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CHAPTER 7 OVERVIEW 174 MOVING BEYOND LIMITED EFFECTS: FOCUS ON FUNCTIONALISM AND CHILDREN In the 1950s and 1960s the United States stood as the undisputed economic, social, and technological leader of the world. Fascist totalitarianism had been defeated in a long and brutal world war, and although much of Europe and Asia still smoldered as their nations worked to rebuild from that carnage, the U.S. economy roared, homes and suburbs were built, college enrollment soared, and new television networks and interstate highways linked Americans in nationwide optimism. Despite this progress, the country’s social fabric was beginning to unravel. A wide variety of domestic social ills, from racial discrimination to juvenile delinquency, suggested that all was not well. Abroad, the United States was threatened by the spread of Communism in Third World nations. Obviously, the American system worked—there was much that was good. And yet at times the system seemed not to be working as well as people expected and hoped. Again and again critics emerged who blamed many of the problems on media. Media fomented racial unrest, they said; media encouraged young people to challenge adult authority. The media were an easy and logical target for criticism as the country searched for answers to the era’s dramatic social change. After all, the end of the 1950s and the early 1960s saw the development and commercial application of the computer; television in almost every home in the country; and the emergence of FM radio as a medium in its own right, youth-oriented and distinct from the AM radio favored by parents. The invention of the transistor allowed radios to become portable, allowing teens to enjoy rock ’n’ roll anywhere, especially away from those judgmental adults. But if media could contribute to society’s ills, surely they could contribute to society’s health. In this chapter, we examine changes in post–World War II American society that forced a reconsideration of the prevailing thought on mass communication theory. Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
functionalism Theoretical approach that conceives of social systems as living organisms whose various parts work, or function, together to maintain essential processes communication systems theory Theory that examines the mass communication process as composed of interrelated parts that work together to meet some goal social cognitive theory Theory of learning through interaction with the environment that involves reciprocal causation of behavior, personal factors, and environmental events Chapter 7 Moving Beyond Limited Effects: Focus on Functionalism and Children 175 These changes—in American society and in mass communication theory—were significant. American technological know-how had helped win World War II, and in the 1950s it provided many citizens with a comfortable and independent lifestyle. At the heart of this success were increasingly complex large-scale social, economic, and technological systems. Surely factors such as new communication technologies, efficient superhighways, universally available home ownership and higher education, the population’s migration to the suburbs, an exploding advertising industry, women entering the workforce in ever larger numbers, expanded leisure time, the rise of the youth culture with its new music and social styles, the geographic displacement of millions of GIs as they were ushered out of the military, the increased voice and visibility of racial minorities, and the Cold War with its threat of imminent global destruction (to name only a few) worked—or functioned—together to produce the America that offered so much that was good and so much that was troubling. Mass communication theories needed to be developed to explain media’s role in the operation of our society, but they could not stray too far from the dominant thinking of the time that media had, at most, limited effects. As such, functionalism “became dominant in American [social] theory in the 1950s and 1960s. The cornerstone of functionalist theory is the metaphor of the living organism, whose parts and organs, grouped and organized into a system, function to keep its essential processes going. Similarly, members of a society can be thought of as cells and its institutions as organs whose functioning … preserves the cohesive whole and maintains the system’s homeostasis” (Bryant and Miron, 2004, p. 677). Through functionalism, mass communication’s obvious influence on the social world could be explained and understood, and at the same time that effect could be seen as “limited” by other parts of the system. But some researchers thought that functionalism could also be applied to the study of mass communication itself and not just to the social system it helped support. The resulting communication systems theory offered hope to those who were beginning to reject limited-effects notions. They argued that a communication systems theory could allow us to conceptualize the role of media in the society at large and assess the usefulness of the powerful new communications technologies. Perhaps media’s power could be better assessed at the macroscopic level—that is, by understanding its larger role in the social system. During this same period of great social upheaval, psychologists, unfettered by communication researchers’ adherence to the limited-effects perspective, thought they could explain some of the turmoil in microscopic—that is, individual—terms. Psychologists turned their attention to how people, especially children, learned from the mass media, especially television. What would eventually become known as social cognitive theory and its early focus on children moved communication theorists even further from a focus on limited or minimal media effects. They directed much of their attention toward increases in the amount of real-world violence and the possible contribution of the new medium of television to that rise. “The media” was one of the factors eventually blamed for causing or aggravating violent actions. Social scientists developed several different perspectives on the effects of television violence, including catharsis, social learning, social cognitive theory, aggressive Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.
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Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. Al
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1959 C. Wright Mills’s The Sociol
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From the Wadsworth Series in Mass C
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This is an electronic version of th
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To Sidney Kraus His words and actio
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x Contents CHAPTER 2 FOUR ERAS OF M
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xii Contents Limitations of the Exp
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xiv Contents Development of Recepti
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xviii Preface Many if not all of th
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xx Preface THE USE OF HISTORY In th
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xxii Preface about these issues. We
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xxiv Preface their refinement in he
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4 Section 1 Introduction to Mass Co
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10 Section 1 Introduction to Mass C
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CHAPTER 2 convergence The erasure o
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SECTION 2 42 THE ERA OF MASS SOCIET
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46 Section 2 The Era of Mass Societ
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CHAPTER 5 96 NORMATIVE THEORIES OF
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100 Section 2 The Era of Mass Socie
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224 Section 3 From Limited-Effects
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SECTION 4 238 CONTEMPORARY MASS COM
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240 Section 4 Contemporary Mass Com
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CHAPTER 10 278 MEDIA AND SOCIETY: T
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REFERENCES Adbusters. (2002). “Th
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366 References Century, April 17. (
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368 References Argument about New M
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370 References Gerbner, G., L. Gros
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372 References 1942-1943. New York:
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374 References Lasswell, H. D. (192
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376 References Miller, K. (2005). C
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378 References Preiss, R. W. (2007)
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380 References Smillie, D. (2009).
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382 References query Human capacity
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384 Index children, focus on functi
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386 Index I ice-age analogy, 342 Id
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388 Index media and culture theorie
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390 Index sensemaking, decoding and
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392 Index theory, understanding and
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