Perspectives for Understanding Communication Media and the Public Interest

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Perspectives for Understanding Communication
Media and the Public Interest

• Thom McCain

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Contemporary Environment

• The Information Age moves to the Conceptual Age
• The speed of technology invention
• From speaker to writer 41,500 years (1,300
  lifetimes)
• From writing to printing 5,000 years (167
  lifetimes)
• Last 100 years more invention than in the
  previous 450 centuries.

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• If the same rate of change happened in the Auto
  industry as has happened in communication
  technology in the past 10 years, you could buy a
  Lexis for ten cents and it could travel for 1000
  miles on a thimble of gas.
• Randall Tobias

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Perspectives

• Axes to grind
• Ways of knowing
• Ways of valuing
• Ways of being
• Ways of doing
• Societies are what they know

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Research/Theoretical Perspectives of
Communication Media and the Public Interest
(adapted from McQuail)

• Perspectives that focus on media as social,
  political and economic processes -- Encoding
• Perspectives of form and substance of messages
  Media Content
• Perspectives that focus on audience use and
  effects of media processes and messages
  Decoding
• Perspectives can be Macro or Micro

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Encoding Perspectives

• Macro theories of social class, ideology,
  structure and function
• Effects of the media on social institutions
• Normative practices of the media
• Organizational practices that operate within the
  media

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Media Content

• Patterns in media content
• Form of media content
• Production values
• Stereotyping

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Decoding

• Links between audiences and media professionals
• Audience composition
• Audience socialization and symbolic interaction
• Media effects