Grossberg, Wartella, Whithney
Debates Over Media Effects.
(aus Media making, Mass Media in a popular culture, Sage, London, 1998)
Abstract
During the past decades strong public concerns are represented by the studies, which
asses the power of media. Some of these public fears have to do with the influence
that television violence, pornographic images advertising and persuasive methods
have on the audience’s behavior, as well as the influence of the television on the
social behavior of children specifically. All these matters have been studied and
scrutinized extensively and have also occupied justice. Indeed media factors maybe
contributors to social problems that should not be ignored, but on the other hand the
regulation of content would not alleviate social problems. It’s obvious from research
that most of the behaviors have multiple causes. Television alone or the media all
together are rarely, if ever, a necessary and sufficient cause of public behavior, as they
operate in a larger social system.
Danai Foteini Makri
0407461
696511 VO Medienpädagogik: Medienbildung, Medienkompetenz, Medienkultur
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Thomas A. Bauer, Institut für Publizistik- und
Kommunikationswissenschaft, Universität Wien., WS 2004/2005
During the past decades strong public concerns are represented by the studies, which
asses the power of media. Some of these public fears have to do with the influence
that television violence, pornograrhic images advertising and persuasive methods
have on the audience’s behavior, as well as the influence of the television on the
social behavior of children specifically. All these matters have been studied and
scrutinized extensively and have also occupied justice. Indeed media factors maybe
contributors to social problems that should not be ignored, but on the other hand the
regulation of content would not alleviate social problems. It’s obvious from research
that most of the behaviors have multiple causes. Television alone or the media all
together are rarely, if ever, a necessary and sufficient cause of public behavior, as they
operate in a larger social system.
Medienpaedagogic rises as the means to heal all the negative consequences of
the new communication technologies. One of the definitions given to it by
Tulodziecki {Tulodziecki, entwickelte systematic, 1992a, S. 17,18} suggests that
medienpaedagogic is a topic terminal for all the thoughts and acts that are explained
from a paedagogic aspect and are related with media. The media theory and research
contains the building of hypothesis and its reality checking procedure while it is
directly related to the field of paedagogic action.
In the article the first topic is the relation between television violence and reallife aggression. The causes of violence are multiple. Racism, poverty, drug abuse,
abusive family relations, gangs, guns, mental illness, and the frustrations of poverty
can all lead to violence and aggressive behavior. However, the writers believe that to
ignore media violence would be a grave oversight.
Many researches have been conducted in order to examine any correlation
between media violence and aggression. The American Psychological Association
asserted that media violence can contribute to two outcomes, desensitization of
viewers to violent actions and fear of being the victim of violence. Moreover, survey
research has point out that heavy viewers are more likely to engage in aggressive
behavior than are light viewers and they become fearful of the world, afraid of
becoming victims of violence, and over time, they engage in more self-protective
behaviors and show more mistrust of others, an outcome sometimes known as scary
world syndrome.
Although there is a correlational evidence in such studies, they don’t provide
evidence of the direction of the causal relationship. The writers believe that it might
be that people inclined to act violently are more likely to watch television violence,
and so it is their predisposition toward violence that leads to viewing violent TV, and
not the other way around. Besides, various research reviews have overwhelmingly
concluded that television violence is a cause of real world violence; it may not be the
cause.
To the same conclusions has come also David Buckingham1, who says that
television has come to be seen as a primary cause of cultural and social disorder and is
blamed for the decline of the family and of organized religion. The influence of the
medium is so massively overstated and the critical abilities of children so poorly
acknowledged. However, such arguments not only oversimplify the nature of the
children’s relationship with television, but also represent a way of avoiding genuine
social problems and of failing to acknowledge the real complexity and difficulty of
the issues at stake.
The children psychologist Bruno Bettelheim2, who also examines the impact
of TV violence on children supports that the major factor is the personality of the
child, which has been formed by influence of the parents. Professor Kunczik3
expresses himself like this: “In principal, the impact of television program that shows
violence depends on the content (dramatization, content of the script), the viewer’s
personality (age, gender, intelligence, social integration) and the situation in which he
is(alone, with friends).
In another research, it is first made distinction between personal violence and
structural violence. In massive programs the personal violence is dominant, while the
structural violence is found in information and in the conversation television
broadcasts. An analysis of media violence presentation includes not only one
dimension of violence, but also many psychological and structural dimensions.
When it comes to the influence of pornography, the second topic of the article,
violence remains the most important factor in assessing its affects. Violent
pornography viewing can be related to real world aggression against women, but it is
the violence or the message about violence that is important, not simply the sexual
nature of the materials. Sexually explicit materials which are not violent or degrading
to women don’t cause antisocial effects, thing which is very important considering the
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behavior making on several different scales, with the frequency of the exposure to the
message.
Grossberg, Wartella, and Whitney continue in their chapter “Debates Over
Media Effects” by dealing with the influence of television on the social behavior of
children. The writers consider the children’s learning new behaviors from watching
television in three domains. The first one is the effects of planned educational
programming on children’s learning of school-related knowledge and behavior, the
second domain is the children’s learning about people and behaviors and the last
domain is the children’s learning about consumption.
Sesame Street is considered as the standard of educational programming for
children that incorporates a planned curriculum and is also entertaining. Actually, a
recent study demonstrates that regular viewers of Sesame Street learn new words and
improve their vocabulary from such viewing. After the success of Sesame Street other
planned educational programs have been found both to increase children’s interest in
the educational content of programs and to teach some of the planned curriculum.
However, the question is whether watching television throughout the grade
school years help children in school. There is no clear relationship between the
amount of television viewed during the grade school years and school achievement
measures as reading ability, scores, on achievement tests. Basically, the relationship
depends on which programs children watch and what other activities in their life
reinforce television and other media use.
One study4 of the University of Kansas in 1987 shows how television can help
children in school. Children, that have watched educational programs when they were
3 and 4 years old, had in the age of 5 years old bigger vocabulary and could learn
better reading. A series of other studies have proved also that the consumption of
programs of inferior quality affect intensely the learning of reading.
Robin Flanagan and John Black5 propose a different explanation about the
educational and social problems that television viewing can cause. Problems such as
poor concentration and poor persistence may not be a matter of the television
programming but may have to do with the television viewing experience itself.
Actually, what Flanagan and Black propose is that television viewing facilitates a
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learning situation in which the learner is passive and the learner’s actions are
unrelated to the feedback and stimulation the learner receives.
According to H. G. Schmidt, children should learn more. Media should be
used in this way, so that they help them to face the actual life process. Schmidt
defines fantasy and creativity as dimension of human understanding of things.
As for the children’s learning about consumption, the writers mention that the
majority of the children below the age of about 5 or 6 do not understand the
persuasive intent of advertisements and cannot criticize the advertiser’s motives.
Advertising’s appeal to children declines as they grow older and become more mature
and experienced viewers of such advertising, having bought products advertised and
been disappointed with them. That means that advertising can be successful with
children, and its success is higher with younger rather than older children.
There are some very interesting results of a research project6 of the University
of Bielefeld and Halle during the summer of 1995, where 1617 children between the
age 6 and 13 were asked about their attitudes to the advertisements. Children after 5
years old could tell the difference between an advertisement and a program and
younger children were not able to understand the intention for selling. Only one to
four children believed that often or always advertisements lead them to consumption.
Related to the market orientation, a important effect of advertising, older children
seemed to show preference to a particular jeans brand.
Judith VanEvra in her book Television and Child Development7 attempts to
find the variables which have to do with the advertising effects on children. The first
variable is related with the developmental differences. Young children do not have the
critical viewing skills that older children and adults can use, and they are unable to
understand subtle cues and messages, making them significantly more vulnerable to
advertising techniques. Cognitive ability clearly is a very important component in
children’s level of understanding of advertising and their subsequent response to it.
Moreover, the impact of advertising depends also on the formal features,
which is the second variable. Advertisers are aware that features such as music,
repetition, jingles, slogans, visual effects, and animation command greater attention in
viewers of all ages, but especially attractive to young viewers who rely most heavily
on such perceptually salient cues to derive meaning or to gain information from the
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television input. Other variables are the gender differences, the amount of viewing
and the viewer needs.
Grossberg, Wartella, and Whitney want also to find out the effects of the
information campaigns and especially how should design them in order to influence
people’s behavior. These media campaigns are advertising that has been used to
discourage smoking, alcohol and drug use and to promote healthy lifestyles and
nutritional practices. Since the late 1970s, it is has been evidence that wellconstructed information campaigns can affect the audience behavior. Well
formulated, persuasive campaigns rooted in strong theoretical formulations of how to
accomplish attitude and behavior change offer the greatest likelihood of success.
Judith VanEvra8 agrees that number of such advertisements in television and
print media is strong testimony to the perceived effectiveness of such advertising, but
she goes further by saying that the actual impact on behavior of this use of advertising
is inconsistent. In one study of the effects of television advertising on drinking among
teenagers, for example, the relation between exposure and drinking liquor was a
strong positive one, with a moderate relation for beer and a weak one for wine.
Moreover, the relation between drinking and advertising was stronger than the
relation between drinking and parent influence, gender age, social status, or seeing
alcohol in programming.
At this point it is important to mention some information about Medienpaedagogik, as
this will help to the comprehension of all the conversation around the media affects
and the different arguments on this field. The development of Medienpaedagogik was
described from the beginning as Bewahrpaedagogik, meaning the attempt for leading
to critical perception, to an actual development of a real world living orientated
Medienpaedgogik. Schorb makes a distinction between Normative Medienpaedagogik
as the continue and expansion of Bewahrpaedagogik, Technologische
Medienpaedagogic that makes stronger the procedure of learning and teaching and
Handlungsorientierte Medienpaedagogik, which is concentrating on watching the
single individual. To carry on, we will keep the division into Bildungstechnologische
Medienpaedagogik and Normative Medienpaedagogik. Bildungstechnologisce
Medienpaedagogik was developed with the emancipation from a theoretical centered
perception of the world and the turning back to a natural science centered perception,
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change which brought up the discovery of natural science rules on the combination of
all aspects of life. These natural science rules would be useful if not only one elite but
also the whole population had education. To this part the machines and the media
came as a medium of help. In the beginning came the perception of media, under
Bildungstechnologische Medienpaedagogik, in the context of prevalence of films.
Beside the dangers that were recognized behind the affects of such a medium were
also see many possibilities. Films may use as a support to the teacher during working
on complex procedures.
On the other hand, with the transformation of the industrial society to the
society of the information there was a priority in the information and communication
techniques. From this point of view Normative Medienpaedagogik focused on the
possible negative affects of media consumption on all the people and especially on
children and young people. Violence and pornography are the central points of this
conversation. Now behind the new medium film was seen the possibility of danger
and harm. This direction of Medienpaedagogik is the one close to the rules and laws
taken for the viewer s protection. Under Normative Medienpaedagogik were
developed different theories, which examine the effects of violence. The stimulation
theory says that the viewer after watching violence TV is motivated and stimulated to
copycat what he has seen, the habituation theory says that the viewer accepts violence
as every day phenomenon while on the other hand the catharsis theory says that
viewer through the watching of violence in TV has already experienced aggression
and there is no danger in acting violently in his real life.
As a conclusion can be mentioned that there is a relationship between the
television content and the building of behavior. Of course this relationship is neither
simple neither clear as television is a part of a complicated social system, creating a
mutual affect process.
Interesting terminals and objects for further searching: Medienkompetenz, Personale
Gewalt, Structurelle Gewalt, desensitization, The scary world syndrome, educational
programming for children, Bobo dolls experiments.
Bibliography
1. Swan Karen {1998}: Social learning from broadcast television, Hampton Press,
Cresskill
2. Kruesman Bill {1998}: Kinder und Medien, Neue Dt./Schule/Verl./Ges., Essen
3. Van Evra Judith {1998}: Television and child development, Mahwah Press,
Erlbaum
4. Brandstaetter Helmut, Brandstaetter Regina {1995}: Fernsehen mit Kinder,
Meberreuter Vlg, Wien