Mass Communication Talk

“The scholarship about the mass media has grown so large and become so fragmented,” argues W. James Potter, “that it is very difficult for scholars to understand, much less appreciate, the incredible array of great ideas and findings that have been produced” (2009, p. xiv). You’ll see these “great ideas and findings” throughout this text and discover how in their harmony and dissonance they have shaped the discipline’s thinking. For now, though, let’s take this example, the impact of video violence, and see how different social scientists might approach it.Do you believe that watching televised or videogame violence can cause kids to act more aggressively? Surely this must be an easier thing to demonstrate than the existence of an ever-expanding universe. This link has been theorized ever since the first silent-movie hero slugged the first silent-movie villain. What is the most useful way to study the complex relationship between this specific […]

Now that you’ve been introduced to the four broad categories of social scientific theory, you might have guessed another reason that those who study the social world often don’t get the respect accorded their physical science colleagues. Sociologist Kenneth Bailey wrote, “To this day you will find within social science both those who think of themselves as scientists in the strictest sense of the word and those with a more subjective approach to the study of society, who see themselves more as humanists than as scientists” (1982, p. 5). In other words, and as you’ve just seen, not all who call themselves social scientists adhere to the same standards for conducting research or accepting evidence. But complicating matters even more is the fact that social science researchers and theorists often blend (or mix and match) categories as they do their work (Benoit and Holbert, 2008). To some observers, especially committed postpositivists, this seems unsystematic. It also generates disagreement among social scientists, not […]