What Are the Mass Media?
Media(the plural of medium) are the ways that we communicate with each other. If
I am talking, I am using the medium of speech. I could also sing, gesture, and make
smoke signals. In the Canary Islands, people used to communicate through the
medium of whistling. Right now I am writing, or more precisely typing, using alpha-
betic symbols instead of sounds.
Technological innovations like the printing press, the radio, the television, and
the personal computer have created mass media, ways to communicate with vast num-
bers of people at the same time, usually over a great distance. Mass media have devel-
oped in countless directions: There are books, newspapers, magazines, motion
pictures, records and tapes, CDs and DVDs, radio and television programs, comic
strips and comic books, and a whole range of new digital media. New forms of mass
media are constantly being developed, and old forms are constantly falling into disuse.
Sometimes the new forms of mass media can revive or regenerate the old.
Teenagers used to keep their diaries hidden in their rooms, with little locks to deter
nosy siblings. Today they are likely to publish them on the Internet as blogs.
Sociologists are interested in the access to media by different groups with differ-
ent resources and also in the effects of media—how they affect our behaviors and atti-
tudes, how they bring us together or drive us apart, how they shape the very rhythm
of our days.
For example, do your parents ever tell you that video games, MP3s, iPods, and
the Internet rot your brain and make you passive and stupid? I’d bet that your grand-
parents said the same thing to your parents about television. They even called it the
“boob tube” or “the idiot box.” And theirparents said the same thing about comic
books and the radio. And theirparents said the same thing about nickelodeons
(machines that display moving pictures when you turn a crank) and “penny dread-
fuls” (cheap, garishly printed books about crime and murder).
Mass media have allegedly been rotting brains for well over a hundred years.
Every generation worries that its children are becoming mass media zombies with no
initiative or imagination. Yet every generation is smarter, more literate, and better
informed than the one before.588 CHAPTER 18MASS MEDIAattitudes. If they didn’t reflect our society, then they wouldn’t make any sense. And if they
didn’t have some effect on our attitudes or behavior, then they wouldn’t “work”—which
means that the entire advertising industry would be out of business.
Sociologists understand that the media had an effect on Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris’srampage at Columbine, but we also understand that the media no more caused it than
watching Law and Orderrepeats increases the conviction rate. Sociologists are rarely inter-
ested in “whether or not,” but rather “how” and “in what ways.”