The Power of Mass Media and Their Impact on the Consumer
The mass media have played an increasingly significant role in contemporary societies. The term media refers to the technologies which can be used to transmit messages to an audience (Laughey 2007p.1,). Mass media then represents the massive reception of the information transmitted through the media, across wide spaces (Laughey 2007, p.2). From a capitalist perspective, the media became potent means of communication for enterprising, thus rising to power as business enterprises in the 19th century. As the radio and the television emerged, the interest in transmitting information to the public increased exponentially, and with it, so did the interest of different stakeholders in studying the influence of the media on consumers. As McQuail (1979, p.9) showed, the first attempts to explain and measure the effect of the media on consumers emerged in at the beginning of the 20th century. However, it was beginning with the 1940s that research on mass communication grew and became more focused on specific questions (McQuail 1979, p.9). The main problem that academicians tried to solve was whether the media had a powerful influence on the consumers or not. The debate on the effects of mass media continues to split the academic world, as one group of researchers argues in favour of a strong influence of media in affective consumer beliefs, behaviours and decisions, whereas the other group argues against it. As this paper will show, the mass media are able to influence the consumers to a great extent by taking advantage of their often passive engagement with media content in order to form, transform and reinforce their beliefs, behaviours and preferences.
Early studies into the effects of media use on consumers have shown that the media have limitless potential to shape the consumers’ beliefs and behaviour according to the specific intentions of the programmers. This idea led to the elaboration of the direct effect theory, which was based on the assumption that the audience lived in an urbanized society, which was alienated, rootless and consequently, easy to manipulate (Bineham 1988, p.232). This led to the development of the hypodermic model of mass communication, which was introduced by author Elihu Katz. This model compares the information transmitted by the media with a drug which is injected in a patient, and assumes that the audience accepts the message passively, without engaging with it critically. Besides, the model assumes that the audience is homogenous, and that the same message is recorded the same way by all the consumers (Giddens & Griffiths 2006, p.609). The hypodermic needle model was developed particularly following the analysis on the effects of propagandistic messages during the World War I, and also received the name of ‘magic bullet theory’, because it perceived the audiences as hopeless victims (Plooy 1995, p.6). In one article on the topic from 1940, a journalist claimed that the injection of sex and violence makes the child unable to enjoy more calm stories, and will lead to “a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one” (Lubken 2008, p.22). Furthermore, in the 1920s and the 1930s, L.L. Thurstone’s conducted the Payne Fund experiments on the effect of films on children. The researcher asked children to watch the film “Street of Chance” and then examined how the film changed their worldview. Thus, after seeing the film, the children stated to believe that rambling is a much more serious offense than they believed it to be before seeing the film ( Bineham 1988, p.236). Thurstone’s study explicitly argues that the media can be used to transform social attitudes in school children, thus confirming the validity of the hypodermic model. However, this model was later criticized for considering other factors that could affect the way in which the model was perceived.
While the direct effect on the viewers may be limited, and could not be accurately measured, research clearly indicates that on the long term, media has the power to affect the consumers’ system of beliefs to a great extent. One researcher who studied the long-terms effect of the media is George Gerbner, who proposed the cultivation theory as a framework for examining this problem (Plooy 1995, p.10). According to this theory, “heavy television viewing leads to the exclusion of other information, ideas and consciousness” (Plooy 1995, p. 10). This results in the cultivation of the viewers, by which the theories means, teaching the viewers a shared world view or ideology, and common values. In their study on the effects of mass and social media on the perception and behaviors in post-disaster recovery following the 211 Great East Japan earthquake, Cheng et al. (2016) tried to assess the impact on continuous reception of messages on television and the internet, regarding the post-disaster recovery. Cheng et al (2016, p.753) found that, “Television is still the most influential medium when it comes to cultivating people’s perceptions of the disaster, in particular on those who were not directly affected by the disaster” (p.768). Based on continuous information from television and social media, people were more likely to engage in post-recovery activities. Furthermore, a test conducted by Byant, Carveth and Brown in 1981 showed that undergraduates who were asked to watch mainly action-adventure programs for six weeks came to see the world as a much more dangerous place than they used to, and reported that they had high chances of becoming involved in violence (Signorelli 2005, p. 19). Therefore, by watching the same messages being transmitted every day by the broadcasters, people gradually begin to perceive the world in a way that best fits the interests of those who control the media.
However, perhaps the most powerful effect of the mass media is that of influencing consumers to buy things they do not really want through advertising. Advertising is clearly successful, which is proved by the fact that companies spend millions of dollars on advertising campaigns (Shah 2012, n.p.). Advertising begins to influence people since an early age. As Kirsh (2010, p.81) showed, as early as the 1960s, advertisers realized that children and adolescents had their own wishes, and could also influence their parents into buying the products they wanted. Moreover, being influenced to become loyal to a particular brand in youth promises that the individual will remain loyal for a long time during adulthood as well (Kirsh 2010, p.81). However, even adults are influenced by the media to buy products they do not really want or need. As Avila (2009) showed, advertising is a tool used by producers to manipulate the public and even today advertisements are effective in creating false needs in people. Avila (2009, p.37) further showed that advertisements “encourage consumers to understand themselves though their possessions and to fabricate their identities in and through things” (p.37). In other words, consumers see themselves as defined by what they wear or by the objects they use. For example, a perfume advertisement which portrays the person who wears it as an irresistible woman, with high sex-appeal, consumers come to believe that by buying this perfume, they would also become more attractive. Commercial media therefore manipulate the consumers by sending them messages that describe the products as a paramount necessity in their lives, even though this is not true in most cases.
On the other hand, other scholars deny the influence of the media as unsupported, mainly because it is based on a simplistic view of the audience. Consequently, they developed different theoretical models which explain the experience of consuming media and its consequences in a different light. For example, the ‘uses and gratification theory’ views the audience as a group of reasonable individuals who take their own decisions, and uses mass media in order to inform themselves, using a variety of media and programs to gather information and form an opinion, or take a decision. Based on this theory, it is obvious that the consumers know what they want actively engage with the information they receive, and choose to engage with media according to their needs. For example, in a study conducted by Pearson (2011, p.1), the researcher tried to assess the relationship between consumer needs and the changing content of print magazines, using the ‘uses and gratification theory’ . Pearson (2011, p.46) found that editors changed the content to match the readers’ needs, by including information which is easy to read and relevant for the target audience. This shows that readers’ preference guides the media content, and that readers actively choose what they want to read according to their needs, rather than the other way around. This is particularly true since the readers now have an abundance of media, available to them.
Not only are audiences able to engage with information from various sources, but audiences are also able to decide if the information is desirable or not and to decide whether this information should influence their decisions or not. Beginning with the 1970s, media researchers developed ‘an increasing awareness that people’s use of media might be an important mediating factor making effects more or less likely” (Baran and Davis 2009, p. 237). This led to the emergence of the active audiences theories according to which, people are only influenced by media content that they find useful or trustful. For example, readers can decide whether to read a book or not, and by making the decision to read it, they also decide to allow the book to influence them (Baran and Davis 2009, p.237). Active-media theorists claim that people allow media content to influence them by making media serve their purpose. Researchers argue that in engaging with known media, audiences anticipate meaning and actualize, it, seeking coherence (Wilson 2009, p.3). In a study which analyzed the responses of the audience to a BBC evening program, researchers found that it is viewers’ memories of the internal structure of media content which guides the processes of decoding information (Willson 2009, p.3). However, other researchers also found that, while being able to decode the information presented by the media, the audiences were not necessarily also able to reject it. Furthermore, by expecting certain content from certain genres, the audience can be played upon by manipulating “the horizons of our understanding, creatively curbing our cognitive capacity” (p.37). Therefore, the active audience theory is important in explaining how users may choose the content that they want to learn from, or engage with, and this is particularly relevant today, when consumers are informed and self- educated much more than ever before, particularly because of the availability of sources. However, this theory has also been criticized for ignoring the fact that users may also become influenced without their knowledge and intention. Product placement in films or other media content may unconsciously influence the viewers.
Based on the idea that consumers do not passively engage with media content, some researchers also argue that advertising does not influence buyers, as many others claim. Thus, Sheehan (2013, p.29) explained in this respect that the passive consumer is in fact a myth which was created by the advertising industry itself. However, Sheehan (2013 further showed that, “advertising can make suggestions but it cannot control us. In fact the opposite is true: we as consumers are in control because we make the meaning of the messages ourselves” (p. 29). Thus after the emergence of social media, consumers have become even more skeptical than they used to be, and they often discuss with other people about the true quality and usefulness of a good before purchasing it. Also, in one study, the researchers showed that active consumers of advertising engage with advertising differently than the theoretical passive consumers. Furthermore, Kwak, Andras & Zinkhan (2009) showed that “US consumers have grown up with very high levels of ad exposure. As a result, they may have developed a level of cynicism to advertising effects of advertising on an audience which is presumed to be active, rather than passive” (p. 70). Consequently, the authors suggest that researchers should study more what consumers do with advertising, rather than studying what advertising does to people (Kwak, Andras & Zinkhan 2009, p.70). Therefore, by assuming that the audience engages actively with advertising, it may be argued that advertising does not produce a powerful effect on the consumers, and that it only influences people when they want to be influenced by it.
As shown throughout this paper, the debate on the power of media to influence consumers is still extremely intense, and the new media technologies that emerged in the past decades contribute to the diversification of the issues surrounding this topic. While in the past decades, new insights developed concerning the way in which audiences are able to resist such influence, the influence of the media remains overwhelming. Advertising influences people both openly and discretely in signs and symbols that the audiences often do not even have the time to process. Furthermore, television has an extremely powerful impact in shaping people’s worldview, and influencing their beliefs. While it is true that the audience today can and often does engage actively with the media, people often behave as passive consumers of advertising, entertainment and news content, thus giving great power to mass media.
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