Abstract
With the progress of informationization in society, the electronic media is increasingly closer related to social situations. The consequences of this trend are very important for our daily life. However, the impact of electronic media in relation to social situations has not often been addressed in communication research. In this article, by focusing on the relationship between"media"and"situations", we aim to study the changes in individuals that are caused by the media. These changes are mediated by the social situations. Considering the family as the typical example of the social setting, we first reviewed past studies on TV use to see how the electronic media were associated with families. We found that TV is often used to maintain the social realities of families. Second, defining construction of"situations"as one characteristic of the electronic media, we described the process in which media bring about the social change by making the individual's social reality relative. Finally, the research data on the relation young people in Japan have with the"multi-media age "was fitted against the argument above. The major findings of this study are as follows. (1) Nowadays in the studies of TV viewing behavior, more attention is paid to the families as audiences. The reason of this increasing attention to families rise in the recognition of the importance of TV for maintaining the social realities of the families. (2) In modern society, families are changing remarkably. TV has on the one hand certainly contributed to family unity, but, on the other hand, it made their social reality relative. However, TV did not disorganize family reality completely. (3) Young people now experience multiple situations by associating different kinds of electronic media with their daily life. Out of their answers, we constituted a variable of the multiplicity and tested its association with their view on interpersonal communications. We found that people who are used to multiple situations tend to communicate superficially with others, rather than not communicate at all. The multiple situations caused by the electronic media are associated to the multiple realities in the communication with others.
