The mass media is one form of communication found in many societies throughout the world, and has become increasingly important in recent centuries. Communication is a prerequisite for human society. Humans are not genetically programmed for one pattern of behaviour, but rather have the capacity to learn many different patterns. Any particular society institutionalizes a specific set of behaviours selected from the wide range of possible ones. Basic to this institu-tionalization is communication with the young, in order to socialize them to the norms of the society, to pass on the cultural symbol system that carries the norms of the society, and to teach them the language that serves as the major means of communication. Furthermore, people must communicate to coordinate their actions in accomplishing the tasks necessary to maintaining their lives and their society.
Traditional forms of mass media
The two most general and common forms of communication are face-to-face verbal communication using language and face-to-face nonverbal communication using body language. Mass communication, in which messages are passed to large groups or collections of individuals, can be seen in traditional forms widespread for millennia, such as sermons, plays, town criers, musical concerts, and the more long-distance medium of loud instruments such as drums or horns. Traditional forms of mass communication have required the copresence of the individuals communicating, and beyond the moment of communication, rely upon memory for conservation.
The use of traditional mass media can be seen in Indian villages (Hartman et al. 1989). In the southeast province of Andra Pradesh, tom-toms, locally called dandora, were used to attract attention for public announcements. Drama, locally natakam, was well established, as was a concert of sung narration, katha, in which several people or a group presented epic themes from regional history and religion. In West Bengal:
Indigenous mass media … disseminates ideas and information. Folk drama, folk songs, folk tales, the repertoire of itinerant minstrels and musicians at festivals — all serve as media of mass communication .
Here jatra (a folk drama performed in the open) is still prevalent and very popular . it runs on non-commercial lines, and is open to everyone without any barriers of class, caste, religion, age or sex. A jatra … serves as a reflector of traditional or existing social norms.
There are three drama clubs in Ranabanda [village] .
There are a number of professional drama companies in Calcutta who perform their shows in the countryside towns for about six months in the year .
Another type of traditional folk drama is the Bhanumatir Gan … . It is a song-based drama, with a group of singers playing the harmonium and singing with the actors forming the backbone of the play .
Folk songs and lyrics are powerful means of propagating the ideas and experiences of the wise and learned to village people who cannot read and write.
Plays, concerts, recitations and sermons continue to be important means of communication in contemporary societies. From the influential after-prayer sermons in Muslim mosques and Christian churches, to punk and rap music concerts, to plays in Africa and Asia (Peacock 1968), traditional forms of media are used to express established norms and ideals and to challenge the established.
The written word was a great breakthrough, for it allowed communication across space and time. Traditional use in mass communication was, however, limited to the reading of proclamations and the limited engraving of public monuments. Texts central to particular cultures, such as the Old Testament to the Jews, the New and Old Testaments to the Christians, and the Koran to the Muslims, were arduously reproduced, sometimes memorized, and then passed on to the general populace through sermons, which became an established and regular part of religious ritual, and through religious schools.
The printed media
The development of printing made the written word into a medium of mass communication. For the first time, copies of messages could be economically produced and distributed widely, bridging great gaps of space and time. It became possible to communicate with large numbers of people, as opposed to the minuscule few of the elite who had access to the manuscripts. The availability of technology for disseminating written texts did not, however, automatically provide everyone, or even most, with the ability to read and understand; it could not eradicate the widespread barrier of illiteracy resulting from lack of education. The slow increase in education, albeit uneven geographically and across economic classes, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the corresponding spread of newspaper, pamphlet, and inexpensive topic production and dissemination, resulted in the growing impact of the printed word as a medium for mass communication. In spite of the large and increasing number of literate people and the proliferation of printed material, large portions of the population in even the most technologically developed societies could not or did not read, and in the great rural populations of the agrarian societies of Africa, Asia and South America, reading remained a rare skill of the elites.
At the end of the twentieth century, in the large rural districts and in the poorer classes everywhere, the reading of newspapers. Even in successfully developing countries such as India, with large indigenous publishing industries, major impediments remain in the diffusion of information via the printed word. One major problem is that the level of literacy is not high enough for many people to read with comprehension, ease and pleasure, and so they do not read. The other main difficulty is that newspapers and books are comparatively expensive, and the costs can be sustained only by members of the richer classes (Hartman et al. 1989). Some indirect diffusion does take place, as in those who read printed information verbally to others. But the limitations of the written mass media as a cultural influence remain, with a consequent ineffectiveness as a spur to change.
The electronic media
The development of the electronic media — film, telephone, radio, television, video – provided the means for communication over space and time as well as inexpensive and efficient diffusion, coded through the same human skills of speech and body movement that are characteristic of face-to-face communication. The electronic media bypass the need for special communication skills, such as literacy, thus opening communication to those who, for lack of literacy skills, are excluded from communication via printed media. Even the cost of the electronic media is less than that of the printed media, for portable radios and audio tape players cost little more than one or two books.
Ordinary people everywhere are capable of receiving communication through the electronic media, and increasingly people throughout the world, even in the remotest forest, desert, and mountain settlements, are regularly receiving radio and television broadcasts from multiple sources. These sources are at the same time highly diverse and notably similar. They are diverse because media broadcasts – including series such as soap operas and comedies, films, musical performances, and news and documentaries -travel and are transmitted across cultural boundaries, from one country to another and from one ethnic group to another. These sources are similar because, for economic and technological reasons, they tend to come from industrial countries and regions to non-industrial countries and regions, from large countries to small, and from urban to rural areas. Consequently, the material heard or viewed is often diverse from the conditions and norms of the viewer’s local life, while there is a consistency or similarity in the broadcast material because of the commonalities of the urban, industrial sources of production.
Mass media and culture
The production of messages for mass communication is rooted in the culture of the producers and that of the supposed audience. Messages are sets of cultural meanings and are effective as communication only if they fit with the structure of cultural meanings held by the audience. For example, the Brazilian prime time, evening television telenovelas, social dramas or soap operas, that have become a national obsession in Brazil, incorporate and reflect basic cultural assumptions, such as the dominance of the extended family in social life and the emphasis on status rather than work in values and identity (Kottak 1990).
The producers of Brazilian telenovelas, which run for many episodes, keep a close watch on audience reaction, and shift story lines and juggle characters to hold audience interest and enthusiasm. In this case as in most others, ongoing production is maintained and producers prosper by drawing audiences and thus making profits, either directly from audiences or from commercial advertisers. Directors of Tamil films in South India, as with producers everywhere, must therefore cater to the tastes of the audiences, such as for escape fantasies or heroic violence, even if they do not directly approve of those tastes (Dickey 1993). These directors, like others, sometimes insert morals to instruct and ‘improve’ the audiences.
In addition to commercial factors, producers must deal with the power and governmental structures in the societies in which they work. Media regulation and censorship boards are used, to one degree or another, by powerful societal elites to control and limit messages disseminated in the media. Producers and their programmes vary in degree of conformity and subversion. Producers do have at their disposal many symbolic ways of expressing views and representing problems which may not be expressed explicitly and represented directly.
Symbolic codes that make up the content of programmes speak to issues in the lives of the audience. The long-running, popular space programme Star Trek, which has spawned several spin-off programmes, expresses basic themes in American life, such as space travel representing the quest for adventure and exploration and the interaction, collaboration, and co-membership of beings from different planets representing ‘the incorporation of strangers and diversity within an expansive American culture’ (Kottak 1990: 101) To be successful, films or programmes must be ‘culturally appropriate, understandable, familiar and conducive to mass participation’ (Kottak 1990: 43). At the same time, success requires satisfying the culturally conditioned psychological needs and desires of the audience. In the case of Tamil films, ‘viewers … seek out movies as entertainment and as an escape from the difficulties of their lives’ (Dickey 1993: 141). But they also look for relevance to their lives.
[Viewers] see very personal connections between themselves and their relationships, on the one hand, and the characters and relationships shown on the screen on the other, and occasionally see more general class level connections as well . They focus on themes . central to [their] lives: . among other things the effects of marriage on individuals and families, possibilities for romantic love, the responsibilities of children or siblings, and the disregarded inner virtues of the poor. Films create utopian resolutions of these issues. Escape and reality are intimately connected.
Viewers are active in responding to the messages sent through the mass media; they do not passively absorb what the mass media brings them. There is an ongoing interplay and feedback between producers and audiences of the mass media.
The active nature of audience response does not mean that the audience is unaffected or uninfluenced by messages sent through the mass media. Some messages may be rejected or ignored, as in the case of development information in Indian villages (Hartman et al. 1989). But other messages, intended or inadvertent, will be consciously or unconsciously accepted and assimilated. At the very least, the mass media has an ‘agenda setting’ function; it cannot successfully tell people what to think, but it can effectively tell them what to think about by including some issues and ideas in messages and excluding others.
The interplay between mass media and culture becomes even more complicated when, as often is the case, messages are transmitted across cultural boundaries. Much of the world’s film and television production takes place in a small number of urban centres: Sao Paulo, Delhi, Rome, New York, Paris, Tokyo, Hollywood, London and Bombay. The economics of production and the technology of transmission favour wide distribution, and so audiences in small countries, in less developed countries, in rural remote regions, see films and programmes that have grown out of quite different cultures, in codes based upon those cultures, and which tend to advance values from those cultures, such as individualism, commercialism, consumerism, and romanticism, which sometimes clash with the established norms, values, and beliefs of local society. Such influence can be seen, depending upon one’s point of view, as liberation or as cultural imperialism.
