Mass Communication Theories PDF

1.1. Mass communication as a source of impact: theories For many decades, scientists have been trying to answer the question of how mass communication affects the audience. To do this, they make a fundamental distinction between the communicator that transmits the message and the audience that rece...

1.1. Mass communication as a source of impact: theories For many decades, scientists have been trying to answer the question of how mass communication affects the audience. To do this, they make a fundamental distinction between the communicator that transmits the message and the audience that receives it. In this scheme, the communicator becomes the source of influence, and the recipient becomes the target. Initially, proponents of this approach said that mass communication has unlimited impact. However, today scientists believe that the influence of mass communication increases under some conditions and weakens under others. The idea that mass communication messages have an impact on the audience has formed the basis of four main theories: agenda, priming, cultivation, and socio-cognitive theory. Priming theory and socio-cognitive theory explain psychological phenomena in different fields. At the same time, agenda and cultivation theories were specifically created to explain the impact of mass communication. Taken together, these theories describe different aspects of the influence of mass communication: from the perception of the importance of public events to social norms and behavior. Theory of the agenda. An agenda is a hierarchy of social problems (events) that a person builds for himself. At the top of the hierarchical pyramid are the most important, and at its foot --- the least important, from a person\'s point of view, problems (events). The agenda theory proposed by M. McCombs and D. Schaustates that mass communication messages set the \"agenda\" for a large number of people: they determine which events or aspects of problems (events) people consider more important and which are less important. Proponents of this theory believe that the more often a message on a particular topic appears in the mass media, the more importance the audience attaches to it. For example, regular viewers of TV channels that actively discuss future presidential elections attach more importance to them than those who watch channels with a predominance of other topics. Frequent viewers or listeners of programs that discuss the country\'s security problem consider this problem more possible than people who watch or listen to such programs rarely, etc. Свое первое исследование McCombs and Schau conducted their first study in the American city of Chapel Hill at the height of the presidential campaign. For three weeks, they analyzed the content of local newspapers, television and radio to understand what public issues are discussed in mass communication. In addition, they asked voters what issues they thought the state should address first. Comparing the content of messages and people\'s opinions, the researchers found that they largely coincide. Over the next thirty years, a number of experimental and correlation studies were conducted on this theory. Meta-analyses have shown that the content of mass communication messages is indeed positively associated with the subjective assessment of the importance of problems (events). However, this connection is stronger when it comes to events that people do not experience firsthand, which they do not know much about from other sources, but which nevertheless affect their interests. Theory of cultivation. Cultivation is the process of forming a certain idea of the world in which some characteristics of people or events are related to others. Gerbner\'s theory of cultivation Гербнеромstates that mass communication - especially television-is the source of ideas about the world. Modern man has a large amount of information that he cannot learn from personal experience. Mass communication messages provide the audience with knowledge of things that they rarely encounter in their lives (S5HWYIMT, 2017). For example, most people have never been victims of crime, many people have never visited other countries, and not everyone knows lawyers or teachers. Mass communication messages allow us to fill this \"gap\". They offer the audience their own version of the world: they talk about how often crimes are committed, how life works in other countries, and how many lawyers and doctors there are in this world. The more time a person devotes to mass communication, the more his ideas correspond to the existing image of reality in them. In the modern world, there are mass communication messages that target different groups of people (for example, children or adults over the age of 18, men or women, members of certain ethnic groups or residents of countries). However, many messages are available to a wide variety of audiences: they are viewed by people of different genders, ages, and nationalities. Due to this, unification occurs in society: the ideas of different groups become similar to each other. This facilitates interpersonal communication between people, but reduces the differences between them. The cultivation of representations is enhanced when the information conveyed by mass communication comes into \"resonance\" with the information that the audience receives in their own experience. Resonance occurs in this case when events that a person has observed independently confirm the ideas about the world transmitted through mass communication channels. For example, the most likely victims of crime are those people who, on the one hand, often watch criminal news, and on the other --- live in areas with a high crime rate. In the original version of the theory, it was argued that mass communication is a single information field in which different messages convey similar assessments and ideas. To identify general trends, we need to compare the intensity of participation in mass communication (frequency of TV viewing) and audience representation. Later, some researchers began to talk about the fact that different messages of mass communication convey different ideas, so the cultivation is caused by watching not television as a whole, but individual programs (for example, soap operas or crime series). The effect of cultivation can be observed in different areas of life. Initially, the vast majority of research focused on three main topics: the impact of mass communication on perceptions of violence, political issues, and gender roles. A meta-analysis of correlation studies conducted more than twenty years ago found that there is a weak positive relationship between the frequency of television viewing and perceptions of the world. It manifests itself when it comes to watching television in general and specific types of programs. However, in modern studies, one can find examples of the effect of cultivation in other areas. For example, the amount of time that Americans spend watching television programs (but not medical series as such) is associated with an overestimation of the number of serious diagnoses (injuries and poisoning) and the death rate among patients. Watching television reports that treat the results of scientific research as indisputable increases Germans \' faith in and interest in science compared to reports that treat the results of scientific research as questionable. Watching some situation comedies and soap operas is associated with the desire of Dutch teenage girls and young women to become traditional mothers who devote themselves entirely to the family and are very much engaged in children. Watching romantic comedies and soap operas by American students is associated with idealistic expectations of a marriage in which the spouses fully understand each other, can talk about everything, and, as a result, are more willing to marry.