Media Effects

          There’s a tradition in the study of mass communications called the “effects tradtion” which seeks to answer to question of “who says what to whom, and to what effect?” Some academics in the field call this the “effects paradigm” rather than "effects tradition" because they want it to sound more sciencey. The word “paradigm” is an allusion to physicist and scientific historian Thomas Kuhn’s book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published 1962; this famous book made the word paradigm one of the most widely used words in Academic English (AE),  sort of like what Gramsci did for the word "hegemony." Kuhn’s use of the word paradigm was the term for an overarching framework that delimits a mode of scientific investigation. In other words, a paradigm determines directions for inquiry, core assumptions, methodology, and issues of verisimilitude.  Kuhn’s book deals mostly with physics, and when mass commincations schalors  use the term “effects paradigm” they are implying that what they are engaged in is also a science.

            It is not. At least that is my thesis. What mass communications scholars do cannot justly be called science regardless of the fact that they have had modeled their methodologies after those used in the natural sciences (aka naturalism). The study of the "effect" a message has on a receiver - that is, a self conscious human being - has no coherent theory able to break down human communication to a set of causal or behavioral laws. This failure is due to the fact that too little is known about the how the physical processes of the brain produce what we call a consciousness -- this is the classic mind/body dilemma that's been around since Descartes. In fact, scientists like N. Chomsky and R.C. Lewontin  say that there is a good possibility that we will never know how the brain gives us the "mind" ("As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice or actions arise, human science is at a loss." - N. Chomsky). Nevertheless, "effects" practitioners in mass comm. will bore you to death with their intricate descriptions of their empirical methods (which usually involves a survey) and their theories about "media effects" on human cognition. Although, after thousands of studies researchers remain vexed on the question of how portrayals of violence effect children and many other questions like it.
            One of the major debates within the media effects "paradigm" is whether media have strong or weak  effects; which is to say, there is no agreement at all within the field on even the degree to which the media affects someone's  behavior after almost 60+ years of investigation. This is not surprising given what I have outlined above, but there are reasons that such investigations will continue to persist regardless of their lack of success. First, such "effects" research tends to focus its attention exclusively on the receiver of messages -- the audience -- and  these questions conveniently sidestep any questions about the institutions creating the messages in the first place. Most effects researchers essentially do not care about institutions and politics even though one might think such issues would be central to a study of the media. This avoidance of integral political questions allows these scholars to point to their professional detachment and objectivity. Second, to say that "we don't know" anything conclusive about media effects is frankly unacceptable. The history of the study of mass communications is tied intimately to the study of ways to conduct successful propaganda campaigns after all, and saying that it is impossible to measure scientifically "media effects" to interests --like advertisers or political candidates --  that believe that these questions can be answered and have a vested interest in them being so answered would effectively discredit the whole enterprise. People believe that science should be able to answer these questions and so scientific language and methods are used to try and answer them -- but this is just mere scientism, it has no explanatory ability.
          Thus, one need not be afraid of the absolute power of propaganda; it has no such power. Of course, mendacity is always a problem in public life, and I think that it is the special responsibility of educators to teach their students to detect the massive amounts of bullshit that will be thrown their way for much of their lives. Nevertheless, it is a fallacy to believe that advertising and other forms of propaganda are a kind of hypothermic needle injecting desires/ideology into an unwitting public. Are modern forms of advertising and propaganda sophisticated and well-funded? Yes. Has propaganda been used to successfully confuse the public on a complicated scientific issue like global warming? Yes. But one need not attribute these to any special scientific powers of corporate bullshittery. People can be credulous, short-sighted and easily confused, but this has always been true and there have always been those in positions of authority who have taken advantage of these human downfalls. But that does not mean that reason and active minds cannot prevail in the end. Try as they might, corporate and national interests cannot control people's minds, even if they think that they can -- the powerful are never as powerful as they believe they are.