What is Mass Communication?

Video Transcript

"If you think of communication as something that people do through messages, and the end communication is the production of messages and the sharing of messages and the interpretation then mass communication becomes the mass production of messages. In fact, in some ways the book was the first mass produced product when suddenly you can produce an exact, infinite number of copies of exact same thing, that's what the book was. And suddenly you could take a message and reach vast numbers of people by repeating the message, by mass producing the message and sending it over huge numbers of of diverse heterogeneous crowds. Different types of technologies have been very good at reaching very specific groups, some have been very good at reaching enormously varied and diverse groups but when you can mass produced messages you can reach an unbelievable number of people. The idea is, if you think about what would be like to suddenly reach 200 million people, 400 million people, the number of people that watch some big event, a Super Bowl, an inauguration, landing on the moon, something very spectacular. Then it is in human history, it is incomprehensible to think about what it would have been like to reach that many people at once. We take it completely for granted, it's completely normal to us. It wasn't that long ago that just sending a message between one city and another could take days or across the ocean. But with mass communication you can send a message from one person or one group to an infinite number of groups and an infinite number of cities, countries, all around the globe, instantaneously reaching larger numbers of people that was ever possible before."