Mass Communication: A Critical Approach
_____blank______ are the symbols of expression that individuals, groups, and societies use to make sense of daily life and to articulate their values; a process that delivers the values of a society through products or other meaning-making forms.
Culture
The Internet originated as a military-government project. In the 1960s, computers were relatively new, and there were only a few of the expensive, room-sized mainframe computers across the country for researchers to use. The Defense Department’s _____blank_____ developed a solution to enable researchers to share computer processing time beginning in the late 1960s.
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)
More and more people owned televisions, and this development provided a platform for video games. The first home video game, the ____blank____ was developed by German immigrant and television engineer Ralph Baer. Released by in 1972 and sold for a whopping $100, it used player controllers that moved dots of light around the screen in a twelve-game inventory of simple aiming and sports games.
Magnavox Odyssey
In 1877, Thomas Edison had success playing back sound. He recorded his voice by using a needle to press the sound waves onto tinfoil, which was wrapped around a metal cylinder about the size of a cardboard toilet-paper roll. After recording his voice, Edison played it back by repositioning the needle to retrace the grooves in the foil. The machine that played these cylinders became known as the ____blank_____, derived from the Greek terms for “sound” and “writing.”
phonograph
The telegraph —the precursor of radio technology—was invented in the 1840s. American inventor _____blank_____ developed the first practical system, sending electrical impulses from a transmitter through a cable to a reception point. Using what became known as Morse code —a series of dots and dashes that stood for letters in the alphabet—telegraph operators transmitted news and messages simply by interrupting the electrical current along a wire cable.
Samuel Morse
______blank_____ are the cultural industries—the channels of communication—that produce and distribute songs, novels, news, movies, online computer services, and other cultural products to a large number of people.
Mass media
The ____blank_____ was developed in the late 1980s by software engineer Tim Berners-Lee at Switzerland’s CERN particle physics lab to help scientists better collaborate. It was initially a data-linking system that allowed computer-accessed information to associate with, or link to, other information no matter where it was on the Internet.
World Wide Web
Nintendo developed the _____blank_____ console, which reached U.S. markets in 1985 bundled with the Super Mario Bros. platform game.
Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
Audiotape’s lightweight magnetized strands finally made possible sound editing and multiple-track mixing, in which instrumentals and vocals can be recorded at one location and later mixed onto a master recording in another studio. By the mid-1960s, engineers had placed miniaturized reel-to-reel audiotape inside small plastic _____blank_____ and developed portable players, permitting listeners to bring recorded music anywhere.
cassettes
The key development in wireless transmissions came from _____blank_______, a Scottish physicist who in the mid-1860s theorized the existence of electromagnetic waves : invisible electronic impulses similar to visible light. He further theorized that a portion of these phenomena, later known as radio waves could be harnessed so that signals could be sent from a transmission point to a reception point.
James Maxwell
______blank______ is the process of designing and delivering cultural messages and stories to diverse audiences through media channels as old as the book and as new as the Internet.
Mass communication
Gathering users’ location and purchasing habits has been a boon for advertising, but these data-collecting systems also function as consumer surveillance and ______blank_____ The practice also raises issues of Internet security and privacy.
data mining
With the Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo set the standard for video game consoles, Mario and Luigi became household names, and _____blank_____ became the most successful video series for the next twenty-four years.
Super Mario Bros.
By the late 1970s, Sony and Philips were jointly working on a way to design a digitally recorded disc and player to take advantage of this new technology, which could be produced at a lower cost than either vinyl records or audiocassettes. As a result of their efforts, digitally recorded _____blank_____ hit the market in 1983.
compact discs (CDs)
German physicist ____blank_____ proved Maxwell’s theories. He created a crude device that permitted an electrical spark to leap across a small gap between two steel balls. As the electricity jumped the gap, it emitted waves; this was the first recorded transmission and reception of an electromagnetic wave.
Heinrich Hertz
______blank______ is the technological merging of media content across various platforms (cross platform) or a business model that consolidates various media holdings under one corporate umbrella.
Convergence
______blank______ refers to the principle that every website and every user—whether a multinational corporation or you—has the right to the same Internet network speed and access.
Net neutrality
Sony’s venture into video games came about because of a deal gone bad with Nintendo. Sony had been partnering with Nintendo to create an add-on device to Nintendo’s NES that would control music CDs (hence the name they proposed: “play station”). When the partnership fell through, Sony went into direct competition with Nintendo, launching in 1994 the impressive _____blank_____, which doubled the microprocessor size introduced by Sega.
PlayStation
The _____blank______ file format, developed in 1992, enables digital recordings to be compressed into smaller, more manageable files. With the increasing popularity of the Internet in the mid-1990s, computer users began swapping music files online because they could be uploaded or downloaded in a fraction of the time it took to exchange noncompressed music files.
MP3
In 1896, ______blank______ traveled to England, where he received a patent for wireless telegraphy, a form of voiceless point-to-point communication. In London in 1897, he formed the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company and began installing wireless technology on British naval and private commercial ships. In 1899, he opened a branch of the company in the United States.
Guglielmo Marconi
In the _____blank____ model of culture, we judge forms of culture as good or bad based on a combination of personal taste and the aesthetic judgments a society makes at particular historical times.
map
One common method that commercial interests use to track the browsing habits of computer users is ____blank_____, or information profiles that are automatically collected and transferred between computer servers whenever users access websites.
cookies
In 2001, computer software goliath Microsoft entered into the world of serious gaming. The _____blank_____, which represented a $500 million commitment from Microsoft, had many firsts: the first console to feature a built-in hard disk drive; the first to be connected to an online service and the first to have Dolby Digital sound, for a cinematic sound experience.
Xbox
Today, _____blank_____ is quickly becoming the format of choice. In the language of the music industry, we are shifting from ownership of music to access to music. The access model has been driven by the availability of services such as the Sweden-based Spotify, which made its debut in the United States in 2011 and hit seventy-one million worldwide subscribers in 2018.
streaming music
Westinghouse engineer _____blank______ set up a crude radio studio above his Pittsburgh garage in 1916, placing a microphone in front of a phonograph to broadcast music and news to his friends two evenings a week on experimental station 8XK, he unofficially became one of the medium’s first disc jockeys.
Frank Conrad