Hi everyone! Nicole here.

Introduction

After today’s mind-blowing and rather abstract discussion on the topic of “Influence”, I’ve just decided to draw up a brief summary of the concepts and issues that we have discussed as well as bring in a few ideas that I have stumbled upon while trying to break down this complex term.

From what I gather from today’s tutorial, the notion on how the mass media influences its consumers can be categorized into two large groups. The first group concerns that of the producer and the second, that of the consumer.

Media Producers

When addressing the producers of media, we need to consider the intention of why the producer has come up with a certain movie or piece of news or video clip etc. It could have the purpose of persuasion, propaganda or just a mere form of entertainment.

Persuasion has been defined as the attitude change that results from being exposed to information that is put in place by others while propaganda, as defined by Ross, is an ‘epistemically defective message with the intention to persuade a socially significant group of people on behalf of an organization, institution or cause.’ Thus, it is pretty obvious that when the producer engages in persuasive communication or propaganda, he does have the intention to influence the audience in some way or another. With respect to media as a form of entertainment, the idea of influence is not so straightforward and largely depends on how consumers interpret these forms of entertainment, which I will be touching on later.

We talked about a few techniques that producers make use of with the intention to influence and two of them would be the idea of framing and agenda-setting. Tankard defines a frame as ‘a central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection, emphasis, exclusion and elaboration.’ This then led us to the issue of power relations as frames, more often than not, are defined by those who have a say, those who have power.

Media consumers

As for media consumption, I’ll like to expand on this concept of interpretation of media by the audience. I think we have established that ‘The Bullet Theory’ is no longer as applicable to society as consumers are no longer as vulnerable to media messages as we have different ways of interpreting a text.

 Some characteristics of audiences are as follows:

1.     Audiences are selective people.

2.     Audiences have their own background knowledge and views of certain issues.

3.     Audiences are not isolated individuals and their surrounding plays an important part in crafting their views.

4.     Audiences live in different social contexts.

All in all, audiences are not passive and they are a heterogeneous group.

To what extent?

Our discussion then led us to the question on the degree of how media influences us. I think for starters, we can address the people who consumes the media. There is this concept known as the ‘four rings of defense’ as to how audiences filter and interpret messages.

The first ring is that audiences perform selective exposure in the sense that they only expose themselves to communications that are in agreement with their existing attitudes and avoid those that disagree. The second ring is that audiences perform selective perception which is the tendency for people’s perception to be influenced by wants, needs, attitudes and other factors. The third ring is that of selective attention, where the audience only pays attention to those messages that are in agreement with their views. And lastly, the fourth ring is selective retention, in which the audience only retains information that they find to be more favourable.

I guess we can use this model to evaluate to what extent the audience is influenced by the mass media. There are I’m sure many other concepts and issues that are not covered, however, I feel that this is just one of the many frameworks that can help us through the complicated process of media interpretation.

Conclusion

So these are just my thoughts on what we discussed during tutorial today! I’m sorry if some statements that I mentioned are sweeping ones or too generalized as I’m still a bit fuzzy with this concept myself, so do correct me if I’m wrong! :)

Nonetheless, I know this post is rather lengthy haha but I hope it managed to help in some way or another! :)

Have a good week ahead everyone!

P.s. There is a ‘comments’ link at the end of every post, so please feel free to comment on the other posts that our classmates have written!