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Content
Analysis
miteinander übereinstimmt, auf der gemeinsamen Plattform versammeln,
und wenn nun noch geeignete Präsentationsformen gewählt werden, die
dem Nachfragenden ein zielgenaues Auffinden und eine rasche Beurteilung
der Informationen ermöglichen, sind die notwendigen Voraussetzungen dafür
geschaffen, das eine erfolgreiche Evolution des Wissens als Folge beschleunigter
Kommunikationsprozesse stattfinden kann.
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Prof. Beat F. Schmid, mcm institute, University of St. Gallen
Content Analysis
Research into mass media content identifies, categorizes, describes and
quantifies short-term and long-term trends. An early and most valuable descriptive
trend study was that of Ernst Kris and Nathan leites in 1947. In
“Trends in 20th century propaganda” in B. Berelson and M. Janowitz, eds.,
Reader in Public Opinion and Communication (US: Free Press, 1947) the
author traced the trend in propaganda from the 1st World War (1914-18) to
the 2nd (1939-45), identifying a changing style towards a less emotional,
less moralistic and more truthful orientation.
Content analysis serves an important function by comparing the same material
as presented in different media within a nation, or between different nations;
or by comparing media content with some explicit set of standards or
abstract categories. On the basis of the existing body of quantitative and
qualitative research, several broad generalizations may be hazarded about
the content of mass communication: what is communicated by the mass
media is a highly selected sample of all that is available for communcation;
what is received and consumed by the potential audience is a highly selected
sample of all that is communicated; more of what is communicated is
classifiable as entertaining rather than informative or educative, and because
the mass media are aimed at the largest possible audience, most material
is simple in form and uncomplicated in content.
Watson, James; Hill, Anne: A Dictionary of Communication and Media Studies.
New York: Arnold, 1997
Convergence Convergence
The coming together of communication devices and processes; a major fearture
of the development of media technology in the 1990s. In Of Media
and People (US: Sage, 1992), Everette E. Dennis writes of forms converging
“into a single electronically based, computer-driven mode that has been
described as the nearly universal integration of systems that retrive,
process, and store text, data, sound, and image”, in short, multimedia. Dennis
pounts out that convergence is far more than “the stuff of hardware and
software: it is the driving force that has spurred major change in the media
industries and almost everywhere else”.
Convergence has operated at the technical and operational level and at the
level of ownership and control. Just as individual items of hard and software
have been centralized into one multi-media outfit, so media procuction has
been centralized into fewer corporate hands, most of these transnational.
With convergence has come a blurring of media functions: with the aid of a
MODEM, the telephone permits us to surf the INTERNET or, regulation
permitting, to summon up channels of screen entertainment. We can work
from home, shop from home, summon up the world from home (if we are
lucky enough to be able to pay for the technology). Dennis says that convergence
“has ushered in a united state of media, one that will continue to
pose important and wrenching questions in the 1990s”.
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