media theory offers a diversion from work and reduces social tensions, acting as the release valve for society as it helps individuals to temporarily set aside their problems and conflicts.
• Functionalism in media theory focused on how the media tends to integrate and bind people and societies together.
• Correlation in media theory is about explaining and helping us to understand the information that it produces.
• Denis McQuail identified media’s social functions which help to stabilize the system: Information, Correlation, Continuity, and Entertainment.
• The media establishes social norms, showing us what is accepted and not in our society.
• Social media refers to a group of online and internet-based applications that are used for social interaction among large groups of people, enabling people to build social networks of friends and contacts, exchange pictures, videos, news, and more.
• The Frankfurt School look at individuals as being passive because they accept everything that they see on the media.
• In the past, the public sphere developed coffee salons where people used to discuss issues and share opinions.
• According to Habermas, the public sphere is an arena of public debate where issues can be discussed and opinions are formed, which is considered necessary for democracy.
• Habermas looked at this as something positive as people were coming together and discussing in an equal way.
• Habermas identified the decay of the public sphere throughout the years.
• Jurgen Habermas, part of the Frankfurt School, looked at how the public sphere was in trouble because people did not have the chance to voice their opinion and criticize what they see on TV.
• Habermas argues that public opinions are not formed through discussion but through manipulation and control.
• Members of the Frankfurt School are critical of the effects that the media has on the population and culture, especially Theodor Adorno.
• Social media plays an important role in helping people spread their message or voice their opinions, through blogs or profiles, various individuals share or write text where they either reject or accept what is seen on media or what is happening.
• They also believe that the model shows that the audience is vulnerable to the influence and manipulation of opinion leaders.
• Of all the media effects models, the Gratification Model assumes that media have the weakest effects and the audience is the most active.
• The media messages reach the audience at the first step.
• Opinion leaders selectively pass on these messages, which contain their opinion and interpretations, to others in their social groups at the second step.
• The audience receives and are influenced by mediated (altered and interpreted) messages from opinion leaders whose views and opinions they respect.
• The audience may then pass on their opinions to others, in a kind of chain reaction leading from one person or group to another.
• The model does not recognize that people may have views, opinions, and experiences of their own on which to base their views on media content.
• Later studies look at a more active role of the audience and developed the Gratification Model.
• Critics of the model believe that it still assumes that the media audience is more or fewer victims of media content.
• Others believe that the model overestimates the power of the audience and underestimates the power and influence of the media and media companies to shape and influence the choice people make and the pleasure they derive from the media.
• Ms. Debattista explores the choices and the media may create different pleasures through advertising.
• This will result in more favorable stereotypes of the upper class and the middle classes than the working class or the poor.
• Reception Theory focuses on how the people actively interpret the media, focusing on the way social class and cultural background of an individual can affect the way an individual interprets the media 'texts'.
• The Interpretative Model suggests that individuals can filter information through their own experience, linking media 'texts' or questioning what they are watching on the TV and what they read on newspapers.
• The Interpretative Model believes that the audience itself shapes the media that they watch by either agreeing or rejecting the output the media represent.
• Some believe that the media portrays the middle-class version of a working class because the media production is mainly dominated by middle-class professionals.
• Representing class, gender, ethnicity & disability, Kendall argues that the working class is shown through the majority of the programs, such as EastEnders, Coronation Street, My name is Joe and Billy Elliot.
• The ownership of the main mass media in modern Britain is concentrated in the hands of a few large companies which are mainly interested in making a profit.
• The media is now owned by transnational media corporations, which have international recognition and influence.