Why SCT Is Useful
These stories, or fantasies, can help businesses, corporations or politicians guide the positive and negative feedback directly back to those in power. Because SCT is a general theory built on the method of natural sciences, it can be applied to many different cultures and timelines. It has been used to account for the communicative processes, created by a group, used to foster the creation and sustenance of the group's so-called "consciousness." Below are a few points of how and why SCT can be useful in everyday situations.
Determining communication malfunctions A question that happens a lot within SCT is, "Why do some fantasy themes spark a chain of sharing while other fail?" Groups fate as a part of a group have common experiences that predispose them to share fantasies which relate to their concerns. Therefor, these groups will have successful fantasy chains because they have more in common and are able to share more. When issues of power, sexism, role conflict, social rejection and other touchy topics come into play, groups members often find the direct confrontation of such issues to be unsettling. These fantasy chains may begin, but often do not last very long.
Assessing communication efforts and persuasive campaigns This theory can provide insight within small groups, meetings, lectures and speeches, but it provides a greater use of assessing effects within the media. It is most heavily used within political campaigns. In the 1976 campaign, the investigators included the relationship between the media messages and the audience effects in their study. These studies analyzed the extent to which actual voting behavior can be anticipated by participation. By being able to predict the voting behaviors, political representatives could carefully craft their messages for different groups of people before giving their speeches and lectures to best benefit themselves.
The role of consciousness Within fantasy chains, there are three phases that keep the chains going. They are consciousness creating, consciousness raising and consciousness sustaining. In the first phase, people to come to create a commonality among their group. If the groups shares this common fantasy, consciousness raising will often fall in line next. And lastly, the two first points combined will create a sustaining fantasy chain that will last.
Read more about this topic: Symbolic Convergence Theory