this is the first of two C1 media screencasts looking at audience effects theories and as you can see here this is the penultimate topic of the mass media unit and this topic addresses this key question what kind of impact uh does the media have on audiences and what we're going to do during this topic is look at a number of different theoretical models that have tried to answer this key question and this key question about the extent to which the media uh affects audiences is not just of concern to sociologists this is also uh an issue of public concern of public debate and there's been concern about uh the influence of the media on audiences ever since the early 20th century uh with the rise of things like Cinema and radio so there's been a fear that people might be manipulated politically or encouraged to violence through the media and mass propaganda was deployed to devastating effect uh in the 1930s and 1940s by the Nazis in Germany and those of you studied modern history may be familiar uh with the famous nanzi propaganda film uh Triumph of the will uh from which these images that you can see on the screen were taken now there are two basic positions that you can take on this debate about the impact of the mass media so position one argues that the media is very very powerful and that the audience is relatively weak so this position sees the media as having a strong controlling influence uh over the audience so the audience are essentially seen as passive dopes mindlessly consuming mediate tchs who accept everything that the media throws at them whereas the second basic position that you can take on this debate uh is the opposite so in this view uh audiences are not passive they're in fact active interpreters of media content uh given it different meanings and interpretations and according to this perspective uh there might be other uh social influences other agencies of socialization like the family like the peer group that are actually much more powerful than the media now there are a range of different theoretical models that you're going to need to understand uh in order to answer exam questions on this topic and in this screencast we're going to focus on the hypodermic syringe model the cultural effect model and then this two-step flow model now the hypodermic syringe model sometimes also referred to as the magic bullet theory was one of the earliest ways of thinking about how the mass media uh influences audiences so this perspective was developed in the 1920s and 1930s after researchers observed the effect of media propaganda uh during World War I and this model suggests that the media act like a hypodermic syringe injecting messages uh into the veins of media audiences so this is a linear communication Theory which suggests that media messages are injected directly into the brains of a passive audience and it's a perspective that suggests that the audience are homogeneous that we're all the same and that we all respond to Media messages uh in the same way so it's a very simple view of the media uh as being all powerful and as having the potential to cause direct and immediate changes in people's behavor behavior and some academics have suggested that children and teenagers are directly influenced by violent media content because they're still in the early stages of socialization and are therefore very impressionable for example in 1963 uh the psychologist Albert bandura uh carried out an experiment on young children which involved exposing them to films and cartoons of a South writing doll being attacked by uh a mallet as we can see in some of these images and bandura concluded on the basis of this experiment that violent media content uh could lead to imitation or copycat violence the impact of advertising on consumers is also sometimes used in support of the hypmic syringe model so in 1957 Vance Packard wrote a very famous book book called The Hidden persuaders and this was a book about advertising so he described how ordinary people uh were persuaded to consume Goods without being aware of the techniques being used so in his view uh the mass media was so powerful that they could directly inject messages uh into the audience without the audience even realizing and in the advertising industry now uh advertisers increasingly hire psychologists to develop subliminal messages below the fresh holder Consciousness in order to persuade consumers to buy certain products however the hypmic syringe model is heavily criticized for example this model assumes that the entire audience is passive and will react in the same way uh to media content this kind of assumes that we're just kind of spoonfed uh information from the media and we absorb that information in the same way whereas in reality people may well have a range of responses to media content depending on their own social situation and the experiences that they've had and critics of this perspective also argue that it's wrong to assume that the media have enormous power and influence it's wrong to assume that the power of the media can override all of the other agencies of socialization that people exposed to and people's own experiences the second theory that we need to look at is called the cultural effects model and like the hypmic syringe model this perspective suggests that the media do have a direct and Powerful uh effect on the audience but it isn't the immediate effect that that's implied by the hypmic syringe model Instead This perspective suggests that the media gradually influence the audience over a longer period of time so this is a kind of drip drip effect uh a sort of slow steady subtle uh everpresent process of brainwashing which gradually shapes people's everyday view of the world for example if we see minority ethnic groups in the media nearly always betrayed in the context of trouble and crime then over time this will come to form uh the stereotypes that we hold of these groups to the exclusion of other aspects of their lives so the cultural effects model is saying that the media is powerful that it does have a big impact uh on audiences but it's not an immediate whizbang effect it's a slow cative effect which is much more subtle and I think we can relate this approach to some of the theories that we've looked at in earlier parts of the course so I think the cultural effects model fits quite nicely with Marxism because marxists believe the audiences have been exposed over a long period of time to a drip drip effect process in which media content has become imbued with capitalist ideology and I think feminist sociologists would make a similar argument about the drip drip effect of the media transmitting an ideology uh based on patriarchy however one of the problems with this approach is that methodologically is extremely difficult to measure uh the long-term effects of the media and it's virtually impossible uh to measure uh media effects uh in isolation from other agencies of socializing ation and other influences on audiences okay we're going to finish this screencast by looking at the two-step flow model and you can see from where I positioned this particular perspective that although uh this Theory argues that the media does have an influence it's not as powerful and not as direct as the one implied by the previous two models in the 1940s the American sociologist Paul Lazer F uh wrote a book called The People's Choice which summarized his research into the 1940 uh US presidential election and in the course of his research he discovered that we're more likely to be influenced by other people than we are by the mass media and laeral called these people the opinion leaders so these are those uh respected members of any social group who get information and form views from the media who then lead opinion and discussion within their social groups so opinion leaders are people that uh others will listen to and take notice of as we can see in this image the two-step flow model suggests that opinion leaders uh pay close attention to the media and then they pass on their interpretation of media messages to their their followers in other words this Theory suggests that opinion leaders uh select interpret and filter media texts before they reach Mass audiences so they form their own opinions and interpretations of them that's the the first step opinion leaders then selectively pass on uh these messages which contain uh their own opinions and interpretations to other people in their social group so this is the the Second Step so although the two-step flow model recognizes that the media uh can have a powerful impact on audiences uh it argues that this is often an indirect effect rather than a direct effect and what I mean by an indirect effect is one that is mediated or altered by opinion leaders and according to Brett lamb the two-step flow model is still a theory that has some credibility today for example in a paper presented at the 20th uh annual worldwide web conference in 2011 researchers looking at the flow of information on the social networking site Twitter revealed that they had found significant evidence to support the two-step flow model so after analyzing the flow of information the researchers discovered that news Finds Its way to people through a number of prominent and influential opinion leaders who include celebrities journalists and bloggers nevertheless there are criticisms of the two-step flow model for example this perspective uh suggests that the audience is divided into active viewers the opinion leaders and then passive viewers who are influenced by the opinion leaders and this is probably too simplistic and it doesn't explain why opinion leaders are directly influenced by the media content when others in the audience are not and also when we're thinking about modern communication it's very likely that there's more than two steps in the flow of communication and ideas and interpretations of media content may get bounced around in discussion in a variety of groups creating many steps in the flow of medeor influence