About Denis McQuail: An overview of Media Theory

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About Denis McQuail An overview of Media Theory

• May 9th, 2007

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In General

• A difficult reading
• No background in Media
• To solve this problem, lets look at some
  sentences or ideas that gave you trouble
• Some questions
• Where did it originate
• How long has it existed as an area of research?

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Where/When did it Start

• Varied beginning
• It began in no one place or no one time
• Informally, there were sociologists who looked at
  media in communities as a way of understanding
  people in those communities
• Example Robert Park in Chicago in 1922
• Formally, it began in America in the late 1940s
  with the Columbia School
• Lazarsfeld was the key person in this school

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Sociology of Knowledge

• Sociology The study of the social (groups)
• Interaction
• Activities of groups
• Sub-groups
• Ethnic groups
• Politics (power)
• Economics (about the household, then it was
  corporations kinds of groups)
• Ideas (come from culture) like ideology and
  philosophy and morality

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Sociology of Knowledge

• Sociology study of groups
• Knowledge inputting of information or
  experience in a way that makes sense in a way
  that we know or we understand.
• Thus, the sociology of knowledge is the study of
  how groups use or understand information and/or
  experience.
• These writers (McQuail and Tuchman) are
  explaining how different groups of
  thinkers/researchers look at media in a
  particular way, with particular results

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Sociology of Knowledge

• Knowledge information
• Not all information is knowledge
• Example a clock tells time and that is
  information, but not really knowledge
• Knowledge experience
• Not all experience is knowledge
• Example if I burn my finger that is experience
  but it is not really knowledge
• When does experience or information become
  knowledge?
• Knowledge when we input information or
  experience into our heads in a way that makes
  sense in a way that we know or we
  understand.

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What Happened in the 1940s?

• There was a war all over the world
• How is this related to groups who study media?
• Economically and politically America came out
  ahead after the war.
• In the lead
• How is this related to media study?
• In the 1960s, 1970s one criticism is that media
  studies is too US-centered and also that it is
  too much a reflection of the biases or
  interests of the groups doing research in the US

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How is Research Done (generally)

• Most important thing you cannot do research
  without money
• After the war, where was the money?
• US government and/or US universities had the
  money.
• You dont get something for nothing in life, so
  what did the US government want in exchange for
  its money?
• Concerned about power and influence
• How would this translate into media studies?
• Power and influence how do we get people to do
  what we want using media (influence) and also how
  are people affected by media messages?

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One More Important Thread

• Information Theory
• Late 1940s/early 1950s
• Shannon and Weaver
• Based on modeling how communication happens
• Very mathematical, and linear
• Information source which sends a message on a
  transmitter to a receiver and that message is
  then processed and meaning is taken from it or
  action then occurs
• Important things added in the coming years were
  words like encoding and decoding and noise
  and redundancy and feedback

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Working with the Model

• What do these words mean?
• encoding (information that is inputted which
  may not always look exactly like what is
  decoded at the end)
• This is a communication problem sometimes -- when
  the decoding occurs on a machine (sometimes a
  brain but it can be a medium like computer) that
  is not set up perfectly to receive the message as
  it was encoded/intended
• decoding (getting the information in a form
  that we can make sense of it)
• Example of Magrittes this is not a pipe
  painting --
• http//cours.funoc.be/essentiel/article/img151/mag
  ritte.jpg
• This is an example of noise and also
  incommensurability of messages (contradict one
  another) -- interfering with proper decoding

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Working with the Model

• noise (what interferes with the processing of
  the message)
• redundancy (sending the message many times or
  in multiple ways)
• feedback (the reaction/response to the
  original message)
• Added a few years later after (valid) criticism
  of the linear one-way model of communication
• Vivian -- Holden interaction and Osgood and
  Schrams circular model
• http//www.intcul.tohoku.ac.jp/holden/MediatedSoc
  iety/Images/schramos.gif

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Lasswell A Verbal Linear Model

• Who Says What to Whom in which Channel with What
  Effect?
• This became the major approach to media studies
  in the first few year
• What word stands out? Effect
• The early years of media studies emphasized this
  idea of effect
• It became the goal/outcome of all media research
• At least at US universities
• And this relates to the sociology of knowledge
  because it is this group of researchers in this
  site (universities) at this time (1950s and
  1960s) who were studying media from this
  perspective/viewpoint

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This Contrasts with the European Approach

• Emphasized
• Marxism
• Signs/Meaning
• Problems associated with power
• Economic or political institutions that used
  media/communication to get power/influence

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What is Media Institution?

• This is a word McQuail uses on p. 52
• McQuail says that it is intermediate, but what is
  it?
• Also, what is it intermediate to (what does it
  stand between)?
• Is it the who that Lasswell talks about, or is
  it the thing that stands between the Who and
  Whom?