Consolidation

Mass media is communication—whether written, broadcast, or spoken—that reaches a large audience. This includes television, radio, advertising, movies, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, and so forth. Mass media is a significant force in modern culture, particularly in America. Sociologists refer to this as a mediated culture where media reflects and creates the culture. Communities and individuals are bombarded constantly with messages from a multitude of sources including TV, billboards, and magazines, to name a few. These messages promote not only products, but moods, attitudes, and a sense of what is and is not important. Mass media makes possible the concept of celebrity: without the ability of movies, magazines, and news media to reach across thousands of miles, people could not become famous. In fact, only political and business leaders, as well as the few notorious outlaws, were famous in the past. Only in recent times have actors, singers, and other social elites become celebrities or “stars.”

1. Media messages are constructed using creative techniques, but the construction process is invisible to viewers, readers and listeners. 

Media messages are meticulously planned to capture the consumer’s attention while immediately increasing their desire for a certain product. Through the use of social media companies, famous actors like Ian Somerhalder are able to see the immense amount of people who are liking him on his social platforms and then have access to see what those fans also like besides his page. This creates double endorsements when the same type of audiences are liking Ian Somerhalder but also another product like Origins skin care. This creative technique is just a glimpse at all of the carefully planned advertising techniques that are enforced throughout everything we see and ‘like.’ However, this process can become invisible to readers when they are overwhelmed with the content that they like because it speaks to them, and don’t question the data and procedure behind it. The entire process behind advertising and their techniques is invisible to the audience unless they have prior knowledge on the subject or an education that makes them think critically and analyze what they are being told and shown. Generation Like with Douglas Rushkoff has dedicated events to this in making parents aware of the market they are being sold into and he believes that awareness of this procedure will remove the invisibility. 

2. Media messages are representations of the world. We depend on the media to understand our world and different cultures. 

Media can also be quite knowledgeable however and a resource that we can rely on to try to explain and understand societal values and cultures at different points in time. Looking at the evolution of advertising over the past century already says an immense amount about also the evolution of our values. Gender roles and stereotyping specifically was displayed in almost all advertising in the majority of the 20th century (beginning and was starting to eradicate through the movement of feminism towards the 21st century). Seeing how we portrayed women in 1930’s compared with how we portray women now in our advertising, gives us incredible knowledge in how our society values have evolved. Advertising also gives us insight to different cultures as different cultural values would be fully instilled in another country’s advertising that we would lack. An example of this would be Coca Cola advertisements and the differentiating values such as the ones in conservative countries vs. more liberal cultures. An advertisement for the same product which is the Coke drink, is advertised in a completely different way in Saudi Arabia, then in the USA. The advertisement shows a father teaching his daughter how to drive in the desert with both of them fully clothed which was published just after women were legalized to drive in Saudi Arabia. The advertisement in the USA shows a man doing labor work, not fully clothed and the women relaxing in a park. The comparison of these two advertisements if effective in helping us to understand these cultures and what they value and this is what analyzing all advertisements can do for us. 

3. Media messages have economic and political purposes and contexts. Mass media industries sell audiences to advertisers. 

When ever any of us create a social media account and begin liking other’s content and brands, we immediately create data and a demographic profile for ourselves that is seen worldwide by advertisers. This data and profile is sold on to various brands to assist in their advertising to their target audiences and this is a concept that is often ignored. In Generation Like, they mention how Facebook earns millions of dollars every year, however with an account and an app that each of us have for free, we never question where they recieve this money from. Facebook for the majority is entirely funded by advertising, our data profiles and the information on what we like and how they can sell this. Everything we see and like, retweet or follow is logged and analyzed and further assist advertisers in their campaigns. 

4. Individuals create meaning in media messages through interpretation. 

A theory that captures how the individuals interpret the meaning is The culturalist theory, which claims that people interact with media to create their own meanings out of the images and messages they receive. This theory sees audiences as playing an active rather than passive role in relation to mass media. One strand of research focuses on the audiences and how they interact with media; the other strand of research focuses on those who produce the media, particularly the news.Theorists emphasize that audiences choose what to watch among a wide range of options, choose how much to watch, and may choose the mute button or the VCR remote over the programming selected by the network or cable station. Studies of mass media done by sociologists parallel text‐reading and interpretation research completed by linguists (people who study language). Both groups of researchers find that when people approach material, whether written text or media images and messages, they interpret that material based on their own knowledge and experience. Thus, when researchers ask different groups to explain the meaning of a particular song or video, the groups produce widely divergent interpretations based on age, gender, race, ethnicity, and religious background. Therefore, culturalist theorists claim that, while a few elite in large corporations may exert significant control over what information media produces and distributes, personal perspective plays a more powerful role in how the audience members interpret those messages.