Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1.0 Introduction
2.0Objective
3.0Main Content
3.1 Understanding Theory
3.2 Normative Theories
3.3 Mass Society Theories (All-Powerful Media Effect)
3.4 Social Scientific Approach (Limited Effects Theories)
3.5 Theories of Media, Culture and Society
3.6 Active Audience -Uses and Gratification Theory
3.7 Media Violence. Children and Effects
3.8 Common Sense Theories
4.0 Conclusion
5.0 Summary
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Theory is a conceptual representation or explanation of phenomenon. They are stories
about how and why events occur. Kurt Lewin defines theory as a way of explaining the
ordering and occurrence of various events. It can also be defined as a set of systematic
generalizations based on scientific observation and leading to further empirical
observation. (Severin and Tankard (Jnr.) 1982).
2.0 OBJECTIVE
This unit exposes students to various mass communication theories, their origins,
methods and uses. Students should be able to identify a theory that goes along with
specific research studies in order to develop a theoretical framework for such.
A) Scientific Criteria
(1) Intellectual Rigour: - Every theory is a product of careful analysis and giving great
attention to details. This process ensures that they are testable, verifiable or systematic.
(2) Dynamism: - Theories are subject to change; they are seldom constant because
they can be modified or completely repudiated when new facts emerge.
(3) Predictive power: Theories enable us to make predictions but those predictions are
rarely ever realized with exactitude. Theory is step behind reality.
(4) Economy: A good theory explains many cases with a few statements and with few
exceptions, if any.
(5) Explanatory Power: ability of a theory to be used to explain a puzzling phenomenon
(6) Internal Consistency: There should be no contradiction in the process. The
processes involved should agree with one another.
(7) Heuristic Potential: Should help to see a new thing or new things; or should be
useful for solving problems.
(8) Practical Utility. Theories have usefulness to reality. They can be used to solve real
life problems and issues.
B) Aesthetic/Humanistic Criteria
1) Fresh (New) understanding of the human condition.
2) Societal value- capacity to stimulate or generate change/clarification of values.
3) Aesthetic appeal- capacity to capture our interest/imagination or pique our curiosity.
4) Community agreement- acceptance and support by a “community” of (like-minded)
scholars.
5) Capacity for social reforms. Ability to carry out useful reforms and changes in the
society. The changes are mostly socio-economic in nature.
From the foregoing it can be seen that theory and research are closely linked.
This is a type of theory that describes an ideal way for media systems to be structured
and operated. Normative theories do not describe things as they are nor do they provide
scientific explanations; instead, they describe the way things shall be if some ideal
values or principles are to be realised. They help to explain the way in which social
communication rules impinge on mass media structures, conventions and performance,
and highlight the consequences of non-convergence between societal communication
principles and mass communication principles. They include:
The main task of the press is to promote the socialist system and maintain the
sovereignty of the proletariat (working class) via communist party. While the soviet-
communist theory seeks to use the media to support development and change towards
the attainment of the communist stage, the authoritarian seeks to use the media to
maintain the status quo. But they are similar in subjecting the media to direct state
control. Every issue in Soviet communist must be seen and interpreted in favour of the
communist party. The four working principles of soviet press are (1) Truthfulness. (2)
Partiality. (3) Commitment to the people. (4) Mass culture.
Libertarian and Social Responsibility theories assign economic function to the press
while the Soviet press removes the profit motive since it is an arm of government and
financed by government. Libertarian and Social Responsibility theories expect the
media to raise social conflict to the level of discussion but Soviet theory forbade
organisation of press structure along the lines of political conflicts since social societies
aspired to become “classless societies”.
Social scientific theories are generalisations derived from systematic observation and
objective analysis of mass media variables, by employing methods associated with
empirical research in the social sciences. Methods such as experimentation, field
surveys, content analysis, focus group etc are used. The social scientific approach to
investigating the effects of the media led to the emergence of limited effects theories.
The Two-Step flow was later modified to Multi-Step or N-Step flow theory, since opinion
leaders also have opinion leaders and so on continuously.
Klapper (1960) explains that selective process helps media content consumers to cope
with media‟s impact. Generally, people tend to expose themselves to those mass
communications that are in accord with their existing attitudes and interests; while they
consciously and unconsciously avoid communications of opposite hue. However, when
exposed to such communications, they often seem not to perceive it, or recast and
interpret it to fit their existing views.
Selective Exposure
This is people‟s tendency to seek out information that supports their interest, confirms
their beliefs and boosts their ego while avoiding those that are contrary to their
predispositions. In other words, receivers choose exposure to ideas that reinforce and
confirm already held beliefs and attitudes e.g. As a christian, you may have the
tendency to read books or watch films that support your religion while you avoid another
religion‟s materials, say Islamic religion.
Selective Attention
As a result of too much barrage of information that bombard us, we tend to attend to
media messages that we feel are in accord with our already held attitudes and interests,
while we filter those ones that do not cater for us.
Selective Perception
This is the mental recasting of a message so that its meaning is in linewith a person‟s
beliefs and attitudes. It is a psychological process, which involves decoding of
communication messages and ensuring that they align with your previous experiences
and current dispositions – needs, moods and memories.
Selective Pretention
This is the process by which people tend to remember best and longest information that
is consistent with their pre-existing attitudes or interests.
Certain terms that have emerged in the process of exposition and discussion of this
theory include:
1. Double Opinion Climate- the media opinion is different from public
opinion
2. Silent Majority- Domination of minority opinion over majority
3. Pluralistic Ignorance – Feeling of belonging to minority whereas opposite is the case
4. Bandwagon- Tendency to belong because majority belong
5. Snob- effect- Decrease in popularity of opinion because it is believed to be cheap.
Audience members determine the occurrence and shape of media effect and it is
related to how the audience uses the media. Since we make use of the media to make
sense of our world, we permit the media to shape our expectation. Thus, the greater the
need and consequently the stronger the dependency, the greater the likelihood that the
media and their messages will have an effect. Media will equally influence not everyone.
Those who have greater needs and thus greater dependency on media will be
influenced.
In Herta Herzog‟s study of the use of radio soap opera, three (3) major types of
gratification were identified:
1. A means of emotional release
2. Opportunities for wishful thinking – commonly recognised form of enjoyment
3. Advice obtained from listening to daytime serials – commonly unsuspected.
Wilbur Schramn provided a concept to answer the question “what determines which
offerings of mass communication that will be selected by a given individual? or what
determines the media content that an individual pays attention to?” The answer offered
is called the fraction of selection:
Expectation of Reward
Effort Required
His point was that 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 needs meet; but the efforts required in meeting the needs
will eventually influence the decision we make.
So, individuals select the media that will likely satisfy their needs, they selectively
consume the content of those media and there may or may not be any effect.
3.6.2 Reception Studies-Decoding and Sense Making
It focuses on how various types of audience members make sense of specific forms of
content. Halls (1980a) argued that media content can be regarded as a text that is
made up of signs. These signs are related to one another in specific ways. To make
sense of a text –to read a text – you have to be able to interpret the signs and their
structure. For example, when you read a sentence you must not only decode the
individual words but you also need to interpret the overall structure of the sentence to
make sense of the sentence as a whole.
In other words, though people are exposed to the powerful/pervasive media messages,
the individual ways of decoding such messages do not always allow them to be
influenced.
We examine here some theories that summarised and offered useful insight into the
media‟s violence effects.
This theory assumes that people, children especially, tend to learn aggression from the
mass media and to model their behaviour after the ones displayed. When people
observe media violence, they learn and imitate what is seen. The possibility of
actualising what is seen is enhanced when:
Loevinger also pointed to the ambiguity of the media mirror. This is presumed to be a
reference to the distortion caused by the “slant” peculiar to each media establishment
as well as by the distortion at every stage and level of the gate keeping process,
beginning with the news selection stage. The ambiguity of the media mirror and the
differential perception by the audience are mutually enhancing and reinforcing. The
audience differential interpretation of the media mirror looks like a variant of the
perception theory, while the ambiguity of the media mirror can be linked with the
gatekeeping theory.