Engaging with “media effects”

The term “media effects” refers to a constellation of theories concerned with the media’s influence on people’s behaviours, beliefs, and attitudes. The effects tradition of audience research is at least a century old, which is in itself remarkable: researchers have been exploring and debating the effects of communication for over a hundred years. Students who come to communication studies wanting to write about the harmful effects of video games, the impact of TikTok or Instagram on mental health, or the perpetuation of gender stereotypes in advertising – or similar – are sometimes unaware that they’re stepping into a research tradition with such a long history.

And this history involves powerful dissent from key thinkers, as we’ll see in a moment. “Media effects” may be a communication concept, but we don’t have to agree with it: indeed, there are many reasons why we shouldn’t.

Running parallel to this century of research, public anxieties about media effects have been projected onto emergent media products and practices. When the communication landscape changes, people are naturally curious about the consequences of new ways of communicating, and often, this leads to a build-up of fear and worry.

At times, public anxiety and research coalesced. In the 1920s, for example, research funded by the Payne Fund in the United States investigated the effects of movie-watching on children. At the time, movies were a new form of communication and extraordinarily popular with kids. The research was informed by concerns about the erosion of moral standards and worries about the unknown impacts of this spectacularly new technology.

Waves of later research would elaborate on this early work.

For example, the mean world syndrome was a theory proposed by communication scholar George Gerbner as part of his work on cultivation analysis in the 1970s. Gerbner was interested in the build-up of pessimistic ideas through long-term media consumption. He argued that people can develop heightened anxiety, and a heightened sense of risk and vulnerability, due to the amount of crime or violence depicted in the media. In other words, someone who watches or reads a lot of media will think the world is a scarier place – or so the theory goes.

Meanwhile, psychologist Albert Bandura’s work on social learning theory – also in the 1970s – cast media effects in a new light of relevance by suggesting that individual behaviour is influenced by what we observe in others, including those we see on screen.

As these examples suggest, the idea of “media effects” usually implies negative effects. While positive effects are themselves interesting and worthy of attention, the effects tradition has been mostly concerned with risk, vulnerability, and harm.

Generally, this sort of research also focuses on (and tries to find evidence of) changes that occur in audiences following exposure to a message. This may be a change in attitude or a change in behaviour, or both, but it does not usually include fleeting reactions such as a shift in mood.

For example, if I’m an avid watcher of a television crime drama, it may be that I experience a range of emotional responses while viewing each episode. Perhaps I experience suspense or feel on the edge of my seat, eager to know what happens next. Perhaps I feel frustrated with particular plot developments or experience grief if my favourite character falls victim to a horrible crime. Media effects researchers wouldn’t be too interested in these sorts of reactions. Instead, they might wonder whether I felt scared in real, public places as a result of this viewing experience, or whether I started to believe that violent crimes were more likely to occur than was statistically probable in my local area. And they would certainly be very interested if I committed a violent crime myself after watching the program.

In fact, media depictions of violent crime are often debated, scrutinised, and policed – and even outrightly blamed – when high-profile crimes are committed. Only a few years ago, in the wake of the tragic 2018 shooting at a school in Parkland, Florida, the governor of Kentucky Matt Bevin claimed that video games like Grand Theft Auto are dangerous and culpable because they celebrate a “culture of death” (as reported in this article from The Verge). Here, the idea of media effects is politicised, even weaponised.

Most communication and media scholars today are suspicious or openly critical of the idea of media effects, arguing that it “tackles social problems backwards” (Gauntlett 2005), fails to hold up in an era defined by media fragmentation (Bennett and Iyengar 2008), and underestimates the degree to which audiences – including very young audiences – actively decode media meanings (Jenkins 2015: 106).

What many of these scholars agree on is this: concerns about media effects are usually articulations of deeper cultural anxieties. For example, concerns over depictions of gun violence in the media are informed by deeper anxieties about gun control or social disorder; concerns over “screen time” for children are informed by deeper anxieties about the changing nature of childhood.

Photo by Ron Lach from Pexels

On the one hand, then, we have fierce arguments from thought leaders and communication scholars debunking the media effects model, and this has led to real progress in communication studies. In particular, it has encouraged more research into the practices, perceptions, and everyday lives of audiences themselves.

On the other hand, these concerns haven’t gone away. Far from it – they resurface and collect around the emergence of new media. And in some cases, “media effects” is a very real problem that is lived, felt, experienced, and grappled with by individuals on a daily basis.

We’ll take up these ideas in the next section.