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Evolution and Theories of Communication | 77

TV, while those with more schooling and money might often avoid such
programmes. Similarly the rural, the urban, males and females and those of
the other social categories with distinctive subcultures show clearly defined
differences in attention to different forms of media content.
Thirdly, people who have deeply established social ties are more likely
to attend to issues and topics that they know are of interest to their friends
and families than to unrelated themes. Furthermore, patterns of friendship
can be powerful influences on people in directing or even redirecting their
reading, viewing, and listening habits. Social relationships can even lead to
attention to media content that the individual does not like. Many a wife has
endured live cricket telecasts to suit a husband’s taste and many a male has
viewed episodes of Indian family drama soap operas just to keep peace in
the family. Thus, the principle of selective attention is that cognitive struc-
ture, category membership, and meaningful social linkages result in paying
of attention to media content that are linked to those factors.

selective recall
In the same way people act in their own way as a result of being exposed to
a given media message. Action is the final link in the chain before it takes
place, a member of an audience has to attend to the media presentation,
perceive the meaning, and remember its content.
The selective influence theories can be summed up as following: one is in
terms with the nature of the intervening conditions that they pose between
media content and the responses people make. Secondly, in terms of the four
principles of selectivity lead individuals to attend to, interpret, recall, and act
upon media messages in distinctive ways.

The Individual Differences Theory

As psychologists undertook studies in human learning and motivation, it
increasingly became clearer that people are all different in their psychological
makeup. Like fingerprints, the personality of every human being was found
to be unlike that of any other, while they all shared the behavioural patterns
of their cultures. Each individual had a different cognitive structure of needs,
habits, perceptions, beliefs, values, attitudes, skills and so on.
Therefore the study of individual differences and their distributions in
their populations eventually became an important focus of psychological
research. To summararize, therefore, the progress of research on the pro-
cess and effects of mass communication had the beginnings in the simplistic
beliefs of the magic bullet theory, and proceeded through the more complex
selective influence theories to culminate in the theories of long range and
indirect influences.

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