Page 32 - Decoding Culture

THE WAY WE WERE 25

media, provided, as Mills puts it, with identity, aspirations, tech­
niques and escape. As always in such top-down models they are
deprived of any real sense of agency, any capacity to intervene
actively in what is in effect a world pre-defined in media terms. This
view is inconsistently applied, however, in that not all social actors
are deprived of agency in this way. Those with the capacity to dis­
criminate are perceived as active contributors to culture, critical,
self-conscious interpreters of complex cultural artefacts. So the
tacit picture here is one constructed around concepts of them and
us, centre and periphery, in which the vast ordinary population of
mass society are unable to resist the all-powerful constraint of the
mighty media, although the fact of this constraint is immediately
apparent to the enlightened and therefore resistant elite.
Here, of course, we are running up against the familiar 'hypo­
dermic model' of media effects, that account of the functioning of
the mass media which metaphorically envisages media as effective
much as an injection of a powerful drug is effective: applied direct
to the individual, homogeneous in character, irresistible in out­
come. Now, there has been some argument as to quite how
widespread were 'hypodermic' or 'magic bullet' models in mass
media research in different periods, a debate I shall not seek to
document in any detail here. A useful survey can be found in
Bineham (1988). Suffice to say that some argue that the 'hypoder­
mic model' was a misleading post hoc interpretation designed to
allow later revisionists, such as Katz and Lazarsfeld (1955) and
Klapper (1960, 1963), to promote their own case for limited effects
against the prevailing strong effects tradition. Others, the present
author included, believe that the hypodermic model was indeed an
accurate reflection of much thinking in the early days of media
research, and, furthermore, that the practice of effects research
remained deeply influenced by these precepts throughout the var­
ious revisions of the post-war era. Certainly some such belief was

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