Page 97 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

EFFECTS

questionnaires. The ‘effect’ of ‘violence’ on ‘individuals’ could then be
measured. The researchers then attempted to link their results to social
trends.
The problem with a methodology such as this is that it substituted
the experimental situation for reality, and regarded audiences as
isolated individuals, ignoring factors such as context and personal
ideologies that viewers negotiate when watching media texts. The fact
that energetic adolescent boys seemed more uppity when they had just
seen a TV action showwas said to demonstrate that television causes
violence. Such a conclusion would have been much more convincing
had researchers shown that the same ‘stimuli’ had the same ‘effect’ on a
‘controlled’ group of people who were not noted for their propensity
for aggression – ministers of religion, for instance. But such work was
never carried out. There was a good deal of wish-fulfilment in ‘effects’
research.
Challenges to the assumptions of the effects model began in the
1970s, with researchers such as Umberto Eco (1972) and Stuart Hall
(1973) setting out to investigate whether single texts offered a variety
of readings to differing audiences. Media studies recognised the
impossibility of carrying out such a task on individuals and instead
chose to instigate projects looking at individuals as members of
nominated groups defined by, for instance, class, race and gender.
Writers such as Hall, Fiske (1987), Ang (1985) and Morley (1980) all
claimed that watching media texts was a process of negotiation
between the text, a given audience and what ideologies, beliefs and
values those groups bought to the process. From this research it was
argued that audiences could no longer be thought of as passive
recipients of information, rather that they were readers, who accepted,
rejected, subverted and negotiated all media texts.
Gauntlett (1998: 121) provides a useful summary of the problems of
the effects model. He suggests for instance that the tradition tackles the
problem backwards, with researchers often looking at media images
and tying these into recent deviancies, rather than approaching this
research in reverse order. Pertinently he asks why the ‘basic question of
why the media should induce people to imitate its content has never
been tackled’ (1998: 127). The difficulty of knowing individuals, as
opposed to the relative ease in a methodology that relies on counting,
may provide some insight.
Government regulatory bodies, interest groups and sociologists all
seemed to be exempt from the effects they sawin others among the
population. What was it that made these groups invulnerable? The
effects model is yet another of the dangerous categorisations that

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