Mass Media: Who Owns the UK Media?
Reasonably through and up-to-date information about UK Media Ownership is always a useful resource and this publication, Who Owns the UK Media?, from Media Reform UK (a Pressure Group that promotes reform of UK Media (there’s probably a clue in the name) is something Media Sociology teachers should find helpful for a couple of reasons: […]
Digital Optimism vs Digital Pessimism
Whatever your views on whether we should be broadly optimistic about the development of digital technologies, such as the Internet and mobile computing, or view them with varying levels of pessimism, it would be helpful, teaching-wise, if someone put together a useful summary of these two opposed schools of thought. Luckily for us that’s just […]
Media Effects: A New Digital 2-Step?
Of the four main models of media effects that developed predominantly in the latter part of the 20th century and are conventionally taught in a-level sociology, three have in their different ways managed to carve-out varying degrees of theoretical relevance in the 21st century: The Hypodermic Syringe model has, for example, swivelled to focus on […]
Sociology Texts: Another Big Bundle of Free
One of the things we like to do on this blog is discover and post orphaned sociology textbooks – as in texts published sometime this century that have either gone out of print or been superseded by later, bigger, more-colourful, All-Singing-All-Dancing versions – for the benefit of teachers and students in these straitened economic times. […]
Sociological Research Articles
I found this document lurking on a hard drive and while I’ve absolutely no idea from where it originally came, the metadata says “2008” and since it’s called “Sociological Research articles (since 2000)” it’s a fair bet it contains articles published between those two dates. As you can see, very little gets past me. Digging […]
Sociology Lesson Elements
This set of resources from the OCR Exam Board is, as you might expect, designed to support teaching and learning for their A-Level Specification. While some of the resources may fall outside the remit of other Sociology Specifications this isn’t to say that teachers of the latter won’t, with a little bit of judicious editing, […]
Takeaway Homework Menus: The Basics
Takeaway Homework Menus are based on an original idea by “Twitter phenomenon and outstanding teacher” Ross Morrison McGill (100 Ideas for Secondary Teachers) – webmaster of the inspirational Teacher Toolkit site – and if you’re not familiar with the idea, the basic premise is a simple one: Instead of giving all your students a single […]
New Media, New(s) Values?
The concept of news values – the basic principles journalists use to guide their decisions about what constitutes “news” – has been a staple of media sociology since Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) taxonomy (classification) identified the various basic requirements “stories must generally satisfy” if they were to qualify as news. As you might expect, this […]
Mass Media 5 | Effects
The final chapter in this series on the Mass Media to accompany the chapters on:Defining and Researching the Media,The Ownership and Control Debate, The Selection and Presentation of News and Media Representations looks at a range of models of Media Effects: how and in what ways (if any) the mass media affects individual and social […]
Sociology Flipbooks
A Flipbook is a way of displaying a pdf document online so that it has the look-and-feel of a paper-based magazine, one whose pages you can turn using a mouse (desktop) or finger (mobile). That’s it, really. I could talk about stuff like whether this creates a greater sense of engagement among students than the […]