The direct effects paradigm. Hypodermic needle: overview Sometimes also referred to, after Schramm, as the Silver Bullet Model (1982), this is the idea.

The direct effects paradigm

Hypodermic needle: overview

• Sometimes also referred to, after Schramm, as the Silver Bullet Model (1982), this is the idea that the mass media are so powerful that they can 'inject' their messages into the audience, or that, like a magic bullet, they can be precisely targeted at an audience, who irresistibly fall down when hit by the bullet. In brief, it is the idea that the makers of media messages can get us to do whatever they want us to do.

• In that simple form, this is a view which has never been seriously held by media theorists. It is really more of a folk belief than a model, which crops up repeatedly in the popular media whenever there is an unusual or grotesque crime, which they can somehow link to supposedly excessive media violence or sex and which is then typically taken up by politicians who call for greater control of media output.

• If it applies at all, then probably only in the rare circumstances where all competing messages are rigorously excluded, for example in a totalitarian state where the media are centrally controlled.

Advertising and World War I propaganda

• The 'folk belief' in the Hypodermic Needle Model was fuelled initially by the rapid growth of advertising from the late nineteenth century on, coupled with the practice of political propaganda and psychological warfare during World War I. Quite what was achieved by either advertising or political propaganda is hard to say, but the mere fact of their existence raised concern about the media's potential for persuasion. Certainly, some of the propaganda messages seem to have stuck, since many of us still believe today that the Germans bayoneted babies and replaced the clappers of church bells with the churches' own priests in 'plucky little Belgium', though there is no evidence for that. Some of us still cherish the belief that Britain, the 'land of the free', was fighting at the time for other countries' 'right to self-determination', though we didn't seem particularly keen to accord the right to the countries we controlled.

The Inter-War Years

• Later, as the ‘Press Barons' strengthened their hold on British newspapers and made no secret of their belief that they could make or break governments and set the political agenda, popular belief in the irresistible power of the media steadily grew. It was fuelled also by widespread concern, especially among élitist literary critics, but amongst the middle and upper classes generally, about the supposed threat to civilised values posed by the new mass popular culture of radio, cinema and the newspapers.

• The radio broadcast of War of the Worlds seemed also to provide very strong justification for these worries.

• Concern also grew about the supposed power of advertisers who were known to be using the techniques of behaviourist psychology. Watson, the founding father of behaviourism, having abandoned his academic career in the '20s, worked in advertising, where he made extravagant claims for the effectiveness of his techniques.

Political propaganda in European dictatorships

• 1917 had seen the success of the Russian Revolution, which was followed by the marshalling of all the arts in support of spreading the revolutionary message. Lenin considered film in particular to be a uniquely powerful propaganda medium and, despite the financial privations during the post-revolutionary period, considerable resources were invested in film production.

• This period also saw the rise and eventual triumph of fascism in Europe. This was believed by many to be due to the powerful propaganda of the fascist parties, especially of Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had great admiration for the propaganda of the Soviet Union, especially for Eisenstein’s masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. Though himself a fanatical opponent of Bolshevism, Goebbels said admiringly of that film: 'Someone with no firm ideological convictions could be turned into a Bolshevik by this film.' The film was generally believed to be so powerful that members of the German army were forbidden to see it even long before the Nazis came to power and it was also banned in Britain for many years.

• After the war, Speer, Hitler's armaments minister, said at his trial for war crimes:

[Hitler's] was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country ... Through technical devices like the radio and the loudspeaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.

Post-War and the present day

• With the development of television after World War II and the very rapid increase in advertising, concern about the 'power' of the mass media continued to mount and we find that conern constantly reflected in the popular press. That concern underlies the frequent panics about media power. In the popular press, Michael Ryan was reported to have gone out and shot people at random in Hungerford because he had watched Rambo videos, two children were supposed to have abducted and murdered Jamie Bulger because they had watched Child's Play. After the 1992 General Election, The Sun announced 'It's the Sun what won it' - a view echoed by the then Conservative Party Treasurer, Lord McAlpine, and the defeated Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock.

Empiricist tradition: overview

• It probably wouldn't be correct to say that the researchers in the empiricist (or empirical) tradition are empiricists in the strictest sense in which it is used in philosophy. Their approach to the study of mass media effects is close to what we might expect to be the methods of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology etc.). It is characterised by counting and categorising audience members and by the attempted measurement of direct effects of communication on those audiences.

• These entirely practical concerns are what we might well expect from university departments in the USA, where this tradition has been most prominent. University research in the States has long been funded by business and by political parties who have given the university departments quite specific briefs. The sponsors of such research are quite naturally concerned to know whether they are fully exploiting the market or whether their newspapers, movies, TV programmes are failing to exploit some sectors; whether their party propaganda really is encouraging the electorate to vote for them; whether their advertising really is getting more people to eat their beans and so on.

• The empiricist researchers were concerned to find out as much as possible about media audiences, in much the same terms as advertisers today would seek information from, say the National Readership Surveys: number of people, age, sex, social status, occupation, leisure and so on.

• By and large these data tended to be used to support studies into the effectiveness of communication, rules for mounting effective campaigns and so on.

• Contemporary commentators on media research are frequently dismissive of the 'scientific', experimental methods often employed in early empiricist 'Effects Research'. Whilst there is much to criticize in this approach, the critics often unfairly overstate their case, disregarding the methodological diversity which did exist at the time. Such diversity was often forced upon the researchers by the realization that their 'scientific', ‘positivistic' approach was based on a transmission model of communication which conceives of a message being sent from sender to receiver, disregarding institutional, psychological, cultural and other factors which contribute to any possible effects the media may have.

Cultural effects: overview

• We are using the term 'cultural effects' here as shorthand for the investigation of social, political and cultural effects.

• Broadly speaking, those analysts who are concerned with cultural effects fall into two camps:

• somewhat élitist literary critics who are distressed by the spread of popular culture, which they see as diluting and undermining the values enshrined in high culture

• Marxist critics whose 'critical' perspective derives from the work of Karl Marx and from the Frankfurt School. Their main concern is with the way that the mass media are used to spread and legitimate the dominant ideology.

Uses and gratifications: overview

• In the fairly early days of effects research, it became apparent that the assumed 'hypodermic' effect was not borne out by detailed investigation. A number of factors appeared to operate to limit the effects of the mass media.

• Katz and Lazarsfeld, for example, pointed to the influence of group membership and Hovland identified a variety of factors ranging from group membership to the audience's interest in the subject of the message.

The active audience• As a result of this evidence, attention began to turn from the

question of 'what the media do to the audience' to 'what the audience do with the media'. Herta Herzog was one of the earliest researchers in this area. She undertook (as part of Paul Lazarsfeld's massive programme of research) to investigate what gratifications radio listeners derived from daytime serials, quizzes and so on. Katz summarises the starting point of this kind of research quite neatly:

• ... even the most potent of the mass media content cannot ordinarily influence an individual who has 'no use' for it in the social and psychological context in which he lives. The 'uses' approach assumes that people's values, their interests, their associations, their social rôles, are pre-potent, and that people selectively 'fashion' what they see and hear to these interests (Katz (1959) in McQuail (1971)

• Researchers in the uses and gratifications vein therefore see the audience as active . It is part of the received wisdom of media studies that audience members do indeed actively make conscious and motivated choices amongst the various media messages available.

• Like much of the research in the Empricist vein, the American tradition of Uses and Gratfications research has been located within a pluralist view of the mass media. Within that context, especially where news coverage is concerned, the conceptualization of the media as the fourth estate is particularly significant.

Recent developments: overview

• Postmodernity

Many of the recent approaches to the mass media are influenced, or at least informed by, postmodernism.

Hovland

• Very important amongst these researchers was Carl Hovland of Yale whose carefully controlled experiments were designed to test the separate variables in the communication process. The main focus of his research was persuasion. Many of the principles he established are generally accepted today - one finds them being repeated, in one form or another, by, for example, political spin doctors, PR people, advertisers. However, it's worth bearing in mind that such people are trying to sell their services and so may be making greater claims for Hovland's principles than they deserve. Certainly, as mentioned above, many contemporary critics would criticize the unashamedly positivist approach adopted by Hovland, an approach which implies that it is possible to discern general 'rules' for effective and persuasive communication. 

Lazarsfeld

• Paul Lazarsfeld was also a very important researcher who contributed much to the development of empirical methods in the social sciences during his work at the Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research. The most famous of the studies he conducted was that into voting behaviour carried out in the 1940s and which led him to develop the highly influential Two Step Flow Model of mass communication.

• As a result of his research, Lazarsfeld concluded that the media actually have quite limited effects on their audiences. This view of the media is common to many of the researchers in the US. Hovland, for example, whilst showing what variables can be altered to make a communication more or less effective, also places considerable emphasis on those factors, especially social factors such as group membership, which limit the persuasiveness of the message. Consequently, this view of the media is often referred to as the 'limited effects' paradigm or tradition.

Limited effects

• In Towards a Sociology of Mass Communication (1971), McQuail summarises some of the main findings of the research which confirms this 'limited effects' view:

• 'persuasive mass communication is in general more likely to reinforce the existing opinions of its audience than it is to change its opinion' (from Klapper (1960))

• 'people tend to see and hear communications that are favourable or congenial to their predispositions' (from Berelson & Steiner (1964))

• 'people respond to persuasive communication in line with their predispositions and change or resist change accordingly' (from Berelson & Steiner (1964))

Consequently:• 'political campaigns tend to reach the politically interested and converted', as shown

for example in Lazarsfeld's research • 'mass media campaigns against racial prejudice tend to be unsuccessful', as

demonstrated in Kendall and Woolf's analysis of reactions to anti-racist cartoons. The cartoons featured Mr Biggott whose absurdly racist ideas were intended to discredit bigotry. In fact 31% failed to recognise that Mr Biggott was racially prejudiced or that the cartoons were intended to be anti-racist (Kendall & Wolff (1949) in Curran (1990)).

• 'effects vary according to the prestige or evaluations attaching to the communication source', as demonstrated by Hovland

• 'the more complete the monopoly of mass communication, the more likely it is that opinion change in the desired direction will be achieved' - as in totalitarian societies, such as Nazi Germany, for example

• 'the salience to the audience of the issues or subject matter will affect the likelihood of influence: "mass communication can be effective in producing a shift on unfamiliar, lightly felt, peripheral issues - those that do not much or are not tied to audience predispositions"' (from Berelson and Steiner (1964)). This is also supported by the recent research of Hügel et al, who confirm other studies' findings that media agenda-setting effects are limited to unobtrusive issues. (Hügel et al (1989))

• 'the selection and interpretation of content by the audience is influenced by existing opinions and interests and by group norms', as suggested by Hovland's research

• 'the structure of interpersonal relations in the audience mediates the flow of communication content and limits and determines whatever effects occur', as suggested by Katz and Lazarsfeld's research.

Powerful effects

• Schramm (1982) points to three powerful effects which the media can exert and which are pointed to by the research of the Columbia Bureau:

• the media can confer status on organisations, persons and policies. As Schramm suggests, we probably work on the assumption that if something really matters then it will be featured in the media; so, if it is featured in the media, it must really matter;

• the media can enforce social norms to an extent. The media can reaffirm social norms by exposing deviation from the norms to public view - this connects with British research by Cohen into folk devils and moral panics;

• the media can act as social narcotics; sometimes known as the narcotising dysfunction, this means that because of the enormous amount of information in the media, media consumers tend not to be energised into social action, but rather drugged or narcotised into inaction.

Violence and Delinquency

• As mentioned above, the empiricist vein of research in the US was funded to a large extent by major corporations concerned to investigate the influence of their advertising and public relations and by political parties which wished to devise the most effective campaigns. Another important impetus came from the government which responded to widespread public concern about media (especially film and then, later, television) portrayals of violence and their possible link with juvenile delinquency. The nature of the assumed links was then and continues to be unclear and confused.

Klapper (1960) reduced the assumptions to six basic forms:

Mass media messages containing the portrayal of crimes and acts of violence can

• be generally damaging • be directly imitated • serve as a school of crime • in specific circumstances cause otherwise

normal people to engage in criminal acts • devalue human life • serve as a safety valve for aggressive impulses

Cultural effects - Marxist approach

• The Marxist view is referred to by a variety of terms. Fairly common are the terms 'critical' and 'radical'. In Britain and Europe Marxist approaches to the mass media and, more generally, to culture as a whole ('cultural studies') were dominant from the mid '60s to the mid 80s (approximately). Although less dominant now, Marxism still colours much media research.

• Generally, the Marxian view of media influence depends on an understanding and elaboration of the operation of the notion of ideology. Although perhaps in everyday parlance, the term 'ideology' refers to a set of (especially 'political') beliefs and values which is not necessarily related to any particular social class (for example: Marxist ideology, Anglican ideology, proletarian ideology, Conservative ideology, socialist ideology, free market ideology), in the Marxian literature the term is generally used in an entirely negative sense to refer to a supposedly dominant ideology which supports the interests of the dominant class. Various thinkers (Mannheim, for example) have examined ideology from a class-neutral point of view, but it is this crucial notion of domination which is central to the Marxian understanding of ideology. Ideology is seen as a tool of the dominant classes, misleading and illusory.

The Frankfurt School

• An important source of the left-wing critique of mass culture is the Frankfurt School. Developing Marx's view that the dominant class in society not only owns the means of material production, but also controls the production of the society's dominant ideas and values (dominant ideology), the ‘critical theorists’ of the Frankfurt School examined the industrialisation of mass-produced culture and examined the economic imperatives behind what they dubbed the 'culture industries'. They saw the products of the culture industries as providing the ideological legitimation of existing capitalist societies and were the first to recognise the importance of the culture industries as significant agents of socialisation. Thus, what is sometimes referred to as 'vulgar Marxism' was developed by the Frankfurt School theorists beyond its rather mechanistic materialism and economic determinism to include consideration of culture as a vehicle of ideology, as well as a critique of science and technology as tools of social domination within capitalism.

Cultural effects - literary criticism

• This is generally a deeply pessimistic view of the supposed triviality of mass culture, which is seen as irredeemably commercial, and the pernicious effects of media systems, which are seen as permeated by lies and deceit. It dates back at least as far as Matthew Arnold's warnings in Culture and Anarchy of 1869 of the extension of 'philistine culture', which he considered to be spreading with the development of literacy and democracy.

The Leavisites

• Perhaps the strongest attack among British critics who present this view of mass culture are the 1930s to 1960s literary critics, Frank and Queenie Leavis. They saw the only salvation from mass culture as lying in the 'Great Tradition' of Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Keats and so on. Contemporary America seemed to fill Frank Leavis with dread:

  “.... the vision of our imminent tomorrow in today's America:

the energy, the triumphant technology, the productivity, the high standard of living and the life-impoverishment - the human emptiness, emptiness craving alcohol - of one kind or another.” Leavis FR (1962)