Social Psychology of Media

CATV 463
 What is Media? What Media does?

• Media can be described broadly as

communication that is delivered through
some types of medium such as TV, Radio,
Newspaper, computer (social media).
• When looking at the 20th century; radio
started to spoke to the masses. Later, TV
became more popular.
 What is Media? What Media does?

• In the 21st century, the advent and increased

public use of the Internet, it made all sorts of
information available.
• According to Bernard Cohen, news media may
not be successful in telling people what to
think but they are stunningly successful in
telling them what to think about (Cohen,
1963)
 What is Media? What Media does?

• During the 1968 presidential campaign in the

USA, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw
made a study that news media plays a key
role in the construction of our pictures of
reality.
• Their central hypothesis was that the mass
media set the agenda of issues for a political
campaign by influencing the salience of issues
among voters.
 What is Media? What Media does?

• Those issues emphasized in the news come to

be regarded over time as important by
members of the public. McCombs and Shaw
called this influence agenda-setting.
• To test this hypothesis, that the media agenda
can set the public agenda, McCombs and
Shaw conducted a survey among a sample of
randomly selected undecided voters in Chapel
Hill, North Carolina.
 What is Media? What Media does?

• In the survey, these undecided voters were

asked what they thought were the key issues
of the day, regardless of what the candidates
might say.
• The issues named in the survey were ranked
according to the percentage of voters naming
each one to yield a description of the public
agenda.
 What is Media? What Media does?
• Concurrent with this survey of voters, the nine major news
sources used by these voters—five local and national
newspapers, two television networks, and two
newsmagazines—were collected and content analyzed.
The rank order of issues on the media agenda was
determined by the number of news stories devoted to
each issue.
The high degree of correspondence between these two
agendas of political and social issues established a
central link in what has become a substantial chain of
evidence for an agenda-setting role of the press.
 Media 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’.
 Media Psychology
• In 1991, the psychology/communication distinction formed the
basis of a special issue of the journal Communication Research.
• 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
 Media Psychology
• 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 (WinterhoffSpurk, 1995; Winterhoff-
Spurk & van der Voort, 1997)
 Media Psychology
• 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.
 Media Psychology
• 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).
 Media Psychology
• McLuhan’s much-quoted expression, “The
medium is the message.”
• Marshall McLuhan is well known for his
“Medium Is the Message” statement, implying
that a medium communicates an image or
generates effects independent of any single
message it contains.
 Media Psychology
• Mass communication, 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.
 Media Psychology
• Mass media could be seen as the intersection of
mass communication, culture, and technology.
• 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).
 Media Psychology
• PSYCHOLOGY AND MEDIA
• North American social psychology journals in the 1970s
and 1980s reveals a large number of research papers
dealing with the “effects” of television and films.
• Most of these studies were instigated by a concern
that, far from being a harmless box of tricks in the
corner of the living room, the television is a source of
imagery and information that is capable of turning
acquiescent and innocent little children into gormless
zombies, or, worse, mass murderers.
 Media Psychology
• The goal of media psychologists is to try to
answer those questions by combining an
understanding of human behavior, cognition, and
emotions with an equal understanding of media
technologies.
• Human behaviour intersects media technologies.
• Media psychology uses the lens of psychology to
understand human interaction with technology.
 Media Psychology
• Media psychology is important because media
technologies are everywhere, people of all ages
use media technologies a lot, young people use
them most, older people worry about younger
people and technology is not going away.
• How media and technology affects psychology
of people?
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=PFZMp6849YQ
 Media Psychology
• HOW MEDİA AFFECTS THE SOCİETY?
• HOW MEDİA MANİPULATE THE PEOPLE?
• HOW MEDİA CHANGE ATTİTUDES, BEHAVİOUR
THİNKİNG?
• HOW MEDİA CHANGE IDEOLOGİCAL
PERSPECTİVES?