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Flashcards in Mass Media: Transmission & Persuasion Deck (8)
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1
Q

What were the first wave of media effect models?

A
  • Hypodermic Needle Model
  • Shannon and Weaver’s Transmission Model
  • Two Step Flow Model
2
Q

What is the hypodermic needle model?

A
  • 1960s
  • Used in retrospect to describe the media’s communication conveyance process as a taking information and injecting it into the head
  • Here’s an opinion for you
  • Stimulus/Response
3
Q

What is the rationale for hypodermic model?

A
  • Lasswell in 1927
    • Doctoral thesis on WW1 communication techniques
    • Letter to America Political Science Review
    • “Propaganda is the management of collective attitudes by the manipulation of significant symbols”
    • Deductive Inference
      • Lasswell emphasised the manipulation of symbols and their effects of collective attitudes
      • The Nazi’s manipulated symbols: ostensible shift in collective attitudes: ergo…
        • i.e. is a pretty weak correlation/causation
4
Q

What is stimulus/repsonse?

A
  • Carl Hovland picked up on this idea:
    • Communication = ‘the process by which an individual transmits stimuli to modify the behaviour of other individuals’
  • Importance of physicality and tangibility
  • Researchers faced measurement problems
    • Focusing on the message, or consequence change in behaviour?
    • How can you isolate message effects (.e.g are you a conservative because you watch Fox or a Fox viewer because you’re a conservative?)
5
Q

Who were Shannon and Weaver?

A
  • Claude Shannon
    • Worked at Bell Labs
    • Published book trying to make sense of information tranmission
    • Had an engineering focus
    • i.e. efficiencies in transmitting and storing information (in bits)
    • Origins of information theory
  • Warren Weaver
    • Saw this was revolutionary for communications theory
    • Conceived information in a ‘very broad sense to include all of the procedures by which one mind may affect another”
6
Q

What is the transmission model?

A

Source: Message: Transmitter: Signal: Noise: Received Signal: Receiver: Message: Destination

7
Q

What is the relvelence of the SW model?

A
  • Moved discussion from ‘hypodermic needle’ to ‘transmission’ of information
  • Legitimised the stimulus-response idea
    • (Because engineers have more credibility)
  • Introduced the idea of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding’ the source into transmittable data: how tiny can we make this data
8
Q

What is two step flow?

A
  • ‘The People’s Choice’
  • Paul Lazarsfeld and co-authors surveyed 2400 throughout the 1940 US Election
    • Wanted to know how voters made up their minds
    • Observed the importance of ‘opinion leaders’
  • Information is conveyed via media to opinion leaders, who imbue the information with their own authority etc
  • And people listen to the opinion leaders more than to media directly
  • Tangibility is important: opinion leaders are thought to be chosen as representatives (geographical or otherwise), so obviously pre-digital
  • Political Implications: Hillary bringing out Beyonce and Jay Z etc
  • Some evidence: face to face discussions can change people’s media-bred bias’s about sexualities etc, and these new attitudes persist, but only when engaged by an ‘opinion leader’ directly