The Uses and Impacts of Mass Communication

According to Denis McQuail, “,,,media extend and change the entire spectrum of socio- technological possibilities for public communication”. It is important to learn about communication theories because nowadays people live in the era of information, In simple words, communications deal with the information flow, its origins, exchange and impacts. Therefore, any information has its purpose and target audience In order to understand the regularities of information transfer, it is necessary to become aware of the mass communications theories. The science of communication is about the power of information For example, operational theory refers to the aspects of the practical appliance of the ideas how advertisements can be the most effective, how to please audiences, and other fundamental tasks Anyhow, its influence in respect of people‘s behavior cannot be underestimated.

The basic functions of communication are information, bonding, interpretation, diversion, and instruction.

Another example is a Marxist theory of communication which tells that communication performs an important function in the production and distribution of wealth within society.

“Two broad processes take center stage in communication scholarship: commodification and sense- making”. For comprehending human experience, communication scholars inspired by this theory conduct investigations regarding the role of communication in the process of labor, mainly commodity production, sense-making, and media consumption. What is important to understand in this theory, the sense-making process arouses from the struggle of social classes against the types of exploitation and oppression that occurred in capitalist relationships within the society. The success of capitalism happened to a large extent thanks to the constant communication of it advocates for expansion of economic freedom boundaries for corporations.

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Thus, advocacy, debate, and argument are the tools that certain social classes control the processes within the social world. As far as mass media is a powerful tool, it is used for political, economic, religious, cultural propaganda, persuasion, and manipulation. Advertising is a means of economical propaganda. There are evident media impacts that are genuinely influential and a large portion of people would concur are regular. For instance, people put on another clothes and change their arrangements according to the information learned from the Weather Channel, or quit eating a certain food after people watch the news about its contamination danger, Different impacts are more hard to study and more troublesome for individuals to acknowledge on the grounds that they are long haul and more individual. For instance, media might impact people’s own feeling of style, perspectives on sex, the impression of different races, or values pretty much as people’s free will, partners’ and parents‘ behaviors, it is troublesome to decide in a particular case the amount of impact the media has on a person’s convictions or conduct in extent to different components that impact him or her.

Media messages might likewise influence viewers in ways not planned by the message creators. Two media impacts that are regularly talked about are boomerang and reciprocal impacts (Griffin) The reciprocal impact focuses to the intelligent relationship between the media and the covered subject, At the point when an individual or occasion receives media consideration, it impacts the way the individual acts or the way the event happensi Media scope frequently enhances self-consciousness that influences people’s activities. It is like the way that people change conduct when they know certain individuals might be watching them. For instance, the Occupy Movement that started on Wall Street in New York City increased some consideration from option media and individuals utilizing micro media stages like free bloggers.

As news of the Occupy movement in New York transmitted, individuals in towns and cities began to frame their own groups. For this situation, media consideration brought on development to spread that might have generally stayed restrictedi The boomerang impact alludes to media-instigated change that is counter to the sought change. In the realm of twenty-four—hour news and steady floods of client produced material, the impacts of errors, bumbles, or plain old poor choices are considerably more hard to control or contain. Prior to a gathering or individual can clear up or give setting to information disclosed, a story could become viral and a media account built that is difficult to backtrack and exceptionally hard to try and control. Overall, pretty much as an entryway controls the stream of movement, the media goes about as a watchman, permitting a few messages to go through and others not.

According to McLuhan’s theory, “the medium is the message” (Berger) which insists that not the text of the message is important, but the sense of it. Therefore, by evoking certain emotions from the target audience, people can be guided to perform actions like purchasing a product or changing beliefs. Thus, desires and fears are the two major leverages used by media in order to organize and manipulate the viewers. Moreover, a massive amount of mass culture products, such as films, songs, broadcasts, and shows are aimed at the generalization of these two feelings. Desires are propagated for enhancing people‘s appetites, so they find the satisfaction of their desires at the market place. Imposing fear is the governmental tool for the community members to trust and look for help in the authorities. This trick leads to the mass obedience to authorities.