Preface

      This book is not really a textbook. There are several fine textbooks or handbooks that deal with media effects that any student should have. I use them regularly in my own work and have contributed to some of them throughout the years. While this book attempts to provide a broad view of the field, it is also an attempt to resolve some of my own dissatisfactions with it. Chief among these has been the fact that people doing different kinds of work that bear on questions of media effect don’t seem to talk to each other. The separation of scholars into “schools” that value their own approach seems to go against the grain of the fact that none of these schools has produced work – taken on its own – outstanding enough to warrant its being called a “paradigm” for media effects research. Given this, one would think there is ample room for scholars of different methodological stripes to work with each other. Our schools of thought, as well as our actual schools, should do more to encourage this cross-fertilization.

A second issue is frustration with the fact that media effects often seems to ignore its most salient aspect, its content. The evolution of communication study broadly, and media effects specifically, means that the field came into being as an intersection of other fields, borrowing methods and philosophies from them, even as those other fields were more focused on the content that media scholars were also studying. Thus, media scholars were more likely to be able to say something about the media instantiations of various messages, leaving observations about how the messages themselves could affect people to those with expertise in the content areas of those messages. But we have learned that it is difficult to speak about form without reference to content, and in fact, in the end, many media effects theories really are about content anyway, just as much as form. In this book, I draw attention to what is really becoming obvious about media effects, which is that media’s impact on people is heavily involved with narrative, the foremost way in which people receive and understand information of any kind.

      This is a good place to make a disclaimer. This book is not by any means intended to be an exhaustive review of the field. As noted above, there are some good texts that already do a very good job of presenting the wide variety of theories, approaches, and methods that have been used throughout the years. An example of a good encyclopedic source would be Oliver, Raney, and Bryant’s Media effects: Advances in theory and research (2019), which is updated periodically to present new work in the major sectors of the field. The purpose of this book, within the goals of this series, is to present an accessible and concise account of the field, anchored by a unifying construct that links subfields that don’t often talk to each other.

To create this construct, we focus mainly on media effects through the lens of narrative. As we will see, an important aspect of narrative is the selection of what will be presented, along with the many things that will not be included within the narrative. In this book, some things have been given short shrift along the way, including once-contemplated chapters focusing solely on sex/gender and politics. We can return to those at a later time. There has also been a larger-than-originally-intended focus on work from my own areas of interest (cultivation and cultural indicators), perhaps inevitably as I structure the media effects narrative from my own experience. As any author discovers, though, you end up writing what you can write, a realization that becomes a useful addition to the admonition to “write what you know.”

      Ultimately, this book is my own idiosyncratic storyline through the field of media effects. It won’t replace any of the standard texts, but I do hope that it will leave clues for some as to new avenues that can be pursued, or even help generate new attitudes and states of mind that can be fruitful for new groups of scholars that are examining these now age-old questions about media, even as we move into confusing new media environments.