SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES OF MASS COMMUNICATION

• Fall 2009: 177 Comm Arts Bldg (W 6:00-8:50 p.m.)
• Instructor: Dr. Tom Hove
• Office: 327 Comm Arts (355-6666)
• Email: hovet@msu.edu

[my personal version of the syllabus]

Papers by John Girdwood

• Mass Media Ethics: Thoughts on Zaller & Lessig [Google Doc] [blog post]
• Challenging Traditional Gate-Keeping Power & Control: How New Media Transcended Conventional Mass Media Roles [Academia] [blog post]
• Personal Influence and Communicative Action: A Critique of Habermas, Friedland, Katz, and Lazarsfeld [Google Doc] [blog post]

Primary Texts Studied

• Pierre Bourdieu, On Television
• John Durham Peters and Peter Simonson, Mass Communication and American Social Thought (MCAST)

Purposes and Objectives

This course will explore several fundamental and recurring topics in the history of mass communication research. We will study mass communication in its various forms: journalism, advertising, public relations, entertainment, new media, and digital culture. One major goal will be to provide you with a foundation of knowledge about the American and European traditions of media studies. We will read a variety of theoretical and empirical works that shaped and defined mass communication studies over the course of the twentieth century and that remain influential today. We will also read recent studies that extend, update, or challenge these classic works. Topics covered will include the following: theories of community; roles of the mass media in forming and influencing public opinion; critiques of propaganda, mass society, and mass culture; mediated social interaction; nationalism and the mass media; theories of civil society; minority representation and access to the public sphere; influences of political and economic power on the media professions; intersections of consumerism and politics; and the theoretical challenges posed by new media and the Internet. Required readings will cover a range of academic interests: mass communication, sociology, history, social psychology, moral philosophy, cultural studies, political science, and Internet studies.

Readings

• Lazarsfeld, “Administrative and Critical Communications Research” (166-173);
• Gitlin, “Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm”
• Lazarsfeld & Merton, “Mass Communication, Popular Taste, and Organized Social Action” (230-241); (MCAST)
• Wirth, “Consensus and Mass Communication” (249-253); (MCAST)
• Wright, “What Is Mass Communication?” (454-456) (MCAST)
• Peters & Simonson intro to Part III (263-274) (MCAST)
• Park & Burgess, “Introduction” (31-34); (MCAST)
• Park, “Natural History of the Newspaper”;
• Friedland, “Communication, Community, Democracy”;
• Calhoun, “Community without Propinquity Revisited”
• Lippmann, “The Disenchanted Man” (36-41);
• Lasswell, “The Results of Propaganda” (47-50);
• Bernays, “Manipulating Public Opinion” (51-57);
• Lang & Lang, “The Unique Perspective of Television” (328-337)
• Horkheimer & Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment
• Mills, “The Mass Society” (387-400);
• Bell, “The Theory of Mass Society” (364-372);
• Macdonald, “A Theory of Mass Culture” (343-352)
• Merton, “The Social and Cultural Context” (215-217);
• Katz & Lazarsfeld, Personal Influence
• Noelle-Neumann, “Spiral of Silence”
• Mutz, “Impersonal Influence”
• Horton and Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction” (373-386);
• Innis, “Industrialism and Cultural Values” (275-279);
• Thompson, Media and Modernity