Define communication, mass communication, mass media, and culture.

1. Define communication, mass communication, mass media, and culture.

1) In its simplest form, communication is the transmission of a message from a source to a receiver. For over 60 years now, this view of communication has been identified with the writing of political scientist Harold Lasswell (1948). He said that a convenient way to describe communication is to answer these questions:

• Who?

• Says what?

• Through which channel?

• To whom?

• With what effect?

Expressed in terms of the basic elements of the communication process, communication occurs when a source sends a message through a medium to a receiver producing some effect.

2.Mass communication is the process of creating shared meaning between the mass media and their audiences.

3. When the medium is a technology that carries messages to a large number of people— as newspapers carry the printed word and radio conveys the sound of music and news—we call it a mass medium (the plural of medium is media).

4.Culture is the learned behavior of members of a given social group. Many writers and thinkers have offered interesting expansions of this definition. Here are four examples, all from anthropologists. These definitions highlight not only what culture is but also what culture does:

Culture is the learned, socially acquired traditions and lifestyles of the members of a society, including their patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting. (Harris, 1983, p. 5)

Culture lends significance to human experience by selecting from and organizing it. It refers broadly to the forms through which people make sense of their lives, rather than more narrowly to the opera or art of museums. (Rosaldo, 1989, p. 26)

Culture is the medium evolved by humans to survive. Nothing is free from cultural influences. It is the keystone in civilization’s arch and is the medium through which all of life’s events must flow. We are culture. (Hall, 1976, p. 14)

Culture is an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbolic forms by means of which [people] communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes toward life. (Geertz, as cited in Taylor, 1991, p. 91)

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