Who decides what gets put on television anyway? Or
in movies, video games, or comic books? Are they tapping
into the tastes and interests of the audience, or do they
actually create new tastes and new interests?
Both. The media tap into our culture just as the media
help to create it. The media provide a common language,
a common set of reference points from which we draw in
our daily conversations. At the same time, the media “seg-
ment” us into definable groups, based on class or age or
race or gender.
Some media events unite us: When Hurricane Katrina
struck in the summer of 2005, or the World Cup soccer
tournament was played in the summer of 2006, the whole
world was watching. Yet at the same time, the media world
is divided into hundreds, maybe thousands, of separate audiences, markets, and spe-
cial interest groups with little or nothing in common. For example, in my classes, I
might refer to a song by Bruce Springsteen, which students under 30 and students of
color find quaint, anachronistic, or just plain “White”; when I refer to Nelly or
Shakira, students over 30 and some White students get a blank look. In a class in
which students are varied by age or race, we struggle for a common language of media
references.
This market segmentation occurs at the global level as well. Around the world,
the staggering inequality between countries, and also within many countries, is
reflected in media access and use. The vast majority of the world’s people cannot
afford media, so media production and consumption are strongly oriented toward
the wealthier members of the world’s population.
Types of Mass Media
There are many types of mass media. All have experienced enormous growth since
the nineteenth century, and today media animate—and some would say dominate—
our everyday lives.
Print Media.People have been keeping written records for 5,000 years, on clay
tablets, papyrus scrolls, the wooden tablets of Easter Island, and eventually books.
But everything had to be copied by hand, so anything written was extremely rare
and expensive. In The Canterbury Tales(1386), the Clerk is so obsessed with books
that he owns 20 of them!
The printing press, which appeared in China in the eighth century and Europe
in the fifteenth, changed the way we record and transmit information (Eisenstein,
1993). The new technology allowed media to be produced more quickly, more
cheaply, and in larger numbers. Reading shifted from a privilege of upper-class males
to a much wider population, and the literacy rate in Europe jumped from less than
1 percent to between 10 and 15 percent.
But even during the 1800s, most people owned only two or three books—the fam-
ily Bible, an almanac, and maybe a book of poetry. In the first decades of the twen-
tieth century, reading became a mass middle-class activity (Radway, 1999). People
read cheap paperbacks, newspapers, and magazines.
The newspaper and the magazine were originally vehicles for general interest read-
ers (the word magazineoriginally meant a storehouse where you would keep your
excess flour or corn). In the nineteenth century, both flourished. Newspapers became
a staple of middle-class life in the developed world (in the United States, over 11,000
WHAT ARE THE MASS MEDIA? 589JThrough media segmenta-
tion, some groups are con-
nected to global cultural
trends while others remain
wedded to more local forms.
These Argentine fans greeting
Ricky Martin in 2006 may
have more in common with
American fans than they do
with the rural poor in
Argentina.