Media as a whole is difficult to define; it covers such a wide range of
things to Facebook to music videos and the way new technology has changed the
way we view media today will be highlighted throughout this discussion.
Times have changed and with this it has brought new technologies and
methods in which to allow the consumer to interact with media products,
listening to the radio will mean you will also listen to the advertising,
social media also directs advertising at you and even lets your friends spread
the advertising by liking certain products and sharing it with their friends,
this is the entire advertising model on a wider scale, a scale in which we may
never know how vast it actually is. Product placement is also another form of
advertising in which the consumer does not directly see the product being
advertised, just merely being used; this happens a lot in movies where it will
be difficult not to see an apple product or music videos where you will be hard
done by if you can’t see a Dr. Dre product somewhere. This is just a few
examples of how the industry will force certain things upon the consumer.
In the past the media was the newspapers and magazines, which is where
things were advertised and where the news was printed, today news is everywhere,
if something happened people will be notified; I personally was notified via
the sky news app 3 minutes after Joan Rivers was publically declared dead which
is astonishing to say the least. This leads me onto the development of smart
phones, the pillar of every owners life, it contains my entire life, all my
profiles and contacts, even down to my grammar, with the intelligent spell
check and the phone itself has software within it to record my preferences and
target advertising at me which fits my profile which I think is amazing but it
can be used as a great example of how media has changed over time due to new
technological advances.
The hypodermic needle theory was one of the earliest ways to
describe how mass media affects the audiences, it was developed after
researchers saw how much of affect propaganda had in world war one. The theory
itself suggests a linear communication in which media messages are injected
into the brain of the audiences and the theory works on the basis that we are all
the same and respond the in the same way as others after witnessing a form of
media, the theory is often said to drip feed information to the public. This
suggests that the media is extremely powerful in relation to the passive
audience. The theory is not used much anymore as it was considered inadequate
and not fit for purpose. Examples of its use are Red Bulls advertising on
extreme sports where it has now become associated with the amazing stunts. Levi
jeans had an advert in the mid-80s where the sales rose 800% because the man
took his clothes off in the laundrette and people wanted to buy the jeans to
buy this lifestyle, the sales of boxer shorts even rose because Nick Kamen wore
them; this shows the power of the media and also that on occasion this theory
does work. Personally I think the whole injecting the message into people’s
heads is extreme but it is true; for example I could say three words and you
would be able to know what product I was referring to, “washing machines
live….”, here is an example of how advertising has branched out into using
slogans and catchphrases to harness the audience further, if you have not found
the product yet it is “Calgon”.
The uses and gratification theory suggest audiences aren’t
passive and not just accept what they see, unlike the hypodermic needle theory
which has a linear communication theory. McQuail (1972) describes four types of
gratification: Diversion, where the audience is distracted from day to day life
by emerging themselves in media; Personal relationships, where the consumption
of media makes you feel like a part of the community and it can be used to
improve personal relationships by discussing mass media topics with your peers;
Personal identity, where the consumer confirms their identity by interacting
with media that is deemed appropriate by society for example a politics teacher
would be expected to watch Prime Ministers Question Time on a Wednesday; and
the fourth type of gratification is surveillance, in which the audience have a
desire to want to know what is going on in the world. Livingston & Bovill
found that young people used media for boredom, which is easily seen today with
most young people on their social media sites, describing every aspect of their
lives. Lull researched the reasons why people use media and found that people
have a need for: background knowledge on subjects around the world; for
conversational topics in day to day life; to find people to bond with or avoid,
called affiliation or avoidance; social learning, which aids peoples problem
solving skills and helps with decision making and the final reason was so
people can use what they gained from the media to beat people in an argument,
called competence and dominance. Overall this theory is not bad; it is
considered one of the better audience theories but it ignores things such as
dysfunctional media consumption.
With all this amazing technological advances I can access
media everywhere, media can notify me to keep me updated with the important
news and I wouldn’t even think to pick up a newspaper at all, but that’s from a
17 year olds view, I presume I am not the target audience of many publications
so I cannot generalise here; but what I can say is that technology means that
the world is now connected, constantly; meaning it has great power, you could
call this globalisation.
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