Reading The Media- The Sociology Of Mass Communications
Reading The Media- The Sociology Of Mass Communications
An Outline of selected models of Mass Communications.
This discussion will specifically attempt to examine and hopefully come to some conclusion about the individual and collective effects of the mass media with some concentration of the single most dominant contemporary form of mass communication - television.
That television is attitudinally determinant in manifold ways is widely accepted across the political and social spectrum. The right, and especially the religious right both here and in the US claim that exposure to Television is largely responsible for crime, juvenile violence, drug abuse, sexual promiscuity, the collapse of the nuclear family, declining respect for authority and every other perceived malaise of the modern period. The left accuse television of promulgating sexism, racism and the unthinking acceptance of the lifestyle and behaviour patterns of a society bound hand and foot to reckless and irresponsible mass consumption.
Within the Social Sciences the power of Mass Communications has long been recognised and indeed models of receptivity have been dominant and have been usurped. The first model to have wide acceptance in the social sciences arose largely out of an extraordinary event in 1938, and the academic reaction to it:
The girls...huddled around their radios trembling and weeping in each other's arms. They separated themselves from their friends only to take their turn at the telephone to make long distance calls to their parents, saying goodbye for what the thought might be the last time...Terror stricken girls hoping to escape from the Mars invaders, rushed to the basement of the dormitory. (Cantril, 1940 p53)
Orson Wells radio Drama based on the HG Wells Novel "War of the Worlds" sent a wave of irrational panic through many North American communities, especially isolated ones, during and after its broadcast in 1938. The public reaction to the drama appeared to verify the then dominant model of reception of mass communications. The model is however, drawn from a particular perspective within academic psychology rather than sociology, and therefore limits itself to perceived individual effects of the content of mass media. The "Hypodermic Syringe" model asserted that the effect of the mass media is very simple and direct. The assumptions behind this model do indeed even seem to gaining some ground in the current debate surrounding the portrayal of violence in the cinema. At its simplest it is asserted that the portrayal of deviant behaviour such as violence and criminality brings about an increase in such behaviour- that is that their is a relatively direct causal connection between behaviour and action. In particular children are seen as vulnerable to corruption by the media. At its simplest it can be seen as part of the underlying assumptions behind such institutions of content control as the BBFC in Britain. Indeed itshould be noted that it is the BBFC that has delayed the release in the UK of Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers" on the evidence of so-called "copycat crimes. Its academic origins lie largely in the school of psychology which was dominant for the early part of this century-Behaviourism:
This school of thought saw all human action as modelled on the conditioned reflex so that one's personality consisted of nothing more that responses to stimuli in the individual's environment which formed stable and recognisable patterns of behaviour... The mass media appeared to be an obvious candidate for any theory of the powerful stimuli to be found in modern society. (Glover 1984 p4)
This model however sees the audience, the mass as merely passive recipients of the message which is injected into them, rather than active human actors capable of choice and discrimination both in their attitudes to the media and in their ordinary social behaviour. It is now seen as overly deterministic particularly since it has been impossible to establish any real evidence for a direct causal connection between exposure to material relating to deviant behaviour and participation in such behaviour.
Despite the weakness of the model it does still appear to have some power for the media itself- the assertion that the children guilty of the Bulger murder were made evil by exposure to video "nasties" or Andrea Dworkin's assertion that pornography "creates" rapists still appear to betray a belief in a simple direct causal relationship between media and action.
The Hypodermic Syringe Model has largely been replaced within media studies itself by other models which are more attentive to the possibility of human will. The Two Step Flow Model has its origins in a text by Katz and Lazarsfeld, " Personal Influence- The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications" and arose as a result of an earlier quantitive survey into voting intentions carried out by Lazarsfeld in Illinois. Lazarsfeld asserts that the mass communications flow is mediated by the individual's direct social group. Far from being the isolated atomised individuals that are so vulnerable to the powerful influence of the mass media we are fundamentally involved in groups- our families friends, social circle, and colleagues, and it is within these groups that opinions and attitudes are formed. Indeed Lazarsfeld asserts that the leaders of these groups actually act to directly mediate information flow from radio and print to other members of the group.
The Uses and Gratifications Model which so some extent grew out of the work of Katz & Lazarsfeld concentrates on the way in which the audience actually chooses media content that fulfils certain social needs. A soap opera may provide some satisfaction of a need for companionship, reading a daily paper may be as much habit and ritual as an attempt to garner information about the world.
It the first of the three models is thought to be over deterministic the latter two barely accept that the media have any effect on behaviour and attitude at all- an assertion that does not appear to be borne out by the multi-million pound budgets of advertising agencies. A more plausible model is needed then and more recent work has concentrated on building a set of theories that can take into account both human choice and the influence that the mass media evidently does have on the behaviour and attitudes of any given population.
It would be wrong to assert that "Cultural Effects Theory" is a single homogeneous school of thought, indeed each of the perspectives the within academic discipline of Sociology seems to have evolved its own version of the model.
What Cultural Effects Theory asserts is complex and equivocal, but put as simply as possible it is asserted that the media has a subtle cumulative effect on the social being of individuals. For example rather than react directly to a single showing of an advertisement by rushing out to buy the product being promoted, the brand image is slowly incorporated into the lifestyle of the consumer, who may have been exposed to literally a lifetime of advertising. It may even be asserted that the cumulative effect of such exposure is to legitimate the existence of an advertising industry, and of the consumer society that it promulgates. This model:
..assumes that the media can have important effect on their audiences. However, these effects are not the immediate changes of opinion studied by earlier researchers but rather the slow cumulative build-up of values and beliefs through which we understand the world. For example feminist writers have argued that the kinds of images of women which the media surround have had a major influence on our ideas of what women are like and how they should behave. (Glover, 1984 p10)
Obviously the perspective from which the media researcher will have some bearing on both the choice of subject for study and the outcome of the research. The sociological schools in in the study of Mass Communications and the areas of interest that they concern themselves with are the next obvious area to examine.
Brian Mulrine 1994/5 BICC.
References:
Cantril, H (1940) "The Invasion from Mars: A study in the Psychology Of Panic" University Press, Princeton.
Glover, D (1984) "The Sociology of the Mass Media" Causeway Press, Ormskirk.
|
|