Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
Chapter 1
Lecture Builders
Meet Astronaut and Social Media Star Chris Hadfield
If you were asked to name an astronaut, chances are your first choice would be Neil Armstrong,
the first man on the moon. Or you might go with Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. But you
are not likely to come up with anyone who has flown since the early 1980s.
The only recent space traveler you might mention is retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield,
who showed the world what a magical place space could be and what a beautiful place Earth is spread
out below his home in the International Space Station (ISS). During his five-month stay at the ISS in
2013, he demonstrated how social media can be used to bypass the traditional Big Media and
communicate directly with millions of people across the globe.
1
Even before going up to the ISS, he had an active presence on Twitter and YouTube, but
following his tweets and videos from a low Earth orbit, he became a social media superstar with close to
one million followers on Twitter.
While Hadfield did a great job of building a name for himself through social media during his
time in space, that wasn’t his real goal. Instead, he was trying to draw a whole new generation of young
people into being interested in space exploration. So along with his space demonstration videos, he
shared images of Earth, life in space, and the ISS itself.
Not long after he arrived at the ISS, Hadfield got started creating short videos about life in space
that the Canadian Space Agency posted to YouTube. These showed Hadfield demonstrating how to use a
treadmill, wash his hands, or even give a haircut. Toward the end of his stay at the ISS, Hadfield had
approximately 681,000 followers on Twitter and more than 1.2 million followers across all of his social
media accounts. Using the Internet from the International Space Station can be a bit of a challenge as
the astronauts’ connection speed is similar to what terrestrials had using dial-up Internet in the 1990s.
2
But the thing that would really make Hadfield a global celebrity was when his son Evan
convinced him to record the first music video in space—a somewhat edited cover of David Bowie’s 1968
hit “Space Oddity.” This video brought him to the forefront of popular culture, with nearly 21 million
views as of March 2014. Hadfield does his own singing and guitar playing in the video, which was
produced by Evan. This wasn’t Hadfield’s first foray into music, having previously recorded an
Earth/space video with the Canadian band Barenaked Ladies, and while on Earth he played with an all-
astronaut rock band. Evan slightly rewrote the lyrics to include references to the space station and the
Soyuz space capsule that would take Hadfield home, and he also gave the song a happy ending. (The
astronaut dies in Bowie’s version of the song.)
The evening before Hadfield was scheduled to return to Earth, the video was posted to
YouTube. Hadfield himself had to do relatively little for the project. He had shot some video, recorded
his vocal track, and strummed his guitar. So before he went to sleep on his last night in space, he logged
1
Scott Simon, “Astronaut Chris Hadfield’s Most Excellent Adventure,” May 18, 2013,
http://www.npr.org/2013/05/18/184821421/astronaut-chris-hadfields-most-excellent-adventure.
2
Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth: What Going to Space Taught Me About Ingenuity,
Determination, and Being Prepared for Anything (New York: Little, Brown, 2013), p.145.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
onto YouTube. “I was shocked,” Hadfield writes. “There had already been close to a million hits.”
3
The
next day after landing on Earth, he learned that it had reached more than 7 million views.
Hadfield’s success with videos and other social media was not entirely self-made. His son Evan,
whose specialty is social media marketing, helped his father lose his “robotic” style of Twitter writing
and cross-promoted his recordings, videos, and photos using a range of social media tools.
People your author’s age are children of the space age. To us, the moon landing was a highlight
of our childhood, not history. But now Commander Hadfield is bringing the space program to life for a
new generation using interactive media that was barely in its infancy in 1969. For my generation, it was
the heroic Neil Armstrong on television and the large-format photos from Life magazine announcing his
historic first step on the surface of a globe that wasn’t Earth. For my children, it’s short messages,
photos, and videos downloaded to a mobile phone or tablet from a permanent habitat in space. Check
out http://www.ralphehanson.com/2013/05/16/ground-control-to-cmdr-hadfield-winning-social-media-
from-outer-space/ for further details.
Children’s Media Use – Generation M2
Teens are significant media users. According to the 2010 study Generation M2: Media in the Lives of
8–18-Year-Olds, a follow-up to the 2005 study Generation M, children in the United States spend an
average of seven hours and thirty-eight minutes a day using media—more time than they spend doing
anything else other than sleeping. There are also a lot of stereotypes about teen media use that may or
may not be supported by evidence. The study, conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, surveyed
teens and discovered that because teens are often engaged in media multitasking, they are actually
consuming ten hours and forty-five minutes of media content within those seven and a half hours. Here
are some of the study’s major findings:
• Teens are big users of mobile devices: 66% of young people aged eight to eighteen have mobile
phones, and 76% have an iPod or other MP3 player.
• Young people spend more time consuming media (forty-nine minutes per day) than they do
talking on their phones (thirty-three minutes). And the biggest mobile phone activity? Seventh
to twelfth graders spent an hour and a half per day texting, which was not counted as media use
in this study.
• Few young people have rules controlling how much time they spend with media. But the
approximately 30% who do have rules limiting their media consumption spend nearly three
hours less per day with media.
• Young people are spending more time consuming video than in the past (four hours and twenty–
nine minutes,) but less time watching television (down by twenty-five minutes a day from 2004).
How is this possible? They’re watching video online and using mobile devices.
See the table for a summary of what the researchers found out about media use for
children aged eight to eighteen over the last decade.
3
Hadfield, p. 252.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
Time Spent With Medium in a Typical Day
Medium
2009
2004
1999
TV/Video
4:29
3:51
3:47
Music/Audio
2:31
1:44
1:48
Computer
1:29
1:02
0:27
Video Games
1:13
0:49
0:26
Print
0:38
0:43
0:18
Movies
0:25
0:25
0:18
Total Media Exposure
10:45
8:33
7:29
Multitasking Proportion
29%
26%
16%
Total Media Use
7:38
6:21
6:19
Michael Jackson’s Death
On Thursday, June 25, 2009, Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz used the
microblogging tool Twitter to announce his current status: “Slow morning. No new Iran protests, no new
sex scandals. Might have to do some reporting.” But by late afternoon, Kurtz and virtually every other
reporter on the planet would have put aside the contested Iranian election and a scandal surrounding
the South Carolina governor to report on the sudden death of superstar Michael Jackson. For the next
two weeks, the death of the self-proclaimed King of Pop would dominate the news industry. But it
would also provide stark evidence of the rapidly changing media world we all live in.
Jackson was 50 years old at the time of his death, and he had been a star for more than forty
years. He has been credited with helping to create the current era of popular music where stars need to
be great dancers and performers as well as gifted musicians. He also generated a fandom that
transcended age, race, and nationality.
4
Jackson was undoubtedly a superstar in the music, video, and
pop culture world. He sold 750 million albums—that means 2.5 albums for every man, woman, and
child in the United States.
5
But, in addition to being famous for groundbreaking albums and music
videos, Jackson also was famous for his eccentricities and infamous for charges of child molestation.
The news of Jackson’s death broke in a way that was as controversial as his life. The story of his
cardiac arrest and subsequent death was first reported by the tabloid-like TMZ.com, a celebrity gossip
website owned by two divisions of Time Warner. TMZ’s initial post of Jackson’s death went up at 5:20
p.m. eastern time, six minutes before the coroner officially declared Jackson dead, and more than an
hour before most other news outlets would report the King of Pop had died.
6
Jackson’s death led to a ripple that could be felt across the Internet:
• The average load time for stories at news websites doubled.
• Online fights emerged over whether Jackson’s Wikipedia page would list
him as alive or dead.
4
Dr. Ink, “Ask Dr. Ink: On Wacko Jacko,” March 10, 2003, www.poynter.org/column.asp?id= 1&aid=21116.
5
Al Tompkins, “Al’s Morning Meeting: What Michael Jackson Did for Music and Music Videos,” June 25, 2009,
www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=2&aid=165797.
6
Brian Stelter, “TMZ Was Far Ahead in Reporting Death,” New York Times, June 27, 2009.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
• Twitter saw a doubling of the normal level of tweets per second being
posted.
• AOL’s instant messaging service went down for 40 minutes after Jackson
died because of the huge amount of traffic Jackson’s death generated.
7
Legacy media outlets, such as the major television networks, were reluctant to attribute to TMZ,
looking instead for what they saw as better sources of the news. “There’s still this residual . . . instinct to
think ‘Oh, it’s just TMZ, let’s wait for the Associated Press, or the New York Times, or the Los Angeles
Times before we can say it’s true,’” said press critic and journalist Kurt Anderson. “I don’t think in, say,
five years, that this will be the case.”
8
TMZ was founded in 2005 and is owned by the same folks who own Time, Sports Illustrated,
CNN, and People. This was not the first big scoop for the upstart site. It broke the stories of misbehavior
by actors such as Mel Gibson, Alec Baldwin, and Christian Bale, and many people turned to it for news
when Anna Nicole Smith died in 2007. The site has been accused by critics of paying for information,
something that is generally frowned on in journalism circles, though the practice is common enough in
the celebrity tabloid business.
9
Terrence Samuel, an editor for TheRoot.com, notes that although TMZ is not a traditional news
outlet, it got the scoop on Jackson using traditional techniques: “In some ways, despite all the tweeting
and Facebooking, what you had here was a very old-time media scoop where somebody had better
sources.”
10
Rolling Stone contributing editor Touré says that journalists and the public are going to have
to get used to getting news from a much wider range of sources than in the past. “The mode of delivery
doesn’t make it not journalism or journalism,” he says. “A tweet can be journalism. . . . TMZ was ahead
of the story and they were right. And if that doesn’t validate them, what will?”
11
For the next two weeks, news about Jackson’s death was unavoidable. According to the Project
for Excellence in Journalism, during the day following Jackson’s death, 60% of the news coverage was
about Jackson. And that does not include the prime-time coverage of Jackson on the broadcast
television networks. On the cable news networks, 93% of the coverage from the time of Jackson’s death
on Thursday through Friday night was about Jackson.
12
Although his dominance slipped a bit the
following week, Jackson’s death was still the biggest story on television.
Was the Jackson story over covered? Perhaps, but as Time magazine founder Henry Luce has
been credited with saying, “People make news, and dead people make more news, and dead superstars
7
Wailin Wong, “Michael Jackson Death News: Online Activity Heats Up Twitter and Google, Slows Down Some
Sites,” Chicago Tribune, June 26, 2009; Sharon Shahid, “Royal Treatment for Fallen Celebrities,” June 26,
2009, www.newseum.org/news/news.aspx?item=nh_CELEB090626&style=f; Brian Stelter, “With Jackson
2009.
10
Jackie Alexander, “Diversity at Work: CNN’s Klein on Breaking News: ‘Being First Is Overrated’,” August 7,
2009, www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=58&aid=168086.
11
Ibid.
12
Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism, “PEJ News Coverage Index: June 22–28, 2009; Media
Swings From Protests in Iran to the Passing of the King of Pop,” journalism.org/news_index/99?page=1.
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
make even more news.”
13
The wall-to–wall coverage of Jackson’s death hasn’t always been the standard
for celebrity deaths. As Emily Hedges of the Newseum points out, The CBS Evening News didn’t report
Elvis’s death until six-and-a-half minutes into the evening newscast.
14
Regardless of critics charging that television, in particular, over covered the Jackson story, there
can be no doubt at all that the public was interested. The three prime-time specials that aired on CBS,
NBC, and ABC the night Jackson died drew a total audience of 21.3 million viewers. That compares to 8.2
million viewers for a CSI: Miami rerun a week earlier, or 4.7 million people for a health-care special by
President Barack Obama.
15
Jackson’s memorial service drew more than 31 million viewers spread across
18 networks that carried the event live. In addition to the television viewership, MSNBC had 19 million
video streams fed by its website the day of the service, a record for the news site, and CNN had more
than 4 million streams going out during the service. ABC News had close to 6 million streams, and
FOXNews.com had more than 3 million.
16
On a number of levels, Jackson’s death will have a lasting impact. At its most obvious, Jackson’s
death was the loss of an amazing, if controversial, talent. Jackson’s album Thriller and the
groundbreaking videos that accompanied it changed the face of popular music. But the reports of his
death were funneled to an online and mobile generation through channels that were not even thought
about when Jackson’s career began. In the week’s following Jackson’s death, TMZ continued to scoop
the so-called mainstream media with accurate details about the police investigation of the cause of
Jackson’s death.
17
Nirvana and Secret Three—Everything from the margin moves to the center
Consider the grunge band Nirvana. Founded in 1987 by Kurt Cobain and Krist Novoselic, the
band brought the 1970s British punk sound to a mass American audience, and their breakout album
Nevermind sold 10 million copies. Cobain could not cope with the fact that his antiestablishment
message was making him a part of the establishment. Following a lengthy battle with drug use and
depression, he committed suicide in 1994. The problem that Cobain and other punk and grunge rockers
encountered was that themes of alienation resonate strongly with young people, leading the artists to
experience the kinds of success that they were rebelling against. Rebels don’t sell out, they simply
become part of the mainstream, whether they want to or not.
18
13
Bob Garfield, “A King’s Farewell,” July 10, 2009, www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2009/07/10/01.
14
Emily Hedges, “A Look Back at the Death of Elvis,” August 16, 2007,
www.newseum.org/news/news.aspx?item=nh_081607_Elvis&style=f.
15
David Hinckley, “Media Just Responding to Michael Jackson’s Fans’ Demands with Staples Center Memorial
Coverage,” New York Daily News, July 7, 2009.
16
David Hinckley and Richard Huff, “Michael Jackson’s Memorial 2nd Most-Watched Funeral Ever, After Princess
Di, Say Nielsen Ratings,” New York Daily News, July 8, 2009.
17
Howard Kurtz, “Media Notes: TMZ Gets There First,” July 27, 2009, www.washingtonpost.com/wp–
dyn/content/article/2009/07/29/AR2009072901110.html.
18
Patricia Romanowski, Holly George-Warren, and Jon Pareles (eds.), The New Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock
& Roll, completely revised and updated ed. (New York: Rolling Stone Press, 1995).
Mass Communication: Living in a Media World, 6th edition
Ralph Hanson
Lecture Builders
Global Reach of Media
The “When media connect us to the more remote places on Earth” Media Transformations box
helps illustrate the global reach of the mass media. The Everest disaster story that served as the basis
for Jon Krakauer’s book was among the first to flow to the public at large through an Internet channel
and satellite phone. This became much more common in the years following the Everest disaster. The
IMAX film on that climbing season is available on DVD for purchase or rental from sources such as
Netflix.
You can also read more about Krakauer’s reaction to the 2014 avalanche on Everest that
claimed at least thirteen lives at my website:
http://www.ralphehanson.com/2014/04/22/into-thin-airs-jon-krakauer-on-everest-disaster/
The Columbia shuttle breakup was reported live over the Internet, and even television news used Web-
quality video during the 2003 war with Iraq.
A “chat” session by shuttle observers was likely the first place the news about the shuttle Columbia was
reported. It can be read at
www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/833885/posts?q=1&&page=1