Media Effects Theory Evaluation

Media Effects Theory EvaluationThis chapter consists of ii calves. In the first section I will critically wait back media publications theories and seek relevant speculative climb upes underpinning active hearing studies. I will in either case discuss recent studies exploring media enamour, delving into the methodological approaches as hygienic as observing several(predicate) slip panache that the media atomic number 18 claimed to cod wallop on large numbers encountering. In crabbed, I will focus on literatures in atomic number 18as of risks and health, as easily as examining studies utilising creative methods for kittyvass media influence, all which I will relate to my findings chapters. The way in which media influence is con school schoolbook editionualised in this search stock- static, should non be misunders in additiond as trying to prove just about(prenominal) direct come to media take aim on battalion. Instead, my intention is to offer ship apprizeal of cerebration about media influence and hopefully this would help build a connection ming conduct with my findings and the theoretical body. I will reiterate my billet towards the end of the chapter whilst situating my look indoors literatures of media influence.In the second part of my literature, I will explore interrogation conducted in aras of infant feeding, in exceptional to studies about breastfeeding and the media. This section will offer variety ways of exploring breastfeeding incommodes and how analyse the media would fit into the sociable place setting and problems related to breastfeeding. I will also explore studies conducted in antithetical heathen settings, which hopes to highlight the different ways culture and religion can influence infant feeding practices and their oerall representing of breastfeeding. What I hope to achieve by the end of this chapter is to father an paper of the different directions to studying breastfeeding in the m edia and defend my approach in this thesis. I hence conclude this chapter by positioning my investigate in spite of appearance the theoretical, methodological and empirical frame bestow that I have explored byout.Media Effects, active hearings and beyondReview of Media cause theoriesEarly works on media influence atomic number 18 focused on medias cause on human behaviours (ref). The idea that the media has correctly effects on heap gained ground during the 1930s, in light of the elites fascist treatment towards society and dictators using the media as propaganda tool in countries exchangeable Ger some(prenominal) and Russia. Research tenseness at the time was to find out what the media can do to multitude (ref) and this brought about the first opening of media effects (the hypodemic harry sit around), envisi onenessd by scholars of the Frankfurt school in 1923 which signals that media content argon injected into consultation thoughts and therefrom would in fluence their behaviours. Such studies assumed causal link surrounded by aggregated media and ken hearing, suggesting that the media has a magic bullet effect that could result to media-inspired mass behavior (for example see works of Cantril et al., 1940 Lasswell 1927 and Lippman, 1922). Researchers at the time sought to link amid media representations and mass behavior, for the most part were implicated over the (harmful) effects media has on society. This gave rise to studies supporting strong media effects and sets the parameter for most media research that took place mingled with the 1940s to the mid-sixties (for example see Bandura and Walters, 1963 Lazarsfeld et al., 1944). It was one of the reasons why media effects studies was democratic and gained more(prenominal) importance in the field of media studies at the time.However, hypodemic needle model or magic bullet supposition is flawed in so umpteen ways. The word media effects itself put much fierceness and world-beater to the media that pursuit of hypodemic needle model / magic bullet theory often disregard the detail that listening themselves ar active build uprs of core. Media and auditory modality kindred does non exist in void b bely is involved and influenced by many an(prenominal) things, among other(a)s, social context, culture and political-economy of a society. Audience consists of singulars who have different social and ethnical backgrounds which makes it problematic if not impossible, to create by mental act one mass auditory sense. It is thence renders attempts to measure media effects difficult and complex.Researchers tried to improve this link by including additional stages/layers to media effects, such is done by Lazarsfeld and Katz (1955) when they introduced opinion leaders into the carry out a model which is also kn confess as the ii locomote flow. What this model argues is that the effects of media on sense of hearing atomic number 18 mediat ed by different key singulars, who tends to be citizenry with most access to the media and are assumed to be more media literate. These are opinion leaders who are sought to explain and diffuse media content to others. Although this model reduces the direct effects, it shut absent simplifies the process involved surrounded by media and audience, and more importantly maintains audiences position at the receiving end of this alliance. This does not altogether sustain the idea that audiences are peaceable but also renders them incapable of producing their own run intoations.Another social theory which tries to explain media effects was developed by George Gebner in the 1960s, known as the Cultivation theory. The theory proposed that the media has long term effects on audiences, nurturing veritable ideas through representations and media talk over. The cultivation theory springs from a large-scale research digest called Cultural Indicators, a project that was aimed to explor e media processes and track effects (particularly waste programming) on audiences ( miller, 2005, p.281). A part of the study investigates the kindred amongst audience attention to media messages and their conceptions of social reality (Morgan, p70 and Shanahan and Morgan p. 6-7). Findings suggest that moving-picture show to television, over time subtly cultivates audiences perceptions of reality. This cultivation effects are claimed to travel light television viewers as well because the media (television) functions as a tool for socialisation and enculturation process (Gerbner and Gross, 1976175). Therefore, the theory suggests that any impact television has on heavy users will also, in time, impact on the entire culture. Gerbner et al (198623) later notes that this impact does not necessarily accuse a unidirectional process but rather, it is a complex ontogeny built through subtle interactions between medium and its publics. Miller (2005282) reiterates this situation by e xplaining that the impetus of cultivation theory was not to prove coifed media effects on behaviours, but to highlight medias overarching influence towards the way people think about the world. Gerbners idea was widely accepted however, similar to the former media effects theories, it supports the notion that audience is vulnerable and easily manipulated. Cultivation theory asserts federal agency to the media and regards audiences as subjects with limited interpretation, ignoring their social context and ability to catch own centers.The many limitations of media effects theories have prompted researchers to switch focus. Following dot of research in media studies question media power and shift emphasis towards studying audiences and their use of the media. Theorists such as Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., Gurevitch, M. (1974) argued for a model that recognizes audience as powerful receivers. They proposed Uses and Gratification theory which quarreld the traditional way of lookin g at media-audience relationship by asking what people do with the media rather than what the media does to people (Katz, 1959). This approach suggests that people have specific unavoidably and use the media to fulfil them or gain specific gratifications. Blumler and Katz (1974) proposed intravenous feeding broad audience needs that are fulfilled by the media. These include diversions (a form of escapism from frequent life), Personal Relationships (where viewers build communities through conversations about television or how they relate to the characters), Personal Identity (where audience explore, re-affirm or question their in-person identity in regards to the characters identities) and Surveillance (where the media are referred for information about what is happening elsewhere). These four needs are argued to represent the ways audience establish their relationship with the media.While uses and gratification model provides a useful framework for thinking about audiences rel ationship with the media, critics question the fundamental structure of this theory. Researchers who are in support of media effects theories for example, questioned the notion of gratification itself, which in a way could be seen as a media effect. It was also argued that this approach focused firmly on audience use of the media, rather than how audiences make imports of media content. Therefore, uses and gratification theory does not foregrounds itself in the theoretical debate, rather it focuses on the methodological approach of media studies, offering a way of doing media research, as opposed to contextualizing the relationship between media and audience (Littlejohn, 2002 Severin and Tankard, 1997 McQuail 1994). Therefore, studies adopting this approach were more focused on examining audience mental needs and often overlook the importance of socio-cultural elements of audience needs.All the theoretical approaches discussed thus far have only allocated power to either the audi ence or the media. single of the pioneer works to break away from this over emphasis of unilateral power was ceremonious by Stuart antechambers through his convert/decoding model. Hall (1980) argues that media take a leakrs encode specific essences in media text, which is distributed to audiences who will then decode and (re)produce these consequences through their own judgment (Hall, 1980128). Hall suggests that the media (television) is an iconic bespeak because it possesses some of the qualities for the object in which they represent (Hall, 1980131) and the process involved to produce and interpret these iconic signs is known as encoding/decoding.Hall does not just chart a middle ground between audience and the media but also introduced media producers into the equation and their roles in this relationship. Hall argues that producers agendas and assumptions are encoded in media text and that this shapes the preferent hearts of the text, albeit embedded in codes and co nvention of a particular medium to hide the text own ideological construction. Such meanings limit and guide audience interpretations, although specific frameworks outside the text such as socio-economic frameworks (for example gender, education and ethnicity), do play a role to influence audiences interpretations. Halls approach is in line with the social constructionists, where previous knowledge as well as experience of the media and the subject discussed played an important part to help construct peoples perception.While Halls notion of preferred meanings does not suggest that audience is homogenous, their interpretations will however, be consistent to producers intended idea. However, he suggests that audience can encode preferred meanings in a slightly different manner, in which Hall refers to as the margin of understanding. Halls encoding/decoding model suggests the meaning of a text lies somewhere between the producer and the reader. One of the reasons why encoding/decoding model is significant in media studies is because it balances the relationship between the media and audience, re funing some power to the media man maintaining audience as active participants. This approach acknowledges both audience and the media as sites of meaning making.Hall further develops a model for the types of audience decoding. The four identified construes are (1)Dominant when audience recognise and agree with the preferred meaning offered by media text (2)Oppositional when audience understand the preferred meaning but disagree with it because it contradicts to their own set of beliefs and attitudes (3)Negotiated when audience opposes or adapts to the preferred meaning and (4)Aberrant decoding when audience gives meanings deviant to the preferred meaning. Morley however notes that this model is limited because preferred meaning is itself an unclear concept. This is because the model tends to coincide text and producers intention as preferred meaning, when they act ually involve different processes and that preferred meaning may not always be embedded in text. It is therefore difficult to conceptualise preferred meaning, one which can be easily confused with something that is agree by majority of the text audience.Kitzinger (1998) further argues that oppositional reading is sometimes a problematic term because people do not necessarily understand the preferred meaning. In her research she prime out that peoples understanding sometimes intersect with pre-existing knowledge and mental pictures of other things, particularly when an issue is raw(a) and has not received much media attention. For example, in her research she found that some people do not understand the preferred meanings of human immunodeficiency virus media awareness campaign and uses their pre-existing knowledge of AIDS as a way to understand and decode media messages about HIV. Nonetheless, despite limitations to Halls types of audience readings, encoding/decoding model contin ues to serve as an advantageous model in media studies.Among others, Halls encoding/decoding model has led to an increasing interest to explore media reply and audiences as active participants. A significant body of work developed in the UK focused on audience studies, but positioned within cultural framework (for example see Ang 1985 Morley, 1980 Radway, 1987). The foundations for this body of work is championed by Hall himself at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCCS) and his colleagues such as David Morley (1980) who explored how people from different (sub)cultures responded to the resembling media output (the BBC channel live personal matters programme across the country). His nationwide Audience Research adopted a semioticalal approach to understanding audience responses to media text. Morley compiled audience responses from various different correct and social/cultural backgrounds after they watched an episode of the news/current affairs progr amme Nationwide. Through these interviews, Morley tried to observe whether participants obtained a preferred reading from the programme.In a way, Morleys work puts Halls Encoding/Decoding model to the test. From his findings, Morley argues that encoding/decoding model is insufficient because it underestimated the variety of determinants in decoding a reading (Fiske, 1989). Morley argues that people may decode according to Halls audiences decoding positions but this process intersects with sociological demographics such as age, gender and also the context for viewing the programme (Morley, 198026 199299). What this propose is that the meaning of text is interpret within audiences sociological and cultural framework which may influence their knowledge, prejudices and fortress towards a talk. Members of a given sub-culture will tend to grapple a cultural orientation towards decoding messages in particular ways and that their individual readings, whether dominant, negotiated or oppo sitional are framed by dual-lane cultural formations and practices (1981b, p. 51). This shared cultural interpretation may (or may not) cut across different groups from different economic backgrounds and social class (Morley 1980). In his body of work, audiences are seen to actively consume media for pleasure, reinforcement and identity construction, a framework that focuses on media consumption and the role media play in popular culture. By emphasising that the meaning is not in the text, but in the reading (siapa) it opens up possibilities for audience reception studies and looking at the relationship between media and audience, in relations to other social context. His study was therefore considered one of the major turn around point in the history of media studies. According to David MorleyBefore Messages can have effects on audiences, they must be decoded. Effects is thus a shorthand, and inadequate, way of marking the point where audiences read and make awareness of message s. (Morley 1978, p125 (emphasis added)He later addsOf course, there will always be individual private readings, but we need to investigate the extent to which these individual readings are patterned into cultural structures and clusters (Morley 1980)Researchers continued to explore reception studies and studying audience became a popular trend for media researchers in the 1990s. Expanding Morleys approach which looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds interpret representations in media, researchers were interested to explore peoples personal and socio-cultural context as an integral part for understanding the rich seethe of meanings decoded and understood by media audience. On the whole, these studies adopted a culturalist perspective and are concerned with exploring audience active choices, consumptions and interpretations of media materials. Such research emphasizes audience interpretations of the text based on their individual cultural background and life experien ces. In essence, the meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within different processes involved in the relationship between the text and the reader.For example, Katz and Liebel (1985) conducted a cross-cultural study on television muck Dallas in Japan, Israel and Russia. They concluded that various ethnic groups differed in their interpretation of irrelevant television programme, in which they referred to as critical distance. From the research, Liebes (1988281) suggested that different groups perceive selectively towards what they watch and that this played a part in the forms of retelling and the talk they hand about a television program. A basic acceptance of the meaning of a specific text tends to occur when audience share traits and cultural background, which then may lead to the text being interpreted in similar ways.Culture has an interpretative function for the members of a group which share that particular culture. Nonetheless, expressio ns of culture-resultant behaviour are modified by the individuals personality, up convey and life-experience to a considerable degree. Developments in cross-cultural audience studies have deepened our understanding of media reception in different cultures and the different relationship audiences have with the media. This process plays a role in the development of other issues for example, production of identity and popular culture. Audience use existing cultural frameworks to (re)construct meaning from a media text, thus it is through audience interpretations that we are able to gain more knowledge towards the culture to which that audience belongs (Gauntlett).This new approach for looking at media-audiences relationship was coined unexampled Audience Research (Ang 1996, Morley 1990, etc). Researchers such as Curran et. al. (1996) saw this as a revolutionary rethink of the dispersion of power within the media-audience relationship, while scholars such as Fiske (1987) proclaim powe r of the audience. As Fiske commented on Morleys Nationwide StudyIts value for us lies in its shift away of emphasis away from the textual and ideological construction of the subjects to socially and historically hardened people. It reminds us that actual people in actual situations watch and delight in actual television programmes. (Fiske 1989, p63)Indeed Fiske, ever enthusiastic of Morleys research, said that it established ethnographic research as a legitimate tool to understand audiences (Fiske 1989). The focus on human beings in their social settings seems to a coeval reader to be quite an obvious component of audience research.The important academic journal Screen began to take up the idea that the audience was do up of more meaning than that disseminated by the text (Fiske 1989). This led to a generation of media and cultural studies protagonists who turned their focus away from semiotic summary of the text and the individual and tried to focuson the social background o f the audiences and how they decode the text itself. Their work appeared from the early 70s to the mid 80s and mostly conducted qualitative field work on small groups from targeted socioeconomic backgrounds (Nightingale 1996).The idea of the audience being able to make their own readings and the move away from semiotics was given a more pluralistic (Morley 1990) element by cultural studies writer John Fiske. Fiske was influenced heavily by the French polymath Michel de Certeau (Underwood, 2008), who advocated that people were continuously trying to undermine the dominant culture by creating tactical manoeuvre of resistance within e realday life.Fiske incorporated this into the idea of the active audience (Fiske 1989, pp 62-83), believing that audiences constantly tried to find new meanings inside media and that it was programmes that were made by industry, not text. Fiske maintained thatTexts are the product of their readers. So a programme becomes a text at the moment of reading. (Fiske 1989, p 14)And thatTexts are the site of conflictbetween production and reception. (Fiske 1989, p14).From this freedom of meaning and conflict, audiences are capable of creating all sorts of resistance readings to the preferred dominant culture, constantly changing it in the process as elites try to catch up and circle the masses into its fold once more. Fiske (1990) takes the example of jeans as fashion items they produce jeans and we alter them to look more trendy, so they react again. Creating a rhythm method of birth control of resistance by the active audiences/consumers and the dominant classes. Fiske continues, maintaining that there is no such thing as a homogenised audience, but rather a collection of pluralised audiences that are created from a multiplicity of backgrounds. Fiske maintained that this multiplicity of meaning amounts to a semiotic democracy (Fiske 1989, p95) where people are culturally qualified enough to not need media experts to help them.This g oes much further, it could be argued, than Morley, as Fiske seems to be saying that the actual meaning of any programme could be completely different, not just oppositional, negotiated, or dominant. Fiskes argument causes problems for many media researchers as it means that they are or so incapable of discovering how audiences think and behave. Indeed, Fiske often cites the fact that 80-90 per cent of all advertising strategies violate to succeed in bringing in an increase in sales (Fiske 1990), which has led to many people to question the usefulness of New Audience Research. First, there seems to be a peachy deal of backtracking and shifting over how much meaning should be assigned by the audience and how much on the text amongst its protagonists with disagreements as to how far audiences were interpreting texts through their social backgrounds with Nightingale (1996) pointing out that many later research studies backtracked into textual analysis. Morley (1990) decided to distan ce himself from Fiskes ideas of a semiotic democracy despite the latters praise of his Nationwide study. In his article printed in Curran et al (1990), he criticises the lack of power in Fiskes beliefs, stating that it had become too disseminated and lacked ideology. He also commented on the fact that reading texts is not the same as changing the text itself.Morley (ibid) himself had an argument with his contemporary James Curran, who questions the regeneration of New Audience Research and therefore how much it had to add to the discourse. For instance, he cited work completed by a large number of media effects researchers from the 1940s and 1950s, who studied reception analysis whilst taking into account sociological backgrounds. For New Audience researchers, he argues year AD starts with textual analysis (ibid p266) in the cultural/literary effects tradition and ignores what went before it. Of Fiske he argues that his ideas were old pluralism re-heated (ibid p267) that simply pla yed into the hands of neo-liberal America, that wanted to deny any sort of hegemonic power in the media. Nightingale (1996) takes this further and comments that news and current affairs programmes and the ideology politics that surrounded them were dropped soon after the Nationwide study for more identity-orientated politics within soap operas making the research far more populist. The fact that the research turned the idea of power and ideology away from the media itself is something that Nightingale and many others criticise. Even Morley (1990) acknowledged that it is very well to rip ones jeans as a sign of resistance however this is at best a micro-political move of resistance and not one that makes people think twice about buying designer jeans. in spite of these valid criticisms, this essay still maintains that New Audience Research still was revolutionary as it helped a discourse that was very much upstage from focusing on the audience as individuals able to make a resistance or re-interpret the media in any way. Morley (cited in Curran et al, 1990) replied to Currans argument by saying that he criticised the new research with the gift of hindsight given to him by new audience researchs work, and that none of the previous authors whose work focused on the audience would have been brought to light if it was not for new audience research raising the audience as an issue once again. In this way, a once marginalised area of research reasserted itself into the mainstream. It was, as Morley (1980) said a mental image shift in every sense of the word. Sympathy, too, has to be given to Fiske for his pluralistic vision of semiotics. It could be argued that he was merely taking Halls original challenge to its logical conclusion that it could be hypothesised that Audiences could actually hold a great deal of power. Curran (1990), Nightingale (1996), Eco (1974 cited in Nightingale 1996)) and others all agree that Fiske through his ideas on the active audience and plurality of meaning brought the idea of semiotics to a new generation of researchers, especially in America. Nightingale (1996, p 58) goes further and argues that New Audience Research was the point where sociology and semiotics understand in a globally unifying approach to the study of mass communications. Nightingale herself argues that despite the shortcomings, the new wave of Audience research was hence paradigm shift and created a profound reorientation in cultural studies (ibid, p 60). Her reasoning for this was that studies such as Morleys Nationwide forced researchers to look beyond the passivity of audiences, beyond psychology and/or effects and infrastructure the debate within political and sociological discourse. It allowed researchers to look beyond the mass and see the inherent stratification in society (ibid, p 69). Furthermore, the emphasis on ethnography and qualitative research helped to bridge the time out between researcher and subject (ibid, p 68). In this way researchers now had to acknowledge this dimension of the audience as a major factor in audience research.In conclusion, despite new audience researchs critics saying that that it dissolves the meaning of the text, is not anything new, and individualises and pluralises audience research to a point to where meaning almost evaporates (Curran p 260), the concept behind it has still proved to be revolutionary. First, it took the discourse of audience studies away from the pessimistic and almost patronising beliefs of Marxists, Leavisites and media affects theorists that saw the audience as a single, passive mass. Instead it made them into active forces of meaning as Hall maintained. As Morley discovered in his experiment, they did not have to agree with the way mass media encoded the text, they could take various meanings from it depending on a host of background factors. They were an active audience, according to Fiske, who could resist the hegemony of media and create their own re adings. It has had a lasting effect on audience research globally, whilst the discourse has moved on, the social, cultural and economic etc background of an audience is seen as a major component of audience studies research (Jensen et al, 1991).Active audience studiesNew Influence ResearchThe evolution of media studies reviewed thus far reveals the distinctions, if not contradictions to the approaches between media effects research and studies exploring active audiences / reception studies. Kitzinger (200424) notes that the polarity between these two media scholarships has split media researchers into two sides, moreover with the existing geographical and cultural borders between which historically underpins media studies framework. Studies emphasising media effects and media power over audiences are more popular in the United States, whereas researchers in the Western Europe are more interested with the way audience use and meanings of media messages. At some point, this bedspread continues to widen as researchers focused on the difference, rather than finding a way to bridge media effects and audience studies (Morley, 1998).Nonetheless, a group of scholars have attempted to revitalise Halls encoding/decoding theory and try to (re)connect reception studies with media effects studies (for example see reception work conducted by the Glasgow Media Unit, Kitzinger, 2004 and Miller et. al., 1998). These studies revive the approach of Morleys Nationwide research and differentiate themselves from the over-emphasis of audience power in most active audience studies. This approach, also referred as the new influence research acknowledges that the media has some influence towards people and that the focus is to refer what and how audiences interact with these influences. Kitzinger (2002276) asserts that the new influence studies has little connection with the hypodemic needle theory and that exploring into the ways audiences interpret media messages will help reveal w ays in which media effects actually operates. The new influence research therefore acknowledges some media effects on audiences by theorizing ways in which audience interpret media representations and construct meanings.Although the impetus of new influence research is to bridge the gap between two major approaches of media research, most empirical work do not necessarily concern to find a link between media and behaviour in any context. In fact studies consistently fail to find a link between these two (Barker and Petley, 1996 Norris et. Al, 1999), and any research hoping to prove such link is doomed to failure (Gauntlett, 1998). On the other hand, the new influence research embraces the different ways audience may interpret what they see/hear/read in the media and acknowledges the limits of these interpretations, as well as the possibilities for shared mainstream interpretation particularly when dealing with repetitive and comparatively closed text (Kitzinger, 1999 Livingstone, 19 99). What this suggests is that although people can individually respond actively to the media, their predisposed collective needs, beliefs and interests may influence their response.Media reporting of health and perception of risksSeale (22025) argues that the ways in which audience understand health issues is complex and involves a process of selecting and constructing unique composition of different health stories through media customs and experience. This process, or intertextual experience as he describes it, should not be overlook in studies of media and health as audience are not only exposed to a single health story, but interactions of various different health issues across different media. As a result, audience understanding of a particular health issue may (or may not) overlap or influenced by their interpretation of other health stories in the media. Seale therefore believes that when analysing any forms of media