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Media Effects summary
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Summary of the first twelve chapters of the book 'Media Effects' by W. James Potter.
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Media effects summaryChapter 1: Why study media effects?
This chapter focuses you on the big picture of media effects by emphasizing three trends: media
message saturation, the growing challenge of coping, and the growth of knowledge about media
effects. Taken together, these three trends make now the most important time for you to start
studying media effects.
MEDIA MESSAGE SATURATION
High Degree of Exposure
The increase in media use is driven by younger people who are shifting away from traditional media
(such as newspapers, magazines, and books that use print on paper) and toward electronic forms of
media. A report generated by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2005 characterized your generation
(people 8 to 18 years old) as the “M Generation” for your focus so strongly on media use.
Accelerating Production of Information
Not only is information easily available to almost anyone today, but information also keeps getting
produced at an ever-increasing rate. The biggest drivers of this accelerating increase in information
are the growing popularity of social networking and digital television and cameras that are not only
used by hobbyists by in surveillance of public places.
Impossible to Keep Up
Time is a big problem. If you were to try to read only the new books published this year, you would
have to read a book every 3 minutes for 24 hours each day with no breaks over the entire year— that
is 20 books per hour and 480 books each and every day. All that effort would be needed just to keep
up with the new titles published in the United States alone!
We live in an environment that is far different from any environment humans have ever experienced.
And the environment changes at an ever-increasing pace. This is due to the accelerating generation
of information and the sharing of that information through the increasing number of media channels
and the heavy traffic of media vehicles traversing those channels. Messages are being delivered to
everyone, everywhere, continually. We are all saturated with information, and each year the media
are more aggressive in seeking our attention. It is a hopeless expectation to keep up with all the
available information. The most important challenge now lies in making good selections when the
media are continually offering us thousands of messages on any given topic.
THE CHALLENGE OF COPING
How do we meet the challenge of making selections from among the overwhelming number of
messages in the constantly increasing flood of information? The answer to this question is, We put
our minds on “automatic pilot” where our minds automatically filter out almost all message options. I
realize that this might sound strange, but think about it. We cannot possibly think about every
available message and consciously decide whether to pay attention to each one. There are too many
messages to consider. So our minds have developed routines that guide this filtering process very
quickly and efficiently so we don’t have to spend much, if any, mental effort.
To navigate our way efficiently day-to-day through our information-saturated culture, we rely on
automatic processing. Psychologists refer to this automatic processing of information as
automaticity. Automaticity is a state wherein our minds operate without any conscious effort from
us.
In our everyday lives, the media offer us thousands of choices for exposures. With automatic
,processing, we experience a great deal of media messages without paying much attention to them.
Every once in a while something in the message or in our environment triggers our conscious
attention to a media message.
The huge advantage of automatic processing of information is that it helps us get through a great
many decisions with almost no effort. However, there are some serious disadvantages. When our
minds are on automatic pilot, we may be missing a lot of messages that might be helpful or enjoyable
to us. We might not have programmed all the triggers we need to help us get out of automatic
processing when a useful message comes our way.
When we are too concerned with efficiency, we lose opportunities to expand our experience and to
put ourselves in a position to make better decisions that can make us healthier, wealthier, and
happier.
MEDIA INFLUENCE IS PERVASIVE AND CONSTANT
Who has programmed the computer code that governs our automatic routines? The answer to this
question is that we have programmed some of our code but that there are also other forces that
have been programming our code. Those other influences include our parents, our friends, society in
general with its social norms, the educational system, along with a variety of other institutions (such
as religion, politics, criminal justice system, government, and so on), and the media. Each of these is
continually exerting an influence on how we think, how we feel, and how we behave. Some of this
influence is obvious and easy to notice, but most of it occurs subtly and shapes our mental codes
unconsciously. When we are not consciously paying attention to these influences, they quietly shape
our mental codes without our being aware of it. This is especially the case with the media, because
there are so many messages and because we open ourselves up to so much media exposure. Over
time, this exposure becomes a habit that we never think about consciously.
The media are continually programming and re-programming our mental codes. They are adding
information, altering our existing information structures, stimulating responses, and reinforcing
certain patterns of thinking and acting. The media are thus exerting an influence on us whether we
are aware of it or not. Furthermore, media influence is constant. The media influence on us does not
stop when we stop exposing ourselves to media messages. As long as the media have an influence on
programming our mental codes, their influence shapes how we think and act any time those mental
codes are automatically running in our conscious or unconscious minds.
HUGE KNOWLEDGE BASE ABOUT MEDIA EFFECTS
Chapter 2: Defining key ideas
NATURE OF AUDIENCE MEMBERS
The most fundamental starting place for examining media effects is to consider the nature of humans
and how they process meaning from media messages. Scholars who conduct research on media
effects have engaged in a longstanding debate about the nature of humans when they encounter
media messages. One side of the debate argues that the human mind is like a machine that
automatically processes meaning from the outside, then stores those learned meanings in the brain.
When people encounter a media message, their minds decode the symbols automatically and
everyone arrives at the same meaning. The other side of the debate argues that people are
interpretive beings who have the freedom to construct any kind of meaning they want out of any
message.
The Human Mind as Machine
If people did not share meaning, communication would not be possible. When we talk to people, we
,must assume that they will have the same meaning for words as we do. The human mind is very fast
in accessing those learned meanings when it encounters stimuli. Thus mental codes allow our minds
to be very powerful information processors
Interpretive Beings
Another view of the human mind is that people are interpretive beings who continually create
meaning for themselves. We have a great deal of freedom to think for ourselves, and this allows for a
wide variety of opinions, experiences, and lifestyles.
The debate about whether humans are machines or interpretive, creative beings has generated a
very large body of research literature both by behaviorist social scientists (who examine the
commonalities among people) as well as by humanistic scholars (who focus more on the
uniquenesses across people). This has been especially important because media effects researchers
have found times when people act rather like machines (that is, there are certain factors that affect
all people the same way) and other times when people act very different from one another (that is,
where everyone constructs a different interpretation of the same media message).
MEDIA EXPOSURE
Exposure and Attention
In everyday language, exposure is a term that is often used synonymously with the term attention;
but when we study media effects, we need to be more precise and draw an important distinction
between the two terms. This distinction says that there are three kinds of exposure: physical,
perceptual, and psychological. Only when all three conditions of exposure are met can there be
attention.
Physical Exposure. Physical exposure requires some sort of proximity (both in time and space) to a
message. This means that the media message and the person must occupy the same physical space
at the same time in order for this type of exposure to take place. Thus space and time are regarded
as barriers to exposure.
Perceptual Exposure. The perceptual consideration refers to a human’s sensory bandwidth or the
ability to receive appropriate sensory input through the visual and auditory senses. There are limits
to the abilities of a human’s sense organs. The perceptual criterion, however, has a feature beyond
simple bandwidth; we must also consider the connection between the sensory input and the
processing in the brain. There are instances when the sensory input gets to the brain in one form, but
then the brain transforms the raw stimuli into another form. Stimuli that are outside the boundaries
of human perception are called subliminal. Subliminal messages can leave no psychological trace
because they cannot be physically perceived; that is, humans lack the sensory organs to take in
stimuli and/or the hard wiring in the brain to be sensitive to them. There is a widespread
misconception that the mass media put people at risk for “subliminal communication.” This belief is
based on confusing “subliminal” with “subconscious.” There is an important distinction that needs to
be made between subliminal and subconscious, because they are two very different things and they
have two very different implications for exposure. Subliminal refers to being outside a human’s
ability to sense or perceive; thus it is always regarded as nonexposure. However, once media stimuli
cross over the subliminal line and are able to be sensed and perceived by humans, it is regarded as
exposure. But this does not mean that all exposure is conscious, and this brings us to the third
criterion in our definition: psychological.
Psychological Exposure. In order for psychological exposure to occur, there must be some trace
element created in a person’s mind. This element can be an image, a sound, an emotion, a pattern,
and so on. It can last for a brief time (several seconds in short-term memory then cleared out) or a
, lifetime (when cataloged into long-term memory). It can enter the mind consciously (often called the
central route) where people are fully aware of the elements in the exposure, or it can enter the mind
unconsciously (often called the peripheral route) where people are unaware that elements are being
entered into their minds.
Attention. In order for attention to occur, a person must first clear all three of the exposure hurdles
described: physical, perceptual, and psychological exposure. However, these three things alone do
not guarantee attention; something else must also occur. That something else is conscious
awareness of the media message. As you can now see, there are a lot of things that have to happen
in order for us to pay attention to a media message. For this reason, attention rarely occurs
compared to all the opportunities for attention that are presented to us continually each day.
Exposure States
There are four possible exposure states: attentional, automatic, transported, and self-reflexive. Each
of these states is qualitatively different from the other three; that is, you will have a different
experience with a given media message depending on which state you are in when you encounter
that message.
Attentional State. When you are in the attentional state, you are conscious of being exposed to
media messages, and you pay attention to the message as you are exposed to it. This does not
necessarily mean that you have a high level of concentration, although that is possible. The key
feature of the attentional state is that you have a conscious awareness of the messages during
exposures. Within the attentional state there is a range of attention depending on how much of your
mental resources you devote to the exposure. At minimum, you must be aware of the message and
consciously track it, but there is a fair degree of variation in the degree of concentration, which can
range from partial to quite extensive processing depending on the number of elements handled and
the depth of analysis employed.
Automatic State. When you are in the automatic state of exposure, you are not consciously aware of
those messages in your physical environment. This screening-out continues automatically with no
effort until some element in a message breaks through your automatic filtering process and captures
your attention, such as your favorite song coming on the radio. In the automatic processing state,
message elements are physically perceived but processed automatically in an unconscious manner.
This exposure state resides above the threshold of human sense perception but below the threshold
of conscious awareness. People have no conscious awareness of the exposure when it is taking place,
nor do they have a recollection of many of the details in the experience if they are asked about it
later.
Transported State. When you are in the transported exposure state, you are swept away by the
media message; that is, you are drawn into the experience of the message so much that you lose
track of time and place. They lose track of real time; instead they experience narrative time; that is,
they feel time pass like the characters feel time pass. The transported state is not simply the high end
of the attentional state. Instead, the transported state is qualitatively different than the attentional
state. While attention is very high in the transported state, the attention is also very narrow; that is,
people have tunnel vision and focus on the media message in a way that eliminates the barrier
between them and the message. People are swept away and “enter” the message. In this sense, it is
the opposite of the automatic state where people stay grounded in their social worlds and are
unaware of the media messages in their perceptual environment; in the transported exposure state,
people enter the media message and lose track of their social worlds.
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