Mass communication - class discussion
In class we recently discussed mass communication- how it works, the ways it has changed, and the lasting effect on people. It was very intriguing to me how there are so many different aspects to mass communication.
Mass communication has 5 major steps- stimulus, encoding, transmission, decoding, and internalization. Stimulus is the thought of the idea and encoding is putting the idea in a format in which people can understand. During transmission it is given out to a large group of people. In decoding the audience understands the information given to them and internalization is the remembering of the information. While you are trying to decode the mass communicated content, a few things could get in your way. Such as filters or noise.
Filters and noise (aka impediments) are things that interfere from you decoding the information. Filters could be psychological (ex: you don't like the author), a language barrier (ex:you speak Spanish but the media is in English), or boring (ex: you dislike sports and the media topic is football). Impediments aka noise are caused when the incoming is not done properly. When this occurs, you can not decode the information correctly. It could be semantic noise, actors were not very good, the script is poorly written, a signal error, etc.
I personally learned a lot in this dissuasion/lecture. Most class discussions I have some background information regarding the topic. But, for mass communication I only inferred it was about, well, communicating with a large group of people. I did not know about the time and effort it takes to create the mass communication. Also this, along with most class discussions, affects me. Without mass communication, I wouldn't know about current events and would be oblivious to anything but my own life. It sometimes takes a while (i.e. books) but other times it is instant (i.e. social media or websites). I am very thankful for mass communication and what it does for people on an everyday basis.