Mass Communication-What is it?

Our first class discussion, back in late August, was about the fundamentals of mass communication. Some examples of mass communication are newspapers, magazines, and social media. One of the defining traits of mass communication is that there is never any immediate feedback. So, YouTube is an example of mass communication because a user can post a comment on a video a couple of weeks after the video is posted, which is not immediate feedback. Another defining trait of mass communication is that it has to have the potential to reach a large, or mass, audience. It also most communicate through a medium and travel through space and time. A medium can be anything from a newspaper to a blog post.

There are 5 steps to mass communication. First and foremost, one most think of an idea, or a stimulus. They then must put this idea into a share able form, or encode it. An example of encoding it would be making your idea into a paper copy of a script. Then you must put your encoded idea out into the world. This is transmission. After transmitting, it may take a while, but eventually people will begin to read your script, watch your movie, etc, and decode your encoded stimulus. The final step to this process is internalization, when others retain/ remember your stimulus.

There are 3 filters (things stopping you from internalizing) and 3 impediments (obstacles). I have listed them below, along with their definition.

Filters

1. Physical-physically preventing you from doing something (I can't)
2. Psychological-this happens in your brain; you can't internalize the info; you won't accept it (I won't)
3. Informational-when you are missing a piece of information (I don't know)

Impediments

1. Semantic noise-poor encoding
2. Channel noise-occurs during transmission that makes it hard to decode material
3. Environmental noise-occurs during decoding, such as when a truck is knocking down a tree outside while you are trying to watch a television program.