Page 101 - Sustainability Communication Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Theoritical Foundations

84 C. de Witt

precede opinion-makers. The effectiveness of the agenda-setting effect depends on
the urgency of the topic. Topics that are directly experienced are communicated less
often than topics that are not personally experienced. The effect is also dependent on
the type of medium. While topics broadcast on television tend to have a short-term
effect, print media are more likely to have a long-term one.
The communication of topics through the media has varying degrees of duration,
which can be shown using a number of different models (Schenk 1987):

• Cumulative model: an intensification of the reporting leads to a higher ranking of
the topic on the audience agenda.
• Threshold model: a topic becomes part of the audience agenda when a minimum
amount of reporting has taken place.
• Inertia model: when a topic has achieved a certain level of importance on the
audience agenda then increases in that importance through more intensive report-
ing are unlikely to occur.
Media effect approaches such as agenda setting have long played an important
role in media science discourse. While they dealt with the question of what media
do with people, use approaches contradict the idea that media have a control func-
tion and that recipients are only passive. The uses-and-gratification approach
describes people as recipients who look for the satisfaction of their needs in the
media. “Media use in the form of selection and attention follows the principle of the
use that the recipient expects from it” (Maletzke 1998: 119). An individual inter-
venes, from this perspective, in the process of media communication by “selecting,
testing and rejecting media content; and often enough he resists media content”
(Maletzke 1998: 119). The knowledge that humans have a distance to things, that
they define their situation and see their perception and experiences not as passive
reception may not be new (Maletzke 1998: 122), nevertheless it is important that
both effect and use approaches are taken into account.
Visual anthropology is also concerned with the constitution of culture by the
media. It describes how media intervene in cultural perspectives and which effects
their technological implications have in cultural use. Especially cultural studies pre-
cede from the assumption that types of reception are determined by a given cultural
tradition while at the same time they are continually changed by the particular struc-
tures of the different media. According to Rusch, media theory has its historical
beginning “as criticism of the written form in Plato’s Phaedo” (2002: 253). “Plato
criticises the use of writing as a new medium that – indirectly – weakens memory
but especially that it leads to problems of interpretation as those unfamiliar with a
topic could read a text and as a result of their lack of knowledge of the topic or their
differing experiences are barely able to understand its meaning or what was intended
by the author” (see also Mersch 2007).
In retrospect every medium that has been introduced has effects on social and
individual communication. Goody (1986) for example notes that historical writing,
the bureaucratisation of trade and administration or the establishment of legal regu-
lations are a consequence of literate culture, while for Bertolt Brecht, who was
considering the possibilities of the audience to engage in active participation,