Page 17 - Culture Society and the Media

THEORETICAL APPROACHES 7
media propelled ‘word bullets’ that penetrated deep into its inert and passive
victims. All that needed to be done was to measure the depth and size of
penetration through modern scientific techniques.
A reassessment of the impact of the mass media during the late 1940s, 1950s
and 1960s gave rise to a new academic orthodoxy—that the mass media have
only a very limited influence. This view was succinctly stated by Klapper (1960)
in a classic summary of more than a decade’s empirical research. ‘Mass
communications’, he concludes, ‘ordinarily do not serve as a necessary and
sufficient cause of audience effects’ (p. 8). Underlying this new orthodoxy, was a
reassessment of man’s susceptibility to influence. A succession of empirical
enquiries, using experimental laboratory and social survey techniques,
demonstrated that people tended to expose themselves to, understand and
remember communications selectively, according to prior dispositions. People, it
was argued, manipulated—rather than were manipulated by—the mass media.
The empirical demonstration of selective audience behaviour was further
reinforced by a number of uses and gratifications studies which argued that
audience members are active rather than passive and bring to the media a variety
of different needs and uses that influence their response to the media.
Underpinning this reassuring conclusion about the lack of media influence
was a repudiation of the mass society thesis on which the presumption of media
power had been based. The view of society as being composed of isolated and
anomic individuals gave way to a view of society as a honeycomb of small
groups bound by a rich web of personal ties and dependences. Stable group
pressures, it was concluded, helped to shield the individual from media influence.
This stress on the salience of small groups as a buffer against media influence
was often linked to a diffusionist model of power. In particular it was stressed by
a number of leading empirical researchers that the social mediation of media
messages was not a hierarchical process. ‘Some individuals of high social status
apparently wield little independent influence’, wrote Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955),
‘and some of low status have considerable personal influence’. Wealth and
power, it seemed, did not shape public opinion in the leading Western
democracy.
Even the image of man as a natural prey to suggestion and influence was
challenged by a number of persuasive theories of personality formation that
apparently explained selective audience behaviour. In particular cognitive
dissonance theory, which postulated that people seek to minimize the
psychological discomfort of having incompatible values and beliefs, seemed to
explain people’s deliberate avoidance and unconscious decoding of uncongenial
media messages.
In short, the conventional belief in the power of the media seemed to be
demolished. A popular view based on flimsy anecdotal evidence had been
confounded by systematic empirical enquiry. Even the assumptions about the
nature of man and the structure of society on which the belief in media power
had rested, had been ‘revealed’ as bankrupt and misguided.