MassCom Digest: Notes, Theories & Media Trends

The Intercultural approach.  The intercultural approach aims to boost positive community life between individuals from various cultures and religions by focusing on individuals as a central element and holders of rights. As for strategies, these are considered from an intercultural perspective in public policies. Intercultural communication (or cross-cultural communication) is a discipline that studies communication across different cultures and social groups, or how culture affects communication. It describes the wide range of communication processes and problems that naturally appear within an organization or social context made up of individuals from different religious, social, ethnic, and educational backgrounds. In this sense it seeks to understand how people from different countries and cultures act, communicate and perceive the world around them. Many people in intercultural business communication argue that culture determines how individuals encode messages, what ...

Development communication refers to the use of communication to facilitate social development. Development communication engages stakeholders and policy makers, establishes conducive environments, assesses risks and opportunities and promotes information exchanges to create positive social change via sustainable development.Development communication techniques include information dissemination and education, behavior change, social marketing, social mobilization, media advocacy, communication for social change, and community participation. Development communication has not been labeled as the "Fifth Theory of the Press", with "social transformation and development", and "the fulfillment of basic needs" as its primary purposes. Jamias articulated the philosophy of development communication which is anchored on three main ideas. Their three main ideas are: purposive, value-laden, and pragmatic.Nora C. Quebral expanded the definition, calling it "the ar...

  Political economy  is the study and use of how economic theory and methods influences political ideology. What is Political Economy? Political economy is a social science that studies production, trade, and their relationship with the law and the government. It is the study of how economic theories affect different socio-economic systems such as  socialism  and communism, along with the creation and implementation of public policy. The propaganda model is a conceptual model in political economy advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky to explain how propaganda and systemic biases function in corporate mass media. The model seeks to explain how populations are manipulated and how consent for economic, social, and political policies is "manufactured" in the public mind due to this propaganda. The theory posits that the way in which corporate media is structured (e.g. through advertising, concentration of media ownership, government sourcing) creates an ...

FRANKFERT SCHOOL OF THOUGHT In contemporary usage, the term Cultural Marxism is an antisemitic conspiracy theory that the Frankfurt School is part of a continual academic and intellectual effort to undermine and destroy Western culture. The Frankfurt School refers to a collection of scholars known for developing critical theory and popularizing the dialectical method of learning by interrogating society's contradictions and is most closely associated with the work of Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. It was not a school, in the physical sense, but rather a school of thought associated with some scholars at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt in Germany. One of the core concerns of the scholars of the Frankfurt School, especially Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, was the rise of what Horkheimer and Adorno initially called "mass culture" (in Dialectic of Enlightenment). This phrase refers to the way t...

Persuasion Theory  is a mass communication theory that deals with messages aimed at subtly changing the attitudes of receivers. The concept of Persuasion has been developed between the 1940s and 1950s after studies aimed at defining the optimal persuasive effectiveness of Propaganda, being it political or an  advertising  campaign. Like the  Hypodermic Needle Theory , it considered audiences passive although the scope of a campaign switched from manipulation into persuasion. Researches on Limited Effects of mass communication demonstrated that messages are successful only if they embed the same opinions of their receivers. Therefore, the focus of any campaign has to be on individual psychological factors. Unlike the Hypodermic Needle Theory, Persuasion Theory considers the Stimulus-Response model as interposed by a filter: individual’s specificities, i.e. psychological characteristics of an individual. In this perspective, persuasive messages are thus able to...

a-quick-understanding-of-hegemony The definition of hegemony is leadership or dominance of one group over another. An example of hegemony is the student government leadership in a school. Media Hegemony. ... Based on the definition of hegemony, media hegemony means the dominance of a certain aspects of life and thoughts by penetrating dominant culture and values in social life. In other words, media hegemony served as a crucial shaper of culture, values and ideology of society (Altheide, 1984). REPRESENTATION : Hegemony Hegemony is a representational strategy of power; a way of using representations to control other people. In many ways hegemony is the central concept of media studies. This idea is crucial to the key concepts of representation, ideology, narrative, institutions and audience so it is essential that we develop a detailed understanding of the idea. Let us start with a definition: Hegemony is a representational strategy of social power that aims to ensure t...

FORMATION OF PUBLIC OPINION History and Orientation Neumann (1974) introduced the “spiral of silence” as an attempt to explain in part how public opinion is formed. She wondered why the Germans supported wrong political positions that led to national defeat, humiliation and ruin in the 1930s-1940s. In an 1974 research article, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann presented a groundbreaking political science and mass communication theory called ‘Spiral of Silence’ (SoS). SoS is a process when an individual finds his views less popular, in contradiction with the majority, and may lead to ‘isolation’, then (consequently) s/he chooses not to express his/her views. Neumann defines ‘the tendency of the one to speak up and the other to be silent starts off a spiralling process which increasingly establishes one’s opinion as the prevailing one.’ As a result, minority opinion may lead to ‘fear of isolation’, which (may) eventually result into self-censorship for detailed version visit the followi...

The cultivation theory was proposed by George Gerbner.  It is one of the core theories of media effects. According to the theory, people who watch television frequently are more likely to be influenced by the messages from the world of television. The influence goes to such an extent that their world view and perceptions start reflecting what they repeatedly see and hear on television. Television is,therefore, considered to contribute independently to the way people perceive social reality. Hypothesis The theory postulates that watching television frequently influences an individual to develop certain ideas of reality or beliefs and assumptions about life that mirror the most consistent or universal values that are showcased on television. The more a person watches television, the more likely he is to be influenced by what he watches when compared to others who watch less but share other similar demographic characteristics. Cultivation Theory The theory argues that the ...

INCREASING GAP BETWEEN HIGHER AND LOWER EDUCATED PEOPLE History and Orientation The knowledge gap theory was first proposed by Tichenor, Donohue and Olien at the University of Minnesota in the 70s. They believe that the increase of information in society is not evenly acquired by every member of society: people with higher socioeconomic status tend to have better ability to acquire information ( Weng, S.C. 2000 ). This leads to a division of two groups: a group of better-educated people who know more about most things, and those with low education who know less. Lower socio-economic status (SES) people, defined partly by educational level, have little or no knowledge about public affairs issues, are disconnected from news events and important new discoveries, and usually aren’t concerned about their lack of knowledge. Core Assumptions and Statements The knowledge gap can result in an increased gap between people of lower and higher socioeconomic status. The attempt to improv...