Informational Status and the Mass Media: The Case of the Urban Poor

Abstract

A relatively recent development in the history of social inequality is the growth of mass media communications. In developed and in underdeveloped nations, in highly stratified and in egalitarian societies, research documents the persistence of major disparities between different socioeconomic groups in their awareness of given topics. Despite the abundance of information available through a diversity of communication channels and information agencies in our nation, evidence points to the inability of major population sub‐groups to gather the appropriate types of information to cope with the most pressing information needs. These differences in information acquisition and in the ability to manage information seem to be related to differences in exposure to the mass media, which in turn appear to be strongly related to, or constrained by, differences in income, education, and other available socio‐economic resources.

Citation

Flores Duran, D. (1978), "Informational Status and the Mass Media: The Case of the Urban Poor", Collection Building, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 49-60. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb023016