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Broader Philosophical Issues
- How do we identify reality?
Our reality is defined as what we can all agree on, which in turn, is defined by the dominant discourses of our time
All this ties in with a central area of study...
Phenomenology is....
So, what role does the media play in structuring how we think things
'REALLY' are?
Habermas’s concept of media effects stems from his depiction of the interrelation of ‘system’ and ‘lifeworld’
Lifeworld (Communicative Action)
“Subjects acting communicatively always come to an understanding in the horizon of a lifeworld. Their lifeworld is formed from more or less diffuse, always unproblematic, background convictions. This lifeworld background serves as a source of situation definitions that are presupposed by participants as unproblematic.” (Habermas, 1984: 80)
The gradual infiltration of the lifeworld by systemic understandings and notions of truth. That is, systemic
messages become so unproblematic and widely accepted, they become accepted as truth.
Normative Media Effects - the systemic colonisation
of the lifeworld
Differences in Normative and Behavioural Research
Differences in Normative and Behavioural Research
Broader philosophical issues - how to identify reality
Normative Media Effects - the systemic colonisation
of the lifeworld
Reconciling normative and behavioural
understandings of media effects
How Can We Reconcile Behavioural and Normative understandings of
Media Effects?
Normative and empirical approaches to media effects don't contradict each other
Behavioural 'cultivation theories', such as
mean world syndrome,
Bandura's Social Learning Model
and particularly Parentti's take on Social Learning
all suggest that media plays a central role in establishing our 'pre-existing values and beliefs'
and normative theory tends to agree that strong willed individuals are less susceptible to media directly effecting their actions (although their actions are still conditioned by the lifeworld their media use creates).
behavioural research highlights the difficulties in making effective media and helps us understand why mass media is produced the way it is.
Normative media research focuses on media messages as texts
as such, it focuses on how media messages form part of broader discourses
that 'stand in' for reality
This kind of analysis - critical discourse analysis - is what we'll be doing in the second half of this unit
Normative theory tends to argue that media effects are far more complicated than empirical research suggests.
In some ways observation understimates effects:
In some ways it overestimates effects:
The central argument of the normative approach is that 'media effects' don't exist in isolation from other cultural and economic structures (and problems)
System (a domain of Strategic Action)
Where action is coordinated not through unproblematic agreement but through the use of the coercion offered through either money or power.