Mass media, popular culture, and technology: Communication and information formats as emergent features of social control

This dissertation explores the expansion of social control in daily life examining the relationships between media entertainment formats, popular culture, and technology, illustrating how emergent communication and information technologies contribute to changes in social interaction, communication, and social control. A basic argument is that information technologies cultivate and enhance the integration of shared ideas about crime and deviance into an effective, controlled, and accepted communication environment.; The principle thesis this project advances is the notion that popular culture reinforces facets of both formal and informal social control while also contributing to the development of new and unforeseen aspects of social control. Social control concerns the ability to define a situation so that people behave in a particular or desired manner. This dissertation examines the operation of social control in the meanings and censorship of "rap" music and artists; the production, marketing, and identity promotion of mobile telephone "ringtones" and; the institutional (primarily educational) regulation and banning of "iPods" and related technologies.; The research outlined here explicates how shared ideas, especially those about crime and deviance, are informed through mass media and popular culture. The implications here are notable for issues of social justice as these ideas inform select patterns of criminalization. This process, one where users rely more upon communication and information technologies for cues about social life and social interaction, simultaneously lead users to surrender elements of control to these very same formats, in turn creating new developments in the efficiency of social control.