- Cultural industries – The different types of popular media’s production, distribution and consumption
- Production – How a piece of media is created
- Distribution – How a piece of media is sold
- Exhibition / Consumption – How a piece of media is watched/read etc.
- Media concentration – Few individuals owning mass amounts of media
- Conglomerates – A group that owns multiples companies which specialise in different types of media e.g. audio-visual or written
- Globalisation (in terms of media ownership) – Owning companies throughout the entire globe
- Cultural imperialism – The practice of promoting the culture or language of one country in another
- Vertical Integration- A way of expansion via acquiring different businesses in the same chain of production and distribution
- Horizontal Integration – A way of expansion via acquiring media companies that work in similar sectors e.g. a company owning a magazine, radio and newspaper
- Mergers – merging 2 existing companies into 1 new company
- Monopolies – Owning several companies all in one business
- Gatekeepers
- Regulation – Laws that prevent certain things from happening e.g. creating monopolies
- Deregulation – Removing or loosening restrictions on media outlets
- Free market – A market in which voluntary exchange and the laws of supply and demand provide the sole basis for the system
- Commodification
- Convergence
- Diversity – individuality of viewpoints or content
- Innovation – change and individuality in several aspects of the media landscape, from developing new platforms, to new business models, to new methods of production
1. Hypodermic model (passive consumption)
The hypodermic model was theorised by Harold Lasswell, who wrote “Propaganda Technique in the World War ” in 1927 – highlighting the “subtle poison, which industrious men injected into the veins of a staggering people until the smashing powers… knocked them into submission”. Lasswell developed a linear model of communication in 1948, breaking down the line of communication from point A to point B (in which the SENDER is sending a MESSAGE through a MEDIUM which has an effect on the RECIEVER)
2. Two Step Flow of Communication (active consumption)
Paul Lazarfeld recognized that the simplicity of the linear model may not be sufficiently complex in understanding the relationship between sending a message and receiving the message. Due to this, he developed the Two Step Flow model of communication in 1948, taking into account of the way that messages are not directly “injected” into the audience, but go through “opinion leaders” first – people that the public trust and believe in. These opinion leaders exert influence onto the public, making communication subject to bias, interpretation, rejection, amplification, support and change
Katz, Gurevitch & Haas put forward research showing that individual audience members are a lot more active than was previously thought and were key to the processes of selection, interpretation and feedback. Individuals sought particular pleasures, uses and gratifications from individual pieces of media as shown above. Or categorised as: diversion, personal relationships, personal identity and surveillance.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs argues that people actively looked to satisfy their needs based on a hierarchy of social and psychological desires, as shown below
Psychographic Profiles
Approaches towards the audience will either adopt a QUAUNTITATIVE (objective, amount of sales/costs/viewership) approach or QUALITATIVE (interpretive, why audiences consume media) approach
