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MEDIA FUNCTIONS
AND EFFECTS
PREAMBLE
• “Just as all living organisms live in certain specialized
environments to which they adapt and which completely
determine their lives, so do human beings live, to a
significant extent, in an ocean of words. The difference is
that the human environment is, to a large extent, man
made. We secrete words into the environment around us
just as we secrete carbon dioxide and, in doing so, we
create an invisible semantic environment of words which
is part of our existence in quite as important ways as the
physical environment. The content of verbal output does
not merely passively reflect the complex social, political,
and economic reality of the human race: it interacts with it
as well. As our semantic environment incorporates the
verbal outputs secreted into it, it becomes both enriched
and polluted, and these changes are largely responsible
for the course of human history”.
(Rapoport 1969)
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What is Mass Media?
• Mass media are the
means of public
communication
reaching to the large,
scattered,
heterogeneous and
anonymous audience
at the same time.
The branches of the Mass
Media
http://americanmassmedia.wikispaces.com/Evolution+of+American+mass+media
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How does it influence us?
• We are produced by the environment of
signification that we have collectively
produced
• However, we cannot simply 'ingest' those
secretions because our culturally learnt
codes and conventions transform what we
get from external stimuli into actual
communication, where the message is not
only received but also decoded, understood
and responded to
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How do we perceive it?
• The codes and conventions which comprise our
particular culture's ways of seeing are incorporated
into the modes of perception of each individual
• We are largely unconscious of their operation
• Our perception is not so much an inherited
mechanism as a learnt one
• The awareness we bring to consuming media is a
precondition for making sense of what we get
• This awareness is itself produced in us by what we
have experienced hitherto
Media consumption or media
diet
http://www.roninmarketing.co.uk/blog/2015/02/a-balanced-media-diet/
• It is the sum of information and entertainment
media taken in by an individual or group
• It includes activities such as interacting with new
media, reading books and magazines, watching
television and film, and listening to radio
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Media blames
• Media is often blamed for producing results which
are in fact conditioned by much broader and more
diffuse historical circumstances
• The number of hours people spend consuming
media is not ultimately caused by media itself - it
results, much more obviously, from:
• shorter working hours
• increased family resources available for leisure
• the hours the new media fills were previously filled by various
activities, like knitting, chatting or even dozing
• the new medium seems to be able to co-exist quite comfortably
with them
Media evolution
• It has brought new stimulus into the home,
and created a demand for more
entertainment:
– more books, magazines and newspapers are
read
– more music heard
– more plays and films are seen now than ever
before - even if 'only' on television or online
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http://www.media2mrw.com/
http://grow3.com/evolutionofbrandcommuni catio n/
http://mastersofmedia.hum.uv a.nl/2010/10/1 4/evolution-of-twitter-th rough-alternative-ways -of-us age/
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THE FUNCTIONAL TRADITION
• Media theory is based on some underlying
assumptions.
• There are at least three, which can best be
thought of under the following headings:
• (1) individualism;
• (2) abstraction;
• (3) functionalism.
1 Individualism
• This assumption presupposes a one-to-one
relationship between the mass
communicator and the individual viewer
which is justified by reference to the one-toone model of face-to-face communication
• The media consumer is regarded as an
individual with certain psychological needs
• They take these needs with them to the
screen, and the mass communicator
attempts to gratify them
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2
Abstraction
• Here the assumption is that an individual's
psychological needs are much the same no matter
what society or culture s/he belongs to.
• There is a kind of universality and timelessness about
human relations, which derive from myths about the
existence of a universal 'human nature'.
• This approach tends to disregard the historical
processes which have produced such formative
developments as the division of labour, class
oppositions, regional cultures, economic differentials
and the various subcultures, in favour of general
psychological needs.
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Functionalism
• This approach assumes that media is used by its
consumers to satisfy their psychological needs, in a
more or less conscious and active way
• Functional analysis concentrates on the relations
between the different parts in a system, in order to
discover how they work and the functions they
perform
• The notion of functionalism derives from a wellestablished sociological discipline, and in the field of
mass communication it has extended the range of
the earlier stimulus-response assumptions
• The most recent research has developed from this
into what is called the 'uses and gratifications'
theory
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USES AND GRATIFICATIONS
• This theory attempts to explain the uses and functions of the media
for individuals, groups, and society in general.
• There are three objectives in developing uses and gratifications
theory:
1. to explain how individuals use mass communication to gratify
their needs. “What do people do with the media”.
2. to discover underlying motives for individuals’ media use.
3. to identify the positive and the negative consequences of
individual media use. At the core of uses and gratifications
theory lies the assumption that audience members actively
seek out the mass media to satisfy individual needs.
A medium will be used more when the
existing motives to use the medium leads to
more satisfaction
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USES AND GRATIFICATIONS
There are five basic needs to be fulfilled by the mass
media (Katz et al.1974):
1. Cognitive needs: the acquiring of information,
knowledge and understanding.
2. Affective needs: the need for emotional and aesthetic
experience, love and friendship; the desire to see
beautiful things.
3. Personal integrative needs: the need for selfconfidence, stability, status, reassurance.
4. Social integrative needs: the need for strengthening
contacts with family, friends and others.
5. Tension-release needs: the need for escape and
diversion.
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AN 'INTEGRATED, THEORY' OF
MASS MEDIA EFFECTS
The idea of needs becomes the basis for
understanding the media as a whole. The
three categories of need are (De Fleur and
Ball-Rokeach1989):
1. The need to understand one's social world
2. The need to act meaningfully and effectively in
that world
3. The need for fantasy-escape from daily
problems and tensions
Magic Bullet Theory
The "hypodermic needle theory" implied mass
media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect
on its audiences.
The mass media in the 1940s and 1950s were
perceived as a powerful influence on behavior
change.
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"strong effects" theory
• Factors:
– the fast rise and popularization of radio and
television
– the emergence of the persuasion industries,
such as advertising and propaganda
– the Payne Fund studies of the 1930s, which
focused on the impact of motion pictures on
children, and
– Hitler's monopolization of the mass media
during WWII to unify the German public
behind the Nazi parties:
Criticism
• Even 'handling' the 'large amounts of raw news' might
still leave the individual in a dysfunctional state
• The news itself increases personal tensions and anxiety
which leads the individual to reduce his attention to the
news
• It is appropriate that the bread of news should be
leavened by the judicious addition of quantities of
entertainment
• The function of entertainment is 'to provide respite for the
individual which, perhaps, permits him to continue to be
exposed to the mass-communicated news,
interpretation, and prescriptions so necessary for his
survival in the modern world
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Wright 1975:
• Imagines the individual consumer of media as a mechanism
whose needs are merely those of equilibrium-maintenance
and continued 'exposure' to the 'necessary' doses of news.
• This is in fact a classic statement of the 'hypodermic needle'
model (sometimes also called the 'bullet theory') of mass
communication's uses and effects.
• As a mass, an audience displays the following four
characteristics:
– It comprises people from all walks of life.
– It comprises anonymous individuals.
– Its members share little experience with each other - there is
little interaction between them.
– Its members are disunited - they are very loosely organized.
Underexposure
• One of the most striking results of this
approach can be observed in the attitude to
individuals who for whatever reason are underexposed to media influences
• They come to be regarded as sufferers from a
new kind of social malady, namely 'mediadeprivation'.
• This stands if we define the media primarily in
terms of their function of disseminating news
and public affairs from an informed elite to a
dependent mass public.
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MASS CONSUMPTION OR
MASS COMMUNICATION?
• Early research done by the broadcasting institutions
or their agencies lead to the definition of the
audience as a 'market', comprising people whose
shared characteristic is that they are all 'consumers'
of television output
• But this language is of course metaphorical;
audiences do not 'buy' television messages, and
they do not 'consume' the messages transmitted to
them
McQuail’s (2010) theory
• suggests the fact that television is
communication as well as mass
• If the mass media are to influence individuals,
then, as a form of communication, they must
do so according to the rules of communication
in general
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McQuail’s five conditions to the effect of communication:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The greater the monopoly of the communication source
over the recipient, the greater the change or effect in favour
of the source over the recipient.
Communication effects are greatest where the message is
in line with the existing opinions, beliefs and dispositions of
the receiver.
Communication can produce the most effective shifts on
unfamiliar, lightly felt, peripheral issues, which do not lie at
the centre of the recipient's value systems.
Communication is more likely to be effective where the
source is believed to have expertise, high status, objectivity
or likeability, but particularly where the source has power,
and can be identified with.
The social context, group or reference group will mediate
the communication and influence whether or not it is
accepted.
Relationship media-audience
1 Diversion
– escape from the constraints of routine
– escape from the burdens of problems
– emotional release
2 Personal relationships
– companionship
– social utility
3 Personal identity
– personal reference
– reality exploration
– value reinforcement
4 Surveillance - maintaining an overall view of the
immediate
environment.
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WHO IS THE COMMUNICATOR?
• There is an apparent paradox which does not
occur in most other forms of communication:
neither party in the communication act knows
who the other is.
• Normally when one party encodes a message
according to one set of codes and conventions
and a second party decodes that message
according to different codes, the result is known
as an aberrant decoding.
• As Umberto Eco has pointed out, aberrant
decoding is quite normal in the field of the mass
media.
Relationship communicator audience
• We can identify three simultaneous levels in the
presentation of the communicator:
– The image on the screen, whether that image be one
of a newscaster, the actors in a fictional
representation, or camera shots of the world out-there
- urban streetscapes, for instance.
– The broadcasting institution, its employees and
professional codes
– The culture for which the messages are meaningful. At
this level the communicator is the macro-group, of
many millions of people, of which each member of the
audience group is a differentiated part.
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• There is no single 'authorial' identity for the mass
communicator
• The image on the screen would hardly be able to
make itself understood at all were it unable to rely
upon the resources of everyday verbal language.
• Media functions are to some extent dependent upon
and defined by the functions of speech in general.
• Media is a complex semiotic system going beyond
mere words - but much of its visual content takes the
form of 'para-linguistic' signs derived ultimately from
real-life linguistic codes.
• Television functions in society as a form of
communication
Roman Jakobson’s functions of
communication
1. The referential function. Language's most familiar
function, where the relationship between a sign and its
referent or object is dominant.
2. The emotive function. This concerns the relationship
between a sign and its encoder; it expresses their
attitude towards the subject of the message (e.g. 'it's
been a long day' communicates the speaker's attitude
towards the day, and does not refer to its time-span).
3. The conative function. This concerns the relationship
between the sign and its decoder. Imperative
commands are messages where the conative function
is most clearly dominant
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4.
5.
6.
The poetic function. Here the dominant function is the
message's concern with itself. It is not confined to poetry.
Slogans can use it (e.g. 'I like Ike'), and so can proverbial
sayings (e.g. 'Finders, keepers, losers, weepers'). It is
dominant in many television advertisements.
The phatic function. Here the dominant function of the
message is to stress the act of communication between the
parties involved. Remarks about the weather are its classic
example. Television programmes use it frequently; perhaps
because of, rather than in spite of, the 'remote' relationship
between broadcaster and viewer.
The metalinguistic function. Here the function of
language is to communicate a message about language.
Literary criticism is all metalanguage, and many television
programmes, especially comedies, are 'about' the television
message. Parodies are especially adept at exploiting
metalanguage.
Media Effects
1. Media influenced effects are those
things that occur as a result—
either in part or in whole—from
media influence.
2. They can occur immediately
during exposure to a media
message, or they can take a long
time to occur after any particular
exposure.
3. They can last for a few seconds or
an entire lifetime. They can be
positive as well as negative.
4. They can show up clearly as
changes but they can also
reinforce existing patterns, in
which case the effect appears as
no change.
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Media Effects
5. They can occur whether the media have an intention
for them to occur or not.
6. They can affect individual people or all people in the
form of the public.
7. They can also affect institutions and society.
8. They can act directly on a target (a person, the public,
an institution, or society) or they can act indirectly.
9. And, finally, they can be easily observable or they can
be latent and therefore much more difficult to observe.
Sources
•
•
•
•
•
•
http://www.thetvaddiction.com/functions_of_television.html
Fiske, J., Hartley J. 1996, Reading Television, London and New York:
Routledge
Jeff Lewis .2002. Cultural Studies: The Basics. London: Sage.
Katz, E., Blumler, J. G., & Gurevitch, M. (1974). Ulilization of mass
communication by the individual. In J. G. Blumler, & E. Katz (Eds.), The uses of
mass communications: Current perspectives on gratifications research (pp. 1932). Beverly Hills: Sage.
DeFleur, M. L. & Ball-Rokeach, S. 1989. Theories of mass communication (5th
ed.). White Plains, NY: Longman.
McQuail's.2010. Mass Communication Theory 6th edition, London: Sage
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