Chris Livesey

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Mass Media

Media Effects

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This final section addresses how - and in what ways -audiences are affected by the media they consume byoutlining three models of media effects that can also belinked to and explained in terms of, different types oftheoretical explanation.

These types of effect are called often calledmediacentric or transmission models because theyfocus on the role of the media and argue they have astrong, usually negative, direct influence onaudiences. This general model has a relatively longhistory, with older iterations suggesting a relativelysimple, direct and effective relationship between themedia and their audiences:

Hypodermic…

The hypodermic syringe (or magic bullet) model arguesmedia messages are like a drug injected into the body;the media transmit messages that are picked-up andacted upon by the audience (receivers) in ways thatchange or reinforce their behaviour in line withwhatever message is being pushed and promoted. Thegeneral argument here is that media messagesdetermine how audiences see and understand theworld in a directly measurable causal way.

The media (cause) transmits information and theaudience reacts (effect) in a broadly predictable waythat is immediate and directly attributable to themessage received. Audiences, in this respect, arecharacterised as passive receivers rather than activeinterpreters of media messages.

Transmission..

These models, initially developed by Shannon andWeaver (1949), suggest the transmission process ofmedia messages is split into two parts;

1. The information source (such as a governmentannouncement)

2. The transmission source (such as a newspaper ortelevision report of the announcement).

Media messages, therefore, can have differentsources:

● direct reporting might involve a newspaper printinga speech made by a government minister.

● indirect reporting involves the speech beingselectively quoted to support a particular story.

Transmission models, while still suggesting mediaeffects are direct and immediate, are an advance onthe basic hypodermic model in the sense that thesource of the message significantly affects (ormediates) how it is received by an audience.

In this variation it's also possible for audiences to beindirectly affected by a media message through theirinteraction with people who are directly affected -people, for example, who pass on media messages,through their everyday conversation, to those whohaven’t personally experienced them.

This type of indirect media transmission is particularlyapplicable to something like social media where anoriginal direct media message is picked-up, modified,amplified, criticised and so forth on platforms likeTwitter, Reddit, Facebook and the like.

The Effect of the Mediaon Society

Direct Media Effects

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A by-product of this form of direct-indirect transmissionis the addition of a further layer of interpretation byintroducing concepts of noise and interference -defined as anything that distracts from or interfereswith the transmission of a message. Conventionalmedia, such as newspapers, can introduce noisethrough selective reporting, while audiences mayreceive the same message in different ways - somedirectly, others indirectly.

In terms of media effects, the basic Hypodermic modelhas a relatively long history - one that, notuncoincidentally, is tied into technological changes inhow media are delivered (from the print media of the19th century, through the development of radio andtelevision in the 20th century, to the Internet in the 21st

century). Each technological development has, in itsdifferent way, given rise to a resurgence in interest -particularly in the popular imagination - in this model.

This is partly because the model is particularly simpleand easy to understand - a new and powerful mediumdevelops that seems to exert an undue influence onrelatively unprepared audiences - and this makes itparticularly easy to grasp. When presented, forexample, with a new and powerful medium ofcommunication that comes to dominate the lives ofmany millions it’s not difficult to see why people wouldbe both concerned about the possible effect of suchmedia and looking for explanations to justify suchconcerns.

It’s also, therefore, partly because of what we mightterm “the shock of the new”. When a new mediumdevelops and is taken-up by large numbers of people itripples normative expectations. It creates, in otherwords, a certain level of confusion - a mildly-anomiccondition - over how the new medium might impact onsocial behaviour.

And it’s also partly because, in the early - mid20th century, the apparent success of politicalpropaganda techniques - British, German,American and Russian - lends the model acertain credibility. State propaganda, forexample, particularly but not exclusively duringthe 1st and 2nd world wars, seemed to exert apowerful, almost hypnotic, influence over thebehaviour of many millions of disparateindividuals.

We also need to be aware that the kinds ofsocieties in which modern forms of massmedia developed were quite different in scopeto the kinds of late / post modern society thathave developed in the late-20th - early-21st

centuries.

The former were, for example, much morerigidly-stratified in terms of media ownership:the mass of the population had little or no access to theproduction of media messages (production was in the

hands of governments, hugely-powerful individuals(“media barons”) and large-scale corporations. In sucha situation, therefore, it’s not difficult to see whyaudiences were generally considered uncritical, gullible,passive and receptive individuals easily influenced andled by whatever they read, saw or heard in the media.

As we’ve seen with the development of the Internet -and social media in particular - once the media wasopened-up to “the masses” this audiencecharacterisation couldn’t be convincingly sustained inthe face of critical, questioning and highly-activeaudiences.

Evaluation

One piece of evidence often cited to support theidea of uncritical audiences and the power of thehypodermic model is the actor / director OrsonWelles’ infamous War of the Worlds broadcast(1938), a radio play cleverly designed to simulate aMartian attack (yes, really…) using the newsbroadcasting techniques of the time. The receivedwisdom here is that many Americans believed theywere hearing about a real invasion and panicked ina variety of ways; the evidence for this ‘masshysteria’ is, however, actually very thin (it is, to co-opt a currently-popular phrase “fake news”).

From an audience of around 6 million, some peopleclearly did feel unsettled by what they heard (apolice station in the area of the supposed invasionanswered around 50 calls from worried residents),but accounts of people ‘fleeing to the hills’ havebeen grossly exaggerated over the years. Theremarkable thing about this story is not so muchpeople believed what they were hearing, but thatthe behaviour of the vast majority of listeners wasnot influenced or changed in any appreciable way.

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The fact some contemporary audiences do appear tobe uncritical, gullible and hugely-receptive to mediamessages simply adds to the sense of explanatoryconfusion surrounding the hypodermic model -something that, at least in recent times, has led toattempts to square this circle by modifying the basicmodel to focus on “vulnerable audiences”. That is, theidea that while “most people” are largely immune tomedia messages “some groups” (such as children, thementally ill and the elderly) are much more prone to theuncritical reception of media messages.

In relation to children, for example, the basic argumenthere is their lack of social experience and a tendency tocopy behaviour makes them more amenable to directmedia effects (and copy-cat violence in particular) thanadults. Actual evidence for direct effects, however,tends to be anecdotal - the media claim, rather thanprove, a relationship between, for example, violentbehaviour and violent play.

While Anderson et al's (2003) review of "direct effectsresearch’ argues there is "unequivocal evidence mediaviolence increases the likelihood of aggressive andviolent behaviour", Cumberbatch (2003) argues that “Ifthis analysis was a car, the door would fall off in yourhand and the thing would collapse half way up thestreet”. Gauntlett (1995) also demonstrates how evenvery young children may be media literate - they havean understanding about the media and how it works;most children, for example, can distinguish betweenfictional and factual representations of violence.

In relation to the elderly, a recent study by Guess et al(2019) found they were much more likely to share “fakenews” on Facebook: “On average, users over 65shared nearly seven times as many articles from fakenews domains as the youngest age group”.

They do, however, qualify this statement by noting that“First and foremost, we find that sharing this contentwas a relatively rare activity”.

While transmission models are a more-sophisticatedexplanation of media effects than their hypodermiccounterpart - although they suggest some form of directeffects, these can be mediated through differentchannels and sources, which makes it more difficult tomeasure the exact effect of the media on audiences -Gauntlett (1998), among many others, suggests theempirical evidence for direct media effects is weak,partly because most research has taken place underartificial conditions, such as a laboratory, thatinadequately represent the real situations in whichpeople use the media.

Bandura et al's (1961) ‘Bo-Bo doll’ experiment forexample, is frequently cited as evidence that watchingtelevised violence produces violence in children. One ofthe (many) weaknesses of the study was that thechildren were ‘rated for violence’ by adult assessors,which raises questions about research objectivity.Belson (1978) is also cited as evidence that prolongedexposure to media violence produces violent behaviourin young males. Hagell and Newburn (1994), however,found a general lack of interest in television amongyoung offenders.

Cumulation theory, a more-recent modification ofdirect effect models, suggests media effects arecumulative, rather than immediate; prolongedexposure to violent films or computer games can resultin both changed behaviour and desensitisation; themore someone is exposed to media violence, forexample, the less likely to be moved, shocked orappalled by real violence.

Applying Direct Effects Models: The Frankfurt School

A major problem for traditional Marxism has been the general failure of the working classes to develop asense of class consciousness that would enable it to become a "class for itself"' to challenge and replacea capitalist system through which it was systematically oppressed, exploited and impoverished.

One explanation for this "failure" looked to the emerging mass media in the early part of the 20th century,understanding its role as a cultural support system for a dominant ideology of capitalism and as a source offalse class consciousness - a way of preventing the working class understanding the true nature of itsoppression, through things like entertainment and misrepresentations of the social world.

The Frankfurt School, for example, developed manipulation theory to explain how the media directlyattempts to influence audience perceptions; in a mass society characterised by social isolation andalienation the media becomes a source of mass culture through the agency of what Adorno andHorkheimer (1944) term a "culture industry". With few links to wider social networks providing alternativesources of information and interpretation, audiences are uniquely receptive to whatever the media transmits.

The media mirrors other forms of industrial production in capitalist society by creating various elements ofa popular culture - film, magazines, comics, newspapers and so forth - consumed uncritically and passivelyby the masses. Through control of the culture industry a ruling class controls the means of mental productionand populations, as Schor (1999) puts it are "manipulated into participating in a dumbed-down, artificialconsumer culture, which yields few true human satisfactions".

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An alternative argument, sometimes called a culturaleffects model, is that while effects are still strong, theyare slow, cumulative and operate through the media'sability to embed itself in the cultural background of thesociety in which it operates. The media, in this respect,plays an hegemonic role in people's everydayinteraction - and the heavier the consumption, thegreater the media's long-term influence.

Cultivation theory, for example, suggests television,in particular, cultivates what Gerbner (1973) callsdistinctive attitudes and orientations in its audienceover time, rather than directly determining behaviour.

People who watch a lot of television, for example,gradually take on board the beliefs and attitudes towhich they're exposed; where crime is a constanttelevision staple, audiences become fearful of crime inways that are out of all proportion to their risk ofvictimisation or personal experience.

Gerber called this “mean world syndrome”, the ideathat constant exposure to violent media content - bothphysical and verbal - leads individuals and groups toconclude that the world is much more dangerous,violent and meaner place than it actually is.

For Gerber, therefore, a significant media effect is thecultivation of attitudes about the world that thentranslate into real-world behaviours. While this doesn’tsimply mean that exposure to media violence makesindividuals more violent, as hypodermic models tend toclaim, it does mean that people approach their widersocial relationships - both primary and particularlysecondary - with a mindset that sees others aspotentially aggressive and violent.

The cultivation of meanness through media, therefore,suggests that where some people approach theirrelationships with others “prepared for the worst” itmakes real-world aggression much more-likely.

For Chandler (1995), the media ‘"induces a generalmindset" around particular areas of social life (such ascrime), taking-on a hegemonic role where somebeliefs are encouraged and others discouraged.Attitudes and behaviour don’t change overnight - mediaeffects are gradual, long-term and build slowly overtime - the result of a range of influencing techniquesthat include:

1. The consistent promotion of one set of ideas to theexclusion of others. These become the dominantdiscourse when a particular issue is discussed in themedia. This discourse shapes the debate anddemands to be addressed by all involved.

One example here is the dominant discourse over thepast 30 or so years about Britain’s membership of theEuropean Community. The debate is continuallyshaped by questions of immigration - both legal andillegal.

Another is the issue of knife crime and the recent risein fatal stabbings, particularly, but not exclusively, inLondon. This issue is most-commonly framed in themass media as a problem of “gang culture” and anydiscussion of knife crime is predominantly framed bythis narrative: how to combat gangs, how to prevent“vulnerable youth” joining gangs and so forth.

As Irwin-Rogers (2018) puts it “During (my) manymeetings, roundtables and conferences on youthviolence, I have been struck by people’s fixation ongangs whenever the issue of youth violence arises”.

When Irwin-Rogers looked at the knife crime statisticsproduced by the Metropolitan Police, however, hediscovered that the reality of knife crime seemed far-removed from the media-fuelled discourse: “In 2016,just 3.8% of knife crime with injury (fatal, serious,moderate and minor) had been flagged by theMetropolitan Police as gang-related”.

2. The marginalisation of dissenting views: ideas thatdeviate from the “accepted media consensus” rarely, ifever, appear in mainstream mass media.

Indirect Media Effects

Those aged 65+ watch the most television inboth Britain and America.

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Alternative viewpoints and interpretations to thedominant media discourse are either not reported orare the subject of intense questioning and criticism.

3. The repetition of dominant ideas until they assumea taken-for-granted status. Between 1995 and 2015,for example, “everyone knew” (because that was thedominant media discourse) that “crime was rising” -when both official police crime statistics and evidencefrom sources such as the British Crime Survey showedthat, overall, crime had declined significantly over thisperiod.

The media, from this viewpoint, lead people in certaindirections, towards particular ideas and ways ofthinking about the world.

As Gerbner et al (1986) put it “the continual repetitionof patterns (myths, ideologies, ‘facts’, relationships,etc.) serve to define the world and legitimize the socialorder”.

Applying Indirect Effects Models: Neo-Marxism

For neo-Marxism, there is no automatic relationship between economic ownership and control over themeans of mental production. The relationship between a ruling class and the media is both indirect andambivalent. Curren (2002), for example, argues ‘The conviction the media are important agencies ofinfluence is broadly correct. However, the ways the media exert influence are complex and contingent’.

Cultural effects theories, therefore, see the media as a powerful influence: overwhelmingly supportive of thestatus quo and core capitalist values, but also capable of asking important and difficult questions. The primaryrole of the media is cultural reproduction: to promote and police cultural values since, as Newbold (1995)puts it, the media is embedded in social relationships and works "to produce and reflect powerful interestsand social structures’ - ideas that reflect an hegemonic dimension to media effects and social controls; onethat allows alternative views and interpretations to develop.

Hall's (1980) use of reception theory, for example, involves the idea media messages always have a rangeof possible meanings and interpretations, some intended by the sender and others read by the audience.This involves two processes:

● encoding, or the intended message.● decoding - how the audience interprets the message. The latter depends on a variety of factors, including

class, age, gender and ethnicity, and is significant because the receptiveness of an audience determineshow the message is understood and, by extension, its effectiveness

Audiences are seen as relatively autonomous: although people have the ability to accept, reject and modifymedia messages, this is always influenced by class, age, gender and ethnic factors. Someone who can'tafford a personal jet, for example, is unlikely to be swayed by an advert to buy one. Relative autonomymeans media messages can be interpreted in different ways, depending on the background characteristics ofthe receiver. Hall, for example, suggests three main readings:

• Hegemonic: The audience shares the assumptions and interpretations of the author and reads themessage in the way it was intended.

• Negotiated: The audience broadly shares the author’s views, but may modify their interpretation in the lightof their own particular feelings, beliefs or abilities.

• Oppositional: The audience holds views and values opposed to the author and rejects the message.

The relationship between media and audience is, in these terms, reflexive - the one influences and modifiesthe other in a circular fashion. This means the media has to work harder and more subtly to attract, retain andinfluence an audience,. Contemporary advertising tries to establish a brand with which an audience identifies,rather than simply repeating the words "Buy me!". In this respect the media attempt to establish hegemoniccontrol through agenda setting; they repeatedly try, according to Severin and Tankard (2001), to put certainideas and issues in the public sphere at the expense of others.

However, as McCombs and Estrada (1997) note, being told what to think about doesn’t guarantee anaudience will think about it in a particular way, which is why framing is an important aspect of agenda setting;ideas are presented in ways that suggest to audiences how they should be interpreted (as with the relatedidea of preferred readings). Simon and Xenos (2000) argue framing primes audiences to understand issuesin terms of ‘elite discourses’; how dominant media groups - a ruling class, men, whites… - encourageaudiences to understand an issue. In this way, the media create mythical realities for audiences - especiallythose heavily immersed in media - that construct the world in terms favourable to ruling elites.

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Cultural effects theories involve methodologicalproblems related to measuring effects that are slow,cumulative, indirect and long term - such as how tomeasure attitude or behavioural changes in anaudience that are the result of media, as opposed tosome other, effects.

More fundamental problems relate to the definition andtracking of media effects, since just about anything canbe advanced as evidence to support the theory.

● If an effect is identified, this demonstrates themedia’s hegemonic role.

● An inability to identify effects, however, doesn’t,disprove the theory since “oppositional readings”may explain why there are no effects.

Cultural effect models have also been criticised onconceptual grounds.

● Corner (1983), for example, argues it is difficult toshow empirically which, if any, reading is a preferredone in a situation where there are always manypossible readings of a text. This situation has, ifanything, become even more complicated with thedevelopment of the Internet and social media.

● Myers (1983) also argues it is in an advertiser'sinterest to create a range of preferred readings, sotheir product will appeal to a wide and differentiatedaudience. In other words, effective advertising, in asimilar way to effective news reporting, depends onthe ability to create a range of possible readings of aparticular product.

A single preferred reading is an important part of neo-Marxist arguments because it explains how dominantgroups exercise hegemonic control; if there can bemany different readings embedded in a text, thismakes the concept - and the theory it supports - moreproblematic.

A further problem is the use of semiological analysisto disentangle deeper cultural meanings from theeveryday "surface reality" of media messages. Quizshows, for example, can be interpreted as harmlessescapism or as indicative of capitalist values of greed,consumerism and individualism - with no empirical wayof deciding between the two.

In relation to cultivation theories / mean worldsyndrome there is also the problem of causality: thosewho, for whatever reason, distrust the world may bemuch more-likely to consume (violent) media that fitstheir preferred view of that world. Rather than themedia causing distrust, mean-minded people simplyconsume media, such as violent films and games, thatfits their view of the world.

A third general approach, sometimes calledaudiocentric or diffusion theories because they focuson how audiences use the media to satisfy their ownparticular needs, suggest few, if any, measurableeffects directly attributable to the media.

Diffusion theories focus on how media messagesspread throughout an audience, based on a trickle-down effect; although messages originate with mediaproducers, they are received by an audience bothdirectly - such as personally viewing a news broadcast- and indirectly, through interaction with those whodirectly received the message, other media sourcesreporting the original message, social media and soforth. Katz and Lazarfield’s (1955) two-step flowmodel, for example, argues messages flow:

1. From the media to opinion formers - people whodirectly receive the original message.

2. Through them to people in their social network -people who receive the original message in amediated form. That is, they receive an edited,condensed or embellished version of the originalmessage.

These "informal, interpersonal relations" - at the timeKatz and Lazarfield were writing this mainly involveddirect face-to-face interaction and communication(family, school, friends, work colleagues…) but this canbe easily extended to encompass the kinds of socialinteraction currently found on social media sites - wereand arguably remain the key to understanding howmass audiences responded to media messages.

The basic argument here is that any behaviouralchanges in an audience are the result of howmessages are interpreted, discussed and reinterpretedwithin primary groups (groups whose membership wevalue) rather than from any direct media influence.

Two-Step Flow Model

Evaluation Limited Media Effects

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This version of diffusion theory, therefore,has three main elements:

• Primary social groups are a moresignificant influence than the media.

• Interpersonal sources of information aresignificant influences on how people receiveand respond to media messages.

• Limited direct effects: Behaviouralchanges are likely to result from the waymedia messages are interpreted, discussedand reinterpreted within primary groups,rather than from any direct media influence.

Diffusion theories, although originally developed 50-odd years ago, actually translate quite easily intocontemporary audiences and their relationship withsocial media - particularly those, like Facebook orTwitter, that aim to develop communities of like-mindedindividuals who share common interests and ideas.

In contemporary societies, therefore, electroniccommunities may constitute primary groups for anincreasing number of people and their interaction blursthe line between “the media” and “the audience” - anidea compounded by Shannon and Weaver's (1949)concept of noise; the original message easily becomeslost, over-simplified and misrepresented whenmediated through social interactions.

On this basis, contemporary mass communicationsfunction in highly selective ways, in terms of:

● Perception: people notice some messages but notothers.

● Exposure: people choose media messagesconsistent with their beliefs.

● Expression: people listen to the opinions of peopleimportant to them both offline and, increasinglyperhaps, online.

● Retention: people remember things that fit withtheir beliefs and forget those that don't.

● Selection: some messages are never relayed andnever reach their intended audience.

The implications here are that while “the media” mayhave an unknown effect on people’s lives andperceptions we should stop thinking about “media”and “audience” as distinct and separate.

We should also stop thinking about “media effects” interms of something “the media” does to “anaudience”. In an increasingly important sense, themedia is the audience: information is picked-up,changed, adapted, transmitted and retransmitted byan audience to an audience with little or no input fromconventional media sources such as television andnewsprint.

Uses and gratifications takes the separation betweenmedia and audience a step further by arguingconsumers ‘pick-and-choose’ both media andmessages: they use the media to satisfy a range ofgratifications, such as four primary uses suggested byMcQuail et al (1972):

1. Entertainment – as a diversion from everyday life,to relax, for mental stimulation and so forth.

2. Social solidarity: Talking about a sharedexperience, such as seeing the same film or televisionprogramme, serves an integrating function; peoplefeel they have things in common with each other.

3. Identity - to create or maintain a sense of ‘who weare’. It is a resource - from reading lifestyle magazinesto maintaining a Facebook presence - used toconstruct a sense of self.

4. Surveillance - providing news and information aboutan increasingly complex world.

Severin and Tankard (2001) suggested a further use -companionship - when they found the heaviest mediausers were those who were lonely and / or sociallyisolated.

Are audiences taking on the role of media?

Online primary groups?

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Although the idea of active audiences is an importantdimension of our understanding of media effects, itssignificance is overstated.

Choice, for example, may be extensive in terms ofdifferent publications, but in limited by ideologicalsimilarities. While different newspapers, for example,may offer different specific political viewpoints, allconform to very similar core values (no major UKnewspaper, for example, offers a critical analysis ofcapitalist economics).

Stam (2000) goes further by claiming limited effectsmodels essentialise the audience - to the relativeexclusion of all other possible influences - by givingthem an unwarranted and unsupported primarysignificance in terms of how media messages areinterpreted.

Diffusion models broadly suggest the media has few, ifany, effects - yet billions of pounds are spent each yearby advertisers precisely because the media does haveclear and measurable effects; these may not be simpleor clear-cut, but the principle remains strong.

On the other hand, it’s not hard to find evidence tosupport the claim that “media effects” are overstated.

Over the past 20 years, for example, UK media haveregularly transmitted messages about the possibledangers of mobile phone use (from brain cancer tomemory loss and sleeping disorders) - yet despite thepossible dangers, mobile phone use hasn’t declined,let alone stopped.

While one reason for this might be a general beliefsuch warnings are either untrue or exaggerated,another way of looking at this is throughFestinger’s (1957) concepts of:

• Cognitive assonance: In broad terms, if amessage fits with our personal and social(primary group) beliefs we are more likely toconsider it favourably.

• Cognitive dissonance involves the reverseidea.

If the message doesn’t fit with what we want tohear, we respond in a variety of ways: byquestioning it, dismissing it, ignoring it or workingout a way to twist it to fit with what we alreadybelieve. We find, in other words, some way torationalise - and effectively neutralise - the dissonancewe experience.

What this suggests, therefore, is that the relationshipbetween the media and audiences is a complex one; arelationship that can’t be easily characterised in asimple “either / or” way: either the media has an impacton audience beliefs or it doesn’t.

Applying Limited Effects Models: Interpretivism

For Interpretivists the key to understanding media ishow people receive and interpret messages, ratherthan how or why these messages are transmitted.This follows, as Hallahan (1997) argues, because"people can look at the same message and focuson different aspects to draw different conclusionsabout the message's meaning". Unlike Marxistmodels where the focus is on the producer of mediamessages, for Interpretivists the focus is onunderstanding audiences.

Where transmission models argue the mediacreates the audience, either directly (hypodermic) orindirectly (hegemony), Interpretivism arguesaudiences create the media in their image, throughtheir consumption choices; popular mediaflourishes, unpopular media fails.

Diffusion models in this respect reverse thecausality; where hypodermic models, for example,argue the media can cause an audience to becomeviolent, the former argues those who like violenceseek-out and use violent media to satisfy theirneeds.

This is an argument reflected in reinforcementtheory; people seek out media that reinforcesrather than challenges their worldview.

While primary groups (such as family and friends)fundamentally shape people's beliefs andbehaviours, secondary groups, such as the media,merely reinforce these beliefs.

Evaluation

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Postmodern approaches offer a fundamentally differenttype of explanation for media effects, initially in terms ofethnographic analyses of audiences. These move theeffects debate away from an analysis of ‘the media’ andonto a cultural analysis of audiences and how theyinteract with different media.

An important dimension here is a move away from thenotion of mass audiences, in terms of their actions andreactions, to audiences differentiated by age, gender andethnicity as well as by more individualised categoriessuch as cultural and technological competence. Whereas40 or 50 years ago the “mass media audience” waslargely homogeneous (relatively undifferentiated) in termsof tastes, general beliefs, identities and so forth,audiences today are much more fragmented.

This methodological shift - to focus on audiencesrather than media - reflects a postmodern concern withhow and why media are used in the construction ofpersonal and social identities, an important componentof which is how we understand and use mediatechnologies. This, more-specifically, involves examininghow media spaces - from print to television and theInternet - are structured.

To do this we need to understand both relatively simpleissues - “Who uses what media in what contexts and forwhat purposes?” - to more complex issues about controland ownership of technology and how our media use fitsinto the general flow of social behaviour.

A further postmodernist strand focuses on exploringcultural competence - how different audiences bringdifferent levels of literacy to their media use. In thisrespect, how people use the media - and what they takefrom it - depends on their familiarity with that media andthis extends from things like understanding theconventions of films (how, for example, they manipulateour emotions), through the expectations we have fordifferent media (what can and can’t it do?), to the abilityto master new and different technologies.

Another dimension to postmodern understanding is toconsider how we engage with technology - the hardwareand software that increasingly surrounds us. Forty yearsago, for example, UK audiences had to cope with twotelevision channels. Now, we are surrounded bytechnology, from 100’s of television channels tosmartphones, tablets, wearable computers and the“Internet of Things” - how various consumer goods, fromtelevisions to fridges and microwaves, are connectedthrough the Internet.

While this suggests far higher levels of contemporarytechnological engagement - we not only use moredevices, they are also more-deeply embedded in ourpersonal lives (think, for example, about how you’d feel ifyou had no access to a smartphone, tablet or desktop) -the main question here is the extent to which audiencefragmentation, allied to an increased understanding of

“how the media works”, has altered or limited ourability to be manipulated in some way by massmedia.

Post-effects

Postmodernism, in this respect, embodies a differenttheoretical approach to understanding possible “mediaeffects”; one that challenges conventional relationshipsseen in terms of media, in the sense of contentproducers, and audiences (content consumers).

It suggests the kinds of conventional media effectstheories we’ve reviewed here no-longer have muchcurrency. To try to apply them to contemporary forms ofmedia and audiences would merely be to look for thewrong things in the wrong places in the wrong ways.

This follows because, despite their differences,conventional effects theories all assume a relatively hard-and-fast distinction can be made between mediaproducers and consumers.

Postmodernism

Consuming while creating?

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● For traditional Marxism the relationship is clear andseparate (producers are the dominant partner).

● For neo-Marxism the relationship is more ambivalent(producers dominate in some respects, but consumershave a significant interpretative role).

● For interpretivists the dominant role is played byconsumers who are able to pick and choose variousforms of media consumption that meet their particularneeds and purposes.

Where postmodernism differs from most othersociological perspectives is in the characterisation ofinformation structures. Whereas modernist approaches,such as Marxism or Pluralism, view informationhierarchically (the flow is from producers at the top toconsumers at the bottom), Castells (1996) suggestspostmodernists characterise societies in terms ofnetworks that have “become the dominant form of socialorganization”.

For this reason, power (in terms of control over theproduction and distribution of information), is no longerconcentrated within institutions (media organisations,governments and so forth) but within social networkswhere information is both produced and consumed by thesame people.

Information, therefore, flows between different points(people) within a network in such a way as to make itimpossible to distinguish between producer andconsumer (because they are, effectively, one and thesame). Tuomi (2002), for example, identifies thecharacteristic features of postmodern media in terms of:

• User as producer - they are, as just suggested, thesame people.

• Backstage is frontstage: This reflects Goffman’s (1969)idea of social interaction as a performance; just like anactor in a play, we prepare and evaluate our public (orfrontstage) performances “backstage” - in private, as itwere. Tuomi adapts this idea to argue that withsomething like social media there is no backstage - allinteraction is played out within the confines of themedium (Meyrowitz, 1994).

• Content reflects interpretation: In other words, the waydifferent people in the network interpret informationcontributes to the development of the media - a reversaland rebuttal of the Marxist idea of a preferred reading.

The main implication here is that we have to discard(modernist) concepts such as truth or falsity whenthinking about the ideological role of the media. Allknowledge, from this perspective, is ideological - whichmakes it a fairly pointless exercise trying to argue someforms of information are more (or indeed less) ideologicalthan any other form.

This consequently means it is no-longer possible to thinkabout “how the media affects people” in the waysconventionally proposed by (modernist) effects models.

Perverse Spectators

One reason for this is the postmodern focus on theconcept of meaning; where conventional media effectstheories assume various levels of separation between‘the media’ and ‘the audience’ Staiger (2000) argues themedia have no immanent meaning (one that is fixed andunchanging).

Audiences, she argues, are perverse spectators; theyuse media in their own way - and for whatever purpose -through “activated meanings”.

These are meanings created through the ways anaudience interacts with media. In other words, themeaning of a soap opera, drama, news broadcast orwhatever, is created and expressed in numerous differentways by whatever each viewer brings to theirconsumption and enjoyment of the programme; themeaning of EastEnders or a news broadcast changeseach and every time it is viewed by different individuals.

Flat, non-hierarchical information networks…

Probably not the most reliable and valid way to testmedia (lack of) effects

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This makes it impossible to quantify ‘media effects’ in anymeaningful or coherent way since any ‘effect’ is changedeach time it is identified. This idea holds true for both:

● the present - the meaning of a media text is changedimmediately it is consumed.

● the past; horror films, forexample, that were onceconsidered shocking are nowmore likely to elicit laughterthan fear.

These ideas lead to a coupleof different ways of looking at“media effects” in post-effectssociety.

Audience as media

The first way of looking at“effects” in postmodernity is tothink about the changingnature of the relationshipbetween audience and mediathat has been brought aboutthrough changes in mediatechnology and use.

Rather than being separated,as most conventional effectstheories argue, thedevelopment of new media -from personal websitesthrough blogs to massivesocial networks likeFacebook, Twitter and Instagram in Europe and Americaand WeChat in China - has led to a situation, as Tuomiargues, in which the audience can be both the producerand consumer of media texts.

The audience, in this respect, is the media and the mediais the audience - the two are interchangeable andindistinguishable. One is simply a reflection of the other.

This generalidea, althoughshot through withdebates aboutmedia literacies,competenciesand the unevenspread oftechnologicaldevelopmentboth within andbetweensocieties, issignificantbecause itsuggests adifferent direction

for media research and effects theories. Although aproducer may have some idea about how they would likean audience to receive and understand their texts, eachreader interprets that text in terms of their own ideas,beliefs, cultural and technological backgrounds.

If, as Basulto (2011) argues, socialmedia is a force “obliterating thedistinction between the producers andconsumers of culture” and Napoli(2016) contends that “audiences areboth consumers and (increasingly)producers or creators of mediaproducts”, this raises importantquestions about “media effects”: not justin terms of conventional ideas abouthow “the media” influences “anaudience” (if, indeed, we can talk aboutsuch things) but also in terms of a moreradical reappraisal of the idea of “mediaeffects” per se.

Media as audience

1. The fragmentation of potentialaudiences.

2. The development of new political andcultural identities and allegiancesamong these fragmented audiences.

The basic idea here is that postmodernsocieties become decentred, theyfragment into smaller groupingsfocused around their different claims toparticular political and cultural identities.

This creates a problem, of sorts, for media producersbecause they can no-longer reply on their content, printor electronic, routinely reaching a “mass audience”.Rather, media producers are forced to target content atniche markets - small, but highly active and keenlyinterested groups with quite specific interests.

There has, of course, always been anelement of media producers modifyingtheir output for particular audiences.

●UK newspapers, for example, have al-ways been targeted at particular audiencedemographics. The Daily Star, for exam-ple, tailors its output (it’s difficult to actuallyclassify it as “news”) to a working class de-mographic while The Times looks to an en-tirely different, far more affluent andup-market, audience.

●Special interest magazines have similarlytargeted particular demographics - from

sport, through motor vehicles to fashion.

The exception that proves the rule?Psycho (1960) still makes me nervous about

taking a shower…

To be fair, it’s not always easy to tell…

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Evaluation

What makes the producer-consumerrelationship different in postmodernity is theidea that changes to the audience producechanges in the media.

Audience fragmentationmeans competition foraudience share intensifiesamong competing producersas they each strive to createcontent that appeals to aspecific audiencedemographic. Mediaorganisations, in other words,focus content on appealing toniche audiences - but themajor difference betweenniche programming in the pastand nouveau nicheprogramming is that ratherthan produce content that thenseeks to attract an audience,some - but not necessarily all - mediacompanies identify an audience and explicitlytailor their content to what that audiencewants.

In some instances this simply translates intothe kinds of conventional niche marketing we’ve justnoted. In others, such as how news is selected,represented and presented, there is a dependence onwhat the target audience demands - something thatreverses the conventional relationship between mediaand audience. In this situation media producerseffectively become “the audience”; they create contentthat directly reflects whatever view of the world theirparticular consumers hold - a level of understandingachieved by the kinds of sophisticated audiencesurveillance made-possible by the Internet and socialmedia: the willingness, knowingly or otherwise, ofindividuals to disclose massive amounts of informationabout themselves in exchange for “free access” to amedia platform such as Facebook.

In basic terms, an “audience” is the source of a particularset of ideas and interpretations about the world that theirpreferred media simply shapes and reflects back at them.The media - a contemporary example ofwhich might be something like the cable-channel Fox News in America, a “producer”that channels a highly-particular worldviewdemanded by its predominantly elderly, white,male and conservative consumers - becomesthe audience for whatever worldview is heldby consumers.

For this approach, it’s no-longerpossible to talk about “media effects”in the way we’ve conventionallytheorised them here. Rather, themain effect in postmodernity is theimpact audiences have on mediaproducers: there are few, if any,conventional “media effects” becausethe conventional relationship betweenmedia and audience no-longer exists.

While critics of these approaches tounderstanding the role and effects ofthe media in late / postmodernityhave acknowledged the changingnature of both media and audiences,there’s a strong argument that claimsabout the dissolving relationshipbetween media producers and mediaconsumers have been overstated.There is, for example, little or noevidence to support the claim ofsome commentators that “Socialmedia has completely deconstructed

the traditional channels of media andhuman communication”.

What is critically clear, however, is that the social andmedia landscape today is quite different to 40 or 50 yearsago (or even pre-Internet) and one importantconsequence of this change is the audience voice; thatis, the ability of individuals to express their thoughts,hopes, fears and so forth through a wide variety of mediachannels that didn’t exist pre-Internet.

A major aspect of the changing media landscape is therise of “platform media”: corporations, such as Facebook,who provide a platform for audiences to “create media”through the expression and exchange of their views,much of it in real time. Such Corporations, while notbeing conventional media organisations who produceand distribute their own content are, however,increasingly coming to resemble the types of organisationthey are supposedly replacing “in postmodernity”.

Nouveau niche?

Fox News:Telling it like it isn’t?

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Facebook, for example, increasingly selects and presentsnews content across its platform in ways that apeconventional news organisations and it acts to “censor”content (such as hate speech) by banning users where itdecides such content infringes its rules.

While such platforms have led to a re-evaluation of whatwe mean by media producers and consumers, it’s nottrue to say they have replaced conventional mediaorganisations. There are, for example, a wide variety ofnational and global media corporations that continue tosuccessfully produce content that is simply consumed byan audience.

While such audiences may not be as overtly passive asin the past (Game of Thrones and Star Wars fans, forexample, have been extremely vocal in their criticism ofthe latest content produced by the global mediacorporations behind their production), there’s no realsense in which these audiences are anything more thanmedia consumers.

In terms of media effects, therefore, while powerful andpotentially influential media organisations exist - fromconventional “old style” media companies like NewsInternational to less-conventional evolving “mediacarriers” like Facebook, WeChat or Twitter - relativelypowerful audiences also exist, although the power of thelatter is less concrete, more-ephemeral, ill-defined andconstantly changing than that of their corporate mediacounterparts.

This suggests, at the very least, we need to examineboth of these elements - media organisations and mediaaudiences - if we are to understand both media effectsand the media landscapes in which they are played out.

While postmodernism questions the possibility of massmedia through “unsustainable distinctions” betweenmedia producers and media consumers - the twoeventually become indistinguishable - an alternative viewis that regardless of how, in late / postmodernity, weactually define media “producers” and “consumers” theeffects of their behaviour are real, tangible and can beboth theorised and measured.

We could, for example, quite happily apply something likecultivation theory to understand the effects of audienceinteractions on social media.

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As we’ve seen, debates over media effects polarisearound two opposing interpretations:

● those (traditional and neo-Marxism) who see themedia as having significant effects.

● those (Interpretivists and Postmodernists) who, fordiffering reasons, see the conventional idea of mediaeffects as limited at best.

While these debates tend to focus on individuals andgroups with society (differentiated in various ways byclass, age, gender and ethnicity) there is a broaderdebate about the role and effects of media in society as awhole.

Unsurprisingly, these debates also polarise betweenthose who see the role of the media positively, as a forcefor liberation and freedom and those who see it morenegatively - as a force for oppression and control.

Before we outline examples of these positions it'simportant to note that the debate has moved-on in recentyears, with the development of new media forms thatboth challenge and complement old media. As recentlyas a generation ago the debate was framed in terms ofnational borders and the impact of state controls onmedia that operated within a broadly national context(with obvious exceptions, such as Hollywood and theAmerican film industry).

Presently the debate is increasingly framed aroundglobalisation, its implications and tendencies. Culturalinstitutions such as the media, in a similar way toeconomic institutions and, to a lesser extent, politicalinstitutions, increasingly operate on a global scale andthis has important implications for the role of the mediaacross both national and international borders

Both Pluralists and Postmodernists point to a range ofideas to support the argument that the media has anumber of beneficial effects, one of the most significantbeing choice; the diversity of available media reflectsevery viewpoint and no viewpoint - an apparentcontradiction resolved by observing that as mediabecomes more diverse it comes to represent and reflecta range of competing worldviews rather than a singleworldview.

No single discourse is able to dominate.

Culturally, choice and diversity has a knock-on effectacross a range of institutions and behaviours. Genderand age groups, for example, find themselvesempowered by greater freedom of personal expressionand a less restrictive moral order, as reflected in themedia.

Butler (1990), for example, argues gender scripts areno-longer limited and restrictive, but many and varied;there are now more ways to "perform gender". The sameholds broadly true for categories such as class, age andethnicity.

More generally, a significant media effect is the creationof a greater global awareness of:

● economic trends (such as the development of areaslike China and India as important production centres),

● political developments - events surrounding the 2011Arab Spring, for example, were extensively reportedthrough Twitter in the absence of more traditionalmedia.

● cultural exchanges involving a greater exposure to andunderstanding of cultural differences.

Politically, media choice and diversity brings with it agreater questioning of "authority". Lyotard (1984), forexample, argues a defining feature of postmodernity is its‘incredulity towards grand narratives’ - the "big stories",such as religion, science or political philosophies, thatclaim to explain "everything about something".

Postmodernity also involves a scepticism towards claimsof "truth" as an objective category - truth and falsity canonly be distinguished subjectively, on the basis of ourvalues. Such incredulity towards metanarratives meansthe media is less likely to influence behaviour in the wayit might once have done in the past.

This scepticism may, of course, have it’s downsides. Theemergence of a globalised “anti-vaccination” movement,whose ideas are spread through social media, has led,for example, to the re-emergence of diseases, such asmeasles, that are relatively easily controlled throughcheap and efficient vaccinations.

Effects of the Media on Wider Society

Positive Effects

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Postmodern approaches, as we’ve suggested, offerfundamentally different types of explanation for mediaeffects, particularly in terms of the detailed ethnographicanalyses of audiences that seeks to understand underwhat circumstances and why people use different mediain different ways.

These approaches, in other words, move the effectsdebate away from an analysis of ‘the media’ to a culturalanalysis of audiences and how they interact with differentmedia.

One important dimension here is a move away from thenotion of mass audiences, in terms of their actions andreactions, to audiences differentiated by age, gender andethnicity as well as by more individualised categoriessuch as cultural and technological understanding andcompetence.

This methodological shift reflects a general concernwith how and why media are used in theconstruction of personal and social identities, animportant component of which is how weunderstand and use media technologies.

Ethnographic approaches, in this respect, exploremedia use in terms of ideas like social space andhow different media are integrated into differentspaces, particularly the private space of the home,but also given the uptake of mobile technologiesover the past 10 - 15 years, public spaces such asthe workplace, schools, leisure spaces and so forth.

A further political dimension facilitated by thedevelopment of new media is the changing nature ofpolitical representation - the public can not only interactdirectly with elected politicians, through email and socialnetworks, they can organise quickly and easily aroundpolitical issues to put pressure on politicians to act inparticular ways.

New media opens-up greater opportunities for discussionand self-expression, with voices being heard that in thepast went heard. This, in turn, has a significant impact onhow we understand the deviance of political leaders orlarge-scale transnational corporations; both, for example,are under increasing sousveillance - surveillance "frombelow".

Those who argue for the media having a generallynegative effect point to a different set of ideas.

Economically, global processes of concentration andconglomeration have accelerated, with giant mediacorporations dividing-up global markets and operating asan oligarchy that prevents entrance to media markets,restricts competition and limits consumer choice.

Rather than media diversity, Lechner (2001) arguesthere is a tendency towards homogenisation; the globalreach of transnational media corporations creates aparticular kind of “consumerist culture, in which standardcommodities are promoted by global marketingcampaigns to create similar lifestyles”.

The development of peer-to-peer networks has led to theexponential rise of intellectual property theft ("piracy")which, while a problem for mega-corporations, may beeconomically disastrous for small production companies.

On a national level the ease with which media can beduplicated has lead to widespread disregard for copyrightand patent rights, plus the state-sponsored hacking ofcommercial secrets In 2018, for example, the Americangovernment claimed the theft of copyrights and patentsby China remained at "unacceptable levels".

The development of computer networks has presentedproblems for media industries whose products are easyto copy and distribute, with no loss of quality thanks todigital reproduction. Global media conglomerates haveresponded in a range of ways, such as:

● legal prosecutions of individual offenders and attemptsto shut-down illegal providers (such as Napster in thepast and Megaupload more recently).

● the development of new economic models."Freemium" models, for example, provide a service(such as software or a game) for free but users thenpay for "added extras". Hugely popular Facebookgames, such as Farmville, have successfully appliedthis model.

Negative Effects

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Politically, global media corporations have tendedto cooperate with oppressive regimes rather thanchallenge their legitimacy.

In China, for example, state censorship of bothtraditional and new media remains the norm withboth indigenous and Western media companies;Yahoo, for example, censors its Chinese searchresults to exclude information banned by theChinese government.

While Western democracies don't operate thesame type and level of media censorship ascountries like China (with their "Great Firewall"that blocks access to banned sites and webpages), control and surveillance has beenextended through new technology and new media.

Social networking sites, for example, collect, storeand sell massive amounts of personal informationabout users, while mobile phone technology canbe used to both track individuals and monitor theircontacts. The lack of new media regulation allowsfor the expression of all kinds of racist, sexist andhomophobic ideas that would be unacceptable -and probably illegal - in old media.

Culturally, global media are instrumental infostering cultural hegemony, whereby local /national cultures are colonised by the productsand lifestyles of dominant cultures. The globaldomination of the American film industry is a goodexample here.

Global media corporations have encouraged thespread of a particular form of neo-liberal economicideology based around individualism and the"fetishism of the self" (because we're worth it...).Instagram, for example, has been colonised by“social media influencers” acting as “coolambassadors” for a wide range of global products.

The development of “open admissiontechnologies”, such as the Internet, is alsochanging how we see the relationship betweenage categories like childhood and adulthood.Where the Internet can’t differentiate betweenadults and children the latter are exposed tocontgent (sex, violence, news and so forth) thatdiminish our ability to decide where childhoodends and adulthood begins: children becomemore like adults in terms of their generalbehaviour, sexuality, dress and language whileadults become more “childlike” in their equation ofyouthfulness with health, vitality and excitement.

One major effect of globalised media, therefore, isthe promotion of a consumption culture where theconsumption of goods and services - from mobile phonesto social networks funded by advertising - is simply seenas an end in itself.

Some of the categories Facebook records aboutindividual users that is made available to advertisers

who want to target specific demographics…

© Chris. Livesey, 2019

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