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 are necessary to keep democracy alive. That is true, but it does not mean that news could not have the same effects as fictional representations. Even, we can say that journalism has not improved in the last years and may be getting substantially worse. Generally speaking, television has become increasingly sensational. In Spain, for example, TV news shows are about murders, robberies, rapes, car accidents, fires… and I think it is not exclusive from there. From my point of view, news programmes not only can cause the same effects as action films, but also these effects can be worse. People are aware that movies stories have been created by somebody, instead what journalists explain have happened in reality (and can happen again).
Moreover, society tends to believe that all what journalists explained is true and sometimes it can be misunderstood. An extensive study of Glasgow University Media Unit about audience understandings of AIDS (Briggs, 2002) is a proof of our hypothesis. The 52 focus group discussions conducted for this project suggested that widespread media adoption of the phrase “body fluids” contributed to some people’s belief that saliva was a route of HIV infection (‘because it is a body fluid’). The research also revealed how health education advice such as ‘If you are not 100% sure of your partner, use a condom’, interacted with cultural conditions to produce, in some cases, an anti-safe sex messages e.g. that using a condom implied distrust of your partner.
In 1941, two psychologists, N.E Miller and John Dollard, proposed that people can learn new behaviours through their observation of others’ behaviour. They called their theory social learning theory (Grossberg, 1998). However, by the early 1960s, social psychologist Albert Bandura offered a revised social learning theory and argued that actors in the mass media are so attractive that audience members want to be like the media actors. Therefore, media characters or models can influence the behaviour of audience members simply by existing. Bandura believed that the best way to teach new behaviours, particularly to children, is to present the behaviour you want the child to learn, and the child will imitate that behaviour. We are now at the heart of the ‘effects’ tradition: the figure of the ‘child’ (innocent, vulnerable, corruptible…). In a series of early controlled laboratory experimental studies called Bobo doll studies, Bandura demonstrated that children can learn new behaviours by observation. He wanted to study two different effects: first, whether observing a filmed behaviour could teach children that behaviour, and second, if such observation motivated the children to be like the film model (Grossberg, 1998). He showed nursery school children a film of a person hitting a Bobo doll, an inflated plastic clown doll with a sand base, which rocked back and forth when punched. So, after each viewing condition, the children were taken into a room with various toys, including a Bobo doll like the one of the film. Bandura argued that this set of toys allowed the children to either imitate the aggression on the film or engage in various no imitative play behaviours. It could be argued for instance that this study is artificial as it took place in a laboratory instead of a naturally-viewed television diet. According to Gauntllet (1998:124) ‘research subjects are likely to be shown selected or specially-recorded clips which lack the narrative meaning inherent in everyday TV productions’. On the one hand children may be observed in simulations of real life presented to them as a game. The Bobo doll is an inanimate object that is likely associated with the previous viewing experience in the mind of the subject, rendering the study invalid. And on the other hand, it has been demonstrated that the presence of an observer can radically affect children’s behaviour.
Gaunllett (1998) criticizes that in psychology, children are often considered not so much in terms of what they can do, as what they (apparently) cannot. Some projects have shown that children can talk intelligently and indeed cynically about the mass media. Robert Hodge and David Tripp’s studied what are the children responses to a television mock-horror cartoon Fangface. They argued that children are capable of understanding complex issues such as nature of good and evil. They also studied how children make sense of characters, action and narrative. Hodge and Tripp concluded: ‘Young children do distinguish between fantasy and reality, but they do not know what is needed to distinguish with the precision and subtlety assumed for adult television’ (Barker, 2001:12). Obviously, ten-years-old children can not understand with the same precision as an adult, nevertheless they are aware of the issues they watch and listen to.
Another valuable work on children and television has been carried out by David Buckingham: how children and young people actually perceive, define and understand television programmes. In particular he has become concerned with the ways in which children become citizens of their society and the role of the media in these processes. His researches led him to this conclusion: ‘Children respond to and make sense of television in the light of what they know about its formal codes and convention, about genre and narrative, and about the production process. In theses respects, they are much more active and sophisticated users of the medium than they are often assumed to be’. (Barker and Petley, 2001: 13)
Television is still the medium that most children spend the most time with. Considerable evidence indicates that television can teach a wide range of information, attitudes, expectations and behaviours to child viewers. According to Barker and Petley (2001: 311) ‘the concern is not whether television can teach children things, but rather what it is teaching them’.
As in the violence controversies, public debate about sexually explicit pictures is long-standing. Throughout the twentieth century, many U.S. Supreme Court cases have tried to define what is ‘obscene’ and therefore not protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. However, we are not interested in debating what should be allowed to show, that is another matter. Public concern includes both sexually explicit and pornographic contents and much of the debate relies more on moral, religious and ethical grounds than on social and scientific ones. One more time there is no evidence of the direct connection between distribution of pornographic materials and crimes against women in general. I am not saying that it is not true, only that there is no proof of that.
One major area of theorizing about media effects, concerns advertising and its influence on buying. How does advertising work? Is it effective? One more time there is no proof of it. In my opinion, we can not know if somebody has bought a particular brand because of an advertisement. The evidence on the effectiveness of advertising to actually get people to buy products is not at all clear. During the day, we receive a wide range of stimulus, therefore our decision depends on a lot of components. From our point of view it would be really difficult to find evidence of that. Surveys about consumer behaviour are not useful as people sometimes do not say the truth, or even do not know why they buy a brand and not another one. In the same way, we can look at information campaigns. What effect can information campaigns have on people? Can media campaigns succeed in influencing people’s beliefs and behaviour? The history of media research on information campaigns suggests that media power and influence is often counterbalanced by audiences who resist, reformulate and selectively retain media messages. As Grossberg (1998:313) says ’media campaign designers must hold realistic expectations about the goals of a media information campaign”, otherwise the campaign will not be efficient.
Finally, I would like to highlight my own conclusions. The mass media are an important site of influence, but not the only one. We can not draw attention only in media and forget other components such as our relationships, experience, knowledge… that also influence our reality vision and our behaviour. It is evident that mass media is an element that contribute in our socialization, but how? Although it is very difficult to speak definitively about media impact, people have studied the media and it has helped define our understandings of individual events. Such media effects can not be dismissed simply because these processes are complex and sometimes unsuccessful. Therefore, I do not completely agree with Gaunlett when he says (1998:120) that ‘direct effects of media upon behaviour have not been clearly identified, then we should conclude that they are simply not there to be found’. It is true that media effects are not identified, however they are there. They are elements which rely on our behaviour. Acknowledging that audiences can be ‘active’ does not mean that the media are ineffectual. The only thing we can be sure of ‘The Frankfurt School’ is nowadays discredited because if there is any clear issue it is that people do not absorb messages directly into their minds.
The second conclusion that Gauntlett (1998:120) draws attention after 60 years of research is more optimistic and, in my opinion, more appropriated: ‘Media effects research has quite consistently taken the wrong approach to the mass media, its audiences, and society in general’. Future researchers should explore how media operate with the development of new communication technologies. They need to change into a new paradigm, a new way of looking at the media without forgetting the technological transformation.
Finally I would like to highlight an interesting reflection. As I have already said, the effects of the fictional depictions and the news are the same, although it is not considered like that by some researchers. Therefore, if we condemn some reality representations we are rejecting to know what happens in the world, as Martin Bell says ‘we refuse to show the world as it is (…) You are seeing it all the time-in fiction, in the cop series, in movies. It’s just the real world is not allowed to be seen like that’.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barker, M. and Petley, J. (2001) ‘Introduction: from bad research to good – a guide for the perplexed’ in III Effects: The Media/Violence Debate. London: Routledge, pp.1-26.
Cumberbatch, G. ‘Effects’ and Kitzinger, J. ‘Impacts and influences’ in Briggs, A. and Cobley, P. (eds) (2002) The Media: An Introduction (Second Edition) London: Longman.
Gauntlett, D. (1998) ‘Ten things wrong with the effects model’ in Dickinson, R. et al (eds) Approaches to Audiences: A Reader, London: Arnold, pp.120-130.
Grossberg, L. et al (1998)‘Media and Behaviour’ and ‘Debates Over Media Effects’ in MediaMaking: Mass Media in a Popular Culture, pp. 277-235.
Turow, J (1999) ‘Mass Media Issues’ in Media Today: An Introduction to Mass Communication, Houghton Mifflin: Boston, MA.