Media Audiences Exam 1

Gidden’s Structuration Theory

Gidden’s Structuration Theory

Structure: any type of social behavior or set of interactions or relationships between human beings over time

Agency: the actions of individuals within their environment

Power: the capacity to achieve outcomes within the structure/agency duality

Audience

Constructed, situated, contingent, and abstractions rather than objective realities

Meta-Theoretical Views of Audience

Information-Based v Meaning-Based

Information Based

Shannon and Weaver Model of Communication

Shannon and Weaver Model of Communication

One way process (source, transmitter, channel, receiver, destination, and noise)

Information Based

Transmission View of Communication

Transmission View of Communication

Focus in on the content and Act on sending the message

In information based,

the audience is passive

Meaning Based

Process-Oriented - content is less important than meaning made

In meaning based,

there is a media gap

Three Models of Audiences

Audience as Outcomes

Audience as Mass

Audience as Agent

Audience as Outcomes

• Audiences are people being acted upon by the Communicator who creates specific impacts with intention - Assumes audience is captive and must listen

  • Effects/Film Theory, Propaganda/attitude change

Audience as Mass

• Audiences are a large collection of people who don’t  know Communicator or audience members - Communicator’s goal is to gain attention and keep it

  • Ratings/Behaviors/Events

Audience as Agent

• Audiences are like “free agents” who make choices about what types of communicators they engage with - Communicator views audience members having choice for what they consume

  • Reader responses/users and justifications

All three models overlap to create the

public sphere

Media Gap

where community relationships and “small group and special group communication” are largely missing

Constructionism

Treats audience as signifier and subject position rather than referent and autonomous subject

Charles Horton Cooley

defines communication as: the mechanism through which human relations exist and develop - all the symbols of the mind, together with the means of conveying them through space and conserving them through time

Observation and Imitation

Newspapers were a superficial form of media

The Payne Fund Studies

60% of children can recall specific details about media they are exposed to

Peterson and Thurstone

• found significant effects on attitude: exposure to the racist film Birth of a Nation directlt lessened viewer favorability toward African Americans

Blumer

connected motion picture viewing to delinquency: proposed the idea of emotional contagion - ideas spread in media like a virus from one individual to another through mass media

By 1935

• Roughly 70% of all households have a radio

• Nearly 78 million Americans claimed to be habitual radio listeners

• Radio was perceived to offer “expert opinions” and news

• Scholars worried about its potential use for propaganda

War of Worlds

• Fictionalized Orson Wells series, changed setting from London to New Jersey

• Although fewer than one in three listeners believed it was “real news”, over one million people had mass panic over the broadcast and od the ones who believed it was real, 70% reported being scared, leaving home, running from aliens

• Cantrill theorizes this as the “psychological of panic” - concluding that “critical ability” to analyze media messages is critical and probably related to an individual’s education

Source Credibility

the degree to which we trust a source or sender as credible

Consistency Theory

drive for cognitive consistency is key motivator for all human behavior

Cognitive Dissonance

need for consistency

Selective Perception

process of reinterpreting the world to match already held/previous beliefs

Selective exposure

consciously avoiding the message that challenges your beliefs

Elaboration Likelihood Process

effects depend on individual’s motivation to process the message

• Central Processing: active engagement

• Peripheral Processing: cognitive shortcuts

The People’s Choice

very few people change their mind over the course of a political campaign; media exposure reinforces previous political beliefs

• Opinion Leaders: active engagement

• Two Step Flow: impact of media message flows through opinion leaders who pass it to along to smaller groups/audiences

Who was Cooley?

one of the first academics to link the development of worldview to interpersonal cultural feedback and communication media

Social Learning Theory (Bandura)

How children socialize, imitate adults, Bobo doll experiments shows children model adult behavior

Cultivation Theory (Gerbner)

the more you watch/expose yourself to a message, the more likely you are to believe it

Social Media

• an early study of social media use revealed that half of teens reported being addicted to their phone

  • Makes them feel more connected to parents

  • Makes them more distracted with multitasking

  • Makes them more anxious/FOMO/social guilt

  • Makes them more likely to engage in risky behaviors (sexting/bullying)

“Intoxification”

intoxication by too much information

Scalability

social media increases emotions of meanness, betrayal and harassment by amplifying the number of people who can see the behavior