Positivismo y critica

Clase: Teoría de la comunicación de masas

Abstract:

America, Mass Society and Mass Media

Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer

What model of study can be used

There seems to be a littledoubt that there is some determinate relationship between a society and its system of communications. Certain gross relationships seemed obvious. It is certainly more than an accident the society mostdeveloped technologically should be also the society in which mass communications are also most developed. The history of the growth of the American system of communications can be written largely intechnological and economic terms. The extensive development of the mass media for transmission of information and entertainment depended on a high level of technological advance and a great deal ofwealth and social leisure.

It is equally certain that there is also a determinate relationship in the other direction, that a society as complex and extensive as ours requires a flow of informationand ideas that could not be handled by more primitive means. It has also been suggested although there is a moot point that our civilization generates a demand for the vast amount of diversion andentertainment that is produced by our press, radio, movies and television.

There is a considerable body of speculation and generalization concerning the relationship of the mass media of communicationto American society. While there is a wide variety of assertions optimistic and pessimistic, specific and general, informed and uniformed, sophisticated and naïve on this topic, there is only oneposition of prominence which approximates a coherent “theoretical” statement, the so-called theory of mass society and mass culture. We use the word theoretical in quotation

a) el problema queabordan: El poder de los medios masivos en las personas, la forma en la que influyen en ellos.
b) las teorías sobre las que se basan: Teoría de la comunicación de masas, ya que dicen que es la única...