Mass Communication and the Internet

            Remember playing the “telephone-game” when you were in elementary school? The rules were easy. All you had to do was listen to the sentence that was being whispered and repeat what you heard into a fellow classmate’s ear. However, in a room filled with short attention spans and giggles, it would seem that the goal of the telephone-game could never be achieved. Either some poor soul would forget instantly what was said and scramble to come up with something new, misinterpret what was whispered, or deliberately jumble up the message for their own satisfaction. Ultimately, the real message gets revealed and everyone is in bewilderment.

            This example is but a small representation of the linear model of mass communication and its affect on society. In this case, the message (which portrays texts) travels through numerous ears (mass media channel) and ends up being received (children who are not the senders at the time but receivers of the message). Yet, there are no gatekeepers and the only feedback is at the end when the false as well as the real message is exposed. In the book, Media and Culture, on page 13 Roger Rosenblatt states in Time magazine that, “We are a narrative species. We exist by storytelling-by relating our situations-and the test of our evolution may lie in getting the story right.”

          Since the oral and written era has passed and the age of convergence has come, what better way can we leave behind our identities for the next generation than through digital communication? No matter how far we progress technology wise, we ourselves cannot escape the need to feel connected with others. Whether we join social networking sites, write blogs, or contribute to Wiki websites, in the end, all we really want is our story to be told and to be told truthfully.

           Authors Richard Campbell, Christopher Martin, and Bettina Fabos of Media and Culture, do an amazing job with breaking down various processes (like the linear model of mass communication, or media literacy and the critical process for case studies) so that the reader can understand such complicated inner workings of the media and mass communication. Part of the writers’ appeal is their ability to combine historical facts with present day situations to produce startling information that is well outlined and relatable.