Mass Communication

The transfer of ideas, information, and symbolic content to a large number of people in dispersed locations, usually at the same time. It is contrasted with face-to-face or individual communication acts. The term usually refers to widespread communication that requires a technological interface, a means of preparing and presenting messages to a large audience. The media that can deliver mass communication to dispersed audiences include newspapers, television, radio, books, magazines, movies, and the Internet. Devices such as telephones or e-mail, originally used by individuals for personal communication, have been transformed into mass communication devices via listservs, mass e-mailings, spam, telemarketing, text marketing on cell phones, and political robo-calling. This indicates that any form of technological communication is inherently a form of mass communication.

The process of mass communicating has traditionally been traced back through time to the development of the printing press in the 15th century and to the rise of newspapers, broadsides, magazines, and various forms of print and, later, electronic media. But it can also be argued that whenever humans congregate in groups, from the smallest band in prehistoric times to the large civilizations of the ancient Egyptians or the Maya, there is a need for mass communication, for dispersing a message to everyone associated with the community. It is simultaneously a way of establishing and testing the coherence of a group.

The term is not as common today as it was when electronic media were first becoming widespread and scholars were trying to explain the effects of everyone seemingly getting the same message across large distances and in different racial, ethnic, and religious communities. Early research in mass communication emphasized its negative effects, and its mere existence was considered proof of the negative consequences of populations moving out of small-scale rural communities and into large-scale urban regions. Today, “new media” and new communication devices have rapidly integrated into the flow of everyday life, being devices for both mass communication, directed at the users, and sending out individual messages.

Mass communication is a concern to some because it seems to indicate an institutionalized power that develops homogenized and singular messages coming from one source, with media producers distinct from message recipients. When it appears across national boundaries, it is said to indicate a globalization of that power and indicates the negative influence of having one cultural tradition dominate social life and the production of meaning. For further reading, see Thompson (1995).