The Social Research Of Mass Media

Today's mass media reach audiences that can number in the hundreds of millions, and they make use of a technology of breathtaking sophistication. Yet, our mess media still perform the same functions as their more primitive predecessors. Like the hieroglyphics, smoke signals, and jungle drums of earlier times, they move information across time and space. A major difference is that today there can be millions of receivers who simultaneously construct meanings to interpret the messages transmitted by the communicator.The medium, however, is not the message. It may pose limitations on how the message is constructed; it may introduce subtle connotations that differ from one medium to another; it may enhance the communication experience with color, perspective, or face-to-face discussion; or it may even detract from the accuracy with which the message is received. However, the basic process that is taking place when contemporary mass media are used is human communication based on language. Even in the age of technologically sophisticated media, then, people are still locked into a basic process of human communication. It is the words and sentences used by the newspaper or TV reporter that determine how accurately the story is understood. Analogously, the clever and entertaining use of verbal and nonverbal language determines whether a movie or a play is regarded as a success by its audience.Language and its use, then, are the beginning point for developing an understanding of the basic process of human communication and, by extension, mass communication. For that reason, we must first look at how human communication takes place in the absence of media. That is, what are the fundamentals of face-to-face human communication? With that analysis as a basis for comparison, We next take a close look at mass communication. This, in turn, permits a comparison of the two and a fuller understanding of the advantages, limitations, and effects of communicating with contemporary media.Human beings communicate in ways that are very different from those used by any other species on our planet. Specifically, we communicate with some form of learned and shared verbal and nonverbal language that is a part of a culture that has accumulated and grown increasingly complex over time. Other species communicate with signs and signals in ways that have changed little since the dawn of their existence. In spite of romantic ideas about whales, porpoises, and other animals that supposedly “talk,” those creatures do not use language that based on culturally shared systems of symbols, grammar, and meaning. Animals clearly communicate with each other, sometimes in relatively sophisticated ways. However, they do so with behavioral systems that in most cases learned, but are never part of a culture in the true sense. In other words, no matter how one looks at it, in any realistic sense, only human beings communicate with language based on shared culture rules.