Mass Media- Definitional

Mass media refers to a particular class or section of the media that is specifically designed to reach a large audience. Example are magazines, television, news programs, and radio. The audience has a lot to do with how mass media is reached. Mass mediated communication can form its own society with its own characteristics but the audience is going to have a lack of social connection. In our society today, we lose connection with each other because mass media is taking over our lives and we lose the social connectedness that we once had. And when we lose this social connectedness, the individual is more susceptible to advertisers and propaganda. Some scholars have determined that mass media is the hardest to determine whether it is true or untrue. This is because it is bias and we don't know who is sending the message typically.

The way that Wright defines Mass Communication is as follows: the audience is relatively large, it is diverse, the audience is anonymous to the source, the experience of communication is quick, it is public, it is fleeting (spreads and disappears quickly), the source works through a complex organization, the source is not isolated, and the message reflects the efforts of a large group of stakeholders. According to Grossburg there are three different types of media that are present in our society. The first is interpersonal which is a cell phone and you have control over the audience and there is more power in the relationship with this type of media. The second is mass media, or newprint, and there is unequal power in this because the media has control over you. And lastly is a network, like Facebook or fax machines and this is a beneficial form because people can communicate from different countries and still get the same message.

The media plays a role in the construction of reality in the technologies, the institutions and the cultural forms. The way that it affects the technologies is that it is a physical means of producing the message. In the institutions it is any large scale entity that embodies social relationships and functions that was created by human beings to perform a function in society (religious, film industry, etc.). And in the cultural forms the media affects how the products of media technologies and institutions or organizations are structured (by codes, languages, symbols).