Citare / Citation

Călin, R.A. & Bunăiaşu, C.M. (2010). Communication and Mass-media - from information
to formation, susţinut la Conferinţa Internaţională „Mass-media and Education”, Buşteni,
05-06.03.2010 şi publicat în Buletinul Universităţii Petrol - Gaze din Ploieşti, Vol. LXII, Nr.
1A/2010, pp. 230-238 (ISSN: 1841-6586)

Communication and Mass-media

- from information to formation -
Călin Răzvan-Alexandru*, Bunăiaşu Claudiu**

*Universitatea din Craiova – str. A.I. Cuza nr. 13, Craiova

e-mail: cra_psi@yahoo.com
** Universitatea din Craiova – str. A.I. Cuza nr. 13, Craiova
e-mail: bunaiasu_claudiu@yahoo.com

Abstract

The XXIst century is one dominated by information, speed, communication and efficient relationships among
them.
The present study wants to be a theoretical approach meant to shape a series of specificity elements that
processes as communication acquire in the present mass-media context.
The psychological inferences with formative valences, positive and negative coming out from the exposure on
mass-media aren’t ignored either.

Keywords: communication, mass-media, formative effects.

Introduction
During its existence, each person is bent to multiple educative influences, which may act
concomitantly, successively or complementarily, in various forms. Some of them action
spontaneously, incidentally, others have an organized, systematized character which come from
school or from other extra-school institutions.
In order to determine some specific forms of the education a distinction is made between educative
actions and educative influences. The thing which bonds them is their contribution to the human’s
formation. Both of them have an educative finality, releasing and producing modifications in the
intern structure of the human personality being different depending on the way in which they are
organized and on the degree of efficiency they have.
The technology is constantly perfected and this is how the capacity of communicate is improved.
Because of the fact that the communication technology and the social order are in a continuous
changing process, it becomes obvious that the mass-media influences won’t be the same from an era
to another, existing a permanent concern in understanding, describing, explaining and predicting
what’s happening when some category of people are exposed to specific contains through a certain
medium of mass communication.

Communication
The human communication is a transactional type process by which people transfer energies,
emotions, feelings and change meanings. It always has a purpose, the one of making the
interlocutor feel, think or behave in a certain way. The purpose also exists when the communication
partners don’t realize it. The stimuli wait for an answer. The communication involves an influence
act, of reciprocal influence between the actors participating in the act of communication. Between
people, communicating means putting in common sensations, affects, emotions, feelings, ideas,
opinions and facts. This means more than “making known, let know, inform, notify, say” or “speak,
get in contact with, be in touch with”. Communicating means to emit and to receive messages, to
send stimuli and collect answers. After being emitted and received, the message shall belong to the
one who “gave” an also to the one who “received”.
The communication exists while sensorial stimuli, symbols and signals having on the emission the
signification gave to them on arrival. First, the locutor 1 (the initial emitter) formulates his message,
anticipating a structure of it (feed-forward) in order to give it more chances of being correctly
decoded and understood by locutor 2 (the initial receptor). The locutors have in common the
language, the code, then the context, the channel and the noises (distortions). In an efficient
communication, they have to put the message in the common zone of the repertoires, in order for it
to be correctly decoded and understood. Also, in the same time with the change of the roles of
emitter and receiver, the feedback segment also becomes operational, which reveals to the initial
emitter the manner in which the massage was understood. (Fig. 1)
Mass communication and mass-media
The human being is a social communicational being, so a being who cannot exist out of the
communication with the members of his group and of the general social ambient. In the process of
the social communication two important types of relationships may exist:
1. direct relationships (the communication is realized between two or more persons who interact and
who influence one another);
2. indirect relationship (the communication between persons is mediated by an instrument
permitting the transfer of the message from an emitter to a receiver).
The first type defines the interpersonal communication and the second type the mediated
communication, mentioning for this last case, that the mediation is made by technical equipments
“permitting the people to communicate the expression of their thought”. The technological
development in the sphere of the communication transformed the mediated communication in mass
communication, leading to a democratization of the information. The fundamental characteristic of
mass communication is the radiation of messages around a source; it is always indirect (between the
moment of the emission and the one of the reception there is a delay: in space, time or space and
time), unilateral (from the emitter to the receiver) and public (it is addressed to all that who can
appropriate the message and who doesn’t represent a small group and clearly defined). Synthesizing
more definitions, it can be said that the mass communication is oriented through big, heterogeneous
audience which is unknown by the communicator, of being characterized of ubiquity and by the
anonymity of the emission and reception.
The term represents a social process; a communication relationship between this field institutions
and an undifferentiated public, unorganized, made of separated individuals from the physical point
of view and who have the possibility of a common reaction.
Mass-media names the medias of mass communication, including the written press, the radio, the
TV, cinema, posters, and others, phrase used as synonym for the “press” in general, as well as for
other technical expressions as “social communication instruments”, “collective diffusion
techniques”, “mass communication systems”. In the mass communication the emitter (the
communicator or the gate-keeper) is represented by groups of people specialized in the procedure of
types of messages, organized in complex institutions, developing activities wearing the mark of the
industrial production processes.
On individual, social and international level, mass-media has five major functions:
- The information function, satisfying an incontestable human need, but also giving to the receivers
caught in the game a veritable informational bulimia, of which effect may be the stumping of the
discernment, which can lead to the installation of some form of passivity, apathy, paralysis of the
will of understanding and action which Paul Lazarsfeld and R. K. Merton named “dysfunction of
narcotization”.
- The interpretation function, manifesting so explicitly, by journalistic productions like the editorial
or like the commentary, the first one exposing the official point of view pf the press organ, while the
second announce to the public only the personal opinions of his author, as well as for an implicitly
manner, but not with less efficacy, represented the selection of the transmitted information and
establishing priorities, perceived by the receivers as hierarchies of importance.
- The instructive-cultivator function refers to the explicit delivery of cultural-scientific knowledge,
as in the case of some documentary films or pages of popularization of science in the periodical
publications as in the promotion in a less obvious form, but more persuasive of values, norms,
behavior models concerning the cultural paradigm of the society, on which stability it contributes
this way, in non-negligible measure.
- The bond function derives from the above ones, because the individuals having a similar type of
information are preoccupied by the same issues of the actuality and share moral and cultural
common values, they should feel closer one another and they should join on need beyond the
national, religious, political, racial frontiers mobilizing in favor of noble causes perceived as being
of the whole nation.
- The divertimento function, answering to the will of relaxation of the man stressed by the
professional requests, but also of the evading thirst in an imaginary universe of the non-adapted,
invaded so much the mass-media content as for becoming a second nature of these. But, in percents
the emissions or the page dedicated to relaxation and amusement are in a continuously growing but
more than that it is observed a more and more marked orientation towards treating in show terms of
all the subject approached by the mass communication medias. The television, but also other media
organizations transform into a show any situation they present. The danger of moral order of such
approach resides in the risk of cultivating on the receivers a certain “esthetic detachment” reporting
to the serious issues of the reality, unperceived in their veritable dimensions because of their
presentation on the coordinates of the show, modality that tends to stump the borders between
reality and fiction.
In the centre of our approach we have, obviously one of these functions, the instructive-cultivator
one, the formation one.
Extending the model of the inter-human communication presented (Fig. 1) on the situation existing
in the case of mass communication (Fig. 2 and 3), some essential differences can be distinguished,
from which finally the special formative valences of this type of communication come out.

So the feed-forward type connection is much more important and more present, because of the
absence or because of the lowered relevance of the other connection, the feedback. This is because
it isn’t possible anymore for the message to be restructured, reformulated or even explained, as in
the case of a strong feedback connection existing in the situation of interpersonal communication.
E-media (the radio, the television, etc.) tries to formulate a message regarding exactly the target
public, the message coming to welcome them. The Feedback is rarely obtained by measurements of
rating, polls, analyses of the forums of the mass-media institutions, etc. More than that, the persons
addressing to the mass-media organizations aren’t often the most representatives for the preferences
and for the opinions of the consumers mass, but only the one having the most spare time. The
receiver audience is submitted to an informative assault coming from more media emitters, each
one aiming to attract and to obtain an affiliation behavior from a public as numerous as possible, as
a guarantor of the audience and implicitly of obtaining the financial purposes coming out from the
time allocated to the publicity. In this case, the message leaves from an emitter who identifies
himself with the institution, the emitting publication and reaches an undefined number of receivers,
heterogeneous from the educational point of view.
The receiver is made in the mass communication of a multitude of people, geographically spread
and heterogeneous from the socio-cultural point of view, the communication being preponderant
unidirectional (from the emitter to the receiver). The content of the mass communication is
extremely various and it is elaborated (standardized) in types of messages – information, relaxation,
ideas and opinions – taking into account the “average human”. This “average human” represents the
“gravitational center around which all the press messages gravitate: the contents, the packaging
forms, the text ordering, the affective accents – all of them reported to the attitudes, interests an
aspirations of this average public. This is why the content of the mass communication shall be
characterized by clarity, simplicity, attractiveness – features ensuring the direct, rapid access to the
meaning of the messages for the huge crowd of average people choosing this form of consumption
and cultural communication.
Under this context, the school never used so many signs and symbols as it does now and the school
has never had the duty of initiating its students in deciphering and acquiring of so many acquisitions
of mass-media, of the new mass-media. This way, the education for communication is inseparable
from the education for mass-media, which entered the instruction of all degrees. The new mass-media
are dependent on the democratic status of the culture. This is why the education for the mass-media
means training in order to use the new means. We practically assist to a paradigmatic change, from the
supremacy of the audio-video means to the one of the virtual medium, of the Internet.
Each language has its rules, uses certain procedures in order to send the meaning. The new mass-media
have own semiotics – syntaxes, semantics and pragmatics – so that the access to the sent cultural values
impose their acquirement from school, this being useful for easement and the amplification of the
efficiency of the educational process, as well as for the openings ensured to the student even in his
dialogue with these means, themselves a message. We find a condensed quantity of information that
no other mean of communication cannot offer in the same time unity, the reunion from the Internet
medium meaning more than the sum of the involved languages. So it is necessarily to talk about an
education for the understanding of the virtual media message. The new mass-media become this way
that “opened window” through all the corners of the existence, permitting a new and wider
perception of the world. The internet asserted more rapidly than any other mean by its big
accessibility, succeeding in communicating the senses directly and eloquently, not requesting a
special intellectual effort and eliminating the painful feeling of ostracism and isolation, of
inaccessible, of incompetence and incapacity of understanding.
Lacked of concepts, the Internet ensures the access to the information, it let itself to be understood
from a glance, it accumulates and accelerates the rhythm and the efficiency of the communication.
Associated or structured under the form of the audio-visual images, it beats the linguistic
commentary. The accent is put on the moving image. The commentary belongs to it. In order to
verbalize a sonant, musical or moving image – sometimes a static one, a drawing for example –
means to destroy the message, to transform it.
The audio-visual images are more on the “type” of the human soul. Also the effected experiences are a
testimony, inclusively in the education process. G. Norbis, following the quantity of information that
can be memorized, uses all the presentation means and he obtains:
Presentation Quantity of memorized information
means after 3 hours after 3 days
oral 70% 10%
visual 72% 22%
 oral/visual 85% 65%
How convincing the results are, it is attested by what is known, namely the fact that the audio-visual
ensures the dialectic unity between intuition and abstraction, fact that would grow the informative
and educative value.
The ones that became nowadays the vectors of the mass communication, the emblematic ones for the
society of the post modernity, the new media, the audio-visual media and especially the Internet and the
television widely contribute on the modeling of the new codes, characteristics of the social relationships
and of the cultural systems of them (with the purpose of determining the generic qualification:
“mediated” societies), but also their influence isn’t easy to evaluate because it springs from the original
mechanism, inedited from the historic point of view.
Because the “transforming into images” of a reality tends to spontaneously accredited the illusion of a
faithful reproduction of it (“image” comes from “imitate” and “see” means “believe”), we first have to
underline the fact that it involves, in contrary, a manipulation work which inevitably transforms: its
reconstruction in order to do it “representable”, its dramatization in order to do it “spectacular” (in the
basic sense of the term), they do from the image which is delivered from this reality, not its reflection
or its equivalence, but an approximate figure, so a simulacra – when we don’t talk about a fake. The
intended effects of signification conceived and realized, thing that leads to the sense “super-loaded” of
the imagined fluxes addressed to the audience.
So we can advance, in general manner that the Internet and the television represent the co-producers of
the realities put in images, more than its revelators. This super-exposure to the information and the
images in the world is though done in certain conditions, which stimulates the affectivity and the
imagination, more than developing the knowledge and the control of the real.
Roger Clausse considers regrettable that some authors use the term of information in an extensive
sense, which destroys its clarity and precision. The information shall be seen as identity
photography. The same fact of the immediate reality described by the press may be seen from the
perspective of the politics, the philosophy or esthetics with more harshness if its presentation didn’t
ignore the objectivity. The comment of the information, its metaphorization in reportage
transfigures the related facts. The pure information may be considered as an identity photo, exact
photo and the genres of commenting the information as an artistic photo, as an interpreted portrait
of the reality. The three criteria depending on what the effect produced by the message sent by mass-
media is analyzed, are:
1. how big the audience of the message is;
2. how much of the content of the message is memorized;
3. how much of the content of the message is understood.
Taking into account the evidence of the formative role of mass-media, the question appears “is there
any instance – and which would be its nature – to discover if the information, news, show has
formative consequences or on contrary, negative to the audience?” As a consultative and orientation
title, there is the Resolution 1003 from 1993 concerning the ethic of the journalist, from which put
in the prim-plan, without commenting some points as they can be found in the text of the mentioned
document.
15. Neither the editors and owners, nor the journalists should consider that they are owners of the
news. The press agencies don’t have to treat the information as merchandise, but as a fundamental
right of the citizen. In this sense, the mass information means don’t have to speculate with the
quality and the essence of the news or of the opinions with the purpose of increasing the audience
for growing the income from publicity.
18. The importance of the information, especially of the news given on radio or on TV was brought
into light in the Recommendation 1067 of the Meeting. Its influence over the public opinion is
obvious.
21. So, the journalism doesn’t have to modify the veridical, impartial information and the honest
opinions or to use them for information purposes in order to create or influence the public opinion
because the legality of it is based on respecting the right of the fundamental right of information of
the citizens as part of respecting the democratic values.
35. Concerning the specific influence of mass-media, especially of the television, to the attitude of
children and of the young people, it is necessary not to broadcast programs, messages or images
reflecting violence, sex or consumerism or to use an inadequate language. (Ethics and auto-
regulation in journalism)...
But all these get another signification if the reference system is changed...

Conclusions
The mass-media messages are multiplied by the different way in which they are received, each
individual selects his preferences and interprets the messages depending on his own cultural
interests. So the “differential reception” phenomenon becomes interesting, when the audience
doesn’t receive the messages passively, but on contrary, it negotiates the receiving of those by the
fact that it can choose the products, but also by the fact that it has the ability of refusing “the
preferential lecture” in favor of a “negotiated” lecture or of one of “opposite code”. The
“negotiated” lecture, according to Stuart Hall, recognizes the legitimacy of the definitions and
applies on situational level its own norms. The “opposite code” lecture produces radical
interpretations because it has a system of values opposing the one proposed by the hegemonic
model.
The education of the young people is not an exclusive charge of the school. The development of the
personality of the child is an objective on realization of which the entire social system contributes
by the mean of various implied agents. School, family, the belonging groups, mass-media, other
institutions assuming such attributions, influences the instruction of the children efforts but also
their practices of optimal use of the spare time. Acting convergent as a whole, these factors can
configure an efficient education system.
The coordination and the integration of the forms of the education which complete them and
potentate them reciprocally, ensures a coherent development of the entire formation process and of
developing of the personality of the individual. A partnership of the school with all the other
educative agents is not only wished but even necessarily. More than that, the charge of ranking,
synthesizing and valuing the influences exercised by these, so the educative input which they bring
in order to have the desired relevance goes to the school.
The extension of the education beside the disciplines and the school activities is a reality that we
need to accept. The formal education may win from such non-formal and informal influences under
the condition that they wouldn’t promote the risible, not to cultivate the pseudo-culture or the
dangerous vulgarizations. These influences interact, they are interdependent and complementary.
Even if they are different under the aspect of the realization, the contents, the medias, etc., they
connect in such way that the impact to the educated one to be on the height of the expectances more
and more complex in front of which people are put in the contemporary society.
If it is accepted that the Internet and the audio-visual represent “an opened window to the world”,
this should be understood not as a way to enter some world, but one that the new means build and
rebuild. Through them the new world is transforming in way of reuniting of all influences with the
purpose of building a new own reality. We take into account, in the first place, the educative and
ideological impact by which the ideal of personality itself should be influenced.

Reference
1. B a l a b a n , D . – Comunicare mediatică, Editura tritonic, Bucureşti, 2009
2. B e r t r a n d , C . - J . – Deontologia mijloacelor de comunicare, Institutul European, Iaşi, 2000
3. B o t e z , V. – Comunicare şi valoare în presă, Editura Academiei R.S.R., Bucureşti, 1987
4. C h e l c e a , S . – Comunicarea nonverbală în spaţiul public, Editura Tritonic, Bucureşti, 2004
5. C l a u s s e , R . - Le journal et actualite, Marabout Universite, Bruxelles, 1972
6. D a n c i u , I . M . – Mass-media, Comunicare şi Societate, Editura Tribuna, Cluj-Napoca, 2003
7. *** Declaraţia Universală Drepturilor Omului - http://www.cncd.org.ro/Files/?FileID=63
8. G h e o r g h e , V. – Efectele televiziunii asupra minţii umane, Editura Prodomos, Bucureşti, 2008
9. G r e e n , A . - Comunicarea eficientă în relaţiile publice, Editura Polirom, Iaşi, 2009
10. *** Rezoluţia 1003 privind Etica Jurnalistică - http://www.mediaindex.ro/articol.php?
a=42&s=2&ss=3
11. H a i n e ş , R . – Comunicarea televizuală, Editura Eficient, Bucureşti, 2000
12. K a p f e r e r , J . - N . – Căile persuasiunii, Editura I.N.I., Bucureşti, 1998
13. L e c o m t e , P. – Comunicare, televiziune, democraţie, Editura Tritonic, Bucureşti, 2004
14. L o c h a r d , G . , B o y e r , H . – Comunicarea mediatică, Institutul European, Iaşi, 1998
15. M a r i n e s c u , S . , D i n e s c u , R . - Invitaţie la educaţie, Editura Carminis, Piteşti, 2003.
16. M c Q u a i l , D . , W i n d a h l , S . – Modele ale comunicării pentru studiul comunicării de masă,
Editura Comunicare.ro. Bucureşti, 1993
17. P a i l l i a r t , I . – Spaţiul public şi comunicarea, Editura Polirom, Iaşi, 2002
18. R i v o l t e l l a , P. C . – Media Education: which epistemological out-line?, Summit 2000, Children,
Zouth and the Media Beyond the Millennium, Toronto, 13-17- May, 2000
19. R u n c a n , M . - A patra putere, Editura Dacia, Cluj-Napoca, 2002
20. R o g o j i n a r u , A . – Comunicare şi cultură organizaţională: idei şi practici în actualitate,
Editura Tritonic, Bucureşti, 2009
21. R u s u - P ă s ă r i n , G . – Comunicare audio-vizuală, Editura Universitaria, Craiova, 2005
22. Ş o i t u , L . – Comunicare şi acţiune, Institutul European, Iaşi, 1997

Comunicare şi mass-media
- de la informare la formare -
Rezumat
Secolul XXI este unul dominat de informaţie, viteză, comunicare şi de relaţiile caracterizate de eficienţă care
se dezvoltă între acestea.
Studiul de faţă se vrea o abordare teoretică menită să reliefeze o serie de elemente de specificitate pe care
procese precum comunicarea le dobândeşte în contextul mass-media actuală.
Nu sunt ignorate nici implicaţiile psihologice cu valenţe formative, pozitive şi negative, care decurg din
expunerea la mass-media.