Media Literacy: Ways of Understanding

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Photofest

Experts have used a variety of approaches to understand how the various media work and what influence they have on our lives in order to strengthen our media literacy. These approaches to mass communication include the linear model (which focuses on the communication process), the cultural model (which views mass communication as a cultural characteristic and uses anecdotal evidence to interpret media), and the social scientific model (which uses numerical data-gathering and statistical analysis).

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Often, popular stories and characters evolve in our culture over time, acquiring new meaning. Consider the classic 1931 film Frankenstein (top) and the 1974 parody Young Frankenstein (bottom). How does each story reflect changes in cultural attitudes?
© 20th Century Fox/Photofest

The Linear Model

The linear model represents a traditional approach to interpreting media content. The model attempts to explain how a mass medium actually communicates messages and how people understand those messages. According to this model, mass communication is a linear process by which media producers deliver messages to large audiences. Senders (authors, producers, organizations) transmit messages (programs, texts, images, sounds, ads) through a mass media channel (newspapers, books, magazines, radio, television, the Internet) to large groups of receivers (readers, viewers, consumers). In the process, gatekeepers (news editors, executive producers of TV shows and movies) filter those messages by making decisions about which messages get produced for which audiences. This linear process allows feedback, in which citizens and consumers, if they choose, return messages to senders or gatekeepers through letters, phone calls, e-mail, Web postings, tweets, or talk shows.

The problem with the linear model is that it doesn’t capture certain complexities of the mass communication process. In reality, media messages do not always get to their intended receivers, nor do receivers always interpret these messages in the way media producers want. For example, people might ignore an advertisement or a new movie, or draw an entirely different message from a magazine article or TV show than what the content creator intended to communicate. The cultural and social scientific models have since developed more sophisticated approaches to media study that improve on the limitations of the linear model.

The Cultural Model

The cultural model of media literacy views media content as a part of culture. Culture consists of the ways in which people live and represent themselves at particular historical times, as manifested in things like fashion, sports, architecture, education, religion, science, and media.

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By analyzing the news media’s coverage of the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the cultural model shows how media content shapes attitudes and beliefs. Graphic portrayals of the human casualties caused many people to oppose the wars.
© Greg Whitesell/Reuters/Corbis

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As cultural forms, the media help us make sense of daily life and articulate our values. When we listen to music, read a book, watch television, or scan the Internet, we assign meaning to that song, book, TV program, or Web site. And different people often assign different meanings to the same media content. Take the Harry Potter book series. Some readers see the series as an innocent coming-of-age children’s story. Others interpret it as more adult literature, containing pointed metaphors about good and evil that parallel current political events. Still others construe the series as a tool for luring children into a life of witchcraft. And others use the books merely for entertainment, inventing Harry Potter parodies in almost every imaginable media form.

We describe this model for understanding media content as cultural because it recognizes that individuals assign diverse meanings to messages depending on personal characteristics, such as gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, occupation, and religious beliefs. According to this model, audiences actively affirm, interpret, refashion, select, or reject the messages flowing through various media channels. One manifestation of this active audience in the digital age is the Internet meme. Coined by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the term meme has come to mean a digital experience—a video, a sound recording, even just a catchphrase—that is passed electronically from one consumer to another—sometimes with new variations (remakes, remixes, mash-ups, and so forth)—often very quickly. This widespread, rapid transmission is frequently referred to as viral, and includes brief cultural touchstones, like Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, Charlie Sheen’s use of “winning,” or Three Wolf Moon T-shirts. Unlike network celebrities and corporate brands, the meme is a product of an interactive culture in dialogue with itself.

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But even as we shape media content, it shapes us, too. For instance, during the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, journalists’ work increased people’s awareness of the wars and in some cases altered attitudes toward them. Graphic depictions of the wars’ human toll prompted many people to vocally oppose the wars. This opposition in turn influenced political leaders to reconsider their military strategies.

Thus, the cultural approach to studying the media critically analyzes media content, the ways in which audiences interpret the content, and the circumstances of how the media produce such content.

The Social Scientific Model

The social scientific model also asks important questions about the media, but it is informed by an approach that tests hypotheses with measurable data. The model has its roots in the natural sciences’ pursuit of objective research. However, as social scientific researchers know, applying rigorous social scientific methods to the study of human behavior is much less reliable than applying such methods to a highly controlled chemistry or physics laboratory environment.

Nevertheless, social scientific research has provided valuable insight into questions about how the media affect us and has become more sophisticated with the rise of electronic and digital media in the twentieth century. Early research looked at the effects of movies, using electric mechanisms attached to viewers’ skin to detect heightened responses to frightening or romantic scenes. More recent research has continued to test hypotheses about media effects, using controlled laboratory experiments. For example, researchers might set out to chart the relationship among stereotypical magazine representations of women of color and readers’ occupational expectations for women of color in general.

Politics and public opinion also have long attracted the interest of media researchers, beginning with the rise of survey research in the twentieth century. Today, media researchers—working for universities, news organizations, the government, and political parties—conduct regular national and regional surveys to take snapshots of the public’s opinions on all manner of issues. They also use that information as a basis for action. For example, public opinion researchers (usually working as consultants for political parties or campaigns) test words, ideas, and images on small focus groups to see how different ways of framing a topic—such as “global warming” versus “climate change”—affect voters’ decisions.

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Just as media research can help political candidates formulate their campaign strategies, it can also help businesses develop and market their products. For instance, consumer product companies use quantitative methods to track the effectiveness of their advertisements; Hollywood studios regularly screen-test movies to figure out which ending works best for viewers; and ratings services track audience numbers for radio, television, and Web sites, compiling immense stores of data that companies use to gauge the effectiveness of their ad spending.

The goal of social scientific media research, then, is to develop testable hypotheses (or predictions) about the media, gather relevant data, and determine whether the data verifies the hypotheses.