The study of popular communication is tied to two historical approaches to media communication studies, Mass Communication Studies and Media Studies. Mass Communication evolved as a primarily quantitative-based behavioral field with methods utilizing statistical analyses of audience responses to media products. In contrast, Media Studies approaches draw from the interpretive and critical traditions and increasingly became more Critical in approach.
Media effects studies focus on the impact media has on audiences and audience behaviors. As we discussed in module 3, media producers focus on trying to sell their products to the public, and therefore constantly try to determine what motivates public interest to attempt to reach multiple audience groups and demographics (Dunwoody, 2008). Media effects scholarship has focused historically on how messages can reach the largest groups of consumers, and more currently on targeted consumer groups due to the proliferation of media choices (Bennett, 2018; Pew, 2014; Ems & Gonzales, 2016). Media effects helps producers develop targeted marketing strategies likely to appeal to consumers based on their interests, values, location, demographic categories, and communication technology usage. Media effects scholars, however, are often as critical of these processes as the producers are in favor of them.
Communication theorist James Carey (1996) explains:
Mass communication research began in the years surrounding World War I as a response to a widespread fear of propaganda: wartime propaganda by the major military powers, peacetime propaganda by organized interests, particularly the modern corporation and the business class The fear of propaganda was fueled by the spread and increasing sophistication of advertising and public relations, but the indictment of these practices moved from the arena of news and public affairs across the landscape of mass-produced culture and entertainment. If the cognitive and attitudinal life of the citizen was under assault by propaganda, the moral, appreciative, and affective life of children (and the child in us all) was similarly assailed by a banal and pernicious system of cultural production emanating from massive, concentrated institutions. (p. 22)
Rooted in work from the Chicago School of Sociology, which developed in the early 1900s, these studies originated with the goal of using mass media as a means of predicting human behavior (Carey, 1996; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007). The Chicago School was one of the first academic institutes to study contemporary, urban cultures. Rooted in quantitative analyses of statistical patterns of behavior, the early members of this school saw electronic communication as a means of facilitating democracy. One of the leaders of the school, former journalist Robert E. Park (1940) witnessed how public opinion could be shaped and formed by mass media while studying in Germany. Park argued that the press could act as a form of social glue by supplying ideological values to mass audiences. This idea would evolve into the agenda setting theory (McCombs & Shaw, 1972) discussed in module 3 (Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007).
In the earliest years of mass media studies, the media and popular culture were seen as potential tools for generating social progress. By the 1930s, a general fear of Hollywood morals permeated discussion about mass media and in 1934 the Hays Code of moral censorship went into effect in the film industry (Black, 1989; Gardner, 1987; Johnson-Yale, 2015; Mondello, 2008). The code was not abandoned until 1968 (Black, 1989; Gardner, 1987). In 1933, in response to the rising concern regarding Hollywood’s moral impact on society, Chicago School scholar Herbert Blumer (1933) published a study of movie audiences where the participants recorded their experiences. Blumer reported that children and young adults learned behaviors from films, including how to kiss, how to pick pockets, what clothes and hairstyles to wear, and general attitudes and belief systems.
Harold Lasswell (1927), published an account of the propaganda techniques used during the First World War. Lasswell argued that communication could be broken into specific components, like the texture of a message. Take a look at his 1948 definition of communication: “Who says what to whom in what channel, with what effect?” (p. 39). Drawing on Freudian theory, Lasswell argued that media messages, including propaganda, should be measured in terms of their impact or effect on audiences. This idea became the basis for media effects studies, which focus on what happens to audiences after exposure, generally prolonged exposure, to media products.
The power of mass media, then, was seen as something that had to be controlled so that ideologies could be preserved. This led to the creation of the hypodermic needle theory (Lasswell, 1927) of mass media: that it is possible to inject values and ideals into audiences by embedding them into media products (Carey, 1996). One famous historical incident convinced many people that this theory is true. In 1938 when Orson Welles broadcast the War of the Worlds as a radio program mimicking a real news broadcast, audience members who tuned in without realizing it was a work of fiction caused a general panic (Bratich, 2005; Carey, 1996; Pooley & Socolow, 2013). Although there were many accounts of panicked listeners, and even suicides, how much of it was sensationalized by the media to sell newspapers is highly debated.
Although the hypodermic needle theory was disproven by PaulLazarsfeld as early as 1948 (Lazarsfeld, 1948; Sills, 1996), it continued to be utilized by producers of popular culture as a justification for mass marketing films, music, and radio and television programming. Commercial advertisements and product placements began to permeate programming, especially for products aimed at those two audiences with spendable cash: housewives and teenagers. For example, the soap opera format was created, literally, to sell soap to housewives—soap companies sponsored the programs (Lavin, 1995; Rubin & Perse, 1987). The most prominent of these was Proctor and Gamble, who owned soap operas such as The Guiding Light that stayed on the air, on radio and television, for more than 70 years (Meyers, 2015; Seiter, 1989). You’ll note that this American research desire is in many ways contrary to the work of the Marxists which evolved soon after this in Germany, and no doubt reinforces why Adorno responded so aggressively to American consumerism.
One of the strongest arguments against the hypodermic needle theory comes from Herta Herzog (1941, 1944) arguments that people gravitate toward media types that appeal to their ideological groundings. Studying soap opera radio serial audiences, she argues that listeners reported emotional needs, wishful thinking, and learning new things as reasons for listening to soaps. Herzog (1941) explains:
Since the life of very many middle class and lower middle class people is uneventful, the variety of incidents in these programs is many times greater than anything which these women could live through or observe themselves. Thus the question comes up of whether, through daytime serials, radio is likely to have a great influence upon the attitude of these listeners toward their own lives and the problems they have to meet. (p. 66)
Producers encouraged this response by incorporating dramatic moments and a need to continue listening to hear what happens to the characters into the radio serial format.
In response to those who disagreed with his hypodermic needle theory, Lasswell (1948) built on his earlier argument, claiming that media served four purposes for audiences: surveillance, correlation, entertainment, and cultural transmission. These concepts developed into a body of theory labeled Uses and Gratifications. Uses and Gratifications models assume that audiences are active in choosing what elements of mass media to take in, rather than being passive dupes. This means that audiences choose the media forms and content that appeals to them, rather than blindly following producers’ leads. This body of theory further suggests the need for competition in media, so that more of a variety of choices is designed to appeal to consumers. Further, media also compete against other sources of information and entertainment forms, because people do make use of their ability to choose how to spend their time.
By this point the field of media effects studies was firmly established as a branch of communication studies. Media effects research continued for the next decades to be the dominant way media were studied in the United States. With the growth of the television industry, sales to a growing audience remained a major motive for research. By the 1960s, as the social movements began to permeate society and media forms, more of the Marxist style arguments from the Frankfurt School began to enter the consciousness of analysts. However, focus on media forms and audience analysis stayed at the center of American media analysis.
The impact of media on politics, culture, and other aspects of daily and civic life remains a significant focus of mass communication scholarship.
In 1964 Marshal McLuhan published Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In it was a phrase that would become one of the dominant ways media would be analyzed for several more decades, and reintroduced with the growth of digital social media. McLuhan argued, “The Medium is the Message” (p. 7), that we should study the media form itself rather than the message separate from the medium. His argument is that the media form has a social impact. For example, the War of the Worlds radio broadcast would not have had the same effect on television or in print, because people would have been given visual clues to help recognize a work of fiction. And individual media forms utilize distinct formats. For example, situation comedies often use laugh tracks that indicate to audiences where we should recognize humor. Do you think that process has an influence on what we come to accept in society as funny?
McLuhan’s argument is more complicated than appears at first glance. He illustrates that any medium carries within it other media. Newspapers use writing, film uses writing and cinematography. And media build on each other: Facebook uses media forms that date back to the telegraph. Consider the different impact of reading a news story about a war, watching part of the war on television, and interacting with persons present in the war zone via Twitter. Which elements are shared between the media forms? What did the television industry adapt from the print industry? What did social media adapt from television? Which one will give us more detail? Will each of these have a different impact on the audience?
Ultimately, McLuhan gave us a new way of understanding cultural products. The structure and form of the product may be more significant than the producer’s intent. This reinforced the concept that it is consumers who drive popular culture, not producers. The challenges brought up by McLuhan’s work are some of the questions that guided the development of popular cultures studies as a unique field, in two distinct locations. As we move forward in this history, keep in mind the impact of the media forms, and the debate regarding whether producers or consumers actually have more control over cultural products.
Media Studies: Ideological Criticism of the Culture Industry
The story of interpretive and critical media studies begins after the Second World War with the rise of the United States as a political and economic entity, and with the influence of social movements on academics. As we discussed in module 3, the fields of rhetoric and public communication in the late twentieth century moved toward a critical paradigm view. This view is rooted in the belief that ideological criticism plays a necessary role in society, and that communication scholarship has a rhetorical responsibility to uncover the impact that rhetoric and public communication have on diverse populations and address real-life concerns (Cloud, 1999; McGee & Martin, 1983; Wander, 1983, 1984, 2011, 2013). Critical media studies followed a similar progression, based on the need for ideological criticism of media artifacts and popular culture as well as more traditionally recognized forms of public rhetoric (Fasset, Warren & Nainby, 2018; Vande Berg, 1999).
A key goal of critical media studies is ideological criticism with a focus on how media is marketed to and potentially exploits particular consumer groups. This style of consumer-based critique developed based on Adorno's culture industry critiques and other neo-Marxist criticism developed in the Frankfurt School as we discussed in module 5. Post-war America was understood as a time of prosperity for a large portion of middle-class U.S. citizens, and for the first time a large proportion of the general population has spending cash. Significantly, one of the largest groups within this population is a category of people who are given a relatively new label: the teenager (Bernard, 1961; Massoni, 2016; Spring 2003).
Social forces and changes to traditional understandings of the progression from childhood to adult had been changing for the past decades. In the 1920s education reforms led to more students attending high schools, effectively lengthening childhood for many who would otherwise have entered the workforce at a younger age (Coulter, 2015). Another major factor that impacted the development of the teenager was the automobile. Car culture allowed teens to venture farther from home for leisure and dating. Car culture also created the suburb and the large middle-class, suburban shift (London, 1972; Whiteley, 1987). Automobiles also allowed for further educational reform as buses could take children and teens to larger area-based and suburban schools.
As high school students, teenagers were not expected to work full-time hours. After the war, when men reentered the workforce incomes were steady enough that many suburban teens did not need to work to help pay for basic household expenses. They became involved in after-school activities, and took jobs for extra income and spending cash. Even those who weren’t teenagers, including housewives and financially secure homeowners were perceived as having cash to spend. Crafty marketers and advertisers realized that they had a supremely exploitable audience, and one that could be manipulated into buying and even replacing consumer products on a regular basis (Massoni, 2016; Whiteley, 1987).
In the late 1940s and 1950s housewives became another dominant consumer group. During the Second World War many women had been employed in manufacturing and other jobs that, once the men returned from fighting overseas, were now filled by men. Women once used to working were now spending their lives in the home, and looking for ways to stay busy. As discussed above, marketers focused entire radio and television programs on these groups, forming the Soap Opera genre (Herzog, 1941, 1944; Mumford, 1995). These and other shows aimed at the housewife were built around corporate sponsorships, and product placements in the programs themselves became very common. And these programs promoted a life of leisure, something that appealed to hardworking middle-class families. Soon, housewives were out shopping for the items that their television counterparts used and sold on a daily basis.
Popular culture was therefore produced for these presumably carefree audiences, and this mass-produced entity included a variety of products aimed at audience members with the ability to spend freely. Marxist criticism rooted in the Frankfurt School looks at how consumers themselves become consumed as part of the culture industry (Storey, 2018). Consider the image below featuring an advertisement for a fancy new kitchen cooking products for the average American housewife in 1950's.
Product placements in film and early television, storylines that promoted particular lifestyle values, particularly ones that could be bought-and-paid for abounded. However, not all audiences could obtain the lifestyle promoted. For this reason, ideological criticism became a means of pointing out both the way that our lives are shaped by popular media and consumerism, and how diverse groups within culture are unable to obtain the "ideal" lifestyle presented in media (Fassett, Warren, & Nainby, 2018).
Ideological criticism presents the opportunity to address how culture products produce cultural meanings "understood both as centered in empowered ideas and as positively sanctioned in social structures—have served to maintain existing sets of social relations and practices and to prevent social change" (Vande Berg, 1999). In other words, the media critic sets out to critique how power structures are reinforced by mass media products, and how those power structures oppress diverse audience groups (Fassett, Warren, & Nainby, 2018; Ott & Mack, 2010; Vande Berg, 1999).
Because of the ideological connection between the audience groups and bodies of critical theory that are applied to these analyses, in addition to Marxist approaches critical media studies are also rooted in feminist theory, critical race theory, post-colonial theory, transgender theory, and other approaches that seek to highlight the status and representation of groups of individuals within media products (Fassett, Warren, & Nainby, 2018).
Media criticism, over time, began to replace behavioral mass communication studies in many communication studies programs and publications throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. However, the media industries were still interested in audience analyses and mass communication. Therefore many of these programs began to merge with Marketing, Advertising, and Journalism schools, as well as merge with the critical media programs, and refocus on both production and reception of media products.
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