Download The Five Main Media Effect Theories

The Five Main Media
Effect Theories
Or: how this stuff winds up making
us feel/do things…
Magic Bullet/Hypodermic
Needle Theory
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1920’s
Most simple model
Basis of most effects that followed
Believes that the media is SO powerful
and that viewers are SO spongelike that
it is able to inject its audience with its
messages.
Example: War of the Worlds
 1938 Broadcast by Orson Welles of H.G.
Well’s novel The War of the Worlds
 Broadcast as part of the Mercury Theater
regular radio program
 Performed as a “mockumentary”
 Believed by Millions!
 http://www.archive.org/details/WAROFTH
EWORLDS2
Were they crazy?
 According the The Guardian the New
Jersey police HQ was besieged by
callers and numbers of people fled their
homes in terror.
 EXPERIENCE IS 100%!
 Welles’ program began a minute or two
prior to a popular show ended – people
flipped to the middle of the show
The Two-Step Flow
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1940’s
Katz and Lazarsfeld
Hypodermic=too strong
Media is filtered by “opinion leaders”
 People are the intervening factors between
stimuli and belief/action
 Source  Message  Media Opinion
Leaders  General Public (GP)
Example:
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Source: Burger King
Message: Open Late
Medium: television commercial
Opinion Leader: Diddy
General public
Who are today’s opinion
leaders?
“Limited” Effects
 1940’s to 1960’s
 Hovland, Lazarsfeld, Cooper and Jahod,
and Klapper
 Aka law of minimal consequences
 Media has a small effect on population.
The Limitations
 Intervening variables
 Individual differences
 Social differences
The Hovland Army
Experiment
 Why We Fight – a film series by Frank
Capra
 Tested how effective propaganda
techniques (a form of media influence)
were on groups of soldiers.
What Hovland noticed
 Who learned
 Who changed their minds about the
enemy
 Who was more eager to die (not many)
 Gap between smarter and less educated
Basically, media is
powerful…
 Sometimes forms attitudes
 Sometimes only reaches a fragment of
the audience
 Sometimes only reinforces what is
already there
 Sometimes provides a model for
behavior (not true effect bc no 100%
causality)
Uses and Gratifications
 1970s (the me era)
 Katz and Blumler
 Uses play an active role in media (we use
media to gratify ourselves)
 Media Gratification can come from
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Content
Familiarity
General exposure
Social context
4 Basic Uses
 Surveillance: knowledge brings security
(Maslow)
 Personal Identity: to determine what we
are like and what we are not
 Personal Relationships: we gain
belonging.
 The Watercooler Effect
 Show/Team Ownership
 Diversion: escapism
Spiral of Silence
 1980’s
 Noelle-Neumann
 People look to mass media to provide the
popular opinion
 People then choose to share opinion or
not based on its relationship to the
popular opinion
 Media has more power than individual.
Other important theories
 Cultivation (Gerbner): tv is the thing that
speaks the most to most families;
therefore, tv creates the common view of
the world, the common social roles, and
common values
 Revision (Hirsch): some groups are more
effected than others (based on SES)
More important theories
 Media Determinism (McLuhan): “the
medium is the message”
 We believe based on the type of media
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Newspapers
Books
Radio
Television/Film
Internet
And Lastly,
 Synthesis (Katz): the most important
things are the
 Media we select
 The people we associate with
So BASICALLY, we are
affected by media
 Somewhat
 Dependent on our Socio-Economic
Status
 In-groups
 Education
 Economics
 Dependent on our experience