Audience Effect - Media Aspect

Media Aspect

Audience activity in the media transaction may function to promote or to deter media effects. Facilitative activity includes selectivity, attention, and involvement. Inhibitory activity includes avoidance, distraction, and skepticism. The authors expected instrumental media motivation, selectivity, attention, and involvement to be positive predictors of satisfaction, parasocial interaction, and cultivation effects from watching daytime television serials. They expected avoidance, distraction, and skepticism to be negative predictors of those effects. Three path analyses largely supported their expectations. The authors observed direct links between instrumental motivation and media effects, and indirect links that operated through audience activity, such variations in audience activity help explain how and why people respond differently to media messages. It is suggested that there is lack of clarity as to whether the media have effects is that researchers have proceeded from the wrong theoretical conceptualizations to study the wrong questions. The dependency model of media effects is presented as a theoretical alternative in which the nature of the tripartite audience-media-society relationship is assumed to most directly determine many of the effects that the media have on people and society. The present paper focuses upon audience dependency on media information resources as a key interactive condition for alteration of audience beliefs, behavior, or feelings as a result of mass communicated in formation. Audience dependency is said to be high in societies in which the media serve many central information functions and in periods of rapid social change or pervasive social conflict. The dependency model is further elaborated and illustrated by examination of several cognitive, affective, and behavioral effects which may be readily analyzed and researched from such theoretical framework.