Hypodermic syringe model (passive)✅

The hypodermic syringe model

• Sometimes called the magic bullet theory, is a very simple model, and most commentators would now regard it as an old-fashioned and inadequate view of the relationship between media content and audiences of readers, listeners and viewers.

• This model suggests that the media act like a hypodermic syringe (or a bullet), injecting media texts into the ‘veins’ of media audiences. Audiences are seen as unthinking, passive receivers of media texts, who are unable to resist the messages that are ‘injected’ into them.

• In this view, media messages fill audiences with the dominant ideology, sexist and racist images, scenes of violence or other content, and the audiences then immediately acts on these messages. It is like seeing violence on television, and then growing out and attacking someone or viewing pornography and then going on to abuse women, as radical feminists suggests.

• It is a simple view of the media as causing immediate changes in people’s behaviour. It is the hypodermic syringe model which lies behind many moral panics over the effects of the media on behaviour, and it was the model sometimes used to partly explain the Tottenham/London riots in August 2011, with some claiming social media like Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger were fuelling the riots.

• On rare occasions, people may react quite directly to what they see in the media, as in copycat crimes or urban riots where people copy what they’ve seen in the media. Advertisers also spend millions of pounds on advertising their products, and we might reasonable assume that these have some effect on consumers and the sale of the goods advertised.

Criticisms of the hypodermic syringe model

1. Assumes the entire audience is passive and homogenous (sharing the same characteristics) and will react in the same way to media content. However, people may well have a range of responses to media content, depending on their own social situation and the experiences they have had. Young people with limited life experiences of their own might react differently from older audiences, and middle-class people might react differently to media representations of social from people in the working class. Violence in the media could have a variety of effects - people might be appalled and become determined to stamp it out; others might use it to work out their violent fantasies so it doesn’t happen in real life; others simply might ignore it.

2. It assumes audiences are passive, gullible and easily manipulated - but people are active thinking human beings, who use media in a variety of ways for their own purposes. They have their own ideas, and interpret and give different meanings to media texts. They are therefore not simply the uncritical passive consumers of information that the model suggests.

3. It assumes the media have enormous power and influence, overriding all other agencies of socialisation and peoples own experiences.

4. There is little evidence that media content has the immediate effects on audiences the model suggests.