Full Description
"Arguing for a General Framework for Mass Media Scholarship challenges scholars and students to consider and reconsider what we know about media and how we think about media. As such, the book provides an important framework for thinking about knowledge—regardless of the discipline... The text provides all of the necessary tools to move the field forward in a way that will increase the rigor of the work being done and augment the overall profile of the discipline."
-Dana Mastro, University of Arizona
In this groundbreaking book, W. James Potter presents an innovative perspective to media scholars and students who are frustrated with the fragmentation of research findings across so many journals, books, and fields. Arguing for a General Framework for Mass Media Scholarship presents a clear plan for a more efficient way to build knowledge about the mass media so that it can be better organized and made more useful.
Key Features
Conducts an in-depth analysis of mass media scholarship's four major facets of effects, content, audiences, and organizations
Presents a significant shift in conceptualizing media effects and ways research can be conducted to generate more useful knowledge about media influence
Develops "narrative line" as a tool to guide analyses about how content decisions are made by producers
Synthesizes a system of explanation about why audiences attend to certain messages and how individuals construct meaning from those messages
Incorporates an analysis of mass media organizations to provide greater context of understanding messages and their effects on individuals and macro units in society
"The book will play an important role in providing structure to a broad, fragmented discipline. I believe it will, at the very least, create important dialogues about what we now know/understand about areas of mass media, and where we should move as a discipline... This book is clearly a 'call to arms' for mass media scholars to ratchet up the quality of research (and what we know), to see the interconnections within and among strands of scholarship, and to move forward in a more efficient, organized manner. Professor Potter should be commended for this." —Roger Cooper, Ohio University
"This book is...that call to action that comes forward every few years, to wake us up and challenge our ways of doing things, not by being radical, but via synthesis... I've been waiting for several years for a book like this."
—Sahara Byrne, Cornell University
Contents
PART I: INTRODUCTION
1. Why Do We Need a General Framework?
2. Introduction to the General Framework
PART II: EXPLAINING THE MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS FACET
3. Media Media Organization Line of Thinking
4. Business Strategies
5. Marketing Strategies
6. Employment Strategies
PART III: EXPLAINING THE MEDIA AUDIENCES FACET
7. Media Audience Line of Thinking
8. Audience Cognitive Algorithms
9. Audience: Filtering Media Messages
10. Audience: Meaning Matching
11. Audience: Meaning Construction
PART IV: EXPLAINING THE MEDIA MESSAGES FACET
12. Media Message Line of Thinking
13. Message Formulas and Conventions--General
14. Message Formulas and Conventions by Genre
15. Critique of Media Message Scholarship
PART V: EXPLAINING THE MEDIA EFFECTS FACET
16. Media Effects Line of Thinking
17. Conceptualizing Media Influence and Effects
18. Designing Media Effects Studies
PART VI: CONCLUSION
19. Integration of Explanations
