Previously in coms240:

1. Surveying the field: JD Peters and L. Gitelman

2. Communication as information (cybernetics) .

This week:

3. The Media Effects Tradition: Wilbur Schramm; Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld

Media Effects: Media effects research: “The body of research that investigates how

exposure to different forms of media (television, video games, music, etc) can directly influence the attitudes and behaviours of its audience.”

From: Joshua Greenberg and Charlene D. Elliot Communication in Question: competing

perspectives on controversial issues in communication studies (Canada: Nelson, 2008), p. 357.

This book contains very interesting debate on the subject of media

effects and video games called “Toxic Gaming: do video games make children aggressive?”

Protagonists: Rose Dyson (yes)

Stephen Kline and Benjamin Woo (no)

•  Wilbur Schramm, “How Communication Works”

Communication is composed of 3 primary elements:

•  The source (the encoder)

•  The message (the signal)

•  The destination (the decoder)

–  SCHRAMM

–  “We are talking about something very like a radio or telephone circuit. In fact, it is perfectly possible to draw a picture of the human communication system that way:

–  Source--> Encoder-->Signal--->Decoder---> Destination

–  Substitute ‘microphone’ for encoder, and ‘earphone’ for decoder and you are talking about electronic communication. Consider that the ‘source’ and ‘encoder’ are one person, ‘decoder’ and ‘destination’ are another, and the signal is language, and you are talking about human communication.” (p. 4)

–  If communication is to be effective, then the source and the destination must be “in tune” (p. 5-6). They must share a “field of experience”.

–  SCHRAMM

Messages are signals

Messages are also signs (p. 6) (NOTE: NOT THE SAME AS SEMIOTICS!)

Each person is potentially an encoder and a decoder

–  SCHRAMM

The effective transmission of a message is shaped by “mediatory effects” (p. 8) “Exactly what you will encode will depend on your choice of responses available in the situation and connected with the meaning.”

What barriers are in the way, both environmental and social that will hinder you from becoming an encoder who can decode and respond, thus becoming another encoder?

The return process is called feedback. Problem and challenge of communication: there are multiple

channels open to us at any one time.

–  SCHRAMM

Borrows from Learning Theory and Psychologists of Learning (pp. 10-11)

to explain the movement of inputs and outputs in the way that

an individual may communicate. It is a schematic model intended to map out all of the possible sequences of possibility available to an individual. It is mean to be predictive, but in a limited sense.

–  SCHRAMM

There are 3 levels of interaction that he adds, based on Charles Osgood’s social psychology model of learning theory.

1. The sensory and motor skill level (stimulus for action)

2.The dispositional level (learned integration of attitudes and values that act as intervening variables)

3.The representational level (meanings are assigned and ideas are considered)

–  SCHRAMM

“The chief reason we study this process it to learn something about how it achieves effects.

We want to know what a given kind of communication does to

people. Given a certain message content, we should like to predict what effect that content will have on its receivers.” (p. 12)

Conditions of success:

To be successful he says you must do 4 things:

1. Gain the attention of the other 2. Employ signs to call forth a response 3. Arouse personality needs 4. Meet those needs.

–  SCHRAMM: –  Choice is influenced by a ‘fraction’ (expectation of reward divided by the effort

required) (p. 19) –  Borrows other assumptions from Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper “ A Theory of Human Motivation”

–  SCHRAMM (p. 21)

–  Mass communication is simply a situation of an organization encoding and decoding messages and distributing them to a mass audience. This mass audience is many individual receivers themselves each encoding and decoding messages.

–  These receivers are connected with a group, and it is in this group context that a message is re-interpreted and acted upon (or not).

–  Our society engages in this process by “surveying the environment”; “arriving at consensus”; and “transmitting culture and policy” (p. 22).

–  LAZARSFELD and MERTON

•  They open the article by contending that the mass media of communication has changed the structure of social control.

•  They say that there seems to be some consensus that the mass media are ubiquitous (everywhere); that they create audience conformism; and that they lead to the debasement of taste.

•  Their thesis is that the social role played by the very existence of the mass media has been commonly over-estimated.

•  The mass media play a relatively minor role in shaping our society.

–  LAZARSFELD and MERTON

•  Nevertheless, they contend the media do have effects:

1. They engage in status conferral: they legitimize particular players and their messages.

2. They enforce social norms and values.

3. They have a narcotizing dysfunctional effect. They create apathy.

–  LAZARSFELD and MERTON

•  Mass society has created a seeming debasement of people’s taste.

Further “people may read more but they comprehend less”. (pp. 506-508)

•  But then they point out a paradox:

•  “the significance of the sheer existence of the mass media has been exaggerated and the multiple indications that the media do exert influence on audiences.” (508)

LAZARSFELD and MERTON There are 3 conditions that must be fulfilled if ‘propaganda’ is to be

effective:

•  1. Monopolization (of media ownership)

•  2. Canalization (pre-existing behaviours, attitudes or values must be capitalized upon) (Schramm makes same point)

•  3. Supplementation (supplementary F 2 F contact must be made).

Media Effects: Media effects research:

“The body of research that investigates how exposure to different forms of media (television, video games, music, etc) can directly influence the attitudes and behaviours of its audience.”

From: Joshua Greenberg and Charlene D. Elliot Communication in Question: competing

perspectives on controversial issues in communication studies (Canada: Nelson, 2008), p. 357.