mass-communication-theory

Chapter 11 Media and Culture Theories: Meaning-Making in the Social World 321
older ties with a wider national loyalty. The press also makes it possible for the
immigrant group to participate in American life, thus providing a first step in
Americanization.
Park understood the metropolitan press to serve essentially the same function.
Public opinion rests on news, on people talking about present events, and that is
what newspapers make possible. While news is primarily local in character, the real
power of the press, and other means of mass communication as well, is in providing
the basis for public opinion and political action. Compatible with both permanence
of location and with mobility, the metropolitan newspaper is an important
means of holding together a city organism made up of various distinct parts.
(Goist, 1971, p. 57)
Although Park made abstract arguments concerning the function of the press in
cities, the Chicago School didn’t develop a theory clearly explaining how and
why newspapers performed their role. As we saw in Chapter 5, members of the
Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press argued for extensive local coverage
that would permit people living in different communities to learn more about other
communities. Unfortunately, Chicago newspapers didn’t see much reader interest in
this type of news. In the 1950s and 1960s, big urban papers earned increasing
amounts of money from sales in the growing and more affluent suburbs. Other
than to report bad news about crime and social unrest, they ignored inner-city
ethnic neighborhoods, often neglecting to deliver there as their residents depressed
the papers’ suburb-enriched, advertiser-attractive up-scale demographics (Kirkhorn,
2000). It’s doubtful that these newspapers played the role Park envisioned for
them. But they undoubtedly contributed to (and disrupted) urban culture in other
ways.
CURRENT APPLICATIONS OF SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
Although Mead first articulated his ideas in the 1930s, it was not until the 1970s
and 1980s that mass communication researchers gave serious attention to symbolic
interaction. Given the great emphasis that Mead placed on interpersonal interaction
and his disregard for media, it is not surprising that media theorists were
slow to see the relevancy of his ideas. Michael Solomon (1983), a consumer researcher,
provided a summary of Mead’s work that is especially relevant for media
research:
1. Cultural symbols are learned through interaction and then mediate that
interaction.
2. The “overlap of shared meaning” by people in a culture means that individuals
who learn a culture should be able to predict the behaviors of others in
that culture.
3. Self-definition is social in nature; the self is defined largely through interaction
with the environment.
4. The extent to which a person is committed to a social identity will determine
the power of that identity to influence his or her behavior.
Among the most notable efforts by communication scholars to apply this symbolic
interactionist thinking to our use of mass media was the book Communication
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