G. F. Kline and P. J. Tichenor. 1986, Perspectives on Media Effects, D. Zillmann and J. Bryant. 1989, Handbook of Communication Science, C. R. Berger and.
6 BEYOND EFFECTS
Conceptualizing Communication as Dynamic, Complex, Nonlinear, and Fundamental
Annie Lang David Ewoldsen
When we began to write this chapter—with the overall goal of contributing to the rethinking of communication in mind—we began with a common perception of past thinking about communication. Specifically, that research on communication, and in particular on mass communication, has been, since its inception, burdened by a focus on effects, not just a focus on effects, but indeed, a search for effects as the raison d’être for the field. But as is often the case, a little bit of reading demonstrated that the received history of the field and today’s lumping of all scientific or quantitative research in the field under the extremely limiting term effects is somewhat misleading. Instead, we found that, in the beginning, there was everything, and effects were, as we are arguing it should be, only a part of everything. This suggests that this chapter may indeed be simply re-thinking about communication. The preface to the first edition of the Zillmann and Bryant (now Bryant and Oliver) series of influential books on “media effects” (Zillmann & Bryant, 1986) states that the book was conceived of as following in the footsteps of the “classic anthology The Process and Effects of Mass Communication by Wilbur Schramm” (p. xiii) published in 1954. Interestingly, in 1954, process was given pride of place over effects. A brief perusal of our bookshelves yielded the following chronology: 1954, The Process and Effects of Mass Communication, W. Schramm 111
112
LANG & EWOLDSEN
1963, The Science of Human Communication, W. Schramm 1972, Current Perspectives in Mass Communication Research, G. F. Kline and P. J. Tichenor 1986, Perspectives on Media Effects, D. Zillmann and J. Bryant 1989, Handbook of Communication Science, C. R. Berger and S. H. Chaffee 2001, Media Effects and Society, E. Perse 2002, Media Effects Research, G. Sparks 2009, Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, J. Bryant and M. B. Oliver Surprisingly, the early anthologies claiming to bring together in one place articles reviewing research on communication and mass communication focus on science, on process, and on perspectives (Berger & Chafee, 1989; Kline & Tichenor, 1972; Schramm, 1954, 1963). It is not until the first Zillmann and Bryant book in the mid-1980s that the word effects begins to be central—but still the focus is on perspectives on media effects not a focus on the effects themselves. The second edition of that book, published in 2002, was retitled Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, which is repeated in 2009. This new title completely subordinates theory and research to the study of media effects. The implication being that mass communication research and theory are about media effects. At about the same time, the Perse and Sparks textbooks were published, and again the titles seem to define media research as effects research. Based on how these books presenting media research are titled, somewhere around the turn of the century, the definition of the field of media research as general, process oriented, and multidimensional shifted towards a framing of the field as the linear, outcome-oriented, and applied study of the effects of communication. Clearly, the Zillmann and Bryant (now Bryant and Oliver) volumes are outstanding collections of essays by top media scholars, and they have received deserved praise. (Indeed, it would be difficult for either of us to argue otherwise as we have both contributed to this series of books!) Likewise, the Perse and Sparks volumes are very good textbooks. So why do we raise the issue of how these volumes are titled? Why does it matter? Is there a problem with focusing only on research and theory that tells us about the effects of mass communication? We will argue in this chapter that it does matter—that words are powerful and that the words we choose to describe what we do influence both what we choose to do and how we are perceived. Further, we will argue that if we choose to focus on effects—that is, to ask questions about and theorize about only the empirical and observable outcomes of communication and mass communication—we will never develop a generalized understanding of communication that can be used to theorize across contexts, media, and contents.
BEYOND EFFECTS
113
LIMITATIONS IMPOSED BY THE WORD EFFECTS The effects tradition in media research has clearly advanced our understanding of the media. We have gained many insights from the past research, and our understanding of the media is much more nuanced than it would be without this rich research tradition. But we believe that while useful, the effects tradition has a tendency to focus our attention on certain types of research to the exclusion of other equally important research programs. The word effects implies a cause. Something must have occurred that resulted in an effect. Therefore, when looking at the effects of mass media or of communication, some kind of communication must precede its effect. While on the surface that seems not only innocuous but also useful (and it reflects the way we do science in communication—that is, we manipulate some communication variable and measure its effect on carefully chosen dependent variables), this focus on effects has the consequence of limiting our conceptualizations of communication and the questions that we see as fit to be asked. The placing of communication in the cause box and everything else into the effects box forces theorizing that conceptualizes the message or the medium or the communication behavior as the cause and defines change in some behavior or class of behavior as the effect. It encourages a focus on the existence of the effect—not on the mechanisms or processes underlying the effect or the contextual or individual differences that catalyze, magnify, eliminate, or diffuse the effect. It implies that the effect is what matters and that how the effect comes about is less important. The word effects implies permanence. It suggests that once changed a thing will remain changed until some other cause comes along to change it back. Almost it denies the existence of change without external cause. Other words, for example, response, lack this sense of permanence. One can respond to a communication act without the implication of being changed forever. Further, the status implied by the word effects ignores the very dynamic nature of communication. When communication occurs, what is effect becomes cause and what is cause becomes effect. The media may influence people’s attitudes or beliefs, but those same attitudes and beliefs influence what people view and how they interpret those messages. The very notion of an effect and a cause is at its core misleading and directs our attention away from the dynamic processes that are a central component of communication. The word effects implies a one-way walk through time. It conceptualizes the communication artifact as the beginning and the change in something else as the end. Beginnings and ends are treated in an arbitrary manner. This one-way and one-dimensional treatment of time does not reflect the multidimensionality of time. First, it treats communication as a feed-for-
114
LANG & EWOLDSEN
ward phenomenon, which we know is not true. Indeed, a great deal of communication is about feedback. By ignoring the two-way nature of communication (even mass communication with, for example, its focus on ratings), we ignore the ability of communication to change something and then change it back, or change it in yet a different way. Two other major dimensions of time—duration and frequency, as well as the interaction of the two—are often ignored or determined arbitrarily. As a result, we have a commonly accepted methodological paradigm that embraces these limitations on duration and frequency rather than exploring their influences. We expose research participants to 15 to 30 minutes of “cause”—be it slasher films, virtual worlds, or doctor–patient communication—and then spend another 30 minutes measuring pre- and postindicators. This allows the research session to be completed in about an hour. As a result, little research has manipulated direction, length, and frequency of a communication act to determine how changes in “dose” and “consumption schedule” influence some specific response. Instead of asking do violent video games cause aggression we should be asking how frequency and length of play variously influence enjoyment, arousal, learning, and state levels of aggression. Perhaps infrequent long sessions influence state aggression but frequent short sessions influence arousal and enjoyment? Further, little research has been done examining the duration of the response—we may know about the initial response—but we know little about its half-life. Time plays a central role in communication, and both our theorizing and our methodological paradigms need to reflect the multidimensionality of time. The word effects implies that only change is important. It forces us to focus on how communication or mass communication change the status quo as opposed to how they may function to maintain, strengthen, or structure what is. Yet systems often operate to maintain themselves. The focus on change also implies a sense of a static unchanging world, a world that must be prodded in order to produce change. This focus on change creates an unrealistic dichotomy where a great deal of research goes into trying to answer the yes/no question, “Does communication have an effect on behavior X?” By asking if communication has an effect on some behavior—rather than asking how the amount, type, frequency, and duration of communication influence mechanisms underlying that behavior—we allow the assumption that communication has no effects to be the null hypothesis (e.g., the presumed truth). Then we develop research studies whose goal is not to understand how the pattern of some well-known behavior is altered by the presence or absence of various kinds of communication in various doses. Instead, we take some arbitrary pieces of the type of content we are worried about and apply them to some arbitrary group of people for an arbitrary amount of time and then measure some behavior (perhaps only marginally related to the behavior we are actually interested in) and then proclaim an
BEYOND EFFECTS
115
answer: There is an effect or there is no effect. Our questions need to be more nuanced. When and how does communication operate to maintain the status quo or to bring about change? When do people select information that allows them to feel good about themselves in order to maintain their moods, their beliefs, their behaviors, and their self-images? Conversely, when do people seek out messages that help them change their moods, their understanding of an issue, or how they feel about themselves? The focus on effects tends to blind us to communication functions other than change.
THE INSIDIOUS NATURE OF FOCUSING ON EFFECTS The word effects invites us to categorize. The focus on an observable change in something as the central goal of communication research leads naturally to categorizing those observable changes. An obvious categorization is good versus evil. We have prosocial effects and we have antisocial effects. However, by giving social value to the thing you are studying, you automatically alter the ways in which you study or are allowed to study the thing you claim to be interested in. If you are trying to show that something is bad and has bad effects, then you are very limited in the research you are ethically able to perform. As a result, you are open to criticisms of your research methodology—which becomes inferential in the extreme because you can’t actually put people at risk—and thereby increase the acceptance of “the null”—that is, that there is indeed no effect. If we studied, for example, how various doses and dosage schedules of various types of communication influenced acceptable levels of things like aggressive behavior, we would be building knowledge about the mechanisms underlying the relationship between communications of all sorts and aggressive behaviors. This would lead to a better understanding of how communication influences a naturally occurring response (aggression), which would be more insightful than arguments over whether violent media cause aggression (which we label as bad) and, if so, how big the effect is. Further, by labeling the messages as “antisocial,” we limit our ability to see potentially positive effects of these messages. Is violent content always bad? Probably not. Media violence provides ways and opportunities for people of all ages and walks of life to see, discuss, and think about social and personal responses to violence. The presence of violence in the world influences all kinds of social behaviors from communication to cooperation to the creation of social ties. Who is to say that media violence doesn’t also lead to many types of behaviors besides aggressive behaviors? Research on the potential positive consequences of antisocial media is virtually nonexistent and almost disallowed when we fall into the trap of categorizing effects as good and evil.
116
LANG & EWOLDSEN
The word effects invites the building of hierarchies. The received history of our field provides one excellent example of how we create hierarchies of effects (DeFleur & Ball-Rokeach, 1982). Many of us learned that, early on, communication researchers believed that the media had powerful effects, perhaps due to their experience of historical events like the panic caused by the War of the Worlds broadcast and the incredible power of propaganda in World Wars I and II. Next, we learned that empirical research failed to support the claim of powerful media effects but instead suggested that mass media had very little power to influence people and indeed had very limited effects. At the time when both of us were in graduate school, we were being told that research aimed at investigating under what conditions, for what people, and at what times communication might have effects was leading the field back to a powerful effects model. It is worth noting that many of us also learned that this received view of communication research was relatively inaccurate (Delia, 1987; Wartella & Reeves, 1985). Nonetheless, this provides an example of the insidious nature of hierarchical thinking. Effects are big or they are small. Big effects are better than small effects. Big changes matter more than small changes. Small changes need not be worried about. Implied here is that the size of the effect makes the cause important. If the effect is not big, then the cause does not matter. So, if meta-analysis shows that media violence use has only a small correlation with aggressive behavior (say r = .2 or about 4% of the variance in aggressive behavior), then we don’t have to worry about media violence. It has the next best thing to no effect, and that is a very small effect. As we will argue, a simple focus on effect sizes is often misleading. The word effects invites judgments based on personal experience. To say that communication has an effect implies that it is a general effect. The implication of generality is that the effect should happen to each one of us. If violent videogames cause aggression, then when I play a violent videogame, I should feel aggressive. If I play and then do not feel aggressive, then the logical conclusion is that the media don’t affect me. And, if they don’t affect me, then the effect is not general. Therefore, the media are not powerful, and we don’t need, as a society, to understand them or to study them.
MEDIA EFFECTS AND CHINESE WATER TORTURE Too often in our history we have ignored the development of theory about the process involved in some area of communication research and focused instead on the size of the effect. Consider the much-maligned cultivation effect. In its original formulation, cultivation was a theory about an overtime interaction between the media and the culture, not an effect. The theory
BEYOND EFFECTS
117
argued that throughout history societies had storytellers and that storytellers passed on the culture of the society (Gerbner, 1969; Gerbner & Gross, 1974). That both children and adults heard the stories and from those stories learned the culture’s bedrock beliefs and codes of behavior. By listening to stories, we learn what is right and what is wrong, what is important and what is not important, and what is good behavior and what is bad behavior. The argument was made that as mass communication, in particular commercial television in the United States, grew in popularity and ubiquity, it was becoming a major cultural storyteller. Unfortunately, according to Gerbner and his colleagues, commercial television of the 1960s and 1970s was not telling stories that embodied the cultural beliefs and codes of America. Rather, in order to make money and sell advertising, commercial television was using the trappings of storytelling and the psychological shortcuts of stereotypes, sex, and violence to capture the attention of the American people and to tell stories that did not gibe with current cultural mores. They did a great deal of work demonstrating that the television culture was very different from “real-life” culture (Gerbner, 1980; Gerbner, Gross, Jacksonbeeck, & Jeffriesfox, 1978; Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1979, 1980; Gerbner, Gross, Signorielli, & Morgan, 1980a, 1980b; Gerbner, Gross, Signorielli, Morgan, & Jacksonbeeck, 1979). They argued that, over time, as more and more people heard television’s cultural story, that story would become part of the “real” culture, and that cultural norms would shift to reflect this powerful and ubiquitous new storyteller. This is a provocative theoretical construction. In its original telling, it was not about effects. It was not about short-term change. It was not about behavior change. It was not about attitude change. Indeed, to the extent it is about change at all, it is about the inevitable, continuous, ongoing slow shifts in cultural mores and morals that are part of all social systems. The argument is not that this new storyteller will change the process of building social codes (that process is assumed to be ongoing). The argument is not that the new storyteller will have an immediate impact on social codes. The argument is not that the new storyteller is the only storyteller having an impact on social codes. The argument is not that the new storyteller will make a big change in the social codes. Rather, the argument is about the entry into the social system of a new, steady, consistent stream of information. The argument is about how this new steady informational push would slowly, over time, cause a new pattern of shared cultural information to exist. Unfortunately, the standard methodological paradigm designed to find effects was used to test this theory. But the approach matched neither the theory’s level of analysis or conceptions about time. The research did not attempt to understand the processes and time course of cultivation but instead focused on determining if there was a measurable correlation between the amount of TV viewing and perceptions of violence and fear of
118
LANG & EWOLDSEN
violence. Studies were done that aggregated individual-level attitudes as a stand-in for social systems and used retrospective measures of television use as a stand-in for time. The result was a general conclusion that while there might be a very small cultivation effect it was indeed very small. Hence, there was nothing to worry about as such a small effect was certainly not in any way related to other ongoing societal changes such as increasing violence. This then is how effects research misses the power of the small and the consistent—effects research cannot perceive or illuminate the power of Chinese water torture. One drop of water is so small, it has no effect—why you don’t even need to clean it up. Two drops of water are barely more important than one. One hundred drops of water might matter more, but that would depend on the amount of time between the drops, the size of the drops, the makeup of the surface on which the drops are falling (absorption, hardness, concavity, etc.), the composition of the water (dissolved minerals), and the context surrounding the surface (humidity, evaporation rates, wind). Water falling at a constant rate, one drop at a time, onto an unmoving surface will make a hole because each drop has its own tiny infinitesimal effect on the surface. But the power is not in the effect of one drop or even in the cumulative effect—it is in the process of continuous dripping. The drip is the mechanism, but the visible result of the process is dependent on a myriad of variables related to the drops themselves, the context in which they are falling, and the surface they are falling on. To understand what happens when water drips, you need to understand all of these. If you focus on the drip, you’ll miss the point that, in the end, over time, water destroys even the hardest most durable surfaces or, in the right context, just the opposite occurs and beautiful stalagmites are created.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS? Departments and Schools of Communication have proliferated over the last 50 years. Communication struggles to be a social science discipline with its own identity. As we turn out more PhDs and require them to do research in order to get tenure, we need to build research infrastructure. Research costs money. Money is in short supply. Communication’s short history as a discipline means that there is not a directorate at NSF or NIH that is interested in funding basic research in communication. Instead, to the extent that communication research is funded at all, applied research is funded. That is research that shows how communication can be used to change behavior— effects research). But at the same time, because effects research does not get at the basic questions of how communication works, it fails too often and continues to support people’s anecdotal certainties about communication effects: They don’t happen to me and mine—they don’t exist.
BEYOND EFFECTS
119
If, as a discipline, we continue the habit of thinking that scientific, quantitative research in communication must be focused on effects, we will never begin the complex and necessary work of theorizing about long-term, systemic, complex, dynamic, interactive processes that make up the science of how communication works. We will continue to focus on short-term, linear, change-related variables and fail to notice underlying similarities and generalities that might lead to understanding basic principles. The problem is that effects research forces our theorizing to be about the wrong thing—the effect—rather than about what we purport to study—the dynamic processes of communication. Our theories should be about communication. Whether media stories set an agenda, or prime the information people use to make decisions, or influence how people interpret ambiguous information should emerge from these larger theories of communication—not be the focus of the theories. Focusing on the effects of media on some outcome makes us overly sensitive to change—not just in the behavior of media users, but also in the media itself. Each change in the medium or development of a new medium is held to be a reason to restart the same old series of effects studies. Maybe this new medium has an effect on this specific behavior even though that old medium had only a small and unimportant effect. Do comic books cause violence? Well, a little. But movies, movies must cause violence, don’t they? Well, a little. Television, it’s everywhere, it’s constant, it must cause violence, mustn’t it? Maybe, only a little. Videogames; they’re interactive, they’re graphic, they’re fun, they must cause violence. Well maybe, just a little, but not as much as television. Conclusion: Media does not cause violence. Wrong conclusion. Suppose I look at the same research but look for the consistencies within the changing media landscape? Here we have a series of studies using five different media and multiple different methodological and theoretical paradigms and they all suggest the same thing—a small behavioral “effect,” even a very small effect, maybe as little as 4% of the variance. But wait, isn’t that amazing? Across media platforms, the same short-term small effect. Not only that, it shows up in experiments; it shows up in field experiments, it shows up in surveys, and it shows up in meta-analyses. That’s pretty amazing. But we don’t say that’s amazing. Instead, because of our focus on effects, we decide that the little teeny number four means it isn’t important and it doesn’t matter much. This is just a drop of water. But maybe, just maybe, we should be focusing on that underlying generality. Maybe we should be working to understand how stories about violence in all kinds of media (and undoubtedly those told interpersonally) are drops of water. Maybe we should accept that how they influence an individual, a family, a town, or a social structure does not depend on the individual drop. Rather, all those other variables come into play. What is the frequency with which those drops fall? What is the size of those drops? What is the context in which those drops are falling? What is the state of the individual surface
120
LANG & EWOLDSEN
on which those drops are falling? How do these other variables interact in linear and nonlinear ways to maintain or create a social environment? Because we focus on effects, we tend to discount research that starts trying to answer these questions. The focus on effects leads us to want general effects, things that happen to most people, most of the time. Indeed, the professional focus of our field also pushes us to look for general, everybody effects. Advertisers want to know how to make an ad that influences everyone. Prevention researchers want to make public service announcements that work for everyone. Entertainment producers want hits and blockbusters. But understanding communication is likely not about great big, general, everybody changes effects. Understanding communication is about finding the generalities underneath the change. It’s about learning to see how communication works within a system to change it, to strengthen it, to shift it. It’s about beginning to look at the traditional levels of analyses as systems levels. We have individual biological systems, interacting with the world through perceptual and cognitive systems, living in social systems, which are nested in larger cultural systems. We need to study these systems within systems. All of these things are changing continuously over time. Indeed, there is very little that is static. The focus on effects leads to a belief in lack of change. But change is the constant form of a dynamic system. Consider a mountain stream. Snow melts at the top of the mountain and tumbles, as a result of gravity, down the side of the mountain. No single drop of water takes exactly the same path down the side of the mountain. The majority of those drops follow the path of least resistance. Over time, all those drops following that path created the streambed. But every drop contributes to further change in the contour of the streambed. At the same time, outside forces act on this stream. Animals drink from the stream, briefly diverting the water. Trees, leaves, branches, and so on fall into the stream, creating various size impediments and longer term detours. The water acts on these impediments to lessen them, move them, lodge them together, and wear them down. To the human looking at the stream, we see the continuity, the timelessness, the unchangingness. As a culture, we focus on what is and think of it as what has been. So we build all along the banks of the river even though we know that rivers change their courses. Hence, we have the Army Corps of Engineers trying to keep countless rivers within their banks despite changes in the system that have created new paths of least resistance. The study of how media content interacts with individual human information-processing systems within various social and cultural systems cannot proceed by focusing on short-term, arbitrary changes in behavior brought about by specific pieces of media content. Real understanding of how communication influences individuals is only impeded by looking for effects. The search for effects simplifies and then ultimately trivializes communication as we decide over and over again that our effects are small and
BEYOND EFFECTS
121
therefore not important. As with rethink about communication, we need to move away from thinking of communication as linear, specific, short-term change and instead think about communication as a fundamental human process that operates within any given human dynamic system. To do otherwise is to contribute to the dismissal of communication as worthy of study and to accept that we will fail to gain an understanding of communication as a powerful force in human behavior and society.
REFERENCES Berger, C. R., & Chafee, S. H. (1989). Handbook of communication science. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Bryant, J., & Zillmann, D. (1986). Perspectives on media effects. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. DeFleur, M. L., & Ball-Rokeach, S. (1982). Theories of mass communication (4th ed.). New York: Longman. Delia, J. G. (1987). Communication research: A history. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Gerbner, G. (1969). Toward cultural indicators: Analysis of mass mediated public message systems. AV Communication Review, 17(2), 137–148. Gerbner, G. (1980, January). Death in prime time: Notes on the symbolic functions of dying in the mass-media. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 447, 64–70. Gerbner, G., & Gross, L. (1974). System of cultural indicators. Public Opinion Quarterly, 38(3), 460–461. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Jacksonbeeck, M., & Jeffriesfox, S. (1978). Cultural indicators: Violence profile no. 9. Journal of Communication, 28(3), 176–207. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1979). Televised violence and paranoid perception: View from Great-Britain: Comments. Public Opinion Quarterly, 43(1), 123–124. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Morgan, M., & Signorielli, N. (1980). The mainstreaming of America: Violence profile no 11. Journal of Communication, 30(3), 10–29. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Signorielli, N., & Morgan, M. (1980a). Aging with television: Images on television drama and conceptions of social reality. Journal of Communication, 30(1), 37–47. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Signorielli, N., & Morgan, M. (1980b). Television violence, victimization, and power. American Behavioral Scientist, 23(5), 705–716. Gerbner, G., Gross, L., Signorielli, N., Morgan, M., & Jacksonbeeck, M. (1979). Demonstration of power: Violence profile no 10. Journal of Communication, 29(3), 177–196. Kline, G. F., & Tichenor, P. J. (1972). Current perspectives in mass communication research (Vol. 1). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Perse, E. (2001). Media effects and society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Schramm, W. (1954). The process and effects of mass communication. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
122
LANG & EWOLDSEN
Schramm, W. (1963). The science of human communication: New directions and new findings in communication research. New York: Basic Books. Sparks, G. C. (2002). Media effects research: A basic overview. Wadsworth. Wartella, E., & Reeves, B. (1985). Historical trends in research on children and the media: 1900–1960. Journal of Communication, 35(2), 118–133. Zillmann, D., & Bryant, J. (Eds.). (1986). Perspectives on media effects. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
