How Does John Thompson Use Coercive Power

John Thompson explains that the advent of modernity has completely changed numerous aspects such as political, coercive, and symbolic power. This was even more significant in the changes that took place in Europe throughout the centuries. Symbolic power is a concept that he developed from Pierre Bourdieu’s work who discussed this numerous times previously. Thompson differentiates symbolic power from other power dimensions which are the military’s or law coercive power, the governments political power, and the corporations’ economic power. The coercive power works by using threats and force whereas the political power works by co-ordination or the constant regulation of groups or individuals. Furthermore, economic power takes place through creating
Primarily, he highlights using the word ‘’mass’’ and explains that the media in our world today isn’t created for mass population, but are only produced for specific niche markets. He also explains that the word ‘’mass’’ is extremely misleading because it ends up conjuring an image that includes vast audiences that comprise thousands, if not millions of people. Even though this might actually be an image that is accurate when it comes to certain media products like newspaper or television programmes, this is not the case when it comes to other media products. Thompson also criticizes using ‘mass’ in the definition because it leads to categorizing audiences into several ‘’undifferentiated individuals’’. Thompson then begins explaining that using ‘’communication’’ and mass communication can be very overwhelming as he contrasts it with direct communications when two people actually speak to each other. He believes that in the world of digital technology, there are other specific terms that can be used such as ‘’mediated communication’’ to avoid misleading audiences (Thompson,