Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
REPRESENTATIVE: THE
MASS MEDIA
It's not too contentious to assert that we know most of what we know
about the world beyond our doorstep courtesy of the mass media. The
mass media are those in and through which largely one-way few-to-many
communications are achieved on a daily basis. Today, radio, television,
newspapers, magazines, cinemas, billboards, games consoles and (increas-
ingly) the Internet are the most important mass media - though we might
also include such things as zoos, museums, theme parks and galleries
because the most successful of these attract very large numbers of visi-
television soap operas to popular music to video games to investigative jour-
nalism. The mass media does today what it's always done: it aims to
inform
and edify
millions of people, to
entertain
them and (as product advertising
makes abundantly clear) to actively
shape their values, tastes and preferences
.
Until relatively recently, it was largely domestic in scale, with each country
having a relatively small number of national newspapers and broadcasters.
This ensured that the mass media was largely 'mainstream', its format and
content remaining within the perceived bounds of what most members of
a country would regard as 'acceptable'. Despite some recent diversification
and a degree of geographical disembedding - exemplified by the prolifer-
ation of pay-TV channels, the rise of 'reality television' and the creation
of 'global' news channels like CNN's - the mainstream mass media rarely
strays beyond the perimeters of 'decency'. In large part, this is because it's
been able to define and over time slowly redefine where those perimeters
lie. Whether it simply reflects or sets the pace for changes in its wider
sociocultural milieu has been a perennial question for mass media analysts.
This said, it's been suggested that mainstream media is now being dis-
placed by 'alternative media' in many countries. These are not alternatives in
the technological sense because they utilise the established communicative
channels of the Internet, print, radio, television, photography, etc. Instead,
they're alternative in an informational/content sense. It's become techni-
cally easy and relatively cheap for all manner of organisations and people to
disseminate their own ideas, knowledge and images far and wide - so-called
'many-to-many' communication. The information/content created is often
accessible well beyond the bounds of any one nation state. For instance,
Wikileaks, YouTube and the website of Earth First!, in different ways, offer
Internet users worldwide written or videographic representations that the
