Operant conditioning – where you enforce an behavior

the fiction of free will – when you believe you have free will but actually u don’t and are being manipulated in one sense or the other but you believe it to be you own idea

Propaganda v persuasion

propaganda- is the expression of opinions and appears overtly political and manipulative

Harold lasswel – Hypodermic model = direct injection = passive audience

Shoshana Zuboff- persuasion behavior control technology is concerned with conditioning

in the turn of the 1800 so 1910,1903 etc was the start of mass media

“Lasswell , as a behavioural scientist researching areas connected with political communication and propaganda, believed each government had ‘manipulated the mass media in order to justify its actions’ in World War 1” 

Model example:

who: Daily Mail

Says what: theres a correlation of trump in power and rising corona cases ie Trump isn’t helping reduce cases

Chanel: Article

To whom: people who are anti trump/ left wingers

With what effect: To persuade to people to be anti trump

This approach was later adapted by Shannon and Weaver in 1949, as the Transmission model of Communication, which included other elements, such as NOISE, ERROR, ENCODING and FEEDBACK. In other words, there is the suggestion that the process of sending and receiving a message is clear-cut, predicable or reliable and is dependent on a range of other factors that need to be taken into consideration.

Paul Lazarfeld recognised that a simple, linear model may not be sufficiently complex to understanding the relationship between message sent > message received. As such, in 1948 he developed the Two Step Flow model of communication, which took account of the way in which mediated messages are not directly injected into the audience, but while also subject to noise, error, feedback etc, they are also filtered through opinion leaders, those who interpret media messages first and then relay them back to a bigger audience.

The audience is active

Research into this area began with Denis McQuail and Jay Blumler, who in 1969, looked to study the 1964 UK Election. In the early 1970’s they were joined by Elihu Katz, Joseph Brown, Michael Gurevitch and Hadassah Haas. 

In essence, they put forward research to show that individual audience members are more active than had previously been thought and were actually key to the processes of selection, interpretation and feedback. In essence, individuals sought particular pleasures, uses and gratifications from individual media texts, which can be categorised as:

1. information / education
2. empathy and identity
3. social interaction
4. entertainment
5. escapism

Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs (1954), which argues that people actively looked to satisfy their needs based on a hierarchy of social and psychological desires.

 Looking primarily at the relationship between violence on television and violence in society. They developed what is known as CULTIVATION THEORY, noting the distinct characteristics of television in relation to other media forms, they suggest that ‘television cultivates from infancy the very predispositions and preferences that used to be acquired from other primary sources‘ (Gerbner et al 1986). In other words, television shapes the way individuals within society think and relate to each other. However, the research also notes that the effects of television are limited and as such, the overall position is that ‘watching television doesn’t cause a particular behavior, but instead watching television over time adds up to our perception of the world around us‘ 

uis Althusser as at this particular time, he was concerned to raise the idea that the State asserted power and control through a number of key agencies and structures, which he calledIDEOLOGICAL STATE APPRATUSES (ISA’s), which he saw as deliberating working in the interests of State power to modify individual behaviours. Alongside prison, psychiatric hospitals, schools and families, Althusser was also critical of the role and function of the media, which he saw as working within and for the dominant interests of society – often at a subtle level of interaction, which audiences may not even be aware of – so again an invidious transmission of information produced for a specific set of messaging. So perhaps the hypodermic model as a lived-in experience? Althusser illustrates this with the concept of “hailing” or “interpellation” a process which calls individuals into a network of (dominant) ideological values, attitudes and beliefs.

where other media theorists argue that messages are imposed on people from above, Hall said power is not as simple as that‘. Hall suggested that power, control and therefore, behaviour management cannot be exerted directly, willfully and without resistance. Towards this aim he proposed the encoding/decoding model of communication, or the theory of preferred reading, where individuals are not only active in the process of interpretation and the construction of meaning, but they are also able to dismiss and reject dominant messages. Although it could be argued that we all take up different readings of different media, Hall proposed three distinct positions that could be occupied by individual viewers, determined, more or less on their subject identities.

1. A dominant position accepts the dominant message
2. A negotiated position both accepts and rejects the dominant reading
3. An oppositional position rejects the dominant reading

This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. It means they are active in the making (or rejecting) of meaning through mass communication.

Shirky stated that, ‘the more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with.’ In other words, Shirky makes claim for the emancipation gained from new media technologies, liberating individual consumers from the behavioural management techniques of the State that were positioned as problematic by Hall, Althusser, Chomsky and others. A position that is the revolution of new media technologies, which in many holds similarities with the introduction of the printing press in the 1500’s, a potential to transform the working machinery of public discourse and to reinvigorate democracy (re: Habermas and the Transformation of the Public Sphere).

The arena of digital intrusion, of excessive, experimental and at times, unlawful, data mining is the subject of another post. It is enough perhaps to end on this lengthy quote from Zuboff, which seems to summarise the current concerns around media communication technologies, the role of those in power to adjust and manipulate our behaviour and ultimately the future of human freedom and individual liberty.