Page 153 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

MASS COMMUNICATION

lifestyle of their locality. With a dual agenda of social/neighbourhood
regeneration and competitiveness within the global economy, these
policy approaches have a specific focus on place rather than the nation
as a whole. The mobilisation and coordination of funding bodies, arts,
heritage and tourism agencies as well as private- and third-sector
groups are central to this trend. By providing opportunities for creative
workers, creating programmes for skills development and advancing
cultural industries with a wide appeal, cities (and some towns) are
attempting to stand out in the global landscape.

See also: Cluster, New economy

Further reading: Coyle (1998); Friedman (1990); Hall (2000); Hannerz (1990)

MASS COMMUNICATION

The practice and product of providing leisure entertainment and
information to an unknown audience by means of corporately
financed, industrially produced, state-regulated, high tech, privately
consumed commodities in the modern print, screen, audio and
broadcast media, usually understood as newspapers, magazines,
cinema, television, radio and advertising; sometimes including book
publishing (especially popular fiction) and music (the pop industry).
Caution should be exercised with respect to the term itself. The
word ‘mass’ may encourage the unthinking replication of mass
society theory, while the word ‘communication’ in this context
masks the social and industrial nature of the media, promoting a
tendency to think of them as interpersonal communication. Since
mass communication is neither mass nor communication as normally
understood, the term should be seen as something akin to a proper
name.
Mass communication is not a concept that can be defined, but a
common-sense category that is used to lump a number of different
phenomena together in a non-analytic way. Attempts to define it,
however, are plentiful, but they always fail. This is because they are
forced to be too restrictive, in which case the definition does not do
justice to all that we commonly think of as mass communication (it is
hard to encompass the diversity of what constitutes print, cinema,
radio and television within one definition). Or else they are forced to
become too over-extended, in which case the definition ends up
applying equally well to something that we don’t think of as mass

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