FERMENT IN THE FIELD: COMPETING CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES CHALLENGE LIMITED-EFFECTS THEORY Despite these pockets of domestic resistance, most mass communication researchers in the United States still found limited-effects notions and the empirical research findings on which they were based persuasive. But challenge also came from researchers in other parts of the world who were less convinced, as you’ll see in Chapter 9. Mass society notions continued to flourish in Europe, where both leftwing and right-wing concerns about the power of media were deeply rooted in World War II experiences with propaganda. Europeans were also skeptical about the power of postpositivist, quantitative social research methods to verify and develop social theory (they saw this approach to research as reductionist—reducing complex communication processes and social phenomena to little more than narrow propositions generated from small-scale investigations). This reductionism was widely viewed as a distinctly American fetish. Some European academics were resentful of the […]
THE EMERGENCE OF THE LIMITED-EFFECTS PERSPECTIVE
A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE ON MASS COMMUNICATION LEADS TO THE EMERGENCE OF THE LIMITED-EFFECTS PERSPECTIVE Mass society notions were especially dominant among social theorists beginning in the mid-1800s and lasting until the 1950s. Since then these ideas have enjoyed intermittent popularity whenever new technology has posed a threat to the status quo. In 2005, for example, conservative religious leaders attacked cable television’s cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants for promoting “the homosexual agenda” (Olbermann, 2005), and in 2007 film critic Michael Medved accused Happy Feet, the digital animation film about penguins, of containing “a bizarre anti-religious bias,” an “endorsement of gay identity,” and a “propagandist theme” of condemnation of the human race, support for environmentalism, and exaltation of the United Nations (quoted in Hightower, 2007, p. 3). During the 1930s, world events seemed to continually confirm the truth of mass society ideas. In Europe, reactionary and revolutionary political movements used media in their struggles […]
THE ERA OF MASS SOCIETY AND MASS CULTURE
Our description of the eras of mass communication theory begins with a review of some of the earliest thinking about media. These ideas were initially developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century, at a time when rapid development of large factories in urban areas was drawing more and more people from rural areas to cities. At the same time, ever more powerful printing presses allowed the creation of newspapers that could be sold at declining prices to rapidly growing populations of readers. Although some theorists were optimistic about the future that would be created by industrialization, urban expansion, and the rise of print media, many were extremely pessimistic (Brantlinger, 1983). They blamed industrialization for disrupting peaceful, rural communities and forcing people to live in urban areas merely to serve as a convenient workforce in large factories, mines, or bureaucracies. These theorists were fearful of cities because of their […]
FOUR ERAS OF MEDIA THEORY
Media theory has undergone important transformations over the past two centuries. We have identified four distinct eras in the development of mass communication theories, beginning with the origin of media theory in the nineteenth century and ending with the emergence of an array of contemporary perspectives. As we explore each of these eras, we will describe the various types of mass communication theories that were constructed, consider their objectives, and illustrate both their strengths and their limitations. We will point out the purposes these theories served and the reasons why they were replaced or ignored by later scholars. In some cases, theories were rejected when they couldn’t be validated by scientific research or supported by logical arguments. Empirical evidence contradicted their key notions, or they proved difficult to explain or defend. Occasionally, proponents gave up trying to find evidence to support them or they became irrelevant as media or society […]
FOUR ERAS OF MASS COMMUNICATION THEORY
Technophiles have been hailing convergence, the erasure of distinctions among media, ever since the introduction of the personal computer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates heralded its full arrival in 2004 at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. Convergence, he told his listeners, doesn’t happen until you have everything in a digital form that the consumer can easily use on all the different devices. So, if we look at the three types of media of greatest importance—we look at photos, we look at music and we look at video—the move toward giving people digital flexibility on them is pretty incredible on every one of them. It’s been discussed for a long, long time. And now, it’s really happening. (quoted in Cooper, 2004, p. 1) In fact, it’s happening today in ways that Gates might not have anticipated those many long years ago (in Internet time). We […]
Thinking About Theory
WHAT’S YOUR QUESTION? WHAT’S YOUR APPROACH? Social networking site Facebook hit the Internet in 2003. Five years later it had 100 million users; by mid-2010 it had half-a-billion members networking in 40 languages (Kang, 2010). Half the teenagers using Facebook check in at least once a day, but the greatest growth in members has been among adults aged 35 to 54. These grown-ups spend nearly four hours a day on Facebook, more than any other age group (Orenstein, 2009). What questions do these few facts raise for you? One obvious question is, “Who are these social networkers?” Does the growth in the number of “older” social networkers surprise you? Why or why not? What about the amount of time they spend networking? What about networkers’ gender? Does that play a factor? Where do they access these sites? Why would middle-aged people be such heavy users of a new technology almost […]