ABSTRACT
This chapter examines both traditional mass media and new media. The first half of the chapter begins with an overview of traditional media characteristics. After describing the surveillance, correlation, cultural transmission, and entertainment functions of mass media, the chapter looks at media effects, including ways the mass media affect consumers and ways consumers resist media pressure. Agenda-setting, hegemonic messages, and cultivated worldviews are discussed, as well as ways in which audiences’ selective process mediated information. A brief overview of uses and gratifications research is also offered. The chapter goes on to compare the formats and logics of newspapers, radio, and television news and entertainment programming. The discussion of traditional media ends with a description of ways TV logic has pervaded and transformed other media.
The second half of the chapter looks at user-generated mass communication, mediated messages created by audience/producers using digital devices. The importance of internet memes as forms of vernacular creativity is discussed as well as the rise of microcelebrity in the attention economy. This section ends with a consideration of media credibility and the challenges presented by truth decay. The chapter ends by reviewing ethical issues in both old and new media.
