Chapter 1 Mass Communication

What I believe you should know about this chapter is for starters you must truly understand the definition of culture. Culture can be thought of as the symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and socities use to make sense of daily life and articulate their values.Whats funny is the book says that we "the people" are assigning meaning to the songs, books, TV programs, or Websites we visit. In other terms when we look at something and it invokes a feeling we connect it with whatever is going on in our lives. I know when I listen to Aerosmith "I don't want to miss a thing" I connnect it to me not having a relationship or me missing a significant other. I felt that this definition was important because I never thought of culture in that terminoloy. When I think culture I think backrounds, peoples ethinicity not something people use to make sense of their lives. The rest of the chapter just basically talks about the five phases of how communication has evolved starting with oral, written, print, electronic and digital(our lovely world today). The chapter begins to break down how communication works. First, the sender sends the message into what is know as a mass media channel(this could be the internet for example) ,and then the reciever "the audience" gets the message. Not to skip over anything, but what I also found interesting was the steps on how to have a critical perspective on things:

1) Description: you have to be very attentive, you have to take notes and do plenty of researching on whatever the topic is at hand. For example the rise in celebs cheating on their spouses:

i.e.: Tiger Wooods, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse James, and so much more (on the low).
2) Analysis: focusing on the patterns that come up from the description page.
3) Interpretation: the fun part of trying to figure out the meaning with whatever dots you connected in the first stage. Like with my example I am discovering that the husbands of hollywood are cheating bastards that can't be momgamous.
4)Evaluation: in this stage you begin to make your verdict on the subject and I think with my example my judgment on them is pretty clear.
5)Engagement: lastly connecting our findings to make our points/questions to all media institutions.

So apparently everything on the top helps us to better recognize the highs and lows of media forms. Now isn't that interesting folks!