Exam 1 Flashcards
Mass communication
- Reach Mass audiences, not an individual
How does media affect your perception of reality?
- Mediation becomes part of our experience of “real” things
- Powerful forces shape our perceptions of experience
Media and Society
a. Storytelling has become professionalized
b. People’s experiences have become “mediated” with mass scale and extent of communications on the rise
c. As attention is scarce, valuable, and hard to sustain, new technologies “personalize” what essentially continues to be mass communications.
Historical Perspectives of Media Effects
a. Media effects are cognitive, affective, physiological, attitudinal, or behavioral responses to media content.
b. Early studies found little support for magic bullet/hypodermic needle notions of media effects, as these tend to be contingent and limited
Cultivation
a. Media cultivate viewers’ interpretations of the world in line with the “media world”
b. Heavy doses of violence in TV result in a mean world syndrome
c. Political attitudes of heavy TV users tended to converge
d. New interactive settings may enhance the cultivation of attitudes
Agenda Setting
a. Media Tells the public what to think about
b. Forces shaping media’s agenda: powerful external actors, media routines and organization, professional norms and ideology, citizens
c. What can Limit media’s agenda-setting effect: obtrusiveness of issues, political talk, personal interests, and declining trust.
Forces shaping media’s agenda?
powerful external factors, media routines, and organization, professional norms and ideology, citizens
What can limit the media’s agenda-setting effect?
Political talk, personal interests, and declining trust
What may challenge the media’s agenda-setting role?
New communication, enviroment, the emergence of issue publics, and partisanship
Knowledge Gaps Hypothesis
a. Those with higher socioeconomic status tend to acquire info from media at a faster rate than the lower-status segments of the population.
b. Underlying justifications: comm skills; stored information; social contacts; selective exposure, acceptance, and retention.
Uses and Gratifications Approach
a. Paradigm shift: It is what people do with media, not what media does to people
b. Individual differences affect media use, message interpretation, and effects
c. Active audiences impinges upon info processing
d. Effects are not necessarily uniform, but contingent on predispositions and use
e. Sometimes people are not as active
Media Framing
a. Framing goes beyond agenda setting, as frames highlight certain info that becomes central in understanding and decision making
b. Effective frames define a problem, suggest its cause, the solution, and who is responsible
c. Lack of counter-frames are easier to adapt
Priming
a. To make judgments, people rely not on all available information but more on accessible information
b. Media messages can activate neural networks that make us evaluate things in a certain way and not in others
c. Priming activation is short-term and needs repetitions (“chronic”) to be effective.
d. Priming activation can be “balanced” through reasoning
Third Person Effect
a. People over/underestimate media effects on other people’s reactions and behaviors compared to their own.
b. This perception gap is contingent upon negative content, social distance corollary, perceived expertise
c. Consequences: prevention (censorship), correction, accommodation (compliance or withdrawal to perceived social norms)
d. Media market coverage around commercial practices, but this does not mean independence.
e. Cosmopolitan Communications (CC): the way people learn about, and interact with people and places beyond the nation-state.
f. Audience Impact of CC: LA effect, Taliban Effect, Conditional Effect due to country/individual level factors
e. Press Freedom factors: pluralism, media independence, environment/self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, infrastructure, abuses.
Hostile Media Phenomenon
a. Reversal of assimilation bias, as people interpret media content as biased against their position
b. The more extreme the issue positions are, the more susceptible people are to experiencing hostile media effects.
c. Underlying mechanisms: selective recall, selective categorization, different standards.
d. In a partisan media environment, relative hostile media effects may appear.
