{The Effects Model

Hypodermic Needle Theory

The Hypodermic Needle Theory depends on the view that the audience is completely passive.

This largely refers to the days before Web 2.0 and media interactivity.

Passivity

The hypodermic theory suggests that the passive audience is ‘injected’ by the media producers with a message

This means that Media Text Producers can encode whatever message they want the audience to take from it and that the audience will take the dominant reading.

Hypodermic?

This means that the audience are powerless to resist what the media producers want you to think or feel.

Subliminal messages were often put in by producers to determine particular social groups as the ‘Bad People’.

Danger…

In Bond Films, one of England’s largest and most popular media texts, why are the villains until recent films always foreign?

In many of them, the bad guy is an evil eastern European mastermind, reflecting the previous antipathy towards real life bad guys like Hitler and Stalin.

In this way, producers used their personal bias to demonize the groups that they didn’t like, passing on this hatred to the general public.

Examples

A critical thinker realised that the media had great power in social control

He felt that not only was the power of the Hypodermic theory a threat but more so that Popular culture was too.

His name was Theodor Adorno.

Theo DaWhoHa…?

Adorno noticed how popular culture was the only thing that distracted human beings from the higher important issues such as political events or societal change.

Adorno suggested that culture industries churn out a debased mass of unsophisticated, sentimental products which have replaced the more 'difficult' and critical art forms which might lead people to actually question social life.

Theodor Adorno

Adorno (1903-1969)

He was a German philosopher, sociologist, musicologist and was known for his critical theory of society.

The Frankfurt School found in the 1920s and 1930s that, in agreement with Adorno’s idea, the mass media acted to restrict and control the masses to the benefit of government and capitalism.

Shortly after, the Nazi Party utilised the use of media control in the form of anti-semitic Propaganda to horrific effect and with disastrous consequences.

Adorno and the Frankfurt school were proven correct.

Frankfurt Findings

The issue with the Hypodermic theory is that it suggests the audience are wholly passive which in modern day times we are not thanks to the introduction of Web 2.0 through which we now have the Two Way system in which we can now dictate what happens within the media to a larger extent than before.

However, in the past this was not the case. Perhaps the most susceptible to this Effects

Theory were children as investigated by the Bobo Doll experiment.

How so easily?

This was a controversial investigation that seemingly proved that children will copycat violent behaviour that they see.

Conducted by Albert Bandura in 1961.

The Bobo Doll experiment

72 Children examined. 3 groups of 24 children watched

different model videos of an adults behaviour in a play room that they would later be left in themselves.

3 models for three groups. Two acted aggressiveley, swearing and

hitting a Bobo Doll, the other two played with the toys nicely and completely avoided the Doll and for the third group of children, no model was shown at all. (See picture next slide)

The experiment

Image diagram

The children were all shown a video as explained in the previous diagram.

Each child was then sent into the same room alone to play and were examined through a one way mirror by psychologists.

What happened?

It was clear that the children who were exposed to violent behaviour imitated this behaviour and often with creative embellishments, seeking to find their own individual ways in which to hurts the Bobo Doll.

Looking deeper, many findings were made about the difference between gender and the susceptibility however the point was proven.

The Children copied the violent behaviour, proving that what they see in video and media will effect them.

Results?

Although the experiment was carried out on children, it would not be wrong to feel that this experiment strongly and emphatically suggests that Human beings with low maturity level or those who are easily influenced can be just that.

The Media can strongly influence a large amount of the population to act, think, feel or behave in certain ways towards certain people.

The implications of this finding are astronomical – The media, if not regulated and stopped could cause atrocious behaviour and enforce Dominant ideologies that could cripple equality and peace just as was done by the Nazi Party in the 1930s.

And so…

Hopefully, this has helped you to understand the effects theory.

The Effects theory.