Study Guide on the Influence of Media Industry

Anthony Kim
THR 117

In order to survive in our information-saturated culture, we put our minds on “automatic pilot” to protect ourselves from the flood of media messages we constantly encounter. The danger with this automatic processing of messages is that it allows the media to condition our thought processes.

High Degree of Exposure
1. 30% of the waking day was spent with media as the sole activity, another 39% was media us coupled with another activity
2. 70% of the average person’s day is in par of media
3. Less than 21% of the time is devoted to work

The Information Problem
The rise of mass media, the information problem has shifted from one gaining access to one of protecting ourselves from too much information

• Our minds have been programmed by a combination of our friends, our parents, mass media, the advertisers, and us. It helps us overcome obstacles and reinforce our weakness. Other agents of programming are trying to use us to achiever THEIR goals.
• Taking control is what media literacy is about. It gives you a better perspective of the border of the real world and the world manufactured by the media
• Automaticity – it controls or unconscious through the media

The three building blocks of media literacy
1. Personal Locus – the energy and plan
• Composed of goals and drives
• The goals shape the information processing tasks by determining what gets filtered in and what gets ignored
• The more you pay conscience attention, the more you control the process of information acquisition and usage
• The locus operates in 2 modes: conscience and unconscious
2. Knowledge Structures – raw materials
• Sets of organized information in a person’s memory
• Information is piecemeal and transitory, whereas knowledge is structured, organized, and more enduring significance
3. Skills – tools
• The skills most relevant to media literacy are analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis, and abstraction.

The Definition of Media Analysis
• A set of perspective that we actively use to expose ourselves to the media to interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter.
• Media literacy is multidimensional concept with many interesting facet. We need to view it from man different perspectives to appreciate all it has to offer
• Media literacy is a continuum, not a category

Individual Perspective
• Individuals are active when processing media messages as they make decisions either consciously or automatically about filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction.
• They continually are making these decisions in one of four exposure states: automatic, attentional, transported, and self-reflexive.

Information-Processing Tasks
We are constantly engaged in a series of 3 information-processing tasks every minute. They are filtering, mean matching, and meaning construction. We choose to filter the message out (ignore it) or filter it in (process it). If we decide to filter it in, then we have to make sense of it, that is, recognize the symbols and match our learned definitions to the symbols. Next, we need to construct the meaning of the message.

Industry Perspective On Audience
The mass media segment the general population into marketing niches, and then construct niche audiences by creating special content to attract people into each niche so those audiences can be rented to advertisers.
• The media focus on particular niches where they can provide content that serves a need not already being met.
• Identifying Niches – they divide the population into meaningful segments. Then they select each niche and develop messages to attract them. Over the years segregating has been more precise and more complex grouping. The 5 types of separations are geographic, demographic, social class, geodemographic and psychographic
• Attracting Audiences – after a media organization has selected a niche to target, it develops content to attract the audience. They employ two tactics, they first appeal to your existing needs and interests. Then, they use cross media and cross vehicle promotion to attract your attention.

Children as a Special Audience
Children are treated as a special audience because of their lack of maturation and experience; however maturation and experience alone does not make someone media literate.
• Advocates of child protectors focus their attention primarily to television because this medium is virtually in every American household and children spend a great deal of time with it. They have tried to protect them from negative effects of exposure and unfair advertising practices.

Proactive Perspective on Media Effects
We need to be proactive-rather than reactive- in understanding how the media affects us. We also need to realize that there are many factors interacting in the effect process. When we can understand these two ideas, we can gain control over the process of effects.
• Media Literacy and who to blame – The key is to recognize multiple influences and not allow any one of the influences to be absolved simply because it was not the only influence.
• Media effects are constantly occurring in a complex process. The idea that the weather is always there however its effects are constantly changing. Media influences factor 3 ideas. Media effects are constantly occurring because we are constantly being influence directly and indirectly by media messages. Second, the media work with other factors in our lives. Third, you can control the effects process in your own life.

Broadening Our Perspective on Media Effects
When we take a four dimensional perspective – timing, type, valence, and intentionality – of effects, we can better appreciate the broad range of effects the media are constantly exerting on us.
• We live in a media saturated environment, and the effects are constantly happening to us as they shape our knowledge patterns, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors.
• Being media literate requires that we understand the full range of media effects. We need t protect those of negative effects and recognize that benefit us and enhance it’s power.

Development of the Mass Media Industries
The development of the media industries generally moves from the innovation stage through growth, peak, decline and then adaptation.
1. Innovation Stage - Each of the mass media industries began as an innovation. The innovation stage is characterized by technological innovation. Marketing and technology innovation.
2. Penetration Stage – Once an innovation has created a new mass media channel, that channel needs to appeal to a very large, heterogeneous population if it is to be effective as a mass medium. It is to satisfy existing needs or create new needs.
3. Peak Stage – the medium commands most of the attention from the public and generates the most revenue compared to other media. This usually happens when the medium has achieved maximum penetration.
4. Decline Stage – A newer medium would go and challenge the peak in decline. It is a loss of audience acceptance and therefore a loss in revenue.
5. Adaption Stage – It redefines its position in the media marketplace.
The Economic Games
The businesses in the media industries are in strong competition with each other to acquire limited resources, play the high-risk game of appealing to audiences, and achieve a maximum profit.

The Players
• Consumers – Our resources are our time and money. We seek to exchange our time and money for entertainment and information. We are the largest group with over 300 million in the country and over 6 billion in the world.
• Advertisers – They bring money into the game. They negotiate the exchange of their money for time and space to present their ads to a target audience.
• Media companies – They bring money, messages, and audiences to the game to compete in three different markets simultaneously. First, each media business competes in the talent market to get the best workers of their field. Second, they target the largest amount of people using their talented employees. Third, media companies have to compete in advertising markets. When media companies have constructed quality niche audiences, they have something valuable to offer advertisers who want to get their messages in front of certain types of consumers.
• Media employees – They bring talent into the game. Their goal is to bring their income and benefits for each hour worked in the media, we make a distinction between below – the – line employees and above – the –line employees.

Media Industries Strategies
The media industries have developed some general economic strategies over the years that make them successful at playing the economic game and achieve their goals. Three major strategies are illuminated – maximum profits, constructing audiences and reducing risk.

The Current Picture
The mass media industries are very healthy.

Mass media Content and Reality
The media spins reality to make it appear more exciting and thus attract people away from their real lives.
• We are continually entering the media world to get experiences and information we cannot get very well in our lives.
• We live in two worlds: the real world and the media world
• The next step reality organizing principle shows us that every media message is a mix of reality and fantasy.