MCM 733: Communication Theory

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MCM 733Communication Theory

• Chapters 6, 7, 8

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Orson Welles The War of the Worlds
• Only certain personality types were affected
• Emotionally insecure, phobic, lacking
  self-confidence, fatalists
• Led social scientists to investigate these
  narrow effects? If it was true for WotW, then
  could it be true for all media limited effects
  was born.
• Tied in well with fears surrounding propaganda
• Neo-Marxist (critical-cultural) and LimEff
  battled

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• LE was developed by methodologists in 40s 50s
• We focus on Paul Lazarsfeld and Carl Hovland

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Lazarsfeld Hovland
• Did not assume the power of media, wanted to
  prove it empirically
• if medias power could be understood then it
  could be controlled or harnessed for good.
• Believed that the society with the best
  scientists would also have the best democracy
• Found that Media influences were much less
  powerful than SES (socio-economic status)

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Factors that led to limited effects
• The refinement of and respect for empirical
  methods.
• Successful branding of mass society /propaganda
  models as unscientific
• Big commercial potential
• Strong govt private backers (NSF, Rockefeller)
• Media corps started their own research depts
• Gained interdisciplinary acceptance.

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Two-Step Flow Theory
• An inductive theory
• data/observations first, generalizations second
• Led to middle-range theory
• empirical generalizations based on a empirical
  facts
• Unlike grand social TOEs Mass
  Society/Propaganda

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Presidential election of 1940 FDR vs Wendell
  Willkie
• One of the largest LE studies ever
• Chose Sandusky, Ohio for its averageness
• Chose a panel of 600 who were interviewed seven
  times from May until November
• Used a long questionnaire that focused on speech
  effectiveness (radio was prevalent mode of Mass
  Comm)

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Findings were telling because they led to voter
  typing
• Early Deciders chose a candidate in May and
  never changed
• Waverers chose one candidate then were undecided
  or switched, but ended up voting for their first
  choice
• Converts chose one candidate but then switched
  and voted for his opponent (ideological
  conversion)
• Crystallizers did not choose early, but choose
  by e-day. Their choice were predictable along
  certain vectors (party affiliation, farm or not,
  etc.)

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• These findings directly conflicted with
  propaganda theory predictions
• Lazarsfeld concluded that mass media reinforced
  the voters choices.
• People were not converted by media. Rather they
  were cross-pressured (i.e. religion, friendship
  bonds, kinship)

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Generalizations that Lazarsfeld came up with
• Gatekeepers people who screen messages and pass
  on those messages and help other share their
  views
• Opinion leaders people who pass info on to
  opinion followers
• Opinion followers passive receivers of info from
  opinion leaders
• Two step flow message pass from media to opinion
  leaders then to opinion followers

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Limitations to Lazarsfeld Method
• Surveys are not real time
• Surveys are expensive and cumbersome
• Very conservative in terms of media effects
• Produced contradictory results (i.e. was
  contextual to type of info transmitted)
• Surveys are crude only take a gross measurement
• Surveys omit important things because the
  researcher must choose what to include
• Theory ignores the effects of historical context
  at the time.

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Great Contributions of Limited Effects Theory
• Media rarely directly influence individuals
• There is a two-step flow of media influence
• By adulthood, people have developed strong group
  commitments
• Media effects, when they do occurs, are modest
  and isolated.

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Motivations for Attitude-Change theory
• Success of Nazi propaganda challenges Americans
  optimism about the peoples wisdom
• The military needed methods to quickly induce
  bonding among the diverse thousands who signed up
  from varied geo and cultural locations
• Psychologists saw a readily available and
  controlled subject pool.

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Karl Hovland used controlled variation to assess
  the strength of elements of propaganda
• Why did Why we fight (Frank Capra) fail?
• Propaganda did not have an immediate effect
  rather it required a cultivated audience.
• Time was a major factor in propaganda
  effectiveness
• One-sided arguments were effective with people
  already in favour of the message,
• Two sided arguments worked better with the
  undecided.

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• The Communication Research Program (Yale)
• High credibility communicators increased attitude
  change
• Fear-arousing appeals worked, but depended on the
  experiences and knowledge of the participants
• Individual differences research your personal
  attributes make you more or less susceptible to
  persuasion.
• High intelligence high persuasability

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Mass Comm Research Media Effects
• Individual Differences people differ so media
  messages must contain specific elements to appeal
  to specific personality types
• Social categories people who belong to
  well-defined social categories will respond to
  media messages in a coherent fashion

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Cognitive consistency people seek out and
  believe messages that are consistent with the
  values and beliefs of those around them
• Cognitive dissonance (Festinger) information
  inconsistent with peoples beliefs create
  discomfort

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Selective Processes exposure (attention),
  retention, and perception
• Selective exposure people tend to expose
  themselves to messages they feel are familiar
• Selective retention people remember messages
  best that are in sync with their worldview
• Selective perception people will believe what
  they want to believe, altering the meaning of
  messages to suit themselves.

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Limitations of the experimental persuasion
  research
• Experiments were conducted in labs in controlled
  environments
• Experiments have opposite problems from surveys
  (i.e focus on immediate effects, not long-term)
• Conservative about assessing media influence
  eliminated key factors such as convos pre/post TV
  watching
• Experiments are crude for studying long-term
  media effects
• Many variables that are hard to explore in
  experminents

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Information Flow Theory
• 1950s saw a rise in interest of how messages flow
  from media organizations to audiences
• Based on the idea that maximizing how
  well-informed citizens are will improve democracy
• Hard News (politics, science, world events,
  community organizations) people did not partake
  much and learned little
• Soft News (sports, life, gossip, entertainment)
  partook a lot and learned much

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• The trick to making information flow theory work
  is embed soft ideas into hard news. These act as
  hooks making people pay attention to the hard
  facts (Colbert Report)
• Limitations Info-flow is a simplistic, linear,
  source-dominated theory.

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Klappers phenomenistic theory
• Argued that researchers exaggerated the effects
  of media
• Mass comm does not serve as a cause of audience
  effects, rather functions through a nexus of
  mediating factors and effects
• These factors lend mass comm a reinforcing power
  exaggerating already held beliefs and existing
  trends

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Elite pluralism
• This theory came of the desire to understand
  Lazarsfelds opinion leader observation.
• Most audience members are apathetic, but they
  listen to opinion leaders, who are well-informed
• This is in contradiction to libertarian theory
• Elite a small number of opinion leaders
• Pluralism a diversity of groups

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite
• Democratic theorists disdained elite pluralism
• They felt it was just reflective of current
  trends and did not offer a hope for a return to
  libertarian democracy
• Mills book raised lots of interesting questions
• If elite pluralism was true, why were black and
  religious minority elites not powerful?

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Major Generalizations of Limited Effects
  Perspective
• Role of mass media is limited, it mostly
  reinforces existing trends
• Role is limited in peoples lives, tends to be
  positive, can be negative in certain pathological
  cases (personality dis., addicts)
• The role of mass media is overwhelmingly positive

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Drawbacks of Limited Effects Perspective
• Survey and experimental research are very limited
  methodologically
• Systematically excluded certain effects for fear
  of spurious effects
• Too large of a focus on immediate effects. Very
  little focus on long-term effects

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Ch 6 Rise of Limited-Effects

• Contributions of Limited Effects
• Supplanted Mass Society theories
• Prioritized empirical observation and downgraded
  speculative forms of theory construction
• Provided a framework for research in universities
  and colleges in the 50s and 60s

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Functionalism a theoretical approach that
  conceives of social systems as living organisms
  whose various parts work, or function, together
  to maintain essential processes
• Communication Systems Theory the mass media as a
  series of parts that work together to meet a goal
• Social cognitive theory theory of elarnign
  through interaction with the environment that
  involves reciprocal causation of behaviour,
  personal factors and environmental effects

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Theories of the Middle Range and the Functional
  Analysis (Merton, 1967, p. 45)
• consist of limited sets of assumptions from which
  specific hypotheses are logically derived and
  confirmed by empirical investigation
• do not remain separate but are consolidated into
  wider networks of theory
• sufficiently abstract to deal with differing
  spheres of social behaviour social structure
  transcend sheer description
• cuts across the distinction between
  micro-sociological problems
• Involves the specification of ignorance

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Merton was value-neutral he did not divide the
  world into us and them bad guys and good guys
• Merton promoted the cumulative nature of small,
  limited-effects studies that were empirically
  grounded
• Manifest functions intended and observed
  consequences of media use
• Latent functions unintended and less easily
  observed consequences of media use

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Mertons Four Functions of the Media
• Surveillance of the environment
• Correlation of the parts of society in responding
  to the enivroment
• Transmission of the social heritage from one
  generation to the next (oral culture)
• Entertainment

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Narcotizing dysfunction as news about an issue
  inundates people, they become apathetic to it,
  substituting knowing about the issue for action
  on it.

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Mendelsohns Mass Entertainment theory
• The relaxing and entertaining properties of TV
  serve a vital social function.
• Some very few become addicted, but most are
  happily pacified and removed from the daily
  tension of worklife
• Typical of Functionalist theory some functions
  are good, some are bad, but they are balanced in
  the organism, like toxins and vital elements in a
  body.
• Researchers found that they could combine LE
  findings to come up with a functionalist
  middle-range theory
• Television and the Lives of Our Children (1961)
  TV made some kids violent, but most were simply
  pacified.

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• The Rise of Systems Theories
• System consists ofa set of parts that are
  interlinked so that changes in one part induce
  changes in other parts
• Cybernetics the study of regulation and control
  in complex systems
• Feedback loops ongoing mutual adjustments in
  systems
• Communication systems systems that function
  primarily to facilitate communication

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Modeling Systems
• Model any representation of a system, whether in
  words or a diagram
• Goal-orientation characteristic of a system that
  serves a specific overall or long-term purpose
• Systems models can be adapted to human
  communication (email, internet use, etc.)
• In mass comm, systems models replaced the linear
  transmission model of Lasswell

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Criticisms of Functionalism
• Humanists dislike the mechanistic and biological
  analogies used in systems theory
• Do not focus on traditional views of causality
  because functional systems are not linear
• Are biased towards the status quo because of
  their basis in description and empiricism

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• TV changed the global mediascape in at the
  Worlds Fair in New York 1939. TV occurred
  simultaneously with big changes in USA society
• WWII made USA more urban
• Shift work and regularly scheduled jobs
• Had more leisure
• More regular incomes to spend on leisure
• Non-Caucasian fought in WWII and demanded share
  of American Dream
• Women permanently entered the workforce
• People moved away from small towns and
  traditional influences, like church and school
  diminished in importance.
• New demographic because of the baby boom the
  Teenager!

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• More changes
• Crime waves,
• JFK, RFK, MLK assassinations
• Civil rights Anti-Vietnam War
• Weathermen Black Panthers
• Young people behaving oddly weird music and
  taking drugs
• Generation gap was observed

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Medias role in these changes was hotly debated
• TV and film became the subject of many
  investigations
• Surgeon General Scientific Advisory Committee on
  Television and Social Behaviour was founded in
  1969

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Television Violence Theories
• Catharsis viewing violence is enough to sate or
  reduce peoples natural aggressive drives
• This theory doesnt really hold generally people
  who watch video sex dont have diminished sex
  drive
• Aristotle used catharsis to explain the effects
  of Greek tragedy, so the argument from the
  tradition was used for TV
• Final finding showing representations of
  violence can reduce violent behaviour, but
  because of learning not catharsis.

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Humans learn from observation (although
  cognitivism denies this)
• Imitation we learn by direct reproduction of
  others behaviours
• Identification a special form of imitation that
  springs from wanting to be like an observed model
  relative to some broader characteristics or
  qualities (thin like Cindy Crawford, hip like
  Angeline Jolie, tough/sensitive/rugged like Brad
  Pitt)
• Social learning encompasses both imitation and
  identification to explain how people learn
  through observation of others in their
  environments

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Social Cognition from Mass Media
• Operant learning theory learning occurs only
  through the making and subsequent reinforcement
  of behaviour
• Behavioural repertoire learned responses
  available to an individual in a given situation
• Negative reinforcer particular stimulus whose
  removal, reduction or prevention increases the
  probability of a given behaviour over time
• Modeling acquisition of behaviour through
  observation

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Social Cognition from Mass Media (cont)
• Observational effects when the observation of a
  behaviour is enough to learn that behaviour
• Inhibitory effects the effects of seeing a model
  punished for a behaviour, reducing the likelihood
  of the observer reproducing the behaviour
• Disinhibitory effects model rewarded for an
  aggressive or prohibited behaviour, increasing
  the likelihood observer will engage in the
  behaviour

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Social Cognition from Mass Media (cont)
• Vicarious reinforcement reinforcement that is
  observed rather than is directly experienced
• Reinforcement contingencies the value, positive
  or negative, associated with a given reinforcer
• Behavioural hierarchy the likelihood that we
  will engage in a particular behaviour.

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Aggressive Cues information contained in media
  portrayals of violence that suggests (or cues)
  the appropriateness of aggression against
  specific victims
• Boxer example boxer got shocked more often
• Two observations
• Viewers psychological state can lead them to
  respond to cues in programs that meet the needs
  of that state
• Viewers who see justified violence see it as a
  good or useful problem-solving device
  (disinhibition)
• Aggressive cues research is supported by priming
  effects research

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Banduras summary of so-coggie findings
• Reward/Punishment rewarded aggression is more
  frequently modeled (disinhibitory) punished
  aggression is less frequently modeled
  (inhibitory).
• Consequences mediated violence accompanied by
  portrayals of negative or harmful consequences
  produces less modeling (inhibitory).
• Motive motivated media aggression produces
  greater levels of modeling, and unjustified media
  violence results in less viewer aggression.
  Viewers are cued to the appropriateness of using
  aggression.

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Banduras summary of so-coggie findings cont
• Realism especially with boys, realistic media
  violence tends to produce more real-world
  aggression.
• Humor because it reduces the seriousness of the
  behaviour, humourously presented media violence
  elads to the greater probability that viewers
  will behave aggressively in real life.
• Identification with media characters the more
  viewers identify with media characters (like
  themselves or attractive models) the more likely
  it is that they will model the behaviours
  demonstrated by those characters.

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Active Theory of Television Viewing View of TV
  consumption that assumes viewer comprehension
  causes attention and, therefore, effects or no
  effects
• Viewing Schema interpretational skills that aid
  people in understanding media content conventions
• Active-audience theories put a focus on
  assessing what people do with media, these are
  audience-centered theories

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Developmental perspective the view of learning
  from media that specifies different intellectual
  and communication stages in a childs life that
  influence the nature of media interaction and
  impact.
• Jean Piaget argued that children, as they move
  from infancy to adolescence have different
  cognitive abilities avail. to them.

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Video Games Reignite interest in media violence
• There has been a shift away from TV toward video
  game research
• Kaiser Family Foundation study revealed that more
  than eight out of ten young people have a game
  console at home, half have one in their bedroom

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Four major reasons why video games are of
  research interest
• Amount of game play kids engage in
• Presence of video games in high-profile high
  school shootings (Columbine/Jonesboro)
• Video games interactivity gamers are actors,
  not viewers
• Sheer brutality of many video games

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Ch. 7 Beyond Limited Effects Focus on
Functionalism and Children

• Media Childrens Socialization
• Early Window theory media allow children to see
  the world before the have the skill to
  successfully act in it
• This is particularly powerful for gender learning
• Advertising, junk food and obesity most ads are
  for candy and snacks leads to a desire to
  consume theses instead of healthy alternatives.