A COGNITIVE

PSYCHOLOGY OF MASS
COMMUNICATION

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

MASS COMMUNICATION
IN OUR WIRED SOCIETY
CHAPTER 1

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 CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

After reading this chapter, you should be

able to:
1. Identify mass communication from a
psychological perspective
2. Understand the history of mass
communication
3. Know the types of mass communication

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 CONTENTS

I. Prevalence of Mass Communication

II. What Is Mass Communication?
III. The Media of Mass Communication

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Q: How much material is on
the World Wide Web?

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A: No one quite knows for sure. One
2011 estimate indicated that there
were at least 17.9 billion indexed
web pages, and that number is
growing fast (The size, 2011 ).

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Q: How have mobile phones
revolutionized developing
countries?

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A: In numerous countries, such as Botswana,
Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Paraguay, and
Venezuela, mobile phone users outnumbered
conventional phone users by 2000 (Romero,
2000 ).

Mobile “smart phones” in conjunction with

social networking sites such as Twitter and
Facebook have even been credited with helping
dissidents organize revolutions in totalitarian
countries such as Egypt and Tunisia (Preston,
2011 ).
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I. PREVALENCE OF MASS
COMMUNICATION

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 TWO CLASSIC TYPES:

Print:
• The form of print: Gutenberg’s invention
of movable type and the printing press in
1456.
Electronic/broadcast:
üThe advent of electronic media, starting
with radio around 1920
üTelevision around 1950
üVideo and cable technology in the 1980s
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 RADICALLY CHANGED IN THE
20TH CENTURY
• Americans spend more time watching
television than doing anything else
(except working and sleeping)
• Spend 15 to 20 of their average 39
hours (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010).

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TODAY, NO PLACE ON EARTH IS BEYOND
THE REACH OF MASS MEDIA.
• The last country to have a television
was South Africa, 1976 (for the politic reason).

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 STUDY: CHILDREN’S CREATION

In the 1970s, a unique study in three towns

in interior eastern British Columbia:
• Compared children and adults in the
three towns before and after television
was finally introduced to Notel.
• Results of children’s creativity scores:
were/higher before TV in Notel than in
either (1) the other towns before TV or (2)
any of the three towns after TV.

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 II. WHAT IS MASS
COMMUNICATION?

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 WHAT MAKES MASS
COMMUNICATION “MASS”?

1. The audience is large and

anonymous, and often very
heterogeneous
2. To be institutional and organizational
3. The most importantly, the basic
economic function of most media in
most nations is to attract and hold as
large an audience as possible for the
advertisers
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 FOR EXAMPLE

Magazines that
accept tobacco
advertisements print
fewer stories about
the health risks of
smoking than those
that have no
cigarette ads.

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 FOR EXAMPLE

• A TV movie dealing
with rape will have a
very different effect on,
indeed a different
meaning for, a viewer
who has herself been a
rape victim than for
someone else with no
such personal
experience.

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III. THE MEDIA OF MASS
COMMUNICATION

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 TWO CLASSIC TYPES:

Print Electronic/broadcast
Print media also require Less dependent on formal
literacy of the audience literacy or accessibility of urban
infrastructure.
• Newspapers
• Television
• Magazines
• Radio

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 NEW TYPE
Computer-mediated communications(CMC):Anyone
can start a blog and post for others to read

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3.1 MEDIA OF USE
A. TELEVISION

• Group Differences
• Time-of-Day
Differences
• Video

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• Unknown till after the end of World War II
1. Rapid penetration in 1950s
2. 1946 (.02%), 1950 (9%), 1955 (65%), 1960
(90%), 1965 (93%), 1980 (98%)
• Growth of cable: 1980s and 1990s –
• Purpose of all commercial TV and radio: increase
audience to sell ads.
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 GROUP DIFFERENCES

• Ages 2 – 4: from about 15 minutes to 2.5 hours/per

day
• Ages 4 – 8: watch less than before age 4
• The high school and college years and young
adulthood: less than other ages
Reasons: busy with romance, studying, working,
listening to music, and parenting young children)
• Elderly adults watch more television than most
groups.
• Watch television more than average:
Women, poor people, and ethnic minorities.

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 TIME-OF-DAY DIFFERENCES

Typically the
largest network TV
audience is
during “prime
time”—8 to 11
p.m.

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 VIDEO

• Starting with Sony’s slow introduction of

$2,000-plus Betamax machines into the
U.S. market in 1975
• VCR, 1995: had reached 85% in U.S.
homes
• 2010: replaced with DVD players, DVRs,
or Internet television and movie viewing
(Nielsen Company)

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 B. RADIO

q Rapid rise in 1920s

• in 99+% of U.S. homes 1996 – 12,000+ radio stations
q Listen to radios: 18 hrs/wk
q Most often accompanied by other activities
• Used for company rather than content – esp. driving
q Feared it would die after advent of TV – survived but
radically changed
1. Pre-TV: prime-time programming like TV today, much
talk, entertainment
2. Post-TV: mostly music, news format

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 RADIO (CONT.)
q Highly age segmented – rock, easy listening, country,
alternative, etc.
q Age
1. Young children very little use
2. Part of pre-teen music culture and esp. adolescence
• 7th graders 2.5 hours of music/day, 9th graders 3.5 hrs
3. Being replaced by MP3 players and computers
q Some current concerns
1. Rap lyrics (violence, misogyny)
• Not new concern with music – perhaps more now
2. Toxic talk radio
q Often extremely important in poor and isolated societies
1. Used in literacy programs in Africa
2. Penetrating rigid totalitarian societies

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C. NEWSPAPERS

q Most income from ads

• Newspaper ads seen more favorably by public than
TV ads – seen as less intrusive and more
informative
q Daily circulation 62 million 1990, 55 million 2005
• Huge age differences
• % reading newspaper “yesterday”
• Ages: 60+ 60%, 30–49 39%, 18–20 23%
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 NEWSPAPERS
Decline in no. of large city papers
1. Many have only one
2. Advertising strategy of concentrating on largest paper and
ignoring others
• Fewer people read >1 paper/day
3. Urban decay –> distribution problems
4. Population shift to South, West, and suburbs –> less
feeling of attachment to community in these areas
5. Morning papers usually dominant in large markets
• But most suburban and smaller cities publish in PM
Concentration of news sources – esp. wire services AP,
Reuters, AFP

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NEWSPAPERS

Medium best suited to local news, ads, and merchants

• Positive feelings for local dailies
Higher income/SES, whites, older, more educated read
more
• Also more likely to get news from other sources as
well
Sports the most-read section
Importance of parental model
• e.g., read toddler the funnies
• Ways to attract kids – e.g. Uruguay weekly kid insert

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 NEWSPAPERS
Age differences
1. Grade schoolers – comics by far most popular part
2. High schoolers (esp. boys) like sports
3. Teens less interested in news than parents are
• Exception: more interested in environmental news
International comparisons
1. U.S. about average in readership among Western
democracies
2. Sweden, Japan, UK, Uruguay higher; France & Italy
lower
3. U.S. press almost totally regional (exceptions: USA
Today, Wall Street Journal)
4. Contrast to national papers elsewhere (Guardian, Le
Monde)

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 D. MAGAZINES
q 11,000 in U.S. mid-1990s
q Greatly changed by TV
1. Fewer mass-audience magazines (Life,
Look, Saturday Evening Post), more
specialty magazines with specific target
audience
2. High failure rate of new magazines
3. Great drop in comic book sales
1950–1970
q Appeal of photography – more important
in magazines than other print media
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 MAGAZINES

q Great dependence on postal rates and advertising, esp.

liquor, tobacco
• Bias on coverage: mags. that accept tobacco ads have
less on risk of smoking
q Some magazines for children – can be way to
encourage reading
• Teens
• Part of girls’ socialization – e.g., Seventeen,
Glamour, Cosmo
q Most magazines national (often with regional editions)

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E. COMPUTER-MEDIATED
COMMUNICATIONS

q 2010 – over 2 billion use Internet

1. Over half of adults in world
2. Over 1 trillion hours of free time among world’s
educated people
q Qualities of the Internet (Walther et al. 2005)
1. Synchronicity
• Asynchronous – e-mail, texting
• Many asynchronous – Listservs
• Asynchronous access – websites
• Synchronous communication – chat rooms, role-
playing games, IM

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 COMPUTER-MEDIATED
COMMUNICATIONS

2. Multimedia
• Text, pictures, videos, music
3. Interactivity – more so than TV or radio
• People like to consume, produce, and share media –
but only Internet allows producing and sharing on
wide basis
4. Hyper textuality
• Non-linear process of navigation
• Most distinctive aspect of internet – different from
all other media

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