Mass communication is, of course, defined in large measure by the fact that it is designed to reach a large audience. This fact - that each "act" or "text" of mass communication affects the ways in which mass communication is structured. Mass communication cannot rely on nuance and ambiguity in the same way that acts of more personal communication can: If I an talking to another individual and see that a glazed expression is beginning to descend upon him then I know that I should go back and try to clarify what it is that I have been saying. This is not possible with mass communication in which the person communicating a message and the people to whom the message is aimed are unlikely ever to meet.
Because of the lack of direct connection between the "speaker" (who may be anyone from a movie director to a song writer to a news anchor to a ad copywriter) and the listener in mass communication, those who craft mass communication products rely on archetypes, on stereotypes, on myths - ideas and forms of communication that the speaker and the listener already have in common and so that can withstand the attenuating forces of mass media. One example of this is the British television show Absolutely Fabulous, which uses the conventions of the fairy tale (conventions that most of us absorbed quite early in life) to relay a modern story in terms that are conventional enough and also robust enough to withstand the requirements of mass media.
Mass media can play around with the rules, as we see in Absolutely Fabulous but only by substituting other well-known cultural views about social roles and forms of communications. Thus it is true that modern popular culture contains a number examples of characters and stories that intentionally play with the ways in which gender was traditionally used to construct narratives, presenting us with female characters who disrupt traditional engendered rules of power. We can see this in the British televi...