appearance of movies kicked up the level of debate. As films became more popular – dealing with the same themes as dime novels did, but now with moving pictures – research efforts found a considerable number of images of violence in movies, as well as negative effects upon adolescents. The case is instructive, with concern about film rising almost as soon as it started to reach wide audiences in the early 1900s. When it was introduced, film was quite new in terms of the experience that it offered. The riot of image collages and narratives that it made popular could be somewhat un-nerving. Very early films that could be viewed by the public were often just visual records of popular vaudeville-style entertainments, or even things that were naughty or raunchy, such as burlesque dancers. The films appealed to a working-class aesthetic, and brought with them a concern among the well-to-do that films would exert a corrosive social effect. These worries were exacerbated as film developed a more accomplished technical vocabulary that made it appeal to even wider audiences. As film developed in popularity, it was also seen, by some, to pose a social danger.
Self-appointed social guardians responded to film in ways that would become typical across the history of mass media. A new medium introduces affordances for disseminating messages that are seen as socially problematic (e.g., film makes violence and sex available to young people), but it also becomes a vehicle for explaining intractable problems that might have been due to other sources (e.g., rising crime or violence rates). In the case of film, these concerns were brought to the fore in a series of early studies that was one of the first forays into the world of media effects research. Spurred by social reformers who were also publicity seekers, social scientists were encouraged to collaborate on studies that would explicate how people (especially children, as an often-perceived “vulnerable” group) would react, and to see whether the movies and their messages were in some way injurious to a harmonious social fabric. These were the “Payne Fund Studies” (Charters, 1933; Jowett, Jarvie, & Fuller, 1996).
The Payne Fund studies were notable because they were the first that brought together social scientists in addressing media concerns, and they are the place where media effects work as we know it today really begins. As we have seen, there were those who had written or speculated about media and their influence well back into the age of the penny press. But during those early print days, there was not much of a social science apparatus to deal with media effects questions systematically. By the 1920s and 1930s the scene had changed greatly, with disciplines of psychology and sociology setting themselves in place to answer social questions with something approaching the rigor of the natural sciences.
Of the great body of films that were examined, the studies found that:
the average is heavily weighted with sex and crime pictures. An analysis of a smaller sampling of pictures shows a predominance of undesirable, often tawdry “goals” in life, and with a population of characters to match the goals. By this over-loading, moreover, life as presented upon the screen is too often inevitably distorted, so that the young and especially children, so far from being helped to the formation of a true picture of life, often derive its opposite. (Forman, 1934, p. 275)
There are two ways to look at such a quote. One is to see it as a relic of a time during which socially reactionary forces could use the appearance of a new medium in a nostalgic project to retard the development of society. Another would be to look at it as a legitimate concern about the social noise that could hinder young peoples’ development in a healthy and natural way. The reality of media effects research lies somewhere between these two poles; at times we are reacting to precipitous new developments in media technology that are poorly understood, at other times we are struggling to find where the “human” still is in all the forward rush of technology.
The discussion did not end with film. Radio in the 1930s and 1940s was not immune to similar criticism (Dennis, 1998). In the 1950s, comic books were seen by some as particularly nefarious, “seducing” innocent child readers into a sordid life of violence and depravity (Wertham, 1954). The emergence of television then provided a fresh target for these fears. Since television seemingly combined all previous media into one (it was aural, visual, and immediate), its presumed effects were greater. And now fingers point to other media such as video games and the Internet.
“Media effects”: An etymology
Before we delve into the voluminous theoretical and empirical research on these questions, it might behoove us to try to unearth the origins of the terminology we will be using. Where did the idea of “media effects” come from? Who coined the term? What were the conditions of the birth of the idea? There are key readings and moments from the history of social science, and from our own social history, that can help us pin down its origins.
The growth of sociology, psychology, and political science as scientific disciplines was bound to eventually mean a turn toward media questions. The development of media technology has always been a key component in terms of how society has evolved (Innis, 1951; McLuhan, 1964); acceleration in the media sphere was a big part of how overall social change proceeded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Across this period, in relation to emerging media, we can identify two issues that became of prime importance in how researchers would look at media effects: (1) the question of opinions (later also called beliefs and attitudes), and (2) the question of the mass nature of mediated communication.
Opinion
Much of human history occurred with little attention to the idea of opinion. Under systems of government that were monarchical or feudal, the thoughts and feelings of the average man mattered almost not at all. It wasn’t until the advent of the very gradual process of the assertion of individual human rights in the political sphere, the Enlightenment, that opinions were brought to the fore. As this happened, there were not clear ideas about how opinions were formed, how they were “aggregated” into larger “public opinion,” or whether the process was in any way rational.
One of the key figures in media effects theory, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, has given a cogent account of how opinion came to matter along two tracks. First, there is the idea of public opinion as a means through which gradually expanding classes of people contribute to the political discourse in rational ways. This form of public opinion (raisonnement in the words of the French Enlightenment thinkers) is how we like to think of public opinion (its “sunny side” as Noelle-Neumann puts it) contributing ever more progressively to the development of a politics that can benefit the largest number. People express viewpoints in public settings, and deliberative discourse based on these ideas leads to solutions for the body politic. It’s what we colloquially think of as the “marketplace of ideas.”
On the other side, though, she finds the idea of opinion as social control, looking at the tendencies of people to base their actions not only on their own beliefs and attitudes, but also on what others think about them. Because, as social animals, we need and require approval from the group for what we do, we regulate and censor our own beliefs and activities to assure that they will meet with that approval (Noelle-Neumann, 1993). Thus, we have not only our own rationally-formed individual opinions, but our expression of opinion as conditioned by what the group thinks about us. Because the latter process is based on this need for group approval, it is seen as less rational than raisonnement and ultimately more affective. It can even lead to irrationally-held opinions.
Both tracks of thinking have had great impact on media effects work. Rational ideas about opinion are seen in work that seeks to understand how individuals form opinions; we notice it quite clearly in the frequent use of psychological theories that explain how people extract facts and images from media and build those logically into attitudes and opinions. On this track, media in effect become a prime source of, if not the prime source of, personal opinion. The huge body of literature that has developed on attitude change is of this stripe. Media are seen as variables that can play a direct role in the formation of rationally held attitudes, and they have the capacity
