General Systems Theory

1
General Systems Theory

• Bertalanffy
• Used to understand the interrelationships among
  various organizational units

2
Feedback

• Information, positive or negative, received by
  organizations and its members
• Through this that units are able to determine if
  the information being transmitted is clear and is
  sufficient to achieve the desired goals.

3
Mass Media as Social Systems

• Social science insist on evidence makes them
  seem to defend media when actually defending
  process of research
• Mass Media survives even flourishes despite sharp
  criticism
• Answer somewhere between public taste
  determines media fair and media fair determines
  public taste

4
Social Systems

• Media viewed as social systems that operate
  within a specific external systemAmerican
  society
• Pattern of action exhibited by individuals or
  sub-groups who relate themselves to one another
  within systems
• Social system--abstraction

5
Social Systems

• A complex state of stable, repetitive, and
  patterned action that is in part a manifestation
  of the culture shared by the actors, and in part
  a manifestation of the psychological orientations
  of the actors (which are in turn derived from
  that culture).
• The cultural system, the social system, and the
  personality systems (of the actors), therefore,
  are different kinds of abstractions made from the
  same basic data, namely, the overt and symbolic
  behaviors of individual human beings.

6
Functional Analysis

• Focuses on some specific phenomenon occurring
  within a social system. It then attempts to show
  how this phenomenon has consequences that
  contribute to the stability and permanence of the
  system as a whole.

7
Types of Content

• Low-taste widely distributed widely attended
  to by mass audience consistently poorly rated by
  critics
• Nondebated widely distributed widely attended
  to by mass audience very little said by critics
• High-taste widely distributed but note widely
  attended to by audiences

8
Low Taste Content

• Audiences
• Research Organizations
• Distributors
• Producers/Sponsors

• Advertising Agencies
• Subsystems of Control
• External Conditions
• Formal laws
• Informal norms