For all the times that Cultivation theory has come up thus far, Morgan et al. (2009) finally lay out the breadth and nuance of the perspective. These discussions on the effects of television and of cultivation intrigue me far more than the results of any one experiment exactly because of the breadth and nuance that can be brought forward.
I was a teenager during the rise of violent video games, and
many of my first forays into news and politics were through the lens of someone
on the receiving end of a moral panic. Don’t take away my violent video games, Senator;
I can tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I didn’t understand why video
games were always being bullied in the traditional media, when TV, movies, and
books had as much violence. I blamed political scapegoating and an entrenched
media that feared and distrusted an emerging artform. It is good to revisit
these thoughts from a nuanced understanding, and to be fair to my younger self,
the portrayal of these topics in the media always takes on a simplistic framing.
Morgan et al. suggests that violence comes up again and again in media effects
research because it is easy to study, gets funding, and makes the work of
researcher more accessible to the general public through a concrete topic. Violent
media and its effects lend themselves to being easily conceptualized and
discussed. They, as well as Jacobs et al. (2017), suggest that the clearest effects
of violent media are on a person’s worldview, not necessarily on their likelihood
to commit violent acts themselves.
My love of video games is likely what led to my unchecked optimism
for technology. Televisions were getting bigger and cheaper, with
high-definition on the horizon, while video games, computing, and graphics
technologies were rapidly advancing, and I thought this was great — it was great
for everyone and everything, always. Current events have tempered this feeling — current
events or that, oh no, I’m getting older.
For my youth, I was steeped in online video game forums, gaming-industry and
technology magazines, television shows about science-and-technology, and technology-and-business
related news. Without realizing it, I’d been pushed toward a worldview that
normalized a perspective on technology that was extreme in optimism, trusting
both industry-leaders and start-ups implicitly, and one that expected and
demanded a high degree of morally, economically, and environmentally
unsustainable obsolescence. New, new, new; the next big thing always meant
something better.
From these new understandings, it’s easy to see how my media selection and exposure cultivated a specific outlook. The realities of growing up before the end of Moore’s Law, and being an end-user to the industries driven by it, gave me heuristic models for understanding the world that privileged the newest things as the best things. Even just a few years ago, my thoughts on technology were somewhat nuanced but still firmly in the tech-enthusiast camp. The criticism of technology always seems to be framed around “Millennials,” and I see this as a trope. Cries that a current generation is ruining civilization are as old as civilizations themselves while the voracity of undue criticism can mask actual social issues — for everyone. I still believe this last bit, but at the time I also thought that there was a certain xenophobia around the new forms of cultural expression that devices like cellphones permit. Like emojis; it’s probably not worse, just different. At the time, I made the argument that, yes, while everyone is walking through public with their faces glued to their devices and ignoring the people near them, those same devices permit them to be, not anti-social, but hyper-social. Internet-connected devices permit choosing quality over proximity in social interactions. Today, however, these thoughts are overtaken by just how different the current environment is from anything that came before, and the effects that emerge as the new media environment has matured. As I go next into the media effects literature addressing new media, I’m curious to see how my current positions are informed or changed by the research.
Literature reviewed
Jacobs, Laura, Marc Hooghe, and Thomas de Vroome. “Television and Anti-Immigrant Sentiments: The Mediating Role of Fear of Crime and Perceived Ethnic Diversity.” European Societies 19, no. 3 (May 27, 2017): 243 – 67. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2017.1290264.
Morgan, M., J. Shanahan, and N. Signorielli. “Growing up with Television: Cultivation Processes.” In Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, edited by Jennings Bryant and Mary Beth Oliver, 3rd ed., 34 – 49. Communication Series. Communication Theory and Methodology. New York: Routledge, 2009
Riddle, Karyn, W. James Potter, Miriam J. Metzger, Robin L. Nabi, and Daniel G. Linz. “Beyond Cultivation: Exploring the Effects of Frequency, Recency, and Vivid Autobiographical Memories for Violent Media.” Media Psychology 14, no. 2 (May 31, 2011): 168 – 91. https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2011.573464.
This week I watched some conveniently relevant
news reports on health and advertising (perhaps this could be considered a priming effect?) while reading on health information effects. The videos,
special reports put out by Vox, covered the effects of today’s advertising on public
health — specifically the use of nicotine by minors and young adults, which had
been nearing zero until e-cigarettes started being marketed and framed
separately from smoking cessation (Vox, 2018, “How Juul made
nicotine go viral”), as well as prescription
drug ads (Vox, 2016, “How Americans got
stuck with endless drug ads”).
Initially, these reports interested me because
they touch on what effect the interpretive aspects of an ad’s visual vernacular
have on the audience — like model ages, gestures/poses, scenery, facial
expressions, and other visual connotations or cues that build “expectancy.” These
reports and the media effects literature on health follow-up on areas of my interest
that were last influenced by Jean Kilbourne and Sut Jhally. They also provide
some scholarly sources that I can add to a growing selection of literature I’ve
been collecting — searching for a perspective to address “graphic design
effects.”
But, back to health. Messages related to
health and medicine are particularly worrisome for the fatal implications of
being misinformed and worrisome for the realities of medical research: null
results are not published while news reporting exaggerate and misconstrue the
underlying medical literature.
The media effects perspectives on internet
health resources are particularly interesting, for both their positive and
negative outcomes. This makes me wonder to what extent media effects
researchers can investigate historical periods. I want to know if the spread of
public libraries (“Carnegie libraries”) in towns across the US had similar
consequences for public health as digitally democratized sources.
Randolph and Viswanath’s
treatment on public health effects (2004) was slightly bizarre to read. It is
the first paper that I’ve read to directly discuss practical, goal-directed
applications of media effects research — applying the models and research toward
achieving some specific outcome. Even though the discussion is directed toward
theory-based campaigns for the public good, I nevertheless found it alarming.
This reaction is somewhat hypocritical, of course, because that process — create
an intervention, evaluate the resulting behaviors, then revise and repeat — is a design process by the most fundamental definitions of design.
Message design is also discussed by Anket et
al. (2016), though there is a misunderstanding behind their discussion of Noar
(2006b) and of message design. Noar can’t be specific related to message design
because that’s not how design solutions work — they are nearly always one-offs.
This is true of all design, but is especially true of communication design.
You’re working with people; messy, complicated, and intensely irrational in one
moment then intensely rational in the next. Worse, your only tool is language,
which is both imprecise and endlessly descriptive. Even that word, language,
makes my point for me because it is so ubiquitous and abstract that how I use
it here may call up unintended understandings in a reader. All of this is to
say that repeating campaigns and messages can ignore hidden contexts that
allowed the initial ones to be successful, and it risks the message becoming
stale, or worse, subverted with each use. There is nothing inherently wrong
with the three message elements that they lay out (use of celebrity, community
members, and audience participation), but there is nothing inherently right,
either. The biggest factor ignored by their meta-analysis is novelty, which I argue was a major contributor to the success of The Truth tobacco cessation
campaign.
To the authors, or anyone hoping to evaluate
such public health campaigns, I would offer this advice: Anker et al.’s three
“inclusion criteria” are a good starting point for a design brief, but if you
are searching for replicability between campaigns then I’m sorry, but
communication design is not a social science. Design by committee, by formula,
and by template will fail you, and there are so many confounding variables to
deal with that you will have to rely on intuition. That’s not to say that you
shouldn’t be informed, but establish your intent, research prior campaigns,
research unrelated (even commercial) campaigns, and above all else work to gain
an understanding of your target audience — their social, media, health, and
internal contexts — and then try to do something different than what other people
are targeting these people with. Your message will stand out by contrast. From
this mindset, craft many, divergent versions of your message and then test and
iterate on them. Helen Armstrong’s book, Participate, offers valuable insight
on the practicalities of user testing. But also take inspiration from
unexpected places. Paul Bennett, a partner in the design firm IDEO which has a prolific history of design within health contexts, discusses the mindsets
necessary for this in his talk, “Design
is in the Details.” Stanford’s Design
program hosts a resource that might be helpful in creating better models for
the design of public health campaigns (see “A
Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking”).
This week I watched some conveniently relevant news reports on health and advertising (perhaps this could be considered a priming effect?) while reading on health information effects. The videos, special reports put out by Vox, covered the effects of today’s advertising on public health — specifically the use of nicotine by minors and young adults, which had been nearing zero until e-cigarettes started being marketed and framed separately from smoking cessation (Vox, 2018, “How Juul made nicotine go viral”), as well as prescription drug ads (Vox, 2016, “How Americans got stuck with endless drug ads”).
Initially, these reports interested me because
they touch on what effect the interpretive aspects of an ad’s visual vernacular
have on the audience — like model ages, gestures/poses, scenery, facial
expressions, and other visual connotations or cues that build “expectancy.” These
reports and the media effects literature on health follow-up on areas of my interest
that were last influenced by Jean Kilbourne and Sut Jhally. They also provide
some scholarly sources that I can add to a growing selection of literature I’ve
been collecting — searching for a perspective to address “graphic design
effects.”
But, back to health. Messages related to
health and medicine are particularly worrisome for the fatal implications of
being misinformed and worrisome for the realities of medical research: null
results are not published while news reporting exaggerate and misconstrue the
underlying medical literature.
The media effects perspectives on internet
health resources are particularly interesting, for both their positive and
negative outcomes. This makes me wonder to what extent media effects
researchers can investigate historical periods. I want to know if the spread of
public libraries (“Carnegie libraries”) in towns across the US had similar
consequences for public health as digitally democratized sources.
Randolph and Viswanath’s
treatment on public health effects (2004) was slightly bizarre to read. It is
the first paper that I’ve read to directly discuss practical, goal-directed
applications of media effects research — applying the models and research toward
achieving some specific outcome. Even though the discussion is directed toward
theory-based campaigns for the public good, I nevertheless found it alarming.
This reaction is somewhat hypocritical, of course, because that process — create
an intervention, evaluate the resulting behaviors, then revise and repeat — is a design process by the most fundamental definitions of design.
Message design is also discussed by Anket et al. (2016), though there is a misunderstanding behind their discussion of Noar (2006b) and of message design. Noar can’t be specific related to message design because that’s not how design solutions work — they are nearly always one-offs. This is true of all design, but is especially true of communication design. You’re working with people; messy, complicated, and intensely irrational in one moment then intensely rational in the next. Worse, your only tool is language, which is both imprecise and endlessly descriptive. Even that word, language, makes my point for me because it is so ubiquitous and abstract that how I use it here may call up unintended understandings in a reader. All of this is to say that repeating campaigns and messages can ignore hidden contexts that allowed the initial ones to be successful, and it risks the message becoming stale, or worse, subverted with each use. There is nothing inherently wrong with the three message elements that they lay out (use of celebrity, community members, and audience participation), but there is nothing inherently right, either. The biggest factor ignored by their meta-analysis is novelty, which I argue was a major contributor to the success of The Truth tobacco cessation campaign.
To the authors, or anyone hoping to evaluate
such public health campaigns, I would offer this advice: Anker et al.’s three
“inclusion criteria” are a good starting point for a design brief, but if you
are searching for replicability between campaigns then I’m sorry, but
communication design is not a social science. Design by committee, by formula,
and by template will fail you, and there are so many confounding variables to
deal with that you will have to rely on intuition. That’s not to say that you
shouldn’t be informed, but establish your intent, research prior campaigns,
research unrelated (even commercial) campaigns, and above all else work to gain
an understanding of your target audience — their social, media, health, and
internal contexts — and then try to do something different than what other people
are targeting these people with. Your message will stand out by contrast. From
this mindset, craft many, divergent versions of your message and then test and
iterate on them. Helen Armstrong’s book, Participate, offers valuable insight
on the practicalities of user testing. But also take inspiration from
unexpected places. Paul Bennett, a partner in the design firm IDEO which has a prolific history of design within health contexts, discusses the mindsets
necessary for this in his talk, “Design
is in the Details.” Stanford’s Design
program hosts a resource that might be helpful in creating better models for
the design of public health campaigns (see “A
Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking”).
Literature reviewed
Anker, Ashley E., Thomas Hugh Feeley, Bonnie McCracken, and Carolyn A. Lagoe. “Measuring the Effectiveness of Mass-Mediated Health Campaigns Through Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Health Communication 21, no. 4 (April 2, 2016): 439 – 56. https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2015.1095820.
Randolph, Whitney, and K. Viswanath. “Lessons Learned from Public Health Mass Media Campaigns: Marketing Health in a Crowded Media World.” Annual Review of Public Health 25, no. 1 (April 2004): 419 – 37. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.25.101802.123046.
Walsh-Childers, K., and J. D. Brown. “Effects of Media on Personal and Public Health.” In Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, edited by Jennings Bryant and Mary Beth Oliver, 3rd ed., 469 – 89. Communication Series. Communication Theory and Methodology. New York: Routledge, 2009.
This week’s readings, in light of previous weeks, has given
me an appreciation of the process behind social science and the challenges that
media effects researchers and scholars face--the scope of the current models
allow for an expanded breadth and specificity for investigating media effects,
but significant limitations persist. The field fully admits that the models for
understanding and explaining media effects are myopic. But, it seems that this
is as much a feature of social science as it is a criticism of media effects
literature. Addressing overly narrow and ungeneralizable models has to be done
slowly, through incremental gains over decades, because each addition to a model is a complication that must be proven. The design process has something similar:
iteration. It’s an important process for improving work, but it has a blind
spot. You can slowly walk yourself down a dead-end. So, early on in the
ideation process, designers will inject chaos into their process and play with
the results--this trial-and-error experimentation relies heavily on intuition.
I’ve been thinking about intuition a lot lately. In social science, intuition can obviously be a dangerous trap for researchers, leading to biases and unfounded assumptions that have to be mete out. Designer’s, however, rely on intuition to guide their work. The “effects” of graphic design can’t be reliably produced without it--formulaic design fails. This semester I’m teaching a freshmen-level design class where students learn to identify and create gestalt “effects” with principles like closure, contrast, hierarchy, and implied movement. By creating a large set of studies using very basic shapes to elicit these principles, they begin to intuit how to do this.
Sometimes intuition, inspiration, and other creative things are couched in airs of mysticism, and this is unfortunate. Even if we, as individuals, can’t articulate or be fully aware of how and why we have certain perceptions and feelings, intuition can be externally understood and explained. Intuition is a type of heuristic thinking. Gaining access to that terminology was important in my professional development because a perceived mysticism originally pushed me away from art and design.
Rosko-Ewoldsen et al. have expanded my lexicon further. The
general affective aggression model qualifies intuition as primary appraisal
based on mental models or schema. So, to rephrase, this Bauhaus-style of design
pedagogy helps students build good, versatile mental models for interpreting
visual information. Then, over the course of their education, these mental
models are developed into more abstract--and thus, more widely
applicable--schema that they can use to apply their craft to cross- and
interdisciplinary means.
This leads me to wonder how we generate and train our own mental models at the causal level. Rosko-Ewoldsen et al. state that our mental models are under some amount of self-control. We can direct changes to them, swap out and test different ones, and apply them to information at will. They can be viewed as fast and efficient or as quick and dirty. While this fails to explain the role of circumstance, rather than intention, in the formation of mental constructs, it explains an area of filmic studies that I’ve been fascinated with since my undergraduate studies, which is the gay read.
Before the papers themselves primed my rants and tangents on intuition, I was looking forward to digging into the topic of media stereotyping because I wanted to talk about one thing: The relationship between film and the Gay Rights movement. First, these were people who did not have characters that they could identify with, but that didn’t stop them. Gay affections and cross-dressing are frequently played for laughs, and today we could (perhaps should) condemn such stereotypical portrayals, but at the time characters and scenes with these elements gave the only mirrors from which an LGBT person could see themselves. They also gave heteronormative films a “gay read,” which is applying the constructs and mental models from their personal and romantic lives to films in order to understand the characters differently and gain further mirrors for their self-identity. The best, however, were campy movies.
Campy is a term that’s hard to pin down, but it’s used to describe
movies that are over-the-top in a way that’s appealing. Think, so bad it’s
good. For LGBT persons in the 70s through the 90s, campy movies provided the
only portrayals of gay and lesbian characters. They were usually low-budget,
which gave creators some freedom to include (what were then) subversive topics.
This was crucial not just for their individual identities, but also for their
group identities. Communities centered around viewing these films, they gave
rise to cult fandoms like that of Rocky Horror, but they also gave much more
than entertainment. These communities gave a sense of normalcy, defined what it
meant to be something other than straight, and were a source of the collective
courage needed to come out and to pursue the political action necessary to
secure a better future at a point in history when admitting this meant risking
your job, your family, and your safety.
How is that for the power of media effects? Or, for the
monumental importance of fair and diverse portrayals of societal groups?
Literature reviewed
Mastro, Dana. 2009. “Effects of Racial and Ethnic Stereotyping.” In Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, edited by Jennings Bryant and Mary Beth Oliver, 3rd ed. Communication Series. Communication Theory and Methodology. New York: Routledge.
— — — . n.d. “Effects of Racial and Ethnic Stereotyping,” 13.
Rosko-Ewoldsen, D. R., B. Rosko-Ewoldsen, and F. D. Carpentier. 2009. “Media Priming: An Updated Synthesis.” In Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, edited by Jennings Bryant and Mary Beth Oliver, 3rd ed, 74 – 93. Communication Series. Communication Theory and Methodology. New York: Routledge.
Skinner, Allison L., and Jacob E. Cheadle. 2016. “The ‘Obama Effect’? Priming Contemporary Racial Milestones Increases Implicit Racial Bias among Whites.” Social Cognition 34 (6): 544 – 58. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2016.34.6.544.
Tukachinsky, Riva, Dana Mastro, and Moran Yarchi. 2015. “Documenting Portrayals of Race/Ethnicity on Primetime Television over a 20-Year Span and Their Association with National-Level Racial/Ethnic Attitudes: TV Portrayals and National-Level Attitudes.” Journal of Social Issues 71 (1): 17 – 38. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12094.
The biggest take away from the contemporary scholarship is
that Media Effects seems to be having its “Expanding Field” moment (a term I know from art history; see Krauss, 1979). Shit’s getting complicated, and
things can’t be adequately explained without venturing into the theoretical
frameworks of other disciplines or redefining some of the field’s foundational
terms.
Following up the criticism from Holbert et al. to not toss
the baby out with the bathwater, my instinct is to think that the discrepancies
between Media Effects models that can describe effects and uses in earlier
periods and the ones needed to describe today’s as requiring some overarching
model or theory that can adequately explain effects from both periods. However,
I don’t know if that’s possible, already happening, or within the scope of
media effects study. The human ecological factors that audiences feel likely
have confounding influences on media use, as the differences in early Modern
(1890-1930) and late Modern (1930-1960) periods show — media use that was most
informed and guided by social, political, and economic factors like
urbanization and mass migration (Chaffee & Metzger, p. 367).
A second, counter-perspective also comes to mind. To
continue the parallel that Neumann draws between Media Effects models and the
Heliocentric and Geocentric astronomical models, the Geocentric Model didn’t
cease being useful for navigation, timekeeping, or for telling you where in the
sky to point a telescope. It is important to note that a model doesn’t need to
represent truth to be useful; it simply must have its limitations qualified.
Maps and diagrams are another perfect example of this. Michael Beirut has a great video lecture (“The genius of the London Tube Map”) that explains how a geographically accurate map of London’s Underground train system was
challenging to read and understand, but when they trialed a map which was
abstracted from geography, it was instantly successful and quickly became the
world standard for public transit maps.
Between this mess of mixed notions that I have, I think the
key to evaluating any model is its simplicity and utility.
I think that there is a certain amount of alarmism around
media fragmentation. While, yes, new technology is creating the infrastructure
for extreme selectivity and individualized media use, there must be a finite
ability for a population to create desirable, gratifying media content with
diminishing quality and gratification for audiences and diminishing revenue and
resources for creators as the audience narrows. Eventually, this media and
audience fragmentation will equalize; though it may be at different levels depending
on the nature of the platform. For example, I have a lower tolerance for
low-quality YouTube videos than I do for low-quality links and discussion on
Reddit. It takes more effort to evaluate the quality of a video (being a linear, durational medium), while Reddit’s text comments take minimal effort to
skim and skip over. But in both platforms, I regularly reach the limits of the
desirable content, and either become less-selective or move onto other things.
The only thing which concerns me are echo-chambers and Eli Pariser’s Filter
Bubbles, and not because they might completely isolate but because they might
legitimize fringe ideas and largely seem to be passive, unintentional
consequences of algorithms. Being driven by algorithms optimizing for clickthroughs
and ad revenue, filter bubbles have the power to make us more extreme versions
of ourselves in strange and unexpected ways.
Literature reviewed
Bennett, W. Lance, and Shanto Iyengar. 2008. “A New Era of Minimal Effects? The Changing Foundations of Political Communication.” Journal of Communication 58 (4): 707 – 31. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2008.00410.x.
— — — . 2010. “The Shifting Foundations of Political Communication: Responding to a Defense of the Media Effects Paradigm.” Journal of Communication 60 (1): 35 – 39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2009.01471.x.
Chaffee, Steven H., and Miriam J. Metzger. 2001. “The End of Mass Communication?” Mass Communication and Society 4 (4): 365 – 79. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327825MCS0404_3.
Holbert, R. Lance, R. Kelly Garrett, and Laurel S. Gleason. 2010. “A New Era of Minimal Effects? A Response to Bennett and Iyengar.” Journal of Communication 60 (1): 15 – 34. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2009.01470.x.
Neuman, W. Russell. 2018. “The Paradox of the Paradigm: An Important Gap in Media Effects Research.” Journal of Communication 68 (2): 369 – 79. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqx022.
The thing that immediately stood out to me about Rubin’s discussion of Uses and Gratifications was the language. Uses and gratifications …what? Is it a perspective? Approach? Theory? It frequently goes unqualified, which seemed to be a deliberate affectation. I looked into it, and there seems to be some criticism or debate around the precise terminology, and this paper may be attempting to stay out of it. Apparently, U&G originally received criticism for being called a theory while not qualifying as one.
These are the types of
things that I tend to notice when practicing “active reading,” where I approach
a text as a conversation with the author (parasocial). I note questions and
tangential thoughts that come to mind as I’m reading. Overall, this increases
my engagement with a text, improves my recall and comprehension, and I find
that it permits me to be more critical — in contrast to Kim & Rubin (1997)
who classify skeptical responses as reducing comprehension. This is an area
where I’m active by choice and utility, but my TV viewing has become active out
of necessity and format.
I’m both a cord-cutter
and a huge nerd, which I think makes me acutely aware of media selectivity, the
intentions behind my media use, and desires that I pursue through that media
use. I love science fiction (for its reality exploration) and educational
television (value reinforcement; learning is fun) to the exclusion of most
other types of TV content. Knowing that, it’s probably easy to see why I cut
cable.
For me, primetime television was replaced, many years ago, with educational YouTube videos because they better met my cognitive and affective desires. With what happened to TLC, Discovery Channel and the History Channel, an entire genre was increasingly absent from cable TV; I missed it and resented its departure. I sought out educational content as much I could, selectively exposing myself content like Nova and Cosmos. When the last blocks of WW2 programming gave over to the History Channel’s paranormal and pawn shop crazes, I almost entirely ceased using television and video media for passive, ritualized, and diversionary viewing. Once YouTube dominated my use of the video medium, I had to be a much more active viewer. Partly because the content is short and I have to pick what to watch next, and partly because I have to fight to keep the algorithm trained to my preferences (avoidance: list videos and conspiracy theories).
The industry is finally catching up with this. I’m a big Star Trek fan, so I am watching Star Trek Discovery. Being the show that launched CBS’s online-only platform, it requires even more intent (and money) to watch. However, it provides me with fresh (affective) involvement in a fandom from my childhood. Involvement that doesn’t end with the episode itself; I also have to participate in the fan discussions (behavior involvement) over the course of days and weeks, because I enjoy the fan-created critical essays that dissect each moment, reference, and context as much as the show itself.
Literature reviewed
Knobloch-Westerwick, Silvia. 2015. “Building Blocks of the Selective Exposure Paradigm.” In Choice and Preference in Media Use: Advances in Selective Exposure Theory and Research, 3 – 24. New York: Routledge.
Oliver, B., and K. M. Krakowiak. 2009. “Individual Differences in Media Effects.” In Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, edited by Jennings Bryant and Mary Beth Oliver, 3rd ed, 517 – 31. Communication Series. Communication Theory and Methodology. New York: Routledge.
Riles, Julius Matthew, Andrew Pilny, and David Tewksbury. 2018. “Media Fragmentation in the Context of Bounded Social Networks: How Far Can It Go?” New Media & Society 20 (4): 1415 – 32. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444817696242.
Rubin, A. M. 2009. “Uses-and-Gratifications Perspective of Media Effects.” In Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, edited by Jennings Bryant and Mary Beth Oliver, 3rd ed, 165 – 84. Communication Series. Communication Theory and Methodology. New York: Routledge.
While I initially took issue with Potter’s definition of Mass Media, I see the need for the distinction that he makes between modes of mass media and the senders themselves. But, his framework raised questions in me on how to consider and qualify “viral media” — those messages (typically) made by individuals which achieve extremely pervasive exposure across societies for an extremely brief period. Are such messages exerting an influence and what types? Is there a meaningful distinction between viral messages and forms of mass media with short exposure? How do “fake news” or disinformation campaigns factor in, and do they work within or further complicate the existing models of media effects?
Greenberg and Salwen pose a question in a similar vein; is accessing internet databases a form of mass communication? Setting aside the issues Wilbur Schramm had with academia’s narrow focus, it seems that mass communication is worth studying separately from interpersonal communication because of emergent attributes and consequences unique to those forms. For my current understanding of the field, this notion points to a more fundamental definition than the one Potter provides. Valkenburg and Peter fill this gap. What makes mass communication effects distinct from interpersonal communication are the complex interactions between indirect effects and conditions that can accrue over time, reinforcing or negating each other, and spreading across a population.
The number of models and ways of conceptualizing media effects that are in and alluded to in these readings suggest that there is a “wickedness” to media effects. Wicked, as in Wicked Problems, is a term used to describe issues that are complexly interconnected, inherently human, and (because of that humanness) difficult to describe and define. Valkenburg and Peter reinforce this idea with their focus on conditional and indirect media effects. Their DSMM article does the best job of qualifying the challenges of media effect studies, and they layout a path for further research that they hope can lead to some predictive capacity that links specific media content with specific media effects.
Perhaps because of a dispositional susceptibility, I was the most engaged with Potter’s discussion of the physiological effects of media because several overlaps in areas of my work, studies, and personal life. And as an ADHD person, I often have to use sensory noise to control an overactive orienting reflex. Within design, this relates to my studies of gestalt theory, kinesthetic (body) empathy, and sensory toys/affectations.
The four arousal responses miss something that I think is necessary to fully describe the physiological effects of media. He slightly hits on it with his example of a fight/flight response, but we can vicariously experience more than just triggers for that reflex. Distinct from generalized arousal, which treats the brain like a black box and seems to be more of a catchall for the mechanisms lacking an explanatory process, I argue that we also have an empathetic arousal — that is, the activation of “mirror neurons” in response to events happening to others (usually living creatures, but not necessarily). This empathetic response allows you to feel a facsimile of another’s internal state, like the pain of a scraped knee or the love behind a proposal. It would provide explanatory power for why there is audience backlash when a favorite character is written out of a show. It explains for me why I felt dissonant with the TV show Last Man on Earth, which had character-driven stories in socially awkward situations that were genuinely hard to watch, but which also elicited endearment through vignettes on the human condition. Though this is conjecture on my part, an empathetic reaction may also be responsible for some of the principals of gestalt theory, allowing us to interpret things like implied motion from static arrangements.
Potter’s brief on Brain Processing is in dire need of an update; the vast majority of its cited material is two or more decades out of touch. We have better ways of conceptualizing brain activity than brain waves, the Left/Right Brain theory carries a lot of baggage, and the connection between media exposure and ADD (now called ADHD) is entirely fallacious. Describing brain functioning in terms of contemporary computer-use and using analogies from neural-networks may be more useful (which is a realistic expectation for something published in 2012).
Literature reviewed
Greenberg, Bradley S., and Michael B. Salwen. 2009. “Mass Communication Theory and Research: Concepts and Models.” In An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and Research, edited by Don W. Stacks and Michael Brian Salwen, 2nd ed, 61 – 74. Communication Series. Communication Theory and Methodology. New York: Routledge.
— — — . 2012. “Types of Mass Media Effects on Individuals.” In Media Effects, 85 – 106. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Valkenburg, Patti M., and Jochen Peter. 2013. “The Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model.” Journal of Communication 63 (2): 221 – 43. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12024.
