What does it really mean to speak to the masses? From kings carving words into stone to TikTok clips spreading across the globe, people have always tried to push their voices further than the moment in front of them.
Mass media, as John Durham Peters explains in Critical Terms for Media Studies (Mitchell & Hansen, 2010), is part of this long history of communication across distance and time. In our group’s presentation, we looked at how mass media reshape communication, power, and culture. Peters (2010) explains this through a triad: the message (content), the means (delivery), and the agents (authors and audiences). Together, these form an ecosystem of media.
Mass Media has transformed from speaking face-to-face, to broadcasting for unknown audiences in three main features:
- Generalization, where the content is made for public standards and interests rather than tailor for specific individual needs.
- Spatiotemporal Reach, which enables communication across space and time.
- Elective Participation, related to the targeted audiences’ availability in time and the method of access.
Classic Theorists on Media & Power
These three aspects allow the media to become “mass” by expanding its audience while addressing them as strangers.
Classic theorists like McLuhan and Innis deepen this argument.
- “The Medium is the Message”, one of Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrases, on how the form of media covers more meaningful information than the content it carries.
- Harold Innis shows a different perspective on power and different media forms, proved by the space-binding media like images, prints and audios serve better in Commerce, while time-binding media like oral traditions and scripture sustain Religious and Cultural authorities.
These key arguments of the chapter highlight why media matters while showing how mass media has always been tied to structures of power while still leaving room for audiences to interpret and resist.
Media’s Reach & The Power of Audiences
Our chapter on Mass Media looks at media through a general lens that broadly covers concepts about its development and reception. It begins by discussing how “any form of communication has potential for spillage,” meaning that any form of communication, but most significantly word of mouth/face-to-face communication, may not be limited to being understood by the target audience. For example, a conversation, a speech, or a broadcast always has the potential to be overheard by an external audience that the content is not intended for.
The second point, which the chapter elaborates on most extensively, is crucial to understanding the presence and efficacy of mass media: the Spatiotemporal Range. This basically refers to the presence of a media object across time and space, and how it maintains permanence through this.
The spoken word is a temporary form of communication. It addresses only a finite audience. Even though it can address large audiences at once, it cannot be passed on across cities or countries or years in the exact same way. In these terms, writing has a better spatiotemporal range. With the printing press, the written word could be replicated multiple times, which gives it permanence and the ability to be transported across landscapes. This becomes even easier with the internet and, in today’s age, social media. Now, ideas can be communicated instantly, reach an indefinitely large audience, and be preserved over decades effortlessly.
Lastly, the writer addresses the fact that interaction isn’t always two-sided. The way a piece of media is interpreted, and by whom, lies mainly in the hands of the audience/ consumers. Creators, authors, and speakers can curate their content to address a specific group of people and ensure it is understood in a certain way. However, the actual engagement with that content can always differ from the intended outcome.
These sections lead us to understand the place of mass media in culture and through its evolution, eventually guiding us to a main argument, which, according to Peters is that “power is perhaps the ultimate mass medium.” Keeping this in mind, we think that the most crucial point that the readers can latch onto is that, despite Mass Media being centered around institutions of power, ultimately, the power to choose what influences people resides with us as audiences and consumers of media. Or in simple words: audiences have agency.
This chapter is especially important and relevant now, when every individual has the ability to create independently, as well as easy access to any form of media through the internet. In such a digital environment, people of power can spread messages farther than ever. At the same time, this amplification of the spatiotemporal range, also amplifies the ability for audiences to reinterpret, resist, boycott, or support these messages and spread their own individual ideas. The vastness and accessibility of the internet allow the audience to do more than just accept or reject dominant ideas, which adds fragility to power.
Connecting the Dots: Finding Common Ground in Media Theory
While this chapter looks at mass media through a broad lens, we found that other groups’ presentations had many overlapping themes with ours and were able to dive deeper into certain concepts to provide further insight into areas of media.
For instance, though our presentation used the term ‘communication’ loosely, the group that presented on communication further explained how it works and the systems within it. They compared two models of communication: the transmission model, which focuses on the one-way transfer of information, and the constitutive model, which views communication as a dynamic, reflexive process. The latter describes how meanings are not fixed and are instead created during interaction, as the decoding of a message by a receiver heavily relies on social and contextual factors. We found that the constitutive model is similar to our chapter’s discussion of mass media’s indefinite form of address, in which it is explained that different audiences outside of the target group can interpret the same piece of information differently and thus change the original meaning.
Furthermore, we emphasised the significance of power in mass media, which is a theme that runs through many other chapter presentations. The presentation on image talked about how we as humans heavily rely on images to act as tangible representations of concepts, which is why religious imagery, such as paintings, has such a strong influence on audience perceptions. The group that covered writing detailed different forms of writing such as recordkeeping or numerical notion for trade, and how the ability to write distinguishes those who have access to knowledge, and therefore power and control. Thus, image, writing, religion and art are some of the many chapters that relate back to our chapter’s argument that media is always tied to institutions of power, which makes mass media a tool of global influence.
Reflective Conclusion
Looking back on our presentation, we think there are a few things we could have done differently. One main thing we wish we had included was more examples, both from the author’s text and from our own media experiences. The chapter itself is filled with vivid illustrations from medieval manuscripts to modern broadcasting, and bringing more of those into the presentation might have made the theory feel less abstract. Even more importantly, connecting the ideas directly to examples familiar to us as BMS students, maybe like current events, pop culture or how we consume global media. We think this could have made it more interactive and relatable for our audience.
What we found challenging about this chapter was its sheer scope. The author moves from ancient kings and religious sermons to radio and television, and at first it was difficult to pin down what exactly he meant by “mass media.” Was it a modern invention or a timeless human practice? Eventually, we came to see that his answer is both: the urge to reach the many, to preserve messages across space and time, has always been central to communication. Even face-to-face speech, the author argues, carries the potential for mass communication because words inevitably spill beyond their intended audience. That realization reshaped how we think about communication itself, it is never fully contained.
Preparing this presentation also taught us something valuable that we think matters for the rest of the class: the importance of studying media historically and critically. It’s easy to treat mass media as something that began with the printing press or exploded with radio, television, and the Internet. Still, the author shows us that the logic of mass communication is much older. Religious texts, oral performances, decrees, even monuments, all functioned as forms of mass media long before the digital era. For us, that was a crucial takeaway. Mass media is always entangled with institutions of power but it has also always been reshaped by the audiences who interpret and respond to it.
If we had to summarize our own takeaway, it’s that mass media is never neutral. It carries with it histories of power, control, and institutions, yet it is never completely one-sided. Audiences always bring their own interpretations and agency, whether that’s through critique, resistance, or creative re-use. That tension, between institutional influence and human response, is what makes studying media so relevant to us today. In a world where media can both oppress and liberate, the responsibility falls on us to recognize its power, challenge its narratives and imagine new possibilities for how stories are told.
Contributors: Maryam Abusamak, Adela Lynge, Minh Ha Nguyen (Eira), Kenisha Sukhwal
Reference: Peters, J. D. (2010). Mass media. In W. J. T. Mitchell & M. B. Hansen (Eds.), Critical terms for media studies (pp. 267–280). University of Chicago Press.