NON-FICTION.materials / Chapter 3 Questions

Questions to Consider

from McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory

PART II. THEORIES

CHAPTER 3. Concepts and Models for Mass Communication

• Early Perspectives on Media and Society

• Have the terms of public debate about the potential social significance of the media changed greatly?

• What sets of questions were (and still are) of particular importance for media researches?

• What contributed to the formation of the impression that media is effective in shaping opinion and influencing behavior?

• Name major conditions for effective media power.

• Describe social situation in the late 19th and early 20th century with respect to the problem of lack of social integration.

• Discuss positive and negative contributions from mass communications to social development.

• Comment on the role of mass communication as mass educator.

• What harms are traditionally associated with mass media?

• How do media themselves contribute to the spread of these alarmist views?

• The ‘Mass’ Concept

• Discuss the development of the concept of mass and its essential features. Pay special attention to the negative and positive connotations.

• The Mass Communication Process

• When did the term ‘mass communication’ come into use? Were its essential features already known to that date? Have they changed since?

• What are the main features of mass communication?

• Why is it important to distinguish between the process of mass communication and the mass media?

• What is meant by the statement that mass communication was, from the beginning, more of an idea than a reality?

• The Mass Audience

• In what ways does the mass differ from other social formations?

• To what formations other than the audience for mass media can the word ‘mass’ be sometimes applied?

• What implications for research did the concept of mass have? Comment on their shortcomings.

• Mass Culture and Popular Culture

• Discuss narrower and wider references of the ‘mass culture’ concept, its connotations and present-day use. Contrast it with the notions ‘high culture’ and ‘folk culture’.

• What other views of mass culture exist? Mention more objective and remaining critical approaches to the definition of the phenomenon, as well as relative deproblematization of the term ‘popular culture’.

• Comment on positive and negative influences mass media have on society.

• Four Models of Communication

A transmission model

• Describe the origins of the model and its major improvements.

• On which national system of media is this model based? Why?

A ritual or expressive model

• What implication does the traditional transmission model of communication carry?

• What view of communication does a ritual model take?

• What consequences for society can ritual communication have? How can it be exploited by planned communication campaigns?

Communication as display and attention: a publicity model

• Which aim of mass media is primary in a publicity model?

• What direct and indirect economic goals does it help to attain?

• Discuss additional features that go with the notion of communication as a process of display and attention and do not apply to the transmission or ritual models.

Encoding and decoding of media discourse: a reception model

• What is the essence of a reception approach?

• On what grounds were basic principles of structuralism and semiology concerning the meaning of the text challenged?

Comparisons

• Name media activities to which each of the four models of mass communication is appropriate.

• Comment on the orientation of sender and receiver in different moles of mass communication.