There has been a lot of controversy with this effect as it makes people look easily influenced and that they rein act and believe everything that they see.
A study was carried out after the court case of Nathan Martinez, who after watching a film ‘Natural Born Killers’ went out and murdered his sister and daughter. The film was very violent and it was suggested that it influenced him to do the killings. Though this was a strong case it was very hard to prove the link.
Though this effect is short term I think it could contribute to long-term cultural effects, e.g., if people continually watch violent films they will get used to them and over a long period of time violence would become acceptable to present in the media and in our society.
Like the hypodermic syringe effect, the two-step effect is short term and still believes that the media is very powerful. Unlike the first effect where the information from the media goes straight to the public this effect has an opinion leader who interprets the media into their own opinions to then share with the public. I think that this effect can be dangerous as it can encourage bias and facts can be edited to make the story sound better but it is not fully true. An example of an opinion leader is the newspaper ‘The Sun’, they get the true facts about the news and politics and then use language and headlines to crate their own version being one-sided and biased about a particular story or political group e.g., labour, the sun bluntly had the headlines ‘VOTE LABOUR’ on the day of the elections. This effect is very powerful, as it proves, as Tony Blair won the election, and that the opinion leaders do have a great effect on their audience. This effect is very similar to the hypodermic effect, though it doesn’t show the public as being sponge like but that there are different people to influence our opinions about topics in the media.
Unlike the others, the third approach, ‘uses and gratifications’, concentrates on the audience and the way they use the media and not the way the media is presented and the effects of it. The key element of this effect is not what does the media do with people but what does people do with the media.
There are many different ways in which people use the media e.g., TV on as company, diversion, personal relationships, and background music e.t.c, e.g. people may choose to watch soaps so that they can relate to certain characters or storylines. What is interesting with this approach is that a family could be watching the same programme and all get something different out of it, e.g. a study by David Morley, where he made 29 people watch a programme and then interviewed them afterwards showed that they all preferred different parts of the programme and got different things out of it. This show that whatever the media shows us we pick and choose what we want out of it and want we believe in it.
I think this effect slightly contradicts the hypodermic syringe approach as it shows that people to have brains and that we are not all like sponges and believe everything that we and hear from the media.
The last effect is the ‘cultural effects approach’, as where the first 3 effects were fairly short term, this effect concentrates in the long-term effect of the media, and the ways it has changed people’s views and opinions about certain cultural topics.
I think the first two effects has contributed greatly to this approach, as media a long time ago hit certain topics which now we have a certain way of thinking about,
e.g., page 3 models have been used for long time now (since early 60s), and people are completely used to seeing them and the majority except it as part of our culture, though when ‘The Sun’ first had women posing nude on page three there was a huge up raw and people were very shocked. Over a long period of time people started to get used to the idea and didn’t mind so much, though some people believe it is under minding women and using them for their bodies, that’s why I believe now men see women as sex objects.
Another way the media has changed our views is by people like Martin Luther King, who through using the media spread his opinions about racism. He could be called an opinion leader from the two-step approach as he saw what was going on around him used the media to tell people about his opinions towards racism to try and stop it. I again think that this is contradicting the hypodermic syringe approach as it showed that not everybody agreed with him and had their own opinions about the issue of racism. I can see that through the work of Martin Luther King through the media it has made a large cultural effect as in today’s society racism is only a small issue and generally people no longer judge other people by their colour.
There are many other cultural effects where the media has changed our views over a long period of time, but they are forgot about because people just see these issues as being normal as they have been used in the media for such a long time.
There has been many studies on this effect and like the other effects they are just theory’s and are hard to prove, but at least with this effect you can look back at media in the past and see how it has changed the publics view.
I think all four effects are hard to prove and affect different people in different ways.
