Erica Scharrer

Chapter VII – Learning rules and norms—further evidence of media effects

This chapter discusses how children and teenagers learn norms, rules, and values of the society from media. The people appearing on television and in other media demonstrate the ways of the world to children and teenagers. They do so by the ways they dress, speak, behave, express attitudes and emotions, and interact with others. These impressions, costumed as entertainment, sports, information, and news, guide the performance and affect the success of viewers and readers. However, media is not the sole socializing influence experienced by children and adolescents. Parents and caregivers, teachers and other prominent adults, siblings and peers, and clubs and organizations including the religious, social service, and leisure-oriented also provide young people with cues they may use to navigate the social world. Consumer, scholastic, and aggressive behaviors are learned in large part through media consumption. The chapter examines medias role in socializing children and teens in the topics of citizenship and politics, gender roles, career expectations and desires, fashion brands, and physical presence. The chapter also provides theoretical explanations for how and why media contribute to socialization.

Chapter VIII – Knowledge for what?

There are primarily three parties that influence the role of media in the lives of young people in addition to the choices that young consumers themselves make. These are the federal regulatory apparatus, the media industries, and parents. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the Congress have important but in practice quite limited roles in regard to television and no role at all for other media. Those in the business of making and disseminating media products are primarily motivated by economic interests, although in many cases a large role is played by creative concerns. The major responsibility in regard to media and young persons inevitably falls to parents and other caregivers. They determine the opportunities for very early use of television and the age at which other media become readily accessible, the household environment that figures so importantly in the use of all media, and the media stockpiling in bedrooms that makes isolated media use so frequent for so many young people.

Chapter 6 – Using the Media

Audience members differ according to their level of interest in knowledge about, and attentiveness to political affairs at various times throughout the electoral cycle, and therefore select and attend to messages in a variety of ways. The primary ways in which the public employs media information for political purposes include such pursuits and processes as knowledge acquisition, the formation of attitudes about candidates and issues, and voting or other forms of political participation. People vary in whether they find news items personally relevant and in the amount of prior knowledge and experience they have about certain topics. The influence of the news media is not limited to the importance and relevance of issues, events, and people, but extends to specific aspects of those issues, events, and people. Second-level agenda setting is immensely important in the political realm. News reports often focus on particular properties of candidates, events, and issues, especially in the medium of television in which constraints on time and an emphasis on simplicity largely eliminate the possibility of presenting multiple aspects within a single story.

Public Thought and Action

This chapter discusses two contrasting views of information—civic knowledge and public understanding. The civic knowledge record is dismal on all counts—knowledge, media, and in particular, television. Public understanding gives a very different impression. This is the measurement of what the public thinks and believes about the events of the day and the people who figure in them. The emphasis is on the response to the news rather than on acquisition of facts. This perspective is consistent with the conclusion of analysis of the evidence on what voters learn from the mass media by Weaver (1996) that awareness and concern about issues and people are typically what is acquired from attending to the news. The chapter also highlights the construction of the importance imputed to issues, people, and events and its role in shaping opinions about them.

Decisions, Stories, and Viewers

This chapter discusses the factors that influence the makeup of newscasts into the norms that govern gatekeeping, decision making, and the application of the gatekeeping norms in national and local news operations. The principal feature of gatekeeping is norms and values that specify newsworthiness. Routines help gatekeepers proceed in an orderly manner. These conventions are to newsroom operation what gears are to an old-fashioned watch. The two principal perspectives in explaining exposure to the news have been the seeking of particular gratifications that derive from the internal motives of viewers and structural factors in which regularities of viewing predict the size of the audience. Gratifications represent the preferences of individual viewers. Structural factors represent the options for their expression. The most prominent motive behind choosing to view the news is that of surveillance with an emphasis on events.

Assembled to Monitor

Television viewing is a sampling, comprehensive and wide-ranging, of all the ways that modern people attend to mass media—browse, momentarily ignore, assemble into a mosaic of contrasting bits, passingly follow and attentively consume. The parameters of television programming consist of conventions that have proved successful in attracting and holding audiences, and they represent the expectations of those turning on their sets at any given time of day. The most prominent characteristic is stability. Genres remain much the same. Innovations, sometimes quite important in terms of presaging trends in programming, are largely confined to the rise or fall of a genre. It is easy to demonstrate active involvement in viewing, such as using a remote control to find greater rewards or choosing the same program again and again when viewing at a particular time. The preference is to build on two concepts introduced by Rubin (1983, 1984)—ritualistic and instrumental viewing. The mode of behavior that most succinctly and thoroughly characterizes the way by which a television set is typically attended to is monitoring. Viewing connotes a theater-like physical disposition in which the screen is watched continuously. Monitoring is defined as paying sufficient attention to three sets of cues—those of the visual and audio elements of the televised presentation and those resident in the behavior of any others in the vicinity who might be viewing—to follow the unfolding narrative. The underlying principle is that attention rises with the ability and need to assemble a narrative successfully.

The Political Medium

Television is a particularly important medium for politicians. Paid campaign announcements and news coverage permit a candidate to electronically address a large audience that is heterogeneous demographically and ideologically. Television has characteristics that make it highly serviceable as a vehicle for political persuasion. It presents candidates multi-dimensionally—the person as well as the figure—and its depictions can readily arouse emotions. Image management of political candidates can conservatively be said to be a multimillion dollar industry, and politicians essentially are political brands marketed as if they were legal or medical services. Political advertising is a direct form of image management, whereas positive news coverage is an indirect route. Image or identity is particularly important when party loyalty is low and the race is close. Image making is a necessary strategy for the candidates to control the way they are perceived rather than being at the mercy of their opponents. The conventions of television news production—such as lighting, editing, and shot selection—can create either a favorable or an unfavorable image of the same set of events. There are also demand characteristics by which a medium depicts events to take advantage of the features that give it an advantage over competitors. These are analogous to the characteristics of the experiments that elicit behavior external to the treatment under study; media differentially covers political events even though the news personnel are all trying to cover the same story.

The Main Means

Television financially supports itself mainly through the sale to advertisers of access to audiences. This has led to the observation that televisions product is not programming but the attention of the viewers. This chapter examines four aspects: what sets television advertising apart, commercial design, the publics somewhat pejorative—but not consistently unfavorable—evaluation, and the assessment of effectiveness. Television commercials, as with advertising in all media, represent the vested interest of the party paying for the advertisement. Advertising has no purpose other than to advance the interests of its sponsor. Usually, this interest rests in the purchase of a particular product by the viewer or reader, but sometimes it lies in elevating the impression of a brand name, company, or genre of goods. The most pervasive and banal feature of display advertising, of which television commercials are essentially a subspecies, is the use of classical conditioning. The advertised product or brand name is paired with an image that is expected to arouse a positive effect, such as a symbol of power and authority, sexual attractiveness, or pleasurable consumption. As a result, the response evoked by the image becomes more likely in response to the product or brand name, enhancing favorability toward it. The success of this psychological truism is not the means by which the effectiveness of a commercial in the specific instance is measured. It is simply a central part of many features that presumably advance favorability toward the product or the brand name.

Chapter 7 – Scholastic Performance

Publisher Summary This chapter introduces four topics on which the expectations have been that television would enhance achievement that are vocabulary, interests, visual skills, and televised interventions. The chapter puts a view on a variety of other relationships where expectations have been less favorable or more mixed and ambiguous. It specifies the relationship between viewing and achievement. Two well-studied examples of television designed to change attitudes, beliefs, and behavior are Freestyle and The Great American Values Test. Freestyle was a public television series of thirteen 30-minute episodes intended to change the beliefs and norms of pre teens (ages 9-12) about gender roles, such as a girl doing auto repair (Grease Monkey) and a boy showing nurturing behavior (Helping Hand). The Great American Values Test was a 30-minute program designed to change attitudes in regard to the environment, gender equality, and relationships between whites and blacks that was broadcast in the evening simultaneously on all three network outlets in an eastern Washington city. The effects of television on scholastic performance and cognitive activity continue to be debated. Several specific outcomes have been hypothesized that would mediate performance, some positively, some negatively. With regard to the relationship between viewing and achievement, some have concluded that when confounding variables are properly controlled there is no evidence of any association. Others have concluded that achievement declines as viewing increases, but there is disagreement on the causal contribution of viewing.

Chapter 8 – Antisocial Behavior

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the social context of public opinion and other media, the evidence of effects on aggressive and antisocial behavior, the user criteria and schema for interpreting the evidence, and the broad implications of the data. The theories and dimensions that figure in the effects of television violence on aggressive and antisocial behavior apply to all categories of behavior and all media. This has become a commonplace in the social and behavioral sciences—the conformity of broad ranges of behavior to the same few general principles. The result is a general psychology of the behavioral influence of media. The chapter presents three bodies of evidence. The first is the symmetry in the meta-analytic data on the effects of antisocial and prosocial television portrayals. The second is the success of the health belief model, which is derived from social learning theory, the precursor of social cognition. It is accurate conceptual genealogy to recognize that the large-scale federally sponsored programs employing media to change the health behavior of the public have their theoretical roots in the responses of children to the thumping of Bobo dolls and thereby testify to the wide applicability of the underlying theory. The third source is the extensive literature on the modification of behavior—phobias, fears, and anxieties—by the calculated use of media portrayals to make the stimuli involved less arousing and the viewer more confident in reacting to them. Such outcomes are limited in their applicability to ordinary viewing, but they further document that television can influence a wide variety of behavior.