[MUSIC PLAYING]
The media does not control your brain, probably.
I suppose it's possible that the media has controlled
my brain such that I'm convinced that the media doesn't control
brains.
It's also possible, if not more likely,
that I'm one of the people controlling your brain so it
would behoove me to lie about whether or not your brain is
controlled by media.
Or maybe your brain is controlled,
but you like it that way.
So whatever, water under the bridge-- control away.
If we can agree that the media doesn't literally
control your brain, good.
But still, we can't ignore the fact
that the media, news entertainment, even
educational media is able to handily deliver
messages which impact the way we see the world.
We learn our personal values from our parents, our friends,
colleagues, and authority figures
but we also gain tons of insight about ourselves
and the world from the arts, sciences, politics,
entertainment, journalism.
Much information about this stuff
gets to us through the media.
So the question is, as the media is bringing information
and insight to us and that information slash insight is
having some kind of impact on our thoughts and actions,
how exactly does that happen?
How is it that media contains messages which we parse, judge,
and sort into good or believable and bad or not believable?
How does a message turn into an opinion or a behavior?
Well, one explanation is the magic bullet theory,
which is in reference to an actual bullet and not
the magic bullet blender that you can buy on QVC.
Instant guacamole.
Sometimes called the hypodermic needle model,
as well, this media theory dates way back to the 1930s.
It was popular during World War II, when
propaganda in both Germany and the United States
was a big part of the media landscape.
TV ANNOUNCER: Working together to produce
an ever greater abundance of material and spiritual values
for all.
That is the secret of American prosperity.
At the time, it was thought that all audiences would
respond basically uniformly to messages contained in media,
that media messages were like bullets
shot into the brains of spectators,
or in the case of the hypodermic needle model, a serum injected
into their bloodstream and that they wouldn't
be able to resist its effects.
Basically, it was thought that media could directly
influence public opinion.
This was also an explanation as to how
someone like Hitler, a literally evil overlord,
could come to power.
The relatively nascent technologies
of radio and moving pictures could
contain impossible to resist messages
that would just implant into the minds of its audiences.
Today this sounds absurd and actually
remarkably like a conspiracy theory
that the media can inject thoughts
and meaning into its audiences who are unable to resist them.
I know.
I know they're not the same sunglasses,
but just bear with me.
You get the joke.
But as media theorists, psychologists,
and other experts tempered their assumptions
about things like human nature and uniform effective response
with research and stuff, two other theories came about.
The first is called two-step flow.
After thinking through the hypodermic needle
model for a while, it became clear
that it didn't account for the differing effectivenesses
of media messages or the varying not
having it-ness of audience members or the fact
that people talk to one another.
We don't all consume media in our individual media
consumption cells and then stand dutifully silent in the break
room discussing nothing of what we've watched,
read, or thought.
So where the magic bullet theory supposed a direct influence
of media on its audiences, two-step flow
inserts a middleman.
Between media and audience sits an authority figure--
an opinion leader is what they're usually
called-- who are seen by others as
well-informed, well-connected, and/or just good
at what they do.
They don't need to be famous or even popular,
but often they are.
Opinion leaders maybe people on the TV,
your coworker who seems to know a lot about politics,
your aunt who works for the IRS, or your pal, Jeanine,
who's the office manager of a small business.
They consume, digest, and refine the output of mass media
and bring it to their own audience, who see them
as more trustworthy than the media itself,
making the two steps of two-step flow one,
media messages moving from source to opinion
leader and two, from opinion leader to the masses.
Unlike the magic bullet, two-step flow
admits that there's a social component to one's media diet.
It isn't simply that the media does a thing
and we accept the thing as a thing worth accepting.
There's also a negotiation between various streams
of media, their related messages, and social authority
figures related to those media, as well as communities
which form around it all.
For some people, though, the agency
provided by two-step flow doesn't go far enough.
It still says media kind of influences people who
then influence other people.
It's the turtles all the way down of media influence.
Two-step flow also has a complicated relationship
to the internet, which amplifies opinion leaders,
or influencers is I think what we're calling them these days.
But it also empowers consumers, allowing them direct contact
with media messages of their choosing.
So it's how they do that choosing
and how the choosing then affects their opinions that
brings us to one final theory called uses and gratifications.
Uses and gratifications is less a theory and more a way
to think about why it is certain people gravitate
towards certain media messages.
The long and short of uses and gratifications
answer to why people consume the media they do
is because they want to.
In hoping to understand why people use media
and what exactly they use it for,
one proposed angle is that there are certain personal goals,
views, or outcomes which certain media can help people
reach, reinforce, or produce.
Media may help us look smarter at work, may give us something
to talk about with friends.
Media may be cathartic, empowering, relaxing,
or just simply interesting.
Media has uses, and in that usage we may feel gratified.
That gratification then feeds back
into how we choose more media and form
our opinions around it.
If we feel gratified, that media must have been right or good
and then we return to it.
It's an effective tautology.
We agree with media that makes us feel nice
and we feel nice about media that we agree with.
So if the hypodermic media needle is like medicine
that your body can't resist and two-step flow is
sort of like people you trust handing out
the hypodermic needles, then uses and gratifications
is like you standing in the cold, flu,
and pain reliever aisle at the pharmacy
deciding which brightly colored box
is going to unclog your schnoz.
Are you going to go with the one that's worked before or the one
that your pal, Ashley recommended?
Or maybe just the one that looks really nice, or the cheapest?
More so than media injecting us with messages
or us going to opinion leaders to find out what it all means,
uses and gratifications assumes that the audience
will find and experience the media which
is most useful to them for whatever reason that may be,
which is the part that's easy to take issue with.
Don't get me wrong, there are all kinds
of uses for uses and gratifications.
It gives most of the agency to people and not media,
which is A+, nice work, good job.
The problem is that it may give people so much agency
it sort of glosses over some of the things
that are actually troubling about the media
ecosystem and all of the powerful forces working
within it-- threatening music and stuff.
But seriously, like to what degree can
we really say that people's gratifications
are fully self-determined?
I'm not about to put my tinfoil hat back on
and say that the media controls our brains
and tells us what to like, but we also
know how the mere exposure effect means
the more we're exposed to something, especially a media
something, the more we identify with it.
This is one of the central principles
of advertising, which both is and works for the media.
I'm not uncritically defending the hypodermic needle,
but media organizations do work very, very hard
in lots of different and sometimes very tricky
ways to get us to experience and accept certain messages even
if we're not interested in them.
Second, I think we can question the degree to which media
consumption is clearly usage or gratification oriented.
It may be hard slash impossible to say how and why someone
enjoys a thing or how exactly enjoyment or usefulness
factor into choices determining one's media diet.
You need only talk with a few friends
about their favorite music, movies, books, or whatever
to discover that most humans are not great at knowing
why we like stuff.
We like stuff because certain other people
like it, because certain other people don't like it,
because we've been told to, because we feel we have to,
and a million other reasons.
And rarely do we sit down and think, ah, yes, I
find this medium message pleasurable
and I will allow it to dictate my opinions
because the in group I wish to belong to believes that-- nope,
it just doesn't work that way.
In the end, to the degree that opinions and beliefs are
influenced by the media we consume,
how that works may be a weighted combination of these three
ideas operating at varying levels of complexity
and effectiveness, just hopefully not
perfect effectiveness.
To return to our metaphor, standing in the grocery store
aisle looking at boxes doesn't describe
all of medicine, only one part.
And it doesn't cancel the other parts out, they all co-exist.
Just as, if not more helpful maybe
to use these theories to talk about how
we want media to interact with public opinion.
Being able to recognize when, how, and that certain opinions
and beliefs are carried, reinforced
and often encouraged by particular media sources.
We're able to ask if the fact and method of such a thing
is something that we're comfortable with.
Are any of your preferences, for lack of a better word,
injected?
Why does certain media gratify you the way that it does?
And why do you take what Jeanine says so seriously?
Ghostbusters, what do you want?
What do y'all think?
Which of these three media theories
do you think is the most believable,
or how do you see them working together?
What do you experience in your own media diet?
Let us know in the comments and I will respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding video game bosses.
If you will watch that one, you can click here or find
a link in the doobly-do.
A couple of bits of news.
I talked with David Wilensky for his ongoing video games
interview project, No Don't Die, about that very thing,
video games.
We talked about violence and some of those ideas
eventually became the [INAUDIBLE] video,
talked about the video game fandom
as a whole, why I am not interested in shooting soldiers
anymore, and all kinds of stuff.
So I'll put a link to that in the description.
Also in the description, you will find a link
to "The Hustle Economy," which is a book that I am in.
It's a book that's about what it means
to be a creative professional working independently.
And it's all of these essays about what
it means to do that work, what it means to have a side
hustle or a hustle, as it were.
And I wrote a chapter about the advice, do what you love,
which I think is simultaneously the best and worst thing
you can say to someone who has just graduated college
and is trying to figure out what to do with their lives.
So I will put a link to that in the description,
too, if you want to check it out.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a Subreddit links
in the doobly-do.
And the tweet of the week comes from indie Evan,
who shared a bunch of photos of his local park full of people
playing-- surprise, surprise-- Pokemon Go.
And I really like it.
It makes me think about I was having
a conversation with some people on Twitter about Pokemon
go kind of reversing what modernist city planning did
to communities, which was modernist city planning
sort of put all of these blocks around the city
and divided communities and divided spaces
and doesn't provide enough space for people to gather.
And is it possible that poky Pokemon
go is kind of providing that space,
just you access it through your phone, but also while walking?
I don't know.
I like it.