Media effects, use, and agency

This chapter has explored media effects, a topic with a very long history that continues to surface in conversations about communication today – the public conversations that play out in news media and in political discourse, as well as the more informal conversations that swirl around us, including those I’ve had with students in communication studies classrooms – many of whom are deeply concerned, interested, and invested in the effects of media in a fast-paced digital world.

Such conversations continue to throw up questions that are fascinating because they are so difficult to answer. Will generative AI have a damaging, lasting effect on our ability to communicate and produce creative works? Can communication change people’s minds about climate change? And what about the effect of communication systems and products on the natural world itself?

Media effects plays an important role in my own research on children and environmental communication. Children have always been at the centre of media effects-based research: adults have long been asking (and imagining, and worrying) about the effects of mediated communication on young people, and much scholarly work on children and young people in recent decades has worked to unpick the deeply established ideas that position children as innocent, incompetent non-adults who are vulnerable to, and must therefore be protected from, the encroach of (digital) media technology.

Whether we’re talking about children or adults, it’s important to note that “effects” is only one approach through which we might understand the relationship between communication, society, and everyday life.

So what are the alternatives?

We’ve already explored some of them. Meaning was our focus in Chapter 5, and as Henry Jenkins has insisted (2006), a focus on meaning and interpretation is an approach that opens up the avenues of inquiry and discovery that are often closed by debates about the media’s effects. And if you reflected on your own identity in Chapter 6, you would likely have found that your relationship with digital media and networked communication is too complex and multifaceted to be contained within the idea of “effects”, even if you agree that you are effected by communication in some way.

Closely related to both meaning and identity is the notion of media use.

In the 1960s, communication scholar Elihu Katz proposed a theory of uses and gratifications that is widely considered to be an antithesis to the notion of media effects. Katz believed media use was an active choice – and he wanted to work out how audiences use media, rather than whether they were effected by it. This is sometimes described as a shift in emphasis from ‘what the media does to us’ to ‘what we do with the media’.

Katz was particularly interested in broadcast communication, namely radio and television, but we can funnel his ideas into our own time and our own reflections on our digital selves. For example, when thinking about our relationships with our phones, rather than asking how our phones effect us, we can ask – what benefits and uses does our phone provide or fulfill? These benefits and uses might include escapism, diversion, connection, information, participation, activism, and/or the formation of aspects of our identity.

Scholars writing about the uses of social and digital media often deploy the term affordances to describe the relationship between a media platform, its properties, and its users. Affordances are the qualities or attributes of an object that define the ways it can be used.

In her work on teenagers and their digital practices in the emergent days of social media, danah boyd outlines the complicated relationship between media effects, media use, the affordances of digital tools and platforms, and the agency of media users, particularly in the context of networked publics. Boyd observes that digital technologies of networked communication have shifted social norms about privacy and sharing (2014: 63): a clear “effect” of digital media on society and on individual lives. However, she also reveals that young people often develop their own ways of operating within a system that is designed to restrict their privacy and profit from their sharing. She explains:

By agency, she means the capacity to act with power and intention. Notice how boyd’s research, which focuses on the practices and perceptions of young social media users, actively disrupts media effects paradigms by foregrounding the power (or potential power) of a social group typically perceived to be both vulnerable and problematic in relation to their media use.