Media Effects. James Shanahan
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the same as anywhere else. The huge gleaming towers that shoot up everywhere are outward signs of the ingenious planning of international concerns, toward which the unleashed entrepreneurial system (whose monuments are a mass of gloomy houses and business premises in grimy, spiritless cities) was already hastening. (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002; During, 1993, p. 32)
Media is just another standardized product in the output of bourgeois capitalism, and serves the same functions and needs (Kellner, 1989). A related idea, that of cultural “hegemony,” was also offered. Theorists such as Gramsci (1971) noted that cultural production, dominated by ruling classes, is suited to and creates acceptance of the status quo. Cultural institutions can work through ideology rather than through more forceful means to engineer acceptance. Again, the view here is tied to a very strong media effects position. Media have the ideological power to manufacture consent to the dominant worldview.
How are these ideas related to media effects research? First, early critical theorists were often in contact with and even collaborating with some of the empirical researchers. They sometimes defined themselves in relation to each other. Critical theorists viewed those doing effects research as starting from assumptions that were tied to the dominant economic and social paradigm. They were seen as functionaries of a media system doing “administrative” tasks designed to further the effectiveness of the system (for a recent discussion, see Katz & Katz, 2016). The critics often asserted that the focus on effects was itself misguided, and positioned themselves as involved in a higher-level philosophical endeavor. So we often tend to see critical theorists as opposed to a strong view of media effects. But that view can be misleading:
There is a major flaw in thinking that administrative research is focused on effect, while critical research is not. It is true that administrative research looks at the causal chain of “who says what to whom with what effect.” But the effect is short run. But it is altogether wrong to overlook the giant effects [emphasis added] aimed for by the Frankfurt School – the production of consciousness, false and true, and ultimately on society. More than that, the ostensible reluctance of the Frankfurters to use the term effect is itself a giant statement that society continues at an uninterruptable standstill, and that the media serve to reinforce the status quo. In other words, “no change” is their major effect. (Katz & Katz, 2016, p. 9)
The idea that a media effect could be conceptualized as a maintenance of the status quo becomes important a little later in our story. Still, the perceptual dichotomy that opposes critical to effects research has been durable. They may differ on an informational/ideological axis, but both are concerned with effects. A question that we will pose throughout this volume is whether there is a synthesis that can bring together this dichotomy, to the extent that it is false and not a useful way to continue proceeding.4
Cultural studies
The critical/hegemonic view implies a very strong view of media effects. Its early versions were a piece of what social scientists were arguing against when they created the straw-man idea of the “hypodermic needle” or “magic bullet” theory. Perhaps what was happening was something that we have seen later in media effects work, where the most fearful hypotheses about media’s very strong effects are formulated early in the experience with a new medium. The Frankfurt School’s work was powerful, but over-argued, and it became evident that their explanations, along with those of the ones who had panicked about propaganda, were not sufficient to explain the wide variety of media phenomena that were seen, as well as the wide variety of people’s reactions to them.
Moving through the 1960s and 1970s, critical work began to recognize that media did not automatically and always enforce the views of privileged classes. Stuart Hall’s idea that media messages could be encoded and decoded in different ways (“dominant,” “negotiated,” “oppositional”) moved critical theorists to lessen their overall view of media power. While still holding to the idea of media as important cultural organs in service of the state, there appeared more room for “readings” of media. In these works, culture becomes something more than the product of an artistic or literary elite; it is equated with the daily lived experience of a people. With this change, popular media take on a more important role: not just as bread and circus for the masses, but as vehicles through which cultural experiences can be both generated and consumed.
It is to Hall that we owe some of the most relevant criticism of the “behavioral” effects perspective. Hall was writing from a standpoint that was dissatisfied with empirical approaches such as content analysis, or the isolation of specific items of discourse as the meaningful causes of effects in the empirical studies. His most famous essay (Hall, 1973) sought to emphasize that isolating or counting instances of violence, let alone trying to establish whether exposure to them had any effect, was an ill-advised venture:
If we refuse, for a moment, to bracket and isolate the issue of violence, or the violent episode from its matrix in the complex codes governing the genre, how many other, crucial kinds of meaning were in fact transmitted whilst researchers were busy counting the bodies? This is not to say that violence was not an element in the TV western, nor to suggest that there were not quite complex codes regulating the ways in which violence could be signified. It is to insist that what audiences were receiving was not “violence” but messages about violence. (Hall, 1973, pp. 8–9)
Hall’s research was an important starting point for a cultural studies tradition that has been strongly concerned with not just how elite cultural producers attempt to get across messages – and do they? – but how audiences themselves see them, use them, and ultimately whether these uses make any difference (which is also a kind of “effect”).
Other concerns and outlooks
As the years passed, media and cultural studies also began a move toward focusing on media’s role in relation to race, class, gender, and other issues of social difference. The whole issue of media and identity is somewhat beyond the scope of this book, as it has become a voluminous discourse with an attendantly huge literature. Some of these issues had been dealt with in the effects tradition (studies of the demography of television for instance), but not with the foreground attention that came to dominate critical work. In these studies, media are most often seen as vehicles for constructing views of marginalized classes of people that serve the interests of a more dominant group (Gross, 1991, provides a summary of this type of outlook in relation to sexual minorities). While the presumed power of media is still strong, these studies also include ways to look at how marginalized groups negotiate identity within a power-defined media system.
While the critical/ideological perspective has often couched itself as opposed to strong views of effects, those working from the “political economy” perspective were most direct in arguing that media exerted a propagandistic effect on audiences. Herman and Chomsky’s “propaganda” model (1988) of media argues that media are directly controlled by economic elites, and that their messages serve these elites equally directly. It’s an ironic return to the propaganda concern that started effects research in the first place. Other writers in the tradition (e.g., Smythe, 1981) were effective in noting how modern media structures could essentially commodify the time of workers, turning all human experience into an activity determined by and relevant to a capitalist mode of production (see also Jhally & Livant, 1986).
Down the line from these concerns, critical approaches exploded in multiple directions and variants. Critical theory and media studies, in their own way, followed a similar trajectory to the communication effects research tradition. An initial statement implied very strong media effects, motivated by social conditions and the experience of the time. However, a simplistic view proves to be unsuitable to explain all phenomena, and theoretical specifications occur that moderate the view of media power. In the case of critical theory, postmodern theory and cultural relativisms became much more influential, leading to a situation in which almost any statement of theory could be critiqued from a relatively radical position. A dominant metaphor was offered which viewed media as a key player in the “social construction” of reality. But the postmodern moment led to many different offshoots,