Chapter 1

After reading this chapter, I began to grasp what mass communication really is. I always knew the basics of mass communication, but never the full detailed part. Chapter one was really helped me to understand the true concepts of mass communication and gave me the knowledge I needed to further understand my major, which is communications. This chapter examines key concepts and introduces critical processes for investigating media industries and issues. The goal is for us, the readers, to become media literate, more critical as consumers of mass media institutions and more engaged as participants who accept part of the responsibility for the shape and direction of media culture.

On page 5 there was some interesting and useful information, that I felt really helped me obtain what mass communication really was and did. One way to understand the impact of the media on our lives is to explore the cultural context in which the media operate. Often, culture is narrowly associated with art, the unique forms of creative expression that give pleasure and set standards about what is true, good, and beautiful. Culture, however, can be viewed more broadly as the ways in which people live and represent themselves at particular historical times. This idea of culture encompasses fashion, sports, architecture, education, religion, and science, as well as mass media. Although we can study come cultural products, such as novels or songs from various historical periods, culture itself is always changing. It includes a society's art, beliefs, customs, games, technologies, traditions, and institutions. It also holds a society's modes of communication, which is the creation and use of symbol systems that convey information and meaning. For example, languages, morse code, motion pictures, and computer codes.

Another thing that caught my eye and made me think was on page 11. A second model for understanding media takes a cultural approach to mass communication. This concept recognizes that individuals bring diverse meanings to messages, given factors such as gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, and occupation. In this model of mass communication, audiences actively affirm, interpret, refashion, or reject the message and stories that flow through various media channels. For example, when controversial filmmaker Michael Moore released the 2007 documentary Sicko, which calls for a universal nonprofit health-care system, regular filmgoers and health insurance company executives often had a very different interpretations or the story that the movie told. Some executives saw the documentary's support for universal health care as an indictment of capitalism and as the "American way," while many ordinary people read the film as advocating a commonsense solution for providing health care to uninsured individuals and lowering soaring health-care costs. I really never thought of this aspect to be related with mass communication and now this only further expands my knowledge of this topic.