J 363 Test 1

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Mass communication used to be defined as:

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1) It is directed toward relatively large, heterogeneous and anonymous audiences
2) Messages are transmitted publicly, are often timed to reach most audience members simultaneously, and are transient in character
3) The communicator tends to be or operate within a complex organization that may involve great expense

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Characteristics of the New Media environment:

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1) Previously distinct technologies such as printing and broadcasting are merging
2) We are shifting from media scarcity to media abundance
3) We are shifting from content geared to mass audiences to content tailored for groups or individuals
4) We are shifting from one-way to interactive media

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Media Convergence

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Coming together of services that have been separate, including the Internet, television, cable and telephone

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The goal of theory

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is to formulate statements or propositions that will have some explanatory power

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The Goals of Mass Communication

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1) To explain the effects of mass communication -> Can be intended or unintended
2) To explain the uses to which people put mass communication -> Active role of the communication audience
3) To explain learning from the mass media
4) To explain the role of the mass media in shaping people's values and views -> Politicians and members of the general public are in mass media, how does this effect people's POV

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Empirical School

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characterized by quantitative research and empiricism (basing knowledge on observation and experiments)

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Critical School

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Takes a more philosophical approach, emphasizes the broader social structure in which communication takes place, and focuses on the issue of who controls a communication system

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Cultural Studies Approach

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join the critical theorists in shunning the scientific approach used by scholars of the empirical school. Cultural theorists attempt to examine the symbolic environment created by the mass media and study the role that the mass media play in culture and society

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Theories must be...

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scientifically testable, that means they ultimately have to be verifiable through observations

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A model is...

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more limited than a theory and is usually an attempt to identify the crucial parts of a process or phenomena

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Tenacity

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accounts for many of the beliefs that we have always held to be true; repetition, reinforcement by family, etc. help us hold beliefs without any type of evidence

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Authority

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rely on experts whom we consider to be more competent or credible than ourselves or almost anyone else -> Most different types of sources tend to disagree

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Intuition

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Based on our personal values, early socialization or common sense

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Methods of Establishing Truth

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Tenacity, Authority, Intuition

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Transmissibility

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Sciences' ability to overcome barriers of geography; language; and social, economic and political systems.

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Cumulation

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takes place because of a set of scholarly values and scholarship to a great extent must be "detached, objective, unemotional and nonethical"

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Hypothesis

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scientific proposition, usually framed in what is known as a conditional form (if….then….); Assumed that the statement is preceded by ceteris paribus, "all other things being equal"

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Induction

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uses particular or specific instances as observed by the scientist to arrive at general conclusions or axioms

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Empiricism

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use of data or evidence to arrive at generalities

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Deduction

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Begins with what is general and applies it to particular cases (often called logic or rationalism)

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Generalization

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a statement of uniformities in the relations between two or more variables of well-defined classes

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Theory

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a set of systematically related generalizations suggesting new observations for empirical testing

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Law

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A hypothesis of universal form that has withstood intensive experimentation

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Model

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a theoretical and simplified representation of the real world

- By itself, it is not an explanatory device
- By nature it suggests relationships
- The jump from a model to a theory is often made so quickly that the model is in fact believed to be a theory. A model is disguised as a theory more often than any other concept

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Content Analysis

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A systematic method of analyzing message content; a tool for analyzing the message of certain communicators

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Experimental Design

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the classic method of dealing with questions of causality

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Case Studies

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Used to examine many characteristics of a single subject

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Statistics

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Mathematics used to summarize information about populations and/or to aid in making inferences from data to populations

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Descriptive Statistics

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provide information such as the mean, median, variance and percentiles for a body of data (Bring large quantities of data to manageable form by providing summaries)

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Sampling or Probability Statistics

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Enable scientists to make estimates of population characteristics -> draw inferences form data at specific levels of confidence -> As scientists increase the degree of confidence they expect in prediction, the interval within which they can make the predictions also increases

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Random assignment

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assures that there will be no systematic bias in subject assignment

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External Validity

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deals with the question of whether the phenomena observed and measured by an investigator are representative of the real-world phenomena the scientist wishes to generalize about

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Internal validity

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required in experimental research if conclusions are to be drawn from the data

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Operationally Defining the Hypothesis

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the act of translating abstract hypotheses to real-world phenomena

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Reliability

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deals with the consistency of measurement

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External reliability

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The ability of measure to provide the same results time after time, within acceptable margins of error, if applied to the phenomena under the same conditions

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Internal reliability

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refers to the question of whether various subparts of a test provide comparable data

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Functions of a Model

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Organizing, heuristic, predictive and measuring

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Channel Capacity

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Not the number of symbols a channel can transmit but rather the information a channel can transmit or a channel's ability to transmit what is produced out of a source of information

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Destination

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The person or thing for whom the message is intended (audience to thermostat)

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Entropy

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The uncertainty or disorganization of a situation -> In information theory, it is associated with the amount of freedom of choice one has in constructing a message

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Redundancy

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the portion of the message that is determined by the rules governing the use of symbols in question or that is not determined by the free choice of the sender

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Noise

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Anything added to a signal that is not intended by the information source

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System

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any part of an information on chain that is capable of existing in one or more states or in which one or more events can occur

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Communication system

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anything from the air to the optic nerve

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Two fundamental orientations in Shannon's theory

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- Relationship between source and destination
- Technical characteristics of transmission channels

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Perception

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The process by which we interpret sensory data (through our five senses)

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Structural Influences

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Perception comes form the physical aspects of the stimuli to which we are being exposed (the closer dots are together, the more they seem to form a line)

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Functional Influences

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Psychological factors that influence perception, and therefore, introduce some subjectivity into the process

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Selective Perception

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Applied to the tendency for people's perception to be influenced by wants, needs, attitudes and other psychological factors

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Decoding

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The process of receiving and interpreting a message is referred to in many communication models

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Selective Processes

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Tendency for individuals to expose themselves to those communications that are in agreement with their existing attitudes and to avoid those communications that are not

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Selective Attention

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tendency for individuals to pay attention to those parts of a message that are consonant with strongly held attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors and to avoid those parts of a message that go against strongly held attitudes, beliefs or behaviors

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Selective Retention

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tendency for recall of information to be influenced by wants, needs, attitudes and other psychological factors

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Schema

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"In a nutshell, a schema is a cognitive structure consisting of organized knowledge about situations and individuals that has been abstracted from prior experiences"

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Two important aspects of communication theory have roots in propaganda

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Attitude Change and General Effects

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Laswell's 4 major wartime objectives of propaganda

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- To mobilize hatred against the enemy
- To preserve the friendship of allies
- To preserve friendship, and, if possible, to procure the cooperation of neutrals
- To demoralize the enemy

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Name Calling

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Giving an idea a bad label--is used to make us reject and condemn the idea without examining the evidence

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Glittering Generality

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Associating something with a 'virtue word'--is used to make us accept and approve the thing without examining the evidence

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Transfer

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Carries the authority, sanction, and prestige of something respected and revered over to something else in order to make the latter more acceptable

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Testimonial

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Consists in having some respected or hated person say that a given idea or program or product or person is good or bad

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Plain Folks

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is the method by which a speaker attempts to convince his audience that he and his ideas are good because they are "of the people," the 'plain folk

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Card Stacking

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involves the selection and use of facts or falsehoods, illustrations or distractions, and logical or illogical statements in order to give the best or worst possible case for an idea, program, person or product

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Bandwagon

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has as its theme, "Everybody--at least all of us--is doing it'; with it, the propagandist attempts to convince us that all members of a group to which we belong are accepting his program and that we must therefore follow our crowd and 'jump the bandwagon

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The Bullet Theory

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suggests that people are extremely vulnerable to mass communication messages. It suggests that if the message "hits the target," it will have its desired effect

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Consistency

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the notion that phenomena are ordered that allows predictability -> this allows people to build theories and predict future outcomes

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Rationalization

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The attempt to explain irrational behavior in a rational or consistent way -> emphasizes that in our desire to appear rational or consistent to ourselves we often employ means that may seem irrational or inconsistent to others

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Heider's Balance Theory

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○ Balance theory deals with the way an individual organizes attitudes toward people and other objects in relation to one another within her or his own cognitive structure

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Selective Perception

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If we do receive a message that causes incongruity, we may misperceive the message to make it fit our view of reality

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Selective Retention

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remember only points that support our "prevailing frame of reference