Effects of Mass Communication

Video Transcript

"The question of how media affect us is a vast one. There are thousands and thousands of studies on so many different aspects on how it affects our political knowledge, on our tendency to have stereotypes about different groups. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of studies just done on violence alone. There are many competing theories about how media affect us, but a couple of the dominant ones are the belief that media don't necessarily tell us what to think, but what to think about, and that's called agenda setting because the idea is that media...they set the agenda. They tell us, "Okay. This is the topic that everybody has to be focused on right now." Another theory is called cultivation where it's not, for example, where media will make people act more violently, but will give people images of the world. If you watch a lot of television, you'll see a lot of violence, and so one strand of research has found the more people watch television, the more violent and scary and dangerous they think the world is. That's a very different approach than thinking that if you watch television, that you'll just imitate it and act violent yourself. Obviously, most people don't do that, but people who watch a lot of television over long periods of time will come to believe that the world is much scarier and more violent than it really is, and that leads to interpersonal mistrust, that leads to greater apprehension, and that leads to an alienation from society and other people. Those are a couple of the major things, as I...as we can see. Effects are more subtle and more complicated, and often more dependent on other factors than the way they're often presented in the media and by politicians and public discourse where the assumption is they'll just affect you in a very automatic, simple way."