mass-communication-theory

324 Section 4 Contemporary Mass Communication Theory
will do and when you will do it. You can skip classes without risk of being expelled.
Your grades must be consistently very low over a number of semesters before
you might be asked to leave. On the other hand, a primary reason why the
world of work is real is that individuals have much less control over their actions
and any consequences they might produce. Although the rules governing work are
becoming more flexible, most jobs still require people to work certain hours of the
day. Between those hours, employees are required to do whatever tasks are assigned.
Many workplaces are still hierarchically structured, with a few people at
the top dictating what everyone else does. Unlike the university, even occasional
violations of the rules of the workplace can get you fired. Real, in this example,
then, means that work is socially constructed with less input from us and therefore
more beyond our personal control than college.
Social constructionism’s view of the role of media contrasts sharply with both
mass society theory and the limited-effects perspective. Mass society theory envisioned
vast populations living in nightmare realities dominated by demagogues.
Limited-effects research focused on the more or less effective transmission of ideas,
attitudes, and information from dominant sources to passive receivers. When social
constructionism is applied to mass communication, it makes assumptions similar to
those of symbolic interactionism; it assumes that audiences are active. Audience
members don’t simply passively take in and store bits of information in mental filing
cabinets; they actively process this information, reshape it, and store only what
serves culturally defined needs. They are active even when this activity largely
serves to reinforce what they already know—to make them more willing to trust
and act on views of the social world communicated to them by media. Thus, media
can serve as an important way for social institutions to transmit culture to us; they
let us know what social roles and personal identities are appropriate.
Active audience members use the media’s symbols to make sense of their environments
and the things in it, but those definitions have little value unless others
share them—that is, unless the symbols also define things for other people in the
same way. A Lexus, for example, can be as expensive an automobile as a Porsche,
and both are functionally the same thing: automobiles that transport people from
here to there. Yet the “realities” that surround both cars (and the people who drive
them) are quite different. Moreover, how these different drivers are treated by
other people may also vary, not because of any true difference in them as humans,
but because the “reality” attached to each car is used to define their drivers (Baran
and Blasko, 1984). We’ll discuss this more later. For now, it’s worth noting that
your power as an individual to control the “realities” surrounding these cars is
limited.
Alfred Schutz (1967, 1970), a banker whose avocation was sociology, provided
some early systematic discussions of ideas that have become central to social
constructionism. Like many meaning-making theorists, he was fascinated by what
he regarded as the mysteries of everyday existence. For example, as a banker, he
was conscious of how dependent our economic system was on people’s willingness
to routinely accept that money—identically printed on standardized pieces of paper,
differing only slightly, primarily on the numbers printed on their face and
back—could have radically different value. But money is just one everyday mystery.
Schutz sought a broader understanding of how we make sense of the world
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