EXAM 1

How do we audience?

"Audience is a situated role that people temporarily perform, and in their performance people produce representations of audiences"

The quantification of public opinion 19th century - rise of quantification

Measuring majority sentiment quantitatively

Effects= Audiences as Mass

Mass suggestibility Mass Society Moral and Media panics The Payne Fund Studies Recall Opinions Immediate Responses Emotional Contagion

Selective Perception

Previous smoking example: For example, if you are a cigarette smoker and you have a desire and expectation that you will live a long life, when you encounter informa- tion that provides conclusive evidence that smoking causes cancer, then you will be moti- vated to resolve this inconsistency by changing your behavior (e.g., giving up cigarettes). To take the previous smoking example, if smokers were confronted with information about the health dangers of cigarettes, then they might decide that they actually smoke so little that the negative effects are going to be quite small (and therefore the decision to smoke is rationalized). This process of reinterpreting the world to match one's previously held beliefs is called selective perception (see Box 2.1).

political economy

"Study of social relations, particularly the power relations, that mutually constitute the production, distribution, and consumption of resources" -Historical Shifts -Connections between economy and social forces -Moral philosophy/social values

Constructionism

"audiences are seen not as empirical actors to be examined in their concrete activity, but as discursive constructs, as effects of a variety of programs, institutions, and measuring instruments. Constructionalism is a metatheoretical approach that thats audience as signifier and subject position rather than referent and autonomous subject... To study audiences is to study the discourses that take audiences as their object"

Public opinion

"group consensus about matters of public concern which has developed in the wake of informed discussion" -Communication from citizens to the government

Share

# of households watching specific show out of the # total households that are watching TV at the time

Ratings

# of households watching specific show out of the # total households that exist

Direct effects

(aka "magic bullets" or "hypodermic needle") drove research at this time But, although some evidence of effects was found, there was little evidence for mass persuasion.

Media and us: driving questions

1. How do Media affect us? 2. How do we affect? 3. HoW does our engagement/Interaction with media relate to our responses, understandings, meaning-making?

Structuration Theory (Giddens)

A good way to think about the notion of power is to consider these audiences in terms of structure and agency. These are the foundational building blocks of British sociologist Anthony Giddens' (1986, 1987) structuration theory, a fruitful perspective for understanding human societies from a sociological point of view. As we'll see, the concepts of structure and agency exist in a kind of dynamic tension with one another, since the actions of individuals both reproduce and potentially alter existing forms of social structure. Let's deal with each of these in turn.

Nielsen/Arbitron ratings (TV) Con

Accuracy of diaries streaming and OnDemand Deceased cable subscriptions Measurement error

Selective exposure

Additionally, Festinger argued that individuals would actively avoid a state of cognitive dissonance. So, the smoker may consciously avoid communication mes- sages about the health hazards of smoking. This process is called selective exposure. (Sullivan 40)

The notion that audiences are not observable, objective realities but instead constructed entities that emerge in popular memory, institutional practice, and academic research was crystallized in a review article by Martin Allor 1988.

Allor argued that "the audience exists nowhere; it inhabits no real space, only positions within analytic discourses...if we, as a discipline, are going to move forward on this issue, the central problematic of the field, we first have to deconstruct the 'audience's' unity into constituent and constituting moments."

Cultivation Theory

Another key research tradition that focuses on the long-term impacts of television is cultivation theory. Developed by Dr. George Gerbner of the Annenberg School for Com- munication, cultivation theory argues that audiences' conceptions of reality are devel- oped through exposure to television over a period of months and years (Gerbner & Gross, 1976). Through surveys, Gerbner and his colleagues found that heavy television viewers (those who watched more than four hours per day) were more likely to perceive the world in ways that mirrored television reality rather than other, objective measures of social reality. They found, for example, that individuals who watched more television were much more likely to believe that the world was a violent and dangerous place, even if they themselves had not personally experienced violence (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1980; Signorielli, 1990). Cultivation research was a significant shift in the effects paradigm because it turned the focus on the stability of attitudes over time rather than attitude change, thus turning on its head the central thrust of the persuasion research of the World War II era.

double-barreled questions

Asking about 2 or more things in 1 survey question

Moral Panics

British sociologist Stanley Cohen (2002) used the term moral panics to describe very strong negative public reactions to the spread of a new social behavior. This response is generally an overreaction, which makes finding an accommodation to the new behavior difficult.

where do the public's opinions come from?

But where do the public's opinions come from? Communication research has produced compelling evidence that citizens' political awareness and information environment are profoundly shaped by the news media. Walter Lippmann first suggested that the press creates a "pseudo-environment" by selecting only certain events, perspectives, and ideas to present to the public. In this section we'll briefly explore how news coverage affects the public's opinions about the importance of political issues, and how that perception feeds back into the policy arena and into the news media as well.

Why measure?

Buying and selling audiences Understanding industry trends Audience as mass Historically audience size = success

Aristotle

Collective will is superior to the opinions of individuals -Politics is not the realm for universal truths

Uses and Gratifications

Consider how and why individuals use the media rather than the ways in which they are acted upon by the media

Power and media audiences

Consumer- potential source of revenue because watch what they want Citizen- politics use of media; informs us about world/people around us Individual- power is identified through the decision-making of individual agents, through the nondecision-making of agents (passive non choices) and through the ability of institutions to shape our decisions without even knowing it.

Way corporations can get feedback and track individuals to better target them

Corporations and other commercial institutions also have a vested interest in measuring media audiences. In order to be responsive to consumer needs and desires and ultimately generate revenue, advertisers and marketers have devised elaborate means for obtaining feedback. Example: Wal-Mart, the largest retailer in the United States, stands out in the industry when it comes to turning information into profit. It is perhaps obvious to say that Wal-Mart is in the business of selling products such as electronics, toys, and clothing to consumers. What is less obvious, however, is Wal-Mart's other business, which emerges out of its primary retail function. The firm uses the transaction records of millions of customers to compile a vast database of purchasing behavior by American consumers. Most national retail busi- nesses today routinely gather and store information about consumer purchases. However, Wal-Mart's sheer size, volume of business and almost universal penetration into the U.S. market allows the company to monitor the purchasing patterns of American consumers on a much larger scale. What does Wal-Mart do with all of this customer information? By matching customer purchasing records, universal product codes (UPC) and radio fre- quency identification tags (RFIDs) on products, Wal-Mart knows what customers are pur- chasing, in which stores these products are being bought, and in what quantities. One way Wal-Mart keeps prices and overhead low (besides purchasing cheaper goods from China and keeping wages and benefits for employees to a minimum) is by using its profile of customer behavior to minimize warehousing costs. As soon as a product is purchased from a Wal-Mart store, an order to refill that item is communicated instantaneously to the warehouse (Smith & Young, 2004). In fact, one of the keys to Wal-Mart's market success (and its most jealously guarded proprietary asset) is the ability to utilize this massive information source to track and, yes, predict consumer behavior. Shortly before the landfall of Hurricane Frances in Florida in 2004, Wal-Mart consulted its vast customer databases to predict that demand for certain types of products would increase. In short order, truckloads of flashlights, batteries, blan- kets, strawberry Pop-Tarts (this was a top-selling item in previous hurricanes), and beer were rushed down to the areas in the path of the hurricane. These goods quickly sold out (Hays, 2004). Wal-Mart's use of consumer information demonstrates two fundamental principles that are the foundation of this chapter: (1) that sophisticated surveillance mech- anisms have been put into place in modern post-industrial economies to be able to mea- sure and track individuals' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors and (2) that these tools are often used by powerful institutions and organizations to advance their own goals, thus bringing into play fundamental issues of power.

Unclear questions

Difficult for participant to decipher the meaning of the question, tend to just answer yes

Communion or meaning based

Emphasis on commodity "productive" of meaning Media as a process Focus is on interpretation transformation and process

Transmission or information based

Emphasis on persuasion control , "representation" of meaning Media as transactional Focus on forms of persuasion messages, techniques

Effects of Media Messages

EXAMPLE OF EFFECTS WITH VIDEO GAMES: The scene was shocking and gruesome: On the bright spring morning of April 16, 2007, on the campus of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), a 23-year-old South Korea-born student named Seung-Hui Cho went on a shooting rampage that left 32 people dead and 25 wounded. After a frantic manhunt for Cho around the campus, he was found dead with a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The attack represented the single deadliest shooting rampage in American history and prompted comparisons to other gun-related massacres at schools in the late 1990s, particularly the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado (Hauser & O'Connor, 2007). Amid the shock and grief, questions were raised about the school's slow response to early reports of a shooter on the campus and the lack of a campuswide emergency protocol to deal with threats to students and faculty. At the same time, however, another important question emerged in the news media: Why would a young person like Cho stockpile handguns and automatic weapons and turn them on his classmates and faculty? What would motivate an individual to become so enraged that he would commit mass murder? In hindsight, there was evidence that Cho had struggled with mental health issues for much of his life, including a diagnosis for severe anxiety disorder and extensive psycho- logical therapy during his middle school and high school years. Along with these personal psychological issues, however, another possible culprit (or, at least, co-conspirator) emerged in the news media: violent video games. After initial news reports indicated that Cho had been an avid player of violent, realistic first-person shooter video games, Florida attorney Jack Johnson, an outspoken critic of games such as Doom and Counter-Strike, was booked on numerous talk shows and news programs. Johnson argued that violent video games both desensitize young people to the consequences of violence and equip players with the motor skills necessary to commit fast, efficient killing with automatic weapons. Johnson noted, "This is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer" (Benedetti, 2007). Johnson's claim was echoed by television's in-house psychiatrist, Dr. Phil, on the Larry King Live interview program on April 16, 2007, when he reasoned that "common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high" (Interview with Dr. Phil McGraw about the Virginia Tech Massacre, 2007). Dr. Phil's hypothesis was that violent video games encouraged vulnerable youths like Cho to act out their violent fantasies in the real world. While an investigation by Virginia Tech (Virginia Tech Review Panel, 2007) ultimately debunked the theory that Cho had been obsessed with violent video games (it turned out he played much more innocuous ones like Sonic the Hedgehog), the hypothesis that media exposure could encourage violent, antisocial behavior had already gained widespread recognition in the mainstream news media. (Sullivan 26) The Virginia Tech example illustrates a style of reasoning that stretches back more than a century: that media messages carry potentially damaging information for the public, and that these messages need to be carefully monitored and potentially restricted. The idea that media messages can lead to changes in individual audience members is the thrust behind the "effects perspective," which emerged in the 20th century as the dominant paradigm in the field of media studies. This chapter orients you to some of the major strands in media effects theories, beginning with the origins of mass society theory in the early 20th century. We then focus on early concerns over film and radio. The chapter then moves on to exam- ine some key studies in media exposure and persuasion in the World War II era. The final section focuses on concerns with mediated violence and its effects on society, particularly children. This is examined via the U.S. television violence studies in the late 1960s and early 1970s (especially the Surgeon General's Report). The chapter concludes with some examples of more recent research into the effects of mediated violence on children, spe- cifically those from video games. (Sullivan 26)

Personal influence

Ever the intellectual entrepreneur, Lazarsfeld agreed to do the study, but added additional survey questions so that he could study the process of opinion leadership. The findings from the research were released in a book entitled Personal Influence, which was coau- thored by Lazarsfeld and a graduate student, Elihu Katz. The research was based on interviews with 800 women in the Decatur, Illinois, area. By using the survey, the research team was able to discover 693 reported opinion leaders (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955). Who were these opinion leaders and what distinguished them from the rest? They discovered that women's "position in the life cycle" (their age and role as single or married, for example), their socioeconomic status, and the extent of their social contacts were largely responsible for their position as opinion leaders. Addi- tionally, different women acted as opinion leaders for different kinds of products. For household items, older married women were cited most often as opinion leaders while younger women acted as opinion leaders for fashion and movie selection. Along with their role as informal persuaders for others, Katz and Lazarsfeld discovered that opinion leaders were also more likely to closely monitor the media for trends and information. This led to a new theory of media effects called the two-step flow of communication. Katz and Lazarsfeld reasoned that the impact of media messages flows through opinion leaders, who then pass along this influence to other audiences (see Figure 2.4). The two- step model suggested that the lack of media influence found in previous research studies (such as The People's Choice) was likely because scholars had not adequately understood the role that person-to-person communication played in media effects. The close con- nection between interpersonal communication and mass media impact was an impor- tant contribution of Personal Influence. (Sullivan 43)

Wertham's Seduction of the innocent What Model/paradigm of communication is Wertham using? How are ideas of audiences and power at play here? Who has power? Who doesn't? Who should? What is a possible counter argument to wertham? Why was Wertham so successful in spreading his message? Are there other examples of these types of reactions to media?

First published in 1955 Group Interviews/Therapy with "delinquent Clients -Ages 13-16 Main points: Children are isolated, impressionable Comic books can negatively influence them due to: -"Delinquent" behaviors portrayed as cool, heroic, suave -Instructions and ideas for crimes -Opportunities to purchase weapons etc. in ads 1. Transmission paradigm 2. Media makers have the power;

Fredric Wertham

German american Psychiatrist Seduction of the Innocent -Description and analysis of juvenile clients -Condemnation of "crime comics" Impact on media and audiences -Spurred congressional inquiry -Blueprint for moral panics of 20th and 21st centuries Falsified data? Change of opinion?

The quantification of public opinion 20th century - Surveys and the public opinion industry

Government, private companies, academic institutions, New corporations

Early U&G: Payne Fund Studies

Harold Blumler- 1920s Self-reports of "life histories" - college and high school students Uses and understanding of movies are responses to individual desires and needs

Who is part of the "public" is always shifting

Historical content Agenda of those in power or doing the measuring

More on institutions

If we wish to have governments and market systems that respond to the will of the people, it is vital for our institutions to obtain feedback about the public's wants and needs. However, the method by which these institutions gather intelligence about the audience is often fraught with conceptual and logistical pitfalls. The source of these problems can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution. As outlined in Chapter 1, the Industrial Revolution created an artificial separation between the workspace and the home (or leisure space). This meant that audience consumption of media messages took place in private, domestic spaces (such as the home) that were not under the direct supervision of private companies or the government. As we'll discuss in this section of the text, the fact that our product consumption, voting, and other forms of political engagement now take place outside of the public realm poses some thorny problems for institutions. These institutions want to ascertain our behaviors, attitudes, wishes, and desires but are often blocked by the legal and social protections that we have set up to protect our private spaces from outside influ- ence. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence takes language from Enlightenment phi- losopher John Locke that the goal of government should be to enable citizens' unfettered access to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

information based view: trans mission view

In medieval times, hereditary rulers, monarchs, and feudal lords would often "grant an audience" to their constituents, utilizing the term to indicate a disparity in social station between the two individuals in the conversation. This transmission view of audience, then, emphasizes the verbal or other symbolic transaction between a speaker and a receiver. The focus is on both the content of the message as well as the act of sending and receiving messages (the purposes of which are intentional). In its most simplified form, then, every act of communication requires two parties: a message sender (or creator) and a receiver. In this case, the audience would refer to the receiver of a particular symbolic message. The sender transmits the message through a specific means (which is referred to as the channel) whether it be face-to-face speech or via mediated communication. As the message travels from the source to the intended receiver, it is subject to "noise," which refers both to literal interference from other ambient sounds or a rogue radio signal as well as to psychological noise such as any competing thoughts or feelings that may interrupt or otherwise distort the original intent of the message. Communication with the audience is achieved when the message from the sender reaches its intended target. This model describes communication between a sender and a receiver either at the interpersonal or mass level. The model that we most often associate with audience in common parlance is that of a mass audience—where many anonymous individuals are receiving a particular message via some kind of media channel (either simultaneously) or at different points in time).

Nielsen/Arbitron ratings (TV) Pros

Industry norm Standardized

Audience-as-agents

Interested in audience members as active individuals capable of conscious decision making People have freedom to choose and interpret thier media Selective processes, uses and gratifications, interpretations rather than imagining audiences as either injects that are acted upon by media stimuli or constructions of powerful institutions, in this mode " people are conceived of as free agents choosing what media they will consume, bringing their own interpretive skills to the texts they encounter, making their own meanings, and generally using media to suit themselves." In this model, audience members are regarded to be reflexive about their own media use—selecting specific media and content to fit their own needs and desires, and actively interpreting those media within the framework of their own personal experiences.

Audiences as outcome

Interested in the effects of media on people (ie the OUTCOMES) Often negative in tone Often about individuals propaganda, attitudes, effects this model "see people as being acted upon by media. Typically, it reflects a concern about the power of media to produce detrimental effects on individuals, and by implication on society as a whole.

Public

Is a space for citizens to assemble and discuss the issues of the day

Sample

Like George Gallup in the 1930s, survey methodologists today use proba- bility sampling to select the individuals for the sample. This means that individu- als are selected at random from the popu- lation such that there is a known chance of being included in the sample. This assures that the sample is roughly repre- sentative of the population as a whole and increases the likelihood that the results are generalizable. Pollsters attempt to be cost-conscious by assembling the small- est possible sample that will still be repre- sentative of the population. (Sullivan 63)

Mass audiences in Danger

Media Messages carry potentially damaging information for the public and these messages need to be monitored and potentially restricted [Media] would five their public only a superficial understanding of (and concern with public issues and other people. New technologies...would not only encourage the dissemination of more information among the populace but would also catalyze a "growth of a sense of common humanity, of moral unity, between nations, races, and classes

Media and aggression: What we know

Media are consistently found to relate to aggression -In surveys -In experiments -In longitudinal studies But, the effect size is small -Media alone does not cause aggression -Media do not impact everyone in the same way -But, can influence attitudes, emotions , and behaviors

The audience commodity

Media are sold to audiences and audiences are sold to advertisers Audiences perform labor for advertisers -learning about brands -paying attention consumption of products

Media Panics

Media panics are a specific type of moral panic that surround the introduction of a new type of media or content genre (Drotner, 1992). Audiences are typically imagined as vulnerable to negative influences from this new medium or content, since messages are assumed to be have a direct influence on each individual.

Media panic

Media panics are a specific type of moral panic that surround the introduction of a new type of media or content genre (Drotner, 1992). Audiences are typically imagined as vulnerable to negative influences from this new medium or content, since messages are assumed to be have a direct influence on each individual. The rapid expansion of new media technologies in the 20th century were largely char- acterized by a cycle of media panics and subsequent actions, including scholarly research, elite activism, and even public policy responses. Münsterberg's book was one of the first to facilitate a media panic surrounding the motion picture, and in so doing effectively replaced Le Bon's idea of crowd psychology with the notion of a mass society. This concept of the isolated, anonymous, and vulnerable mass became the dominant view of media audiences throughout much of the 20th century. (Sullivan 30)

Agenda setting

Media tell us what to think about, what to prioritize what is important

Framing

Media tells us how to think about certain topics, frame or guide our understanding

Uses and Gratifications Key assumptions

Media use is Functional Media audiences are Active Media choice is linked to gratifications Mass media are one of many options for need fulfillment Audience members are aware of their needs and able to report them Researchers should not make value judgments based on audience choices

populations

Modern public opinion surveys consist of a number of components. First, surveys are designed to measure a popula- tion of individuals. A population refers to a group of individuals (citizens of a com- munity or nation, for instance) who may have an opinion relating to the subject of the survey (P. V. Miller, 1995). With most populations, especially in a nationwide study, it is impossible to include everyone in the survey.

Affective needs

Needs related to "strengthening aesthetic, pleasurable, and emotional experience"

Social needs

Needs related to "strengthening contact with family, friends, and the world"

Integrative needs

Needs related to "strengthening credibility, confidence, stability, and status"

Cognitive needs

Needs related to "strengthening information, knowledge, and understanding"

Escape

Needs related to escape or tension release, also "weaken[s] contact with self and one's social roles"

Agency

On the opposite side of the coin is the notion of agency. Agency refers to the actions of individuals in their environment. For Giddens, human beings are defined by their ability to freely make decisions and actions that serve the goals of the individual agent. Action, as Giddens suggests, "should be conceived as a continuous flow of interventions in the world which are initiated by autonomous agents." Far from being blind to the consequences of their individual actions, says Giddens, human beings are instead "reflexive" about their actions. Individuals are aware of their environments, engage in active sensing of their environments, and gather information about the consequences of a particular action that will inform and structure future decisions and actions. However, "it does not follow that [agents] know all there is to know about the consequences of what they do, for the activities of others or for their own activities in the future. Nor do they know all there is to know all about the conditions of their action, that is, the circumstances that are casually involved with its production." Giddens is pointing out here that we make decisions all the time in ways that match our goals, but that we may not know or fully understand all of the various consequences of those decisions, more do we perhaps even grasp the reality that the available choices in front of us are shaped by other people and social forces that are outside of our own control.

Concerns with persuasion

One of the key early texts to explore the relationship between the media and audiences was Public Opinion, published in 1922 by journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann. While Lippmann is most remembered for his reflections upon news and politics (he was extensively consulted by numerous U.S. political figures, including presidents), he is also "arguably the most important single figure in the immediate prehistory of academic communication research" (Jansen, 2008, p. 82). The title of Lippmann's 1922 classic is a bit misleading—his book did not consider public opinion in our modern sense of that phrase (statistical measurements of collective sentiment). Instead, Lippmann painted a broad picture of how modern forms of mass communication such as newspapers and motion pictures affected the psychological outlook of individuals and therefore their abil- ity to effectively participate in a democratic society. Specifically, Lippmann outlined the notion of stereotypes, which described the pre- dominant method through which all individuals perceived the world. He wrote that "we are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them" (Lippmann, 1922, p. 90). Individuals' sense of reality is therefore mediated by their expectations of reality, and these expectations are formed through their exposure to the media. Journalists, who conduct what Lippmann called "intelligence work" on behalf of the public by gathering information about national events, policies, and people, provide an incomplete picture of political and world events for the public. The public, therefore, makes decisions and evaluates their political leaders according to the "pictures in their heads," which are comprised of the narratives and images that are provided by the news media. This presented an important problem: If there existed "some barrier between the public and the event," then this barrier could create a "pseudo-environment" that could be effec- tively managed by those with specific interests in mind. In essence, Lippmann foreshad- owed the dangers posed by media propaganda. The term "propaganda" refers to the means to "disseminate or promote particular ideas" and it stems from the Latin term meaning "to propagate" or "to sow" (Jowett & O'Donnell, 2011, p. 2). In its modern usage, however, pro- paganda has taken on a more negative connotation, describing a deliberate attempt by one party to control or manage the information environment of another (or group) through the manipulation of symbols or psychology. The power of the media to direct the American public's understanding and evaluation of world events was demonstrated strikingly during World War I (1917-1918). Then-President Woodrow Wilson recognized from an early stage that he faced a highly skeptical public and Congress regarding the potential entry of the United States into a costly and dangerous foreign conflict. To rally public support and to put pressure on Congress and American businesses to cooperate with his administration in its war policy, Wilson established the Committee on Public Information (CPI) by executive order in April 1917. The commit- tee was chaired by George Creel, who worked closely with the Secretaries of War, State, and the Navy to carefully coordinate the first wide-scale public relations effort in American history (Jowett & O'Donnell, 2011, pp. 124-125). The CPI carefully crafted mes- sages about the U.S. war efforts and com- municated them through an enormous range of media outlets: news stories, motion pictures, books, magazines, post- ers, billboard advertisements, speeches, and phonograph records. In a series of billboards and posters, Creel's commit- tee not only informed Americans of their responsibilities to preserve food and to buy war bonds, but also depicted the German army as evil and barbaric, which generated hard feelings among the pub- lic for the enemy (see Figure 2.2). The wartime propaganda effort was regarded by many to be highly successful in mobi- lizing the U.S. public and the industrial interests in the United States to fight a long, protracted war in Europe. After the armistice was signed in 1918 bringing an end to the war, a num- ber of lawmakers in Congress began to call for an investigation into the CPI since they believed that it had system- atically deceived the American public during the war. Creel (1920, pp. 4-5) staunchly defended his work on the CPI in a 1920 book entitled How We Adver- tised America, arguing that he had sim- ply engaged in "plain publicity proposi- tion, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventures in advertising. . . . We did not call it propaganda. . . . Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward pre- sentation of the facts." The experience of World War I (1917-1918) also solidified the notion that media forms could persuade millions of people to change their attitudes and behaviors. (Sullivan 37)

Ways to collect data

Public opinion surveys use a number of methods for gathering data on audience atti- tudes and beliefs. The ideal situation is the person-to-person interview, in which the researcher sits down with a respondent, establishes a rapport, and asks in-depth ques- tions. This type of interaction allows for the best "read" of the complexities of individu- als' thoughts about the issue in question. The major downside of this method is the time and excessive cost involved, which is why few national polling organizations gather their data this way. Instead, polling firms utilize telephone interviews as the primary means of gathering survey data. Telephone surveys are relatively quick and easy to organize, and computers are employed to dial telephone numbers randomly in order to achieve a prob- ability sample of the population. Since telephone survey questions can be difficult for the respondent to understand, they are designed to be as straightforward as possible and the length of the interview is typically kept short (less than 20 minutes) to maintain the attention and cooperation of the respondent. By far the cheapest method to gather data is the mail-administered survey, but response rates for method are often so low (less than 5% return rates, as opposed to the minimally acceptable 50% response rate) that polling firms hardly ever resort to this technique (Glynn et al., 1999, p. 73). In fact, most surveys that you typically receive in the mail are not scientific surveys at all, but thinly disguised marketing messages meant to raise awareness of a political candidate or prod- uct, or an appeal for money.

How do we measure success?

Ratings Share Conversions Clicks Awareness Engagement

Pros of public opinion polling

Reduced Uncertainty Efficient Cost-effective Provides relevant information -E.g. info on ratings for media companies

Spiral of silence

Reported public opinion may silence those whose opinions differ

Bandwagon effects

Research has also shown evidence for bandwagon effects. This occurs when individuals hear news reports of opinion polls that differ from their own opinion, which causes them to shift their outlook to match the majority opinion

Bandwagon effects and Underdog effects

Research has also shown evidence for bandwagon effects. This occurs when individuals hear news reports of opinion polls that differ from their own opinion, which causes them to shift their outlook to match the majority opinion. Underdog effects are the opposite of bandwagon effects. This happens when the public shifts its support to a minority position or political candidate. For example, if voters do not expect a political candidate to win (since opinion polls show that candidate trailing), they may vote for the candidate anyway. During election seasons when opinion polls are reported quite often in the news media, bandwagon effects are much more commonly found (Marsh, 1984). Morwitz and Pluzinski (1996) found evidence that both the bandwagon and underdog effects were contingent upon whether voters were paying close attention to the polls in an election, as well as their degree of support for a particular candidate. The more uncertain voters were about their candidate choice, the more likely they were to join the perceived majority opinion. During elections, the news media provide continual updates about which candidate is leading in the opinion polls. This is called horse race coverage. In a series of controlled experiments, Cappella and Jamieson (1997) discovered that poll-centered, strategy-oriented news cover- age of elections (as opposed to issue-oriented coverage) actually increased voter cynicism about politics in general.

response effects

Response effects occur when some questions on a survey affect respondents' answers on others. For example, a survey in 1984 asked respondents about their interest in politics and then followed that question with more specific questions about some obscure political issues (Bishop, Oldendick, & Tuchfarber, 1984).

Rosengren's theories

Rosengren took Maslow's theories as the starting point for understanding the uses and gratifications associated with media use. The fulfillment of some needs as a precondition for the satisfaction of other needs became a central tenet of the uses and gratifications paradigm. As Maslow argued, "Our needs usually emerge only when more prepotent needs have been gratified. Thus gratification has an important role in motivation theory. Apart from this, how- ever, needs cease to play an active determining or organizing role as soon as they are gratified" (1970, p. 30). Rosengren added to this individualistic notion of needs intra-individual charac- teristics such as personality variables and extra-individual characteristics such as social posi- tion, along with other variables such as the structure of the media and to arrive at a more complete paradigm for modeling how and why people choose different sorts of media. (Sullivan 115)

Cons of public opinion polling

Sampling issues data manipulation manufactured opinions Debate becomes numbers Self-reports Wording issues

long term effects of media violence

Scholars also began looking closely at the long-term effects of television exposure on children for evidence of media effects. For example, a 10-year longitudinal study of 436 children was conducted by Eron, Huesmann, Lefkowitz, & Walder (1972) to understand the impact of television exposure on later childhood development. The researchers discov- ered that the TV viewing habits of 8-year-old boys were predictive of their aggressive behavior throughout their childhood and later into adolescence. The research team con- tinued to follow the children into their twenties (Huesmann, 1986) and even their thirties (Huesmann, Moise-Titus, Podolski, & Eron, 2003), and the findings remained strikingly consistent: children who were in the upper 20% of television exposure were significantly higher on measures of aggression than the study's other participants. Thus, negative impacts of television violence may last much longer than some scholars had anticipated.

Research on Persuasive messages

Scholars became fascinated by the prospect that individuals might be susceptible to persuasive messages distributed via the mass media. A myriad number of questions remained, however: What types of media and what aspects of the specific media message would prove most persuasive for audiences? Under what conditions might audiences shift their attitudes and behaviors as a result of experiencing a message?

How do our engagement and interaction with media reach to our responses, undertakings, meaning-making?

Social media as content distributor Misattribution of real images Manipulated/ synthesized content

Evolution of Media Effects

Stage 1: Direct effects Stage 2: Limited effects and Indirect effects Stage 3: Ecological Approach

Feedback information and implications of feedback

Since individuals in democracies do not live under the constant surveillance of a police state, institutions must turn to more indirect means for gathering feedback from the citi- zenry. This feedback takes many forms such as public opinion polling, audience ratings, and market surveys. There are some important implications to consider here. First, these forms of feedback always involve a time delay because of the nature of the process: Mea- suring audiences is complicated, costly, and sometimes slow, therefore the feedback pro- vided always reflects the past rather than the present. Secondly, because most modern, industrialized societies are extremely large, the feedback solicited by institutions will always be incomplete since there are simply too many people in the audience to provide input on any one issue (and institutions would not be able to adequately process all of that information even if it were possible to gather it all). Sampling the audience is therefore necessary. Thirdly, the process for gathering feedback from the audience is often subject to institu- tional pressures. This means that social institutions have particularized ways of knowing about message receivers because their techniques for information gathering and process- ing often reflect institutional motives and needs. For example, you might experience a plethora of complex reactions to a program that you see on television, but those reactions are of little concern to audience measurement firms like the Nielsen Corporation. These firms only need to know who was present in the audience in order to fulfill their business contract with an advertiser. This disconnect between how you understand yourself and how audience measurement firms understand you might not seem that strange or prob- lematic until you realize that institutions make critical decisions that can constrain the universe of actions or choices available to you. Indeed, governments, law enforcement, and the legal system have the power of life or death in their hands (Douglas, 1986). Returning to Giddens's theory of structuration, this means that institutions are powerful structures that can affect individual agency. Thus, while forms of audience measurement may be crude and imprecise, these constructions have real power to change decisions that affect millions of people. For this reason, it is critical that we understand how and why these institutions construct audiences.

Peripheral processing

The ELM model also suggested a second- ary route to persuasion, however, called peripheral processing. When the motivation or ability to process a message is low, then the receiver is likely to take a "cognitive shortcut" to process the message by making a quick decision about the message based on a periph- eral cue (such as the background music or other emotional cue) (Petty, Brinol, & Priester, 2009). Peripheral processing could therefore provide a "backdoor" for a weak argument to persuade a receiver, though the persuasive effects of this type of processing are typically not as long lasting as centrally processed messages.

Payne Fund Studies

The Payne Fund, a philanthropic organization founded to encourage adolescents to take up reading, took up the cause against the movies by hiring William Short, the executive director of the Motion Picture Research Council (another private educational group), to organize a large- scale research project to generate scientific evidence about the deleterious effects of the movies. Short himself was "convinced that commercial interests had captured what was a powerful tool for education and morality and were producing movies that undermined the moral education of youth" (Jansen, 2008, p. 82). In 1927, Short began the process of invit- ing scholars from a number of fields such as education, sociology, and psychology to con- duct systematic research into the effects of motion pictures on America's youth. The Payne Fund Studies, as they came to be known, explored numerous types of effects of the movies, including physical and emotional impacts, effects on racial attitudes and beliefs, self- identity, and factual learning and retention. The project culminated in a sizeable 13-volume report, which was published in 1933. While an extensive overview of the studies is beyond the scope of this chapter, some highlights of the findings are outlined below. One of the questions addressed by the research was the influence of motion pictures on adults' and children's retention of factual information. George Stoddard, director of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station at the University of Iowa, and a graduate student, P. W. Holaday, conducted a series of experiments in which they showed feature-length films to children in different age groups (1933). To measure information retention, the researchers gave the children a fact quiz six weeks and three months after they had seen the films. They found that 60% of children could recall specific details about the films they saw, though the retention of information increased for films with exciting action sequences and for films that featured contexts that were beyond the world experiences of the children. In another study, psychologists Shuttleworth and May (1933) developed a questionnaire with inventories of children's attitudes toward categories of people and ethical situations, including questions about their own moviegoing habits and performance in school. After conducting surveys with approximately 1,400 children and comparing movie "fans" to those with sparse movie attendance, only small differences were observed: Movie fans had slightly lower grades in school but were more liked by their peers. The lack of conclusive results about the impact of movie attendance on these behavioral and attitude measures was a source of concern for William Short, who urged the researchers to keep looking for a connection (Jowett et al., 1996, p. 68). A clearer link between film exposure and attitude change was observed by Ruth Peterson and L.L. Thurstone (1933). This study loomed particularly large in the larger Payne Fund research project, because Thurstone's pioneering work on quantifying and measuring attitudes was considered crucial to finding specific evidence of motion picture effects (Jowett et al., 1996, p. 67). In their experiments, Peterson and Thurstone selected sixteen different feature films that presented either favorable or unfavorable views about one of a number of topics, such as antiwar sentiment (All Quiet on the Western Front) or anti- Black sentiment (Birth of a Nation). In experiments that investigated both single and multiple film effects on different children ranging in age from sixth through 12th grades, children's attitudes were measured two weeks before exposure to films and then again afterward. While some individual films had little if any effect on attitudes toward themes or ethnic groups portrayed in the films, other films demonstrated a measurable impact. In a study which measured attitudes of more than 400 high school students with little exposure to African Americans, for instance, exposure to the racist film Birth of a Nation substantially lessened viewers' favorability toward Blacks. Peterson and Thurstone dis- covered a cumulative effect as well: When two or three films were shown that expressed very similar views, the effects on children's attitudes were much more pronounced than with single film exposures. he Payne Fund Studies also contained research on more immediate and visceral impacts of the movies. Christian Ruckmick and graduate student Wendell Dysinger, both from the University of Iowa psychology department, were fascinated by the physiological and emotional responses of children to motion pictures (1933). In their studies, they attached children to heart monitors and galvanometers in order to capture real-time mea- surements of children's heart rates, blood pressure, and sweaty palms as indicators of excitement, arousal, and fear. Children in their study screened adventure and romance films that were in circulation at the time, such as Charlie Chan's Chance and The Feast of Ishtar. Responses to films varied according to the children's age. For instance, scenes of danger and tragedy had a powerful effect on children up to age nine, but then began decreasing steadily among teens and adults. On the other hand, responses to erotic or romantic scenes were muted among seven- to ten-year-olds, but grew in intensity among 10- and 11-year-olds, only to peak in the 16-year-old viewers. (Sullivan 32) Ultimately, the Payne Fund Studies found limited evidence of negative media effects on youth However, the way the results were communicated to the public left an impression that media, particularly movies were a powerful fanger to American Youth.

Power

The ability of one person or group to shape the decisions and well-being of another person or group relative to the decisions or well-being of the second group in a scenario without the first group the story of the audience is always closely connected to the ways in which the audience is defined and by whom.

Audiences as unpaid labor

The audience commodity - audiences perform labor for advertisers The question of leisure, time, and value Disappearing line between ad and content

Structure

The concept of structure refers to any type of social behavior or set of interactions or relationships between human beings that is reproduced over time. Social structures are most visible when they are enshrined in an institutional form; in other words, there are organizations or institutions (such as the church, the government, the education system, etc.) that maintain a particular type of status quo in society, thereby circumscribing the actions of members of society in a particular way. These structures don't simply constrain our actions, however.

the mass audience concept

The definition of the mass audience concept was most famously outlined by early 20th century sociologist Herbert Blumer (1954, p. 370), who argued that this new type of audience included two distinguishing features: (1)membership from "all walks of life, and from all distinguishable social strata" and (2) anonymity marked by little interaction or exchange among individuals. In contrast to the 19th-century notion of crowds, a mass audience is loosely organized and unable to act as a unified whole because individuals are geographically dispersed, con- nected only via their spectatorship of a particular medium. Consequently, Blumer's notion of the mass is largely that of an undifferentiated, impersonal collective that is "devoid of the features of a society or a community" (1954, p. 370). (Sullivan 23

horse race coverage

The more uncertain voters were about their candidate choice, the more likely they were to join the perceived majority opinion. During elections, the news media provide continual updates about which candidate is leading in the opinion polls. This is called horse race coverage

Power details

The more you can achieve your individual goals without hindrance from other structures or individuals or the more you can influence others in order to obtain those goals, the more power you have. We tend to think of power as vested in particular types of institutional authority such as the police or the courts or even in political leadership. The classic view of power in political science involves "the making of decisions on issues over which there is an observable conflict of (subjective) interests, seen as express policy preferences, revealed by political participation." However a more sociological definition of power recognizes that it is omnipresent and relational in nature, encased from individual and from institutional to individual, rarely with any kind of direct coercion from one agent toward another, A more precise definition of power, therefore, would be similar to the one offered by Bartlett, who wrote that power involves "the ability of one actor to alter the decisions made and/or welfare experienced by another actor relative to the choices that would have been made and/or that would have been experienced had the actor not existed or acted."

The shifting public sphere

The representative public spheres (Middle Ages) -The king represents the embodiment of the public The bourgeois public sphere (18th Century) -Jurgen Habermas The public as a social process emerging through conversation among citizens Emergence of the will of the "people -Social distance shrinking Public spaces for conversation-French salons and English coffee houses

Question wording effects

The researchers then reversed the question order and found that, when asked the obscure policy issues first, respondents were much less likely to describe them- selves as interested in politics. Question-wording effects occur when shifts in survey responses are the result of the way in which the question is asked.

systematic forms of error

There will always be some amount of random error in quantitative surveys. However, public opinion surveying is also prone to more systematic forms of error that results from the mechanics of the measurement process; something that Zaller (1992, pp. 32-33) calls "response effects" and "question-wording effects."

Source Credibility

They also discovered that communica- tions from a source perceived to be low in credibility would be seen as more biased and unfair than from a high credibility source. Thus, source credibility, or the degree to which a message receiver perceived the source of the message to be credible, emerged as a major factor in determining whether or not attitude change took place in the receiver. This effect was a short-term effect, however, since people tended to disassociate a message from its source over time (Kelman & Hovland, 1953)

mass society theory

Tönnies' ideas about the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft had a profound impact on the development of the field of sociology in the 20th century (Kamenka, 1965). It also shaped a new way of thinking about the vulnerability of audiences to forms of mass media in urban, industrialized environments by giving rise to the Mass Society Theory. Mass Society Theory assumes that Tönnies' claims about the isolated nature of individuals living in modern, urban environments are correct and then imagines the role that media such as newspapers, magazines, and motion pictures might play in such a society. The theory pos- its that these forms of media are a malignant force in society because they have the capac- ity to directly influence the attitudes and behaviors of individuals. Modern audiences are vulnerable to media influence precisely because they are anonymous city dwellers who have been cut off from their families, communities, cultural traditions and other social institutions. Forms of mass media, then, serve to further isolate individuals, debase culture as a whole, and generally result in social decline (for a recent overview of the notion of the mass, see Lang & Lang, 2009).

Leading questions

Trying to get specific answer using wording, directionality

Underdog effect

Underdog effects are the opposite of bandwagon effects. This happens when the public shifts its support to a minority position or political candidate. For example, if voters do not expect a political candidate to win (since opinion polls show that candidate trailing), they may vote for the candidate anyway

public opinion

We tend to think of public opinion in terms of poll results that we read about in the newspapers or online. However, the notion that the public is essentially created via the machinery of polling is a relatively recent innovation. In its more general meaning, public opinion refers to "group consensus about matters of public concern which has developed in the wake of informed discussion" (Graber, 1982, p. 556). The purpose of this group consensus is to communicate public sentiment and policy preferences back to government. For example, Speier (1950) understands public opinion as "primarily a communication from the citizens to their government" (p. 376). Feedback from the citizenry to those in power is an essential feature of a participatory democracy. As we'll see in this brief overview, the type of feed- back from citizens to the state has wide-reaching implications.

institutions

We will focus our attention on the strategies with which institutions actively construct notions of the audience through different research methodologies. The term institution here refers to "complex social forms that reproduce themselves such as governments, the family, human languages, universities, hospitals, business corporations, and legal systems" (S. Miller, 2011). Sociologist Anthony Giddens (1986, p. 24) notes that institutions "by defi- nition are the more enduring features of social life." We will be considering a number of important institutions in our society, such as the government, the press, and the media marketplace.

Media Audiences Observation

We're going to need technological solutions but I don't think they're going to solve the problem....I think it's a societal problem - a human problem.

effects paradigm

While the scope of the research in the effects tradition is vast, there are some clearly iden- tifiable characteristics that define this research tradition. The operative notion in the effects paradigm is that the audience exists in a naturally occurring state that can be interrupted and dramatically changed thanks to specific media messages. The notion of the anonymous, powerless mass audience is no longer the dominant assumption in effects research. Never- theless, the media effects literature approaches the audience as a collective that potentially requires protection from dangerous outside influences

Problems with Quantitative measurement of public opinion

Zaller (1992) notes several inherent problems with the quantitative measure- ment of public opinion. For instance, the public may seem overly fickle, since their responses on similar questions will be seem to shift markedly over time. This might simply be an indication that individuals carefully monitor events in the media and adjust their views on an ongoing basis. However, psychological research on attitudes (see Chapter 2) has found strong evidence that individuals' true attitudes are quite stable over time. A more plausible explanation is that the shift in responses is due to "measurement error." Stated differently, because surveys (1) measure a small sample of the population; and (2) attempt to measure complicated concepts through a questionnaire, then there is a "chance variation" that can creep into the results. This means that the survey is not measuring the public's "true" opinion as accurately as we might wish.

Priming

activating particular associations in memory Repreated priming can have long term effects

Desensitization

diminished response to stimuli after repeated exposure

if you were "part of the audience" for the season premiere of your favorite television program

if you were "part of the audience" for the season premiere of your favorite television program last night, you may be referring to the fact that you were viewing a particular media program in the comfort of your home at the same time as millions of other people in "the audience" were doing the same if you were "part of the audience" for the season premiere of your favorite television program last night, you may be referring to the fact that you were viewing a particular media program in the comfort of your home at the same time as millions of other people in "the audience" were doing the same thing. In the second example, you were viewing the same media source as millions of other people, but you were not located in the same space. Indeed, cramming 6 million viewers of a television program into one physical location would create chaos and confusion.

Func- tional theory

looks to understand why people do what they do. It considers individuals to be rational, decision-making creatures whose actions can be understood within particular social contexts (see Wright, 1959, for an overview of this perspective in mass communica- tion research).

Mobile Privatization

mobile privatization, which refers to "a pattern of social life characterized by high mobility, a consequent uprootedness, and the construction and valorization of privatized family homes whose contents were both easily transportable and conducive to isolation from the surrounding community." Unlike agrarian economies where work (production) and leisure (consumption) happens in the same physical and social spaces, capitalism has created a divide between the spaces of production—where workers expect to be closely monitored by their employers—and spaces of leisure—where the home and domestic sphere are separated from the public realm and individuals are granted autonomy and privacy. This divide, notes Streeter, has been ingrained into the fabric of our modern lives in terms of space (we live sometimes far away from work sites) and time (days are for work, nights are for leisure), as well as in the social structure.

Plato beliefs on the role of the public

public opinion worthy of respect but should not drive decision making -Philosopher-kings, experts -Reliance on science and universal truths

Why were people impacted by the world of wars broadcast?

radio listeners were Primed to believe in the radio as a trustworthy source of news, hundreds of thousands of listeners panicked when they heard Welles' broadcast

Social Learning Theory

the theory that we learn social behavior by observing and imitating and by being rewarded or punished

If onewere to say "I was in the audience" for a movies, you mean you were one of a number of individuals witnessing a media event at the same time and place.

you mean you were one of a number of individuals witnessing a media event at the same time and place. In the first example, your audience experience was both a temporal (paying attention to the sam thing at the same time as others) and a physical one: you were sitting along with other strangers in a darkened theatre.

Consequences of the payne fund studies

Despite the somewhat mixed results regarding the impacts of motion pictures on chil- dren's attitudes, emotional health, and behaviors, the lasting impression left by the Payne Fund Studies was that the movies represented a powerful and inherent danger to American youth. This perception was fueled mainly by Short's public interpretation of the findings and by some of the more reformist-minded scholars who contributed research to the proj- ect. Chief among these reformers was University of Chicago sociologist Herbert Blumer, who conducted a qualitative study that compared the autobiographical reflections of middle-class high school students with those of juvenile delinquents (1933). A reformer by nature and a critic of the movies, Blumer was interested to see if he could uncover a con- nection between motion picture exposure and delinquency. In one of his two reports submitted to the Payne Fund Studies, Blumer built upon Le Bon's ideas about emotional contagion by using a concept called "emotional possession" to describe the sway that the moviegoing experience had on young viewers. The effects of this on the individual were so strong, argued Blumer, that "even his efforts to rid himself of it by reasoning with himself may prove of little avail" (Butsch, 2008, p. 45). While Blumer ultimately discovered only a tenuous connection between juvenile delinquency and moviegoing, the notion of emo- tional contagion—the viral-like spread of emotional states and attitudes from one indi- vidual to another, facilitated through mass media—captured the public's concern once again, drawing attention back to earlier concerns that had been so powerfully perpetuated by Le Bon's and Münsterberg's research. Fears about the persuasive impact of motion pic- tures were largely transferred to the medium of radio, which began to rise in importance in the late 1920s. (Sullivan 33)

Framing

Further research has uncovered the ability of the news media to affect not just the salience of particular issues for the public, but also the types of conclusions that the public draws about those issues. A number of studies have closely examined news fram- ing. Framing occurs when journalists or media producers "select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation" (Entman, 1993, p. 52). For example, in political campaigns some candidates may be considered by the press as the "frontrunner" in the race, and this particular med ia frame has consequences for voter perceptions of the candidate. A number of studies in the 1980s and 1990s uncovered empirical evidence that media frames can affect "how people interpret the news and the judgments they form after viewing or reading the news" (Perse, 2001, p. 106). For instance, a classic book by Iyengar and Kinder (1987) found that news reports not only shape citizens' aware- ness of public issues, but they also provide citizens a conceptual framework within which to understand these stories. A follow-up book (Iyengar, 1994) found that media frames directed respondents toward specific policy solutions for social and economic problems.

Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)

A significant advance in the study of the per- suasion process occurred with the discovery of the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986a, 1986b). The model maps out the process by which an individual forms an attitude about an object, event, or experience. Petty and Cacioppo's significant contribution to the study of persuasion was their contention that an individual's suscepti- bility to a persuasive message was directly related to their motivation to process the mes- sage. If the message is of perceived relevance to the receiver, and the receiver is able to process the message, then she may engage in central processing. In this case, the receiver carefully attends to the message, evaluates the information, and makes a reasoned judg- ment based on a number of factors (including the arguments made and the credibility of the source) and, ultimately, may accept or reject the information. Central processing rep- resented the type of classic learning theory that had been characteristic of earlier work in persuasion, including Hovland's World War II research.

Both agency and structure

Agency and structure are closely related to one another, since through our actions we essentially alter and reproduce social structures. Think about the example of the social structure known as the educational system from the previous paragraph. This institution continues to exist only because the actions of hundreds of thousands of human beings continually reinforce this system by recognizing the value of education, by financially supporting it, and by sanctioning those who do not participate in the system. Indeed, by attending classes, taking notes writing papers, and taking exams, students also become willing participants in this institutional structure, and by so doing continually support the existence of that structure

Rubin theories

Alan M. Rubin is one of the most recognized scholars in the uses and gratifications paradigm. Along with his students, he was among the first to map out the area of motives and their relationship to various media uses (see Haridakis & Whitmore, 2006). In a series of studies in the early 1980s (A. M. Rubin, 1983, 1984, 1985), he found that audiences' uses for television could be divided into two broad categories. Ritualized audiences tended to use TV more habitually, watching in order to consume time or to be diverted from other activities. These viewers often did not particularly care what type of television programs they viewed. In contrast, instrumental audiences would search for specific kinds of message content, often seeking out and selecting informational material in a purposive way, suggesting greater care and selectivity over media as well as increased involvement with the programming itself. In a large-scale survey of 1,836 college students in 11 different universities around the United States, Rubin asked about levels of daytime TV soap opera viewing, along with questions about how much students identified with the characters in the soaps, how religiously they watched, how satisfied they were with their own lives, and their level of social activity (A. M. Rubin, 1985). Based upon the results, these college viewers' motives for watching TV soaps were separated into four broad cat- egories: orientation, avoidance, diversion, and social utility (see Figure 5.4). Rubin found that viewers differed on their motives for watching TV according to their levels of social activity, life satisfaction, and affinity for soap operas. For instance, those individuals who tended to watch soap operas for avoidance or social utility were also those who were more involved with soap operas. These individuals also indicated lower levels of life satisfaction. This study, like other uses and gratifications research on both news and entertainment media, draws connections between media use motives and other attitudes or behaviors. For a more recent example of this type of study, see Box 5.1. (Sullivan 118)

Criticisms of public opinion surveys

Although modern surveys conducted using probability sampling techniques have been shown to be quite accurate reflections of the attitudes and behaviors of large populations, critics and scholars have continued to debate whether these new techniques enhance or undermine our political discourse. This section briefly lays out some important criticisms of public opinion as expressed through quantitative surveys. These critiques focus on two key claims: (1) that the institutionalization of opinion polling in the 20th century has carried us far afield from the type of engaged, rational discussion of the Enlightenment period; and (2) that some of the inherent weaknesses of the survey method can skew the findings, thereby creating a false and artificial sense of public opinion today.

public opinion more

Although the term "public opinion" is used quite often in our popular discourse, scholars have devised numerous definitions of the term. In part, this has to do with the goals of the people defining the public in particular ways. As Glynn, Herbst, Shapiro, & O'Keefe (1999, p. 56) note, "who is a member of the public is always shifting, depending upon historical context and the agendas of those measuring public opinion" (see Figure 3.1).

issues with survey research

Another important issue in survey research is that the individuals chosen randomly to participate often choose not to do so. Large, professional polling organizations typically obtain survey participation rates of 70% to 80% (meaning that 70-80% of respondents who are initially contacted choose to participate in the survey) (Glynn et al., 1999, p. 71). Low response rates can endanger the generalizability of the findings, particularly when the types of individuals who decline to participate are systematically different from the survey participants. Selecting potential survey respondents became much easier beginning in the 1930s and 1940s because most Americans were listed in public records such as telephone books and mailing lists (Glynn et al., 1999, p. 66). More recently, however, pollsters have become worried that representative samples of Americans will become more difficult to find in the next decade. The problem is that many Americans are canceling their land- line telephones in favor of mobile phones, which are not listed in telephone directories. A recent study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that approx- imately 7.1% of Americans were from "cell-only" households (Keeter, 2007). Worse yet, the Pew Center study revealed that these cell-only citizens differed systematically from their landline peers: They were much younger, more likely to be African American or Hispanic, and less likely to be married or own a home. Although the net impact of cell-only indi- viduals on nationwide poll results is still small, this sampling problem will continue to increase as more Americans adopt mobile phones over landlines

Liebert and Baron (1972)

Another study by Liebert and Baron (1972) determined that children who watched even a short selection from a violent television program were more willing to show aggression to other children. This aggression was measured by chil- dren turning a handheld dial that they were told would either help or hurt another child's chance to get a prize. Like the Payne Fund Studies 40 years earlier, the Surgeon General's Report stoked fears that children were uniquely vulnerable to the powerful influence of the media. The fact that children's access to television was only as far away as their living rooms prompted further discussions in government and industry about how to protect children from potentially damaging content.

political economy of communication.

As the Wal-Mart example suggests, the concentration of information about the behavior of individuals in the hands of a single organization or corporation can have powerful consequences for consumers, even though we may not even realize that we are being monitored. A research tradition that examines these fundamental issues of power and access to resources in the communications industries is called the political economy of communication.

Surveys

Beginning in the 1930s, the survey became the most widely utilized research method for measuring public opinion. A survey (or poll) refers to a quantitative research technique for counting or describing characteristics of a population (Glynn et al., 1999, p. 68). Public opinion surveys are guided by a number of methodological considerations that are described below. In general, opinion surveys construct "the public" as a numerical aggre- gate of individual, private opinions in response to questions about political issues and policies. This means that quantification is a critical aspect of the process of measuring public opinion today. Surveys are most often cross-sectional, meaning that they are con- ducted at a single point in time to capture a snapshot of the public's views on issues. This model is far removed from the types of political discussions that took place in the salons and coffee houses of the 18th century, but it has come to define the parameters of "public opinion" in our modern era. (Sullivan 62)

Salons

In fact, the public emerged as a social process that was created through conversation between citizens (Peters, 1995, p. 9). These conversations were facilitated through the devel- opment of the English coffee house and the French salon (see Figure 3.2). Salons provided a physical space wherein men (and sometimes women) could gather for conversation that was not sponsored or controlled by the state. The salon "was an experiment in equality that assumed paradigmatic importance within a hierarchically organized society" (Speier, 1950, p. 381). Salons were important not just because citizens could speak together about politics, but because these were some of the first places were the citizens' opinions could be assessed by other citizens as well as the ruling regime (Herbst, 1995a, p. 52). We should be clear that the 18th-century notion of the public did not refer to universal citizenship. Rather, the con- cept of the public reflected the growing economic and political power of the middle class, which emerged as a potential threat to the entrenched monarchies and aristocracies of the feudal period. The notion of the public was therefore "less a signifier of democracy than a shift in power toward an educated, property-owning middle class" (Lewis, 2001, p. 23). Some scholars have critiqued Habermas' celebration of the bourgeois public sphere as a model for democratic citizenship because of the restricted access of many citizens to the political arena, particularly women and minority groups (Benhabib, 1992; Fraser, 1990).

Public Opinion, Lippmann (1922)

In his book Public Opinion, Lippmann (1922) argued that individual citizens had neither the time nor the resources to be able to develop complex and reasoned responses to national or inter- national events. Instead, they relied chiefly on elites in the news media to gather intelligence on those events in their place. In this sense, it was somewhat misleading to claim that public opinion was an independent entity. In his follow-up to Public Opinion called The Phantom Public, Lippmann (1993, p. 147) took his argument further to suggest that the entire notion of the public is an artificial fiction based upon a "mystical notion of Society." The public, he argued, most often performed the role of bystanders who are more interested in their own personal lives than they are in the affairs of state. Indeed, two researchers in the 1990s found that a sample of American citizens could answer only 4 out of 10 basic questions about civics, such as the name of their U.S. representative, the stands of key politicians, or what party controlled the U.S. Senate (Carpini & Keeter, 1997). Lippmann argued that there was a small number of knowledgeable people who possessed the power to make changes in economic and political affairs (called "agents"). Thus, Lippmann urged the abandonment of the myth contained in public opinion polling that all citizens were equally engaged in the issues.

agenda-setting effect.

In the classic democratic model, citizens discuss issues that are relevant to their lives and these issues are then dutifully reported by the news media so that they can filter up to political elites. This is reminiscent of the type of press found back in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the news consisted of summaries of what citizens talked about in public places such as taverns and salons. However, groundbreaking research in the early 1970s discovered that this classic model had been reversed in our modern era. McCombs and Shaw (1972) examined national and regional news coverage of the 1968 presidential elec- tion to compile a list of the top issues of the presidential campaign, which they dubbed the news agenda. They compared the news agenda with public opinion polls asking a representative sample of voters which issues were more salient to them (the public agenda) and found that the news agenda profoundly shaped what voters thought was important. The ability of the mass media to transfer the salience of items and their attributes from the news agenda to the public was called the agenda-setting effect (see Figure 3.4).In the past 40 years, hundreds of research studies have found empirical support for agenda- setting (Dearing & Rogers, 1996; McCombs & Reynolds, 2009). More recent studies have demonstrated that media agenda-setting can even trump our own personal experiences in directing our opinions about important public issues. For example, a survey conducted in Washington, DC, found that exposure to local news stories about city crime increased respondents' awareness of crime as an important local political issue (Gross & Aday, 2003). Interestingly, Gross and Aday found that respondents' personal experiences with crime had no agenda-setting effect.

Consistency Theory

One of the major theoretical advances to come out of Hovland's Yale research group was consistency theory. Consistency theorists argued that the human being's drive for cognitive consistency (the mental agreement between someone's beliefs about an object or event) was the prime motivator for all human behavior. The assumption of the theory was that when individuals are exposed to information that is inconsistent with their previously held beliefs, they will experience confusion and tension. For example, if you are a cigarette smoker and you have a desire and expectation that you will live a long life, when you encounter informa- tion that provides conclusive evidence that smoking causes cancer, then you will be moti- vated to resolve this inconsistency by changing your behavior (e.g., giving up cigarettes). The most famous and controversial theory of cognitive consistency is Leon Festinger's (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance. Festinger's claim was that the need for cognitive consis- tency was so strong (and the discomfort felt by individuals by inconsistency was so great) that individuals will rationalize their actions to relieve the inconsistency.

Bandura studies

One of the most memorable studies included in the report was by psychologist Albert Bandura, who was interested in social learning theory, or how children are socialized by their environment. In Bandura's (1965) study, children observed an adult model beating an inflatable plastic Bobo doll in an experimental setting. In one experimental condition, the adult model was chastised for this behavior and in another condition the adult model was not chastised. Children who did not witness the adult model being reprimanded for the aggressive behavior were more likely to play aggres- sively when left alone in a room with the Bobo doll. Bandura observed, however, that even children who did not demonstrate aggressive play could still reproduce the behavior when asked to do so by an adult. Bandura's research was the first to provide empirical evidence that children imitate adult models, which suggested that children were internalizing behav- iors they witnessed on television

Ways pollsters get there questions

One of the most significant challenges in conducting survey research is crafting the language of each question to be clear, concise, and understandable to a broad range of respondents. Survey questions that initially seem straightforward can potentially lead to respondent confusion, thereby obscuring the "true" opinion that is being measured. For example, pollsters attempt to avoid leading questions, which can steer respondents to give a particular answer even if it is not the best representation of their views. So, if a survey question asks "What do you see as the benefits of a tax cut for the American economy?" the respondent may be primed to think only about the positive aspects of a reduction in the tax rate rather than other negative consequences. Pollsters also try to avoid double-barreled questions, which occur when two separate issues are inadvertently combined into a single question, leading to respondent confusion. An example of a double-barreled question might be, "Do you support President Obama's economic stim- ulus proposal or do you think it doesn't provide enough tax cuts?" Here there are two questions rolled into one: whether or not the respondent supports the stimulus proposal and what specific aspects of the proposal are individually supported. To correct the problem,questions such as these need to be broken into their constituent parts and reframed as separate issues to avoid respondent confusion. We'll address some of the problems with question wording in the next section.

Katz notion

One of these early studies, by Elihu Katz and his colleagues, investigated audience uses for a number of different mass media. Katz et al. started with the notion that individuals bring to their media use a pre-existing set of desires and expectations—what they termed "needs." In order to come up with a list of these needs to better understand the use of media among audiences in Israel, they consulted the "(largely speculative) literature of the social and psychological functions of mass media"

Magic Bullets

Social psychologists and sociologists were hastily recruited by the federal gov- ernment to study how to perfect propaganda and counterpropaganda. The U.S. War Department was particularly concerned about the seeming effectiveness of the German propaganda machine in persuading Germans to back the policies of Hitler's Nazi gov- ernment. It was clear that some media messages could achieve powerful effects under certain conditions, but the researchers working under the auspices of the government attempted to determine which "magic bullets" could alter attitudes on a mass scale.

Survey Methodology

Sociologist Herbert Blumer (1969, pp. 201-202) was similarly critical of the concept of public opinion, though he was much more concerned with the mechanics of the survey methodology itself. Blumer argued against the notion of public opinion as a "quantitative distribution of individual opinions." Instead, he considered public opinion to be an organic outgrowth of social relationships be tween everyday people. What surveys accomplished, he argued, was the transformation of democratic debate into columns of numbers and symbols. Not only did this rob the public of the ability to have a vigorous debate about the issues, but the survey instrument essentially denied its own existence and presented polling data as fact. It also removed the need for public discussion of the issues, since public opinion is registered anonymously. In this sense, "citizens do not themselves produce public opinion today; it must be generated through the machinery of polling. The power to constitute the public space, then, falls into the hands of the experts, not of the citizens" (Peters, 1995, p. 20). Habermas (1991) added that opinion polling reintroduces the representative public sphere by placing the power to define public opinion in the hands of elite pollsters.

Audiences as a commodity

Some audiences are more valuable than others -Age -Race -Gender -HHI -Location -Psychographics What does this mean for less valued demos?

Video Game Violence and Effects

Television continues to be a dominant source of news and entertainment in people's lives; our 21st-century lives are now full of technologies that can reach audiences any- where, anytime. Incidents like the Virginia Tech shooting have focused the public's atten- tion on a relative newcomer to the media scene: computer and video games. In the 1980s, American children played video games roughly four hours per week, but more recent estimates indicate that the average is now around 13 hours per week (Anderson et al., 2008). There is an expanding volume of scholarly work that examines the impacts of video games on audiences. Many of these studies have adopted the effects theories from earlier research on television and aggression to consider what types of impacts modern video games might have on child and adult audiences (Sullivan 46) For example, Anderson and Dill (2000) surveyed college students about their use of various types of video games. They found that the students who said they spent more time playing video games also reported more aggressive and delinquent behaviors. They also set up a laboratory experiment in which students were assigned to play either a violent or a nonviolent video game. In the laboratory setting, those playing the violent video game displayed more aggressive behaviors toward peers. A comparative study of American and Japanese children also found that respondents who indicated a higher level of violent video game play were more likely to report aggressive actions and feelings over time (Anderson et al., 2008). A meta-analysis of the research on video games and aggression in 2001 found that data from about 30 independent investigations seemed to show a "small effect of video game play on aggression, and the effect is smaller than the effect of violent television on aggression" (Sherry, 2001, p. 427). A follow-up review later in the decade (Lee, Peng, & Park, 2009) found that Sherry's conclusion was still relevant for research on the transference of emotional or behavioral aggression from violent video games to audiences. Lee, Peng, and Park noted, however, that video game addiction (an inability to stop playing video games) had become a source of concern. Scholars have also begun investigating the effects of video games through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to detect whether the areas of the brain that control aggression are activated during exciting, first-person shooter games (Weber, Ritterfeld, & Mathiak, 2006). Thus, despite the intense public interest in isolated cases like the shootings at Columbine High School in 1999 and Virginia Tech in 2007, the research has found only small, negative effects from video game play, though the field of video game research is still relatively new.

Changes in television

The arrival of television in American homes in the 1950s heralded a new era for the media. Now, audiences could experience visuals as well as sound right in their own living rooms. Along with the immersive experience of the movies, television carried the immediacy of radio with continually updated news, live sporting events, and entertainment programming. By 1959, approximately 88 percent of all Americans households owned a television set (roughly 50 million sets), making television the fastest growing media technology in history at that time (Schramm, Lyle, & Parker, 1961, p. 12). During the 1960s, however, parents, edu- cators, and cultural critics became concerned that much of the television diet available on the three networks (ABC, NBC, and CBS) consisted of cheap, overcommercialized fare such as game shows, violent dramas, and mindless comedies. The lack of quality programming on American television received nationwide attention in` 1961 when the then-chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Newton Minow, gave a speech to the National Association of Broadcasters in which he dubbed TV programming "a vast wasteland" (Minow, 2002). Concerns about television in the 1960s were in part a reflection of the growing unrest in American society. Americans were witnessing increasingly stark images of violence in the news thanks to the United States' deepening involvement in the Vietnam War, antiwar dem- onstrations on university campuses around the nation, and acts of civil disobedience to protest segregation policies against Blacks and other minorities. After the deeply troubling assassinations of key American political figures such as President Kennedy, his brother Robert, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., many began wondering whether vio- lence was becoming a nationwide epidemic.

What is an audience?

The definition of what we mean by an audience is... an abstraction, variable, fluid over time

Mass Media observation

The entire business model of these trillion-dollar companies is attention engineering

The war of the worlds

The event that crystallized critics' concerns about the power of radio was the War of the Worlds broadcast on October 30, 1938. The broadcast was a production of a radio drama program entitled Mercury Theatre on the Air on the CBS network: a weekly pro- gram of audio-only stage dramas (including classic works by Shakespeare) that featured the vocal and artistic talents of director Orson Welles and his troupe of classically trained actors. During this particular week, Welles and his creative collaborator John Houseman had decided to dramatize British author H. G. Wells' science-fiction classic from 1898, The War of the Worlds. Wells' first-person narrated novel follows the events of an imag- ined invasion of London by Martians. Welles and Houseman reimagined the novel for their radio drama by making several small but fateful changes to the narrative. They adopted the first-person narration of the original novel but changed the setting of the drama to take place in the United States with the small town of Grover's Mill, New Jersey, as the landing site for the fictional Martian invasion. After an initial introduction to the program by Welles himself set the stage for the drama, a fictional radio announcer took the microphone and informed listeners that they would be listening to a selection of musical pieces played by Ramon Raquello and his orchestra in the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York. The drama quickly shifted, however, when multiple news bulletins interrupted the music to inform listeners that a strange object had landed from space near Princeton, New Jersey. The broadcast skillfully wove in sup- posed eyewitness accounts of Martians attacking passersby and spreading their extrater- restrial conquest throughout the country. Radio listeners who had tuned into the Mercury Theatre program from the 8:00 p.m. start time were likely aware that the musical program they were listening to was part of the plot of the drama. There were many more, however, who tuned in late, thanks to a much more popular program on rival network NBC. Many of these "dial twisting" listeners believed that the broadcast was a news program and that accounts of alien invaders in New Jersey were happening in real time. Primed to believe in the radio as a trustworthy source of news, hundreds of thousands of listeners panicked when they heard Welles' broadcast. The reaction was strongest in the area immediately surrounding Princeton, New Jersey, where news reports indicated that families were rushing out of their homes with wet handkerchiefs and towels around their heads to ward off a gas attack (Cantril, 1940, p. 49). In all, an estimated 1 million people out of the several million who tuned into the broadcast were frightened by what they heard. (Sullivan 35)

Findings from the people's choice

The key finding of The People's Choice study—that the media may simply reinforce rather than persuade citizens about their voting choice—foreshadowed much of the post- war selectivity research. One interesting and unexpected finding from the Erie County study was that many respondents indicated that their conversations with others were more influential in their voting decisions than their media exposure. It was clear from the results that some individuals had acted as opinion leaders for others. In other words, these indi- viduals were regarded to be knowledgeable about a particular issue and were consulted by others as a source on that issue. Lazarsfeld vowed to follow up on this insight in subsequent research.

Abraham Maslow

The key to unlocking the notion of needs, argued Rosengren (1974) in one of the early books on uses and gratifications, was to turn to psychological literature. Rosengren noted that Abraham Maslow's (1970) theories of needs and human motivations could serve as the foundation for understanding how needs related to media uses. Maslow outlined a basic need hierarchy as the foundation for the motivation of all human beings, beginning with "physiological drives" that are necessary to maintain homeostasis ("the body's auto- matic efforts to maintain a constant, normal state of the blood stream") (1970, p. 15). Once basic survival needs such as food, water, and shelter were met, he argued, new "higher order" needs would emerge for the individual (see Figure 5.3). These included safety needs (or "security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, anxiety, and chaos"), followed by belongingness and love needs (such as "giving and receiving affection"), esteem needs (a "desire for a stable, firmly based, usually high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others") and self- actualization needs (which "refers to people's desire for self-fulfillment, namely, the tendency for them to become actualized in what they are potentially") (Maslow, 1970, pp. 20-22). Added to these higher order needs were basic "cognitive needs" such as the desire to know and understand (pp. 23-24) and "aesthetic needs" (p. 25).

Press role 18th century

The press began to play an increasingly important role in these new private discussion spaces. While monarchs had vigorously controlled printing during the feudal era, private printers emerged during the Enlightenment, thanks to increased patronage from the mer- chant middle class. Rather than extol the virtues of the feudal lord, this new liberated press aimed for a more realistic description of events in order to make the functions of the state more transparent. Ordinary citizens became the primary subject of the news. The goal of the press was simply to "publicize" or to provide a record of what individuals had said to one another in public places like coffee houses, taverns, and salons. The press, therefore, did not necessarily serve the kind of watchdog role that is most common today. Instead, it served as a vehicle of publicity and a "reflector of animated public conversation and argument" (Carey, 1995, p. 382). In this sense, the press facilitated the expansion of public conversa- tion beyond the confines of the salons and coffee houses, thereby creating a broader awareness of political issues. The press not only made things public, but it actually "made publics" by "opening up the affairs of state to citizens who had no other way of knowing" (Lewis, 2001, p. 25).

Straw Polls

The private nature of secret ballot elections created some trepidation among political leaders who could not directly access the public mood in advance of these elections. This uncertainty motivated politicians, political parties, and journalists to create a crude, quan- titative form of opinion polling in the 19th century called the straw poll (Herbst, 1995a, p. 69). Straw polls are oral or pen-and-paper surveys that measure the popularity of a political candidate or policy. This form of measurement seemed much more scientific than a political discussion held in a tavern or coffee house. However, there was little regularity to the methodology behind these polls, which led to sometimes conflicting results. In the highly partisan era of the mid-19th century, political candidates could always find a par- ticular straw poll that favored their interests (Herbst, 1995a, pp. 80-83). Nevertheless, straw polls often animated citizen discussions about the results, thereby building on the strong tradition of public discussion from earlier centuries (Herbst, 1995b).

Audience-as-mass

Think of audiences as large group of unconnected people Interested in drawing conclusions about large numbers of people Largely focused on powerful institutions, institutional constructions of audiences In this model, audiences are seen as "a large collection of people scattered across time and space who act autonomously and have little or no immediate knowledge of one another." Scholars and practitioners utilizing this model typically ask questions such as these: What kinds of media do people consume? How many and what types of people are in the audience? How might specific groups of people respond to a particular issue or policy position? As we'll explore in the second section of the text (chapters 3-4), public institutions (such as the government) and private organizations (like for-profit corporations) rely heavily on this notion of the audience, utilizing quantitative measurement techniques such as public opinion surveys and television ratings to gauge mass responses to specific stimuli. Often, however, these audience constructions say more about the logistical and strategic needs of the institutions creating them than they do about audience's own self-images and concerns.

The people's choice 1944

The study that became The People's Choice was designed to answer a basic question: To what extent did the radio and newspapers shape voters' choice in a presidential elec- tion? The test case was the 1940 presidential election between the incumbent president, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Republican Wendell Willkie. Lazarsfeld and his team selected Erie County, Ohio, as the main research site for a number of reasons. First, the small county of 43,000 residents was culturally homogeneous and had changed little in population size or character for 40 years. Secondly, the county had deviated little from national voting trends, making it a convenient microcosm for the country as a whole. Six hundred randomly selected respondents were given a telephone survey at various points throughout the 1940 campaign season, and their responses were compared with four control groups in different months to make sure that the repeated surveys were not biasing the results. Lazarsfeld wanted to know when voters made up their mind about how they would vote in the November election and whether their exposure to the news media affected their decision. The results revealed that very few voters actually changed their minds over the course of the campaign. In fact, voters' ultimate choices could be largely inferred in advance by looking at their socioeconomic status, religious affiliation, and age (a combined metric that was dubbed the "index of political participation"). With regard to media exposure, Lazarsfeld's team discovered that voters' reported news exposure served mainly to reinforce their latent predisposi- tion to vote either Democratic or Republican.

Propoganda

The term "propaganda" refers to the means to "disseminate or promote particular ideas" and it stems from the Latin term meaning "to propagate" or "to sow" (Jowett & O'Donnell, 2011, p. 2). In its modern usage, however, pro- paganda has taken on a more negative connotation, describing a deliberate attempt by one party to control or manage the information environment of another (or group) through the manipulation of symbols or psychology. Example: In a series of billboards and posters, Creel's commit- tee not only informed Americans of their responsibilities to preserve food and to buy war bonds, but also depicted the German army as evil and barbaric, which generated hard feelings among the pub- lic for the enemy (see Figure 2.2). The wartime propaganda effort was regarded by many to be highly successful in mobi- lizing the U.S. public and the industrial interests in the United States to fight a long, protracted war in Europe.

Effects of media violence

The theories of the mass audience that animated much early concern about motion pictures and radio gave way to the limited effects paradigm in the postwar years. This did not mean, however, that concerns about the potentially dangerous effects of media mes- sages evaporated. In fact, during the 1960s and 1970s, the increasingly important role of television in American households sparked new concerns about mediated violence, sexuality, and hyper-commercialization. A few of the major research projects conducted during the television era are outlined below. The main focus of concern was the potential impacts of television exposure on children: more specifically, how images of violence on television affected children's attitudes and behaviors. Many of these questions about the impacts of media violence have been transferred to the newer technology of computer and video games. We'll bring the chapter full circle by returning to the question of whether video-game violence can cause violent attitudes and behaviors like the kind we witnessed at Virginia Tech. (Sullivan 44)

Insights from the research on the news and pub- lic opinion

There are a number of insights to be gained from the research on the news and pub- lic opinion. First, opinion polls give us a sense of how our fellow citizens think about important issues, allowing us to understand how our views compare with those of the majority. Second, these surveys are critical information tools for the press, which regards them as unproblematic mirrors of citizen sentiment and give them wide expo- sure via news outlets. Third, agenda-setting theory demonstrates that the extent of news coverage about a particular event or issue can have a powerful effect on whether or not the public thinks carefully about that issue. Thus, there is a kind of reciprocal, mutually reinforcing relationship between the news media and public opinion. Finally, a number of scholars have found evidence that both the media and public agendas can impact the policy agenda, or the actions of political elites and policy makers (Dearing & Rogers, 1996; Rogers & Dearing, 1988).

Meaning-based view

There is an alternative notion of communication, however, that regards communication not as a transaction but instead as a process: this is the meaning-based view. In this model, the interaction between the sender and the receiver is an ongoing process that may or may not be intentional. The message is de-emphasized here in favor of the meaning that is made of the message by the receiver—thus, this model regards the meaning-making acrtivity of the receiver(s) as much more significant than the transmission of the message itself. A key aspect of this second model is the notion of feedback between the receiver and sender. Take a simple conversation between two people as an example. There is a recursive nature to the interaction between the sender and the receiver, because one person may be responding to nonverbal signs from the other while the message is being transmitted. If your friend's attention begins to wander when you are describing to her a near miss you just had while driving your car, you would probably take that as a hint that she was not listening to your story and interrupt your recitation to ask her: "Are you all right? Why aren't you listening to me?" The feedback from sender to receiver here is immediate and changes according to the relationship between individuals in a face-to-face context.

Breaking the divide of private and public

This divide has some fundamental consequences for the mass media as well. Since our experiences as media audiences occur largely within the domestic, privatized sphere— after work, on our "leisure" time—the production/consumption divide has created a pro- found crisis for capitalist institutions that want to continually monitor our viewing habits and purchasing activities. Media corporations must find some way to break into this private realm to measure and catalog consumers' behaviors for commercial purposes. This corpo- rate desire to penetrate the home made it necessary to develop sophisticated measurement practices to try to understand, quantify, and monitor the behaviors of the audience. Over- coming this divide is the primary purpose behind the types of audience ratings and market research strategies that we'll explore later on in this chapter.

public sphere

This historical discus- sion incorporates the important scholarship of German sociologist and political philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Habermas' notion of the "public sphere" is key to understanding the historical transformations in the notion of public opinion during the Enlightenment and beyond, and his ideas are found throughout this brief historical overview.

Two Step flow Model

This led to a new theory of media effects called the two-step flow of communication. Katz and Lazarsfeld reasoned that the impact of media messages flows through opinion leaders, who then pass along this influence to other audiences (see Figure 2.4). The two- step model suggested that the lack of media influence found in previous research studies (such as The People's Choice) was likely because scholars had not adequately understood the role that person-to-person communication played in media effects. The close con- nection between interpersonal communication and mass media impact was an important contribution of Personal Influence.

The role of the press

What is the role of the press in the bourgeois public sphere? -Broke monopoly on information -spread information -provided multiple/alternative perspectives via private printing -Moved public sphere beyond the walls of salons and coffee houses

Duality of structure,

in what Giddens terms the "________," structures effectively enable certain types of behaviors and social outcomes as well. Consider the fact that you are likely reading this text as part of a college- or university-level course in media audiences. The constructed nature of the coursework—the syllabus, paper assignments, deadlines, need for regular classroom attendance, and participation in class discussion—all work to effectively constrain the boundaries of your own individual activity in relation to the course. The same is true for the education system in general: Your freedom to navigate your own education, particularly from elementary through high school, is profoundly shaped by institutions and systems beyond your own immediate control, sometimes leaving students and their parents with a sense of helplessness about the system. On the other hand, along with all of this institutional constraint, the completion of a high school diploma or a college degree can be incredibly enabling as well. Think about it: That same education can make you a much more competitive applicant for higher-paying, more prestigious jobs, social and cultural benefits. This is the reason why structures are simultaneously both constraining and enabling for individuals.