Comprehensive Comparison of Communication Media focused on Communicative Capacity

Communication media (hereinafter called "media") are systematically compared on communicative capacity escaping from the effects of popular but vulgar impression for media. For this purpose "general item list for media comparison" has been created, which consists of 14 items about the mode of communicative manner and 4 items about the mode of message, bringing the total to 18 items. Then 21 media types are categorized by the 18 items in the general item list, in order to analyze the media environment in contemporary Japanese society. These categorical data are used for making the hierarchical classification with cluster analysis and for visualization in 2-dimensional space with non-metric multidimensional scaling method. These analyses allow us to understand methodically the positional relation and allocation of media, and it is found that the general item list is useful.