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Definition of Communication (Shannon)
“The transmission of information and understanding through the use of common symbols”
SHANNON-WEAVER MODEL
classic model of communication
FEEDBACK
S – ENC – MES – MED – DEC – R
FEEDBACK
The sender decides which message to send.
• S: the person with informations to comm.
• E: the way in which the information is expressed, ex: spoken English
• Message: the information itself as encoded by the sender; the selected message is transformed into a signal which is sent through a channel to the receiver
• Medium: the form, physical or technical, in which the message is carried (ex: telephone)
• D: interpretation of the message
• R: the person who receives the information
• F: what the receiver communicates back to the S
3 Categories of media
• PRESENTATIONAL (voice, face, body); require the physical presence of a comm, produce acts of comm
• REPRESENTATIONAL (books, painting, photo, writing, ecc.); they exist independently of the communicator; produce works of c
• MECHANICAL (TV, radio, tel); transmitters of P and R
Noise:
Anything added to the signal between its transmission and reception that is not intended by the source
Shannon and Weaver’s kinds of noise
• Semantic noise:
a distorision of meaning not intended by the source
• Engineering noise:
physical
Why is feedback important?
Because it enables the speaker to adjust to the responses of the audience; some channels of c make f very difficult
Meaning
According to S and W the meaning is contained in the message: improving decoding will increase semantic accuracy.
But the model does not specify that the meaning is at least as much in the culture as in the message.
Redundancy and entropy
• Is that which is predictable or conventional in a message (es.: “Hello”)
It’s determined by our experience,culture or usage. It’s a system of conventions.
It improves communication, in that it make the message easier to understand
• Low predictability
It “breaks the rules” and makes comm more difficult
Entropic variations are possible only within the conventions, the r of the form
the context in which comm takes place is a source of redundancy
Context: “SPRING IS...”
• COMING
redundant use of the context
• A PANE OF GLASS
entropic
To obtain > r, the message is structured according to patterns and conventions;
ex.: rhythmic poetry
r. is obtained through the patterns of
metre and rhyme
How redundancy relates to the audience:
> a - > r
Redundancy and social relationships
A phatic comm is crucial in holding a community or a society together by maintaining and reaffirming relationships
KATZ, GUREVITCH, HASS
Model explains the interelationships of the five most important media through a circular model.
People refer to NEWSPAPERS, RADIO and TV to connect themselves to the society, BOOKS and CINEMA to escape from reality.
GERBER’S MODEL
• Relates the message to the reality
• Introduces a new element: perception
E= event
M
selecion
context
avaialability
M can be a human or a camera or a videocamera matches the external stimuli with his/its internal concept. The relation between E and E1 involves selection
the percept E1 (that is E how it has been transformed –represented- by M) is converted into a signal about E (SE)…
…and sent through a channel
SE is a signal or statement about the event E, it’s a unified concept, what we normally call message
channel
SE1 is a signal or statement about SE: it’s the meaning that M2 gives to SE among all the possible meanings.
M
M2
It doesn’t specify how this meaning is generated.
This model introduces a vertical dimension and clarifies that our perception of a message is not the same as our perception of the event
LASSWELL’S MODEL
WHO
WHAT
WHICH CHANNEL
WHOM
EFFECT
WHO
WHAT
WHICH CHANNEL
WHOM
EFFECT
MARXIST LIBERAL
INFLUENCED T THEORIES
(ADORNO) (AGENDA S)
MEDIA USES AND GRATIFICATION THEORY
• The communicator wants to informe and even persuade
• The recipient wants to be entarteined, informed, or alerted to opportunities that can fulfill individual needs
Audiences come to messages for different reasons:
• Surveillance of the enviroment to find out what is happening, locally or globally, that has some impact on them
• Entertainment and diversion
• Reinforcement of their opinions and predispositions
• Decision making about buying a product or service
Uses and gratification approach assumes that people make highly intelligent choices about which messages require their attention and fulfill their needs.
AGENDA SETTING (Lazarsfield and Katz)
• Media content sets the agenda for public discussion
• Media, by the selection of stories and headlines, tell the public what to think about but not necessarily what to think.
“LIMITED EFFECTS” model (Klapper)
Mass media ordinarily does not serve as a necessary and sufficient cause for audience effects, but rather functions among and through a nexus of mediating factors and influence.
Such factors may include the way opinion leaders analyze and interpret the information provided by the mass media.
FRAMING THEORY (A. Powers)
It’s important to understand the ways in which journalistic framing of issues occurs because such framing impacts public understanding and, consequently, policy formation.
CULTIVATION THEORY (Gerber)
Mediated reality can influence beliefs and even conduct if repeated often enough.
AGENDA SETTING
“What we know about our society and the world in general we know it through the media”
“Through the (Lippman: construction of stereotyopes made by the) media we can access to worlds and realities that we could not easily experience directly”
Basic statement
Media content sets the agenda for public discussion
“…Mass Media do not try to persuade people, media do not tell us WHAT to think but ON WHAT to think: in this sense they give a structure to our society, setting the agenda of the issues…”
Mass media establish the hierarchy of the issues
…and through this agenda individuals make sense of their socitey and the world in general
1968: study on how the electoral behaviour is influenced by the agenda imposed by the media
The Construction of the agenda
• Reality imposes the issue
(ex: wars, earthquakes, hurricanes, ecc.)
• Media impose the issue
(ex.:unemployment, racism, ecc.)
Lang’s distinction
• High treshold themes: far from the daily life of the citizens
• Low threshold themes: close to the people either because they are already part of the agenda or because they are close to the direct experience of the citizens
To make possible that an issue becomes part of the agenda of the public, it is necessary that it is a low threshold theme, and to make this possible it is necessary a costant coverage by the media.
Ex.:
Watergate: only thorugh a costant coverage by the media this issue (tipically of high threshold, known just to a few people working in the field) has become a low threshold theme known by all the American citizens.
Cultural effects of the media
We use the term cultural effects for the investigation of social, political and cultural effects.
In Britain and Europe Marxist approaches to the mass media and, more generally, to culture as a whole ('cultural studies') were dominant from the mid '60s to the mid 80s (approximately). Although less dominant now, Marxism still colours much media research.
Those analysts who are concerned with cultural effects fall into two camps:
• Somewhat elitist literacy critics who are distressed by the spread of popular culture, which they see as diluting and undermining the values enshrined in high culture
• Marxist critics whose critical perspective derives from the work of Karl Marx and from the Frankfurt School. Their main concern is with the way that the mass media are used to spread and legitimate the dominant ideology
Ideology
In the Marxian literature the term ideology is generally used in an entirely negative sense to refer to a supposedly dominant ideology which supports the interests of the dominant class.
It is this crucial notion of domination which is central to the Marxian understanding of ideology. Ideology is seen as a tool of the dominant classes, misleading and illusory
Marx and Cultural marxists
MARX : classes were determined by objective relations of production and other primarily economic factors.
CULTURAL M.: relations of domination are developed and maintained, not only or even primarily by economic forces, but by cultural forces (more attention than Marx to the role of symbolic goods in constitute and support relations between individuals.
The Frankfurt School
Developing Marx's view that the dominant class in society not only owns the means of material production, but also controls the production of the society's dominant ideas and values (dominant ideology),
the 'critical theorists' of the Frankfurt School examined the industrialisation of mass-produced culture
The Cultural Industry
They saw the products of the culture industries as providing the ideological legitimation of existing capitalist societies
and were the first to recognise the importance of the culture industries as significant agents of socialisation.
Culture is seen as a vehicle of ideology, science and technology as tools of social domination within capitalism.
It’s through the cultural industry the dominant class mantains its consensus.
Adorno and Horkheimer:
• Strong critic to the cultural industry
• Strong critic of the mass media: cinema, radio, ad, Tv, ecc.
• Mass media operate in a way that each individual unconsciously absorbes the (negative) values of the existing world and society.
• mass media are not something neutral, contaniners that can be filled up with different contents
• mass media are ideologies themselves, deliver an image of the world that has to be acceptable by anyone
• Mass media develop uniform and standardized languages that lead to general conformism
Alienation
• The individual is alienated in that the cultural industry imposes its ideology (values, patterns of behaviour, needs, language) that is the acceptance of purposes imposed by others
• The individual is nothing, he is simply directed from above by the class that is on power
Through the mass media the class in power imposes values and patterns of behaviuor, creates needs and establishes the language.
It’s in this way that the cultural industry leads to general conformism
Adorno and Horkheimer were writing in the last year of the Nazi terror
their arguments were applied equally to the United States where they had sought refuge, in part because the USA of the struggle against Hitler was subjected to methods of propaganda, regimentation and social control.
Even more in entertainment the individual is directed from above…
• I consider .... that the average television entertainment is fundamentally far more dangerous politically than any political broadcast has ever been
• TV entertainment drummed false consciousness and 'disguising of reality' into viewers, 'injecting' them with ideology
Art
Art is the only possible way the individual has to escpae this threatining reality
Masses rather than proletariat
From The Dialectic of Enlightenment onwards, Adorno and Horkheimer gradually moved away from Marxian categories: they express little faith in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, largely because capitalist modernity has succeeded in dominating and mystifying the individual via advertising, mass communications media and new forms of social control; indeed the term 'proletariat' is generally replaced by 'masses' in their work.
Critic to Adorno’s theory
The failure to differentiate between individuals in the so-called mass
Adorno: the receivers of mass media messages are not generally in a position to reply. But it does not follow from this inability to reply that the receivers have no control over media messages and that the act of reception is not participatory.
Marcuse
Marcuse was a member of the Frankfurt School who, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, retained his commitment to revolution.
Marcuse: Advertising leads to one-dimensional thought
He accepted that capitalism had succeeded in raising the living standards of most of the population.
However, in his view, the manipulation of false needs established by capitalist advertising is repressive. It leads to one-dimensional thought. It blocks people's ability to realise that they are being controlled.
His view was that one of the most important mechanisms of control in capitalist societies is the manipulation of the conscious and unconscious.
New needs have to be created to encourage people to buy the new goods which are produced. People have to be convinced that they really do have a need for these goods and that possession of the goods satisfies the needs they have.
The false needs
In attempting to satisfy their false needs people reproduce the capitalist system and it’s in this way that social control is generated.
Generally, Marcuse tends, like the other Frankfurt School members, to portray audiences as passive victims
and, like them he laments the decline of the individual and the demise of authentic culture, a demise promoted by the rubbish produced by commercial radio and television.
Althusser: ISAs
There are many different institutions in our society which socialise us into acceptance of these dominant ideas and values.
The mass media are one such institution.
Althusser referred to such institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which operate alongside the Repressive State Apparatus of courts, police, prisons, military and so on.
Althusser argued that all of these ISAs are bits of apparatus for the state to use in order to manage the consent of society's members,
and to persuade us to accept the ideology which in fact best serves the interests of the dominant class.
The ISAs are:
• the religious ISA (the various churches)
• the educational ISA
• the family ISA
• the legal ISA
• the political ISA
• the trade-union ISA
• the communications ISA (the mass media)
• the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sports, entertainment etc)
The fact that many of the organs within these apparatuses are within what we would normally think of as the private (rather than state) domain is no objection since any ISA can perfectly well function as a state apparatus:
they all communicate and support the ideology of the dominant class
Althusser developed the classical Marxist notion of a dominant ideology, breaking away from the concern with the economic base and arguing that ideology is the medium through which we experience the world.
Ideology is seen as a determining force in its own right.
Recent developments: The crisis in Cultural Studies and audiences' generation of meanings
• In recent years, research has turned increasingly to the way that audience members generate their own meanings from their readings of media texts, often resisting the preferred readings suggested by those texts.
• Much of this research is coloured by the ideas of the French sociologist, Michel de Certeau, whose views have been enthusiastically disseminated and applied in the English-speaking world by John Fiske.
Debord
• Society of the Spectacle (1970):
“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles: everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”.
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