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Social Scientific and Cultural Approaches to Media Research

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In 2010, soon after widely publicized stories attributing fifteen-year-old Billy Lucas’s suicide to antigay bullying, commentator and author Dan Savage launched the It Gets Better Project with a YouTube video created to inspire hope for young people enduring homophobic harassment at school and online. His idea snowballed into a worldwide movement, generating over thirty thousand user-created videos as well as submissions from celebrities, politicians, and media personalities. But despite the barrage of positive, inspiring messages, there are still stories like that of fourteen-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, who had posted a video on Savage’s YouTube channel but ended up taking his own life the following year. Rodemeyer had been bullied at school since the fifth grade—and had endured online messages like “I wouldn’t care if you died. No one would. So just do it :) It would make everyone WAY more happier!”¹

In 2012, twelve people were killed and seventy wounded in Aurora, Colorado. The attack took place in a movie theater during a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises. The attack, amid a number of mass shootings in public places, prompted calls for stiffer gun control laws, and Warner Brothers, the studio behind The Dark Knight Rises, delayed the release of its film Gangster Squad to replace a sequence in which gangsters shoot up a movie theater. Another theater shooting occurred in the summer of 2015 at a showing of the comedy Trainwreck.

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In 2012, the blogging site Tumblr announced a ban on blogs that “actively promote self-harm,” including those facilitating or glorifying suicide, self-mutilation, anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders. Before launching the policy, Tumblr’s staff considered continuing to allow users to publish such material but posting public service messages warning users of the content and providing information about helplines and other support services. Ultimately, the staff adopted the ban after deciding that “sometimes Tumblr gets used for things that are just wrong.”²

These and other similar events have raised important questions: What power do the mass media have over individuals and society, and how do the media contribute to social problems like homophobia, bullying, suicide, self-mutilation, and eating disorders? And what should we do about it?

THE IDEA THAT MEDIA HAVE A SIGNIFICANT IMPACT on society has fueled the development of two types of research in the study of mass communication: social scientific and cultural studies.

Social scientific research attempts to understand, explain, and predict the impact of mass media on individuals and society. The main goal of this type of research is to define the problem with a testable hypothesis, collect data through one of various methodologies, and draw conclusions based on the data. Researchers who focus on cultural studies explore how people make meaning, understand reality, articulate values, and interpret their experiences through use of cultural symbols in media. Cultural studies scholars also examine how groups such as corporate and political elites use media to circulate their messages and serve their interests. Such research focuses on daily cultural experience, examining the subtle intersections among mass communication, history, politics, and economics.

In this chapter, we look at how these two forms of media research have evolved over time by:

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