Marc Wallin Wallin # 1103/28/2000Assignment #2Professor Papageorge The Positive Benefits of Mass Communications to Humanity Mass communications, like anything for humans, has its advantages and disadvantages, but mass media has far more advantages to offer the world. From taking you to a far off land to teaching you about the intricacies of the life inside a colony of ants, to surfing the Internet for a new chat group to join, we learn and experience things and events that no humans ever before in history have experienced through this miracle we call mass media. In the next few pages we will explore the multifaceted and unique areas of the publics perception of mass media, the educational value of the media, and the Internet as a new mass medium. The public has always had an interesting relationship with mass media because it is the public that is breaths life into this organism called the mass media machine. From the earliest time periods in human history mass media was communicated through word of mouth, and it was that very relationship that spawned small town gossip in the middle ages , where information like what the local lord was doing and if he was hanging anyone that week for insubordination. Word of mouth continued until the invention of the printing press in 1436 when the news of the town could be told and recorded forever. A present-day survey taken about what the publics view on the media is from the article, Who Do You Trust and Why?, by Joe Saltzman says that ... the publics use and view of its media, shows that word of mouth is less trusted than CNN, public television news, local television news, and prime-time TV news magazines. News anchors Americans see on television are considered more reliable as sources of accurate information than personal acquaintances (par 3). This ...
