Media in Everyday Life

Mass Media: Media that is meant to reach the mass population of society. It was created as a result of Mass society—increased mechanization and industrialization of society in the 1920’s. Thus, mass society gave forth mass culture, which then resulted in the creation of mass media.

Public Sphere: The public sphere is a place in which individuals of society can come together to discuss and create a public forum in which ideas and opinions can be formed. It is a link between the private sphere(corporations and organizations) and the sphere of public authority(the government).

Convergence: A term coined in the 1990’s, used to describe the merge of different media forms—specifically the technology used to create media, resulting in the consolidation of sectors of media into one all encompassing group--allowing for greater control over viewers.

Critique: The process of analyzing and drawing conclusions from the media—often focusing upon underlying messages that may have been subtly inserted by either the creator or large commercial media conglomerates.

Digital culture greatly impacts the media paradigm, starting from the creation of mass media; while originally, mass media was a means for large media corporations to push propaganda laden ads and insert subtle biases into the media, the transition to allowing the masses to now easily create their own media (via handheld camcorders, laptop cameras, cell phones, etc…) has resulted in a drastic paradigm shift in media--from private to public media. Mass media now is something that refers more to the mass creation of media, rather than the mass consumption of it.