The Mass Media

Abstract

The turn of the 21st century was thick with movies about the blurred line separating reality from fantasy. 'The Truman Show' (1998) gave us Jim Carrey as an insurance sales agent who discovers that everyone in his life is an actor. He is the unwitting subject of a television program that airs 24 hours a day. In 'The Matrix' (1999), Keanu Reeves finds that his identity and his life are illusions. Like everyone else in the world, Reeves is hard-wired to a giant computer that uses humans as an energy source. The computer supplies people with nutrients to keep them alive and simulated realities to keep them happy. Similar blurring between reality and media-generated illusion is evident in 'Pleasantville' (1998), 'EdTV' (1999) and 'Nurse Betty' (2000), while 'Surrogates' (2009) sees people interacting through robots who inhabit the outside world while their operators remain at home. In today's society, we endlessly consume what we refer to as 'the media': From the traditional media of the press, radio and television, to the more recent social media of Facebook and Twitter, we could hardly imagine life without them. But what do media actually do? Any given medium stands between us, the consumers of that medium, and the particular aspects of the social world that the medium mediates. A specific medium connects us to the world in specific ways. For example, a news broadcast takes what might be otherwise disconnected events in the world and turns them into a story; we consume the story. The world becomes meaningful to us through a narrative composed through the articulation of images and words according to the acceptable conventions of the news broadcast. We do not access the world directly here: instead, the broadcast tells us what is important about the world at any given moment and provides us with a way of interpreting it. A sociologist cannot let matters rest there, however. How is meaning created for us through a news broadcast? In order to answer this question, we would need to know about the ways in which journalists are trained, how they learn to draw distinctions between the important and the unimportant, how they may have to take into account the political and ideological beliefs of their editors and the owners of their company, how time constraints and deadlines impact on what they produce, and so on. But creation of the message is only one side of the matter. A sociologist will also be interested in how different social groups might interpret the 'same' message: how the social attributes of class, gender, age and ethnicity influence how we see and interpret the world.