Essay On Sociology In Sociology

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Sociology wants you to look at why we do certain things in life. It wants you to challenge the way society affects you. In media, sociology focuses on the way in which media impacts mass audiences. The mass media plays a very important role in the transformation of societies from traditional to modern and from modern to postmodern (Devereux, 2003: 9). The media plays a key role in upholding and influencing social relations. When sociology is applied to the media it becomes concerned with both consumption and production and the effects it has on society.
During the twentieth century there was a decline in manufacturing in the United States. Ritzer proposed a theory that involved the Industrial age, Post-Industrial age and the Information age. …show more content…

There is the community media/non profit making media, the public or state owned media and the private owned media. The community based media are community radio stations and newsletters. They usually make their own profits by local commercials and small advertisements. Public and state owned media are in control of radio stations, newspapers and television. State control has an ideological role to play in which it attempts to secure hegemony among the public (Devereux, 2003: 55). The private owned media is dominated by the Big 6. They were formerly known as the Big 50 back in 1983 but have since combined to become just 6. These corporations are Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, News Corporation, Bertelsmann and Comcast. These 6 corporations own the majority of television, newspapers and many other media content. The term synergy has become a term that is being used by media conglomerates and it is the primary part of their scheme to maintain their position of power or control. ‘The co-ordination of parts of a company so that the whole actually turns out to be worth more than the sum of its part acting alone, without helping one another,’ (Turrow,1992:683) is the way in which Turrow defined synergy. Media conglomerates are all about profits and how they can achieve more money. An example would be the use of cheaply produced toys in ‘Happy meals’ from McDonalds