CRITICALLY ASSESS DEBATES ON 'MEDIA EFFECTS'

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CRITICALLY ASSESS DEBATES ON

‘MEDIA EFFECTS’

Laia Prat Ortega

MS-100: Introduction to Media Communication

12th November 2004


CRITICALLY ASSESS DEBATES ON ‘MEDIA EFFECTS’

A long history lies behind question about how communication affects or influences people. Greeks developed sophisticated hypothesis about how to impress listeners through the spoken word and Aristotle was concerned with theorizing the art of speaking. Even nowadays in face-to-face conversations each of us mobilizes theories about how to influence our listeners. For instance, we wish to make others understand how we feel or what we think. Today, mass communication studies have developed as a discipline with a focus on television and newspapers and, to a lesser extent, cinema and radio. Thanks to mass communication technologies a programme can now be viewed globally, so that questions about effects have thus become more complex.

The origin of modern media studies is usually located in 1930s Germany associated with work by scholars such as Adorno, Marcuse and Horkheimer. Their theories were developed in response to Germany’s descent into fascism. This work, collectively known as ‘The Frankfurt School’, theorized that social disintegration left people vulnerable to propaganda. This School promoted a ‘hypodermic model’ of media effects whereby messages were directly absorbed into the minds of the people. Many other theories and approaches to the media have developed since then; but nowadays, as we will see, this model is discredited.

More recently studies have revealed the diverse ways in which different people may respond to the same programme. Theses researchers highlight the fact that the messages ‘decoded’ by audiences are not necessarily those intended by the programme producers. How we respond to a particular programme or newspaper article can be influenced by class, gender, sexual and ethnic identity as well as cultural context. The trajectory of media and cultural studies during the last fifty years insisted that we recognize audience diversity and see people as ‘active’ rather that passive consumers of media images.  

After this brave introduction about media effects history, we will explain in detail which are these effects and if they are effective or not. We will consider some categories that represent strong public concerns such us media violence (both, fiction and reality portrayals), television influence on children, effects of pornographic images and the persuasiveness of media messages and information campaigns.  

American society is often reported to be one of the most violent in the world. Media violence is claimed to be a major contributing cause to real violence. It could be argued instead that the causes of violence in American life are multiple: racism, poverty, drug abuse, abusive family relationships, gangs, guns, mental illness... Therefore, there is no evidence that media violence is the only contributory cause of real violence.

In 1985, the American Psychological Association (APA) held that television can cause viewers to act aggressively. More recently, in its overall review of television and behaviour, the APA Task Force on Television and Society reaffirmed this view and asserted that media violence can contribute to two other outcomes, desensitising viewers to violent actions and fear of being the victim of violence. However, these studies alone are not sufficient evidence that media violence causes aggression. According to Grossberg (1998:301) ‘it might be that people inclined to act violently are more likely to watch television violence, and so it is their predisposition toward violence that leads to viewing violent TV, and not the other way around’. In my opinion, APA took a wrong approach in its study, because they took the media as its starting point to explain the general problem of violence in society (which has many other references). As Gauntlett (1998:120) says ‘the media effects approach comes at the problem backwards, by starting with the media and then trying to lasso connections from there on to social beings, rather than the other way around’. In short, if researchers had not showed some of the materials about which they were asking the respondents to comment on, they would not normally have viewed them. Therefore, as Barker and Petley (2001:4) conclude after a research focused on women’s responses to four very different kinds of programme, ‘the issue is not whether depictions of violence increase the likelihood of similar violence among potential perpetrators, but the feelings and reactions that it creates among those who are the actual or potential victims of violence’. The important point is not so much violent representations can be the cause of world violence, as what people feel while they are watching some kind of violent depictions.

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We can also note that the media depictions of ‘violence’ which the ‘effects model’ typically condemns are limited to fictional productions. As Gauntlett (1998:125) says ‘there is no obvious reason why the antisocial activities which are always in the news, and which frequently do not have such apparent consequences for their agents, should not have similar effects’. Most of the studies about media effects almost always separate their discussions of entertainment from news. Turow (1999) believes that people have been taught to expect more from journalists than from creators of action films, for example. Society thinks that mass media ...

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