The effects model has been a bastion of media studies for many years. Many people refer to it every day without even realising; the "nanny state" lives and dies by one of the oldest media theories.
The effects model was first thought up by the Frankfurt School, who were the first group to take the study of media seriously, as they were concerned with how it was being used as a propaganda tool.
Two of the main theorists were Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. They argued that culture had become mass produced, churned out again and again as one would produce a car. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1947). Adorno said that the repetition and routine of these new media made them useful as tools of control to reinforce the capitalist order (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1947). This idea is often called the "hypodermic needle" model as media "injects" an audience with information.
Their worldview was not shared by Walter Benjamin. He believed that the shift from art as a singular spectacle to art as a mass produced commodity represented a victory over bourgeois traditions; or as he puts it, it "emancipates art from its parasitic dependency on ritual" (Benjamin, 1968, pp.6).
Benjamin said that pre-industrial art possesses an 'aura', or a set of rituals governing its consumption; you walk into the Louvre, you ogle at the Mona Lisa from an aesthetic perspective, you leave. In an era where art can be mass-produced, you are able to appreciate the work from a whole host of social and industrial contexts (Benjamin, 1968). If the film you're watching is made in Hollywood, how does that impact the codes, conventions and values it carries?
The effects model has come under a lot of criticism in recent years. The work of Stuart Hall on audience theory proposed that there was more to the human experience of media than being a puppet. We all have individual tastes influenced by our socio-economic backgrounds, Hall says. In short, the media does not inject us with information, but instead provides us with information to make our own judgments based on our beliefs (Hall, 1973).
We can see this by watching Gogglebox, a show in which members of the British public react to television broadcasts. When the participants watched the John Lewis "Bear and the Hare" advert, opinion was diverse and appreciated the text both critically (A man remarks that the animation is "incredible, on a par with Disney" and a bewildered twenty-something yells "What the fuck is this about?") and commercially (two housemates attempt to guess which shop produced the advert and a working class mother protests its £7 million budget by stating "they're obviously making far too much money") (Gogglebox, 2014).
Another criticism of the effects model is how it treats the children as incapable of drawing their own conclusions from the media. We can see how this is disputed in The Fine Bros.' "Kids React" videos on Youtube, where children are able to form cognitive opinions about challenging topics like Caitlyn Jenner and Islamic terrorism having been given minimal information (Fine and Fine, 2016).
In conclusion, while the effects model has a lot of applications in the modern day, it's become discredited in the years since and is no longer a staple of media theory.
SOURCES:
Adorno, T. and Horkheimer, M. (1947). Dialect of Enlightenment. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: Querido Verlag.
Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Fine, B. and Fine, R. (2016). Fine Brothers Entertainment. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheFineBros [Accessed 29 Feb. 2016].
Gogglebox, (2014). [TV programme] Channel 4.
Hall, S. (1973). Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. Birmingham [England]: Centre for Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham.
No comments:
Post a Comment