Media Effects. James Shanahan

Media Effects - James Shanahan


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on the effects of mass communication. But the story diverges with the group’s post-war continuation of the research with government and military funding, often with a Cold War and anti-Communist agenda. Rather than setting forth a relatively quieting and self-congratulatory message of mass communication as something that a strong democracy could tolerate, researchers were looking for ways to bring mass media questions into areas of “administrative” usefulness such as psychological operations, focusing on a propaganda of a different, pro-US, type (Sproule, 1989; Simpson, 1994).

      With the invention of mass communication, Lasswell also put on the table a simple list of research questions that could focus the minds of those studying the topic in the war years: “Who says what in which channel to whom with what effects?” (Bryson et al., 1940; Lasswell, 1948, p. 37). The formulation proved to be an enormously appealing way to simplify the complicated task at hand of reducing mass communication research to component questions that would be susceptible to study. Two parts of the question (which channel, with what effects) gave birth to, or at least crystallized, what most researchers in communication generally came to understand their job to be: figure out how media have effects.

      Figure 1 Appearance of the terms “mass communication” and “media effects” in books in English (as a % of total)

      Source: Google Ngrams, https://books.google.com/ngrams

      Some commentators have equated the overall field of communication with the quantitative study of media effects, though this is an obvious exaggeration. The growth in the number of studies focusing on media effects (and calling themselves that) was astronomical from the 1940s onward. Particularly as institutes were set up within universities to study communication, and then departments as well, media effects work acquired the qualities of being focused on determining measurable changes in attitude or behavior from exposure to media messages.

      The foregoing material describes only one story about how people have studied media effects. While it is easy to over-generalize, much of the work described above looks at media from a perspective that can be termed “informational.” That is, media messages are usually seen as pieces or streams of information that can be absorbed by recipients. The questions of Lasswell lend themselves quite easily to this outlook; the methods of social science like to be able to boil things down to single quantifiable variables. Across hundreds and even thousands of studies, the goal of this kind of media effects research (even today) is to determine to what degree these absorptions are effective. Media effects has been, in many ways, a vast elaboration of the basic ideas of persuasion research. We will be examining this perspective in greater detail in later chapters.

      Ideological strains of thinking about media begin with reactions to Marx. To simplify greatly, Marxism – which itself adopted the mantle of science – had predicted that proletarian revolutions would come as workers would realize the injustice of the inequality of their situation in relation to capital. Although some of these revolutions did occur, first and most notably in Russia, they were not as widespread as would have been necessary to confirm the hypotheses of Marxism. From this came the work of follow-on theorists, many on the European left, who sought ways to extend the basic ideas of Marxism in light of the actual progression of history. Oftentimes this involved a view of the media as a sort of narcotic that distracts people from true class consciousness. If people were not reacting in ways that Marxist social theory predicted, it might have been because media served as a cultural “opiate” (Marx had also identified religion as such an opiate, and modern mass media was beginning to take on some of the trappings of religion as well).

      Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system. The decorative industrial


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