Who are Curran and Seaton?

Theorists that came up with the idea that media is controlled by a small number of companies and primarily driven by the logic of profit and power.

Regulation- Free market or state control

Habermas argued that participation in the public sphere is in it’s classical phase and was restricted to the propertied class.

How can the Media act in the ‘Public Sphere’ in the ‘Public Interest’?

“a public space between the private domain and the state in which public opinion was formed and ‘popular’ supervision of government was established”

• Structures of ownership
• The role of advertising
• Links with ‘The Establishment’
• Diversionary tactics – ‘flack’
• Uniting against a ‘common enemy’

Agenda Setting: Agenda-setting is the creation of public awareness and concern of salient issues by the news media

Framing: Framing compromises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies, organize, perceive, and communicate about reality

Myth Making:

• Who really benefits from a digitally networked society? Big business or individuals? Refer to ‘loop theory’ and the ‘Dunbar number’
• Large businesses benefit mostly from a digitally networked society because of ‘the loop theory’, this theory suggests that there can be many links just from one business to another helping businesses grow and evolve. However the dunbar number suggests that one individual can only have so many stable social links with people implying that an individual will have a lot less links than a large business.
• How does big business benefit? What commodity do they trade in? Answer: predictive human behavior.
• Big businesses benefit because it means they can have a lot more links with other businesses making trading easier and profits for that business higher.
  

• What is the network effect? (Theodore Vail)
• More people participate in something so it gradually expands into a massive community.
• Can you remember what ‘feedback loop theory’? (Norbert Wiener) 21 mins into video
• What is the Dunbar number? (Robin Dunbar)
• Dunbar’s number is a suggested limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships which is a maximum number of 150.

• Canadian Philosopher
• Was an English teacher
• He predicted the World Wide Web 30 years before it was invented