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SOCIALIZATION: DEFINING US

Unlike the other three functions of mass media, socialization doesn’t supply a lot of job opportunities. Reporters and other journalists specialize in supplying information to the public. The entertainment industries are vast, as are career options for entertainers. And those who enjoy persuasive communication should consider jobs in advertising or public relations. But other than researchers (mostly in academe), nobody is drawing a steady paycheck to concentrate specifically on media’s social impact.

 

Despite the lack of obvious career paths, socialization is arguably the most important role played by the media. For good, bad or somewhere in between, the media help us all figure out how we fit in and what we can expect from life.

 

Though nobody doubts the existence of a relationship between media and society, its exact nature and boundaries are harder to pin down. Over the years scholars and critics have come up with many theories about media effects. We’ll start by taking a look at seven of these theories. Then we’ll finish this survival guide by considering how we can determine what influence the media exert in our lives.

 

 

Hypodermic needle

 

One of the earliest theories of media influence was the “hypodermic needle” or “magic bullet” model. Based on behaviorist psychological theories common in the 1930s, the hypodermic needle model regarded the media as a massive brainwashing tool. Whatever people get from the media is automatically absorbed and believed, sort of like getting a giant shot full of ideas injected directly into their brains.

 

Coincidentally enough, the big media event that seemed to prove the hypodermic theory correct actually led to its downfall. The panic caused by the 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast suggested that many listeners heard the “news” story and reacted without thinking critically about what they just heard.

 

But not everybody reacted the same way. Many people who missed the beginning of the broadcast and thus had no reason to doubt what they were hearing nonetheless remained unconvinced that New Jersey was being attacked by Martians. These skeptics made some scientists question the notion that everyone is automatically brainwashed by the media. Further study revealed that the hypodermic needle theory was wrong.

 

Different media affect the mind in different ways, and different people respond differently to the media. So the notion of automatic brainwashing isn’t correct.

 

 

Uses and gratifications

 

In the wake of the hypodermic needle’s death, social scientists began to speculate that the opposite might be true. Uses and gratifications theory considers audiences far more active in the media selection process. The theory holds that people identify their own particular information and entertainment needs and then deliberately seek out media that gratify their desires.

 

It’s an interesting approach. Try applying it to television. When the theory was first developed in the 1950s and then “fine tuned” in the 60s and 70s, it was probably dead wrong about viewers’ TV consumption. With only three major networks to choose from, people tended to watch what was on at the time whether or not they had a strong use for the programming.

 

Now, however, we have hundreds of channels to choose from. So at any given time we’re likely to find something that’s exactly what we want. Further, we can increase our chances of gratification by using a DVR to pick shows that might interest us and watch them whenever we want.

 

Once we add in all the other media, the infoscape becomes a vast, all-you-can-eat buffet of uses and gratifications. Some industries – such as the major movie studios – still bet a bundle on the idea that we’ll watch whatever they produce. But with so many choices available to us, this theory may be one of the best ways to understand media consumer behavior.

 

 

Minimal effects

 

We get the minimal effects hypothesis from the world of politics. Some research conducted during presidential elections between the 1940s and 1960s suggested that political campaigns didn’t exert a lot of influence on election outcomes. People tended to vote based on long-term political allegiances or stances on the issues rather than the amount of stumping and advertising a candidate did.

 

By extension, this questions the influence advertising has in general. Companies spend billions of dollars per year to persuade us to buy their products, but if the minimal effects theory is correct then it may be a colossal waste of money.

 

Right away, you should be raising an eyebrow. Though large companies make mistakes, they aren’t legendary for wasting that much cash for that long. So most likely there’s at least some evidence that the media’s effects are more than minimal. And in fact election studies done since the 1980s suggest at least some relationship between the amount of money spent on campaigns and the outcome of elections.

 

You can test this by studying your own reactions to advertising. Do some ads influence your buying habits? Others not so much? Many students in the past have responded that “small involvement” purchases are more easily affected by ads. Personally, I’m a sucker for a good movie trailer. They’re one of the few kinds of ads I’ll voluntarily sit through. And if the movie isn’t as good as promised, I’m out less than $10. No big loss.

 

But for “big ticket” purchases such as cars, appliances and the like, consumers tend to dig a little deeper, weighing more serious factors such as cost, features and reliability. In these cases, the effect of the media tends to be a good deal more minimal.

 

 

Spiral of silence

 

Throughout his one-and-a-half-term presidency, Richard Nixon suffered harsh criticism of his handling of the Vietnam War. Almost every night the news showed another long, loud anti-war protest. In his defense, Nixon evoked the “silent majority.” He claimed that most Americans supported his policies, but their support never made the news because they didn’t stage protests rallies.

 

Nixon’s theory leads us naturally enough to the “spiral of silence” theory of media effects. This theory holds that media coverage can become a vicious cycle that silences majority opinion.

 

Fringe extremists on both the left and right dominate news coverage by engaging in newsworthy activities (protest rallies, parades and the like). The majority of the population probably doesn’t share their opinions. They might agree to some extent with the general ideas being expressed, but most folks don’t like to go to extremes. Still, people say to themselves, “Those strongly-opinionated people sure do get a lot of coverage. I don’t agree with them, but they’re in the news and people like me aren’t. Maybe I should just shut up and go along.”

 

The more people toward the center remain silent, the more coverage the fringes receive. And the more coverage the fringes receive, the more the center shuts up. Thus the term “spiral of silence.”

 

 

Social learning

 

Once upon a time, people lived completely media-free lives. Their days were occupied with work, family, friends and community. Then little by little the media crept into daily life. As media consumption began to take the place of other activities, it also began to play the role once played by the other things we did. In particular, the media – accidentally or on purpose – started teaching lessons we used to learn from family and community about how to behave.

 

One of the most obvious modern examples of social learning is the legend about Clark Gable’s appearance in the 1934 movie It Happened One Night. In one scene he takes his shirt off to reveal – gasp! – that he isn’t wearing an undershirt. The story goes that clothing companies saw undershirt sales drop through the floor after the public saw the picture. Snopes lists the legend’s accuracy as “undetermined,” and the movie probably didn’t single-handedly destroy the undershirt business. On the other hand, the movie probably did help teach men that they didn’t really need the extra bother, heat and expense of wearing two shirts at once.

 

On a more serious note, if the social learning theory is correct then people learn a lot of negative things from the media. Models of violent behavior can prove particularly troublesome, such as the case of the parents who blamed MTV’s Beavis and Butthead for inspiring their son to burn their house down. Though the story lost a good deal of momentum when it turned out the family didn’t have cable and the kid might actually never have seen the offending program, the network nonetheless started cutting out all of the show’s references to Beavis’s fire obsession to prevent young viewers from learning that pyromania was okay.

 

The media may also be teaching us counterproductive lessons about race and gender relations. If movies and music teach us how to treat people who are different from us, what kind of education are we getting?

 

 

Cultivation

 

One April morning in 1999, two boys armed with shotguns and other firearms entered Columbine High School. In less than an hour they killed 12 students and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves. In the wake of the tragedy, blame fingers started pointing every which way. In short order everyone from the boys’ parents to the NRA had been held responsible.

 

The media proved an especially popular blame target. The crimes would never have occurred, the theory went, if only the criminals hadn’t spent time playing violent video games and listening to death-obsessed music. Headlines held Marilyn Manson responsible (despite the lack of evidence that the shooters ever listened to his music) because he “helped create a climate of violence.”

 

The video game part of the theory fit perfectly with the social learning hypothesis. The boys could have learned at least some form of violent behavior by playing first person shooters. But that wouldn’t explain Manson’s connection. Even if the criminals had been big Manson fans, the singer never performed a song specifically urging listeners to go shoot up their schools. No Manson video ever portrayed anything like the Columbine massacre.

 

Enter the “cultivation” theory. According to this model, Manson’s music could cause violent behavior even if it didn’t teach listeners how to commit specific acts. By exploiting some teenagers’ natural tendencies to obsess about the darker side of human existence, it encourages moodiness that can lead to destructive behavior.

 

The cultivation connection is too weak to create legal liability. The parents of the Columbine victims would never be able to win a wrongful death suit against Manson. But the connection may be strong enough to prompt media professionals to at least pause and consider the consequences of their actions.

 

 

Agenda setting

 

We’ve established that media influence isn’t absolute (no “hypodermic needle”), but it isn’t nonexistent either. One of the most popular compromises between the two extremes is the “agenda setting” model. This theory suggests that the media may not be able to tell people what to think, but they can tell people what to think about.

 

You can see this principle in action once every four years. Every time the United States faces another major election season, the media’s attention turns strongly political. Broadcast news and newspaper editorials can’t actually tell us whom to vote for (well, they can try telling us, but tellin’ ain’t gettin’). But they do an excellent job at focusing our attention on the election process. For what seems like months leading up to the vote, there might as well be nothing else going on anywhere in the world.

 

However, the agenda setting model may be eroding at least a little. In an infoscape made up of one metro daily newspaper and your choice of three TV networks, the media have enormous power to set the boundaries of public discourse. But 21st century audiences have a lot more options. The easier it is for us as individuals to set our own agendas, the harder it becomes for the media to set agendas for us.

 

 

Experiments

 

Theories are great. They help us get some kind of handle on the world around us. But they aren’t particularly useful unless they can be proven correct by gathering evidence.

 

The most basic form of scientific study is the experiment. A good experiment starts with a hypothesis, a logical notion about how things work. Then scientists set up an environment that’s as controlled as possible and do two tests, one that makes a change (the experimental group) and one that doesn’t (the control group). If the two groups end up the same, then we’ve proved that the changed condition had no effect. But if they’re different, we’ve proved that whatever condition we changed was in fact significant.

 

One of the most famous experiments in the history of media studies was the “Bobo doll” test. Researchers divided a group of preschool kids into two groups. The control group was allowed to play with their choice of a roomful of toys, including a clown-shaped punching bag called a Bobo doll. The experimental group first watched an adult punching a Bobo doll. Then they were offered the same toy choices.

 

Early stages of the experiment were designed to test the social learning theory in general. Would kids learn aggressive behavior modeled by adults? When results indicated that kids who watched Bobo getting punched were more likely to punch Bobo, researchers decided to try some new variations on the experiment. One variation that got a lot of attention was a test that exposed the experimental group to a video of an adult punching the doll. The idea was to figure out if kids could pick up violent behavior not just from in-person example but also from watching such conduct modeled on television. The studies suggested that kids could in fact learn aggression from TV.

 

Experiments are great for establishing strong cause-and-effect links between things. However, in practice they can be tricky. They’re often expensive and cumbersome to set up. Imagine all the arrangements you’d have to make to get the Bobo test to work. Just getting the parental consent forms signed would take days.

 

And if you’re going to use human subjects (which you almost certainly will if you’re trying to do an experiment to test the media’s effects on people) you’ll probably have to go through an extended approval procedure. In one of my classes in grad school we started the semester by designing an experiment only to discover that the university’s approval process would take so long that we couldn’t possibly do our test before the semester ended.

 

 

Surveys

 

The media love surveys. It seems like everywhere you turn you’ll find another report of what some survey found out about public opinion. So to think critically about what you’re reading, you need to understand the difference between a scientifically-accurate poll and a pseudo poll.

 

In order for a survey to be considered scientifically accurate, it has to meet several qualifications. In particular, the people who participate in the survey must be selected at random. If you’re trying to figure out what everyone in the United States thinks about an issue, then your survey team will need to ask the same questions of randomly-selected people (calling them on the phone, stopping them in malls and so on) until you get a significant sample size. The bigger the sample, the more accurate the results are likely to be. And of course the sample must represent the population as a whole. If you’re trying to determine what the whole country thinks, you can’t limit your sample to rich people who live in Wisconsin.

 

In a pseudo-poll, on the other hand, participation is voluntary. If a web site puts up a “What do you think? Click here to vote” box, anyone who wants to can participate. And anyone who doesn’t can ignore it completely. Thus the result will reflect not the opinions of the general population but only those who cared enough to respond. Particularly for controversial questions, the difference can be huge.

 

Here’s a quick tip for telling a scientific poll from a pseudo-poll: scientific survey results will typically list a margin of error.

 

 

Content analysis

 

In many ways, content analyses are the easies media studies to perform. If you want to know how many times the f-word appears in Scarface, you don’t have to set up an elaborate experiment or survey thousands of people to find the answer. Just get out a notepad, watch the movie and add a tick mark every time you hear what you’re listening for.

 

Still, content studies can be tricky. If you wanted to know how many violent acts occur during an average hour of prime time television, once again you’d get out your trusty notepad. But before you start counting, you’ll have to define exactly what you mean by “violent act” so you’ll know one when you see it. You’ll also need to be sure you aren’t just watching early (when networks tend to run less violent competitions and sitcoms) or late (when they tend to show potentially more violent hour-long dramas). You can’t just watch one network. You can’t watch just one day. You can’t watch only during a sweeps period. And so on.

 

Content analyses are great for figuring out what the media are serving up. But if we’re trying to determine what effect media content has on individuals, groups or society, a good content analysis is only the first step.

 

 

Political-economy studies

 

One of the things we’ve seen in just about every medium we’ve studied is the strong industry dominance of a small handful of companies. Though the Big Five or Big Six varies from medium to medium, seldom do we have to include more than six companies on a pie chart before we can account for well more than half the pie.

 

Political economy studies supply the data that tells us who owns how much of what. And they can be difficult to perform. The world of big business is a vast maze of companies that own companies that in turn own other companies. Corporations with publicly-traded stock have to meet report-filing requirements that make some aspects of their operations possible – if not exactly easy – to track. Companies that belong to a single owner or small group of owners can avoid answering a lot of questions about what they do with their money.

 

Further, the business world is constantly in motion. Companies are bought and sold all the time. So even when we figure out who owns what, we still have to keep constant track of the news to make sure a media company doesn’t change hands without our notice.

 

Fortunately, some organizations that study the media maintain reasonably up-to-date records of who owns what. The results of their ongoing political-economy studies are available online, so unless we need to know extremely specific ownership information we can generally learn everything we need to know from other people’s work.

 

 

Social impact studies

 

Many media studies textbooks attach a great deal of importance to political-economy studies. Over and over they emphasize media ownership patterns. But without some additional information, that doesn’t necessarily mean all that much. A political-economy study might reveal that one corporation owns both a sports news network and a Major League Baseball franchise. But that isn’t particularly interesting unless the company’s network gives more prominent or favorable coverage to the company’s baseball team. And even if so, the effect will still be minimal unless the coverage increases the team’s popularity. To figure that out, we’d need to do an impact study.

 

Social impact research can be done via experiment, survey or content analysis. Regardless of method, the study will be designed to determine a cause and effect relationship between something in the media and something in society. These studies can be narrowly tailored to answer a specific question – is a company unfairly promoting its baseball team – or it can help us judge the accuracy of a theory of media effects.

 

Without social impact studies, most of the rest of our consideration of the media wouldn’t mean much. By figuring out exactly how the media influence us, we greatly increase our chances of keeping our brains alive in the 21st century infoscape.