Syllabus
Unit I Media and Everyday Life
Mobile phones, Television, Ring tones, Twitter The Internet‐ discussion around
media and everyday life, Discussions around mediated and non mediated
communication
Unit II
Communication and Mass Communication
Communication, Types of Communication, Barriers to effectiveness,
Unit III Mass Communication and Effects Paradigm
Direct Effects; Mass Society Theory, Propaganda, Limited Effects; Individual
Difference Theory, Personal Influence Theory
Unit IV Cultural Effects and the Emergence of an Alternative Paradigm
Cultural Effects: Agenda Setting, Spiral of Silence, Cultivation Analysis, Critique
of the effects Paradigm and emergence of alternative paradigm
Unit V Four Models of Communication
Transmission models, Ritual or Expressive models, Publicity Model, Reception
Model
Introduction to Media and Communication
Tutorial
Unit I Media and Everyday Life
Discussion around media and everyday life
From the wealth of theoretical aspects of action and experience, which Schütz
develops, two concepts which offer immediate help in understanding television
are picked out: the ordinariness and familiarity of everyday life; action and its
constituting process in everyday life.
Introduction to Media and Communication
Ordinariness and familiarity For the present
generation of researchers, one aspect of everyday life in relation to children’s,
young people’s and families’ use of television is hard to understand:
television as
“the unquestioned reality” of current everyday life, as television only became
apart of everyday life for the researchers when they were older. Only the present
generation of children, teenagers or young adults grew up with television as a
quite normal and ordinary matter.
Children and young people take for granted
this their everyday world, that is in the ubiquitous media and consumer network,
as their parents’ generation structured and organized their lives around the car.
This everyday world of media and consumption as “unquestioned reality”
conveys the idea, as it always has, of one’s own world being a universal valid
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constant as it always was: Schütz speaks of the ordinariness of the everyday
world as a universal constant: the “structures of the world “, the “validity of our
experiences of the world” and our chances for influencing the world – all this is
accepted as something valid and constant.
This constancy of experience and
action – which includes present day television and the way people respond to it –
confront the media educationalist with considerable problems: how to handle and
reflect something as a problem of special meaning and “relevance” although its
everyday occurrence does not give cause to do so. The researcher must equally
take fundamental account in his research plan of the constancy of television and
its ordinariness in everyday life,
Introduction to Media and Communication
This goes beyond questions of research
methods, e.g, that television taken for granted as an element of everyday life
excludes simple questioning techniques: you do not really know the point at
issue. That means that questions about everyday life can only offer superficial
explanations, by providing information about watching patterns, e.g. switching on
times. Of decisive importance for research,
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on the other hand, is to take a close
look at action and at what people tell researchers, seeing this information as a
representation of their complex everyday world. In terms of research strategy,
this means using research observation and informative documents to uncover
the very varied layers of everyday life and of the mediation process of experience
and action in relation to the ordinary everyday reality of mass communication.
Introduction to Media and Communication
This leads to interpretation methods in which texts which at first sight appear
simple and insignificant (they are after all understandable in an everyday sense)
are analysed from very abstract and theoretical perspectives, which make
everyday life seem questionable. One question,
for instance, then to be asked is,
to what extent well-known television genres and young people’s patterns of
action relate to each other. Patterns of action and interpretation In order to get
closer to the symbolic quallty of television and its integration into everyday life, it
is appropriate to consider Schütz’s argument that patterns of “expression and
Introduction to Media and Communication
interpretation” structure everyday life: although it is an unquestionable reality, we
organise the “social world” of everyday life by means of the “socially conditioned
schemata of expression and interpretation prevailing in the group to which we
belong.” These schemata’ ‘also co-determine what within our culture is accepted
as unquestionable, what can become questionable and what appears as worthy
of questioning”.
Introduction to Media and Communication
These schemata of expression and interpretation have, over and
above this reflective significance for everyday life, the general function of a
“common schema of interpretation of the common world.” They are “a means of
mutual agreement and understanding”. In the relationship of a subject to the
Introduction to Media and Communication
world and to other people, which is always mediated via interpretative schemata,
television today also plays an interpretative role. The status of television’s
interpretative role can now be empirically characterized. This in terpretative.role
results from the common origins of interpretative schemata which bring action
and experience together in a reflexive fashion. Thus nowadays television
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watching and those experiences linked with it (e.g. the everyday life of the family)
enter into structuring interpretative schemata, while this relationship, because it is
part of an unquestioned reality, is not reflected upon. One cannot reflect about
how and why television experiences, family life, action, other experiences and
nterpretation should aIl be linked in a coherent process. These interpretative
schemata arise because experiences are integrated in the prescribed “total
context of experience. In this reflexive process of interpretation and experience in
the given framework of a personal biography, television in various sequences
has its own role for example as an experience which is integrated, or for example
as an interpretative scheme which integrates experiences. Furthermore,
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television might weIl structure complex areas of experiences by providing
particular patterns of order Television has, therefore, the cultural function of
integrating and developing everyday patterns of action and interpretation in terms
of classifying schemes.
It is not easy, from a methodological point of view, to
work using this complex structure of interpretations, experiences, interpretative
schemes and patterns of order as a research object, for these processes relate
reflexively the one to the other and do have the quality of ambiguous events and
thus are not to be described definitely, This complex relationship is not only
dependent on the respective individual and cultural situations but also, as it is a
reflexive process, it is always new and also uniquely in a state of flux.
Introduction to Media and Communication
Mobile phones,
A mobile phone, known as a cell phone in North America, is a
portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link
while the user is moving within a telephone service area.
The radio frequency link
establishes a connection to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator,
which provides access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Modern
mobile telephone services use a cellular network architecture, and, therefore,
mobile telephones are called cellular telephones or cell phones, in North
America.
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In addition to telephony, 2000s-era mobile phones support a variety of
other services, such as text messaging, MMS, email, Internet access, shortrange wireless communications (infrared, Bluetooth), business
applications, video games, and digital photography. Mobile phones offering only
those capabilities are known as feature phones; mobile phones which offer
greatly advanced computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones.
The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F.
Mitchel and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c.
2 kilograms (4.4 lbs) In 1979, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) launched
the world’s first cellular network in Japan. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the
first commercially available handheld mobile phone. From 1983 to 2014,
worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over seven billion, penetrating
virtually 100% of the global population and reaching even the bottom of the
economic pyramid. In first quarter of 2016, the top smartphone developers
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