Mass Media: Transmission & Persuasion

Question 1

What were the first wave of media effect models?

Answer 1

• Hypodermic Needle Model
• Shannon and Weaver’s Transmission Model
• Two Step Flow Model

Question 2

What is the hypodermic needle model?

Answer 2

• 1960s
• Used in retrospect to describe the media’s communication conveyance process as a taking information and injecting it into the head
• Here’s an opinion for you
• Stimulus/Response

Question 3

What is the rationale for hypodermic model?

Answer 3

• Lasswell in 1927
  
  • Doctoral thesis on WW1 communication techniques
  • Letter to America Political Science Review
  • “Propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols”
  • Deductive Inference
    
    • Lasswell emphasised the manipulation of symbols and their effects of collective attitudes
    • The Nazi’s manipulated symbols: ostensible shift in collective attitudes: ergo…
      
      • i.e. is a pretty weak correlation/causation

Question 4

What is stimulus/repsonse?

Answer 4

• Carl Hovland picked up on this idea:
  
  • Communication = ‘the process by which an individual transmits stimuli to modify the behaviour of other individuals’
• Importance of physicality and tangibility
• Researchers faced measurement problems
  
  • Focusing on the message, or consequence change in behaviour?
  • How can you isolate message effects (.e.g are you a conservative because you watch Fox or a Fox viewer because you’re a conservative?)

Question 5

Who were Shannon and Weaver?

Answer 5

• Claude Shannon
  
  • Worked at Bell Labs
  • Published book trying to make sense of information tranmission
  • Had an engineering focus
  • i.e. efficiencies in transmitting and storing information (in bits)
  • Origins of information theory
• Warren Weaver
  
  • Saw this was revolutionary for communications theory
  • Conceived information in a ‘very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another”

Question 6

What is the transmission model?

Answer 6

Source: Message: Transmitter: Signal: Noise: Received Signal: Receiver: Message: Destination

Question 7

What is the relvelence of the SW model?

Answer 7

• Moved discussion from ‘hypodermic needle’ to ‘transmission’ of information
• Legitimised the stimulus-response idea
  
  • (Because engineers have more credibility)
• Introduced the idea of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ the source into transmittable data: how tiny can we make this data

Question 8

What is two step flow?

Answer 8

• ‘The People’s Choice’
• Paul Lazarsfeld and co-authors surveyed 2400 throughout the 1940 US Election
  
  • Wanted to know how voters made up their minds
  • Observed the importance of ‘opinion leaders’
• Information is conveyed via media to opinion leaders, who imbue the information with their own authority etc
• And people listen to the opinion leaders more than to media directly
• Tangibility is important: opinion leaders are thought to be chosen as representatives (geographical or otherwise), so obviously pre-digital
• Political Implications: Hillary bringing out Beyonce and Jay Z etc
• Some evidence: face to face discussions can change people’s media-bred bias’s about sexualities etc, and these new attitudes persist, but only when engaged by an ‘opinion leader’ directly