media effects

• Uses and Gratifications (Blumer and Katz)

  the idea that people use media messages and find various types of gratifications in some media texts rather than in others

  1. personal relationships
  2. personal identity
  3. diversion
  4. surveillance
• Hypodermic Needle Model

  an outdated effects theory that suggests a mass audience responds immediately to the direct influence of media products.

  relates to more passive audiences
• Cohen - Moral Panic

  The reaction by a group of people based on exaggerated or false perceptions about crime and criminal behavior
• Cumulation

  • term that refers to the combined impact of individual media exposures can have a powerful and lasting / knock-on effect on people's attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.
  • many argue that the repetition of message overtime can influence media responses
  • leads to myth making, moral panics etc
  • The idea that media effects and influences can take place and grow over a short-term or extended peiod of time
• Media Literacy

  • the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and create media in a variety of forms
  • those with lower media literacy levels may find it difficult to interpret their own ideas and passively accept messages received by media products
  • people not as exposed to new media and digital technologies, the digital underclass, struggle to keep up with media literacy, more susceptible to passively believing media messages transmitted to them
• Bandura's Social Learning Theory


  Learning occurs when we observe other people and model their behavior.

  We also learn from the consequences of others

  e.g bobo doll experiment - looked at the potential for children to copy mediated behaviour