Appendix

B Understanding Mass and Mediated Communication

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Sandie and Chris fell in love during the 1980s, while spending late evenings together watching Late Night with David Letterman on NBC. About twenty years later, their teenage daughter, Alice, sits in front of a laptop on a Saturday morning, watching streaming clips of Jimmy Fallon sitting behind Letterman’s old desk. She’s also monitoring her Facebook page to see if anyone has commented on the picture she created of herself with actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. She’s also rereading the Hunger Games series on her Kindle and posting on her blog about the movie versions. Later, she texts her friends to make plans to go to the movies but not before checking out a few trailers online. During dinner, she DVRs a History Channel documentary on the Roman Empire for a school project. After dinner, she’s off to the movies and conscientiously turns off her cell phone—it’s the first time she’s been disconnected all day. By the time Alice goes to sleep, she’s seen more media than her parents did in a week when they were her age. Meanwhile, Chris and Sandie pull up Thursday night’s episode of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on DVR, grateful that they no longer have to stay up until 1:30 A.M. to finish watching it.

Most of us, like Alice and her family, spend a great deal of time with these interconnected media technologies, often using two or more simultaneously (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2010). In this appendix, we look at mass and mediated communication and discuss the blurred lines between the two. We explore the forces that shape how media messages are made, such as the economics of the media industries and the attempts at government influence, and we discuss the potential effects that media have on us as audience members. Finally, we examine the benefits and difficulties that the ever-expanding array of media technologies presents for American society, as well as what we can do to cope effectively with our media experience.