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Social Theory and the Mass Media*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Thelma McCormack
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Extract

This paper is an attempt to offer a functional theory of the mass media, and to suggest criteria for evaluating the media which emerge from it—criteria which are not taken from other disciplines or from the technology of the media. First, the present stage of communications research is considered; second, the contributions of Marx and Freud; and third, an alternative hypothesis is suggested.

Urban sociologists ought to be parties to any discussion of the mass media, for it is difficult to imagine anything more symbolically urban than the mass circulation daily newspaper, the car radio, or the TV antenna. Yet judging from books on urban sociology interest in this aspect of urban life has, in recent years, dwindled to almost nothing. Neglect here is matched by the peculiar evasion in communications research of the urban context. Comparisons are routinely made between rural and urban populations with respect to readership, audiences and programme preferences, but these tabulations are not weighted any differently from comparisons along such dimensions as marital status, sex, education, and others in our standard repertoire. The two bodies of knowledge, then, have developed independently of each other despite the common-sense observation that they are inextricably related.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , November 1961 , pp. 479 - 489
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1961

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Footnotes

*

Presented to the Conference of Learned Societies on June 10, 1961 in Montreal.

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