6.5 Evidence Flashcards
Different models of media effects
10 Things Wrong with the Effects Model
Gauntlett
1) The effects model tackles social problems ‘backwards’: The
‘media effects’ approach, in this sense, comes at the problem backwards, by starting with the media and then trying to lasso connections from there on to social beings, rather than the other way around.
Criminologists, in their professional attempts to
explain crime and violence, consistently turn for explanations not to the mass media but to social factors such as poverty, unemployment, housing, and the behaviour of family and peers. In a study which did start at what I would recognise as the correct end – by interviewing 78 violent teenage offenders and then tracing their behaviour back towards media usage.
In comparison with a group of over 500 ‘ordinary’ school pupils of the same age – Hagell & Newburn found only that the young offenders watched less television and video than their counterparts, had less access to the technology in the first place, had no unusual interest in specifically violent programmes, and either enjoyed the same material as non-offending teenagers or were simply uninterested. This point was demonstrated very clearly when the offenders were asked, ‘If you had the chance to be someone who appears on television, who would you choose to be?’:
‘The offenders felt particularly uncomfortable with this question and appeared to have difficulty in understanding why one might want to be such a person… In several interviews, the offenders had already stated that they watched little television, could not remember their favourite programmes and, consequently, could not think of anyone to be. In these cases, their obvious failure to identify with any television characters seemed to be part of a general lack of engagement with television’
2) The effects model treats children as inadequate: In psychology, then, children are often considered not so much in terms of what
they can do, as what they (apparently) cannot. Negatively defined as non-adults, the research subjects are regarded as the ‘other’, a strange breed whose failure to match generally middle-class adult norms must be charted and discussed.
This situation is clearly exposed by research which seeks to establish what children can and do understand about and from the mass media. Such projects have shown that children can talk intelligently and indeed cynically about the mass media (Buckingham, 1993, 1996), and that children as young as seven can make thoughtful, critical and ‘media literate’ video productions themselves (Gauntlett, 1997, 2005).
3) Assumptions within the effects model are characterised by barely-concealed conservative ideology: Effects studies from the USA, in particular, tend to assume a level of television violence which is simply not applicable in Canada, Europe or elsewhere, and which is based on content analysis methods which count all kinds of ‘aggression’ seen in the media and come up with a correspondingly high number.
George Gerbner’s view, for example, that ‘We are awash in a tide of
violent representations unlike any the world has ever seen… drenching every home with graphic scenes of expertly choreographed brutality’ (1994, p. 133), both reflects his hyperbolic view of the media in the US and the extent to which findings cannot be simplistically transferred across the Atlantic.
Whilst it is certainly possible that gratuitous depictions of violence might reach a level in US screen media which could be seen as unpleasant and unnecessary, it cannot always be assumed that violence is shown for ‘bad’ reasons or in an uncritical
light. Even the most ‘gratuitous’ acts of violence, can be interpreted as
rationally resistant reactions to an oppressive world which has little to offer them.
The way in which media effects researchers talk about the
amount of violence in the media encourages the view that it is not important to consider the meaning of the scenes involving violence which appear on screen.
The opportunistic mixing of concerns about the roots of violence with political reservations about the content of screen media is a lazy form of propaganda. Media effects studies and TV violence content analyses help to sustain this approach by maintaining the notion
that ‘antisocial’ behaviour is an objective category which can be measured, which is common to numerous programmes, and which will negatively affect those children who see it portrayed.
4) The effects model inadequately defines its own objects of study (Methodological problem)
5) The effects model is often based on artificial elements and assumptions within studies (Methodological problem)
6) The effects model is often based on studies with misapplied methodology
7) The effects model is selective in its criticisms of media depictions of violence: The acts of violence which appear on a daily basis on news and serious factual programmes are seen as somehow exempt. The point here is not that depictions of violence in the news should necessarily be condemned in just the same, blinkered way, but rather to draw attention to another philosophical inconsistency which the model cannot account for.
If the antisocial acts shown in drama series and films are expected to have an effect on the behaviour of viewers, even though such acts are almost always ultimately punished or have other negative consequences for the perpetrator, there is no obvious reason why the antisocial activities which are always in the news, and which frequently do not have such apparent consequences for their agents, should not have similar effects.
8) The effects model assumes superiority to the masses: Surveys typically show that whilst a certain proportion of the public feel that the media may cause other people to engage in antisocial behaviour, almost no-one ever says that they have been affected in that way themselves. This view is taken to extremes by researchers and campaigners whose work brings them into regular contact with the supposedly corrupting material, but who are unconcerned for
their own well-being as they implicitly ‘know’ that the effects could only be on others. Insofar as these others are defined as children or ‘unstable’ individuals, their approach may seem not unreasonable; it is fair enough that such questions should be explored. Nonetheless, the idea that it is unruly ‘others’ who will be affected – the uneducated? the working class? – remains at the heart of the effects paradigm, and is reflected in its texts
George Gerbner and his colleagues, for example, write about ‘heavy’ television viewers as if this media consumption has necessarily had the opposite effect on the weightiness of their brains. Such people are assumed to have no selectivity or critical skills, and their habits are explicitly contrasted with preferred activities: Most viewers watch by the clock and either do not know what they will watch when they turn on the set, or follow established routines rather than choose each program as they would choose a book, a movie or an article’.
This view – which knowingly makes inappropriate comparisons by ignoring the serial nature of many TV programmes, and which is unable to account for the widespread use of TV guides and digital or video recorders with which audiences plan and arrange their viewing – reveals the kind of elitism and snobbishness which often seems to
underpin such research. The point here is not that the content of the mass media must not be criticised, but rather that the mass audience themselves are not well served by studies which are willing to treat them as potential savages or actual fools.
9) The effects model makes no attempt to understand meanings of the media: A further fundamental flaw, hinted at in points three and four above, is that the effects model necessarily rests on a base of reductive assumptions and unjustified stereotypes regarding media content. To assert that, say, ‘media violence’ will bring negative consequences is not only to presume that depictions of violence in the media will always be promoting antisocial behaviour, and that
such a category exists and makes sense, as noted above, but also assumes that the medium holds a singular message which will be carried unproblematically to the audience. The effects model therefore performs the double deception of presuming (a) that the media presents a singular and clear-cut ‘message’, and (b) that the proponents of the effects model are in a position to identify what that
message is.
The meanings of media content are ignored in the simple sense that assumptions are made based on the appearance of elements removed from their context (for example, woman hitting man equals violence equals bad), and in the more sophisticated sense that even in context the meanings may be different for different viewers (woman hitting man equals an unpleasant act of aggression, or
appropriate self-defence, or a triumphant act of revenge, or a refreshing change, or is simply uninteresting, or any of many further alternative readings)
10) The effects model is not grounded in theory: Finally, and underlying many of the points made above, is the fundamental
problem that the entire argument of the ‘effects model’ is not substantiated with any theoretical reasoning beyond the bald assertions that particular kinds of effects will be produced by the media. The basic question of why the media should induce people to imitate its content has never been adequately tackled, beyond the simple idea that particular actions are ‘glamorised’. (However, antisocial actions are shown really positively so infrequently that this is an inadequate explanation). Similarly, the question of how merely seeing an activity in the media would be translated into an actual motive which would prompt an individual to behave in a particular way is just as unresolved.
Moving Experiences: Understanding Television’s Influences and Effects
Gauntlett
Gauntlett (1995) demonstrated how even very young children may be media literate – they have an understanding about the media and how it works. For example, most children can distinguish between fictiona and factual representations of violence.
Evidence for Hypodermic Syringe Model
Feminist sociologists such as Susi Orbach and Naomi Wolfe have highlighted how the ‘beauty myth’, especially the representations of size zero as normal, have encouraged an increase in eating disorders, especially among young women, as well as an increase in mental health problems.
