Audience Effect Theories

History

• The media has been criticized since the rise of the mass media, and particularly of television, from around the 1950s
• When media first started as a 'serious' discipline in the 1960s, the focus was very much with the effects that the media had on the audience.

Effects Theory and the Hypodermic needle

• In effects theory, the media are powerful, negative forces who control the masses. The media is seen as a hypodermic needle, injecting out helpless minds with messages which we take on board fully. This originated from a new notorious study carried out by bandura in 1961.
• Bandura's study used a toy called a "bobo doll", and it measured behaviours of children who watched a modle beating up the doll. The model was either rewarded or punished, and Bandura noted that children would replicate the violent behavior when it was rewarded. This suggested that audiences are passive, and that the media has an enormous influence on our behaviour. In particular, effects theories state that media representations of aggressive or violent behavior can lead to imitation.
• The effects model is still in evidence today, particularly in tabloid newspapers who construct moral panics around the latest buzz in the media; rap music, videos, horror movies, facebook and so on.

Moral Panics

• Stanley Cohen in 1972 published a book "Folk Devils and Moral Panics". Moral panics happen when members of a society and culture become outraged, fearful and upset by the challenges and menaces posed to 'their' accepted values and was of life, by the activities of groups defines as deviant. These could be violent extremists, teenagers or an organisation/idea such as the internet, violent games or social media.

Cultivation Theory: Gerbner

• Gerbner built on the work done by Bandura. He suggested that the media doesn't simply inject us, but cultivates particular beliefs/attitudes over time. Cultivation theory states that high frequency viewers of television are more susceptible to media messages and the belief that they are real and valid. Heavy viewers are exposed to more violence and therefore are affected by the "mean world syndrome", the belief that the world is a far worse and dangerous place than it actually is. Cultivation theorists posit that television viewing can have long-term effects that gradually affect the audience.
• The theory suggests that prolonged watching of television can tend to induce a certain paradigm about violence in the world.
• Gerbner found that heavy TV viewing led to "mainstreaming" - a common outlook on the world based on the images and labels on TV. Mainstreamers would describe themselves as politically moderate