ABSTRACT
Noted earlier was international concern that mass media, especially television, contribute to society as positively as possible, and that the media's negative effects be neutralized. Out of this widespread concern have grown various systematic efforts to alert the massive audiences of media to what is happening in this inadvertent love/hate relationship with the television box, particularly among children. Also noted was the shift in emphasis through recent decades from alleged effects of media's content on passive audiences, to the interactive perspective of how and why viewers use a mass medium-including how they create individualized "meaning" of media content within their respective viewing and living environments. More central to the internal characteristics of mass media is study of how media are crafted, including aesthetics and art, as well as how they operate and are formed by social, economic, and political factors.
