The Social Benefits of Mass Communication

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The Social Benefits of Mass Communication

Mass communications, like anything for humans, has its advantages and disadvantages, but mass media has far more advantages to offer the world. From taking you to a far off land to teaching you about the intricacies of the life inside a colony of ants, to surfing the Internet for a new chat group to join, we learn and experience things and events that no humans ever before in history have experienced through this miracle we call mass media. This paper will explore the multifaceted and unique areas of the public’s perception of mass media, the educational value of the media, and the Internet as a new mass medium.

The public has always had an interesting relationship with mass media because it is the public that is breaths life into this organism called the mass media machine. From the earliest time periods in human history mass media was communicated through “word of mouth,” and it was that very relationship that spawned small town gossip in the middle ages , where information like what the local lord was doing and if he was hanging anyone that week for insubordination. Word of mouth continued until the invention of the printing press in 1436 when the news of the town could be told and recorded forever. A present-day survey taken about what the public’s view on the media is from the article, “Who Do You Trust and Why?,” by Joe Saltzman says that “... the public’s use and view of its media, shows that word of mouth is less trusted than CNN, public television news, local television news, and prime-time TV news magazines. News anchors American’s see on television are considered more reliable as sources of accurate information than personal acquaintances” (par 3). This ...

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...ve all made impacts on who we are as humans and what we will become in the future as we progress through the ages. Hopefully mass media will last several more hundred years being that mass media is only fairly recent when human history is considered.

Works Cited

Gabler, Neal. “The Net-Setters.” The Los Angeles Times 27 June 1999: 3 pgs. 22 March 2000 Online Proquest.

Hogan, Majorie, “Media Education.” Pediatrics Aug. 1999 22 March 2000 Online Proquest.

Huston, Aletha C. “Television and the Informational and Educational Needs of Children.”

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science May 1998: 9-23.

22 March 2000 Online Proquest.

Saltzman, Joe. “Why Do You Trust and Why.” USA Today Jan. 2000: p. 59 22 March

2000 Online Infotrac.

“Survey Asks Young Adults About Media Use.” The Quill Jan. 2000: p. 7 22 March 2000

Online Infotrac.

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