An awareness of the many effects media have on us is key to increasing our level of media literacy and helps us gain control over the messages we experience every day.
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Key Idea: When we take a four-dimensional perspective—timing, valence, intentionality, and type—on media effects, we can better appreciate the broad range of effects the media are constantly exerting on us.
· Four-Dimensional Analytical Tool
o Timing of Effects
o Valence of Effects
§ Consumer Perspective
§ Media Business Perspective
o Intentionality of Effects
§ Consumer Perspective
§ Media Business Perspective
o Type of Effects
§ Cognitive-Type Effect
§ Belief-Type Effect
§ Attitudinal-Type Effect
§ Physiological-Type Effect
§ Emotional-Type Effect
§ Behavioral-Type Effect
§ Macro-Type Effects
· Using the Four-Dimensional Analytic Tool
o The Example of Addiction
o The Analysis
· Becoming More Media Literate
· Summary
· Further Reading
· Exercises
Suzanne is babysitting her two younger brothers, ages 7 and 10. She is reading a magazine while they are watching Spider-Man on television. She sees an ad for a new shampoo and tears out the coupon in the magazine ad, making a mental note to buy some of this brand when she is out shopping later today.
Her brothers are starting to shout at the television screen. Suzanne yells at her brothers to be quiet, then turns on her iPod to listen to some new music she has downloaded. As a new song starts playing, she starts to pay more attention to the lyrics and puts down her magazine. She begins to really like the song and wonders, “Who is singing this? I’ve never heard it before.”
She begins to daydream about her date tonight. “I hope Tim takes me like to another like horror flick. It’s like so much fun to like scream my lungs out and to attack him like during the bad parts.”
When the song on the iPod finishes, she is in a happy mood, which is then shattered as her brothers begin yelling at each other and wrestling around on the floor. Suzanne runs into the room and breaks up the fight. “You guys better behave yourselves or I won’t let you watch Spider-Man anymore! Get back in your own chairs now.”
With peace restored, Suzanne picks up a newspaper and notices a story about a drive-by shooting where a gang of youths imitated some action in a recent movie. She thinks, “The media have such a bad effect on young kids. My brothers are going to end up in jail if they keep watching those shows. Thank goodness the media doesn’t have any effect on me!”
Many of us have a narrow view of media effects. We look for high-profile tragedies as evidence of a media effect and use those isolated incidents to conclude that there are media effects. Although these high-profile tragedies are indications of media effects, they are rare in number, and this leads many people to think that media effects do not happen often and that when effects do occur, they happen to other people. This is faulty thinking. Media effects are happening all around us every day. And those effects are not only happening to other people; they are happening to all people, including Suzanne and us. For example, in the scenario above, Suzanne was persuaded to buy a new shampoo; she changed her mood by listening to downloaded music to try to calm herself; she had fantasies triggered when she looked forward to a movie later that day; and she learned about a crime by reading the newspaper, then generalized from that one story to an unreasonable fear about her brothers ending up as convicts.
When you have a narrow perspective on what media effects are, you will not be able to perceive the many effects that are constantly occurring all around you. A sampling of some of those effects is presented in Appendix B on this book’s Edge site (find Media Literacy 10e on http://www.sagepub.com, then use the SAGE Edge link.). When you increase your awareness of this variety of media effects, you will begin to see indications that many of these effects are constantly occurring in your life as well as with the people around you. This awareness will help you decide which effects you want to continue experiencing and which you want to avoid. The purpose of this chapter is to help you become more aware of the great variety of media effects by expanding your perspective on what a media effect is. To guide your expansion of understanding, I present a four-dimensional analytical tool.
FOUR-DIMENSIONAL ANALYTICAL TOOL
The analytical tool I present in this section has four dimensions: timing, valence, intentionality, and type. This tool is presented here as a stimulus to expand your ability to perceive media effects by suggesting ways to think about those effects in a manner that you may not have thought about in the past. This tool can also be used in your everyday life to analyze things that happen to you as a result of media influence. Let’s begin by examining each of the four dimensions in this analytical tool.
Timing of Effects
Media effects can either be immediate or long term. The timing of effects distinction focuses your attention more on when evidence of the effect starts to show up than on how long the effect lasts. An immediate effect is one that occurs during your exposure to a media message. The evidence of an immediate effect is observable during the media exposure or shortly after. Immediate effects might last only for a short period of time (such as becoming afraid during a movie) or it might last forever (such as learning the outcome of a presidential election), but it is still an immediate effect because it changed something in you during the exposure. For example, when visiting your friends’ Facebook pages, you learn what’s new in their lives. Or while reading a website on sports, you immediately feel happy when you learn that your favorite sports team won an important game. And when watching an action/adventure film, you might begin jumping around in your seat and acting aggressively with the people around you. These are all immediate effects because something happened to you during the exposure.
Long-term effects show up only after many exposures. No single exposure is responsible for the effect. Instead, it is the pattern of repeated media exposures that sets up the conditions for a long-term effect. For example, after years of being exposed to ads for all kinds of products, we become more materialistic; that is, we are more likely to believe that the way to solve our problems or live a happier life is keyed to greater consumption of advertised products (Opree et al., 2014). No single exposure or event “caused” this belief; instead, this belief was slowly and gradually constructed over years of exposures.
Immediate effects are much easier to notice than long-term effects. There are two reasons for this. First, because immediate effects occur during an exposure to a particular message, it is easy to link the effect to a particular media message as a cause and conclude that the particular exposure was responsible for the observed effect. In contrast, by the time people notice a long-term effect, it is well after many media exposures and many other things happening in their lives, so it is more difficult to link the effect to particular media exposures.
A second reason why immediate effects are easier to notice is because they are usually sudden changes. For example, when you are visiting a friend’s Facebook page, you may see a posting that insults you and immediately you would feel angry, or your friend might send you a YouTube clip that makes you laugh. These sudden changes in your emotions are easy to notice.
Valence of Effects
Valence refers to whether the effect is positive, neutral, or negative. Notice that these terms are value laden, so we need to determine who is making the value judgment. With media effects, the who can be either you as the consumer of media messages or the businesses that produce and disseminate media messages. Each of these two groups of people has a different perspective on what makes a media message positive, neutral, or negative.
Consumer Perspective
From the perspective of the individual consumer, a positive effect is one that helps you achieve a personal goal or satisfy a personal need. In this situation, you use your needs to guide you in the selection of media messages that you believe will best satisfy those needs. For example, if your need is to get some information to satisfy your curiosity, then finding facts in a book, in a newspaper, or on the internet is a positive effect.
Media Business Perspective
We can also look at the valence of effects from the perspective of the media businesses. From their perspective, a media message is positive if it attracts the intended audience in large numbers and then serves to motivate those audience members to seek out those messages repeatedly. Thus, a sequence of messages that are positive in this manner will build an audience that media businesses can monetize by selling access to those audiences to advertisers and selling information about those audiences to marketers. In contrast, media messages are negative if they cannot attract an audience or if they cannot motivate audiences to return to their message service for repeated exposures.
Sometimes media messages can be positive from both perspectives. When media companies can construct messages that satisfy the needs of a large audience, then both the media businesses and the consumers are likely to regard the effects of those messages as being positive. But oftentimes, the two groups will not make the same judgment about valence. For example, when media businesses have conditioned their audiences to such a high degree that many audience members are addicted to those messages (e.g., uncontrollable compulsion to play digital games or to check social networking sites), the media businesses would regard this as very positive because of the dependably high exposure rates but the consumers who are addicted would regard this as very negative.
The media are constantly trying to use you and your resources to achieve their own goals, and when their goals are in conflict with your goals, this can lead to negative effects for you. For example, advertisers want you to spend more and more of your money on their products. If you buy products that actually do help you overcome problems you have, then this is a positive effect for both you and the advertiser. But if you allow advertisers to convince you that you are suffering from problems that you do not actually have and you repeatedly buy their products, then this is a negative effect on you while being a positive effect for the advertiser.
Intentionality of Effects
Intentionality requires an awareness of which media effects we expect to occur. Oftentimes, we have a clear intention for a media effect, and when that effect occurs, we can easily conclude that it was intentional. However, exposure to media messages can lead to unintentional effects. Unless we consider unintentional effects in addition to intentional effects, we will not be able to perceive many of the media effects that are constantly occurring.
Consumer Perspective
Oftentimes, we intend for an effect to happen, so we consciously seek out particular media messages in order to experience that intended effect. For example, we may be bored and want to feel some excitement. To satisfy this conscious need, we watch a video that presents a great deal of action and horror. During the exposure to this video, our blood pressure and heart rate go way up, and we are moved to the edge of our seat with fear. We have satisfied our intention to become aroused and excited. But after viewing the video when we try to calm down and go to sleep, we keep having nightmares composed of images from the video. This is an unintended effect. Therefore, a given media exposure can have both an intended and an unintended effect.
Unintentional effects can be both long term and immediate. In the example above, watching the video had a strong immediate effect of raising blood pressure and causing fear. It also had the effect of triggering nightmares. It could result in an additional long-term effect of leading us to develop a belief that the world is a mean and violent place, which may make you irrationally fearful of traveling or meeting new people.
Unintentional effects frequently occur when you are in the state of automaticity because your defenses are not engaged. You are not aware that any learning is taking place, and hence, you are not actively evaluating and processing the information. However, even when you are trying to be an active viewer, unintended effects can occur.
Media Business Perspective
Media businesses try to satisfy existing audience needs as a way of attracting people to their messages and experiences. When they do this well, the businesses and the audiences both benefit. However, sometimes the businesses go beyond trying to satisfy existing needs, and this different intention does not line up with consumers’ intentions well. For example, sometimes advertisers will plan to increase their sales by trying to convince consumers that they have more needs (or different needs) than they really have.
Media businesses might be so successful in applying their techniques that effects can arise in their audiences that the businesses did not intend. For example, a media business—such as a digital game company or a social networking platform—might be so successful in conditioning users for repeat exposures that the users become addicted to their services and thereby suffer serious negative effects. In these situations, the media businesses defend themselves by saying that their intention has always been to simply entertain people and that it was never their intention to addict people. Unintended effects often occur. If we ignore those unintended effects, we will greatly underestimate the number of ways the media are constantly affecting all of us.
Type of Effects
Most of the attention about media effects focuses on the behavior of individuals. For example, there is a belief that watching violence will lead people to behave aggressively, that watching portrayals of sexual activity will make people behave promiscuously, and that watching crime will make people go out and commit the crimes they witness in media messages. While many media effects show up as behaviors, there are many nonbehavioral types of media effects, such as cognitive, belief, attitudinal, physiological, and emotional effects. Also, we need to think beyond effects on individuals and consider effects on more macro things, such as society and institutions. Let’s examine each of these in some detail.
Cognitive-Type Effect
Perhaps the most pervasive yet overlooked media influenced effect is the cognitive-type effect. Media can affect what we know by planting ideas and information into our minds. This happens all the time and may be the most prevalent of all media effects. We are constantly acquiring information during every exposure to the media. But rarely do people credit the media with this type of effect when they are thinking about media effects. Think about all the information you now possess that got into your mind from your exposures to textbooks, magazines, and newspapers.
Famous media personalities, such as Ellen DeGeneres and other well-known figures, can act as powerful social role models.
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This cognitive learning is not limited to factual information; we also learn a great deal of social information from the media. As children, we learn a great deal about our world by observing role models—parents, older siblings, friends, and so on. Observation of social models accounts for almost all of the information communicated to children up until the time they begin school. The mass media provide an enormous number of models and actions from which children might learn. Given the large amount of time children spend with the media, pictorially mediated models (especially television and movies) exert a strong influence on children’s learning about social situations.
Even as adults, we continue to pay careful attention to social models. When we do not have the social models we need in our real lives, we can usually find them in the media. Some of us want to learn most from social models who are powerful, extremely witty, physically attractive, or very successful in a particular career or sport. We develop a vicarious relationship with a professional athlete, famous actor, powerful politician, or wealthy role model. By observing these role models in the media, we gather lots of social information about what it takes to be successful and happy. Think of all the information you have in your memory about characters in television shows and movies you have seen; think about all those names, faces, behaviors, witty lines, and emotions they portrayed.
Belief-Type Effect
A belief is faith that something is real or true. For example, most humans have beliefs about the meaning of life, how we should treat one another, what happens when we die, and the existence of a supreme deity. The media influence our beliefs both immediately and over the long term.
As for an immediate belief-type effect, the media continually show us public figures who exhibit a particular belief. We often accept those beliefs and make them our own. The media also present us with fictional stories in which characters exhibit particular beliefs. We can acquire beliefs from fictional characters as well as from real people. However, we typically construct our beliefs over the course of a long-term process in which we continually observe how real people as well as fictional characters exhibit their beliefs through actions, then we consider how the consequences of their actions affect them. We look for patterns across many occurrences and use those patterns as lessons about how life works, and these learned social lessons become our beliefs about the norms of society. Norms are social rules about what is acceptable and desirable in society. For example, we might watch a lot of videos about people who have relationship problems with friends so that we can learn how they handle those problems; over time, we develop beliefs about what friendships are and how we can develop the types of friendships we want most. Thus, over time, media messages can shape our beliefs about important things such as what makes a good person, a valuable friendship, a successful relationship, an attractive person, a rewarding career, and a happy life.
Attitudinal-Type Effect
Attitudes are evaluative judgments about things. We compare the thing (a person, a song, a political position, etc.) to our standard. If the thing meets our standard, we judge it to be okay; if it exceeds our standard, we judge it to be good, very good, excellent, outstanding, or super cool; and if it fails to meet our standard, we judge it to be bad, very bad, terrible, or uncool. The media can influence our judgments about all sorts of things. This is the attitudinal-type effect. We can listen to a political pundit, religious leader, or attractive character express an evaluative judgment and simply accept that attitude as our own. Or we can make up our own minds using a standard that is one of our beliefs. For example, we might hear a new song on our friend’s mobile device and immediately decide that it is one of the best songs we have ever heard—that is, we create a very positive attitude about the song. Or we could read the discussion of the performance of an elected official and judge them to be a good leader. In these examples, you might be thinking that these are not illustrations of media influence. But remember that the media can influence our standards so that when we make our own judgments, we end up using their standards. Think about what your standards are for popular music or a good leader and ask yourself the extent to which the media has shaped those standards for you.
Attitudes rely on beliefs because beliefs are often the standards we use when making our evaluative judgments. For example, after years of observing glamorous men and women in Hollywood movies, fashion magazines, and internet sites, we come to believe that we need to be tall and thin with six-pack abs and thick hair to be considered attractive. While we know this is an impossible standard for everyone to achieve, we still use this standard when evaluating the attractiveness of the people we see as well as what we see about ourselves in the mirror. Few people can live up to this unrealistic standard, so we hold attitudes that the people around us are all unattractive because none of them can live up to the unrealistic standard of attractiveness set by the media. Media influence on attitudes has been found to be stronger on people’s attitudes at a more general level—such as opinions about society—than on more specific-level attitudes—such as one’s opinion about one’s friends, one’s own experiences, and oneself (Chock, 2011).
Compare & Contrast Attitude Effects and Belief Effects
Compare: Attitude effects and belief effects are the same in the following ways:
· Both can occur in individuals as a result of media exposure.
· Both can occur immediately (during a media exposure or shortly after) or after a long period of continual exposure to media messages.
Contrast: Attitude effects and belief effects are different in the following ways:
· Attitude effects are evaluative judgments whereas belief effects are acceptance that something is real or true.
· Attitude effects require the comparison of an element to a standard whereas belief effects require the simple acceptance of a statement.
Physiological-Type Effect
Media can influence our automatic bodily systems, which are physiological-type effects. These are usually beyond our conscious control, such as the contraction of the pupil of the eye when we look at a bright light. We cannot control the degree to which the pupil contracts, but we can look away from bright lights and thus prevent the iris from contracting.
With the media, there are many physiological effects that usually serve to arouse us. A suspenseful mystery serves to elevate our blood pressure and heart rate. A horror film triggers rapid breathing and sweaty palms. Hearing a patriotic song might raise goose bumps on our skin. Viewing erotic pictures can lead to vaginal lubrication, penile tumescence, and increased heart rate (Malamuth & Check, 1980). A farce might make us laugh so hard that we are unable to stop, even when laughing becomes painful. Or listening to music can calm and relax us by reducing our heartbeat and bringing our rate of breathing down to a regular, slow rate.
Over time, our physiological responses to particular media messages can change. For example, when we see our first horror movie, our heart rate might go through the roof. But if we keep watching horror movies, we might find that it takes more and more gore to trigger any increase in heart rate. Gradually, over many exposures to horror films, our physiological responses wear down.
Emotional-Type Effect
The media exert an emotional-type effect by making us feel things. They can trigger strong emotions such as fear, rage, and lust. They can also evoke weaker emotions such as sadness, peevishness, and boredom. Emotional reactions are related to physiological changes. In fact, some theoreticians argue that emotions are nothing more than physiological arousal that we label (Zillmann, 1991). If a character on a YouTube video triggers a very high level of arousal in us, we might label this feeling we experience as love or we might label it as hate; it depends on whether we are positive or negative about the character.
Have you ever become angry watching a sports game or felt sad during a movie? Then you’ve experienced an emotional-type effect, where your feelings become physiological reactions.
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We have all experienced emotional changes while exposing ourselves to media messages. Horror movies trigger extreme fear; bloggers can make us feel outrage; magazine pictures can make us feel lust; and calm music can help us feel more peaceful.
The media also exert long-term emotional effects. One long-term emotional effect is desensitization. Over years of watching violence in the media, which rarely show victims suffering and instead focus on the perpetrators of the violence and how attractive they are, we gradually come to lose the ability to feel sympathy for victims both in media portrayals and in real life. We might regard the homeless as people who are victims of their own bad judgment and who don’t deserve much sympathy from us.
Behavioral-Type Effect
Media can trigger actions. This is the behavioral-type effect. For example, after seeing an ad for a product, we might get on a website and order the product. Or we may read about some disturbing event on a news site on the internet and call a friend to talk about it.
There are also long-term effects to our behavior. For example, think about when you first got access to a computer to surf the internet. Initially, you might have visited a lot of sites for a few minutes each. But over time, you developed a pattern of going to a few favorite sites and spending more and more time on particular sites. Perhaps you have gotten to the point where you spend almost all your waking hours playing certain games or connecting with friends on a social networking site. Perhaps your internet behavioral habit is displacing other activities, such as exercising, hanging out with friends in real life, or going to class. Perhaps this behavioral habit has moved into an addiction. Many people continue interacting with friends on social networks for the purpose of getting emotional support even though research repeatedly shows that emotional support is far more satisfying offline than online (Trepte et al., 2015).
Macro-Type Effects
The six types of effects presented above are all effects on individuals. The media also exert their influence on larger units such as organizations, institutions, and society; this influence results in macro-type effects. Some institutions, such as politics, have fundamentally changed due to the direct influence of the media, especially television and now the internet. Other institutions—such as the family, society, and religion—have changed because of many different social pressures, and the media have served to heighten these pressures.
To illustrate this point, let’s consider the institution of family. In the span of a few generations, the makeup of the American family has changed radically. The number of traditional two-parent families has shrunk, eclipsed by childless couples, single parents, and people living alone. During the 40-year period starting in the early 1970s to 2009, the percentage of American households made up of married couples with children dropped from 45% to under 21%. Marriage has also dropped from 75% of all adults in 1972 as being married to 48% (U. S. Bureau of the Census, 2013).
One explanation for the erosion of the “traditional family” is that the rates of divorce are very high in the United States, and they have been climbing since television first penetrated our culture. In 1960, 16% of first marriages ended in divorce, and 50 years later, that figure had increased to 50% (U. S. Bureau of the Census, 2013). Critics claim that the rise of the divorce rate and the portrayals of broken families on television are not a mere coincidence; they claim that the television portrayals have socialized people to believe that divorce and having children out of wedlock are acceptable. Critics point out that television too frequently portrays divorce, single-parent households, and alternative lifestyles. These portrayals, presented over many different kinds of shows and over many years, tend to be internalized by viewers as being indicators of what is normal. Over time, people become dissatisfied with their own marriages and seek adventure with other partners. Also, many popular television series have been portraying married life in a negative manner, thus giving young people the idea that marriage is an unattractive lifestyle.
The media have the potential to bring the family together to share a common experience. Families can build a bonding ritual around shared media behaviors and use those exposures as a chance to talk and bond. For example, in the 1970s, many households had only one television, and viewing was a common family activity (Medrich et al., 1982). However, few families now use television or other media in this way. Family members rarely share viewing time. Instead, family members are likely to watch very different shows at different times on different platforms, such as laptops, smartphones, and iPods. And the content different family members expose themselves to is fragmenting so that family members rarely share the same media experiences.
Also, parents have reduced the time they spend with their children—40% less time from the 1950s to the 1990s (Pipher, 1996) and that time is even less today. Pipher argues, “Rapidly our technology is creating a new kind of human being, one who is plugged into machines instead of relationships, one who lives in a virtual reality rather than a family” (p. 92). “When people communicate by email and fax, the nature of human interaction changes” (p. 88). The conveniences of technology serve to cut us off from others. We depend less and less on others (at least face-to-face). People are likely to be regarded as things or services rather than as human beings. Pipher said that 72% of Americans don’t know their neighbors, and the number of people who say they have never spent time with the people next door has doubled in the past 20 years.
Even if we accept the argument that television has influenced the trend toward the breakdown of the traditional family, we must realize that there are also other influences, such as economic ones. For example, it takes more money to support a family. The median household income is now about $59,000 (Luhby, 2017), so both adults are likely to work, and this makes it harder for them to have children and raise them at home. The percentage of women in the labor force has been steadily climbing. Today, there are almost 75 million adult women in the U.S. labor force, with 70% of women with children under 18 working and 40% of women with children under 18 being the sole support of the household (DeWolf, 2017).
Another reason that family structure and family interaction have changed is that careers have become more important to many people than their families. Wage earners work longer hours, and this takes them away from the home for a higher proportion of their waking hours. There are strong stressors of time, money, and lifestyle, which make people regard the home as a place to recover from the workplace, not a place where they have high energy. For more than a generation, Americans have felt that family has not been of paramount importance in most people’s lives (Pipher, 1996). The irony is that perhaps people are working longer hours so they can afford more of the things advertised on television and thereby achieve a happier life as promised by advertisers, but by spending less time with our loved ones, we are steadily becoming less happy.
Modern family structures have evolved to include television, smartphones, and other forms of media use in daily life, even if this means limiting family interactions.
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Clearly, family structures and interaction patterns have been changing over the past five decades. There are many reasons for this. Media influence is a key element in this change, but not the only one. The additional elements of economic demands, the rise in the importance of careers, and changes in lifestyle preferences have all contributed to the probability of change in the institution of family.
USING THE FOUR-DIMENSIONAL ANALYTIC TOOL
This section presents an extended example of analyzing a media effect using the four dimensions of timing, valence, intentionality, and type. For this example, let’s consider the effect of internet addiction, which has been a growing concern as critics of media influence now understand how successful media companies are at conditioning their audiences for repeated exposures. Many media companies are now becoming targets of criticism for their role in addicting people, particularly children, to their technological devices (Godwin, 2018).
The Example of Addiction
To begin this analysis, we first need to consider what is meant by addiction. Media companies are very successful in conditioning audience members for repeat exposures to their messages and products. But is this addiction? The answer is no. Although the conditioning procedure used by media companies can lead to audience members becoming addicted, addiction is not merely conditioning for habitual behavior. Addiction requires that the conditioning reach a point where people are no longer able to stop performing their addicted behaviors (Alter, 2017). In his book, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, Alter (2017) explains that in the medical and psychology professions, the idea of addiction used to be limited to chemical dependency wherein the human body becomes so dependent on the continual intake of chemicals (such as nicotine, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, oxytocin, etc.) that some people reach a point where they cannot stop themselves from consuming those chemicals. The consumption of these chemicals often leads to addiction because these chemicals stimulate the release of dopamine in the brain that makes the person feel pleasure, even to the point of euphoria. Over time, as people consume these chemicals in order to experience pleasure, they find that they have to consume these chemicals in greater amounts and frequencies in order to trigger the same level of pleasure. Eventually, they reach a point where the consumption of these chemicals becomes more important than everything else in life, so they sacrifice other things (such as family, friends, job performance, hobbies, etc.) that used to be important to them. As their quality of life deteriorates, so does their ability to control their consumption of these chemicals.
Recently, health professionals have recognized that addiction need not be triggered only by chemicals; it can also be triggered by learned behavioral patterns. Certain behaviors can trigger bodily responses that are identical to the bodily responses triggered by chemicals, even though those behaviors do not involve the person taking chemicals. Thus, behaviors such as internet gambling, shopping, viewing pornography, and social networking activities have also been found to trigger the release of dopamine, and over time, some people find this release so essential to their everyday lives that they cannot stop the behaviors they use to achieve this release and they exhibit all the signs of addiction. This connection between behaviors and dopamine production was first discovered by James Olds in 1954 in a series of experiments where Olds hooked up rats to a device that stimulated the rats’ lateral hypothalamus, which is the pleasure center that releases a neurotransmitter called dopamine in the brains of organisms (Carr, 2020). In these experiments, rats had electrodes implanted in their brains and were put in a cage with a lever. The rats quickly learned that when they pulled the lever, they would feel pleasure because the movement of the lever stimulated their brains’ pleasure center by triggering the release of dopamine. Olds found that his rats would continue to pull the triggering lever over and over until they were completely exhausted; some rats even died from this exhaustion!
Many internet companies have become very successful at conditioning audiences for habitual use of their products by treating their messages and platforms as dopamine delivery vehicles (Adler, 2017). Thus, internet platforms are designed to provide people with a continual stream of immediate pleasure in the form of making a winning bet on poker sites, outbidding the competition on eBay, experiencing an erotic image on pornographic sites, or increasing the number of one’s friends and followers on social networking sites. Platform designers build into their experiences all kinds of features to keep their audiences coming back for more and more exposures by knowing how to construct their internet platforms in a way that stimulates dopamine in the brains of their users.
The Analysis
Now let’s use the four dimensions to analyze this media effect that is known as internet addiction. By using the language provided by the four dimensions to think about this effect, you will be able to dig below the surface and understand the effect at a much deeper level.
As for timing, internet addiction is clearly a long-term effect. You cannot become addicted with one exposure. In order for addiction to occur, people need to be conditioned over a long period of time so that they get caught in a pattern of habitual behaviors that they can no longer control.
As for valence, the effect is a very positive one—for the media businesses. When a media business has conditioned audience members so completely that those people are addicted to their service, those businesses can depend on this audience for a great deal of exposure for a long period of time. They can sell advertisers access to this audience and thus guarantee a steady income of advertising revenue. However, when we view this effect from the users’ perspective, it is no longer positive; it is highly negative because it is so harmful to the well-being of users. While the pleasure those audience members receive in the short term can be regarded as positive—Who does not want more pleasure?—it becomes negative when people pass into addiction and can no longer control their exposures. When people become addicted to an internet platform, they significantly decrease their attention to non-internet activities. That is, face-to-face interactions with loved ones, friends, and other people trigger less pleasure. The challenges in their jobs and academic courses become less important, so addicts cut corners in those areas to shift time to their internet activities. They care less about eating healthy (or at all), exercising, and sleeping than they care about using an internet platform to achieve their next success and receive the reward of dopamine.
As for intentionality, people are intentional in seeking out pleasure from their use of the media; however, it is not likely that anyone is seeking addiction. Therefore, the use of internet platforms for the delivery of pleasure is, of course, intentional up to the point of addiction. Becoming more media literate will alert people to the path they get on when they increase their use of internet platforms and help them monitor their usage so they can continue to enjoy the effects they intend to get while avoiding going too far in their behavioral conditioning and preventing themselves from entering into the unintentional extreme of addiction.
As for analyzing internet addiction by type, things get more complicated because addiction suggests a variety of types of effects—physiological, emotional, behavioral, and belief. These effects, while of different types, arrange themselves in a progressive sequence of effects beginning with physiology. The experiencing of pleasure through the triggering of dopamine in the brain is a physiological response to engaging with an internet site. Over time, people build a tolerance for lower levels of dopamine and require more intense triggering (or more frequent triggering) in order to achieve the level of pleasure they want to experience. The physiological effect of dopamine production is experienced as pleasure, this morphs into an emotional effect and then into a behavioral effect because the emotion of pleasure triggers the behavioral patterns of engaging more and more with the internet platform (e.g., playing the game more, seeking more contact with more friends, buying more products, etc.). When people pass into the realm of addiction, their lives are dominated by behaviors that serve to feed their addiction. And what serves to maintain this increasing pattern of behavior is a set of beliefs that the increased exposures will deliver the expected pleasure and that stopping such behaviors will be truly devastating. So, internet addiction is best understood as a progression of different types—physiological, emotional, behavioral, and belief. Trying to treat addiction as only one of these effects is likely to be an unsuccessful approach because the addiction is a combination of all four.
As I hope you have seen in this extended example, using these four dimensions to analyze a media effect helps you develop a greater understanding of that effect. Some parts of this (and any) analysis are simpler than others. In this example, it is relatively easy to see that internet addiction is a long-term effect that can vary by valence and intention, depending on whether you conduct the analysis from the point of view of a media business or an individual audience member. And the analysis by type shows you how complex addiction is and why it is such a challenge to overcome an addiction once it really takes hold of a person.
BECOMING MORE MEDIA LITERATE
Now that you have seen how the four-dimensional approach to media effects can broaden your perspective, let’s see how well you internalize this information. First, see how many different effects you can identify in the people around you (Exercise 3.1). Remember to consider long-term effects as well as immediate effects, positive effects as well as negative effects, and unintentional effects as well as intentional ones. Also, see if you can identify different types of effects.
Regarding Exercise 3.1 as a warm-up, let’s move on to a more rigorous challenge. Exercises 3.2 and 3.3 ask you to be more systematic and complete; that is, see if you can identify examples of both immediate and long-term effects across all six types. If you are not able to do this in one sitting, then keep these exercises in mind as you go through a typical week. See if you can spot different effects as they occur and thereby fill in some of the gaps in your charts. Also, you may find that some examples of effects have elements that would fit into several types. For example, you might learn something (cognitive effect) that leads directly to you doing something (behavior effect). Also, an immediate effect may suggest a long-term effect. For example, after a session of playing an electronic game, you may feel really good (emotional immediate effect), and then later you notice that you have returned to the game again and play even longer (behavioral conditioning over the longer term).
Finally, take a look at Exercise 3.4 but do not feel you need to answer all those questions now. Keep these questions in the back of your mind and when you have a few minutes now and then in your everyday life, reflect on things such as your expectations for romance, college, and career. Where did these expectations come from? Are they realistic? To what degree are you meeting these expectations? To what degree do your behavioral patterns conform to your beliefs about yourself and others? These are very important questions. Don’t pressure yourself to answer these questions now; instead, let the answers come to you as flashes of insight as you encounter the problems and joys in your everyday life.
SUMMARY
A key step in increasing your media literacy is to expand your perspective about what a media effect is. Don’t get trapped into thinking of the media only as a kind of candy store. Don’t think that the media only affect others, such as young children who don’t know any better or the criminal types who blame their bad behavior on simply copying what they see in the media.
Candy as an Analogy for Media Effects
Many people think of media effects as if they were candy. As we walk down the street, there are people passing out all kinds of candy for free. They want us to taste their sweets then come into the store and buy something. We are tempted. When we take a piece, it tastes good and makes us want another piece. Often, we sneak another piece or two, thinking it can’t hurt. But then a few minutes later, we experience a sugar rush followed by a crash of energy. Also, there is this lingering sweet taste in our mouths that becomes unpleasant as time goes by. We envision the sugar eating holes in our teeth. If we have kids with us, we find that they are rambunctious and whine for more candy. And now we have to act like the bad guy and tell them no; it will spoil their dinner.
A lot of people think of the media as a candy store. Their messages are tempting, and we let ourselves sample and often like the experience. But afterward, we feel guilty. We feel we should have been doing something more substantial or productive with our time. We feel that those messages are now eating holes in our brains as we can’t get a jingle, a song, or stupid joke out of our minds. If we have kids with us, we fear that they are soon going to imitate the bad language, bad attitudes, or bad behavior they have seen in the messages.
Yes, the media do offer lots of “candy” messages. If we indulge ourselves with a steady diet of candy over the years, we will clog up our arteries with fat and experience all sorts of negative health effects. But the media offer many other kinds of messages. If we can resist the initial temptation of candy and instead find the more nutritious messages in other parts of the media cafeteria, then we can consume a more balanced and full range of vitamins and minerals. To live a healthier life, we need to know what to consume and we need to exercise some self-discipline.
Because we are submerged in a media-saturated environment, effects are constantly happening to us as they shape our knowledge patterns, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. They even trigger physiological reactions, such as our heart rate, blood pressure, and other bodily functions. And we don’t even need to experience a change in order to see that the media have an effect on us because a prevalent effect is reinforcement—that is, solidifying our existing beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral patterns.
In our everyday lives, the immediate and long-term processes work together. The immediate process gives us a new fact that either extends our learning or adds weight to our already-existing knowledge structure. In the long term, we look for patterns across these facts and infer conclusions about how the world operates. These generalized conclusions then become part of our knowledge structures. If we are not aware that we are making generalizations, then we cannot control that process and ensure that those generalizations are reasonable and accurate. Thus, faulty principles will get into our knowledge structures and lead us to make more defective conclusions and guide our search for facts in a faulty manner.
Being media literate requires that we understand the full range of media effects. We need to recognize when those effects are having a negative influence on us so that we can protect ourselves. And we need to recognize when the effects are having a positive influence on us so we can appreciate and enhance their power.
Further Reading
Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible: The rise of addictive technology and the business of keeping us hooked. New York: Penguin Press. (354 pages, including endnotes and index)
The author, a New York University business school professor, shows how behavioral addiction follows the same patterns and has the same causes as chemical addiction. He focuses his arguments on the behavioral addiction to the internet, especially shopping, social contacts, pornography, and gambling. The first part of the book (three chapters) deal with the biology of addiction and how we have increased our understanding of behavioral addictions over the past few decades. Part 2 (six chapters) deal with how internet designers engineer addiction. In Part 3 (three chapters), the author provides some suggestions for helping people avoid addiction and to reduce it once it starts.
Bryant, J., & Oliver, M. B. (Eds.). (2009). Media effects: Advances in theory and research (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge. (640 pages, including index)
Now in its third edition, this classic academic book presents a set of 27 chapters written by experts on a wide range of mass media effects. Each chapter provides an in-depth review of the research literature on a different effects theory (e.g., agenda setting, cultivation, social cognitive theory, etc.), type of effect (e.g., social perception, eating disorders, attitude change, etc.), or influence of type of content (e.g., sex, violence, educational television, etc.).
John, C. A. (2012). The informatidiet: A case for conscious consumption. Sebasttopol: O’Reilly Media, Inc. (150 pages total)
The author is a political consultant who became bothered by all the bad information available from the media, so he wrote this book to show people why they need to consume better information and how to do that. He uses food nutrition and the importance of dieting to avoid becoming obese as a metaphor to show why consumption of junk information can lead to problems of false understanding of our world.
Johnson, S. (2006). Everything bad is good for you. New York: Riverhead Books. (250 pages, including endnotes)
Steven Johnson, who is not an academic but is a bestselling author, argues that the popular opinion that the media are harmful to us is wrong. Instead, he says that exposure to media, especially television and video games, produces more net good than harm. He says that media messages are getting more complex over time, not simpler. This makes exposure more challenging and hence more rewarding. The story lines of television shows are much more complex and involved now than they were several decades ago. And today’s video games are far more challenging than early video games. He says that culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less.
Nabi, R. L., & Oliver, M. B. (Eds.). (2009). Media processes and effects. Los Angeles: SAGE. (643 pages, including index)
This edited volume includes 37 chapters that focus on a wide variety of media effects topics. It is organized into six sections: conceptual and methodological issues; society, politics, and culture; message selection and processing; persuasion and learning; content and audiences; and medium issues.
Potter, W. J. (2012). Media effects. Thousand Oaks: SAGE. (377 pages, including index)
In this 2012 media effects book, I more fully develop the ideas that I am introducing in this chapter and the next. I also present many more examples of media effects than I am able to present in the two effects chapters in this book.
Storr, W. (2014). The unpersuadables: Adventures with the enemies of science. New York: The Overlook Press. (355 pages, including index and endnotes)
The author is a journalist who has interviewed people who hold beliefs at odds with scientific evidence (creationists, holocaust deniers, etc.) to find out why they hold their beliefs. He concludes that all of human reasoning and knowledge is based on stories that we tell ourselves and that it is too psychologically troubling to change our stories, so we deny all those versions of the truth that do not conform to what we believe.
EXERCISE 3.1
THINKING ABOUT MEDIA EFFECTS
1. Pick some child with whom you have spent a fair amount of time. Can you think of any effects that child has exhibited that could be regarded as a media effect? (List them below.)
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2. Pick some adult with whom you have spent a fair amount of time—perhaps a parent or a neighbor. Can you think of any effects that adult has exhibited that could be regarded as a media effect? (List them below.)
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3. Pick a friend about your own age. Can you think of any effects that friend has exhibited that could be regarded as a media effect? (List them below.)
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4. Now think about yourself. Can you think of any effects that you have exhibited that could be regarded as a media effect? (List them below.)
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EXERCISE 3.2
RECOGNIZING IMMEDIATE EFFECTS
Think about the differences among cognitive, belief, attitudinal, physiological, emotional, and behavioral effects. Then think about what has happened to you in your life after particular media exposures.
On a blank sheet of paper, divide the page into six rows, labeling them cognitive, belief, attitudinal, physiological, emotional, and behavioral effects.
For each row, see if you can list at least two effects that have happened to you immediately after being exposed to the media. Name the immediate effect, and then describe a specific example of how the media have affected you or someone you know.
Use the list below to guide your thinking.
1. Cognitive: Media can immediately plant ideas and information.
2. Belief: Media can illustrate beliefs that we accept.
3. Attitudinal: Media can influence our evaluative judgments.
4. Physiological: Media can arouse or calm you.
5. Emotional: Media can trigger an immediate emotional reaction, such as fear, attraction, sadness, and laughter.
6. Behavioral: Media can trigger behavior.
EXERCISE 3.3
RECOGNIZING LONG-TERM EFFECTS
Think about how the media may have exercised a subtle effect on you over the long term.
On a blank sheet of paper, divide the page into six rows, labeling them cognitive, belief, attitudinal, physiological, emotional, and behavioral and effects.
For each row, see if you can list two long-term effects. Next to each effect, describe specifically how long-term exposure to media has led to that effect on you.
Use the list below to guide your thinking.
· Long-term effects: A slow accumulation of information, attitudes, and images that lead to beliefs about the real world.
1. Cognitive: Oftentimes, people do not expose themselves to the media for the purpose of learning anything. Rather, they are be interested in seeking escape or entertainment. This is especially true with television, radio, and film. However, acquisition of information and attitude change does take place. This type of learning is called incidental learning.
2. Belief: Erosion or reinforcement of values that are used as standards in evaluations
3. Attitudinal: Erosion or building up of existing attitudes
4. Physiological: Increased tolerance for certain content; physiological dependency on a medium or certain content.
5. Emotional: People can build up a tolerance against emotional reactions over time and thus become desensitized.
6. Behavioral: New behaviors can be learned in the short term but not performed until much later.
EXERCISE 3.4
WHAT HAVE YOU INTERNALIZED FROM THE MEDIA CULTURE?
1. When you are driving and listening to your car radio, do you switch the channel, looking for something else, even when you are satisfied with the song you are currently hearing—thinking maybe a better song is on another station now? Do you flip through the channels on the television set looking for something better to watch?
2. In romantic relationships, which is more important to you: commitment or perfection? When you are in a romantic relationship, are you happy when you make a lasting, strong commitment to the other person? Or do you worry that this person may not be the absolute best one for you and perhaps there is someone a little better out there?
3. In college, do you value learning or efficiency more? Do you make a commitment to each course, attend every session, and try to get all you can from each one? Do you take a wide range of courses (some you know nothing about) to expand your experience? Or do you look for better ways to spend your time, such as going on a job interview, finishing a term paper for another course, or catching up on sleep? Do you look for courses on the basis of which ones require the least amount of work for the highest grades?
4. In your career, which will be more important to you: loyalty or success? Will you find a job and build your entire career there to pay back your employer for your first big opportunity? Or will you take the first job as a stepping-stone to something better and leave as soon as you have learned all you can in that job?
5. When you have a major problem, are you upset when you cannot solve it in a short period of time?