Introduction to Media Effects

Introduction to Media Effects

• Media effects involve changes resulting from media exposure, whether direct or indirect.
• These changes can be cognitive, affective, psychological, or behavioral.
• Media effects include both immediate impacts and long-term influences.
• Studying media effects is vital due to media's omnipresence in shaping perceptions, emotions, and decisions.
• Media effects are crucial for understanding cultural and social transformations.

Key Issues in Examining Media Effects

• Timing: immediate vs. long-term effects
• Duration: temporary vs. permanent effects
• Valence: negative vs. positive effects
• Change: whether media causes a difference or has no effect
• Intention: whether the effect is intended or unintended
• Level of Effect: micro (individual) vs. macro (societal)
• Directness: direct vs. indirect influence
• Manifestation: observable vs. latent effects

Key Characteristics of Media Effects

• Timing of effects can be immediate upon exposure or develop gradually over time.
• Duration of effects can be temporary or permanent, causing lasting changes.
• Valence (Polarity): effects can be positive, leading to belief shifts, or negative, instilling fear or anxiety.
• Scale: effects operate at individual level, like personal attitudes, and macro level, like societal norms.

Types of Effects on Individuals

• Cognition: media exposure influencing mental processes, such as transformation of information into knowledge.
• Belief: media shaping faith in what is real or true.
• Attitude: media influencing judgements about something.
• Affect: media shaping feelings that people experience.
• Physiology: media causing automatic bodily responses.
• Behavior: media influencing overt actions of an individual.

Ways Media Exerts its Influence

• Acquiring: provides new information or images.
• Triggering: activates pre-existing knowledge or memories, like a familiar tune triggering associations with a product.
• Altering: changes or modifies existing ideas or behaviors gradually over time.
• Reinforcing: echoes pre-existing beliefs or behaviors, strengthening existing views.

Historical Phases of Media Effects Theories

• Phase 1 - All-Powerful Media (Early 20th Century): media was considered omnipotent, directly shaping public opinion and behavior.
• Phase 2 - Minimal Effects School (1930s-1960s): media effects were seen as limited and mediated by individual differences.
• Phase 3 - Revival of Powerful Media (1960s-1980s): strong media effects were revisited, focusing on long-term, cumulative influences.
• Phase 4 - Negotiated Media Influence (1980s Onward): media influence is negotiated by audiences, integrating media's power and individuals' active role.

Key Theorists and Studies

• Harold Lasswell: his formula (Who says what to whom in what channel with what effect) analyzed the communication process.
• Hovland: his experiments during WWII highlighted that media effects depend on message and audience characteristics.
• Lazarsfeld: introduced the two-step flow model of communication, where opinion leaders mediate media influence.
• Noelle-Neumann's Spiral of Silence explores how media can suppress minority viewpoints.
• Gerbner's Cultivation Theory examines how television exposure shapes perceptions of social reality.

McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory

• Discusses the "paradox of media effects," noting the difficulty in measuring or predicting media influence.
• Emphasizes that media operates within a broader social and cultural ecosystem.
• Outlines research moving from cause-and-effect models to nuanced approaches considering long-term exposure and cumulative processes.
• Highlights the challenges in isolating media effects because of overlapping influences.

Bryant and Finklea’s “Media Effects: a Historical Perspective”

• Provides a historical account of media effects and long-standing concerns around media's impact.
• Introduces the "third-person effect" theory.
• This theory explains how individuals perceive media as having a greater influence on others than themselves.
• Situates media effects within historical events and societal reactions.

The Purpose of Media Effects Theories

• Theories categorize and explain how media messages influence individuals and society.
• They structure thinking, predict outcomes, and critique methodologies in research.
• Theories help scholars to hypothesize what effect will occur under certain conditions.

Agenda-Setting Theory

• Media tells us what to think about by selecting certain issues and focusing on them.
• McCombs and Shaw’s (1972) study: prominence of issues in media correlates to voters' perceptions of importance.

Priming

• Exposure to a media message activates related thoughts or associations in memory, influencing judgements or behaviors.
• Priming is rooted in cognitive neoassociation, making certain ideas more accessible for subsequent decisions.

Framing

• Media shapes the interpretation of issues by emphasizing certain aspects of a story.
• Frames serve as mental shortcuts to simplify complex information, like framing a news story to highlight conflict.

Cultivation Theory

• Gerbner developed this theory.
• Prolonged media exposure (especially television) cultivates a shared perception of reality.
• Heavy viewers adopt a worldview mirroring themes and stereotypes in media content.
• "Mean world syndrome," is explained by this theory.
• Continuous exposure to violent media content leads to exaggerated fear of crime.

Spiral of Silence

• Noelle-Neumann developed this theory.
• Individuals are less likely to express opinions if they believe they’re in the minority, due to fear of isolation.

Third-Person Effect

• People perceive media messages as having a greater influence on others than themselves.
• This bias leads individuals to dismiss potential impacts on their own attitudes or behaviors.

Uses and Gratifications

• Individuals actively select media sources based on personal needs and motives, highlighting choice and purpose in consumption.

Additional Theories

• Cognitive capacity models: how individuals encode, store, and retrieve information.
• Elaboration likelihood model: distinguishes between central and peripheral routes to persuasion.
• Diffusion of innovations: explains how new ideas spread through societies.

Cultural Approaches to the Societal Impact of Media

• Media Actively Participate in Constructing Social Reality.
• Media representations are intertwined with cultural norms, ideologies, and power structures.
• Media messages are produced, interpreted, and negotiated within cultural contexts.

Encoding/Decoding Model (Stuart Hall)

• Encoding: media producers embed messages within texts using culturally specific codes.
• These messages are influenced by institutional practices, ideologies, and economic interests.
• Decoding: audiences interpret media messages based on cultural backgrounds, experiences, and social positions.
• Results in varied readings, like dominant, negotiated, or oppositional interpretations.
• Hall's model underscores that meanings are not fixed.
• Audiences actively negotiate meanings, making media influence is a dynamic process.

Social Constructivism

• Reality isn't passively received.
• Reality is constructed through social interactions and shared symbols.
• Media constructs perceptions of identity, community and power.
• This challenges deterministic views of media effects. Argues that media both reflect and create social world. Interactive media transforms the encoding/decoding processes.

New Affordances

• Digital platforms let audiences participate more actively.
• This alters how messages are constructed and interpreted.
• Interactivity disrupts established power hierarchies in media production.
• Media actively shapes cultural narratives, identities, and influences public debates about norms and power.
• Media reinforces ideologies or providing counter-hegemonic perspectives.
• With digital rise, roles of producer and audience are blurred.
• This participatory form of cultural production allows audiences contribute to meaning-making in real time.

Qualitative Approaches

• Cultural studies use interpretative methods, (discourse analysis, ethnography, digital ethnography) to explore how media constructs meaning.
• Cultural mediation is vital for analyzing diverse media landscapes.
• Technological change and audience interactivity redefine society's role.

Institutional Approaches to the Societal Impact of Media

• Examines the role of media institutions.
• Focuses on how media organizations shape content and presentation through routines and frameworks.
• Media logic: practices, routines, and business imperatives that guide the creation, formatting, and distribution of media content.
• Media logic is in both traditional and digital platforms.
• Media Institutions operate within defined frameworks.

Changing Dynamics in the Digital Age

• User Engagement: personalized feeds, curation and interactive features have appeared.
• With digital content, the speed and reach of information transforms how news and information is disseminated and consumed.
• Altheide (2015) - Operational routines: institutional practices shape the flow of information.
• Altheide (2015) - Power of Technology and Business Models: media logic is embedded with values and imperatives of media corporations.
• Van Dijck & Poell – Digital Affordances: platforms use algorithmic sorting and user data to influence content.
• Van Dijck & Poell – Transformation of Audience Interaction: Digital media facilitates a two-way communication.
• Media institutions are significant with implications for democratic debate.

Broader implications

• Fragmentation vs. Unity: while digital media may allow for niche content, it may risk fragmenting areas. Tailored approach leads to echo chambers, reinforcing beliefs.
• Economic imperatives in media logic limits the diversity of voices and perspectives.

Mediatisation Theory

• Media is not simply channels for communication.
• Media is embedded in and transformative to social,cultural, and political structures.
• Evaluates if media should be a function of society or separate from it.
• It influences institutional processes, everyday practices, and reshapes cultural norms.
• Media's influence expands beyond content transmission.
• Everyday Life and Social Practices: media tech has become embedded in daily routines. Changing social interactions.

Institutional Change

• As media permeates traditional institutions it makes changes in political communication, journalism, education,
• Media's contribution is reshaping standards and cultural flow.

Approaches vs Social-Constructivist

• Institutional approach and focuses on how the organizations within Media impact social practices.
• Social Constructivist - media and culture affect each other to shape standards.
• Mediatisation may transition to a better understanding.
• Media has become essential components for structural change.

Couldry & Hepp

• Mediatisation is within broader debates on media influence.
• Media not only construct media but construct social reality.
• Accounts for content, historical and institutions and societal change.