Media Psychology: A Personal Essay in
Definition and Purview
by
Stuart Fischoff, Ph.D.
Online Publication Date: February 8, 2005
Journal of Media Psychology, Volume 10, No. 1, Winter, 2005
The subject matter of media psychology is a mother lode of material that
psychology has actively mined for decades, but only within the last ten to fifteen
years has the enterprise emerged as a distinct and explicit subdivision of
psychology.
Media psychology found its
inspirational roots more than 90 years ago within the discipline of social
psychology and in the early work of social psychologist Hugo Münsterberg concerning the psychology and the psychological
impact of film. Published in 1916 under
the title, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, it was the first empirical study
of an audience reacting to a film. Münsterberg also provided such a keen analysis of a
screenplay's (then called a photoplay) grammar of visual construction and
nascent cinematic conventions and their psychological impact on the audience,
that his incisive words still echo today in numerous film school lecture halls
and classroom seminars.
And there was psychologist L.L. Thurstone, arguably the Father of Attitude Scale
Construction and Measurement (a signature area of theory and research in social
psychology), who developed scales for the measurement of attitudes toward movies
for the famous and notoriously politicized Payne Fund Research in 1928. This study’s practically avowed purpose was
to indict (not investigate) the medium of film as a source of inspiration of
bad behavior in a youthful audience.
Few psychologists, however, followed Münsterberg and Thurstone into
the thicket of entertainment media influences and effects. It was not until the advent and market
penetration of television in the 1950s coupled with concerns about unconscious
influences of advertising, in all its forms and venues, that
the attention and media interest of psychologists truly crystallized. Even then, academic psychology’s interests
largely centered around television’s use by children
and how it influenced their acquisition of reading skills and imitation of
anti-social behavior.
This narrow focus persists today; the
research on media effects still draws most attention from theorists and
researchers whose professional interests are children-centric. But the truth is that the various media impact
on virtually everyone and, in many ways, every living thing on the planet, from
bovine milk production (the “Mozart effect”), to plant growth, to electronic
Prozac for malcontented family pets.
Most psychologists, and people in
kindred fields like communications studies, journalism or sociology, largely
address the negative effects on young people inflicted by such mass media as
television, film, or popular music lyrics, effects such as promoting violence
or premature or ill-considered sex.
Concerns about gender conditioning, sexism, racism, ageism, etc., are
also in evidence, numerically but pale in comparison with concerns and studies
about sex and violence.
However, the truth of media effects
and influence, positive or negative—there are both — is far deeper and
pervasive and passes little-noticed by consumers and little-appreciated in the
grand scheme of a media-centric culture by producers of media appliances and
content. Like the proverbial fish and
water, the users and producers of media are often the last ones to discover how
totalistic the medium of media has become.
Students of media are and will continue to be increasingly called upon
to chart the topographic surface and deep structures of media influences on
individuals, groups and, finally, the family of man.
Broadly speaking, media psychology
uses the theories, concepts and methods of psychology to study the impact of
the mass media on individuals, groups, and cultures. But this definition is too broad to be very
useful, and it ignores the very dynamic and reciprocal nature of media and
people or consumers.
More specifically, media psychology
is concerned with the inter- and intra-personal psychological dimensions
underlying the impact and use of any medium of communication, irrespective of
the nature of the subject matter being communicated.
The key delimiting definitional
element in this view is that such interpersonal communication is accomplished
by way of something other than face-to-face, oral-aural communication. In other words, media psychology is concerned
with the social and psychological parameters of communications between people
(or people and other organisms) that are mediated by some technology or conduit
other than simply air.
Disciplines are as much defined by
what they exclude as what they embrace; by what they are not as much as what
they are. To wit, media psychology is
not concerned with the dynamics of speech as a form of communications per
se. Nor is it concerned with the science
and technology behind devices for mediated communications per se. Media psychology is not concerned, for
example, with speech pathology except insofar as such pathology is better
understood, obscured, or affected by some mediated influence. Hence, it is of possible interest to
media psychology that the use of print as a communications vehicle can hide or
obscure a speech impediment such that people who correspond via the Internet
and who have any sort of speech impediment, can
eliminate it from the ongoing communication equation. It is of definite interest to media
psychology if someone consciously uses text messaging, email and/or Internet
chat rooms precisely because these media obscure their speech impediment
thereby effectively and favorably altering their self perception and self
presentations.
Many practitioners in the field of
media psychology apply and ply their various skills, training and expertise in
a variety of arenas. Not only do they
teach courses in the field but also do research on media issues, appear in
print and electronic media as interviewees and columnists. They also advise various media organizations
including movie studios, independent filmmakers, television networks,
screenwriters, producers and directors, on the myriad aspects of human behavior
and how such information might be most accurately portrayed in the media. Useful advice to media organizations,
however, requires more than a knowledge of psychology;
it requires a knowledge of how media function as well as an understanding of
the media’s need to strike a balance between accuracy values and entertainment
purposes.
In sum, media psychology is
principally interested in all forms of mediated communications and their
related effects on both senders and receivers.
To fully appreciate the discipline, we must look more extensively at its
embrace, its purview.
How do media hardware and the
information they transmit influence the way we think, the way we relate, our
attitudes, values, and beliefs about the world?
How do they shape our use of leisure and work time, limit and expand our
recreational outlets, outline our sense of history and politics, simultaneously
expand and diminish our world? How does
the proportion of mediated and direct world experience change as a function of
reliance on communications technologies?
These are media psychology questions.
The field of media psychology embraces the teaching, study and analysis of, and research and commentary on the various media as they exert their presence in and influence on the arenas of entertainment, communication, and the field of information technology (IT). IT, in turn, looks at the technology of information gathering and telecommunications or information transmission or exchange, as well as how content and behavior are influenced by innovations in media-related technology. Portability, miniaturization, and wireless technology are, for example, radically transforming the way people communicate, what they communicate, how often they communicate, and why they communicate. Dick Tracy's wrist radio is now a quaint fictional antecedent to what is available to the cell phone or PDA user.
Media psychologists talk of a communications
medium like television. We talk of a
collection of communications media as a collective noun – the media. And we talk of mass media. What makes a medium of communication a mass
media rather than simply a personal medium?
A defining element for a medium to be
specified as mass vs. personal must be that the medium reaches out to a high
volume of people rather than to only one or a few. The medium of communications known as the
telephone is a not per se a mass medium (even if it is hosting a conference
call); nor is the palm pilot or the cell phone, even if they connect to a
system of broadcasting over or receiving from a mass medium, such as the
Internet. For example, the phone doesn’t
transmit the digital image, the Internet does.
Mass audiences define a mass
medium. TV, motion pictures, radio,
newspapers and magazines and, increasingly, the personal computer with the
growing availability of bulletin boards, data bases, fax and modems devices,
and, of course, the Internet, are distinctly mass media.
Yet, while the telephone, in all its
current incarnations, is not a mass medium, it is a communications medium. And it is increasingly a multi-purpose
device. Because of this, the study of
phone-related behavior easily falls within the purview of media psychology For example, the use of cell phones by teens
for a variety of purposes other than simple communication, such as gaming and
entertainment, has expanded the potential influence of this protean instrument
in unanticipated ways. This certainly
engages the interest of media psychology.
It also taps into the REM cycles of movie studio executives.
“Tweens”
and teens, the premier target audiences for 70% of Hollywood releases, now use
cell phones for instant text messaging.
During the show or immediately afterwards, these techno-savvy
demographic age groups can instantly praise or bury a summer blockbuster on its
Friday night opening. In a nanosecond,
the best laid and most expensive plans for a studio public relations blitz
slams into a dream or nightmare. Such
speed of judgment dissemination was unheard of in the halcyon “slower
days.” The new cell phone-digital camera
technology which can instantly record and transmit pictures is on the media
psychology radar screen, especially when such phone-cameras are deployed in
paparazzi fashion to spy on and publicly expose celebrities in private,
intimate, or compromising situations.
Technology, communications speed,
youth market disposable income subsidized by parents who are otherwise engaged,
entertainment product and industries, these are all part of the expansive
purview of media psychology.
The media have come to be integral
parts of a variety of social institutions such as schools, hospitals, political
and military systems, even religions, and their real and virtual
assemblies. The media shape the way news
gathering and transmission, advertising, political
processes and campaigns, wars, diplomacy, education, entertainment, and
socialization are conducted. The effects
the media have on these human enterprises are legitimate points of interest on
the expanding scope of media psychology.
Examples:
·
If the U.S.
is more likely to intervene in a natural or man-made catastrophe in another
country precisely because television images of human suffering move audiences
to contact their government representatives, that is a media psychology effect
and that is a media psychology event.
·
If
television has changed the way sports are played, demands game rules to speed
up on-field action in order to keep the home viewing audience watching the
commercials between plays, that is a media psychology effect and that is a
media psychology event.
·
If athletes
become celebrities who can command multi-million dollar contracts because of
their appearances and performances on television, that is a media psychology
effect and that is a media psychology event.
·
If we are a
culture obsessed with celebrity because of the endless sources of entertainment
and news about entertainment and entertainers; if everyone is just waiting for
their chance to step in front of a camera to become "somebody"
in a world where, unless your picture or name is in the media, you're just a
"nobody;"
if these are current phenomena that significantly define our
evolving culture, then these are matters of interest to media psychologists.
·
If news
about celebrities push off the front pages and out of prime time news agendas
and people know more about The Apprentice’s Omorosa
and American Idol’s Paula and less about Islam’s Osama
and Russia’s Putin, that’s a media psychology effect.
Not surprisingly then, media
psychology looks at the phenomenon of the elevation of celebrity to a level of
importance unprecedented in history, especially if importance is measured in
terms of the amount of time and space devoted to the coverage of celebrities or
to their pop culture products. It also
looks at the ways in which national and local news have agendized
their programming such that viewers come to know and understand less and less
about what directly affects their lives and more and more about what has little
or no consequence for their lives. Media
psychology looks at how the network economic bottom-line directive to make news
more entertaining morphed into the directive to make entertainment more
newsworthy.
In the matter of celebrity, media
psychologists also look at the disturbing and rapidly expanding flip side of
celebrity, fandom, and how intense passion for celebrities can lead to the
pendulum arc from fan to fanatic, from star admirer to star stalker or star
murderer.
Existential ramifications are
dizzying in an age of media innovation, expansion, and penetration. As media content and technology evolve, so
does culture. As culture evolves so does
the media and so does the manner in which reality is understood. As culture evolves, social and political
agendas are set, and personal exploration, discovery, and productivity are
conceived of, formed and transformed, in an endless developmental cycle of
technological breakthrough, social adoption, market penetration, maturation or
saturation, market decline, and, eventually, adaptation (redefining a market
focus, e.g., radio evolving from a venue for plays and live concerts to a venue
for music and talk) in the face of newer technology and attendant competition
for consumer dollars and consumer attention.
When some piece of media technology
(e.g., camcorder or digital camera) becomes cheaply available in the consumer
market, it has a tendency to change our sense of self through the passages of
time. People capture still or moving
pictures of themselves or their loved ones on cameras, tape recorders,
camcorders, and leave records of their lives, of precious, tender, intimate, or
painful moments, records of complexity and continuity, to a degree unheard of
and undreamed of in previous centuries.
On the most personal level, our sense
of self, our clear grasp of aging, of the passage of time has become
democratized. What was once the
privilege of the wealthy who could command portraits or statues of themselves,
or of movie stars who could chronicle their careers through the eyes of the
motion picture camera with images engraved on film, is now universally
available on digital images and videotape.
If we want to, we can all record passages and smile or
scowl or weep at the tales told and the life led -- truly an unprecedented
opportunity to grasp life's arc.
Our lives are there to unfold for our children on bequeathed DVDs.
Yet, the interesting question arises:
How will family legends and icons fare under the
scrutiny of live action chronicles? A
photo captures a moment in time and conjures projections, fantasies, and
imaginings. But a video portrait, across
time and space, leaves far less to the imagination. Will that enhance or stunt family
myth-making? Will we be culturally
richer or poorer for these vivid, visual accounts?
Before the advent of photographs and
recorders of voice and moving images, legends were made and tales were woven
and embellished in the recounting of events from memory and in stories passed
on from one generation to another, in voice or in print.
In the past, people of questionable
motive, behavior and accomplishment became the stuff of myth and legend. Such legend and dream weaving may be
diminished, cut down to size with current recording technology. People like George Armstrong Custer, Billy
the Kid, or Jesse James were once outsized “legends” by virtue of exaggerations
and fabrications by politically biased or profit-motivated pulp writers who
preferred to make Western myth rather than impart truth of the old West. Such so-called “heroes” may, in their
contemporary incarnations, be relegated to minor or ignoble places in
historical recounting because audio and visual recordings are now available to
“keep the record straight.”
The contemporary understanding and
evaluation of violence at the hands of agents of government or terrorists is
similarly dramatically modified and memorialized by current image-storing
technology. The ready availability of
camcorders easily records events like the Rodney King beating, the police trial
and subsequent riot in Los Angeles, and the events of September 11, 2001 and
its chilling revelation of America’s vulnerability to world-wide terrorist
movements.
Videotaped capsules of history have
shaped public reactions even as they traumatize viewers who were subjected to
an endless repetition of images of brutality and carnage. At the same time, attitudes toward war and
its conduct are altered by miniaturized television cameras in smart bombs and
missiles and used by journalists "embedded" in caravans of military
vehicles in “search and destroy missions.”
Other sea changes in military
strategy and flexibility derive from technology-enriched “command and control
centers.” These centers provide military
decision-makers with real-time bird's eye views of Mogadishu or Baghdad
battles, arrayed on banks of color television monitors which are near the
fighting or thousands of miles away. War
history, as we chronicled it, historicized it, and as we thought we knew it, is
no more! The media have turned the page
on the business of war, or more accurately, started a whole new set of books on
the subject.
Certainly other disciplines have looked
at and continue to look at the impact of the mass media on society. The fields of communications, popular
culture, sociology, and critical studies have long traditions of addressing
such issues. So too has psychology, but
not as a distinct subdivision of the larger field. In fact, until recently, psychologists who
were principally interested in studying media effects found more congenial
academic homes in university departments other than psychology. What does the psychological perspective bring
to the study of the mass media that other disciplines do not?
The fact is that many of the theories
and research in other disciplines devoted to the study of media derive directly
from psychological theory and its methods of research. Clinical and personality psychology have
traditionally looked at how events shape individual behavior. Social psychology has traditionally looked at
the way social forces impact on individual behavior and attitudes. All of these sub-specialties of psychology
provide theory, research, and methods to assess the effects these major social
forces – the personal and the mass media – have on the individual and,
consequently, on the society in which the individual resides.
The clinical, personality and social
perspectives of psychology are ideally suited to add extra dimensions to the
study of the impact of the media on our personal and collective lives,
dimensions beyond those provided by other academic disciplines. Together however, the confluence of diverse
academic perspectives, viewed through the organizing lens of media psychology,
has the potential to bring to light a fuller understanding of the dynamic
interrelationship of media and society.
Time and perspective are imperative
if we are to truly understand the media's tectonic shaping of the world of
people and events as they exist in the present and as they will exist in the
future. We cannot reliably assess the
impact of any mass medium by its effects on individuals or even groups of
individuals. We must attempt to understand
such impact over a longer time perspective and as a larger
and more complex cultural phenomena, one which will inevitably have
unforeseeable effects and unintended consequences, e.g., television viewing,
entertainment eating, obesity, and epidemic childhood diabetes.
Moreover, we must look at incubation,
threshold, and synergistic effects.
Take, for example, the issue of so-called media-induced violence: how
much and what sort of media-displayed violence, over how many years, catalyzed
by what kind of personal experiences, interacting with what kind of personality
configurations, absorbed through what media environments or venues and
confluence of media environments and venues, is necessary to inflect a culture
and its people towards violence? This is
the complex equation that must be formulated in order to truly talk of the
effects of the media on society. Any
conclusions about the impact of media displays of violence on viewer real-world
violence is, at present, quite premature and unwarranted and certainly provides
no valid basis for legislative action.
Only
by understanding how and why mass media influence our lives can we better cope
with them and only by coping with them can we change them so that they serve us
rather than control us.
Media are vehicles for
transmitting. What a particular medium
transmits defines the nature of that medium.
How it transmits (i.e., the nature of the delivery system), draws upon,
emphasizes, or even cultivates one or more senses and skills in the receiver or
consumer. Neal Postman noted, for
example, that, before German goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg, invented the
printing press in the 15th century, there was mass illiteracy. In part this related to the fact that there
were very few books available and were very expensive; they had to be
laboriously scripted by hand (hence the term “manuscript.”); oftentimes by
monks and mostly about religious topics.
But with the cheap and easily
produced books and pamphlets from Gutenberg’s invention, suddenly there was a
reason to learn how to read and literacy spread through nation-states like
wildfires, but especially in the middle and upper classes. Not surprising, religious tracts gave way to
erotica as a principal subject matter for publishers -- the erotica industry,
an unintended consequence of the printing press and pervasive literacy!
Media titan and guru, Marshall McLuhan ,
observed in his seminal 1964 book, Understanding
Media: The Extensions of Man, that "The medium is the
message." While this dictum is now
repeated in cliché-babble mode, it still points the way: Among other things, a
medium, irrespective of what it is transmitting, shapes the way the audience
interacts with it and with the content being transmitted. Radio and music recordings, in whatever
format, are auditory media. Print is a
visual medium; the Internet, television, and film are audio-visual media. Their respective sensory-cognitive demands
are both informative and transformative.
The audience, however, is often
unaware of just how important a given medium has been in shaping audience
comprehension and expectation. In other
words, the audience of a new medium must be trained to decode the message of a
medium, learn the proper language, grammar, emotional impact and requisite
senses, skills and aptitudes demanded by the new medium. It is this novelty of psychological and
sensory-motor schemata that quickly separates generations, in terms of comfort
with and mastery of new media. It also
endlessly creates new classes of technogurus and
technophobes.
Each new medium has its own learning
curve to ride before it begins the process of self- actualization. Television is an excellent example. This new medium, born commercially after the
end of WWII, had to find its televisual voice and its unique immediacy of
transmission of live pictures and sounds of entertainment programming and
breaking sports and news events before it could became the 800 lb. Gorilla we
know and ambivalently embrace today.
The infant medium of television had
to borrow the concept of advertising subsidy from radio and convert it into
funding for television programming. Its
inspirational sources of program content, the creative component of the broadcast
medium, began with theater, radio, motion pictures, and the phonograph.
Eventually and inexorably, television
had to distinguish itself from these pre-existing media and find what it did
differently, worse than and better than each of those ancestral media. It began to shape the product it transmitted,
revised how it transmitted it, how it looked and sounded and, finally, it
reformed the variety of options available to the audience to consume it. Americans had free television because no one
tried to evaluate the psychic cost and effects of watching commercials, hour
after hour, and day after day, over a lifetime.
Meanwhile, other nations, in other parts of the world, went a completely
different direction. TV was subsidized
by the government and by taxes on the purchase of television. There was, in effect, no such thing as
commercial television in Europe. How
European television began to eventually look more like American commercial
television is a story for another essay.
Of course, the medium itself is not and cannot be all. The content transmitted, what people ordinarily think of as "the message," or the programming, is just as important. It is the reason people come to a medium to feed at its trough. People buy, rent, or lease, or steal media appliances for two basic purposes: to be informed or to be entertained.
We have come to talk as though we are
in the “information age.” But is
information what most media are about?
Hardly. The media
transmit entertainment and related diversions.
The vaunted information highway and the 500 channel universe are a
little less grand and a little more grandiose when such portals are principally
used the purposes of entertainment.
Repeated studies reveal that 70-80% of the reasons cited for watching
television, going to movies, or surfing the internet, relate to purposes of
entertainment or relaxation or fulfilling a social function, i.e., sharing an
enjoyable experience with others. To
illustrate, the dominant purpose for most non-work time users of the Internet
(and some work-time users as well) is email, “eBay-addictions,” sex, and sex
lies, games, forums and chat rooms. In
other words, for most people, the highways and universes will be traversed and
explored largely for entertainment's sake—as well as for acquisition, social
outreach, and social bonding.
Shorn of spin doctoring the truth is
then, that for most, the media, mass or personal, serve entertainment
purposes. The advertisers may advertise
them as educational tools, business tools, and world-expanding tools
("where do you want to go today?”), but they know and we know that such an
ostensible purpose is a salve for the superego.
Id-pleasure is what the media really provide.
Film and television are the dominant
forms of audio-visual media-delivered entertainment. (The Internet, as will be noted later, is
challenging that dominance.) But film
and television frequently breach the boundaries of entertainment and become
virtual teaching and inspiration machines.
They educate or create dreams, hopes and fears. In the first instance, a host of anecdotal
data shows that how Hollywood portrayed America in such programs as Dallas or Fresh Prince of Bel Aire,
or in such films as Boyz' N' the Hood or Pretty Woman, shaped immigrant expectations of what American life
is really like. Films such as El Norte showed immigrants striving to get to America to live the
life promised in these fictional television programs or movies. At the same time, in an opposite vector, we
are currently witness to ethnocentric protectionism and Fundamentalist outrage
at American cultural exports through its films and television programs. Such is the power of products of popular
culture. They create dreams and inspire
wars.
In the second instance, research
clearly indicates that people are offended by how their groups are portrayed in
film and that different groups take offense at different portrayals and
representations. Research shows, for
example, that Blacks resent Black criminal stereotypes in film while Asians
resent model minority stereotypes but not as much as they resent on-screen
Asian invisibility. Other work shows how
Muslims are offended by endless media stereotypes of them as either rich and
profligate or brutish and violent -- even before 9/11! Since then, it’s only gotten worse.
Importantly, what research has not shown yet is the short- or
long-term impact of such portrayals, either with reference to ingroup self-concept or to perceptions of the ingroup by some outgroup, an outgroup which is either majority-dominant or merely
minority-competitive. This omission is
of intense interest to media psychology because much print ink, speech time,
and classroom lecture has been spent detailing the precise negative effects of
such portrayals of demographic groups.
In other words, there are many words and very few facts on the subject
of effects of stereotypes in the media on self-perceptions of those in
portrayed groups.
So too is the fact that television
can be a window to a wider world or a too-ready escape from learning the skills
necessary to succeed in life. It is
important to media psychology that some people who have poor reading skills
fall further behind in school because they choose to watch television rather
than read books. Television is an easier
way to be entertained than is reading and thus the skill of reading is further
retarded by such convenience choices.
Yet, crucial research shows that those who do not have difficulty
reading are not affected adversely by television watching, unless television
watching reaches levels above 30-40 hours per week. Negative impact on reading skills once
viewing reaches that high a level is known as a “threshold effect.”
"But
wait, there's more."
Yet, there is another side to all this
raging against the machine. Television
can be good for you! Most people shrug
off the demonstrable fact that television can be a very effective teaching and
motivation technology. True, it cannot
do so well what print can; but equally true, print cannot do so well what
television can. In the right hands, with
proper guidance, at home or in the classroom, both media can be used
synergistically, each can support the other: one (TV) excites interest while
one (print) provides intellectual elaboration once the interest is
excited. From media, out of nothing can come passion, direction, and illumination.
Television alerts and sensitizes
people to current social issues such as drug and alcohol abuse, drunk driving,
birth control, AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, and matters of
crimes of hate, fear and revenge. But
how it does it best is most fascinating.
Research shows that lecturing to people about these issues in what are
called Public Service Announcements (PSAs) is a far
less effective means of education than incorporating these issues into
storylines of fictional programs like sitcoms or dramas, or afternoon soap
operas. People learn and are more
willing to take effective action when messages are able to bypass censors and
inclinations to selective attention. A
pro-social message that tags along with the fate of a loved character on The Young and the Restless, has a
greater chance to make the trip into the mind’s inner space and set behavior
change into motion than does an uninspired Public Service Announcement or on a
PBS special.
Recent research shows that young
people between the ages of 14 and 35 are now spending more time surfing the
Internet than they do in front of the television. This is a tsunamic
shift in leisure time activity and points to the increasing penetration of
interactive media. Parenthetically, whether this means that interactivity is
going to displace passive television watching or merely that interactivity is
finding its place at the table of entertainment options is an intriguing
question. This media (r)evolution may follow the scenario that unfolded when, in
the 1950s, the upstart medium of television rapidly ravaged and decimated the
audience for movies. The massive
population shift from one medium to the other [a drop of weekly movie
attendance from 90 million in 1948 to 19 million in 1958] seemed to signal the
death of the motion picture as a leisure time activity. It was not to be, of course. The two media found their unique strengths
and weaknesses, cooperated and eventually each secured or re-secured its place
on the entertainment menu of America, even feeding each other talent and
product.
Similar changes and merges are afoot
with the computer, the Internet, and the television. The single console with interactive
capabilities at onsite and remote locations, bundled into the capabilities of
smart houses is in the offing. How such
“in touch” capacities will change the way people live and interact is the
speculative stuff of science fiction writers and futurists. It is almost certain that the changes in
routines and expectations of the typical American that will be wrought from
such advances will whet the appetite and stir the interests of future media
psychologists.
How the media of film and television,
by use of music, camera angles, editing, lighting, color and black and white
recording, image size, and all facets of sound and image production, create
impressions and facilitate our suspension of disbelief to become absorbed in
fictional stories is, of course, another dimension of interest of media
psychology. It is tantamount to studying
how, technically, media have the effects they have on
viewers.
Daily newspaper, Monday through
Friday readership, has declined from 70 percent of the population in 1979 to 50
percent in 2000, and dropping. More
recent research indicates that almost 70% of Americans get most of their news
from television and of the remaining 30% that get their news from newspapers, almost 60% of them are over the age of 50,
stigmatizing newspapers as a “geezer” medium.
This decline has been in place since the early 1960s and threatens to
continue unless newspapers find some more effective way to grow readers.
Newspaper owners have countered this
trend of television to erode readership by diversifying investments, both
vertically and horizontally, into other media venues and by expanding into
cyberspace. Steven L. Seraita, Senior Vice President of print media for
Scarborough Research in New York City, recently
pointed out "The growth of e-readership is up among all age groups, but
especially among young adults. The
Internet is a way to capture some of these young readers."
This then, is one of the reasons why
newspapers, local, regional and national, have developed a major presence on
the Internet. In part, such sites gather
readers who want more in-depth coverage of breaking stories and of complex
issues; and, in part, such a web presence has the potential for cultivating a
new generation of newspaper readers.
Yet, something disturbs! Studies conducted over the past 50 years
comparing absorption of information from reading newspapers versus watching
television repeatedly show that information recall is greater for print than
for television. This would suggest that
the nation's youth is turning away from its best source of information and
analysis for understanding critical social issues and turning to a headline-depth source of information,
television.
Because of declining subscription, newsstand,
and advertising revenues, newspapers struck back at television-molded minds by
what they deemed the best strategy—imitation!
They aped television with new products such as USA Today, a colorful, non-taxing, non-regional, graphics-heavy
success story. They turned over new
leaves and increased their entertainment and sports sections, and to many
critics, newspapers “just plain dumbed down.”
This Faustian bargain entered into by
newspapers has been only partially successful.
In terms of major metropolitan dailies, newspapers are still losing
readers. But they are increasing
circulation with minor community, daily and weekly newspapers, products that,
unlike major metropolitan dailies, are intensely local in coverage and have
essentially abdicated state, national and international coverage.
The abandonment of national and
international news by small local papers leaves their readers highly dependent
on television for their state, national and international news. Given that the amount of news on such
programs has dropped both absolutely and in proportion to the amount of time
devoted to sports, entertainment and celebrity goings-on, this reliance on
local television outlets for most of the news is both alarming and depressing. The implications for maintaining an educated
electorate and citizenship are enormous, and, not coincidentally, of major
interest to media psychology.
Recent changes in FCC regulations
allowing the intensification of mergers of major media conglomerates promises
to accelerate trends toward both superficialization
and parochialization of America’s world view IQ—“If
it’s not happening in my town, state or country, I’m not interested.”
Ironically, however, there is a
bright side to this. While the Internet
is, for many, principally a social contact and entertainment platform that,
like television, drains leisure time activities away from reading and other
"growthful" hobbies and activities, it is,
nevertheless, increasing literacy.
Effective use of the Internet and online game playing and interactions
demands that users, especially those who shied away from reading because it
was, on the surface, too hard, are now motivated to develop literacy skills
precisely because it allows for more effective game playing and interpersonal communication. Thus it would seem that, for many poor
readers, the obstacle to improved reading skills may not have been task
difficulty. It may have been task
motivation.
Bibliotherapy is a traditional adjunct to therapy. It entails the use of books and other written
materials to help patients further understand their psychological
problems. A recent modernization of this
intervention strategy has emerged in the form of a specialization called,
variously, cinema therapy or film therapy.
Movies, being more of a limbic than cortical audio-visual experience,
are believed to provide, for many, a quicker access to problem areas than
either books or other printed material.
Film Therapy or, the term more
commonly used, Cinema Therapy (CT) is an area of growing public interest and
professional organization and is generating numerous publications relating
specific movies to specific areas of psychopathology. Felicitously, the area of CT is also
generating a growing number of research studies which are seeking to validate
the methodology and specify its strengths and weaknesses. CT also possesses the cachet of motion pictures and for many patients it is easier to
employ than assigned reading, especially given the innovation in availability
of videos through rentals, purchases, VOD or PPV. Of course, television also provides
programming that serves purposes similar that of film in using fiction to touch
people where they emotionally live and sometimes hurt.
The media of film and television join
the clutch of art intervention strategies, such as art therapy, dance therapy,
writing therapy, etc. Collectively,
these "therapies" are all techniques designed as either supplements
or alternatives to drug and talk therapies.
They are employed as treatment modalities, with the aim of helping
people get better acquainted with their problems.
The field of media psychology has
becoming increasingly interested in how the various media can help in
delivering medical and psychological treatments and intervention strategies.
The popularity of Internet medical sites and medical chat rooms has increased
dramatically as well. People are
reaching out to others for advice about experience with medical conditions. One result is that inquirers become more
knowledgeable about their medical conditions, more willing to ask more and
better questions, and even take knowledge-based issue with the opinions of
medical practitioners. Research suggests
this oftentimes results in better treatment.
Similar help and education have made
for quick national, hemispheric, and global communications for wildlife
rehabilitation specialists who are often hundreds of miles from trained
veterinary assistance. Online forums for
such animal rescuers provide support, instructive photographs, recipes for
feeding neonates of all species, and even surgical intervention techniques.
Thus, Internet human and animal
medical sites and chat rooms have become not only knowledge resources but,
importantly, separated the people with internal locus of control –“seek and ye
shall find” -- from those with an external locus of control –“please tell me
what to do.” A welcome research area is
whether information availability can move people with an external locus of
control regarding their psychological or physical health to the status of
someone with an internal locus of control.
Research shows that few people are internal or external across all
areas. In some areas they feel more
powerful, in others, less. Understanding
how the Internet informs and empowers, and possibly transforms styles of
problem solving or coping, is of significant interest to media psychologists.
On a distinctly darker note, media
psychology also examines the phenomena sometimes called "disaster marathons,"
hours or days of intense media coverage of great tragedy, of which the events
of 9-11 and its aftermath were recent examples.
It looks at the possible destructive consequences on viewers and on
journalistic ethics, of the formulaic, emotionally saturated over-coverage of
these traumatic and traumatizing events.
What’s more, it offers recommendations for better ways to keep the
public informed in these moments without inflicting additional damage in the
process.
There is a fundamental conflict in
our society -- between consumers and business.
This conflict is played out on the fields of the mass communications
media. To be sure, there is overlapping
interest. Consumers often want to buy and
businesses always want to sell. But the
concept of advertising is predicated on salesmanship, i.e., it's no trick to
sell people what they want to buy; the trick is to make people want to buy what
you want to sell. When you succeed at
that, you're a salesman. Otherwise,
you're simply a clerk. Media
advertisements and commercials are designed to be salespersons, not clerks.
Consumers think purchasing decisions
are within their control. If they are
told they are being manipulated into wanting to purchase a product, they will
recoil. They know ads are designed to
"sell" but they think that such susceptibility mostly applies to
others, not to them. This is known as
the "Third Person" effect.
People also want to be
entertained. But they do not want to
think that entertainment is, in fact, merely a vehicle for inducing them to
purchase advertised products. They want
the boundaries between entertainment and advertising pitches to be clearly
delineated. That delineation is the last
thing business wants. Not until or
unless consumers of entertainment understand how businesses manipulate them
into awareness of and desire for their products via ostensible entertainment
programming, will the media playing field ever be level.
Yet, there is a dialectic tension
afoot. It is a war of wills out
there. The relationship between the
networks and advertisers, on the one hand, and the listener or viewer on the
other hand, is essentially point-counterpoint.
When consumers found the remote, the videotape and most recently, TiVo, they zapped commercials. Sponsors first panicked and then responded
with breaking up programming into unpredictable time units. When that failed and commercials were still
being zapped (research shows that females like to watch commercials more than
do men), advertisers returned the volley with product placement.
Product
Placement
Thanks to the explosive sales spike
of Reese's Peanut Butter Pieces after they were featured in Steven Spielberg's
movie classic, E.T., The
Extra-Terrestrial, placing a purchasable product conspicuously in a movie
(or television program) is now commonplace.
In feature films, where advertising had never established the foothold
it had in television and other media venues, deals between producers and
advertisers have flourished. Studios are
paid large fees for conspicuously placing products in a scene or making brand
name products part of the storyline.
Screenwriter Shane Black tells the story of how promotional fees were
paid by Subway Sandwiches so that the characters in Lethal Weapon II made a pit stop at Subway even though the entire
scene was absent from the original script and served no purpose in advancing
the story.
Curiously, product placement, visual
or auditory, may, in fact, be superior to straight commercials because, except
for those who intentionally search for shopping inspiration, people generally
put up defenses against invitations to a purchase. Product placement circumvents these defenses
and places the product in the viewer's eye and mind…for future influence. Moreover, recent media psychology research
suggests that embedding PSA-type messages into storylines is more influential
on motivational arousal and attitude change than placing the same message as a
stand-alone PSA. So, beware of movies
like Spielberg’s Minority Report,
with Tom Cruise. It is wall-to-wall
product placement.
TV, like its big brother, movies, is
becoming a virtual product placement free fire zone. You can run but you can’t hide. Advertisers are even returning to the early
days of television when a few or a single product (e.g., Kraft, Chrysler)
sponsored entire episodes or whole series.
Children and Television
Advertising
Children
are not inhabitants of commercial-free zones.
They are prime commercial targets.
Networks previously sold toys and other products to children by blurring
the boundaries between what is the commercial and what is the program. This was accomplished by selling children’s
products during commercials which featured the same characters appearing in the
children’s programming. Media activist
Peggy Charren's work on behalf of children led to
legislation that required commercials and program content to be clearly
delineated. Charren’s
arguments to Congress were buttressed by the results of hundreds of research
studies conducted by psychologists specializing in media effects. One small step for children…
Media
Literacy
Adults and children can and should be
media savvy. They can and should be
educated to understand the costs and benefits of living in a politically free
but materialistically dictatorial society that stands on the twin pillars of
production and consumption. Media
literacy, knowing how media affect us emotionally, cognitively, and behaviorally,
and how to defend against their messages if we want to, is vital for an
informed, free society. We need
“defenses”, Neal Postman opined in his classic book and polemic against
television and other entertainment diversions, Amusing Ourselves to Death, "we need defenses against the
seductions of eloquence," against the emotional manipulations embedded in
all appeals to buy and use and discard and to buy and use and discard again.
Media
manipulation is so complex an art form it is doubtful that, even with
government legislation and safeguards, the citizen-consumer can ever be on a
par with goal directed advertisers serving their clients. While companies spend thousands of hours and
millions of dollars devising ways to manipulate the public, the public spends
little time and little money designing counter strategies. Business can only win and the public can only
lose.
The public loses, not because
business is inherently bad. It
isn't. Advertising can be a very
desirable forum for public education and personal development. Rather, the public loses because it ends up
buying things for the sake of buying things.
Advertising promotes the mantra that to buy is to be alive, to buy is to
be real, to be important, to count! It’s the American way.
To summarize, media psychology is
concerned with a wide swath of human behavior, especially so in an increasingly
media-dominated society. Its purview
captures the worlds of entertainment and advertising and their short- and
long-term impact on values, attitudes and behavior. It explores the media as they exert influence
on social, educational and strategic communications, on Information Technology
and telecommunications, on politics and sports, on ideology and on religion, on
war and peace and on diplomacy and terrorism, and on physical and psychological
wellbeing. Media Psychology analyzes how
media cover great or tragic moments that come to define a culture, such as the
first walk on the moon or the last moments of a fallen president.
These same media not only help define
an American culture but they bring these American images, values and
accomplishments to the eyes and imaginations of those in many other world
communities. These images and implicit
values oftentimes parade promises, visions and life styles that strike the
fancy of some and arouse fear and outrage in others. To understand the ramifications of cultural
commerce in this emotionally charged symbolism is a highly placed item on the
intellectual menu of media psychology.
Arguably,
the field of media psychology may be the study of a religion. The forces of media create the celebrity gods
we both adore and hate. They create the
means by which we come to understand ourselves and evaluate others. They provide the intellectual, spiritual and
hedonic manna that fills our senses and alternately crystallize or cloud our
thoughts. They inspire the dreams of our
ambitions and the demons of our nightmares.
The
media business and creative elements, whether they fully appreciate it or not,
constitute a priest class that has the power to move us and to shake us. They create the songs to be sung, the
instruments on which they are composed and performed, and designate who are to
be the performer demigods of the moment.
Media
technology, embodied in celestial eyes or terrestrial cameras, provide witness
to our private thoughts and public forays.
In time, magical media machines will offer virtual paradises for those
seeking the safe remove from a too-demanding world or provide the thrill of the
dangerous, the forbidden or the unattainable for those for whom such sojourns
are either materially unavailable or personally inconceivable. What but the handiwork of transcendent
mortals could offer such dangerous wonders?
In the beginning there was the word.
In the beginning there was the image.
And in the beginning there was the voice. Media psychology is about this trilogy. It is about all that is human and all that is
of interest to humans. Humans interest
humans, humans in word, in sound, in image.
The
media is devoutly a reflection of its creators, in all their mediated
reflection, incarnation, aspiration and rumination. To study this remarkable panoply is to study
the creators and their creations. It is
to come to understand their arenas of work and arenas of play, their things of
work and their things of play. To study
media psychology is, in the final scene, to study how humans represent
themselves to themselves through lenses, through harmonics and through spectra
and how humans send these self-images across time and space in a fierce
proclamation of existence.