Sociology Revision Booklets: 3. Mass Media

The third in our occasional series covering free revision resources on the web looks at the Mass Media (as you’ve probably guessed from the title).

The number of resources is substantially less than previous offerings on Theory and Methods and Beliefs in Society but what they lack in number is more than made-up for by the depth of their content.

Possibly.

I may just have been making that up.

Anyway, you can see for yourself by downloading any, or indeed all, of the following:

1. Media Revision Pack [Word version | Pdf version]: Although I’ve called this a Revision Pack (because that’s what it is…) it wasn’t originally created in that form. Rather, it’s an amalgam I’ve put together of a range of media revision documents, authored by Mark Gill, that cover:

• Ownership and Control
• New Media
• Representations
• Audiences
• Social Construction of News

Part of the reason for making the Pack available in different formats is that if you’d prefer to break the document down into its constituent parts it’s a fairly simple job to do this in Word. It’s possible to do this with a pdf document but that would mean faffing around with software that splits pdf files and you’re probably much too busy to bother with stuff like that.

The Notes themselves are coherent and competent, with good coverage of the major Specification areas (although it’s aimed at AQA there are parts that apply to other Specifications).

2. Media Revision (Chris Deakin): This is a series of PowerPoint slides saved as a pdf document, which probably tells you a lot about what to expect: short, sharp, revision topics and key points, in the main, with a few Mind Maps and exam questions thrown in for good measure. The materials cover:

• What are the mass media?
• Technological developments
• Uses of internet
• Effects of the media
• Media and socialisation
• Ownership and control of the media
• Representations of ethnic groups
• Representations of gender
• Internet and democracy
• Deviance amplification
• Media and violence.

3. Mass Media Revision Pack: Although created in 2012 (possibly by Ms Carpenter? The meta data doesn’t give any indication of authorship but since she features in a diagram it might be safe to assume she also created this pack) so you need to check for Specification coverage, I’ve included this Pack as a counterpoint to the previous Packs because where they, to varying degrees, are mainly text resources this particular Pack is, by-and-large, based around diagrams – some of which are pretty-and-quite-arresting, others of which are quite basic but also interesting.

The Pack identifies a range of Key Issues, brief Notes and gives an example of a essay question for each of the following:

• Trends in the ownership & control of the mass media
• New media, globalisation & popular culture
• The selection & presentation of news, & moral panics
• The mass media & audiences
• Representations of the body: gender, sexuality & disability
• Representations of ethnicity, age & social class