Mass media: cultural effects

Cultural effects: overview

We are using the term 'cultural effects' here as shorthand for the investigation of social, political and cultural effects.

Broadly speaking, those analysts who are concerned with cultural effects fall into two camps:

• somewhat élitist literary critics who are distressed by the spread of popular culture, which they see as diluting and undermining the values enshrined in high culture
• Marxist critics whose 'critical' perspective derives from the work of Karl Marx and from the Frankfurt School. Their main concern is with the way that the mass media are used to spread and legitimate the dominant ideology.

Professor Halloran who himself works within the 'empiricist' tradition expresses the difference between his approach and the 'cultural effects' approach this way:

The debate has been carried on by the moralizing literati, social philosophers, moralists, artists, and educators, who, judging from their comments, often feel that the social scientists are so preoccupied with research techniques and methodological devices that their works lack immediate social relevance and that they suffer further because they are unrelated to the general intellectual discussion of mass culture on the one hand and its historical development on the other. The social scientists reply to this by questioning the whole nature of the evidence produced by these writers and by criticizing the undisciplined nature of the generalizations, interpretations and speculations which abound in this field.

Halloran (1964)

In other words, according to Halloran, there are social scientists who are concerned with empirical studies of mass media effects. These social scientists are criticized by those who want to get on with discussing the impact of mass culture. As Halloran sees it, such people simply don't provide the empirical evidence to support the generalizations they make about mass culture.

On the other side of the fence, there are those critics of mass culture who would criticize Halloran and other empiricists for failing to make any kind of worthwhile progress. Curran, for example, puts it this way:

we wanted to resist the American domination of the field, with what seemed to many of us at the time its sterile consensus, its endless flow of repetitive and inconclusive 'effects' studies ....

Curran (1990)

Mind you, 1964 was a long time ago and there have been considerable shifts on either side of the debate since then. The sections which follow will give you a broad outline of various aspects of the cultural effects approach. Please choose from the two below:

For an overview of each 'tradition', please click below:

The hypodermic needle model

Cultural effects

Uses and gratifications

Recent developments

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