This week in the class readings, we focus on the uses and gratifications of mass media. I was particularly interested in what these chapters had to say because I have taken a few classes which have assigned a media diary and record what media medium I use the most and how much media I consume in a given week. From the journal, one thing was apparent; mass media is a huge part of my life. In today’s society, the access we have to any media outlet is incredible. It has become such a part of my daily routine that any free time that I have in a day, even if it is just for a few minutes, I consume some type of media content.
In the McQuail reader, it talked about a study that was done on Swedish children and their use of the mass media- TV, radio, cinema, books, etc. The results of the study were what interested me the most. They made the argument that, “in this context it is worth noting that television, in spite of the children’s comprehensive consumption of entertainment programmes, is the mass medium that constitutes their most important source of knowledge” (McQuail, 361). Now my question for everybody is, does this apply to you? Do you use the television the most to get your information? If not, then what is your primary media content for information?
Personally, the internet has effected me the most and has become my primary media content for seeking information. The amount of access we have when we log onto the internet is great. Anything I want to know more about I can easily find it on the internet. One argument out of the Baran and Davis reading is that when choosing which offerings of mass communication an individual will choose, they will weigh the gratifications against the amount of effort it took to retrieve that reward. If this were true, for me, I think that television would be the most popular in the category of information seeking. I don’t know about anybody else, but my computer is a piece of work. It takes a good couple minutes to load up, the pop-ups are inevitable, and the loading time of some web pages can sometimes actually be a joke. But for some reason, I still pick using the computer over watching television. In this “fraction of selection” (expectation of reward/ effort required) true for anybody? Do you pick your mass media outlet based on how much effort it takes to retrieve that information? If you know your going to have to search on the internet for something as opposed to flipping on the television and listening to the story, which are you more likely to choose?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jMt6saTqq4
Take a look at the video posted above. In the Baran and Davis chapter, Phillip Palmlgreen, Lawrence Wenner, and Karl Rosengren wrote, “studies have shown that a variety of audience gratifications (again, both sought and obtained) are related to a wide spectrum of media effects, including knowledge, dependency, attitudes, perceptions of social reality, agenda-setting, discussion, and various political effects variables” (Baran, Davis, (243). Dependency is what stood out to me aside from the others. Knowledge, discussion, perception of social reality; these all seem like positive effects of the media. Dependency, on the other hand, does not. Is dependency a good thing? In the “Bing” ad it is suggesting that search engines on the internet have fried our brains, and now we actually need a website that not only gives us results to what were searching for, but they claim to have made decisions for us. It is, in effect, a decision making website. What do you think about the message this website is saying? Do you think all of our media consumption and addiction with technology is actually having this effect on us, or was the commercial being overly dramatic? Does this tie in with McQuail’s idea of the “Non-social/ escapist function about using the media to get away from reality? (Mcquail, 359).
Lastly, I would like to know your media habits. Which media outlet are you using the most? And why? In the McQuail reader, it suggests that gratifications given by the media to the individual fall under 5 categories; Entertainment/ emotional, informative/ cognitive, social, non-social, and mode of consumption (McQuail, 358-360). Can you think of any other reasons/ gratifications that meet your individual needs/ wants?
As a college student, media is a huge part of my day. Although I probably would be able to survive without my daily dose of Facebook and evening television, I could not survive without the Internet and e-mail. Because I am a student, I use my computer for several hours a day and use the Internet as my primary source of media. I wouldn’t even be able to post this blog comment without the Internet. I believe that media cannot be avoided, as we cannot even walk through the mall without hearing music in the background. Besides using the Internet, I consume a large amount of television, and I perfectly fine with that (as long as it doesn’t interfere with homework!). Although I love reading blogs, surfing the Internet, going on Facebook, and listening to the radio, I would have to say that sitting down in the evening and watching television to be one of my favorite activities. In fact, I love Tuesday nights just because I get to watch a new episode of GLEE. According to McQuail, research shows, “On average, children consider the most important functions of television to be its ‘entertaining’ functions, closely followed by its ‘informative’ functions,” (McQuail 360). Based on my personal television uses, I agree with those children. Television even brings my friends and I closer together because we all get to sit around the TV with a bag of chips and enjoy the show together. Clearly, the main reason I watch television is for entertainment, but I also watch the news for information as well.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I watch TV for entertainment, I am an individual and my reasons for watching TV may be different from those of someone else. Baran and Davis discuss the uses-and-gratifications model offered by Katz, Blumer, and Gurevitch. One element of the model is “The initiative in linking need gratification to a specific media choice rests with the audience member,” (Baran and Davis 240). I agree with this idea because people have all different reasons to watch what they watch or do what they do, and audience members are given an endless amount of options today.
When it comes to finding out information, I along with Shane, use the Internet as my main source of information. I enjoy watching Anderson Cooper on CNN every now and then, but when I want immediate gratification, I use the Internet. It is fast, convenient, and provides a vast amount of resources. I can search something using Google or Bing as the ad suggests, and find out almost anything in the matter of a few seconds. If I want to find out something simple like the weather in my area, it is must easier for me to look on weather.com, than to turn on the television, flip to a news station, and then wait for the news to come on. I found the Bing advertisement to be a bit exaggerated and dramatic, but true nonetheless. Our generation is glued to the Internet and I can also bet on the fact that a majority of college students used a search engine today. I cannot even imagine what my life would be like without Google. Can you imagine using Ask Jeeves everyday and having to find out information by asking a question? Overall, I mainly use the Internet as my source of information and watch television for entertainment.
I have to say that the commercials for the Bing search engine are humorous, but unfortunately true. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t “Google” something to find an answer to a question or for my own personal curiosity. This YouTube clip perfectly fits with a featured theory that Baran and Davis explain on page 229 called the active-audience theories. The active-audience theories are “theories that focus on assessing what people do with media; audience-centered theories.” Unlike the uses and gratifications, “active-audience theories do not attempt to understand what the media do to people but, rather, focus on assessing what people do with media” (229). In my media consumption experience, and according to the Bing commercial, sometimes you learn things from television, internet and other media sources without consciously knowing it, but how do we then use this knowledge?. A downfall to this highly overwhelming media flow, as the Bing commercial also presents, is that sometimes information overload can occur with media consumption.
ReplyDeleteThe Bing commercial features adults having a difficult time with information overload but what about children? McQuail explains that there are five main groups of needs that gratify children in media. The five are entertaining, informative, social, non-social, and mode of consumption. Entertainment and information are the two most popular categories for why children watch TV. Some may say that entertainment and information are very different and probably cover a large spectrum of the types of children the researchers studied to make this conclusion. On the other hand, McQuail defends that “it is more reasonable to supposed that every program and every message in a communication contains, basically, a certain measure of information that is more or less entertaining” (361).
After reading all of the studies that have been done, I have come to the conclusion that there is no real answer to why people consume media or how exactly they use that information they absorb. It seems that the theories and inferences blur together to create audiences that thinks differently and use differently the media they consume. This generates the type of society we currently live in; an opinionated society that allows for the freedom of discussion.
The Bing commercial that Shane used is an excellent example of dependency on media. Dependency in my opinion, is not a good thing. Last semester, for an article that I was writing for my internship, I gave up Facebook for an entire week. Sadly, it was one of the most difficult things that I have ever done. I was constantly thinking about it, and I felt completely out of the know. I felt like I was missing so much. How sad is that? I thought that I was missing out on what was going on with my friends in the virtual world, when I could have just talked to them in the real world.
ReplyDeleteI think that the commercial does tie in with McQuail's theory of escapism. It is a need to "get away from the people around."(p. 360) In the commercial, the parents are unable to speak normally to their daughter, in a way they have escaped into their own little world. This also relates to my addiction, and I'm sure many others addiction to Facebook. It is removing face to face communication, an escape from the people around.
I also agree with Shane, that my main source of information is the Internet. I barely ever watch television, because the Internet is just so much faster to find exactly what I want, when I want it. The Baran and Davis reading defines my use of the Internet perfectly "Demassification is 'the ability of the media user to select from a wide menu...Unlike traditional mass media, new media like the Internet provide selectivity characteristics that allow individuals to tailor messages to their needs" (p. 238).
I think that my main use of the media is for information/cognitive and also social. My main form of media is the Internet, which I use to get news and also to remain social with my friends through social networking.
At first when I read this blog my mind immediately turned to the TV as a source of where I get most of information. One might think it was the internet but really most of my internet time is spent chatting with people which is much more a line of direct communication than information just being portrayed to you.
ReplyDeleteEvery night I watch the evening news because it is usually on when Im am doing my homework. However, after reading the Baran and Davis chapter, I realized I am absorbing very little information while I am doing it. On page 245 Baran and Davis states "Though most of us view television as an easy medium to understand and one that can make us eyewitnesses to important events, television is actually a different medium to use." I never considered this until I read this quote.
I've come to realize that the effect that television is trying to have on me really does not at all. The goal of the evening news is to keep the viewer informed. However, I never really take away that much information from the broadcast. I almost never remember the stories that i just watched after I watched them, probably because they weren't interesting. Clearly this media is not having the affect on me that it should.
The Katz article on Blackboard on page 167 states that "It is clear that the need to relax or kill time can be satisfied by the act of watching television". I believe that watching television does serve the purpose of killing time for me. However there is no affect on information that I am receiving and I do agree with Shane that I may want to turn back to the Internet as it is a more focused way of getting information I want.
“In this context it is worth noting that television, in spite of the children’s comprehensive consumption of entertainment programmes, is the mass medium that constitutes their most important source of knowledge” (McQuail, 361).
ReplyDeleteI thought about this quote a lot after reading it. In a child’s life, is television the most important source of knowledge? When I was younger, television was always my primary medium. This may have been because the Internet had yet to really come into its own as a relevant medium for communication, but at the time, I just didn’t have much of a use for it. Eventually, once the idea of the Internet really took off, it completely eclipsed television for me, but even still, I hesitate to say that TV wasn’t an important source of knowledge for me when I was younger.
Perhaps this comes from the interactivity inherent in the Internet. When one goes online, he has to consciously seek out a source of information by entering the URL of a website. The user then has the option of what content to absorb and what to ignore. With television, however, information is more sequential. One selects a channel, and then is at the mercy of that network to provide information. Shows aren’t readily skippable, and even then, with only so many choices for content the viewer more often than not will just settle for watching whatever’s on. This isn’t to say that the experience is particularly painful; that idea of filtration is just turned off. In fact, through this willingness to relinquish control of the content, the viewer can be exposed to ideas they wouldn’t normally seek out of their own accord.
In that respect, I think television can be an important medium for children. Granted, some television content is obviously inappropriate for children and it can be difficult to balance their exposure to complex ideas with the negative effects it may cause, but as with most media, one must take the good with the bad.
Looking at my media intake based on the points of the uses and gratification theory I would say that a there is a balance in which I utilize my media resources. When it comes to television I solely turn it on for recreational purposes. I remain dedicated to television to stay up to date on my list of favorite shows. I know you can access them online but the structure of a television schedule is what I still abide by. Taking a break from my work that revolves around the computer, it is refreshing to sit back and enjoy a screen from a distance rather than hover over my small laptop.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to the computer a large majority of my work revolves around it. I use the web as both a recreational and informational resource depending on my workload. I can agree with many of my fellow classmates that when we finally reach our lazy Sunday’s, for some of us, we choose to sit back and watch television or participate in a marathon of gaming. The uses and gratification theory is presented in the Baran and Davis chapter to try to find the reasoning in why we consumption so much media. They posed lots of questions within the text for readers to ponder their own media usage. This particular question, pulled from page 230,“Why do people seek information from media or how do they cope with the flow of information from the media?” The answer to this question is demonstrated in the media example that was presented by Shane. The Bing commercial shows how the average human beings brain would react if vast amounts of information were channeled to a person at one time. Bing search engine is there to prevent that from happening. We solve our information overload with new forms of media. As human beings we can only retain so much information at one time these tools preserve the information that humans are discovering everyday. I would answer Shane’s question of “Is dependency a good thing? ” In terms of preserving and organizing information, yes!
The only danger that Baran and Dennis stated was viewer’s awareness. Those that are blindly watching television with no knowledge of the media’s development and pattern they surely are going to develop all the effects of the media’s overwhelming influence. A good representation that the McQuail reading stated was that unaware viewers particularly children are in a “shiney cafeteria” filled with all type of goodies. A child is free to browse there various sources/tools that media has to offer but the outcome is can be majorly influential if not monitored in the right way. Just like food, all the tasty stuff (junk food) is the worst for your but in moderation we can enjoy it. Our different forms of media are first utilized to inform and preserve our findings. It has further evolved in that it also is a form of entertainment and enjoyment and with moderation and observation a user can overlook the effects and utilize the tool responsibly.