Blog 4: Media Use and Audience Responses

There are three main theories in regards to media use and audiences responses.  Two of those, I will be covering.  The first is Uses and Gratification Theory which shifts the focus of direct effects of media onto the receivers.  Instead of the audience being injected, so to speak, with a particular idea, like the Hypodermic Needle Theory, Uses and Gratification assumes an active audience and questions media's impact on the people's motivation.  Because motivation is the driving force, U and G proposes that audiences are selective about their media choices.  The way one is motivated is through achieving goals, such as learning, passing time, companionship, escapism, or relaxation.  These goals are categorized as either ritualized - using media as a diversion and, thus, habitual - or instrumental - using media to require information and, thus, non-habitual.  However, overlap can occur, such as a stock broker who habitually watches the news to detect market trends based on political unrest.

The other type of of media use theory is called Active Audience.  Active Audience challenges the idea that people are indoctrinated by media without realizing they are being dominated.  Furthermore, it assumes two things: the concept of agency, meaning the power lies in thee people and they are not easy to dominate and media cannot tell the people what to think or how to behave in any direct way, and autonomy, meaning our belief in the intelligence and autonomy of people.  Essentially, the theory also contrasts the Hypodermic Needle Theory because it assumes the audience is active and thinks for itself.

Both of these theories are similar because they contend the audience has free will and can choose how it will behave.  However, it must be remembered that each individual in the audience has grown up with a different set of experiences and, therefore, will interpret the intended media message in a different way.  Do you think there are any universal experiences that everyone has had that media producers can try to influence?  Or is it impossible to have a message come across the same way to all people?

Blog 3: Prosocial Media

Prosocial media is aimed at being socially helpful (altruism, friendliness, acceptance, cooperation) or personally helpful (calming fears, healthy eating, safe sex).  The Children's Television Act of 1990 mandated that there must be a minimum of 3 hours of educational television per week.  Shows such as Barney encouraged children to be clean, place nice, and work well with others.  Barney, and other shows, use Social Cognitive Theory to give positive reinforcement so that a particular good action can be imitated.  While these notions work for children, teenagers are less-likely to be helpful because they are more egocentric.

Adults, meanwhile, tend to react to televised characters as they would real people with likability, perceived realism, and perceived homophily.  Another part of prosocial media is the parasocial element, which involves learning about marginalized groups through mediated messages.  If one has a positive experience with an individual in a minority, his or her behavior with be altered and he or she will be motivated to seek out more interactions.  Also, those experiences will carry over to real interactions with people of that marginalized group.

It seems, given these sets of beliefs, that children and adults are influenced by media, while teenagers are not.  However, this seems to be untrue, because teenagers who play violent video games have long been theorized to have been impacted by their gaming.  There is no doubt that a sizable portion of gamers are teens and violent video games are some of the most popular titles.  Unfortunately, simply button-mashing and making a character kill and maim on a screen definitely seems to have an impact, especially those games that focus on stylizing the violence so that it appears "cool" instead of disturbing.  When the game MadWorld came out for the Nintendo Wii, it offered a double-dose of offensiveness.  Not only did players act out the kills using the Wii remote, but they were also rewarded for killing creatively, using elements such as street signs, chainsaws, and baseball bats.  Given the fact that the game portrays this violence in a comical setting because of how over-the-top it is, the developers intended for gamers to be able to distinguish it as such.  However, impressionable teens undoubtedly focus more on the violence in and of itself than in the context of the game.  Even though the game has an M-rating, which requires the buyer to be 17-years old to buy it, many parents don't pay enough attention and simply indulge their child's wishes.  My 13-year old neighbor plays the games Call of Duty: Black Ops and Halo: Reach on a regular basis and, not surprisingly, has occasional violent outbursts.  However, whose fault is it?  Is it the game producers, parents, or the kids, who are responsible for what teenagers are exposed to in terms of violent video games?

Blog 2: Anti-Social Effects

It has long been known that media influences public opinion.  The Directs Effects model proposes that members of society are just passive viewers who absorb the media's message without discerning it.  However, Lazorsfeld's Limited Effects model claims that people are influenced by media as well as other things.  This theory was used in the article by Tiggemann and Polivy when they examined the role of thin models on the feelings of women.  The researchers showed 114 women pictures from popular magazines and asked them to report their reactions to the photographs.  Not surprisingly, the women gave negative reactions when they compared themselves to the women in the pictures.  I believe the main reason for this is not because the women in the study were simply shown pictures of thin models, but because they have been constantly bombarded with such images and, therefore, believe that those women constitute how "normal" women look.  Men are also exposed to the images as much as women are and are influenced by them.  This leads men to think that women should look a certain way in real life, which only reinforces the women's beliefs about their own inferiority, perpetuating a vicious cycle.

The article by Goodman discovered the same thing about women's beliefs about their bodies.  However, she noted at the end of her paper that women who were already thin reacted less dramatically to the ads than women who were significantly less thin.  Both articles support the Bandura Social Learning Theory, which purports that individuals learn behavior and attitudes from visuals.  No one in the pictures is telling the women that they're overweight and need to change their habits.  Contrarily, they are simply providing a visual standard that nonverbally and subconsciously affects the women's psyches.

We are all aware that many magazines, especially those targeted at women, use airbrushing in their photographs.  However, is it the responsibility of the media to warn individuals that their pictures may have negative effects, or is it on the individual to use common sense and discern unrealistic images?

Blog 1: Men and Women

Differences between men and women have practically been beaten to death in the media.  A plethora of sitcoms spanning numerous decades have all highlighted the contrasting communication styles of both sexes.  While these differences are nothing new, the degree to which they are expounded upon has increased in its magnitude.  Of course, it must be noted that society has much to do with the level of acceptability in a program's content.  Because of this, TV broadcasters often seem compelled to push the envelope in terms of risqué content.  However, the paper by Amir Hestroni seems to contradict this presumption with a somewhat startling graph.  Not only has the sexual content on television declined in the part thirty years, but it is near one of its lowest points as of the early 2000s.  It is difficult to explain this difference, but one possible explanation could deal with the subjectivity of sexual content.  Certainly, there are objective norms, such as talking about sex or touching of a sexual nature.  Many other instances, however, can be interpreted in a variety of ways with varying degrees of closure.  The point is sexual content on television cannot be simplified with such scientific means.  Interpretation is the reason public opinion differs so much from the findings in Hestroni’s study.  Because of this, an objective conclusion cannot be reached.