mass-communication-theory

250 Section 4 Contemporary Mass Communication Theory
run-of-the-mill effects research. As we discussed earlier, by the 1960s most of
the important tenets of the limited-effects perspective had been worked out and
demonstrated in study after study. In all this research, media’s role was found to
be marginal in comparison with other social factors. But how could this be true
when media audiences were so vast and so many people spent so much time consuming
media? Why were advertisers spending billions to purchase advertising
time if their messages had no effect? Why were network television audiences continuing
to grow? Didn’t any of this media use have important consequences for
the people who were engaging in it? If so, why didn’t effects research document
this influence? Was it overlooking something—and if so, what?
The limited-effects perspective had become so dominant in the United States
that it was hard to ask questions about media that weren’t stated in terms of measurable
effects. There just didn’t seem to be anything else worth studying. But if
researchers restricted their inquiry to the study of effects, all they could obtain
would be predictable, modest, highly qualified results. Though they were frustrated
by this situation, few could see any practical alternative.
This first revival of interest in the uses-and-gratifications approach can be
traced to three developments—one methodological and two theoretical:
1. New survey research methods and data analysis techniques allowed the development
of important new strategies for studying and interpreting audience uses and
gratifications. Researchers developed innovative questionnaires that allowed
people’s reasons for using media to be measured more systematically and objectively.
At the same time, new data analysis techniques provided more objective
procedures for developing categories and for assigning reasons to them. Also, a
large new generation of media researchers entered the academy in the 1970s.
They were trained in the use of survey methods. As the decade advanced, the
computer resources necessary to apply these methods were increasingly available.
These developments overcame some of the most serious methodological
barriers to active-audience research.
2. During the 1970s, some media researchers developed increasing awareness that
people’s active use of media might be an important mediating factor making
effects more or less likely. They argued that a member of an active audience
can decide whether certain media effects are desirable and set out to achieve
those effects. For example, you might have decided to read this book to learn
about media theories. You intend the book to have this effect on you, and
you work to induce the effect. If you lack this intent and read the book for
entertainment, use of the book is less likely to result in learning. Does the
book cause you to learn? Or do you make it serve this purpose for you? If
you hold the latter view, then you share the perspective of active-audience
theorists.
3. Some researchers began expressing growing concern that effects research was
focusing too much on unintended negative effects of media while intended positive
uses of media were being ignored. By 1975, we knew a lot about the influence
of television violence on small segments of the audience (most notably
preadolescent boys) but much less about how most people were seeking to
make media do things that they wanted.
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