HOW POWERFUL IS THE MEDIA?

The media can influences people’s behaviour, appearance and many other factors of people lives. As a result, media is very important to society. Sociologists (people who study society) have many different ideas about how the media affects society.

The first approach is called the hypodermic syringe approach. This approach suggests that the mass media has a direct and immediate effect on audiences. This approach proposes that seeing, for example, violence on TV can lead to violent or anti-social behaviour in real life. When you are ‘injected’ with information from the media (e.g. seeing celebrities in magazines) you alter your behaviour to copy the things you see. Many studies have shown this to be true. However, a criticism of the hypodermic syringe approach is that not everyone who watches something violent, so not everyone is influenced.

On the other hand, some approaches look at the idea of the media being less influential. The uses and gratifications approach suggests that the audience choose media to suit their needs. This approach would argue that the media are not so powerful and therefore do not have a direct and immediate effect on audiences. A sociologist called McQuail found that the needs TV most satisfied were: personal relationships (e.g. soaps), entertainment (e.g. comedy programmes), information (e.g. the News) and personal identity (e.g. self-help programmes). This approach tells us that the audience is in control of what they become influenced, not the media.

Another approach that sees the media has less influential is the decoding approach. This approach suggests that the media send us many messages and then we choose how to interpret them. This gives the audience more power, as they all view the same thing differently. Sociologists, Katz and Lazarfield, said that conversation with others can result in people changing or rejecting media messages, further suggesting that people are not always influenced by the media. Another sociologist named Abercrombie said that audience members are like decoders and how people decode things depends on: age, gender, ethnicity, cultural backgrounds and social backgrounds. This approach differs from the hypodermic syringe approach by suggesting that the audience has more power and the media does not have a direct and immediate effect. However, a criticism of the decoding approach is that some people are more likely to be influenced by the media.

To conclude, although there is a lot of evidence to show that we are strongly influenced by the media, there is more evidence to suggest that we are not. Sociologists will always view things in different ways and it’s interesting to look at the variety of ways people view society.