Theoretical Perspectives on Media Problems

It is difficult to conceive of any one theoretical perspective to explain the variety of problems with media, including the TV shows you watch, the ads wrapping the bus you take to work or school, or the magazines you flip through in a dentist's waiting room, not to mention all the forms of new media, including TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and the like. Is the institution of media critical to societal advancement? It it a pernicious capitalist tools that lead to the exploitation of workers worldwide? It it the tool that the world has been waiting for to level the playing field and raise the world’s poor out of extreme poverty? Choose any view and you will find studies and scholars who agree with you, as well as those who disagree. The ideas of the three major sociological perspectives are summarized in the Theoretical Perspectives Snapshot table below.

Theoretical Perspectives Snapshot

Theoretical perspective	Major assumptions
Structural functionalism	The institution of media has positive and negative functions for society. Manifest functions include entertainment, information dissemination, and socialization. Latent functions include harmful impacts on our mental or physical health. Other social institutions may fuel problems of media such as decisions made by government within the institution of the state.
Conflict theory	Powerful elites control the media in part through gatekeeping, perpetuating ideologies and inequalities that serve to reinforce their powerful positions. Media and technology are also mechanisms of social control, via increasing surveillance of the population.
Symbolic interactionism	Media shape our understandings of our self and of the social world. It is part of the social construction of reality, serves as reference groups of which we compare ourselves to others, and can involve harmful processes or behaviors such as online harassment.

  

Structural Functionalism

Structural functionalism focuses on how the institution of media contributes to the smooth functioning of society. Media have functions for socialization, commercial purposes, entertainment, and more. Some of these are intended and obvious, while others are accidental or hard to recognize. A manifest function is a primary function, one that is intentional and discernable or easy to recognize. For instance, manifest functions of the institution of education include how schools impart knowledge required for successful participation in society and to socialize children into national values. A latent function, by contrast, is an unintended function or outcome that is at times less obvious and sometimes not ideal. Latent functions of education include free childcare for parents/guardians (a positive latent function) and of reproducing social hierarchies along the lines of social class, gender, race, and other areas of social location (a negative latent function). 

An obvious manifest function of media is its entertainment value. Most people when asked why they watch TV or go to the movies would answer that they enjoy it. Even while the media is selling us goods and entertaining us, it also serves to socialize us, teaching and reinforcing social norms, values, and beliefs. In fact, we are socialized and resocialized by media throughout our whole lives. All forms of media teach us what is good and desirable, how we should speak, how we should behave, how we should react to events, and other norms, values, and beliefs. 

TV commercials can carry significant cultural currency. For some, the ads during the Super Bowl are more water cooler-worthy than the game itself.

Dennis Yang/flickr

An example of a latent function of media is related to health – exposure to or extended time with media can negatively impact our mental or physical health. For instance, some studies suggest the rising obesity rate is correlated with the decrease in physical activity caused by an increase in use of some forms of technology (Kautiainen et al. 2011). In this and other cases of negative consequences, functionalists may focus on how the institution of media involves dysfunctions, which impair societal harmony. In fact, the downside of ongoing information flow in media is the near impossibility of disconnecting. Such a fast-paced dynamic is not always to our benefit. Some sociologists assert that this level of media exposure leads to narcotizing dysfunction, a result in which people are too overwhelmed with media input to really care about the issue, so their involvement becomes defined by awareness instead of by action (Lazerfeld and Merton 1948).

Functionalists may also be concerned with how other social institutions interact with the institution of media. For example, some media problems are allowed to persist due to the government's lack of intervention or regulation of them, such as the lack of regulation for sexual 'deepfakes.' In this view, the institution of the state is failing to protect victims of deepfakes and to reduce future victimization. As we will see, governmental regulation (or lack thereof) is connected to several media social problems. 

  

Conflict Theory

In contrast to the functionalist perspective, the conflict perspective focuses on the reproduction of inequality. When we take this perspective, one major focus is the differential access to media and technology embodied in the digital divide, discussed further in the next page. Conflict theorists also look at who controls the media, and how media promotes the norms of middle-class white people while minimizing the presence of the working-class and people of color.

Powerful individuals and social institutions have a great deal of influence over which forms of technology are released, when and where they are released, and what kind of media is available for our consumption, which is a form of gatekeeping. Shoemaker and Vos (2009) define media gatekeeping as the sorting process by which thousands of possible messages are shaped into a media-appropriate form and reduced to a manageable amount. In other words, the people in charge of the media decide what the public is exposed to, which, as sociologist C. Wright Mills (1956) famously noted, is the heart of media’s power. Take a moment to think of the way new media evolve and replace traditional forms of hegemonic media. With hegemonic media, a diverse society can be dominated by one race, gender, or class that manipulates the media to impose its worldview as a societal norm. New media weakens the gatekeeper role in information distribution. Popular sites such as YouTube and Instagram not only allow more people to freely share information but also engage in a form of self-policing. Users are encouraged to report inappropriate behavior that moderators will then address. However, new media have brought on other problems even as they have helped reduce gatekeeping. 

Some conflict theorists suggest that the way US media are generated results in an unbalanced political arena. Those with the most money can buy the most media exposure, run smear campaigns against their competitors, and maximize their visual presence. According to the Federal Election Commission (2025), candidates of the 2024 presidential election raised $2 billion and spent about $1.8 billion in that year's election cycle. Some argue that the Citizens United vs. Federal Election Committee is a major contributing factor to our unbalanced political arena. In Citizens United, the Supreme Court affirmed the right of outside groups, including Super Political Action Committees (Super PACs) with undisclosed donor lists, to spend unlimited amounts of money on political ads as long as they don't coordinate with the candidate's campaign or specifically advocate for a candidate. What do you think a conflict perspective theorist would suggest about the potential for the non-rich to be heard in politics, especially when Super PACs ensure that the richest groups have the most say?

From a conflict perspective, media is also a mechanism of social control. Social scientists take the idea of the 'surveillance society' so seriously that there is an entire journal devoted to its study, Surveillance and Society. The panoptic surveillance envisioned by Jeremy Bentham, depicted in the form of an all-powerful, all-seeing government by George Orwell in 1984 and later analyzed by Michel Foucault (1975) is increasingly realized in the form of technology used to monitor our every move. This surveillance was imagined as a form of constant monitoring in which the observation posts are decentralized and the observed is never communicated with directly. Today, digital security cameras capture our movements, observers can track us through our cell phones, and police forces around the world use facial-recognition software.

From a feminist perspective, let's take a look at popular TV shows, advertising campaigns, and online game sites. In most, women are portrayed in a particular set of parameters and tend to have a uniform look that society recognizes as 'attractive.' Most are thin, white or light-skinned, beautiful, and young. Why does this matter? Feminist theorists believe this idealized image is crucial in creating and reinforcing gender stereotypes. For example, Fox and Bailenson (2009) found that online female avatars conforming to gender stereotypes reinforce negative attitudes toward women, and Brasted (2010) found that media (advertising in particular) promotes gender stereotypes. As early as 1990, Ms. magazine instituted a policy to publish without any commercial advertising. Press coverage in the media also reinforces stereotypes that subordinate women; it gives airtime to looks over skills, and coverage disparages women who defy accepted norms.

Many people argue that women's portrayal in the media remains misleadingly narrow. The advent of influencer culture may provide more agency to women, who can control their own portrayal, though many influencers have reinforced or even exaggerated gender stereotypes.

Nenad Stojkovic/flickr

  

Symbolic Interactionism

Media is ridden with symbols and ideas that shape our perceptions of ourselves and others, our thoughts about material needs (consumerism), and our understanding of reality.

Media create and spread symbols that become the basis for our shared understanding of society. Theorists working in the interactionist perspective focus on this social construction of reality, an ongoing process in which people subjectively create and understand reality, as discussed in the Sociology chapter. Media constructs our reality in a number of ways. For instance, people portrayed in media become reference groups: Groups that influence individual, to which individuals compares themselves, and by which we judge our successes and failures.

While social media apps like Instagram and Facebook encourage us to check in and provide details of our day through online social networks, corporations can just as easily promote their products on these sites. Even supposedly crowd-sourced sites like Yelp (which aggregates local reviews) are not immune to corporate shenanigans. That is, we think we are reading objective observations when in reality we may be buying into one more form of advertising, which influences our behavior and understanding of ourself. Facebook started as a free social network for college students, but became a monetized business, selling its users goods and services in subtle ways and securing that users are constantly engaged and shown ads through algorithms. Chances are that you don’t think of Facebook as one big online advertisement. What started out as a symbol of coolness and insider status, unavailable to parents and corporations, now promotes consumerism in the form of endless ads, games, and fandom. For example, think of all the money spent to upgrade popular Facebook games like Candy Crush. And notice that whenever you become a 'fan,' you likely receive product updates and special deals that promote online and real-world consumerism. It is unlikely that millions of parents want to be 'friends' with Pampers. But if it means a weekly coupon for diapers, they will in essence rent out space on their Facebook pages for Pampers to appear.

 

The Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma (2020) exposes some of the harmful consequences of social media algorithms. How do you think that exposure to social media has shaped your beliefs, values, or sense of self? 

Untitled courtesy of Exposure Labs/Netflix via IMDb

Social interactionists may also examine how we interact with each other via media, such as on social media or when gaming with peers. Both allow for a high degree of anonymity, which can fuel harsh or even harmful behaviors. For instance, a 2022 Pew Research Center Study found that nearly half (46%) of US teens aged 13 to 17 – youth who are still developing and vulnerable – reported experiencing at least one of several types of online harassment and 28% had experienced multiple types. Interactionists would be interested not only in these interactions but also in the impact they have on individuals' sense of self, in other words, how these experiences are internalized. Thus, social interactionists may agree with theorists of the other two perspectives that the nation should more strongly regulate harmful online behavior.

  

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This page incorporates the page 8.5: Theoretical Perspectives on Media and Technology from the OER textbook Introduction to Sociology 3e (OpenStax), shared under a CC BY 4.0 license.