Effect of Advertising and Mass Communication to the Society - Research Paper Example

This view, though still pandemic, was largely reproached by the research conducted in the 1940s and 1950s. These studies found that the voters with strongest political interests were the most likely to pay contemplation to the campaign and therefore were least likely to be affected by the campaign. Recently, research has aggrandized to move beyond looking only at the effects that media and contents of media have on individuals and society to observing on how living in a world with all-inescapable media change the nature of our interactions and culture.

This essay will mainly focus on the effects of media on the interaction and culture of the society as a whole. (Ryan, J., & Wentworth, W. M. 1999) Mass Communication (media) is a strong force in the modern culture, particularly in the United States. Sociologists refer to this as a mediated culture where the media illustrates and creates the culture. Communities and individuals are assailed constantly with messages from a several sources including TV, billboards, and magazines etc. These messages endorse not only the products, but moods, attitudes and behaviors of the people of the society.

Mass communication makes the possible visualization of celebrity: without the ability of films, magazines, and news to reach across thousands of miles, people could not become distinguished. As a matter of fact, only political figures and businessmen as well as some few notorious fugitives were famous in the past. (In Schramm, W., & In Roberts, D. F. 1971) The present level of media saturation has never existed before. As recently as the 1960s and 1970s, the television, for instance, consisted of mainly three networks, public broadcasting and a few local independent stations.

These channels targeted their contents and programs primarily at the small, middle-class families. Even at that time, some middle-class families did not own a television. But today, one can find a television in the most poor of the homes and more than one TVs in the middle-class homes. Not only the availability has increased but the programming is increasingly assorted with shows aimed to satisfy the viewers of all ages, incomes, backgrounds and attitudes. The vast availability makes the television the cardinal focus of major mass-media discussions.

And recently, the Internet has alleviated its role exponentially as more businessmen and ordinary working and non-working people “sign in.” While TV and Internet has dictated the mass communication (media), movies and magazines, specifically those lining the egress at grocery checkout points – also play an important role in culture as other forms of media do. (Ekstrom, R. R. 1992). The culturist theory, which was developed in the 1980s and 1990s, combines the previous two theories and illustrates that people interact with media to establish their own meanings out of the pictures and messages they receive.

This theory observes the viewers as playing an active rather than a passive role in relation to mass communication. One research focuses on the audiences and how they interact with media while the other research focuses on those who create the media, especially the news. (Yssing, H. L., Handelshojskolen 2000) The researchers emphasize that the viewers choose what to watch among a wide range of channels and also how much to watch, and may choose the mute option or the VCR remote over the channel