Media Effects

The introduction to James Potter’s new undergraduate textbook, Media Effects, makes a compelling point: our thinking about our field is somewhat incoherent and disorganized. When we teach, we typically focus on a list of popular topics and theories. Our students are unlikely to leave our classes with a systematic framework for organizing these topics into a “big picture” understanding of media effects. In response to this state of affairs, Potter’s text makes a simple and ambitious offer—to lay out two templates, one for individual-level effects and one for macro-level effects that capture and organize the entire gamut of media effects research. The notion of these overarching frameworks is very attractive. There are so many possible topics, so many possible studies to cover, so many decisions to make at each point about how much detail to give and what to emphasize. As a professor, I routinely suffer from anxiety at the beginning of the semester and remorse at the end over what does and doesn’t get covered. So, how useful are these templates? How effective is this likely to be as an undergraduate text? And finally, a further question—one that is somewhat unfair given the general focus of the book, but is relevant to the readers of this journal—to what extent do the templates and the book as a whole acknowledge the role of human development in media effects? Potter’s template of individual-level effects is a six by four grid. Outcome variables are categorized into six types: cognitive, belief, attitudes, affect, physiology, and behavior. The ways in which media content may influence those outcomes are divided into four functions: acquiring (e.g., gaining new cognitions, beliefs, attitudes), triggering (activating existing states or, perhaps somewhat confusingly, activating processes that produce new states), altering (changing the individual’s pre-existing states), and reinforcing (strengthening pre-existing states). Obviously, many of these categories are intertwined and Potter acknowledges that there are overlaps and that individual scholars working with these variables don’t always use these classifications. Nonetheless, he argues convincingly that there is value to making these distinctions. On reflection, they make intuitive sense—media content may have effects by giving us new stuff, activating our pre-existing stuff, changing our pre-existing stuff, or reinforcing our pre-existing stuff. The “stuff” that’s being affected may be our cognitions or our attitudes or our emotions and so on. Fair enough. The macro-social template lays out the influence of media content on three broad aggregates: the public, institutions, and the media themselves. For each of these aggregates there may be effects on the same outcomes as at the individual level (beliefs, emotions, behaviors, etc.,) minus physiological effects which are not considered at the