B.F. Skinner – Operant Conditioning,
“The fiction of free will” – Skinner suggests we don’t actually have free will and we are conditioned to think or feel a certain way, the environment is controlled. We are conditioned to do different things, it’s provocative and manipulative. We are open to manipulation, people will play to other people’s weaknesses in order to manipulate
Schedule of reinforcement – If someone/something knows it will get something good and positive in return they will continue this process (e.g a pigeon will peck a dish to get food as they know they will get a reward from this)
Harold Lasswell – Propaganda Technique in the World War (1927) Highlighted the brew of ‘subtle poison, which industrious men injected into the veins of a staggering people until the smashing powers…knocked them into submission’
Hypodermic model – Suggests the direct injection of media messages into a passive audience
Propaganda – it is overtly political and manipulative
Zuboff highlights ‘A major segment of the emerging behaviour control technology is concerned with conditioning, through which various forms of persuasion are used to stimulate certain types of behaviours while suppressing others’
Individuality & personal freedom v behaviour modification:
“Technology has begun to develop new methods of behaviour control capable of altering not just an individual’s actions but his very personality and manner of thinking”
“The behavioural technology being developed in the US today touches upon the most basic sources of individuality and the very core of personal freedom”
“The power this technology gives one man to impose his views and values on another”
Cambridge Analytica – British political consulting firm that was involved in influencing hundreds of elections globally and that came to prominence through the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal
Hypodermic model (passive consumption) – Model of communication suggesting that an intended message is directly received and wholly accepted by the receiver.
“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”
Early theoretical work on the relationship (or effects) of media consumption are often traced back to Harold Lasswell who developed the theoretical tool of ‘content analysis’ and in 1927 wrote Propaganda Technique in the World War which highlighted the brew of ‘subtle poison, which industrious men injected into the veins of a staggering people
My article ‘William fears for UK mental health amid virus curbs’:
Who:
What: People need to work together to tackle mental health during coronavirus and lockdown, mental health in the UK could be at risk
Whom: The community, everyone who may be affected by mental health
With what effect: People want to make sure mental health is ‘okay’ and get people to think about what it could be like
Shannon and Weaver (1949) – Transmission model of Communication, which included other elements, such as NOISE, ERROR, ENCODING and FEEDBACK. There is a suggestion that the process of sending and receiving a message is clear-cut, predictable or reliable of other factors that need to be taken into consideration
Paul Lazarfeld – Two step flow of communication (active consumption) linear model may not be sufficiently complex to understanding the relationship between message sent > message received. He developed the Two Step Flow model of communication, took account of the way in which mediated messages aren’t directly injects into the audience, but subject to noise, error, feedback etc. Filtered through opinion leaders, those who interpret media message first then relay them back to a bigger audience
Martin Moore suggests ‘people’s political views are not, as contemporaries thought, much changed by what they read/heard in the media. Voters were far more influenced by their friends, their families and their colleagues’ (2019:124)
Audiences are active not passive and can be influenced by any factor, we like to know what’s going on so sometimes this means we can be influenced more easily. People could be subject to bias, interpretation, rejection, amplification, support and change.
Use and Gratifications (active selection) – The audience is a passive consumer of messages, either directly from source/opinion leaders, recognises the decision making process of audience. Individual audience members are more active than had previously been though and were actually key to the processes of selection, interpretation, feedback. People look for enjoyment/pleasure in specific uses of grat, including: information/education, empathy and identity, social interaction, entertainment, escapism
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (1954) – People actively looked to satisfy their needs based on hierarchy of social/psychological desires
Cultivation theory (George Gerbner)- People’s behaviour can be shaped and changed over time if being told the same thing enough times over and over until people start to believe this. The power of television to modify behaviour in support of the dominant structures of society
Theory of preferred reading (Stuart Hall) – There are 3 ways to read a text through: a dominant position, negotiated position and oppositional position. People presented as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. Active in the making/rejecting of meaning through mass communication
Clay Shirky – Suggests there isn’t such a thing as audience and there are only individuals
“The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with”, 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