Mass Communication Defined

05 January 2009

We speak, too, of Mass Communication. Mass Communication is the process of creating shared meaning between the mass media and their audiences. Schramm recast his and Osgood’s general model of communication to help as visualize the particular aspects of the mass communication process. The original Osgood and Schramm scheme have much in common – interpreters, encoding, decoding, and messages – but it is their differences that are most significant for our understanding of how mass communication differs from other forms of communication. For example, whereas the original model includes “message,” the mass communication model offers “many identical messages”.

In addition, the mass communication model specifies “feedback”, whereas the interpersonal model does not. When two or a few people communicate face-to-face, the participants can immediately and clearly recognize the feedback residing in the reciprocal messages.