What is mass media? According to Schaefer in, Sociology, a Brief Introduction, mass media includes print and electronic ways of delivering a message to a large amount of people. Mass media can help us better understand people and events because we now have easier access to these different experiences. Everyday we are surrounded by mass media, mainly electronic/internet media. This electronic media serves many functions in its day to day use, the most common, that I have observed, being entertainment.
Using the functionalist perspective, mass media has quite a bit of functions that play a part in our society. Examples of these function include, entertainment, conferral of status, promotion of consumption, educate, and enforcing social norms. Depending on what kind of message is being sent or what kind of media is being consumed, determines what function that media is serving to the audience. Media can serve more than one function at a time also, but usually it does have a primary function or reason for being. …show more content…
I kept notes on what the media was and then determined what function I thought it served. The main functions that I determined where entertainment and conferral of status. The third most common was promotion of consumption, which was surprising, I originally thought that this would be a top function. The last two functions where enforcing social norms and educating the audience. Most of the evidence I collected was from mass media on the internet, I only had one example of print media. This was not surprising as print media is very quickly becoming less used as the internet become
Using the functionalist perspective, mass media has quite a bit of functions that play a part in our society. Examples of these function include, entertainment, conferral of status, promotion of consumption, educate, and enforcing social norms. Depending on what kind of message is being sent or what kind of media is being consumed, determines what function that media is serving to the audience. Media can serve more than one function at a time also, but usually it does have a primary function or reason for being. …show more content…
I kept notes on what the media was and then determined what function I thought it served. The main functions that I determined where entertainment and conferral of status. The third most common was promotion of consumption, which was surprising, I originally thought that this would be a top function. The last two functions where enforcing social norms and educating the audience. Most of the evidence I collected was from mass media on the internet, I only had one example of print media. This was not surprising as print media is very quickly becoming less used as the internet become