adjusting voting behaviour in a digital age

b.f. skinner – operant conditioning:

• behavioural science
• “free will is fiction”
• schedule of reinforcement: if the pigeon knows it is going to get rewarded it will repeat the process to get that satisfaction

harold lasswell

• involved in world war 1
• propaganda technique in the world war: the way in which governments etc could brew up a “subtle poison” which could be injected into the veins of staggered people until the smashing powers … knocked them into submission
• hypodermic needle model
• propaganda vs persuasion: propaganda overtly political and manipulative vs persuasion (subtle manipulation)

Zuboff

• The age of surveillance capitalism
• emerging behaviour control technology: phones used to stimulate certain types of behaviour
• new technology -> new methods of behaviour control
• changing not only actions but changing people’s personalities and ways of thinking

cambridge analytica

• alexander nix – boss of CA

audience theory

• hypodermic needle – 1920 – 1930: passive audience, conditioning & propaganda. less people read and write

lasswell’s model: the daily mail article

WHO:

Sarah Harris and

SAYS WHAT:

“The number of white male, secondary school teachers has fallen by almost 20 percent in a decade, sparking fears over a lack of role models for working class boys”

CHANNEL:

The daily mail newspaper

TO WHOM:

right-wing aligned or centre-right aligned audience

WITH WHAT EFFECT:

reinforces the idea that the increase in diversity of teachers is bad because “white boys don’t have any role models”. (Conveniently leaving out that minorities never had role models in the first place). This creates racist ramifications as it ultimately creates the idea that “minorities are invading teaching spaces”

KATZ, GUREVITCH & HAAS

Personal needs: understanding self (reinforcing ideology)

Social needs: “knowledge” about the world

self confidence, stability, self esteem: if ideas are reinforced that align with the reader’s interests, they may agree giving a sense of stability

• shannon weaver: 1949: noise, error, encoding and feedback. Noise: being unable to understand the message conveyed due to some kind of distraction such as noise or another factor

• paul lazarfeld 1948: two step flow: information is shown to group 1 (influencers) (step 1). where one or two people are given the information. Then those people tell a lot of people (step 2)
• As Martin Moore suggests, ‘people’s political views are not, as contemporaries thought, much changed by what they read or heard in the media. Voters were far more influenced by their friends, their families and their colleagues’ (2019:124).
• active audience – the heart of the idea of the liberal press

• katz, gurevitch and haas: uses and gratifications 1973
• choose information based on what you want
• maslow’s hierarchy of needs

gerbner 1975: cultivation theory

• behaviours can be changed
• More pertinently, Gerbner and Gross assert that ‘television’s major cultural function is to stabilize social patterns and to cultivate resistance to change‘ (1978: 115). In other words, they assert the power of television to modify behaviour in support of the dominant structures of society.

Noam chomsky

• propaganda model

althusser

• theory of interpolation

stuart hall: theory of preferred reading (1980s)

• you don’t have to believe what people are telling you 9the media is telling you)
• 3 different ways of reading: dominant oppositional and negotiated
• encoding is different from the decoded message

clay shirky 2000: the end of audience

• no audience only individuals
• intersectionality
• In many ways, Shirky is not too removed from the work of Hall, prioritising the power of individual agency in the relationship between audiences and institutions, for example, recognising how the audience can be both producers and consumers of media text. This can be realised in the realm of new (interactive) communication media, where individual communications can be made in what appears to be beyond State or commercial control and interest.
• , ‘the more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with.’

the idea of “surveillance capitalism”