The effects of communication

Have you ever tried to limit the amount of time you spend on your phone because of concerns about its effect on you?

Have you ever reduced your news consumption because you’re sick of the negative effects of news on your mood?

Have you ever put a trigger warning on a piece of content you’ve created, in an effort to reduce the potential harmful effect on particular audiences?

Have you ever worried about the effect of excessive screen time on your children – or have you found that, as a young person, your own screen time is policed, controlled, or made an object of concern by others?

If so, you’ve thought about the effects of communication, on yourself or on other people.

There is a very long history behind these ideas. The question of “effects” has haunted communication studies and driven much of its pioneering work. Longstanding and persistent debates about the existence, nature, and severity of such effects have led to advances in communication theory but they have also surfaced again and again in response to shifts in the technological landscape.

Strangely, media effects has become an avoided topic in university courses that teach students how to become skilled communicators. Nevertheless, the effects of communication on individuals and on society are fundamentally related to both theory and professional practice.

When we communicate, we are often intending to have an effect. Professional communicators who work in advertising, public relations, graphic design, journalism, or any number of crisis communication, risk communication, activist or advocacy roles, are always designing content with a desired effect in mind: they are trying to provide information, attract attention, entertain or persuade target audiences. Even if you’re having a conversation, the intended effect of your communicational efforts may be persuasion, self-promotion, the expression of support or kindness – or perhaps you just want the other person to understand you, which is an effect in itself.

Effect is absolutely at the core of what communicators do.

And as we have seen in previous chapters, the relationship between communication and society involves complex effects. Communicators can act as change agents – they can raise awareness of social issues and provide context for understanding them. Communication is linked to how power is distributed in society and how it is struggled over.

But are the effects of media and communication something we should worry about?

Or, more precisely, how do we confront and work with the effects of communication in a digitised world, in a way that does not sideline particular practices – or particular people?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Media effects is a communication concept that refers to the real, predicted, or imagined effect of mediated communication on audiences. It is both a research tradition with a long and complicated history, and a way of thinking about communication that often frames public debates about media consumption and regulation. No doubt you’re familiar with some of these debates, which manifest in questions like these:

• Do social media influencers perpetuate harmful ideas about beauty standards?
• Are the screens in our lives making us more distracted?
• Is excessive screen time bad for children?
• Are video games addictive?
• Does the use of digital tools like Google or ChatGPT erode our capacity to think critically and creatively?

You’ll notice that these are not easy questions to answer. Indeed, the best way to approach them is to resist the compulsion to apply an easy answer. To fully participate in these debates, we need to understand their origins.

This chapter will explore the effects of communication. Its launching place will be the effects tradition of media research, but we will move from there into an examination of the effects of communication on society and everyday life.