ICS semester 1 final Flashcards
Cutting through the clutter
The way we cognitively process only a few messages per day from the thousands we receive.
Attitude
evaluative response (positive or negative) to a stimulus
Hybrid advertising
a strategy that combines different types of advertising approaches or channels to create a more comprehensive and effective marketing campaign
Parasocial interaction theory
the one-sided, quasi-social relationships that viewers can develop with media figures, such as celebrities, TV characters, or social media personalities.
Affiliate advertising
the process by which an affiliate earns a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products. For example, YouTube sponsorships
Source credibility theory (also known as credibility theory)
Refers to how the perceived credibility of the source impacts the acceptance, belief and effectiveness of a message.
Main aspects are:
Trustworthiness
Expertise
Perceived intent
Social influence theory
examines the ways in which individuals are influenced by the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours of others within a social group or society.
Key concepts related to social influence theory
- Conformity: Conformity is the tendency of individuals to adjust their beliefs, attitudes, or behaviours to align with those of a group or majority, even if it goes against their personal beliefs.
- Compliance: Compliance involves individuals conforming to a request or directive from another person, often due to social pressure or the desire to gain approval or avoid disapproval.
- Obedience: Obedience is the act of following orders or instructions from an authority figure, even if these orders conflict with personal values or ethics. The famous Milgram experiment is a classic example of obedience to authority (the electro-shock experiment)
- Social Norms: Social norms are the unwritten rules and expectations that guide appropriate behaviour within a society or group. Adherence to social norms is a form of social influence.
- Groupthink: Groupthink is a phenomenon in which group members prioritise consensus and harmony over critical thinking, often leading to poor decision-making.
Social Learning Theory
Social learning theory, developed by psychologist Albert Bandura, focuses on how individuals acquire new behaviours and skills through observing and imitating the actions of others in their social environment.
Key components of social learning theory include:
- Observational Learning: Observational learning involves individuals learning by watching and imitating the actions, behaviours, and consequences experienced by others. This is often referred to as modelling or vicarious learning.
- Reinforcement and Punishment
- Self-efficacy. High self-efficacy encourages individuals to engage in behaviours they believe they can successfully perform
- Reciprocal Determinism: Social learning theory acknowledges the dynamic interplay between personal factors, environmental influences, and behaviour. It suggests that individual behaviour and the environment continually influence each other.
Catharsis theory
the idea that viewing violence is sufficient to purge or at least satisfy a person’s aggressive drive and therefore reduce the likelihood of aggressive behaviour
Persuasive communication
Information that is aimed at influencing receivers’ views, beliefs and action using media such as text, audio and visuals.
Imitative (social) learning:
Motivation => Presence of cues => performance of behaviour => positive reinforcement.
Modelling
the process through which individuals learn new behaviors, skills, or attitudes by observing and imitating the actions of others
Inhibitory effects
Seeing a behaviour being punished reduces the likelihood of us making that behaviour
Vicarious reinforcement
is seeing other people be rewarded or punished for certain behaviours and from those reinforcement contingencies adapting our behaviour.
Disinhibitory effects
Media depicting reward for prohibited behaviour is sufficient enough to encourage that behaviour
Aggressive cues
Is the way how media portrayed violence is always in some kind of context and that context provides us cues, telling us when and against whom is violence acceptable
Priming effect
Priming effects refer to the phenomenon where exposure to a stimulus or information influences a person’s subsequent thoughts, perceptions, or behaviours related to that stimulus or related concepts.
Best example of priming is the sexualisation of women in advertisements.
Desensitisation
the mitigation or reduction of anxious physiological arousal in response to depictions of violence, both mediated and real-world, as the result of habitual consumption of mediated violence.
Cognitive-neoassociationistic perspective
This model suggests that emotions are linked to specific cognitive and environmental cues through associative networks. It posits that certain stimuli become associated with specific emotional responses through experience
The Cognitive-Neoassociationistic perspective also integrates elements of social learning theory, emphasizing that individuals can learn emotional and cognitive responses by observing others in social situations.
Media contextual variables
- Reward/punishment
- Consequences (inhibitory or disinhibitory effects)
- Motive
- Realism
- Humour
- Identification with media characters
- Arousal, arousal can increase attention and emotional appeal, thus resulting in more modelling.
Active theory of television viewing
Viewers actively and consciously work to understand television content.
active-audience theories
argues that average audience members can routinely resist the influence of media content and make it serve their own purposes.
downward spiral model of media influence
Posits that individuals tend to seek media content that is consonant with their character, thus reinforcing certain character features such as aggression.
Developmental perspective
Provides an age related perspective on media affects. It claims that children are cognitively developing and are affected by media differently according to their age
similarity identification
the observer identifies with a character because they share some salient characteristic
wishful identification
Here the observer “desires to emulate the character, either in general terms (as a role model for future action or identity development) or in specific terms (extending responses beyond the viewing situation or imitating a particular behaviour).”
Cultivation theory
Repeating messages on TV cultivates our worldview and constructs a new perceived reality that does not necessarily reflect actual reality.
Cultivation effects
- First-order - probabilities of something happening
- Second-order - stereotypes and behaviours cultivated based on those probabilities.
Gerbner’ 3 Bs of television
- TV blurs traditional distinctions of people’s views of their world.
- TV blends their realities into cultural mainstream
- TV bends that mainstream to the institutional interests of television and its sponsors.
Resonance
When the TV world resembles your everyday environment and reality it results in stronger cultivation effects.
Super Peer Theory
Claim that children and adolescents mimic the behaviour of those individuals whom they most want to be like.
Media figures can replace those individuals and be role models
Theory of Mind (ToM)
It refers to the ability to understand that others have thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that may be different from one’s own. In other words, it’s the capacity to attribute mental states to oneself and others.
scope of self model
asserts that adolescents who have heavier media diets, television in particular, are exposed to only a narrow slice of the vast diversity in real-world human existence
Self-complexity
seeing oneself as having different self-concepts across different situations.
Script theory
It’s a cognitive framework for understanding how people have mental representations, or “scripts,” for specific situations and how they use these scripts to guide their behaviour and make predictions about what will happen next.
Objectification theory
Internalise an observer’s perspective and treat oneself as an object to be looked at and evaluated for one’s appearance.
Early window
The way that media allows children to see the world well before they are developmentally capable of competently interacting with it.
Kinderculture
The corporate construction of childhood.
The brain drain hypothesis
the mere presence of one’s own smartphone may occupy limited-capacity cognitive resources
nomophobia
is used to describe a psychological condition when people have a fear of being detached from mobile phone connectivity.
Social capital
the networks of relationships among people who live and work in a particular society, enabling that society to function effectively
Self-disclosure
the purposeful and voluntary sharing of personal history, attitudes, feelings, values, secrets
Self-fulfilling prophecy
expectation or belief held by one person about another influences the behavior of the other person in such a way that it causes the initial expectation to come true. In other words, a person’s beliefs or expectations can lead them to behave in a manner that elicits responses from others consistent with those beliefs or expectations.
idealised virtual identity hypothesis
Posits the tendency for creators of social network site profiles to display idealised characteristics that do not reflect their actual personalities.
extended real-life hypothesis
predicts that people use OSNs (online social networking) to communicate their real personality
social comparison theory
is the idea that people, in order to satisfy their need to evaluate their own opinions and abilities and to reduce uncertainties they may have about themselves, make “comparative judgments of social stimuli on particular content dimensions
Media literacy
understanding the sources and technologies of communication, the codes that are used, the messages that are produced, and the selection, interpretation, and impact of those messages
We interact with media in 4 ways:
- The cognitive domain, which refers to mental processes and thinking
- The emotional domain is the dimension of feeling
- The aesthetic domain is the ability to enjoy, understand, and appreciate media content from an artistic point of view
- The moral domain refers to the ability to infer the values underlying the messages.
Empowered child model of television effects
Children eventually become competent, self-aware users of television.
affective forecasting error
people feel more depressed when they expected more from social media, but that expectation was not met
Uses and gratification theory
is an approach to understanding why and how people actively seek out specific media to satisfy specific needs.
Several meanings of activity:
- Utility: put media to your own use
- Intentionality: media use because of prior motivations
- Selectivity: existing interests and preferences
- Imperviousness of influence: people avoid certain types of influence.
Alan Rubin’s typology of needs for television viewing (1980s)
- Passing time
- Companionship - feeling companionship with media characters.
- Escape
- Enjoyment
- Social interaction - it gives something to talk about later with other people.
- Relaxation
- Excitement
- Information
Hedonic motivation
people often consume media, simply aiming to maximise pleasure and minimise pain, rather than for anything else.
Eudaimonic motivation
when people choose content for personal insight, self-reflection and contemplation.
Mood management theory
Argues that a predominant motivation for using entertainment is to moderate or control our moods.
Selective exposure self and affect management model (SESAM)
Argues that media users select messages to manage and regulate their self-concept along with affective and cognitive states and behaviours via social comparison.
SESAM suggests that people often engage in social comparisons with people featured in mediated communication for reasons of:
- self-consistency for looking at people with the same views
- for self-improvement, getting inspired by upward comparison.
- for self-enhancement by feeling better about oneself through downward comparison.
Temporarily expanding the boundaries of the self perspective
Since we can never achieve total agency, total autonomy, and total social affiliation because we’re busy achieving what we can as we negotiate everyday life, we jump to the media to temporarily expand our daily life.
Reception studies
Relates how media content is produced and interpreted
Encoding
social and political context in which messages are produced
Decoding
The consumption of media content and its interpretation.
Polysemic messages
Can be interpreted in several ways.
Most messages are indeed polysemic
Preferred or dominant reading
A single dominant understanding of a message as intended by the sender.
Negotiated meaning
Differing interpretation from the one intended by the preferred reading
Oppositional decoding
When the interpretation of a message is completely opposite of the preferred reading.
Entertainment theory
seeks to understand what entertaining media content does to and for people
Commodification
the transformation of things such as goods, services, ideas, nature, personal information, people or animals into objects of trade or commodities
It is the process of converting human, social or culture value into market value.
Sportswashing
Using sport to create a positive reputation and draw attention away from poor human rights records, corruption, scandals…
commodification of culture
the study of what happens when culture is mass produced and distributed in direct competition with locally based cultures. It is the act of selling culture as a product.
Decontextualise
Strip away local culture context
Objectify and Simplify
transform complex ambiguous aspects of culture into things that are easily interpreted and experienced
Recontextualize
create mass culture context for items => genres of programming
The best example of recontextualisation is Hollywood. Most movies obey certain narratives and rules.
Mediatisation
It refers to the process by which media become increasingly integrated into various aspects of society, influencing and shaping not only communication but also social, cultural, and political structures
two perspectives of mediatisation:
- Institutional, when institutions adjust to the logic of the media institution. All or most societal institutions are to a certain degree exposed to media pressures.
- Social constructivist - how media affect daily social practices.
Deep mediatization
is ‘an advanced stage of the process in which all elements of our social world are intricately related to digital media and their underlying infrastructures.
Narrative persuasion theory
the impact of narratives on the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of individuals exposed to them
Transportation
is “a convergent process, where all the person’s mental systems and capacities become focused on the events in the narrative”
Identification
An imaginative process through which an audience member assumes the identity, goals, and perspective of a character
Identification, then, involves a cognitive response (perceived similarity) and an emotional response (empathy)
Entertainment-education (EE)
occurs when prosocial messages are embedded in popular media content, either with the specific intent of influencing attitudes or behaviour or simply as a dramatic device, but one that serves incidentally to promote a prosocial end
Entertainment overcoming resistance model (EORM)
states that transportation, identification, similarity, and parasocial interaction (PSI) help overcome various types of resistance to persuasion - enhancing persuasive outcomes.
absorption
losing self-awareness during consumption of the narrative
Wishful identification
occurs when individuals want to be like, desire to emulate, and look up to the character
Efficacy
refers to the message cues or action steps to avoid the threat offered by the message.
Response efficacy
refers to a person’s beliefs as to whether the recommended action step will actually avoid the threat
Persuasion knowledge
comprises people’s understanding and attitudes concerning persuasive attempts
Consumer persuasion resistance strategies:
Avoidance:
a) Mechanical - skipping the ad or having an ad blocker or something
b) Physical - walking away physically. Advertisers overcame this with embedded advertisement - placing brands inside shows
c). Cognitive - selective avoidance, dozing off, ignoring it.
Behavioural Determinants
- Attitudes, beliefs
- Social norms
- Self efficacy Response
- Efficacy
- Perceived severity
- Perceived susceptibility
6 Principles of persuasion:
- Reciprocity
- Scarcity
- Authority
- Consistency
- Liking
- Consensus
Identification has four dimensions:
- empathic (sharing feelings with the character),
- cognitive (sharing the character’s perspective),
- motivational (internalising the character’s goals),
- absorption (losing self-awareness during consumption of the narrative).
