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Chapter 8. Talk About TV Effects: Enculturation
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Chapter 8 Talk About TV Effects: Enculturation On my list of questions I prepared' ore doing the interviews, I included the simple inquiry, "Do yo uJ.I"\ TV affects you?" My intent was not to make a claim about 902J j in t,ยท' , 'lparison or contrast to other types of viewing, or about "televisi, \! Cl "per se, but rather to elucidate a discourse that underlay vie,,\ _, tit:'}' '~nce of 90210, highlighting certain aspects of the viewing pro( ;~nj 'oncealing others. While the responses turned out to be tangee .lal tq ~,he theme of female identity, they speak directly to the ways the tLrnlCS of community and expertise interlock with Western thinking about enculturation. To my mind, these conversations sent up some red flags that media literacy proponents may wish to attend to. I also hope this chapter might prove thoughtprovoking for viewers and readers in general in our media encounters. The last several chapters have shown how viewers analyzed, critiqued, and memorized aspects of 90210; as reported in Chapter 2, they also said they arranged shower and homework time, turned down jobs or left night classes early, switched off their phone bells or even recorded temporary new messages ("You know what I'm doing. Why are you' calling ?") to protect their 90210 viewing time. And all the while, these viewers denied that television affected them. To me, this way of constructing the notion of "television effects" suggested a complicated relationship between behaving, thinking, and "being affected" that called for exploration . As background, I want tOl5ive a brief nod to the effects literature that has importantly influen('~d the way our culture-and the viewers I listened to - conceptualize television. And I will also use this forum to air the somewhat unorthodox belief that the history of television research is much more unified than generally indicated by our academic arguments about methods and models. It seems to me that both quantitative and qualitative researchers have carefully and fruitfully pursued that slippery and elusive question of what happens when people watch television. Though each research paradigm feels bound to critique the 138 Chapter 8 others for not taking its particular interests into account, it seems to me that we are all looking at different aspects of the same important issue. Indeed, as has been seen, even within cultural studies we have different ways of expressing the problem, different ideas about what counts as data, and different interpretations of our results. But our concerns remain the same. Frankly, we worry: can the very large, very powerful, and very self-interested media industry manipulate us in ways that disadvantage us or are just plain bad for us? In fact, it was fear of the brainwashing power of media that inspired early American mass media research, which studied World War I propaganda. These researchers feared that malevolent senders could inject messages into helpless receivers with a "hypodermic needle" or "magic bullet" (for an overview, cf. Littlejohn 198~~ Wimmer and Dominick 1983; for an overview of models, cf. RubeL 198::~). Later research agendas through the 1950s included an increased interest in advertising, public information , and journalism, particularly political messages (e.g., Schramm 1954; Katz and Lazarsfeld 1955). l"'hroughout, researchers feared that persuasive and controlling media could deliver a unitary, unidirectional message to an essentially passive and undifferentiated public. This context provided a background as television became a focus of study: Mass media were seen as potent persuaders, suspected to possess the power to make people both passive and violent. The viewer was at first suspected to be malleable, a passive tabula rasa, and television a leveler, producing uniform effects on all viewers. This position was abandoned several decades ago, as described by Klapper (1960), who concluded that research had invalidated the "magic bullet." In its place had come the theory of limited effects: mass communication can reinforce beliefs, but it cannot convert; moreover, neither violent nor passive behavior can be attributed directly to exposure to mass media. Social and psychological factors play an intervening role in the ways in which mass media messages are received, Klapper said. Klapper outlined lines of inquiry that predicted, if not prescribed, mass media research agendas in the next decades- research that has become theoretically divergent: emphasis on powerful media vs. studies of a resistant public; emphasis on unilateral vs. limited vs. multifaceted message; emphasis on the individual vs. social effects of television; emphasis on qualitative vs. quantitative data. In part, this divergence can be traced to the fact...