Media in Everyday Life

Mass media - Began with the mass society (i.e. centralized around cities, urban areas), we receive our messages through centralized broadcast forms of national and international media, a one-way broadcast model. Mass media is a term that describes media forms designed to reach large audiences perceived to have shared interests. For example: radio, network, cable television, the cinema, and the press.

Convergence - Term used in the 1990s to describe the coming together of media forms, such as movies becoming an electronic and digital form through digital projection, and the bundling of formerly discrete services such as cable, Internet, and telphone.

Critique - Critiques of mass media judge them, and point out strong points and flaws of it. Critique is taking things apart, seeing are what they are made up of - this idea moved into what we know as movie reviewers, "go see it/don't go see it," etc. Critiques of mass media claim it contributes to the erosion of interpersonal and group life, fostering centralized models of communication and identity. Schiller warns that public space is threatened by by private media interests and the control of mass communications by military-industrial complex. On the other hand, John Fiske argues that mass media allows the non-literate to consume media, making it a democratic process.

PUBLIC SPHERE - Public sphere is an area where people can get together and discuss societal/political problems. Something that didn't exist until certain forces lined up - economic forces, technological forces, religious forces - to create a middle class, and therefore birth of public opinion.

The Internet allows for media to become multidirectional, rather than viewers only consuming, making them active users rather than passive viewers. These viewer-users can produce their own images and videos with relative ease, uploading it to websites, forums, and so forth. This allows producers to reach a mass audience while bypassing the traditional mass media models. As a result, the model of broadcast communications has lost much of its dominance, yet media industries have become increasingly consolidated.