Effects of media messages

The topic, "effects of media messages" is essential to the study of audiences because audiences are exposed to such a variety of different media formats everyday such as: print media, television, movies, video games, music, cellphones, various kinds of software and of course the internet.

because such a variety of media formats are readily available for audiences to consume its important to remember to use a broad perspective on media effects in order to understand the incredibly wide range of influence the media messages carry.



Personally when I hear the phrase media affects my mind goes towards the negative impacts media has on us, such as watching violent TV causes aggression in youths, or how hearing a radio broadcast can cause direct effects on its listeners, or how medias unrealistic image of the female body creates young females to become self conscious and anorexic trying to meet media standards.

However true these statements can be showing negative affects of media messages

Lecture example of "Social Learning Theory" created by Albert Bandar exploring how children are socialized by their environment. An experiment took place where some children were made to watch as an adult as he betted a plastic Bobo doll, while others weren't exposed to this. Then all of the children were individually put into the same room were they found themselves to with the Bobo doll.  The results showed that the children whom had watched the adult be aggressive towards the doll, displayed similar characteristics, while the ones who did not witness the violent acts were not violent themselves. Thus the plastic Bobo experiment displays an example of negative effects of the media.


Textbook example of the "War of The Worlds Broadcast" of 1938 a time when listeners ate, slept and dreamt about what the radio told them to. During this particular broadcast, actors were given the famous script of the novel, "War of The Worlds" while enhancing the broadcast with realistic background sounds which would have been described in the book. The broadcast intention was to be a source of entertainment for its listeners however the broadcast ended up leaving listeners leaving their homes with  their families believing the world itself was being taken  over by aliens. This shows the direct effects media messages can have.

There are also examples of positive media affects as shown in audiences were "The Ice Bucket Challenge" a challenge encouraging audiences to pour cold water on themselves to display for a brief second what it feels like to have mls, each video was promoted to donate to mls funds to find a cure. This is a positive example of effects of media messages because it promotes good behaviour, for a good cause.

In seminar this week we discussed how hard it is to study audiences effects of media due to a variety of reasons: inadequate technology, miss representation, active vs passive audience etc. which lead us to discuss the many hardships in actually trying to study audiences and how studying audiences have changed over the years. this topic was backed up by the article we were suppose to read for class, "Taking audience research into the age of new media: old problems and new challenges" this article discusses how in the past audiences were mainly reported by ethnographic studies. the main example was the example of the study of romance novels, and how it was previously assumed that middle aged women simply read the medium to pass time, however due to a change in how we study audiences from a passive stereotype to a active member allowed for research to conclude that women read romance novels for many reasons, for submission of the male characters, to enhance their love life's, etc. not to simply pass the time.

an end thought, audiences are always changing, we as the audience are finding new ways to consume media and participate in the media we choose, therefore as we change the technology and research to study us will have to change organically as well.