Abstract
We live today in an information environment. As active communicators, we spend much of our time constructing messages and discovering meanings. But we are also continuously bombarded with messages from media whose encoding capabilities are largely out of our hands, and which therefore tend to shape us into relatively passive, uncritical receivers of much of their information. The mass media themselves almost never try to teach us how to be more actively critical of their messages, and why should they? Such education would not be in the commercial interests (thus one deodorant manufacturer may "teach" us to be more wary of other brands; but whose interest is really at stake?). It is clearly the responsibility of the communication educator to encourage a more critical awareness of and response to the mass messages which inundate our lives.
Journal Title
Iowa Journal of Speech Communication
Volume
11
Issue
1
First Page
31
Last Page
36
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Crow, Bryan K.
(1979)
"Critical Reading of Mass Messages in the Communication Course,"
Iowa Journal of Communication: Vol. 11:
No.
1, Article 10.
Available at:
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/ijc/vol11/iss1/10
Copyright
©1979 Iowa Communication Association
