Operant Conditioning – positive reinforcement, rewards and punishment. Create connotations. B.F Skinner

This can be transposed onto the media and how audiences feel coheres into certain matter of behaviour.

‘The fiction of free will’ – deterministic- false idea hate wee have a free will.

social conditioning determines behaviour not free will.

PROPAGANDA AND PERSUASION–

propaganda is overtly political and manipulative whereas persuasion often appears visible at first glance and subsequently revealed as insidious.

STRUCTURE OVER AGENCY

HAROLD LESSWELL

• propaganda technique in the world war.
• “Propagandais the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influence the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends through psychological manipulations.”

Individually liberty & personal freedom vs behaviour modification-technology has developed new method of behaviour control capable of altering not just an individual’s actions but his very personality and manner of thinking.

THEORIES AND APPROACHES TO AUDIENCE
Hypodermic model (passive corruption)

• Early theoretical work on the relationship (or effects) of media consumption are often traced back to Harold Lasswell
• HE developed the theoretical tool of ‘content analysis’ and in 1927 wrote ‘Propaganda Technique in the World War‘ which highlighted the idea of ‘subtle poison, which industrious men injected into the veins of a staggering people until the smashing powers . . . knocked them into submission’
• 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 .
• we must think about who
• Linear method of communication
• (WHO, SAYS WHAT, THROUGH WHAT CHANNEL, TO WHOM, TO WHAT EFFECT)

IN-TERMS OF THE I ARTICLE

The I says that’s the Covid-19 app is being downloaded up at down the country by 43% of smartphone users and that according to celebrity doctor Amir Khan the app can protect patients and health workers.

SHANNON AND WEAVER

• This approach was later adapted by Shannon and Weaver in 1949
• the name it the  Transmission model of Communication
• It included other elements, such as NOISE, ERROR, ENCODING and FEEDBACK.
• 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

• Two Step Flow of Communication (active consumption)
• ecognised that a simple, linear model may not be sufficiently complex to understanding the relationship between message sent > message received. 
• in 1948 he developed the Two Step Flow model of communication
• It 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 and actively decoding the information given.

USES AND GRATIFICATION

• The distinction is this approach is rather than categorising the audience as passive consumers of messages, either directly from source, or from opinion leaders, this theory recognises the decision making process of the audience themselves.
• As Elihu Katz explains the Uses and Gratifications theory diverges from other media theories to focus on: what do people do with media? 
• They put forward research to show that individual audience members are more active than previously thought and were actually key to the processes of selection, interpretation and feedback.
• Individuals sought particular pleasures, uses and gratifications from individual media texts, which can be categorised as:
• information / education,
• empathy and identity, 
• social interaction, 
• entertainment,
• escapism,

GEORGE GERBNER

• Cultivation Theory,
• Looking primarily at the relationship between violence on television and violence in society.
• They developed what is known as CULTIVATION THEORY, 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).
• Television shapes the way individuals within society think and relate to each other.
• ‘watching television doesn’t cause a particular behaviour, but instead watching television over time adds up to our perception of the world around us‘ (cited in West, 2014).
• they assert the power of television to modify behaviour in support of the dominant structures of society.

LOUIS ALTHUSSER 

• It is also worth noting the work of Louis 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),
• he saw this 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. S
• o 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. 

STUART HALL

• Preferred reading
• Also developing a critical theory that looked to analyse mass media communication and popular culture as a way of both uncovering the invidious work of the State and Big Business, as well as looking for ways of subverting that process.
• Hall was working at a time of great societal upheaval and unrest in the UK,
• 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.
• This is 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.
• Hall proposed three distinct positions that could be occupied by individual viewers, determined, more or less on their subject identities. 
• A dominant position accepts the dominant message 
• A negotiated position both accepts and rejects the dominant reading
• An oppositional position rejects the dominant reading
• 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. 

CLAY SHIRKY

• The End of Audience,
• To bring this summary of different audience approaches towards a conclusion, would be to look at Clay Shirky‘s notion of the end of audience,
• 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,

ZUBOFF

• surveillance capitalism we are directly targeted