Related Research Articles
The hypodermic needle model is claimed to have been a model of communication in which media consumers were "uniformly controlled by their biologically based 'instincts' and that they react more or less uniformly to whatever 'stimuli' came along".
The knowledge gap hypothesis is a mass communication theory based on how a member in society processes information from mass media differently based on education level and socioeconomic status (SES). The gap in knowledge exists because a member of society with higher socioeconomic status has access to higher education and technology whereas a member of society who has a lower socioeconomic status has less access or none at all. Since there is already pre-existing gap of knowledge between groups in a population, mass media amplifies this gap to another level. For example, television news programming targets a more affluent group who are interested in political and science news. The higher status viewer pays more attention to the serious stories and seeks out more in depth information beyond the news program. This article provides an overview of the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis and includes theoretical concepts, historical background, operationalization, narrative review, meta-analytic support, new communication technologies and competing hypotheses.
The two-step flow of communication model says that most people form their opinions under the influence of opinion leaders, who in turn are influenced by the mass media. In contrast to the one-step flow of the hypodermic needle model or magic bullet theory, which holds that people are directly influenced by mass media, according to the two-step flow model, ideas flow from mass media to opinion leaders, and from them to a wider population. Opinion leaders pass on their own interpretation of information in addition to the actual media content.
Paul Felix Lazarsfeld was an Austrian-American sociologist and mathematician. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, he exerted influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. "It is not so much that he was an American sociologist," one colleague said of him after his death, "as it was that he determined what American sociology would be." Lazarsfeld said that his goal was "to produce Paul Lazarsfelds". He was a founding figure in 20th-century empirical sociology.
Agenda-setting theory suggests that the communications media, through their ability to identify and publicize issues, play a pivotal role in shaping the problems that attract attention from governments and international organizations, and direct public opinion towards specific issues. The theory suggests that the media can shape public opinion by determining what issues are given the most attention, and has been widely studied and applied to various forms of media. The way news stories and topics that impact public opinion are presented is influenced by the media. It is predicated on the idea that most individuals only have access to one source of information on most issues: the news media. Since they establish the agenda, they may affect how important some things are seen to be.
Opinion leadership is leadership by an active media user who interprets the meaning of media messages or content for lower-end media users. Typically opinion leaders are held in high esteem by those who accept their opinions. Opinion leadership comes from the theory of two-step flow of communication propounded by Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz. Significant developers of the opinion leader concept have been Robert K. Merton, C. Wright Mills and Bernard Berelson. This theory is one of several models that try to explain the diffusion of innovations, ideas, or commercial products.
The spiral of silence theory is a political science and mass communication theory which states that an individual's perception of the distribution of public opinion influences that individual's willingness to express their own opinions. Also known as the theory of public opinion, the spiral of silence theory claims individuals will be more confident and outward with their opinion when they notice that their personal opinion is shared throughout a group. But if the individual notices that their opinion is unpopular with the group, they will be more inclined to be reserved and remain silent. In other words, from the individual's perspective, "not isolating themself is more important than their own judgement", meaning their perception of how others in the group perceive them is more important to themself than the need for their opinion to be heard.
Uses and gratifications theory is a communication theory that describes the reasons and means by which people seek out media to meet specific needs. The theory postulates that media is a highly available product, that audiences are the consumers of the product, and that audiences choose media to satisfy given needs as well as social and psychological uses, such as knowledge, relaxation, social relationships, and diversion.
The hostile media effect, originally deemed the hostile media phenomenon and sometimes called hostile media perception, is a perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the tendency for individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue to perceive media coverage as biased against their side and in favor of their antagonists' point of view. Partisans from opposite sides of an issue will tend to find the same coverage to be biased against them. The phenomenon was first proposed and studied experimentally by Robert Vallone, Lee Ross and Mark Lepper.
Diffusion of innovations is a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread. The theory was popularized by Everett Rogers in his book Diffusion of Innovations, first published in 1962. Rogers argues that diffusion is the process by which an innovation is communicated through certain channels over time among the participants in a social system. The origins of the diffusion of innovations theory are varied and span multiple disciplines.
Mass communication is the process of imparting and exchanging information through mass media to large population segments. It utilizes various forms of media as technology has made the dissemination of information more efficient. Primary examples of platforms utilized and examined include journalism and advertising. Mass communication, unlike interpersonal communication and organizational communication, focuses on particular resources transmitting information to numerous receivers. The study of mass communication is chiefly concerned with how the content and information that is being mass communicated persuades or affects the behavior, attitude, opinion, or emotion of people receiving the information.
In media studies, mass communication, media psychology, communication theory, and sociology, media influence and themedia effect are topics relating to mass media and media culture's effects on individuals' or audiences' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. Through written, televised, or spoken channels, mass media reach large audiences. Mass media's role in shaping modern culture is a central issue for the study of culture.
Audience theory offers explanations of how people encounter media, how they use it, and how it affects them. Although the concept of an audience predates media, most audience theory is concerned with people’s relationship to various forms of media. There is no single theory of audience, but a range of explanatory frameworks. These can be rooted in the social sciences, rhetoric, literary theory, cultural studies, communication studies and network science depending on the phenomena they seek to explain. Audience theories can also be pitched at different levels of analysis ranging from individuals to large masses or networks of people.
Media system dependency theory (MSD), or simply media dependency, was developed by Sandra Ball-Rokeach and Melvin Defleur in 1976. The theory is grounded in classical sociological literature positing that media and their audiences should be studied in the context of larger social systems.
Media studies encompasses the academic investigation of the mass media from perspectives such as sociology, psychology, history, semiotics, and critical discourse analysis. The purpose of media studies is to determine how media affects society.
Selective exposure is a theory within the practice of psychology, often used in media and communication research, that historically refers to individuals' tendency to favor information which reinforces their pre-existing views while avoiding contradictory information. Selective exposure has also been known and defined as "congeniality bias" or "confirmation bias" in various texts throughout the years.
Communicology is the scholarly and academic study of how people create and use messages to affect the social environment. Communicology is an academic discipline that distinguishes itself from the broader field of human communication with its exclusive use of scientific methods to study communicative phenomena. The goals of these scientific methods are to create and extend theory-based knowledge about the processes and outcomes of communication. Practitioners in the communicology discipline employ empirical and deductive research methods, such as cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys, experiments, meta-analyses, and content analyses, to test theoretically-derived hypotheses. Correlational and causal relationships between communication variables are tested in these studies.
Active Audience Theory argues that media audiences do not just receive information passively but are actively involved, often unconsciously, in making sense of the message within their personal and social contexts. Decoding of a media message may therefore be influenced by such things as family background, beliefs, values, culture, interests, education and experiences. Decoding of a message means how well a person is able to effectively receive and understand a message. Active Audience Theory is particularly associated with mass-media usage and is a branch of Stuart Hall's Encoding and Decoding Model.
In studies of science communication, the information deficit model, also known as the deficit model or science literacy/knowledge deficit model, theorizes that scientific literacy can be improved with increased public engagement by the scientific community. As a result, the public may then be able to make more decisions that are science-informed. The model implies that communication should focus on improving the transfer of information from experts to non-experts.
Suggestion theory is a theory used in the early part of the 20th century to describe how persuasion worked as a phenomenon of human collective behavior. Because a distinctive function of public communication is to advance social consensus, many scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries sought to understand the role of human communication in the process of social influence. Writing in 1904, Roy Park recognized suggestion theory as the "suggestive influence exerted by people on each other." To understand suggestion, Park focused on studies of collective behavior like rallies and crowds, noting that "when two or more people come in contact... a 'circular process' of mutual suggestibility gets triggered" However, scholars used different terms, including imitation, sympathy, reciprocal suggestion and prestige suggestion to describe the role of human communication in consensus formation. During the 1920s and 1930s, rising interest in the nature of propaganda accelerated interest in suggestion theory, which drew upon ideas from the emerging field of psychoanalysis. Yet, by the 1960s, suggestion theory had become a "lost doctrine" as it was effectively marginalized by scholars aiming to establish communication scholarship as a new discipline. Instead of emphasizing how humans engage in reciprocal suggestion to influence each other's attitudes and behavior, communication scholars critiqued studies of propaganda and persuasion, and emphasized the idea that media had only limited effects on individuals in society. A focus on rational argumentation replaced examination of popular suggestibility, propaganda, and persuasion.
References
- ↑ Straubhaar, Joseph; LaRose, Robert; Davenport, Lucinda (2013). Media Now: Understanding Media, Culture and Technology (8th ed.). Boston, Massachusetts: Cengage Learning. pp. 415–416. ISBN 978-1133311362.
- ↑ Stansberry, Kathleen (2012). "One-step, two-step, or multi-step flow: The role of influencers in information processing and dissemination in online, interest-based publics". ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.
- ↑ Foss, Karen; Stephen W., Littlejohn (September 17, 2009). Encyclopedia of Communication Theory. SAGE Publications, Inc.
- ↑ Pooley, Jefferson (2006). "Fifteen Pages That Shook the Field: Personal Influence, Edward Shils, and the Remembered History of Mass Communication Research". Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 608: 130. doi:10.1177/0002716206292460. S2CID 144829287.
- ↑ Livingstone, Sonia (January 11, 2006). "The Influence of "Personal Influence" on the Study of Audiences. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science" (PDF). The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 608: 233–250. doi:10.1177/0002716206292325. S2CID 145678055.
- ↑ Nisbet, Matthew C.; Kotcher, John E. (2009-03-01). "A Two-Step Flow of Influence?: Opinion-Leader Campaigns on Climate Change". Science Communication. 30 (3): 328–354. doi:10.1177/1075547008328797. ISSN 1075-5470 . Retrieved 2024-11-25.
- ↑ Stansberry, Kathleen (2012). "One-step, two-step, or multi-step flow: The role of influencers in information processing and dissemination in online, interest-based publics". ProQuest Dissertations Publishing.