Mass communication

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 rule

traditional ideas about appropriate gendered behaviour is how the show approaches the issue of consumerism: These may be independent women in many ways who derive their sense of self in modern ways - but they also derive a sense of who they are by the way in which they shop. In this sense, they are little different from those essential icons of traditional televised femininity Lucy and Ethel. The ways in which gender and the power of money are mixed together in this show are an example both of the inversion of the normal status quo - it is men and not women who are supposed to wield money in the particular way that these female characters so - and a reinforcement of that status quo, because after all it is still money that talks. Even though Edina and Patsy can afford to 'buy' just about whatever man strikes their fancy (along with the more traditional trappings of female consumerism, such as the best clothes and the best therapist), we must see them as in many ways pre-feminist creatures, happy to be defined by a consumerist culture that in the end cannot be truly liberating for any woman who defines herself in terms of its values. It is important to note that it is not only the female characters that are important in terms of

Category: Business - M