W. James Potter - Media Literacy-SAGE Publications, Inc (2016) - PDFCOFFEE.COM (2024)

Media Literacy Eighth Edition

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Media Literacy Eighth Edition W. James Potter University of California, Santa Barbara

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FOR INFORMATION: SAGE Publications, Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 E-mail: [emailprotected] SAGE Publications Ltd. 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP United Kingdom SAGE Publications India Pvt. Ltd. B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044 India SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte. Ltd. 3 Church Street #10-04 Samsung Hub Singapore 049483

Copyright © 2016 by W. James Potter. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-4833-7932-6 This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Acquisitions Editor: Matthew Byrnie Editorial Assistant: Janae Masnovi eLearning Editor: Gabrielle Piccininni

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Production Editor: Laura Barrett Copy Editor: Sarah J. Duffy Typesetter: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd. Proofreader: Theresa Kay Indexer: Marilyn Augst Cover Designer: Scott Van Atta Marketing Manager: Ashlee Blunk

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Brief Contents 1. Preface 2. Acknowledgments 3. About the Author 4. part I: Introduction 1. Chapter 1: Why Increase Media Literacy? 2. Chapter 2: Media Literacy Approach 5. part II: Audiences 1. Chapter 3: Audience: Individual Perspective 2. Chapter 4: Audience: Industry Perspective 3. Chapter 5: Children as a Special Audience 6. part III: Industry 1. Chapter 6: Development of the Mass Media Industries 2. Chapter 7: Economic Perspective 7. part IV: Content 1. Chapter 8: Media Content and Reality 2. Chapter 9: News 3. Chapter 10: Entertainment 4. Chapter 11: Advertising 5. Chapter 12: Interactive Media 8. part V: Effects 1. Chapter 13: Broadening Our Perspective on Media Effects 2. Chapter 14: How Does the Media Effects Process Work? 9. part VI: The Springboard 1. Chapter 15: Helping Yourself and Others to Increase Media Literacy 10. part VII: Confronting the Issues 1. Issue 1: Media Ownership 2. Issue 2: Media Piracy 3. Issue 3: Sports 4. Issue 4: Media Violence 5. Issue 5: Advertising 6. Issue 6: Privacy 11. Glossary 12. References 13. Index

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Detailed Contents Preface Acknowledgments About the Author Part I: Introduction Chapter 1: Why Increase Media Literacy? The Information Problem Growth Is Accelerating High Degree of Exposure Keeping Up Dealing With the Information Problem Our Mental Hardware Our Mental Software Automatic Routines Advantages and Disadvantages The Big Question Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Chapter 2: Media Literacy Approach What Is Media Literacy? The Three Building Blocks of Media Literacy Skills Knowledge Structures Personal Locus The Definition of Media Literacy The Development of Media Literacy Advantages of Developing a Higher Degree of Media Literacy Appetite for Wider Variety of Media Messages More Self-Programming of Mental Codes More Control Over Media Summary Further Reading Exercise Part II: AUDIENCES Chapter 3: Audience: Individual Perspective Information-Processing Tasks Filtering

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Meaning Matching Meaning Construction Analyzing the Idea of Exposure to Media Messages Exposure and Attention Physical Exposure Perceptual Exposure Psychological Exposure Attention Exposure States Automatic Attentional Transported Self-Reflexive The Media Literacy Approach Summary Further Reading Exercise Chapter 4: Audience: Industry Perspective Shift From Mass to Niche Perspective on Audience What Is a Mass Audience? Rejection of the Idea of Mass Audience The Idea of Niche Audience Identifying Niches Geographic Segmentation Demographic Segmentation Social Class Segmentation Geodemographic Segmentation Psychographic Segmentation Twelve American Lifestyles VALS Typology Attracting Audiences Appeal to Existing Needs and Interests Cross-Media and Cross-Vehicle Promotion Conditioning Audiences Summary Further Reading Exercises Chapter 5: Children as a Special Audience Why Treat Children as a Special Audience? Lack of Experience 10

Lack of Maturation Cognitive Development Emotional Development Moral Development Special Treatment From Regulators Protecting Children From Negative TV Content Protecting Children From Unfair Advertising Practices Special Treatment From Parents Re-examining the Case for Special Treatment Maturation Experience Young Adults as a Special Audience Cognitive Abilities Field Independency Crystalline Intelligence Fluid Intelligence Conceptual Differentiation Emotional Abilities Emotional Intelligence Tolerance for Ambiguity Nonimpulsiveness Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercise PART III: INDUSTRY Chapter 6: Development of the Mass Media Industries Patterns of Development Innovation Stage Penetration Stage Peak Stage Decline Stage Adaptation Stage Comparisons Across Mass Media Life Cycle Pattern Indicators of Peak Decline and Adaptation Current Picture Convergence Special Case of the Computer Industry 11

Profile of Mass Media Workforce Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises Chapter 7: Economic Perspective The Media Game of Economics The Players The Goal The Rules Characteristics of the Game Importance of Valuing Resources Well Indirect as Well as Direct Support Complex Interdependency Among Players Digital Convergence Nature of Competition Advertising as the Engine Media Industries’ Strategies Maximizing Profits Increasing Revenue Streams Minimizing Expenses Constructing Audiences Attracting People to Niche Audiences Conditioning Audiences Reducing Risk Consumers’ Strategies Default Strategy Media Literacy Strategy Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises Part IV: CONTENT Chapter 8: Media Content and Reality Role of Reality in Media Content Formulas Complex Judgment Magic Window Multiple Dimensions of Reality Differences Across Individuals Organizing Principle: Next-Step Reality 12

Audience’s Perspective Programmers’ Perspective Reality Programming as a Genre The Importance of Media Literacy Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercise Chapter 9: News Dynamic Nature of News Different Perspectives on News Political Philosophy Perspective Traditional Journalistic Perspective News-Working Perspective Economic Perspective Consumer Personal Perspective Hyper-localism Selective Exposure Who Qualifies as Being a Journalist? How Can We Make Judgments About the Quality of News? Truthfulness Neutrality Lack of Bias Balance Accuracy Full Set of Facts Context How Can We Become More Media Literate With News? Exposure Matters Quality Matters Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises Chapter 10: Entertainment Story Formulas General Story Formula Genres Challenges Challenge by Medium 13

Changing Public Taste Dealing With Risk Findings From Research Patterns Character Patterns Controversial Content Elements Sex Homosexuality Violence Language Health Deceptive Health Patterns Responsible Health Patterns Body Image Values Becoming Media Literate With Entertainment Messages Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises Chapter 11: Advertising Advertising Is Pervasive Process of Constructing Advertising Messages Campaign Strategy Copy Platform Becoming More Media Literate With Advertising Analyze Your Personal Needs Analyze Ads Evaluate Ads Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises Chapter 12: Interactive Media Competitive Experiences Designing Electronic Game Platforms Marketing Electronic Games Attraction to Electronic Games Psychology of Playing Electronic Games MMORPGs 14

Cooperative Experiences Friendship Dating Living Opinion Sharing Acquisition Experiences Information Music Video Shopping Media Literacy With Interactive Messages Personal Implications Broader Concerns Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises PART V: EFFECTS Chapter 13: Broadening Our Perspective on Media Effects Timing of Effects Valence of Effects Intentionality of Effects Type of Effects Cognitive-Type Effect Belief-Type Effect Attitudinal-Type Effect Emotional-Type Effect Physiological-Type Effect Behavioral-Type Effect Macro-Type Effect Becoming More Media Literate Summary Further Reading Exercises Chapter 14: How Does the Media Effects Process Work? Media Effects Are Constantly Occurring Manifested Effects and Process Effects Baseline Effects and Fluctuation Effects Factors Influencing Media Effects Baseline Factors 15

Developmental Maturities Cognitive Abilities Knowledge Structures Sociological Factors Lifestyle Personal Locus Media Exposure Habits Fluctuation Factors Content of the Messages Context of Portrayals Cognitive Complexity of Content Motivations States Degree of Identification Process of Influence Thinking About Blame Becoming More Media Literate Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises Part VI: THE SPRINGBOARD Chapter 15: Helping Yourself and Others to Increase Media Literacy Helping Yourself Ten Guidelines 1. Strengthen Your Personal Locus 2. Develop an Accurate Awareness of Your Exposure Patterns 3. Acquire a Broad Base of Useful Knowledge 4. Examine Your Mental Codes 5. Examine Your Opinions 6. Change Behaviors 7. Think About the Reality-Fantasy Continuum 8. Become More Skilled at Designing Messages 9. Do Not Take Privacy for Granted 10. Take Personal Responsibility Illustrations of Milestones Cognitive Ladder Emotional Ladder Moral Ladder Aesthetic Appreciation Ladder 16

Examples of Levels of Literacy Helping Others Interpersonal Techniques Interventions Public Education Current Situation Barriers What Can You Do? Societal Techniques Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises PART VII: CONFRONTING THE ISSUES Issue 1: Media Ownership Delineating the Issue Arguments Against Concentration of Ownership of Media Companies Arguments for Concentration of Ownership of Media Companies Evidence of Concentration Trend Toward Concentration Factors Driving the Trend Efficiencies Regulation and Deregulation Evidence of Harm Increased Barriers to Entry Reduced Level of Competition Reduced Number of Public Voices Reduced Range of Content Your Own Informed Opinion Expanding Perspective Reexamining Evidence Thinking About Underlying Values Localism Efficiency Informing Your Opinion Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2: Media Piracy Delineating the Issue 17

Commercial Products Amorphous Infobits Problems Determining a Message Unit Ownership Rights Evidence of Piracy Music Film Print Addressing the Problem Legislation Law Enforcement Legal Action Anti-piracy Technology New Marketing Model Your Own Informed Opinion Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 3: Sports Delineating the Issue The Money Cycle Players Owners and Leagues Television Networks Advertisers Public Olympics Video Gaming Your Own Informed Opinion The Big Picture Extend Your Knowledge Cost-Benefit Analysis Think About Implications Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 4: Media Violence Delineating the Issue Public’s Faulty Perceptions 18

Equating Violence With Graphicness Ignoring Context Having a Blind Spot on Harm Producers’ Faulty Beliefs Violence Is Necessary to Storytelling Blame Others, Not Producers Your Own Informed Opinion Implications for Individuals Implications for Producers Moving Beyond Faulty Thinking Further Reading Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 5: Advertising Delineating the Issue Faulty Criticisms Advertising Is Deceptive Companies Manipulate Us Through Subliminal Advertising Advertising Perpetuates Stereotypes Criticisms Based on Personal Values Advertising Is Excessive Advertising Manipulates Us Into Buying Things We Don’t Need Advertising Makes Us Too Materialistic Criticisms About Responsibility Advertising Potentially Harmful Products Invading Protected Groups Invading Privacy Altering Needs Your Own Informed Opinion Further Reading Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 6: Privacy Delineating the Issue Criminal Threats to Your Privacy Stealing Private Information Stealing One’s Identity Hijacking Breaching “Secure” Databases Destroying Information Hacktivism Non-criminal Threats to Your Privacy 19

Monitoring Selling Information Controlling Spamming Public Opinion and Regulations Public Opinion Regulations Your Informed Opinion Information Assessment Take an Inventory of What Information About You Is Publically Available Map Your Information by Privacy Levels Threat Assessment Privacy Strategy Remove Private Information Correct Inaccuracies Continually Monitor Threats Download Software to Protect Your Computer From Threats to Your Privacy Set Up Your Internet Browsers to Disallow Cookies as the Default Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Applying Media Literacy Skills Glossary References Index

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Preface Most of us think we are fairly media literate. We know how to access all kinds of media to find the music, games, information, and entertainment we want. We recognize the faces of many celebrities and know many facts about their lives. We recognize a range of musical styles and have developed strong preferences for what we like. We can easily create messages through photos, videos, and text then upload them to various sites on the Internet. Clearly, we know how to expose ourselves to the media, we know how to absorb information from them, we know how to be entertained by them, and we know how to use them to create our own messages and share them with others. Are we media literate? Yes, of course. We have acquired a great deal of information and developed remarkable skills. The abilities to speak a language, read, understand photographs, and follow narratives are significant achievements, although we often take them for granted. While we should not overlook what we have accomplished, it is also important to acknowledge that we all can be much more media literate. In many ways, your overall level of media literacy now is probably about the same as it was when you became a teenager. Since that time, your information base has grown enormously about some types of media messages, such as popular songs, Internet sites, movies, and TV shows. However, your information base may not have grown much in other areas—about the economics of the mass media industry, who controls that industry, how decisions are made about the production of content, and how that constant flow of content affects you and society in all sorts of subtle ways. Thus, your current level of media literacy allows you to do many things with the media, but you could be exercising much more control and getting more out of your media exposures—if you grew your knowledge in additional areas. The more you are aware of how the mass media operate and how they affect you, the more you gain control over those effects and the more you will separate yourself from typical media users who have turned over a great deal of their lives to the mass media without realizing it. By “turning over a great deal of their lives to the mass media,” I mean more than time and money, although both of those are considerable. I also mean that most people have allowed the mass media to program them in ways they are unaware of. And because they are unaware of these ways, they cannot shape or control that programming. The purpose of this book is to show you how the media have been shaping your beliefs and behavioral patterns. Until you become aware of how much your beliefs have been formed by media influence and how the media have accomplished all that shaping, you will continue to float along in a flood of media messages oblivious to their constant, subtle influence. However, once you begin to see things from a media literacy perspective, you can see how this process of influence works, and this understanding will help you to gain control over this shaping process.

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Organization of the Book This book is composed of 15 core instructional chapters followed by six issues chapters. The purpose of the 15 core chapters is to provide you with the framework of ideas to help you organize your knowledge structures in four areas: media audiences, media industries, media content, and media effects. These chapters also present you with some facts and figures to hang on those frameworks. To help you acquire more information to elaborate these frameworks on your own, the chapters include a list of books, articles, and websites for further reading; I have selected these as particularly interesting extensions of what I have presented in each chapter. Also, because things change so fast these days with the media, I have also provided several sources of information—typically websites—where you can access the most current information available on each topic. Part I of this book, Chapters 1 and 2, provides an introduction to the problems of living in a media message– saturated culture and how the media literacy perspective can help you. Part II focuses on the audience. Chapter 3 examines the audience from the individual’s perspective, while Chapter 4 focuses on the audience from the mass media industries’ perspective. Chapter 5 poses the question: Should children be treated as a special audience? This chapter shows you that, yes, children are a special audience in some ways, but so too are adolescents, young adults, and the elderly. Part III focuses on the media industries. Chapter 6 helps you see the media industries from a historical perspective so that you can appreciate the challenges they have overcome to arrive at their current status. Using a life cycle structure, it shows what is behind the innovation and development of the media industries. An economic perspective is used in Chapter 7 to show the business foundations of the industries. Part IV focuses on media content. Chapter 8 introduces the idea of content and presents the major characteristic of all media content—what I call “one-step remove” reality. Then, Chapter 9 focuses on news content, Chapter 10 on entertainment content, Chapter 11 on advertising content, and Chapter 12 on interactive content, such as games and social networking media. Part V focuses on media effects. When we take a broader perspective on effects, we can more accurately assess the influence of the media in our lives. This also puts us in a much better position to manage the effects of the media. Chapter 13 will help you expand your vision about what constitutes a media effect. Effects are both long term and immediate. Although they can influence our behavior, they also have profound influences on us cognitively, affectively, emotionally, and physiologically. And they have positive as well as negative effects. The question of how the effects processes work on us is explored in Chapter 14. Those processes are hardly ever simple or direct. More often, the media work in concert with many other factors that each serve to increase the probability that an effect may occur. Part VI, Chapter 15, is a springboard chapter to help you use what you have learned to build your own media literacy strategy. The first time you read through these 15 core chapters, stay focused on the most important ideas as you build 24

your own knowledge structures. Then once you have these structures, go back and re-read the chapters to add the detail you need to elaborate your understanding. After you have finished with the core chapters and building your initial set of knowledge structures, you are ready to dig deep into some controversies within media studies. The six issues chapters in Part VII give you a chance to use your knowledge structures and increase the strength of your skills as you take apart these controversies, appreciate the beauty of their complexity, and put together your own informed opinion. Issue 1 unpacks the controversy about whether the ownership of the mass media has become too concentrated; some critics argue that there are now too few owners of too many media businesses. This issue chapter could be paired with Chapter 7, on the economics of the mass media industries. Issue 2 examines the complex problem of piracy of media messages by individuals and companies. Issue 3 covers the issue of sports by examining possible answers to the question: Is there too much money being spent on sports? This issue chapter also could be paired with Chapter 7. Issue 4 tackles the persistent controversy over whether there is too much violence in the media and whether this type of content is harming individuals and society. This issue chapter could be covered along with Chapters 13 and 14, on the effects of media. Issue 5 analyzes how we criticize advertising and whether those criticisms are valid. This issue chapter could be paired with Chapter 4, which deals with the media industry’s perspective on the audience. This section concludes with Issue 6, which examines the growing concern about privacy and how the new media environment is making it much more difficult for you to protect your privacy. If you engage these issues on a superficial level, then you will likely be frustrated by what seems like unsolvable problems. But if you dig deeper and apply your developing skills of media literacy, you will likely appreciate the complexities of these problems and find ways to begin reducing the influence of these problems in your own life. Thus you will be taking more control over issues that you previously thought were too big, too complicated, and the fault of other people.

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How to Get the Most Out of This Book As you read through this book, think frameworks and be strategic. If you keep these two ideas in the front of your mind, you will be able to read faster and at the same time get more out of your reading. Frameworks are maps. When you have a map to guide your reading journey, you know where you are and where you have to go next. To help you perceive the most important frameworks, each chapter begins with a key idea followed by an outline of topics covered. Also, throughout the text I have included a Compare and Contrast feature to help you understand the key similarities and differences between pairs of key terms. Strategies keep you focused on what is most important. When you read through each chapter, be guided by several important questions, then be strategic in your reading; that is, actively look for the answers to those questions. By actively, I mean don’t just scan the words and sentences; instead, start with an agenda of questions, then as you read through each section, look specifically for answers to your questions. After you have finished a chapter, close the book and see how much you can recall. Can you remember only a random mass of facts, or can you envision an organized set of knowledge structured by your questions? You will get more out of each of the chapters if you try to incorporate the information you are learning into your own experience. The exercises at the end of each chapter help with this. This book has a self-help tone as it presents guidance and practical exercises to help you achieve higher levels of media literacy. Do not get caught in the trap of thinking that it is sufficient to memorize the facts in each chapter and then stop thinking about the material. Simply memorizing facts will not help you increase your media literacy much. Instead, you need to internalize the information by drawing it into your own experiences. Continually ask yourself: How does this new information fit in with what I already know? Can I find an example of this in my own life? How can I apply this when I deal with the media? The exercises at the end of each chapter will help you get started with this. The more you think through the exercises and the more you develop new exercises for yourself, the more you will be internalizing the information and thus making it more a natural part of the way you think.

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To Conclude It is my hope that this book will stimulate you to think more deeply about your media habits and become motivated to increase your control over the process of influence from the media. The information presented in these chapters will get you started in this direction. Will the book provide you with all the information you need to complete this task fully? No. That would require too much information to fit into one book; you will need to continue reading. At the end of most chapters, I suggest several books for further reading on the topic of that chapter. Although some of those books are fairly technical, most of them are easy to read and very interesting. This book is an introduction. It is designed to show you the big picture so you can get started efficiently on increasing your own media literacy. It is important to get started now. The world is rapidly changing because of newer information technologies that allow you to create and share your own messages in addition to accessing all kinds of information on just about any conceivable topic. I hope you will have fun reading this book. And I hope it will expose you to new perspectives from which you can perceive much more about the media. If it does, you will be gaining new insights about your old habits and interpretations. If this happens, I hope you will share your new insights and “war stories” with me. Much of this book has been written to reflect some of the problems and insights my students have had in the media literacy courses I have taught. I have learned much from them. I’d like to learn even more from you. So let me know what you think and send me a message at [emailprotected]. See you on the journey!

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Ancillaries The password-protected Instructor Resources site at http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e includes: Test banks provide a diverse range of prewritten options as well as the opportunity to edit any question and/or insert your own personalized questions to effectively assess students’ progress and understanding. Lecture notes summarize key concepts on a chapter-by-chapter basis to help with preparation for lectures and class discussions. Chapter-specific PowerPoint slides offer assistance with lecture and review preparation by highlighting essential content, features, and artwork from the book. Tables and figures are available in an easily downloadable format for use in papers, handouts, and presentations. Sample course syllabi for semester and quarter courses provide suggested models for structuring your courses. Discussion questions help launch classroom interaction by prompting students to engage with the material and by reinforcing important content. Chapter activities for individual or group projects provide lively and stimulating ideas for use in and out of class that reinforce active learning. The open access student study site at study.sagepub.com/potter8e includes: Mobile-friendly practice quizzes allow for independent assessment by students of their mastery of course material. Mobile-friendly eFlashcards strengthen understanding of key terms and concepts. Carefully selected chapter-by-chapter video and multimedia content enhances classroom-based explorations of key topics.

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Acknowledgments This book project has traveled a very long distance from its initial conceptualization in the mid-1990s. Since then I have had the privilege of using various versions of the book with more than a thousand students at Florida State University, UCLA, Stanford University, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. These students helped me form the idea into a useful book for a broad range of undergraduates and refine the material through seven subsequent editions. I thank them for every question, every puzzled look, and every smile of satisfaction from an insight gained. Over the years, Media Literacy has been translated from English into four other languages, which makes it accessible to readers in many parts of the world. Some of those readers have provided me with their reactions, and I thank them. I thank the many reviewers whom SAGE called on to critique the text in each edition. Some contacted me directly; others chose to remain anonymous. In all cases their comments were valuable. The reviewers include: Rachael Hanel, Minnesota State University, Mankato Mary Jo Nead, Thomas More College Frank Nevius, Western Oregon State University Dr. Tim Chandler, Hardin-Simmons University Debra Finkel, Webster University Kathleen Osbeck Sindorf, Cornerstone University Julie Smith, Webster University, Saint Louis Missouri I am grateful for the support of SAGE, with its many highly skilled staff members, over the years. First, I need to thank Margaret Seawell, who initially signed this project then shepherded it through three editions, then Todd Armstrong who took over for Margaret on the fourth and fifth editions, then Matt Byrnie who took over for Todd and gave me considerable help with the sixth, seventh, and now the eighth edition. I also must thank Matt’s editorial assistant, Georgia McLaughlin, as well as Natalie Konopinski, who joined this project as the development editor on this eighth edition. In the Production Department, Astrid Virding skillfully took the first edition from manuscript to bound book, as did Claudia Hoffman on the second edition, Tracy Alpern on the third, Astrid Virding again on the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions, Olivia Weber-Stenis on the seventh edition, and Laura Barrett on this edition. They made it look easy, though there must have been days when it was anything but. I also want to thank Ashlee Blunk in marketing and SAGE salespeople for their enthusiastic support of the new edition. Finally, I must thank the many fine copy editors

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SAGE has assigned to this project over the years, especially Sarah Duffy, who did a great job on this eighth edition. If you like this book, then I share the credit of success with all the people I mentioned above. If you find a mistake, a shortcoming, or a misinterpretation, then it is my fault for not fully assimilating all the high-quality help I have been privileged to experience.

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About the Author W. James Potter, professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, holds one PhD in communication studies and another in instructional technology. He has been teaching media courses for more than two decades in the areas of effects on individuals and society, content narratives, structure and economics of media industries, advertising, journalism, programming, and production. He has served as editor of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media and is the author of many journal articles and books, including Media Effects, The 11 Myths of Media Violence, Becoming a Strategic Thinker: Developing Skills for Success, On Media Violence, Theory of Media Literacy: A Cognitive Approach, and How to Publish Your Communication Research (with Alison Alexander).

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Part I Introduction Chapter 1 Why Increase Media Literacy? Chapter 2 Media Literacy Approach

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Chapter 1 Why Increase Media Literacy?

The Information Problem Growth Is Accelerating High Degree of Exposure Keeping Up Dealing With the Information Problem Our Mental Hardware Our Mental Software Automatic Routines Advantages and Disadvantages The Big Question Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date

Key Idea: In order to survive in our information-saturated culture, we put our minds on “automatic pilot” in order to protect ourselves from the flood of media messages we constantly encounter. The danger with this automatic processing of messages is that it allows the mass media to condition our thought processes.

Media literacy increases your ability to exercise control over the vast array of messages you encounter through daily media exposure. iStock/Xavier Arnau

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The first challenge we all face when confronting a new body of information is motivation. We ask ourselves: Why should I expend all the effort to learn this? How will learning this help me enough to make all that effort worthwhile? With media literacy, our initial answers to the above questions are likely to make us feel that learning about media literacy is not worth the effort because we feel that we already know a lot about the media. We are familiar with a large number of websites, apps, recording artists, and celebrities. We are already able to access a wide range of entertainment and information, so why would we need to learn a lot more about the media? This book will show you the answer to that question. By presenting you with some key insights about things you don’t know about the media, this book will expand your perspective into new areas. Your growing perspective will allow you to exercise more control over your media exposures so that you can get more value from those messages. Let’s get started! In this chapter, I will show you the big picture of our media environment so that you can see how enormous the information problem is. The way you deal with this problem typically works well on a day-to-day basis, but its effectiveness is questionable over the long run. That is, the disadvantages in the long term greatly outweigh the advantages in the short term.

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The Information Problem Our culture is saturated with media messages—far more than you may realize. Hollywood releases more than 700 hours of feature films each year, which adds to its base of more than 100,000 hours of films it has already released in previous years. In addition, users of a video platforms such as YouTube upload more than 100 new hours of video every minute of every day (YouTube, n.d.). Commercial television stations generate about 48 million hours of video messages every year worldwide, and radio stations send out 65.5 million hours of original programming each year. We now have more than 140 million book titles in existence, and another 1,500 new book titles are published throughout the world each day. Then there is the World Wide Web, which is so huge that no one knows how big it really is. Google is attempting to index all webpages, and that index has now reached over 67 billion webpages on its 900,000 company servers (Statistic Brain Research Institute, 2015).

Apple CEO Tim Cook debutes the Apply Watch collection in San Francisco, March 9, 2015. This wearable technology allows you to text and make calls, as well as tell the time. The Asahi Shimbun/Getty Images

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Growth Is Accelerating Not only are we already saturated with media messages, the rate of that saturation is growing at an accelerating pace. More information has been generated since you were born than the sum total of all information throughout all recorded history up until the time of your birth. And the rate continues to accelerate! It is estimated that it now takes only 2 years for the total amount of information to double (Silver, 2012). Why is so much information being produced? One reason is that there are now more people producing information than ever before. Half of all the scientists who have ever lived are alive today and producing information. Also, the number of people in the United States who identify themselves as musicians has more than doubled in the last four decades, the number of artists has tripled, and the number of authors has increased fivefold (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2013). Another reason is that the technology now exists to provide easy-to-use platforms to share information. Thus everyone can generate and share information to large numbers of people every day. You no longer need to be a musician to create songs; you can use GarageBand or other computer synthesizers. You don’t need to be signed to a recording contract by a record company to distribute your songs. You can also be a journalist, a fiction writer, a photographer, a filmmaker, or even a video game designer as a hobby and make your messages easily available to millions of people, just like professional artists. Or you can generate and share smaller forms of information such as e-mails and tweets. There are now 2.4 billion Internet users worldwide, and they send and receive 300 billion e-mail messages each day; users of Twitter generate more than 500 million tweets per day; and Facebook reports that 100 million photos are uploaded each and every day.

Social media continues to be the fastest growing area for media exposure, being consumed mostly on smartphones and other mobile devices. iStock/ Georgijevic

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Each of us is adding to this information clutter like never before. Tucker (2014) explains:

Between checking your phone, using GPS, sending e-mail, tweets, and Facebook posts, and especially streaming movies and music, you create 1.8 million megabytes a year. It’s enough to fill nine CD-ROMs every day. The device-ification of modern life in the developed world is the reason why more than 90 percent of all the data that exists was created in just the last three years. (p. xv)

Tucker continues, “And it’s growing exponentially, with 44 times as much digital information in 2020 as there was in 2009” (p. xvi).

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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High Degree of Exposure The media are highly attractive, so we increase the time we spend with media messages each year. Over the last three decades, every new survey of media use has shown that people on average have been increasing their exposure time every year. For example, in 2010, people spent an average of 10 hours and 46 minutes with all forms of the media each day, and this increased to 12 hours and 14 minutes by 2014 (“Time Spent per Day,” 2014). A recent study projected that by 2015, the average person in the United States would be consuming more than 15 hours of media each day, not including media for work. The biggest increases will be with text messaging, viewing videos, and visiting social networks, especially Facebook (Zverina, 2013). By 2015, 71% of all adults were regular users of social media platforms and 52% of users were regularly accessing two or more social media websites (Goel, 2015). It is clear that the media are an extremely important part of our everyday lives. In our information-saturated culture, we are constantly connected to our friends, our society, and the entire world through the media.

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Keeping Up How do we keep up with all this information? One thing we try to do is multitask. For example, a person can listen to recorded music, text friends, and watch video on a pop-up window all at the same time—thus experiencing 3 hours of media exposure for each hour of clock time.

Multitasking, like talking to a friend on your smartphone while watching online videos, has increased the average young person’s daily quantity of media exposure. © Comstock/ComstockThinkstock

Multitasking, however, is not a good enough strategy for helping us keep up with the flood of information. If you wanted to view all the videos uploaded to YouTube in just one day, it would take you an entire year of viewing and you would have to multitask by watching 16 screens with no breaks! While multitasking helps increase our exposure, it is not a good enough strategy to help us keep up with even a tiny fraction of media messages in the everyday flood of information.

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Dealing With the Information Problem Although we are all saturated with information, and each year the media are more aggressive in seeking our attention, we are able to deal with it. How is this possible? The answer lies in the way the human brain is wired and programmed—its hardware and software.

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Our Mental Hardware The most remarkable piece of hardware on Earth is the human brain. Although the human brain is relatively small (weighing only about 1 kilogram), it has a remarkable capacity to take in information from the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell), process all that information by storing it or filtering it, then making decisions that result in action. The human brain is composed of 100 billion neuron cells, which is the number of stars in the Milky Way (Storr, 2014). Each cell is linked by synapses to as many as 100,000 others. That means your brain has created over 500 trillion string-like fibers called axons and dendrites that connect with other neurons at junctions call synapses. “These synapses constantly form and dissolve, weakening and strengthening in response to new experiences” (Haven, 2007, p. 22). As the human brain is constantly monitoring the environment, thousands of neurons are receiving stimulation from thousands of other neurons and must decide whether to ignore the input or respond in some way by sending a signal to another specific neuron. “Somehow, through this freeway maze of links, loops, and electric traffic jams, we each manage to think, perceive, consider, imagine, remember, react, and respond” (Haven, 2007, p. 22).

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Our Mental Software How does this complex piece of hardware know what to do? The answer to this question is that the brain has been programmed to fulfill certain functions. This programming or software, which is sometimes referred to collectively as the mind, tells the brain how to function, much like the software on your computers tell them what functions to perform and how to perform those functions.

The human brain is capabale of taking in and processing large amounts of information about our surroundings. iStock/andresr

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Some of this software has been hard wired into the brain before birth. For example, the brain automatically oversees the body’s internal states by constantly monitoring the performance of the organs (heart, lungs, kidneys, etc.) to keep them functioning properly. The brain also has been programmed to monitor a person’s environment for threats. For example, an orienting reflex directs the brain to pay attention to the environment for sudden changes like loud noises and flashes of light, and when a potential threat is identified, the brain creates an attentional state that forces the person to examine the thing that triggered the attention to determine whether it is an actual threat or not. Also, the brain has been hardwired with a fight-or-flight reflex so that when a potential threat is encountered, the body is automatically made ready (increased heart rate and blood pressure) to either fight off the threat or run away to safety. In addition to the hardwiring of the brain to maintain physical well-being, there are also examples of how the human brain has been hardwired with programs to enhance its social well-being. For example, scientists believe the ability for language has been hardwired into human brains so they can communicate with other humans by expressing their meaning for things and accessing the thoughts of others. While humans have 44

developed thousands of different languages, none of which is hardwired and must be learned after birth, the more basic ability to learn a language is what is hardwired. We see that every culture has developed a language. An important part of this language hardwiring is the ability to tell stories and process the meaning of stories that others tell us. Haven (2007) explains, “humans have told, used, and relied on stories for over 100,000 years,” and evolutionary biologists believe that this “reliance on stories [has] evolutionarily hardwired a predisposition into human brains to think in story terms. We are programmed to prefer stories and to think in story structures” (p. 4). Stories are vehicles we use to tell others what we feel and think. Stories provide us with information about our world, ranging from simple facts to complicated lessons about how the world works. Stories entertain us. And stories can persuade us. As we accumulate experiences in life, our minds accumulate additional programming that tells our brains how to perform additional functions, like math, logical reasoning, how to work through moral problems, how to control one’s emotions, and how to expand and grow one’s skills that would lead to rewarding careers and relationships. This additional programming initially comes from one’s parents and siblings. It also comes from one’s contact with cultural institutions, such as education, religion, politics, and government. It comes from one’s friends, acquaintances, and even one’s enemies. And it comes from the mass media. All of this additional programming shapes how we make decisions in our everyday world about what to wear, what to eat, what is important, how to act, and how to spend our resources of time and money. This programming is constantly running in our unconscious minds in the form of automatic routines.

The human brain not only oversees autonomic functions like breathing, but also manages our reactions to the environment and social well-being. iStock/itsskin

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Automatic Routines The human mind can be wondrously efficient. It can perform many everyday tasks quickly by using automatic routines, which are sequences of behaviors or thoughts that we learn from experience then apply again and again with little effort. Once you have learned a sequence—such as tying your shoes, brushing your teeth, driving to school, or playing a song on the guitar—you can perform it over and over again with very little effort compared to the effort it took you to learn it in the first place. As we learn to do something, we are writing the instructions like a computer code in our minds. That code then runs automatically in our unconscious minds and serves to guide us through the task with very little thought or effort. To illustrate, recall your experience in first learning to type. You had to think of the individual letters in each word, think about which key controlled which letter, and then command a finger to press the correct key. It took you a long time to type out each word. But now after much practice, your thumbs (or fingers) move over the keyboard quickly as you type out messages in seconds. Now when you message someone, you think only about the message while not having to think at all about the task of typing. Psychologists refer to this automatic processing of information as automaticity. Automaticity is a mental state where our minds operate without any conscious effort from us. We encounter almost all media messages in a state of automaticity; that is, we put our minds on “automatic pilot” where our minds automatically filter out almost all message options. I realize that this might sound strange, but think about it: We cannot possibly consider every possible message and consciously decide whether to pay attention to it or not. There are too many messages to consider. Over time, we have developed automatic routines that guide this filtering process very quickly and efficiently so we don’t have to spend much, if any, mental effort. To illustrate this automatic processing, consider what you do when you go to the supermarket to buy food. Let’s say you walk into the store with a list of 25 items you need to buy, and 15 minutes later you walk out of the store with your 25 items. In this scenario, how many decisions have you made? The easy answer is to say 25 decisions, because you made a separate decision to buy each of your 25 items as you put each item into your cart. But what about all the items you decided not to buy? The average supermarket today has about 40,000 items on its shelves. So you actually made 40,000 decisions in the relatively short time you were in the supermarket—25 decisions to buy the 25 products and all those other decisions not to buy the remaining 39,975 products. How did you accomplish such an extensive task in such a short period of time? You relied on automatic routines. See how these automatic routines govern your buying habits? Our culture is a grand supermarket of media messages. Those messages are everywhere whether we realize it or not, except that there are far more media messages in our culture than there are products in any supermarket. In our everyday lives—like when we enter a supermarket—a program is loaded into our mind that tells it what to look for and automatically filters out the rest. This automatic processing guides most, but certainly not all, of our media exposures. With automatic processing, we experience a great deal of media messages without paying any attention to them. Every once in a while something in the message or in our environment triggers our conscious attention to a media message. To illustrate this, imagine yourself driving in your car and you have music from your iPod playing through your car’s sound system, but your attention is

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on the conversation you are having with your friend who is seated next to you. Then your favorite song starts playing, and your attention shifts from the conversation to the music. Or perhaps your conversation is interrupted when you friend notices that the radio is playing her favorite song and she starts singing along with the music. In both scenarios, you are being exposed to a stream of media messages from your car sound system without paying conscious attention to them, but then something happens to trigger your conscious attention to the music.

Advantages and Disadvantages The huge advantage of automatic processing is efficiency. When the filtering software is running automatically, it is making thousands of decisions for us without requiring us to expend any effort. There are, however, some significant disadvantages. When we rely exclusively on our automatic routines, we get into a rut and miss out on paying attention to many messages that may be highly useful to us; we never know what we are missing. When our minds are on automatic pilot, we may be missing a lot of messages that might be helpful or enjoyable to us. We might not have programmed all the triggers we need to help us get out of automatic processing when a potentially useful message comes our way. Returning to the supermarket example from above, let’s say you are very health-conscious. Had you been less concerned with efficiency when you went into the supermarket, you would have considered a wider range of products and read their labels for ingredients. Not all low-fat products have the same fat content; not all products with vitamins added have the same vitamins or the same proportions. Or perhaps you are very price-conscious. Had you been less concerned with efficiency, you would have considered a wider variety of competing products and looked more carefully at the unit pricing so you could get more value for your money. When we are too concerned with efficiency, we lose opportunities to expand our experience and to put ourselves in a position to make better decisions that can make us healthier, wealthier, and happier.

How is shopping in a supermarket similar to consuming media content? iStock/mediaphotos

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Another disadvantage is that over the long run we start to experience message fatigue. When we feel overwhelmed with too many media messages, we try to protect ourselves even more by narrowing down our focus and thus filtering out even more messages. Eventually we end up exposing ourselves to the same type of message over and over and the value of each message keeps decreasing and we lose the ability to concentrate. In 1971 the Nobel Prize–winning economist Herbert Simon observed that “a wealth of information crates a poverty of attention” (quoted in Angwin, 2009, p. 239). This is illustrated by a study where experimenters set up a jam tasting table in a grocery store. Half the time, they offered 6 jams, and the other half the time, they offered 24 jams. While the table with more jams attracted 50% more visitors and tasters, the table with fewer jams stimulated more sales. Among the visitors to the table with the larger number of jams, only 3% bought some jam, while among the visitors to the table with the smaller number of jams, 30% bought some jam (C. Anderson, 2006). The lesson here is that while choice is attractive, too much choice can paralyze us into inaction. When we feel overwhelmed, we rely more and more on automatic routines, and this leads us into a deeper and deeper rut of doing the same things over and over.

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The Big Question Given that we live in a culture highly saturated with information and given that we protect ourselves from this flood of information with automatic routines programmed into our minds, the big question becomes: Who benefits the most from the way that code has been programmed? There is no simple answer to this question because many forces have been active in influencing how your code has been programmed over the course of your life so far. Some of this influence has come from parents, siblings, and friends who typically have had your best interests in mind, so their influence is likely to have been positive. Some of this influence has come from institutions and society, which are prosocial influences, but they have also been concerned with pushing you to conform to their ideas of what you should believe and how you should behave. Then there are the media programmers and advertisers who are most concerned about influencing you in order to satisfy their own goals. The task of sorting through all these influences requires some considerable analysis. This book will guide you through the media part of that analysis. Each of the 15 chapters in the instructional core of this book will show you how to ask the crucial questions about what you think about the world, what you believe to be true, and your habits of spending your resources of time and money. Through these analyses, you will gradually increase your awareness about the degree to which the media have programmed your automatic codes. This increased awareness will make it clear to you which parts of your code are not acting in your best interest and are likely training you to waste your personal resources, which leads you into frustration, anxiety, and unhappiness. This will put you in a position to reprogram those faulty bits of code so that in the future, as your code runs automatically, it will be acting much more in your best interests. That code then will be much more valuable as a means of achieving your own personal goals and delivering happiness. People who do not periodically examine their automatic routines are defaulting to influences outside their control. When we are not consciously paying attention and carefully evaluating our media exposures, the mass media continually reinforce certain behavioral patterns of exposure until they become automatic habits. We mindlessly follow these habits that are delivering less and less valuable information and experiences. We allow advertisers to increase their influence as they continually program an uneasy self-consciousness into our minds so that we are on the lookout for products that will make us look, feel, and smell better. Advertisers have programmed many of us into a shopping habit. People in America spend more time shopping than people in any other country. Americans go to shopping centers about once a week, more often than they go to houses of worship, and Americans now have more shopping centers than high schools. A few years ago, 93% of teenage girls surveyed said that shopping was their favorite activity (B. Schwartz, 2004). Advertising has programmed our automatic routines so that we shop even when it would be in our best interest to do other things. When you allow others to dominate the programming of your mind, then when your mind runs on automatic pilot you end up behaving in ways that achieve the goals of those programmers rather than behaving in ways that would make you more happy. If you are bothered that the media have been programming your automatic routines in order to satisfy their 49

objectives rather than your personal objectives, then you will likely have the motivation to learn how to take more control over this programming process. You will want to learn how to examine the code that has been programmed into your mind and sort through those programs that really do help you while eliminating those programs that are making you unhappy. Taking control is what media literacy is all about.

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Summary We cannot physically avoid the glut of information that aggressively seeks our attention in our culture. Instead, we can protect ourselves by psychologically avoiding almost all of the messages in the flood of information. We do this by keeping our minds on automatic pilot most of the time. This automaticity allows us to avoid almost all messages and to do so efficiently. Automaticity, however, comes with a price. While we are in the automatic state, we allow the media to condition us to form all kinds of habits that consume our time and money. While some of these habits may be beneficial to us, others are not. Learning to tell the difference between the two requires a stronger media literacy perspective. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Gleick, J. (2011). The information: A history, a theory, a flood. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. (526 pages including index) This is a rather long book that gets very technical in places with mathematical and engineering type descriptions. But it is worthwhile if you really want to understand the nature of information and how it has changed forms over the years. Schwartz, B. (2004). The paradox of choice: Why more is less. New York, NY: HarperCollins. (265 pages including end notes and index) Schwartz writes about how much choice the average person is now confronted with every day. He argues that increasing choice up to a point is a good thing but that beyond that point, increasing choice overwhelms people and they cease to make good decisions. Silver, N. (2012). The signal and the noise: Why so many predictions fail—but some don’t. New York, NY: Penguin. (534 pages with index) Silver documents the dramatic increase in information over the last several decades and argues that most of this information is noise, which makes it more difficult—rather than easier—to make good predictions and forecasts. Wright, A. (2007). Glut: Mastering information through the ages. Washington, DC: Joseph Henry Press. (252 pages with index) Wright, who characterizes himself as an information architect, takes a historical approach to showing how humans have evolved in the way they generate, organize, and use information. He argues that all information systems are either nondemocratic and top-down (a hierarchy) or peer-to-peer and open (a network). Tracing the development of human information, he uses perspectives from mythology, library science, biology, neurology, and culture. He uses this historical background to critique the nature of information on the Internet.

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Keeping Up To Date For some chapters, the material I talk about is very fluid and quickly changes. Therefore some of the facts and figures I present may be out of date by the time you read a particular chapter. To help you find more up-todate figures, I have included some sources of information that you can check out to get them most recent figures available. Infoniac.com (http://www.infoniac.com/hi-tech) This site presents information about the growth of information in the world, and more generally it provides information about new developments in technologies. Pingdom (http://royal.pingdom.com) This is a blog written by members of the Pingdom team on a wide variety of topics concerning the Internet and web tech issues. Begun in 2007, Pingdom is a company that provides Internet services to companies around the world. Statistical Abstracts of the United States (http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical_abstract.html) Up until 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau, of the Department of Commerce, released a new statistical abstract from the data it gathered every year. Since then this website presents links for reports based on data gathered by other organizations.

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Chapter 2 Media Literacy Approach

What Is Media Literacy? The Three Building Blocks of Media Literacy Skills Knowledge Structures Personal Locus The Definition of Media Literacy The Development of Media Literacy Advantages of Developing a Higher Degree of Media Literacy Appetite for Wider Variety of Media Messages More Self-Programming of Mental Codes More Control Over Media Summary Further Reading Exercise

Key Idea: Media literacy is a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to the media and interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter. It is multidimensional and a continuum.

Media literacy is the ability to access and process information from any kind of transmission. Getty/David Malan

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As you learned in Chapter 1, we are constantly flooded with a huge number of messages from the mass media. We must screen out all but a tiny percentage. To help us do this screening with the least amount of mental effort, we default to automaticity, where our minds quickly screen out messages without any conscious awareness of this process. This automatic filtering process is governed by a set of procedures—much like a computer program—that runs unconsciously until something in a media message triggers our attention. While this filtering process is largely automatic, it is possible for us to gain greater control over it if we increase our media literacy.

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What Is Media Literacy? The most standard use of the term literacy applies to a person’s ability to read the written word. However, with the advent of technologies to convey messages in addition to print, the idea of literacy was expanded to also include things like visual literacy (the ability to process flat two-dimensional pictures or our threedimensional world), story literacy (the ability to follow plots on television and film), and computer literacy (the ability to record one’s own messages, to send them to others electronically, to search for messages, and to process meaning from electronic screens). In this book we do not focus on any one particular type of literacy but instead take a broad approach that considers all media. Another characteristic within the writings about media literacy is a focus on the mass media as being harmful; that is, mass media messages expose people to risks of harmful effects. While acknowledging that media messages have the potential to increase the risk of harmful effects, this book attempts to show you that media messages also offer a great potential for positive effects—if we are open-minded. To illustrate this point, let’s consider the belief that newer forms of technology have harmed people’s ability to write well. An illustration of this belief is John Sutherland, an English professor at the University College of London, who has argued that texting has reduced language into a “bleak, bald, sad shorthand,” that Facebook reinforces narcissistic drivel, and that PowerPoint presentations have taken the place of well-reasoned essays (quoted in Thompson, 2009). He says that today’s technologies of communication that encourage or even require shorter messages, like Twitter, have shortened people’s attention spans and therefore have limited their ability to think in longer arcs, which is required for constructing well-reasoned essays. In contrast, other people regard these newer formats for communication more positively. For example, Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, argues that the newer information technologies have actually increased literacy. She says, “I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization” (quoted in Thompson, 2009). In addition, she argues that these new technologies of communication are not killing our ability to write well but instead are pushing it in new directions of being more personal, creative, and concise. She reached this conclusion after systematically analyzing more than 14,000 student writing samples over a 5-year period. She explains that young people today are adept at understanding the needs of their audiences and writing messages especially crafted to appeal to them. For today’s youth, writing is about discovering themselves, organizing their thoughts concisely, managing impressions, and persuading their readers.

Media literacy stimulates us to adapt to changing communication technologies and open our minds to new media messages. © Sven Hagolani/Corbis

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When we open our minds, we see that there are both positive as well as negative effects of these newer forms of communication. The newer technologies of communication offer fewer opportunities to develop certain skills but at the same time increase the opportunities to develop other kinds of skills. Thus it is shortsighted to regard the media’s influence on our skill set as being either all good or all bad. In addition to encouraging us to open our minds, media literacy also stimulates us to adapt to our changing world rather than to ignore those changes or to deny that those changes are happening. We adapt by opening ourselves up to a wider variety of messages and then by analyzing those messages for new elements, and evaluating those elements so we can appreciate their value.

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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The Three Building Blocks of Media Literacy The three building blocks of media literacy are skills, knowledge structures, and personal locus. The combination of all three is necessary to build your wider set of perspectives on the media. Your skills are the tools you use to build knowledge structures. Your knowledge structures are the organizations of what you have learned. Your personal locus provides mental energy and direction.

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Skills Many people who write about media literacy primarily consider it a skill, and the term they use to refer to this skill is critical thinking. While the term critical thinking sounds good, its use creates confusion, because everyone seems to have a different meaning for it. Some people regard critical thinking as a willingness to criticize the media; other people define it as the need to examine issues in more depth; still others suggest a meaning of being more systematic and logical when interacting with the media; others imply that it means the ability to focus on the most important issues and ignore the rest; and the list goes on. In order to avoid this conglomeration of meanings, I will not use this term; instead I will try to be more clear by showing you how media literacy relies on seven specific skills. These are the skills of analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis, and abstracting (see Table 2.1).

Table 2.1 The Seven Skills of Media Literacy Table 2.1 The Seven Skills of Media Literacy Skill

Definition

Analysis

Breaking down a message into meaningful elements

Evaluation

Grouping

Induction

Judging the value of an element; the judgment is made by comparing a message element to some standard Determining which elements are alike in some way, determining how a group of elements is different from other groups of elements Inferring a pattern across a small set of elements, then generalizing the pattern to all elements in the set

Deduction

Using general principles to explain particulars

Synthesis

Assembling elements into a new structure

Abstracting

Creating a brief, clear, and accurate description capturing the essence of a message in a smaller number of words than the message itself

These skills are not exclusive to media literacy tasks; instead, we use these skills in all sorts of ways in our everyday lives. We all have some ability with each of these skills, so the media literacy challenge is not to acquire these skills; rather our challenge is to get better at using each of these skills in our encounters with media messages. In the remainder of this section, I will define each of these skills and show how they are applied in a media literacy context. (For a more detailed treatment of each of these skills, please see Potter, 2015.)

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Analysis, one of the seven skills of media literacy, breaks down a message into meaningful components. iStock/media photos

Analysis is the breaking down of a message into meaningful elements. As we encounter media messages, we can simply accept these messages on the surface or we can dig deeper into the message itself by breaking them down into their components and examining the composition of the elements that make up the message. For example, with a news story, we can accept what a journalist tells us or we can analyze the story for completeness. That is, we can break the story down into its who, what, when, where, why, and how to determine if the story is complete or not. Evaluation is making a judgment about the value of an element. This judgment is made by comparing a message element to some standard. When we encounter opinions expressed by experts in media messages, we could simply memorize those opinions and make them our own. Or we could take the information elements in the message and compare them to our standards. If those elements meet or exceed our standards, we conclude that the message—and the opinion expressed there—is good; but if the elements fall short of our standard, then we judge the message to be unacceptable. There is a lot of evidence that people simply accept the opinions they hear in media messages without making their own evaluations. One example of this is the now widespread opinion that in the United States, the educational system is not very good and a big reason for this is that children now spend too much time with the media, especially TV. To illustrate, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) is an agency of the U.S. federal government that uses standardized testing to assess the level of learning of America’s youth in reading, science, and mathematics each year, then compares their levels of learning with youth in 65 other 60

countries. The 2012 Program for International Student Assessment report says that adolescents in the United States are ranked 24th in reading, 28th in science, and 36th in mathematics (NCES, n.d.). Critiques of the U.S. educational system use information like this to argue that adolescents spend too much time with the media and this makes their minds lazy, reduces their creativity, and turns them into lethargic entertainment junkies. If this happens, children will not value achievement and will not do well in school. This criticism is faulty for several reasons. One reason for its faulty nature is that it blames the media exclusively and fails to acknowledge that academic performance is influenced by a complex of factors, especially parents’ values for education and student motivations. Another reason is that it focuses only on negative effects and recognizes no potential for positive effects that continually accrue from media exposures of all kinds. When we analyze this criticism in even a little depth, we can see that it is misleading. To illustrate, let’s examine the often-heard criticism that television viewing is negatively related to academic achievement. What makes this faulty is that this relationship is explained better by something else—IQ. School achievement is overwhelmingly related to IQ. Also, children with lower IQs watch more television. So it is IQ that accounts for lower achievement and higher television viewing. Research analyses that take a child’s IQ into account find that there is no overall negative relationship; instead, there is a much more interesting pattern (see Potter, 1987). The negative relationship does not show up until the child’s viewing has passed the threshold of 30 hours per week. Beyond that 30-hour point, the more television children watch, the lower their academic achievement, and that effect gets stronger with the more hours they watch beyond that threshold. This means that academic achievement goes down only after television viewing starts to cut into study time and sleep. But there is no negative effect for less than 30 hours of viewing per week. In fact, at the lowest levels of television viewing, there is actually a positive effect; that is, a child who watches none or only a few hours a week is likely to do less well academically than a child who watches a moderate amount (around 12 to 15 hours per week). Thus, the pattern is as follows: Children who are deprived of the source of information that television provides do less well in school than children who watch a moderate amount of television; however, when a child gets to the point where the amount of television viewing cuts into needed study time, academic performance goes down. Television—as well as the Internet and all other forms of the media—has potentially positive as well as negative effects. Television exposure can displace constructive behaviors such as studying, but television can expand our experience, teach us valuable social lessons, and stimulate our imaginations. Preventing children from using television can prevent a potentially negative effect but it also prevents positive effects as well. When we pose the question “What effect does viewing television have on a child’s academic performance?” we could give the simple, popular answer: There is a negative effect. But now you can see that this answer is too simple—it is simpleminded. It is also misleading because it reinforces the limited belief that media effects are negative and that the media are to blame. The reason faulty beliefs are such a dangerous trap is because they are self-reinforcing. By this, I mean that as people are continually exposed to faulty information, they feel even more secure that their faulty beliefs are accurate. They feel less and less motivated to challenge them. When someone points out that the information

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on which their beliefs are based is faulty, they do not accept this criticism because they are so sure that they are correct. Thus, over time, they are not only less likely to examine their beliefs but also less tolerant of the possibility that beliefs other than their own are correct. Grouping is the determining of which elements are alike in some way then determining how a group of elements are different from other groups of elements. This skill is so important that each of this book’s core instructional chapters, from this chapter on, includes a Compare & Contrast illustration of key terms so that you can develop a greater appreciation for how pairs of terms share similarities as well as illustrate differences that are key to making them distinct from one another.

Media exposure can have both positive and negative effects on childrens’ academic performance. iStock/monkeybusinessimages

The key to applying the grouping skill well relies on employing the most useful classification rules. The media tell us what classification rules are, so if we accept their classification rules, we will end up with the groups they want us to use. But if we make the effort to determine which classification rules are the best ways for us to organize our perceptions of the world, we will end up with groupings that have more meaning and more value for us. Induction is inferring a pattern across a small number of elements then generalizing the pattern to all elements in the larger set. We see examples of induction all the time, some good and some not so good. One example is a public opinion poll. Surveyors ask a few hundred people a question then generalize the results to the entire population. If the surveyors use a sample of people that represent the entire population, then this 62

use of induction is good. However, if surveyors sample only one particular kind of person, then it is misleading to generalize their findings to the entire population, which is composed of all kinds of people. We use induction in our everyday lives when we make a few observations then generalize. For example, we might get sick and go to the emergency room for treatment and have to wait several hours before being seen by a doctor. We get angry and claim that the entire health care system is overburdened and that everyone has to wait too long to get medical care. Deduction is using general principles to explain particulars, typically with the use of syllogistic reasoning. A well-known syllogism is as follows: (1) All men are mortal (general principle). (2) Socrates is a man (particular observation). (3) Therefore Socrates is mortal (conclusion reached through logical reasoning). The starting place for deductive reasoning is our general principles. If our general principles are accurate, then we are likely to reach good conclusions. But when we have faulty general principles, we will explain particular occurrences in a faulty manner. One general principle that most people hold to be true is that the media, especially television, have a very strong negative effect on other people. They have an unrealistic opinion that the media cause other people to behave violently. Some people believe that if you allow PSAs (public service announcements) on TV about using condoms, children will learn that it is permissible and even a good thing to have sex. This is clearly an overestimation. At the same time, people underestimate the influence the media have on them. When they are asked if they think the media have any effect on them personally, 88% say no. These people argue that the media are primarily channels of entertainment and diversion, so they have no negative effect on them. The people who believe this say that they have watched thousands of hours of crime shows and have never shot anyone or robbed a bank. Although this may be true, this argument does not fully support the claim that the media have no effect on them; this argument is based on the false premise that the media trigger only high-profile, negative, behavioral effects that are easy to recognize. But there are many more types of effects, such as giving people the false impression that crime is a more serious problem than it really is or that most crime is violent. Synthesis is the assembling of elements into a new structure. This is an essential skill we use when building and updating our knowledge structures. As we take in new information, it often does not fit into an existing knowledge structure, so we must adapt that knowledge structure to accommodate the new information. Thus the process of synthesis is using our new media messages to keep reformulating, refining, and updating our existing knowledge structures. Abstracting is creating a brief, clear, and accurate description capturing the essence of a message in a significantly smaller number of words than the message itself. Thus when we are describing a media message to someone else or reviewing the message in our own minds, we use the skill of abstracting. The key to using this skill well is to be able to capture the “big picture” or central idea of the media message in as few words as possible. These seven skills are the tools we use to create, alter, and update our knowledge structures. We use these tools to mine through the flood of information to find those key bits we need for some purpose and then

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transform those bits in some way (judge their worth, look for a pattern, or draw a conclusion) so we can fit them into a meaningful knowledge structure. Skills are like muscles; the more you exercise them, the stronger they get. Without practice, skills become weaker.

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Knowledge Structures Knowledge structures are sets of organized information in our memory. If they were simply unorganized piles of random facts, then they would not be useful. Instead, the information needs to be carefully organized into a structure that helps us see patterns that organize our worlds. We use these patterns as maps to tell us where to get more information and also where to go to retrieve information we have previously encoded into our knowledge structures. To help visualize this, think about your bedroom. Are your books, papers, clothes, food wrappers, and everything else randomly scattered all over your bed, desk, closet, and drawers? If so, is it difficult for you to find things? Information is the essential ingredient in knowledge structures. But not all information is equally useful in the building of a knowledge structure. Some information is rather superficial. If all a person has is the recognition of surface information, such as lyrics to television show theme songs, names of characters and actors, settings for shows, and the like, he or she is operating at a low level of media literacy, because this type of information addresses only the question of “What?” The more useful information comes in the form of the answers to the questions of “How?” and “Why?” But remember that you first need to know something about the what before you can delve deeper into the how and why. In everyday language, the terms information and knowledge are often used as synonyms, but in this book they have meanings very different from one another. Information is piecemeal and transitory, whereas knowledge is structured, organized, and of more enduring significance. Information resides in the messages, whereas knowledge resides in a person’s mind. Information gives something to the person to interpret, whereas knowledge reflects that which has already been interpreted by the person.

Knowledge structures help to organize the different kinds of social and factual information we are exposed to every day. istock/scyther5

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Information is composed of facts. Facts by themselves are not knowledge any more than a pile of lumber is a house. Knowledge requires structure to provide context and thereby exhibit meaning. Think of messages as the raw materials, and think of skills as the tools you use to build your knowledge structures. While I’m on the topic of distinguishing information from knowledge, I also need to define a few terms related to the idea of information: message, factual information, and social information. Messages are those instruments that deliver information to us. Information is the content of those messages. Messages can be delivered in many different media—computers, smartphones, television, radio, CDs, video games, books, newspapers, magazines, websites, conversations, lectures, concerts, signs along the streets, labels on the products we buy, and so on. They can be large (an entire Hollywood movie) or small (one utterance by one character in a movie). Messages are composed of two kinds of information: factual and social. Facts are discrete bits of information, such as names (of people, places, characters, etc.), dates, titles, definitions of terms, formula, lists, and the like. For example, when you watch the news and hear messages, those messages are composed of facts, such as the following: Barack Obama was reelected to the office of president of the United States in the fall of 2012. This statement contains facts. Social information is composed of accepted beliefs that cannot be verified by authorities in the same way factual information can be. This is not to say that social information is less valuable or less real to people. Social information is composed of lessons that people infer from observing social interactions. These lessons are inferred from the patterns of actions and consequences we observe. 66

With media literacy, we need strong knowledge structures in five areas: media effects, media content, media industries, the real world, and the self. With good knowledge in these five areas, you will be able to make better decisions about seeking out information, working with that information, and constructing meaning from it that will be more useful in serving your own goals.People who have had a wider range of experiences in the real world have a broader base from which to appreciate and analyze media messages. For example, those who have helped someone run for political office can understand and analyze press coverage of political campaigns to a greater depth than those who have not had any real-world experience with political campaigns. People who have played sports will be able to appreciate the athletic accomplishments they see on television to a greater depth compared to those people who have not physically tested themselves with those challenges. People who have had a wide range of relationships and family experiences will have a higher degree of understanding and more in-depth emotional reactions to those portrayals in the media. Knowledge structures provide the context we use when trying to make sense of each new media message. The more knowledge structures we have, the more confident we can be in making sense of a wide range of messages. For example, you may have a very large, well-developed knowledge structure about a particular television series. You may know the names of all the characters in that TV show. You may know everything that has happened to those characters in all the episodes. You may even know the names and histories of the actors who play the characters. If you have all of this information well organized so that you can recall any of it at a moment’s notice, you have a well-developed knowledge structure about that television series. Are you media literate? Within the small corner of the media world where that one TV show resides, you are. But if this were the only knowledge structure you had developed, you would have little understanding of the content produced by the other media. You would have difficulty understanding trends about who owns and controls the media, about how the media have developed over time, about why certain kinds of content are never seen while other types are continually repeated, and about what effects that content may be having on you. With many highly developed knowledge structures, you could understand the entire span of media issues and therefore be able to see the “big picture” about why the media are the way they are. Your level of media literacy is determined in large part by how well you have developed knowledge structures in four areas: media industries, media audiences, media content, and media effects. This book presents structures and information to help you with these. To make a simple assessment of how well developed your knowledge structures are in these four areas of the media, do Exercise 2.1. Do the best you can in answering the questions in that exercise, but don’t be too shocked if you cannot come up with many answers. Think of this exercise as a diagnostic to tell you where you need to add more information, then keep those needs in mind as you actively read through the following chapters of this book. Also, at this point, don’t worry about checking your answers for accuracy; you can do that later as you read the book. For now, let this diagnostic exercise simply help you assess where you think you have information.

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Compare & Contrast

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Factual Information and Social Information Compare: factual information and social information are the same in the following ways: Both are things we learn from exposure to media messages. Both are stored in our memories and recalled when we have a need to use them. Contrast: factual information and social information are different in the following ways: Factual information is raw, unprocessed, and context free; facts are discrete bits of information, such as names (of people, places, characters, etc.), dates, titles, definitions of terms, formula, lists, and the like. Social information is composed of lessons that we infer from observing social interactions both in real life as well as in media messages; these are guidelines we learn about how to dress, talk, and act in order for other people in society to consider us attractive, smart, athletic, hip, and so forth.

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Personal Locus In order to develop and use the set of seven skills of media literacy to build useful knowledge structures, you need one more element: a strong personal locus. Your personal locus is composed of goals and drives. The goals shape the information processing tasks by determining what gets filtered in and what gets ignored. The more you are aware of your goals, the more you can direct the process of information seeking. And the stronger your drives for information are, the more effort you will expend to attain your goals. However, when your locus is weak (i.e., you are not aware of particular goals and your drive energy is low), you will default to media control whereby you allow the media to exercise a high degree of control over exposures and information processing. The more you know about your personal locus and the more you make conscious decisions to shape it, the more you can control the process of media influence on you. The more you engage your locus, the more you will be increasing your media literacy. Being media literate, however, does not require that your personal locus be fully engaged every minute of every day. That would be an unreasonable requirement, because no one can maintain a high degree of concentration all the time. Instead, the process of increasing media literacy requires you to activate your personal locus in bursts. During these periods of high concentration, you can analyze your mental programs to make sure that they are set up to achieve your own personal goals rather the goals of the media programmers or advertisers. These periods of analysis will generate new insights about what is working well and where the glitches are. Then you can use those new insights to reprogram your mental code and fix the glitches by correcting faulty information, repairing uninformed opinions, and changing habits that are making you unhappy. Then once these alterations are made to your mental codes, you can return to automatic processing where your newly programmed codes will better help you achieve your goals for information and entertainment.

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The Definition of Media Literacy Now that I have laid the foundation for media literacy by setting out its three major building blocks, it is time to present its formal definition. Media literacy is a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to the mass media to process and interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter. We build our perspectives from knowledge structures. To build our knowledge structures, we need tools, raw material, and willingness. The tools are our skills. The raw material is information from the media and from the real world. The willingness comes from our personal locus. What is a perspective? I’ll illustrate this with an analogy. Let’s say you wanted to learn about the Earth. You could build a 100-foot-tall tower, climb up to the top, and use that as your perspective to study the Earth. That would give you a good perspective so that you could see for perhaps several miles in any direction. If your tower were in a forest, you would conclude that Earth is covered with trees. But if your tower were in a suburban neighborhood, you would conclude that Earth is covered with houses, roads, and shopping centers. If your tower were inside the New Orleans Superdome stadium, you would conclude something quite different. Each of these perspectives would give you a very different idea about Earth. We could get into all kinds of arguments about which perspective delivers the most accurate or best set of ideas about Earth, but such arguments miss the point. None of these perspectives is better than any other. The key to understanding Earth is to build lots of these towers so you have many different perspectives to enlarge your understanding about what the Earth is. And not all of these towers need to be 100 feet tall. Some should be very short so that you can better see what is happening between the blades of grass in a lawn. And others should be hundreds of miles away from the surface so that you can tell that Earth is a sphere and that there are large weather formations constantly churning around the globe. We use these perspectives or knowledge structures to process and interpret the meaning of messages. Notice the distinction between processing messages, which is automatic, and interpreting messages, which requires more mental effort. When we process messages, we use our knowledge structures to match meaning; that is, when we perceive a symbol (a word, image, sound, etc.), we access a knowledge structure to match the meaning to that symbol. For example, when you read a page of print in a textbook like this one, you are likely to see about 300 individual words and you are able to process all of these individual words in about a minute—about 5 words a second. How are you able to be so efficient? The answer is that you know how to read at a basic level; that is, you are familiar with almost all these common words, so you can very quickly access the meaning of each one from your existing knowledge structures. This is why it is so important that your knowledge structures be highly organized so you can find the meaning of symbols very rapidly. But reading is more than recognizing the meaning of individual words. You must also interpret the meaning by looking at broader patterns, that is, infer the meaning underlying the sentences and paragraphs. This takes more time and requires a higher level of concentration. To illuminate this idea of media literacy further, I need to describe two of its most important characteristics. First, media literacy is a multidimensional concept with many interesting facets. Therefore, we need to view it from many different perspectives to appreciate all it has to offer. Second, media literacy is a continuum, not a 71

category. Media literacy is multidimensional. When we think of information, we typically think of sets of facts such as from a textbook, a newspaper, or a magazine article. But this is only one type of information—cognitive. Media literacy requires that we acquire information and build knowledge in more than just the cognitive dimension but also to consider information from emotional, aesthetic, and moral dimensions. Each of these four dimensions focuses on a different domain of understanding. The cognitive domain refers to factual information—dates, names, definitions, and the like. Think of cognitive information as that which resides in the brain.

Media literacy is a set of perspectives that we actively use to expose, process, and interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter. iStock/Audy_indy

The emotional domain contains information about feelings, such as love, hate, anger, happiness, and frustration. Think of emotional information as that which lives in the heart—feelings of happy times, moments of fear, and instances of embarrassment. Some people have little ability to experience an emotion during exposure to the media, whereas others are very sensitive to cues that generate all sorts of feelings in them. For example, we all have the ability to perceive rage, fear, lust, hate, and other strong emotions. Producers use easy-to-recognize symbols to trigger these, so they do not require a high degree of literacy to perceive and understand. But some of us are much better than others at perceiving the more subtle emotions such as ambivalence, confusion, wariness, and so on. Crafting messages about these emotions requires more production skill from writers, directors, and actors. Perceiving these subtle emotions accurately requires a 72

higher degree of literacy from the audience. The aesthetic domain contains information about how to produce messages. This information gives us the basis for making judgments about who are great writers, photographers, actors, dancers, choreographers, singers, musicians, composers, directors, and other kinds of artists. It also helps us make judgments about other products of creative craftsmanship, such as editing, lighting, set designing, costuming, sound recording, graphic layout, and so forth. The ability to appreciate the aesthetic qualities in media messages is very important to some scholars (e.g., Messaris, 1994; Silverblatt, 2014; Wulff, 1997). For example, Messaris (1994) argues that viewers who are visually literate should have an awareness of artistry and visual manipulation. By this, he means an awareness about the processes by which meaning is created through the visual media. What is expected of sophisticated viewers is some degree of self-consciousness about their role as interpreters. This includes the ability to detect artifice (in staged behavior and editing) and to spot authorial presence (style of the producer/director). Think of aesthetic information as that which resides in our eyes and ears. Some of us have a good ear for dialogue or musical composition. Some of us have a good eye for lighting, photographic composition, or movement. The more information we have from this aesthetic domain, the finer discriminations we can make between a great actress and a good one, between a great song that will endure and a currently popular “flash in the pan,” between a film director’s best and very best work, between art and artificiality. The moral domain contains information about values. Think of moral information as that which resides in your conscience or your soul. This type of information provides us with the basis for making judgments about right and wrong. When we see characters make decisions in a story, we judge them on a moral dimension, that is, the characters’ goodness or evilness. The more detailed and refined our moral information is, the more deeply we can perceive the values underlying messages in the media and the more sophisticated and reasoned are our judgments about those values. It takes a highly media-literate person to perceive moral themes well. You must be able to think past individual characters to focus your meaning making at the overall narrative level. You need to be able to separate characters from their actions—you might not like a particular character, but you could still appreciate his or her actions in terms of fitting in with (or reinforcing) your values. Your media literacy perspective needs to include information from all four of these domains. For example, you may be able to be highly analytical when you watch a movie and quote lots of facts about the history of the genre, the director’s point of view, and the underlying theme. But if you cannot evoke an emotional reaction, you are simply going through a dry, academic exercise. Media literacy is a continuum, not a category. Media literacy is not a category, like a box, where either you are in the category or you are not. For example, either you are a high school graduate or you are not; either you are an American citizen or you are not. In contrast, media literacy is best regarded as a continuum, like a thermometer, where there are degrees. We all occupy some position on the media literacy continuum. There is no point below which we could say that someone has no literacy, and there is no point at the high end of the continuum where we can say that

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someone is fully literate; there is always room for improvement. People are positioned along that continuum based on the strength of their overall perspective on the media. The strength of a person’s perspective is based on the number and quality of knowledge structures. And the quality of knowledge structures is based on the level of a person’s skills and experiences. Because people vary substantially on skills and experiences, they will vary on the number and quality of their knowledge structures. Hence, there will be a great variation of media literacy across people. People operating at lower levels of media literacy have fewer perspectives on the media, and those perspectives are supported by knowledge structures that contain little information and are less organized. Thus people at lower levels of media literacy have less ability to understand the media, to appreciate their wonderful advantages, and to protect themselves from dangerous risks. These people are also habitually reluctant or unwilling to use their skills, which remain underdeveloped and therefore more difficult to employ successfully.

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The Development of Media Literacy Media literacy is a broad continuum, as you have seen from the previous section. It involves personal locus, knowledge structures, and skills along the four dimensions of cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and moral. In order to make sense of all this detail in a way to illustrate how people can develop their media literacy, it is useful to think of various levels or stages. Table 2.2 displays a scheme with eight developmental stages. The first stage is Acquiring Fundamentals, which occurs during the first year of life. Language Acquisition occurs during years 2 and 3, then Narrative Acquisition happens during years 3 to 5. These are stages that are typically left behind by children as they age into adolescence and adulthood.

Table 2.2 Development of Media Literacy Table 2.2 Development of Media Literacy Stage

Characteristics Learning that there are human beings and other physical things apart from oneself; these things look different and serve different functions

Acquiring

Learn the meaning of facial expressions and natural sounds

fundamentals Recognize shapes, form, size, color, movement, and spatial relations Rudimentary concept of time—regular patterns Recognize speech sounds and attach meaning to them Be able to reproduce speech sounds Language acquisition

Orient to visual and audio media Have emotional and behavioral responses to music and sounds Recognize certain characters in visual media and follow their movement Develop understanding of differences:  fiction vs. nonfiction  ads vs. entertainment

Narrative acquisition

 real vs. make-believe Understand how to connect plot elements:  by time sequencing

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 by motive-action-consequence Discount claims made in ads Developing skepticism

Sharpen differences between likes and dislikes for shows, characters, and actions Make fun of certain characters even though those characters are not presented as foils in their shows Have strong motivation to seek out information on certain topics

Intensive development

Develop a detailed set of information on particular topics (sports, politics, etc.) Develop high awareness of utility of information and quick facility in processing information judged to be useful

Experiential exploring

Seek out different forms of content and narratives Focus on searching for surprises and new emotional, moral, and aesthetic reactions Accept messages on their own terms then evaluate them within that sphere Develop very broad and detailed understanding of the historical, economic, political, and artistic contexts of message systems

Critical appreciation

Have the ability to make subtle comparisons and contrasts among many different message elements simultaneously Have the ability to construct a summary judgment about the overall strengths and weaknesses of a message Take a moral stand that certain messages are more constructive for society than others; this is a multidimensional perspective based on a thorough analyses of the media landscape

Social responsibility Recognize that one’s own individual decisions impact society, no matter how inutely Recognize that there are some actions an individual can take to make a constructive impact on society The Developing Skepticism stage occurs from about ages 5 to 9, and the Intensive Development stage is shortly after. Many people stay in this stage the rest of their lives, because this stage is fully functional; that is, people in this stage feel they are getting exposure to the messages they want and getting the meaning out of those messages they want. They feel they are fully media literate and that there is nothing more they need to learn.

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The next three stages can be regarded as advanced, because they require the continual use of higher level skills and the active development of elaborate knowledge structures. People in the Experiential Exploring stage feel that their media exposure has been very narrow, and they seek exposure to a much wider range of messages. For example, people who have watched only prime time action/adventure and situation comedy programs will begin to watch news, PBS documentaries, travelogues, MTV, science fiction, offbeat sports, and so on. They will pick up niche magazines and books about unusual topics. The thrill for these people is to see something they have never seen before. This makes them think about the variety of human experience. People in the Critical Appreciation stage see themselves as connoisseurs of the media. They seek out better messages that offer greater appeal along the four dimensions—cognitively, emotionally, aesthetically, and morally. People in this stage exhibit strongly held opinions about who are the best writers, the best producers, the best news reporters, and they have lots of evidence to support their well-reasoned opinions. They can talk fluently and at length about what makes a good writer and how these elements are exhibited in a particular writer’s body of work. Social Responsibility is characterized by people having critical appreciation of all kinds of media messages, but instead of having a primarily internal perspective (as with the previous stage), the perspective here is external. The person at this stage not only asks “What is best from my point of view and why?” but also is concerned with questions such as “What types of messages are best for others and for society?” Now think of these eight stages as neighborhoods. You have a home neighborhood where you live, depending on your age, your personal locus, how well you have developed your skills, and how elaborate your key knowledge structures are. You can move around to other neighborhoods depending on your needs. For example, when you are reading a book that is considered a classic novel for a college course, you may be able to move up to the Critical Appreciation level. But when you flick on the television and watch MTV’s Catfish or Teen Mom to relax, you might sink down to the Intensive Development level. There is nothing wrong with this dropping down a level or two, because there are times when we just want to “veg out” and don’t want to spend the effort to stay at the highest stages. However, remember there is a difference between people who stay at the lower stages because they are unable or unwilling to operate at higher stages and people who are able to operate at all stages but who choose to take it easier at lower stages occasionally. We all have a stage at which we feel generally at home. This is where we are most comfortable interacting with the media. We are usually able to move up a stage or two from our home neighborhood. But moving up a stage requires a conscious effort where we must expend more energy to apply higher level skills. So we don’t move up unless we are strongly motivated to do so.

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Advantages of Developing a Higher Degree of Media Literacy There are primarily three advantages to developing a higher degree of media literacy. First, with increases in media literacy, your appetite for a wider variety of media messages will grow. Second, with increases in media literacy, you learn more about how to program your own mental codes. And third, with increases in media literacy, you are able to exercise more control over the media.

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Appetite for Wider Variety of Media Messages The media offer an incredible array of choices. The Internet contains websites on every topic that humans can conceive. Books are published each year on an extremely wide range of topics. Magazines with their 10,000 titles published each year offer a much wider range than any one person can consume. Cable television is a bit more narrow still, but with several hundred channels from most cable TV providers, the choice is much wider than any one person can keep up with. However, the mass media continually try to direct our choices to a smaller set. For example, with magazines, although there are about 10,000 magazines published in the United States, even a large bookstore is likely to have only about 300 on its magazine shelves. You don’t want to have to scan through all 300 magazines, so you rely on your automatic filtering to narrow your choice down to about a dozen magazines that you have found interesting in the past—that is, the media have conditioned you to like these magazines. Your choice is then to buy 1 or 2 from this smaller list of 12. Do you have a choice? Yes, of course. But see how the media—first through the bookstore buyer, then through media conditioning —have narrowed your choice down to 12; in other words, the decision you made was determined 99.88% by factors other than you. The media have programmed you to think that you have choices when in fact the degree of choice is greatly limited. It is rather like parents laying out two pairs of dress pants, one black and the other dark blue, for their 4-year-old son and giving him the total power to choose what he will wear today. Whether you regard this as a real choice depends on how much you know about the real range of options. If the boy’s perspective on pants is limited to dark dress pants, then he will view his parents’ offering of two pairs as a real choice. However, if his perspective is broader, to include knowledge about jeans, cargo pants, skater shorts, bathing trunks, and football pants, then he will think the two dress pants is not much of a choice. The mass media continually try to constrain your choices so they can condition you into habitual exposure to a few types of media vehicles. This makes you more predictable from a marketing point of view. The media literacy perspective encourages you to be more adventurous and explore a wider range of messages. When you do so, you will likely find many of those messages are not interesting or useful to you; however, you will also likely find a few types of messages that are highly useful, and these surprises will expand your exposure repertoire.

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More Self-Programming of Mental Codes The purpose of media literacy is to empower individuals to make more of their own decisions about which messages to expose themselves to and to construct meanings from those messages to serve their own goals. When you operate at higher levels of media literacy, you have more power in programming your mental codes. This means that you reduce the power of the media in programming those codes that limit your media exposures to the habits they have built for you. You can reprogram your mental codes to open yourself up to new experiences. Also, you examine your standards and beliefs to find those that are faulty and replace them with standards and beliefs that are more of your own making. Then when you apply those more personal standards, you are making evaluations that are more in line with your own goals.

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More Control Over Media Increasing your level of media literacy gives you more power to control media exposures and their eventual effect on you. At lower levels of media literacy, you default to media control; that is, the media will use you to achieve their own goals. The mass media are composed of businesses that are very sophisticated in knowing how to attract your attention and condition you for repeat exposures. There are times when the media’s business goals and your personal goals are the same, thus creating a win-win situation for both the media and you. But there are also many times when your personal goals are different from the media’s goals; when this occurs, you need to make a decision about whether to go along with the media-conditioned habits or break away from those conditioned habits to pursue your own goals. Oftentimes, we do not realize there is a decision to make because we are so firmly entrenched into those mediaconditioned habits. The media literacy perspective will help you recognize when you have choices, especially in situations where the media’s goals are different from you own goals.

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Summary This chapter presents a definition of media literacy as a perspective from which we expose ourselves to the media and interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter. Media literacy is not a category; instead, there are degrees of media literacy. Media literacy is also multidimensional, with development taking place cognitively, emotionally, aesthetically, and morally. Media literacy is composed of three building blocks: skills, knowledge structures, and personal locus. The skills are the tools that we use to work on information in the media messages to build strong knowledge structures. The direction and drive to do this work lies in one’s personal locus. People who are highly media literate are able to see much more in a given message. They are more aware of the levels of meaning. This enhances understanding. They are more in charge of programming their own mental codes. This enhances control. They are much more likely to get what they want from the messages. This enhances appreciation. Thus, people operating at higher levels of media literacy fulfill the goals of higher understanding, control, and appreciation. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Buckingham, D. (2003). Media education: Literacy, learning, and contemporary culture. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. (232 pages) This survey of the field of media education focuses attention on key debates and controversies then lays out some guidelines for the future. Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Weigel, M., & Clinton, K. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (128 pages) Funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, this book focuses on the skills that are most important for dealing with the new media culture, which is characterized by interactive media, making it possible for people to participate in society in ways not available before. Mackey, M. (2007). Literacies across media: Playing the text (2nd ed.). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (224 pages) This book describes an 18-month project that was designed to study how a group of boys and girls, aged 10 to 14, made sense of narratives in a variety of formats, including print, electronic book, video, DVD, computer game, and CDROM. The author’s analyses reveal how those children developed strategies for interpreting narratives through encounters with a diverse range of texts and media. Potter, W. J. (2015). The skills of media literacy. Santa Barbara, CA: Knowledge Assets. (224 pages, including references and glossary) This book presents a detailed description of the seven essential skills of media literacy along with exercises to help readers develop those skills. Silverblatt, A. (2014). Media literacy: Keys to interpreting media messages (4th ed.). Westport, CT: Praeger. (340 pages, including index) This mass media book presents some chapters with information about what is needed as far as knowledge about the media. It has the feel of a textbook for an introductory-level course with its use of photographs and exercises for students to undertake. Tyner, K. (Ed.). (2010). Media literacy: New agendas in communication. New York, NY: Routledge. (243 pages with index) The 10 chapters in this edited volume deal with how media literacy initiatives have taken place in the past and what they should emphasize going forward. These initiatives are organized into four contexts: communitybased settings, K–12 classrooms, higher education, and virtual environments.

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Exercise 2.1

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Assessment of Knowledge Structures About Mass Media

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Media Industries 1. Can you list the different mass media according to how old they are? Start with the oldest and continue to the newest one. 2. What does convergence mean within the media industries? 3. What are the stages that structure the development of each mass medium as an industry? 4. What are the key characteristics of the media economic game? 5. How can you use your knowledge about the development of the mass media industries and how they play the economic game to increase your level of media literacy?

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Media Audiences 1. What are the three key information processing tasks we perform when we encounter media messages? 2. What is the difference between exposure and attention? 3. In what four exposure states do we experience media messages? 4. Why have media programmers shifted their view from a mass audience to niche audiences? 5. How do media programmers identify niche audiences? 6. What are the key strategies media programmers use to attract and condition audiences? 7. How have children been treated as a special audience? 8. How should young adults also be treated as a special audience? 9. How can you use the knowledge about information processing tasks, exposure states, attention, niche audiences, and media programmers’ strategies to increase your level of media literacy?

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Media Content 1. What is the next-step reality principle? 2. In what ways are “reality” TV programs real? 3. How has the idea of “news” changed? 4. How should we go about the task of determining who should be regarded as a journalist? 5. What are the ways people use to judge the quality of news and which of these are faulty? 6. What is the general formula for media entertainment? 7. Can you articulate patterns of how the following topics are portrayed in the media: character demographics, sexual activity, violence, and health? 8. Can you explain in detail the strategies used by advertisers in designing overall campaigns as well as copy platforms? 9. What strategies do electronic gamers use to develop and market their games? 10. How does the design of cooperative experiences differ from competitive experiences on interactive electronic platforms? 11. How can you use the knowledge about the principle of next-step reality, definition of news, standards for judging quality of media messages, and the strategies used by media programmers to increase your level of media literacy?

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Media Effects 1. Explain how the four-dimensional perspective broadens the view of media effects. 2. What are the differences between baseline and fluctuation effects in the process of influence? 3. What are the differences between process and manifest effects? 4. How can you use knowledge about the four-dimensional perspective and the process of influence to increase your level of media literacy?

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Part II Audiences Chapter 3 Audience: Individual Perspective Chapter 4 Audience: Industry Perspective Chapter 5 Children as a Special Audience

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Chapter 3 Audience: Individual Perspective

Information-Processing Tasks Filtering Meaning Matching Meaning Construction Analyzing the Idea of Exposure to Media Messages Exposure and Attention Physical Exposure Perceptual Exposure Psychological Exposure Attention Exposure States Automatic Attentional Transported Self-Reflexive The Media Literacy Approach Summary Further Reading Exercise

Key Idea: In our information saturated culture, individuals are constantly processing media messages as they make decisions either consciously or automatically about filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction. They continually are making these decisions in one of four exposure states: automatic, attentional, transported, and self-reflexive.

The human brain has enormous capacity for information, but can only pay attention to a relatively small number of stimuli at a given time. Getty/David Hill

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Harry and Ann are discussing their relationship over lunch on campus. “Harry, you never pay attention to what I say!” “How can you say that? We spend almost all day together every day and you are constantly talking,” Harry replies. “I hear what you say.” “Maybe, but you don’t understand what I say.” “Yes, I do. I know a lot about you. I know the names of all your brothers and sisters, and where you went to high school, and your favorite color, and—” Ann interrupts, “Those are facts about me. They are not me! You don’t seem to know me.” “I know the meaning of every word you say. I don’t need a dictionary!” “There is more to meaning than the definitions of the words I use!”

In interpersonal conversations, we often get ourselves into trouble if we are not careful to make a distinction between literal meaning—the dictionary-type meanings we all share for common words and phrases—and the deeper meaning that resides in how we say things, which engages a more complex process. To help make sense of all this complexity, this chapter will show you that there are three generic information processing tasks—filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction—as we continuously encounter media messages in our everyday environments. Once you understand these three information-processing tasks, we will move on to the distinction between exposure and attention. Finally, the chapter will show how you can use this knowledge to increase your media literacy and thereby control these processes to a higher degree.

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Information-Processing Tasks We are constantly engaged in a series of three information-processing tasks every day. These tasks are filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction (see Table 3.1). First, we encounter a message and are faced with the task of deciding whether to filter the message out (ignore it) or filter it in (process it). If we decide to filter it in, then we must make sense of it, that is, recognize the symbols and match our learned definitions to the symbols. Next, we need to construct the meaning of the message.

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Filtering As you saw in Chapter 1, there has been a huge increase in the amount of information generated, which has led to media companies competing much more aggressively for our limited attention. While the human brain has enormous capacity for processing information, the way it functions (or at least the way we currently understand how it functions) limits our ability to pay attention to a relatively small number of stimuli at any given moment. While the human mind can take in 11 million pieces of information in an instant, our awareness is limited to only about 40 of these pieces of information at any given moment (T. D. Wilson, 2002). This means that the brain has the capacity to track a huge amount of stimuli in our environments but provides us with a very limited ability to be aware of all that activity. While our brains are constantly processing an enormous amount of stimuli from our environments, only a tiny percentage of all that stimuli makes it into our conscious awareness; the rest of the stimuli are being processed unconsciously with the use of automatic routines. The automatic routines that run in our minds are like the automatic routines that run on our computers, where this programming guides your computer through thousands of complicated tasks without continually pausing to ask you dozens of bothersome questions about how you want that program to run. To illustrate this point, think about your e-mail account. Your e-mail provider uses spam filters to screen out all those e-mails that it determines are coming from spammers. Estimates run as high as 80% of all e-mail sent each day is from spammers, each of whom regularly sends out tens of millions of e-mails each day to get people to buy things like pseudo-wonder drugs, pet rocks, and other products we don’t want. Spam filters are automatic routines that do a considerable amount of filtering for you without asking you whether you want to receive emails from various addresses. However, because you don’t see the tens of thousands of addresses that the automatic filter is using as spammers’ addresses, you don’t know whether the spam filter is blocking out some messages you might want to read. For the sake of efficiency, we don’t make the considerable effort to check the long spam address list; instead, we let the spam filter run automatically.

Table 3.1 Three Tasks of Information Processing Table 3.1 Three Tasks of Information Processing Filtering Messages

Meaning Matching To use basic

Task

To make decisions about

competencies to

which messages to filter

recognize referents and

out (ignore) and which to

locate previously

filter in (pay attention to)

learned definitions for each

To attend to only those messages that have some

Meaning Construction

To use skills in order to move beyond meaning matching and to construct meaning for oneself in order to personalize and get more out of a message

To interpret messages from more than To access previously 96

one perspective as a means of

Goal

kind of usefulness for the

learned meanings

identifying the range of meaning

person and ignore all other

efficiently

options, then choose one or synthesize

messages

Focus

Messages in the environment

across several

Referents in messages

One’s own knowledge structures

Our minds also have programmed filters that guide the processing of messages. This raises the question of who programmed those filters; that is, who decided which messages to filter out? If it was you who fully programmed this code, then the filter is automatically following only your commands. But what if some of the filtering code was programmed by someone else? If this is the case, then you have let that someone else determine what you see and what you do not get to see. Some media services do a significant amount of filtering for us. For example, when we shop for a book on Amazon, the keywords we use might generate a list of several thousand possible books, but Amazon shows us a screen of perhaps a dozen books. When we do a search for information on Google, the search might result in several million hits, but Google displays a screen with its top choices to save us from spending all day going through thousands of screens. For example, if you Google “information overload,” you will get 11 million results in.3 seconds. While this is helpful in going from 67 billion indexed pages down to 11 million pages—it still leaves us with 11 million choices. These services proclaim they are providing us with efficiency, which is true. But they are also exercising considerable control over the filtering process. And they are continually seeking ways to increase their control over those filtering processes by claiming to “personalize” our searching and shopping experiences. Let’s return to the “information overload” example where Google searched through 67 billion indexed webpages and found 11 million that mentioned that keyword. Thus Google was able to filter out more than 99.9% of all webpages in less than one third of a second. While that is very efficient, Google wants to become even more efficient in helping you with filtering. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that Google’s goal was to guess what you are interested in. In December 2009, Google changed its algorithm to personalize searches. This means that your Google searches are not guided exclusively by the keywords you use; those searches are also guided by information Google has gathered about your personal preferences (to test this, do Exercise 3.1). Then in the fall of 2010 it rolled out Google Instant, which guesses what you are searching for as you type in the keyword. Google Vice President Marissa Mayer said that the company hoped to make the search box obsolete. Google wants to guess at what you want to search for so that you won’t even need to type a keyword (Pariser, 2011).

Media search engines like Google use personal preferences to guide our searches. iStock/inkit

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Where do these companies get their information about you in order to direct your choices? They collect some of the information themselves by recording your interactions with them; they also can buy a tremendous amount information about you—all your financial transactions and your media usage, including how often you use social media, e-mail, and text as well as what you talk about. For example, Acxiom is a large marketing research firm that has a database of 96% of all Americans and half a billion people worldwide. Names of family members, their current and past addresses, how often they pay their credit card bills, whether they own a dog or a cat and its breed, whether they are right-handed or left-handed, what kinds of medication they use based on pharmacy records—a data list 1,500 items long (Pariser, 2011). These large marketing data firms collect even more information on individuals than the government. Remember the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11? The major U.S. intelligence agencies (FBI, CIA, DEA, etc.) worked around the clock to identify the terrorists and 3 days later announced that they had identified 11 of the 19 terrorists involved—names, past addresses, current and past associates. Those intelligence agencies received most of their information from Acxiom (Pariser, 2011). Internet companies employ sophisticated algorithms to churn through all the information they have about you in order to infer conclusions about what you like, then use those inferred conclusions to direct you to particular products while walling you off from other products in the name of efficient filtering. Because these powerful algorithms direct your attention to a narrow range of products and media messages, they serve to limit your experiences. And they do this without your awareness. The media create much of our filtering code for us. They do this primarily by conditioning us for repeat exposures of the messages we like. This conditioning creates and reinforces exposure habits. When we follow our exposure habits, we leave no time to explore other media or other types of messages. 98

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Box 3.1 Implications of Filtering Algorithms Imagine the following scenario. Let’s say a marketing company assembles a huge database about college students by pulling together information from Facebook pages, credit history, health history, parents’ income level, and so on. Then someone in that marketing company develops an algorithm that churns through all that data and rank orders all the college students on potential for success and economic wealth. Now, imagine that the marketing company’s algorithm ranks you at the bottom as a loser but ranks your roommates at the top as potential winners. The marketing company sells its rankings to advertisers who then send your roommates all kinds of great offers for low-interest credit cards, coupons for exciting trips, opportunities to network with successful professionals, and so on. Meanwhile, you are ignored by these advertisers because you are regarded as an undesirable target audience. Your roommates go on to live very successful and happy lives because of all the opportunities offered by advertisers who bought data that told them that your roommates were highly desirable targets. Your roommates get higher paying jobs at graduation than you because employers looked at the rankings. Your roommates go on to get bigger raises and promotions, have better health care plans, travel more and meet more interesting people, and so on. Marketers can set people off in different life paths by the opportunities they offer certain people and not others.

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Questions Do you think this is fair? Should advertisers offer the same opportunities to everyone? In a society where people’s needs are so varied and fragmented, does it make sense to expect all advertisers to spend the money necessary to send their messages to everyone when they know that many of those people will never buy their products?

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Meaning Matching Meaning matching is the process of recognizing elements (referents) in the message and accessing our memory to find the meanings we have memorized for those elements. This is a relatively automatic task. It may require a good deal of effort to learn to recognize symbols in media messages and to memorize their standard meanings, but once learned this process becomes routine. To illustrate, think back to when you first learned to read. You had to learn how to recognize words printed on a page. Then you had to memorize the meaning of each word. The first time you saw the sentence “Dick threw the ball to Jane,” it required a good deal of work to divide the sentence into words, to recall the meaning of each word, and to put it all together. With practice, you were able to perform this process more quickly and more easily. Learning to read in elementary school is essentially the process of being able to recognize a longer list of referents and to memorize their denoted meanings. Some referents in media messages were words, some were numbers, some were pictures, and some were sounds.

The relatively automatic task of meaning matching allows you to connect elements to meaning—for instance, recognizing the particular sound your cell phone makes when you’ve received a text message. iStock/ymgerman

This type of learning develops competencies. By competency, I mean that either you are able to do something 102

correctly or you are not. For example, when you see the phrase “2 + 2” you either recognize the “2” referents as particular quantities or you do not. You either recognize the “+” referent as addition or you do not. You can either perform this mathematical operation and arrive at 4 or you cannot. Working with these referents does not require, or allow for, individual interpretation and creative meaning construction. Competencies are our abilities to recognize standard referents and recall the memorized denoted meanings for those referents. If we did not have a common set of referents and shared meanings for each of these referents, communication would not be possible. Education at the elementary level is the training of the next generation to develop the basic competencies of recognizing these referents and memorizing the designated meaning for each one. When your cell phone makes a certain sound, you know that means you have received a text. You look at the screen and see a name and know which friend has sent you that text. You tap the screen at a certain icon and your text message is revealed. That message has words and emojis that convey meaning to you. In this example, the sound, name, icon, words, and emoticons are each symbols that have a specific meaning that you learned in the past and are now able to match with its learned meaning with almost no effort. This task is accomplished automatically because you have acquired those competencies.

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Box 3.2 Metaphors for How the Human Mind Works Philosophers have been speculating for millennia how the human mind works, and scientists have been conducting research tests of the human mind for perhaps a century. However, we are still in the early stages of understanding this wonderfully complex phenomenon. Thus it helps to think about the human mind metaphorically. Two popular metaphors have been clocks and clouds (Brooks, 2011). Clocks are self-contained, orderly systems that can be examined in a reductive manner; you can take apart a clock into component pieces and see how they all fit together in one and only one way. This metaphor captures what neurologists do: They focus on the parts of the human brain and how they function. Clouds, in contrast to clocks, are irregular, dynamic, and idiosyncratic. They change minute to minute and can be formed in many different ways. The essence of clouds cannot be captured in numbers or fixed structures. The cloud metaphor reflects how humanists regard the human mind. There are scholars who continue to debate which conception of the human mind is more accurate. But as you can see, both are useful ways to think about what the human mind does. When we take a broad perspective on media literacy, we can see there are times when the human mind seems to act like a clock and there are other times when it appears more as a cloud. With meaning matching tasks, the human mind acts more like a clock as it automatically clicks through the routine of recognizing symbols and accessing their meanings that are connected to the symbols in memory. With meaning construction tasks, the human mind acts more like a cloud as it makes associations in a more amorphous and constantly changing manner.

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Questions Can you think of examples in your life where your mind acted more like a clock? Can you think of examples in your life where your mind acted more like a cloud? Which metaphor better describes the way your mind works?

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Meaning Construction In contrast to meaning matching, meaning construction is a much more challenging task. It is not an automatic process but instead it requires us to think about moving beyond the standard denoted meaning and to create meaning for ourselves by using the skills of induction, deduction, grouping, and synthesis. We engage in a meaning construction process either when we have no denoted meaning for a particular message in our memory banks or when the denoted meaning does not satisfy us and we want to arrive at a different meaning. Let’s say you get a text from your friend Christopher, who has just broken up with his girlfriend Christine, and the text message says, “Chris is not happy with your help. Thanks a bunch.” This message is too ambiguous for meaning matching. For example, does the Chris in the message refer to the sender or his exgirlfriend? Is the sender being sarcastic when he says “Thanks a bunch” because he resents your interference? Or is he sincere because you helped him break up when he couldn’t do it himself? To answer these questions, you need context about your friendship with Christopher, his relationship with Christine, his intention to break up with her or not, and so on. So you need skills rather than competencies to analyze the situation, evaluate his intention, and see how this message fits into the pattern of your relationship, so synthesis is an appropriate response. Many meanings can be constructed from any media message; furthermore, there are many ways to go about constructing that meaning. Thus, we cannot learn a complete set of rules to accomplish this task. Instead, we need to be guided by our own information goals, and we need to use skills (rather than competencies) to creatively construct a path to reach our goals. For these reasons, meaning construction rarely takes place in an automatic fashion. Instead, we need to make conscious decisions when we are constructing meaning for ourselves. Also, every meaning construction task is different, so we cannot program our minds to follow the same one procedure automatically when we are confronted with a range of meaning construction tasks. Much of our processing of media messages utilizes meaning construction. There is a large body of research that clearly shows that each of us brings a considerable number of factors with us to any media message exposure, and these factors constitute a frame that we use to interpret the message. For example, Kepplinger, Geiss, and Siebert (2012) conducted a study to see how people constructed meaning in news stories. They wanted to see if the way the media presented the story influenced how viewers interpreted the events and people in those stories. The researchers found that the way the media told the story did indeed influence the respondents’ interpretation of meaning but that the meaning was also strongly influenced by the personal frames of the individual respondents. While meaning matching relies on competencies, meaning construction relies on skills. This is one of the fundamental differences between the two tasks of meaning matching and meaning construction. Competencies are categorical; that is, either you have a competency or you do not. However, skill ability is not categorical; on any given skill there is a wide range of ability. That is, some people have little ability, whereas other people have enormous ability. Also, skills are like muscles. Without practice, skills become weaker. 106

With practice and exercise, they grow stronger. When the personal locus has strong drive states for using skills, those skills have a much greater chance of developing to higher levels. The two processes of meaning matching and meaning construction do not take place independently of one another; they are intertwined. To construct meaning, we first have to recognize referents and understand the sense in which those referents are being used in the message. Thus, the meaning matching process is more fundamental, because the product of the meaning-matching process then is imported into the meaning construction process.

Research shows that how a media message such as a news story is framed, or presented, will influence how an audience interprets the message. © Guy Croft/Alamy

It’s important to avoid getting the two mixed up. Consider the example of a physics exam where the professor asks students how they could use a barometer to measure the height of a building. If the professor is treating this as a meaning matching task, then there is one sanctioned answer: Take a reading of barometric pressure at the foot of the building and again at the roof then, using a particular formula, translate the differences in readings into feet, thus computing the height of the building. But what if a student is creative and can think of other ways to use the barometer to measure the height of the building, such as what Neils Bohr did in a physics exam at the University of Copenhagen on 1905? Niels answered the question by saying that he would go up onto the roof of the building, tie a string to the barometer, lower the barometer to the group, and then measure how long the string was. The professor gave him an F. Niels went to talk to the professor and said there were several other answers: (1) throw the barometer off the roof, count the number of seconds it took to 107

hit the ground, then calculate the distance; (2) measure the length of the shadow of the barometer and the building then calculate the ratio. While all of these alternative methods could yield an accurate measure of the height of the building, the professor did not care, because he was looking for one particular answer that required matching the problem to the one solution he taught in his physics class. Niels Bohr took the F that day but continued to use his creative mind to become a very successful physicist, winning the Nobel prize in physics in 1922 for his contributions to atomic structure and quantum mechanics.

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Compare & Contrast

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Meaning Matching and Meaning Construction Compare: meaning matching and meaning construction are the same in the following ways: Both are essential tasks in the process of information processing. Both are new television series that substantially copy the formulas used by a previously successful television series Contrast: meaning matching and meaning construction are different in the following ways: Meaning matching is largely an automatic process relying on competencies where media symbols are efficiently matched with previously learned meanings. Meaning construction is a process requiring a person’s attention and engagement of cognitive processes involving skills where people move beyond simply accepting the previously learned meaning of symbols and infer (or create) fresh meanings that fit better with the context of the present situation and/or the person’s own needs for meaning.

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Analyzing the Idea of Exposure to Media Messages In everyday language, the terms exposure and attention are often used synonymously. However, now that you have seen that we are exposed to a great number of media messages without paying attention to them, it is important to highlight the difference in meaning across these two terms.

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Exposure and Attention As we clarify the difference between exposure and attention, it is helpful to analyze the idea of exposure and see that there are several kinds. Let’s look at a sequence of three types of exposure: physical exposure, perceptual exposure, and psychological exposure to media messages.

Physical Exposure The most foundational criterion for exposure is physical presence. A person must experience some proximity to a message in order for exposure to take place. Physical exposure means that the message and the person occupy the same physical space for some period of time. Thus space and time are regarded as barriers to exposure. If a magazine is lying face-up on a table in a room and Harry walks through that room, Harry is physically exposed to messages on the cover of the magazine but not to any of the messages inside the magazine unless Harry picks it up and flips through the pages. Also, if Harry does not walk through that room when the magazine is on the table, there is no physical exposure to the messages on the cover of the magazine. Likewise, if a TV is turned on in the lunch room during the noon hour then is turned off at 1 p.m., anyone who walks through that room after 1 p.m. is not physically exposed to TV messages. Physical proximity is a necessary condition for media exposure, but it is not a sufficient condition. A second necessary condition is perceptual exposure.

Perceptual Exposure The perceptual consideration refers to a human’s ability to receive appropriate sensory input through the visual and auditory senses. We are constantly immersed in a wide range of stimulus elements, but we perceive only a small fraction of these elements because of the limits on our sense organs and processing ability. We live in a world where information is encoding on each of billions of different frequencies along the electromagnetic spectrum. One of these frequencies is called light and our eyes are sensitive to perceive some of that information on that frequency. At other frequencies (e.g., television signals, radio signals, cell phone signals) we cannot hear that encoded information, but we have invented devices to translate that information into a form where it occurs within our ability to perceive it (e.g., radio receivers translate that information into sound waves within our range of hearing).

Three types of exposure—physical, perceptual, and psychological— are needed before we pay attention to a media message. iStock/PeopleImages

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The perceptual criterion, however, has a feature beyond simple sensory reception; we must also consider the sensory input–brain connection. Frequently, when the sensory input gets to the brain, it must be transformed into something that we can understand. For example, when we watch a movie in a theater, we are exposed to individual static images projected at about 24 images per second. But humans cannot process 24 individual images per second in a conscious manner; instead, those individual images run together and appear as continuous motion. Also with film projection, there is a brief time between each of those 24 individual images every second when the screen is blank, but the eye-brain connection is not quick enough to process the blanks, so we do not see those blanks as blanks; instead we see only smooth motion. If the projection rate of images were to slow down to under 10 images per second, we would begin to see a flutter; that is, our brains would begin to see the blanks, because the replacement of still images is slow enough for the eye-brain connection to begin processing them. Stimuli that are outside the boundaries of human perception are called subliminal. Subliminal messages can leave no psychological trace because they cannot be physically perceived; that is, humans lack the sensory organs to take in stimuli and/or the hard wiring in the brain to be sensitive to them. There is a widespread misconception that the media put people at risk for “subliminal communication.” This belief indicates a confusion between subliminal and subconscious. There is an important distinction that needs to be made between subliminal and subconscious, because they are two very different things and they have two very different implications for exposure. Subliminal refers to being outside a human’s ability to sense or perceive, thus it is always regarded as non-exposure. However, once media stimuli cross over the subliminal line and are able to be sensed and perceived by humans, it is regarded as exposure. However, this does not mean that all exposure is conscious, and this brings us to the third criterion in our definition: psychological. 113

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Box 3.3 Limits of Human Perceptual Ability Seeing: With the human eye, we have three kinds of cones in the retinas at the back of our eyes. One cone recognizes red, one blue, and one green. Thus, the human eye perceives three primary colors, and every color we see is a combination of these three. Some animals, such as skate fish, have no cones, so they experience the world only in white and black (presence of light and absence of light). Some birds and insects have up to six types of color receptors (Storr, 2014), so they can perceive much more of a range of color than we can. Hearing: Human sensitivity to sound frequency extends from around 16 Hz to 20,000 Hz, but sounds are heard best when they are between 1,000 Hz and 4,000 Hz (Metallinos, 1996; Plack, 2005). A dog whistle is pitched at a frequency higher than 20,000 Hz, so humans cannot perceive that sound; that is, it is outside the range of human sensitivity to sounds. Bats have very poor sight compared to humans, but their hearing is much more developed, so they live in a world of sounds. Smells: Many animals have a much more sensitive perceptual ability to experience a wider range of smells. For example, dogs have a much better sense of smell than do humans, so they live in a world of smells much more than do humans.

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Questions Can you think of other ways in which your human senses are better than those of other animals? Can you think of other ways in which your human senses are more limited than those of other animals?

Psychological Exposure In order for psychological exposure to occur, there must be some trace element created in a person’s mind. This element can be an image, a sound, an emotion, a pattern, and so on. It can last for a brief time (several seconds in short-term memory then cleared out) or a lifetime (when cataloged into long-term memory). It can enter the mind consciously (often called the central route), where people are fully aware of the elements in the exposure, or it can enter the mind unconsciously (often called the peripheral route), where people are unaware that elements are entering their minds (see Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Thus there is a great variety of elements that potentially can meet this criterion for psychological exposure. The challenge then becomes organizing all these elements into meaningful sets and explaining how different kinds of elements are experienced by the individual and how they are processed as information.

Attention In order for attention to occur, a person must first clear all three of the exposure hurdles described above: physical, perceptual, and psychological exposure. However, these three things alone do not guarantee attention; something else must also occur. That something else is conscious awareness of the media message. As you can now see, there are a lot of things that have to happen in order for us to “pay attention” to a media message. For this reason, it is rare for a media message to achieve attention. Harold Pashler (1998), who wrote The Psychology of Attention, explains that at any given moment, awareness encompasses only a tiny proportion of the stimuli impinging on a person’s sensory systems. Furthermore, while we are paying attention to one thing, our attention can be distracted away to another thing. Pashler says there are times when “attention is directed or grabbed without any voluntary choice having taken place, even against strong wishes to the contrary” (p. 3). Thus when you are paying attention to a conversation with your roommate, your attention can be grabbed by a sound or an image that pops up on your computer screen and you shift your attention away from your roommate to the screen.

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Exposure States Thus far I have made a distinction between automatic processing and paying attention to particular media messages. This suggests two exposure states, but to understand better the experience of media exposure, we need to consider two additional exposure states. Thus, the four media literacy exposure states are automatic, attentional, transported, and self-reflexive. Each of these states is a qualitatively different experience for the audience member. By this I mean that these four are not arrayed along a single continuum where they are distinguished simply by the degree of attention. Instead, crossing the line from one state to another results in a qualitatively different experience with the message.

Automatic In the automatic state of exposure, people are in environments where they are exposed to media messages but they are not aware of those messages; that is, their mind is on automatic pilot as it filters out all the messages in the environment. This screening out continues automatically with no effort until some element in a message breaks through people’s default screen and captures their attention. In the automatic processing state, message elements are physically perceived but processed automatically in an unconscious manner. This exposure state resides above the threshold of human sense perception but below the threshold of conscious awareness. The person is in a perceptual flow that continues until an interruption stops the exposure or “bumps” the person’s perceptual processing into a different state of exposure or until the media message moves outside of a person’s physical or perceptual ability to be exposed to it. In the automatic state, people can look active to outside observers, but those people are not thinking about what they are doing. A person in the automatic state can be clicking through a series of websites without paying attention to the messages on those sites. While it may look to an observer that the person is actively searching the web, the person may be just randomly clicking through webpages while thinking about something else. Even when there is evidence of exposure behavior, this does not necessarily mean that people’s minds are engaged and that they are “making” decisions. Rather the decisions are happening to them automatically. Exposure to much of the media is in the automatic state. People have no conscious awareness of the exposure when it is taking place, nor do they have a recollection of many of the details in the experience if they are asked about it later. This is especially the case when people are multitasking. Someone might be listening to music, surfing the web, and talking to a friend on the phone; while the person may be paying attention to the phone conversation, he is in an automatic exposure state with regard to the music and the web pages. If his attention suddenly shifts to an image on a webpage, then he slips into the automatic state with the phone conversation and no longer pays attention to what his friends is saying. Multitasking severely reduces a person’s cognitive advantages (i.e., ability to concentrate on a particular message) but enhances emotional gratifications (i.e., receiving pleasure from more than one thing at a time; Wang & Tchernev, 2012).

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Attentional Attentional exposure refers to people being aware of the messages and actively interacting with the elements in the messages. This does not mean they must have a high level of concentration, although that is possible. The key is conscious awareness of the messages during exposures. Within the attentional state there is a range of attention depending on how much of a person’s mental resources one devotes to the exposure. At minimum, the person must be aware of the message and consciously track it, but there is a fair degree of elasticity in the degree of concentration, which can range from partial to quite extensive processing depending on the number of elements handled and the depth of analysis employed.

Transported When people are in the attentional state but then are pulled into the message so strongly that they lose awareness of being apart from the message, they cross over into the transported state. In the transported state, audience members lose their sense of separateness from the message; that is, they are swept away with the message, enter the world of the message, and lose track of their own social world surroundings. For example, when watching a movie in a theater, we often get so caught up in the action that we feel we are involved with that action. We experience the same intense emotions as the characters do. We lose the sense that we are in a theater. Our concentration level is so high that we lose touch with our real-world environment. We lose track of real time. Instead we experience narrative time; that is, we feel time pass like the characters feel time pass. This transported state also typically occurs when people are playing video and computer games.

In the transported state people are pulled into the message so strongly that they lose their sense of separateness from the message. iStock/by_nicholas

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The transported state is not simply the high end of the attentional state. Instead, the transported state is qualitatively different than the attentional state. While attention is very high in the transported state, the attention is also very narrow; that is, people have tunnel vision and focus on the media message in a way that eliminates the barrier between them and the message. People are swept away and “enter” the message. In this sense, it is the opposite of the automatic state, where people stay grounded in their social world and are unaware of the media messages in their perceptual environment; in the transported exposure state, people enter the media message and lose track of their social world.

Self-Reflexive In the self-reflexive state, people are hyper-aware of the message and of their processing of the message. It is as if they are sitting on their shoulder and monitoring their own reactions as they experience the message. This represents the fullest degree of awareness; that is, people are aware of the media message, their own social world, and their position in the social world while they process the media message. In the self-reflexive exposure state, the viewer exercises the greatest control over perceptions by reflecting on questions such as these: Why am I exposing myself to this message? What am I getting out of this exposure and why? Why am I making these interpretations of meaning? Not only is there analysis, but there is meta-analysis. This means that the person is not only analyzing the media message; she is also analyzing her analysis of the media message. While the self-reflexive and transported states might appear similar in that they are characterized by high involvement by audience members, the two exposure states are very different. In the transported state, people are highly involved emotionally and they lose themselves in the action. In contrast, the self-reflexive state is

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characterized by people being highly involved cognitively and very much aware of themselves as they analytically process the exposure messages.

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The Media Literacy Approach The ideas presented in this chapter will help you understand how you can increase your media literacy. That is, you can get better at making decisions about filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction. This does not mean that you must encounter all media messages in a state of attention or self-reflexivity in order to make better decisions; instead, you can alter your decision algorithms so that when they run in an automatic state or transported state they will deliver better choices. As for the filtering task, you can periodically examine your media exposure habits and ask yourself why you are spending time with particular media and particular messages while ignoring others. If you have good reasons for your habits, then it is likely that those filtering habits are helping you achieve your own goals. But if you are puzzled by some of your habits, it is time to think about changing those habits to see if your needs can be met better through exposure to different media and different kinds of messages. As for meaning matching, you can periodically check some of the meanings you have memorized. Perhaps you have acquired some of those meanings by simply memorizing the opinions of so-called experts, such as newscasters, pundits, cultural critics, and others. Perhaps the experts were later found to be wrong, yet you still hold onto a memorized opinion that is now faulty. Or perhaps you should not have memorized an expert’s opinion but instead constructed your own opinion that fits better with your own personal beliefs and experiences. It is likely that your large set of memorized meanings contains elements that are out of date, are causing friction with what you now believe, or are faulty in some way. If you don’t identify them and clear them out of your “mental dictionary,” you will automatically continue to use those meanings, and this can take you further away from your goals. As for meaning construction, you can identify areas where decisions are most important in your life. As you use the media messages to gather more information, ask yourself if you are simply accepting that information as is or transforming it to fit into your needs and goals. The more you work on transforming the raw material of information into knowledge that helps achieve your own goals, the more your meaning construction process will operate under your control. The meaning of media messages is not always the way it might seem on the surface. There are often many layers of meanings. The more you are aware of the layers of meaning in messages, the more you can appreciate all the options for meaning construction that are available. And when you recognize multiple options for meaning construction, you can exercise more control over selecting the meanings that are most useful to you. Some people perform these information-processing tasks better than others and are therefore more media literate than other people. Increasing one’s level of media literacy requires a strong personal locus. We need to be aware of our personal goals and needs, then exert the drive energy to take control of our meanings. We also need tools to execute our plans. Those tools are competencies and skills. Competencies are the tools people have acquired to help them interact with the media and to access information in the messages. Competencies are learned early in life, then applied automatically. Competencies are categorical; that is, either 121

people are able to do something or they are not able. For example, either people know how to recognize a word and match its meaning to a memorized meaning or they do not. However, having competencies does not make people media literate, but lacking these competencies prevents people from being media literate because this deficiency prevents them from accessing particular kinds of information. For example, people who do not have a basic reading competency cannot access printed material. This will greatly limit what they can build into their knowledge structures. This will also suppress the drive states in the personal locus; people who cannot read will have very low motivation to expose themselves to printed information. In addition to competencies, people need a set of media literacy skills, especially with the task of meaning construction. Skill development is what can make a large difference in people moving from lower to higher levels of media literacy. People who have weak skills will not be able to do much with the information they encounter. For example, if their skill of analysis is weak, they will not be able to dig out the good information from media messages. If their skill of evaluation is weak, they will not be able to judge the quality or usefulness of information well, so they cannot tell which information is good and which is faulty. If their skills of grouping induction are weak, they will not be able to see patterns across different messages. If their skills of abstraction are weak, they will struggle to see the “big picture” in a message. And if their skills of deduction and synthesis are weak, they will have great difficulty incorporating new information into their knowledge structures. They will organize information poorly, thus creating weak and faulty knowledge structures. In the worst case, people with weak skills will try to avoid thinking about information altogether and become passive; as a consequence, the active information providers (such as advertisers, entertainers, and news workers) will increase their power as the constructors of people’s knowledge structures and will take control of how people see the world by altering their beliefs and giving people faulty standards that they then use to create their attitudes. Skills and competencies work together in a continual cyclical process. With certain information-processing tasks, some skills or competencies may be more important than others. For example, with the task of filtering, the skills of analysis and evaluation are most important. With the task of meaning matching, the competencies are most important. And with the task of meaning construction, the skills of grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis, and abstracting are most important. However, the value of the individual skills and competencies varies by particular challenges presented by different types of messages.

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Summary As we encounter the flood of media message each day, our brains engage in three interlocking informationprocessing tasks of filtering, meaning matching, and meaning construction. The task of filtering is performed automatically where almost all messages are processed unconsciously and only a very few break through into consciousness. The meaning matching task is also performed unconsciously, like a machine, where message stimuli (such as words, sounds, and images) are matched with recalled meanings. In contrast, the meaning construction task requires a conscious process using skills to create novel meanings for the messages we encounter. Because so much of the information processing takes place automatically, we need to periodically examine the mental codes that govern that processing to determine if they are operating in our best interests. It is important to analyze our media habits periodically so that we can identify which habits are working to achieve our goals and which are diverting our time and attention away into wasteful or harmful practices. Once we can make this distinction clearly, we can reprogram our automatic codes so that when we return to the state of automaticity and our minds make thousands of decisions while on automatic pilot, those decisions will make us smarter, happier, and more productive. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Brooks, D. (2011). The social animal: The hidden sources of love, character, and achievement. New York, NY: Random House. (424 including index and endnotes) This is an easy-to-read book about the human brain. It presents a lot of interesting information about what is known, and what scientists think they now know, about this complex organ. Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: How the new personalized web is changing what we read and how we think. New York, NY: Penguin Books. (294 pages with index and endnotes) In this fascinating book, Pariser provides many examples of how the mass media are making filtering decisions for you. Potter, W. J. (2005). Becoming a strategic thinker: Developing skills for success. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice-Hall. (183 with index) In this book I show that success in higher education is based on how well students have mastered eight skills. Seven of these skills are also key to developing higher levels of media literacy. This book presents lots of examples and exercises for each skill. Storr, W. (2014). The unpersuadables: Adventures with the enemies of science. New York, NY: Overlook Press. (355 pages including index and endnotes) Storr is a journalist who has interviewed people who hold beliefs at odds with scientific evidence (creationists, Holocaust deniers, etc.) to find out why they hold their beliefs. He concludes that all of human reasoning and knowledge is based on stories that we tell ourselves and that it is too psychologically troubling to change our stories, so we deny all those versions of the truth that do not conform to what we believe.

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Exercise 3.1 Conduct a Google Search to Observe the Result of Personalized Searches 1. Get together with some friends in a group. While this exercise can be performed with as few as two people, it works better with a larger number. Also, this exercise works better when the group is composed of people with a wide divergence of interests. 2. Brainstorm a list of searches. The list of searches should be specific; that is, they should refer to specific interests and hobbies of the different people in the group. 3. Develop a list of keywords for the searches. Try to use words that have more than one meaning. For example, the word fish could refer to the action of trying to catch food from a boat, searching for information, the victim in a con game, and so on. The word green could refer to a color, a person who is new at something, a person’s last name, and so on. 4. Conduct the searches simultaneously on Google. Each person should be connected to the Internet on his or her own device (laptop, notebook, smartphone, etc.), be on the Google search page, and enter the exact same keyword at the same time. 5. Analyze the results of each search. Notice differences in time of search, number of hits, and sites ranked highest. Can you explain the differences in search results by the personal characteristics of the different people who conducted the searches? 6. Repeat the process above with relatively general terms, such as news, clothing, advertising, reality, effect. Analyze the results of each search on a general term. Are there as many differences across people when you use a general term compared to when you use a specific term?

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Chapter 4 Audience: Industry Perspective

Shift From Mass to Niche Perspective on Audience What Is a Mass Audience? Rejection of the Idea of Mass Audience The Idea of Niche Audience Identifying Niches Geographic Segmentation Demographic Segmentation Social Class Segmentation Geodemographic Segmentation Psychographic Segmentation Twelve American Lifestyles VALS Typology Attracting Audiences Appeal to Existing Needs and Interests Cross-Media and Cross-Vehicle Promotion Conditioning Audiences Summary Further Reading Exercises

Key Idea: The mass media segment the general population into marketing niches then construct niche audiences by creating special content to attract people in each niche so those audiences can be rented to advertisers.

Actress Sophie Turner and writer George R.R. Martin from HBO’s Game of Thrones at the 2014 San Diego Comic Con, one example of a niche media audience. Chris Frawley/Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc./ Getty Image

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Alan and Jean were having coffee when Alan started to complain, “I’m starting to feel old these days.” “Oh, Alan, don’t be ridiculous. You’re not old. You still have all your hair and it hasn’t even started to turn gray. You don’t even need to wear glasses yet.” “I know that, but I still am feeling old.” “Are you starting to have mysterious aches and pains?” “No. I feel fine.” “Is it hard for you to wake up in the morning and have enough energy to get through the day?” “No. I still have lots of energy.” Jean was frustrated, “I don’t get it. Why are you feeling old?” “Well, it’s my favorite shows on television.” “Are they being canceled?” “No, it’s not that. It’s the ads in my shows. All the ads are for old people products like Geritol, denture cream, electric wheel chairs, retirement cruises, stuff like that!” “Is that all that’s bothering you?” Jean replied, feeling relieved. “That’s no big deal. You can easily fix that. I had that same feeling last year and all I needed to do was watch other TV shows.” “What shows?” “There are lots of shows with ads for cheap trucks, beer, and fast food.” “Watching those shows helped you feel young again?” “Yes, it did. I no longer think about whether I have enough health insurance when I’m retired and whether I should strap on a diaper when I go to bed.” “Like, that is so awesome, dude.” Alan was already feeling younger.

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“Of course, there is one problem with this,” said Jean. “The TV shows you have to watch seem so juvenile and silly.”

The mass media construct audiences so they can rent those audiences out to advertisers. In constructing those audiences, the media focus on particular niches where they can provide content that serves a need not already being met. They attract particular kinds of people into those audiences then condition them for repeat exposures. In this chapter, we will examine these strategies of audience attraction and conditioning. But first, we need to examine the more fundamental issue about how the mass media have changed their perspective on the audience as being a mass to being a wide variety of smaller niche audiences.

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Shift From Mass to Niche Perspective on Audience Media programmers no longer think of the audience as a large general mass of all people. Now they think of audiences as many niches of smaller specialized sets of people as defined by their particular interests.

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What Is a Mass Audience? Until fairly recently, many media programmers and researchers believed there was something called a “mass” audience for the media. The term mass communication came into use about a century ago, when early social philosophers posited that newspapers, magazines, and books communicated their ideas to all audience members in roughly the same way. It was assumed that every person in the entire population was pretty much the same as far as his or her needs for information and entertainment and that a given media message would affect everyone the same way. Thus, the term mass was used to refer to a certain type of audience—one that was composed of all individuals who shared the same needs—more so than an audience that was large. Starting with the industrial revolution in the mid-1800s, the United States and Western European countries were regarded as having mass societies. Because these countries were heavily industrialized, it was believed that this technological progress had shaped the lives of people. Less industrialized countries did not have mass societies because people there were tightly integrated into social networks in which they interacted continually with others on a daily basis. So the United States was regarded as having a mass society and India was not, even though the population of India was much larger than that of the United States. When the term mass communication was coined in the early 20th century, sociologists believed that the industrial revolution had created a mass society; that is, while factories were produced standardized products, they also were standardizing society. They believed that the industrialization of work, where most people labored in factories or rigid 9-to-5 jobs, had served to turn people into parts of a machine in a mass society that had four characteristics (Blumer, 1946). First, although society was heterogeneous (i.e., composed of everyone regardless of gender, ethnic background, or any other characteristic), everyone had been transformed into having one lifestyle. Second, the individuals in a mass society were anonymous to media businesses and advertisers. The message designers didn’t know the names of anyone in the audience—nor did they care to— because the designers regarded everyone to be the same and interchangeable. Third, there was no interaction among the members in the audience. People didn’t talk to each other about the media messages, so the messages did not get modified in conversations. Instead, those messages had a direct effect on each person in a uniform manner. And fourth, the mass audience had no social organization, no body of custom and tradition, no established set of rules or rituals, no organized group of sentiments, and no structure or status roles. Because it was believed that communication did take place in a mass-like fashion, it was assumed that each media message reached everyone in the same way and was processed by everyone in the same manner. It was also believed that the processing itself was very simple; that is, people were vulnerable and had no psychological defenses against messages because they did not discuss messages with other people. As evidence for this position, social critics pointed to the way that Adolf Hitler used the mass medium of radio in the 1930s to mobilize the German population to support him. Kate Smith’s radio telethons for war bonds, in which she raised millions of dollars, were also offered as evidence that people were highly susceptible to media messages. Another often-cited example of the public’s seeming lack of defense against media messages is provided by the widespread reaction to Orson Welles’s 1939 Mercury Theater presentation of War of the Worlds, which was a fictional radio play presented as if it were a real newscast. Initial reports of 130

listener reactions to the radio play indicated that everyone was panicked by the belief that Martians were landing in New Jersey. Sociologists of the 1930s and 1940s became vocal in their warnings about the dangers of mass communication. However, a more careful analysis of the three examples mentioned revealed that most people were not affected by those messages (Cantril, 1947). Furthermore, it was later shown that the people who were affected were not all affected in the same manner, nor did they all react in the same way. Thus, the idea of mass audience and its supporting belief that all audience members reacted to the messages in the same way started breaking down.

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Rejection of the Idea of Mass Audience By the 1950s, it became apparent to many scholars that the assumption of the audience as a “mass” was incorrect. Friedson (1953) was the first to criticize this view of the audience. He argued that people attended movies, listened to the radio, and watched television within an interpersonal context. Discussions of media material frequently took place before, during, and after exposure. He acknowledged that there was a welldeveloped web of organized social relationships that existed among audience members. This social environment continually influenced what audience members exposed themselves to and how messages affected them. Media behavior was merely a part of their more general social behavior. Friedson warned that “the concept of mass is not accurately applicable to the audience” (p. 316). Since Friedson made this point, many other researchers have supported this position (Bauer & Bauer, 1960). Today, the term mass communication is still used, but there is no evidence to support the belief in a mass audience. Instead, there are many audiences, some with structures and leadership and others without these characteristics. While people may be isolated from one another across niches, they use the media to communicate a lot with people within their niches or networks. Also, it is very rare for a media event to attract everyone. Even with events such as the Super Bowl, less than half of all Americans watch. And more important, the people who do watch the Super Bowl do not all experience the same thing. Some viewers are elated as their team is winning, others are depressed as their team is losing, some are happy that there is a reason to party, and others have no idea which teams are playing the game. There is little common experience. Also, during the viewing, people talk to each other and help each other interpret events.

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The Idea of Niche Audience Mass media programmers and product marketers long ago abandoned the idea of mass audience. They know that it is foolhardy to attempt to sell a particular product, service, or media message to everyone. Instead, media programmers construct special kinds of messages to appeal to different kinds of people: niche audiences. They send those messages out in their media channels, hoping to attract as many of those targeted people as possible. Once they have attracted them, they rent that audience’s attention out to advertisers, who want to get their persuasive messages in front of those targets in order to condition them to buy their products and services. Thus, media programmers are in the business of constructing niche audiences. For example, if a website designer wants to attract an upscale, highly educated, professional audience, the designer must identify an interest these people would have, for example, an interest in golf. The web designer would then need to create content that would satisfy a need that these people have that is not already being met by other websites, cable TV networks, magazines, and books. The web designer must then find out where this potential audience is spending its time with the media and put ads in those media messages to attract those people to the newly designed website on golf. Once the website starts attracting these people, a sales staff will sell access to this audience to certain advertisers, such as luxury cars dealers, jewelers, travel agencies, and stores that sell golf equipment.

Media programmers have shifted attention away from the large anonymous mass audience (left) toward more targeted and individualized niche audiences (right). iStock/Maxiphoto iStock/bo1982

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Each person is a member of many different niche audiences. You are a member of a local community that the local newspaper, radio stations, and cable TV franchise targets. You are a member of virtual communities when you get on the Internet, communities that quickly form and may last for only one evening. You are a member of certain hobby groups that are targeted by certain websites and magazines, although other members of your audience are spread out all over the world and will never meet you in person.

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Compare & Contrast

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Mass Audience and Niche Audience Compare: mass audience and niche audience are the same in the following ways: Both are conceptions of the audience for mass media messages. Both are used by marketers to build their strategies for attracting audiences, holding their attention, and conditioning them for repeated exposures. Contrast: mass audience and niche audience are different in the following ways: Mass audience is based on an industrial-type conceptualization where the mass media are viewed as a factory producing standardized products for a mass of people who are heterogeneous (includes everyone), anonymous, isolated from one another, and without social organization. The niche audience is conceptualized as a relatively small number of people who all share some interest (hobby, lifestyle choice, particular need); marketers view the people within a niche audience as homogenous (all share the same interest), personal, and members of a social network where they continually interact with one another as they recommend media messages and products to one another.

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Identifying Niches A major challenge for mass media programmers is to identify useful niches. In order to meet this challenge, they begin by trying to divide the total population into meaningful segments. Then they select the segments— niches—of interest to them and develop messages to try to attract people in those niches. Over the years, audience segmentation schemes have become more complex in an effort to generate more precise groupings. This is illustrated by showing the development of thinking over five types of segmentation methods: geographic, demographic, social class, geodemographic, and psychographic.

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Geographic Segmentation This type of segmentation scheme is most important to newspapers as well as broadcast radio and local television where there are geographical boundaries to their coverage areas. But it has also been useful to other media in thinking about getting their messages out to certain regions of the country. This is the oldest form of segmentation. A company would begin a business in a certain locale and produce products that the people in that locale wanted. Because of limits on distribution, that company would do business only in that one area. If that company wanted to expand, it would move out from its home locale to other places in the region where the product met a need. If there was a nationwide need, then the company could expand into national distribution, which many companies did, and thus geographic segmentation has become less useful.

Geodemographic consumer segmentation explains why neighborhoods tend to be homogeneous, and that people will nagivate to the neighborhoods that most align with their own characteristics. iStock/EXTREME-PHOTOGRAPHER iStock/AHMCPHERSON

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Demographic Segmentation Demographics focus on the relatively enduring characteristics about each person, such as gender, ethnic background, age, income, and education. These are fairly stable characteristics and have been quite useful in classifying us into meaningful audience segments. Although people can change their status on some of these (such as education and income), such change requires a great deal of effort and takes some time to evolve. Like with geographic segmentation, the usefulness of demographics as an audience segmentation device has been diminishing. Decades ago, when adult women typically stayed home and raised children, it made sense to focus the marketing of household and child care products on women only. But now that there are so many single-parent households and that the number of women in the workforce is about the same as men, gender has lost its value as a way of identifying a target market for most marketing campaigns. Ethnicity also used to be a stronger demographic segmenter than it is today as the range of income, education, political views, and cultural needs is much greater within any ethnic group than it is across ethnic groups. With the tremendous growth of credit, household income has not been as useful a segmenter. Educational level is also less useful. Sixty years ago, having a college degree put you in an elite—the top 5% of the population. But now, over 20% of American adults have at least one college degree, and another 20% have earned some college credit. While demographics are still valuable as a segmenter for some products and some media messages, other segmentation schemes are required for most products and media messages.

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Social Class Segmentation We could think of social class solely in terms of household income level, but then social class would mean the same thing as the demographic of income. Why would we need both types of segmentation schemes if they put the same people into the same groups? Instead, social class is a mix of characteristics. One of those characteristics is income, but psychological characteristics are also part of the mix. For example, being in the lower class, of course, means a low income. But you as a college student have a fairly low income. Do you consider yourself lower class? No, obviously there is more to the definition; that something more is concerned with a person’s outlook on life. Being in the lower class means being governed by the psychological perspective that what happens in life is not under your control. Lower class people feel that they were born into a situation with not much opportunity and that they must struggle to maintain their existence. Because fate has put them in this situation, all they can do is try to make the best of it when they can. Therefore, when they get a windfall of money, they want to have as much fun as they can before someone takes it away from them. There is no point in saving for a tomorrow that will never come. Being middle class means holding the value that it is good to put off immediate pleasures for more important longer term goals; that is, you are willing to make sacrifices today in order to make investments in your future. The fact that you are in college is a good indication that you hold a middle-class perspective. You believe that it is a good idea to make economic, time, and lifestyle sacrifices for 4 years now so that later your college degree will allow you to receive much larger rewards. You believe that your current actions influence your future. You believe that you control your fate, not the other way around. Being upper class does not mean simply having more money; it means being able to control more resources— yours and those of others. It means the ability to raise large sums and wield a high degree of power.

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Geodemographic Segmentation A relatively recent innovation in consumer segmentation is geodemographic, which is a blend of geographic and demographic segmentation. It is based on the assumption that we choose to live in neighborhoods where other people are like us. So neighborhoods tend to be homogeneous on important characteristics, and these characteristics are very different across neighborhoods. One example of geodemographic segmentation is the PRIZM scheme, which was developed by the Claritas Corporation in 1974. PRIZM is based on a complex analysis of the U.S. census data. It began with the 35,000 ZIP code neighborhoods and concluded that there were 40 different kinds of neighborhoods in the United States. It gave the clusters memorable (and trademarked) nicknames such as “sun belt singles” (which are southern suburban areas populated by young professionals), “Norma Rae-ville” (named after the movie about a working-class woman who unionized factory employees),“Marlboro country” (evoking a western rural area with rugged men on horses),“furs and station wagons” (typified by new money living in expensive new neighborhoods), and “hardscrabble” (which represents areas in the Ozark mountains, Dakota badlands, and south Texas border).

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Psychographic Segmentation Psychographics is the current cutting edge of segmentation schemes. It is not limited to one or two characteristics of people but uses a wide variety of variables to create its segments. Typically, a psychographic segmentation scheme will use demographics, lifestyle, and product usage variables in segmenting consumers. There are many examples of psychographic segmentation. Two stand out as being very influential.

Twelve American Lifestyles William Wells, director of advertising research at Needham, Harper & Steers in Chicago, developed the 12 American lifestyles that include Joe the factory worker and his wife Judy, Phyllis the career woman and her liberated husband Dale, Thelma the contented homemaker, and Harry the cigar-chomping middle-aged salesman. Each of these creations represents a different lifestyle. For example, Joe is a lower-middle-class male in his 30s who makes an hourly wage doing semiskilled work. He watches a lot of television, especially sports and action/adventure programs; he rarely reads. He drives a pickup truck and knows a lot about automotive parts and accessories. In contrast, Phyllis is a career woman in her 30s with a graduate degree. She reads a lot, and when she watches television, it is usually news or a good movie. She likes fine food, dining out, and travel.

Psychographic segmentation looks at multiple characteristics of a person’s lifestyle to develop the segmentations. iStock/-OxfordiStock/People Images

VALS Typology VALS was developed at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) by Arnold Mitchell. After monitoring social, economic, and political trends during the 1960s and 1970s, Mitchell constructed an 85-page measurement instrument that asked questions ranging from people’s sexual habits to what brand of margarine they ate. He had 1,635 people fill out the questionnaire, and the answers became the database for his book Nine American Lifestyles, published in 1980. In the book, Mitchell argued that people’s values strongly influence their spending patterns and media behaviors. So if we know which value group a person identifies with, we can 143

predict a great deal about the products and services he or she will want. For example, one of the groups is called Experientials. The people in this value grouping like to try new and different things to see what they are like. They like to travel. They are early users of new types of products. And they are constantly looking for something different. The VALS typology has made SRI very successful, with an income of more than $200 million per year. By the mid-1980s, SRI had 130 VALS clients, including the major TV networks, major ad agencies, major publishers such as Time, and major corporations such as AT&T, Avon, Coke, General Motors, P&G, RJ Reynolds, and Tupperware. For example, Timex, a giant corporation best known for its watches, wanted to move into the home health care market with a selection of new products, including digital thermometers and blood pressure monitors. It decided to focus on two VALS segments: Societally Conscious and the Achievers. Everything about the packaging and the advertisements was chosen with these two groups in mind. Models were upscale and mature in comfortable surroundings with plants and books. The tagline was “Technology where it does the most good.” Within months, all of Timex’s products were the leaders in this new and fastgrowing industry. Over the years, as the American culture has changed, VALS has changed its segments to keep up. Today, the VALS typology of segments looks very different than it did in the early 1980s. By keeping up with changes in people’s lifestyles over the years, VALS has remained a valuable tool to mass media programmers and marketers.

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Attracting Audiences Attracting audience attention is critical for the thousands of advertisers who spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year to expose their target audiences to their carefully designed messages. But as more and more advertisers as well as media outlets compete for the attention of the public, attention has grown to become the most valuable resource within the information economy. In their fascinating book The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Davenport and Beck (2001) argue, “In postindustrialized societies, attention has become a more valuable currency than the kind you store in bank accounts. . . . Understanding and managing attention is now the single most important determinant of business success” (p. 3). After a media organization has selected a niche audience to target, it must develop content to attract people into that audience. The mass media employ two tactics to do this. First, they try to appeal to your existing needs and interests. Second, they use cross-media and cross-vehicle promotion to attract your attention.

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Appeal to Existing Needs and Interests The mass media do not develop vehicles and messages and then go looking for an audience; instead, they conduct research to try to identify the message needs of potential audiences, and then they develop that content. Not everyone has the same needs and interests, so the media can identify a range of different types of people as defined by those different needs. For example, some people are very interested in sports, but other people are more interested in news and public affairs. These are two important niches for the media. Each of these has sub-niches. Some sports fanatics might like baseball, whereas others cannot stand baseball but love football. How do media companies know what the existing needs are? The easiest way to answer this question is to look at what messages are already being consumed. The messages that already are attracting the most attention within a niche audience demonstrate that there is a particular existing need. The new competitors then try to create their own messages to attract that same audience by appealing to that same need. This is why many new films, TV shows, and popular songs typically look and sound like last year’s most popular films, TV shows, and songs. For example, in March 2006, the cable TV channel Bravo premiered The Real Housewives of Orange County. Its success resulted in spin-off series located in New York City and Atlanta in 2008; New Jersey in 2009; Washington, D.C., and Beverly Hills in 2010; and Miami in 2011. Programmers know that we have a relatively narrow exposure repertoire—that is, a set of message types we attend to—so if the new competitors can make their messages very similar to what we are already attending to, we will likely pay attention to those new messages also. Messages that are too different than what we are already exposing ourselves to will not break through the automaticity. We typically stay in this state of automaticity until something triggers our attention, and then we pay attention to it. Therefore, media programmers look for what has triggered our attention in the past, and they construct their messages in a similar manner so their messages will also trigger our attention. Although we have a wide variety of media and messages available to us, we usually select a small subset of them that tend to serve our needs best. This fact about a small set of message preferences, or media repertoire, was clearly established several decades ago when there were far fewer media choices than we have today. Several decades ago, Douglas Ferguson (1992) found that even in cable TV households with more than 100 choices of channels, TV viewers typically watched only 5 to 8 channels and ignored the rest. Also, having a remote control device to change TV channels or a device to record shows was not found to increase the size of a person’s channel repertoire. Thus when the media expand the number of messages offered, individuals do not increase the range of their exposures; instead, the expanded number of messages increases the number of niche audiences. With a larger range of messages available, individuals can find particular messages that better serve their needs. Today, as the newer interactive media make it possible to have even greater choice in how we use the media, each of us still has a relatively narrow focus on the types of media and messages we like best.

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Cross-Media and Cross-Vehicle Promotion Media programmers must find potential members of their audience in other audiences so the programmers can promote their new messages and thus attract people to the audience they are trying to construct. Programmers therefore will engage in a great deal of cross-media promotion and cross-vehicle promotion.

Derek and Julianne Hough from ABC’s hit show Dancing With the Stars appear on ABC’s Good Morning America in an example of cross-vehicle promotion. © Derek Storm/Everett Collection/Alamy Live News

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Several decades ago, media programmers were most concerned about branding their particular vehicles and trying to build loyalty to those vehicles. For example, local television stations wanted you to watch only them.

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A newspaper wanted you to be loyal to that newspaper and get your news only there, not from magazines, television, or the radio. But with the rise of media consolidation, media programmers have shifted their focus to the message and away from the vehicle. So, for example, a political commentator on the radio might also be asked to post a column on a website and appear on a TV show where the company that owns the radio station also owns the website and the television station. That company might also own a magazine and book publishing firm, in which case the commentator would be encouraged to write a column for the magazine and publish a book. When this media conglomerate company brands its message (i.e., the commentator), the company then tries to market that message through as many media and vehicles that it owns so as to increase the number of revenue streams without adding much to existing expenses. Therefore, media companies think of audiences more in terms of messages that would attract them rather than as groups of people limited to one medium or one vehicle. Differences across media are also blurring over time. Newspapers have become more like magazines in their editorial outlook, featuring more soft news and human interest pieces that are not time-sensitive and that appeal more as entertainment than as information. Trade books are becoming shorter and less literary. And computers with their games, encyclopedias, and webpages are becoming more like films, books, magazines, and newspapers. Given the focus on messages and the convergence of channels, the content is becoming much more of a focus than is the delivery system. Several decades ago, some futurists argued that we were moving toward convergence, where all the media will be one: “a single, high capacity, digital network of networks that will bridge what we now know as the separate domains of computing, telephony, broadcasting, motion pictures, and publishing” (Neuman, 1991, p. x). This convergence has been happening and continues to happen (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). The differences between channels of disseminating information have become much less important; in contrast, the differences in consumer needs across niche audiences have become much more important.

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Conditioning Audiences Once a mass media organization has attracted you to a message, it immediately tries to condition you for repeated exposures. This drive toward audience conditioning is an essential strategy for all mass media. The costs of attracting members of an audience to their first exposure to a message are so high that media organizations must rely on repeated exposures in order to recoup their initial investment and eventually make a profit. Media exposures are inertial. This means that when we are paying attention to a particular message, we tend to keep paying attention to that message, and when we are in an automatic state, we tend to stay in that state and filter out all the messages around us. For example, let’s say you go to YouTube and watch one of your favorite videos. YouTube will suggest additional videos you might want to view next. These suggestions are formulated based on your history of watching other videos. YouTube wants to hold onto you as a continuing audience member, so it keeps suggesting content you might like. Then as you watch each suggested video and are entertained, you are being conditioned to want to return to YouTube tomorrow and the day after and the day after that. Successful websites, whether they deal with information, entertainment, music, video, or the printed word, all try to do the same thing. They offer you apps that you can download and use for free on your mobile devices. They want to condition you to continually use their services so it becomes a habit that you cannot live without. How much have the media conditioned you? And what is the pattern of that conditioning? To answer these questions, estimate how much time you spend with the various media during an average week. Because many media habits are governed by automatic routines, you may not be aware of the extent of your exposure, but that is okay at this point. Just estimate the best you can in Exercise 4.1. When you have finished with your estimates in Exercise 4.1, look at the pattern across the different media. Which ones consume the most time? Which ones do you ignore? Think about why you apportion your time with the media like you do. Why do you ignore certain media altogether? Now complete Exercise 4.2 to see how well your estimates of exposures to various media match your actual patterns of exposure by recording your actual exposures over the course of a week. I must warn you that this is an onerous task! Carrying around a diary (even if it is just a piece of paper) all week and remembering to record all exposures takes continual mental effort. But this exercise should demonstrate how much effort you save when you follow your habits automatically and don’t have to think about them at all. Compare what you thought were your exposure habits (from Exercise 4.1) and your actual exposure habits (from Exercise 4.2). Do you see differences? Is your estimate of total weekly hours spent with the media the same as your actual hours? If your estimate is lower, then you can see that your habit is stronger than you previously thought; think about how the mass media have programmed you to expose yourself to a higher degree than you were aware. If your estimate is higher than your actual exposure, why do you think you overestimated your media habits? Now look for difference between the estimates and actual figures across

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different media. Where did you underestimate your exposures and why? Where did you overestimate your exposures and why? The degree to which your estimates are accurate reflections of your actual exposure patterns is an indicator of how aware you are of your media habits. If you are highly aware, it is also likely that you are in control of those exposure patterns; that is, you have programmed your own exposure mental codes so that when those codes run automatically they are serving your goals. If, however, you have found large differences between your estimates and your actual exposure patterns, this is evidence that your codes have been programmed largely by others without your awareness.

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Summary This is an exciting time to be a part of our culture. The media are constantly working hard to identify our changing needs for information and entertainment. Once the media have identified a new need, they quickly design all kinds of messages that will attract people with that need; in this way they construct audiences. Then once a media company has attracted an audience, it works hard to condition that audience for repeat exposures. When we are well aware of our needs, we can use the mass media as an essential resource to satisfy a wide variety of needs. But if we are not self-aware, the most aggressive of the mass media will herd us into audiences for their most profitable messages. Increasing media literacy gives you more control so you can use the mass media as a tool in achieving your needs, rather than allowing the mass media to us you as a tool to achieve their needs. After reading through this chapter, you should be more sensitized to your media exposures, and you should be more aware of those exposures. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Davenport, T. H., & Beck, J. C. (2001). The attention economy: Understanding the new currency of business. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. (253 pages with index) This is a very readable book written by two business school professors who explain why attention deficit is such a serious problem in our economy. But they are not social critics who are interested in pointing out a problem then exploring recommendations for ameliorating the problem. Instead, they write more as marketing consultants who provide suggestions to businesses about how to attract the public’s attention. Napoli, P. M. (2011). Audience evolution: New technologies and the transformation of media audiences. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. (272 pages) Written by a professor at Fordham University, this book shows how the conceptualization of audiences has changed over time, particularly with the development of the newer media technologies that serve to fragment society. The scholarly analysis of this phenomenon focuses on political, economic, and social perspectives. Neuman, W. R. (1991). The future of the mass audience. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. (218 pages) Neuman begins with a good, balanced discussion of the difficult idea of postindustrialism and with the conflict between fragmentation and homogenization. He argues that education contributes to fragmentation, with people able to peruse their specialized interests. Family has changed as women entered the workforce in large numbers. He also shows that media use has fragmented. He argues that this is not a new issue but is a continuing and central problem of political communications. The key issue is that of balance: balance between the center and the periphery, between different interest factions, between competing elites, and between an efficient and effective central authority and the conflicting demands of the broader electorate. This is the conflict between community and pluralism. Rowles, D. (2014). Mobile marketing: How mobile technology is revolutionizing marketing, communications, and advertising. Philadelphia, PA: Kogan Page. (266 pages) This book begins with a good overview of recent changes in marketing and advertising then presents a good deal of practical information to help readers design their own campaigns to reach target markets.

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Exercise 4.1: Estimate Your Media Exposure Try to estimate how many minutes and hours you spend with each of the following media during a typical week. _______ Watching video (cable, broadcast, DVDs, streaming, etc.) _______ Watching films at a theater _______ Listening to radio (at home, in your car, etc.) _______ Listening to recordings of music _______ Reading newspapers _______ Reading magazines of all kinds _______ Reading books (texts for class, novels for pleasure, etc.) _______ Surfing the Internet looking for information and entertainment _______ Interacting with friends on social networking platforms, texting, etc. _______ Playing games on computer, TV screen, handheld device, etc. _______ Creating media content to upload (photos to Facebook, videos to YouTube, etc.) _______ TOTAL

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Exercise 4.2: Track Your Media Exposures Keep a Media Exposure Diary for one week. Get a small notebook—one you can carry with you wherever you go for 7 days. Every time you are exposed to a message from the media either directly or indirectly, make an entry of the time and what the message was. Direct exposures are those where you come in contact with a medium and experience a message during that contact. For example, if you watch The Walking Dead, then write, “Message: The Walking Dead; Time: Monday 8–8:30.” Listening to KXXX for 30 minutes in the car is also a direct exposure. Indirect exposures are those where you see a reminder of a media message, such as seeing a title of a movie on the marquee or at a bus stop. You don’t see the film itself (which would be a direct exposure), but you see something that reminds you of it. Also, listen to conversations. If people talk about something they heard from the media, then you have been exposed to that media message indirectly. For example, if you heard your friends talk about The Walking Dead, then write, “Message: Talked with friends about The Walking Dead; Time: Tuesday morning 10–11:30.” If you happened to hear your roommate humming a popular song that is played often on the radio, then write, “Message: Roommate hummed X song; Time: Wednesday all day!” At the end of the week, analyze the entries in your diary to answer the following questions: 1. How much total time were you exposed to media messages? 2. How much total time did you spend creating media content (photos, videos, etc.)? 3. How much total time did you use the media for social interactions? 4. How much time did you spend in competitions, that is, using media for games of all kinds? 5. What proportion of the exposures was direct and what proportion was indirect? 6. What proportion of media exposures was initiated by you (active) and what proportion just happened (passive)? 7. What kinds of experiences dominate your time with the media? 8. How do your diary data compare to your estimates from Exercise 4.1? 9. Now that you’ve conducted a careful inventory of your media usage, did you discover anything that surprised you?

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Exercise 4.3: What Segments Are You In? 1. Pick three of your favorite television shows. Write the name of each on the column heading line below. Then watch each of these shows and list the products being advertised in each commercial on the lines in the column for that show.

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2. Now look at the lists of products and try to imagine who the advertisers had in mind as a target audience when they decided to advertise in these shows. * Are those products oriented more toward males or females, or doesn’t it matter? * What age group are the products aimed at? * What economic level are the products aimed at? * What educational level are the products aimed at? * What geographical location are the products aimed at, or doesn’t it matter? * What values do the advertisers think you have? 3. Did you notice any ads for other TV shows? If so, what other shows were those ads trying to get you to watch? Do you watch those other shows? Why or why not? 4. Now try the same exercise using three websites that you like. 5. Monitor the e-mails you receive from companies trying to sell you something. Think about how these companies got your e-mail address.

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Chapter 5 Children as a Special Audience

Why Treat Children as a Special Audience? Lack of Experience Lack of Maturation Cognitive Development Emotional Development Moral Development Special Treatment From Regulators Protecting Children From Negative TV Content Protecting Children From Unfair Advertising Practices Special Treatment From Parents Re-examining the Case for Special Treatment Maturation Experience Young Adults as a Special Audience Cognitive Abilities Field Independency Crystalline Intelligence Fluid Intelligence Conceptual Differentiation Emotional Abilities Emotional Intelligence Tolerance for Ambiguity Nonimpulsiveness Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercise

Key Idea: Children are treated as a special audience because of their lack of maturation and experience; however, maturation and experience alone do not make someone media literate.

The public and policymakers regard children as a special audience that needs protection from potentially negative effects of mass media exposure. iStock/Goldmund Lukic

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Kyle sent his report on the battle of Gettysburg to the color printer attached to his family’s computer. He had done his research on Wikipedia, then pasted some pictures of the battlefield he had taken with his digital camera during his family’s vacation the previous summer. He looked proudly at the report and thought that Mrs. Hawthorne, his fourth-grade teacher, would surely give him another A. To reward himself, he clicked on his favorite social networking website and began texting his growing list of friends when his brother Bobby interrupted him. “Hey, Kyle. Let’s play some online games. How about some poker!” “Yeah, right. If Mom catches us playing poker again she’s gonna ban me from the computer for a month.” “Come on, she’s not going to find out.” “No way.” “Then show me how to get on the poker site. I want to play.” “I already showed you a million times.” Kyle tried changing the subject. “Did you do your homework, Bobby?” “Boring. Besides I forgot how to get on that math site.” “I’ll show you—again.” Kyle was getting irritated with his big brother. Kyle felt that Bobby, who was in the sixth grade, should be teaching things to him, not the other way around.

Researchers, policymakers, and the public in general have treated children as a special audience, because they believe that children are especially vulnerable to negative effects from the mass media. For example, reviews of the literature on the effects of various content on children show that children are affected, positively as well as negatively, by playing video games (Prot, Anderson, Gentile, Brown, & Swing, 2014), browsing the Internet (Livingstone, 2014), as well as from exposure to all kinds of media content such as food advertising (Harris, 2014), portrayals of drugs (Strasburger, 2014), and sex (J. D. Brown, El-Toukhy, & Ortiz, 2014).

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Exposure to these same types of media content, however, have been shown to affect adolescents and adults of all ages. This leads us to ask: Why are children treated as a special audience?

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Why Treat Children as a Special Audience? There are two beliefs about children that are used as reasons about why they should be regarded as a special group when it comes to the mass media. One of these beliefs is that children have not lived long enough to have enough real-world experience to protect them from media messages. The second belief is that children have not matured enough to be able to process enough elements in particular kinds of media messages in order to protect themselves from potentially harmful effects. Let’s examine each of these two beliefs about children in more detail.

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Lack of Experience It is obvious that children have less worldly experience than older people. So it follows that people with lower levels of real-world experience would have greater difficulty processing media messages, such as making good evaluations of the degree of fantasy in portrayals or the degree of credibility of information. Thus children can more easily be misled into believing that the media world is an accurate reflection of the real world. And if children are misled in this way, they are at risk for negative effects when they try to behave in the real world in ways they have learned from the media world. For example, Dorr (1986) uses this reasoning as the basis for her argument that “children may accept program content as accurate ‘information’ when other more knowledgeable viewers know it to be otherwise” (p. 13). This belief has a good deal of face validity. Children have not had as much time as adolescents or adults to develop knowledge structures on most things. This is why a good elementary education is so important, so that children can acquire the basic ideas about science, history, civics, geography, and other topics. Until children have developed many knowledge structures, they don’t have many perspectives from which to view the world. Children also need to develop knowledge structures about the media. For example, Piotrowski (2014) has shown that children who have more advanced story schema are able to comprehend stories and educational content better than children with less well-developed schema. Because schema must be developed by individuals through exposure to media messages, children who increase their exposure to the media—and do so mindfully—will be better able to develop the schema and knowledge structures necessary to understand and appreciate the media more. But this reveals an irony. People who argue that children are at higher risk of negative effects from the media because children have lower levels of experience with the media will typically try to restrict children’s exposure to media messages in an effort to protect those children from the potential of negative effects; however, this restriction serves to limit their media exposure and thereby keeps children in a condition of vulnerability.

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Lack of Maturation As we age from infancy through adolescence, many of our abilities mature, thus enabling us to do more things. This maturation is most obvious in the physical realm, where our bodies grow larger and stronger from infancy through adolescence, thus enabling us to lift heavier objects, move quicker, and cover longer distances. Childhood is a time when we mature in other ways beyond the physical. From a media literacy perspective, it is important that we consider other forms of maturation, especially cognitive development, emotional development, and moral development. Think of maturation as a series of gates along the path to higher media literacy. When we encounter one of these gates, we must wait behind it until we mature to a certain level, then the gate opens and we can proceed. There are a series of cognitive gates, emotional gates, and moral gates. These gates occur every few years throughout childhood and hold us back in the early stages of media literacy. For example, most humans are not capable of acquiring the skill of reading until they are beyond the age of 4 or 5 because their minds have not matured to a point where such learning is possible. Trying to teach reading to 2-year-olds is very frustrating. No matter how hard you work as a teacher or how hard the children work to learn, they will not get much out of this effort because their minds have not matured enough to handle this task. But once a child’s mind matures to the point where he or she can use those skills, the practice of reading begins to pay off.

Cognitive Development When we are very young, our minds are not developed enough to allow for an understanding of abstract thoughts, such as what is required by mathematical reasoning. A task of reasoning (such as multiplying four times five) is very difficult for us when we are 4 years old but very easy for us a few short years later. The most influential thinker on the topic of cognitive maturation during childhood has been the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. From years of research, Piaget found that a child’s mind matures from birth to about 12 years of age, during which time it goes through several identifiable stages (P. K. Smith & Cowie, 1988). Until age 2, children are in the sensorimotor stage and then advance to the pre-operational stage from 2 to 7 years of age. Then they progress to the concrete operational stage, and by age 12 they move into the formal operational stage, where they are regarded as having matured cognitively into adulthood. In each of these stages, children’s minds mature to a point where they can accomplish a new set of cognitive tasks. For example, in the concrete operational stage (ages 7–12), children are able to organize objects into series. If you try to teach this skill to a child at age 3, you will fail, no matter how organized and clear your lessons are. Another skill that is developed throughout childhood is conservation, which is the ability to realize that certain attributes of an object are constant, even though that object is transformed in appearance (Pulaski, 1980). For example, ask children to make two balls of clay exactly the same size. Then roll one of them out into a long, thin shape like a snake, and ask them which of the two shapes has a bigger amount of clay. Younger children will say the snake has more clay than the ball because the snake is longer. They do not yet have the ability to understand that the amount of clay is still the same even when it changes shapes; that is, 165

the amount has been conserved even though the shape has changed. By the time children reach the age of 7, their minds have matured enough to understand the idea of conservation. Cognitive maturation also influences how they watch television. Although children begin paying attention to the TV screen as early as 6 months of age (Hollenbeck & Slaby, 1979), and by age 3 many children have developed regular patterns of viewing of about an hour or two per day (Huston et al., 1983), their viewing is primarily exploratory. This means that they are looking for individual events that stand out because of certain motions, color, music, sound effects, or unusual voices. They look for action, not dialogue. They have difficulty in understanding how individual events are ordered into plots, how characters’ motives influence the action, and why characters change as a result of what happens in the plot (Wartella, 1981). The reason for this is that young children have not developed a very sophisticated understanding of narratives. Until they learn more of the principles of narrative progression, they will have difficulty making sense out of stories longer than a minute or two (Meadowcroft & Reeves, 1989). By about age 4, children are spending less time in the exploratory mode and more time in a search mode. This means that children begin developing an agenda of what to look for; their attention does not simply bounce around haphazardly from one high-profile action to another. By kindergarten, a continuous story line holds their attention. They focus their attention on formal features in making their decisions about what is important in the shows. For example, they interpret that a laugh track signals that a program is a comedy. Also by age 4, children begin trying to distinguish between ads and programs. At first this is difficult, until they develop the skills of perceptual discrimination. During this trial-and-error learning, children either express confusion about the difference or use superficial perceptual or affective cues as the basis for the distinction. With practice, they become more skilled at separating ads from program content.

Cognitive development influences how children watch television. At each new stage of maturation, children are capable of understanding more about what they see on screen. iStock/Vesna Andjic

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Children must also acquire the knowledge that ads are paid messages that are designed to get them to buy something—or make them ask their parents to buy something. Only 10% of children 5 to 7 years of age have 167

a clear understanding of the profit-seeking motives of commercials, and about half of all children are totally unaware of the nature of ads and believe commercials are purely for entertainment. For example, Barbara Wilson and Audrey Weiss (1992) found that, compared to older children (ages 7–11), younger children (ages 4–6) were less able to recognize an ad for a particular toy and comprehend its intent when it was shown in a cartoon program, even when the product spokesperson was a character from a different cartoon program. Disclaimers placed before ads to alert children to the fact that the program is being interrupted and that an ad is about to be shown do not generally work well with children younger than age 7 because they do not fully understand what an ad is. However, when disclaimers are in both the audio and video tracks, children are better able to perceive them. Also, when disclaimers are reworded into the language of children, their comprehension dramatically increases. By the second or third grade, most children have overcome their difficulty distinguishing between programs and commercials. With the combination of cognitive maturation, experience, and active application of critical skills, children no longer have any trouble understanding the purpose of ads and distinguishing ads from the program content. As children develop an understanding of the purpose of advertising, they also develop an ability for critically evaluating ads. By the fourth grade, children have developed a critical and skeptical attitude toward advertising. They are also cynical about the credibility of commercials and begin feeling that they have been lied to in an effort by the advertiser to get them to buy products that are not as desirable as the commercials’ portrayal. However, this skepticism is usually limited to their experience with products. For example, the skepticism is high with ads for familiar toys. Presumably, they have had real-world experiences with these toys and have learned that the ads contain exaggerated claims. However, children are much less skeptical of ads for medical or nutritional products; understandably, they have much less technical knowledge about these products and have less of a basis for skepticism. By ages 8 to 10, most children have developed a good understanding of fictional plots. They understand how motives of characters influence plot points and how characters change as a result of what happens to them. Children of this age are not limited to understanding characters on only their physical traits but can also infer personality characteristics. By ages 10 to 12, children have a rudimentary idea of the economic nature of TV. They recognize that there are different businesses that produce media messages and that these businesses have a profit-making motive.

Emotional Development Emotions are hardwired into our brains (Goleman, 1995). Regardless of the culture in which we are raised, we all can recognize in ourselves and others the basic emotions of anger, sadness, fear, enjoyment, love, surprise, disgust, and shame. Although we do not need to learn emotions in the sense that we must learn to recognize words in order to read, there are still developmental steps in dealing with emotions that indicate that there is a range of emotional maturity. We develop higher levels of emotional literacy by gaining experience with emotions and by paying close

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attention to our feelings when we interact with the media. As we gain greater experience with emotions, we are able to make finer discriminations. For example, we are all familiar with anger because that is one of the basic emotions. But it takes experience with this emotion to be able to tell the difference between hatred, outrage, fury, wrath, animosity, hostility, resentment, indignation, acrimony, annoyance, irritability, and exasperation. A lack of cognitive development can be a barrier to appropriate emotional reactions to media messages. For example, very young children cannot follow the interconnected elements in a continuing plot; instead, they focus on individual elements. Therefore, they do not fully understand suspense, and without such an understanding, their emotional connection with the plot is limited as the suspense builds. Thus, a child’s ability to have an emotional reaction to the media messages is limited not because of a lack of ability to feel emotions but because of a lack of ability to understand why certain things are happening at particular parts of a story. By adolescence, children have reached cognitive maturity, and all the gates are open to a full understanding of all kinds of narratives. But some adolescents and adults still do not have much of an emotional reaction to media stories. Some people can be very highly developed cognitively but very undeveloped emotionally. Goleman (1995) argues that a person’s emotional intelligence interacts with IQ:

We have two brains, two minds—and two different kinds of intelligence: rational and emotional. How we do in life is determined by both—it is not just IQ, but emotional intelligence that matters. Indeed, intellect cannot work at its best without emotional intelligence. (p. 28)

Therefore, emotional development is tied to cognitive development. Children who cannot read or follow visual narratives will have their emotional reactions limited to reactions of micro-elements in messages. As people mature emotionally, they are better able to “read” emotions in themselves and others by having a higher degree of empathy and a greater self-awareness. In contrast, people at lower levels of emotional development are less able to experience emotions vicariously through characters, or they experience the wrong emotions. This connection between emotional development and cognitive development is especially important when it comes to helping children understand advertising. It is widely assumed that helping children understand the nature of advertising makes them less susceptible to the effects of advertising. However, empirical research does not provide convincing evidence for this view (Rozendaal, Lapierre, van Reijmersdal, & Buijzen, 2011). Because so much of advertising is focused on manipulating emotions, the more we understand about the emotional development of people, the better we can help them cope with this type of message.

Moral Development We also develop along a moral dimension. We are not born with a moral code or a sensitivity to what is right and wrong. We must learn these as young children, and children learn these things in stages. Like Piaget,

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Lawrence Kohlberg has studied the development of children. While Piaget was concerned with cognitive development, Kohlberg focused on moral development. He suggested that there are three levels of moral development: pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional. The centerpiece is conventional, which stands for fair, honest, concerned, and well regarded—characteristics of the typically good person (Kohlberg, 1966, 1981). The pre-conventional stage begins at about age 2 and runs to about age 7 or 8. This is when children depend on an authority to tell them what is right and wrong. Thus the child’s conscience is external. Children try out all kinds of behavior and wait to be told by others if the behavior was good or bad. During the conventional stage, children develop a conscience for themselves as they internalize what is right and wrong. They distinguish between truth and lies. However, the threat of punishment is still a strong motivator. The post-conventional stage can begin as early as middle adolescence. In this stage, adolescents try to move beyond the conventional norms about what is right and wrong as they encounter moral dilemmas where none of the alternative courses of action are all right or all wrong. Adolescents in this stage search for fundamental principles that underlie the conventional norms, and this requires the ability to think abstractly. They move beyond the what and think more deeply about the why. Thus, the stages in this level are characterized by a sense that being socially conscious is more important than adhering to rigid legal principles. Kohlberg’s stages are not fixed steps that everyone follows in the same sequence. People can move around among the steps, given particular problems and moods. However, each stage is very different, and those stages are hierarchically ordered such that the more evolved person is likely to operate most often at higher levels. There appears to be a gender difference in moral development. Men more typically base their moral judgments on rights and rules, whereas women tend to think in terms of care and cooperation. So in a conflict situation, women are likely to try to preserve relationships. In contrast, men are likely to search for a moral rule and try to apply it even if it hurts their relationship (Gilligan, 1993). Let’s examine these stages with a media example. Joey is a young child in a family that allows him to spend a lot of time playing highly competitive and aggressive video games and watch a great deal of television unsupervised. There is no parent or authority figure to help him process the messages or to show him alternatives to what is portrayed in the media world. Therefore, his moral development during the preconventional stage is shaped by the themes in the television messages, mainly cartoons, action/adventure shows, and situation comedies. From his steady exposure to these types of shows and values, Joey is likely to learn the following moral lessons: Aggression (both physical and verbal) is an acceptable and successful way to solve problems; with a little hard work, everyone can be successful, that is, be wealthy, powerful, and famous; family relationships are full of conflict and deceit, but everyone still loves each other; and romantic relationships are exciting but superficial and temporary. As Joey moves into the conventional stage, much of his behavior will be governed by these moral lessons. He feels that the best way to get approval from others is to be funny, live dangerously, and have lots of peer 170

relationships filled with conflict—the active, interesting life. Finally, as Joey reaches late adolescence and confronts the post-conventional stage, he should begin asking questions such as the following: How can I resolve moral dilemmas so that I don’t decide on a purely selfish basis? How can I live my life so as to benefit society in general? Given Joey’s moral development and the lessons learned, it is unlikely that he will be interested by these post-conventional questions. It is probable that he will stay at the conventional stage and continue to make moral decisions based on the principles he learned while watching TV as a preschooler. This example illustrates that as people age, they become more capable of engaging in more sophisticated moral thinking, but if they are not motivated to progress, they will stay at a lower level of development.

Exposure to aggressive video games at the pre-conventional stage of development (ages 2 to 7 or 8) can affect moral development by conveying the idea that aggression is an acceptable way to solve problems. iStock/junpinzon

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Special Treatment From Regulators Advocates of protecting children and policymakers have focused their attention primarily on television because this medium has been so pervasive for a half-century. TV comes into virtually every American household, and children spend a great deal of time with TV even when they are very young. This activity has been focused primarily on policies intended to protect children from negative effects of exposure to TV content as well as policies designed to protect children from unfair advertising practices (Kunkel & Wilcox, 2001).

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Protecting Children From Negative TV Content For more than 50 years, Congress has been periodically holding hearings on television violence and its possible effects on children. During that time, Congress passed no legislation regulating content, but it has over time exerted pressure on the television networks to adopt some changes. In 1975 the TV industry tried a self-regulatory policy called the “family hour” whereby programmers pushed violence and other material regarded as being harmful to children later into the evening, leaving the first hour of prime time solely for content appropriate for so-called family viewing. However, several stations filed suit citing infringement of free speech and won their suit in court. Then the omnibus Telecommunication Act of 1996 included an amendment mandating that all TV receivers sold in the United States after 1999 have a v-chip, which is a screening device that allows TV owners to program their sets to avoid programs with certain ratings for violence, sex, and language. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has been more aggressive in regulating indecent material, such as sexual depictions as well as specific words deemed offensive. In one instance during the 1970s, the FCC took steps to fine a radio station that aired a George Carlin skit titled “Filthy Words” where he repeatedly said the seven words explicitly prohibited on the airwaves. The station appealed, but the FCC ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court, which reasoned it was in the public’s interest to protect radio listeners from hearing those words during parts of the day when children were likely to be in the audience. More recently shock jock Howard Stern was fined, as was the company that controlled the radio stations that broadcasted his explicit sexual references.

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Protecting Children From Unfair Advertising Practices Kunkel and Wilcox (2001) point out that there have been two types of regulations designed to protect children from unfair practices in television advertising. One of these has been to limit the amount of time devoted to advertising in programs aimed at children. The limits are 12 minutes per hour on weekdays and 10.5 minutes per hour on weekends. While compliance is relatively good, there are exceptions. For example, Viacom was cited for 600 violations in one year and fined $1 million. Viacom blamed the problem on human error (Shiver, 2004). A second type of regulation aimed at protecting children has been the requirement to keep a clear separation between program content and commercial content on television programs aimed at children. Young children are fuzzy about the difference between entertainment and advertising content. Thus the FCC requires bumpers, which are 5-second segments before and after commercial breaks to alert young children about the switch in content. These bumpers typically take the form of “And now a word from our sponsor.” The FCC also prohibits host selling, which is the use of a character from a TV show being the product spokesperson for products advertised in ads inserted into that program. This too has relatively high compliance, but again there are exceptions. Disney was found to air 31 half-hour episodes in which commercials for products associated with the children’s program were aired. Disney was fined $500,000 and blamed the problem on human error (Shiver, 2004).

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Special Treatment From Parents Think back to when you were a child and how your parents controlled your media exposure, especially your television viewing. If you were like most children, your parents used one of four kinds of treatments: imposing restrictions, co-viewing, active mediation, or using program ratings. Perhaps you were raised in a household where your media exposure was limited by rules about how much, when, and which types of television you were allowed to watch. Media exposure was used as a reward for good behavior, and when you were bad, your media use was restricted. Researchers, however, have found that only about half of American households have any rules for media use (Rideout, Foehr, Roberts, & Brodie, 1999) and that parents are more likely to say they have media exposure rules compared to their children (Jordan, 2001). Co-viewing involves parents and children watching TV together. No conversation is required. The assumption here is that when parents are in the room while children are viewing, children will avoid watching harmful content. There is a discrepancy in the research about how often co-viewing occurs. Some surveys have found co-viewing to be very common (Sang, Schmitz, & Tasche, 1992; Valkenburg, Krcmar, Peeters, & Marseille, 1999), with as many as 93% of parents saying they watch TV with their children at least once in a while (Jordan, 2001). Other surveys have found co-viewing to be rare (Dorr, Kovaric, & Doubleday, 1989; F. Lawrence & Wozniak, 1989) with as many as 95% of children 7 years of age and older saying that they never watch TV with their parents and 81% of children ages 2 to 7 saying they never watch with their parents (Rideout et al., 1999). In a recent national probability sample of 2,326 parents of children aged 8 and under, Connell, Lauricella, and Wartella (2015) looked at parent–child co-using of media across six types: books, TV, computers, video games, tablets, and smartphones. Results indicate that parents are more likely to co-use traditional media such as books and television, whereas they are least likely to co-use video games. Active mediation consists of conversations that parents or other adults have with children about television. An analysis of the literature on active mediation studies over the years has revealed four types of mediation approaches that parents use when viewing with the children (Austin, Bolls, Fujioka, & Engelbertson, 1999). These are non-mediators (parents who talk about television with their children infrequently), optimists (those whose discussion primarily reinforces television content), cynics (those whose discussion primarily counters television content), and selectives (those who use both positive and negative discussion techniques, depending on the situation). Thus the key difference in mediation style is positive mediation, which is pointing out the good things in television messages as well as encouraging children to emulate those good things, and negative mediation, which is pointing out the bad behaviors of characters and being critical of what is portrayed. Active mediation has been found to be rare over many decades of research (Austin, 1993; Himmelweit, Oppenheim, & Vince, 1958; Mohr, 1979; Nathanson, Eveland, Park, & Paul, 2002).

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exposure and experience. iStock/Lise Gange

Program ratings have been available for decades, but few parents use them. The Motion Picture Association of American (MPAA) has been rating Hollywood movies released to theaters since 1984. Yet in repeated studies, about one third or fewer parents use the MPAA age-based ratings system (Abelman, 1999; Bash, 1997; Mifflin, 1997). Since 1999 all televisions sold in the United States have a v-chip where users can program their sets to screen out certain types of programs based on the industry ratings of those shows for violence, language, and sexual situations. However, only a minority of parents use these ratings to protect their children from TV content. Over the years, parental usage has ranged from about one third (Foehr, Rideout, & Miller, 2000; B. S. Greenberg, Rampoldi-Hnilo, & Hofschire, 2000; Jordan, 2001; Kaiser Family Foundation, 1999; Rampoldi-Hnilo & Greenberg, 2000) down to less than one fifth (“V-chip Still Not Taking Flight,” 2001). The research on how parents help their children to be more media literate leads us to three conclusions. First, it appears that parents have little real motivation to help in this area. Of course parents say they are concerned, and of course they care about the well-being of their children. But parents do not behave in a way that follows through on that concern. Parents think they are doing much more than they are, if children’s take on things can be believed. If parents are co-viewing with children, laying down rules, and actively mediating their television exposures, this is not making an impression on many of those children. Second, almost all of the research on parents attempting to help children with the media is limited to TV viewing. Thus far we know little about how parents help children with Internet exposures, especially with

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social networking sites and games. And the little research that is available on this topic so far is not promising. For example, Byrne and Lee (2011) conducted a national survey of 456 parents of children 10–16 years of age and found that there was considerable disagreement between children and their parents over what treatments were being used and what was working. Third, it appears that many parents do not know what to say to their children to help them become more media literate, nor do they have an educated rationale for viewing rules. Unless parents themselves are media literate, their help is likely to lead to negative effects rather than truly helping their children.

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Re-examining the Case for Special Treatment Clearly young children are at a disadvantage compared to adolescents and adults; young children have lower levels of maturation and experience. Therefore, it is understandable why children are treated as a special group that needs protection from risks of negative media effects. However, we must also realize that many adolescents and even adults are subject to significant deficiencies in maturation and experience. Let’s examine these deficiencies in more detail and look at the implications of these deficiencies for media literacy.

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Maturation It is tempting to think that once we have completed childhood, we have matured to the point cognitively, emotionally, and morally that we can take care of ourselves during media exposures and that we do not need help. Evidence for such a belief comes from Piaget and his stage theory of cognitive development. Most people think that because Piaget’s stages end at age 12 we all become adults cognitively at age 13. However, this is a misinterpretation of Piaget’s stage theory. While it is true that Piaget’s theory does stop its explanation at adolescence, there is no evidence in his writing that he believed cognitive development ends at age 12. He simply confined his investigation and explanations to children. However, over time, Piaget’s lack of attention to older age levels has been used as an argument that humans plateau at age 12 and stay at this level of cognitive development; that is, their capacity stays the same. People at other age levels share the same stage cognitive ability, and their differences in learning are then attributable to other things such as IQ, experience, and persistence. For example, Eron, Huesmann, Lefkowitz, and Walder (1972) argue that once children reaches adolescence, their behavioral dispositions and inhibitory controls have become crystallized. This appears to be a faulty belief. There is a growing literature that documents how adults continue to experience cognitive changes throughout their lives. For example, Patricia King (1986) conducted a review of the published literature that tested the formal reasoning abilities of adults and concluded that “a rather large proportion of adults do not evidence formal thinking, even among those who have been enrolled in college” (p. 6). This conclusion holds up over the 25 studies she analyzed, including a variety of tests of formal reasoning ability and a variety of samples of adults 18 to 79 years old. In one third of the samples, less than 30% of the respondents exhibited reasoning at the fully formal level, and in almost all samples, no more than 70% of the adults were found to be fully functioning at the formal level. Therefore the claim in Piaget’s stage theory of cognitive development that humans mature into the stage of formal development at 12 years of age is faulty. Perhaps humans are ready to exhibit the skills of formal development beginning at age 12; however, most do not follow through on this readiness. The ability to reason morally is not always shown to be more advanced with age. For example, Van der Voort (1986) found no evidence that children judge violent behavior more critically in a moral sense as they age. He found no reduction in the approval of the good guys’ behavior. And as children aged, they were even more likely to approve of the violent actions of the bad guys. So although children acquire additional cognitive abilities with age, they do not necessarily acquire additional moral insights. There is a range of moral development among people of any given age. Also, older children are not automatically more highly developed morally than are younger children.

Regardless of your age, the more eager you are to embrace new experiences and new perspectives, the more media literate you will become. iStock/STEEX

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In summary, there is ample evidence that people develop cognitively, emotionally, and morally over the course of childhood and that this development does not stop at adolescence but continues throughout one’s entire life. Furthermore, it is important to note that not everyone at a given age is at the same level of development; there are significant differences across people at any particular age. It is likely that there are many adults who are not as highly developed cognitively, emotionally, or morally as many children.

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Experience While it is true that young children have spent less time on Earth than have adults, it does not necessarily follow that experience is the same as age. There are many adolescents and adults who have been having the same experiences over and over so that as they age, their experiences stay the same. Their lives are so routinized that they do pretty much the same thing every day. In contrast, there are children who are trying very different things every day. This is especially true with new technologies; children are the eager users of all kinds of innovations while many adults lag behind in their willingness to try many of the newer technologies. Also, younger people are much more willing to try different kinds of messages—more likely to view newly released movies, more likely to try video games, more likely to keep up with changes in popular music, and more likely to try a wider range of Internet sites. Every age group has different challenges along the path of increasing media literacy. With children the special challenges are their lower levels of development—cognitively, emotional, and morally—as well as their lower amounts of experience with the real world. Adults also have special challenges. For example, older adults are likely to have very well-established media habits that can be very difficult to alter. Also, older adults have experienced many decades of media conditioning to form their beliefs, which then form standards for evaluating all kinds of people and experiences. The challenge for older adults is to examine their existing knowledge structures to weed out faulty or out-of-date information and to systematically incorporate new information to keep up with our rapidly changing world. Younger adults also have special challenges as you will see in the next section.

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Young Adults as a Special Audience Recall from the definition of media literacy that the more perspectives people have, the more media literate they are. These perspectives are abstract constructs, so they are not possible to examine directly, but you can infer what your perspectives are by assessing how broad, or narrow, your life experience has been so far in your life by doing Exercise 5.1. After you have completed this exercise, think about how eager you have been to try new experiences, new media, and new kinds of messages. Your eagerness as well as your follow-through on engaging in new experiences and making sense of them can be explained by a set of cognitive and emotional abilities. The stronger these abilities are, the easier it is to embrace new experiences and make the most of them.

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Cognitive Abilities There are four natural abilities that are most related to media literacy. These are field independency, crystalline intelligence, fluid intelligence, and conceptual differentiation.

Field Independency Perhaps the most important ability related to media literacy is field independency. Think of field independency as your natural ability to distinguish between the noise and the signal in any message. The noise is the chaos of symbols and images. The signal is the information that emerges from the chaos. People who are highly field independent are able to sort quickly through the field of chaos to identify the elements of importance and ignore the distracting elements. In contrast, people who are more field dependent get stuck in the field of chaos—seeing all the details but missing the patterns and the “big picture,” which is the signal (Witkin & Goodenough, 1977). For example, when reading a news story on a website, field-independent people will be able to identify the key information of the who, what, when, where, and why of the story. They will quickly sort through what is said, the graphics, and the visuals to focus on the essence of the event being covered. People who are field dependent will perceive the same key elements in the story but will also pay an equal amount of attention to the background elements of pop-up pictures, ads, borders, and so on. To the field-dependent person, all of these elements are of fairly equal importance, so they are as likely to remember the trivial as they are to remember the main points of the story. This is not to say that field-dependent people retain more information because they pay attention to more; on the contrary, field-dependent people retain less information because the information is not organized well and is likely to contain as much noise (peripheral and tangential elements) as signal (elements about the main idea). Let’s try one more example of this concept. Have you ever had to read a long novel and gotten so lost about 100 pages into it that you had to quit in frustration? You may have felt that just when the author was getting the story going with one set of characters, he or she would switch to a different setting at a different time with a totally new set of characters. This may have been happening every few pages! There were too many characters talking about too many different things. You were overwhelmed by all the detail and could not make sense of the overall story. This indicates that the novelist was making demands on you to be much more field independent than you were able to be when you tried to read his or her novel. If you had been more field independent, you would have been able to sort through all the details and recognize a thematic pattern, then use that thematic pattern as a tool to sort through all the details about characters, settings, time, dialogue, and action to direct your attention efficiently to those elements that were most important. The value of being field independent increases as our culture, and your everyday life, grows more and more cluttered with media messages. Think about all the text messages, e-mails, and phone calls you receive and send each day. Think of all the words, pictures, images, and videos you see on all your screens every day. Are they all of equal importance, or are you able to navigate through all the noisy clutter to award your attention to the best stuff exclusively? If you can do this efficiently and accurately, you are likely field independent. But if you get distracted easily, go off on long tangents, and burn through many hours following trivia, then you are 183

likely more field dependent; that is, you allow the field to take you in all kinds of directions rather than controlling your journey yourself. The sheer bulk of all the information makes it more difficult to sort the important from the trivial, so many of us do not bother to sort. Instead, we default to a passive state as we float along in this stream of messages. The advantage of this automatic processing is that it screens out the noise, but the disadvantage is that it screens out much of the signal too. When we are more field independent, we can better program our attention triggers to maximize the filtering in of signal and at the same time maximize the filtering out of noise.

Crystalline Intelligence It is helpful to make a distinction between two types of intelligence: crystalline and fluid. Both types of intelligence are important for media literacy. Crystalline intelligence is the ability to memorize facts. It is best measured by tests requiring knowledge of the cultural milieu in which one lives, such as vocabulary and general information. Highly developed crystalline intelligence gives us the facility to absorb the images, definitions, opinions, and agendas of others. With most adults, crystallized intelligence seems to increase throughout the life span, although at a decreasing rate in later years (Sternberg & Berg, 1987). This means that as adults get older, they do better on tests requiring factual knowledge of their world, such as vocabulary and general information. In general, older people can more easily add new information to existing knowledge structures and more easily retrieve that information from those knowledge structures they use most often. When you have a welldeveloped knowledge structure on a topic, it is easy to sort through new information as you are exposed to it, compare the new information to what you already have in your knowledge structure, and make a determination whether the new information is useful to remember. If the new information is worthwhile to remember, it is easy to catalog it in a way that it is easy to recall later. However, if you are exposed to a message on a brand-new topic (one for which you do not have a knowledge structure), it is difficult to process that new information. To test this, pick a topic that is of equal interest to you and your parents (your neighborhood, your family, politics, sports, etc.) and then see how much detail your parents remember compared to you.

Crystalline intelligence, one of the four natural cognitive abilities, is the ability to memorize facts such as vocabulary. iStock/JohnArcher

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People strong in crystalline intelligence are good at what is called vertical thinking. Vertical thinking is systematic, logical thinking that proceeds step by step in an orderly progression. This is the type of thinking we need in order to learn the introductory information on any topic. We need to be systematic when we are trying to learn basic arithmetic, spelling, and dates in history. People high in crystalline intelligence are likely to have a more extensive list of competencies because they have memorized a much larger set of symbols and their denoted meanings.

Fluid Intelligence In contrast to crystalline intelligence is fluid intelligence, which is the ability to be creative, make leaps of insight, as well as perceive things in a fresh and novel manner. People strong in fluid intelligence are good at what is called lateral thinking. Lateral thinking, in contrast to vertical thinking, does not proceed step by step in a straight line. Instead, when confronted with a problem, the lateral thinker jumps to a new and quite arbitrary position, then works backward and tries to construct a logical path between this new position and the starting point. Lateral thinkers tend to arrive at a solution to a problem that other thinkers, who are locked into a vertical form of thinking, would never arrive at. Lateral thinkers are more intuitive and creative. They reject the standard beginning points to solving problems and instead begin with an intuitive guess, a brainstorming of ideas, or a proposed solution “out of the blue.” Few people have a natural aptitude for lateral thinking. However, those people who do have an aptitude for lateral thinking typically use it a lot. For example, many inventors are lateral thinkers because they approach old problems in fresh ways. For example, Thomas Edison invented so many things that by the end of his life, he had more than 1,300 patents in the areas of the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, movie camera, and 185

projectors. This suggests that there is a capacity for generating new ideas that is better developed in some people than in others. This capacity does not seem to be related to sheer intelligence but more to a particular way of thinking. There are smart and not-so-smart lateral thinkers, just like there are smart and not-so-smart vertical thinkers. There are advantages and disadvantages to both forms of thinking. Vertical thinkers tend to do best at solving traditional problems for which the solutions can be learned. However, when their traditional methods of solving problems break down and they reach a dead end, they are stuck and have nowhere to go because their systematic step-by-step method of proceeding has led them down a path to a dead end. When others are stuck at a dead end of thinking, it is the lateral thinkers who break through the barriers. However, lateral thinkers can often be flighty and may come up with many new ideas that might not be feasible ways of solving a problem. People who are good at both and who know when to try each approach are, of course, the most successful problem solvers. Being strong on both these abilities helps with increasing one’s level of media literacy. Highly developed crystalline intelligence gives us the facility to absorb the images, definitions, opinions, and agendas of others. This helps us a great deal in the meaning matching task because we are likely to have acquired a large set of accurate matches of symbols and meanings. Highly developed fluid intelligence gives us the facility to challenge what we see on the surface, to look deeper and broader, and to recognize new patterns. This helps us a great deal in the meaning construction task because we are able to move beyond the surface meaning and construct meanings that are more useful for our own purposes.

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Compare & Contrast

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Crystalline Intelligence and Fluid Intelligence Compare: crystalline intelligence and fluid intelligence are the same in the following ways: Both are natural cognitive abilities where individuals vary along a continuum from low natural ability to high natural ability. Both can be developed to higher levels with training and practice. Both are related to a person’s level of media literacy where higher abilities reflect a higher level of media literacy. Contrast: crystalline intelligence and fluid intelligence are different in the following ways: Crystalline intelligence refers to a person’s natural ability to memorize facts and absorb information as presented. It is reflected in vertical thinking, which follows a systematic, logical progression and is most valuable in learning spelling of words, dates in history, and steps in solving arithmetic problems. Fluid intelligence refers to a person’s natural ability to be creative, make leaps of insight, as well as perceive things in a fresh and novel manner. It is reflected in lateral thinking, which is solving problems not by taking logical steps but by thinking “outside the box.”

Conceptual Differentiation This refers to how people group and classify things. People who classify objects into a large number of mutually exclusive categories exhibit a high degree of conceptual differentiation (Gardner, 1968). In contrast, people who use a small number of categories have a low degree of conceptual differentiation. Related to the number of categories is category width (Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 1956). People who have few categories to classify something usually have broad categories so as to contain all types of messages. For example, if a person only has three categories for all media messages (news, ads, and entertainment), then each of these categories must contain a wide variety of things. In contrast, someone who has a great many categories would be dividing media messages into thinner slices (breaking news, feature news, documentary, commercial ads, public service announcements, action/adventure shows, sitcoms, game shows, talk shows, cartoons, and reality shows). When we encounter a new message, we must categorize it by using either a leveling or a sharpening strategy. With the leveling strategy, we look for similarities between the new message and previous messages we have stored away as examples in our categories. We look for the best fit between the new message and one of remembered messages. We will never find a perfect fit; that is, the new message always has slightly different characteristics than our category calls for, but we tend to ignore those differences. In contrast, the sharpening strategy focuses on differences and tries to maintain a high degree of separation between the new message and older messages (Pritchard, 1975). To illustrate this, let’s say two people are comparing this year’s Super Bowl with last year’s Super Bowl. A leveler would argue that the two games were similar and point out all the things the two had in common. The sharpener would disagree and point out all the differences between the two Super Bowls. Levelers tend to have fewer categories so that many things can fit into the same category, whereas sharpeners have many, many categories. In our example, the leveler would likely have only one category for Super Bowls, feeling that all the Super Bowls are pretty much the same. A sharpener might have a different category for every Super Bowl, treating each one as unique. Increasing one’s level of media literacy

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requires one to do more sharpening of categories for media messages, media companies, and media effects.

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Emotional Abilities In addition to the four cognitive abilities outlined above, there are three natural emotional abilities that can help you considerably in meeting the challenge of increasing your media literacy. These three emotional abilities are emotional intelligence, tolerance for ambiguity, and nonimpulsiveness.

Emotional Intelligence Our ability to understand and control our emotions is called emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is thought to be composed of several related abilities, such as the ability to read the emotions of other people (empathy), the ability to be aware of one’s own emotions, the ability to harness and manage one’s own emotions productively, and the ability to handle the emotional demands of relationships. Those of us with stronger emotional intelligence have a well-developed sense of empathy; we are able to see the world from another person’s perspective. The more perspectives we can access, the more emotional intelligence we have. When we are highly developed emotionally, we are more aware of our own emotions. We also better understand the factors that cause those emotions, so we are able to seek the kinds of messages to get us the emotional reactions we want. In addition, we are less impulsive and are able to exercise more selfcontrol. We can concentrate on the task at hand rather than become distracted by peripheral emotions.

Tolerance for Ambiguity Every day, we encounter people and situations that are unfamiliar to us. To prepare ourselves for such situations, we have developed sets of expectations. What do we do when our expectations are not met and we are surprised? That depends on our tolerance level for ambiguity. If we have a low tolerance for ambiguity, we will likely choose to ignore those messages that do not meet our expectations; we feel too confused or frustrated to work out the discrepancies. In contrast, if we are willing to follow situations into unfamiliar territory that goes beyond our preconceptions, then we have a high tolerance for ambiguity. Initial confusion does not stop us. Instead, this confusion motivates us to search harder for clarity. We do not feel an emotional barrier that prevents us from examining messages more closely. We are willing to break any message down into components and make comparisons and evaluations in a quest to understand the nature of the message and to examine why our initial expectations were wrong. During media exposures, people with a low tolerance encounter messages on the surface. If the surface meaning fits their preconceptions, then it is filed away and becomes a confirmation (or reinforcement) of those preconceptions. If the surface meaning does not meet a person’s preconceptions, the message is ignored. In short, there is no analysis. People with a high tolerance for ambiguity do not have a barrier to analysis. They are willing to break any message down into components and make comparisons and evaluations in a quest to understand the nature of

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the message and why their own expectations were wrong. People who consistently attempt to verify their observations and judgments are called scanners because they are perpetually looking for more information (Gardner, 1968).

Nonimpulsiveness This refers to how quickly people make decisions about messages (Kagan, Rosman, Day, Albert, & Phillips, 1964). People who rush to a decision are impulsive. In contrast, people who take a long time and consider things from many perspectives are reflective or nonimpulsive. Typically, there is a trade-off between speed and accuracy. Impulsive people are most concerned with speed; they feel overwhelmed by decisions, so they want to have things resolved as quickly as possible. For them, it is worth the risk to make a bad decision as long as they can quickly end the worry that comes with being faced with a decision-making task. Reflective people are most concerned with accuracy; they dread being wrong, so they think about all the options of a decision, even if it takes a long time. How much time we take to make decisions is governed by our emotions. If we feel comfortable encountering new information and like to work through problems carefully, we are likely to act reflectively and take our time. However, if we feel a negative emotion (such as frustration), we tend to make decisions as quickly as possible to eliminate the negative emotional state.

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Summary The public and policymakers regard children as a special audience that needs protection from potentially negative effects of mass media exposure. There has been a good deal of research to show that children are indeed vulnerable to certain types of messages. However, adolescents and adults have also been found to be vulnerable to certain types of messages. Therefore every audience should be regarded as special because each audience has different vulnerabilities and challenges when it comes to media literacy. The argument for protecting children is based on the idea that children are at lower levels of development— cognitive, emotional, and moral—as well as lower levels of experience. These deficiencies make them especially vulnerable to negative effects. However, the research shows that many adolescents and adults are also vulnerable. Media literacy can help children, adolescents, and adults reduce negative effects and increase positive effects of exposure to media messages. Media literacy can be developed. That development is easier among people who keep improving on their natural abilities, who keep searching for a wide range of experiences in both the media as well as the real world, and who keep applying their skills actively to build more elaborate and useful knowledge structures. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. New York, NY: Bantam. (352 pages with index) In this very readable best-seller, Goleman argues that there is an emotional IQ, not just an intellectual one. He challenges the long-held belief that a person’s intelligence, as measured by a narrow IQ test, is an adequate predictor of success or ability. First, he broadens the conception of intelligence, and then he shows how a person’s emotional development interacts with a broad range of cognitive abilities. He cites physiological data to show that emotions are part of the brain and are triggered by the capacity of the body. Jordan, A. B., & Romer, D. (Eds.). (2014). Media and the well-being of children and adolescents. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (288 pages including index) This edited book presents 16 chapters written by various experts on children and media. Each chapter focuses on a different type of media content or effect where children are shown to be vulnerable. Kohlberg, L. (1981). The philosophy of moral development: Moral stages and the idea of justice. New York, NY: Harper & Row. (428 pages, including references and index) Kohlberg lays out his moral development scheme of three stages, each with two substages. There are many examples relating this structure to how people come to understand the concept of justice. Lemish, D. (2015). Children and media. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons. This is an easy-to-read description of the major research findings about how children are affected by media messages as well as key efforts to protect children from harmful messages through education, advocacy, and regulation. Pulaski, M. A. S. (1980). Understanding Piaget: An introduction to children’s cognitive development (Rev. and exp. ed.). New York, NY: Harper & Row. (248 pages with index) This is a very clear, well-organized description of most of Piaget’s thinking and research. Many drawings illustrate key concepts. Singer, D. G., & Singer, J. L. (Eds.). (2001). Handbook of children and the media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. (765 pages including index) This is a definitive handbook on the topic of children and the media. It consists of 39 chapters, each written by an expert in the field. The chapters are clustered to address the following topics: children’s uses of the media and the gratifications they obtain from them; cognitive functions and school-readiness skills; hazards of TV viewing; personality, social attitudes, and health; the media industry and its technology; and policy issues and advocacy.

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Keeping Up to Date Parent Further (http://www.parentfurther.com) This website provides information on how children are affected by media exposures and how parents and others can help increase their coping with these influences. Media Awareness Network (http://www.media awareness.ca/english/issues) Like the website above, this is a good source of information about how children are affected by media exposures and how parents and others can help increase their coping with these influences. Journal of Children and Media (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17482798.asp) This scholarly journal is published quarterly. It presents research articles in the areas of children as consumers of media, how children are portrayed in media messages, and how media organizations produce content for children.

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Exercise 5.1: Thinking About the Breadth of Your Life Experiences 1. Friends Do you have lots of friends or just a few? Are your friends all pretty much the same as far as background, values, political attitudes, personality, and so on? Or is each friend very different from the rest? 2. Daily routines Do you march through life structured by the same routines, or do you try to make each day different? Do you wake up each day at the same time and go to bed at the same time? Do you eat your meals at the same time each day? Do you commute to school or work the same way every day, or are you curious to find new routes? 3. Shopping Do you shop at the same stores, or are you always looking for new shopping experiences? When you enter a store, do you walk around the merchandise the same way each time? When shopping for groceries, do you buy the same foods and same brands each week? When shopping for clothes, do you always look for the same styles and same brands? 4. Education Think about the range of courses you have taken in college or high school. To what extent is the range of courses due to mandatory requirements for your degree? To what extent is the range due to your curiosity for exploring new areas of knowledge? How much of your education has been motivated by a desire to get a degree, and how much has been motivated by your curiosity? 5. Media use Do you routinely access certain media (such as Internet) and routinely avoid others (such as print newspapers)? When you listen to recorded music, is it typically the same artists and same genre? When you watch movies or TV programs, is it typically the same types of shows? To what extent do you have media habits, that is, how structured are your days by media exposure routines?

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Part III Industry Chapter 6 Development of the Mass Media Industries Chapter 7 Economic Perspective

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Chapter 6 Development of the Mass Media Industries

Patterns of Development Innovation Stage Penetration Stage Peak Stage Decline Stage Adaptation Stage Comparisons Across Mass Media Life Cycle Pattern Indicators of Peak Decline and Adaptation Current Picture Convergence Special Case of the Computer Industry Profile of Mass Media Workforce Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises

Key Idea: Historically the mass media industries have followed a life cycle pattern of development (innovation, growth, peak, decline, and adaptation stages) but now the most powerful force shaping their current nature is convergence.

Mark Zuckerberg, Chairman and CEO of Facebook, announces that he will acquire the messaging application Whatsapp for $19 billion, at the Mobile World Congress in 2014. © Lino De Vallier/Dermotix/Corbis

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Heather was determined to do well and earn a high grade in a course entitled Development of the Mass Media. She had bought the textbook, which included a dozen chapters, each one on a different type of mass medium. She had read each chapter carefully and highlighted the important facts in green. Now as she prepared to study for a major test, she noticed that almost every word on every page was green. She felt frustrated and thought, “How am I ever going to learn all this material?! It’s too much. There are a million tiny facts. There is no way I can memorize all these facts.”

It is likely that many of you have felt like Heather when you were confronted with a subject that is composed of a great number of facts. The mass media industries is a topic composed of a great amount of detail—dates, names of inventors, historical occurrences, business practices, names of businesses, complicated charts of who owns what, and tons of financial data. When I first started writing about this topic, I too was overwhelmed. As a writer, I could have made it easy on myself and simply presented one fact after another in a long and boring historical sequence. But that way of presenting facts would not have made it easy on you—the learner. Learning is much easier when you start with a simple, clear map that organizes all the detail in the territory you are about to cover. Once you have a map, you can efficiently navigate through all the details without getting overwhelmed and lost. In this chapter, as well as the next chapter, I present you with maps of the most important ideas about the mass media industries. These maps will show you the overall shape of the important knowledge structures and help you efficiently navigate through all the detail. Once you understand the overall structures of ideas, then you can fill in the details. Many of those details about the media industries are provided for you in Appendix A, which you can access at http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e. If you want even more details then you can continue acquiring facts by looking at the suggestions for Further Reading and Keeping Up to Date at the end of this chapter.

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This chapter will focus your attention on three topics. First, we will examine the patterns in how the different mass media industries have developed over time. Second, we will look at those patterns across the mass media industries. Then third, we will take a close look at the factors that are shaping the mass media industries today.

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Patterns of Development Some of the mass media industries are relatively old and have been around for more than two centuries (e.g., books, newspapers, and magazines) while others are relatively young (e.g., cable TV and especially the Internet). While each industry has been shaped by different historical influences, technologies, regulations, and audience needs, all the mass media industries have exhibited a high degree of commonality in the way they have grown and developed over time. When we focus our attention on the changes that have been common to all the media industries, we can develop a better appreciation for the nature of all mass media. The life cycle pattern provides a useful framework for examining the media industries because it focuses your attention on how the industries have gone through changes and why. The life cycle pattern contains five stages: innovation (or birth), penetration (or growth), peak (maturity), decline, and adaptation.

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Innovation Stage Each of the mass media industries began as an innovation. The innovation stage of a medium’s development is characterized by a technological innovation that makes a channel of transmission possible. For example, there would be no film industry if someone had not invented the motion picture camera and projector. However, technology by itself is not enough to create a mass medium. A mass medium is more than an invention; there have been many technological innovations that have failed. So the innovation stage is also characterized by marketing innovations in addition to technological innovations. This means that someone had to create a business that would use the technology to deliver messages and thus build audiences. A successful marketing innovation begins with an entrepreneur recognizing a need in the population, then using a new technology to satisfy that need in a way that people begin recognizing the value of the new medium and how it can help them. To do this, the entrepreneur must have a mass-like orientation; that is, he or she must exploit the channel’s potential to attract particular audiences then continue to use that channel to condition those audiences for repeat exposures. For example, in the early 1900s, after the motion picture camera and projector were invented, some entrepreneurs turned their living rooms into theaters and began charging people to watch movies. These entrepreneurs found that there was a market for this kind of entertainment, so they took steps to grow that market by renting out storefronts to accommodate larger audiences; then they rented concert theaters, and then they built their own theaters that were primarily for the showing of films. This growing number of large theaters increased the demand for more movies. This stimulated other entrepreneurs to create film production companies to make and distribute films to the theaters. Without all these marketing entrepreneurs who recognized a public need and marketed their services to grow that need into a habit, the technology of the motion picture camera and projector would never have developed beyond a curious invention.

Launching a new mass medium successfully requires more than just technological innovations; it also needs marketing innovations. iStock/mbortolino

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Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Compare & Contrast

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Technological Innovations and Marketing Innovations Compare: technological innovations and marketing innovations are the same in the following ways: Both involve the creation of new ways of crafting messages and disseminating them to target populations. Both are required characteristics of the innovation stage in the development of the mass media industries. Contrast: technological innovations and marketing innovations are different in the following ways: Technological innovations are engineering-type inventions that have created new ways to capture, store, and transmit information in print, graphic, photographic, audio, and video formats. Marketing innovations are strategic-type inventions that have created new ways to identify audiences and their needs, attract their attention, and present messages in a way that holds their attention and conditions those audiences for repeated exposures.

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Penetration Stage Once an innovation has created a new mass media channel, that channel needs to appeal to a very large, heterogeneous population if it is to be effective as a mass medium. This is called penetration. The penetration stage of a medium’s development is characterized by the public’s growing acceptance of that medium. The public’s reaction to a new medium is based on the medium’s ability to satisfy existing needs or to create new needs among many members of the public. Sometimes, the public has a need that is already being satisfied by existing media, but a new medium comes along that can satisfy those needs better in some way. For example, in the 1940s, people were satisfying their need for entertainment with radio and with films. But then broadcast television came along and was better than radio, because it offered pictures in addition to sound. Thus, television provided more to audiences in return for the same attention. Television was better at satisfying many people’s need for entertainment compared to film because television brought many hours of entertainment into a person’s home each and every day, so there was no need to leave the house, get a babysitter, find a parking place, or buy a ticket. Television was much more convenient. Also, television is credited with increasing the American public’s appetite for entertainment. The amount of viewing has steadily increased since television was first introduced; now, the average household watches some form of television more than 50 hours per week, most of which is entertainment programming. As each medium grows, it is influenced by factors that shape its growth. These factors include the public’s need and desire for the medium, additional innovations that change the appeal of other competing media, political and regulatory constraints, and the economic demands of the private enterprises that own and operate the mass media.

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Peak Stage The peak stage is reached when the medium commands the most attention from the public and generates the most revenue compared to other media. This usually happens when the medium has achieved maximum penetration; that is, a very high percentage of households has accepted a medium, and the medium cannot grow in penetration any more. Of course, it can continue to absorb a greater proportion of an audience member’s time and money. For example, broadcast television reached a peak in the 1960s after taking audiences away from radio and film. Broadcast television also had taken national advertisers away from magazines and radio. Until the 1990s, broadcast television remained at a peak as the most dominant mass medium, because people were spending more time with broadcast television every day compared to any other medium. Also, most people regarded broadcast television as their primary (and often only) source of entertainment and news.

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Decline Stage Eventually, a peak medium will be challenged by a newer medium and go into a decline. In the decline stage, the medium is characterized by a loss of audience acceptance and therefore by a loss in revenues. A decline in audience size results not from a decline in need for a particular kind of message but by those message needs being satisfied better by a competing medium that is growing in penetration and moving toward its own peak.

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Adaptation Stage A medium enters the adaptation stage of development when it begins to redefine its position in the media marketplace. Repositioning is achieved by identifying a new set of needs that the medium can meet, because the old needs it used to fulfill are now met better by another medium. For example, after radio lost its audience to television, radio adapted by doing three things. First, it stopped competing directly with television by eliminating its general entertainment programs such as soap operas, situation comedies, and mystery dramas. Instead, radio shifted to music formats where disk jockeys would play popular songs one after another. Second, it abandoned its strategy of trying to appeal to a general audience and instead segmented the market according to musical tastes, and each station aimed its programming at the people in one of those niches. So now in each radio market, there is likely to be a top 40 station, a rhythm and blues station, a jazz station, an album-oriented rock station, a golden oldies station, a country and western station, a classical music station, and so forth—each appealing to a different set of listeners. Third, it realized that with the invention of the transistor radio in the 1950s, it could be portable whereas television could not. So radio developed playlists that formed a kind of background mood-shaping experience as people drove in their cars, lay out on beaches, and talked on the phone.

Internet radio provider Pandora appeals to the needs of niche audiences by offering personalized stations based on individual preferences. © NetPhotos/Alamy

For the past several decades, broadcast television has been in decline as it fights off challenges by cable TV 209

and computers. Broadcast television is trying to adapt much like radio did in the 1950s by trying to be more mobile and programming to niche audiences.

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Comparisons Across Mass Media Now let’s look at the big picture across the media industries. We’ll compare the development of the different mass media industries to get a sense of which are the newest and when each was the strongest.

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Life Cycle Pattern Take a minute to look at the life cycle patterns displayed in Figure 6.1. Notice that the print media of books, newspapers, and magazines are the oldest, with each of them moving out of its innovation stage more than a century ago. Computers are the newest mass medium, with its innovation stage finishing about the time you were born. Notice also that all of the mass media, with the exception of cable TV and computers, are currently in the adaptation stage. This means they are all trying to figure out how to coexist with the other up-andcoming media as well as with each other. Although the life cycle pattern is a good template for showing patterns, it is not perfect. For example, notice that several of the media (books, magazines, and recordings) never reached a peak. This does not mean that those media are not important or successful; it only means that those media never achieved dominance as the most important mass medium at a given time.

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Indicators of Peak We are at an interesting time in the development of the media industries. Broadcast television has left the peak stage, which lasted for about 40 years, during which time it accounted for almost all of the television audience. But cable channels have been eroding broadcast television’s hold on the audience, and now broadcast television has slipped below 50% of the television-viewing audience, and its revenues are now lagging behind that of cable television. Cable has been at the peak for more than a decade but is threatened by the medium of computers (which includes receiving media messages on desktops, laptops, notebooks, mobile phones, and the like). The computer medium is showing that it can be the delivery system for books, newspapers, magazines, recordings, film, and video; it can deliver those messages anywhere through a wire or wirelessly; and it provides the additional feature of being interactive so that users can easily make copies of messages, transform them, and pass them along to others. For all of these reasons, the medium of computers is well on its way to a peak. FIGURE 6.1 Life Cycle Patterns

When a medium is at its peak, it is usually the dominant medium; that is, it is the most important medium to the greatest number of people. This can be seen in terms of how much money the industry generates and how much time people spend with that medium. Given these criteria, it appears that cable television (along with its satellite delivery services) is still the most dominant medium. Cable and satellite TV now has revenues greater than any other medium (see Table 6.1). Notice that radio is in second place with the amount of time that people spend with it per year. Does this mean that radio should be considered the second most dominant medium? The answer is no—for several reasons. First, although people spend a lot of time with their radios 213

on, they are using the medium for background noise; that is, they are not really paying much attention to those messages. When radio was at its peak in the 1920s and 1930s, its programming commanded listeners’ full attention. That programming included a wide range of genres that are now seen on television. People would listen to soap operas, detective shows, game shows, and comedies. But now, most of radio listening is background music. While listening to this music, people are typically exposing themselves to other media (such as reading books, magazines, and newspapers), or they are doing something else (such as talking on the phone, jogging, or working) that requires more attention. Even though the radio is on for so many hours in the lives of so many people, it does not hold people’s full attention for very long.

Table 6.1 Time and Money Spent With Various Mass Media Table 6.1 Time and Money Spent With Various Mass Media Mass Medium

Hrs:Min Per Day Money Spent per Year

Cable and satellite TV 2:51

$375.22

Radio

2:05

NA

Broadcast TV

1:50

NA

Internet services

0:30

58.90

Recorded music

0:28

44.92

Newspapers

0:26

47.33

Magazines

0:19

45.93

Books

0:18

105.83

Video games

0:15

44.64

Total

9:47

$929.04

Time figures are hours per person per day on average. Money figures are dollars per person per year in 2009 paid directly to a business in that medium; these figures do not include advertising revenue. NA = not applicable because consumers did not make direct payments to broadcast TV or radio. Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2010).

Second, radio does not generate as much revenue as other media. Notice that in Table 6.1 both radio and broadcast TV have no figures listed in the Money Spent per Year column. Does this mean people do not spend money on these media? Of course not. It means that these media do not get any income directly from the consumer. People must buy receivers, but that money goes to Best Buy, Walmart, or wherever people buy

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their sets. Broadcast radio and television get almost all of their revenue from advertising, which comes from consumers but only indirectly. Table 6.1 includes only direct revenues from consumers to the media businesses themselves. We are currently in a very dynamic and interesting time with the development of the mass media. The newer technologies that can be grouped under the title of computer are changing the way audiences access media messages by giving them much more control and variety. Take film, for example. In 2010, Americans spent almost twice the money on home viewing of movies (on-demand videos, digital downloads, and DVDs) than going to theaters (“Unkind Unwind,” 2011). When people are limited to theaters to view films, they have only about a dozen choices at any given time and they must be at the theater when the film starts and sit there for the entire running of the film unless they want to miss some of it. However, when people watch a film through their cable provider or especially from a website, they have a virtually unlimited range of choices and they can watch the film whenever they want and interrupt whenever they want. Access to news is much faster and up to date on websites than waiting for printed newspapers or magazines to be delivered. Access to books and recordings is faster when downloading them to handheld devices than driving to a brick-and-mortar store. The newer media are growing fast and moving quickly through the penetration stage. They are putting growing pressure on the older media, forcing them to continue adapting. It appears that computer/Internet is now entering the peak stage. The time spent with this medium has been steadily growing. Advertising revenues in the United States have increased to $42.8 billion, which is larger than the advertising revenues of any other mass medium. And these ad increases have been going up by double digits every year (Wikipedia, 2015f). Banner ads began posting in 1994 and by 2012, the number of banner ads had grown to more than 5.3 trillion display ads per year by 445,445 different advertisers (Morrissey, 2013).

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Decline and Adaptation Notice that when television penetrated the culture in the 1950s and quickly rose to a peak, other media industries—especially radio and film—went into a decline that forced them to adapt. Newspapers adapted by presenting longer stories of in-depth reporting that the short format of radio and television news could not provide. Newspapers survived for a time with this adaption, but now with the rise of the computer/Internet, newspapers are experiencing a steep decline in terms of readership and revenues, which has led to many newspapers going out of business. In 2008, the average American spent 31.4 minutes reading a newspaper, and this declined to 21.7 minutes by 2012 and was projected to decline even further to 16.6 minutes by 2018 (“Daily Time Spent Reading Newspapers,” 2015). The declining readership led to shrinking advertising revenues that dropped from $20.7 billion in 2011 to $17.8 billion in 2013 and were additionally projected to fall to $16.1 billion by 2017 (“Newspaper Advertiser Spending,” 2015). And the number of daily newspapers published in the United States steadily declined from 1,730 in 1981 to 1,382 in 2011 (“Number of Daily Newspapers,” 2015). This is in contrast to magazines, which have been growing in number. In the United States, the number of magazines increased from 5,340 in 2002 to 7,240 in 2013 (“Number of Magazines,” 2015). Clearly the newspaper industry is in decline, and it will be interesting to watch as it struggles to adapt. Now the fastest growing medium is the computer/Internet, especially with the widespread use of mobile devices, like tablets and smartphones. The typical smartphone now has more computing power than Apollo 11 had when it landed a man on the moon (Gibbs, 2012). It allows users to make phone calls, send texts, play music, read books, take pictures, and record video. With the use of apps, smartphones can access the Internet, play games, present coupons and pay for purchases at brick-and-mortar stores, track people on GPS, trade stocks, and follow traffic patterns in real time. In the United States, 9 out of 10 adults carry a mobile and by the eighth grade, 80% of kids have their own cell phone (Cloud, 2012). And in many parts of the world more people have access to a mobile device than have a toilet or running water. Of all smartphone users, 20% check their phones every 5 to 10 minutes. Three-quarters of 20-year-olds sleep with their phones (Gibbs, 2012). At this point, let’s see if you can use the information you have learned thus far in this chapter about the patterns of development of the mass media industries. Exercise 6.1 gives you a chance to apply your knowledge about how the mass media industries spring into being through technological and marketing innovations then grow larger and more powerful to a peak stage. Think about what that peak stage really means to a media industry and how the industry at a peak affects all the other media industries. This exercise has no right or wrong answers because it asks you to speculate what will happen in the computer/Internet industry 5 years and 20 years into the future. So think outside the box of the present time and have some fun predicting the future!

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Current Picture Now that you have seen the big picture about how the various mass media industries have developed over time, it is time to shift our focus to what is happening now. First we examine the most powerful force shaping the media industries today—convergence. Then we profile the industries in terms of their workforces.

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Convergence The key to understanding the nature of the mass media industries today is to realize how the influence of convergence has been so powerful over the past decade and will continue to be well into the future. In the most general sense, convergence simply means the moving together over time of things that were previously separated. With the media, convergence means the blending together of previously separate channels of communication such that the characteristics that have divided those channels into distinctly different media have been eroding. In this section, we’ll examine how three types of convergence—technological, marketing, and psychological—have been changing the nature of the mass media. Technological convergence refers to how innovations about storing and transmitting information have brought about changes to the mass media industries. The key technological innovation that has been driving convergence is not the computer per se but the software code that runs computers. This software code is digital; that is, it is written, stored, and read as discrete, individual numbers that are arranged in sequences to communicate patterns. While computers and digital code have been around for more than half a century, it was not until about two decades ago that the media largely replaced analog coding with digital coding.

The movement from analog to digital—from audio cassettes to MP3s and music streaming, for example —has been key to technological convergence. iStock/republica iStock/Atanas Bezov

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Analog coding is the recording, storage, and retrieval of information that relies on the physical properties of a medium. Print information is stored as ink marks on paper. Sound recording information was stored as fluctuations within the grooves in vinyl disks. As a vinyl revolved on a turntable, a needle was dragged through the groove and picked up the tiny fluctuations pressed into the walls of that groove and translated those fluctuations into electrical impulses that were sent to an amplifier then to a speaker where those impulses were translated into movements in the speaker, which sent out waves of compressed air to human ears. In the 1970s, recording companies began shifting from vinyl disks to magnetic tapes but the analog system of coding was still used.

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Digital coding refers to using a sequence of symbols or bytes (usually numbers) that are not dependent on the physical characteristics of any one medium. Digital recording of information offers several major advantages over analog recording. Perhaps the biggest advantage is that digital code is standard and can be read by any medium, while the analog code is different for each medium. This standard code used by digital allows for ease of making copies of a message and accessing those copies on many different kinds of platforms (your MP3 player, computer, smartphone, car radio, home television, etc.). Another big advantage is that the digital code can be compressed so that all the music on an album could be put on a CD, which is much smaller than the old vinyl disks. Advances in compression technologies have now made it possible to store thousands of albums on a device the size of your thumb. Because of these advantages, all of the mass media have been switching over from analog to digital means of recording, storing, transmitting, and retrieving their messages. While digitization of messages has been the major technological development leading to convergence, there have also been several other important technological developments that have helped this trend. One of these is the switching from copper wire to fiber optics in the sending of signals to televisions and computers. With the combination of compression of digitized information and fiber optics, both the amount of information and its speed have been increased thousands of times over the past few decades. Now with the availability of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies, even greater amounts of information can move around at faster speeds. This has led to the availability of two-way communication. Now computer users can both upload and download enormous files—like huge software programs and videos—in a matter of seconds. People can engage in texting, instant messaging, and video conferences without wired connections. Marketing convergence is a powerful influence that has changed the way media programmers regard audiences and how they develop their messages. In the past, media companies used to define themselves by channels; that is, newspapers saw themselves as a print medium only. However, technological changes have forced media businesses to move away from distinctions by channels of distribution and focused much more on the messages and the audiences. In the past, movie studios produced only films for theaters, magazine companies produced only print magazines, and recording companies produced only records. The channel limited their distribution and kept them in a box where they competed only with other like companies in the same box. But now media companies think outside the box (previously limited by their channel of transmission) and have broadened their marketing by thinking about all the ways they can distribute their messages across as many channels as possible. With technological convergence, channels are much less important than are audience needs and messages. Now mass media companies think first about the needs of different niche audiences then develop messages to satisfy those audience needs. They translate that message into as many forms as possible to attract and hold that niche audience (film, TV, websites accessed through computers, notebooks, cell phones, etc.). This procedure has two major advantages. One advantage is that a single message can generate many streams of revenue, so once the media company pays to have the message produced, it can collect revenues several times. The second advantage is that when the message appears in one channel, it stimulates audience members to expose themselves to the message in other channels. For example, people who read the Harry Potter books are stimulated to see Harry Potter movies. They also want to read about the actors in those movies in magazines, 220

newspapers, and fan websites.

Director Sam Taylor-Johnson (far left) and author E.L. James (far right) accompany actors Jamie Dorman and Dakota Johnson who helped bring the popular book series Fifty Shades of Grey to life on the big screen. Karwai Tang/ Wireimage/ Getty

This trend toward convergence also has changed the way media companies view audiences. In the past, the big media companies would try to attract the largest audiences possible. In order to do this, they would design their messages so they appealed to everyone without offending anyone with language or with certain themes that a part of the general audience might find distasteful. Thus they adopted the programming principle of lowest common denominator (LCD). Programming has now shifted to what is called long tail marketing. To understand what a long tail is, think of the bell curve, which is referred to as a normal distribution by statisticians and college professors who “grade on the curve.” On any characteristic (height, weight, IQ, scores on tests, etc.) people are arranged in a distribution that ranges from lowest to highest, and most people cluster in the middle of the distribution. Let’s take height, for instance. Adult males can range from under 4 feet tall to over 7 feet tall, which is a range of about 40 inches. Within this overall range about two thirds of adult males are clustered in the middle 5 inches (between 5 feet 7 inches and 6 feet), which forms the fat part of the curve. On either side of this fat part are fewer people who are either shorter or taller than the majority; these small areas on either side of the fat part are the tails. The tails are rather short on both sides of the fat part of the height distribution—there are almost no adult males who are taller than 7 feet or shorter than 4 feet. However, when it comes to personal interests like preferences for music or entertainment, the fat part of the 221

distribution is not so fat; that is, there are fewer people who share the same preferences. For example, the highest rated television series draws less than 3% of the U.S. population. Does this mean that people are watching less TV? No, to the contrary, people are spending more time watching TV but they are spread out over hundreds of viewing options, each with a small audience. That is, we are spread out over a very long tail of different preferences satisfied by many different viewing options. Long tail marketing refers to finding out what the special needs are for each of the many small niche audiences that form the long tail then developing the kind of content to attract that niche audience. Long tail marketing is now a viable marketing strategy given the trends discussed above. Huge media conglomerates have deep pockets and can afford to pay for the research necessary to discover these new niche interests then accept the risk of developing new messages. The Internet allows for more experimentation and creativity. To illustrate, old-time brick-and-mortar book stores had limited shelf space, so they had to be selective in choosing which books to stock. But Amazon is web-based so it can market all books and thus it has something to offer to every niche market—no matter how tiny—throughout the entire long tail of interests. This means that Amazon does not need to focus only on best-selling books (books ranked in the top 10 of sales). Over half of Amazon’s sales comes from low-ranked books (books ranked lower than 130,000; Bollier, 2008). Because Amazon offers hundreds of thousands of books for sale on every conceivable topic, it is easier for Amazon to generate sales of a million copies of books by selling 10 copies each of 100,000 different books than to try selling one million copies of a single book. That is long tail marketing. Convergence is not just a technological or marketing force; it also has profoundly changed the psychology of the audience (Jenkins, 2006). Psychological convergence refers to changes in people’s perceptions about barriers that previously existed that are now breaking down or totally eliminated due to recent changes in the media. These changes have served to help people see things in a different way and have provided them with tools to act on those changes in perception. One of these changes in perception concerns geography; that is, geographical barriers are no longer important. With e-mail, instant messaging, social networking websites, and mobile phones, people can stay in close contact psychologically with friends and colleagues even when those people are not physically present. There has also been the breaking down of sociological barriers. With newer media platforms, a person can cross all those barriers to make contact with anyone, regardless of social class, occupation, ethnicity, or age. With the removal of these geographical and sociological barriers, people have redefined their social spheres.

Marketing convergence gives media businesses the opportunity to send their messages through many different channels. iStock/Fakhri-sa

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Convergence has changed the way people think about the media and use them. That is, digitization has allowed people to access messages from various platforms and merge those into their own messages. The interactive features of many platforms have allowed users to bring together all kinds of previously unacquainted people into a single network of friends or professional colleagues. Thus there is a convergence of people’s individual needs with the available ways to satisfy those needs. People are more active now and do not have to wait for media companies to recognize their needs; instead they can assemble their own messages as their needs arise. People do not think of themselves only as consumers of the media but also as essential contributors.

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Special Case of the Computer Industry Now the computer medium is moving into dominance. This industry is very dynamic as it grows and changes each year. The media businesses in this industry can be organized into three categories. One category includes those businesses that have been primarily the developers of hardware and software that they have sold to relatively large audiences. A second group includes conglomerates that have acquired many media companies over the years and now market messages across many different channels. This segment includes huge media conglomerates like the Walt Disney Company and Time Warner. These are examined in more detail in Issue 1. The third group includes companies that provide Internet-based services, such as Facebook (see Timeline 6.1) and YouTube (see Timeline 6.3).

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Profile of Mass Media Workforce The media employ a wide variety of people in many different businesses and occupations. However, you may be surprised to learn that the media employ only a very small percentage of the workforce—fewer than two million people, which is less than 1% of the adult population in the United States. While the general rate of growth in employment is expected to be about 8% across all industries in this country in this decade (2008 to 2018), the media are expected to grow about 10% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). Let’s take a look at where these people work. There are two ways to examine this. One way is to examine the relative size of the workforce and businesses across the different media (see Table 6.2). Another way is to examine how people identify with occupations. The largest employer within the media industries has been newspapers along with film and video production. Software publishing has recently grown rather large in terms of employees and especially in terms of establishments (unique businesses). On the other end of the range are cable TV and sound recording. It is also important to look at employment from an additional perspective to get a more accurate picture because a lot of people who work in the media occupations do so only part time, like with actors or musicians. Also, there are people who contribute a great deal to various media industries without being employees of any of those businesses. For example, 70% of authors and writers are self-employed, which means that they get paid when they sell their work to a book publisher or producer of a movie or video project without ever being considered an employee of a media company. Table 6.3 shows us that there are a lot of people who consider themselves developers of computer applications and many of them are self-employed. This segment of the media is growing fast and projected to increase by 21% in this decade (2008 to 2018). The segment that includes people with occupations in public relations and advertising is also expected to grow very well. In contrast, the demand for journalists (broadcast and print) is expected to decline. As for salaries, the figures need to be regarded with some skepticism because the salary range for each occupation is quite large. However, I present the median salaries (point at which half the people are paid more and half are paid less per year) to give you a rough idea of the pay rank ordering across the variety of media occupations. The two occupations at the bottom of Table 6.3 are reported as hourly pay rates rather than yearly salaries because actors, musicians, and singers vary so widely in terms of how often they work.

Table 6.2 Number of Employees and Number of Establishments Across Media Industries Table 6.2 Number of Employees and Number of Establishments Across Media Industries Number of

Number of

Average Employees per

Employees

Establishments

Establishment

Software publishing

397,145

8,302

47.8

Newspapers

231,384

7,624

30.3

Film/video production

133,365

13,484

9.8

Mass Medium

226

TV broadcasting

124,875

2,113

59.1

Radio

101,652

6,756

15.0

Book publishing

64,969

2,622

24.8

159,673

6,887

23.2

47,699

747

63.8

1,037

357

2.9

Internet publishing and broadcasting and web search Cable TV and other subscription programming Record production Source: U.S. Census Bureau (2012).

Demographic patterns When looking at the total labor force in this country, we can see a trend toward more and more women becoming employed outside the home. Now, about 45% of the labor force is female. With the mass media industries, there has been a growth in the number of women employed, but there are still many more men working in the mass media than there are women. The media industries that have the highest percentage of women employed are magazines and books, where women make up more than 50% of the labor force. The most growth in terms of the percentage of women has been in the newspaper industry. In 1960, only 20% of all people working on newspapers were women, but this percentage has been growing slightly each year. A major reason for this increase has been because newspapers have been moving away from the traditionally male-oriented press jobs and into more clerical and technologically oriented jobs. In broadcasting, 23% of all employees were women in 1960. This remained fairly static until the early 1970s, when the federal government began monitoring hiring practices in businesses. Since that time, there has been a gradual increase to the current figure of about 30%.

Table 6.3 Media Related Occupations, Growth Rates, and Media Salaries (2008–2018) Table 6.3 Media Related Occupations, Growth Rates, and Media Salaries (2008– 2018) Occupation

Number of People Growth Rate Median Salary

Computer app development 514,800

21%

$85,430

Producers and directors

98,600

11%

$64,430

PR and advertising

275,200

24%

$51,280

227

Editors (film and video)

25,500

11%

$50,560

Editors (print)

129,600

12%

$49,990

Camera operators

26,300

11%

$41,670

Sound engineers

114,600

8%

$38,050

Authors and writers

151,700

8%

$35,010

Journalists

138,600

–6%

$34,850

Photographers

152,000

12%

$29,440

Musicians and singers

186,400

8%

$21.24/hour

Actors

56,500

11%

$16.59/hour

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics (2011).

In motion pictures, about 40% of all employees are women, but this varies depending on the sector of the industry. In the large exhibition sector (ticket takers, concession clerks, projectionists, etc.), about 45% of all employees are women. But with the production sector (actors, directors, producers, and writers), 95% are men.

Today, more than half of U.S. journalists are younger than 35. digitalvision/digitalvision/thinkstock

228

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Timeline 6.1: Profile of Facebook 2000 2004 Facebook launched by Mark Zuckerberg while he was a computer science undergraduate at Harvard University. The website’s membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges and high schools. 2005 2005 Facebook has just 10 million monthly visitors compared with 24 million for MySpace. 2005 Facebook introduces the News Feed, which provides members with updates about their friends’ activities. 2007 Facebook introduces a guidebook to widgets (small slide shows) that can run on the website. 2009 Facebook has more than 250 million active users worldwide. It employs 700 people and generates over $300 million a year. 2010 2011 Facebook is valued at $76 billion. At its growth peak it adds 20 million new users a month, with 700 million users worldwide and about 150 million users in the United States. Fifty percent of those users log in every day. 2012 Facebook goes public and begins selling shares on the NASDAQ with a valuation of $104 billion. It creates an App Center to sell applications that operate on Facebook. 2015 2014 Facebook has over 1.2 billion active users worldwide with 1 billion using mobile devices to activate their accounts. The company acquires the mobile-messaging application WhatsApp for $19 billion. Sources: Angwin (2009); Wikipedia (2015c); Olivarez-Giles (2001); Frier (2014).

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Timeline 6.2: Profile of YouTube 2005 2005 Three former PayPal employees create YouTube: a video-sharing website on which users can upload and share videos. The first YouTube video is uploaded showing one of the founders, Jawed Karim, at the San Diego Zoo. 2005 The site opens to the public in November. It uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of usergenerated video content, including movie clips, TV clips, and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. 2006 More than 65,000 new videos are uploaded every day and the site receives 100 million video views per day. 2006 Google acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion. 2007 YouTube’s bandwidth costs are estimated at approximately $1 million a day. 2008 YouTube reaches an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS to allow the companies to post fulllength films and TV shows on the site, accompanied by advertisements. 2009 YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43%. 2010 2011 YouTube is the world’s largest video platform, with 500 million monthly viewers. 2015 2015 More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube and watch over 6 million hours of videos each month. More than 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute. YouTube is in 61 countries and 80% of traffic comes from outside the United States. Sources: Chmielewski (2011a); YouTube (n.d.).

Journalism A popular profession within the media industries is journalism. In this journalistic community, there are about 67,000 reporters and correspondents, 23,000 writers and editors, and 67,000 radio and television announcers and newscasters. Most are male, White, and young. About one third of working journalists are women, which is an unusually low percentage given that about two thirds of students in journalism schools over the past decade have been women. Only about 8% are minorities (3.7% are African American, 2.2% Hispanic, 1% Asian American, and 0.6% Native American). More than half of U.S. journalists are younger than 35, and only 10% are 55 or older. Almost all have a college degree, either with a major in the skill of journalism or another content-based area, such as English, American studies, and political science. In the United States, there are more than 300 universities with journalism/mass communication programs, and each year about 20,000 bachelor’s degrees are granted by those journalism programs.

Writers In the television and film industries, most writers are men, and most of these men are young. Bielby and Bielby (2001) collected data on the careers of 8,990 television and film writers and found that writers are getting younger. The researchers explained this trend by saying that marketing strategies in television and film have been shifting to target younger audiences more, so these industries are hiring younger writers to tell stories that would attract that target market. The Writers Guild of America has a membership of about 12,000 employed writers for TV and film and among these people, only 16% are minorities and about 30% are women (Hulett, 2013).

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Advertising According to the American Association of Advertising Agencies, there are about 160,000 people currently employed in advertising agencies in the United States: about 24% in creative, 15% in account management, 10% in media, 10% in financial, 8% in special support services, and the rest (i.e., about 33%) in secretarial and clerical areas. Women account for 55% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011).

Status Women who are employed in the media industries are usually in positions of lower status, earn less money, and have less education. For example, in newspapers, women hold about 120 managing editorships at 1,700 newspapers in the United States. As far as policymaking positions on newspapers, women hold about 361 (11%), whereas men hold 3,057 (89%). With book publishing, about 64% of editors, vice presidents, and professionals are men; however, there is better representation in the smaller publishing houses. The figures presented in this section are general figures to give you a broad idea about the media workforce. These patterns might not hold in any one particular media industry or business. Check this out for yourself by doing Exercise 6.2.

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Summary The development of the media industries generally moves from the innovation stage to growth, peak, decline, and then adaptation. Remembering this pattern will help you understand how the media industries start, how they grow, and where they are today. Historically, the mass media industries have been defined by their channels of distributing messages—book, newspaper, magazine, film, recording, radio, broadcast television, cable television, and computer. But over the past few decades the mass media industries have undergone profound changes due to the forces of convergence—technological, marketing, and psychological. These forces of convergence have eroded the old channel distinctions and have shifted the focus away from the characteristics of distribution and onto the needs for media messages in distinct niches of audiences. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Drapes, M. (2009). Vault guide to the top media and entertainment employers. New York, NY: Vault. (137 pages including appendices) This is a guidebook that gives practical advice about getting hired in the media industries, particularly film, magazines, and book publishing. There is also a section that describes in detail what industry people do in their day-to-day jobs, whether on the business or creative side of the industries. Drapes, M. R., & Lichtenberg, N. R. (2008). Vault guide to the top media and entertainment employers. New York, NY: Vault. (326 pages) This book provides profiles of 41 large companies covering all facets of the mass media. While there is practical information about how to go about getting a job in these companies, the profiles provide much more detail about the companies themselves—how they are organized and how they developed over time. Fellow, A. R. (2012). American media history (3rd ed.). Boston, MA: Wadsworth/Cengage. (438 pages with endnotes and index) If you are interested in learning more about how the mass media developed in America, this book is a good source. Each of its 14 chapters focuses on the development of the various media from the colonial years to the present. It presents brief biographies of important media figures as it tells the story of the men and women whose inventions, ideas, and struggles helped shape the nation and its media system. Neuman, W. R. (Ed.). (2010). Media, technology, and society: Theories of media evolution. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. (231 pages with index) This edited volume consists of 10 chapters written by various scholars. Seven chapters trace the development of a different mass medium—newspapers, telephone, film, radio, television, cable, and the Internet. The remaining three chapters focus on theories of media evolution, privacy and security policy, and the future of ownership. Seguin, J., & Culver, S. H. (2012). Media career guide: Preparing for jobs in the 21st century (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s. (122 pages with index) This is a practical guide to help college students prepare for a career in any facet of the mass media industries. Its seven chapters offer a lot of practical advice about how to develop a job search strategy; how to get an internship and maximize that experience; and how to write cover letters, resumes, and thank-you notes.

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Keeping Up to Date Bureau of Labor Statistics (http://www.bls.gov/ces/home.htm) This is a website run by an agency of the federal government that reports information on all kinds of occupations in the United States, including salaries, duties, and required educational training. Statistical Abstract of the United States (http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab) The U.S. Department of Commerce releases a new statistical abstract every year. For updates on the material in this chapter, go to the section on Information and Communication. Vault.com (http://www.vault.com/wps/portal/usa) This is a website that provides lots of useful information about various industries; particularly relevant to media literacy are the industries of publishing, newspapers, Internet and new media, music, broadcast and cable, advertising, and public relations. Zap 2 It (http://zap2it.com) This website provides ratings of television shows and figures about popularity of various Hollywood movies.

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Exercise 6.1

236

Speculate About the Future of the Computer/Internet Industry This exercise gives you a chance to use what you have learned so far about how the media industries develop over time and what the current state is.

237

5-Year Vision Can you imagine the media world 5 years from now? What will the computer/Internet industry be like? Let your speculation be guided by the following questions: 1. How long do you think it will take for the computer/Internet industry to reach its peak? 2. When the computer/Internet industry reaches its peak, how will the remaining media industries adapt in order to survive and stay successful? 3. Do you think any of the other media industries will collapse and all those companies go out of business? Which ones and why?

238

20-Year Vision Try to imagine what the computer/Internet industry will be like 20 years from now. Let your speculation be guided by the following questions: 1. Will the computer/Internet industry still be at its peak? 2. Which of the other media industries will still be around by then? 3. Can you imagine what the next new media industry will be? If so, in what stage will that new industry be 20 years from now?

239

Exercise 6.2

240

Examining Individual Media Businesses for Workforce Patterns I. Select a media company to analyze. If you are thinking about pursuing a career in the media, select a company that you might like to work for and go to that company’s website. Search the website to find answers to the following questions. 1. How many people work at this company? 2. How are the employees organized? By different levels (management, mid-level, low-level clerks) By departments (for different functions: production, sales, etc.) 3. How many of the employees are women and how many are men? 4. Are there gender differences across levels or departments? 5. Can you find any recruiting information? Profiles of the kinds of employees who work there Listings for actual jobs for which they are soliciting applications II. Select a second media company to analyze. Find a second company in the same industry and same location if possible. If you selected a radio station in Part I, then try to find a second radio station in the same market to analyze in this part. Answer the same five questions as above. III. Select a third media company to analyze. Find a third company in a different industry. If you selected radio stations in Parts I and II, then try to find a TV station, newspaper, magazine, recording studio, or computer/Internet company to analyze in this part. Answer the same five questions as above. IV. Look for patterns. 1. Compare and contrast the two companies you analyzed in Parts I and II. A. How were the two companies the same as far as workforce patterns? B. How were the two companies different as far as workforce patterns? C. Did the patterns you found match the general patterns presented in the text? D. Based on your analysis, which company would you prefer to work for and why? 2. Compare and contrast the companies across the two industries you analyzed. A. How were the two industries the same as far as workforce patterns? B. How were the two industries different as far as workforce patterns? C. Did the patterns you found match the general patterns presented in the text? D. Based on your analysis, which industry would you prefer to work for and why? A company’s website might not present all the information you need to answer the complete set of questions in this exercise. Be creative in looking for other sources of information. Do a search of business periodicals (Wall Street Journal, Money Magazine, Fortune, etc.). Look for blogs. Search for books; most large media companies have at least one book written about them.

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Chapter 7 Economic Perspective

The Media Game of Economics The Players The Goal The Rules Characteristics of the Game Importance of Valuing Resources Well Indirect as Well as Direct Support Complex Interdependency Among Players Digital Convergence Nature of Competition Advertising as the Engine Media Industries’ Strategies Maximizing Profits Increasing Revenue Streams Minimizing Expenses Constructing Audiences Attracting People to Niche Audiences Conditioning Audiences Reducing Risk Consumers’ Strategies Default Strategy Media Literacy Strategy Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercise

Key Idea: The businesses in the media industries are in strong competition with each other to acquire limited resources, play the high-risk game of appealing to audiences, and achieve a maximum profit.

Actors Robert Downey Jr. and Jeremy Renner ring the NYSE opening bell in celebration of Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron at New York Stock Exchange on April 27, 2015. Photo by Mireya Acierto/FilmMagic/Getty Images

242

The other day I was talking to my neighbor Blaine, who had just graduated from college with a degree in economics. He was telling me how important it was to maximize resources in one’s personal life. “When it comes to the mass media, I try to keep my costs down. That’s why I go to the library and borrow books rather than buy them,” he told me. “I also read newspapers and magazines there for free.” “What if you want a book that someone else has checked out or what if someone else is reading the newspaper when you want to read it?” “Then I wait.” He switched the subject, “I check out movies and documentaries then take them home and copy them for free.” “But don’t you have to buy blank DVDs and flash drives to store your copies?” “Okay, it’s not completely free, but it’s a lot less expensive than buying all that stuff. I also make copies of music for my MP3 player for free. I now have 10,000 songs in my music library.” “Doesn’t that take a lot of time to make all those copies and keep organizing your library?” “Yes, it takes some time but it’s a hobby.” “How much time do you spend watching all these videos?” “That’s the beauty of having a large film library. I have so many choices that if one doesn’t grab my interest right away, I just start watching another one until I find one I like. There are so many bad movies these days that you need a large library to find one that’s any good.” “And your music? How much time do you spend listening to all that music?” “Not as much as I would like. There’s just not enough time in the day!” He thought for a minute then added, “Also, after a while all the new songs sound so derivative of other songs; they all begin to sound alike.” “Blaine, it sounds to me that you are very careful about not spending much money on the media but you do spend an awful lot of time. And it also seems that you don’t get much in return for this investment of time.” “How can you say that? I have amassed a huge library of movies and songs.”

243

“But what’s the point of having acquired all those messages if you don’t enjoy them much? The real payoff is personal enjoyment. It doesn’t seem to me that your huge investment of time has much payoff.”

The economic perspective focuses on resources. When we think of our personal resources we usually focus on money. Before you read on, take a few minutes to complete Exercise 7.1 to estimate how much money you typically spend on the media. As a consumer of media messages, it is also important to think of time, which can be an even more valuable resource than money. How much time to you spend with the media? To see if your perception of time with the media is accurate, do Exercise 7.2. The mass media are very successful each year at getting us to give them large amounts of our money and time in exchange for our exposures to a wide range of media messages. Our expenditures keep climbing and by 2013 had passed $1,100 per person and over 3,500 hours per household per year (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013). How do these figures compare with your expenditures of money and time with the media? Now that you have a better idea of how much of your resources you are spending on the media, the material in this chapter might make more sense to you. As you read through the following sections, keep asking yourself: How well am I playing the economic game?

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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The Media Game of Economics We play a game of economics each and every day; we cannot avoid playing. At the end of each day, we have spent our full 24 hours. What have you received back from this expenditure of time? Do you feel you are better off having traded away all that time? Or do you feel that your time has been wasted and that you have received little in exchange for those 24 hours?

How much time and money do you spend on media each year? Turn to the exercises at the end of the chapter to find out. iStock/STILLFX

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The Players Because we spend so much time with the media, it is important to examine this part of the overall economic game. Within the media part of the game, there are four types of players: (a) you the consumer, (b) the advertisers, (c) the media companies, and (d) the employees of media companies. Each type of player brings a different set of resources to the game. We are the consumers, and our resources include not only our money but, even more importantly, our time and our attention. We seek to exchange our money and time for entertainment and information. We as consumers are the largest group, with almost 330 million people in this country and over 7 billion people worldwide. We have the greatest amount of resources. If we pulled out of the game entirely, the game would collapse. However, our resources are dispersed over so many people that no one individual feels he or she has that much power in playing the game. This feeling is a mistake. While no one individual has a significant amount of power to change the overall game, each of us has in our power to alter the game significantly for ourselves. If we play the game well, we continually increase the value of the entertainment and information we get in return for our time and money. But playing the game well requires that we keep track of our resources as well as our changing needs and that we negotiate better exchanges of resources. If we don’t play the game well, we will make poor economic exchanges and continually get shortchanged on our expenditures of time and money. The advertisers are a second group of players. Advertisers bring money to the game. They negotiate an exchange of their money for time and space in the media in order to expose their ads to their target audiences. Advertisers are very sophisticated in their economic exchanges, because they want to get access to their target audiences for the lowest cost possible. For example, sellers of tennis rackets want to get their ad messages in front of as many people who play tennis as possible, but they do not want to pay a lot of money to get access to a large audience that might also include toddlers, invalids, and people who hate tennis. So they look for media vehicles (such as particular sports TV shows, Internet sites, and magazines) that have constructed an audience of only tennis players and negotiate a good ad price to get access to that smaller, niche audience. The media companies are the third group of players. These businesses bring money, messages, and audiences to the game as they compete in three different markets simultaneously. First, each media business competes in the talent market to try to get the best writers, journalists, actors, directors, musicians, website designers, and so on under contract to them. They try to keep these personnel costs low, but because the top talent is in short supply, their expenses escalate each year. Second, media businesses compete in the audience market; that is, they present the messages produced by their talented employees in such a way to attract the greatest number of people within certain types of audiences. In the media industries of magazines, newspapers, cable, and Internet, those companies sell subscriptions, so they want to maximize their revenue by attracting as many subscribers as possible. Media companies also sell messages in the form of books, recordings (music and movies), and theater tickets. Third, media companies compete in the advertising market. When media companies have constructed quality niche audiences, they have something valuable to offer advertisers who want to get their messages in front of particular types of consumers. 246

The media employees comprise the fourth group of players. Employees bring their time, skills, and talent to the game. Their goal is to increase the pay and benefits they receive for each hour worked. In the media, we make a distinction between below-the-line employees and above-the-line employees. Below-the-line employees are typically the crafts and clerical people who apply fairly common skills in the performance of their jobs. These skills can be learned by many people and can be improved with practice. That is, with the proper training and motivation, most people could perform well in most below-the-line jobs, such as a lighting technician, sound boom operator, copy editor, ticket taker, cable installer, secretary, or receptionist. There is a very large number of people who potentially could do these jobs, so the supply (people wanting these jobs) is much larger than the demand (number of these jobs available). Therefore, the payments to the people who perform these jobs is relatively low.

Taylor Swift poses at the 2015 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas. Her contribution as an abovethe-line talent is due not only to her singing talent but also to her ability to draw large audiences. Steve Granitz/ Wireimage/ Getty

247

The above-the-line employees are the creative types, and this requires talent much more than training or effort, although training and effort are also important. These above-the-line people are the writers, producers, directors, photographers, actors, singers, web designers, choreographers, and so on. We typically regard talent as being artistic ability, but for the mass media industries, talent is regarded more as the ability to attract large audiences then make them want to return for repeated exposures. Sometimes, the two conceptualizations of talent are the same, but more often the two are very different. For example, the singing ability of Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus, and Justin Bieber, although good, cannot alone account for their huge popularity; that is, these recording artists have some inexplicable ability to attract large audiences that cannot be explained solely by the 248

artistic quality of their singing ability. Also, there are many television stars who are not particularly good actors, yet they are in high demand by television producers because these actors can attract large audiences. Above-the-line people are paid a lot more than below-the-line people (at least twice as much on average), and the difference in wages is growing. Why are above-the-line people paid so much more? The reason is because this kind of talent is in short supply. For example, many people can sing and play musical instruments well, but very few musicians can attract enough fans who will buy their recordings in large numbers. The celebrities who can attract the most attention are paid the most (see Table 7.1). Another elite set of employees are the media company managers, who are often also partial owners of the companies. The talent of these managers is to oversee the construction of messages and their distribution so that those messages are experienced by the greatest number of targeted consumers. These media managers also have a talent that is in short supply so they are also paid very well (see Table 7.2). While you may recognize a few names on this list, most people who have created and who run the large media companies are not known to the general public.

Table 7.1 Annual Incomes of Highly Paid Media Celebrities Table 7.1 Annual Incomes of Highly Paid Media Celebrities 2014 Income Person

Profession

$620

Dr. Dre

Music producer

115

Beyoncé Knowles

Singer

105

Floyd Mayweather Boxer

100

The Eagles

Musicians

100

Steven Spielberg

Director/producer

95

Howard Stern

Radio personality

95

Simon Cowell

TV personality

90

Glen Beck

TV personality

90

James Patterson

Author

86

Mark Burnett

Director/producer

82

Bon Jovi

Musicians 249

82

Oprah Winfrey

TV personality

81

Bruce Springsteen

Musician

80

Justin Bieber

Singer

80

Cristiano Ronaldo

Soccer player

77

Dr. Phil McGraw

TV personality

75

One Direction

Singers

75

Robert Downey Jr. Actor

72

LeBron James

Basketball player

71

Paul McCartney

Musician

70

Tyler Perry

Director/producer

70

Ellen DeGeneres

TV personality

66

Rush Limbaugh

Radio personality

66

Michael Bay

Director/producer

66

Calvin Harris

Musician

Source: Adapted from “World’s Highest-Paid Celebrities” (2015). Note: Figures in the Income column represent income in millions of dollars.

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Compare & Contrast

251

Below-the-Line Costs and Above-the-Line Costs Compare: below-the-line costs and above-the-line costs are the same in the following ways: Both are expenses that media companies pay to people as a necessary cost of doing business in a mass medium industry. Both are payments made to individuals to compensate them for their skills and efforts. Contrast: below-the-line costs and above-the-line costs are different in the following ways: Below-the-line costs are payments to people whose skills are widespread in the general population, so there are many people who could do their jobs with a relatively small amount of training. Because there is a large supply of these people, payments are relatively low. Above-the-line costs are payments to people whose skills are rare; these skills are largely based on talent and while training can improve upon that talent, training alone cannot create that special talent. Because there is a very small supply of these people, payments are relatively high.

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The Goal For all four types of players, the general goal is to maximize the value of the exchange for themselves. Those who play the game well become net winners; that is, they have negotiated resource exchanges so well that their payoffs are of greater value than their costs. Because the resource exchange game is zero sum, the other players who give up resources more valuable than they receive in return are the net losers. Determining value is computed in very different ways for different players. For the media businesses and advertisers, value can be computed quantitatively in number of dollars. These businesses compare the dollars they have to spend to create messages and attract audiences (expenses) to the dollars that those exposures generate (revenue). When they keep expenses lower than revenues, they generate a profit. The larger the profit they generate each year, the more of a net winner they are. For consumers, however, value cannot be computed in a quantitative manner and this makes it more difficult for us to determine whether we are winners or losers in our economic exchanges. While our financial costs are obviously expressed in dollars and our time can be translated into dollar amounts, it is much more difficult to translate our satisfaction with media messages into quantitative indicators that can easily be compared to our costs. Typically we assess our satisfactions intuitively and on a micro-oriented ongoing basis; that is, as long as we are feeling some satisfaction with a media exposure, we typically allow ourselves to continue in that exposure instead of asking the harder question about whether the exposure is delivering enough satisfaction to warrant the continuing expenditures of our resources.

Table 7.2 Salaries of Media Managers Table 7.2 Salaries of Media Managers 2013 Pay Name

Company, Job

$93.4

Sumner Redstone

Viacom, chairman

66.9

Leslie Moonves

CBS, chairman & CEO

37.2

Philippe P. Dauman Viacom, CEO

34.4

Robert A. Iger

Walt Disney, chairman & CEO

31.4

Brian L. Roberts

Comcast, chairman & CEO

28.9

Rupert Murdoch

21st Century Fox, chairman & CEO

24.9

Marissa Mayer

Yahoo, CEO

12.6

Jon Feltheimer

Lions Gate, CEO

253

4.0

Reed Hastings

Netflix, CEO

Source: Adapted from Shaw & Maglio (2014). Note: Figures in the Pay column are in millions of dollars and include total compensation, including base salary and bonuses paid in 2013.

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The Rules The most central rule of this economic game is that to play, you must have resources and a willingness to exchange them for other resources. If you lack either the resources or the willingness to engage in exchanges, you are irrelevant to the game. All the other rules are made up by players as they negotiate. These rules are made up in order to maintain a sense of fairness in the exchange. Players who begin to perceive the game as unfair will cease to trust the other players and will stop playing; this diminishes the game. For the game to remain exciting, it must attract huge numbers of players who willingly exchange their resources every day. Although there are few rules, many characteristics guide the play of the game. These characteristics are illuminated in the next section.

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Characteristics of the Game To understand more about how the economic game is played with the mass media, you need to understand six characteristics of that game. These characteristics are as follows: the importance of valuing resources well, indirect as well as direct support, the complex interdependency among players, digital convergence, the nature of competition, and advertising as the engine. An understanding of this set of principles will help you comprehend how the negotiation for resources takes place.

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Importance of Valuing Resources Well The key to being successful in negotiations is to value resources accurately. If one player can do this and the second player cannot, the second player is at a real disadvantage. There are two considerations that go into resource valuation, and both of these require considerable skill to do well. One factor in valuing a resource is making an assessment about how well the resource will achieve a particular goal. A second factor that is important in valuing resources is to consider supply and demand. The more skill people have in these areas, the better they will be able to make accurate assessments of the value of their resources, and the more valuable those people will be in a negotiation. For example, let’s say you find something in your parents’ attic that you think may be valuable. You take it to an antique dealer to sell it. The dealer offers you $60 for it. Should you accept the $60 and sell it to the dealer? If you have no knowledge of antiques and no idea about how rare the piece is, you are operating in the dark. You might think you are savvy and ask for $100, then settle for $80, feeling good that you “got the dealer to raise her price” $20. But maybe the piece is worth $1,000. If you don’t have a good operating knowledge about what your resources are worth, you will continually fall into one of two traps. One trap is to over-value your resources, and no one will want to enter into exchanges with you. The other trap is to under-value your resources, in which case you make lots of exchanges, but you continually are shortchanged. When you have little knowledge of the value of your resources, you can only play the game to lose.

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Indirect as Well as Direct Support Recall that earlier in this chapter I told you that the average person in the United States now spends over $1,100 per year on the media. When we multiply this figure by the size of the population, we get $350 billion. But the media industries now generate about $970 billion in revenue a year. How is it possible that the U.S. population spends $350 billion on the media a year but the industry is able to take in $970 billion a year? The difference is accounted for by indirect payments to the media; that is, the media industries generate their huge revenues each year by taking in money from indirect, as well as direct, expenditures. Thus some of your support of the media is a direct cost and some is an indirect cost. Direct costs are the financial payments you make directly to a media company. For example, when you subscribe to a website, magazine, or cable TV service, you pay a subscription fee to a media company. When you buy a book, you pay a fee to a bookstore. When you download a movie or recording, you make a payment to a media store. When you buy hardware, such as TVs, DVD players, MP3 players, video game consoles, and other media products, you pay money to a store. These are all direct payments because you are involved in an exchange with a media company that gives you access to a media message in exchange for your money. Indirect costs are typically payments of time you make when you expose yourself to media messages. Media companies then translate your time into money by selling your time to advertisers. Advertisers then add this expense to the selling price of their products. So when you buy a heavily advertised product you are indirectly supporting the media. By paying more for products of all kinds (toothpaste, hamburgers, cereal, etc.) you subsidize the advertising industry, which sends a good deal of this money on to the mass media. Thus the mass media receive direct support from consumers in the form of payments to mass media organizations as well as indirect support from consumers who buy advertised products. The media of books, films, and recordings are supported almost entirely by direct costs paid by consumers of those messages. There are a few examples of ads being stuck in books and recordings and displayed before films, but this revenue from these ads is minor compared to direct costs. With magazines, newspapers, cable TV, and now the Internet, the costs are split between direct (subscriptions) and indirect (advertising). With broadcast television and radio, there is often no direct cost for exposure to a program, but there is a high cost for purchasing the means to receive a program (radios and television sets) in addition to indirect costs in the form of advertising. The balance between direct and indirect support is shifting from direct to indirect payment. The reason for this is that the costs of hardware (computers, mobile devices, TVs, etc.) are coming down each year while the revenues generated through advertising of all kinds increase each year. This shift also makes consumers believe they are paying less each year for media messages; however, the reality is that consumers are paying more.

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Compare & Contrast

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Direct Support and Indirect Support Compare: direct support and indirect support of the media are the same in the following ways: Both are ways the general population participates in the economic game to make the mass media industries viable. Both are the continual exchanges people make of resources, where they give up their money and time in exchange for exposures to media messages. Contrast: direct support and indirect support of the media are different in the following ways: Direct support refers to monetary payments made by people directly to various media companies in order to purchase hardware to receive media messages (television sets, computers, mobile devices, etc.), purchases of individual copies of messages (newspaper, magazines, books, etc.), or regular payments for subscriptions to access media messages (cable TV, Internet access, etc.). Indirect support refers to expenditures of time with the media (such as viewing TV programs that programmers translate into money by selling audience attention to advertisers) as well as monetary expenditures (of advertised products).

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Complex Interdependency Among Players Some exchanges are relatively simple, such as when two people make an exchange and no one else is affected or concerned with that individual exchange. For example, let’s say you are an employee of a video game company, and you want a raise in pay and benefits. If you are a receptionist or a secretary, most of the negotiating power lies with the company and not with you, because there is a very large supply of people with these skills relative to the demand. The company will offer you a wage not much above the minimum wage. Either you take this offer or you look for work elsewhere. There are, however, many times when the negotiations are more involved, and this illustrates the complex interdependence among the different players in the media economic game. For example, let’s say a radio station wants to attract more advertisers, so it cuts the price of its ads by 20% in its highest rated show. Advertisers want to buy those ad times (called avails), so demand for the avails at this station increases. The station, which used to air 15 minutes of ads during an hour, decides to air 20 minutes of ads, thus increasing its supply of avails to meet the increasing demand. The station likes this because even though it has cut its income per ad by 20%, it is now selling 33% more avails, and thus the station has increased its total revenue. But the audience notices this change and becomes upset that there are so many ads and not nearly as much music. Most of the audience switches channels during the ads and never comes back. The station’s ratings drop dramatically. Then advertisers become unhappy because it is no bargain to get a 20% discount on ads if the audience they expected to reach is almost gone. Advertisers begin feeling they are wasting their money, so they stop buying those ads. Three other characteristics make this interrelationship even more complex. First, the situation is highly dynamic and interrelated. When a person at one media company makes a decision, it can often have an impact on other companies in the same industry and perhaps other media industries. Returning to the radio station example above, when advertisers flocked to the station to get the discounted price for the avail, other radio stations (as well as television stations, newspapers, and local magazines) most likely lost advertising revenue. So when the revenues of one vehicle dramatically increase in the short term, the revenues of other competing vehicles are affected and usually go down. The same ripple effect can be seen with expenses of the media companies. For example, if several media companies started paying writers more money, then the better writers would be attracted to those companies, and the other companies would either have to pay more or else make do with less talented writers, which would lower the quality of their shows and result in losing audience size and hence lower revenue. When something changes in an industry where all the components are tightly linked, that change ripples outward and affects other players. A second characteristic that contributes to the complexity is that sometimes decision makers are conflicted because they are experiencing cross-purposes. An example of this is when a decision maker might be a member of more than one group—each with a different economic goal. Let’s say you work at a small newspaper and also own half of the newspaper company. As an employee, you might want a raise in salary, but this would increase overall personnel expenses and therefore reduce profits, making your investment less valuable. On a different scale, let’s say you work for a large newspaper and own stock in the company that 261

owns the newspaper. A raise in your wages will benefit you a great deal more than a non-raise will benefit shareholders. So your needs as an employee greatly outweigh your needs as an owner. Third, media vehicles compete in different markets. A market is a segment of the audience to which you offer your product or service. Markets differ in size, with the largest market in the United States being the national one. Only a few vehicles (such as television network prime-time broadcast programs, USA Today newspaper, and major Hollywood movies) see themselves competing in a national market. More typically, vehicles carve out a special niche. One way of identifying a niche is by geography, as is the case with newspapers, radio stations, and broadcast television stations. Media vehicles in these industries have their own geographical locale, such as a city or a limited region. Another way of identifying a niche is by audience interest, which is common with magazines, books, and radio. For example, Surfer magazine appeals to a very different audience niche than does Ladies’ Home Journal. College texts are marketed very differently than religious books. Country and western radio stations appeal to a very different audience than does a rap station. Clearly, the economics of the mass media industries are complex. The complexity can be traced to the fact that there are many different components, each with its own needs that are most often in conflict with the needs of other components. This requires a constant negotiation process, and as decisions are made, effects ripple out and influence the decisions of others. All parties are strongly interlinked.

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Digital Convergence Recall from Chapter 6 that digital convergence has served to eliminate technological differences between media channels. When a media company creates a message, it is stored in digital form, which makes it available to distribute in any media channel. This has created many more opportunities to market content simultaneously across all channels. The digitization of content has also lowered the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs. All of this recently available technology has made it relatively easy for anyone to create content and disseminate it instantly to people all over the world. Now anyone can create a newspaper or magazine by setting up a blog. Anyone can set up a book publishing company by using a very low-cost platform such as Amazon. Anyone can create their own music through easy-to-use programs like GarageBand and distribute it for free on YouTube or their own blogs.

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Nature of Competition Although this economic game involves many people and businesses, there is a limited amount of resources. Competition for those resources is strong—especially for the most valuable of those resources. However, because the game is ongoing, we must consider that certain companies and people get better and better at the game. As a result, those people and companies become more powerful. Some of these companies are attaining near-monopoly status within segments of the market. Thus, we have evolved into a situation referred to as monopolistic competition—monopolistic because each firm is large relative to the size of the market for its products (also, there are very high barriers to entry in most media industries) and competition because firms in an industry compete aggressively for resources. Unusually high profits in an industry typically attract new firms, which results in greater competition. With greater competition, there are more firms and hence expanded output, lower prices, reduced profits, and greater benefits for consumers. But this trend is not apparent in most mass media industries where there are a few companies that generate the majority of the revenue and that make very high profits. Although these companies compete with each other, the industry does not attract other companies because the cost of entry into those industries has become so high. Another characteristic of the competition is that within a market, all products are relatively indistinguishable; that is, the messages are not identical but very similar. For example, the website of CNN looks very similar to the website of MSNBC with pictures, headlines, and advertising; they cover the same stories, and they are continually updated at the same rate. A situation comedy on ABC is very similar to one on CBS; the characters have different names, but the stereotypes, settings, and plot points are very similar. With computer software, all spreadsheet programs are pretty much the same; also, web browsers are almost identical in user features. The key to this competition is making consumers believe that your product is different from the others. Media businesses do not really compete on product features as much as they compete on product images. This is why advertising is so important. Advertising gets people to look beyond the product features to consider product images as well as psychological advantages of using the product.

Media products tend to compete within a realm of familiar features. The sitcoms New Girl on Fox and Undatable on NBC, for instance, share many similarities. Photo by FOX via Getty Images Paul Drinkwater/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

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Advertising as the Engine Advertising is the engine that drives the growth of the media industries. The cost of doing business in the United States has greatly increased as advertising continually becomes a stronger economic force. In 1900, about $500 million was spent on all forms of advertising. By 1940, it was $2 billion, so it took 40 years to multiply four times. In 1980, it was $60 billion, or a growth of 30 times in those 40 years. Now it is more than $316 billion (eMarketer, 2011). Of this total, 32% will go to television (including cable and satellite), 15% to movies and video, 14% to magazines, 14% to newspapers, 13% to Internet, 8% to radio, and 4% to outdoor. Why is advertising so important to our economy? There have been some dramatic changes of the economy of this and other Western countries over the past 100 years and especially over the past 50 years that have worked in combination with advertising to increase both the sale of goods and services as well as the importance of advertising. First, there has been a decline in the proportion of farmers and blue-collar workers and an increase in the proportion of white-collar professional workers. This means that people are not as selfsufficient and must buy their food and clothing. Second, there has been a high level of employment, which gives people the resources to buy goods and services. We have more discretionary income, which makes it possible for us to purchase things at a point well beyond the mere subsistence level. Over time, the standard of living has steadily increased as people’s earning power increases and their expenditures for food, clothing, automobiles, housing, media, and luxuries have all increased. Advertising has been the engine for this growth. Advertising makes it possible for new goods to enter markets and let us know immediately that they are available. With more product successes, more and more companies are willing to introduce an even wider range of new products. These companies fuel advertising agencies with money, which is passed through to the media. As the media grow, they offer more information and entertainment to us. More of us spend more time with the media, thus generating many more audiences, which the media rent out to advertisers. The money cycles from us to products, to the manufacturers of those products, to those companies’ advertising agencies, to the media. Advertising drives this cycle faster and faster each year. If we stopped buying advertised products, the cycle would slow down and eventually stop.

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Media Industries’ Strategies The media industries have developed some general economic strategies over the years that make them successful at playing the economic game and achieving their goals. Three major strategies are illuminated in this section: maximizing profits, constructing audiences, and reducing risk.

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Maximizing Profits Almost all mass media are profit-oriented enterprises. As businesses, they are run to make as large a profit as possible. Remember that profit is the payoff or reward for doing business. This reward can be conceptualized in several different ways. First, it can be regarded as the difference between a company’s revenue (total income) and expenses (total costs)—usually expressed as a percentage of revenues. For example, let’s say you run a web design company and at the end of the year, you total up everything and find that your revenues (all sources of income) came to $100,000. Your expenses (paying employees, office rent, equipment, taxes, office supplies, utilities, etc.) sum up to $90,000. That means you have $10,000 left over after having paid all your expenses for the year. This is your reward. You get to keep 10% of all your revenues; that is, your ROR (return on revenues) is $10,000 divided by $100,000. A second way of computing your reward is to compare your profit to your assets, which is the money you have invested in the business. Let’s extend the same example above where you had a $10,000 profit at the end of the year. If you had $50,000 invested in the business (office furniture, computers, smartphones, and other equipment), then your ROA (return on assets) would be 20%, which is very good. Both ROR and ROA are very important indicators of the reward of doing business, but they look at reward in different ways. For example, let’s say you bought a radio station for $1 million and at the end of the year you had generated a profit of $10,000 on revenues of $100,000. That 10% ROR is pretty good, but the ROA is only 1%, which is terrible! You could have invested the $1 million in a savings account at the bank and done better without taking any risk or doing any work. In another example, let’s say you start a small monthly magazine and your only assets are a computer and a few pieces of furniture totaling $4,000. Your magazine generates revenue of $50,000, but your expenses are $49,000 so your profit is only $1,000. While your ROA is very high at 25% ($1,000 profit divided by assets of $4,000), your ROR is only 2% ($1,000 profit divided by revenues of $50,000). While the ROA of American businesses in general fluctuates around 10% to 12% (Hagel, Brown, Kulasooriya, & Elbert, 2010), media businesses typically exhibit higher returns (see Table 7.3). Newspapers appear to be the best of the mass media industries because they have very high percentages on both ROR and ROA. Remember these are industry-wide averages; some newspapers do much better than these figures, and others have been losing money. On the weaker end is the audio recording industry, with the lowest ROR. As for ROA, the cable television and film industries are the lowest, but both of these industries have huge asset bases, and this is what tends to make their ROA percentages appear smaller.

Table 7.3 Comparison of Profits Across Media Industries Table 7.3 Comparison of Profits Across Media Industries

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Industry

ROR ROA

Television broadcasting

22%

18%

Radio

20

16

Newspapers

17

26

Cable and pay television 15

9

Magazines

11

24

Films

11

9

Books

10

14

Audio recordings

7

14

Source: Adapted from Hagel, Brown, Kulasooriya, & Elbert (2010).

Minimizing Expenses

Increasing Revenue Streams A major strategy employed by media businesses to maximize their overall revenue is to increase the number of revenue streams. Given the way audiences have been fragmenting into smaller and smaller slivers, the level of revenue that can be generated by any one audience has been decreasing. So to work around this problem of fragmenting audiences, media businesses have had to develop multiple revenue streams. One way to do this is to try to appeal to more than one audience. Another way to do this is to try to develop several ways to generate money from the same audience. For example, a film studio will develop an action adventure movie to attract a certain kind of audience to buy tickets at a theater when the movie is first released. Although movie studios typically spend $50 million advertising a film, they know that many films will not earn this much at the box office. So the studios sell the movie on DVDs and through downloads from Internet sites. They also lease the movie to foreign distributors, and this adds another revenue stream. They lease the film to the airlines for showing during flights. They also sell downloads of the music from the film. Often, they try to produce toys, clothing, or other artifacts from the film and sell those to the public. They sometimes hire writers to turn the movie into a book. Or they could hire someone to translate the movie into a comic book format. And they also sell product placements in the films. All these revenue streams increase the total revenue and thus give the film more of a chance to be profitable. This strategy is not limited to film but applies to all the media industries.

Beyond traditional outlets, media companies look for additional streams of revenue like licensing their films and television programs for viewing on airplanes. 270

istock/robertbupuis

This strategy of increasing revenue streams can also be seen in all the merger and acquisition activity across the media industries. When a media company becomes a conglomerate, controlling the distribution of messages in many media channels, it can easily market a single message across many channels and thus quickly create multiple revenue streams for that one message.

Minimizing Expenses One of the largest expenses across all the media industries is personnel. Recall from earlier in this chapter that I made a distinction between below-the-line and above-the-line employees. Because the talent of above-theline employees is at a premium, media companies must pay huge sums to hire this talent. To compensate for this increasing cost of talent, companies are pressured to keep the below-the-line costs down. Most of the positions in the media industries are fairly low-level jobs that entail routine assignments that can be done by many different people with little training. These are the secretaries, receptionists, ticket takers, and low-level craftspeople. A bit higher than this are the assistant producers, camera operators, disk jockeys, and the like. Some of these people have special talent and quickly move up to the top of their industry, but most of them do not. The media pay the people with a lot of talent a lot of money because these people are required for a company to generate large revenues. To counterbalance the large payments to talent, companies reduce expenses by paying clerical people as little as possible. Because the supply of potential workers for entry-level positions is so much larger than the demand, media companies can pay near minimum wage and get good workers.

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The media reduce expenses through economies of scale and economies of scope. Economies of scale exist when marginal costs are lower than average costs, that is, when producing an extra unit of a good decreases as the scale of output expands. Large production runs are good because they spread out the start-up expenses over many units; thus, with each additional unit manufactured, the per-unit cost continues to go down (Doyle, 2002). To illustrate, let’s say you are a magazine publisher and your cost of operation (cost of paying all your reporters, editors, salespeople, office staff, rent on building, depreciation of all your equipment, supplies, phones, other utilities, etc.) is $60,000 per week. This is your fixed cost. If you print only one copy of the magazine each week, you will have to sell it for $60,000 just to cover your fixed costs. If you print two copies, you would have to sell each for $30,000 to cover all your costs; your average fixed cost per copy is cut in half. If you print 60,000 copies, your average fixed cost per copy is only $1. Thus, your average fixed costs keep going down as these costs are spread over more and more copies. However, when you print more copies, the cost of paper, ink, and distribution increases; these are your variable costs because they vary according to how many copies you print. The more copies you print, the more paper and ink you will need, and the price you pay for a roll of paper or a gallon of ink will go down because you can buy these materials in bulk and get big discounts. Although your total cost for ink and paper will go up when printing more copies, your average variable cost for these will go down. This is known as economies of scale. The bigger the scale of your business, the more likely your costs will go down either through the ability to demand greater discounts or because you are able to operate more efficiently beyond a certain point. The media companies, like any business, want to keep their expenses down, so they will find the point at which the combination of both their average fixed costs and their average variable costs is lowest. Beyond this point, distributing more copies only serves to increase unit costs and thus reduce profit. So newspapers, magazines, books, and recordings each seek the point where their average total costs (the sum of average fixed costs and average variable costs) are lowest. With economies of scale, broadcast television, radio, and websites are different from the other media. They have no variable costs, only fixed costs. For example, with broadcast television, there is no cost to the station of adding an additional viewer to the audience. Viewers pay for their own television receivers, and they pay for the electricity to run them. The station has no distribution costs other than the electricity of the broadcast signal, and the power used to broadcast a station’s signal is the same whether 100 or 100,000 sets are tuned in. It is fixed. With no variable costs and with a very high first-copy fixed cost, broadcast television stations keep dropping their average total costs with each additional audience member added. For this reason, the broadcast media (both radio and television) are strongly motivated, more than any other medium, to increase the size of their audiences. The same pattern holds with websites. Economies of scope also serve to reduce a firm’s expenses per unit. Economies of scope are achieved through multi-product production; that is, there are variations on the product produced. Recall the example above about a movie company generating many revenue streams for a single movie. As the revenues increase for each new revenue stream, the expenses remain relatively low; that is, once you have produced the movie, it is relatively inexpensive to record it on DVDs. By increasing the scope of distributing the same product, very

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little additional costs are incurred, and yet the potential for revenues increasing is great. Digitization has made economies of scope even more attractive, because it creates little cost to retransmit a message in many different channels. Also, digitization allows for compression of greater amounts of data or more layers of content to be packed into a product. Now you can buy a DVD that contains an entire movie; it also can have interviews with the writer, director, and stars; outtakes; the director’s cut; alternative endings; and so on. Let’s see if you can apply this general information about revenues and expenses to specific media companies by doing Exercise 7.3. To get this information, access a company’s website and see if you can find its annual financial report.

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Constructing Audiences Because advertising is the principal source of revenue for most of the commercial media throughout the world, media companies are in the business of constructing desirable audiences and renting them out to advertisers. A media business builds an audience by recognizing where there is a need for entertainment or information then providing those products and services to satisfy those needs. This can be done generally in one of two ways. A media business can either (a) use a quantity audience strategy (i.e., try to attract as large a general audience as possible) or (b) use a quality audience strategy (i.e., try to attract a certain kind of niche audience). The dominant mass media in the past typically used a quantity audience strategy. They tried to present whatever content they felt would attract the greatest number of people without caring much about who they were; they simply sought the greatest number of people they could attract. This is what the commercial television networks did in the past, especially for their prime-time period (8 to 11 p.m. each night). During the peak of broadcast television, a prime-time show that generated a rating of 11 was regarded as a failure. Now with audience fragmentation, a prime-time show that generates a rating of 3 is regarded as a hit show.

Attracting People to Niche Audiences The radio and magazine industries have been very successful for years in attracting niche audiences. Recall from the previous chapter that radio was displaced by television as the dominant medium in the middle of the last century. In order to pull itself out of a decline and adapt, radio switched from a quantitative to a qualitative audience strategy and each radio station developed a certain sound to appeal to one kind of listener. For example, one station would use rap music to attract urban youth, whereas another station would use golden oldies to attract the aging baby boomers. The audience for each of these stations was relatively small compared to the audience for broadcast television, which was at its peak and used a quantity strategy to try to appeal to everyone. Now television is no longer at a peak and it is trying to adapt by switching to a quality audience strategy. Relatively small, highly targeted audiences have great value to many advertisers, because special groups of people have special needs. Businesses that are marketing products for a special audience will pay a premium to the media vehicles that attract that special audience. For example, joggers as a group have a special need for information on running practices, equipment, and training techniques. They support several magazines that publish nothing but this type of information. Manufacturers of jogging equipment pay a premium to place ads in these magazines, knowing that the buying of advertising space in these magazines is a very efficient purchase, because the ads placed there will be reaching their most likely customers. This niche orientation is called long tail marketing, which was introduced in the previous chapter. The market for products of all kinds as well as media messages is now much less concentrated on a few hits and is much more spread out across thousands of alternatives, each of which generates a small amount of sales. Our economy has shifted away from a focus on relatively few hits (mainstream products) and moving toward servicing the needs of thousands of tiny markets forming a long tail. To illustrate, the recording industry used

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to focus on signing only those musical groups that could produce hit records. The recording industry was interested only in best sellers, with only those songs on the Billboard Top 100 list having any value. But then with the introduction of MP3 players in 2001 and the widespread use of music-sharing platforms on the Internet, the recording industry moved much more into long tail marketing, and by 2006 there were 8 million unique song tracks being sold and shared. Long tail marketing relies on aggregators, which are platforms that bring together buyers and sellers of all kinds of products and services. Chris Anderson (2006) says there are five kinds of aggregators: physical goods (e.g., Amazon, eBay), digital goods (e.g., iTunes), advertising services (e.g., Google, Craigslist), information (e.g., Google, Wikipedia), and communities/user-created content (e.g., Facebook). These aggregators rely on recommendations to direct users to the products and services they are most likely to buy. That is, the aggregators make filtering decisions so that users can have a more efficient buying experience and not have to slog through all the hundreds of thousands of choices. What makes long tail marketing so successful is the widespread use of technologies that many people can use to create products and messages, the removal of limitations in bottlenecks of distribution, and limits on product lines in stores. Now everything is available (C. Anderson, 2006). Now it is easier than ever to create media messages in many forms (print, musical recordings, video) and make them widely available (via blogs, Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, etc.). We are now in the middle of a major retailing shift away from brick-and-mortar stores to web-based stores. Brick-and-mortar stores have limited shelf space and can offer only a small percentage of products, but virtual stores on the Internet can offer a much more extensive selection of products. For example, of the more than 200,000 films, TV shows, documentaries, and other video that have been released commercially, the average video brick-and-mortar store carries only about 3,000. Thus web based movie rental services are better than even the largest brick-and-mortar stores. For example, 138 million Americans shop at Wal-Mart each week, making Wal-Mart the biggest single seller of music in the country, accounting for 20% of all records sales, but 99% of music albums available today are not in Wal-Mart. Web based retails such as iTunes offers 40 times as much selection as Wal-Mart; Netflix has 18 times as many DVDs as Blockbuster; Amazon offers 40 times as many books as a Borders superstore; and eBay offers thousands of times as many products as even a large department store (C. Anderson, 2006).

Conditioning Audiences Once a mass media business has constructed an audience, it needs to keep that audience so it can continue to rent it out to advertisers. The mass media businesses are not especially interested in providing a message for a single exposure, like a rock concert promoter might. The mass media want to stay in business over the long term, and this requires that they maintain their audiences. Therefore, they must condition their audience members so that they develop a habit of exposure.

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Reducing Risk All businesses face risk. About 90% of new businesses fail shortly after being founded. Venture capitalist firms that finance new businesses for a living are happy when 20% of their investments are successful. Risk is especially high with media businesses. For example, very few Hollywood films earn enough at the box office to cover their initial production costs, and less than 2% of films released each year in the United States account for 80% of box office returns (Schumpeter, 2011). Also, 65% of all series introduced on television are canceled within their first year (Ocasio, 2012). How do media companies reduce the risk that their messages will fail to attract a large enough audience to recover their initial costs of production? Media businesses have shifted their thinking toward something called the marketing concept. Instead of beginning with messages then trying to find audiences for those messages, media businesses begin with audience needs then construct messages to meet those needs. With the marketing concept, managers conduct research to identify particular niche audiences then find out what the unmet needs are for those audiences. Then the media develop messages to meet those previously unmet needs. Beginning with research first and product development second reduces risk of message failure once the messages are released into the market. This procedure is used frequently by the media industries. Researchers look at what works then develop shows that are sequels or spin-offs of successful shows. Also, in the magazine industry, a large conglomerate will do market testing for unmet needs for magazines; once a need is found, the company will develop a magazine to reach that niche audience then rent those consumers to a particular set of advertisers who need to expose that particular audience to their ad messages. Hollywood is fond of sequels because they reduce risk. This is why the number of sequels increased each year until reaching an all-time high in 2011, when a sequel of a major Hollywood movie was released every other week (Lussier, 2011). For example, Spider-Man 2 cost $200 million to produce (see Table 7.4), which is a huge investment risk. However, it earned back all that investment in the first several weeks at the box office then went on to earn a total of over $370 million from all its revenue streams over the next few years. Based on this success the producers made Spider-Man 3 with a budget of $258 million, and that movie earned even more money (“The Financial Web,” 2012).

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Consumers’ Strategies We as consumers follow strategies just like the media industries do. However, our strategies are quite different from the profit-maximizing strategies of the mass media. We have two options for strategies. We can follow a default strategy, or we can follow a media literacy strategy.

Table 7.4 Costs for Making a Hollywood Movie: Spider-Man 2 Table 7.4 Costs for Making a Hollywood Movie: Spider-Man 2 Costs Production Item $20

Script rights from Marvel Comics

10

Screenplay

15

Producers

10

Director

17

Actor: Tobey Maguire

7

Actor: Kirsten Dunst

3

Actor: Alfred Molina

3

Actors: Rest of cast

45

Production shooting

65

Special effects

5

Music

2

Musical composer

200

Total cost to make the movie

Source: Adapted from hasnmedia (2013). Note: Figures are in millions.

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Default Strategy The default strategy typically runs continuously in our unconscious minds. It guides us to follow our preprogrammed habits because this requires very little effort and delivers familiar satisfactions. If we get on Facebook every morning, we will continue to get on Facebook each morning. If we typically send 20 tweets per day, we will continue sending a similar number of tweets each day. If we like a half-dozen music groups, we follow their new releases and typically ignore the music of other groups and are completely unaware of the music in other genres. We follow these habits because it is easy to continue doing what we have in the past without thinking about it much. These habits were developed in the past when we tried something new and felt it was a pleasant experience, so we continue with it without thinking much. We rarely search out the experience for a very different type of message, because we either are not sure what other messages are out there or feel that searching out those messages will entail much more effort than it is worth; that is, we will not feel more rewarded by them. Although the messages we currently experience are not providing huge rewards, they have almost no costs to us because they are routine habits. Therefore value is determined more by the low cost of the exposures than by the high return.

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Media Literacy Strategy People who follow a media literacy strategy understand the economic game and how to be a better player. This means they have higher expectations for a return on the resources they expend. They want more than minimal satisfaction from exposures. They think much more about the value of their own resources, and they want to negotiate a better exchange for those resources. Why do some people follow the default strategy exclusively while others also employ the media literacy strategy? The answer lies in the strength of one’s personal locus. People with a weak personal locus will settle for little in the exchanges because it requires too much effort to become a better player in the economic game. In contrast, people with a strong personal locus are driven to become more of a winner at this game. Expending the greater effort required to improve one’s skills and build more elaborate knowledge structures (see Table 7.5) is fun because it pays them back with much more interesting experiences.

Table 7.5 Types of Skills and Knowledge Structures Needed to Understand the Economic Nature of the Mass Media Table 7.5 Types of Skills and Knowledge Structures Needed to Understand the Economic Nature of the Mass Media Skills

Knowledge

Ability to analyze reports on media industries and companies to determine revenue, expenses, and profits Ability to compare/contrast across industries and companies on economic indicators Ability to evaluate the economic health of media Knowledge of revenue, expenses, and

industries and companies Cognitive

profits of media industries and Ability to generalize from particular companies

specific companies

to industry trends Ability to synthesize a prediction for future trends in the media industries and companies Ability to analyze media industries and companies to recognize the operation of the five economic characteristics Ability to analyze your feelings in reaction to the Emotional economic practices of media

Knowledge of your experiences in buying and using media products

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Ability to analyze the moral implications of economic decisions

Moral

Ability to compare/contrast the moral implications across different companies Ability to evaluate the ethical responsibilities of mass media to society

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Knowledge of values in the media Knowledge of your ethical system

Summary When you add the economic information from this chapter to your knowledge structure about the media, you develop a deeper understanding about how decisions are made. Remember that the media industries are composed of businesses that are run to make as large a profit as they can. Each of the media industries does this well, and each earns a profit much higher than the average of almost all other industries in the United States. The media businesses play the economic game very well because they follow three strategies. First, they maximize profits by increasing revenue and decreasing expenses. Second, they construct niche audiences then condition audience members into habits of continual exposures. Third, they reduce their risks by using the marketing concept. We as consumers have two strategies available to us. One strategy is the default strategy, where we follow habits conditioned by the media. By following this strategy, we exchange our resources of time and money for a continual state of satisfaction with our habitual exposures; our focus is on keeping our costs low by limiting our exposures to content we have liked in the past and avoiding the risk of trying new content that would require more effort to find and understand. The alternative is to follow a media literacy strategy, where we expend more effort to develop our skills and knowledge structures so that we profit by using the media better to fulfill our own needs for entertainment and information. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Albarran, A. B. (2010). The media economy. New York, NY: Taylor & Francis. (202 pages with index) The author covers a lot of ground in this relatively short book. He includes chapters on theories, technologies, regulatory issues, globalization, and labor issues. Anderson, C. (2006). The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. New York, NY: Hyperion. (238 pages including index) Anderson convincingly shows that marketers of media messages—as well as all products—have moved away from depending on hits for generating all their sales and instead are now mining sales from thousands of nonhits, each of which has low sales but added together generate huge revenue. Doyle, G. (2013). Understanding media economics (2nd ed.). London, UK: Sage. (216 pages, including references and index) This book was written for people who do not have a background in economics but who want to learn about how the media industries operate along economic principles. Although the examples are primarily from Great Britain and Europe, they illustrate economic trends and principles that also operate in the United States. Picard, R. G. (2011). The economics and financing of media companies (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Fordham University Press. (274 pages with glossary and index) While taking a broad economic perspective on the mass media, Picard also focuses on how these companies are capitalized and how they use the principles of financial management to make decisions about how to acquire and exchange resources. Vogel, H. L. (2011). Entertainment industry economics: A guide for financial analysis (8th ed.). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. (655 pages including appendices, glossary, and index) This textbook presents a wealth of details about the economics of each of the media industries in 15 chapters. It presents a lot of facts and figures (rather than anecdotes and insider stories) about the economic history and current nature of the entertainment industries primarily in the United States.

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Keeping Up To Date Advertising Age (http://adage.com/datacenter/article?article_id=106352) This website provides lots of information about the leading media companies. Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/54/400list08_The-400-Richest-Americans_Rank.html) This website provides stories on economics and rank-ordered lists of wealthy people.

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Exercise 7.1

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Estimating Your Personal Expenditures of Money on the Media 1. Before you go any further, stop and make a general estimate about how much money you spent on all forms of the media over the past year. Write your estimate here: $_______ 2. Now, let’s itemize those expenditures. Think back 1 year from today and try to remember how much money you spent on each of the following over the past 12 months. If you want to do this accurately, get out your checkbook register and credit card receipts. $_______ Cable subscription (take monthly bill and multiply by 12) $_______ Magazine subscriptions $_______ Buying individual issues of magazines $_______ Newspaper subscriptions $_______ Buying individual newspapers $_______ Buying textbooks $_______ Other books (pleasure reading, gifts, reference books, etc.) $_______ Movie theater admissions $_______ Rental and downloading costs of movies $_______ Buying radios, televisions, DVD players, MP3 players, etc. $_______ Repairs on media equipment $_______ Buying computer hardware and peripherals (printer, game controllers, etc.) $_______ Buying computer software and/or manuals $_______ Subscription to computer services (Internet service provider, website access, etc.) $_______ Buying musical recordings $_______ Buying video or computer games $_______ Playing video games at arcades $_______ TOTAL (sum of all the figures down the column) 3. How close are your figures in #1 and #2? 4. Does the amount of money you spent surprise you? Why?

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Exercise 7.2

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Estimating Your Personal Expenditures of Time on the Media 1. Begin with a wild guess about how much time you spend with the media each year. Write your estimate here: _______ hours 2. Now, let’s itemize those expenditures of time. To make this task manageable, think about an average week. In the spaces below, estimate how many hours and minutes you spend with each of the following activities. Remember that you can be doing more than one of these at the same time. _______ Reading magazines (print and online) _______ Reading newspapers (print and online) _______ Reading textbooks and other materials for classes _______ Reading books (print and electronic) for pleasure _______ Listening to the radio (in your car, on portable players, at home, etc.) _______ Listening to recorded music (non-radio; MP3 player, stereo system at home, etc.) _______ Watching films at theaters _______ Watching videos on screens of all kinds (televisions, computers, mobile devices, etc.) _______ Working on a computer (word processing, doing research, etc.) _______ Communicating on computers and mobiles (e-mailing, texting, social networking, etc.) _______ Playing on computers and mobiles (games, visiting websites for entertainment, etc.) _______ TOTAL (sum of all the figures down the column) 3. How close are your figures in #1 and #2? 4. Does the amount of time you spent surprise you? Why?

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Exercise 7.3

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Financial Analysis 1. Go to the library and get a list of media companies. Try the Hoover’s Guide to Media Companies or get your reference librarian to help you. Find two media companies that look interesting to you. 2. For each company, do a brief financial analysis by answering the following questions: a. How much revenue did the company have last year? b. What were the major sources of that income? c. Given the sources of income, would you say that the company is primarily concerned with media businesses, or are media businesses really a sideline to other more important businesses? d. What were the company’s expenses for the year? e. What was the company’s profit margin? (Can you get both ROR and ROA?) f. What did the company do with its profits? Did it disperse all or part to the shareholders who invested in the company? Or did the company keep all or most of the profits for investing in additional media properties or other businesses? 3. Given your two analyses of the companies, in which would you rather invest your money? Why?

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Part IV Content Chapter 8 Media Content and Reality Chapter 9 News Chapter 10 Entertainment Chapter 11 Advertising Chapter 12 Interactive Media

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Chapter 8 Media Content and Reality

Role of Reality in Media Content Formulas Complex Judgment Magic Window Multiple Dimensions of Reality Differences Across Individuals Organizing Principle: Next-Step Reality Audience’s Perspective Programmers’ Perspective Reality Programming as a Genre The Importance of Media Literacy Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises

Key Idea: The media spin reality to make it appear more exciting and thus attract people away from their real lives.

Host Chris Harrison (left) sits with The Bachelor season 19 stars Chris Soules and Whitney Bischoff during the “After the Final Rose” episode. The popular television show blends reality and fantasy media messages. Rick Rowell/ABC via Getty Images

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“This is a great idea for a show I call Act Real,” said Cosmo as he started his pitch for a reality television show to Sylvia, who was a television network vice president of reality programming. “So Sylv, my idea is to get about 8 to 10 aspiring young actors and stick them in a house in downtown New York City. Every few days they audition for a part in a major Broadway show or TV show. After each round of auditions, only one gets hired and that person moves out of the house. The rest of them stay in the house and we hear them complain and get all depressed. Each week the number of actors in the house goes down and we are left with the actors who feel more and more like losers.” “Well, then where’s the payoff?” asked Sylvia. “Get this, Sylv, the payoff is that the last guy ends up getting the best acting job of all of them. But he doesn’t know that until the last episode when he is the most depressed and the most pissed off because all the other actors who he thinks are not as good as him are all given jobs. It’s beautiful!” “What kind of support do you need from the network?” “First, I want you to put out a casting call for actors for a new show on your network. We should get thousands of applications. We choose the most unstable actors, the real drama queens. Then we need to hire some writers to give the actors cool nicknames and backstories. Also the writers should write some lines here and there for the actors so we get some feuds going. We need your best editors to cut down all our footage because we will have cameras in every room in that house and end up with about 3,000 hours of footage.” “Sounds like a lot of production. What makes this a ‘reality’ show?” “We don’t pay the actors!” “I don’t know about that. The actors’ union will not allow that.” “Yes they will, Sylv. These guys are actors in real life but on our show they are just ordinary people who want to be hired as actors. We don’t have to pay ordinary people to be on a reality show. It’s beautiful!”

A popular way to group media messages has been to put them into two categories: reality and fantasy. These two categories appear to be very different from one another, so it should be an easy task to group media

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messages. However, the task of grouping becomes very difficult when we start analyzing media messages and find a blend of reality and fantasy in almost all those messages. And this distinction between reality and fantasy seems to break down totally when we analyze the content from the newest television genre of “reality programming.” In this chapter, we will examine the role of reality in media content formulas where scholars have been trying to figure out how audiences make judgments about what is real in media messages. Then we will analyze patterns across television shows within the emerging genre of reality programming.

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Role of Reality in Media Content Formulas Reality is one of the most difficult concepts to define in any context. Philosophers have been trying to define it for millennia, and ever since the field of psychology was founded more than a dozen decades ago, psychologists have been focused on the fundamental problem of how the human mind encounters the world and seeks to make sense of what is real. The more that scholars study this idea, the more it becomes clear that it is a complex judgment that involves many criteria and differs across individuals.

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Complex Judgment With media studies, it would seem as if the task of delineating reality would be made easier by simply drawing the line of reality between the media world and the real world. The real world is real, and the media world is fantasy. But this is far too easy a distinction, and drawing the line in this way would be highly inaccurate and misleading. Still, we do have to make a distinction because developing a sophisticated understanding of the nature of reality is very important when trying to gain control over media effects. Let’s begin by examining how scholars have analyzed how people make this distinction.

Magic Window For years, media scholars assumed a clear distinction between reality and fantasy in media messages. Early thinking was that the media, especially television, simply held a window up to the actual world when it covered real events and real people. Thus news and informational shows were considered reality and everything else, which was fiction, was considered fantasy. They used this simple distinction to argue that children initially believed that all of television was a magic window that showed literal reality and that until children learned how to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, they were vulnerable to many negative effects. The results of early research on this topic claimed that very young children (younger than 3 years of age) regarded television as a magic window, but as children’s minds matured cognitively (as you saw in Chapter 5), they developed a skepticism—called the adult discount—about the literal reality of media messages, and they were better able to distinguish reality from fantasy (Taylor & Howell, 1973). As they accumulate more experience with the media, children increase their skepticism and fully embrace the adult discount by about age 12 (Hawkins, 1977). Subsequent research, however, began to show that not all people apply an adult discount consistently by the time they reach age 12. For example, van der Voort (1986) found that although children’s perceptions of reality decreased from ages 9 to 12 for fantasy programs, there was no change in their perceptions of the reality of so-called reality programs. It appears that children base their perceptions of reality not on the accuracy of portrayals or information but on the probability that something could occur in their lives. This suggested that people were not simply making judgments about the reality of media messages using a magic window distinction, but that they used multiple criteria for judging the reality of media messages.

Very young children may view television as a “magic window” on the world, but they can distinguish fictional programming from news by age 5. iStock/Jason Lugo

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While space ships and aliens may be more fanciful than college students, in what ways are the science fiction film Star Wars more realistic than the situation comedy Community? © Lucasfilm/Sunset Boulevard/Corbis AF Archive/alamy

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

Multiple Dimensions of Reality 298

Researchers have found that while the beginning point of judging reality is usually an assessment of whether a portrayal actually happened, people frequently use more criteria, such as factuality, perceptual persuasiveness, social utility, identity, emotional involvement, plausibility, typicality, and narrative consistency (H. Cho, Shen, & Wilson, 2014; Dorr, 1981; A. Hall, 2003; Hawkins, 1977; Potter, 1986; see Table 8.1). Furthermore, it appears that people make judgments on these various criteria in an independent manner; that is, if a message is perceived as highly realistic on one criterion, the person may or may not perceive the message as being realistic on the other criteria. For example, Star Trek is likely to be regarded as fantasy when using the factuality criterion, but it could be regarded as highly realistic by many on the other criteria.

Table 8.1 Criteria for Determining Reality of Media Messages Table 8.1 Criteria for Determining Reality of Media Messages Criterion

Questions Does the message show what actually happened? This is the idea of the magic window

Factuality

that asks: Is the media message an accurate, unadorned view through a window on actual events and people?

Perceptual persuasiveness

Social utility

Identity

Does the media message present characters and settings that look real?

Does the media message portray social lessons that can be used by people in their everyday lives? Does the way characters are portrayed in media messages lead people to believe that those characters are very much like people in their everyday lives?

Emotional

Does the media message engage people’s feelings so they are pulled into the action

involvement

and feel it is really happening?

Plausibility

Does the media message portray something that could happen?

Typicality

Does the media message portray something that usually happens?

Narrative

Does the plot of the story make people believe that the sequence of actions is

consistency

believable?

Differences Across Individuals As you have seen with the arguments laid out above, reality is a complex idea. There are many dimensions. There are also considerable differences across individuals in how they make their judgments of reality of media portrayals. These judgments of reality can vary widely even among people of the same age and experience. Not

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every child of the same age is making the same judgments about reality. For example, van der Voort (1986) reports that perceptions of reality and the degree of identification with characters vary substantially at any given age. In his research, he found that some children became absorbed in watching violent videos and judged the violence to be realistic, which led to a stronger emotional reaction, which led to a belief that the violence was terrible, which did not lead to aggressive behavior in real life. In contrast, other children who were also absorbed in viewing violence and believed it to be realistic had an uncritical attitude toward program violence, which led to them being more jaded and less emotionally involved, which led to more aggressive behavior in real life. To further illustrate the idea of a range of perceptions of reality, consider the situation as described in Box 8.1. The people who wrote to the Coast Guard, begging them to rescue Gilligan and his friends from the island, appear silly. You might be thinking that such a problem with reality is rare, and you would probably be right because this is such an extreme situation. But consider how much variation across people there is on perceptions of reality on shows like Undercover Boss, World Wrestling Federation, Jersey Shore, The Hills, Amish Mafia, and COPS. Which of these shows do you think are more real than others? Do you think everyone else would agree with your judgments or would there be many differences across people? Up to this point in the chapter, I have shown you how complex the idea of reality can be. We must consider multiple criteria that are independent from one another. We must consider that children are less capable than adults in making certain kinds of judgments about reality but become more sophisticated in applying different criteria as they age. We must consider that there is a wide range of sophistication in making reality judgments across adults. How can we simplify this complex array of ideas so that we can focus attention on why all this should matter to media literacy? What do people really need to know about the nature of the reality of media messages to be literate and protect themselves from harmful effects?

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Box 8.1 Gilligan’s Island In 1964, Sherwood Schwartz produced a show called Gilligan’s Island. This was a farcical comedy where seven characters who had been on a pleasure cruise encountered a storm that left them shipwrecked on an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. After about six episodes had aired, Schwartz was contacted by the Coast Guard and told that it had received several dozen telegrams from people who were complaining that the military should send a ship to rescue these seven people. Those telegrams were serious. Schwartz was dumbfounded, calling this the “most extreme case of suspension of belief I ever heard of.” He wondered, “Who did these viewers think was filming the castaways on that island? There was even a laugh track on the show. Who was laughing at the survivors of the wreck of the S. S. Minnow? It boggled the mind” (Schwartz, 1984, p. 2).

The cast of Gilligan’s Island © Ronald Grant Archive / Alamy

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Organizing Principle: Next-Step Reality Much of the complexity in the research about perceptions of reality can be explained simply by what I call next-step reality. When we think about what audiences really want from media messages, we can see that many of their exposure decisions are guided by a desire for next-step reality. Also, when we look at decisions from a programmer’s perspective, we can again see the emergence of next-step reality. This idea is embedded in how media messages get produced and why certain messages attract large audiences whereas other messages do not. In this section, I bring this idea to the surface and show you how it serves as a useful organizing principle for thinking about all kinds of media content.

Audience’s Perspective Why do people expose themselves to media messages? At the most fundamental level, they expose themselves to the media to find messages that they cannot get in real life. If people were getting all the messages they needed in real life, they would have no motivation to go to the expense (money and time) to search through the media for these messages. There are two reasons why people are motivated to get certain messages but go to the media rather than get those messages in real life. One reason is that it is impossible for them to get those messages in real life. For example, for most people, it is impossible to know what the Earth looks like from outer space or what the surfaces of other planets look like. It is impossible to know what it was like to live on a farm during the American Civil War, to be a knight of the Round Table in medieval England, or to watch Jesus Christ preach. To get access to these images, sounds, and emotions, people must access messages from the media. A second reason that motivates people to get messages from the media instead of real life is because the costs of getting those messages in the media are far lower than the costs required in real life. For example, it is easier to watch a 1-hour travelogue on France than to pay the money to travel there for a week. It is far easier to watch a presidential news conference on television than it is to go to journalism school, get a job on a major newspaper or television service, get credentialed as a White House reporter, and attend the press conference in person. And it is less costly emotionally to watch characters in a movie try to meet each other, establish relationships, break up, and learn from their mistakes than it is to go through all of that in real life to learn the same thing. Audiences therefore have a strong, continuing motivation to seek out messages in the media. They search for messages that have two general characteristics. First, those messages must appear real. They must have many elements that signal to viewers that they are real; that is, they are close enough to resonate strongly with a viewer’s experience of everyday reality, and thus those messages are accurate representations or at least plausible and probable. If they do not appear real, then audiences will not trust that the information is useful enough to bring it back into their everyday lives. Second, those messages must present a little more than everyday reality. Without this something extra, there is no reason to search out the media message because the person is already getting the message in his or her real life. This is what I mean by next-step reality—the message is presented as reality to resonate with the audience’s experience and make it have the potential to be 303

useful in everyday situations, but the message is also “sweetened” by an extra added ingredient that takes it one step outside of the audience’s everyday existence. Therefore, people want media messages that are not so real that they are the same as their everyday lives. But neither do they want media messages that are so far removed from their experiences and needs that the messages have no immediate relevance. So people want messages that are one step removed from real life; they want messages that show what is easily possible and make it seem probable and even actual.

Programmers’ Perspective Programmers intuitively know that to attract an audience, they must take their audience’s sense of reality and tweak it a bit to make it seem more interesting. Thus, the producers of media messages typically keep the elements of their messages anchored in the real world as much as possible so that they can accurately resonate with the audience’s experiences in real life. But producers of media messages also know they cannot simply reproduce those messages; there would be no point to this because it would be easier for people to stay with their own real-world messages. Producers of fiction know that their art is in telling stories that are “bigger” than life in some way. Producers can take an ordinary setting and a typical plot (boy meets girl) but change the characters so that they are a little more attractive or a little more interesting than people in real life. Or producers can take ordinary characters and put them in a plot that is a bit more dramatic in events and consequences than what happens to most people in real life. Skilled producers can take the audience on a journey by removing the audience one step at a time until they have taken them willingly to an absurd place. This is the formula with farce. The story begins with what looks like an ordinary everyday situation; then, step-by-step, the producer takes the audience far away from that reality but does it in a way that the audience is not lost but willingly awaits each new step. Thus, producers depend on viewers’ willing suspension of disbelief. To make people willing, producers must take it one step at a time. The next-step reality is also easy to understand with persuasive messages. For example, the typical problemsolution advertising message shows ordinary people with an ordinary problem, such as bad breath, a headache, dirty laundry, hunger for a good lunch, and so on. The advertiser invites the audience to take the step of faith into a solution, that is, to buy and use the advertised product on the promise that it will solve the problem better than any other solution—more quickly, more completely, more cheaply, or more satisfying emotionally. The next-step reality is a bit more difficult to understand with information-type messages. For example, if the purpose of news organizations is to report the events of the day, how can the next-step reality apply to journalists? The answer is that when journalists select what gets reported, they are not as interested in the typical events as they are in the anomalous events. Recall the old saying that if a dog bites a man, it is not news, but if a man bites a dog, that is news. The twist in the event makes it news. Crimes are news because they are aberrant behaviors. Violent crimes are more newsworthy than are property crimes because they are more aberrant and more rare—in the real world.

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All kinds of messages—entertainment, persuasion, and information—are all crafted to retain the appearance of a high degree of reality, but all are really one step removed from reality. The more skillfully this one-step remove transforms the reality, the more interesting the message will be and the more likely it will attract and hold people’s attention. Because we spend so much time with the media world in addition to the real world, and because the boundary between the two is often obscured, we can often get confused. This is especially the case after thousands of hours of automatic processing of both the mundane real-world messages and the massive flow of media-world messages. In all of that continuous flow, there is a constant intermingling of perceptions.

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Reality Programming as a Genre While television has had examples of reality programming throughout its history (with game shows, Candid Camera, etc.), it did not become a recognizable genre until about 2000, when three of the most popular shows (Survivor, American Idol, and Big Brother) were unscripted series using real people instead of professional performers. This type of show was popular with audiences because it appealed to the public’s voyeuristic interest in following real people as they struggle then succeed in competitions. While the reality series is a relatively new genre, there are now several hundred different “reality programs” where ordinary people (not professional actors) find love, friendship, treasure, a job, a new family, or financial backing for inventions; and where ordinary people get their houses rebuilt, their wardrobes upgraded, their vehicles tricked out, and their bodily appearance reshaped; and where ordinary people compete with others to attain the honor of being the best singer, dancer, entertainer, chef, or human punching bag. One of the most popular of the reality series has been Survivor, which takes 16 real people and puts them in a wilderness setting where the individuals depend on each other for survival (food, shelter, fire). Even before airing the first episode, CBS received 6,000 applicants who wanted to be marooned on a small island in the South China Sea and compete for $1 million (Bauder, 2000a). When we apply the eight reality criteria to Survivor, we can see that the show is reality in some ways but not in others. Furthermore, it might appear to be realistic on the surface in some ways, but when we analyze the show’s characteristics, we can see that these judgments might change. For example, the players are real people, not actors hired to deliver scripted lines. However, those players were selected from thousands of applicants not because they were ordinary people; instead they were selected on the basis of their potential attractiveness to audiences and their ability to generate conflict. The situation is artificial in the sense that none of these people live their typical life in the wilderness, and none (with the exception of the all-star seasons) has played this game before—or any game for $1 million.

The popular reality television show Dancing With the Stars places real well-known people in a competitive situation. Adam Taylor/ABC via Getty Images

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Although the setting looks like a deserted wilderness, the players are not really alone. There are dozens of production people (including camera crews, sound engineers, crews to design and build sets for the challenges and tribal councils) and the host, Jeff Probst. Where do these production people live? How do they get to the survivors’ camps to record their actions? Are there helicopter and boat crews? How do all these production people eat—are there cooks? How does their food get to the wilderness location? The show is not scripted in the sense that dialogue has been written by a member of the Writers Guild of America. But each contestant carefully writes his or her own lines, in the sense that the contestant’s interactions are highly calculated to put himself or herself in the best position to win the game. Also, the show is carefully edited to present to the viewing public the most dramatic version of what takes place. The 960 hours over the course of the 40 days of the game are edited down to about 20 hours that are shown to the public. That is less than 2% of what happened, so the editors of all that recorded material exercise considerable control over which stories to tell. The editors and producers of “reality” media messages never tell the audience the full story; they edit out what they think is boring then assemble the pieces they think will be the most dramatic into interesting story lines. The popularity of Survivor quickly generated a slew of other entries into this genre of reality programming. What these shows have in common is that each takes a handful of real people and puts them in a competitive situation. As the participants compete and reveal their personalities, audience members begin to identify with (or at least root for) certain players. For example, on The Bachelor, a young man who is looking for a wife is introduced to 25 beautiful women. Each week, he eliminates some of the women until he gets it down to 1 woman and proposes marriage to her. Another example is The Apprentice, where 16 men and women compete in the business world to get hired as an apprentice to entrepreneur Donald Trump. Within a decade, the number of reality shows on television had grown from 4 in 2000 to 320 in 2010 (Ocasio, 307

2013). Much of this growth came from knock-offs and spin-offs. An example of a knock-off series is Hardcore Pawn, which is a television series about a pawn shop in Detroit airing on TruTV. This series is a knock-off of Pawn Stars, which is a successful series on the History Channel about a pawn shop in Las Vegas (Passy, 2014). An example of a spin-off is the Real Housewives franchise. In March of 2006, the cable TV channel Bravo premiered The Real Housewives of Orange County. Its success motivated its producers to create additional series located in New York City and Atlanta in 2008; New Jersey in 2009; Washington, D.C., and Beverly Hills in 2010; and Miami in 2011. Other TV cable producers formulated their own shows featuring housewives (e.g., Mob Wives). Also, producers have developed international versions. The Real Housewives of Athens premiered in 2011 and was followed by Me’usharot (The Real Housewives of Israel) in 2011, The Real Housewives of Vancouver in 2012, Les Vraies Housewives (The Real French Housewives of Hollywood) in 2013, and The Real Housewives of Melbourne in 2014. England’s version, The Real Housewives of Cheshire, premiered in 2015. The genre of reality TV has grown so large that it requires eight sub-genres and many sub-sub-genre categories to capture all its variety (see Table 8.1). Now that there are so many reality shows, the audience is so split that the ratings for even the most popular shows have dropped. For example, American Idol was the most watched TV show for eight seasons in the early 2000s then dropped to 22nd place by 2014 (Passy, 2014). TV programmers also like reality shows because they are less expensive to produce. “Even on a show like ‘American Idol,’ contestants who make it to the top 12 earn just a few thousand dollars in performance fees” and unlike “writers for scripted television, reality-TV writers often work without union contracts, which means they’re paid less than union members. Consequently, a reality series can cost less than $500,000 an episode—less than what a high-profile sitcom actor gets paid in a single week” (Passy, 2014, p. F3).

Table 8.2 The Sub-Genres of the Reality TV Genre Table 8.2 The Sub-Genres of the Reality TV Genre Sub-Genre

Description

Shows Real people: Big Brother, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills Workers: Undercover Boss, Dog

Documentary style

Cameras record what happens in

Whisperer, American Chopper

everyday life Celebrities: The Osbournes, The Anna Nicole Show Fringe groups: Sister Wives, Amish Mafia

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Court shows: The People’s Court, Reality-legal

People’s behavior is recorded as they deal with legal problems

Divorce Court Law enforcement documentaries: Cops Performance: American Idol, The Voice, Dancing With the Stars

Reality competition/game show

People compete for some prize as one or more contestants are eliminated each episode

Dating competitions: The Bachelor, For Love or Money Job search competitions: Top Chef, Top Model, Last Comic Standing Personal makeovers: The Biggest

Selfimprovement/makeover

Viewers are amazed as a real-

Loser, Extreme Makeover

world person or object is

House makeovers: Extreme Makeover:

drastically improved

Home Edition Vehicle makeovers: Pimp My Ride

People are put in unusual Social experiment

situations and a camera records

Wife Swap, Secret Millionaire

their reactions

Hidden camera

People’s actions are recorded without their awareness

What Would You Do?, Cheaters

People are put in frightening Supernatural/paranormal situations that purportedly involve

Scariest Places on Earth, Ghost Hunters

paranormal forces People are fooled to believe Hoax

something false and their reactions are recorded

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My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss, Hell Date, Punk’d

Compare & Contrast

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Spin-off Series and Knock-off Series Compare: the spin-off series and knock-off series are the same in the following ways: Both are television shows in a series, which is a progression of episodes using the same settings and characters (or real people) and where some plot lines are resolved within a single episode and other plot lines are played out over multiple episodes in the series. Both are new television series that substantially copy the formulas used by a previously successful television series. Contrast: the spin-off series and knock-off series are different in the following ways: The spin-off series is produced by the same people who produced the previously successful television series on which the spin-off is based. The knock-off series is produced by different people who are copying the formula used by other people who produced the successful television series on which the knock-off is based.

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The Importance of Media Literacy We all live in two worlds: the real world and the media world. Attaining higher levels of media literacy does not mean avoiding the media world. Instead it means being able to tell the two worlds apart as the two merge together under pressures from newer message formats and newer technologies that seem to make the boundary lines between the two worlds very fuzzy. Most of us feel that the real world is too limited; that is, we cannot get all the experiences and information we want in the real world. To get those experiences and information, we journey into the media world. For example, you might feel that your life is too boring and you want to experience some exciting romance. You could read a novel, go to a movie, or watch a television program to get this kind of experience. Or you might be curious about what happened in your city today, so you watch the evening news, where reporters take you to all the places of the day’s actions—crime scenes, fire locations, courthouses, sporting arenas. Although these are all real-world locations, you are not visiting them in the real world. Instead, you enter the media world to visit them. We are continually entering the media world to get experiences and information we cannot get very well in our real lives. We enter the media world to expand our real-world experience and to help us understand the real world better. But those experiences we have in the media world are different than if we had experienced them directly in the real world. We often forget this as we bring media-world experiences back into our real world. As we constantly cross the border between the real world and the media world, the border sometimes gets blurred, and over time we tend to forget which memories are from experiences in the real world and which were originally experienced in the media world. This blurring of the line and the interlacing of memories makes it important that we spend some mental energy considering the nature of reality and how the reality of the two worlds is different. Increasingly, the border between our real world and the media world is becoming harder to discern. More and more often, the media do not wait for us to cross over into their world; they bring their messages into our world. Because much of our exposure to media messages is not planned by us, we don’t realize how much we are exposed to the media. Consider the exposure you have to media messages every day in your real world without you being aware of them. For example, there are radio messages coming out of other people’s cars as you walk down the street in your real world; you pass messages on kiosks, billboards, newspapers lying on tables, and people talking about the media messages they have experienced. As the media pump messages into our world at an ever increasing rate, the borderline becomes blurred. We take almost all of this for granted. There are many places where the border between the real world and the media world is not so clear. Think about what makes the following programs real, as the media claim: Big Brother, Extreme Makeover, Ink Master, American Idol, Pimp My Ride, and Hardcore Pawn. To what extent do these shows fit into your real world and resonate with your real experiences? As genres change and the line between reality and fantasy programming becomes even more blurred, we must

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avoid falling into the trap of debating which shows are real and which are fantasy. This is why the next-step reality is so fundamental to media literacy because it shifts the question and hence the focus of our attention. The question should not be: How real are media messages? The next-step reality organizing principle shows us that every media message is a mix of reality and fantasy. Instead, the question should be: Which elements in this message reflect reality and which elements are removed from reality in some way? When you are guided by the organizing principle of next-step reality, you need to analyze media messages to answer these more appropriate questions. This analysis will help you develop a sensitivity to how big of a step you usually tolerate in the one-step remove messages. Some people will tolerate a very small step and limit themselves to messages that very closely match their own experiences and knowledge. On the other end of that spectrum are people who insist on radical departures from what their everyday lives provide them. The key to becoming media literate is not in how close we move to the reality end of the spectrum; that would only limit our range of information and emotional reactions. Instead, the key to media literacy is to be flexible and aware. Being flexible means being willing to traverse the entire spectrum of messages and being willing to enjoy the full range of messages. Being aware means thinking about where you are in the spectrum and knowing the different standards of appreciation to apply to different places on the spectrum of reality. By being both flexible and aware, you can much better enjoy the enormous variety of messages in the media and, at the same time, control the effects of those messages so that you avoid the negative ones that usually come from automatic exposure and instead more intensely enjoy the positive effects that can result from any media message. All of us must continually decide how closely media messages reflect real life and what the implications of those differences are on our beliefs about reality. Sometimes, these decisions about what is real are relatively easy; it is simple for most of us to understand that there is nothing in real life anything like Gilligan’s Island. But some of the decisions are harder to make accurately—especially when they are subtly shaped over a long period of time by the accumulation of thousands of journeys into the media world. Over time, we have come to accept much of the media world as the real world. For example, who is the president of the United States? Are you sure? Have you ever met him? If you have not met him, how do you know he really exists? If you have met him, how do you know he is who he says he is? I am not trying to make you paranoid. I am only asking you to consider the degree to which you trust the information and experiences you bring back from the media world into your real world. When encountering some of that information, you should have a high degree of skepticism, but other information should be accepted by you with a feeling of trust. Do you know which is which? This is why being media literate is so important. Media messages are not always the way they seem. For example, with reality programming, we need to be careful to discern what is the reality and what is the fantasy in those programs. Passy (2014) writes,

Producers and networks acknowledge that reality TV involves a fair amount of fakery. Show producers shape situations to beef up story lines—in the case of competition-style shows sometimes by simply prompting contestants to do something unusual to boost their chances with the judges. 313

Producers argue that truly spontaneous and unplanned situations often take too long to unfold or lack dramatic impact—and that the public understands “reality TV” isn’t meant to mirror reality. (p. F3)

There are often many layers of meanings. Some of those layers are highly unrealistic (never happened in actuality, never will happen, and never could happen), but they are interlaced among layers of realistic elements that could transform the overall message in your perception from “fantasy” to “it might happen” to “it is likely to happen” to “I need to try this.” The more you are aware of the layers of meaning in messages, the more you can control the selection of which meanings you want. Being more analytical is the first step toward controlling how the media affect you. If you are unaware of the meanings, then the media stay in control of how you perceive the world. When you understand this organizing principle of next-step reality, you can better appreciate media content. You can focus your analysis on how different media, different vehicles, and different artists achieve the resonance of reality and then take that one step to remove their message from that reality. This is where the artistic talent comes into play. So a good understanding of this concept can help you develop a keener aesthetic sense as you experience individual messages. Also important, this concept should motivate you to ask questions about patterns in the one-step remove. There are patterns of life in the real world, and there are patterns of stories in the media world. The two patterns are not the same. The more you recognize the story patterns and how they are different from real-world life patterns, the less trouble you will have in recognizing the border between reality and fantasy. To get started on this path, try Exercise 8.1. As you analyze television programs for their reality and fantasy elements, try to push yourself beyond the easy-to-spot elements. Dig deeper to identify the less obvious elements.

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Summary Clearly, the issue of reality entails more than making a simple decision about whether something actually happened. People are able to think in terms of degrees of reality, and when they are assessing the degree of reality, they consider more than one dimension. It is also important to understand that there is not a huge gap between children’s ability to perceive reality accurately and adults’ ability. This is a trap into which adults frequently fall. Being in this trap gives those adults a false sense of security that they do not need to think carefully about the reality of media messages because they are no longer children and therefore are protected by the adult discount. Because the degree of belief in reality is associated with higher negative effects, adults are vulnerable, as are children (Potter, 1986; Rubin, Perse, & Taylor, 1988). The most useful way to think about reality is with the “next-step reality” organizing principle. This focuses your attention on the degree to which media messages are both real and fantasy. This then sets up more important questions: Which elements in the message do I regard as real, and how did I arrive at that perception? Which elements in the message do I regard as fantasy? To what extent am I attracted to the fantasy and willing to try to make it my reality? Keep these questions in mind as you read through the next four chapters on different types of media content. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Dill, K. E. (2009). How fantasy becomes reality: Seeing through media influence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (306 pages with endnotes and index) This is a very readable book by a media psychology scholar. In her nine chapters, she explores the various ways the media’s use of fantasy leads to real effects among individuals. Topics include violence, beauty, race, gender, advertising, and political coverage. Essany, M. (2008). Reality check: The business and art of producing reality TV. Burlington, MA: Focal Press. (260 pages with index and glossary of TV production terms) This is an easy-to-read book with a self-help tone. The author is an industry insider who produced and starred in his own reality television series telecast on E! The book presents a lot of practical information about what goes on during the planning and production of a reality series for American television. Ouellette, L., & Murray, S. (Eds.). (2009). Reality TV: Remaking television culture. New York, NY: New York University Press. (377 pages with index) This edited volume consists of 17 chapters written by critical and cultural scholars. The chapters are organized into four groups: genre, industry, culture/power, and interactivity. Pozner, J. L. (2010). Reality bites back: The troubling truth about guilty pleasure TV. New York, NY: Seal Press. (392 pages) The author is a journalist, social critic, and founder of Women In Media & News (WIMN), a media justice group that amplifies women’s presence and power in the public debate through media analysis, education, and advocacy. This book presents an extended criticism of so-called reality television programs.

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Keeping Up to Date JobMonkey (http://www.jobmonkey.com) This general website posts information about lots of different kinds of job opportunities. Click on www.jobmonkey.com/realitytv/reality-tv-statistics to access the page that presents a lot of information about productions and casting opportunities for a wide range of reality programs.

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Exercise 8.1

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Delineating the Elusive Line Between Reality and Fantasy 1. Analyze television programs: For each of the genres of programs listed below, pick one particular program and analyze it. * Situation comedy * Drama (police drama or family drama) * “Reality” program (Survivor, The Bachelor, Extreme Makeover, The Apprentice, Undercover Boss, etc.) * News program For each program, take a sheet of paper and write the name of the program at the top. Then draw a vertical line down the middle of the page. Label the left column “Reality Indicators” and list in the column all the things about the program that you think would lead someone to believe that the program content is real, that is, depicts reality. Then label the right column “Non-Real World” and list in that column all the things about the program that you think would lead someone to believe that the program was not real. 2. Tabulate lists: Count all the items you have listed in the Reality Indicators column and write that number at the bottom of that column. Then count all the items you have listed in the Non-Real World column and write that number at the bottom of that column. Do the same for all sheets so that you have two totals at the bottom of the page for each program you have analyzed for reality. Turn totals into percentages. For example, if on one sheet you listed five things in the left column (reality items) and five things in the right column (non-reality items), then this would compute to 50% reality and 50% non-reality. If instead you had one item in the reality column and four items in the non-reality column, this would compute to 20% and 80%. 3. Check for patterns: If you are a perceptive television viewer, you are likely to have at least a handful of items in each column. No program is purely reality—there are all kinds of production decisions (about characters, plot, settings, customs, makeup, dialogue, camera placement, editing, etc.) that take messages out of the pure reality realm. Also, no program is purely fantasy—there are character types, situations, language, settings, and so forth that are very much like the real world. Look at the pairs of percentages at the bottom of each page. Are the splits in percentages favoring the first types of shows, which are the more fantasy shows? Or are they favoring the more reality types of shows, which are the second two genres? Or is there no difference? Now try this exercise again: * With movies * With stories in magazines * With newspaper stories * With Internet sites * With video games Do reality proportions vary based on the medium?

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Chapter 9 News

Dynamic Nature of News Different Perspectives on News Political Philosophy Perspective Traditional Journalistic Perspective News-Working Perspective Economic Perspective Consumer Personal Perspective Hyper-localism Selective Exposure Who Qualifies as Being a Journalist? How Can We Make Judgments About Quality of News? Truthfulness Neutrality Lack of Bias Balance Accuracy Full Set of Facts Context How Can We Become More Media Literate With News? Exposure Matters Quality Matters Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises

Key Idea: News is not a reflection of actual events; it is a construction by news workers who are subjected to many influences and constraints.

John Oliver’s satirical news show Last Week Tonight on HBO is an award-winning example of the news-ascomedy genre. Fred Lee/ABC via Getty Images

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Kristen was shopping at the mall when a person came up to her holding a clipboard and said, “I’m taking a survey. Could you answer a few questions for me?” “Okay, what are they about?” “This is a survey about news. My first question is: What newspapers do you read?” “I don’t read any newspapers,” said Kristen. The interviewer made a mark on her form then asked, “What news magazines do you read?” “None.” “Do you listen to newscasts on the radio?” “No.” “How about the evening news on television?” “No.” The interviewer glanced over her form then looked up at Kristen. “So you avoid all news?” “No. I love news and like to keep up with current events. I always read the news on BuzzFeed each morning. Then I watch Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.” “But those aren’t news sources. They’re more like entertainment.” “They present lots of news. I always learn a lot more about what is going on in the world by reading articles on BuzzFeed and watching Last Week Tonight than when I used to watch the evening news programs. And they’re fun.” “They make stuff up to be funny!” “Yes, they do. But I can always tell when they are making something up. With the so-called real news shows, I am never sure what they are making up.”

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News is currently undergoing a dynamic change. Many journalists, social critics, academics, and members of the general public are alarmed about the current state of the news industry. “The news industry is in the midst of a period of profound transition. The advent of the Internet Age has rendered obsolete long-standing models of how to gather and communicate the news,” writes Paul McCaffrey (2010). Given “the breakneck pace at which change has occurred over the past two decades, it’s likely that we are in for an era of perpetual transformation, one with few certainties and no fixed outcome” (p. 3). Schudson (2003), in his classic book The Sociology of News, argues that the audience for news is fragmenting and that journalists have been trivializing the news and thus raises the question: Can journalism continue to be publicly important? These alarms and criticisms, however, are short-sighted because the news—its definition and the practices of journalists—has always been dynamic and changing. In this chapter, you will see what those major changes have been by reading first a brief history of the idea of news then an analysis of what news is from five different perspectives. Working from this foundation, we explore three key questions: Who qualifies as a journalist? How can we make judgments about quality of news? How can we become more media literate with news?

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Dynamic Nature of News Changes in the conception of news are not new; journalists, social critics, and the public have all been experiencing transformations in the way they think about news for centuries. So in order to understand the meaning of the current transformations, we need to draw some context from history. The desire for news goes back to preliterate culture; humans have always expressed an interest in the events surrounding them (Harrison, 2006). News was personal and local; that is, people were most concerned about events that impacted their daily lives (e.g., threats from invaders, impact of weather on their crops, changes in local regulations) as well as the lives of their families and friends. News was transmitted almost exclusively through interpersonal conversations, so it was composed largely of gossip and rumors.

Newspapers have played an important role in American life from the very beginning. The first newspaper to print the Declaration of Independence was the Pennsylvania Evening Post on July 6, 1776. Library of Congress

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Newspapers did not begin until the 16th century, when a group of men in Italy collected information and sold it to their clients in news pamphlets. By the 17th century, these news pamphlets evolved into daily newspapers first in Germany then throughout Europe. These early newspapers presented a simple listing of facts, which made them hard to read because the facts were not presented as a story with any context or flow. The audience for these early newspapers were elites, that is, people who could read and who could afford to pay for information. “Merchants, in particular, had a keen awareness of the value of information, and the dangers of acting on false rumour” (Pettegree, 2014, p. 3). Therefore, these early journalists were most concerned with accuracy of their information so they worked to corroborate their facts to give them greater credibility. 324

The early settlers in America clustered into colonies, each with its own local problems and challenges. People in each colony wanted to be kept up to date about shipping schedules, changes in regulation from England, and their own local politics. Each colony had several newspapers, each with its own political point of view. Following the American Civil War and the rise of the industrial revolution in the mid-19th century, the population was undergoing fundamental change as people moved from farms to cities. After the American Civil War, the population was developing a greater sense of nationhood and wanted information about political leaders and America’s place in the world. And due to compulsory education, literacy rates had greatly increased. Some entrepreneurs (e.g., William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer) saw this as a chance to develop newspapers with very large circulations in the growing population centers. But these entrepreneurs realized that in order to appeal to a large readership, they needed to move away from obvious political partisanship in their stories and make them appear as being “objective” so as not to offend any group of readers. The growth of huge-circulation newspapers ushered in an era of “big news.” Editors of these newspapers regarded the population as hungry for news but needed to be told what was most important. When radio became a mass medium in the 1920s, networks created national news broadcasts using this idea of big news where expert journalists decided what events should be covered. When television became a mass medium in the 1950s, it followed the big news model. This idea of big news reached a peak in the 1970s, then circulation began declining for newspapers, and audiences began eroding for radio and television news. This erosion was slow at first but then increased with the rise of the Internet and the news alternatives it offered in the form of news blogs and bulletin boards. In 1970, 40% of adults subscribed to a newspaper, and now that is down to 10% with little sign that the decline is over (Knox, 2013). The number of daily newspapers decreased from 1,750 in 1970 to 1,350 in 2012 (Pew Research Center, 2014). The combined viewership of local TV news across all markets has declined to about 8%, the combined viewership of network TV news has declined to 7%, and the combined viewership of cable news (CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC) has dropped below 1%. There are two reasons typically given for why traditional news outlets have been losing their audience—the failure to attract younger people and competition from alternative news outlets on the Internet. It is true that traditional news outlets are now attracting a much lower percentage of younger people. The Kaiser Family Foundation (2010) conducted a survey of young Americans from 8 to 18 and found that from 2005 to 2010, time spent reading magazines and newspapers dropped (from 14 to 9 minutes per day for magazines, and from 6 to 3 for newspapers). The proportion of young people who read a newspaper in a typical day dropped from 42% in 1999 to 23% in 2009 (Pew Research Center, 2012). It is also true the audience for alternative sources of news has been growing. By 2014, 36% of all adults were watching online news videos, and 82% of Americans said they got news on a desktop or laptop and 54% said they got news on a mobile device (Pew Research Center, 2014). This movement away from traditional news sources to alternative outlets seems to be driven by younger people, where research has found that 48% of 18to 29-year-olds watch online news videos, while only 27% of 50- to 64-year-olds and 11% of those 65 and 325

older do the same (Pew Research Center, 2014).

Younger Americans increasingly get their news from web-based outlets. iStock/franckreporter

These surface reasons, however, do not tell us why people have been abandoning traditional news outlets. The attraction of the Internet as a source for news alone does not account for all the loss of audience of traditional news outlets. Something else is happening. When we examine the numbers more carefully, it appears that the population’s very idea of what news is may be changing. To illustrate, only 38% of younger Americans (18– 29) say they enjoy keeping up with the news and 37% say they want to be informed (Donsbach, 2010), and a Pew Research Center (2012) survey shows that young people (Grades 7–12) spend only 2 minutes a day reading magazines or newspapers online. These figures are hard to believe unless we limit the idea of “being informed” to what the traditional news media tell us is important. The younger generation is intensely interested in finding out what is happening in the world; however, they focus primarily on what is happening to their friends. The Pew Research Center (2012) reports that 7th–12th graders spend an average of 1 hour and 35 minutes a day sending or receiving texts. There is evidence that adults too are thinking of news as less that which national journalists tell them is important and rely more on everyday people telling them what is going on in the local world. Recent surveys show that 30% of the general population says it gets its news from Facebook, 10% says it gets its news from YouTube, and 8% says it gets its news from Twitter. Furthermore, 26% of the population gets its news from two social networking sites, and 9% gets news from at least three (Holcomb, Gottfried, & Mitchell, 2013). Donsbach (2010) writes, “Younger people are increasingly using blogs, chatrooms or community networks such as Facebook and 326

MySpace to receive what they think is ‘news’” (p. 43). Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg brags that Facebook may be the biggest source of news in the entire world; in 2007 he said, “We’re actually producing more news in a single day for our 19 million users than any other media outlet in its entire existence” (Pariser, 2011). And by 2013, Facebook had almost 1 billion users. With so many people saying they now get their “news” from Facebook and Twitter, it forces us to look for a definition of news very different than that used by editors of newspapers and television news. It appears that the shift in what is news has been away from what traditional news outlets have determined as important events and much more toward what individuals seek out as useful information (J. K. Lee, Choi, Kim, & Kim, 2014; Moon & Hadley, 2014; Revers, 2014; Xu & Feng, 2014). When Purcell and Rainie (2014) asked people if they feel that digital technologies have made them feel better informed than 5 years ago, they found that 81% of respondents said they were better informed about products and services to buy, 75% about national news, 72% about popular culture, 68% about hobbies and personal interests, 67% about friends, 65% about health and fitness, and 60% about family. Notice how important “news” about products, friends, family, and personal health is.

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Different Perspectives on News As you have seen in the previous section, the idea of what is news has always been in a state of dynamic change. Until the rise of news pamphlets and newspapers in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, people’s idea of news was limited to the current events taking place in their immediate vicinity in their everyday lives. Then the idea of news shifted to pamphlets presenting daily listings of facts. Then there was a shift to newspapers presenting stories from a particular political point of view to audiences that wanted up-to-date information to support their political orientations. Then there was a shift to newspapers telling readers that they were presenting objective facts rather than editorializing particular political positions. Then there was a shift toward making news more entertaining rather than purely factual. Then there was a shift to offering a wide variety of platforms—many interactive—to offer every kind of niche audience a different kind of up-todate information.

Table 9.1 Six Perspectives on News Table 9.1 Six Perspectives on News Perspective

Description

Liberal

News is the daily reporting of the key, accurate facts about most significant events of

theory

the day in order to inform the public so that individuals have enough information to

perspective

make rational, informed choices.

Professional

News is that which is reported by journalists who are professional because of their

journalism

knowledge, their membership in professional journalism organizations, and their

perspective

autonomy from outside influences.

Practical

News is that which is reported by people who follow journalistic guidelines about what

journalism

is news, what information needs to be included in stories, and how those stories should

perspective

be structured.

Economic perspective

News is that which is presented by news businesses and as such is shaped by decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources in a way to increase profits by maximizing revenue and minimizing expenses.

Marketing

News is that which news businesses use to attract niche audiences by satisfying their

perspective

existing needs for information and entertainment.

News-

News is the flow of stories produced by news workers who learn how to be successful

working

(get their stories published and read) through a continuing process of socialization

perspective

within news organizations.

Today there exist many perspectives on what constitutes this thing we refer to as “news.” Some of these 328

perspectives are complementary and work together, while others are in conflict with one another. Let’s examine five of these perspectives in some detail.

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Political Philosophy Perspective The political philosophy perspective specifies what news should be. Thus this is a normative perspective rather than a descriptive perspective. People who take this perspective on the news argue that news should focus on the most important events and people in a society in order to keep people up to date about what is most significant. News stories should be constructed from accurate facts rather than journalists’ opinions so that people can become educated about what is really happening and make up their own minds about what positions to take on issues and which candidates to vote for in elections of their leaders. This position is espoused by philosophers and social critics who view the purpose of the press as to educate the public every day about their world and thus create and maintain an informed public that would make the best decisions possible in electing their leaders and supporting issues in a democratic society. This perspective builds from the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the news media from governmental interference so that they can be free to report on public issues “so that crucial features of liberal society can be maintained, for example the protection of rights such as free speech, or the monitoring of abuses of power” (Ward, 2014, p. 3). People holding this perspective on the news believe that the press should not be an instrument used by powerful elites (such as the government or powerful businesses) to achieve their own goals. The press should be independent from political or economic pressures so that it can present the public with an objective representation of major events every day. Kaplan (2010) argues that the quest for objectivity is “American journalism’s proudest, if most difficult to sustain, achievement. Considered a crucial tool for democracy, objectivity supposedly secures a space for neutral, factual information and public deliberation outside the corruption, rancor, and partisan spin that normally characterizes public discourse” (p. 25).

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Traditional Journalistic Perspective The traditional journalistic perspective is also a normative perspective because it encapsulates what journalists believe to be the purpose and nature of news and presents this encapsulation as a template for what news should be. Journalists essentially believe that their purpose is to inform the public, rather than persuade the public, which they refer to as editorializing, which should be avoided. This perspective typically focuses on seven criteria to specify the characteristics an event must have in order to be considered newsworthy. These seven criteria are timeliness, significance, proximity, prominence, conflict, human interest, and deviance. Timeliness is the most obvious criterion for newsworthiness. An event has to be current in order to be considered news. Significance refers to the magnitude of the consequences of an event. Thus a shooting resulting in the death of five people is more newsworthy than a shooting that results in only one death. Proximity refers to how close the event is to the news audience. Thus a shooting that takes place in a news outlet’s home town is more newsworthy in that town compared to a shooting that takes place a thousand miles away. Prominence refers to how well known people and institutions are in the event being considered as newsworthy. Thus if the mayor of a town is arrested for drunk driving, that is more newsworthy than if one of the town’s file clerks is arrested for drunk driving. Conflict refers to the degree to which the parties in an event disagree. Human interest refers to how strongly the event would appeal to human emotions. Deviance refers to the degree to which an event is out of the ordinary. Thus if a dog bites a man, that is not newsworthy, but if a man bites a dog, that is newsworthy. The irony is that we depend on the news to tell us what the norm is. To be well informed, we need to know how things typically work, what is likely to happen tomorrow, and what the relative risks of harm are. But the news media focus our attention on the deviant. Because we see so many portrayals of the deviant, we come to believe that the deviant is the norm.

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News-Working Perspective Unlike the previous two perspectives, the news-working perspective is not a normative one; instead, it has been developed by scholars who study what journalists, editors, and other news workers actually do in the everyday performance of gathering news and presenting it. For example, Altheide (1976) found that while news workers are aware of normative news perspectives that tell them what they should do, they frequently cannot achieve the prescribed standards because of unavoidable constraints, such as deadlines, limited access to sources, and limited financial resources. Journalists learn how to work around these constraints to do the best they can but it always falls short of the ideal. Thus journalists are socialized into their work environment through trial and error as they learn what they must do in order to survive. Over time, they develop what has been called the “news perspective,” which is not something that is consciously imposed by the owners of the media, but instead grows naturally out of their everyday practices. The news perspective is so pervasive and common among journalists that it is taken for granted. It is also generally shared by journalists in all kinds of vehicles and all media, and as a result there is a widespread commonality to all news in traditional news organizations. To illustrate this point, let’s consider the topic of health and how that is covered in the news. First, let’s examine what is covered. In a content analysis of 14,849 local television news stories from across the United States, Haberkorn (2009) kept track of how often the major causes of death (heart disease, lung cancer, and diabetes) were covered. She found that of all news stories, only 5.9% deal with a health issue of any kind. And among that small number of health stories, only 5.8% focused on the top three causes of death. She concluded that there is a poverty of information on local television news programs concerning serious health risks that affect most people. Another content analysis of news (local and national newspapers, television, and magazines) found that news coverage underrepresented the contribution of lung cancer and furthermore news presented almost no information concerning the prevention and detection of cancers (M. D. Slater, Long, & Bettinghaus, 2008). However, while the news media underreported serious illnesses common throughout the population, they were increasing their coverage of elective plastic surgeries (S. Cho, 2007). A key part of the news perspective are story formulas. These are the procedures that journalists learn as shortcuts to help them quickly select and write stories. As far as gathering information on a story, journalists follow the formula of asking six questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? Journalists confronted with a new story begin by asking these questions, then structure their story to answer each of these questions. One popular news-writing formula is the inverted pyramid. This formula tells the journalist to put the most important information at the beginning of the story, then add the next most important set of information. Journalists move down their list of information, ranked according to importance, until all the information is in the story. This formula was developed in the early days of the telegraph, when journalists in the field would send their stories to their newspapers over telegraph lines. They needed to send the most important information first in case the telegraph line went dead before they were done transmitting the entire story. We are way past the days of dependence on telegraph lines, but the formula still has value because editors will cut stories if they run too long. For example, a newspaper editor might want to use a reporter’s 20-inch story but 332

has room for only 16 inches, so the editor will typically cut off the last 4 inches. Another popular formula is to use a narrative to tell a story in an entertainment format. Journalists who use this formula will begin the story with a heated conflict, a gruesome description, or an unusual quote—all designed to grab the reader’s attention in an emotional manner. The journalist then presents each bit of information in a narrative much like a storyteller would. Perhaps the most popular formula for telling stories in the news is what I call simplified extended conflict (SEC). When covering a story, journalists look for some angle of conflict that appears very simple. They believe that a story that has no conflict will not grab the audience’s attention, but if the conflict is complex, the story will not hold the audience’s attention. Furthermore, if the story can be played out over several days—or longer—so much the better. Political elections offer lots of good examples of the SEC. Campaigns always involve conflict between the candidates, and this can usually be reduced to two people. Also, the campaign, which goes on for weeks or months, can be portrayed as a race, with one candidate ahead and the other candidate running hard to catch up. If the conflict is focused on the finer points of complex issues, the story will not appeal to as large an audience. Therefore, journalists look for a simple form of conflict, and that is best seen in the “horse race” metaphor. Political coverage is much more about who is winning and whether the challenger can come from behind and close the gap than it is about issues. Other examples of SEC are the United States against Iraq, various crusaders against Congress, the little guy against city hall, and the forces of pro-life against the forces of pro-choice. The press can present the conflict in these situations in a very simple manner and keep the conflict going for a long time. It does this by polarizing the people or issues in the conflict, inviting the audience to identify with one side, then playing out the fight with lots of drama. When the press has a big story that will consume news space for several weeks or months, it has an opportunity to more fully develop the nuances of the parties in the conflict. With political issues, the press could choose to tell the story of how competing interests have some common ground and how compromise is crafted. With criminal trials, the press could choose to tell the story of how humans can go astray and what justice means in each situation. Instead, the press rarely digs deep into a story—illuminating its complexity and educating the public about the underlying nature of the problem. The press typically focuses on the surface information—polishing it to a more glitzy finish to make it more attractive to passive viewers. While these guidelines and story formulas instruct journalists, they are not definitive prescriptions; that is, journalists are free to deviate from them, and many times in the everyday world, journalists must think beyond the guidelines. This is especially the case in determining what gets covered. For example, let’s say that a local official was arrested for a minor misdemeanor in your town 1 hour ago. This event is high on timeliness and proximity but low on significance. In contrast, let’s say that yesterday an earthquake in a small country halfway around the world killed thousands of people. Which story is more newsworthy? This multi-characteristic definition forces us to compare apples and oranges; that is, when determining what is news, is the characteristic of proximity more important than the characteristic of significance? And what does significance really mean—significant to governments, significant to the people involved in the event, or significant to you? This perspective has been criticized for distorting events. Altheide (1976) argues that “the organizational, 333

practical, and other mundane features of news work promote a way of looking at events which fundamentally distorts them. . . . In order to make events news, news reporting decontextualizes and thereby changes them” (pp. 24–25).

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Economic Perspective The economic perspective on news focuses on how news businesses allocate their resources in a way to achieve the primary goals of business, which is to increase profits by maximizing revenue and minimizing expenses. From the early days of newspapers up until today, the organizations that gather and report news are businesses. Some are very small and some are huge conglomerates but the one thing they all have in common is that they must generate revenue to pay for all their materials and employees. The two most salient characteristics of the economic perspective are commercialism and marketing. Arguably, the strongest influence on the construction of news is its commercial nature (Altheide, 1976). News organizations are in the business of constructing large audiences so they can rent those audiences to advertisers. The larger the audience, the higher the rent and the more revenue the news organization generates. Therefore, the ultimate goal of news is a commercial one, and journalists are driven to construct stories that will attract large audiences. Therefore, news organizations must be careful not to run hard-hitting stories that would offend audiences. Also, news organizations must be careful not to offend their advertisers (M. Lee & Solomon, 1990). Furthermore, news organizations seek to find what kinds of stories audiences want most, then journalists are directed by marketing managers to present those kinds of stories in order to satisfy the existing needs in the market—just like manufacturing companies do when determining which products to produce. Commercialization is not new. The commercialization of newspapers in the United States dates back to about the 1830s, when newspapers shifted away from financial dependence on political parties to dependence upon circulation and advertising revenues (Hampton, Livio, & Sessions Goulet, 2010). Pettegree (2014) argues that “If there was a time when news first became a commercial commodity, it occurred not... with the invention of the newspaper, but much earlier: in the eighty years between 1450 and 1530 following the invention of printing” (p. 2). He says that printers turned the existing appetite for news into a mass market. The economic perspective has been criticized for several reasons. One reason is that when news decisions are made by marketers instead of journalists, the news coverage is confounded with advertising. For example, Kaniss (1996) criticized news shows in the Philadelphia area by pointing out that during the November 1996 sweeps month, the local CBS affiliate on its evening news show ran nine stories on the Titanic, a ship that sank 84 years prior to those “news” stories but was the subject of a CBS mini-series. The Philadelphia ABC affiliate was cited as frequently running “news” stories about Mickey Mouse because the ABC network is owned by Disney. Local affiliates in many TV markets are also found to frequently run news stories about stars on their network series, and they often run soft news stories on topics of made-for-TV movies appearing that night on the network. Another criticism of the economic perspective is that it tends to change the content of news in a way that is somehow harmful to the public. For example, journalists operating under the marketing perspective are more likely to present stories that grab the attention of large audiences by highlighting the unusual so as to shock people. This marketing perspective has led news workers to believe that the public wants more soft news items 335

than stories about the government, the economy, and political matters. In a content analysis of 13,000 items in 12 daily newspapers, it was found that newspapers with a strong market orientation publish fewer items about government and public affairs and more items about lifestyle and sports than do newspapers with a weak market orientation.

Today, the newsrooms of hundreds of U.S. newspapers, magazines, and television stations have embraced, to greater or lesser extents, this approach to making news. Typically a market-driven organization selects target markets for its product, identifies the wants and needs of potential customers in its target markets, and seeks to satisfy those wants and needs as efficiently as possible. (R. A. Beam, 2003, p. 368)

And one of the widespread needs in any population is the need for information that confirms one’s beliefs rather than challenges them (Knobloch-Westerwick & Meng, 2009). Therefore the more successful news organizations use the marketing perspective to identify their audience’s beliefs then provide them with information that supports those beliefs. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein (2013) argue that a foundational issues about the news is “whether journalists supply the news that citizens need and whether citizens want such information or prefer information on sports, crime, an entertainment—subjects that are interesting but don’t contribute to the health of a democratic society” (p. 6). Perhaps there is a gap between the stories that professional journalists think are the most newsworthy (i.e., politics, economics, and international matters) and those that attract audiences most strongly. Gans (2003) observes that journalists expect as an integral part of their professional identities to provide stories that are most newsworthy rather than most attractive. Boczkowski and Mitchelstein conducted a major 2-year study in which they interviewed dozens of news editors and analyzed the content of 40,000 news stories and analyzed audience attractions to 20 news sites across seven countries. They found a large and growing gap between the supply of what they called public affairs stories (stories thought by journalists to be the most important and newsworthy) and public demand for non–public affairs (sports and entertainment). They said

There was a gap despite the presence of substantive differences in the media systems among the countries in which the sites are located and tin the sites’ ideological orientations. Moreover, the lack of major geographic variation persists at the regional level. (p. 17)

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Consumer Personal Perspective When we look at the current patterns of exposure to news content, we must conclude that many people are seeking a kind of information that does not conform to the old traditional journalistic perspective on news. One pattern we see is that people are seeking out information strategically that benefits them. That is, they are not sitting back waiting for “authorities” to tell them what the most important events and issues are; instead, they already have a good idea of their interests and they seek out information that satisfies their personal needs for information they can use. This shows up in two trends—hyper-localism and selective exposure.

Hyper-localism As the audience for news fragments, news vehicles are getting more and more specialized, which is known as hyper-localism. The news watchdog group the Project for Excellence in Journalism says that the mass media are having a very hard time holding onto their audiences for news and the overall audience for newspapers, TV news, and even Internet news is shrinking. Also, the smaller and smaller number of people who care about exposing themselves to news messages have more and more options, beyond newspapers and network news programs (Rainey, 2007). Cable news is pulling away a lot of viewers who like personality-driven news shows (such as Bill O’Reilly’s), comedy news shows (such as The Daily Show or The Colbert Report), sports-focused news shows (such as SportsCenter), or celebrity-focused news (such as on E!). These news seekers are less interested in global or national issues than they are in more local or hobby-type things that interest them personally. News organizations realize this, so they are developing more and more specialized vehicles to appeal to all these many niche audiences.

Today, people tend to seek out news that satisfies their own particular personal needs, in contrast to decades ago, when people let news organizations tell them what was important and should be considered news. iStock/Jill_InspiredByDesign

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Selective Exposure The idea that people selectively expose themselves to news content has been around for a long time, but it is even more important today with the fragmentation of audiences and the proliferation of choices. Selective exposure is a psychological concept that says people seek out information that conforms to their existing belief systems and avoid information that challenges those beliefs. In the past when there were few sources of news, people could either expose themselves to mainstream news—where they would likely see beliefs expressed counter to their own—or they could avoid news altogether. Now with so many types of news constantly available to a full range of niche audiences, people can easily find a source of news that constantly confirms their own personal belief system. This leads to the possibility of creating many different small groups of people, each strongly believing they are correct and everyone else is wrong about how the world works. The consumer-personal perspective appears to be gaining importance with the rise of Internet platforms of news, although this perspective is not new—it has always been around. The locus of this perspective is the individual who determines for himself or herself what is news rather than relying on an outside authority such as a journalist, news company, or philosopher. This perspective is a pragmatic one where individuals’ standard for what is news is purely personal and focuses on what is most important or interesting to the individual. Thus people with a particular hobby will define news as those events currently impacting their hobby— meetings of hobbyists, new regulations on their hobby, new inventions that help them with their hobby, and so on. People who are family oriented are most interested in what is happening to people with whom they are related—who is dating, getting engaged, married, divorced; who is sick; who is traveling and where; and so on. Thus sources such as Facebook provide much more “newsworthy” information than USA Today, Time, and the CBS Evening News put together. For many people, when the president of the United States delivers a 338

State of the Union address in which he lays out his economic plans, this is not newsworthy; instead, when their closest friends lay out their plans for how they plan to spend their time and money on vacations and shopping trips, this is highly newsworthy. Other journalistic criteria, such as proximity or prominence, are relatively unimportant. When a sibling or close friend announces her engagement, this is highly newsworthy regardless of whether she lives next door or far away. What your brother is doing for the holidays is newsworthy to you regardless of whether he is a college student or a congressman.

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Who Qualifies as Being a Journalist? Given the different perspectives described above, you can see that who qualifies as a journalist is different across perspectives. This leads us to ask the question: Isn’t there some objective way to determine whether someone qualifies as a journalist so that we could apply it across all perspectives? The answer to this question requires a clear criterion that can be used to separate journalists from non-journalists. Until recently, a solid criterion was “journalists were reporters and editors working for newspapers, the broadcast media or wires services” (Donsbach, 2010, p. 43). Because this criterion focuses on identifying journalists by their place of employment, it no longer works well. Another criterion that could be used to answer this question is to determine whether a person is a valid member of the journalism profession. However, the problem with this criterion is that it is ambiguous about whether journalism is a profession or not. Let’s examine this claim of ambiguity. Ornebring (2010) points out that professionalism in general is traceable to three qualities: knowledge, organization, and autonomy. He says that knowledge is composed of a cognitive base and particular skills. Organization refers to

how a profession may require membership of professional associations that legitimately represent the profession as a how practitioners must be able to earn a living from engaging full-time in their profession, and how formal codes of ethics organize the profession. (p. 69)

Autonomy refers to how professionals are able to do their jobs with a great deal of individual discretion and that external influence over the work process itself should be nonexistent or minimal. Thus applying these criteria of knowledge, organization, and autonomy, we can see that physicians are members of a profession. They are required to obtain a certain level of knowledge and skill that is tested before they are certified. While they are not required to join a professional association (such as the American Medical Association [AMA]), the AMA does control the education and certification of physicians. And physicians themselves decide what knowledge and skills are required for certification. Other professions (lawyers, CPAs, building contractors, electricians, psychologists, masseuses, etc.) all have a governing organization that decides what knowledge and skills people must have in order to be certified as being a member of that profession.

Who would you consider to be a more qualified journalist: Brian Williams of NBC (pictured), or John Oliver of HBO? Jeff Riggins/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

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While many journalists typically regard their work as a profession, it is questionable whether this characterization is accurate. Using Ornebring’s (2010) three qualities as criteria, it appears that journalism does not qualify as a profession. As for knowledge there is no agreed-upon set of facts that journalists must share, nor is it possible to think what such a set of facts might be given the wide variety of stories that journalists cover daily. A reporter working on crime stories would need a different set of knowledge than reporters covering government, sports, entertainment, religion, or other areas. There is no test that people wanting to be journalists must pass in order to be certified. As for organization, journalists do have professional organizations and a kind of canon of ethics. In 1922, the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) adopted a Statement of Principles that contains the six articles of responsibility, freedom of the press, independence, truth and accuracy, impartiality, and fair play. The document was revised in 1975. Kaplan (2010) writes,

This professional code of studied impartiality and rigorous factuality has been celebrated as American journalism’s proudest, if most difficult to sustain, achievement. Considered a crucial tool for democracy, objectivity supposedly secures a space for neutral, factual information and public deliberation outside the corruption, rancor, and partisan spin that normally characterizes public discourse. (p. 25)

However, there is no licensing process for journalists to make sure they conform to the requirements of their profession like there is for other professions, such as doctors, lawyers, and CPAs. Nor is there a professional organization that monitors their work and applies sanctions to those who violate the canon of ethics.

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As for autonomy, journalists have always sought to be independent from outside pressures in a quest to report the news accurately. But this autonomy has focused on political influence, that is, protecting their independence from governmental interference with rights to obtain information and to report freely and openly. Journalists have been less vigilant about protecting their autonomy from economic influences. This has led Ornebring (2010) to argue that journalism is currently undergoing a reverse professionalization; it is “becoming less of a coherent and autonomous occupation” and this is “thought to have negative effects on the status of journalism in society, the quality of journalism available to audiences, and, perhaps most importantly, the role of journalism as an institution of democracy” (p. 569). When journalists raise the issue of professionalism, they typically are trying to draw a distinction between traditional, mainstream practitioners and the newer upstarts who write stories for weblogs, but this is a fuzzy distinction to try to make (McCaffrey, 2010). The traditional journalists are people who gather news for the “mainstream” news media such as network broadcast services and major daily newspapers, but the problem with this is what is “mainstream”? Of course we mean the television networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC, but do we also include Fox? Do we include non-broadcast TV networks like CNN? What about weekly newspapers? What about newspapers that have shifted from print to the Internet? You can see that this is a difficult distinction to make with adequate consistency. Yet, traditional journalists regard themselves as true journalists and others as non-journalists. People who try drawing a distinction between journalists and non-journalists appear on the surface to draw the line between people who work in mainstream traditional news outlets and those who work in upstart Internet news outlets. But what they really seem to be trying to distinguish is quality. The argument is made that traditional journalists work in organizations where professionals shape their work and ensure that it attains high quality, whereas non-journalists are often individuals who have their own blog and do not have their work reviewed by professionals so it turns out to be of much lower quality. As of now we do not know if the stories produced by traditional journalists are of generally higher quality than those produced by so-called non-journalists. But we do know that there are many examples where a blogger has done a better job of uncovering a news story or writing about an issue in more depth than can be found in traditional news media. The most high-profile example of this took place in 2004 when CBS News ran a report on 60 Minutes that President George W. Bush had used his family connections to receive favorable treatment in the Air National Guard when he was a young man and eligible for the draft during the Vietnam War. Bloggers questioned the authenticity of the memos that CBS had used as the basis for its story. The bloggers were correct that the source memos were faulty, and CBS had to retract the story. Furthermore, Dan Rather, who was the news anchor at CBS, resigned in disgrace. The difficulty in making a judgment about who qualifies to be considered a journalist can perhaps be best illustrated by juxtaposing two events that occurred in the winter of 2015. Brian Williams, anchor of NBC Nightly News, told a story on air about him being in a helicopter covering the war in Iraq when the helicopter was shot down. When the story was found to be false, the credibility of the Nightly News program was damaged as viewers severely criticized the news anchor for knowingly lying on the air. NBC suspended him for 6 months without pay as a way of punishing him. At about the same time, Jon Stewart announced his 342

retirement after anchoring The Daily Show since 1999 (Poniewozik, 2015). His viewers were sad for losing such an important news resource. Even though the public reactions were very different, both men shared many similarities. Both had loyal following from people who wanted daily information on current events. Both were longtime anchors for evening news shows on major networks. But Williams worked for the news division of NBC, where his show attracted 2 million viewers nightly, while Stewart worked for Comedy Central, where his show attracted 3 million viewers nightly. But perhaps the most important difference was that while both men reported on current events, viewers could tell when Stewart was making something up and they appreciated his exhaustive research that was presented as satire to make fun of many current events rather than simply present them as facts.

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How Can We Make Judgments About the Quality of News? The most often mentioned criterion of news quality is objectivity. There is a strong ethic of objectivity in journalism (Parenti, 1986), and Kaplan (2010) adds, “for over a century, the US press has embraced the ethic of objectivity as defining its core public mission” (p. 25). The idea of objectivity, however, is a very general philosophical concept that means a separateness from the object being observed so that the object is perceived accurately and the perception is not distorted by human limitations. This, of course, is an impossible standard for humans—even journalists—to achieve. When humans observe objects, their perceptions are always shaped by their expectations, their abilities, and their histories. Furthermore, journalists are limited by time constraints imposed by deadlines, by the size of the story they can write, by their network of sources, and by their ability to interview people and judge whether those people are telling the truth. More practical criteria for judging the quality of news are truthfulness, neutrality, and accuracy. While these appear to be good, solid criteria for news quality, we find that when we try to actually apply them to make decisions about news quality, their meaning typically becomes fuzzy.

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Truthfulness As a criterion for the quality of news, truthfulness means that the story contains no lies, either by the sources used or by the journalist. Pettegree (2014) points out that the earliest concern about quality of news concerned truthfulness, and “merchants, in particular, had a keen awareness of the value of information, and the dangers of acting on false rumour” (p. 3). This led to the importance of corroboration of facts across several sources so that lies and falsehoods could be weeded out. Truthfulness also requires that journalists not make up facts to fill in the gaps of their stories or to “sweeten” their stories to make them more attractive or compelling to audiences. Jamieson and Waldman (2003) point out that sometimes journalists are tempted to tell a good story and ignore facts that get in the way of telling that story. Fortunately, there are not many examples of fabrication, but the few major instances that have been revealed have really damaged journalism’s credibility. In an article published in the American Journalism Review, Lori Robertson (2001) highlighted almost two dozen high-profile acts of ethical violations that resulted in the firing of journalists. The problem seems to be in all kinds of print vehicles, including well-known magazines (Time, New Republic, Business Week), large newspapers (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Boston Globe), and small newspapers (Myrtle Beach [SC] Sun News, Bloomsburg [PA] Press Enterprise, Owensboro [KY] MessengerInquirer), and cuts across all kinds of reporters, including sports, business, general news, columnists, and arts critics. Perhaps the most publicized ethical problems were perpetrated by Jayson Blair, a 27-year-old reporter on the fast track at the New York Times. In order to enhance his career he tried to write stories that would be so interesting that they would be selected for publication in the most prominent places in the newspaper. However, in order to write such stories he liberally embellished the facts, even going so far as to make up whole stories. When Times editors finally began checking his stories, they found many fabrications and quickly fired Blair. But the damage to the credibility of the Times was done, and the editors felt compelled to publish a 14,000-word apologia on its front page (Wolff, 2003). Sometimes newsmakers will fabricate facts and present them to journalists who must then decide whether to publish the fabricated facts or to expose them as being false. This is especially the case in political campaigns where the public relations staffs of candidates often manufacture “facts” to strengthen the position of their candidate. The 2012 presidential campaign was a good one for fact checkers like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, which uncovered many instances of bending the truth as well as outright lies and brought these to the attention of the public. However, this exposure seemed to have had little effect on either voters or the campaigns. For example, Mitt Romney’s campaign claimed that Barack Obama was ditching welfare work requirements. This was found to be false and reported as false by the fact checkers. However, when this campaign lie was exposed, it did not harm Romney’s campaign. The electorate either did not hear that it was a lie or did not care, because polling numbers were found to increase support for Romney as a result of the claim. When Romney pollster Neil Newhouse was confronted with the lie, he replied, “We’re not going to let 345

our campaign be dictated by fact checkers” (Poniewozik, 2012, p. 68).

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Neutrality As a criterion for the quality of news, neutrality means that the story is free from journalistic bias or editorializing. This means that the journalist does not slant the story to convince the audience to think a certain way, that is, the journalist focuses on informing and not on persuading. Neutrality is observed in lack of bias and balance.

Lack of Bias Bias—like fabrication—is a willful distortion on the part of a journalist, but it is difficult for audiences to recognize when this is occurring. This highlights the distinction between actual bias (where a journalist willfully distorts a news story) and perceived bias (when audiences think that the story is slanted). Examples of actual bias in traditional news organizations are rare but this does not mean that the stories themselves are free of bias. Carl Jensen (1997) points out that there is little evidence of a conscious conspiracy among journalists to censor the news:

News is too diverse, fast-breaking, and unpredictable to be controlled by some sinister conservative eastern establishment media cabal. However, there is a congruence of attitudes and interests on the part of the owners and managers of mass media organizations. That non-conspiracy conspiracy, when combined with a variety of other factors, leads to the systematic failure of the news media to inform the public. While it is not an overt form of censorship, such as the kind we observe in some other societies, it is nonetheless real and often equally as dangerous to the public’s well-being. (pp. 14–15)

In his book Censored: The News That Didn’t Make the News—And Why, Carl Jensen (1995) describes many seemingly important stories that did not receive much, if any, coverage by the news media. For example, in 1985, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) found that more than 240,000 people were in danger in 258 work sites around the United States. It is the purpose of NIOSH to monitor safety in the workplace and to inform workers when they are in serious danger of contracting life-threatening diseases from exposure to chemicals and other hazardous materials in the workplace. By 1995, NIOSH had informed less than 30% of the people who it had found to be in daily danger a decade earlier. Thus, NIOSH knew that 170,000 people were working in highly risky environments every day and let 10 years go by without telling them. The news media ignored this governmental negligence for more than a decade. Those who follow the media closely often complain about a liberal or a conservative news bias, or they say that there is too much negativism. In an analysis of Gallup public opinion data, it was found that more than half of Americans felt that the media were influenced by advertisers, business corporations, Democrats, the federal government, liberals, the military, and Republicans (Becker, Kosicki, & Jones, 1992). The newspaper industry itself has found the same thing in its own surveys. For example, a survey by the American Society of Newspaper Editors found that most people believe the media have political leanings (Jeffres, 1994).

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Perception of news bias has been explained by in-group/out-group differences. Citizens’ political leanings influence how much variation they perceive; politically dissimilar media are seen as having a more uniform partisan bias and politically similar media are seen as having more diverse partisan biases (Stroud, Muddiman, & Lee, 2014). What is interesting is that conservatives feel that the media have a generally liberal leaning, whereas liberals feel that the media are conservative. Conservatives complain that most news reporters are liberal in their own views, and these liberal journalists show their bias when they present their stories. In contrast, liberals feel that conservative commentators have too much power and have redefined the American agenda to stigmatize liberals. In the early days of the United States, most newspapers were founded by men who had a clear political viewpoint that they wanted to promote. Towns had multiple newspapers, each one appealing to a different niche of political thinking. Newspapers were biased politically, and the bias was clearly labeled. But by the late 1800s, newspapers had shifted from a political focus to a business focus, with the goal of building the largest circulation. To do this, newspapers lost their political edge so as to avoid offending any potential readers. This business focus still underlies the mass media. Decisions are made to build audiences, not to espouse a political point of view. Sometimes, arguing for a particular political point of view can be used as a tool to build an audience, but these instances are usually found within those media with a niche orientation. Instead, the large national news organizations such as the television networks and the large newspapers try to present both sides of any political issue so as to appear objective and balanced because they want to appeal to all kinds of people across the political spectrum. This conclusion has been supported by D’Alessio and Allen (2000), who conducted a meta-analysis of 59 quantitative studies of news bias in presidential campaigns since 1948. They found no evidence of bias with newspapers or magazines and only an “insubstantial” bias in network television news. Bernard Goldberg, an Emmy award–winning reporter who worked for CBS News for 30 years, published a book titled Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News in 2003. Goldberg argued that the news is slanted with a liberal bias rather than providing objective, disinterested reporting. Written in a personal style, Goldberg tells insider stories about how the news is gathered and reported that show how almost everyone working in television news fosters a liberal bias in their reporting. It is important to be sensitive to whether particular news vehicles present either a liberal or conservative bias. But it is far more important to be sensitive to the broader bias underlying all news vehicles—that is, the bias of commercialism, entertainment, and superficiality. If all we do is debate the liberal-conservative issue when it comes to news bias, we are in danger of missing the larger picture that the news media are providing us with a worldview that determines not only what we think about (as in agenda setting) but also what we think, how we think, and who we are.

Balance Most events and issues have at least two sides, often many more sides. In stories of simple conflicts, there are 348

usually two sharply differing sides. Fairness requires that journalists present both sides and try to do so with equal weight. Are news stories balanced? Fico and Soffin (1995) looked at balance in newspaper coverage of controversial issues such as abortion, condoms in schools, and various governmental bills. Balance was assessed by examining whether both sides of an issue were illuminated in terms of sources interviewed for both sides and whether assertions for both sides were in the headline, first paragraph, and graphics. They found that 48% of stories analyzed were one-sided; that is, a second side was not covered at all. They counted the number of story elements that illuminated the different sides of each issue and found that, on average, one side received three more elements compared to the other side—therefore, the average story was imbalanced. Only 7% of stories were completely balanced. The authors concluded that professional capability and/or ethical selfconsciousness are lacking in many journalists. Although balance is a simpler criterion than is objectivity, it still presents some problems. One problem is determining how many sides there are to an issue. As I pointed out above, journalists using the simplified extended conflict formula will characterize issues by having two sides only. However, complex issues may have more than two sides, so balance requires a covering of all sides—not just two. Another problem with balance lies with the selection of sources of information. Some sources are more credible than others.

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Accuracy Accuracy as a criterion for news involves truthfulness and neutrality but there is more. In order for a story to be accurate it needs to be complete. This means that stories must present the full set of facts as well as the context necessary for audiences to interpret the meaning.

Full Set of Facts Presenting only a partial story is a type of distortion that is not usually regarded as bias because there does not seem to be an intention by the journalist to mislead the audience. Instead, the journalist has run out of time or does not have enough sources or ability to tell the entire story. Even though the journalist is not trying to mislead the audience, people exposed to a partial story are still shown a distorted picture of the occurrence, and therefore the story cannot be regarded as being objective. One form of partial story is when a major story stops getting covered, even though important events continue to occur. An example of this is the $21 billion settlement by the tobacco industry that was covered during negotiations. But then the press stopped covering the story as the tobacco companies began paying billions of dollars to state governments between 2000 and 2002. Why would it be important to cover how the money was used? The settlement specified that states should spend the money for health care and to educate people, especially children, about the health risks of smoking. But only 5% of this total payout went toward antismoking efforts as it was intended. Instead, it got funneled to all sorts of pork barrel projects across the 50 states, and in North Carolina much of it went to subsidize tobacco farmers. These subsidies did not go to help tobacco farmers transition to other crops; instead, much of it went to modernize their tobacco farms (Mnookin, 2002). Also, the press did a poor job of educating the public about where the money for the payout was coming from. Most people know that it is from the major tobacco companies, but most people do not know where the tobacco companies get much of their revenue that they use to make their payments to states in the tobacco settlement. Each of the major tobacco companies now controls hundreds of brands of all kinds of food products in supermarkets. So the payout was likely financed by a rise in prices of crackers, cereals, peanut butter, dog food, soups, and so on. Another type of partial story is when a journalist tells a story from a single point of view. American journalists typically tell their stories from the point of view that America is always justified in its military actions, and those we aggress against are not justified. For example, Jessica Fishman and Carolyn Marvin (2003) analyzed 21 years of photographs appearing on the front pages of the New York Times. They focused on violence and found that non-U.S. agents were represented as more explicitly violent than U.S. agents and that the latter are associated with disguised modes of violence more often than the former are. The recurring image of non-U.S. violence is that of order brutally ruptured or enforced. By contrast, images of U.S. violence are less alarming and suggest order without cruelty. Thus, violence is associated more with out-group status than with in-group status.

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Context is what helps audiences understand the meaning of the event in the news stories. Without context, the story has ambiguous meaning. For example, a story could report that Mr. Jones was arrested for murder this morning. That fact can convey very different meanings if we vary the context. Let’s say that the journalist put in some historical context that Mr. Jones had murdered several people a decade ago, was caught and convicted, served time in prison, but was recently let go because of a ruling of an inexperienced and liberal judge. In contrast, let’s say that Mr. Jones, one of the candidates running for mayor, was arrested despite the fact that police had in custody another man who possessed the probable murder weapon and who had confessed. The fact of the arrest takes on a very different meaning within different contexts.

A lack of context is the most significant form of bias in journalism. iStock/glegorly

Bagdikian (1992) argues that the most significant form of bias in journalism appears when a story is reported with a lack of context. The fear is that context is only the journalist’s opinion, and opinion must be avoided in “objective reporting.” Bagdikian continues, “But there is a difference between partisanship and placing facts in a reasonably informed context of history and social circumstance. American journalism has not made a workable distinction between them” (p. 214). He says that “there are powerful commercial pressures to remove social significance from standard American news. Informed social-economic context has unavoidable political implications which may disturb some in the audience whose world view differs” (p. 214). So the media report undisputed facts about things but ignore the meaning behind the facts and, in so doing, severely limit our ability to see that underlying meaning.

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Although contextual material is very important, many stories present very little context (Parenti, 1986). For example, the many stories about crimes that we see reported every day are each limited to the facts of that one crime. Rarely is there any context about crime rates or how the particular crime reported in the story matches some kind of a pattern—historical, social, economic, and so forth. Crime stories are like popcorn for the mind. Each story is small, simple, and relatively the same. They give our mind the sense that it is consuming information, but those stories have little nutritional value. After years of munching on this information, we have come to believe that most crime is violent street crime and that it is increasing all around us. But the real-world figures indicate that most crime is white collar (embezzlement, fraud, forgery, identity theft, etc.) and property crime (larceny, shoplifting, etc.) rather than violent crime (murder, rape, armed robbery, etc.). But it is the more rare violent crime that gets reported because it is more deviant and thus more likely to capture the attention of the news audience. Asking journalists to build more context into their stories presents two problems. First, journalists vary widely in talent, and it takes a very talented and experienced journalist to be able to dig out a great deal of relevant contextual information on deadline. Second, when journalists have the responsibility of constructing the context, they may be manifesting a lot of power to define the meaning of the event for the readers. Journalists can substantially change the meaning if they leave out (whether intentionally or through an oversight) an important contextual element. Let’s examine an example of a story reporting facts that are accurate but that lead readers to a wrong conclusion because the reporter does not provide an adequate context for those facts. In 2004, Los Angeles Times reporter Larry Stewart wrote a story from a report by a group calling itself the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport. In his newspaper story, Stewart reported that the report said that it found six of the schools in the 2004 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament Sweet 16 had graduation rates no higher than 50%. This leaves the reader with the impression that universities (at least six) were exploiting their athletes. But what the reporter did not put in the story is that, nationwide, only about 50% of students who enter a 4-year program as freshmen end up graduating with a bachelor’s degree. Therefore, the problem is not with basketball teams having unusually low graduation rates, which is what the story implied. The real issue is the relatively large dropout rate of all college students. Also, the reporter said that the report complained that only 3 of the 16 teams had an African American head coach. Why is this number bad? What should the number be? If the number should be proportional to the number of African Americans in the United States, then we should expect 12% of coaches to be African American, and that would make it 2 coaches. Or instead, should the number of African American coaches be proportional to the number of African American players on NCAA basketball teams? This would be a much larger percentage, but then this raises the issue that perhaps African Americans are overrepresented on these basketball teams and that the problem is that there needs to be better representation from non–African Americans on NCAA basketball teams—why are there not many more Hispanic or Asian American players? The determination of adequate representation is a complex issue. If news organizations see themselves as having the function of informing their audiences so those people can make good decisions, then journalists must provide more detailed contexts. If, instead, a journalist writes a superficial story that features only a controversy, then this serves to stir up negative emotions instead of educating audiences. 352

In summary, you can see that objectivity is a complex concept with many layers of meaning. This makes it difficult to understand what people really mean when they use the term. Thus, it is useful to move past objectivity and focus on more meaningful criteria such as truthfulness, neutrality, and accuracy.

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How Can We Become More Media Literate With News? The information we acquire every day from what we consider news providers molds our view of the world. The gradual accumulation of information about what we think is important shapes our beliefs about how things work and about how things should work. These beliefs become the standards we use when evaluating people, events, and places. Thus over the long run, our patterns of exposure to news are about more than acquiring information about current occurrences; it is more fundamentally an unavoidable process of constructing knowledge structures, beliefs, and attitudes. Therefore the more we think about our exposure patterns and the implications of those patterns, the more we can gain control over the process and make it work in our favor. Becoming more media literate involves the periodic assessment of exposure and quality.

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Exposure Matters The traditional news media cover the same events and present their stories in a very similar way. Thus if you wanted to be informed about national or international events every day, it doesn’t matter whether you watch the ABC, CBS, or NBC evening news or read a daily newspaper—you would be exposed to the same stories. This pattern led scholars to observe that the traditional media set the agenda each day by deciding what to cover and what to ignore. Agenda setting theory explains that the media are selective in what they present as news and what they emphasize as being the most important news. This selection and emphasis set the agenda; that is, the public accepts what the media highlight as most important (see McCombs & Reynolds, 2009; McCombs & Shaw, 1972). While the theory was created to explain how the news shapes public opinion for political campaigns and issues, it has moved into a broader realm beyond politics over the years. McCombs and Reynolds (2009) also say that beyond

the specifics of politics and election campaigns, the larger political culture is defined by a basic civic agenda of beliefs about politics and elections. Exploration of yet other cultural agendas is moving agenda-setting theory far beyond its traditional realm of public affairs. (p. 13)

In the past, we could control whether we exposed ourselves to traditional news media or not, but if we did, then the control shifted to the traditional news media, which told us what was important. Now with the rise of nontraditional news media, we have many alternative sources of news. Thus, the control of what we are exposed to shifts to us. Our exposure decisions are likely to be shaped by what we consider to be news. To think of this choice, consider the dimension of global to personal. At one pole of this dimension is global, which consists of patterns of events worldwide; this exposure takes you to countries, cultures, and historical periods of which you have little or no direct contact. The next “neighborhood” along this dimension is national, which consists of events taking place in your home country where you are likely to know the language, culture, and history and want to be kept up to date with current happenings. The next neighborhood is your region, which is likely the geographical area that you frequently visit on a regular basis. At the other end of this dimension is the personal pole. The news here is not limited by geography but by your sense of personal contacts; that is, you desire to know what is happening to people with whom you have a personal relationship. Where you focus your news exposure experiences along this dimension is determined in large part by your perspective on the news. If your perspective is outward directed, then you are likely to be highly curious about things that are foreign to you. In contrast, if your perspective is inward directed, then you are likely driven to search for exposures that involved personal contact with individuals. Media literacy is not associated with either pole of this dimension; instead media literacy is reflected in the scope of your perspective; that is, the more neighborhoods that generate curiosity in you, the more broad will be your exposure. Thus media literacy warns against a narrow focus. If we limit ourselves to a narrow perspective that focuses only on our personal social networks, then we become blind to how governments work, the shape of the economy, and what is happening in other parts of the world.

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Let’s see where you are in your exposure patterns (see Exercise 9.1). First rate how your news exposure is divided among the four neighborhoods. Then move on to the questions about your curiosity and knowledge to see how those differences are related to your exposure patterns. The culture is becoming fragmented into smaller and smaller interest groups, and the people within each group seem to have a different need for news. Thus over time, the common experience is evaporating; that is, there is a diminishing knowledge base that we all share. Instead we each have a different set of facts about the world, which leads to a multiversity of beliefs and attitudes. Thus when the public must make a choice about electing political leaders or supporting issues, there are many groups, each with a different approach, shouting at each other that they are right and all others are wrong. Thus the political discourse gets more diverse, more loud, more polarized, and less tolerant or understanding of other points of view. It is more difficult to see commonalities. However, one likely commonality is the movement toward a culture of fear. This is because news outlets, regardless of niche audience, use the tool of triggering emotions to attract audiences and hold their attention. Fear is an easy emotion to trigger. News outlets focus on deviance and this triggers a fear in audiences that their well-being and lifestyle may be threatened by criminal activity, higher taxes and fewer services, a faltering economy leading to layoffs, selfish or incompetent leaders making bad decisions, and even bad weather. Rarely does any one of these individual messages paralyze us with fear, but over time the gradual reminder of risks and threats builds in each of us an uneasy fear that things are getting worse somehow.

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Compare & Contrast

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News Objectivity and News Quality Compare: news objectivity and news quality are the same in the following ways: Both are criteria people apply to make assessments of the news. Both are abstract standards that are difficult to articulate. Contrast: news objectivity and news quality are different in the following ways: News objectivity is an impossible criterion to achieve because it requires journalists to perceive news events without bias or limitations (time deadlines, access to sources, etc.). News quality refers to criteria such as truthfulness, neutrality, and accuracy, which are possible but still difficult criteria for journalists to meet.

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Quality Matters If we don’t periodically evaluate the quality of our news sources, we run the risk of believing we are well informed when in reality we are not. Check out Table 9.2. Notice that most of the items in the table are concerned with accuracy and credibility. But quality also refers to scope. Because of selective exposure, we are likely to gravitate to stories that confirm our existing beliefs. It is comforting to continually be reminded that other people think the same way you do. And it is easier to avoid the dissonance that typically arises when we are presented with evidence that our beliefs are weak or wrong.

Table 9.2 Types of Skills and Knowledge Needed to Deal With News and Information Messages in a Media-Literate Manner Table 9.2 Types of Skills and Knowledge Needed to Deal With News and Information Messages in a Media-Literate Manner Skills

Knowledge

Ability to analyze a news story to identify key points of information Ability to compare and contrast key points of information in the news story with facts in Cognitive

Knowledge of topic from many sources

your knowledge structure

(media and real world) Ability to evaluate the veracity of information in the story Ability to evaluate if the story presents a balanced presentation of the news event/issue Ability to analyze the feelings of people in the news story

Emotional

Ability to put oneself into the position of different people in the story

Recall from personal experience how it would feel to be in the situation in the story

Ability to extend empathy to other people contiguous to the news story

Aesthetic

Ability to analyze the craft and artistic

Knowledge of writing, graphics,

elements in the story

photography, and so on

Ability to compare and contrast the artistry

Knowledge of good and bad stories and

used to tell this story with that used to tell

the elements that contributed to those

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other stories

qualities Knowledge of criticism of news and

Moral

Ability to analyze the moral elements in a

knowledge of the meaning of bias,

story

objectivity, balance, and fairness

Ability to compare and contrast this story

Knowledge of other stories on this topic

with other stories

and how those journalists achieved

Ability to evaluate the ethical responsibilities of the journalists on this story

balance and fairness Highly developed moral code for journalism Interactivity with news has created a paradox. On the one hand, interactivity makes features available that draw people into news and make it more useful to them; these features include searchable archives, hyperlinks, discussion forums, and easy downloading of information. These things bring people closer to the news (M. Brown, 2000). But on the other hand, the interactive features require considerable cognitive and emotional cost by demanding more patience, expertise, and cognitive resources that increase the likelihood of confusion, frustration, and reduced member (Bucy, 2004). Because we often get involved in interactive experiences with news, we think of the information we experience in these interactions as highly accurate, but this is not always the case. Now, let’s see how well you can apply the insights you learned in this chapter. Begin with Exercise 9.2 and think about the skills and knowledge structures that help you process meaning of news stories. Then move on to Exercise 9.3, which asks you to use those skills and knowledge structures to analyze and evaluate a news story. Then if you are ready for a more advanced experience of analyzing the news, do Exercises 9.4 and 9.5 to see how well you can see beyond the elements of a news story and picture the practices used by the journalists to work around constraints.

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Summary The idea of what is news has undergone many changes over time and has influenced different perspectives, particularly the perspectives of political philosophy, traditional journalism, news-working, economic, and personal. These changes also lead us to question what is a journalist and how should we judge the quality of news? These questions are especially important now we are in the new media environment where nontraditional news outlets are so prevalent, so niche oriented, and open to so much interactive participation of audiences, journalists, and newsmakers. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Henry, N. (2007). American carnival: Journalism under siege in an age of new media. Berkeley: University of California Press. (326 pages with index) This book is written by a journalist who is concerned about how traditional journalism can survive in the new media environment. Jensen, C. (1995). Censored: The news that didn’t make the news—and why. New York, NY: Four Walls Eight Windows. (332 pages with index) Begun by the author in 1976, Project Censored invites journalists, scholars, librarians, and the general public to nominate stories that they feel were not reported adequately during that year. From the hundreds of submissions, the list is reduced to 25 based on “the amount of coverage the story received, the national or international importance of the issue, the reliability of the source, and the potential impact the story may have” (p. 15). A blue-ribbon panel of judges then selects the top 10 censored stories for the year. Mindich, T. Z. (2005). Tuned out: Why Americans under 40 don’t follow the news. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. (172 pages with index) The author clearly documents that the last two generations of Americans have exhibited drastic declines in attention to news in the traditional media. Furthermore, only 11% of young people even attend to the news on the Internet. He develops some explanations for why news has become so irrelevant to the younger generations then speculates about how this will impact the political system and society in general. Paul, R. P., & Elder, L. (2006). How to detect media bias and propaganda (3rd ed.). Dillon Beach, CA: Foundation for Critical Thinking. (46 pages with glossary) This is a short book focusing on critical thinking and the news. It presents a lot of practical advice on how to think about news stories critically and thereby protecting oneself from bias, especially from novelty and sensationalism. Schudson, M. (2003). The sociology of news. New York, NY: Norton. (261 pages including end notes and index) Schudson sharpens and clarifies many points in the argument that journalists “not only report reality but create it” (p. 2). He digs deep into the issue and offers explanations about how the news construction occurs and the effect those constructions have on the public. After providing a brief history of journalism, he identifies two criticisms as being especially salient today. The first is that news coverage of politics is critical and this promotes cynicism in the public. Second, news itself has gone soft; that is, it is a mix of information with entertainment rather than a legitimate effort to explain complex situations.

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Keeping Up to Date Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hbem20/current#.VcRNF_lViko) Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (http://jmq.sagepub.com) These are scholarly journals that publish research that examines how news is presented in the content of the mass media, particularly newspapers and television WikiLeaks (http://www.wikileaks.ch) Founded in 2007, WikiLeaks is a not-for-profit media organization that provides a secure and anonymous way for sources to leak information to the public. It relies on a network of volunteers from around the world. Leakers are typically whistle-blowers who work in private businesses and government agencies where they feel their organization is doing something harmful to the public so they steal the private information of that organization and make it available for the public to view. News Blogs There are thousands of news blogs. Many are owned by major news organizations such as CNN (http://news.blogs.cnn.com) and the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/blogs/directory.html). The most popular news blog is the Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com), which was started by Arianna Huffington independent of any news organization but was bought by AOL in 2011. Technorati (http://technorati.com) Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs. The name Technorati is a blend of the words technology and literati, which invokes the notion of technological intelligence or intellectualism. Technorati uses and contributes to open-source software. Technorati has an active software developer community, many of them from open-source culture.

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Exercise 9.1

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Assessing Your News Exposure 1. Think about the four neighborhoods along the Global-Personal dimension. What percentage of your time each day is spent searching out news on each of these neighborhoods? _____________ % searching for news on international events _____________ % searching for news on national events _____________ % searching for news on regional events _____________ % searching for news on personal events These percentages should sum to 100%. 2. Rate your curiosity about each of these four neighborhoods. That is, how interested are you typically every day to find out more detail about what is happening in each of these four neighborhoods? A rating of 10 means you are driven to find out everything; a rating of 0 means you have absolutely no interest in anything in that neighborhood. Degree of curiosity about news on international events: ______________ Degree of curiosity about news on national events: ______________ Degree of curiosity about news on regional events: ______________ Degree of curiosity about news on personal events: ______________ 3. Rate your existing knowledge base about each of these four neighborhoods. That is, how much information do you feel you have attained about the people and history of events in each of these four neighborhoods? A rating of 10 means you feel you are expert in your knowledge; a rating of 0 means you know absolutely nothing about the people and events in that neighborhood. Existing knowledge about news on international events: ______________ Existing knowledge about news on national events: ______________ Existing knowledge about news on regional events: ______________ Existing knowledge about news on personal events: ______________

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Exercise 9.2

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Preparing to Analyze a News Story 1. Take a blank sheet of paper and draw the structure of Table 9.2 on it. That is, create two columns: label one column “Skills” and the other column “Knowledge.” Now create four rows, labeling them “Cognitive,” “Emotional,” “Aesthetic,” and “Moral.” Your table should have eight blocks. 2. Think about an important issue that is triggering current events. For now, don’t worry about seeking out any news stories on this issue or the events currently taking place. Instead, think about the issue itself and what kinds of skills and knowledge you would need to get the most out of news coverage. 3. Write down the skills and knowledge you would need to achieve a basic minimal understanding of a story on this topic. Think in terms of your everyday viewing of news, where you just want to monitor the surface facts to keep up with the day’s major events. 4. Think about the skills and knowledge you would need to achieve a much more complete understanding about the meaning of the event in the news story. Think in terms of what it would take for you to be an expert on the event. 5. Look at what you have written in response to Question 4. Does it differ much from what you have written in response to Question 3? How much detail do you have in each of the eight blocks? With which blocks did you struggle the most? Why do you think you struggled there? 6. Compare the results of your tables with those of a friend. Did your friend have more details in certain blocks compared to yours? If so, did that additional detail extend your thinking? The more people’s work you compare, the more you can see a range of differences.

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Exercise 9.3

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Analyzing and Evaluating a News Story After you have completed Exercise 9.2, find a news story on the topic you analyzed. It would be good to record the story so that you can look at it more than once. 1. How accurate are the individual facts in a story? 2. How complete is the set of facts? Are there obvious facts missing (who, what, when, where, why, and how)? 3. Are the facts presented in a meaningful context? Is there a historical context? Are events in this story compared/contrasted to other similar events? 4. Is the presentation of facts descriptive or persuasive? Does the journalist’s voice come through in the story or does it appear that the facts speak for themselves? Do you feel like you are being led to a particular conclusion rather than left alone to make up your own mind? Do you feel that the journalist has an agenda? 5. How credible are the sources of information? Do you feel that the journalist used enough sources of information? Do you feel that the journalist used the best sources of information possible? 6. Do all the facts in the story confirm what you already knew or were you surprised by something? Does this story challenge you to think about things in a different way? Or does the story reinforce your existing beliefs and attitudes?

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Exercise 9.4

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Inferring News Workers’ Decisions Gather together three or four newspapers for the same day—the more the better. 1. Look at the composition of the first page across those newspapers, and think about the differences and similarities of news perspective. a. What are the major stories in terms of placement and size? b. What pictures and graphics are used? Are they used to present substance, or are they used merely to make the page more appealing to the eye? c. How much of the front pages is composed of non-news matter? 2. Read the major news stories. a. What criteria must have been used to select them? b. What types of elements are emphasized in the stories? What are the facts that make each story news? What facts provide background context? c. Is each story balanced, or are obvious viewpoints ignored? 3. Look at the sections of the newspapers. a. Which sections are there (sports, women, business, etc.)? b. Look at how the space is allocated. How much space is given to ads? How much to hard news? How much to soft, entertainment-type news? 4. What happened within the last 24 hours that did not get covered? 5. In summary, which of these newspapers do you think is the best and why? 6. Later today, listen to some news on the radio and watch some on television. How is the news different in these media compared to newspapers?

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Exercise 9.5

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Exercising Your Skills Think of some current event of interest to you. Now pretend you are an editor of an online newspaper. What elements would you want to have in the story? 1. What sources would you want to access? For people as sources, how will you go about getting access? For non-people (such as the records of government agencies and businesses), are these sources considered private? If so, how can you get access to them? 2. What facts and figures would you want to gather? List the questions you would ask. Does the order of the questions matter? 3. What historical contextual factors would you want? How far back should your coverage go? During that time period, what are the key events that your readers should know in order to appreciate the event that is currently happening that makes this news? 4. Would you want to include visuals (such as graphics, photographs, or video) in your story? If not, why? If so, which visuals do you consider important? If these visuals already exist, how will you get permission to use them? If these visuals do not already exist, how will you go about producing them?

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Chapter 10 Entertainment

Story Formulas General Story Formula Genres Challenges Challenge by Medium Changing Public Taste Dealing With Risk Findings From Research Patterns Character Patterns Controversial Content Elements Sex Homosexuality Violence Language Health Deceptive Health Patterns Responsible Health Patterns Body Image Values Becoming Media Literate With Entertainment Messages Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises

Key Idea: Story formulas help designers of entertainment messages attract audience attention and condition audiences for repeat exposures.

Netflix drama series House of Cards has won multiple awards for its direction and writing. © Photos 12/ Alamy

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Katherine, a freelance script writer, had waited 3 weeks to get an appointment with the vice president of Prestige Films and Entertainment Company so she could pitch her idea for a TV movie. If the vice president liked her idea, he would green-light the project, which would mean she would get paid to write the script. Prestige would then likely produce the 2-hour movie that could turn into a pilot for a television series. Katherine was very nervous as she began her pitch. “This is a story about family values as seen through the eyes of a brother and sister who are suddenly orphaned. Chloe is 10 years old and Tony is her 14-year-old brother. The story opens with Chloe, Tony, and their parents on the run from some evil corporation thugs who are trying to track down the father for being a whistle-blower and exposing some illegal practices of the company where the father worked. The thugs find the family but the children narrowly escape as the thugs are killing the parents. Now orphans with no family or friends, the children have to keep moving around so that the thugs don’t find them. Most of the movie is about how the brother and sister form a strong bond as they take care of each other. There is a series of scenes showing how they struggle to find transportation, shelter, and food as they evade the thugs chasing them. There are also some tender scenes where Chloe and Tony talk about their grief and fear. Finally in the climax, the kids figure out a way to trick the thugs into an ambush where they are able to kill the thugs. They take the thugs’ car and discover its trunk is full of cash. So the movie ends on a high note.” The vice president smiled broadly. “I love your idea. It’s got so many great story elements. It’s got tragedy. It’s got action and suspense. It’s got kids fighting to survive. It’s got family values. It’s got violence and retribution. I love it!” “So you’ll green-light the project?” Katherine couldn’t believe that after 2 years of pitching various film projects, she finally had a winner. “Yes. Definitely yes! But I’d like to see one change—one small, tiny change. If you agree to that, it’s a go.” “What kind of change?” “Could you make Tony a porpoise? “A porpoise—a fish?” “Yes, let’s make Tony a fish. TV viewers love animals!”

Humans have been telling stories for over 100,000 years. Haven (2007) points out that “every culture in the 376

history of this planet has created stories: myths, fables, legends, folk tales” (p. 4). He says that not all cultures have created a written language, not all cultures have developed codified laws, not all cultures have created logical argumentation, but all cultures have developed and used stories. What makes stories so useful for humans is that they are entertaining vehicles for communicating meaning. Because producers and audiences share an understanding of these formulas, this is what makes the communication of meaning possible. These formulas tell producers how to begin their stories in a way that grabs the attention of the audience, formulas tell producers how to keep the story going in a way to hold audience attention, and formulas tell producers how to deliver a satisfying payoff to audiences so they will find the experience pleasurable and therefore want to experience more stories. Because we as the audience also understand these formulas—albeit unconsciously and intuitively—we can easily follow the progression of the action. In this chapter, we will examine formulas and patterns of entertainment story in the mass media. The formulas are the guides; that is, they tell storytellers what elements are available to put into their stories and how those elements should be assembled. Patterns tell us about the prevalence of different elements within stories.

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Story Formulas On the surface, it appears that the media present a wide variety of entertainment messages. But when we analyze those messages, we can see that they follow standard designs. For example, all entertainment stories on commercial TV are designed to fit into standard time blocks (30 minutes, 1 hour, or 2 hours), all begin with teasers and story credits, and all have interruptions for commercial messages. Popular music follows definite musical formulas. None of those songs is a purely random sequence of notes. Musical formulas tell musicians which notes are played in sequence (melody progressions) and which notes are to be played together (chords). There are a small number of standard rhythms. All of the songs are creative variations on the standard formula. The same is true for any media message. Story formulas are guides. They help producers navigate the process of making decisions as they select story elements and structure those selections in a meaningful sequence. They help audiences quickly process their ideas about characters and efficiently follow the unfolding action. There are many different storytelling formulas depending on the constraints of different media and the conventions of different types—or genres—of stories. These formulas can be arranged in a pyramid with the most general story formulas, which are few, at the top and the most specific formulas, which are many, at the base. As we move down from the most general formulas at the top, the formulas become more specific to genres and sub-genres. In this chapter, we will begin at the top of pyramid and work our way down several layers.

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General Story Formula The most general of all storytelling formulas provides guidelines for what all stories must have. Such a formula says that all stories must begin with a problem for at least one character. The character struggles to overcome obstacles along the path of achieving what he or she wants, and this involves the character coming into conflict with other characters, institutions, and ideas. This conflict is heightened throughout the story to a point of climax where the conflict is resolved either by the character finally achieving the long sought after goal or by the character adapting to the conflict in some way. This general formula is used not only by the creators of media messages; the formula is also used by us—the audience—to help us easily recognize the good and bad characters and to quickly find where we are in the story. Stories that follow the formulas the closest usually have the largest audiences, because they are the easiest to follow. The more experience we have with entertainment messages, the more we learn the story formula. We are conditioned to expect certain plot points, certain pacing, certain types of characters, and certain themes.

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Box 10.1 Analogy: Constructing a House and Constructing a Story The processes of constructing a house and constructing a story are similar in many ways. When constructing a house, architects know that all houses must have a foundation, an outer shell with windows and at least one door, and a roof. The foundation can be made of many different materials (poured concrete, cinder block, etc.) and size (footing, half basement, full basement), so architects have options, but they know they must have some kind of a foundation. The outer shell is required, but again architect have options of building materials (brick, stone, wood, aluminum, etc.). Houses can be of different styles (ranch, two-story colonial, craftsman, cape cod, etc.). Each of these styles still must conform to the basic requirements for a house, but each comes with its own set of guidelines that build on the basic requirements for a house. While all houses conform to architectural guidelines, there are so many options available (down to lighting fixtures and color of paint on the walls) that no two houses are exactly the same. When constructing an entertainment message, storytellers know that all stories must have a beginning hook to grab the attention of the audience, interesting characters, and a plot that audience members want to follow as characters struggle with conflict. The choice of characters offers many options (by age, ethnicity, personality characteristics, etc.). The conflict can be between two characters, a character and society, or a character and an idea. Stories vary by genre (drama, comedy, romance, etc.). Each of these genres builds off the general story formula but still must conform to the basic requirements of that formula. While all stories conform to storytelling formulas, there are so many options available to storytellers that no two stories are exactly the same.

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Genres The overall entertainment story formula is elaborated in different ways across different genres of entertainment. Let’s examine the story formula in the genres of drama, comedy, and romance.

Drama The drama genre has three basic sub-genres that illuminate three types of drama entertainment: tragedy, mystery, and action/horror (Sayre & King, 2003). Tragedy must have characters that are perceived by the audience as noble and good. However, bad things happen to these characters either because they have a fatal flaw they cannot get around (as is the case in Shakespeare’s tragedies) or because fate has conspired to do them in, such as what happens in the movie Titanic. What audiences enjoy about tragedies is the opportunity to compare themselves with the tragic characters and feel better off than those unfortunate characters. With the mystery formula, an important element of the plot is missing. For example, in a “whodunit” mystery, the who is missing. A serious crime usually triggers the story, and a focal character must uncover information in order to figure out who committed the crime. Audiences are drawn into the story as they try to solve the mystery for themselves. In her book Talking About Detective Fiction, the best-selling novelist James (2009) says that “the formula for a successful detective story is 50 percent good detection, 25 percent character and 25 percent what the writer knows best” (p. 115). The action/horror formula is primarily plot driven as good and evil fight it out in ever deepening conflict. Characters are stereotypes or comic book types. Within several seconds after being introduced to a character, we know whether that character is a hero or a villain. Characters are static and don’t change. The plot relies on fast-paced action that maximizes arousal in the audience. The primary emotions evoked are fear, suspense, and vengeance. Violence is a staple in almost all of these stories. The formula of violence tells us that it is okay for criminals to behave violently throughout a program as long as they are caught at the end of the show. This restores a sense of peace—at least until the commercials are over and the next show begins. Also, we feel that it is permissible for police officers, private eyes, and good-guy vigilantes to break the law and use violence as long as it is used successfully against the bad guys.

Comedy With the comedy formula, minor conflict situations flare up and set the action in motion. The conflict is heightened verbally, usually through deceit or insults. Characters are developed through their unusual foibles and quick wit. The action is neatly resolved at the end of the show, and all the main characters end up happy, because the tension created by their problems has been eliminated. One sub-genre of comedy is the character comedy or comedy of manners. Here the humor arises out of character quirks that illuminate the craziness of everyday situations. Characters find themselves in difficult situations that we all encounter every day. As characters try to work their way through these situations, the absurdity of certain social conventions is illustrated, and this makes us laugh. Examples include Seinfeld and Big Bang Theory. Another sub-genre of comedy is the put-down comedy, where certain characters have power 381

over other characters and exercise that power in humorous ways. Examples include Two and a Half Men and The Office.

Romance A romance story begins with a person experiencing either loneliness from a lack of a relationship or a relationship that is bad due to betrayal, jealousy, or fear. As audience members, we are led to identify with the main character and feel her pain. But she is full of hope for what seems like an unattainable goal. Through hard work and virtue, she gets closer and closer to her goal—even though she experiences frequent heartrending setbacks—until the story climaxes with the fulfillment of the goal, which transmits intense emotions to the audience. Writers who have mastered this formula are very successful. For example, among all paperbacks sold in the United States, about half are in the genre of the romance novel. One romance novelist who has really understood the formula is Barbara Cartland. She has published 723 romance novels, all following the same basic romance formula. She is so successful that she has sold almost one billion books. Has she produced a body of great literature that will be read for centuries? No, of course not. Has she recognized a market for a particular kind of story and manufactured many products to meet that need? There is no doubt of this.

Creator Tina Fey with Ellie Kemper, star of the Netflix series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which tells the story of a quirky young woman adjusting to life in NYC after she is rescued from a doomsday cult. © Nancy Kaszerman/ZUMA Press/Corbis

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After years of watching stories on television and in the movies, we have become adept at following the formulas about characters, plots, and themes. We know these formulas so well that many of us think we can write and produce our own shows. Perhaps some of us can, but producing a successful entertainment message for the mass media is very challenging. While the formulas are deceptively simple, making them work well is difficult.

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Challenges Although these formulas are relatively simple for audiences to understand, they are exceedingly difficult for producers to follow well when creating television series. These challenges arise from using different media, changing public taste, dealing with risk, and using findings from scholarly research.

Challenge by Medium Telling an entertaining story presents a different challenge as you move from one medium to another. If you plan to tell a story in print, you have only one perceptual channel (eyes), and you need to use words to trigger vivid images in the minds of the readers. If you plan to tell a story in song, you again need to trigger vivid images and strong emotions, but you must do this through the audience’s ears, not their eyes. With a song, you also need to use words that sound good; that is, they must have a certain cadence that goes along with the rhythm of the music, and often there is a rhyming pattern. Also, the words must tell their full story in 2 or 3 minutes. Commercial television is one of the most challenging media for telling stories. At first, it might seem the least challenging because it appears to have few perceptual constraints; that is, you can use audio as well as video elements. Also, you are not dependent on the reading abilities of audience members. But it is very difficult to attract an audience on commercial television because there are so many competition channels of broadcast, cable, and video on demand. Also, it is a huge challenge to hold onto an audience once it is initially attracted because commercial television interrupts stories frequently for commercials, and some of these breaks have a dozen or more ads and last for 4 or more minutes. Viewers can forget about the story or lose their motivation to stay tuned unless that story has really intrigued them. Therefore, storytellers on television must do things to catch the audience’s interest right from the beginning; they must build the action to a high point before each commercial break so that the audience will want to stay tuned throughout the commercial pod and find out what happens when the show returns, and they must keep the action interesting every minute so that people who are flipping through channels will want to stop and watch the show.

Netflix is one of the most popular streaming services that screens TV shows and movies on a variety of media devices. © NetPhotos/Alamy

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With television programs, not only must producers use the well-known formulas, they must also be creative enough to break with the story formula to keep their stories fresh for viewers who have seen the same plot hundreds of times. These two tasks seem impossible to complete at the same time, and this is why the percentage of television series that have lasted more than several dozen episodes is small. Entertainment messages on the web (such as videos on YouTube and Hulu) do not have the constraints of timing (they can be any length and accessed at any time) that videos on traditional television channels have. However, web messages face a great deal more competition. Every month 20 million videos are uploaded to Facebook, and if you wanted to view the videos uploaded to YouTube last week, it would take you more than 40 years of viewing with no breaks (YouTube, n.d.). So if you want your uploaded video to attract a significant audience, you have a huge challenge of breaking through the clutter from all the competition. Hollywood films are another very challenging medium because they cost so much to produce, and the risk of failure is so great with more than 90% of all Hollywood films failing to earn back their basic production costs at the box office. Producers continually analyze the most successful movies to try to find the magic formulas that made them so successful. For example, screenwriter Sue Clayton analyzed successful and unsuccessful Hollywood films to try to figure out which elements are most associated with success. From this analysis, she discovered a formula, which she calls the genetic blueprint for a successful movie. This blueprint calls for 30% action, 17% comedy, 13% good vs. evil, 12% love/sex/romance, 10% special effects, 10% plot, and 8% music. This formula shows that Titanic and Toy Story 2 were perfect movies (C. Baker, 2003). While it is doubtful that we could ever reduce the formula for a successful movie or story to a precise mathematical formula, there are certain characteristics all stories must have in order to appeal to audiences.

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Changing Public Taste Storytelling formulas must evolve as public tastes change over time. People get bored with too much repetition and look for something slightly different. Producers of entertainment messages know that while they analyze messages that have been most successful in the past, they cannot simply copy those messages and expect to achieve equal success. The public has certain expectations about what it will and will not tolerate in entertainment. We can see where this line of acceptability is when the public gets offended and complains—particularly in the areas of bad language, sexual portrayals, and violence. Television programmers are essentially conservative and fearful of offending viewers, so they present content that they believe reflects mainstream American values. This line of acceptability, however, changes over time as people get over their shock at a new kind of portrayal, then eventually get used to it. For example, writing in the late 1980s, George Comstock (1989) pointed out

that much of what is on television today would not have been considered acceptable by broadcasters or the public 20 or even 10 years ago. Public tastes and social standards have changed, and television has made some contribution to these changes by probing the borders of convention accompanying each season. . . . These conventions of popular entertainment provide television, as they do other media, with rules that minimize the possibility of public offense. (p. 182)

Since Comstock wrote that, television has continued to push the line of public acceptance, and what offended viewers in the 1980s hardly gets their attention today. The same evolution of a formula has been occurring with popular music. The basic formula of popular songs is a story about love or sex. For example, Christianson and Roberts (1998) conducted a content analysis of 60 years of popular music. While they found that 70% of all songs have dealt with the topics of sex and love, the way those topics have been treated changed. They noticed that in the early decades of their study, love was treated as an emotion, and the lyrics were symbolic; that is, the words suggested actions but left it up to the listeners to imagine the sex. In contrast, the later decades of their analysis found that love was treated as a physical act, and the lyrics were much more explicit in describing those acts.

Dealing With Risk Television programmers realize there is a huge risk in selecting stories to present on television. If they choose stories that are too standard and formulaic, they risk boring viewers who will not return to view subsequent episodes in a series. But on the other hand, if they break with the formulas too much, they risk confusing viewers or, worse, offending them.

While disgust may be seen as a negative reaction, it may also keep an audience engaged with a story.

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iStock/RapidEye

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When TV programmers guess right about breaking with entertainment formulas, they can attract fairly large audiences. The Fox television network rose to prominence in the 1990s by pushing the envelope of acceptability in TV storytelling with shows such as When Good Pets Go Bad, World’s Scariest Police Shootouts, and Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire? While these shows drew a lot of criticism, they also attracted large audiences, and Fox grew to rival the big three dominant TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) at the time. TV programmers are usually very conservative with risk and typically force others to share the risk with them. For example, the major television networks have developed payment conventions that force producers to attract large audiences if they want to make money by paying only about 80% of production costs for new shows. To illustrate, let’s say you have developed a new television show and the audience loved the pilot. The network contracts with you to produce a full season of 22 episodes. At this point you would be feeling extremely successful, because few producers are offered such an opportunity compared to the thousands of producers who are constantly pitching story ideas to network programmers. However, you are still facing a huge challenge. It will cost you about $40 million to produce those 22 episodes. Because the network pays a fee of only about 80%, you will lose about $8 million by the end of that season. If your show is cancelled after one season, you have a huge loss. So you feel a high degree of pressure to attract a large enough audience so 389

that your contract will be renewed for a second season. If you are able to do this, you have the power to negotiate a much more favorable contract and you will start to make money. And the more times you get your show renewed for an additional season, the more you are demonstrating your ability to attract a large audience, and the more money you make.

Findings From Research There is a very large scholarly literature that examines how media entertainment stories attract the attention of audiences, how they process those stories, and how they are affected by them. Story producers can find a lot of useful information in this research literature, even though the findings are more suggestive than definitive because the results of many of those empirical studies present complex or equivocal results. For example, the research shows that violence is typically a story element that attracts and holds audience interest, but this does not hold for everyone, and it appears that it is not the violence per se but the arousing nature of violent portrayals that is the active element (Zillmann, 1991). Also, the research shows that humor is a desirable element to put into media stories. However, there are many different types of humor and because humor is personal, not all audience members “get” all types of humor (Boxman-Shabtai & Shifman, 2014). Suspense has been found to be a useful characteristic but not all audience members enjoy suspense the same way (Shafer, 2014). Research has shown that in general people enjoy stories more that have a higher degree of realism, but realism can be assessed along at least six different dimensions (H. Cho, Shen, & Wilson, 2014). While disgust repels and offends us, it has functionally evolved over time to compel our attention—to both core disgusts (e.g., blood, guts, body products) and socio-moral violations (e.g., injustices, brutality, racism)— making it a quality of many entertainment messages that may keep audiences engrossed and engaged; however, not all people like to feel disgusted when being entertained (Rubenking & Lang, 2014).

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Compare & Contrast

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General Story Formula and Genre Story Formulas Compare: the general story formula and genre story formulas are the same in the following ways: Both are guidelines that are used by creators of media entertainment messages when they are making decisions about how to tell their stories. Both are templates that audience members use to make sense of the media stories during their exposures; these formulas set their expectations about who the characters are and what they are likely to do. Contrast: the general story formula and genre story formulas are different in the following ways: The general story formula presents the elements that all media stories should have to attract audience attention and hold that attention throughout the exposure. Genre story formulas build off the general story formula by adding elements that are characteristic of a particular genre.

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Patterns Although content formulas guide story producers, there are still many options available among story elements so that all stories can be unique. This raises a question about the extent to which stories really do differ from one another or whether producers are selecting the same options over and over again. For example, are certain kinds of characters more prevalent than others? Are certain plot elements more likely to be used than others? These types of questions have led media scholars to examine media content to find answers by using a method known as content analysis. Content analysis is a scientific technique of counting occurrences of various things (character’s gender, age, ethnicity, occupations, etc.) that relies on analyzing samples that are representative of the total population of things being analyzed. However, this challenge has yet to be fully met by media scholars and it is not likely that it ever will. That is, no one has assembled a sample of entertainment messages across all media. The most complete samples were limited to the single medium of commercial television during the period of about 1970 to the mid-1990s, when television was the dominant mass medium and was controlled by three national networks. This body of research—typically motivated to assess patterns that were of concern for social reasons, such as the amount of violence, sexual portrayals, bad language, unhealthy behaviors, and stereotyping—used samples that generally represented the entire television landscape. However, with the fragmentation of the television viewing audience beginning in the 1990s there have been no studies of the entire television landscape, so it is not possible to know if widespread patterns still exist across the television landscape. And if we expand the idea of television to include video readily available to all audiences on platforms such as Hulu and YouTube, the challenge of assembling a representative sample is overwhelming. Not only is the number of messages in the video population so enormous, but the variety is incredibly broad. Therefore this section of the chapter will present patterns derived from a sample several decades old to show you what those patterns were and to stimulate you to think about whether those patterns may still exist.

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Character Patterns Content analyses of the television landscape in the 1970s to 1990s showed that producers of stories were featuring patterns of characters that were very different from patterns of people in the real world (see Table 10.1). The patterns of gender, ethnicity, age, marital status, socioeconomic status (SES), and occupations have been very different in the television world compared to the real world over the years. If we notice these demographic patterns in the television world and assume that they are the same in the real world, we will be creating faulty information for ourselves. For example, look at Table 10.2 to see the differences by occupation between the TV and real worlds. What could account for this dominance of males, Whites, and youthful adults? Perhaps it is due to the demographics of the people who are television writers. Turow (1992) pointed out that according to the Writers Guild of America, White males accounted for more than three quarters of the writers employed in film and TV. Minorities accounted for only 2% of all writers. In a survey of the age, gender, and ethnicity of writers working in Hollywood’s television and film industries in 1985, it was reported that it was dominated by White males. In 2002, the same pattern was found as far as gender and ethnicity (Bielby & Bielby, 2002), and Glascock (2001) reported that males outnumber females 3.6 to 1 among creative personnel, which includes producers, directors, and writers.

Table 10.1 Demographic Patterns Table 10.1 Demographic Patterns Demographic Pattern

Analysis

Males used to outnumber females three to one in the television world. Men were Gender

more likely to be shown as working and in a wider variety of jobs than were women, who were typically portrayed as stay-at-home moms or working at low-status jobs. Eighty percent of all characters were White Americans. African Americans comprised only 2% of television characters until the late 1960s, when they jumped to about 10% of all characters. By the 1990s, African Americans accounted for about

Ethnicity

16% of the main and minor roles, which was larger than their percentage (12%) in the real-world population of the United States. Hispanics, however, have not fared as well. Although Hispanics made up about 9% of the U.S. population, only about 2% of all television characters were Hispanic. Three quarters of all television characters were between the ages of 20 and 50, but in the real world, only one third of the population is between these ages. Young children and the elderly are underrepresented on television. Fictional characters

Age

younger than age 19 make up only 10% of the total television population, even

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though they make up one third of the U.S. population. Also, characters older than age 50 accounted for about 15% of all television characters. Marital status was obvious with about 80% of the women and 45% of the men. Of Marital status

those for whom you could tell their marital status, more than 50% of the women were married, whereas less than one third of the men were married.

Socioeconomic Almost half the characters on television were wealthy or ultra-wealthy, and very few status

(less than 10%) were lower class.

Sources: Adapted from Comstock, Chaffee, Katzman, McCombs, & Roberts (1978); Davis (1990); Glascock (2001); Greenberg, Edison, Korzenny, Fernandez-Collado, & Atkin (1980); Mastro & Greenberg (2000); Signorielli & Kahlenberg (2001).

Table 10.2 Comparison of Occupation Prevalence in TV World and Real World Table 10.2 Comparison of Occupation Prevalence in TV World and Real World Occupation

TV World Real World

Medical workers

12.1%

0.9%

Police

11.4

0.9

Lawyers

8.3

0.7

Executives/managers 6.4

31.0

Media people

8.3

0.3

Space travelers

5.9

0.0001

Salespeople

2.6

11.8

Forensic specialists

4.5

0.01

Source: Adapted from Medich (2002). Furthermore the characters typically portrayed in television were two-dimensional stereotypes. Stereotypes are positive from the point of view that they are easy for viewers to recognize. But stereotypes can also have a negative effect because they are often inadequate as well as biased, they often serve as obstacles to rational assessment, and they are resistant to social change. We use stereotypes in dealing with real-world information, not just media portrayals. For example, when we meet a new person, we try to “type” that person based on the characteristics we can immediately see, such as age, gender, appearance, how they talk, and so on. Once we have typed someone, we have a set of expectations

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for that person. For example, if we see a 5-year-old girl in a fancy dress playing with a doll on the steps of a church, we would immediately call up a specific set of expectations. In contrast, if we see a middle-aged man with a beer belly straining through his dirty T-shirt, chewing tobacco, and cleaning a rifle, we would call up a very different set of expectations. Stereotypes provide us with a set of expectations that we can access quickly as we encounter people and events. They are a necessary mode of processing characters, especially when there are thousands of messages coming at us quickly every day and we need to create order out of “the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality” (Lippmann, 1922, p. 96). Characters in the television world are developed as stereotypes according to certain formulas, which make the characters easily and quickly recognizable to viewers. Look at the examples of stereotypes in Table 10.3. For each of these stereotypes, a clear image likely comes into your mind. You have seen each of these characters many times. When one of them appears in a story, it only takes a few seconds for you to recognize who that character is. Stereotypes, however, can be harmful when they lead audiences to believe that all people of a given type share certain negative characteristics. This is why two groups—African Americans and women—are vocal in their complaints about how their demographic groups are stereotypically portrayed in television stories. Stereotypes in some other areas, such as occupations, families, the elderly, and body images, can also be harmful.

Table 10.3 Examples of Prevalent Stereotypes Table 10.3 Examples of Prevalent Stereotypes The strong, self-reliant police detective who uses unconventional methods to deal with the scum on the street. He is irritated by his authoritarian bosses but always gets the job done using his own unorthodox methods. The nurturing mother who has kooky kids and an idiot husband. The sexy young female actress/model/nurse/secretary who becomes a romantic interest of a male hero. The dumb blonde who is superficial, cares only about physical appearance and dress styles, and has no common sense. The young street punk who commits petty and violent crimes, usually for drugs. He is tough and sassy until police intimidate him into making a plea bargain. The nerdy male adolescent who displays hilariously dysfunctional social skills. Although he is very sensitive, he never learns from his social mistakes.

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Controversial Content Elements In the world of media entertainment, everything can be forgiven except dullness. When TV was being criticized for having so much violence, Howard Stringer, the president of CBS, was arguing against standards to clean up television by saying, “We don’t want to turn the vast wasteland into a dull wasteland” (quoted in Andrews, 1993). And that is the key—TV and all the entertainment media must avoid being dull, so they titillate audiences by playing around with the line of acceptability on controversial topics, such as sex, homosexuality, violence, and language.

Sex A large number of people in the American culture are offended by sexual portrayals and nudity on television. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is sensitive to this and acts as a watchdog. For example, the FCC fined CBS $550,000 for a breast-baring incident at the 2004 Super Bowl in order to placate the large number of people who complained (Fabrikant, 2004). However, producers continually push the line to test the public’s tolerance of sexual portrayals. Sexual activity on television has been prevalent since the 1970s (Buerkel-Rothfuss, 1993; Cassata & Skill, 1983). If we limit our definition of sex to visual depictions of intercourse, the rate fluctuates around one (Greenberg et al., 1993) or two (Fernandez-Collado, Greenberg, Korzenny, & Atkin, 1978) acts per hour of prime time. In soap operas, the rate is even higher. If we expand the definition to include all visual depictions of sexual activity, such as kissing, petting, homosexuality, prostitution, and rape, the hourly rates go up to about 3 acts on prime time and 3.7 acts per hour on soap operas (Greenberg et al., 1993). And when the definition is further expanded to include talk about sex as well as sexual imagery, the rate climbs to 16 instances per hour on prime time (Sapolsky & Tabarlet, 1990). Most of this talk about sex is on situation comedies in the early evening, when it is presented in a humorous context. The most recent major set of studies was conducted from 1997 to 2002, which analyzed 2,817 programs across 10 channels and found that about two thirds of all shows (64%) contain some sexual content and 14% have sexual intercourse. Among the 20 top-rated shows among teens, 83% contained sexual portrayals. The overall rate was about three scenes per hour. Two thirds (67%) of all network prime-time shows contain either talk about sex or sexual behavior, averaging more than five scenes per hour. And the rates of sexual portrayal continue to increase. Over that 5-year time span, the percentage of shows portraying sexual intercourse doubled from 7% to 14% (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2003; Kunkel, Eyal, & Donnerstein, 2007). However, when we take a longer time span, the opposite pattern is revealed. To illustrate, Hetsroni (2007) conducted a meta-analysis of the findings from content analysis about sexual portrayals on television. After examining the findings derived from 2,588 hours of broadcasts from 18 seasons, Hetsroni concluded that the frequency per hour of most of the sexual content had decreased over the years. This is particularly notable for dialogues about sex and normative heterosexual conduct, but it is also true for illegal sexual interactions and messages

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about risks and responsibilities in sexual behavior. Which conclusion should we believe? Are sexual portrayals increasing or decreasing on television? It appears the best way to answer these questions is to acknowledge that the rates of sexual portrayals change over time and that these changes go in cycles. Across some time periods, there appears to be an increase in portrayals as producers push the line of acceptability, while across other time periods, there appears to be a decrease in portrayals as producers cut back in response to public complaints. The bottom line here is that sexual portrayals will always be a part of media entertainment messages, because humans have always been—and will always be—interested in sex. Most depictions of sexual behavior are not presented responsibly from a health point of view. Schrag (1990) reports that American children and teens view an average of more than 14,000 sexual references and innuendos on television each year. Of these, fewer than 150 refer to the use of birth control, so the rate of unprotected sex is very high, yet there is a very low incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) or pregnancies depicted in these stories. This situation may be changing. For example, by the 1997–1998 television season, about 9% of shows dealing with sex presented safe-sex messages, and this had increased to 15% of shows in the 2001–2002 television season (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2003). A few years later, the Kaiser Family Foundation (2005) released a follow-up study that found that the number of sexual scenes on television had nearly doubled since 1998. The report also said that while the inclusion of references to “safer sex” issues—such as waiting to have sex, using protection, or possible consequences of unprotected sex—had also increased since 1998, that rate leveled off in recent years. This finding was further amplified by Kunkel et al. (2007), who reported that that topics related to sexual risks or responsibilities (e.g., condom use, abstinence) are increasingly included on television, but nonetheless remain infrequent overall. Such safe-sex messages occur most frequently in program environments where they are most relevant (i.e., when sexual intercourse is included in the story). Try conducting your own content analysis of some media entertainment by doing Exercise 10.1. As you work through the challenges in setting up and conducting a content analysis, think about the implications of your decisions on the eventual patterns you will find.

Homosexuality The U.S. television industry has a long history of ignoring, stereotyping, and marginalizing homosexuality (Harrington, 2003). Gay and lesbian issues or characters were virtually invisible on television in the 1950s and early 1960s. Then, in the 1970s, gay characters began to appear, but they were limited to two treatments. One treatment was the coming-out story, and the other was the “queer monster” story. Furthermore, although the 1970s ushered in prime-time shows about gay characters, they were typically played by straight actors and marketed to a straight audience. In the 1980s, depictions of homosexuality declined dramatically due to the conservatism of the Reagan years and the growing concern about HIV/AIDS (and its association with gay male sexuality; Gross, 2001). Gay characters began to appear in greater frequency throughout the 1990s in part due to a growing stigma attached 398

to anti-gay prejudice and a growing recognition of a gay consumer market (Gross, 2001). By the late 1990s, about 50 network series had lesbian, gay, or bisexual recurring characters, more than twice the total of all previous decades of television. In 1997, prime-time viewers witnessed the first lesbian lead actress/character on network television, which was the comedienne Ellen DeGeneres, who played Ellen Morgan on ABC’s Ellen. The following year, NBC featured the first network gay male lead in its hit show Will & Grace. During the fall 1999 television season, the big four television networks premiered 26 new series. There were 17 gay characters on the four major networks and about the same number of black, Asian, and Latino characters combined. A big reason for this is that there are many gays in Hollywood and not many minorities (Brownfield, 1999).

Laverne Cox, the transgender actor who stars in the series Transparent, as well as Orange Is the New Black, exemplifies how the LGBTQ community is gaining increasing visibility in the media. © Celebrity Monitor/Splash News/Corbis

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In many respects, the 1990s seemed to transcend the longstanding “rules” for representing homosexuality on television: (a) Gay or lesbian characters must be restricted to one-time appearances in television series or oneshot television movies; (b) gay and lesbian characters can never be “incidentally” gay—instead, their sexuality

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must be the “problem” to be “solved”; (c) their problem should be explored in terms of its effects on heterosexuals; and (d) gay and lesbian erotic desire must be completely absent (Dow, 2001, pp. 129–130; see also Gross, 2001). Although there are more representations of homosexuality than ever before, scholars caution against the presumption that these are necessarily more progressive representations. As throughout television history, gays and lesbians are still more likely to appear in comedies than dramas, where the line between “laughing with” and “laughing at” remains strategically ambiguous. Also, gay and lesbian characters are still often portrayed by straight (or not “out”) actors and marketed to straight audiences (Battles & Hilton-Morrow, 2002; Dow, 2001; Gross, 2001). The most recent analysis of sexual portrayals on television programs found portrayals of non-heterosexuals in about 15% of programs overall. Of 14 genres, only movies and variety/comedy shows had substantial percentages of programs that contained non-heterosexual content. Programs on commercial broadcast networks were less likely to have non-heterosexual content than those on cable networks, especially those on premium cable movie networks (Fisher, Hill, Grube, & Gruber, 2007). Also, in his meta-analysis of the findings from content analysis about sexual portrayals on television over 18 seasons, Hetsroni (2007) reports that the frequency of portrayals of homosexuality have increased considerably.

Violence Violence was the most studied form of content in all of the mass media from the advent of television as a mass medium around 1950 to the turn of the century. Scholars continually monitored the amount of violence on television, producing at least 60 major content analyses (see Potter, 1999) then interest waned. Depending on the definition used, violence has been found in 57% to 80% of all entertainment programs (Columbia Broadcasting System, 1980; Greenberg et al., 1980; Lichter & Lichter, 1983; “NCTV Says,” 1983; Potter & Ware, 1987; Schramm, Lyle, & Parker, 1961; Signorielli, 1990; Smythe, 1954; Williams, Zabrack, & Joy, 1982). The most consistent examination of television violence has been conducted by Gerbner and his associates (e.g., Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1980). Since the late 1960s, they have documented the frequency of violent acts that fit the definition: the overt expression of physical force (with or without a weapon) against self or other, compelling action against one’s will on pain of being hurt or killed, or actually hurting or killing. Signorielli (1990) reports that from 1967 to 1985, the hourly rate has fluctuated from about four to seven violent acts, with peaks occurring about every 4 years. The most comprehensive analysis of violence on television has been conducted with the National Television Violence Study (NTVS; 1996), which analyzed the content of a total of 3,185 programs across 23 television channels for all day parts from 6 a.m. until 11 p.m., 7 days a week, over the course of a television season. NTVS researchers report that 57% of all programs analyzed had some violence and that one third of programs presented nine or more violent interactions. The numbers in the above paragraphs are limited to physical forms of violence, and they do not include verbal

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violence. Verbal violence is even more prevalent on television than is physical violence. For example, Williams et al. (1982) reported finding a rate of 9.5 acts of verbal violence as well as 9 acts of physical violence per hour on North American (United States and Canada) television. Potter and Ware (1987) found about 8 acts per hour of physical violence and an additional 12 acts of verbal violence on American television. Also, Greenberg and his colleagues (1980) reported that an average prime-time hour of television contains 22 acts of verbal aggression and 12 acts of physical aggression. In a comparison of rates of violence on television from the mid1970s to the mid-1990s, Potter and Vaughan (1997) found that the rates of physical violence remained stable but that the rates of verbal violence had increased dramatically. They reasoned that programmers were wary of increasing physical violence because such an increase would trigger a public outcry, but the substantial increase in verbal violence was tolerated by the public, so the increase continued. There have also been some scientific studies of the amount of violence in films. For example, the top-grossing 50 films of 1998 contained a total of 2,300 acts of violence, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs, based in Washington, D.C. “Violence was not only a staple of popular entertainment, it was often portrayed as laudable, necessary or relatively harmless activity,” said S. Robert Lichter, the center’s president (quoted in Goldstein, 1999, p. B1). In another analysis of violent films, Sapolsky, Molitor, and Luque (2003) content analyzed popular slasher films in the 1990s and found more acts of violence in them than similar films from the 1980s. One change was that recent slasher films rarely mixed scenes of sex and violence. The researchers also posed the question about whether females were more victimized than males, and they concluded that in all slasher films, there were more male victims than there were female victims. But they did not stop with this conclusion; they also found that the ratio of female victims is higher in slasher films than in commercially successful action/adventure films of the 1990s. This means than when a female is shown in a slasher film, she has a greater chance of being victimized. Also, females are shown in fear longer than males. Violence on television has been examined not only for its frequency but also for its context—that is, the way it is presented. For example, Potter and Ware (1987) found that with much of the violence, the perpetrator is rewarded and the victims are rarely shown with much pain and suffering. This was also the case in the NTVS studies, where violent acts were rarely punished, and rarely were victims shown as suffering any harmful consequences. Also, 37% of the perpetrators of violence were portrayed as being attractive, and 44% of the acts were shown as being justified. These patterns led the researchers to conclude that violence not only was prevalent throughout the entire television landscape but also was typically shown as sanitized and glamorized (see Potter & Smith, 2000). This level of violence in the media is far higher than the real-world levels of violence and crime. This was demonstrated by Oliver (1994), who analyzed pseudo-reality-based police shows, such as Cops. She found that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) figures for murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault were 13.2% of all crimes, but in the television world, these four violent crimes accounted for 87.0% of all crimes. Also, the FBI reports that 18.0% of crimes are cleared, but on television, 61.5% are cleared—that is, the perpetrator is arrested, is killed, or committed suicide. Again, television focuses on the most arousing crimes rather than the dull ones. Also, there is a more satisfying resolution to crimes than there is in the real world.

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Language It appears as if “bad” language has broken the barrier on television and is here to stay. For example, Kaye and Sapolsky (2001) examined prime-time network programs to ascertain whether usage of offensive language increased throughout the 1990s, when a content-based rating system was implemented. The per-hour rate of objectionable words increased between 1990 and 1994 but decreased in 1997 to a level slightly below that found in 1990. Although the FCC deemed the “seven dirty words” as too offensive for television, five of these words had made their way onto the prime-time airwaves. People continue to complain about bad language on television, and the FCC monitors television programs to determine if they are obscene or not. In making their determination, the FCC takes context into consideration. For example, many people complained about indecency in the movie Saving Private Ryan, but the FCC ruled that it did not contain indecency although there was considerable profanity and violence. The FCC reasoned that the language was appropriate for soldiers fighting in a war (“FCC Finds No Indecency,” 2005). A more recent study found that profanity on network TV increased 69% from 2005 to 2010 and that the greatest increases were during the so-called family hour from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. (Flint, 2010). In addition to obscenity, bad language also includes racial and gender slurs. In the spring of 2007, radio shock jock Don Imus referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” in an offhanded comment during one of his radio broadcasts. Many listeners were greatly offended and criticized his language. This triggered the attention of the media, which made it a prominent controversial story. African American and feminist leaders harshly criticized Imus’s comments. Although Imus met with Rutgers officials and formally apologized and even though his apology was accepted by the members of the women’s basketball team, Imus was fired from his job. Imus had found that after three decades as a popular shock jock where he insulted a wide range of politicians and public figures, his language in this instance crossed a line where the consequences were severe and immediate.

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Health The television world is a generally healthy one when we look at patterns across all kinds of shows. While some of this pattern of health portrayals is very responsible in presenting healthy messages to viewers, other parts of this pattern are deceptive; that is, some portrayals present a very misleading message about health.

Deceptive Health Patterns Although there are many indicators of deceptive health, I’ll present only five in this section. First, although most characters are not shown having particularly healthy habits (eating responsibly, regularly exercising, and getting medical checkups to prevent illnesses), most characters appear healthy, fit, and thin. It has been estimated that 64.5% of the American population is overweight or obese (ProCon.org, 2015), but on television, only 6% of the males and 2% of the females are. Furthermore, characters do not gain weight from their high-caloric diets, although eating and drinking are frequent activities on entertainment programs. About 75% of all shows display this activity. But eating is usually unhealthy. The traditional meals of breakfast, lunch, and dinner combined account for only about half of the eating; snacking accounts for the rest. Fruit is the snack in only 4% to 5% of the episodes. Second, although there is a high degree of violence on many shows, few characters are portrayed as suffering any harm. In fact, most characters are portrayed as being healthy and active. Only 6% to 7% of major characters are portrayed as having had injuries or illnesses that require treatment. Pain, suffering, or medical help rarely follows violent activity. In children’s programs, despite greater mayhem, only 3% of characters are shown receiving medical treatment. Prime-time characters are not only healthy but also relatively safe from accidents, even though they rarely wear seat belts when they drive. And they are rarely portrayed as suffering from impairments of any kinds as a result of an accident. A third indicator of deceptive health is that everyday normal health maladies are rarely shown. Most health problems that are portrayed are serious and life-threatening. When help for medical problems is portrayed, it is not in a preventative or therapeutic manner but in a dramatic and social way. Hardly anyone dies a natural death on television. Prime-time characters are not shown with any kind of physical impairments. Rarely does a character even wear glasses; even in old age, only one out of four characters wears them. Only 2% of characters on primetime shows are physically handicapped. When they do appear, they tend to be older, less positively presented, and more likely to be victimized. Almost none appear on children’s shows. Fourth, mental health is portrayed in a dangerously stereotypical manner. In real life, mentally ill people are usually passive and withdrawn, frightened, and avoidant. But on television, mentally ill characters were found to be 10 times more likely to be violent criminals than non–mentally ill television characters (Diefenbach & West, 2007). In television stories, mentally ill characters are typically shown to be active, confused, aggressive, dangerous, and unpredictable.

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Fifth, doctors are greatly overrepresented on television compared to their numbers in real life. Health care professionals dominate the ranks of professionals, despite the paucity of sick characters on television. They are five times their numbers in real life proportionally. Only criminals or law enforcers are more numerous. Also, many of these doctors are shown making house calls and devoting far more time to individual patients than real-life doctors are able to.

Responsible Health Patterns The use of alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drugs has dramatically declined over the years on television. Smoking was a frequent activity until the mid-1980s, until it almost completely disappeared except for reruns of old movies. Alcohol use has also substantially declined. When it is presented now, it is frequently shown with negative consequences. Until the mid-1980s, alcohol consumption was common on television. The drinking of alcohol was shown twice as often as the drinking of coffee and tea, 14 times that of soft drinks, and 15 times that of water. It was shown as sociable, happy, and problem free. Also, alcohol use was rarely portrayed with any negative consequences. When negative consequences were shown, they were usually very slight, such as a temporary hangover. Despite high rates of consumption across many characters, only 1% of television drinkers are portrayed as having a drinking problem. Although television is showing more responsible portrayals of drug and alcohol use, the movies do not fare so well. An analysis of the 200 most popular movies of 1996 and 1997 reveals that characters frequently abuse drugs and alcohol. Moreover, these characters are not portrayed as worrying about the consequences (Hartman, 1999).

Body Image A content analysis of three magazines from 1967 to 1997 found that male bodies were portrayed as more lean, muscular, and V-shaped. This fits with the male body image ideal of thin and athletic. “Sociocultural standards of beauty for males emphasize strength and muscularity” (Law & Labre, 2002, p. 697). Hollywood movies are also a target of critics of the media’s obsession with a certain type of body image. Alexandra Kuczynski wrote Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery in which she argued that Hollywood has created a standard of beauty that does not exist in nature. “This standard is pert, symmetrical features atop a skinny body with large breasts (also called ‘tits on sticks’)” (Kantrowitz, 2006, p. 54). She says that Hollywood creates celebrities with perfect bodies then floods the media with these images, making them the standard that everyone tries to meet. When people cannot meet this standard, they undergo surgeries or get depressed. Also, Himes and Thompson (2007) conducted a study to examine how overweight characters were presented in movies and television shows. They found that fat characters were typically stigmatized, that is, non-overweight characters used humor to put down overweight characters often directly to their face. They also found that male characters were three times more likely to engage in fat stigmatization commentary or fat humor than female characters.

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Hollywood is often criticized for creating unrealistic and unattainable standards of beauty and body image. iStock/egorr

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Values Examining the arts within a culture is a way to determine the values of that culture. For example, the ancient Greek and Roman cultures exhibited the values of perfection, harmony, and beauty in their art. During the European Middle Ages, the art reflected the dominance of the Catholic Church, with its focus on the life of Christ, especially his birth, miracles, crucifixion, and resurrection. Earthly existence was mundane and painful, whereas the afterlife was glorious. During the Renaissance, the art reflected the values of a scientific approach to understanding the world. During the European Romantic era, the focus shifted from the logical and intellectual concerns that were dominant during the Renaissance to the emotions of humans. During the Modern era, the arts were decoupled from the church and political institutions. Art glorified the individual and his or her unique way of looking at the world and constructing meaning (Metallinos, 1996). Today, we can examine the broad span of messages from the mass media and ask: What do our stories tell us about our current culture? Some researchers and social critics have attempted to answer this question. Table 10.4 shows what two media scholars have observed to be the themes in television entertainment. Notice that the first of Comstock’s (1989) themes deals with material consumption. Comstock is not referring to the ads in the stories but to the values in the stories themselves. He says, “It is not solely that so many stories revolve around the rich, but that in so many instances dwellings and their furnishings are beyond the means of those portrayed as occupying them” (p. 172). For example, the popular situation comedy Friends features Monica, a part-time cook, and Rachel, a waitress in a coffeehouse, who are shown supporting themselves in a wellfurnished two-bedroom apartment in downtown Manhattan. Notice also how the lists of Comstock (1989) and D. Walsh (1994) overlap. For example, Walsh is also concerned with the value of materialism, which he argues is at odds with a healthy society. Walsh also argues that the values of the marketplace are as follows: happiness equals wealth, instant gratification, and me first. In contrast, the values of a healthy society are the following: self-esteem comes from within, moderation, tolerance, understanding, and social responsibility.

Table 10.4 Values Underlying Entertainment Messages Table 10.4 Values Underlying Entertainment Messages Comstock’s (1989) List 1. Material consumption is very satisfying. 2. The world is a mean and risky place. There is a great deal of crime and violence throughout the television world. 3. The TV world has turned the social pyramid upside down by showing most characters as wealthy and powerful and very few of them as working class. 4. Males are more powerful than females in terms of income, job status, and decision making. This is slowly changing, but we are still far from a balance of power. 408

5. Occupational status is highly valued. Professional occupations are depicted as worthwhile, whereas manual work is uninteresting. People attain the status of a worthwhile profession through upward mobility from the middle class. This upward mobility is accomplished through self-confidence and toughness; goodness of character alone is not enough. The movement upward is usually quick and painless. 6. There are a few privileged professions in which the people are almost always shown as doing good and helping others. However, most businesspeople are shady. Businesses are frequently portrayed as taking advantage of the gullible public and abusing their power. 7. Law enforcers are overrepresented as being successful, strong, and justified. Private eyes are almost always shown as better than the police. 8. There is a belief in the occult, life on other planets, life after death, and hidden, malevolent purposes behind the inexplicable. 9. A person’s self-interest is very important. People are motivated to get what they want regardless of the feelings of others. Examples include extramarital affairs, crime, hard-driving businesspeople, and police who disregard the rights of others to achieve their goals. 10. There are often truly heroic acts portrayed where there are daring rescues, selflessness, loyalty to others, and the struggle against difficult odds to do the right thing. Walsh’s (1994) List 1. Happiness is found in having things. 2. Get all you can for yourself. 3. Get it all as quickly as you can. 4. Win at all costs. 5. Violence is entertaining. 6. Always seek pleasure and avoid boredom. In complaining about the direction of programming on TV aimed at young people, U.S. News & World Report columnist John Leo (1999) said,

These shows are also carriers of heavy cultural messages, the most obvious being that parents are fools. In the teen soap operas, parents are absent, stupid, irrelevant, zanily adulterous, on the lam, or in jail. The unmistakable message is that kids are on their own, with no need to listen to parents, who know little or nothing anyway. This helps the TV industry certify teenagers as an autonomous culture with its own set of ethics and consumption patterns. (p. 15) 409

Young people are a very important target for many Hollywood films, and a particular kind of film is believed to be the best draw for them. For example, in a profile of literary manager Warren Zide, Los Angeles Times reporter Claudia Eller (1999) examines the values operating in Hollywood. She said,

When it came to getting the script for American Pie in shape to be sold, Zide said he and his colleagues advised [the writer] “to write the raunchiest script possible without worrying about the rating.” Apparently it was good advice. The R-rated comedy about four high-school buddies who make a pact to lose their virginity before graduation piqued the interest of several studios before it was sold to Universal Pictures for $650,000. (p. C5)

Eller also quotes Zide on his reaction to a script about teenagers on a spring break: “I hated when I was growing up and you go to see some R-rated movie and there’s no nudity in it, and you’re like, ‘Oh, man, I was gypped.’” So, now as a literary agent, Zide asks, “Do we have enough T&A in it?” (p. C5).

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Becoming Media Literate With Entertainment Messages With formulas, we are all fairly media literate. We can all follow stories, even complicated ones with flashbacks, irony, and many characters. We know how to read stereotypical characters from their physical appearance and attribute all kinds of personality characteristics to them. We can easily keep increasing our media literacy with story formulas by simply exposing ourselves to more stories, especially stories in a wider variety of genres and sub-genres. With patterns, however, the challenge for media literacy is considerably higher. Patterns are insidious because we typically process each portrayal individually then unconsciously infer patterns often based on only a few instances or on faulty samples (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). Thus after watching a small number of movies or television shows, we infer patterns about the real world—how people dress and act. These inferences typically result in unrealistic beliefs about attractiveness, romance, success, health, family, and so on. Media stories typically ignore things that are not dramatic (e.g., housework, running errands, and small talk with neighbors) or visually interesting (e.g., thinking by ourselves, reading, walking, and other quiet activities). If we develop our expectations for real life from the pattern of dramatic stories we see in the media, our expectations will be unrealistic, and if we try to achieve those unrealistic objectives, we will continually fail and become depressed. Producers, however, are under no obligation to present an accurate account of the mundane world. Their task is to build as large an audience as possible. To do this, they must rely on all their creative powers to achieve a dramatic effect, so they deliberately distort the world to surprise and startle us. Some creative people produce fantasy that, by definition, is totally unlike real life—they do this to allow us to escape our lives and to see imaginative occurrences. Other producers who try to capture real life must do so in an intriguing manner. That is, they avoid presenting the mundane mainstream of real life and instead highlight the occurrences at the margins where there are particularly interesting people or events. This is real life in the sense that it could happen or even did happen. Producers of entertaining stories are not psychologists or sociologists; they are not usually trying to educate us about how the human mind works or about how society works. However, the drama in their stories does have the side effect of tempting us to use those plots as lessons about the real world. The danger to us as viewers of these stories is that we gradually absorb social lessons from these fictional stories. Over time, we start to confuse the “one-step remove” elements from the more realistic elements. Eventually, we come to believe that the patterns of fantasy that we continually see in media stories should be how we live our real lives. The way to deal with the unrealistic picture presented by television entertainment is not to pressure producers to make their world of fiction more realistic. That would be silly. Instead, the best way to deal with this situation is to educate yourself about the content patterns in the media world and to become more sensitive, recognizing where those patterns diverge from real-world patterns. Learn to appreciate the divergences as fantasy and limit yourself to being entertained by their unreality. And avoid being guided by unrealistic

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expectations based on what media characters look like and how they act. Now that you have more information about patterns of characters, plots, and values of entertainment stories in the media, you have a stronger knowledge structure about media content. When you use this knowledge structure to guide yourself through your exposures to media stories in the future, you will be able to see much more in those messages. Table 10.5 shows the cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and moral skills you will need to do this in a conscious, active manner. But do not restrict yourself to the specifics in Table 10.5; instead, use the information presented there to stimulate your thinking about other skills and knowledge. Then, during your exposures to media entertainment, recall the knowledge you will need and consciously apply the skills in all four domains. During exposure to the media, remember that entertainment messages follow a formula. Viewers want formulaic characters and plots so that the entertainment messages are easy to follow. Look at how closely stories follow formulas by working on Exercise 10.2. As you progress through the exercise, keep the following questions in mind: How do stories follow standard patterns and how do they deviate from them? How much can a story deviate from standard formulas before audiences are likely to become confused and lose sense of what is happening?

Table 10.5 Types of Skills and Knowledge Structures Needed to Deal With Entertainment Messages in a Media-Literate Manner Table 10.5 Types of Skills and Knowledge Structures Needed to Deal With Entertainment Messages in a Media-Literate Manner Skills

Knowledge

Ability to analyze entertainment content to identify key plot points, types of characters, and themes Cognitive

Ability to see entertainment formulas

Knowledge of elements in entertainment formula

Ability to compare/contrast plot points, characters, and themes across vehicles and media Ability to analyze the portrayed feelings of characters

Emotional

Ability to put oneself into the position of different characters in the story

Recall from personal experiences how it would feel to be in the situation depicted in the story

Ability to control emotions elicited by the plot and themes

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Knowledge of writing, directing, Ability to analyze the craft and artistic elements in the story Aesthetic

on

Ability to compare and contrast the artistry used to tell the story with that used to tell other stories

Knowledge of good and bad stories and the elements that contributed to those qualities

Ability to analyze the moral elements as evidenced by decisions made by characters, implications of those decisions revealed by the plot, and underlying themes Moral

acting, editing, sound mixing, and so

Ability to compare and contrast ethical decisions presented in this story with other stories Ability to evaluate the ethical responsibilities of the producers and programmers

Knowledge of what moral systems say about different decisions as well as knowledge of the moral implications of your decisions Knowledge of other stories that have portrayed this topic, both good and bad Knowledge of values of people in the media industries

Keep asking questions about these stories. Be skeptical. Take nothing for granted. If you stay active during your exposures, you will be increasing your media literacy and thus gaining more control over setting expectations for life that are both realistic and special to you.

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Summary When producers create entertainment messages, they are guided by a general story, which outlines what all entertainment stories must have; a genre formula, which builds on the general story formula by adding elements specific to a genre; and knowledge about which particular storytelling elements (such as elements for arousal, types of humor, degree and type of realism, suspense, and triggers for emotional reactions) work with particular types of audiences. Thus entertainment messages within a particular genre share a lot of commonalities that differentiate them from messages within other genres. The more that we, as audience members, understand these formulas, the more effectively and efficiently we can follow their action and process their meaning. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Cantor, M. G. (1980). Prime-time television. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage. (143 pages, including index) Written by a sociologist who spent 10 years interviewing actors, writers, and producers, this book explains how decisions about content are made in the television industry. She develops a model to show that many forces shape the development of any television program. The examples in the book are dated, but the principles still apply. Haven, K. (2007). Story proof: The science behind the startling power of story. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. (152 pages including references and index) With his background as a professional storyteller, Haven examines the scientific literature to analyze what a story is and how stories affect humans in all sorts of ways. He reviews the research literature across scholarly fields as a basis for constructing his own definition of story, then shows how stories have always been a powerful form of communication. Medved, M. (1992). Hollywood vs. America: Popular culture and the war on traditional values. New York, NY: HarperCollins. (386 pages) This film critic argues that Hollywood has a value system that is very different from that of mainstream America. Hollywood glorifies the perverse, ridicules all forms of mainstream religion, tears down the image of the family, and glorifies ugliness with violence, bad language, and America bashing. Then the industry is puzzled why attendance is dropping and criticism is increasing. Postman, N. (1984). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. New York, NY: Penguin. (184 pages with index) This is a strong, well-written argument about how the media, especially television, have conditioned us to expect entertainment. Because our perceptions of ideas are shaped by the form of their expression, we are now image oriented. We respond to pleasure, not thought and reflection.

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Keeping Up to Date Scholarly Journals Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly These are scholarly journals that publish research studies that examine entertainment-type messages in the mass media, particularly television, primarily using scientific-type methods, such as content analysis. The reported findings typically focus attention on broad patterns. Critical Studies in Media Communication Discourse & Society Film Quarterly Sight & Sound These are journals that publish scholarship from a humanistic perspective and therefore provide analyses of media content, especially film and television, from a cultural or critical perspective. Magazines for General Audiences Entertainment Weekly TV Guide Rolling Stone Hollywood Reporter Billboard

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Exercise 10.1

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Analyzing Entertainment Content 1. Write a definition for sexual behavior. This is not as easy as it might seem. You must consider issues such as the following: a. What must the characters do? b. What are their intentions? Is a kiss or a hug always sexual? c. What do they talk about? If a character talks about what he or she wants to do, does that count? 2. Sampling: Select a handful of media messages that have a chance of representing a larger set of messages. For example, you might want to select two different situation comedies on prime-time network television to represent mainstream situation comedies. 3. Code the messages in the sample. Count how many acts occur that meet your definition. Note the gender, age, and ethnic background of the characters. 4. Discuss your results with others in class who did their own content analyses of sex. a. What is the range in the numbers of acts found? Can this range be attributed to differences in definitions or differences in shows? b. Profile the types of characters who were most often involved in sexual activity. c. Are there any noticeable differences in character profiles across types of situation comedies? 5. Now try using your definition to analyze the content on soap operas, music videos, and action/adventure dramas. a. Do you see any big differences in the number of sexual acts across different types of shows? b. Do you see any big differences in the profiles of characters involved in sexual activity across shows? 6. Now think about how sex is portrayed in the television world. a. What types of activity are the most prevalent? b. How responsibly is sex portrayed in the television world—that is, are the physical and emotional risks often discussed or considered? Is sex portrayed as a normal part of a loving, stable relationship, or is it portrayed more as a game of conquest or a source of silliness? c. Did you find anything in the patterns that surprised you? 7. What do you need to know about how sex is portrayed in the media and the role of sex in the real world for you to construct strong knowledge structure on this subject?

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Exercise 10.2

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Practicing Media Literacy Skills on Entertainment Programming Watch a television program, then think about the following tasks: 1. Analysis: Break down the program in the following ways: a. List the main characters. b. List the main plot points. c. Were there violent elements? If so, list them. d. Were there sexual elements? Is so, list them. e. Were their health-related elements? If so, list them. 2. Grouping: Select the two main characters. a. How are they the same/different demographically? b. How are they the same/different by personality characteristics? c. How are they the same/different in the way they move the plot forward? 3. Evaluation: Think about all the characters and make the following judgments. a. In your judgment, which character was the most humorous? Why? b. In your judgment, which character was the most ethical in his or her behavior? Why? c. In your judgment, which actor or actress displayed the best acting skills? Why? d. In your judgment, which of the plot points were the strongest? Which were the weakest?e. In your judgment, what is the theme of this show? 4. Abstracting: Describe your show (characters and plot) in 50 words or less. 5. Generalizing: Start with particular characters and particular happenings in your show, then infer general patterns of people and events in general. a. Think about the demographics of the characters in your show. Do those demographics in your show match the patterns of demographics in the real world? b. Think about the plot elements (sex, violence, health) in your show. Do these elements in your show match the patterns of these elements in the real world? 6. Appreciating a. Emotional: Was the show able to evoke emotions in you? If so, list those emotions and explain how the show triggered those particular emotions. b. Aesthetic: Is there something about the writing, directing, editing, lighting, set design, costuming, or music/sound effects that you found of particularly high quality? If so, explain what led you to appreciate that element so much. c. Moral: Did the show raise ethical considerations (either explicitly or implicitly)? If so, did you appreciate how the show dealt with those ethical considerations?

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Chapter 11 Advertising

Advertising Is Pervasive Process of Constructing Advertising Messages Campaign Strategy Copy Platform Becoming More Media Literate With Advertising Analyze Your Personal Needs Analyze Ads Evaluate Ads Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises

Key Idea: We live in a culture saturated with advertising messages that have been carefully planned to fulfill the goals of each of the thousands of advertisers who flood our culture with messages every day.

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki speaks at a Google presented event about the launch of YouTube Brandcast, a site that gives brands insight into how to best reach desired audiences on the video sharing site. Stephen Lovekin/FilmMagic for YouTube/Getty Images

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“I hate ads. They are so annoying the way they interrupt TV shows and all those pop-ups and banner ads on websites. I refuse to pay attention to any of them. I don’t contribute much to advertisers. They must hate me.” “Not necessarily. Do you buy advertised products?” “Like what?” “Like when you go to the grocery store, you probably buy cereals, snacks, toothpaste. Do you buy well-known brands or the generic house brands?” “I buy the well-known brands. And not because they are well known or because they are so heavily advertised.” “Then why do you buy them?” “They have higher quality.” “How do you know that?” “Everybody knows that.” “If you read the labels carefully, you would see that the ingredients in the house brands are identical to the advertised brands. Also, the same governmental regulations that apply to advertised brands also apply to house brands, so house brands do not have impurities or harmful ingredients. And the house brands are almost always made in the same manufacturing plants that make the advertised brands. Yet you pay a lot more for the advertised brands, because you are not just buying the product. You are also buying the advertising.” “I still think the well-known brands are better.” “Then I think that advertisers must love you!”

Let’s begin with the question: What are the products of advertising? Some of you might interpret “products” to mean the things we buy—clothes, pizzas, mobile phones, and so on. Others might think that the products are the ads we see—after all, that is what the people in the industry create and show to us constantly. While both of these interpretations have some truth to them on the surface, both miss the point of the real nature of advertising. The most important product of advertising is you.

Advertisers have conditioned us to give them our time and money by appealing to what we think we need. iStock/huseyintuncer

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Advertisers have trained you, and all members of the public, to give them your time, your attention, and your money—even money you don’t have when you buy advertised products on credit. Advertisers have spent hundreds of billions of dollars over your lifetime to craft special messages that have put hundreds of thousands of images, jingles, ideas, and desires into your memory banks. They have done this with your permission and even your blessing. And they have even convinced you to pay them for conditioning you. This chapter is organized to achieve three objectives. The first objective is to sensitize you to the amount and pervasiveness of advertising in the culture. The second objective is to help you understand how advertising messages are designed. And the third objective is to get you started being more systematic in analyzing ad messages and evaluating the degree to which their appeals match your real needs.

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Advertising Is Pervasive The United States is saturated with advertising. With about 8% of the world’s population, the United States absorbs almost half of the world’s advertising expenditures. We are literally surrounded by ads constantly (see Table 11.1). Estimates range from 247 to over 5,000 for the number of ads the average person is exposed per day (American Advertising in the Media, 2011). Even if we take the figure at the low end of this range, that is more than 15 ad exposures for every waking hour of every day. Can you remember any of the more than 30 ads you were exposed to during the last 2 hours? You probably cannot recall even two or three. At this point you may think I am exaggerating about the amount of advertising in our culture. To check this for yourself, do Exercise 11.1. This exercise may fatigue you after a day or two (or perhaps even after an hour or two). If fatigue happens quickly, then you will have absorbed the lesson of this exercise—you are being exposed to many more ad messages than you were aware.

Table 11.1 Pervasiveness of Advertising in America Table 11.1 Pervasiveness of Advertising in America Medium

Newspapers

Advertising Sixty percent of the typical newspaper is advertising. Newspapers are now primarily vehicles for ads more so than for news. Movie theaters bombard viewers with ads. A series of ads is projected on their screens while the audience waits for the show to begin. When the film begins, there are usually ads for the theater’s concession stand. The ticket a person buys usually has an ad on it.

Film Films themselves are full of ads in the form of paid product placements. There are more than 30 companies operating in Hollywood to place products within movies and TV shows. For years, the industry standard for maximum number of ad minutes per hour has been Radio

18, but this is not a legally imposed limit but rather a guideline. Many radio stations exceed this guideline and present 40 minutes of ads per hour during particular times of the day. The percentage of programming on television given to commercial messages has been increasing over the years and by 2009 it had increased to over 40%.

Television TV advertising is now in airports, in elevators in high-end hotels, and in doctors’ waiting rooms—all beaming messages to captive audiences. Advertisers are paying for product placement in novels. Cover Girl cosmetics got writer Sean Stewart to mention a particular kind of makeup in his novel about adolescent girls 425

and the publisher increased the book run from 30,000 to 100,000 copies based on the promotional strength of the deal (Smiley, 2006). By 2012, the number of ads shown to U.S. users of the Internet was more than 5.3 Computers

trillion, with 445 different advertisers each delivering more than a billion ads on websites in 2012. The typical Internet user is served 1,707 banner ads per month (Morrissey, 2013). Ads are on the sides of buildings, on taxis and buses, on police cruisers, in public toilets, on gas pumps, on the back of store receipts, on church bulletins, in public school classrooms, and even on the clothing of people walking the streets.

Nonmedia

There are now talking billboards that are fitted with a low-power radio transmitter that tells motorists where to tune for more information on the product advertised on the billboard. Commercial companies now sponsor events such as Russian space launches (Pizza Hut) and trips by the Pope (Frito-Lay and PepsiCo) in exchange for advertising rights.

Each year, the amount of money spent on advertising grows dramatically. In 1900, about $500 million was spent on all forms of advertising in the United States. By 1940, it was $2 billion, so it took 40 years to multiply four times. In 1980, it was $60 billion, or a growth of 30 times in those 40 years. By 2010, it had grown to more than $260 billion per year. These numbers are so large that they are difficult to comprehend. Let’s break down the expenditures by number of people in the population. In 1940, the industry spent $16 on each person in this country; by 1980, it was $260, and now it is more than $1,200 per person per year.

Research shows 80% of consumers opt for the more expensive, advertised brand over a store brand. iStock/leaf

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An advertiser who wants to introduce a new product nationally and break through the existing clutter to get consumers to realize that there is a new product on the market must now spend a minimum of $50 million in advertising to launch the product. Of course, all this new advertising adds even more to the clutter, making it even more expensive for the next product introduction. This growth in advertising expenditure, number of ads, and places where ads appear has been accelerating for the past few decades and likely will continue with no end in sight. Why can we expect continued growth? Because we—the public—do not mind all this advertising. Of course, we sometimes criticize certain ads that we don’t like, and sometimes we get upset when we watch television and have our shows repeatedly interrupted by commercial breaks. However, few Americans have a negative attitude about advertising—only about 15% of us. Thus, advertisers have done a good job conditioning us to accept the flood of advertising messages with few complaints. Our criticisms are minor compared to our unthinking support of advertising. By “unthinking” support, I mean that most of us do not realize how much advertising exposure we experience every day and how it has shaped our attitudes and behaviors. We accept the saturation, and we allow our behavior to be shaped by it. I’ll present two examples of this point to help you understand how much you have been influenced by advertising. The first example deals with how much money we spend on advertised products when we have a choice of buying brands that are unadvertised and sell for much less money. To illustrate this point, think of all the breakfast cereals that consume almost a full aisle in modern supermarkets. Cheerios, which is the leading brand in cold cereals, has a unit price of $5.10 per pound, but most stores sell a very similar cereal as a house brand for about $2.66 per pound.

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The taste of the store brand is quite satisfactory, although most people would slightly prefer the taste of Cheerios. But Cheerios is 92 percent more expensive. Consumers are perfectly aware of the prices of the two brands because the cereals are displayed alongside one another, yet Cheerios outsells the store brand by about four to one. (J. P. Jones, 2004, p. 25)

The minor difference in taste alone does not account for the fact that 80% of consumers spend the extra money to buy the advertised brand. It appears that Cheerios’ advertising has made most consumers believe that something special about Cheerios warrants the very high price relative to the same cereal in the house brand box. Cheerios is only one example of this overall pattern of our preference for the more expensive advertised brands. Next time you are in a grocery store or drug store, notice that almost every heavily advertised national brand sitting on those shelves has an unadvertised store brand sitting close by. Even though these unadvertised store brands always offer a lower selling price—sometimes a much lower selling price—the advertised brands always outsell them. A second example is how much you voluntarily participate as an advertiser. Look at the clothing you have on now. How many clothing logos are you displaying on your shirt, pants, shoes, hat, book bag, mobile devices, and so on? You are advertising those products everywhere you go. How much are those companies paying you to advertise for them? They pay you nothing, right? In fact, you are paying them. Had you bought the same piece of clothing without the prized logo, it would have cost you less money. Therefore, you have chosen to pay more for the privilege of wearing a particular brand and displaying its logo. This is a good deal for those manufacturers who have convinced you to work for them for free and to pay them for this privilege!

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Process of Constructing Advertising Messages Because the cost of advertising is so high and continues to increase, advertisers engage in a very systematic process of design to maximize the probability that their ads will be successful. This process begins with the development of an overall campaign strategy then proceeds to the creation of a copy platform. The more you understand about how ads are designed, the more you can appreciate the effort that goes into this process and the better able you will be to recognize what particular ads are really trying to do.

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Campaign Strategy The planning document that companies or advertising agencies develop to sell a product or service is the campaign strategy. When developing a campaign strategy, planners must keep three things in mind. First, they need to realize that advertising is both a science as well as an art. Many people think of advertising as an art form where creative people brainstorm about how to produce all kinds of compelling messages to stimulate us to buy the hundreds of thousands of products displayed in malls, showrooms, webpages, and the shelves of supermarkets. Yes, a lot of creative people work in advertising. However, advertising is much more of a business enterprise than an artistic pursuit. The design of advertising campaigns is undertaken with rigorous planning by professionals with a great deal of technical expertise. Second, planners must realize that advertising is a risky endeavor. The stakes are high, as is the risk. For example, the average supermarket now has 40,000 products on its shelves, and while several hundred new products are introduced each month, 90% of those new products fail to last more than a year, even though most of these new products are supported with advertising budgets upwards of $50 million each. Third, the role of advertising has changed with the growing popularity of newer media along with the fragmentation of the population (see Table 11.2). Once planners are clear about these three ideas, they then consider a series of six questions. The answers to these questions form the pieces of their plan for an advertising campaign. 1. Who should be the target of the advertising campaign? Advertising campaigns begin with an analysis of who is currently using their product. The big-time advertisers have well-established brands and large numbers of brand-loyal consumers; these people are their primary target for advertising campaigns. Companies know they must continually advertise to their consumer base in order to condition their brand-loyal habits. Companies are also always looking for opportunities to grow their sales by identifying additional targets beyond their primary target. These are called secondary targets. These are people either who are using the competitor’s brand and need to be converted or who have a need for the product and are unaware of it. Also, advertisers are continually monitoring the culture to identify new needs then develop new products to satisfy those needs. In identifying targets, advertisers have typically used geographic indicators, such as where people live (urban, suburban, rural) as well as region of the country, which is related to climate and cultural needs. Demographic indicators have also been important, particularly gender, age, and educational level. Over the past few decades, advertisers have also been looking at psychological indicators (need to achieve, need to socialize, etc.) as well as lifestyle indicators (patterns of consumption). So target markets are described as “women 18 to 34,” “men working blue-collar jobs who are sports fans,” or “recent college graduates who are starting a family.”

Table 11.2 Changes in Advertising Table 11.2 Changes in Advertising

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Old Advertising

Audience

Medium

Must appeal to the mass audience of everyone

New Advertising

Must focus its appeal to the needs within niche audiences

Heavy use of traditional

Heavy use of social media—social networking sites, blogs,

mass media to

video and photo sharing, chat rooms, message boards, listservs,

disseminate ads widely

wikis, social bookmarking, and mobile applications

Relied on interrupting Attention

people to get them to

Relies on delivering content at the precise moment a target

pay attention to

person needs it

messages

Message flow

Message flow is oneway: company to consumer

Message flow is interactive across networks of consumers; companies interject themselves into these networks to befriend consumers, listen to their needs, and influence them in conversations

Advertising focused on Focus

selling products in ad

Advertising focuses on communicating with potential

campaigns that had a

customers in an ongoing dialogue

limited life Source: Adapted from Scott (2013).

2. What is my primary advertising campaign objective? Advertisers work to specify the goal of their ad campaigns, and this involves one of four types of objectives: awareness, conviction, action, and reinforcement. Awareness is the objective of campaigns when a product is new, so advertisers must design a campaign to make sure that their target audience learns about the product’s name, its main features, and where it can be bought. Conviction refers to attitudes; advertisers must move beyond simply providing knowledge and create positive attitudes about their products. Action campaigns focus on getting consumers to buy the product or at least try it. Reinforcement campaigns are aimed at existing customers to make them feel good about their buying habits so they will continue to buy and consume the product. Most advertising campaigns focus on reinforcement objectives because most advertising campaigns are conducted by companies who already have an established product and a well-established consumer base. So they advertise a great deal to protect that consumer base.

Table 11.3 Key Questions Advertisers Ask When Constructing Their Campaign Strategy Table 11.3 Key Questions Advertisers Ask When Constructing Their Campaign Strategy

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1. Who should be the target of the advertising campaign? 2. What is my primary advertising campaign objective?  Awareness  Conviction  Action  Reinforcement 3. How do my targets make their purchasing decision?  More thinking or feeling  Degree of involvement 4. What is the key benefit I want to sell?  Physical features  Functional features  Characterizational features 5. Should I use a product spokesperson in my campaign?

3. How do my targets make their purchasing decision? The more advertisers know about how their customers go about making purchasing decisions, the better they will be able to design a campaign. A relatively simple way to think about consumer purchasing decisions is to make a distinction along two dimensions of involvement (high and low) and thinking versus feeling (see Figure 11.1). With thinking decisions, we tend to want facts about the product and we make logical comparisons among alternative products to choose the one that can best satisfy our rational needs. In contrast with feeling decisions, we rely on our emotions and choose products that make us feel the best, regardless of what our head is telling us. The involvement dimension refers to how important the purchasing decision is to us. When decisions are relatively unimportant (i.e., the consequences of choosing the wrong product are minor), we can make decisions very quickly. In contrast, when decisions are relatively important (high cost with long-term consequences), then we become highly involved in the decision and either want to gather a great deal of information before making a thinking decision or spend a lot of time worrying over the choices before making a feeling decision. FIGURE 11.1 Purchasing Decision Matrix

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4. What is the key benefit I want to sell? Any given product can be advertised in many different ways. When advertisers design their campaigns, they think about what it is about their product that they want to emphasize. There are three choices of physical features, functional features, and characterizational features. Physical features refer to the actual components of the product itself. For example, with a toothpaste, it might contain fluoride to prevent tooth decay or chemicals to give it a minty taste. Functional features refer to the way consumers can use the product. A toothpaste might come in a pump dispenser that makes it more convenient to use. Characterizational features refer to how consumers feel when using the product. A toothpaste can be advertised in a way to make users feel sexy because their breath is fresh and their teeth are so white that they attract romantic partners as they walk around in public. 5. Should I use a product spokesperson in my campaign? Advertisers often use a product spokesperson in their ad campaigns. For most products, the product spokesperson needs to be credible, trustworthy, and attractive. Credibility refers to expertise; that is, the person really knows what she is talking about. Trustworthiness refers to the belief that the person is telling the truth rather than lying to the audience to get them to buy the product. Attractiveness can refer to physical appeal (Victoria Secret lingerie models, Abercrombie & Fitch bare-chested guys showing off six-packs, etc.) but it can also refer to other qualities that make audiences want to watch ads. Typically advertisers would like to have all three characteristics in their product spokesperson, but at times one characteristic becomes overridingly dominant. For example, a doctor spokesperson for a medical procedure is important for credibility; in this case attractiveness is not so important.

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Copy Platform Advertisers use their overall campaign strategy as a foundation for developing a plan for each individual ad— this plan is called a copy platform. They work on developing a copy platform that translates the elements in their plan into the design of individual ads. This task is structured by six questions (see Table 11.4). 1. What message strategy should be used? The first question is about message strategy. There are basically seven options: generic, preemptive, USP, brand image, positioning, affective, and resonance. The generic-type ad is a simple description of a key characteristic of the product. For example, if you are selling hamburgers, you could simply say something like “Buy our burger because it costs 99 cents.” The preemptive strategy is descriptive like the generic strategy but it also makes a claim for superiority. For example, you could say, “Buy our burger because it is the cheapest one in town.” The USP strategy focuses on the product’s unique selling proposition. To use this strategy, advertisers must identify something that their product has that all the competitors lack. For example, “Buy our burger because it is the only one with our secret sauce.” The brand image strategy focuses attention on the positive aspects of the brand. For example, “Buy our burger because it is a McDonald’s burger.”

NBA star Blake Griffin’s KIA commercials are an example of how advertisers use celebrity appearances to create positive associations between the audience and their product. © MICHAEL NELSON/epa/Corbis

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Positioning is a psychological strategy that focuses attention more on the consumer’s mind than on the product itself. Positioning became important in the 1970s. Positioning does not refer to geographical location of the product in stores; instead it refers to psychological neighborhoods in consumers’ minds. Positioning focuses on how your product is thought of in relation to your competitors. With burgers, two psychological neighborhoods in most consumers’ minds are price and quality. The low-price neighborhood is evoked by names like McDonald’s and Burger King. Let’s say in a person’s town, the highest quality burgers are associated with a restaurant named Ritzy Beef. Your ad then might be something like “Buy our burger because it is high quality like Ritzy Beef but inexpensive like McDonald’s.” This ad attempts to position the burger in a psychological neighborhood that is both high-quality and inexpensive. The affective message strategy focuses on triggering an emotion, such as joy or relief. These ads might use humor to make people laugh and/or feel good in some way. Or they might trigger fear of some problem then lead consumers to a feeling of relief that will be brought on by the use of their product. Similar to the affective strategy, the resonance strategy involves the use of emotion. With resonance, the advertiser is trying to evoke a pleasant memory in the minds of consumers. For example, a burger company could show kids eating their burgers as a reward after a little league game, or teenagers after the prom. These images would resonate with targets’ memories of good times and make them want to recapture those experiences. 2. What should be the tone of the ad? Think of tone along two dimensions. One of these dimensions is hard sell versus soft sell. Hard-sell ads are characterized by pressure, such as when a product spokesperson is yelling

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into the camera that you better get down to his store today while the huge sale is going on because tomorrow will be too late! A second dimension is degree of seriousness. 3. How much information should be put into the ad? Many ads focus on presenting only one simple idea. Designers know that the ad environment is cluttered, so they are happy if they can get people to remember one thing about their product. But oftentimes, advertisers will feel a need to pack more information into an ad in order to achieve their purpose of informing their targets or trying to get them to switch brands. Highinformation ads work better in print so that people can read over the detail at their own pace and go back over certain parts if they need to understand them better. High-information ads also work better when the targets are more educated so that they are willing and able to handle more information.

Table 11.4 Key Questions Advertisers Ask When Constructing Their Copy Platforms Table 11.4 Key Questions Advertisers Ask When Constructing Their Copy Platforms 1. What message strategy should be used?  Generic  Preemptive  Unique selling proposition  Brand Image  Positioning  Affective  Resonance 2. What should be the tone of the ad?  Hard sell/soft sell  Degree of seriousness 3. How much information should be put into the ad? 4. What type of story should be used?  Problem-solution plot  Spokesperson presents information  Montage

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5. Who should be cast in the ad? 6. What should the setting be?

4. What type of story should be used? The most standard story structure is problem-solution. The advertiser shows people struggling with a problem when suddenly someone uses their product and the problem goes away. This is what Proctor and Gamble typically uses to show the value of all their household products. Another story structure is to show the product spokesperson talking into the camera directly to the targets. The spokesperson simply explains the features of the product in a way that makes targets want to buy it. The story montage is a series of images that show the product in an attractive manner. Car companies often use this story structure in television ads where they may present several dozen quick shots of a car riding down a winding country road to evoke the sense of adventure and freedom. 5. Who should be cast in the ad? If an ad campaign uses a product spokesperson, then the casting decision is easy. However, many ads do not use a product spokesperson, so planners must decide first whether to use actors or real people. The key to casting is to feature people in the ad who will attract the attention of the target audience. Furthermore if the copy platform calls for a problem-solution story, then it is important to make sure the person with the problem in the ad is someone whom the targets can identify with and see themselves having the same problem solved by the product. 6. What should the setting be? The setting of the ad also requires a lot of thought. In simple problemsolution stories, advertisers want to show the action in places where targets are most likely to experience the problems. Advertisers begin with these questions about the ad campaign and the copy platform then systematically work through all the options to create a set of ads that all contribute to the goals of the overall ad campaign. But advertisers cannot answer all these questions in standard ways and expect their resulting ads to be very interesting and break through all the clutter. Instead they need to demonstrate some creativity. However, creativity does not refer to thinking so far out of the box that all these questions and their options are ignored. Instead, creativity starts with an awareness and understanding of the options for these questions then using those options in new ways.

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Compare & Contrast

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Campaign Strategy and Copy Platform Compare: the campaign strategy and copy platform are the same in the following ways: Both are planning tools used by advertisers. Both require business awareness (of company’s goals and economics), scholarly awareness (about research findings of what works in different ads and why), and artistic interpretation (to be able to use business sense and research knowledge in a creative way). Contrast: the campaign strategy and copy platform are different in the following ways: The campaign strategy translates a company’s business goals and its marketing objectives into a plan about how to go about getting its messages out to a target market in the most effective and efficient manner possible. The copy platform translates a company’s campaign strategy into a set of guidelines that can be used for designing the individual advertising messages.

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Becoming More Media Literate With Advertising In our everyday lives, we can do things to avoid news messages and even entertainment messages, but we cannot avoid advertising messages. Advertising is too pervasive, and advertisers are aggressive in using new ways to expose you to their messages. We encounter almost all advertising messages in a state of automaticity, where we are unaware of how much exposure we are experiencing. Also, when we are exposed to ads in the state of automaticity, we do not process their claims and therefore cannot discount their influence. This is especially the case when we are multitasking, because we are much less likely to analyze the ad claims and counter-argue (Jeong & Hwang, 2012). During unconscious exposure, advertisers can plant their messages into our subconscious, where they gradually shape our definitions for attractiveness, sex appeal, relationships, cleanliness, health, success, hunger, body shape, problems, and happiness. For example, we might have the radio on in the car as we concentrate on driving, and when ads come on, we do not pay much attention. Then later, we find ourselves humming a jingle, or a word phrase occurs to us, or we pass by a store and “remember” that there is a sale going on there. These flashes of sounds, words, and ideas emerge from our subconscious, where they had been put by ads that we did not pay attention to. Over time, all those images, sounds, and ideas build patterns in our subconscious and profoundly shape the way we think about ourselves and the world.

Table 11.5 Types of Skills and Knowledge Structures Needed to Deal With Advertising Messages in a Media-Literate Manner Table 11.5 Types of Skills and Knowledge Structures Needed to Deal With Advertising Messages in a Media-Literate Manner Skills

Knowledge

Ability to analyze an advertisement to identify key elements of persuasion

Cognitive

Ability to compare and contrast key elements

Knowledge on topic from many sources

of persuasion in the ad with facts in your

(media and real world)

real-world knowledge structure Ability to evaluate veracity of claims in the ad Ability to analyze the feelings of people in Recall from personal experiences how it

the ad Emotional

feels to have a need for the advertised Ability to put oneself into the position of

product

different people in the ad Ability to analyze the craft and artistic

Knowledge of writing, graphics,

elements of the ad

photography, and so on 440

Aesthetic

Ability to compare and contrast the artistry

Knowledge of successful and unsuccessful

used to craft this ad with that used to craft

ads and the elements that contributed to

other types of ads

those qualities

Ability to analyze the moral elements of an

Knowledge of criticism of advertising and

ad

knowledge of how ads can manipulate

Moral Ability to evaluate the ethical responsibilities of advertisers

our attitudes and behaviors Highly developed moral code

To increase your media literacy about advertising, you need to construct a good knowledge structure about advertising (see Table 11.5) then use that knowledge structure periodically to check that the advertising aimed at you helps you satisfy your own needs more than the goals of the advertisers. To guide you in this task, I will present three steps in this section. Each step comes with an exercise to help you apply this information.

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Analyze Your Personal Needs The more you are aware of your needs, the more you can use advertising to control your life. If you are not aware of your needs, the constant flood of advertising messages will create and shape your needs—often without you knowing it. Stop reading this chapter now and complete Exercise 11.2. How did you do on Part I? Were you able to come up with a long list of needs, or could you think only of one or two? Was it easy or hard to rank order your needs? Then in Part II, were you surprised by how many products you have brought into your home? Were you surprised about how many were well-advertised brands? Now ask yourself: How aware am I of my needs? Make a comparison of your rank ordered list from Part I with how you spend your money and time as indicated in the inventories in Part II. Is your primary need (from Part I) reflected in the inventories of your possessions and time (from Part II)? For example, let’s say your number one–ranked need was health. Did the inventory of your closet reveal more clothes for healthproducing activities than any other type of clothes? Did your inventory of your kitchen reveal an absence of highly advertised, high-caloric, high-fat, high-sugar, high-salt snacks? Did your inventory of your bathroom reveal more products for sore muscles or more for beauty? Is your toothpaste a decay preventer or a tooth whitener? Did the inventory of your time reveal that you are very active or mostly passive?

Perscription drug advertisements can manipulate people into believing they have additional needs. isotck/WendellandCarolyn

If your self-reported needs (from Part I) matched closely your inventories (from Part II), then congratulations! 442

You are aware of your needs and know how to spend your resources to satisfy them. But if there are discrepancies between your self-reported needs and where you spend your money and time, then you have a faulty sense of your needs. You might be telling yourself that your needs are A, B, and C, when your real needs are X, Y, and Z. You are satisfying your real needs even though you are not aware of what they really are. More typically, discrepancies exist because you are not able to satisfy your needs; that is, you are very aware of what your needs are. But when you go to the store, you end up buying lots of things that really do not address those needs, but you hope they will because you want to believe the puffery in the ads. However, the will to believe is not enough. As time goes by, you become frustrated that you cannot fulfill your major needs, although it seems like you are doing what society (as channeled by advertisements) is telling you to do. One of the biggest dangers concerning the manipulation of our natural needs has to do with prescription drugs. The number of ads for prescription drugs on television grew each year until in 2008 the average person was exposed to 16 hours of ads for prescription drugs, which is more time than they spent with their primary care doctors. These ads mislead the public by inflating their claims and by burying their risks in “a sea of unintelligible tiny print” (Foreman, 2009, p. E5). A content analysis of these ads found that while most ads (82%) made some factual claims and some rational arguments (86%) for product use, almost all of these ads (95%) used an emotional appeal. Many of the ads urged people to use their drug in order to achieve social approval (78%) and to regain control over some aspect of their lives (85%; Frosch, Krueger, Hornik, Cronholm, & Barg, 2007). These ads lead people to diagnose themselves then pressure their physicians to prescribe the drugs they see advertised so they can achieve the wonderful life the drugs depict.

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Analyze Ads The next step is to analyze some ads. Of course, there are too many ads in your environment to analyze them all. Make this step manageable by making a list of the advertised products you buy most often (i.e., your regular grocery store purchases) or the product purchases that are most important (cars, mobile devices, designer clothing, vacations). Then find some ads for those products and analyze them (Exercise 11.3). While conducting your analyses, think most about how the advertiser constructed the campaign strategy and copy platform. Can you identify elements in those ads you are analyzing that would give you a good idea about what the copy platform was as a guide to these ads? Are those ads simply giving you information to make you aware of the products, or are they reinforcing existing beliefs and behaviors? Most people think that ads are designed to convince people to buy the product. Very little of the advertising we see has this intention. Many ads, especially those for new products, are intending only to establish our awareness that the product exists. Some ads are designed to create an emotion in us and link that emotion with the product. Some ads are designed to inoculate us against the claims of competitors so that when we see an ad for one of their competitors, we will not come under its influence. But the most prevalent intention of ads is reinforcement. Most ads are aimed at target groups of people who already use the product. Thus, the advertisement is designed to remind those customers that the product still exists and that it is a good one. People usually remember ads for products they already buy, so most of the effect of advertising is one of reinforcement of existing attitudes and behaviors. Thus, reinforcement is the powerful effect of advertising. Most ads are designed to make people feel good about the products they already have bought so that they will buy them again.

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Evaluate Ads The final step is to compare your personal needs to what the ads are telling you. This requires an evaluation of the ads; that is, you are making value judgments about how well the advertisers understand your real needs and how well they present their products as the best way of satisfying those needs (Exercise 11.4). If you found a close match between your personal needs and the advertising appeals for the products you buy, then you can conclude that advertising is exerting a positive influence in your life. That is, advertisers have identified your actual needs and are helping you satisfy them. In contrast, if you find that advertisers are trying to make you believe you have needs that you really don’t have, then you need to think about what you can do to prevent them from eventually convincing you that these false needs are real.

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Summary We live in a culture that is saturated with advertising messages. In order to become more media literate and protect ourselves from the pervasive influence of this saturation, we need to understand more about the process advertisers use to design their ad campaigns and messages. When we have more knowledge about advertising campaign strategies and copy platforms, we will be more able to analyze and evaluate advertising messages. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Block, M. P., & Schultz, D. E. (2009). Media generations: Media allocation in a consumer-controlled marketplace. Worthington, OH; Prosper Press. (128 pages) This book presents findings from SIMM (Simultaneous Media Usage), which is a marketing study of 170,000 responses over a 6-year period about media usage and consumer behavior. This is one illustration of how much data marketers are continually gathering and how those data form the basis for advertising campaigns that are effective. Fennis, B. M., & Stroebe, W. (2010). The psychology of advertising. New York, NY: Psychology Press. (331 pages including glossary and indexes) Written by two European psychology professors, this book describes what the research in cognitive psychology and social psychology tells us so far about how humans process advertising messages and are affected by them, particularly their memory, attitudes, and behaviors. The authors present a very wellorganized and detailed presentation of theories and research findings from within the field of psychology. Scott, D. M. (2013). The new rules of marketing and PR (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. (439 pages with index) Written by a marketing consultant, this book offers a great deal of practical information about how the professions of advertising and public relations have been changing due to the opportunities offered by the Internet.

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Keeping Up to Date Advertising industry periodicals Ad Week (http://www.adweek.com) Advertising Age (http://adage.com) Professional organizations American Association of Advertising Agencies (http://www.aaaa.org) Interactive Advertising Bureau (http://www.iab.net) MPA—Association of Magazine Media (http://www.magazine.org) Newspaper Association of America (http://www.naa.org) Radio Advertising Bureau (http://www.rab.com) Television Bureau of Advertising (http://www.tvb.org) Video Advertising Bureau (http://www.thevab.tv) Consumer and educational associations concerned with advertising Ad Council (http://www.adcouncil.org) American Advertising Federation (http://www.aaf.org) Better Business Bureau (http://www.bbb.org) Scholarly journals that publish research examining the content and effects of advertising messages presented in the mass media, particularly newspapers, magazines, television, and websites. Journal of Advertising Journal of Advertising Research Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

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Exercise 11.1

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Increasing Your Awareness of Advertising 1. How much advertising are you exposed to on a daily basis? For 1 day, carry around a sheet of paper in your pocket and write down every time you are exposed to an advertising message. Record the time, the product advertised, and the channel. Remember, channels can be media (newspapers, television, radio, etc.) or other types such as posters (on walls, cars, kiosks, sidewalks, etc.) and ads on clothing (sweatshirts, hats, footwear, etc.). How many ads were you exposed to in one day? How many different channels were used? How many of these exposures did you seek out? 2. Watch 1 hour of television and write down each ad. Remember that a promo for a station or a television show counts as an advertisement. How many did you record? Were you surprised by the number? 3. Go through your local newspaper page by page and count the ads. Are you surprised about how many ads there are? Does this amount bother you? If so, would you be willing to pay more for the newspaper if all ads were eliminated? About 80% of a newspaper’s revenue comes from advertising. So if your newspaper currently costs 50 cents, that cost would increase to about $4.00 per issue if subscribers like you had to contribute all the revenue to your newspaper. 4. Get a piece of paper and make two lists. For one, list all the breakfast cereals you can remember. Then turn the paper over and list all the shampoos you can remember. Go to a supermarket and count how many different cereals and shampoos are on those shelves. Were you able to name them all? What percentage were you able to name? Of those you did not have on your list, can you recall anything about their advertising campaigns? If so, why do you think you could not remember them when you made your list? 5. Next time you go to the drug store or the supermarket to shop, try buying as many non-advertised products in place of the advertised brands you usually buy. How much money did you save? Are the savings worth it, or do you feel that you made a big mistake? 6. Run a taste test for your friends. Buy several brands of advertised cola and some obscure brands. Pour different brands into their own cups. Ask your friends to taste each and tell you which cola is in which cup. Could your friends guess the right brands? Were they sure of their choices, or were they making wild guesses?

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Exercise 11.2

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Personal Needs Inventory Part I Take out a sheet of paper and write down your needs. 1. Begin by simply listing all your needs as they pop into your head. 2. Once you have a list, organize the elements into categories. Group all like needs together. For example, you might have several social needs (make more friends, become more popular, etc.), health needs (lose weight, exercise more, etc.), career needs, family needs, school needs, and so forth. 3. After you have your categories, rank order your groups. Which set of needs is most important to you? What set is second, and so on? Now put this paper aside and go on to Part II. Part II 1. Go through your clothes closet. How many changes of clothes (outfits) do you have? How many pairs of shoes? If you have one or two changes of clothes, you are operating at a functional level; that is, you are satisfied to protect your body from the elements and for the sake of being modest. If you have many sets of clothes, group them according to your needs; that is, which are your social clothes, your business clothes, your exercise clothes, and so on? Which set of clothes contains the greatest number of outfits? Why? Do you have the most clothes in an area that is the same as what you designated as your highest ranked need area in Part I? 2. Go through your kitchen cabinets and pantry. How many prepared foods (in boxes, cans, and bags) do you have compared to natural foods (milk, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, etc.)? What proportion of those products are advertised brands, and what proportion are unadvertised or generic? 3. Check your bathroom. How many “health and beauty” aids do you have? How many of those products are for basic health needs, and how many are image enhancers? What proportion of those products are advertised brands, and what proportion are unadvertised or generic? 4. Think about how you spend your time. How much time do you take getting washed, groomed, and dressed each day? How much time do you spend eating and snacking (how many times)? What do you do with your leisure time—are you active in satisfying your needs, or are you passively sitting in front of the TV or listening to music, where you are being told by others what your needs should be?

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Exercise 11.3

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Analyzing Advertising Messages Find ads for the products you buy the most (regular purchases in supermarkets). Look at several print ads from magazines and newspapers. Watch several ads on television. Use this set of ads in the following tasks. 1. What is the main product claim (reason for buying the product) of the ad? 2. Is the claim presented explicitly or implicitly (you have to infer it)? 3. What is the intention of the ad (awareness, positive emotion, change attitude, inoculation, reinforcement, buy product)? 4. Is the ad more emotional or rational? If emotional, which emotion was evoked? Why this emotion? If rational, how much information was presented? Were the right facts presented? 5. Did the ad use a product spokesperson? If so, why was this person chosen? 6. What was the message strategy of the ad? 7. What is the tone of the ad? 8. Look beyond the surface of the ad and the particular product. Can you see some underlying values that the ad is teaching?

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Exercise 11.4

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Evaluating Advertising Messages 1. Which ads evoked the strongest emotions in you? What were those emotions? Explain how the ad triggered those particular emotions. 2. Which ads were the best from an aesthetic point of view? Is there something about the writing, directing, editing, lighting, set design, costuming, or music/sound effects that you found of particularly high quality? If so, explain what led you to appreciate that element so much. 3. Which ads were most upsetting from a moral perspective? What ethical considerations were raised? 4. Overall, which of the ads were most persuasive to you? Why? 5. Overall, which of the ads recognized your existing needs the best? Did these ads present the best reasons for why the product would satisfy your needs? 6. Which ads were most exploitive, that is, tried to convince you of false needs?

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Chapter 12 Interactive Media

Competitive Experiences Designing Electronic Game Platforms Marketing Electronic Games Attraction to Electronic Games Psychology of Playing Electronic Games MMORPGs Cooperative Experiences Friendship Dating Living Opinion Sharing Acquisition Experiences Information Music Video Shopping Media Literacy With Interactive Messages Personal Implications Broader Concerns Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises

Key Idea: Interactive mass media are platforms that attract audiences who want to create their own media experiences for purposes of either competition or cooperation.

Interactive media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, allow people to create their own content based on personal interests. LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images

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The topic of interactive media is included in this section on content rather than in the industry section because it is the content that is most characteristic of the interactive media. The content presented by noninteractive media is created by professional writers and producers who are highly skilled at applying message formulas that will attract particular kinds of audiences then condition them for repeat exposures. In contrast with interactive media, professional designers create platforms—rather than content—to attract users then condition them for repeat exposures. People then use these interactive media platforms to create content and shape their experiences as they interact with other users. These users are not paid for creating any of this content; to the contrary, users not only create the content for free but they often pay the interactive mass media companies a fee for access to the content. Even when users do not pay a fee for access to an interactive platform, they still agree to be exposed to advertising presented on these platforms. There are essentially three types of interactive media platforms—those that offer users a competitive experience, those that offer users a cooperative experience, and those that offer users an acquisition experience. In this chapter, we will examine each of these three types in detail.

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Competitive Experiences Many interactive media platforms have been designed to attract users who want to compete against themselves, to compete against a computer, or to compete against one or many players. The desire to compete is a fundamental part of being human and the playing of competitive games is as old as civilization itself. For millennia, humans competed against themselves by trying to solve puzzles and solve mysteries. Humans invented card games and board games (such as checkers, chess, and Monopoly) to compete against one person or several other people. Then with the invention of computers, the competitive platform was greatly expanded. By playing a game on a computerized platform, we have a greater variety of games available; we can start the game any time we want and pause the game for as long as we want; we can take as much time as we want to decide our next move without our opponent complaining; and we can receive immediate feedback on our performance. With the rise of the Internet, we can now play against opponents anywhere in the world, so geography is no longer a limitation. Also, we can compete with very large numbers of players, such as with massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). And with the proliferation of mobile devices, we can take our game playing experiences everywhere we go.

Thousands of gamers attended the 2014 EXG gaming conference in London. Video games offer the ideal platform for the competitive interactive experiences. Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images

With the technology of computers, Internet, and mobile devices, electronic games became part of the mass media. What all of these games have in common are digital game codes that govern game appearance and 459

play, visual and audio features that attract users into the game, and input devices that the player uses to communicate with the digital code in playing the game (Kerr, 2006a, 2006b). Also, electronic games are like all of the other forms of mass media, because the games are commercial products that have been created in a manner to be highly attractive to particular niche audiences and the games themselves are constructed so as to condition habitual use of them (Giddings & Kennedy, 2006). However, games are different than other types of media messages in the sense that they do not take players through a story in the conventional narrative sense (Friedman, 1995). Instead, games offer the potential for players to construct their own stories as they move through the game. These games force the player to pay a heightened level of attention to the message stimuli instead of simply absorbing its meaning passively. Players must continually make decisions as responses to the game’s stimuli. As the consequences of their decisions unfold, they are drawn more deeply into the experience of writing their own stories. This participation gives players a sense of power and a sense of wonder as they explore how far they can go with their personal stories.

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Designing Electronic Game Platforms The designing of a new electronic game is a very risky business. Teams of about 12–20 people with different specialized skills work on developing each game, which takes about 15 to 18 months to create and test. The designers must understand the electronic gaming industry to identify a potential niche audience; they must understand psychology to know how to attract the right audience and pull them into the gaming experience so they will want to play the game continually; they must understand the economics of how to use resources to engage players in the best manner; they must be artistic to develop the look, feel, and sound of the game; and they must understand computer programming in order to make all these ideas work on the screen. The complicated process of electronic game design can be organized into nine steps (Castronova, 2001). First, an idea is conceived and sketched out in a demo. Second, a team of designers determines what a player will do while playing the game. Third, artists render the environments and characters. Fourth, programmers take the instructions from the designers and artists and write the digital code. Fifth, when enough code is written, an alpha version is tested. Sixth, where the alpha test reveals design flaws, corrections are made. Seventh, a beta version is made available for wider testing. The goal of the beta test is to get a community of insiders hooked on the game, so it is made available on downloads for free during a trial period. Eighth, when management is satisfied with the beta testing, the game “goes gold” and is released to the publisher. And ninth, the publisher designs the box, reproduces the game disks, and distributes them to wholesale and retail outlets. Sykes (2006) elaborates the game design process by pointing out that game developers must make three fundamental decisions about the game they want to design. These decisions concern category of play, formality of play, and the affective tone. As for category of play, Sykes says that there are six types as determined by the objective of the game. These six categories of play are agon (competition is the primary focus; enjoyment derives from competing), alea (games of chance), mimicry (play involving make believe; players take on a new identity), ilinx (players seek vertigo, which is the temporary destabilization of the perceptual system, such as fairground rides), exploration (fun is experienced exploring new places and discovering new things), and social play (contact with others by joining special clans with secret languages, nicknames, initiation rites, etc.). While there is a different niche audience for each of these six, the popular games usually combine two or more of these features in a single game to appeal to a broader base of players. As for formality of play, Sykes (2006) says there is a range in the number of rules that a game can have. At the informal end of this range are games with very few rules or rituals; players experience the spontaneous expression of the animalistic impulse to play. At the formal end of the range of formality are games with many rules and rituals that require discipline to follow; players who learn the rules best and who are capable of using those rules to their advantage succeed the most. As for affective tone, Sykes (2006) again points out that there is a range open to game designers. These designers must think about what they want their players to feel as they interact with the game. One feeling is aggression as players fight a series of stronger and stronger opponents; as they conquer these opponents, players themselves feel stronger and more confident in their abilities. Another popular feeling is mystery or 461

suspense where players must figure out what is happening before something bad happens to them or others. In addition to the design decisions outlined in the above paragraphs, designers also follow some generic-type rules to ensure that their games are able to attract players then condition them for repeat playing. There are six design rules that apply to all successful digital games. Game developers carefully follow these rules in order to reduce the risk that players will reject their games. First, there must be some reward to the player, and the reward must go only to the good players. Bad players should be punished, but the punishment should never be for something that happened outside a player’s control. Second, the game should be relatively easy to learn. Of course, some games are very complex, but the complexity is not revealed to a player in the beginning. Instead, the complexity is gradually revealed step by step as the player moves through the game. Third, the game should be predicable. The game should follow logical rules so that players can predict the outcome of their actions. Fourth, the game should be consistent. The outcome of a particular action must always be the same. Fifth, there should be a fair degree of familiarity. This means that designers should consider what players bring to the game and use it. And sixth, the game should be challenging. If it is too simple, players will quickly lose interest. Instead, designers must build in layers where players advance to greater and greater challenges to keep them playing. While the revenue of the overall video game industry continues to increase each year (“Total and Segment Revenue,” 2015), it is a very risky business, with only about 3% of electronic games earning a profit because the costs are rather high. For example, the cost of designing a prototype for a modest electronic game is typically about $1.5 million. The minimum cost of developing a console game is typically about $7.5 million and this figure escalates when game developers use characters and locations that require licensing permission (Havens & Lotz, 2012).

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Marketing Electronic Games Who is the market for video games? You are probably thinking it is a nerdy teenage boy, but this perception would be wrong. The average electronic game player is 35 years old and has been playing for an average of 13 years; 74% of all electronic game players are 18 years old and older. Also, 44% of all gamers are women, with women over 18 being the fastest growing market. Also, game playing is widespread, with 67% of all U.S. households playing electronic games (Entertainment Software Association, 2015). Marketers of electronic games have moved to psychographic descriptors to identify niches of game players, and they typically identify four types of audiences: explorers, socializers, achievers, and controllers. Each of these four niches is characterized by a different kind of player. Explorers are players who are curious and want to wander around inside the game world to discover all its territories and experiences. Socializers are players who like to interact with other players. They want the game to present challenges that require forming groups so that players have an opportunity to work together in accomplishing shared objectives. They want social interaction in the games, so they want opportunities to join clubs and engage in cultural activities with others, such as weddings, parties, and other social rituals. Achievers are players who are attracted to the games in order to build something, like a city, an empire, or great personal wealth. Finally, controllers are players who want to dominate others. They want games with a high degree of competition so they can figure out ways to defeat and dominate worthy opponents.

Game developers must promote their products to an increasingly wide variety of players. iStock/diane555

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While games are typically marketed to players, game developers also market their game code to other game developers. This is called the middle-ware market. There are would-be designers of games who lack a depth of programming skills required to design a game from scratch; these developers buy game engines, which is the basic programming needed to support a game. They use these game engines to construct the specifics of their games (characters, settings, decision points, etc.) from the basic code (Castronova, 2001).

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Attraction to Electronic Games Why are people attracted to electronic games? The answer is that electronic games offer players an intense way to satisfy two kinds of needs—emotional as well as cognitive (Tamborini et al., 2011). As you saw in Chapter 10, people seek out entertainment messages in order to feel aroused and to experience strong emotions. Games arouse players and can trigger emotions both when they are losing (frustration, humiliation, anger) as well as when they are winning (joy, elation). These emotions are often more intense than the emotions normally triggered in a person’s real life. Playing electronic games also satisfies cognitive needs, especially the needs for competence and autonomy. We all want challenges to motivate us and the experience of meeting those challenges to make us feel successful. Electronic games offer a sequence of gradually increasing challenges; we begin with facing easy-to-meet challenges that help to increase our confidence and this drives us onward to face more difficult challenges that become even more rewarding when met. Even when players’ avatars die in an electronic game, players can still experience pleasure from knowing that the game is challenging, and this can motivate them to play the game again in order to meet those challenges (Schmierbach, Xu, Oeldorf-Hirsch, & Dardis, 2012). We also want to achieve a sense of control in our lives, but real life is often too complicated and we feel that there is little if anything we can do in response to things that happen. Castronova (2005) refers to this as the Sisyphus nature in the lives of many people. Sisyphus was the character in Greek mythology who was doomed to push a heavy boulder up a hill, and each time as he neared the top, he would weaken from the exertion and the boulder would roll back down the hill. Sisyphus would have to start all over again. Castronova says that many people feel like some burdens of their everyday life are too onerous to push over the top of a hill, so they play electronic games where they can be successful—metaphorically, get that boulder all the way to the peak so it will roll down the other side. Another attraction of electronic games is the opportunity to socialize with others on a common task. Even though these games are highly competitive, enjoyment is increased when players band together into teams and develop strong attachments to their team members (Schmierbach et al., 2012).

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Psychology of Playing Electronic Games Psychologists who study how people play electronic games have come up with two terms to describe key characteristics of the game playing experience—flow and telescoping. Flow is a term coined by a social psychologist with the almost unpronounceable name of Csikszentmihalyi (1988). He observed people getting lost in tasks and called this experience flow. In order to achieve this state of flow, people must deeply immerse themselves in a task so that they lose all track of time and place. With digital games, players often get so involved in the playing of the game that it is as if they enter the world presented by the screen and lose the sense that they are in the real world. Players become so focused on the pleasure of the game that other needs (thirst, sleep, hunger, etc.) become secondary; that is, satisfying those secondary needs gets put off in the interest of satisfying the primary need of achieving the next objective in the game. The expectation of completing the next game objective is so pleasurable that everything else is forgotten while in the flow state. Telescoping is a term used by another social psychologist with the much more pronounceable name of Johnson (2006). He used this term to refer to the way electronic game players focus on the steps within the process of moving through a game. At any given point in an electronic game, the player must focus on an immediate objective that follows from previous objectives that were successfully achieved and lead to upcoming objectives that take the player to the end of the game. This focusing on the immediate objective is viewed as the foreground, and all the other objectives are pushed into the background, where they are used only as context for the foregrounded objective. Thus game players must keep the big picture in mind as context while they focus on the immediate objectives they face at a given point in the game. When they meet their immediate objective, they do not stop playing; instead, they feel immediately propelled onward to meeting their next objective. Johnson says “talented gamers have mastered the ability to keep all these varied objectives alive in their heads simultaneously” (p. 54). Telescoping is not the same as multitasking. Multitasking is handling a chaotic stream of unrelated objectives, such as talking on the phone, instant messaging friends, listening to music on an iPod, and googling topics. Telescoping focuses more on a sequence of ordered objectives in a hierarchy of priority then moving through them in the correct sequence. Experiencing flow and telescoping can be very intense and rewarding. It can be like a narcotic that continually draws players back to gaming for a repeat of the experience. And once players feel the experience, they want it to continue uninterrupted. When it is interrupted, they want to get back to it as quickly as possible.

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MMORPGs A popular—and very addictive—electronic game is the MMORPG. MMORPGs are designed to attract a certain kind of audience then to condition that audience into continual play. They have been very successful at this goal even to the point of conditioning players to believe that the cyberworld of the game is more important to players than their real worlds. One of the most popular and elaborate MMOPRGs is World of Warcraft (WOW). Players of WOW “live” in a medieval-type world called Azeroth and aspire to venture into a dungeon to slay a group of villains known as the Four Horsemen. Beginners spend months building up their characters while avoiding being killed (called “ganked” in WOW) by more experienced players. After months of play, the good players get to level 60, where they join with other players in guilds and undertake intricately planned raids on dungeons and engage in massive rumbles against other guilds. In order to play WOW, players must purchase the computer software for $19.99 then pay a monthly fee of $14.99 to play online. By 2009, WOW had 11.5 million players worldwide, making it the most successful online video game in the world (Fritz, 2009). Although it has lost some players since then due to competition from about 40 competing MMORPGs, each with several hundred thousand players, in 2013 it was still is the biggest MMORPG, with 10.3 million players employing 222 servers worldwide. Another popular MMORPG is EverQuest, which is played by “only” several hundred thousand people and has generated a real-world economy comparable to that of a medium-sized country (Lichtarowicz, 2002). About one third of the adult players of EverQuest spend more time in a typical week in the virtual world than in paid employment (Castronova, 2001). Key to MMORPGs is the creation of a cyberworld. Cyberworlds are growing. By 2004, there were already 15 cyberworlds, each with more than 10,000 subscribers. Castronova estimated that worldwide there were at least 10 million regular players and perhaps as many as 30 million. By 2013, there were at least four dozen cyberworld games, each with 10,000 subscribers and more than 50 million players worldwide. The effects of MMORPGs are profound. There is evidence of addiction; Yee (2002) found many players of EverQuest considered themselves addicted to playing the game. There is also anecdotal evidence of other harmful effects, such as a Korean player who died of exhaustion after spending 80 continuous hours in Lineage without a break. An EverQuest user who committed suicide was said to have done so out of desperation at events within the game world (Castronova, 2005, p. 64). To say that many players become addicted to playing and spend a large proportion of their waking hours playing—while true—underestimates the profound effect of these games on many players. The most profound effect of these games is that they create a cyberworld that often takes the place of a player’s real world. For many players, the cyberworlds offer experiences they cannot get in their real world, so players move into the cyberworld and live their lives there, where they create economies, political systems, friendships, romantic attachments, and careers. In his book Synthetic Worlds, Edward Castronova (2005) argued the thesis that 467

the synthetic worlds now emerging from the computer game industry . . . are becoming an important host of ordinary human affairs. There is much more than gaming going on there; conflict, governance, trade, love. The number of people who could be said to “live” out there in cyberspace is already numbering in the millions; it is growing and we are already beginning to see subtle and not-so-subtle effects of this behavior at the societal level in real Earth countries. (p. 2)

Castronova says

the fading of boundaries between our world and the synthetic worlds of cyberspace is what justifies serious inquiry, in my view. As the lines disappear, we move toward a state in which there is really no barrier to a complete translation of every interpersonal human phenomenon on Earth in the digital space. (p. 48)

Castronova conducted a study of users of these games and found that about 57% said they would quit their real-world job and work in the cyberworld if they could make enough money there to support themselves, and three quarters of players wished they could spend all of their time in the cyberworld of the game (p. 59).

MMORPG games like World of Warcraft create a flow and telescoping experience where players are deeply immersed in the tasks and experience of the game. iStock/Yuri_Arcurs

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The boundary between cyberworlds and the real world has also been breached in the realm of the economy. Each MMORPG cyberworld has its own internal economy where players are given opportunities to perform a range of work-like tasks and earn some type of “coin of the realm” for this work. Players can then enter into exchanges with other players. In this way players can satisfy their game playing needs and gradually amass wealth within the game. However, players often take these resources they earn within a game and exchange them in the real world for non-virtual goods. For example, many players of EverQuest will work at menial tasks in that particular cyberworld where they are paid around 300 platinum pieces an hour on average. The platinum piece is the coin of the EverQuest cyberworld. These players can then go to online markets such as eBay and sell their platinum pieces to other EverQuest game players for U.S. dollars. The exchange rate is about U.S.$3.50 for 300 EverQuest platinum pieces. Thus a person can go to work in EverQuest and make $3.50 per hour (Castronova, 2005). Of course, $3.50 an hour is far below the minimum wage in America, but in other countries it is a good income. So ambitious people in poor third-world countries can enter the EverQuest cyberworld and perform a task like hammering metal into suits of armor by clicking a mouse all day then sell these suits of armor to other EverQuest game players on eBay. As of 2004, eBay was hosting about $30 million of annual trade for goods that exist only in synthetic worlds. Much of this trade was for real currencies, meaning that eBay was in the foreign currency exchange market (Castronova, 2005, p. 149). eBay has since banned the sale of virtual goods on its site but there are other sites (e.g., Craigslist) where virtual goods can be sold and many games have developed their own sites for the exchange of virtual goods. How important are the competitive interactive platforms to you? Try working through Exercise 12.1 to take an inventory of your playing experiences. If you never play electronic games, then you cannot do Exercise 12.1, but do not ignore this issue. Instead, ask yourself why you have been avoiding them. Are all your needs currently being met by other ways you spend your time? Are there games that could help you develop skills you would find valuable? Are there games that could provide you with more emotional experiences?

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Compare & Contrast

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Electronic Games and Social Networking Sites Compare: electronic games and social networking sites are the same in the following ways: Both offer users a way to interact with other people without being in the same physical location. Both exist in cyberspace and can be accessed on one’s computer, tablet, smartphone, or any other device that can connect to the Internet. Contrast: electronic games and social networking sites are different in the following ways: Electronic games feature competitive experiences primarily, although some offer opportunities to work with other people in teams, but the purpose of team work is to compete against other teams. Social networking sites feature cooperative experiences primarily; that is, they are platforms for people to make friendships and share experiences that are mutually beneficial.

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Cooperative Experiences More people use interactive media platforms for cooperative experiences than for competitive experiences. Social networking sites (SNSs) have grown extremely popular over the last decade, with 71% of adults now using social media and 52% of them logging on to at least two social networks regularly, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center (Duggan, Ellison, Lampe, Lenhard, & Madden, 2015). Although SNSs are new, there is already fascinating research that shows how certain kinds of people are using SNSs to fulfill their special needs and to overcome their particular challenges. These groups include juvenile delinquents (Lim, Vadrevu, Chan, & Basnyat, 2012), gays (Vivienne & Burgess, 2012), and people suffering with grief (Marwick & Ellison, 2012). However, research has also clearly demonstrated the risks of trying to maintain close personal relationships on SNSs that are rather public (Bazarova, 2012; Van Der Heide, D’Angelo, & Schumaker, 2012). In an interesting ethnographic study, Ito and his colleagues (2009) hung out with American children and teenagers over a 3-year period to study why they spent so much time with the interactive media. The researchers made two major observations. First, they observed that interactive media offer two strong attractions for today’s youth—friendship-driven participation and interest-driven participation. Second, the researchers observed that interactions with media vary by degree of involvement. The least engaging degree of involvement is “hanging out” with friends and extending social networks. As users get more involved with the interactive media, they are required to develop new skills or a different kind of media literacy. This new media literacy is characterized by “deliberately casual forms of online speech, nuanced social norms for how to engage in social network activities, and new genres of media representation, such as machinima, mashups, remix, video blogs, Web comics, and fansubs” (Ito et al., 2009, p. 25). Social contact can take several forms. Some users want friendship, others want dating experiences, some want to live in a different world, and others want to share their opinions and values. It is likely the case that many of us want several of these or all four at times. Let’s examine each of these in more detail below.

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Friendship The most prevalent platform for friendship is the SNS. These are web-based platforms that give individuals the opportunity to create a public profile, generate connections with visitors to their site, and share personal information. These sites provide tools to allow users to construct their sites easily with text, photos, and video. SNSs offer a sense of community that is much more psychological than geographic; in fact, geographic limitations are relaxed to the point where interactions can occur with anyone in the world. The earliest SNS was SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997. Then Myspace started in the summer of 2003 by offering users a profile page with pictures and interests along with the ability to link to friends. It also provided games, blogging (called journals early on), and even horoscopes. The early adopters were teenage girls who used it to keep in touch with their friends around the clock by posting photos and actively blogging. Myspace allowed them to customize their profiles and this had strong appeal for the early users. They also downloaded songs and “mashed up” songs in remixes. Myspace also allowed Fakesters by permitting users to be whoever they wanted to be—themselves, a celebrity, a pet animal, or a wholly made-up person with a created identity. The major activity was “friending,” which is getting people to add you to their friends list and agreeing to be on your friends list. Many users felt it was a competition to have the largest friends list (Angwin, 2009, pp. 59–62).

Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook, speaks at a 2012 Facebook event. Facebook provides many aspects of the cooperative experience such as friendship, opinion sharing, and entertainment. AP Photo/Mark Lenninhan

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Until April 2004 only Myspace members could view the profiles of other Myspace members, but because of the shifting focus to advertising support, Myspace was opened up to the outside world. By 2008 it was by far the most used social networking site, but then it went into a decline as its chief competitor, Facebook, provided people with superior technology and served their needs better, thus taking away most of Myspace’s users and advertisers. Facebook, which was launched in 2004, soon became a major competitor to Myspace. The website’s membership was initially limited to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. During its first year, Facebook was much smaller than Myspace, with just 10 million monthly visitors compared with 24 million for Myspace, but it was growing quickly as it expanded to include any university student, then high school students, and, finally, anyone age 13 and over. Facebook also introduced several new features such as “News Feed,” which provided members with updates about their friends’ activities. By the summer of 2011, Facebook had 600 million users worldwide and virtually eliminated Myspace (“The New Tech Bubble,” 2011). Now in 2015, Facebook has well over 1.2 billion active users worldwide (Goel, 2015).

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Dating While people frequently use a general friendship network such as Facebook to move beyond friendships and into dating, there are SNSs specifically designed for partner seeking. For example, smartphones have apps, such as Skout, that use GPS to help singles find dates in the vicinity. With your phone you can search online for photos and profiles of singles in your vicinity then send instant messages to those people. This helps people meet up in sporting events, shopping malls, and other public places (Li, 2011).

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Living For people who prefer to keep their contact with friends virtual and not interact in real life, there are virtual friendship sites. One of these is called Second Life, whose home page describes it as “A place to connect. A place to shop. A place to work. A place to love. A place to explore. A place to be different. A place to be yourself” (Second Life, n.d.). Second Life is an online virtual world developed by Linden Lab that was launched in 2003. Anyone 13 years of age and older can join and create an avatar. These avatars, called residents, can explore the world (known as the grid), meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another. As of 2015, Second Life had over 41 million registered user accounts (Nino, n.d.).

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Opinion Sharing The most popular type of interactive platform that allows people to share their opinions is the blog, which is a truncation of weblog. Blogs are websites where individuals post personal opinions and invite responses from readers. Blogs are a form of online life construction. Autobiographies and personal essays are traditional forms of announcing oneself, constructing a persona for the world to consider, and presenting a particular face to the public. Structurally, blogs consist of textual elements (diary notations, hobbies, quotes, lists of favorite sites, etc.), visual graphic elements (photographs, icons, weblinks), and interactive elements (online discussion, emails, etc.). Some blogs are focused on the authors themselves while others are focused on issues or interests. Blogs offer the potential for an unlimited size audience and unlimited freedom to talk about anything. Thus they can address issues outside the mainstream media. Blogs are dialogic; that is, they elicit responses, so bloggers post their thoughts with the expectation of receiving reactions. By 2015, the number of publically accessible Tumblr blogs had exceeded 220 million (“Cumulative Total of Tumblr Blogs,” 2015). While most blogs feature the personal ramblings of opinionated individuals and receive only a few hundred visitors at most, there are other blogs that do qualify as examples of the mass media. These are highly organized sites usually focused on a particular topic with many postings designed to attract large numbers of a particular kind of audience; they are also supported by advertising messages. For example, the Drudge Report with 1.6 million unique monthly visitors and the Huffington Post with 773,000 visitors are political blogs but have postings on entertainment, business, media, lifestyle, and other topics. Both in the range and quality of their messages as well as their reach among readers, they rival major newspapers. Included in this blogosphere is Twitter, which restricts people to messages of 140 characters. By the end of 2012, Twitter had increased to more than 555 million active registered users who send an average of 58 million tweets each day (NumberOf, 2013). Tweets are typically impulse messages containing mundane information about their everyday lives (such as what they ate for breakfast) and their opinions about whatever they care about. How important are the cooperative interactive platforms to you? Try working through Exercise 12.2 to take an inventory of your SNS experiences. If you never access an SNS, then you cannot do Exercise 12.2, but do not ignore this issue. Instead, ask yourself why you have been avoiding them. Are all your needs currently being met by other ways you spend your time? Are there SNSs that could help you develop skills you would find valuable? Are there SNSs that could provide you with more emotional experiences?

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Acquisition Experiences People use interactive media platforms to acquire things such as information and physical goods. Of course, people can acquire information and physical goods from brick-and-mortar places. But this section focuses on how people acquire and share these things through interactive platforms on the Internet.

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Information There are many informational and educational websites available. Some of these websites simply present their own information. Some websites provide search engines that direct users to other websites where specific information exists, such as Google, which gets more than 5.7 billion search queries a day globally (Statistic Brain Research Institute, 2015). And some websites are truly interactive; that is, they allow users to contribute. The software technology that allows people to interact with these sites is called a wiki. A wiki is a website that allows any user to add material and to edit as well as delete what previous users have contributed. The term comes from the Hawaiian word wikiwiki, which means fast or speedy. In 1994 a computer programmer named Ward Cunningham developed an initial wiki server designed to be the simplest possible online database. He designed it so that information could be added and edited as easily as possible. Thus this database is essentially democratic and every user has equal access and equal ability to contribute. The most well-known wiki so far is Wikipedia, which is a free web-based encyclopedia that does not hire experts to write the content but allows anyone access to add, delete, and edit content. Begun in 2001, its greatest initial challenge was generating interest among the general public to volunteer to create articles for the encyclopedia without being paid. It met this challenge and by 2015 had generated over 4.7 million articles and was growing by about 800 new articles each day in the English edition (Wikipedia, 2015k). Now its challenge is to check the article writing and editing for accuracy. Also, there is a continuing challenge to ensure that people with certain political or religious orientations do not distort entries for their own purposes. For example, in 2006 Wikipedians noticed that unmet campaign promises of members of Congress were being deleted from articles on those representatives. It was discovered that these deletions were coming from web addresses of congressional aides for those representatives. Also, it was found that the Justice Department was removing references to certain groups it felt were involved in terrorist activities. And it was noticed that supporters of the Church of Scientology were entering a pro-Scientology viewpoint while critics were editing that out in favor of a critical viewpoint. In all of these (and many more instances) Wikipedia had to lock out those people from the editing function and prevent them from distorting the entries to serve their own purposes (Linthicum, 2009). What makes Wikipedia successful is the large number of knowledgeable people who are willing to participate by making contributions, editing, and reading the entries. When errors show up in entries, they usually receive rapid correction because there are so many minds involved. This ensures a much more comprehensive resource than a small group of experts could produce. Also, the great number of people involved contribute to the elaboration of each topic—thus more detail can be provided because it is coming from many different people. (For more on how the collective knowledge of groups is superior, see Infotopia by Cass Sunstein, 2006.)

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Music People have been acquiring music through sharing networks since software by the name of Napster became available in 1999. A computer hacker named Shawn Fanning created Napster as a file sharing software program while he was a student at Northeastern University in Boston. It was released in June 1999 and within a year, the software had been downloaded by 70 million people who used it primarily to allow other users to make copies of audio recordings they had stored in their computer memory. Napster used centralized file directories on the Internet to connect users to music files on thousands of individual computers, thus enabling any user to download virtually any recorded music in existence for free. In December of 1999, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) sued Napster on the grounds that this music sharing service allowed piracy of copyrighted music. The RIAA eventually succeeded in shutting Napster down in July 2001. Since then, many other peer-to-peer services (e.g., Grokster, Lime Wire, KaZaA, Gnutella, BitTorrent) have taken Napster’s place in helping people facilitate online sharing and collaboration.

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Video There are many sites where users can access and download videos. Some of these are interactive and allow users to upload videos. The most popular interactive video site is YouTube, which was created in February 2005. The first YouTube video was uploaded in April. Titled “Me at the Zoo,” it shows one of the founders, Jawed Karim, at the San Diego Zoo. The site was opened to the public in November 2005, and it grew rapidly. By July 2006, the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. By 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet consumed in 2000. And by 2015, YouTube was reporting over 1 billion unique visitors per month; users were viewing more than 2 billion videos every day and users were uploading 300 hours of new video every minute (YouTube, n.d.).

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Shopping People have been shifting from buying products in brick-and-mortar stores to buying products online. Although this e-commerce is relatively new, it already accounted for $304 billion by the end of 2014, which was 6.4% of all retail sales in the United States that year. It continues to grow and is expected to reach almost $500 billion in sales by 2018 (Reingold & Wahba, 2014).

Video sharing site YouTube has over one billion unique visitors a month, and offers more than 100 hours of new video a minute. Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again” featuring Charlie Puth reached over 100 million views in one day. Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Dodge

Two of the dominant platforms for e-commerce are Amazon and eBay. Amazon was created by Jeff Bezos in 1994 and went online the following year as a website for selling books. Over the years it diversified by also selling video and MP3 downloads/streaming, software, video games, electronics, apparel, furniture, food, toys, and jewelry. The company further diversified by also producing consumer electronics—notably, Amazon Kindle e-book readers, Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Fire Phone—and is a major provider of cloud computing services. It is now the largest Internet-based retailer in the United States, with annual sales over $85 billion

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(“Net Revenue of Amazon,” 2015). In September of 1995, Pierre Omidyar started eBay as an online auction website where anyone who wanted to sell household items could post pictures and descriptions of their items online and allow viewers to bid on those items. When sellers accept a bid, they arrange for the sale of the item through eBay then mail the item to the buyer. Within 2 years, eBay had accounted for more than 1 million items sold. In 1998, the company went public selling stock as a public corporation. By 2007, it had a quarter of a billion registered users worldwide with 100 million items on sale at any given time, ranging from items selling for a few dollars to a Gulfstream II business jet that sold for $4.9 million in 2001 (The Basics of Selling on eBay, 2007). By 2014, its annual revenue had increased to $17.9 billion (MarketWatch, 2015).

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Media Literacy With Interactive Messages What are the implications of interactive media platforms for media literacy? Some of these implications are personal and some are broader. The personal implications are things you need to consider as an individual so that you can avoid the risks of negative effects and increase the probability of positive effects. The broader implications refer to the way the increasing use of the interactive platforms has been changing society and the economy.

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Personal Implications As you continue to rely on interactive media platforms, the most important thing you can do to increase your media literacy is to keep making a clear distinction between opportunity and addiction. Your control over the media’s ability to satisfy your needs increases when you use social networking sites and electronic games as opportunities to satisfy your personal needs more efficiently and more effectively. These interactive media platforms can really expand your experiences and give you many opportunities to move significantly beyond the limits imposed by your everyday life. These experiences can give you a much richer understanding of your strengths and much more ability to work on your weaknesses at your own pace and in your own way. These same interactive platforms, however, can lead to addiction if you allow them to condition you so strongly that you cannot control your time with them. These interactive platforms can grow so addictive that they consume a great deal of your resources without delivering commensurate satisfaction. They can alter your mental programs to such a degree that you keep living your life through these platforms even though such an existence is making you unhappy and depressed. You are addicted when these platforms take over your personal goals and you slavishly work to achieve the platform’s goals beyond the point where the game is bringing you any excitement or pleasure. When you use these platforms, keep your own personal goals in mind. Prosocial goals are those that help you function better and more successfully with other people and in society. Thus users who spend time with electronic games that teach business principles, leadership, interpersonal interaction, and the like are learning the value of prosocial behaviors and are developing their prosocial skills. However, many games are available that teach the techniques of fighting, stealing, deception, and even killing people with guns. The players who spend time with these games will learn that antisocial behaviors are successful in resolving conflicts and they will become conditioned to use these behaviors as they build their confidence that they can be successful with such actions. Thus these games have great potential for teaching behaviors, attitudes, emotions, and knowledge. If we use them as tools to help us live a better life for ourselves and other people, then society improves as we improve.

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Broader Concerns The growing popularity of interactive media platforms is changing economies and societies. While there is little you can do to slow down these changes, you can position yourself to take advantage of these changes when you learn how to anticipate them. As people shift their shopping behaviors away from brick-and-mortar stores and toward websites, they are forcing changes in the economy. Brick-and-mortar stores find it hard to compete with all their overhead and their limited selection of merchandise, so many of these stores are closing and the people who work there lose their jobs. But jobs open up in other places, like call centers for website merchants as well as jobs at delivery companies. Another economic change is less visible now but is likely to have major implications as we move into the future. When people spend their resources in virtual worlds, those resources get translated into metrics and currencies that are new and not well understood. For example, if people work in a virtual world like Second Life or a MMORPG and are paid for those efforts with goods and services there, it forces us to reexamine what it means to work and to get paid. This shift also transfers resources from the real world to virtual worlds and has the effect of reducing the vitality of the real-world economies. Thus the gross domestic product (GDP) of real-world economies would shrink while the cyberworld GDP would grow. It appears that this is already happening. This shift also has generated new forms of money. Cyberworkers typically are not paid in real-world currencies but instead are paid in currencies that exist only in particular cyberworlds. This creates the need for new currency exchanges. For example, Bitcoin is a virtual currency (form of money) that was invented in 2008 and already is used worldwide. Internet companies (such as Facebook, eBay, and Yahoo) accept it, as do realworld companies (such as AT&T, Fidelity, and Western Union). It is used in 100 countries, and in the United States over 200,000 companies accept it (“What Is the Impact of Bitcoin,” 2013). Virtual currency is also attracting the attention of banks such as JP Morgan Chase, which filed a U.S. patent application in 2013 to develop a payment system utilizing “Virtual Cash.” The growth of e-commerce and new currencies has existing real-world governments struggling to adapt. In the United States, the Federal Reserve regulates the flow of U.S. dollars as a way of controlling the economy —slowing down inflation and preventing a depression. However, the Federal Reserve has no power to regulate the flow of Bitcoin or other virtual world currencies, so it loses power as these currencies increase in use. Also the Internal Revenue Service, which collects federal taxes on income earned in the United States, is struggling to figure out how to tax income that Americans earn in virtual worlds. Also, when resources move back and forth between cyberworlds and the real world, it raises questions about taxation. If someone works in a cyberworld producing virtual products but then sells those virtual products in the real world, should that income be taxed? If so, what country should do the taxing? Or what if people work in a cyberworld and barter those virtual resources for real-world products—how can we assess the value of

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those products, and should they be taxed as income? As people shift away from face-to-face interactions and toward more virtual interactions, the nature of society changes. Think about how the nature of friendships in the world is changing. You may be developing your closest friendships with people who live thousands of miles away from you—people you will never interact with in person. This is likely to change the definition of friendship. With these friends you cannot borrow tangible objects like a cup of sugar, a sweater, or their car. But you may be finding the opportunity to create deeper relationships based on a closer matching of interests than you could with the people you hang out with in your neighborhood. These changes are likely to have even more profound implications for romantic relationships, which would have to be formed and maintained more on conversations through texting and skyping rather than through physical contact that would require being in the same physical location.

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Summary Interactive media platforms offer a wide variety of competitive as well as cooperative experiences for users. There is nothing inherently negative or positive in any of these experiences. Whether an experience is rendered negative or positive depends on how users engage with the platforms and how they use those platforms to achieve their own goals. When these platforms are used strategically as tools to provide people with experiences to satisfy their needs for arousal, emotion, building skills, and connecting with other people in meaningful and rewarding ways, they can be very valuable. However, when these platforms begin to dominate people’s lives by consuming their resources while returning only frustration, false experiences, and isolation, they can be very harmful. The media literacy perspective offers people a way to make more conscious and more meaningful assessments about the degree to which various platforms are meeting the particular needs of users. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Angwin, J. (2009). Stealing Myspace: The battle to control the most popular website in America. New York, NY: Random House. (371 pages with index) This is a detailed history of Myspace from its launch in the summer of 2003. It also includes some background on the website’s founders (Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson) along with the companies that owned the website (eUniverse, Intermix, and News Corp). It is written in a journalistic style by a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. The author also deals with some larger issues such as the development of advertising on the Internet and personal privacy. Bollier, D. (2008). Viral spiral: How the commoners built a digital republic of their own. New York, NY: New Press. (344 pages with index) The thesis of this book is that the Internet was created as a creative commons where there is a great deal of sharing of resources for the common good. With free software in the 1980s and the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the Internet was created and is still maintained as an open-source network that allows all people to interact freely in a wide variety of ways. By viral spiral, Bollier argues that this open networking structure feeds an upward spiral of innovation. The Internet’s transformative power comes from allowing people free access to the ideas of other people so they can build on and alter those ideas. Therefore change is not planned, ordered, or mechanical; rather change is messy and serendipitous. Threads of thinking radiate dynamically through countless nodes and influence all kinds of people in all kinds of ways to work collaboratively. Thus the Internet has been able to avoid the costly overhead that comes with centralized production and marketing and replaced it with a wide dispersion of vitality throughout the social commons. Castronova, E. (2005). Synthetic worlds. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (332 pages including index, appendix, and endnotes) Professor and economist Edward Castronova says that the computer industry is not only producing synthetic worlds in which its games are played but is stimulating the creation of other synthetic worlds by its players. People who use the games are not simply players; they often try to live the games and perform other human activities there, such as looking for friendships, love, employment, social connectedness, power, and prestige. There is much more than gaming going on there—conflict, governance, trade, love. The number of people who could be said to “live” out there in cyberspace is already numbering in the millions; it is growing and we are already beginning to see subtle and not-so-subtle effects of this behavior at the societal level in real Earth countries. Castronova focuses primarily on massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), treating the phenomenon from an economic point of view by showing that there are economies within the game-playing worlds that extend out of cyberspace and into the real world. Ito, M., Horst, H. A., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Stephenson, B. H., Lange, P. G.,... Robinson, L. (2009). Living and learning with new media: Summary of findings from the Digital Youth Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (98 pages) 489

This book presents the results of a 3-year ethnographic study that examined how young people use the new media and how they learn from those exposures. The authors also wanted to find out how the newer digital media were changing “the dynamics of youth-adult negotiations over literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge” (p. xiv). They focus their attention on four ideas: new media ecology, networked publics, peerbased learning, and new media literacy. Lih, A. (2009). The Wikipedia revolution: How a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia. New York, NY: Hyperion. (246 pages with index) This book tells the story about how the idea for Wikipedia was first conceived in 1995 then went online in 2001. Within 8 years, it had stimulated people to write 10 million articles across 200 languages for free. How was this made possible? Read the book! Nayar, P. K. (2010). An introduction to new media and cybercultures. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. (216 pages including glossary and index) This book provides a descriptive overview of a lot of the terms, concepts, and issues arising from the new media and their creation of cybercultures in its seven chapters.

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Keeping Up to Date Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org) This is the Wikipedia website’s main page. Articles are constantly being added to this web-based encyclopedia. If you have not already done so, check out this amazing resource. Also, you can use this to get more up-to-date information on almost all concepts presented in this book. Yahoo Games (https://games.yahoo.com) This website allows you to try demonstrations of many of the most popular video games.

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Exercise 12.1

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Assessing the Value of Electronic Games to You 1. On a piece of paper list the electronic games you play on your computer and mobile devices (smartphone, iPad, etc.). Now estimate how much time you play each of those games in an average week. 2. Carry the piece of paper around with you for a week. Each time you play an electronic game, record how much time you spent playing that game. 3. At the end of the week, total up all the times recorded for actual game playing. 4. Compare your estimates at the beginning of the week with your totals for actual game playing at the end of the week. 5. Ask yourself the following questions: Was your actual playing time higher, lower, or the same as your initial estimate? Did this surprise you? In your initial estimate, were you able to list all the games you typically play? What do these patterns tell you about how important electronic games are to you? What percentage of your overall media use is devoted to playing electronic games? What percentage of your waking hours is devoted to playing electronic games? 6. What do you get out of this game playing activity? What emotions are triggered as you play? Are these the emotions you want? What skills are you developing as you play? Are these valuable skills to you? Does game playing make you feel more confident or powerful? If so, are you able to transfer those feelings to your real life or are those feelings limited to the game? 7. How valuable is the playing of electronic games to you? Compare your answers to #6 with your answers to #5 to see if you are getting enough payback for the time you are investing in game playing.

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Exercise 12.2

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Assessing the Value of Social Networking Sites to You 1. On a piece of paper list your favorite social networking sites (SNSs) where you build your network of friends/followers/contacts (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.). Now estimate how much time you spend on those sites in an average week. 2. Carry the piece of paper around with you for a week. As you use each SNS, record the time you spend there. 3. At the end of the week, total up all the times you recorded for actual use. 4. Compare your estimates at the beginning of the week with your totals for actual use at the end of the week. 5. Ask yourself the following questions: Was your actual time on SNSs higher, lower, or the same as your initial estimate? Did this surprise you? In your initial estimate, were you able to list all the SNSs you typically use? What do these patterns tell you about how important SNSs are to you? What percentage of your overall media use is devoted to SNSs? What percentage of your waking hours is devoted to SNSs? 6. What have you been getting out of the time you spend on SNSs? How big is your network? Is that big enough? Too big to manage well? What is the quality of your friends/followers/contacts? What skills are you developing on these SNSs? Are these valuable skills to you? What emotions are generated when you are on these SNSs? Are you able to transfer these things to the real world? Do you use the interpersonal skills you develop on SNSs in your real life? Are the friendships you develop on SNSs limited to the SNS world? 7. How valuable has been your investment of time in SNSs? Compare your answers to #6 with your answers to #5 to see if you are getting enough payback for the time you are investing in SNSs.

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Part V Effects Chapter 13 Broadening Our Perspective on Media Effects Chapter 14 How Does the Media Effects Process Work?

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Chapter 13 Broadening our Perspective on Media Effects

Timing of Effects Valence of Effects Intentionality of Effects Type of Effects Cognitive-Type Effect Belief-Type Effect Attitudinal-Type Effect Emotional-Type Effect Physiological-Type Effect Behavioral-Type Effect Macro-Type Effect Becoming More Media Literate Summary Further Reading Exercises

Key Idea: When we take a four-dimensional perspective—timing, type, valence, and intentionality—of effects, we can better appreciate the broad range of effects the media are constantly exerting on us.

An awareness of the many effects media has on us is key to undertanding media literacy, and helps us gain control over the messages we experience every day. © iStockphoto.com/IS_ImageSource

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Suzanne is babysitting her two younger brothers, ages 7 and 10. She is reading a magazine while they are watching Spider-Man on television. She sees an ad for a new shampoo and tears out the coupon in the magazine ad, making a mental note to buy some of this brand when she is out shopping later today. Her brothers are starting to shout at the television screen. Suzanne yells at her brothers to be quiet then turns on her iPod to listen to some new music she has downloaded. As a new song starts playing, she starts to pay more attention to the lyrics and puts down her magazine. She begins to really like the song and wonders, “Who is singing this? I’ve never heard it before.” She begins to daydream about her date tonight. “I hope Tim takes me, like, to another, like, horror flick. It’s, like, so much fun to, like, scream my lungs out and to attack him, like, during the bad parts.” When the song on the iPod finishes, she is in a happy mood, which is then shattered as her brothers begin yelling at each other and then wrestling around on the floor. Suzanne runs into the TV room and breaks up the fight. “You guys better behave yourselves or I won’t let you watch your video of Spider-Man anymore! Get back in your own chairs now.” Peace restored, Suzanne picks up a newspaper and notices a story about a drive-by shooting where a gang of youths imitated some action in a recent movie. She thinks, “The media have such a bad effect on young kids. My brothers are going to end up in jail if they keep watching those shows. Thank goodness the media don’t have any effect on me!”

Many of us have a narrow view of media effects. We look for high-profile tragedies as evidence of a media effect and use those isolated incidents to conclude that there are media effects. Although these high-profile tragedies are indications of media effects, they are rare in number, and this leads many people to think that media effects do not happen often and that when effects do occur, they happen to other people. This is faulty thinking. Media effects are happening all around us every day. And those effects are not just happening to other people; they are happening to all people, including Suzanne and us. For example, in the scenario above, Suzanne was persuaded to buy a new shampoo; she changed her mood by listening to the downloaded music to try to calm herself; she had fantasies triggered when she looked forward to a movie later that day; and she learned about a crime by reading the newspaper then generalized from that one story to an unreasonable fear 498

about her brothers ending up as convicts. If we have a narrow perspective on what media effects are, then we will not be able to perceive the many effects that are constantly occurring all around us. Such a narrow perspective does not eliminate the effects; those effects still happen, but they influence you without your awareness and, more important, occur outside your control. A key to media literacy is an awareness of the variety of media effects. When you have this knowledge, you can decide which effects you want to experience and which you want to avoid. You can gain control. The purpose of this chapter is to help you become more aware of the variety of media effects by expanding your perspective. Many, many effects can occur from media exposures. For a description of many of the more important of these effects, see Appendix B (https://study.sagepub.com/potter8e). But before you look at a list of individual effects, focus on the big picture; that is, read through this chapter and build a better knowledge structure by learning to think about media effects in four dimensions. These four dimensions are time, valence, intentionality, and type of effect.

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Timing of Effects Media effects can either be immediate or long term. The timing of effects distinction focuses your attention on when evidence of the effect starts to show up more so than on how long it lasts. An immediate effect is one that occurs during your exposure to a media message, and the evidence of that effect is observable during the exposure or immediately after. An immediate effect might last only for a short period of time (such as becoming afraid during a movie) or it might last forever (such as learning the outcome of a presidential election), but it is still an immediate effect because it changed something in you during the exposure. For example, when visiting your friends’ Facebook pages, you learn what’s new in their lives. Or while reading a website on sports, you immediately feel happy when you learn that your favorite sports team won an important game. And when watching an action/adventure film, you might begin jumping around in your seat and wrestling with your friends. These are all immediate effects, because something happened to you during the exposure. Long-term effects show up only after many exposures. No single exposure or no single message is responsible for the effect. Instead, it is the pattern of repeated exposures that sets up the conditions for a long-term effect. For example, after years of being exposed to ads for all kinds of products, we become more materialistic; that is, we are more likely to believe that the way to solve our problems or live a happier life is keyed to greater consumption of advertised products (Opree, Buijzen, van Reijmersdal, & Valkenburg, 2014). No single exposure or event “caused” this belief; the belief is slowly and gradually constructed over years of exposures. Immediate effects are much easier to notice than are long-term effects. There are two reasons for this. First, immediate effects occur during an exposure to a particular message, and this makes it easy to link the effect to the media message as a cause and conclude there was a media effect. By the time people notice a long-term effect, it is well after many media exposures and many other things happening in their lives, so it is more difficult to link the effect to media exposures. A second reason immediate effects are easier to notice is because they are usually sudden changes. For example, when you are visiting a friend’s Facebook page, you see a posting that insults you and immediately you feel angry. Or your friend sends you a YouTube clip that makes you laugh. These sudden changes in your emotions are clearly immediate effects from media exposures.

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Valence of Effects The effect can be positive, neutral, or negative. Notice that these terms are value laden. Who is to decide what is positive and negative? The answer can be approached in two ways: the individual and society. From the individual perspective, a positive effect is one that helps you achieve a personal goal or satisfy a personal need. In this situation, you are usually aware of your goals and you use the media strategically to achieve those goals. For example, if your goal is to get some information to satisfy your curiosity, then finding facts in a book, in a newspaper, or on the Internet is a positive effect. This can move you toward a goal of having more information and achieving a higher level of knowledge. However, the media are constantly trying to use you and your resources to achieve their own goals, and when their goals are in conflict with your goals, this results in negative effects for you. For example, advertisers want you to spend more and more of your money on their products. If you do this, you may be going bankrupt trying to solve problems you really don’t have, so this would be a negative effect for you but a positive effect for the advertiser. We can also look at the valence of effects from a broad societal point of view by applying the values of society. The values of society are things like peacefulness, cooperation, freedom from threats, respect for one another, and the like. Media messages that have a likelihood of illustrating these prosocial values can be regarded as having the potential for positive effects. However, if media messages teach people how to commit crimes then trigger that criminal behavior, then the media can be regarded from a social point of view as exerting a negative influence.

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Intentionality of Effects Oftentimes, we intend for an effect to happen, so we consciously seek out particular messages in the media to achieve that effect. For example, we may be bored and want to feel some excitement. To satisfy this conscious need, we go to a movie that presents a great deal of action and/or horror. During the movie, our blood pressure and heart rate go way up, and we are moved to the edge of our seat with fear. We have satisfied our need. Also, when we seek out factual knowledge in the media, we are consciously trying to achieve a particular effect. For example, you visit a sports site on the Internet to learn about which teams won their games yesterday, you watch a cooking show to get ideas for new menus, or you access an app on your smartphone that tells you which groups will be appearing in concerts around your area. The information does not need to be extremely important, and it need not be remembered for more than a few minutes for an intentional effect to have occurred. Every day, there are dozens of examples where you intentionally use the media to pick up a fact that you can use or trigger a feeling you want to experience. Many times, we expose ourselves to the media for one reason, but other effects that we were not seeking also occur. To illustrate, we get on a social networking site to connect with friends and find out what is new in their lives. We want to laugh at their jokes and funny pictures and we want to celebrate their successes. During these exposures, we will usually have our intended effects occur; that is, we will laugh and get some information about our friends. But other effects are also occurring—effects we did not seek out and perhaps effects that we are not even aware of until someone later points them out. For example, our behavior is being conditioned for repeated exposures so that we spend more and more time each day on these platforms, and this can lead to unintended effects like Internet addiction. Unintentional effects can be both long term and immediate. For example, after years of watching exciting movies, you develop a belief that the real world should be much more exciting. Also, your emotional and physiological reactions may have become desensitized; that is, it takes more excitement to make you happy. You did not intend for this to happen, but it happened anyway. Even when you are experiencing an intentional effect, you may be subjected to unintended effects at the same time. For example, you watch a violent movie solely for the excitement, and the movie does deliver the excitement you wanted. However, the movie may also be delivering other effects with the excitement. You may be experiencing an emotional desensitization effect. Also, you have the elements forming to generalize to a belief that the world is a mean and dangerous place, which is a long-term cognitive effect. Unintentional effects frequently occur when you are in the state of automaticity because your defenses are not engaged. You are not aware that any learning is taking place, and hence you are not actively evaluating and processing the information. However, even when you are trying to be an active viewer, unintended effects can occur. For example, let’s say you watch a news program or read a current affairs blog. You understand that the pundits are spinning the story in a way to reach their own particular goals. They are not there to inform you about the complexity of the situation; they do not want to reach a compromise or a synthesis of a higher realization on the issue. Instead, they dumb down the issue and present their polarized position in a way to get 502

viewers to agree with them. If you actively process this information, you can protect yourself from their influence by evaluating the credibility of their information then discounting their arguments. This is much better than simply accepting their polarized position. By analyzing and evaluating the messages actively, you gain control over your opinion formation and this is good. But a negative effect may still occur as you develop a mistrust of political figures.

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Type of Effects Most of the concern about the media focuses on the behavior of individuals. For example, there is a belief that watching violence will lead people to behave aggressively, that watching portrayals of sexual activity will make people promiscuous, and that watching crime will make people go out and commit the crimes they witness in media messages. However, we need to expand our focus beyond behavioral effects and also consider cognitive, belief, attitudinal, emotional, and physiological effects. Also, we need to think beyond effects on individuals and consider effects on more macro things, such as society and institutions. Let’s examine each of these in some detail.

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Cognitive-Type Effect Perhaps the most pervasive yet overlooked media-influenced effect is the cognitive-type effect. Media can affect what we know by planting ideas and information into our minds. This happens all the time and may be the most prevalent media effect. We are constantly acquiring information during every exposure to the media. But rarely do people credit the media with this type of effect when they are thinking about media effects. Think about all the information you now possess that got into your mind from your exposures to textbooks, magazines, and newspapers.

Famous media personalities, such as actor Daniel Craig (James Bond), can act as powerful social role models. Karwai Tang/WireImage/Getty Images

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This cognitive learning is not limited to factual information; we also learn a great deal of social information 506

from the media. As children, we learn a great deal about our world by observing role models—parents, older siblings, friends, and so on. Observation of social models accounts for almost all of the information communicated to children up until the time they begin school. The mass media provide an enormous number of models and actions from which children might learn. Given the large amount of time children spend with the media, pictorially mediated models (especially television and movies) exert a strong influence on children’s learning about social situations. Even as adults, we continue to pay careful attention to social models. When we do not have the social models we need in our real lives, we can usually find them in the media. Some of us want to learn most from social models who are powerful, extremely witty, physically attractive, or very successful in a particular career or sport. We develop a vicarious relationship with a professional athlete, famous actor, powerful politician, or wealthy role model. By observing these role models in the media, we gather lots of social information about what it takes to be successful and happy. Think of all the information you have in your memory about characters in television shows and movies you have seen; think about all those names, faces, behaviors, witty lines, and emotions they portrayed.

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Belief-Type Effect A belief is faith that something is real or true. For example, most humans have beliefs about the meaning of life, how we should treat one another, what happens when we die, and the existence of a supreme deity. The media continually exert a belief-type effect by showing us the values used by people in the news and characters in fictional stories. Some of these beliefs are expressed by characters, so it is easy for us to tell what they are; in this case we simply decide whether to accept or reject them. However, many of our beliefs have evolved over time as we watch what people and characters do in a variety of situations. For example, we might watch a lot of videos about people who have relationship problems with friends so that we can learn how they handle those problems; over time we develop beliefs about what friendships are and how we can develop the types of friendships we most want. Thus gradually over time media messages can shape our beliefs about important things like attractiveness, success, and human relationships.

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Attitudinal-Type Effect Attitudes are evaluative judgments about things. We compare the thing (a person, a song, a political position, etc.) to our standard. If the thing meets our standard, we judge it to be okay; if it exceeds our standard, we judge it to be good, very good, excellent, outstanding, or super cool; and if it fails to meet our standard, we judge it to be bad, very bad, terrible, or uncool. The media can influence our judgments about all sorts of things. This is the attitudinal-type effect. We can listen to a political pundit, religious leader, or attractive character express an evaluative judgment and simply accept that attitude as our own. Or we can make up our own minds using a standard that has been shaped by media influence. For example, we might hear a new song on our friend’s MP3 player and immediately decide that it is one of the best songs we have ever heard, that is, create a positive attitude about the song. Or we could read the discussion of a political candidate on some blog and immediately decide that she would be a good leader. In these examples, you might be thinking that these are not illustrations of media influence. But remember that the media can influence our standards so that when we make our own judgments, we end up using their standards. So think about what your standards are for “popular music” or “a good leader” and ask yourself the extent to which the media shaped those standards for you. Attitudes rely on beliefs because beliefs are often the standards we use when making our evaluative judgments. For example, after years of observing glamorous men and women in Hollywood movies, fashion magazines, and Internet sites, we come to believe that we need to be tall and thin with six-pack abs and thick hair to be considered attractive. While we know this is an impossible standard for everyone to achieve, we still use this standard when evaluating the attractiveness of the people we see as well as what we see about ourselves in the mirror. Few people can live up to this unrealistic standard, so our attitudes about the people around us deteriorate as we come to think that people are getting uglier as we notice that more and more people around us are unable to meet this unrealistic standard. Media influence has been found to be stronger on people’s attitudes at a more general level—like opinions about society—than on a more specific level—like opinions about one’s friends, one’s own experiences, and oneself (Chock, 2011).

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Compare & Contrast

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Attitude Effects and Belief Effects Compare: attitude effects and belief effects are the same in the following ways: Both can occur in individuals as a result of media exposure. Both can occur immediately (during a media exposure or shortly after) or over a long period of continual exposure to media messages. Contrast: attitude effects and belief effects are different in the following ways: Attitude effects are evaluative judgments where individuals compare some element in a media message to their standard and decide whether the element meets the standard, falls short of the standard, or exceeds the standard. Belief effects are the acceptance that something is real or true.

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Emotional-Type Effect The media exert an emotional-type effect by making us feel things. They can trigger strong emotions such as fear, rage, and lust. They can also evoke weaker emotions such as sadness, peevishness, and boredom. Emotional reactions are related to physiological changes. In fact, some psychological theoreticians posit that emotions are nothing more than physiological arousal that we label (Zillmann, 1991). If a character on a YouTube video triggers a very high level of arousal, we might label this feeling love or we might label it hate; it depends on whether we are positive or negative about the character.

Have you ever become angry watching a sports game or sad at an ASPCA commercial? Then you’ve experienced an emotional-type effect. iStock/FrancescoCorticchia

We have all experienced emotional changes while exposing ourselves to media messages. Horror movies trigger extreme fear, bloggers can make us feel outrage, magazine pictures can make us feel lust, and calm music can help us feel more peaceful. The media also exert long-term emotional effects. One long-term emotional effect is desensitization. Over years of watching violence in the media, which rarely show victims suffering and instead focus on the perpetrators of the violence and how attractive they are, we gradually come to lose the ability to feel sympathy for victims both in media portrayals and in real life. We might regard the homeless as people who are victims of their own bad judgment and don’t deserve much sympathy from us.

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Physiological-Type Effect Media can influence our automatic bodily systems, which are physiological-type effects. These are usually beyond our conscious control, such as the contraction of the pupil of the eye when we look at a bright light. We cannot control the degree to which the pupil contracts, but we can look away from bright lights and thus prevent the iris from contracting. With the media, there are many physiological effects that usually serve to arouse us. A suspenseful mystery serves to elevate our blood pressure and heart rate. A horror film triggers rapid breathing and sweaty palms. Hearing a patriotic song might raise goose bumps on our skin. Viewing erotic pictures can lead to vaginal lubrication, penile tumescence, and increased heart rate (Malamuth & Check, 1980). A farce might make us laugh so hard that we are unable to stop, even when laughing becomes painful. Or listening to music can calm and relax us by reducing our heart rate and bringing our rate of breathing down to a regular, slow rate. Over time, our physiological responses to particular media messages can change. For example, when we see our first horror movie, our heart rate might go through the roof. But if we keep watching horror movies, we might find that it takes more and more gore to trigger any increase in heart rate. Gradually, over many exposures to horror films, our physiological responses wear down.

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Behavioral-Type Effect Media can trigger actions. This is the behavioral-type effect. For example, after seeing an ad for a product, we might get on a website and order the product. Or we read about some disturbing event on a news site on the Internet and call a friend to talk about it. There are also long-term effects to our behavior. For example, think about when you first got access to a computer to surf the Internet. Initially, you might have visited a lot of sites for a few minutes each. But over time, you developed a pattern of going to a few favorite sites and spending more and more time on particular sites. Perhaps you have gotten to the point where you spend almost all your waking hours playing certain games or connecting with friends on a social networking site. Perhaps your Internet behavioral habit is displacing other activities, such as exercising, hanging out with friends in real life, or going to class. Perhaps this behavioral habit has moved into an addiction. Many people continue interacting with friends on social networks for the purpose of getting emotional support even though research repeatedly shows that emotional support is far more satisfying offline than online (Trepte, Dienlin, & Reinecke, 2015).

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Macro-Type Effect The six types of effects presented above are all effects on individuals. The media also exert their influence on larger units such as organizations, institutions, and society; this influence results in macro-type effects. Some institutions—such as politics—have fundamentally changed due to the direct influence of the media, especially television and now the Internet. Other institutions—such as the family, society, and religion—have changed because of many different social pressures, and the media have served to heighten these pressures. To illustrate this point, let’s consider the institution of the family. In the span of a few generations, the makeup of the American family has changed radically. The number of traditional two-parent families has shrunk, eclipsed by childless couples, single parents, and people living alone. During the 40-year period from the early 1970s to 2009, the percentage of American households made up of married couples with children dropped from 45% to under 21%. Marriage has also dropped from 75% of all adults in 1972 being married to 48% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013). One argument for the cause in the decline of the traditional family is that the rates of divorce are very high in the United States, and they have been climbing since television first penetrated our culture. In 1960, 16% of first marriages ended in divorce, and that figure is now 50% (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013). Critics claim that the rise of the divorce rate and the portrayals of broken families on television are not a mere coincidence; they claim that the television portrayals have socialized people to believe that divorce and having children out of wedlock are acceptable. Critics point out that television too frequently portrays divorce, single-parent households, and alternative lifestyles. These portrayals, presented over many different kinds of shows and over many years, tend to be internalized by viewers. Over time, people become dissatisfied with their own marriages and seek adventure with other partners. Also, many popular television series have been portraying married life in a negative manner, thus giving young people the idea that marriage is an unattractive lifestyle. The media have the potential to bring the family together to share a common experience. Families can build a bonding ritual around shared media behaviors and use those exposures as a chance to talk and bond. For example, in the 1970s, many households had only one television, and viewing was a common family activity (Medrich, Roizen, Rubin, & Buckley, 1982). However, few families now use television or other media in this way. Family members rarely share viewing time. Instead, family members are likely to watch very different shows at different times on different platforms, like laptops, smartphones, and iPods. And the content different family members expose themselves to is fragmenting, so family members rarely share the same media experiences. Also, parents have reduced the time they spend with their children—40% less time from the 1950s to the 1990s (Pipher, 1996), and that time is even less today. Pipher (1996) argues, “Rapidly our technology is creating a new kind of human being, one who is plugged into machines instead of relationships, one who lives in a virtual reality rather than a family” (p. 92). “When people communicate by e-mail and fax, the nature of human interaction changes” (p. 88). The conveniences of technology serve to cut us off from others. We depend less and less on others (at least face-to-face). People are things or services, not human beings. Pipher 516

says that 72% of Americans don’t know their neighbors, and the number of people who say they have never spent time with the people next door has doubled in the past 20 years. Even if we accept the argument that television has influenced the trend toward the breakdown of the traditional family, we must realize that there are also other influences, such as economic ones. For example, it takes more money to support a family. The median household income is now about $50,000 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013), so both adults are likely to work, and this makes it harder for them to have children and raise them at home. The percentage of women in the labor force has been steadily climbing, and now about 60% of all women 16 and older in the United States work outside the home (U.S. Census Bureau, 2013).

Family members tend to use television or other media at different times and on different platforms. iStock/Fertnig

Another reason that family structure and family interaction have changed is that careers have become more important to many people than their families. Wage earners work longer hours, and this takes them away from the home for a higher proportion of their waking hours. There are strong stressors of time, money, and lifestyle, which make people regard the home as a place to recover from the workplace, not a place where they have high energy. No longer is family of paramount importance in most people’s lives (Pipher, 1996). The irony is that perhaps people are working longer hours so they can afford more of the things advertised on television and thereby achieve a happier life as promised by advertisers, but by spending less time with our loved ones, we are steadily becoming less happy. Clearly, family structures and interaction patterns have been changing over the past four decades. There are 517

many reasons for this. Media influence is a key element, but not the only one, in this change. The additional elements of economic demands, the rise in the importance of careers, and changes in lifestyle preferences have all contributed to the probability of change in the institution of the family.

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Becoming More Media Literate Now that you have seen how the four-dimensional approach to media effects can broaden your perspective, let’s see how well you are internalizing this information. First, see how many different effects you can identify in the people around you (Exercise 13.1). Remember to consider long-term effects as well as immediate effects, positive effects as well as negative effects, and unintentional effects as well as intentional ones. Also, see if you can identify different types of effects. Regarding Exercise 13.1 as a warm-up, let’s move on to a more rigorous challenge. Exercises 13.2 and 13.3 ask you to be more systematic and complete; that is, see if you can identify examples of both immediate and long-term effects across all six types. If you are not able to do this in one sitting, then keep these exercises in mind as you go through a typical week. See if you can spot different effects as they occur and thereby fill in some of the gaps in your charts. Also, you may find that some examples of effects have elements that would fit into several types. For example, you might learn something (cognitive effect) that leads directly to you doing something (behavior effect). Also, an immediate effect may suggest a longer term effect. For example, after a session of playing an electronic game you feel really good (immediate emotional effect), then later you notice that you have returned to the game again and play even longer (behavioral conditioning over the longer term). Finally, take a look at Exercise 13.4 but do not feel you need to answer all those questions now. Keep these questions in the back of your mind, and when you have a few minutes now and then in your everyday life, reflect on things like your expectations for romance, college, and career. Where did these expectations come from? Are they realistic? To what degree are you meeting these expectations? To what degree do your behavioral patterns conform to your beliefs about yourself and others? These are very important questions. Don’t pressure yourself to answer these questions now; instead, let the answers come to you as flashes of insight as you encounter the problems and joys in your everyday life.

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Box 13.1 Candy as an Analogy for Media Effects Many people think of media effects as if they were candy. As we walk down the street, there are people passing out all kinds of candy for free. They want us to taste their sweets, then come into the store and buy something. We are tempted. When we take a piece, it tastes good and makes us want another piece. Often we sneak another piece or two, thinking it can’t hurt. But then a few minutes later, we experience a sugar rush followed by a crash of energy. Also, there is this lingering sweet taste in our mouths that becomes unpleasant as time goes by. We envision the sugar eating holes in our teeth. If we have kids with us, we find they are rambunctious and whine for more candy. And now we have to act like the bad guy and tell them no; it will spoil their dinner. A lot of people think of the media as a candy store. Their messages are tempting, and we let ourselves sample and often like the experience. But afterward, we feel guilty. We feel we should have been doing something more substantial or productive with our time. We feel that those messages are now eating holes in our brains as we can’t get a jingle, a song, or a stupid joke out of our minds. If we have kids with us, we fear that they are soon going to imitate the bad language, bad attitudes, or bad behavior they have seen in the messages. Yes, the media do offer lots of “candy” messages. If we indulge ourselves with a steady diet of candy over the years, we will clog up our arteries with fat and experience all sorts of negative health effects. But the media offer many other kinds of messages. If we can resist the initial temptation of candy and instead find the more nutritious messages in other parts of the media cafeteria, we can consume a more balanced and full range of vitamins and minerals. To live a more healthy life, we need to know what to consume and we need to exercise some self-discipline.

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Summary A key step in increasing your media literacy is to expand your perspective about what is a media effect. Don’t get trapped into thinking of the media only as kind of a candy store (see Box 13.1). Don’t think that the media only affect others, such as young children who don’t know any better or the criminal types who claim they copy what they see in the media. Because we are submerged in a media-saturated environment, effects are constantly happening to us as they shape our knowledge patterns, beliefs, attitudes, emotions, and behaviors. They even trigger physiological reactions, such as in our heart rate, blood pressure, and other bodily functions. And we don’t even need to experience a change in order to see that the media have had an effect on us because a prevalent effect is reinforcement—that is, solidifying our existing beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral patterns. In our everyday lives, the immediate and long-term processes work together. The immediate process gives us a new fact that either extends our learning or adds weight to our existing structure. In the long term, we look for patterns across these facts and infer conclusions about how the world operates. These generalized conclusions then become part of our knowledge structures. If we are not aware that we are making generalizations, then we cannot control that process and ensure that those generalizations are reasonable and accurate. Thus, faulty principles will get into our knowledge structures and lead us to make more defective conclusions and guide our search for facts in a faulty manner. Being media literate requires that we understand the full range of media effects. We need to recognize when those effects are having a negative influence on us so we can protect ourselves. And we need to recognize when the effects are having a positive influence on us so we can appreciate and enhance their power. Now that you have a broader appreciation for media effects, take a look at the list of effects in Appendix B (https://study.sagepub.com/potter8e). This list is not exhaustive. Instead, the list provides illustrations of all kinds of effects. Look for these media effects in your own lives, and let this selection of effects sensitize you to look for many other media effects. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Bryant, J., & Oliver, M. B. (Eds.). (2009). Media effects: Advances in theory and research (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. (640 pages including index) Now in its third edition, this classic academic book presents a set of 27 chapters written by experts on a wide range of mass media effects. Each chapter provides an in-depth review of the research literature on a different effects theory (e.g., agenda setting, cultivation, social cognitive theory), type of effect (e.g., social perception, eating disorders, attitude change), or influence of type of content (e.g., sex, violence, educational television). Johnson, S. (2006). Everything bad is good for you. New York, NY: Riverhead Books. (250 pages including endnotes) Steven Johnson, who is not an academic but a best-selling author, argues that the popular opinion that the media are harmful to us is wrong. Instead he says that exposure to media, especially television and video games, produces more net good than harm. He says that media messages are getting more complex, not more simple, over time. This makes exposure more challenging and hence more rewarding. The story lines of TV shows are much more complex and involved now than they were several decades ago. And today’s video games are far more challenging than early video games. He says the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less. Nabi, R. L., & Oliver, M. B. (Eds.). (2009). Media processes and effects. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. (643 pages with index) This edited volume includes 37 chapters that focus on a wide variety of media effects topics. It is organized into six sections: conceptual and methodological issues; society, politics, and culture; message selection and processing; persuasion and learning; content and audiences; and medium issues. Potter, W. J. (2012). Media effects. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. (377 pages with index) In this media effects book I more fully develop the ideas that I am introducing in this chapter and the next in Media Literacy. I also present many more examples of media effects than I am able to present in the two effects chapters in this book. Storr, W. (2014). The unpersuadables: Adventures with the enemies of science. New York, NY: Overlook Press. (355 pages including index and endnotes) The author is a journalist who has interviewed people who hold beliefs at odds with scientific evidence (creationists, Holocaust deniers, etc.) to find out why they hold their beliefs. He concludes that all of human reasoning and knowledge is based on stories that we tell ourselves and that it is too psychologically troubling to change our stories, so we deny all those versions of the truth that do not conform to what we believe.

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Exercise 13.1

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Thinking About Media Effects 1. Pick some child with whom you have spent a fair amount of time. Can you think of any effects that child exhibited that could be regarded as media effects? (List them below.) ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ 2. Pick some adult with whom you have spent a fair amount of time—perhaps a parent or a neighbor. Can you think of any effects that adult exhibited that could be regarded as media effects? (List them below.) ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ 3. Pick a friend about your own age. Can you think of any effects that friend exhibited that could be regarded as media effects? (List them below.) ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ 4. Now think about yourself. Can you think of any effects that you exhibited that could be regarded as media effects? (List them below.) ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________

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Exercise 13.2

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Recognizing Immediate Effects Think about the differences among cognitive, belief, attitude, emotion, behavior, and physiology. Then think about what has happened to you in your life after particular media exposures. On a blank sheet of paper, divide the page into six rows, labeling them cognitive, belief, attitude, emotion, behavior, and physiology. For each row, see if you can list at least two effects that have happened to you immediately after being exposed to the media. Name the immediate effect, and then describe a specific example of how the media have affected you or someone you know. Use the list below to guide your thinking. a. Cognitive: Media can immediately plant ideas and information. b. Belief: Media can illustrate beliefs that we accept. c. Attitude: Media can influence our evaluative judgments. d. Emotion: Media can trigger an immediate emotional reaction, such as fear, attraction, sadness, or laughter. e. Behavior: Media can trigger behavior. f. Physiology: Media can arouse or calm you.

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Exercise 13.3

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Recognizing Long-Term Effects Think about how the media may have exercised a subtle effect on you over the long term. On a blank sheet of paper, divide the page into six rows, labeling them cognitive, belief, attitude, emotion, behavior, and physiology. For each row, see if you can list two long-term effects. Next to each effect, describe specifically how long-term exposure to media has led to that effect on you. Use the list below to guide your thinking. Long-term effects: Slow accumulation of information, attitudes, and images leads to beliefs about the real world. a. Cognitive: Oftentimes, people will not expose themselves to the media with the purpose of learning anything. Rather, they will be interested in seeking escape or entertainment. This is especially true with television, radio, and film. However, acquisition of information and attitude change does take place. This type of learning is called incidental learning. b. Belief: Erosion or reinforcement of values that are used as standards in evaluations c. Attitude: Erosion or building up of existing attitudes d. Emotion: People can build up a tolerance against emotional reactions over time and thus become desensitized. e. Behavior: New behaviors can be learned in the short term but not performed until much later. f. Physiology: Increased tolerance for certain content; physiological dependency on a medium or certain content

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Exercise 13.4

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What Have You Internalized From the Media Culture? 1. When you are driving and listening to your car radio, do you switch the channel, looking for something else, even when you are satisfied with the song you are currently hearing—thinking maybe a better song is on another station now? Do you flip through the channels on the television set looking for something better? 2. In romantic relationships, which is more important to you: commitment or perfection? When you are in a romantic relationship, are you happy when you make a lasting, strong commitment to the other person? Or do you worry that this person may not be the absolute best one for you and perhaps there is someone a little better out there? 3. In college, do you value learning or efficiency more? Do you make a commitment to each course, attend every session, and try to get all you can from them? Do you take a wide range of courses (some you know nothing about) to expand your experience? Or do you look for ways to spend your time better during class, such as going on a job interview, finishing a term paper for another course, or catching up on sleep? Do you look for courses on the basis of which ones require the least amount of work for the highest grades? 4. In your career, which will be more important to you: loyalty or success? Will you find a job and build your entire career there to pay back your employer for your first big opportunity? Or will you take the first job as a stepping stone to something better and leave as soon as you have learned all you can in that job? 5. When you have a major problem, are you upset when you cannot solve it in a short period of time?

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Chapter 14 How Does the Media Effects Process Work?

Media Effects Are Constantly Occurring Manifested Effects and Process Effects Baseline Effects and Fluctuation Effects Factors Influencing Media Effects Baseline Factors Developmental Maturities Cognitive Abilities Knowledge Structures Sociological Factors Lifestyle Personal Locus Media Exposure Habits Fluctuation Factors Content of the Messages Context of Portrayals Cognitive Complexity of Content Motivations States Degree of Identification Process of Influence Thinking About Blame Becoming More Media Literate Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises

Key Idea: We need to be proactive—rather than reactive—in understanding how the media affect us. We also need to realize that there are many factors interacting in the effects process. When we understand these two ideas, we can achieve greater control over the process of effects.

The media effects process is complex. It is important to keep in mind how media influences us and how we can control that influence. © Jamaway/Alamy

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Two boys watch the movie The Deer Hunter, a film in which American prisoners during the Vietnam War are forced by their captors to play the game of Russian roulette. Russian roulette is a game where one chamber in a revolver contains a bullet while the other chambers are empty. Each player in the game takes a turn pointing the gun at his head and pulling the trigger. If he is lucky and the chamber is empty, the gun does not fire and the player is saved. If he is unlucky, the chamber contains the bullet, which is then fired into his brain, killing him instantly. Several days after watching this movie, the boys are playing in their parents’ bedroom and find a revolver under the bed. They decide to play Russian roulette. Eventually, the gun fires, killing one of the boys.

The tragic incident described above actually happened and when it was well covered by the press, it stimulated debate about who was to blame. There was a great deal of public criticism directed toward movies and television programs that were blamed for causing children to behave in violent ways. What this illustrates is that the public typically takes a reactive perspective; that is, when something happens that generates concern, the public likes to react to the event and debate where blame should be placed. While this reactive perspective is better than no perspective, still better would be a proactive one where the public gets concerned about risks —in this case risks of harmful actions triggered by media portrayals—and educates people so that the probability of a tragedy occurring is greatly reduced. When it comes to media effects, the media literacy perspective is much more oriented toward proactively dealing with potential risks through education rather than waiting until negative effects occur then assessing blame when it is too late to take steps to prevent the problem from getting to a bad point. Learning how to be proactive will give you greater control over the process leading up to a negative effect. Also, it will allow you to position yourself better to achieve positive effects while you are avoiding negative ones. To help you develop a more proactive perspective on mass media effects, this chapter will emphasize four ideas. First, it will show that media effects are constantly occurring. Second, it will illuminate the nature of 533

factors that shape those effects. Third, it will help you develop a broader perspective on blame. And fourth, it will show you that you can control the effects process in your own life. We will then continue this discussion of media effects in the next chapter, when we use the concepts presented in this chapter to explore the broad variety of media effects that are occurring in your lives every day.

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Media Effects Are Constantly Occurring A lot of people think about media effects categorically—that is, either an effect occurs or it does not. The problem with this type of thinking is that it is reactive. If an effect occurs and it is negative, then all we can do is feel bad about it and try to assess blame. Or if an effect occurs and it is positive, then all we can do is be thankful that it occurred and hope it occurs again. This perspective does not give you much control over the effects, because it is reactive. In contrast, media literacy helps you to develop a more proactive perspective so that you can exercise some control over the probability of different media effects occurring. The more you understand about how the media exert their influence, the better you can help yourself avoid the negative effects and also increase the occurrence of positive effects. So in this section, I will show you the big picture about how the media exert their influence on all of us.

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Manifested Effects and Process Effects There are media effects that we can easily observe; these are the manifested effects. But there are also other things going on in our minds and bodies due to media influence. The media are constantly in a process of influencing how we think, feel, and act, whether we manifest these things or not. Let’s call these other effects process effects because we are always in a process of being influenced by mass media messages. If we limit our attention to only the manifested effects, we will greatly underestimate the degree of influence the media exert on us. Just because we do not see an outward manifestation of these things does not mean that the media are without influence. We also need to consider process effects. To illustrate this distinction between manifested and process effects, let’s return to the example at the beginning of this chapter. While the boys watched The Deer Hunter, they were being influenced by the messages presented there. They felt excitement over the danger of the characters playing Russian roulette. Their attitudes were shaped that this game was a cool thing to play. There may have been no outward manifestation of these changes in emotions and attitudes, but this does not mean that the boys were not influenced by the media message. It was not until the boys discovered a revolver and started playing Russian roulette that there was a manifestation. If a parent had realized there were process effects occurring and did something to reduce those process effects, the boys could have been prevented from proceeding to such a horrible manifested effect. The public and media critics are fixated on manifested effects. However, if we are to regard media influence from a media literacy perspective, we need to think more in terms of process effects. The more we understand about process effects, the more we can control media influence. Let’s examine this in more detail by moving on to consider two kinds of process effects: baseline and fluctuation.

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Baseline Effects and Fluctuation Effects To illustrate the important difference between baseline and fluctuation effects, look at Figure 14.1. On those figures, the horizontal lines represent time, and the vertical lines represent degree of risk of experiencing an effect. Our baseline is our typical degree of risk that continues over time (see Figure 14a). Every once in a while something will happen to temporarily change that risk level (Figure 14b). Notice how there is a sudden spike from the normal baseline; this is a fluctuation effect. The fluctuation is usually temporary; after a brief period of time, the risk level returns to the base level. Now, let’s add in the idea of a manifestation level. Think of the manifestation level as kind of a water level. Imagine yourself watching the surface of a lake, when suddenly a fish breaks through the surface then dives back underwater. Until you see that fish break through the surface, you are not sure if there are any fish in the lake. Just because you do not see them does not mean there are not fish—as well as turtles, eels, plankton, and even a Loch Ness monster—swimming around underwater. Observing what happens occasionally above the water level does not tell you much about all the processes that we cannot see under the water. The same is true with media effects. There could be many effects (baseline effects and fluctuation effects) occurring under the manifestation level, and rarely will a fluctuation effect be strong enough to break through the manifestation level (see Figure 14d). Figure 14.1 Baseline and Fluctuation Effects

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When we talk about media effects, we typically mean only fluctuation effects that break through the manifestation level, that is, those changes in behavior or knowledge that we can observe (see Figure 14d). For example, while watching television, we notice that we are going to the kitchen to get that bag of potato chips to eat after watching a commercial for that product. Or we watch a news program covering a campaign and notice that our attitude toward one of the candidates has changed. These examples are of effects we can observe; they have clearly manifested themselves. But if we limit ourselves to considering only fluctuations that have broken above the manifestation level, we lose the opportunity to learn about a great deal of effects activity that takes place underneath the manifestation level—these are the process effects. When considering process effects, it is important to think in terms of baselines. As I said above, the baseline is the typical level of risk for an effect. It is fairly stable over time, but it can gradually increase or gradually decrease. Baselines are shaped by long-term conditioning. Some people are conditioned in a way that their baseline is very close to the manifestation level (see Figure 14e), so it does not take much in a media exposure to result in an effect being manifested. In contrast, other people have been conditioned in a way that their baseline is very far away from the manifestation level, so it is unlikely that any one media exposure will result in an observable effect (see Figure 14f).

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Compare & Contrast

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Baseline Effects and Fluctuation Effects Compare: baseline effects and fluctuation effects are the same in the following ways: Both refer to patterns of effects from media exposures. Both can be explained by combinations of factors of influence. Contrast: baseline effects and fluctuation effects are different in the following ways: Baseline effects express longer term influence patterns that serve as an indicator of how close a person typically is to a manifestation level for an effect being observed. Fluctuation effects are typically immediate effects expressed as a temporary deviation off a baseline.

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Factors Influencing Media Effects Every day, our baseline is being shaped by factors from the media and factors in our own lives. Some of those factors increase the likelihood of a particular effect being manifested while other factors decrease that likelihood (see arrows in Figure 14.2). If there are more factors that increase the likelihood of manifestation, then the baseline will gradually ascend, but if the factors that decrease the likelihood are more powerful, then the baseline will gradually descend. Notice that in Figure 14.2 there are more upward arrows than downward arrows; this indicates that there are more influences that serve to increase likelihood of manifestation compared to the influences that push the likelihood lower; as a result, over time the baseline gradually increases.

Figure 14.2 Factors Influencing the Baseline

Many factors interact in the media effects process. In the following sections, I point out many of the more influential types of factors that are responsible for gradually changing a person’s baseline and for triggering fluctuations off that baseline.

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Baseline Factors What are the general factors that are most influential on a person’s baseline? I discuss seven of them in this section. Each of these seven types of factors exerts a subtle but continuing influence on a person, and this serves to make a person’s baseline relatively fixed and enduring.

Developmental Maturities We mature cognitively, emotionally, and morally as we age. Recall from Chapter 5 that when we are very young, our minds, emotions, and moral reasoning are beginning to develop and thus have a lower ceiling of capacity than when these are more fully developed. As we mature in these areas, we are able to process more information and to apply more sophisticated skills well. This gives us the capacity to move our baselines closer to the manifestation level for the effects we want to experience and away from the manifestation level for effects we want to avoid. As children mature, they expand their cognitive abilities. That is, they are less influenced by a central, salient feature of a message and can process many more elements in a message, which allows them to understand context more fully; they are not limited to concrete thinking but get better at making inferences accurately; they are more sophisticated in making distinctions between fantasy and reality; and perhaps most important, they can think about thinking itself—that is, engage in meta-thinking—which helps them monitor their media exposures and the potential effects of those exposures on them (B. J. Wilson & Drogos, 2009). Thus as children age, they are more capable of staying in a self-reflexive exposure state where they can process media messages and learn from them. This makes it possible for them to exert greater control over the shape of their baselines as well as over fluctuations from those baselines. As for emotional reactions, people at lower levels of maturity are limited in their capacity to control their emotions and behavior. S. L. Smith and Wilson (2002) found that fear reactions from news are affected by age. Older children are more likely to comprehend news stories, and this leads them to be more frightened by the happenings reported. Also, emotional reactions to violent action/adventure films are influenced by humor, but there is a gender difference. For example, research has found that female viewers find that wisecracking heroes add to their emotional distress, whereas male viewers find that wisecracking heroes reduce their distress a bit (C. M. King, 2000). Recall from Chapter 5 that we must be careful not to fall into the trap of believing that everyone of the same age has reached the same level of development cognitively, emotionally, and morally. Yes, children are highly susceptible to certain influences. But there is reason to believe that adolescents and adults can also be susceptible to these same influences.

Cognitive Abilities The developmental maturities suggest potentialities; that is, at a given age, there are limits to what people can understand and how they go about reasoning. But developmental potentialities are not the same as actual 543

abilities; that is, not everyone who has the same potential exhibits the same level of cognitive abilities. There are four cognitive abilities—field dependency, type of intelligence, type of thinking, and conceptual differentiation—that are most relevant to media literacy (refer back to Chapter 5). Each of these has an influence on establishing a person’s baseline for media effects. For example, people who are more field independent, higher on both fluid and crystalline intelligence, and more likely to differentiate information conceptually into categories will be more likely to control their baseline levels.

Knowledge Structures People with the largest amount of knowledge learn most from media. When people have a great deal of knowledge on a particular topic, they have a strong, well-developed knowledge structure. They are usually motivated to acquire more information on various topics and thus seek out media that will provide them with this information. When they see a new message on the topic, they are able to integrate that new information quickly and efficiently into their existing knowledge structure. With many topics, we have no choice but to rely primarily on media information. This is what makes the media so powerful as a socializing influence—we cannot check out the media information by comparing it to information from other sources, such as real-life experiences. For example, almost no one knows what it feels like to be a professional athlete. Sports interview shows and websites can give us some insights about what the life of a professional athlete might be like, but very few people have an opportunity to check those insights out for themselves. This is true for almost all content of news; viewers have no real-world experience about being a political leader, a celebrity coming out of rehab, or a crime scene investigator. The same is true for so-called reality programming; viewers have no real-world experience about being a Beverly Hills housewife, 16 and pregnant, or singing their way to becoming an American idol. And this is certainly true for fictional programming; viewers have no real-world experience about being a vampire, a superhero, or even a surgeon, a lawyer, or a police officer. Because viewers do not have an opportunity to check out these things in their real lives, it is impossible for them to make valid judgments about how accurate these media portrayals are. When people are asked if TV entertainment is credible and a reasonable representation of the way people live, most people say yes. As you increase your amount of viewing, your perceptions of the reality of TV entertainment programs increase. That is, you are more likely to believe the real world is like the TV world. This is especially true among children and those who have the least amount of variety of real-world experiences.

Is it real? Viewers without actual experience of a Beverly Hills housewife may find it hard to judge the accuracy of media portrayals on the reality series The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. © ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy

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Sociological Factors The degree of socialization is related to the amount of influence the media will have. People who have been consistently socialized with particular values for a long period of time will have a relatively weighty baseline; that is, the baseline will be very resistant to change. It is unlikely that the media will be able to exert a strong enough influence to cause a fluctuation, especially one big enough to break through the manifestation level. For example, if a person is a senior citizen and has been exposed consistently to anti-aggression values all her life from parents, friends, educational institutions, church, and so on, she has a baseline far away from a behavioral fluctuation of aggression. She could watch an entire evening of highly aggressive media messages and not move anywhere near the level of manifesting aggressive behavior herself. If, on the other hand, another person has been taught to fight back by his father, been taught that only the strong survive in a tough school, and been shown by his friends that the only way to get respect is to fight, he has a baseline fairly close to a manifestation level for aggression, and it would take very little media influence to push him above that manifestation level. We learn norms by observing other people in real life and through the media. The media present many characters who communicate a great deal of social information to viewers. These messages are especially influential on the socialization of children because young people have less experience in real life to counterbalance the media portrayals. In addition, many adults have very limited real-world information to counterbalance media portrayals, so they too are susceptible to media influence. For example, people who have never served in government, never become active in a political party, and never attended a political rally depend on the media to provide them with all their information about how the political system works and the qualities of the candidates running for office. These people with highly limited political experience have no way to check the media portrayals against the real world, so they must accept the stories the media present as accurate. 545

We are all influenced by institutions, parents, friends, and other social forces. For example, with children, parental involvement in media exposure serves to influence learning. Children increase their understanding and recall of both central and incidental program content when adults provide comments to guide their children’s attention and understanding during viewing. The more a person identifies with a peer group and the more cohesive the group is, the more the person will be influenced by the group and the less effect the media will have by themselves.

Lifestyle People who have active lifestyles where they interact with many people and institutions are generally less affected by the media. In contrast, people who have fewer real-life experiences because of lack of money, education, or vitality are more likely to have much higher exposure to media that is not counterbalanced by other experiences. This is why the poor, individuals of low socioeconomic status, ethnic minorities, and the elderly are particularly susceptible to the influence of the media, especially television, because they expose themselves to a great deal of TV due to their sociological and psychological isolation. TV becomes their window on the world and their primary source of information.

Personal Locus Recall from Chapter 2 that the personal locus is the combination of an individual’s goals and drives for media exposures. This may be the most important factor so far because it reflects the five factors above and, more important, activates the power of those five factors. Furthermore, it determines the seventh factor, which is a person’s media exposure habits. When a personal locus is strong, the person has the drive energy to make the most of his or her maturities, skills, knowledge structures, sociological factors, and lifestyle. People who have a strong personal locus have more awareness of the effects process, so they have constructed their baselines to conform to their personal goals. This means that there are particular effects they want to achieve with the help of the media; for these effects, they have constructed a baseline fairly close to the manifestation level so that a single exposure to the proper media message can achieve the effect. People with a strong personal locus are also aware that there are some effects that they do not want to manifest themselves, so they construct baselines for those effects far from the manifestation level. To illustrate, let’s say Jane and Phyllis both have a strong need to make friends. Jane is acutely aware of this need and uses the media to satisfy her need for friendship. She joins Facebook and actively seeks out friends. She texts her new friends to find out more about their interests and consciously gravitates to those people with whom she shares the most interests. Over time, Jane has used the media to grow her circle of friends, and with her continual interactions she builds more meaningful friendships both on Facebook and in the real world. In contrast, Phyllis feels lonely so she gravitates to television series where she can identify with certain kinds of characters. Over time, she gets pulled more into the world of those fictional characters where she feels part of their lives. However, since these media experiences are not interactive, Phyllis is only observing others and not building her friendship skills, so when she meets a person in real life, it is very difficult for her to interact in a friendly manner, and friendships are not manifested.

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Media Exposure Habits Each of us has a set of media exposure habits that focuses our attention on certain media and certain types of messages presented by those media. For example, some people like to surf the Internet and go to all kinds of sites indiscriminately. In this case, they are exposed to a very wide range of messages and no single type of message is likely to have much effect on their baseline. In contrast, other people might spend all their time playing violent video games and watching action/adventure movies. These people are likely to have a baseline very close to the manifestation level for aggressive behavior.

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Fluctuation Factors While understanding where your baselines are in the processes of influence, it is also important to monitor the factors that will move you off your baseline and create a fluctuation effect. In this section, I present six types of factors about the media as well as three types of factors about you that are important in assessing whether fluctuations will occur or not.

Content of the Messages It matters what you expose yourself to in a particular exposure session. Let’s say you have a habitual exposure pattern of horror and action/adventure shows, and your baseline is very high for an aggressive effect. If you watch another hour of video, will that be enough to push you above the manifestation level? It depends on what content you watch. If you watch a comedy in which the characters help each other and the themes are prosocial, then you are likely to move away from the manifestation level. But if you watch a highly violent program, then you will be more likely to move toward the manifestation level.

Context of Portrayals The meaning of the messages arises from the way they are portrayed, especially social lessons. When the characters in a story are portrayed as being highly attractive, when their actions are portrayed as being justified, when they are rewarded for those actions, then audiences will likely identify with those attractive characters, experience the action from their point of view, and learn from this vicarious experience. Audiences are likely to accept the meaning of the experience that was portrayed by those characters. This is why the portrayal of violence in the media is so dangerous. The “good guys” are as likely as the “bad guys” to commit acts of violence. The good guys’ violent acts are almost always portrayed as being justified, and they are rarely punished. The meaning of violence, then, is that if you are a good guy, violence is an essential and successful means of resolving conflict. Because each viewer regards himself or herself as a good guy, viewers learn that it is okay for them to use violence.

Cognitive Complexity of Content When the message makes few cognitive demands on viewers, people can process its meaning more easily (Lang, Potter, & Bolls, 1999). The more demands the narrative makes on the working memory, the less well will facts be comprehended and remembered (Fisch, 2000). For example, children remember news better from TV than from print, regardless of their reading proficiency. This is because TV news can provide information in several channels at once (pictures, words, and sound), and when the information is semantically redundant —that is, it complements and reinforces each other—learning is achieved better (Gunter, Furnham, & Griffiths, 2000). Children’s comprehension of educational content from media messages is dependent on the degree to which the information is central to the narrative. Facts that are tangential to the main flow of a message are learned less well than facts that are central to the message. Also, people remember information better when emotional cues are also used (Bucy & Newhagen, 1999). 548

Motivations When we have a conscious need for a particular kind of information, we will actively seek out this type of information in the media, and the chance of us learning from this experience is high. When we are passive, learning can still occur, but it is not as likely. Also, people who have a higher education and higher intelligence are more motivated to seek out information from the media. These people select the information that has the greatest utility to them.

States A state is a temporary drive or emotional reaction that occurs in response to some stimuli. Oftentimes, something will happen in our lives that will cause us to feel angry or frustrated. This state can interact with media content and lead to certain effects. For example, someone who is frustrated and then views violence will be much more likely to behave aggressively than if only one of these conditions is present. The media frequently alter our psychological states. Perhaps the most important of these states is arousal. When we are aroused, our attention is more concentrated, and the experience is more vivid for us. We will remember the portrayals more and will be more likely to act while aroused (Comstock, Chaffee, Katzman, McCombs, & Roberts, 1978; Zillmann, 1991). Certain production techniques tend to arouse viewers. These techniques include fast cuts, quick motion within a frame, loud music, and sound effects. Also, certain narrative conventions (such as suspense, fear, lifethreatening violence, and erotica) can lead to arousal.

Fast and Furious 7 uses production techniques like explosions, car stunts, and life-threatening violence at the hands of actor Dwayne Johnson to arouse viewers. Atlaspix/Alamy

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Although most states are regarded as physiological or emotional ones, there are cognitive states also, and these are especially important with media literacy. If you find yourself confronting information about a topic where you have no context or background information, you will likely find yourself in a state of ignorance. This cognitive state of ignorance is usually associated with emotional states of frustration or despair. But the cognitive part of this state is keyed to a lack of informational context. Like all states, cognitive states are shortlived because people will typically either avoid messages that trigger this state or search out more information on the topic, thus reducing the negative feeling about ignorance.

Degree of Identification Identification with particular characters is also a key factor in the effects process because we typically pay more attention to those characters with whom we identify. We can form strong attachments to certain characters, depending on what those characters do and say (Hoffner & Cantor, 1991). The stronger the attachment, the stronger the probability of an effect (Bandura, 1986, 1994) that will show up as a fluctuation. We become involved in media-depicted events through a psychological relationship with characters in a twostep process. First, we make a judgment about how much we are attracted to the character. Attraction is linked to how much we feel that the character is like us or how much we would like to be like that character. Second, we engage in an “as if” experience in which we imagine ourselves in the role of the character. We frequently take these two steps while following stories in the media, and this increases the degree to which stories can affect us.

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Process of Influence In the previous section, I laid out many individual factors that have been found to influence the baseline as well as trigger fluctuations off that baseline. While each of those factors was presented individually, you should understand that rarely does a factor act alone so that it is solely responsible for a fluctuation or a baseline. Instead, factors work together in a complex process such that combinations of factors must be present at certain times in order for changes to occur. I presented those factors one at a time above so that you could get a sense for what the individual factors were. Also, media effects researchers typically test one factor at a time with experiments that attempt to hold all other factors constant while the researchers test whether or not a particular factor is associated with a particular media effect. Over time, as media researchers move on to more multivariate methods of data analyses, they test combinations of factors and typically find things like contingent influences, interactive influences, and asymmetric influences. A contingent effect is one that shows up under certain conditions but not others. For example, age (S. L. Smith & Wilson, 2002) and gender (C. M. King, 2000) are typically found to suggest contingent effects, where particular effects may occur with younger children but not older children and some effects occur with males but not with females. Interactive effects are those where an effect does not occur unless several factors are present to interact. For example, if factor X is present by itself, there will be no effect, and if factor Y is present by itself, there will be no effect. However, if both factors X and Y are present at the same time, their influence will interact and the effect will occur. Fire is an example of an interactive effect—requiring the presence of fuel, oxygen, and heat to be present at the same time in order for fire to occur; if any one of these three factors is missing, there will be no fire even though the other two factors might occur in abundance. Asymmetric influences are when one factor influences another but not the other way around. An example of an asymmetric influence is in autumn when the temperatures drop, the leaves on trees turn colors. The temperature drop influences the color of leaves, but the color of the leaves does not influence the temperature. In the media effects literature, there are many examples of asymmetric influences. One recent example is from a study by Wright and Randall (2014), who found that support for same-sex marriage was not found to predict pornography consumption, but pornography consumption was found to predict support for same-sex marriage. Because the media effects research literature is very large, with estimates of it being composed of more than 5,000 studies (Potter & Riddle, 2007), it offers many valuable insights into the complexity of media effects process. However, the literature is difficult to read because the findings across studies often contradict one another. For example, recent research that examines the use of social networking sites presents findings that the use of social networking sites for political information narrows a person’s learning because of selective exposure (Garrett & Stroud, 2014; Xu & Feng, 2014), while other researchers find that the use of social networking sites opens up users’ minds and leads them to consider a wider range of points of view (J. K. Lee, Choi, Kim, & Kim, 2014). Even within a single study there are often conflicting results. For example, Lewis, Tamborini, and Weber (2014) reported that cognitive conflict in a media story sometimes increased 552

enjoyment and sometimes decreased enjoyment. It is frustrating to see equivocal results like this in the literature when we are looking for the clarity of simple findings. However, we must realize that the media effects process of influence is not a simple one. It is complex and involves many different factors in interaction. To understand this process, we need to analyze research findings to several layers of depth. When Lewis, Tamborini, and Weber did this in their study, they noticed that there were two different processes that people used to make sense of cognitive conflict in narratives. One process, which characterizes experiences of appreciation, is deliberative and slow, and results from cognitive conflict. A second process, which characterizes experiences of enjoyment, is automatic and fast, and occurs when cognitive conflict is inconsequential. They found that although both appraisal processes result from the same underlying framework of intuitive preferences, only the first one results from cognitive conflict.

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Thinking About Blame Let’s return once again to the Russian roulette situation from the beginning of this chapter and readdress the question: Should the media be blamed for the death of the boy who shot himself? This question is continually asked whenever we hear about a killing that is modeled after a portrayal in a movie, television show, or video game. A death resulting from someone imitating something he or she saw in the media typically triggers public discourse that is usually very polarized, where different groups will blame other groups. For example, parents will blame the media. The media will blame the gun industry, lack of regulations on gun ownership, and the parents for leaving a loaded revolver where the boys could play with it. The gun industry will blame the parents and the boys, saying that guns do not kill people; people kill people. The arguments about who deserves all the blame are non-productive. The reality is that many factors contributed to the eventual death of the boy, so blame needs to be apportioned across all these factors. We need to understand that in our complex society, seldom does a single element cause an effect. There are always many influences, and those multiple influences work in combination. This is not hard for us to understand when it comes to knowing what causes a fire, for example. A fire requires fuel, oxygen, and heat. All three must be present to have a fire. With media effects, there are many factors about the media portrayal, factors in the life of the people involved, and factors about the real-world situation that all contribute to a probability that an effect will break through the manifestation level. No one of these factors is responsible by itself. Who is to blame? It depends on how you ask the question. If the question is “Should the gun manufacturers be held solely responsible for crimes committed using their guns?” the answer is no, of course not, because there are other influences involved. If the question instead is “Are the gun manufacturers blameless?” the answer again is no because their guns have been essential ingredients in many violent crimes. The key here is to recognize multiple influences and not allow any one of the influences to be absolved simply because it was not the only influence.

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Becoming More Media Literate The effects process is a complex one. That is why it requires that people increase their level of media literacy in order to appreciate the process of influence. People who are at low levels of literacy will believe the media exert no influence or that media influence leads to effects only in other people. This is faulty thinking. The power to control media effects on oneself begins with an understanding about the wide variety of effects and how media influence works in combination with other influences. We need to think beyond those fluctuations that break through the manifestation level and also consider process effects. We also need to understand that baselines are even more important than fluctuations. This helps us take a proactive approach to media effects. When we understand where baselines are in relation to manifestation levels, we can help shape our baselines to bring them closer to the manifestation level for those effects we want to experience in our lives—effects such as high levels of learning, use of informed opinions, and the practice of behaviors that make us most happy and productive. At the same time, we need to shape our baselines for negative effects so that they move further and further away from the manifestation levels. Let’s see how well you are able to apply what you have learned in this chapter by undertaking Exercise 14.1. Consider each of the six short scenarios and see how well you can use the information you learned in this chapter to speculate about where the baseline is likely to be in each case. Then think about what factors must have occurred to create a fluctuation off that baseline. Now let’s make the exercise more real to you by identifying a media effect that you have experienced that you did not like (see Exercise 14.2). Think of yourself as a psychotherapist who will analyze your personality, habits, and environment to construct a profile of all the factors that likely led to that effect. At this point, don’t worry about whether the scholarly research supports your profile; instead, just use your native intelligence and what you have learned in this chapter to make a reasonable argument for a set of factors.

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Summary Media effects are constantly occurring in a complex process. Perhaps it would be useful to think of this in a metaphorical way (see Box 14.1) to make these ideas more accessible. We are all familiar with the idea that there is always weather and that its effect on us is constantly changing. With media influence, it is important to keep in mind three ideas. First, media effects are constantly occurring because we are constantly being influenced directly and indirectly by media messages. Second, the media work with other factors in our lives in exerting their influence. And third, you can control the effects process in your own life—if you understand how the process works. By now you should have a basic knowledge structure about the wide variety of media effects and how the effects process works. This will give you a much better perspective on controlling the process and thereby achieving the effects you want. However, this chapter cannot give you much detail about all the different factors that change the probabilities of all the media effects that could occur. While I have alerted you to the different types of factors that have been found to influence many effects, you need to elaborate this basic knowledge structure that this chapter presented by taking additional media effects courses and doing some additional reading of the relatively large literature of media effects research studies.

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Box 14.1 The Weather as an Analogy for Media Effects Media effects are like the weather in many ways. Weather is always there, but it can take many forms. Sometimes it makes you shiver, sometimes it makes you wet, and sometimes it gives you a painful sunburn—but it is all weather. Weather is very difficult to predict with any precision because the factors that explain the weather are large in number, and their interaction is very complex. Supercomputers are used to try to handle all those factors in highly complex models. They help increase the predictive accuracy on the broad level; that is, they can tell us how much rainfall and how many sunny days a particular locale will have this year. But they cannot tell us with accuracy who will get wet on which days. Although the Weather Bureau cannot control the weather, we as individuals can control the weather’s effect on us. We can carry an umbrella, use sunscreen, or close ourselves off from elements we don’t like. And we can run out to embrace a beautiful day. Like the weather, the media are pervasive and always around us. Also, like the weather, media influences are difficult to predict because the factors that explain such effects are large in number, and their interaction is very complex. We use powerful computers to examine large sets of variables in trying to make such predictions, and we have learned much about media effects. We know that certain types of messages will lead to certain kinds of opinions and behaviors in general, but we cannot predict with precision whose opinion or behavior will be changed. And as individuals, we do not have much power to control the media, but we have a great deal of power (if we will use it) to control the media’s effects on us. To know how to use this power, we must be sufficiently literate about media effects. There is an important difference between the weather and the influence of the media on us. With the weather, we all recognize its different forms and know when they are happening. It is fairly easy to tell the difference between rain, fog, and snow because there is much tangible evidence whenever these occur. But with media influence, the effects are often difficult to perceive until someone points them out. Then they become easier to spot. We need to train ourselves to be able to spot manifestations of media effects— positive as well as negative. And we need to be sensitive to the fact that there are also process effects in addition to manifested effects.

Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Strasburger, V. C., & Wilson, B. J. (2002). Children, adolescents, and the media. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. (539 pages, including appendices, references, and indexes) This is a very readable book with lots of cartoons, pictures, and graphics. The content deals with how both children and adolescents are influenced by the media, particularly the content of advertising, violence, sexuality, drug use, music, and portrayals of food. It also has special chapters on the media of electronic games and the Internet. The authors take a public health perspective in showing the risks of different kinds of media content on individuals and society. The book concludes with chapters on recommendations to help individuals protect themselves as well as recommendations to others, such as programmers, advertisers, policymakers, educators, parents, and researchers.

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Keeping Up to Date Journal of Advertising Journal of Advertising Research Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media Journal of Communication Journal of Communication Research Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly Media Psychology There are perhaps several hundred scholarly journals that publish research examining how media messages affect individuals and institutions. The seven journals listed above are the ones that account for most of that type of research published each year.

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Exercise 14.1

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Diagnosing Risk in Six Scenarios Each of the following six scenarios features a person interacting with some media message(s). For each of the six scenarios, think about the following five things: a. Pick an effect that the person is at risk of fluctuating. b. Think about where the person’s baseline is for that effect. What factors went into positioning that baseline where it is? c. What factors about a media exposure are likely to push the person toward the manifestation level? d. What factors about the person’s exposure experience or the person himself or herself are likely to push the person toward the manifestation level? e. What could this person do to avoid being pushed toward the manifestation level? Scenario 1: Bobby Bobby is a 5-year-old who loves to watch action/adventure cartoons on Saturday morning television. His mother is happy that the television serves as a babysitter for Bobby, freeing time up for her to work in another part of the house. Scenario 2: Jennifer Jennifer reads every fashion magazine there is. She is obsessed with losing weight and wearing the right designer clothes. Scenario 3: Cool Dude Cool Dude is a sophomore in college. For the past 4 years, he has downloaded every track of heavy metal and rap music he can find. He stays up partying all night every night and sees himself as the center of social life at the school because of his dress, his talk, and his style. Scenario 4: Alison Four-year-old Alison has just watched Bambi’s mother die in the movie. She is so grief stricken that she cannot take her nap. Scenario 5: Percy Percy is a teenager who has seen every horror film made. But now the thrill is gone. Recently, he has lost the ability to be scared while at the movies. Still, he continues to go to every new horror film—hoping that there will be some awesome special effect or super gruesome scene that can excite him. Scenario 6: Harriet Harriet was a nerd in middle school but now she has friends all over the world since her parents allowed her to set up a Facebook account. While she has developed a great deal more self-confidence, she is always tired because she spends more than 12 hours a day keeping up with her friends on Facebook.

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Exercise 14.2

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Profile the Process of Effects on You 1. Think of a media effect that altered your behavior. (Perhaps you watched a violent movie and started behaving aggressively immediately afterward. Or perhaps you saw an ad for a product and immediately went to the store to buy it.) a. Look at the list of seven baseline factors presented in this chapter and write a profile of your baseline for that behavioral effect. b. Now write a profile using the six fluctuation factors presented in this chapter to identify a media message that would result in a large fluctuation spike through the manifestation level. 2. Think about a cognitive effect (refer to the previous chapter and Appendix B for choices). Construct a baseline for yourself on that effect. How close is your baseline to a manifestation level? * If the cognitive effect you selected is a positive one, what can you do to move your baseline closer to the manifestation level? * If the cognitive effect you selected is a negative one, what can you do to move your baseline further away from the manifestation level? 3. Think about a negative attitude you have experienced. Construct a baseline for yourself on that effect. * What can you do to move your baseline further away from the manifestation level? * Profile the kind of media messages you should avoid in order to prevent a fluctuation off your baseline breaking through the manifestation level. 4. Think about a positive emotional effect. Construct a baseline for yourself on that effect. * What can you do to move your baseline closer to the manifestation level? * Profile the kind of media messages you should seek out in order to ensure that a fluctuation off your baseline would break through the manifestation level. 5. Think about other positive and negative effects using the four dimensions presented in the previous chapter. Then for each of those effects: * Profile your baseline. * Profile media messages that would create larger fluctuations. * Profile media messages that would lead to smaller fluctuations.

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Part VI The Springboard Chapter 15 Helping Yourself and Others to Increase Media Literacy

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Chapter 15 Broadening our Perspective on Media Effects

Helping Yourself Ten Guidelines 1. Strengthen Your Personal Locus 2. Develop an Accurate Awareness of Your Exposure Patterns 3. Acquire a Broad Base of Useful Knowledge 4. Examine Your Mental Codes 5. Examine Your Opinions 6. Change Behaviors 7. Think About the Reality-Fantasy Continuum 8. Become More Skilled at Designing Messages 9. Do Not Take Privacy for Granted 10. Take Personal Responsibility Illustrations of Milestones Cognitive Ladder Emotional Ladder Moral Ladder Aesthetic Appreciation Ladder Examples of Levels of Literacy Helping Others Interpersonal Techniques Interventions Public Education Current Situation Barriers What Can You Do? Societal Techniques Summary Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Exercises

Key Idea: You have the power to develop media literacy strategies to influence society and other individuals, but first you need to increase your own level of media literacy.

The more active and aware you are when you engage with media, the more you will get out of your experiences with media. 565

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Congratulations for having worked on building a full range of media literacy knowledge structures throughout the previous chapters. By now you should have a fairly good awareness about what it means to be media literate and have a good base of knowledge about the media industries, their audiences, their messages, and their effects on you and society. You should now be asking yourself: How can I preserve the skills and knowledge structures I already have? How can I improve? And how can I help others improve? In this final chapter, I will help you fashion good answers to their questions. Think about what I say in this chapter as a platform—a jumping-off point for you to take greater control of the trajectory of your thinking as you glide through the rich atmosphere of media messages throughout the course of your life. First, I will help you understand how to develop your own personal strategy for continuing to increase your media literacy. Then second, I will make some suggestions about how you can help others increase their media literacy.

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Helping Yourself The first thing you need to do is to develop a personal strategy for increasing your media literacy. The purpose of developing a personal media literacy strategy is to gain control over the process of influence that the media currently dominate. This is not to say that you forsake all automatic processing of information. That is an unrealistic goal. Instead, your strategy should be one where you gradually improve your awareness of the process of influence and gradually exercise more and more control over it. As you develop your personal strategy, think about the ideas in the 10 guidelines I present in this section.

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Ten Guidelines 1. Strengthen Your Personal Locus Remember that your personal locus is a combination of an awareness of your goals along with the drive energy to search out information and experiences to attain those goals. Begin by analyzing your personal goals by asking two questions. The first question is: How clear are my goals? If your goals are fuzzy, then you are likely to wander around looking for a better life and never find it. Clarity is required to give you direction. The second question is: To what extent are these goals really my goals? If the goals you seek to achieve have been programmed by someone else—like the media—then the achievement of such goals is not likely to make you happy or satisfied. Once you clearly understand what your goals are, you need to analyze your drive energy that is necessary to achieve your goals. With media literacy, the key drive is the energy to expend increasing mental effort to make better decisions about filtering media messages, then to analyze and evaluate those messages using your own standards, in place of the standards forced onto you by advertisers. We all have expectations about the appropriate amount of mental effort that is necessary to read a book, listen to a lecture on an iPod, play a video game, or watch a television program. Each medium requires a different amount of mental effort; each medium also requires a different kind of cognitive engagement. When a message meets our expectation we typically continue our exposure but do so in an automatic state. However, when a message requires more effort than we expect, we might stop our exposure to that message and look for another message that requires less mental effort. This is a natural reaction, but sometimes it is helpful to stay with challenging messages and try to work through those challenges. The greater the mental effort expended, the higher the comprehension, learning, and eventual recall. Also, when you are willing to expend more mental energy when other people are not, you are getting more value from those messages and developing a stronger perspective that sets you apart from other people.

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

2. Develop an Accurate Awareness of Your Exposure Patterns Periodically (maybe once a year), keep a diary of media usage for a week. By repeating this exercise, you can monitor your changing interests in media, vehicles, and messages. As you monitor changes, ask yourself the 568

following types of questions: Am I broadening my exposure to different media, or am I staying primarily with only one or two? Am I broadening my exposure to different vehicles? (If you used to watch mainly sports and action/adventure on television, are you now spreading your viewing around to a wider range of genres?) Explore a wider range of websites, new musical artists, new kinds of television shows, and different magazines. You don’t have to like all these exposures; in fact, you are likely to hate many of them. But by trying new vehicles you are giving yourself opportunities to find even better messages than those delivered through your habitual exposures. And you are likely to discover new messages that you might like even better than the messages you usually get in your habitual patterns of exposure. If you do not occasionally explore the range of media messages, you will likely default to a narrower and narrower focus over time.

What are your personal goals for increasing media literacy? thinkstock

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Think about the degree to which your current patterns of media exposure are meeting your personal goals. Make it a practice to ask yourself: Am I planning my media exposures to serve my own purposes, or am I just exposing myself to whatever comes along? If you are engaging in habitual exposure patterns with no personal goals, then you are clearly a tool of the mass media.

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3. Acquire a Broad Base of Useful Knowledge The key to knowledge is that it is useful; acquiring knowledge that is not useful does not help you. This means we must be continually aware of our needs for knowledge then focus on satisfying those needs. Try Exercise 15.1 and make an assessment now about your knowledge structures concerning the media. What have you learned from reading through the other 14 core instructional chapters of this book? And what supporting experiences have you acquired throughout your life to this point that would contribute to your knowledge base about the media? If your assessment reveals gaps, do not let those deficiencies lead you to believe you have failed in some way. Instead, use this diagnosis as a way of showing you where you can direct your efforts to make the most difference in increasing your knowledge base. There is always a gap between the knowledge we already have and the knowledge we need to understand the world better. Only you can close that knowledge gap for yourself. The means for closing the knowledge gap on a topic is under your control because the knowledge gap is influenced more by your interest in a topic than by our general level of education (Chew & Palmer, 1994). If we have high interest on a topic, we will search out information from many different media and many different sources. But when we have low interest on a topic, we allow the media to determine for us how much information we get.

4. Examine Your Mental Codes As you engage in your habits of media exposures, periodically ask yourself why your habits are the way they are. To what extent have you programmed your habits to serve your needs? And to what extent have the mass media programmed your habits to meet their needs? After you consider answers to these questions, rethink your mental code then reprogram your code to satisfy your own needs better. After this reprogramming, you can return to your routine exposures in a state of automaticity, but this time the code will be delivering on your goals rather than the media’s goals. Periodically work through your mental code to determine whether or not the beliefs that you currently hold are making you unhappy because they are not realistic and not reflective of who you really are. Examine your beliefs about the purpose of life, the meaning of friendship, the meaning of family, the nature of success, the role of a career in your life, what it means to be attractive, and the value of romance and love.

5. Examine Your Opinions Ask yourself the following: Are my opinions well reasoned? Although people criticize television in general, their opinions are inconsistent. For example, the Roper Organization, under the sponsorship of NBC in the early 1980s, had respondents in a national survey express their reactions to 17 particular TV shows—16 of which had been the targets of complaints about sex and violence from religious organizations. Only 13% of respondents said there was too much violence on The Dukes of Hazzard, and 10% said there was too much sex on Dallas—these were the most negatively rated shows! But when asked about television in general, 50% of the respondents said that there was too much sex and violence on TV (Roper Organization, 1981). While this

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study was conducted before you were born, are the findings still valid for you? Do you systematically gather valid information before constructing your opinions?

6. Change Behaviors To what extent do your behaviors match your beliefs? For example, if you think society is too materialistic, do you avoid buying material goods as much as possible? If you do keep your consumption of material goods at a minimum, then there is a match between your behaviors and your beliefs. But there are people who continually complain about waste in our materialistic society then go out and buy lots of new things they don’t need. In a recent survey, 82% of Americans agreed that most of us buy and consume far more than we need. And 67% agreed that Americans cause many of the world’s environmental problems because we consume more resources and produce more waste than anyone else in the world. And yet we in the United States continue to consume nearly 30% of the planet’s resources and services each year, although we account for less than 5% of the world’s population. We can choose from more than 40,000 supermarket items, including 200 kinds of cereal. Do we really need all these material products? Another example of a disconnect between beliefs and behavior is with pollution and cleaning up the environment. The media have put the issue of pollution on the public agenda as the prominence and length of these stories increased dramatically from the 1970s to the 1990s (Ader, 1995). During that same period, air pollution went down about a third, but solid waste went up about 25%. This shows us that as Americans become more concerned about pollution, they have put pressure on the government to clean up the air by regulating manufacturing plants and requiring emission controls on cars. But solid waste, which is under the control of individual citizens through voluntary recycling programs, has not been so successful. This means that individuals are not cutting back on their waste through lower consumption or recycling. Again, many people are looking to the government or someone else to solve their problems. Changing your behavior to correspond with your beliefs demonstrates commitment to a moral responsibility of following through on your beliefs rather than simply blaming someone else and doing nothing, which has become a popular strategy for many of society’s problems. The first step in behavioral change is a realistic assessment of the match between your beliefs and existing behaviors. You could boycott advertisers, cancel subscriptions, and write letters when you see something you don’t like in the media. This action, of course, will have almost no effect on the media themselves, unless large numbers of other people feel as you and do the same things. However, that is not a reason to stop yourself from doing these things. By taking action, you give yourself a sense of gaining control over the media, and this new sense of power will make a difference in your personal life.

7. Think About the Reality-Fantasy Continuum Continually ask yourself about the degree to which something is real or fantasy; this is a continuum. Some messages will be easy to spot as fantasy, such as Looney Toons. But other messages may not be so obvious. Some have a realistic setting and some present realistic situations but are still fantasy, such as Grey’s Anatomy

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or Two and a Half Men. Others may have a fantasy setting but deal with situations in a realistic manner, such as Star Trek. Distinguishing reality from fantasy in the media is often a difficult task that requires you to think about the many different characteristics of a message. So you must think analytically and break a message down into its component parts then assess which parts are realistic. Do not try to categorize messages as simply being either real or fantasy; media messages always have elements of both. Being aware of the fantasy-reality continuum is especially important now, when there are so many so-called reality programs on television. Although all of these programs have reality elements, they also contain many fantasy elements. And some of these “reality” shows may have a mix of elements that make them less real than some fictional programs. The distinction between shows labeled reality and those labeled fiction is not a sharp, clear line. Be careful of accepting the simple labels for messages. The important thing is to know when you are being exposed to fantasy so that you can process those messages differently. If you aren’t sufficiently analytical, many messages with embedded fantasy might appear realistic. Do not go on a quest to avoid fantasy merely because fantasy elements are dangerous to use in real-world expectations. There is a place for fantasy in the enjoyment of the media. Fantasy messages can be very entertaining because of their imaginative or humorous appeal. They can stimulate our thinking creatively. However, we must realize that fantasy is a tool to stimulate our imagination; it is not a model to imitate.

8. Become More Skilled at Designing Messages Many media now not only offer you the chance to create your own messages, they require it. The best example of this is when you create a Facebook account, you must design your own pages and you are expected to update it continually. How does your Facebook page compare to those of your friends? How well designed is it aesthetically? Do you have photos and graphics with your text? Would people want to visit your page just to see how well designed it is? How well designed is your Facebook page from a personal information point of view? What have you decided to reveal about yourself? How will the information on your page affect your friends? Your parents? Future employers?

9. Do Not Take Privacy for Granted In past generations, an individual’s use of the media was a relatively private thing. However, today your media exposures are tracked in meticulous detail, and that information is sold to advertisers or to anyone else interested in your media use habits. When you post a message on your own web page, a blog, or send a tweet, you initially have some control over who will see your message. But you soon lose that control when the web page server, web browser, blog owner, or Internet service provider can make copies of your messages, repackage them, and sell them to other users of the Internet. Once your message is sent in digital form, it can be endlessly copied, stored, and distributed to anyone. Therefore, before you digitize a message and put it out on the Internet, think about all potential audiences who could read that message—marketers, potential employers, friends, future spouse, children, parents, government officials, and on and on. What impression are

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you likely to create among all those audiences?

10. Take Personal Responsibility This may be the hardest to do. We as Americans are fond of placing blame on others, because it allows us to feel that the problem lies elsewhere and therefore it is someone else’s problem to fix. For example, let’s consider the problem of overeating. The American Medical Association tells us that one third of Americans are obese and another one third are overweight. This would seem to be a personal problem, but most people continue to eat too much and exercise too little. They wait for a government to impose some solution. By 2006, 16 states had imposed restrictions on junk food sales in public schools and it appears that those restriction were working to reduce weight gain. In a study of 6,300 public school children in 40 states, it was found that children gained less weight from fifth through eighth grades if they lived in states with strong, consistent laws versus no laws governing snacks available in schools (Tanner, 2012). That is good news, but we need to ask whether people are so weak willed that they need the government to ban something before they will cut down their consumption of something harmful? Many people are that weak. Are you one of them?

Once you post a blog or message on a web page it can be tracked and sold to anyone interested in your media use habits. © NetPhotos/Alamy

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Illustrations of Milestones To help increase your awareness of differences in media literacy development, let’s look at some examples of how people can react to different types of media content. Those reactions are best understood when compared to positions on the learning ladders of cognitive, emotional, moral, and aesthetic appreciation. The learning ladders remind us that we can improve our degree of media literacy in four areas: cognitions, emotions, morality, and aesthetics. Progress up each of these ladders is accomplished by mastering the key skills of analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis, and abstracting.

Cognitive Ladder The first step on the cognitive ladder is awareness, which is the ability to perceive information elements in media messages. This requires the use of analysis. The next step is understanding. This is the ability to perceive the relevant components in any messages and then group them to see how those elements are related to each other. The next step is evaluation, which requires a good deal of contextual information to have templates with which to compare current messages. To do this well, a person needs a great deal of context in the form of elaborate knowledge structures. At the highest step, people are able to appreciate a message by comparing it to their understanding of the constraints and resources of the people who produced the message. The more elaborated a person’s knowledge structure is about the media industries, the more the person will be able to appreciate the valuable elements in those messages and discount the other elements.

Emotional Ladder At low levels of emotional development, people’s emotions control them. They get aroused and angry without being able to control those reactions. They experience fear so strong they cannot shake it. Or they cry at a movie and cannot stop even though they are very embarrassed. Or they are unable to feel any emotions even though they long to do so. At higher levels of emotional development, people can use the media to shape and control their emotions. For example, we have known for some time that stressed women watch more game and variety shows as well as more television in total, whereas stressed men watch more action and violent programming (D. R. Anderson, Collins, Schmitt, & Jacobvitz, 1996). Depressed people especially use television to escape unpleasant feelings and real-world stimuli that could exacerbate those feelings (Potts & Sanchez, 1994).

Chart your progress on learning ladders toward higher degrees of media literacy. istock/porcorex

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If people are aware of what they are doing, then the use of media to manage moods is a sign of high levels of media literacy; that is, people are consciously using the media as a tool to satisfy a particular need. If, in contrast, people are depressed and don’t know what to do, they may watch television by default until they are tired enough to fall asleep. This is not an example of people controlling their exposure, so this is evidence of a low level of media literacy.

Moral Ladder This requires the development of opinions about the ethical nature of media messages. Typically, we infer themes from shows by comparing elements in the portrayals against our personal values. At the lowest level on this ladder, you construct your moral judgment of a message based purely on intuition or because someone else makes the judgment for you and you simply accept it. You see the elements in the show as an undifferentiated mass or blur. You make quick intuitive reactions about whether the show feels right or not, according to your values. If there is a fit, you are happy; if there is no fit, you have a negative reaction. You really can’t articulate your reaction very well because it is primarily emotional. For example, if a respected friend tells you that American Idol is a morally reprehensible program that belittles people and crushes their dreams, you may simply accept this opinion without watching the show. If you accidentally find yourself exposed to it, you immediately have a negative reaction and turn it off. At the middle levels of this ladder, you make a distinction among characters on their values and find yourself

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identifying with those characters who have the same values as you do. If those characters are portrayed positively (rewarded, successful, attractive, etc.), then you are happy. At the higher levels, you think past individual characters to focus your meaning making at the overall narrative level. You separate characters from their actions so that you might not like a particular character, but still you like his or her actions in terms of fitting in with (or reinforcing) your values. You do not tie your viewing into one character’s point of view but try to empathize with many characters so you can vicariously experience the various consequences of actions through the course of the narrative. During a narrative, you are able to assume different moral perspectives and more fully appreciate the action from all participants’ points of view.

Aesthetic Appreciation Ladder This development is oriented toward the cultivation of an enhanced enjoyment, understanding, and appreciation of media content. At lower levels on this aesthetic ladder, people have a very simple categorical opinion that the show is either good or bad. Not much reasoning goes into the intuitive decision, so viewers are not able to explain why they like something. At the middle levels, people are able to distinguish acting from writing and directing. Viewers have the ability to perceive that one of these might be good while another is bad. Also, people are able to compare an artist’s performance within this message with past performances and infer a trend in the work. At higher levels, there is an awareness of media content as a “text” that provides insight into our contemporary culture and ourselves. An awareness of artistry and visual manipulation is also needed. This is an awareness about the processes by which meaning is created through the visual media. What is expected of sophisticated viewers is some degree of self-consciousness about their role as interpreters. This includes the ability to detect artifice (in staged behavior and editing) and to spot authorial presence (style of the producer/director). Learning about visual conventions is not a prerequisite for interpreting visual messages. However, learning these conventions can help heighten our appreciation of artistry; it also provides viewers with the ability to see through the manipulative uses and ideological implications of visual images. This helps enhance critical viewing. Can you make a quick assessment of your position on each of these four ladders? If you can, then your awareness is fairly high. But if you are unclear how to position yourself, then think about these ladders as you watch television or read a newspaper. As you reflect on your media exposures as they are happening, you will develop more insights about the levels at which you normally operate. Remember, you will move your positions on the ladders depending on the type of message and your mood. If you are simply looking for fantasy to help you relax, you are likely operating at lower levels. But you may be capable of operating at higher levels at other times. As you are exposed to media messages over a long period of time, develop a sense of where your “home position” is, that is, at what level you usually operate. Now let’s use these learning ladders as templates to examine some examples. This analysis will highlight the important differences across levels of media literacy. 578

Examples of Levels of Literacy There are many different reasons why people expose themselves to different kinds of content, and there are many different benefits people can get out of any particular message. Because of this, it is not possible to analyze a message and assume that all those who are exposed will extract the same meaning or have the same experience from it. To illustrate these ideas, let’s consider two examples: reality series on television and a Facebook page. Reality series as a genre can appeal to viewers of all levels of media literacy. At a low level of literacy, people feel that the characters are real and that the situations actually happened as presented. They cannot explain why they like the characters or the show. Because they don’t analyze it, they just let it be. At a bit higher level of development, people will watch reality series because they personally identify with the characters and enjoy their parasocial interactions with those characters in their world, which is more exciting than their own barren existence. This leads to a strong emotional reaction. Other people will watch reality shows because they want to learn how attractive characters dress and act; this leads to some cognitive processing and evaluation of how characters look and act.

Reality series Keeping Up With the Kardashians can appeal to viewers of all levels of media literacy. At a low level, people might watch for the dramatic, flamboyant characters. At a higher level, the show can promote conversations about important topics like family values. © WENN Ltd/Alamy

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At a higher level, some people view reality series in groups so they can discuss the action as it unfolds. Or they will call their friends later and use the action as an important topic of conversation. These people use the viewing to maintain a community of friends that they would not have without the reality series. This requires a considerable amount of cognitive processing and emotional attachment. At a higher level still, the viewing takes on an in-depth analysis of the aesthetic and moral elements displayed there. Viewers marvel at the editing that focuses their attention on the most exciting parts of the participants’ lives and over-dramatizes their mundane problems by blowing them up into huge moral dilemmas. Now let’s consider an example about creating a Facebook page. At a low level of media literacy, creating a Facebook page entails uploading snapshots a person thinks are cool. The person adds elements and sends messages to maximize the list of friends. Then the person spends a lot of time monitoring the growing list of friends and sending them all short, superficial messages to maintain contact. At a higher level, users try to improve the artistic quality of their images and sounds so as to impress visitors to their page. They take pride in the increases in hits and friends that are attracted by their updates. At the highest levels of media literacy, users are very strategic in using Facebook as a tool to create and maintain a personal image to satisfy specific goals, such as reinforcing a few key friendships, attracting a specific kind of romantic partner, or showing off web skills to a prospective employer. They are very conscious of what they reveal about themselves and make sure those revelations contribute substantially to constructing a positive image over the long term. Remember that it is not the type of messages you watch or create that make you media literate. Instead, literacy is keyed to what you think and how you feel while you are engaging with the media. The more active and aware you are during those engagements, the more you will get out of the media and the more those experiences will help you achieve your personal goals.

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Helping Others In the previous section, the focus was on helping yourself increase your own level of media literacy. This section shifts the focus to helping others increase their levels. First we examine how you can help others— especially children—interpersonally, and then we look at the more ambitious task of helping others by working with larger aggregates such as public education and society.

We can help others achieve greater media literacy. iStock/ Vernonwiley

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Interpersonal Techniques Interpersonal techniques are the relatively informal things people use in their everyday lives to help others with their media literacy. Researchers have studied the techniques people use, mainly in family settings, and have found that techniques vary in their effectiveness (for review of this literature, see Nathanson, 2001a, 2001b, 2002). There seem to be three keys to helping others become more media literate. The first key is to be positive and constructive. If you want to be successful in helping others, you must show them that you have their best interests in mind and that you are not forcing your help on them for some ulterior motive, like exercising power over them. A second key is to be balanced. You should exhibit an attitude about the media that balances criticism with appreciation. There are some people who drive around town with a bumper sticker that says “Kill Your TV.” It is hard to take those people seriously because they do not seem to realize the enormous positive influence that television has exercised on our culture. Trying to make people more media literate by only criticizing the media is like trying to make people healthy by only forcing bad tasting medicine on them. Media exposures can be fun, so help people have more fun and increase the ways they can appreciate media messages. Then help people be more analytical about media messages so they can identify the elements that warrant criticism. When parents have only a negative, critical attitude about the media, rules become restrictive and are regarded as arbitrary by children. Many children fail to understand why certain kinds of content is bad for them when that content is fun and fulfills their immediate needs. These children are likely to subvert their parents’ restrictions by continuing with exposures they find enjoyable. A third key is to involve people’s cognitive processes and help them get better at thinking for themselves. For example, if you want children to learn that certain content is harmful to them, you need to avoid simply telling them that. Instead, you need to help them analyze the content and see for themselves the silliness, the manipulation, or the harm. Helping others become more media literate will become especially important to you when you become a parent and want to protect your children from negative risks of exposure. Realize that you cannot do everything, so pick your battles. Rather than try to deal with all forms of media content, I suggest you focus on two—food advertising and Internet use. One type of message is the advertisement of food. There is a great deal of advertising of unhealthy foods to children in the United States (Page & Brewster, 2007) and other countries (Roberts & Pettigrew, 2007) that use very sophisticated appeals that exaggerate health claims and imply that the advertised food has the ability to enhance popularity, performance, and mood. These ads can have a detrimental influence on children who are not media literate enough to analyze their claims and find many of them to be silly or false. Studies have found that along with genetics and reduced rates of physical activity, the flood of advertising for high-calorie, low-nutrition foods leads to unhealthy eating and weight gain. In 2005, after criticism of the U.S. food industry for advertising’s role in childhood obesity, national

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advertisers announced new policies to reduce children’s exposure to ads for unhealthy foods. However, a content analysis that was conducted on television food advertisements aired just before and one year after these announcements found very few changes in food advertising seen by children (Warren, Wicks, & Wicks, 2007). And it is not likely that this type of advertising will become more responsible or will be reduced, especially because there is such a huge market for these foods. So the cycle will continue with more unhealthy foods being advertised, leading to more consumption of unhealthy foods, which leads food companies to produce more of this type of product to satisfy the growing market. The best hope you have to break this unhealthy cycle is to teach your children to take responsibility for their own actions and not to blame others, such as the government for lack of regulation, the food providers for providing what the market demands, or advertisers. When you blame others, the best that you can hope for is that those other people will change their practices. When you take responsibility for your own actions, you can move toward a more healthy lifestyle immediately. When we realize that the percentage of overweight and obese children in the United States has more than tripled over the past 30 years (Warren et al., 2007), we can see that we need more children to view themselves less as victims of outside forces and more as people in control of their own lives. A second type of special concern for parents should be with Internet messages. The Internet provides easy access for children to encounter all kinds of messages that are potentially harmful to them; I will focus your attention on three types in particular. One type of harmful message is that which contains material such as sexual matter and hate speech. Children’s cognitive, emotional, and moral reasoning abilities are not developed well enough for them to process these messages in a way that protects them from harm. A second type of potentially harmful message includes communications from strangers who are trying to develop inappropriate relationships. The third type of message from which your children need protection is from advertisers and others who solicit private information from your child. Therefore, parents need to be careful in monitoring what sites their children visit. Parents need to tell their children never to give out any identifying information, such as an address, phone number, school name, and so forth, and never allow a child to arrange a face-to-face meeting with someone online. Parents who find information that may be illegal (such as child pornography or hate speech) should report it to authorities. Parents should build skepticism in their children because people on the Internet may not be who they claim to be; people can make up a persona in terms of gender, age, background, and so on. Parents should set time rules of access; too much contact can lead to addiction. And finally, surfing the Internet can be a fun activity for all family members to do together. Parents, however, must be careful in how they guide their children. Findings from research suggests that children and adolescents often resist parental interference with their Internet experiences. In a national sample of 456 parents of children 10–16 years of age, Byrne and Lee (2011) found that children preferred that their parents empower them to protect themselves rather than restrict their use. But other research shows that younger children appreciate parental involvement. In an experiment, parents who created a Facebook page and “friended” their children were found to decrease conflict in their relationship. Also, even when the parent and child had a more conflicted relationship prior to the parent joining Facebook, the parent’s presence on Facebook also enhanced the child’s closeness with the parent (Kanter, Afifi, & Robbins, 2012). 583

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Interventions In contrast to the interpersonal techniques, which are typically informal things used in a person’s everyday life, interventions are formal, carefully designed sessions that are intended to achieve particular media literacy goals. Media literacy interventions are designed by researchers and educators who select a target group, identify a particular risk that group may be experiencing from exposure to media messages, then deliver some sort of a treatment that includes media materials, mini-lectures, discussions of issues, and practicing some skill. Those treatments are typically designed to give members of the target group some information, insight, motivation, or skill that will help them overcome some negative media effect or inoculate them against experiencing a negative effect in the future (Potter & Byrne, 2009). The design of a good media literacy intervention is a most challenging task, given the wide range of media effects (all of which can be either positive or negative for the individual) and the hundreds of factors about individuals and media messages that have been found to contribute t o those effects (see Chapters 13 and 14). Over the years, media literacy scholars have tested various interventions and published their results in scholarly journals. Recently Jeong, Cho, and Hwang (2012) conducted a meta-analysis of over 50 of those interventions and found that in general media literacy interventions had positive effects on outcomes including media knowledge, criticism, perceived realism, influence, behavioral beliefs, attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavior. They also reported that interventions with more sessions were more effective, but those with more components were less effective. This means that designers of interventions need to simplify their treatments by focusing on one type of message or factor then repeat their treatment several times. When interventions are designed with the right key influence, they can be successful. For example, Slater and Rouner (2002) focused on the influence of role modeling in entertainment programming. They found that when people do not have role models in shows, they are less involved in those shows and this makes them more susceptible to the influence of such messages. Thus, if these people were highly involved and were likely to argue against the messages, their low involvement would defuse the counter-arguments. Therefore a key to designing a successful intervention is to get people involved in the show by identifying with positive role models. Also, Rozendaal, Lapierre, van Reijmersdal, and Buijzen (2011) argue that interventions to help children become less susceptible to advertising effects often do not work well because they are focused on simply providing conceptual knowledge of advertising. They point out that because much advertising is affect targeted and that children primarily process advertising under conditions of low elaboration, knowledge about advertising is not an adequate defense. They recommend that interventions aimed at increasing the advertising literacy among children need to focus on the actual use of conceptual advertising knowledge and attitudinal advertising literacy, which includes low-effort, attitudinal mechanisms that can function as a defense under conditions of low elaboration. There are examples in the research literature where educators have designed interventions to increase the media literacy of the study’s participants (usually children), and when they analyze their results, they find that 585

the level of media literacy has declined rather than improved. This is known as a boomerang effect. An example of this effect was found by Byrne (2009), who ran an experiment on children in the fourth and fifth grades in an attempt to test how well her intervention could help children avoid behaving aggressively after being exposed to violence in the media. She had two interventions and a control group. One intervention consisted of an instructional lesson about not behaving aggressively. A second intervention was the same as the first but it also included a cognitive activity. Children who experienced only the instructional lesson actually increased their willingness to use aggressive behavior and this effect lasted over time—thus this treatment boomeranged. But the treatment with the lesson and the cognitive activity resulted in a reduction of willingness to use aggression, so it was successful. The lesson here is that people who are sincerely motivated to help others increase their media literacy may end up doing more harm than good.

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Public Education Perhaps you are interested in trying to increase the level of media literacy in large groups of people. The institution of education is a good place to start thinking about addressing this task.

Current Situation Critics have observed that the United States lags behind many other countries in developing media literacy courses and curricula in public schools (J. A. Brown, 1991, 1998, 2001; Considine, 1997; Davies, 1997; Kubey, 1997; Piette & Giroux, 1997; Sizer, 1995). They point to a long list of countries that are far ahead of the United States with media literacy curricula. These countries include Australia, Canada, Great Britain, South Africa, Scandinavia, Russia, and Israel, as well as many other countries in Europe, South America, and Asia (J. A. Brown, 1991; Piette & Giroux, 1997). For example, Australia has had mandated media education from kindergarten to 12th grade since the mid-1990s. This curriculum stresses aesthetics and semiotics, with a liberal humanist approach to the popular arts (J. A. Brown, 1998). In Great Britain and some Latin American countries, empowerment of media consumers is paramount, often focusing on industry control through corporate and governmental hegemony. Media education there stresses representational and oppositional ideologies, power, and politics and ways to participate in mainstream media or construct alternative media outlets (J. A. Brown, 1998, p. 45). This gap is getting smaller as many states have been enacting guidelines for media literacy (see the Media Literacy Clearinghouse website listed in the Keeping Up to Date section at the end of this chapter).

Incorporating media literacy into schools and curricula in the United States presents many challenges and opportunities. iStock/ CEFutcher

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Critics point out that the relative lack of attention to media education in the United States is a serious problem because the United States is the most media-saturated country in the world. More time and money are spent on media consumption in this country than any other country in the world, yet our educational system virtually ignores media education (Sizer, 1995). This is not to say that there are no media literacy efforts in America’s schools; however, their existence is rare and largely unsupported by the institution of education. For example, J. A. Brown (2001) characterizes the teaching of media literacy in this country as “isolated teachers introduced mass media topics into their classrooms, usually within the context of traditional content such as English or history social studies” (p. 683). He continued, “Schedules already crowded with curricular mandates had no time for yet another addition, so whatever media study could be introduced was typically integrated into already existing courses” (p. 683). A few states have experimented with media literacy initiatives. More than a decade ago, Kubey (1998) reported that there had been “significant statewide initiatives” in New Mexico and North Carolina, with “noteworthy developments” in Wisconsin and Minnesota. And Hobbs (1998) reported that media literacy concepts were included in the curriculum frameworks in more than 15 states. And this is growing as “ongoing efforts are in place in many U.S. school districts. Interest in media education is even growing among mainstream education organizations and health professionals, including the National Association of Secondary School Principals and the American Academy of Pediatrics” (Hobbs, 1998, p. 24). Initiatives are growing, but we need to monitor whether this talk about the importance of media literacy and its inclusion in mission statements translates into meaningful implementation.

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Why is there so little sustained effort at developing and implementing media literacy curricula in the United States while there are many good efforts in other countries? There appear to be many obstacles for further development of media literacy (for a more complete treatment, see J. A. Brown, 2001; Considine, 1997; Davies, 1997; Kubey, 1997). Arguably, the most critical obstacle is the lack of centralized decision making concerning education in the United States. J. A. Brown (1998) points out that curriculum decisions are spread out over 15,000 school districts, each with its own school board and administrators. Kubey (1990) elaborates on this argument by pointing out that the United States is a huge country with a highly diversified population and no central governmental policy on media literacy to pull things together. Also, only 4% of educational expenditures in the United States come from the federal government (Kubey, 1998). Thus, in this country, the power for curriculum decisions lies at the state and especially local levels. Each of these decision-making bodies has its mix of personalities, needs, and political agendas. Not paying attention to the special circumstances in each school’s culture has been credited in large part for the failure of media literacy efforts that were tried in the 1970s (J. A. Anderson, 1983). Hobbs (1998) extended this point by saying, “Media literacy initiatives have been most successful in school communities where teachers, parents and students have a shared, common vision about their love-hate relationship with media culture” (p. 23). J. A. Brown (1998) said, “If media literacy studies are to survive and grow, administrators in school systems and at individual schools must endorse and support them. They should not be left wholly dependent on the initiative and energy of isolated teachers” (p. 52). Brown called for a more holistic and continuing approach:

To succeed, a curricular program of media literacy must be developed through collaboration among teachers, administrators, specialists, and parents, who together must build it into the systematic education process. Media study should not be a mere appendage of a random elective course, nor should media technology be used merely as a tool or aid to teach other subjects. That means developing studies geared to the participants’ successive levels of cognitive development based on educational and behavioral research findings. It also means continuing and integrating studies into successive grade levels through the school years. (p. 52)

But all this comes with a high cost. Other curricula must be replaced with the media literacy one. Teachers need significant training, and this will require reduced teaching loads. Parents will need to become much more involved. It also requires a sustained commitment that includes substantial training of media literacy teachers. Hobbs (1998) explained,

The most successful efforts to include media literacy in schools have taken 2 or more years of staff development to build a clearly defined understanding of the concept as it relates to classroom practice among a substantial number of teachers and school leaders within a school district. (pp. 23– 24)

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Then once trained, the teachers need to be supported continually by the institution rather than left on their own. Hobbs (1998) explains that a study of teacher performance in Great Britain yielded depressing results. Among the teachers who completed training in media literacy education, about 40% ended up doing nothing, 25% did something moderately well, 10% did something creatively exceptional, and the remaining 25% did something embarrassing, dangerous, or just a waste of time. Unless resources are provided, there are significant barriers to implementation. For example, one study reported that although most high school teachers believe the study of media is important, 40% did not teach it at all because of constraints on time and curriculum space (J. A. Brown, 2001). The same pattern was found in Maryland with language arts teachers; once again, the teachers regarded media literacy as important to teach, but the lack of training, materials, and time prevented many from teaching it (Koziol, 1989). J. A. Brown (2001) observed that few teachers receive training to deal with the challenge of teaching media literacy either in their college degree programs or in workshops for teacher certification. Most teachers, however, do feel that they are qualified to teach media literacy, even though only about one third had any training. Curriculum designers often look to media literacy scholars for guidance. However, there is a lack of agreement among scholars about what media literacy is and what its goals should be (see Chapter 2). Two of the more persistent definitional issues when it comes to curriculum design are tone and texts. Regarding tone, J. A. Brown (1991) complained that “many media workshops and curricula are protectionist and defensive. They seek to inoculate consumers against blandishments of images and messages of media entertainment, news, and advertising” (p. 45). As for texts, Hobbs (1998) observed that although media texts have always been essential in education, rarely are those texts “considered beyond their function as conveyers of information” (p. 25). They need to be the objects of inquiry (Kress, 1992). Students need to analyze the people and corporations that produce and disseminate those texts and understand their motives. Also, the texts themselves need to be analyzed for what they leave out, how they are structured, and their basis for claims both from an aesthetic and moral perspective. This diversity of opinion gets magnified as we move out to consumer activists, teachers, and school administrators. There is also a wide variety of opinion concerning the composition of a media literacy curriculum, what should be taught, how it should be taught, and how the effect of the teaching should be assessed. The good thing about this diversity is that it provides a wide range of ideas for instruction and a variety of curriculum models to the many different school systems in the United States. If most of the school systems were entrepreneurial and willing to search out the techniques that would fit the special culture in their district, then this variety would pay big dividends. But most school districts are very conservative about change. The teachers and administrators already feel they are asked to cover too many topics, so they cannot add another one without a great deal of debate. The diversity of ideas among scholars appears more as an academic debate than as a convincing argument to shift resources. For scholars to present a convincing argument, they must present a perspective that integrates the best thinking into a clear set of principles that can guide their decision making in three key issues: curriculum design, teaching, and assessment.

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What Can You Do? When you become a parent, you can insist that your school district provide some sort of media education. You might have to begin small by volunteering in your child’s classroom. Develop some mini-instructional units based on your own knowledge about media literacy. Typically, children will really like these sessions, because such sessions involve them in something they use every day. If your mini-units work well, students will talk about them, and other students will create a demand for similar instruction. By beginning small, you can grow a demand locally in your child’s school.

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Societal Techniques With societal techniques, the focus is on exerting pressure on a particular part of the industry, the government, or some institution to increase public awareness about a problem or to bring about some particular change. To do this successfully, you will first need a strategy supported by a great deal of commitment. Your strategy will require many years of effort to effect a change. Also, it requires money. Often, people will start a political action committee or a consulting firm that will then apply for grants to support its work. Contacts are also extremely important. By linking up with other powerful people and groups, you could become part of something that could potentially have enough power to get the attention of the large media companies. Look at the list of citizen action groups in Appendix C (https://study.sagepub.com/potter8e). Contact those that are of most interest to you and ask them to send you information. Changing media industry practices or content is very difficult. Remember that the industries have grown and developed in response to demands from the public. If an industry or a vehicle does not respond well to the demand, it loses money. Successful CEOs have confidence that their decisions will result in greater profits. So don’t expect change when you ask them to ignore their experience and to change their practices when they might risk losing millions of dollars by making those changes you suggest. This is why the public concern about television violence has resulted in so little change over the past 50 years. In explaining this non-action, Stuart Fishoff (1988), a psychologist who writes for television and movies, said,

Let’s suppose the results, the conclusions were incontrovertible—TV and film modeling of aggression and other anti-social values has significant effects on the viewing audience. Would it really make any difference to the gate keepers of media fare in Hollywood and New York? I submit the answer is not on your life! (p. 3) He cites an important principle in psychology for his conclusion: The more far-reaching and costly the consequences of accepting a message, the more facts needed before an audience will be persuaded as to the accuracy of the message—and the more energy will be expended in denigrating both the message and the messenger in order to maintain existing belief. (p. 3)

Therefore, the media industries have been very slow in acknowledging the value of any of the research on negative media effects while using the research on positive effects to show that they are acting responsibly. This attitude has outraged many media critics and stimulated many average citizens to want to do something to remedy the problem. Another example of a societal technique is the concern over protecting very young children from the effects of television advertising. In the early 1970s, some consumer groups were formed to protect children from what

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was being seen as abuses by broadcasters. Prominent among these groups was Action for Children’s Television, which found examples of children’s programs that contained as many as 16 minutes of ads per hour—far above the industry’s self-imposed limit of 9.5 minutes. And the products advertised were largely non-nutritious snacks and deceptively presented toys. Many products were being pitched by characters from the programs, thus making the distinction between the show and the ad indecipherable, especially for young children. This pressure influenced the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to hold hearings throughout the 1970s. The FTC considered banning certain types of ads. But in the end, the FTC concluded that although there was evidence that television advertising created risks for children, no practical effective remedies were open to federal policymaking. The primary problems were determining who is a child; that is, at what age is a person no longer a child? Also, there was the fear that regulating advertising on children’s television might cause broadcasters to stop programming for children. Another example of a societal strategy took place in the fall of 1995, when some well-known political figures began a campaign to clean up talk shows on television. Headed by former Education Secretary William Bennett, Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), and Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the campaign did not seek regulation of television content. Instead, it sought to influence public opinion and to shame certain television producers by characterizing the content of daytime talk shows as “lethal.” These critics acknowledged that some of the 20 nationally syndicated talk shows dealt with serious issues of domestic abuse, drug abuse, and racism in a constructive way that enlightens viewers. But they pointed out that some shows had a circus atmosphere that included shouting matches, fistfights, foul language, and audience members yelling out unqualified advice. As an example of sleaze, they cited examples from The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, which featured girls who were sexually active at the age of 10, and Jerry Springer, who hosted a show about a 17year-old who had four children with her 71-year-old husband, whom she called “Dad” (Hancock, 1995). There are many other examples of people and groups who have tried to influence public awareness of problems with media content and to bring about change in the media industries. These efforts have been more successful in raising public consciousness about these problems than they have been in bringing about changes in programming. This leaves us with the following question: Should we continue to try? The answer, of course, is yes. Let’s see how imaginative you are. Try Exercise 15.2. Be idealistic and dream about how you could make a huge difference. Of course, when we try to enact change in the real world, we need to scale back our expectations. Societal change of this type moves at glacial speed—it takes decades to see change. But remember that a glacier is exerting constant pressure, and change is happening constantly—but we can’t see it happening because it is happening very slowly. The same is true with societal campaigns. But if we are committed and are able to exert constant pressure, we will eventually be able to effect changes.

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Summary Media literacy is a perspective. To achieve this perspective, you need to increase your awareness and control. The exercises in this chapter are designed to help you make an assessment (and continue this practice over time) of your awareness about your own knowledge structures, about how your mind works, and about your ability to apply knowledge of the key elements in the effects process. Media literacy is most clearly diagnosed when we compare people’s patterns of thoughts and feelings to the positions on the learning ladders. Keep these ladders in mind during your exposures. Once you develop your own strategy for increasing media literacy, you may want to help others do the same. Think about all the day-to-day informal things you can do to help the people around you understand the media better. If you get more involved in this task, then think about developing formal interventions and doing things to influence public education as well as society. This book is now ending. What kind of an effect have you let it have on you? Did you read it critically by analyzing the information and arguments? Did you compare and contrast the points made here with your existing knowledge structures? Did you evaluate my arguments and positions, agreeing with some and disagreeing with others? Did you synthesize the information you found most useful into your own perspective on media literacy and your own set of techniques to achieve that perspective? If you answered yes to these questions, then you have reacted well cognitively to the book. The key to a high-quality cognitive reaction is not whether you agree with me and accept all this information. Instead, the key is that your mind was continually active as you read the book. Did you have some strong emotional reactions while reading the book? For example, did you get upset with some of the information or arguments? Do you feel challenged and motivated to become more media literate? If you answered yes to these questions, then you have reacted well emotionally to the book. The key to a highquality emotional reaction is not whether you have positive feelings about me or about the book. Instead, the key is that you were able to let your emotions become engaged by hating parts of the book and loving others. Did you take moral positions throughout the book? For example, did you develop a sense of what is right with our culture (and what is wrong) because of the media? Did you make a strong commitment to yourself to do certain things to help yourself and others? If you answered yes to these questions, then you have reacted well morally to the book. The key to a high-quality moral reaction is not whether you agree with my positions. Instead, the key is that you are able to perceive a sense of right and wrong about certain conditions and to take a stand for yourself. Finally, were you aware of aesthetic reactions to the book? Were there times when you appreciated the way I structured a chapter or the way I illuminated an important point? Did you find certain examples useful and creative? Did you feel that certain sections could have been written better? If you were able to answer these questions, then you were sensitive to the aesthetic features of the book. I, of course, hope that your aesthetic reactions were favorable. But whether favorable or not, the more aesthetic reactions you had and the more 595

aesthetic awareness you exercised, the better for your media literacy development. Most important, I hope you can see that you have achieved a significant degree of media literacy. You have many useful knowledge structures and many useful skills. As you continue developing these knowledge structures and skills, remember to be aware of what you are doing and stay in control of your progress. And make it fun! Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Media Literacy Clearinghouse (http://www.frankwbaker.com/state_lit.htm) This website offers a comprehensive list of educational standards that relate to elements of media literacy for all 50 states in the United States.

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Keeping Up to Date There is a good deal of information about media literacy that is made available by various groups on their websites. While some of this information is offered for sale in the form of books, reports, CDs, and DVDs for a nominal price, a lot of this material is available for free. I recommend the following websites for media literacy organizations: Center for Media Literacy http://www.medialit.org Children Now http://www.childrennow.org Citizens for Media Literacy http://main.nc.us/cml Media Education Lab http://mediaeducationlab.com Media Watch http://www.mediawatch.com National Association for Media Literacy Education http://namle.net Parents’ Choice http://www.parents-choice.org There are also groups providing information about advertising (Adbusters and Children’s Advertising Review Unit), news (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), and movie and television ratings (Motion Picture Association of America and TV Parental Guidelines).

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Exercise 15.1

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Awareness of Your Knowledge Structures Below is a list of chapters in this book. Each one presents a knowledge structure on its topic. 1. For each chapter in the book, try to recall the structure of the content. a. Can you remember the key idea of that chapter? Can you remember major ideas or sections of the chapter? b. Then go back to the first page of that chapter and check your recall. If you remembered the key idea, give yourself 1 point, and give yourself another point for your recall of each major idea (the major points in the outline). Thus, your score should be somewhere between 0 and 5 for that chapter. c. Enter your score in the left column, which is labeled “Book.” d. Do the same procedure for each of the chapters listed below.

2. Next, think about the additional reading you undertook after studying each chapter. a. For each book or article you read from the “Further Reading” list or from the reference list, give yourself 2 points. b. For each additional book you have read relevant to the topic since studying the chapter, give yourself 1 point. c. For each significant experience you have had concerning that topic since studying the chapter, give yourself 1 point. (A significant experience is an extended conversation you had with someone on the topic of the chapter, consciously trying to apply the principles in that chapter, etc.)

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d. Record your point totals for each chapter in the column labeled “Ad Exp” for Additional Experiences. 3. Look at the pattern of numbers across the chapters. What does this tell you about the state of your current knowledge structures? a. Look down the “Book” column. If you have mostly 4s and 5s, you have a very strong set of knowledge structures. If you have mostly 3s, you have a good beginning set of knowledge structures. If you have some zeros, you need to go back and reorient yourself to the structure of information in those chapters. Remember that having strong knowledge structures does not necessarily mean you have a great deal of knowledge on that topic, but it does mean that you are aware of the main ideas, and this will help you acquire additional knowledge much more efficiently. b. Look down the “Ad Exp” column. If you have 3s or above, you are showing a strong commitment to extending your knowledge and elaborating your knowledge structures. Look where you have zeros and ask yourself why you were not willing or able to extend your knowledge. c. Look at the total pattern of numbers. Were you stronger on certain chapters than others? It is understandable that you may have more interest in particular topics than others. But remember that balance is important. Be proud of your accomplishments—now build on them to overcome your weaknesses.

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Exercise 15.2

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Fantasizing About Your Societal Strategy Let’s say that next year you win $10 million in the lottery. After you pay your taxes, pay off all of your current debts, and splurge on all sorts of luxuries, you still have $3 million left over. So you decide to do something more worthwhile with your money and your life—you decide to set up a citizen action group that will help people become more media literate and change some of the things in society. Think about techniques as you address the following issues. 1. Goals: What would the goals be for your organization? a. List some interpersonal goals you would want to achieve. b. List some societal goals you would like to achieve. 2. Targets a. To reach those goals set above, which groups would you target for change (see Appendix C, https://study.sagepub.com/potter8e)? List those targets. b. For each target, what specifically would you want them to change? 3. Techniques: How would you stimulate that change? a. What things would you do to get the people in your targets to understand your point of view? b. What things would you do to get the people in your targets to change their behaviors? 4. Barriers: What do you think would be the key barriers that might prevent you from achieving your goals?

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Part VII Confronting the Issues iStock/Vertigo3D

Now that you have read through the 15 instructional chapters, you are ready to apply what you have learned in a broad, systematic way. This section of the book presents you with six controversies about the mass media. See how well you can work through each of these controversies using your strengthening skills of analysis, evaluation, grouping, induction, deduction, synthesis, and abstraction. As context for understanding these controversies, use your four core media literacy knowledge structures—about the media industries, audiences, content, and effects. These six issues chapters give you a chance to continue elaborating your knowledge structures and to continue increasing the strength of your skills. These six issues were selected because each attracts a high degree of public concern and criticism. Each has generated debate over various ways to deal with the problem that underlies the issue.

Issue 1 presents the controversy about the ownership of media businesses. Critics argue that the industry has become too concentrated, with too few companies owning too many media businesses. Are their arguments valid? What is at the root of this controversy? Issue 2 deals with the complex problem of piracy of media messages. Has the digitization of information and the easy sharing of messages on the Internet destroyed the ownership rights of message creators? If so, what motivation do producers have to create new messages when they cannot benefit financially from their work?

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Issue 3 examines various answers to the question: Is there too much money being spent on sports? Issue 4 tackles the persistent controversy over whether there is too much violence in the media and whether this type of content is harming individuals and society. Issue 5 analyzes how we criticize advertising and whether those criticisms are valid and useful. Issue 6 examines the growing concern about privacy and how the new media environment is making it much more difficult for you to protect your privacy. What you don’t know can hurt you.

While each of these six issues has generated considerable debate, rarely have these debates moved beyond a rather superficial level. To date, people who address these issues tend to have polarized positions, so these debates have generated more heat than light. As you read through these issues chapters, try to keep an open mind and understand what people on different sides of the controversy are arguing. Try to view the controversy from as many perspectives as possible. Do not be satisfied with surface arguments. Be rigorous in evaluating the evidence and arguments from all sides of the debate. Dig deep to uncover more layers underlying the controversy. Discuss the issue with your classmates and friends. Each of these six chapters begins with a delineation of the issue to clarify its controversial nature and to outline what is being argued. However, I do not present arguments to lead you to think a certain way. Instead, I give you the raw material to think for yourself. So engage with the issues. If an argument does not sound convincing to you, analyze it to identify the problem. Challenge evidence that is presented. Keep digging through the controversy on your own. Through this process you will be developing your own well-informed opinions.

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Issue 1 Media Ownership

Delineating the Issue Arguments Against Concentration of Ownership of Media Companies Arguments for Concentration of Ownership of Media Companies Evidence of Concentration Trend Toward Concentration Factors Driving the Trend Efficiencies Regulation and Deregulation Evidence of Harm Increase Barriers to Entry Reduced Level of Competition Reduced Number of Public Voices Reduced Range of Content Your Own Informed Opinion Expanding Perspective Reexamining Evidence Thinking About Underlying Values Localism Efficiency Informing Your Opinion Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Applying Media Literacy Skills

Issue: The increasing concentration of media businesses ownership is an undesirable trend leading to harmful effects for the economy and society.

Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, announced he would purchase The Washington Post news organization for $250 million in cash in August 2013. AP Photo/Reed Saxon

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One of the most prevalent criticisms of the mass media concerns their ownership. Critics contend that there has been a trend toward concentration of ownership and that this concentration has been harming the economy and society. This chapter presents an analysis of this issue by first delineating the main arguments of critics and defenders of this trend. Then we examine ownership patterns to determine the extent of the concentration. Next we examine the evidence of harm to see if it supports the claims of the critics. Finally I present some guidelines and exercises to help you develop your own informed opinion on this complex issue.

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Delineating the Issue This issue is driven by critics who are upset that fewer and fewer companies are owning more and more mass media businesses. On the other side of this issue are the large media companies that continue buying additional media businesses each year. Let’s examine the arguments on both sides of this issue.

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Arguments Against Concentration of Ownership of Media Companies Critics who argue against the increasing concentration of ownership of media companies claim that this trend is harming the economy and society. They contend that as fewer owners control more of the mass media, competition is reduced and this harms the economy because these large companies increase the barriers to entry in their markets so that it becomes more difficult for new companies to break into those markets. Critics argue that when a market loses competition and moves toward a monopoly, the products and services offered to consumers degrade while the prices of those products increase. As competition weakens, the incentives to keep quality high and prices low also weaken. Critics also argue that concentration of ownership of media companies is especially troublesome because the product they market is information, which is the lifeblood of a strong society and democratic political system. They fear that when a few people control the flow of information, the range of that information will narrow as the people in power filter out all the information they don’t like.

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Arguments for Concentration of Ownership of Media Companies Defenders of the trend toward concentration take the position that the overall economy is strengthened when individual companies become stronger. Stronger companies have deeper pockets so they can develop better products to meet the needs of many more people. This stimulates more spending as more people buy those products. And in order to produce more products, these companies consume more raw materials and hire more workers.

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Evidence of Concentration In this section we examine the evidence of concentration of media ownership. First we look at the trends in the United States and internationally. Then we examine the reasons why there has been such a strong trend toward concentration of ownership of media businesses.

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Trend Toward Concentration There is a good deal of evidence for patterns of concentration in all American industries, including the mass media. This trend is clearly illustrated by the research of Ben Bagdikian, who began conducting an analysis of media ownership patterns in 1983 and found that the control of the media was essentially in the hands of 50 people—these were the CEOs of the largest media companies that, in combination, controlled more than half of the revenues and audiences in their media markets. Less than a decade later, Bagdikian (1992) found that the number had shrunk to 23 CEOs of corporations that generated most of the revenues from the country’s 25,000 media businesses. Eleven companies controlled most of the daily newspaper circulation. In magazine publishing, a majority of the total annual industry revenues went to two firms. Five firms controlled more than half of all book sales. Five media conglomerates shared 95% of the recordings market, with Warner and CBS alone controlling 65% of that market. Eight Hollywood studios accounted for 89% of U.S. feature film rentals. Three television networks earned more than two thirds of the total U.S. television revenues (Bagdikian, 1992). By 2004, when Bagdikian published the seventh update of his analysis, he claimed that the number of companies that generated most of the mass media revenue in the United States had shrunk to five.

Of the big 5 media conglomerates, Warner and CBS control over 50% of the recordings market. Andres Burton/Getty Images

During the 1980s, there were 2,308 mergers and acquisitions involving media companies for a total of $214 billion (Ozanich & Wirth, 1993). This activity served to consolidate resources in fewer companies. Thus, the CEOs of these newer, larger companies hold a greater concentration of power as they manage those resources. 612

During the 1990s, mergers became more and more popular (see Table Issue 1.1), because they are so profitable. For example, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, which began as a manufacturer of railroad air brakes in Pittsburgh in 1886, decided to change its line of business. By 1995, it had bought one of the major television networks—CBS—for $5.4 billion, then spent another $9 billion buying cable channels and radio stations over the next 2 years. In 1997, it moved its headquarters to New York City and took the name CBS (“CBS Headquarters,” 1997). Then CBS was acquired by Viacom and folded into that conglomerate for a few years, but then Viacom spun CBS Corporation off into a separate company that was still owned by Viacom. Merger activity shows no signs of slowing down; to the contrary, it appears to be increasing. The number of mergers among media-related companies more than doubled from 2011 to 2012, with over 1,350 mergers with a total value of almost $75 billion. However, 90% of these mergers were considered relatively smaller, that is, less than $50 million (“Media M&A Activity,” 2013). Even newer media companies are buying up smaller companies. Facebook continues to grow. After it passed 1 billion users in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s CEO, began acquiring platforms for distributing information, so Facebook bought Instagram ($1 billion), the virtual reality startup Oculus Rift ($2 billion), and the messaging service WhatsApp ($22 billion; Grossman, 2014). Concentration of media ownership is not limited to within the borders of the United States. It is not uncommon for foreign companies to buy or invest in American media companies. In one year, companies from the United Kingdom made 188 deals totaling $23.6 billion to buy U.S. media companies, Japanese companies made 45 transactions for $11.9 billion, Canadian companies made 46 deals for $9.7 billion, French companies made 26 deals for $3.0 billion, and German companies made 27 transactions for $1.2 billion. Also, through the decade of the 1990s, foreign companies were buying American media properties, especially film studios. For example, Pathe, a French-Italian firm, bought MGM and United Artists. Sony, a Japanese electronics manufacturer, bought Columbia Pictures from Coca-Cola. Also, about 13% of all American newspapers are owned by non-American companies (Albarran & Chan-Olmsted, 1998).

Table Issue 1.1 Media Mega-mergers and Acquisitions Table Issue 1.1 Media Mega-mergers and Acquisitions January 1986: Capital Cities Communications Inc. purchases American Broadcasting Company for $3.5 billion to create Capital Cities/ABC Inc. June 1986: General Electric Co. buys RCA Corp., parent company of National Broadcasting Co. and the NBC television network, for $6.4 billion. At the time, the deal was the largest non-oil acquisition in U.S. history. In the same year Capital Cities bought ABC. November 1989: Sony Corp. buys film and television producer Columbia Pictures Entertainment Inc. for $3.4 billion. January 1990: Warner Communications Inc. and Time Inc. complete a $14.1 billion merger, creating

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the world’s biggest media conglomerate at the time. January 1991: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. of Japan buys MCA Inc. for $6.9 billion. September 1993: The New York Times Co. buys Affiliated Publications Inc., parent company of The Boston Globe, for $1.1 billion, the biggest takeover in U.S. newspaper history. July 1994: Viacom Inc. buys Paramount Communications Inc. for $10 billion after winning a bidding war against QVC Inc. to buy the movie, publishing, and sports company. August 1994: Viacom Inc. buys video rental chain Blockbuster Entertainment Corp. for $8 billion. August 1995: Walt Disney Co. acquires Capital Cities/ABC Inc. for $19 billion, making it the largest media company at the time. November 1995: Westinghouse Electric Corp. buys CBS Inc. for $5.4 billion, giving the new company 15 TV stations and 39 radio stations that, combined, give it direct access to one third of the nation’s households. October 1996: Time Warner and Turner Broadcasting System complete a $7.6 billion merger. This becomes the world’s biggest media company, with annual revenues of more than $20 billion. November 1996: Penguin Group, the international publisher, buys Putnam Berkley Group, a U.S. subsidiary of MCA (owned by Seagram Co.) for $336 million. Penguin is strong with backlist books (Arthur Miller, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, E. L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates), and Putnam has a strong front list (Stephen King, Terry McMillan, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell). February 1997: A merger of two radio companies creates Chancellor Media Corp., which takes control over 103 radio stations that generate more than $700 million annually in revenue. The topranked radio group is Infinity Broadcasting ($1.1 billion in revenue annually), which is owned by Westinghouse Electric Corp. January 1998: Compaq Computer Corp. buys Digital Equipment Corp. for $9.6 billion. This makes Compaq one of the three largest computer companies in the world in terms of sales. This is the biggest buyout in the history of the computer industry to that point. September 1999: Viacom announces a merger with CBS Television Network for $38 billion, making it the biggest deal between any two media companies. The merger combines film, television, radio, Internet sites, book publishing, and many other businesses. October 1999: Clear Channel Communications Inc. agrees to buy AMFM Inc. for $16.6 billion in stock, creating the nation’s largest radio company.

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January 2000: America Online Inc. agrees to buy Time Warner Inc. in a $164 billion merger agreement, the largest ever combination in the media industry. January 2000: Time Warner Inc. (record labels of Atlantic, Elektra, and Warner Brothers) and Britain’s EMI Group (record labels of Virgin, Priority, and Capitol) agree to merge their music businesses, thus creating the world’s biggest music company, with combined annual revenues of $8 billion. The new firm represents 2,500 musicians. December 2005: Paramount Pictures agrees to buy independent film studio DreamWorks SKG Inc. for $1.6 billion. The agreement does not include DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. January 2006: Walt Disney announces that it will buy Pixar, the successful animation studio majority owned by Apple’s Steve Jobs, for $7.4 billion. September 2006: Vivendi’s Universal Music agrees to acquire BMG Music Publishing in a $2 billion deal. The acquisition makes Universal’s music publishing holdings the largest in the world. October 2006: Google, the Internet’s leading search engine, announces that it is buying popular online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion. April 2007: Google buys DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion, thus creating the largest repository of details about people’s behavior online. October 2007: NBCUniversal pays $925 million to buy cable network Oxygen, which was started by Oprah Winfrey and others in 1998. September 2009: Walt Disney acquires Marvel comics for $4 billion. January 2011: The Federal Communications Commission approves Comcast’s takeover of a majority share of NBCUniversal from General Electric. January 2011: Comcast buys controlling interest (51%) in NBCUniversal for $30 billion. March 2011: AT&T bids $39 billion to buy T-Mobile from Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, thus adding 34 million customers to its existing base of 96 million and making it even larger than Verizon Wireless. May 2011: Microsoft buys Skype (software that allows users to make voice and video calls over the Internet) for $8.5 billion. September 2013: A. C. Nielsen acquires Arbitron. Sources: Arnold (2011); Associated Press (2000); Chmielewski & Fritz (2009); Common Cause (2014); Fabrikant (1995); Greimel (2000); Hofmeister (1997a, 1997b); Holstein (1999); Lorimer (1994); Lyall (1996); McDonald (2000); “Media M&A Activity” (2013);

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Menn (2007).

An example of how American companies attract foreign investors is Rupert Murdoch, an Australian who owns newspapers in most of the major cities in Australia along with the country’s only national daily, television stations, publishing houses, record companies, and a major airline. He went to Great Britain and bought the London Times, two sex and scandal sheets with a combined circulation of more than 8 million, a string of magazines, a string of provincial newspapers, and companies for manufacturing paper, printing, and distributing newsprint. He came to the United States and bought the New York Post, New York Magazine, Village Voice, Chicago-Sun Times, two other daily newspapers, and 17 suburban weeklies. He has also bought Metromedia’s seven television stations in New York, Boston, and other major cities, giving him access to 21% of the total television audience. Recently, Murdoch’s Australian firm, News Corp., bought the remaining 18% of its U.S. Fox Entertainment Group Inc. unit, giving it full ownership of 20th Century Fox film studios and the Fox network and channels. His empire now generates $33 billion a year. Globalization has been working both ways. American companies market their entertainment services worldwide. For example, by 1993, MTV was in cable systems in more than 71 countries, reaching more than 500 million people (Barber, 1995). By 1995, ESPN was offering programming to 150 countries in 18 languages. Media economist Alan Albarran (2002) explains that markets for media messages have been saturated in the United States, so for American media companies to open up even more revenue streams and to increase the flow of income even more, they need to market their messages in other countries.

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Factors Driving the Trend There are two salient factors that can be seen as responsible for the trend toward more concentration of ownership of media businesses. They are the factors of efficiencies and deregulation.

Efficiencies Larger companies are able to operate more efficiently than smaller companies because of economies of scope and scale (recall these ideas from Chapter 7). They achieve these efficiencies through three types of mergers and acquisitions. First, there is the horizontal merger. This is when one media company buys another media company of the same type. An example is a newspaper chain buying another newspaper. This pattern was very popular during the 1980s, when newspapers were being gobbled up by chains at the rate of 50 to 60 per year. Thus newspaper chains share in the costs of covering national and international news over many newspapers. Also, when they buy materials (such as paper and ink) in very large quantities they can demand a lower wholesale price. Second, there is the vertical merger. This is when one media company buys suppliers and/or distributors to create integration in the production and distribution of messages. An example is a book publisher buying a paper supply company (to help with production) and some bookstores (to help with distribution). Another example is Viacom, which owned television stations in Philadelphia, Boston, Dallas, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Miami. It added significant vertical integration through its ownership of Paramount Pictures, thus allowing Viacom to control the production and distribution of television programs to the television networks (CBS or UPN) and through the Blockbuster stores that it also owned at the time. In addition, it could promote those shows’ soundtracks on MTV and VH1 and do book tie-ins through Simon & Schuster—all of which were also owned by Viacom. Third, there is the conglomerate merger. This is when a media company buys a combination of other media companies and/or companies in a non-media business. An example is a film studio that buys a newspaper, several radio stations, a talent agency, and a string of restaurants. Conglomerates can better survive hard times when one sector of the economy is bad because they own businesses in other sectors that are likely to be doing well at that time. Therefore conglomerates can spread their resources around among all their businesses to help those businesses that happen to be struggling at any given time.

Regulation and Deregulation In the early 1900s, the federal government became concerned over the degree of concentration in particular American industries. The government began monitoring the degree of concentration in American industries and forced very large companies (such as Standard Oil, American Tobacco, and AT&T) to split up when they had become too large and were becoming monopolies. Within the mass media industries, the federal government instituted policies to try to encourage diversity of ownership and prevent monopolies. For example, when the radio industry was forming in the 1920s, the 617

federal government became involved in controlling who was awarded a radio broadcasting license. Radio was different from all the other media industries at the time because radio required the use of the electromagnetic spectrum to send out (broadcast) its wireless signal. While an unlimited number of newspapers, magazines, and film theaters could exist in a given location, the same was not possible for radio. If you want to broadcast a radio or television signal, you must send your signal out on a frequency. If you and I wanted to use the same frequency to broadcast our different signals, then our signals would interfere with each other, and radio listeners would receive a garbled signal. Because there were only a limited number of frequencies made available for radio broadcasting on the electromagnetic spectrum, someone had to decide who got to use which frequencies. The federal government decided that it was the one to make the assignment of radio broadcasting frequencies, reasoning that the electromagnetic spectrum belonged to all Americans much like a national park or any other resource that should be shared by all citizens.

Federal Communication Chairman Tom Wheeler delivers opening remarks at the start of the Open Internet roundtable discussion, September 2014. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

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In the early days of radio broadcasting, the federal government decided to require individuals to apply for a broadcast frequency with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC was immediately flooded with applications for AM radio frequencies. But the AM band on the electromagnetic spectrum allowed for only about 117 broadcast frequencies. The FCC could have chosen 117 applicants and awarded each of them their own frequency. This would have led to 117 AM radio stations, with each using its frequency to broadcast its signal to the entire country. But that is not what the FCC did. Instead, the FCC divided the country into many local market areas and awarded some frequencies to each market. Also, each radio station was limited in the amount of power it could use to broadcast its signal so that the signals would not go beyond their local markets. This allowed the FCC to assign the same frequency to many different markets without having to worry about signals interfering with one another. The FCC chose this alternative

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because it wanted to spread the limited resource of broadcast frequencies around to as many different people as possible. By keeping ownership of radio licenses at the local level, the FCC believed it was setting up a system whereby the stations would be operated in the best interests of their local communities. Private businesses were allowed to broadcast on these frequencies, provided they operate “in the public interest, convenience, and necessity.” The federal government was able to regulate radio because of spectrum scarcity. When television came along in the 1940s, the FCC used the same procedure of allocating broadcasting licenses to local TV stations in the 215 local markets across the United States. Now we have more than 6,800 broadcast television stations and 13,000 radio stations. When the government felt that a media industry was too concentrated, it took steps to force those companies to sell off some of their vertically integrated businesses. For example, in the 1940s, the government felt the film industry was too concentrated, with a small number of film studios controlling film production, distribution, and exhibition. Under this pressure, the film studios sold off their theaters, which removed them from the exhibition sector, thus allowing theaters to compete for films. Another example is AT&T, which made electronic components, produced telecommunication equipment, and sold phone service, so the federal government in the 1970s began taking steps to break up the company to allow for more competition (Samuelson, 2006). Then in the 1980s, the federal government began deregulating all industries, including the media industries. Up until the 1980s, the FCC had been preventing broadcasting monopolies from developing by limiting the number of stations any one company could own to 7 AM, 7 FM, and 7 TV stations in total, with no two being in the same market. In the 1980s, the rules were relaxed to 12 AM, 12 FM, and 12 TV stations. Then the Telecommunications Act of 1996 further relaxed the limits to a significant extent in the guise of opening up competition. Also, the ban was lifted prohibiting a company from owning a TV and radio station in the same market. This deregulation triggered many mergers among media companies. During the 1990s, there was more than a total of $300 billion worth of major media deals in which companies bought multiple television and radio stations (Croteau & Hoynes, 2001). Since that time the FCC has periodically held public hearings and continued to move in the direction of allowing more concentration of ownership. Now a single company can own as many television stations as it wants as long at the coverage of that set of stations does not exceed 39.5% of viewers; it can also own more than one television station in a TV market. As for radio, a company can own as many stations as it wants, including three to eight stations within a single radio market depending on the size of that market. Now one company—Clear Channel—owns more than 200 radio stations in the United States without violating the current “restrictions” on ownership. Over time, broadcasters have chipped away at these regulations. Broadcasters have argued successfully that they were being unfairly limited in their rights to own multiple businesses. They pointed out that there were no ownership limits for magazines, book publishers, newspapers, and Internet sites; also, the previous limits on film studios had been relaxed. Consumer groups, who argued against relaxing the ownership rules, could present no convincing evidence that multiple ownership of broadcasting businesses caused harm to the public. 620

In contrast, broadcasters showed that when businesses are consolidated, they are more efficient and this efficiency benefits consumers. Cable operators have also been fighting to have limits relaxed so that they can expand. In 2009 the FCC limited cable systems from servicing more than 30% of the U.S. population. Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company at the time with almost 25% of the nation’s cable homes as subscribers, sued the FCC to raise its limit and won in a federal court of appeals, which reasoned that the restriction must be lifted to reflect the changing realities of the dynamic video marketplace where consumers have lots of alternatives to cable and therefore cable should not be regarded as a monopoly (Flint, 2009). In recent decades, the trend to consolidate has grown stronger than the government’s impulse to regulate. For example, in 1996, Congress passed the Telecommunications Act and largely removed the last remaining limitations to consolidation. In that year alone, there was $25 billion in merger activity in the broadcasting industry and another $23 billion in the cable industry (C. Jensen, 1997). Since 1996, the FCC has been less concerned with preventing monopolies within the United States and more concerned with allowing American companies to grow significantly stronger to compete and dominate in the world market (Albarran & ChanOlmsted, 1998). Former FCC Chairman William Kennard said that he was merely recognizing the realities of globalization and new technologies. One feature of the 1996 deregulation eliminated the longstanding restriction against allowing one company to own two television stations in the same market. It had long been believed that broadcast television stations were far too precious a local resource to allow one company to own more than one in a given television market. Almost all local markets had very few broadcast stations (typically three to five broadcast television stations), so it was important to have as many owners as possible to ensure a diversity of voices within that small number of stations in a market. However, over time, as greater numbers of people subscribed to cable television services, regulators came to believe that people in all local communities had access to many different voices, and therefore the limits on broadcast station ownership were no longer important.

Table ISSUE 1.2 Indicators of Concentration in Segments of the Mass Media Table ISSUE 1.2 Indicators of Concentration in Segments of the Mass Media CR4* CR8** Mass Medium 98

99

Recording industry

78

99

Motion pictures

77

91

Magazine

77

88

Radio

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53

80

Cable and satellite television

48

69

Daily newspapers

30

50

Book

NA

NA

Broadcast television

NA

NA

Internet

* CR4 = Concentration ratio of top 4 firms: percentage of total revenues of the major four players in the industry. ** CR8 = Concentration ratio of top 8 firms: percentage of total revenues of the major eight players in the industry. Source: Albarran (2002).

The media industries have been moving steadily toward greater concentration both within each industry and especially across media industries. Critics fear that this trend has already put too much power into the hands of a very few people. For example, Table Issue 1.2 shows that the,top eight firms in the recording and motion picture industries account for virtually all the revenue in those industries. Even in the book industry, which is fairly unconcentrated relative to the other media industries, the top eight companies account for half of all book revenue. Table ISSUE 1.3 Most Powerful Media Companies Operating in the United States

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Sources: Albarran (2002); M. R. Baker, Falk, & Manners (2000); Bettig & Hall (2003); Chmielewski & Fritz (2009); Croteau & Hoynes (2001); Flanigan (2003); Free Press (2009–2015); Polman (2003); Verrier & James (2003); Wikipedia (2015a, 2015b, 2015d, 2015e, 2015g, 2015h, 2015i, 2015j).

Furthermore, the figures in Table Issue 1.2, which reveal a high degree of concentration, are likely to underestimate the degree of concentration in the media industries because they do not take into consideration cross-ownership patterns; that is, they do not account for a firm owning and controlling revenue in several mass media industries at once. To see how much cross-ownership there is, look at what the top seven media conglomerates each control (see Table Issue 1.3).

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Evidence of Harm The criticism about concentration of media ownership requires the critics to present evidence of harm. While there is ample evidence of the trend toward concentration, there is less evidence that this concentration results in harm. Let’s examine those arguments for harm in four areas: increased barriers to entry, reduced level of competition, reduced number of public voices, and reduced range of content.

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Increased Barriers to Entry Has the trend toward concentration increased the barriers to entry so that an individual can no longer create a media business? The answer to this question depends on the media business. Entry into the radio and television broadcasting businesses has always been very high. But entry into the newspaper, magazine, book publishing, recording, and Internet businesses has been low and there is no evidence that concentration of ownership has increased the barriers to enter these markets. It is also important to remember that during the last three decades when the trend toward concentration of ownership of media businesses has been so strong, there has also been the rise of the Internet, which has enabled all kinds of people to create their own newspapers and magazines in the form of blogs. It is now far easier to produce videos and attract an audience for them on platforms such as YouTube. And aspiring recording artists and book authors have much more opportunity to make their messages available without having to get signed to a recording studio or book publisher. And the companies that make the platforms to share all kinds of media messages are all relatively new and have become very prosperous (e.g., Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, YouTube). Meanwhile the traditional media companies find that their newspaper, magazine, radio, and broadcast TV businesses are struggling to adapt to the new media environment due to competition from new companies that offer better messages at lower—and sometimes free—cost to consumers.

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Reduced Level of Competition Although there is a clear trend toward concentration of ownership, this by itself has not eliminated competition. The big conglomerates still compete against one another and now they have to compete against many new Internet companies. There is little evidence of vertical integration among companies providing computer services and hardware. “The computer industry is hugely splintered. Some firms sell components (Intel, AMD); some, software (Microsoft, SAP); some, services (IBM, EDS); some, hardware (Dell, Apple). There’s overlap, but not much” (Samuelson, 2006, p. 45). Also, the Internet is dominated by newer companies, such as Google, Facebook, and eBay, not the older established companies. This, however, could change as people and companies attempt to consolidate the existing Internet and new tech companies. For example, Barry Diller is a media mogul who ran Paramount Pictures then Fox TV in the 1970s to the 1980s then in the mid-1990s began spending more than $20 billion assembling a broad portfolio of diverse Web companies. Then he spent $1.7 billion to buy the fourth-place search firm (Ask.com) and will use it to tie together services from his other companies such as Citysearch, Ticketmaster, Evite, ServiceMagic.com (booking local services such as plumbers), and ReserveAmerica.com (campground reservations). So the 40 million monthly users of Ask.com will be referred to other Diller companies when they search for particular services (Stone, 2006).

Social media platforms allow users to express their opinions. Singer Katy Perry has 66 million followers on Twitter. Kevin Mazur/WireImage/Getty Images

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Reduced Number of Public Voices Critics argue that as concentration increases, the individual’s access to the media is reduced. Access in this sense means the ability to get your particular point of view heard through someone else’s media property. This is still relatively easy to do at the local level, such as with newspapers and small-circulation magazines. Most still print letters to the editors, and most buy articles from people with little journalistic experience. Also, most markets have call-in radio programs where you can get your voice heard. In contrast, national media properties, such as Time magazine or a TV or cable network, require a great deal of skill and good connections to get your voice heard because the competition to use those channels is so strong. Many critics argue that the media industries lose diversity of voices when the industries become more concentrated. Fewer voices should mean fewer opinions getting aired. However, Einstein (2004) points out that “in study after study, scholars have determined that there is no proven causality between media ownership and programming content” (p. vii). Einstein argues that the reduction in the number of program choices is due not to consolidation but to television’s reliance on advertising as its primary source of revenue. Because of this reliance, there are severe limits on content, which include time limits for length of program, the “lowest common denominator” mentality, and an avoidance of controversy. In an analysis of the TV industry over the past four decades, Einstein reveals that as the industry became more concentrated, programming became more diverse. She says that diversity was at its peak in the late 1960s and then declined when the FCC imposed regulations about sharing programs through syndication. Then, when those syndication rules were relaxed and broadcasters could keep the programs they produced to themselves, diversity increased sharply. The claim that the number of voices heard in the media has been narrowing due to the trend in concentration of ownership of the mass media businesses appears completely wrong when we consider the Internet. Platforms like Twitter have given absolutely everyone a voice. Anyone can now express any opinion at any time. Celebrities like Katy Perry have 66 million followers on Twitter, which is 11 million more than the president of the United States. Compare this to the highest rated TV show, which has 23 million viewers, and the Wall Street Journal, which is the largest circulation newspaper, with 2.3 million readers. Twitter also has dozens of non-celebrities who have more than a million followers on Twitter, and the average Twitter user has 208 followers (Smith, 2015).

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Reduced Range of Content Critics argue that as competition among media companies decreases, the content of messages changes in a negative way. They claim that as companies grow larger, their content decreases in quality and the messages are more likely to harm the public. Has the quality of the media products declined? There is no evidence that it has. For example, research has not found that when a radio station is bought by a conglomerate the content degrades. Lacy and Riffe (1994) looked at the news content of radio stations and compared group ownership effects. They found that group ownership had no impact on the financial commitment or the local and staff emphasis of news coverage. Also, a study done on newspaper content could find no change in content after a newspaper was bought by a chain (e.g., see Picard, Winter, McCombs, & Lacy, 1988). No evidence of change was found with the stories, the range of opinions on the editorial page, or the proportion of the newspaper displaying news. Crider (2012) conducted a content analysis of news stories on radio station websites to determine the amount of local news, which was covered by journalists at the local stations, and syndicated content, which was imported from other news agencies. While it was found that local programming was less prevalent on smaller market stations, there was no relationship between large corporate ownership and diminished local programming. Has the trend toward concentration of ownership led to an increase in harmful content? This has not yet been tested directly, but there is indirect evidence that concentration of ownership in the radio industry is associated with an increase in negative speech and obscenity. One research study found that as big broadcasters buy more radio stations, shock-jock programming often replaces local content. From 2000 to 2003, the nation’s four largest radio companies racked up 96% of the fines handed out by the FCC, although their stations accounted for only about half the country’s listening audience (Hofmeister, 2005b).

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Your Own Informed Opinion This is an issue about which you likely have some sort of an opinion. But to construct an informed opinion, you need to build it up from a deeper analysis of the situation. In this section, I lay out some steps for constructing an informed opinion on this topic. We begin by expanding your perspective on ownership then use this perspective to gather more evidence and reexamine previous evidence of harm. Next, we confront the idea that your opinion may be based on fundamental values.

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Expanding Perspective As you have seen above, the criticism of media ownership links ownership with control but this linkage is faulty as you will see in this analysis of ownership. If the big media conglomerates were each owned by one individual, then ownership and control would be the same thing. But this is not the case. While the media conglomerates own many media businesses, the media conglomerates themselves have a diversity of ownership; that is, none of these conglomerates is owned by one person or even a small number of powerful people. All of these large conglomerates are owned by millions of people—these are the shareholders of these publically traded companies. For example, the ownership of Disney is spread out over 1.7 billion shares of stock that are openly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Only 35% of these shares are owned by individuals; the other 65% of shares are owned by institutions such as retirement funds, governments, insurance companies, and mutual funds, which are themselves owned by millions of people. There are 1,529 of these institutions that own shares of Disney, and none of these institutions owns as much as 5% of the company. As for individuals, Robert Iger, president of Disney, owns about 1.4 million shares, which is 0.08% of the company, thus if he were to increase his number of shares by 12 times, he still would not own as much as 1% of the company. While ownership gives you some control over a company, the ownership stake of each individual and each entity is so small that it is foolhardy to equate ownership with control. No single person or entity owns very much of any of these large media conglomerates. Stockholders get to vote for members of the company’s board of directors, who in turn get to appoint the people who manage the company and make the business decisions. The power for controlling a company is much more concentrated in the managers than in the individual shareholders. But even among a company’s top managers, their power is dispersed across their large staffs of advisers, analysts, as well as their subordinate managers who make the day-to-day decisions required to run the individual media businesses and departments. Thus the power to control the company is spread out over hundreds of individuals who are much less concerned with limiting voices or a range of media messages than they are with generating revenue. Managers have an economic responsibility to increase the wealth of the millions of owners of the company, and this requires them to increase profits so this money can be passed along to the owners either in the form of dividends on their shares of stock or by reinvesting in the company so that the value of the shares increases. Who benefits from the increasing profits? The answer is that millions of shareholders as well as millions of other people who depend on retirement benefits, insurance benefits, and services from governments.

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Reexamining Evidence Now that you have this expanded perspective on media ownership and who benefits from conglomeration, let’s reexamine the evidence of harm. Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 1.1 directs you to look again at the evidence for harm laid out previously in this chapter. But now think of harm not in terms of a general population but in terms of a very large part of the population that owns these companies. Next, look carefully at your local market. Work through Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 1.2 to make a judgment about the degree of concentration in your local market. First, gather information by seeing what you can find on the websites of the companies that operate media businesses in your local area. The websites should provide you will enough information to get started but you will likely have to develop a search strategy to move beyond these websites to get good answers to all the question in the exercise. After you have gathered this information, look for patterns across the media business.

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Thinking About Underlying Values When we dig deep into this issue of concentration of ownership of media businesses and get down to the bedrock, we can see that the debate rests on people’s fundamental values, especially the values of localism and efficiency. Localism is the belief that society is better when power is spread out among as many people as possible and when governments preserve the differences across individuals and protect forums of information so that all voices can be heard. In contrast, efficiency is the belief that the economy works better when all resources are used most effectively and thus requires the elimination of waste from unnecessary duplication. Both of these values are very American. They can be seen clashing in the way the founding fathers of this country wrote the Constitution. They can also be seen clashing in the way the government has viewed mass media businesses. And they can be seen clashing in our everyday lives. At times, we as consumers favor localism when we want a marketplace with as many voices as possible so we have lots of choices about how to satisfy their various needs for information and entertainment. But at other times, we favor concentration when we want a marketplace with easily available standard products for as low a price as possible.

Localism Localism is a populist value. It is exhibited by the belief that control of important institutions should be spread out as much as possible so that many people share the power. Thus a considerable amount of power should exist at the local level, which is closest to individuals. It is based on the ideal that each person is a rational being, so each person should have an equal say in the political and economic arenas. This maximizes the freedom of each person. It also empowers all people by keeping them involved in as many important decisions as possible. Localism is a part of the American tradition. The founding fathers of the United States followed this value when creating a democratic form of government rather than a more efficient totalitarian one (such as a monarchy) at the national level. They believed that the individual is more important than are institutions or governments. When government is necessary, it should be decentralized so as to be closer to the people’s needs and more accountable to them, so they dispersed power by restricting the federal government from some areas and left decisions in these areas up to state and local governments. Thus, political power was structured so that it was spread out over many layers. America now has 18,000 municipalities and 17,000 townships. Within these, there are 500,000 local governmental units directly elected by local residents, and 170,000 of them have the power to impose taxes. Over time, the American public has retained its value for dispersion of power and has continued to support the overlapping, multilayered structure of government, even if it often seems inefficient.

Efficiency Straining against this value of localism is a very strong trend toward concentration, consolidation, and centralization. Although almost every media company began as a small, local operation, they take on the

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characteristics of big business as they grow. Big businesses are complex organizations that market many different products and services but do so under a strong centralized system to achieve a more efficient operation. Big businesses grow by claiming a larger share of the markets in which they compete. They accomplish this by acquiring control of more resources, and this often leads to buying—or at least investing in —other companies. General industry-wide trends show that fewer and fewer people control more and more of the media. And this trend will probably continue as the cost of buying and operating a media voice keeps going up and as entry into the industry becomes more difficult. Today, a person needs a great deal of money and expertise to attempt to buy a business in one of the established media industries. Because of this, only companies that already own media businesses are successful in acquiring new businesses. Entrepreneurs can still start a media business in the magazine, book publishing, and Internet industries, but those businesses begin as very small enterprises. Either those small companies go out of business quickly, or they grow successful and are usually bought by one of the big media conglomerates. As media companies grow larger and more centralized, there is a danger that they will narrow the range of voices that will get heard. For example, if you send a letter to the editor of a newspaper with a circulation of 1,000, there is a good chance that your letter will get published. But if you send that same letter to a newspaper with a circulation of 1 million, your chance of being published is much smaller. Thus, the larger and more powerful the media company is, the less access you have for making a contribution to its messages or influencing the way it makes decisions. Larger companies must filter out more requests, and in this filtering-out process, there is an increased probability that some types of voices will not get heard at all.

As media conglomerates grow, fewer people exercise more control over more of the media. iStock/OJO_Images

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It is important for you to realize that there are two sides to this issue; that is, both sides have advantages and disadvantages. When you understand the arguments on each side of an issue, you are in a better position to create your own opinion in an informed manner.

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Informing Your Opinion By now you should have a better informed opinion about the ownership of the mass media businesses. However, this is an issue that is likely to keep changing as traditional media struggle to compete with newer media and as governments (both in the United States and around the world) struggle to figure out what the actual economic and social harms of concentration of ownership among conglomerates are and balance them against the benefits then decide whether to regulate or deregulate those conglomerates. This is a complex issue and one that is in constant change. As you move into the future, try to keep an open mind and continually view the controversy from multiple points of view. Do not accept arguments on face value, but demand credible evidence to support those arguments. Keep informing your opinion. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Bagdikian, B. H. (2004). The new media monopoly. Boston, MA: Beacon. (299 pages with endnotes and index) Since 1983, Bagdikian has been conducting an economic analysis of the media industries to track the degree of concentration. With each new edition, the number of powerful companies shrinks as their media (as well as non-media) holdings dramatically grow. This book is a must-read for anyone concerned about how much power is being concentrated in the hands of a few CEOs of media holding companies. Bettig, R. V., & Hall, J. L. (2003). Big media, big money: Cultural texts and political economies. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. (181 pages with bibliography and references) In this book, two professors from Penn State University argue that the media have been unfettered in their drive for greater profits and control over constructing meaning in our culture. They present a great deal of detail in support of this thesis in their six chapters. The authors demonstrate that the result of this media consolidation is that a few very powerful companies are becoming even more invasive in our lives and are successfully supplanting family, friend, religion, and education as the controlling source of constructing meaning. Downing, J. D. H. (2011). Media ownership, concentration, and control: The evolution of debate. In J. Wasko, G. Murdock, & H. Sousa (Eds.), The handbook of political economy of communications (pp. 140–168). Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. The author of this book chapter is an academic who does a good job of laying out the main arguments advanced over the years for the concern over growing concentration of ownership of the mass media. His tone is purely descriptive; that is, he avoids taking sides or making his own arguments about this controversy. Einstein, M. (2004). Media diversity: Economics, ownership, and the FCC. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. (249 pages, including references, appendices, and indexes) The author examines the issue of whether the consolidation in the media industries has led to a lessening of diversity. This book offers strong historical and economic perspectives on the issue. She concludes that despite a clear consolidation of ownership of media properties and the narrowing in the number of people making decisions about media content, there is even more diversity in messages now than there was four decades ago. Maney, K. (1995). Megamedia shakeout: The inside story of the leaders and the losers in the exploding communications industry. New York, NY: John Wiley. (358 pages, including index) This is a well-written description of the major players in the technologies landscape in the mid-1990s. There are lots of anecdotes and stories about what has been happening in the telephone, cable, computer, wireless, and entertainment industries. The book is full of facts and personal descriptions of the personalities involved. However, things are happening so fast in these industries, with new rollouts and buyouts, that the book is likely out of date.

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McChesney, R. W., Newman, R., & Scott, B. (Eds.). (2005). The future of media: Resistance and reform in the 21st century. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press. (376 pages with index) This edited volume of 19 chapters plus an introduction was written by scholars who have been very concerned about the conglomeration of American media and the role of the FCC in not only allowing it to occur but in actually encouraging it. The authors document the increasing level of concentration in ownership of media properties by fewer and fewer companies and argue that this trend is harmful for consumers and citizens.

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Keeping Up To Date Columbia Journalism Review (http://www.cjr.org/resources) This website allows you to check all the media holdings of many major conglomerates. Vault (http://www.vault.com) This is a website that provides lots of useful information about various industries; particularly relevant to media literacy are the industries of publishing, newspapers, Internet and new media, music, broadcast and cable, advertising, and public relations.

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Applying Media Literacy Skills

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Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 1.1

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Confronting the Issue of Concentration of Media Ownership 1. Analysis: Digging deeper into the issue a. Can you think of additional reasons (beyond what was presented in this chapter) that add to the criticism for why the trend toward greater concentration of ownership is harmful? Can you find evidence to support these additional reasons? b. Can you think of additional reasons (beyond what was presented in this chapter) for why the trend toward greater concentration of ownership is something positive? Can you find evidence to support these additional reasons? c. Can you think of a bedrock value beyond localism or concentration that could be used as a perspective from which to view this issue? 2. Evaluation: Making judgments about the validity of the arguments a. Given the arguments presented in this chapter, which have the most valid evidence to support them? b. Which of the arguments have faulty support? For these, can you find strong evidence? Or should these arguments be rejected altogether? 3. Induction: Looking for patterns in the evidence a. Look for patterns (of support or faulty reasoning) across arguments. b. When you see a pattern, think about how you would continue to test it. What kinds of evidence would you need to see in order to increase your belief that those patterns really existed and were continuing into the future? 4. Synthesis: Constructing your informed opinion a. Which arguments of the defenders of the trend toward media ownership concentration are most valid and compelling? b. Which arguments of critics do you find the most valid and compelling? c. Can you think of a way to incorporate the arguments you identified in a and b into a single, well-integrated position that recognizes the value of both sides? 5. Abstracting: Expressing your position succinctly In 200 words or less, can you express your informed opinion clearly and support it with compelling arguments?

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Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 1.2

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Assessing the Concentration of Media Ownership in Your Local Market 1. How many movie screens are there in your market? a. How many theaters control those screens? b. Are the theaters owned by chains? If so, how many chains control the total set of screens? 2. How many radio stations are there in your market? a. How many are group owned? b. How many of the stations are owned by companies that also own other media businesses in your market? 3. How many broadcast television stations are there in your market? a. How many are group owned? b. How many of the stations are owned by companies that also own other media businesses in your market? 4. Is your local newspaper owned by a chain? If so, does it own other media businesses in your market? 5. Are there any magazines published in your market and distributed only in your market? If so, does the controlling company also own other media businesses? 6. What is the name of the company that provides your market with cable TV service? Is that cable company a multiple system operator? 7. In total, how many different media outlets (voices) are there in your market? How many individuals or companies control these voices? 8. If you wanted to express yourself through the media in your market, how hard do you think it would be to gain access to one of these outlets? a. For example, assume that you wanted to criticize some new governmental regulation or tax policy in your local area. Which outlet would be most likely to give you space or time to speak out? b. Which outlet(s) do you think would be the hardest or impossible? 9. Given your answers to the questions above, how concentrated do you think your market is? Do you think it is more or less concentrated than the national market for mass media? 10. What are the harms to the local economy and society due to the degree of local concentration of media? 11. Given your answers to all the questions above, do you think the outlets in your local market are under the control of too few individuals?

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Issue 2 Media Piracy

Delineating the Issue Commercial Products Amorphous Infobits Problems Determining a Message Unit Ownership Rights Evidence of Piracy Music Film Print Addressing the Problem Legislation Law Enforcement Legal Action Anti-piracy Technology New Marketing Model Your Own Informed Opinion Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Applying Media Literacy Skills

Issue: In our current media environment, where digital messages are so easily shared and morphed into new messages, there is a controversy over what the boundaries of a media message are and how piracy should be defined in the sharing environment.

Youku Tudou, China’s biggest Internet video company, was once a hub for illegal video content. Yuko now spends more than $100 million a year on licensing to improve relations with foreign media and crack down on illegal content. Weng lei - Imagechina via AP Images

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Piracy, in its simplest form, is the unauthorized use of things owned by other people. With tangible goods (cars, jewelry, computers, phones, cash, etc.), it is easy to determine when there are acts of piracy, because the goods are tangible and ownership of those goods is easy to resolve. However, with intellectual property (such as inventions and media messages), it is more challenging to define what these things are and who owns them, so it is more difficult to determine when piracy occurs. In this chapter, we begin by delineating the issue by examining what media piracy means and why it is such a complex issue. Then I will show you a range of evidence of piracy that will reveal how difficult it is to determine the size of the problem. We then look at the different ways owners of media messages have been trying to deal with the problem of piracy. Finally, I will guide you in the process of constructing a wellinformed personal opinion on this issue.

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Delineating the Issue The piracy of media messages is a highly volatile issue that reveals a debate between two kinds of people in terms of how they regard media messages. One kind of person regards media messages as commercial products, which is the traditional view. The other kind of person regards media messages as amorphous entities that make up the flow of information. These two viewpoints clash, which creates problems about determining what a creative unit is and what ownership means.

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Commercial Products On one side of this debate are the traditionalists who regard media messages as commercial products created by artists (rock stars, movie producers, novelists, and the like), then those messages are packaged and marketed by media businesses. These creators and marketers establish traditional ownership rights to these messages and charge consumers a fee for access. They want to be paid for their talent and efforts, so they protect their ownership rights and regard anyone who accesses their messages without paying as pirates.

Have you ever shared copyrighted material without paying for access? You might have been involved in piracy. © Soeren Stache/dpa/Corbis

To establish their ownership rights, traditionalists rely on copyright. When message creators copyright their work (a song, movie, book, etc.), they register a copy of their message with the Library of Congress, thus establishing their ownership of that creation. Owners can then sell their messages outright (to publishers) or rent access to their messages to consumers. In this way, creators can benefit financially from their creative labor and this allows them to support themselves while they continue to create messages in the future. If people who do not own the rights to a copyrighted message sell that message and benefit financially, they are committing an act of piracy. Or if people access the work of creators without paying them an access fee, this too is piracy. Under this traditionalist view, media piracy takes three forms: bootlegging, counterfeiting, and sharing

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copyrighted messages without paying for access. Bootlegging is the unauthorized recording of a live delivery of a message (such as recording songs during a concert or recording a movie in a theater) then the subsequent distribution of that recording. Counterfeiting refers to the duplication a copyrighted message along with its packaging and selling it as the authorized product. Sharing messages typically takes place when individuals who pay for a copy of a media product make their copy available to others for free. In all three cases, the creators of the message are having their creative products being disseminated without their permission and without being compensated.

Support your studies with these online resources. study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Amorphous Infobits On the other side of this debate are people who regard media messages as amorphous bits in the flow of information that should be available for everyone to share. They argue that as images, sounds, stories, and other types of messages flow across the Internet, those individual messages all become mashed together in a continually changing amalgam that is the common culture we all share. Because messages are in a constant state of change as people interact with them and pass them on to others, the idea of a single creator is passé. As an alternative to copyright, Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation created the idea of copyleft in 1985. Copyleft was originally developed to set out rules for sharing computer programs that were in contrast to the rules for using copyrighted programs. People who wanted access to a copylefted program were granted full access to its code so they could make any revisions they wanted and share their revised program with other users. All people who revise a copylefted program are required to allow future users to have access to their computer code and make their own improvements (Sunstein, 2006). Thus each step in the dissemination and alteration of an application is open so that follow-on users each have the same opportunity to alter the code to improve it, which expands the application’s utility. With the digitization of messages and the rise of the Internet to widely disseminate messages of all kinds in all kinds of ways, the idea of a creation has changed. Eric Raymond uses the metaphors of cathedrals and bazaars to illustrate this change (Sunstein, 2006). According to Raymond, the cathedral approach relied on an expert who had a clear vision for the computer program and designed its architecture to exhibit that vision as elegantly as possible. In contrast, there is also the bazaar, where lots of individuals with many different agendas and approaches work independently as they design bits and pieces of a computer program to fulfill their own special purposes. The bazaar process is what open-source software allows, and it has been surprisingly successful in creating a wide variety of applications. Raymond explains that computer hackers exist in a “gift culture” where social status is determined not by what they control but by what they give away. By making the products of their creativity freely available to others, hackers get known and admired by others. These ideas of copyleft and open-source messages have been expanded beyond computer programs to include any media message. For example, Wikipedia is an open-access encyclopedia that allows all users to add entries as well as edit existing entries by adding, subtracting, and correcting details. No one person owns his or her entry and no entry’s contributors have ownership rights or are paid for their work. With copyright, the original message is static; that is, once the message is created and copyrighted, its creator owns the rights to that message and sells access to users in return for a royalty fee. In contrast, with copyleft, the creation keeps evolving as each subsequent creator tinkers with it. No one person or business owns the creation; instead the creation is shared openly with everyone and no fees are exchanged.

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Problems The debate between the two kinds of people outlined above reveals several very challenging problems. One problem is determining what a message unit is. A second problem is determining what the rights of ownership are.

Determining a Message Unit Until several decades ago, it was relatively easy to determine what a message unit was. Book publishers would send a copy of a book to the Library of Congress, where it was copyrighted. But now with the availability of electronic books, people can download a full copy from the Internet and then, using a word processing program, alter a few paragraphs and call it a new book. People can download a movie or TV show, insert some additional video from home movies, and call it a new video. People can download a song and, using a program like GarageBand, strip out the bass line and add their own. The software is available on most computers to download any kind of media message and transform it with words, images, video, or sounds. This raises the question: How much transformation is necessary to alter a media message before it can—or should—be regarded as a different message?

Ownership Rights Protecting the rights of creators to benefit from their work has been a serious issue ever since the earliest mass media were made possible by the printing press. The idea of copyright was firmly established before the United States was created, and the founding fathers felt copyright was so important that they put it in the Constitution. The founding fathers wrote, “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries” (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8). Copyright then protects all works “fixed in a tangible medium of expression” and the owner of the copyright has the “sole and exclusive right to reproduce the work in any form for any reason.” As of now the copyright lasts throughout the life of the author plus 70 years then the message moves into what is called the public domain, where anyone can use the message without permission and without having to pay for that usage. In 1976, copyright law was revised to allow for fair use of copyrighted material. Fair use includes quoting portions of a work for purposes of news reporting, criticism, and teaching, but the boundaries of fair use are often fuzzy (Havens & Lotz, 2012). With media content, copyright is the legal establishment of ownership. But copyright has its limits. For example, this book you are reading is copyrighted in my name. However, I have granted the rights to Sage Publications, so that no other publisher can make copies of it and sell it; thus Sage Publications owns the rights to distribute this book. Each time Sage Publications sells a copy of this book, it collects a fee and pays me a royalty. But that is as far as my ownership rights go. If at the end of the semester you sell your copy of the book to a used book dealer, that dealer can sell the copy of the book to another student. The dealer can buy back that copy again and sell it again. Used book dealers are allowed to buy and sell a copy of the book as often as they like without sharing any of that money with the publisher or author. That is how copyright 652

works with books. You can see there is a split between the intellectual property of the ideas expressed in the book and the physical copy of the book. When you pay a bookstore or website for a copy of the book, you own the physical copy but you do not own the ideas. Thus it is not piracy if you sell the physical copy to someone else, but it is piracy if you take my ideas and sell them as your own. The idea of ownership is getting more ambiguous with the digitization of messages and the free exchange made possible through computers and the Internet. Think about social networking sites. If you have a Facebook page and post your selfies, those pictures belong to you. But they also belong to Facebook once you post them on your page—you have granted ownership rights to Facebook when you agreed to their policies in creating your account. Facebook can sell those images to advertisers and to other people who can resell them. So while you “own” your selfies, there are many other people who also own them once you have posted them on a social networking site. For many people the idea of copyright is out of date. Some members of the public and some businesses believe in the sharing of information in a creative commons where ownership is not limited to any one individual or company. These people believe that copyrights are barriers to widespread creativity, so they prefer instead copylefts, which allows openness and common ownership.

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Evidence of Piracy Given the problems of drawing lines that you saw above, it should not be surprising that it is difficult to find good evidence for how much piracy there is. We have some surveys of the public, but many people define piracy differently, and people who are pirates are not likely to report their activity, so the results of these surveys are suspect. And we have estimates provided by industry groups, but these too are suspect because they have a strong motivation to overestimate the problem in order to stimulate regulators. Within each media industry, professional organizations and companies complain that they are losing a lot of money due to the pirating of their messages. When they experience a drop in sales, they assume the drop is due to piracy instead of weak products or changing consumer tastes. Let’s take a look at some of these estimates of the problem in three media industries: music, film, and print.

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Music Piracy has been a problem for the music industry for decades. As early as the 1950s, people used tape recorders to pirate music by recording it off the radio. People could also make a copy of a record or tape on a tape cassette using home-recording equipment, but to do so, they had to already have a copy of the recording and could make only one copy at a time. In the 1990s, Internet users discovered MP3 files for music. These were digital music files that were compressed to less than 10% of their original size and could therefore be downloaded from the Internet relatively fast. By 1999 users were downloading 17 million MP3 files per day (Peraino, 1999). One of the most popular ways of sharing music was for downloaders to go to the Napster website, where they could get access to thousands of other users who were willing to share their music libraries. The recording industry had been experiencing a steady growth in sales throughout the 1990s, reaching a high of almost 1 billion units (CDs, cassette tapes, and records of all kinds) sold per year. But then in 1999, the recording industry claimed that piracy of music had suddenly become a huge problem. The industry claimed that an estimated 3.6 billion songs were being illegally downloaded each month in the United States and that one in four CDs of new music was actually an unauthorized copy. By the end of 2001, the industry estimated that as many CDs were burned and copied as were bought (T. Hall, 2002). The music industry complained that illegal file trading was responsible for reducing legitimate music sales (Knight, 2004). In 1999, about 2% of Internet users said they shared music; 2 years later, more than 30% said they downloaded music (Moody, 2002). Also, in a USA Weekend poll of teenagers conducted in May 2002, 54% responded that they saw nothing wrong with downloading music off the Internet; only 10% thought it should not be done. Also, 45% said they frequently or occasionally downloaded music from the Internet (“Tunes & ’tudes,” 2002).

The Pirate Bay website, founded in Sweden in 2003, does not host any media content itself, but it does allow users to find one another for peer-to-peer file sharing. Industry critics charge that this facilitates illegal uploading and downloading of copyrighted material. © Soeren Stache/dpa/Corbis

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Armed with these estimates, the music industry shut down Napster in 2000, but many other music sharing services (such as MP3.com, Gnutella, Freenet, Kazaa, Morpheus, and iMesh) sprung up to take Napster’s place. By 2008, the recording industry felt it was in even worse shape with piracy. Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) spokeswoman Amy Weiss said that countless well-respected groups and analysts have all determined that illegal file sharing has adversely impacted the sales of CDs. Lewin (2008) estimated that the average iPod or digital music player contained 842 illegally copied songs, with teenagers 14 to 17 years old having song libraries with an average of 61% of all songs illegally downloaded. The RIAA homepage cited a study claiming that music piracy annually resulted in a loss of $12.5 billion to the U.S. economy as well as more than 70,000 lost jobs and $2 billion in lost wages to American workers. The RIAA even went so far as to claim that by 2008, 95% of all music downloads were pirated, which made critics question this estimate as being wildly high. For example, Mahoney (2009) pointed out that the music industry had 2008 revenues of $3.7 billion, so if all this alleged downloaded music was paid for, the music industry revenues would have been $74 billion, which is more than five times the revenue of its best year. Also, a series of surveys conducted by a Houston-based company, Voter Consumer Research, reported that those people who download more songs illegally are less likely to buy music from legitimate retailers. Also, Felix Oberholzer-Gee at the Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf at the University of North Carolina tracked millions of music files downloaded through the OpenNap file-trading network and compared them with CD sales of the same music and concluded that, “at most, file sharing can explain a tiny fraction of this decline” (quoted in Knight, 2004, para. 4). Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf monitored 680 albums, chosen from a range of musical genres, downloaded over 17 weeks in the second half of 2002. They used computer

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programs to automatically monitor downloads and compared these data to changes in album sales over the same period to see if a link could be established. The most heavily downloaded songs showed no decrease in CD sales as a result of increasing downloads. In fact, albums that sold more than 600,000 copies during this period appeared to sell better when downloaded more heavily. The study showed only a slight decline in sales as a result of online trading for the least popular music. “From a statistical point of view, what this means is that there is no effect between downloading and sales,” say Oberholzer-Gee and Strumpf (quoted in Knight, 2004, para. 8). Although the debate over the extent of music piracy within the United States rages on, there is little debate that music piracy is a serious problem internationally. For example, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is an organization representing the international recording industry and has a membership of 1,500 record producers and distributors in 76 countries. The IFPI says that music piracy is an international problem, with worldwide sales of pressed pirated CDs of 500 million units a year accounting for lost revenue of well over $4 billion in U.S. dollars. In territories with high piracy levels, such as China and Russia, it is exceptionally difficult to develop a legitimate market for recorded music. In 2015, the RIAA was estimating that piracy of music was responsible for annual harm at $12.5 billion in losses to the U.S. economy as well as more than 70,000 lost jobs and $2 billion in lost wages to American workers (RIAA, 2015).

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Film Piracy has also been a problem with films. For example, in 2005, the U.S. film industry said it lost $6.1 billion to piracy. Furthermore, college students were blamed for half this loss in revenue, because college students shifted their film access away from theater attendances and video rentals to downloading shared files online (Powers, 2006). Every year the U.S. film industry complains that film piracy is getting even worse and increases its estimate of the amount of money being lost to piracy. By 2012, that figure had climbed to $58 billion a year, a figure that seems wildly inaccurate because it is based on shaky assumptions such as that everyone who downloads a pirated movie would have gone to a theater and paid full price to watch it (Galloway, 2012). Piracy seems to have become a big problem within the pornographic segment of the film industry. When YouTube launched in 2005, within a year several similar sites also launched to provide users with access to pornographic content they could upload and share (PornoTube, RedTub, and YouPorn to name a few). These were flooded with free content that was licensed from legitimate companies and also a lot of material pirated from pay sites. These sites made their money by providing content for free to surfers and exposing them to banner ads. The audience shifted dramatically from pay sites to these free sites where they could watch movies, some of which were 30 minutes long. Within a few years, the revenue of pay sites that provided pornography dropped off 50% to 80% (Wallace, 2011).

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Print The Internet provides so much information—an 8-billion-page cut-and-pastable encyclopedia—that there is a big temptation for students to plagiarize. Software developers are now writing software to detect plagiarizing, and typically studies find that about 30% of papers in college are plagiarized either partially or in full by downloading material from Internet sites (T. Y. Jones, 2006). And it appears that the problem is growing. A recent survey found that over one third of high school and college students admit to some kind of cut-andpaste plagiarism, and a Pew Research Center study reported that 55% of college presidents said plagiarism had increased in the past decade; 89% of those who thought plagiarizing was on the increase cited the Internet as a major reason (Gormly, 2012).

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Addressing the Problem Over the years, lawmakers and media industry organizations have tried to address the enormously complicated problem of piracy. Those efforts can be illuminated in five categories: legislation, law enforcement, legal action, anti-piracy technology, and developing a new marketing model.

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Legislation In an attempt to clarify the rights of owners of copyrights as well as people using media messages for personal use, the U.S. Congress has enacted several laws over the past several decades, beginning with the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA) and further clarifying these rights in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Under the AHRA, all digital recording devices were required to incorporate a Serial Copy Management System (SCMS), which allowed digital recorders to make a first-generation copy of a digitally recorded work. However, the technology prevented people from making a second-generation copy to be made from the first copy, but users could still make as many first-generation copies as they wanted. The AHRA also provided for a royalty tax of up to $8 per new digital recording machine and 3% of the price of all digital audiotapes or disks. This tax is paid by the manufacturers of digital media devices and distributed to the copyright owners whose music is presumably being copied. In consideration of this tax, copyright owners agree to forever waive the right to claim copyright infringement against consumers using audio-recording devices in their homes. This is commensurate with the fair use exception to copyright law, which allows consumers to make copies of copyrighted music for noncommercial purposes. The SCMS and its royalty requirements, however, apply only to digital audio-recording devices. Because computers are not digital audiorecording devices, they were not required to comply with the SCMS requirement (T. Hall, 2002).

Legislation can quickly become outdated as new technologies for recording, storing, displaying, and marketing media messages develop. © Richard Levine/Alamy

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Since the 1990s, technological advances have made it possible to share and store all kinds of digital messages easily on computers and mobile devices. Media businesses complained to Congress that the AHRA and the SCMS were no longer adequate. In March 2002, Senator Ernest Hollings (D-S.C.), chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, introduced the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA). This proposed legislation, which is heavily supported by music industry lobbies such as the Recording Industry Association of America, would require all new digital media devices to be encoded with security technology to prevent unauthorized copying of copyrighted works. However, critics of this legislation thought that it went too far. For example, members of the information technology industry believed that the charge to make them responsible for inhibiting unauthorized copying was an impossible task, because it was not technologically feasible to protect a digital work once it is in the public domain. Consumer groups such as DigitalConsumer felt that the bill violated individuals’ rights to post-purchase flexible use of copyrighted materials. Media critics declared that as a cure, the CBDTPA would be far worse than the disease of digital content piracy. They said that making it more difficult to play a copy-protected CD on more than one digital media device would be only a speed bump for pirates who might easily circumvent anti-piracy technology, but it could turn out to be a roadblock for the average music buyer. This bill languished for several years unpassed, thus illustrating how complicated the issue of ownership of digital messages is.

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Law Enforcement Using the old anti-piracy legislation, some law enforcement agencies have been going ahead with crackdowns on pirates. In April 2004, the U.S. Justice Department completed its largest investigation of the piracy of intellectual property over the Internet. This included an investigation of more than 100 people in 27 states and abroad who were involved in the theft of more than $50 million in music, movies, games, and computer software (“100 People Identified in Piracy Raid,” 2004). Perhaps the highest profile conviction of a pirate was in December of 2006. Johnny Ray Gasca—known as the Prince of Piracy—was sentenced to 7 years in federal prison for illegally taping Hollywood movies in theaters and selling bootlegged copies of the films. He was the first person to be sentenced to federal prison for this type of crime of piracy. Gasca said he made as much as $4,500 a week selling movies (Munoz, 2006).

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Legal Action By the end of the 1990s, the media industries began realizing that law enforcement agencies were having a difficult challenge with piracy of media messages, so the industries took up the challenge themselves by filing lawsuits in civil courts. For example, when the recording industry noticed a drop in sales in 2000, it filed an injunction against Napster for allowing users to share music without paying the recording industry for any of that shared music. This shut down Napster, but other music sharing websites sprung up to take Napster’s place. The most successful of these successors was MP3.com, so the music industry sued MP3.com and won a $100 million judgment. The RIAA continued to monitor the use of music sharing platforms, and from September 2003 to September 2007 the RIAA filed more than 21,000 lawsuits against people who it claimed were downloading music illegally. The RIAA leveled fines against offenders and settled with all but two of them, so the RIAA took the two to court and won both cases. In 2007, Jammie Thomas-Rasset became the first person to go to trial against the RIAA, when she refused to settle her case after receiving a piracy cease-and-desist letter in August 2005. She lost and was sentenced to pay $220,000 for downloading 24 songs with the now-defunct filesharing software Kazaa. Joel Tenenbaum, the other person who refused to settle with the RIAA, was sentenced to pay $675,000 for downloading 30 songs (Franceshi-Bicchierai, 2013). In the fall of 2006, music and movie studios were given an unmitigated victory in their 2001 suit against StreamCast and other companies that were providing file-sharing software that encouraged millions of users to improperly exchange songs, films, and other copyrighted material without permission. The ruling said that these companies engaged in massive copyright infringement because they developed a business model that relied on users who violated the law and the companies did not attempt to block trading of copyrighted materials. The companies could be liable for as much as $150,000 for each copyrighted work shared illegally through a program called Morpheus. StreamCast argued that it did not encourage users to infringe on copyrighted works. But the music and record companies responded that the purpose of StreamCast’s software was to give users the ability to scan one another’s hard drives for songs, video clips, and games that they could then transfer to their own computers (Duhigg, Gaither, & Chmielewski, 2006). In 2007, Viacom filed a lawsuit against YouTube and its corporate parent Google for copyright infringement seeking more than $1 billion in damages. Viacom claimed that the popular video-sharing site was engaging in “massive intentional copyright infringement” for making available a contended 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s entertainment programming. The complicated case dragged on for years until in June 2010 the presiding judge ruled in favor of YouTube, reasoning that its activities were protected under a safe harbor provision that shielded message disseminators from liability from being sued for the messages of content providers. Viacom appealed, and the initial ruling was overturned in April 2012. This judge ruled that Viacom had presented enough evidence against YouTube to warrant a trial, and the case should not have been thrown out in summary judgment. The court did uphold the ruling that YouTube could not be held liable based on “general knowledge” that users on its site were infringing copyright. The case will be sent back to the district court in New York to be tried and is still pending. 664

In the summer of 2011, some media companies formed a coalition to take more aggressive action against individuals who they thought were pirating their media products. The coalition was composed of movie and television studios, cable and phone companies, and record labels. They planned to monitor the Internet activity of households, identify those individuals who they believed were uploading and downloading copyrighted material illegally, then get Internet service providers (ISPs) to cut off their Internet access (Flint, 2011a).

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Anti-piracy Technology The media industries began using technology that would protect them from piracy. The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 gave the consumer electronics industries the right to create their own technological barriers that would prevent consumers from making unauthorized copies of media messages. Technological control over copyrighted materials is called Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM uses technological devices that limit users’ exposures by time or by number of viewings (Havens & Lotz, 2012). Beginning in 2000, the largest record companies tried developing anti-piracy technology to protect their copyrighted music against the information technology industry’s movement toward increasingly user-friendly digital hardware and software. A few of the “big five” major music labels are currently experimenting with anti-piracy technologies designed to combat the online file sharing of their products through peer-to-peer networks, such as Napster. These copy protection programs encode electronic impediments onto commercial CDs, which prevent the disks from being played on any device that is not a simple CD player. Sony has developed its own anti-piracy technology, called “key2audio.” The music label announced in January 2002 that it had produced a total of 10 million disks for 500 different albums that could not be played on personal computers by using its key2audio program, which prevents consumers from listening to CDs on any type of CD-ROM or DVD player. A second version of the software, key2audio4PC, is a bit more lenient than key2audio in that it does permit listeners to play copy-protected CDs on their personal computer. However, the disks are encrypted to limit usage to a single PC. For example, once the CD is played on the consumer’s home computer, that person would not be able to play the same CD on his or her DVD player in the next room or on his or her computer at the office. Downloaded music files may be copied from the PC hard drive to a blank CD, but that CD would likewise be playable only in the specific PC on which the copy was made from an authorized download. Another music label is licensing anti-piracy technology from outside developers. BMG Entertainment began using the Cactus Data Shield anti-piracy program, developed by Midbar Technology. Cactus is designed to prevent consumers from reformatting songs into MP3 files and burning copies or making them available on file-sharing systems. The software prevents listeners from playing the disks on CD-ROM drives, which means that the music will not play on the Sony PlayStation 2, a number of car stereos and DVD players, or on PCs. The Cactus patent application states that the resulting playback distortion on an unauthorized copy would not only distort the sound but also be “potentially damaging” to amplifiers and speakers. The Cactus system also disables stand-alone CD burners. Digital rights management companies are also developing and marketing solutions for entertainment companies. Macrovision, in collaboration with TTR Technologies, developed multiple versions of an antipiracy technology called SafeAudio, a 100% software-based, audio copy protection technology for music CDs. SafeAudio Version 2 allows CDs to operate in CD players and PC-based CD-ROMs but spoils any copy made to the hard drive or a CD burner by adding background noise to the playback sound. SafeAudio Version 666

3 allows CDs to be played in simple CD players but not in a CD-ROM or copied onto a hard disk drive. Products such as SafeAudio are proving to be a difficult sell to record labels in the United States, which are concerned about negative consumer backlash. Perhaps in response to this concern, Macrovision recently released its SafeAuthenticate product, which permits CDs that are authenticated by the product’s software to be a genuine pressing to be played from the computer’s CD-ROM drive or copied onto the hard drive for playback through Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. Particular technological innovations are at best only temporary improvements along the way to the media industries’ solving the problem of piracy. As you can see from the discussion above, the recording industry has been focusing on the use of CDs for the selling and sharing of music. But the marketing of music has been moving away from CDs to streaming and downloads from the Internet. With each new technological advance in the recording, storing, and marketing of media messages, the old technologically based means of controlling piracy become obsolete.

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New Marketing Model Each of the four ways that the media industries have been addressing the problem of piracy as discussed above have serious limitations. This has forced the media industries to rethink the way they market their messages. One change has been to market smaller units of messages. For example, the music industry for decades was selling recordings on CDs as albums, so a person who wanted to buy a particular song had to buy the entire album. Now the music industry has been moving toward allowing consumers to buy one song recording at a time rather than having to buy an entire album. It has also made the shopping for music and buying it more convenient. Apple launched iTunes Music Store in 2003. Shortly afterward, Windows versions were launched —buymusic.com and Listen.com’s Rhapsody. The creation of Internet stores made this change viable because Internet stores were able to offer millions of individual songs, whereas brick-and-mortar stores had limited shelf space. These Internet stores were immediately successful, so much so that it led to the closing of more than 600 brick-and-mortar music stores in 2003 (Kava, 2003). Services like this continue to be successful because they offer a highly convenient way for consumers to sample music and quickly download songs they like for a small cost. Another change in marketing has been for media message marketers to regard their messages as both advertising as well as commercial messages. For example, the New York Times offers free access to most of its stories online each day. This access is limited to headlines and a few sentences on each story. Also, users can click on up to 10 stories each month to read the full story. All of this free access is regarded as advertising to get users to want more and pay for that additional access.

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Your Own Informed Opinion Industry groups are working hard right now to figure out how to deal with the problem of piracy, which has been a growing problem over the past two decades. These industries have had some success with influencing legislation, pressuring law enforcement to arrest violators, taking pirates to civil court, and developing technology to limit piracy. They have also been rethinking the ways they market their messages. Despite all these efforts, piracy continues to be a problem, because of the difficulty in determining what a creative unit is. Let’s see how you make out on this challenge by doing Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2.1. Look at the pattern of your answers then think about the following questions. If you were a lawmaker, how would you word a law that would clarify for law enforcement personnel what a creative unit was? As new platforms become available to sample bits and pieces from various media messages and mash them together to serve each user’s needs better, this problem will become even more challenging to solve. If someone takes several short film clips from Hollywood movies and YouTube videos and edits them together with home movie scenes, is that piracy? Or if someone takes a copyrighted song, changes the lyrics, and adds some additional instruments using GarageBand, is that piracy?

Services like iTunes and Rhapsody allow consumers to purchase smaller units of messages such as individual songs. © NetPhotos/Alamy

Now think about ownership rights. Do Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2.2 from your own perspective, that is, as a consumer of media messages. Now think about where you drew the line on ownership rights and 669

ask yourself if that would give creators of media messages enough incentive to continue creating messages. This asks you to think about what the limits of sharing should be. As a consumer, your motivation is to have open access to all messages and to have that access made free. However, if all people could get all messages for free, what would the motivation be for creators? The issue of piracy has recently become very important as large media conglomerates fail to meet their revenue projections and reason that large numbers of people are copying the products they are trying to sell, particularly music and films. And this issue will continue to grow in importance as the conflict deepens as media businesses try to preserve the old idea of copyright while many individuals interact with the media using the newer idea of copyleft, where sharing and open creativity are stronger values. As you develop your own informed opinion on the issue of piracy, try to avoid getting stuck in only one perspective. Instead, think about balancing the needs of creators and consumers at the same time. Review chapter content and study for exams. http://study.sagepub.com/potter8e Practice quizzes eFlashcards Video links Web resources Online-only appendices

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Further Reading Bently, L., Davis, J., & Ginsburg, J. C. (Eds.). (2010). Copyright and piracy: An interdisciplinary critique. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. (471 pages with index) This is an edited volume of 21 chapters organized into 11 sections: introduction, history, comparative law, economics, linguistics, computer software, information studies, literature, art, sociology/music, and criminology. Levine, R. (2011). Free ride: How digital parasites are destroying the culture business, and how the culture business can fight back. New York, NY: Doubleday. (322 pages with index) The author argues that the current laws and policies to protect copyrighted material from piracy are not working. In this easy-to-read book, the author presents many examples about how piracy of music, movies, and television shows are seriously harming the media industries. Strangelove, M. (2005). The empire of mind: Digital piracy and the anti-capitalist movement. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. (337 pages with index) The author, a Canadian, argues that the mass media have established an empire by using capitalism and that this empire is now being challenged by the newer interactive media. Ordinary people can use the newer media platforms to transform old content and create their own in what the established media regard as acts of piracy.

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Keeping Up to Date Motion Picture Association of America (http://www.mpaa.org) The MPAA is the professional association of the movie industry in the United States. Get on its website to learn more about its ratings and its position on media issues. Recording Industry Association of America (http://www.riaa.com) The RIAA is the professional organization of music producers in the United States. Get on their website and click on the Piracy tab to get information on its official position, its view of the problem, and updates on piracy law as it relates to music. Association for Progressive Communications (http://www.apc.org) Founded in 1990, APC is an international network and nonprofit organization that works for open access to the Internet and media messages for everyone.

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Applying Media Literacy Skills

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Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2.1

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How Big Is a Creative Unit? 1. Think about the size of the unit that is copyrighted. Where would you draw the line between what is protected by copyright and what is too small to be protected by copyright? Check those elements in the list below that you think should be protected by copyright. _____ An artist’s entire body of work _____ An album _____ A song _____ A chorus in a song _____ A chord progression or a lyrical phrase _____ One note or word 2. Now think about how big a unit of information you would feel comfortable copying. At what point does the resulting CD stop being the work of other artists and become your artistic product? From the list below, check those products that you believe would be primarily your own creation. _____ Make a compilation CD of songs of one artist from several different CDs _____ Make a compilation CD of songs of different artists from different CDs _____Make a compilation CD of songs of different artists along with recordings of your own original music _____Make a compilation CD of songs of another artist—some performed by that artist and some performed by you _____Record a song from a CD that you own as a soundtrack on a home movie that you made and will give to your parents on their anniversary _____Record a song from a CD that you own as a soundtrack on a movie that you make for a grade in a film production course _____Record a song from a CD that you own as a soundtrack on a movie that you make and enter into a contest to win a scholarship to college _____Record a song from a CD that you own as a soundtrack on a movie that you make to show on a public-access cable TV program 3. Now that you have considered the options in #1 and #2 above, what is the key criterion that defines a creative unit?

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Applying Media Literacy Skills Issue 2.2

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Where Do You Draw the Line? 1. Let’s say you buy a CD of songs by your favorite musical group. What do you really own? How much control do you have over using that music? Read each item in the list below and consider your rights of ownership. Put a check mark next to each item you feel comfortable doing. For each item you think is wrong or illegal, do not put a check mark. _____ Listen to the CD alone in the privacy of your room _____ Listen to the CD in your room with friends _____ Take your CD to your friends’ room and listen to it there _____Play your CD in your car with all the windows down so everyone on the street can hear it _____ Make a backup copy of your CD _____ Make a copy of your CD and rearrange the songs in the order you prefer _____ Make a compilation CD with songs from several CDs you own _____Lend a CD that you own to one of your friends so he or she can make a copy for his or her own personal use _____Lend a CD that you own to a dozen of your friends so they can each make a copy for their own personal use _____Copy the songs on a CD you own onto your computer so you can listen to them while you are on your computer _____Copy the songs on a CD you own onto your computer and then send an e-mail to a friend and arrange for one of those songs to play in the background as your friend reads your e-mail _____Copy the songs on a CD you own onto your computer and then send a song to your friend to let him or her check it out _____Copy the songs on a CD you own onto your computer and then send all those songs to your friend _____Copy the songs on a CD you own onto your computer and then make those songs available to anyone in cyberspace to make a copy _____ Take your CD to a secondhand store and sell it to the store _____ Sell your CD to another person on eBay _____ Make copies of your CD and sell those copies to other people 2. Now go back over the list above, and every time you see something such as “a CD you own” or a “CD you bought,” substitute it with “a CD you borrowed from the public library.” Read each item in the list above and consider your rights of usage of borrowed material. Put a plus sign (+) next to each item you feel comfortable doing. For each item you think is wrong or illegal, do not put a plus sign. 3. Now compare the pattern of checked statements to the pattern of statements with plus signs. Look at the statements that have check marks but no plus signs; these are the special rights you feel you have as an owner of a CD compared to a user of someone else’s CD.

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Issue 3 Sports

Delineating the Issue The Money Cycle Players Owners and Leagues Television Networks Advertisers Public Olympics Video Gaming Your Own Informed Opinion The Big Picture Extend Your Knowledge Cost-Benefit Analysis Think About Implications Further Reading Keeping Up to Date Applying Media Literacy Skills

Issue: The money cycle drives sports. Some people think the money cycle is destroying sports, while other people think that it is improving sports.

Sports are more than fun and games; they are also a big business in the United States, generating around $485 billion, annually. TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images

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Sports have changed dramatically over the past four decades. The reason is money—big money. Globally, $1.5 trillion is spent annually on sports of all kinds (Plunkett Research, n.d.) and this amount continues to increase each year—driven by the money cycle. This money cycle is especially influential in the United States, where sports revenue has climbed to $485 billion annually; this means that the United States, with only about 4.4% of the world’s population, generates more than 32% of all the global sports revenue.

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Delineating the Issue The controversy concerning sports in the media is whether big money has ruined sports or whether it has made sports better. Like with the two previous issues, the controversy in sports can be traced to people’s values. Some people hold an egalitarian value where they cherish the similarities across all individuals and believe that everyone should be treated equally; they get upset when a few elites are treated massively better than the average person. In contrast, other people believe that there are enormous differences across individuals and that those who have an extreme degree of talent in some area should be rewarded massively. People with lesser talent need to appreciate the differences and admire those who perform at the top. There is no ultimately correct position on this issue because there is no philosophical standard we can use to determine the worth of a person’s talent or life. Instead, we let the economic marketplace tell us the value of talent. However, while markets are typically driven by the forces of supply and demand, there are times when irrational forces also drive markets, causing them to become inflated to a point where an irrational bubble of inflation bursts, thus setting off a market correction. The stock market has experienced many such bubbles and corrections, as has the economy in general. So at any given time, the market may be undervaluing or overvaluing particular resources. With the issue of money in sports, your personal values are important. You must decide for yourself whether the money is now too much (i.e., the salaries of athletes are too high, the profits of team owners and leagues is too rich, and the cost to the average fan is beyond affordability) or whether the money has made the games and the athletes better than ever. The key to being media literate is to get the facts and understand the arguments on both sides of this controversy. Then you can decide in an informed way which side makes more sense to you personally. In this chapter I will present some key facts to help you construct your informed opinion. First, I will show you how the money cycle is accelerating and how that acceleration is changing traditional sports. Then I will present two examples to illustrate the influence of the money cycle on the ancient sports of the Olympics as well as the creation of the brand-new sport of video gaming. The chapter concludes with some guidelines about how you can use this information to strengthen your skills of media literacy and design a stronger knowledge structure on this topic.

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The Money Cycle The amount of time and money Americans spend playing, watching, and talking about sports increases each year. The key to making sense of these increases as well as the nature of sports today is to understand the money cycle. The mass media have been an integral part of making the money cycle possible. The media provide the means for advertisers to inject mammoth amounts of money into the cycle. Also, the media provide so much continual exposure for professional as well as college sporting events that millions of people have made sports an essential ritual in their lives. And the med