Media Psychology

David Giles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135640514
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

Media Psychology examines the impact that 21st century media use has on human behavior, from teenage crushes on pop stars to soap fandom in adulthood. It brings together North American communication research with European media research in a variety of disciplines--psychology, sociology, communication and media studies--and in doing so, maps out the territory for media psychology. David Giles argues that psychologists have been guilty of ignoring the influence of the media over the last century, seeing it at best as a minor nuisance that will eventually go away. However, with the increasing prevalence of new electronic forms of mass communication, the media seem to have a greater influence than ever over our daily lives. In this book, Dr. Giles tackles the traditional topics of media psychology--sex, violence, advertising--along with sections on developmental aspects of media influence and the psychology of the audience. He also examines a number of specific media genres--news, sports, soaps, and the increasingly popular audience participation media, such as "reality" and "lifestyle" television. In addition, he asks what light psychology can shed on the popularity of these genres and the response of their audiences. Finally, there are chapters on the increasing influence of the Internet and on the representation of psychology and psychologists themselves in the media.

Part I
Media Psychology IN CONTEXT

Shortly before I began writing this book I attended a party at the home of some friends. It was a highly civilised affair, populated mostly by professional couples in their 20s and 30s and one or two single people, all graduates of some sort or other, although with little in common other than their friendship with the hosts. I was not wearing my psychologist’s hat; far from “analysing everybody,” as nonpsychologists would have it, I was simply chatting away in my usual friendly style when the topic of conversation turned to a television show that had been broadcast the previous evening. Suddenly, I stopped chatting and started listening. I felt my psychologist’s hat materialising on my head, and it stayed there for the remainder of the evening, as the conversation ebbed and flowed. After about an hour or so, the content of the conversation had almost exclusively concerned media—specific shows had been discussed and critiqued; various personalities and celebrities had been gossiped about and evaluated as though they had been guests in the next room; when cultural matters had cropped up, even they had concerned subjects like football and pop music, which rely heavily (and in some cases exclusively) on media consumption. When the conversation ended and we played a game, this game was based entirely on a popular television quiz show.

A popular cliché states that television has destroyed the art of conversation. Yet here we were, not “consuming” media at all (although the stereo may have provided a quiet aural backdrop), conversing away artistically, indeed playing parlour games as our Victorian ancestors had. However, this roomful of near-strangers were able to discuss an enormous breadth of topics in intimate detail, requiring a degree of shared cultural knowledge that would have astonished past generations. Far from robbing us of social activity, some would argue that the mass media have enriched our cultural lives over the last century in ways that could have never been imagined. For others, they have simply filled our minds with trivia and junk, some of it poisonous. Either way, in 2002 it is seemingly impossible to ignore mass media’s influence on any but the most remote communities on earth.

Statistically, the use of television has been widely reported—we often hear that much of our lives is spent watching the box, for so many hours a day. Harris (1999) claimed that 98% of U.S. homes have television (this figure has remained constant since 1980), and that 96% of U.S. homes have video recorders. It is even estimated that there are more television sets in the United States than there are toilets (Bushman, 1995). Television’s role in communicating world events is so integral that it is easily forgotten, but nobody will forget the live transmission of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, broadcast in all its horror to living rooms across the world. In Manhattan itself, the television almost assumed the role of a mirror, reinforcing the reality of the disaster. Writer Jay McInerney described how he watched the events unfolding with his attention split between the window and the TV set, and could not even recall which source he was following when the second plane hit the building (The Guardian, 15/9/01).

Why have psychologists shown so little interest in the media up to now? In chapter 1, I outline a number of possible explanations. I then lay the foundations for a psychology that has media as its focus from the outset, identifying important questions that a Media Psychology might address, and attempting some broad definition of “media,” which is essential for marking out the boundaries of the field. Developing a Media Psychology requires the synthesis of many diverse theoretical and research literatures, so in chapter 2 I give readers a broad overview of the many approaches to media research in both North American and European traditions (and, indeed, work from other parts of the globe). This wide range of perspectives derives in part from a huge and eclectic toolbox of research methods; hence, in chapter 3 I review a range of methods that have been used to study the media that would be appropriate for a Media Psychology.

Chapter 1

What Is Media Psychology, and Why Do We Need It?

Why has it taken so long for a psychology of the media to evolve? The answer lies in the history of the discipline, and of academic developments in general. In this chapter, I sketch a number of ways in which a distinct field of psychology might be defined. No field of psychology can emerge without a significant number of psychologists simultaneously addressing the same issues and identifying commonalities in each other’s work. I think there are plenty of reasons why, at the start of this century, a diverse but identifiable field is beginning to take shape. The task now is to knit together these diverse literatures and practices.

DEFINING THE TERRITORY

Specialist fields of psychology have appeared at an ever-increasing rate throughout the history of the discipline. Many of those fields are defined by practice—three examples are clinical psychology, educational psychology, and industrial psychology. They emerge due to a social or commercial demand for the application of psychological theory and research in a nonacademic environment. Within academia, broad fields have been defined in attempts to classify general approaches to psychology—cognitive psychology, social psychology, and developmental psychology, for instance. Other fields may be defined by a particular methodological approach or theoretical perspective, such as connectionist psychology, critical psychology, or behaviourism. These are often described as “schools of thought” rather than subdisciplines in their own right. Finally, there are fields that can be defined on the basis of topic, such as parapsychology, (cross-) cultural psychology, or the psychology of music. These fields may incorporate perspectives from broader fields (e.g., cognitive, social, and developmental psychology) but do not have to be dominated by any particular theoretical or methodological approach.

Media Psychology is probably closest to this final, topic-defined type of field. Such fields are brought into being as a result of books (such as this one), journals (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates publishes a journal entitled Media Psychology¹), conferences, and specialist teaching modules (such as the one I teach at undergraduate level at Coventry University). Media Psychology potentially covers an enormous scope—wider, for example, than the psychology of music. This is partly because there are already a number of established fields that could be accommodated within Media Psychology, such as the psychology of advertising and the psychology of the internet (see chaps. 7 and 16).

What makes Media Psychology unusual among specialist psychology fields, however, is that much of the work has already been done in disciplines outside psychology. In North America, most universities have a department of media and communications that carries out research into broadly psychological aspects of media. These departments employ many staff members who have been trained as psychologists in the quantitative science tradition. Their work is referred to as “communication science” or “media research” and is published in journals such as the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media² and the Journal of Communication.³ Each year, the International Communication Association hosts a conference at which many papers are presented on Media Psychology topics. It is rare, however, to see Media Psychology on the curriculum in a North American psychology department.

In 1991, the psychology/communication distinction formed the basis of a special issue of the journal Communication Research.⁴ Here, Reeves and Anderson (1991) discussed the ways in which psychological theory could inform media studies and vice versa, arguing that it was difficult for either field to ignore the other. For media researchers, the cognitive processes involved in watching film or video cannot be dismissed; for psychologists, cognitive and developmental psychology could be enriched by a consideration of media use, much in the way that studies of reading have influenced general theories of cognition. Reeves and Anderson quoted the famous cognitive psychologist Ulrich Neisser (1976) as saying “a psychology that cannot interpret ordinary experience is ignoring almost the whole range of its natural subject matter” (Reeves & Anderson, 1991, p. 599). The implications of media studies for developing social psychology, although not considered by these authors, are potentially greater still.

In Europe, the academic relationship between psychology and media studies is rather different. There has been a limited growth in Media Psychology as such, largely concentrated in Germany (where a German-language journal, Medienpsychologie, has flourished), and two edited volumes have been published based on the proceedings of workshops that brought together European media psychologists during the 1990s (Winterhoff- Spurk, 1995; Winterhoff-Spurk & van der Voort, 1997). These workshops attracted psychologists largely from Northern Europe, most of whom work within the North American communication tradition of laboratory studies of the cognitive and behavioural effects of screen media.

However, this small field is not typical of the European tradition in media and communication research. In most academic institutions, “media studies” has evolved as a specialist branch of cultural studies, and is rooted in the qualitative social science research tradition. Psychologists are rarely found in European media studies departments; indeed, the word psychology tends to carry negative connotations in this field (Livingstone, 1998a). However, recent developments in media studies have paved the way for a psychological treatment of some aspects of audience research. David Gauntlett and colleagues recently published a collection of studies examining the internet, arguing that media studies’ focus on traditional media (mostly television and print media) threatens the discipline with redundancy (Gauntlett, 2000).

In particular, pressure is being placed on media scholars to concentrate as much on audiences as on the media texts themselves, a prospect that, as far as Gauntlett was concerned, requires a level of empirical research that may be beyond the interests (and methodological capabilities) of cultural scholars. He maintained that media scholars should, instead, concentrate on cyberspace and other new media, which offer new and exciting avenues of cultural exploration. Gauntlett’s views are in no way typical of those of media scholars in general, European or American. However, they do highlight a growing concern for media studies in their need to consider new technological forms. They also reflect the suggestion of Livingstone (1999) that audience research has reached a “crossroads” whereby it is no longer sufficient to merely study the content of media; one must now engage at a social level with the practices of media use in general. I would argue that this is a project that is ideally suited to social psychology.

How, then, to chart the territory of Media Psychology? To begin with, there is a danger of Media Psychology becoming so broad that it begins to swallow up other topics in which the media plays an important role, such as political psychology. Clearly, there are important issues around the dissemination of political propaganda or government policy, and media influences on voting behaviour and the popularity of politicians. But it must be remembered that politics is, to some extent, a premedia phenomenon. Admittedly, the presentation of electoral candidates has been shaped by the media in democratic societies, and of course political action has always depended on some form of medium in order to mobilise communities. However, the nature of politics itself—and the psychological processes that govern political thought and opinion that constitute the field of political psychology—require many philosophical, theoretical, and methodological considerations that may be beyond the scope of Media Psychology.

We can go no further, then, without first establishing a boundary. What do we mean by “media,” and what elements of media are, or should be, of interest to psychologists? If political psychology is excluded from Media Psychology on the grounds of its status as a premedia phenomenon, this suggests that history is a prime consideration. However, behaviours such as aggression and sex, or fundamental social and psychological processes such as discourse and cognition, are universal human phenomena that would occur— or so we assume—under any historical conditions. Thus, the key issue is: How might the media have influenced these behaviours and processes?

DEFINING “MASS MEDIA”

Media studies textbooks usually distinguish media (mass media, to be precise) from other forms of communication, in relation to one of the many models of general communication that have been developed over the years (McQuail & Windahl, 1993). This allows us to distinguish communication technologies, such as the telephone, from mass media, in which communication is (ostensibly) unidirectional, such as the television. However, the emergence of the Internet and other interactive media networks have forced us to reconsider our concepts of media.

According to Marshall McLuhan, perhaps the most famous of all media scholars, this is only to be expected, because each new medium shapes society by its own terms, so we can never have a universal definition of “media”— the concept is forever in a state of flux. He cast the net as wide as possible by defining a medium as an “extension of ourselves” (McLuhan, 1964, p. 11), using electric light as an example. Media are effectively ciphers (i.e., empty of meaning) until we perceive some form of content, which is then treated as a message. The electric light is devoid of content until it is used to convey an explicit message, such as an advertising slogan or brand name, or until we credit it with a particular meaning (such as “light pollution”). From such reasoning came McLuhan’s much-quoted expression, “The medium is the message.”

But none of this really helps much. If we are to define a specialist field from psychology in relation to media, we need a definition that will be understood within that discipline. For this, we need to consider the relation of media to two broad aspects of civilisation—technology and culture. These two aspects are common to all human societies throughout time and space. Mass communication, however, is an intrinsically modern concept, emanating from the invention of printing and boosted by the discovery of electricity. The term mass is usually taken to refer to the size of the potential audience of a communication medium, typically 10% to 20% of the given population (Morris & Ogan, 1996). Mass media—the kind of media that are of interest in this book⁵—could be seen as the intersection of mass communication, culture, and technology. This would incorporate all media that rely on electricity, such as television, but exclude media that have a solely communicative function, such as the telephone. Newspapers and magazines are included, even though they require no technological input from their readers.

This leaves a number of grey areas, which is only to be expected with such a vast and difficult concept. First, where do we draw the line between mass media and popular cultural products? CD players and video game consoles satisfy all the criteria—they are electrical devices that communicate cultural material—but should they be treated any differently from more traditional cultural forms, such as books? This problem would not have bothered early media theorists, such as the Frankfurt School (see chap. 2), who made a sharp distinction between traditional culture and what they referred to as the “culture industry” (Adorno, 1991). Electronic cultural products were seen as part of a new dark age in which traditional culture was being, to use a thoroughly modern phrase, “dumbed down,” and used as political propaganda. Today, however, the sheer diversity and ubiquity of electronic cultural material mitigates against such a view, blurring the boundary between culture and media. Nevertheless, the relation between the two—particularly in fields such as cinema and popular music— is so close that the study of media is practically synonymous with the study of contemporary popular culture.

The second grey area concerns new developments in technology that have already begun to transform the 21st century social landscape. The Internet has been described as a multifaceted medium because it comprises a number of distinct functions, each with its own characteristics (Morris & Ogan, 1996). The World Wide Web is the function that most closely resembles traditional mass media—an information medium in which cultural material is communicated electronically to a defined audience; however, its other communicative functions are purely social (e-mail, and outlets such as chat rooms). Strictly speaking, e-mail is no more a “mass medium” than the telephone or the letter.

These grey areas mean that identifying a clear boundary for the field of Media Psychology is no easy task. To address the issue, during the 1990s the American Psychological Association changed the name of its Division of Media Psychology to the Division of Media Psychology and Communications Technology. Although I take issue with the APA’s definition of Media Psychology later in this chapter, the new name at least acknowledges the distinction between media and technology. However, this is not always the case, and it is important to recognise this distinction in developing a psychology of media.

I illustrate this distinction with an example from academic research. This deals with an area of new technology that Biocca and Levy (1995) described as the “ultimate [communication] medium”—virtual reality (VR). Although an enormous amount of research is being conducted on the development and potential uses of interactive virtual environments, the VR experience is restricted to laboratory settings, in which users typically don a headset and gloves or hold “wands” for tactile simulation. The psychological responses to these environments have been a focus for VR research—in one study, for instance, participants were required to skirt round the edge of an apparently steep drop (although in actuality only a few inches) and displayed physiological responses that were consistent with the anxiety produced when faced with a real drop of several feet (Meehan, 2000). The term new media is frequently applied to new technologies for human–computer interaction. However, such laboratory-bound experiences can hardly be classified as “media use.” While Web-based virtual environments may become commonplace in the future, we can presently only speculate about the course of their social and cultural applications, no matter how knowledgeable we are about the capabilities of the technology. Until such environment...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part I: Media Psychology in Context
• Part II: Psychological Effects and Influences of Media
• Part III: Developmental Issues in Media Psychology
• Part IV: The Social Psychology of the Media
• Part V: Genres
• Part VI: The Future of Media Psychology
• References