think about how different you feel after watching a dark thriller movie versus an hour of a city government meeting or your eighth cute kitten compilation in a row media has a real impact on our moods in fact communication experts have developed multiple theories to explain how this works for a long time media Scholars thought that reading or viewing something had a predictable impact on people after all it seems reasonable to assume that if we watch sad news we'll feel sad and if we watch a positive advertisement about buying a car we'll all want to buy that car the messages were thought to have clear and predictable effects turns out surprise people are more complicated than that as we've seen throughout this series we're constantly communicating and mass media is a big part of that as students and communicators understanding how the field thinks about and researches the effects of media means we can craft more effective messages and also better understand ourselves and others I'm Cassandra Ryder and this is study hall intro to human communication [Music] foreign last episode we journeyed through some of the highlights in the history of mass media in order to learn from the big shifts in communication as we discussed in that episode mass media is how people share messages to audiences through print audio visual or electronic means now we're going to explore how mass media affects our lives the effects of mass media are quite varied and researchers have studied a ton of data to figure out some patterns they're still figuring it out to this day after all there are more forms of media than ever before in the 1920s and 1930s researchers who thought media effects were strong and predictable used a metaphor called the hypodermic needle Theory to think about how we respond to Media the idea was that media is injected into us like a vaccine different kinds of media were developed for specific purposes and each would have a very particular and predictable effect on people this Theory would say if a political speech is effective at convincing people to vote for a certain candidate the speech would have that effect on everyone a bold advertisement would equally stun anyone who sees it in an entertaining TV show would win laughs from everyone viewing it in the age of Niche internet media it's easy to see why the hypodermic needle Theory needs to be replaced with a theory that considers how diverse media effects are a cute cat video can get anything from a heartfelt ah to the misanthropic disdain of I've seen cuter but in previous decades the media landscape was very different more limited when people only had three TV channels to choose from media was a lot more uniform and its effects were similarly thought to be uniform then as often happens in human history things changed and so did people's understanding in 2013 communication researchers Patty volkenberg and Johan Peter developed the differential susceptibility to Media effects model it explained how a growing body of studies showed people's life experiences and other factors changed their reaction to Media and that data didn't align with the hypodermic needle Theory as of 2022 the differential susceptibility to Media effects model try saying that five times fast still describes how we think about the effects of mass media so let's break down its different components because each of its propositions gives us ways to understand the variety of mass media effects the first proposition in the model is that there are three kinds of susceptibility or ways we are more likely to experience media effects first there's dispositional susceptibility which is how susceptible we are to being influenced based on our disposition depending on our thoughts values and moods we're more likely to feel the effects of a given type of media the second type of susceptibility is known as developmental susceptibility for a small child scary scenes in a fantasy movie can have a much stronger impact than someone further along in their development for a teenager the scene may have less impact because they have more context and the third type of susceptibility is our social susceptibility basically the people around us like friends and family and the places we spend time like school church or work all Impact us so if a person spent their whole childhood memorizing passages from a particular religious text they're likely to be susceptible to references to key passages of that text as compared to someone who didn't grow up in that religious context each type of susceptibility is likely to impact us at least a little every time we encounter mass media although the impact is different in every scenario which leads us to the next proposition of the model response States this part of the model considers the aspects of ourselves that play a role in how we engage with media and experience its effects things like our attention span how much of the material we absorb and the ways our thoughts resist the ideas in the media are all part of our cognitive response States these are the various ways that people attend to Media with their brain's capacity for thinking for instance people who have shorter than average attention spans might not react as strongly to certain media because their attention drifted so their cognitive response state is important to consider because it reduced the effect of whatever they were scrolling through but we can also consider emotional response states which involve how much empathy or sympathy we feel towards a character or story and that applies to fictitious people too for example watching a sad movie about an adorable dog may affect us more intensely if we recently lost a beloved pet the third set of response States considered by the model are excitative response States that's when we're excited in some way by whatever we're watching or reading or listening to or whatever like if we watch breaking news about danger in our own neighborhood we're likely to have both an emotional reaction and some kind of fight-or-flight reaction especially if we worry that the danger reported in the news is a threat to us so in this model how we're primed or susceptible to react matter years and our present circumstances or state also matters combined all these different factors mean that we're already seeing a ton of ways that each person's reaction to Media is going to be different basically people are complicated that's not a news flash but it does mean that how media affects us is also a lot more complicated than we once thought so with all these potential reactions to Media Peter and valkenberg's model goes on to claim that two different major results come from all the susceptibilities and response States first the response States and susceptibilities are predictors of whether we'll use a particular kind of media in our example of a person in a cognitive response state that makes their attention span short the model predicts that reading 1000 page books and watching hours of political hearings on TV are unlikely to be appealing second response States and susceptibilities are moderators and can dampen the effects of media one example is the depiction of violence in a television show if one person grew up in a family of kickboxing Stars they will have a different reaction than someone from a family of say musicians their susceptibilities are unique the show hasn't changed but the person who grew up around fighting has the media effects moderated to be less severe while the musician might be less familiar with violence so their moderators could make the effect more severe now while the differential susceptibility of media effects model mostly talks about how parts of our lives and identities shape our reactions to Media Peter and volkenberg also talk about how there isn't a neat cause and effect instead all the factors that create our susceptibility and responses also shape what we choose to read or view next in what media we choose next can continue to influence our choices about media that further Alters our susceptibilities and response dates over time basically the effects of media on us and how we mentally process media have a reciprocal causal effect a fancy way to say that the influence can go both ways to see some of the ways that media use changes our lives and our choices for future media let's look at someone who notices the effect of a new source of media in her life Jocelyn is 14 and so excited she just got her first cell phone her family doesn't spend a lot of time on cell phones but her friends do she's entering a new part of her development as a teenager in high school in a new socio-cultural context where she's spending a lot more time around people who spend a lot of time on phones the first thing Jocelyn downloads onto her new phone is the social media app that everyone is using Yap yapper it's a platform people use to share videos and can comment on each other's posts when she starts using the app Jocelyn thinks she'll just watch videos from her friends because these videos make her feel closer to them but soon Jocelyn starts seeing a lot of mean posts about teenagers from her high school it's ugly stuff yet these posts draw her in she'll spend an hour of watching these videos without even looking up or noticing her little brother wants to play with her she feels irritable and frustrated after watching a lot of negative posts or spending a ton of time defending her friends and her school it's not a great cycle and Jocelyn wants to balance her life keeping What She Likes about her phone but reducing some of the negative changes she wants the Good Moods she had before her phone but also wants the connectedness she feels with her friends now to break the cycle Jocelyn has to decide what matters to her and use the app to her advantage she digs through the settings to make her feed friends only and gets a new time tracking app that Rings an alarm 20 minutes after she opens Yap yapper to make sure she isn't spending more time on this platform than she wants to spend pretty soon she's in a better mood because she's only sending positive and fun videos to friends and when her little brother hears the distinctive ring of the alarm he knows his sister is free to play Legos with him it's a real win-win from a little self-analysis on Jocelyn's part self-knowledge was a real strength for Jocelyn made possible by awareness of the effects of mass media she was able to look at the change media had on her life and her behavior then she decided that she wanted something different by doing this she didn't face an All or Nothing choice of whether to quit social media instead she focused on understanding that media does impact us and we have to take charge of our relationship with it or it can deeply affect our relationship with ourselves and others in our own lives we can use our understanding of different theories about how media affects us to help us pinpoint the likely reasons we're having reactions to particular media knowing that we react strongly because of our background or current response State can help us make good decisions about how we engage with media and connect with others we can make practical changes to our media diet with this self-knowledge just like Jocelyn did rather than just saying I don't like this or I'm not in the mood for that we can express clearly what we want from media consumption and help others to develop that language too we can also take the needs of others into account when we choose a show to watch as a group or select a novel for our book club as we've discussed before there are patterns and commonalities in both the way we communicate and our need for communication even if it may seem at first like we're too different we won't all react to the same viral video or breaking news the same way but there are patterns to why we react differently we all have susceptibility and response States and understanding them allows us to understand each other and communicate better whether we're just commenting on a friend's video or reporting for a major News Network thanks for watching Sunny Hall intro to human communication which is part of the city hall project a partnership between ASU and crash course if you liked this video and want to keep learning with us be sure to subscribe you can learn more about City Hall and the videos produced by crash course and ASU in the links in the description see you next time