Baran Davis Chapter 7 - Summary Mass Communication Theory PDF

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Active-Audience theories  Early researchers of media audience research focused on describing audiences and if the media had direct effects  Active-audience theories – do not attempt to understand what the media do to people, but rather, focus on assessing what people do with the media  Audience-centered theories, as opposed to source-dominated theories  Theories the first to make studying audience activity a priority  People put specific media and specific media content to specific use in the hopes of having some specific need or set of needs gratified  The theories in this chapter are microscopic and have limited concern for the larger social order in which media operate  Ask: why do people seek information from media or how do they cope with the flow of content from those media? Why do people seek entertainment and what purposes does it serve for them? Active Audience Research  1940s researchers began to gradually study an active, gratifications-seeking audience (Herzog, Merton, Lazarsfeld, Stanton)  Lazarsfeld and Stanton (1942) – how media organize lives and experiences  Lazarsfeld and Stanton (1942) – produced a series of books and studies that looked at how audiences used media to organize their lives and experiences  Herta Herzog – credited with originator of U&G approach (although not the label)  Did not try to measure the influence – satisfied with only assessing reasons and experiences  Motivations and gratifications of daily serial listeners (radio  popular quiz show, soap opera listeners; wanted to understand why so many housewives were attached to radio soap operas)  Listening as an emotional release  Enjoyment and wishful thinking  Advice obtained Active Audience Research  Wilbur Schramm (1954) – What determines which offerings a mass communication will be selected by a given individual?

 Fraction of Selection – how individuals make media and content choices based on expectation of reward and effort required

 People weigh the level of reward (gratification) they expect from a given medium or message against how much effort they must make to secure that reward  We all make decisions about which content we choose based on our expectations of having some need met

Limitations  How could researchers keep this research object, as individuals could self-report hundreds of different gratifications  Qualitative methods suggested, but postpositivist researchers didn’t see value in studying subjective explanations and thought the only thing they needed to know about audiences were its size and demographics  Thought studying this would only satisfy curiosity, not deliver measurable and definitive answers  Things that advertisers wanted to know  Social scientists thought they must observe how people have been conditioned through exposure to stimuli in past situations – to understand what really motivates people (experiments, survey measurements, would be very costly)  Postpositivists criticized early active-audience research as too descriptive  Just took people’s reasons for using media and put them in arbitrary media categories (ex: three categories, why not five?)

Confusion: Media function or media use?  1960s – Active and grat-seeking audience research confused with functional analysis  Functionalism is not concerned with individuals; it is concerned with overall functions for society that are served by mass media  Failure to adequately differentia media uses from media functions hurt the design of these studies

 Also confusion on levels of analysis – focus of research attention, ranging from individuals to social systems Uses-and-Gratifications Approach  First revival – traced to three developments in research 1. New survey research methods and data analysis techniques – developed questionnaires that allowed for people’s reasons for using media to be measured more systematically; factor analysis; computers for survey methods now available 2. People’s active use of media might be an important mediating factor making effects more or less likely – argued that a member of an active audience can decide whether certain media effects are desirable and set out to achieve those effects  Your conscious decision to actively use this book is a necessary (mediating) factor that must occur so that the intended effect can take place 3. Effects research focusing too much on negative – researchers knew a lot about television violence in small segments, but less about how most people were seeking to make media do things that they wanted  Second revival – new media technologies and Internet applications  Three characteristics of computer-mediated mass communication for uses and grats researchers to examine 1. Interactivity – the degree to which participants in the communication process have control over, and can change roles in their mutual discourse 2. Demassification – the ability of the media user to select from a wide menu (we can select from a lot to tailor to our needs) 3. Asynchroneity – mediated messages may be staggered in time (read email at different times) The Active Audience  Critics of U&G say it exaggerates the amount of active use  Blumler (1979) identified difficulty in defining activity  Utility – media may have many uses for people, and people can put media to those uses  Intentionality – consumption of media content can be directed by people’s prior motivations

 Selectivity – people’s use of media might reflect their existing interests and preferences  Impervious to influence – audience members are often obstinate, they might not want to be controlled by anyone or anything, even my mass media. Audience members actively avoid certain types of media influence  Studied content and media-use-patterns, not what users did with the content once they chose it  Need to distinguish between activity (what the audience does) and activeness (the audience’s freedom in choice – Avatar example) – and see active audience as a relative concept. Uses-And-Gratifications Model  U&G - approach to media study focusing on the uses to which people put media and the gratifications they seek from those uses  Five elements (Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1974) 1. The audience is active and its media use is goal-oriented 2. The initiative in linking need gratification to a specific media choice rests with the audience member 3. The media compete with other sources of need satisfaction – media and their audience are part of the larger society 4. People are aware enough of their own media use, interests, and motives to be able to provide researchers with an accurate picture of that use 5. Value judgements regarding the audience’s linking its needs to specific media or content should be suspended - we each construct our own meaning of content, and that meaning ultimately influences what we think and do (ex: I watch reality TV, don’t judge) Uses-And-Gratifications Model  What other things in the environment influence the creation or maintenance of the audience members’ needs and their judgments of which media use will best meet those needs?  Social situations can: (Katz, Blumler & Gurevitch, 1974) 1. Produce tensions and conflicts, leading to pressure for their easement through media consumption (ex: reading diet advice and watching sitcoms on tv struggle with the same things you are)

2. Create an awareness of problems that demand attention, information about which might be sought in the media (see what popular people are doing and go to media to learn how to be like them) 3. Impoverish real-life opportunities to satisfy certain needs, and the media can serve as substitutes or supplements (don’t have the money to go out, stay in and connect with people on SNS) 4. Elicit specific values, and their affirmation and reinforcement can be facilitated by the consumption of related media materials (ex: reinforces attitudes toward partying if in college) 5. Provide realms of expectations of familiarity with media, which must be met to sustain membership in specific social groups (staying up to date with popular tv shows) Uses and Gratifications Theory Strengths:      

Focuses attention on individuals in the mass communication process Respects intellect and ability of media consumers Provides insightful analyses of how people experience media content Differentiates active uses of media from more passive uses Studies the use of media as part of everyday social interaction Provides useful insight into adoption of new media

Weaknesses:     

Too often mistakenly associated with functionalism, which can create a bias toward the status quo Cannot easily address the presence or absence of effects Many of its key concepts are criticized as unmeasurable Is too oriented toward the micro-level Media gratifications are often not associated with effects

Entertainment Theory  Examines key psychological mechanism underlying audience use and enjoyment of entertainment-oriented media content (Zillman)  Seeks to conceptualize and explicate key psychological mechanisms underlying entertainment and to differentiate entertainment processes from those that underlie media’s role in information, education, or persuasion  Audience member do voluntary control their selection of entertainment content, there are often underlying psychological processes they don’t consciously control

 Entertainment theory integrates findings from research examining the effects of many different types of entertainment content: horror, comedy, conflict, suspense, sex, affecttalk, sports, music, videogames  Media choices:  Hedonistic motivations – choosing content to maintain and maximize pleasure and diminish and minimize pain  Eudaimonic motivations – choosing content that provides opportunities for personal insight, self-reflection, and contemplation  Parasocial interaction – interaction between audience members and characters in media content Entertainment Theory  Sub theories created:  Mood Management Theory – predominant motivation for using entertainment media is to moderate or control moods  Individuals seek our media content that they expect to improve their mood (as it relates to levels of arousal, avoid boredom and stress)  Four types of media content relevant to mood management:  Excitatory potential – the ability of content to arouse or calm emotion – to get us excited or to reduce stress  Absorption potential – the ability of content to direct our thoughts away from things that induce a negative mood or toward other things that induce positive feelings  Semantic affinity – the degree to which entertaining content involves things that are similar to the things that are inducing a bad mood  Hedonic value – the potential that content has to induce positive feelings  Mood management theory can help explain why our efforts to manage our moods can fail or why media content can be entertaining  We don’t have to be consciously aware of content attributes – can be guided by our feelings about content  Mood management theorists don’t necessarily expect audience members to be able to report how they use content to manage moods (no surveys) – use experiments  Also important to differentiate between moods that tend to endure over long periods of time and temporarily induced changes in feelings

Entertainment Theory Strengths:     

Stresses media’s prosocial influence Assesses cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects Provides cogent multivariate explanations for why people seek entertainment from media Is grounded in an expanding body of empirical media-effects research Provides a useful basis for conducting experiments

Weaknesses:    

Tends to accept status quo uses of entertainment media as a starting point for research Has so far found effects that are mostly limited and minimal Tends to ignore and doesn’t provide a good basis for assessing cumulative effects Tends to consider entertainment effects in isolation from other types of effects

Reception Studies  British cultural studies researchers  Audience-centered theory that focuses on how various types of audience members make sense of specific forms of content (Hall)  Any media content can be regarded as text made up of signs  Must be able to interpret signs and their structure in order to read texts  Polysemic – media texts as fundamentally ambiguous and legitimately interpretable in different ways  Message producers have an intended or dominant reading that reinforces the status quo  Disagree and come up with a negotiated meaning and oppositional decoding  Negotiated meaning – when an audience member creates a personally meaningful interpretation of content that differs from the preferred reading in important ways  Oppositional decoding – when an audience member develops interpretations of content that are in direct opposition to a dominant reading  Feminist Reception Studies - Radway (1984/1991) – shift away from exclusive focus on textual analysis and toward an increased reliance on reception studies  Content analysis on romance novels  Readers used these as a silent rebellion against male domination; an escape

 Readers rejected the preferred reading and engaged in negotiated or oppositional decoding Reception Studies Strengths:     

Focuses attention on individuals in the mass communication process Respects intellect and ability of media consumers Acknowledges range of meaning in media texts and the likelihood of many different interpretations Seeks an in-depth understanding of how people interpret media content Can provide an insightful analysis of the way media content is interpreted in everyday social contexts

Weaknesses:    

Is usually based on subjective interpretation of audience reports Doesn’t address presence or absence of effects Uses qualitative research methods, which preclude causal explanations Has been too oriented toward the micro level (but is attempting to become more macroscopic)...