Types of Mass Communication

Video Transcript

"Types of mass communication vary primarily by what sort of technology we're talking about. Some mass communications will bypass time and so it's an optical communication, and some will bypass space. If you think of a book or a magazine then when the message is written down it'll be preserved, it'll stay there so you can communicate with large numbers of people over a long period of time. Other types of technologies will spend vast amounts of distance, whether we're talking about a radio broadcast or an Internet chat or a satellite broadcast of some kind. You can then no longer have distance as an obstacle to communication. Some types of mass communication will reach very very specific specialized group, say, you want to reach everybody who's interested in baseball, that's a large number of people you can communicate just with them. Others will reach hugely diverse audiences where you have people of all ages, of all races, of all income groups, of all geographic and cultural areas. So, mass communication can be very targeted towards a relatively specific group or it can be spread across enormously diverse and heterogeneous groups that otherwise would have nothing in common except for their exposure to those messages. And therefore, it's a question of whether you're crossing time or space or both and different technologies that we've created allow different types of mass communication."