ABSTRACT
One achievement of the telecommunications media is their ability to produce the technology, human resources, and programs that create mass publics. These publics are so dispersed and so heterogeneous that they have little in common for the symbols and messages, the scenes and characters, that they receive from the telecommunications media. In industrialized nations, for example, television is so common that the gap between the rich and the poor, the urban and the rural, in their access to a mass medium has been all but closed. In the United States there is a television set, and sometimes more than one, in 98% of U.S. homes. Thus the potential for widespread exposure to a common set of symbols, messages, and events exists.
