Sociology And Mass Media

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.

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

Sociology of the media has now become more dominated by the theme of relative powerlessness of the media broadcasters (Gitlin, 1978). In order for us as consumers to understand the relationship between media ownership and content we must observe the profit-driven reasons of the media organisations that serve the audiences and production. Politics in the media have one goal only, to shape the way in which the mass audience thinks. Capitalism attracts everything to its similarity in exchange value. ‘Social relations within it are dominated and shaped right through by the relations of exchange-buying and selling’ (Inglis, 1990:113) Karl Marx talked about how one person may only create within the formation and development of the market in which they fall in