 Since it was developed in the 1920s, communication

researchers observed how propaganda messages

were utilized to serve the ends of war in the recently
concluded World War I and in the following years
leading up to World War II.
 Its origin are unknown but Harold Lasswell
introduced Hypodermic Needle Theory in 1972 in
his book entitled Propaganda Techniques in the
World War I.
 The emergence of this theory was also when a very
pioneering invention of the era was invented
surrounding the two world wars which is the
television.
 Between the late part of 1920s, a private institution
named The Payne Fund conducted a research to
asses the effect of media on children. The research
concluded the films has strong influence on
children and the results caused panic among public
which also enabled the formulation of a governing
code for the movie industry.
 By the 1950s the weakness of the hypodermic
needle theory began to emerge.
 These opinion leaders actively access information
from the media and transmit it to less active sectors
of the population.
 In two-step flow, the importance of the media was
diminished in favor of the mediating role of the
opinion leaders.
 Thus, the theory has been called a two-step flow with
the media as the first step and the opinion leaders as
the second step.
 There have also been criticisms levied against the
uses and gratifications approach. First, it clearly
assumes that we have complete choices as to what
we receive or consume from the media. We are
unconscious as our everyday life is saturated by
media messages
 Another criticism is that the individual becomes the
unit of analysis and thus the social dimension of
viewership is totally absent from the theory.
 The uses and gratification that an individual might
claim for evey media and information message that
comes an individual’s way is influenced by the social
group which joins in the viewing process.
 Introduced by George Gebner which he argued
that television cultivates in its viewers a way of
sensing and seeing the world.
 Gebner intuited that regular usage of television
over extended periods of time can shape
people’s opinions, views and behavior.
 Postman (1985,144) stated that television
viewing does not significantly increase lelarning
and is inferior to and less likely than print to
cultivate higher-order inferential thinking.
 For Morgan (1989,2) the increased time given to
adverstisers have made television viewers
subordinate to corporate interests.
 On the decoding side, which is on the part of the
audience, the media and information texts are
always open to a range of meaning in terms of
interpretation.
 The notion of polysemic text. Poly implies
multiplicity, while semic is derived from the
greek word sema, meanind audiences see
various meaning in the signs that are in media
and information texts.
 Usually, the social factors are summed up as the
triumvirate of class, gender, and ethnicity.