At the end of 19th century; and at the beginning of the 20th century, there were many technological and scientific accomplishments around the world, especially in the areas of mass media. These technologies started to exert effects which could not be determined good or evil with ease.
Let's talk about mass media development a little bit. Then, we will discuss about mass media effects. See History of Communication Research.
As you can see, behavioral studies (that was also known as scientific way of learning about human being) became very significant. Also, there was an incident of radio broadcasting – A big chaos at the East coast in the US, which was known as Mercury theatre on the Air 1) incident. Incidents like the above and development of psychology studies led to magic bullet theory which point out that the effect of mass media (film and radio) are immediate and strong 2).
Also, the period of cold war
was beginning, which means that the period of propaganda
started. Joseph Stalin (and many others) believed that film was one of the most influential methods to teach and change people. This kind of political atmosphere also led to researcher to study magic power of mass media. Harold Lasswell was a researcher who believed the potential power of mass media, and wrote Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927).
Film had played a primary role in Soviet propaganda from the very beginning. Sergey Eisenstein pioneered a new genre, “Soviet Montage,” in the 1920s. This method manipulates emotions through quick editing and contrasting images. Battleship Potemkin and Ten Days that Shook the World were his two most highly regarded post-revolutionary pieces. Unfortunately, Stalin did not find Eisenstein's work to be “real” enough to fit into the new “Socialist Realism” genre. Ten Days that Shook the World was banned by Stalin. Stalin embarked on a film tradition of his own.
Stalin had always been fascinated by the medium of film. Seeing is believing, or so the axiom goes, and to a generation new to film what was on the screen might as well have been happening right in front of them. Of course what is on film is not necessarily true, and therein lies the source of Stalin's love for film.
“Cinema is the art of illusion, yet it dictates its laws to life itself ” - Joseph Stalin
Source: http://it.stlawu.edu/~rkreuzer/indv2/confilm.htm
This term shows that at the time, people truly believed that the power of the mass media would be omnipotent. As a result, many researchers who supported by the government started studying mass media effects.
The hypodermic needle theory implied that mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on their audiences. The mass media in the 1940s and 1950s were perceived as a powerful influence on behaviour change. Several factors contributed to this strong effects theory of communication. Those were the fast rise and popularization of radio and television, the emergence of the persuasion industries such as advertising and propaganda, the Payne Fund studies of the 1930s, which focused on the impact of motion pictures on children, and Hitler's monopolization of the mass media during WWII to unify the German public behind the Nazi party, and so on. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypodermic_needle_model
Later, researchers such as Stanton, Cantril, and Lazarsfeld studied mass media at Princeton University, and argued that there was little
evidence that mass media contents affect or influence people in general. They argued that media were no longer feared as instruments of political oppression and manipulation because the public itself was viewed as very resistant to persuasion and extremist manipulation. They believe that most people were influenced by others rather than by media; opinion leaders in every community, who, at every level of society, were responsible for guiding and stabilizing politics. <Limited effects of mass media, see http://socyberty.com/sociology/limited-effects-theory/>
power to make people what to think about
. People believe that they are not manipulated by the news stories. However, the researchers in this line of thoughts argue that people are affected by the mass media – what is important issues around us.
Spiral of Silence
proposed by a german scholar, Noelle-Nuemann. Also, the The third person effect was proposed. And many other approaches were developed for studying the mass media and their effects.
See Research Methods Lecture Note first.
. . . [Theories] simply provide an abstract understanding of communication process (Miller, 2002).
Works like lens
, frame
, etc.: They give us a frame to make sense out of what we are experiencing.
Textbook says:
[Communication theory is] . . . any systematic summary about the nature of the communication process.
Then
science
?
laws
.
theory
of the social
. This special science of the social started to be called sociology
.
What it suggests is that those who employed scientific way of knowing things believed that they were studying science – something different from that had been studied for a long time. They were not studying Poetry, Rhetoric, etc. They were, they believed, studying SCIENCE, which was hold by laws and theories.
Reference
study of knowledge (knowing) – epistemology and
study of existence – ontology
The thing (existence) -- the thing in my mind (knolwedge) | |___ certitudes
ideal status
. The truth is there; but will never be discovered; since only their copies will be experienced. see s-3.2
Some elements involved in the exaplanation of the social phenomena, the society, the world, etc.:
In other words, you want to explain the world with the above three materials, because they are the essence of the world, and social phenomena.
There are four major different approaches in doing the above:
Each approach does have a unique way of seeing the world (epistemologically and ontologically).
Marxism
Three classes
: King and his Knight; the Priest; the Peasantmanaging
them – commercial agriculture).king's right
the wealth
. These are used for industrial capitalism. capital
instead of land
; and those who own it became capitalists. Structuralism 8)
langue
and parole
(system of language vs. use of language = speech)
Assumption: Individuals are like atoms. If a researcher figures out how an individual's decision making process works, such process would be common to everyone in the society.
Elaboration Likelihood Model
Main vs. Peripheral routes (in processing information)
Consistency Theory 9)
Read:
The thing (existence) -- the thing in my mind (knolwedge) | |___ certitudes
A cup or a desk example: From empiricism . . . . The thing in your mind and the thing that you are seeing in front your eyes are equal. There is no doubt about it. We do not consult with each other for what each one is experiencing.
Then, what about the picture? What is it? Or, http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/flashmovie/15.php for thoroughness of human perceptions.
Information (from the object to your brain + something else)
discover
?
The fact that we know
things may be:
Understanding of social orders: – ethnomethodology
Geertz states that we must proceed interpreting a culture’s web of symbols by isolating its elements, specifying the internal relationships among those elements and characterize the whole system in some general way?according to the core symbols around which it is organized, the underlying structures of which it is a surface expression, or the ideological principles upon which it is based. Culture is public because “meaning is,” and systems of meanings are what produce culture, they are the collective property of a particular people
Thick Description, “symbolic anthropology”, meaning → culture, understanding of meaning (public symbol), . . . .
What they argue is that:
See Structuration Theory and Sir Anthony Giddens
According to Giddens: