Page 96 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

EFFECTS

Civil War series created an entire genre of similarly presented
narratives. Australia has a thriving export industry in nature and
wildlife documentaries. This form of serious, interesting, entertaining
information became the staple of entire channels such as Discovery or
the History Channel.
Soon the media/education interface became very fuzzy. Traditional
institutions used media and interactive technologies (video, online and
interactive delivery) and entertaining ‘software’ (charismatic lectures)
to service the learning needs of more students than could ever squeeze
into their library. Open and business-related learning were both
commercially catered and state supported. Publishers converted their
backlists into virtual universities, entrepreneurs standardised learning
services for profit. In short, ‘education’ merged with ‘entertainment’
in the name of the democratisation and universalisation of knowledge,
via the recasting of education from its ‘modern’ status as national-state
institution to its ‘postmodern’ status as customised learning services for
sovereign and borderless consumers.

EFFECTS

The media effects tradition was the only game in town during the
early decades of media research, especially in the US. Based on social
psychology and aspiring to scientific status, the effects model sought to
show causal links between media content and individual behaviour. It
investigated the effects of sexual and violent content in popular film
and television, comics or popular music on adolescents, women and
other, supposedly vulnerable, groups.
The effects tradition arises from early communications studies, in
which communication was understood as a linear process. Mass media
were thought to stick messages into people much as a hypodermic
needle squirts drugs into a body. Thus, producers of media texts were
thought to inject representations and images into viewers (who had no
choice but to accept them), and these ‘stimuli’ were expected directly
to influence individuals’ behaviour, opinions, attitudes or mind-set.
Research using this model was in two stages. First, researchers
literally counted images and representations on TV that were
considered worrying – ‘violent acts’ for instance – using content
analysis. This established the existence of a problem. Second, sample
‘subjects’ were ‘exposed’ to the ‘stimuli’ – they were asked to watch a
video tape – and their ‘behaviour’ was recorded, either directly using
galvanometers and the like, or inductively via diary reports and

81