- with a view to modelling / mobilizing a large and very heterogeneous public
(various ages, social status, professional status etc.); - which is geographically widespread (regional, national, international).
Method presentation
No specialist or practitioner in career counselling (or any other professional) can conceive
of doing without mass-, multi- or macro- media in their activity with clients, whether
traditional, digital, or combined, nor can it be possible any longer in a society calling
itself “informational” and where information / knowledge is essential.
There are several criteria to analyse mass-media in the service of counselling: financial,
time, space, functions, goal / role, effects / consequences, and preferences of
beneficiaries. These criteria call for two other distinctions, between:
- written and audio-visual press;
- mass-media processes and products.
And, there is finally the criterion of competition between “traditional” mass-media
(belonging to the last century wave) and the latest generation mass-media (belonging to
the third millennium – the latest wave): Internet, multimedia, digital-phones (see the
articles: Computer-Based Counselling and Computer-Based Information
Management).
We will briefly present the main types of traditional media still widely employed in
parallel with the latest (multimedia and digital media).
Although in the beginning a clear distinction was made between (printed) publications,
radio, television, and cinema recognized as successively appearing in the history of
mass-media, there is currently a new classification taking into account the support of the
message, so that publications are called written text (with paper as the solid support of the
text), and all the rest are generically called audio-visual press (with the text electronically
recorded and broadcast by means of radio waves).
The written press includes: newspapers, magazines, journals, brochures, posters, mass
collections, leaflets, and documentary materials or even books that are published
periodically by request.