Week 10

• Mass media


  Four key ways to understand the attempts or influence of media in our lives: mass media provide gratification, mass media set agendas, mass media cultivate worldviews, mass media exercise ideological influences
• Mass media provide gratification

  1. Fulfilling needs and desires: Entertainment

  2. Alleviating loneliness

  3. Escape from daily problems

  4. Gaining information

  5. Fulfilling personal gratifications
• Agenda setting


  Selecting and calling to the public's attention ideas, events, people, and perspectives
• Agenda setting


  • Spotlight some issues, event, and people and downplay others
  • Affect our perceptions of what is happening/not happening and what is important/not important in the world
• Gatekeeper


  A person or group that decides which message pass through the gate of media to reach consumer (e.g. producers, editors, webmasters)
• Cultivation


  The cumulative process by which television shapes beliefs about social reality
• Mainstreaming


  A process by which mass communication stabilizes and homogenizes social perspective (accept representations as factual)
• Resonance


  A situation where media representation are congruent with personal experience (accurately represent the world in general)
• Ideological influence


  Individuals and groups that have benefited from the existing social structure tend to control mass media and promote their own views and values
• Mass media are more likely to portray whites, middle and upper-class people as good, powerful and powerful than they are to describe minority people or lower and working class in those ways