Media In Everyday Life Review

What is the "information problem" in our culture/today's society?
-Our culture is saturated with media messages and the rate of that saturation is growing at an accelerating pace
-There are now more people producing information than ever before
-Technology now exists to provide easy-to-use platforms to share information
-We increase the time we spend with media messages each year

What is automatic processing/automaticity? How does it help us consume media messages?
-Automaticity: A mental state where our minds operate without any conscious effort from us
-Can prevent us from spending too much time and energy on saturated information around us

What are advantages and disadvantages of this information processing strategy?
-Advantages: Efficiency
-Disadvantages: When we rely exclusively on our automatic routines, we get into a rut and miss out on paying attention to many messages that may be highly useful to us; When we are too concerned with efficiency, we lose opportunities to expand our experience and to put ourselves in a position to make better decisions that can make us healthier, wealthier, and happier; Over the long run, we start to experience message fatigue

What happens when you allow other agents of programming to dominate your mind?
-They push you to conform to their ideas of what you should believe and how you should behave
-Influence you in order to satisfy their own goals
-Defaulting to influences outside their control - continually reinforce certain behavioral patterns of exposure until they become automatic habits

Why is taking more control over the media programming our automatic routines (that is, becoming more media literate) important? (under "The Big Question" heading)
-You will gradually increase your awareness about the degree to which the media have programmed your automatic codes
-Increased awareness will make it clear to you which parts of your code are not acting in your best interest
-Much more valuable as a means of achieving your own personal goals and delivering happiness

How does the author view mass media in terms of their effects (positive or negative)?
-Negative: Mass media messages expose people to risks of harmful effects; Newer technologies of communication offer fewer opportunities to develop certain skills
-Positive: Increases the opportunities to develop other kinds of skills; Stimulates us to adapt to our changing world rather t

What are the seven skills of media literacy?
Analysis, Evaluation, Grouping, Induction, Deduction, Synthesis, Abstracting

What would "Analysis" skill allow us to do when you are exposed to a news story?
-We can accept what a journalist tells us, or we can analyze the story for completeness
-We can break the story down into its who, what, when, where, why, and how to determine if the story is complete or not

What are knowledge structures?
-Sets of organized information in our memory
-Information needs to be carefully organized into a structure that helps us see patterns that organize our worlds.---We use these patterns as maps to tell us where to get more information and also where to go to retrieve information we have previously encoded into our knowledge structures

What is factual information?
Factual Information: Discrete bits of information that can be confirmed by objective sources
Ex: Names) of people, places, characters, etc.), dates, titles, definitions of terms, formula, lists, and the like

What is social information?
Social Information: A type of information that is characterized by rules and patterns about how individuals behave around other people
This information, which cannot be verified by authorities in the same way factual information can be, is typically inferred as individuals observing how people behave in social interactions and the consequences of those behaviors

What are the five areas in which we need strong knowledge structures?
Media effects, media content, media industries, the real world, and the self.

What is personal locus? Why is it important?
-Personal Locus: A person's plan for building knowledge structures about the media along with the psychic energy needed to execute the plan
-The more you know about your personal locus and the more you make conscious decisions to shape it, the more you can control the process of media influence on you. ---The more you engage your locus, the more you will be increasing your media literacy

How do you define media literacy?
-A set of perspectives that we actively use to expose ourselves to the mass media to process and interpret the meaning of the messages we encounter
-From lecture slides A perspective to actively use media and interpret the meaning embedded within media messages

What are the four dimensions of media literacy?
Cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and moral

What are the three advantages of developing a higher degree of media literacy?
-With increases in media literacy, your appetite for a wider variety of media messages will grow
-With increases in media literacy, you learn more about how to program your own mental codes
-With increases in media literacy, you are able to exercise more control over the media

What are Information Processing Tasks?
-Information-Processing Tasks: Sequence of tasks of filtering media messages then meaning matching and meaning construction
-Filtering: To make decisions about which messages to filter out (ignore) and which to filter in (pay attention to)
Goal: To attend to only those messages that have some kind of usefulness for the person and ignore all other messages
Focus: Messages in the environment
-Meaning Matching: To use basic competencies to recognize referents and locate previously learned definitions for each
Goal: To access previously learned meanings efficiently
Focus: Referents in messages
-Meaning Construction: To use skills in order to move beyond meaning matching and to construct meaning for one's self to personalize and get more out of a message
Goal: To interpret messages from more than one perspective as a means of identifying the range of meaning options, then choose one or synthesize across several
Focus: One's own knowledge structures

The differences between exposure and attention
-Attention: Exposure to a media message that takes place in the attentional stage; conscious awareness of the media message
-Exposure: The condition of being in proximity (place and time) to a message, having the message occur within our perceptual abilities, and leave some impression (however slight) in our minds
--Physical: The message and the person occupy the same physical space for some period of time
--Perceptual: The media message falls within a human's bandwidth of visual and/or auditory perception
--Psychological: A media message creates a trace element in a person's mind

What is the idea of niche audience?
Media programmers construct special kinds of messages to appeal to different kinds of people

How is mass audience conceptualized (see Compare & Contrast section) - how is it different from niche audience?
-Mass audience is based on an industrial-type conceptualization where the mass media are viewed as a factory producing standardized products for a mass of people who are heterogeneous (includes everyone), anonymous, isolated from one another, and without social organization
-Niche audience is conceptualized as a relatively small number of people who all share some interest; marketers view the people as homogeneous (all share the same interest), personal, and members of a social network where they continually interact with one another as they recommend media messages and products to one another

How does each method (i.e., geographic, demographic, social class, geodemographic, and psychographic) divide the total population into meaningful segments to identify useful niches?
-Geographic: Most important to newspapers as well as broadcast radio and local television where there are geographical boundaries to their coverage areas; Has been useful to other media in thinking about getting their messages out to certain regions of the country
-Demographic: Focus on relatively enduring characteristics about each person
-Social Class: A mix of characteristics = income, psychological
-Geodemographic: Based on the assumption that we choose to live in neighborhoods where other people are like us
--Neighborhoods tend to be homogeneous on important characteristics
-Psychographic: Uses a wide variety of variables to create its segments
--Will use demographics, lifestyle, and product usage variables

How do media companies know what existing needs are? How does that help develop content?
-Look at what messages are already being consumed
--The messages that already are attracting the most attention within a niche audience demonstrate that there is a particular existing need
-If the new competitors can make their messages very similar to what we already are attending to, we will likely pay attention to those new messages also
--Media programmers look for what has triggered our attention in the past, and they construct their messages in a similar manner, so their messages will also trigger our attention

What is cross-media promotion?
Advertising your media message in another medium to attract people in that medium to try exposing themselves to your message

What is audience conditioning? Why is it an essential strategy for all mass media?
-Audience Conditioning: A strategy used by media organizations to make their existing audience members want to continually expose themselves to their subsequent messages
-The costs of attracting members of an audience to their first exposure to a message are so high that media organizations must rely on repeated exposures in order to recoup their initial investment and eventually make a profit

How does audience conditioning work? (see YouTube example)
-Will suggest additional videos you might want to view next these are formulated based on your history of watching other videos
--Wants to hold onto you as a continuing audience member, so it keeps suggesting content you might like
-As you watch each suggested video, you are being conditioned to want to return to YouTube tomorrow

Why should children be regarded as a special group when it comes to the mass media?
-Children have not lived long enough to have enough real-world experience to protect them from media messages
-Children have not matured enough to be able to process enough elements in particular kinds of media messages in order to protect themselves from potentially harmful effects

What are the two types of regulations aimed at protecting children from unfair practices in television advertising?
-Limit the amount of time devoted to advertising in programs aimed at children
--Limits are 12 minutes per hour on weekdays and 10.5 minutes per hour on weekends
-The requirement to keep a clear separation between program content and commercial content on television programs aimed at children
FCC requires bumpers, which are 5-second segments before and after commercial breaks to alert young children about the switch in content

What are the patterns of development of the most mass media?
Innovation (birth), Penetration (growth), Peak (maturity), Decline, Adaptation

What is the current picture like in media industry?
Convergence = the moving together over time of things that were previously separated

Why is advertising so important to our economy (advertising as the engine section)?
-Makes it possible for new goods to enter markets and let us know immediately that they are available
--With more product successes, more companies are willing to introduce an even wider range of new products these companies fuel advertising agencies with money, which is passed through to the media
--Money cycles from us to products, to the manufacturers of those products, to those companies' advertising agencies, to the media
---Advertising drives the cycle faster and faster each year

What are the two ways described in text a media business uses to construct audiences?
-Recognizing where there is a need for entertainment or information then providing those products and services to satisfy those needs
-Quantity Audience Strategy: Attempting to attract as large an audience as possible
-Quality Audience Strategy: Attempting to attract a particular kind of audience; the word quality refers to kind of audience, not to an elite audience

What is the marketing concept media businesses adopt in order to reduce the risk that messages fail to attract potential targets?
-Instead of beginning with messages then trying to find audiences for those messages, media businesses begin with audience needs then construct messages to meet those needs
-Managers conduct research to identify particular niche audiences then find out what the unmet needs are for those audiences The media develop messages to meet those previously unmet needs
--Beginning with research first and product development second

Broadening Our Perspective on Media Effects
What are immediate and long-term effects?
-Immediate Effect: One that occurs during your exposure to a media message, and the evidence of that effect is observable during the exposure or immediately after
--Occur during an exposure to a particular message
--They are usually sudden changes
-Long-Term Effect: The pattern of repeated exposures that sets up the conditions

attitudinal type effect
The media-influenced effect that is manifested as the acquisition of a new attitude or the triggering, alteration, or reinforcement of existing attitudes

Behavioral-Type Effect
A type of media-influenced effect that is manifested as the triggering of actions in a person or over time of altering as well as reinforcing patterns of action

Belief-Type Effect
A type of media-influenced effect that is manifested as the acquiring of a belief or the long-term alteration as well as reinforcing of an existing belief

Cognitive-Type Effect
A type of media-influenced effect that is manifested as the acquisition of information (factual or social) as well as the triggering, alteration, or reinforcement of a mental process

Emotional-Type Effect
The type of media-influenced effect that is manifested as the triggering of an emotional reaction or the altering of emotional patterns over time

Physiological-Type Effect
The media-influenced effect that is manifested as the triggering of an automatic bodily function, such as increasing blood pressure or heart rate

What are macro-type effects?
A type of media-influenced effect that is manifested as the gradual altering or reinforcing of processes in aggregates of individuals such as organizations, institutions, and society

How Does the Media Effects Process Work?
What are manifested and process effects?
-Manifested Effects: Media-influenced effects that can be observed and can be easily attributed to media influence
-Process Effects: Media-influenced effects that are continually occurring without being easily observed

How does a fish/water level illustration relate to media effects?
Observing what happens occasionally above the water level does not tell you much about all the processes that we cannot see under the water

What would likely happen if one's knowledge structure is primarily composed of information from the media?
-When people have a great deal of knowledge on a particular topic, they have a strong, well-developed knowledge structure
--Usually motivated to acquire more information on various topics and thus seek out media that will provide them with this information
--When they see a new message on the topic, they are able to integrate that new information quickly and efficiently into their existing knowledge structure
-We cannot check out the media information by comparing it to information from other sources, such as real-life experiences

How does a degree of real-life experience relate to media effects?
-People with active lifestyles are generally less affected by the media
-People who have fewer real-life experiences are more likely to have much higher exposure to media that is not counterbalanced by other experiences
--They expose themselves to a great deal of TV due to their sociological and psychological isolation
---TV becomes their window on the world and their primary source of information

What is the context of portrayals? Why is it important in terms of media effects?
-The meaning of the messages arises from the way they are portrayed, especially social lessons
-Audiences are likely to accept the meaning of the experience that was portrayed by characters
--When characters in a story are portrayed as being highly attractive, when their actions are portrayed as being justified, when they are rewarded for those actions, then audiences will likely identify with those attractive characters, experience the action from their point of view, and learn from this vicarious experience
--This is why the portrayal of violence in the media is dangerous

How does a degree of identification relate to media effects?
-We typically pay more attention to those characters with whom we identify
--We make a judgment about how much we are attracted to a character --> attraction is linked to how much we feel that the character is like us how much we would like to be like that character
--We engage in an "as if" experience in which we imagine ourselves in the role of the character
---Frequently take these two steps while following stories in the media, and this increases the degree to which stories can affect us