| |
The STUDIA UNIVERSITATIS BABEŞ-BOLYAI issue article summary
The summary of the selected article appears at the bottom of the page. In order to get back to the contents of the issue this article belongs to you have to access the link from the title. In order to see all the articles of the archive which have as author/co-author one of the authors mentioned below, you have to access the link from the author's name. |
|
| |
Abstract: Commonly subsumed under the label mass communication are institutions and products destined to help us make sense of what goes on in the world. The press, cinema, radio, television as well as the new information and communication technologies are the “carriers of specific social, political and moral messages generated in a temporal sequence in response to the developments in society” (Davis 1993: 35). The media gather, organise and filter daily events not only because “the real environment is altogether too big, too complex and too fleeting for direct acquaintance”, but also because we are far from being properly “equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations” (Lippman Public Opinion p. 11, quoted in Neuman et al. 1991: 1). Besides representing the world to us in a variety of ways, they also provide images of ourselves, they open up new kinds of communicative relationships between institutions and audiences. In other words, the media have colonized our whole existence and reality itself has been turned into a discursive phenomenon. Without suggesting that the mass media are the only or even primary influence in the establishment of public understanding, we should not fail to admit the existence of a real potency in the mass media, especially in vast areas such as science or thought, for instance, of which, by definition or circumstance, the lay public may know very little. |
|
