Media Consumption theory

Overview

Media consumption theory encompasses a variety of theoretical approaches to the study of the public's media consumption or media diet, including methods of measuring or categorizing media consumption, normative descriptions of "healthy" or "unhealthy" media diets, and theoretical constructions of the relationship between media and consumer. Media consumption consists of the media read, watched, listened to, or otherwise taken in by an individual consumer or by a group, including educational, informational, commercial, and entertainment sources.

Insofar as a media diet consists of prepared information taken in by the audience, people have had a media diet for nearly as long as they have had language. In the millennia before the development of writing, oral traditions likely centered on various forms of poetry and song that varied in form and purpose by culture, and many occasions would be celebrated with rituals that included a performative or call-and-response element. Even after writing was invented around the fourth millennium BCE, most people were listeners, not readers; the media available for them to listene to became more sophisticated as writing led to the development of written literature, plays, and music theory, among other innovations, but not until the fifteenth century, with the invention of the printing press, did the literate population exceed 10 percent of the population of the West. Until the printing press, universal literacy was not a goal; it was not even thought possible or practical. By the eighteenth century, the literacy rate was as high as 85 percent in some countries, and the rest caught up by the early twentieth century, abetted by improvements to technology that greatly reduced the cost of paper and texts and the spread of public education as a result of the industrialized world's need for a literate workforce. While inequalities in literacy persist according to income, education, and other factors, in the modern world they are minuscule compared with previous centuries; that said, literacy remains low by modern standards in Africa and Latin America, which impacts media consumption there.

The technological innovations that improved literacy rates were accompanied by changes in media consumption: as the cost of publishing was reduced, it became more practical to publish works intended principally as entertainment; simultaneously, a larger and larger audience for printed works led to media calculated for mass appeal. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw booms in affordable printed entertainment, ranging from works of literature (many of which remain in print today) to "penny dreadfuls" and dime novels printed on cheap paper. The turn of the twentieth century saw a boom in newspaper and magazine publishing, and as color printing became more affordable, comic strips and comic books became among the most active American media. At the same time, recorded music, radio, motion pictures, and television gradually reduced the printed word's share in the average American media diet, though the spread of Internet access in the late twentieth century reclaimed some of it, albeit in a drastically different form.

Further Insights

Uses and gratification theory (UGT) is a communication theory formulated by researchers beginning in the 1940s to explain issues in media consumption, particularly—at first—newspapers, radio, and children's comics. Influenced by Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs theory and other work from the early and mid twentieth century, UGT focuses not on the effects of media consumption but on its motivations: for example, why a given individual seeks out media of a particular type; what their favorite television show or video game provides them; what gratifications the individual wants to receive by using media. In UGT work, media gratify through education, relaxation, sociality, diversion, and escape. It is common for young people to be criticized for their heavy mobile phone usage, for example, especially in circumstances where they seem to be avoiding interactions with their physical surroundings; however, sociability, reassurance, status, and affection are among the most common uses and gratifications associated with mobile phone use. For many teenagers, the screen is not an escape from social interaction but a means for it. Entertainment media, on the other hand—television, movies, music, for example—are most frequently used for mood management. Narratives (whether scripted or in reality shows) arouse the emotions, provide sensation, engage the viewer's cultural or media literacy, and reward sustained attention. Studies also show that viewers are gratified by feeling that they have characters to root for or against, and experience "excitation transfer," meaning that they feel good when the story works out in favor of the character they think has earned a happy ending. Negative endings, as in tragedies or horror stories, similarly gratify through catharsis. Viewers even form parasocial relationships, meaning that they form a one-way social connection to fictional characters, real-life people on TV (e.g., sports figures, newscasters, reality show participants), and musicians.

While UGT focuses on the audience's quest for gratification, media-system dependency theory (MSD) posits that as an individual's needs are met by media consumption, they develop a dependence on that media. Developed in the 1970s in sociology, MSD portrays this dependency as emerging from the relationship between society and the media, between the media and the audience, and between the society and the audience. Society forms norms and values, and enables access, while media develop in part in response to audience needs. Typically, MSD discusses the needs media meet in terms of escapism, gaining an understanding of one's social world (which can invoke parasocial relationships), and learning to navigate effectively in that world. MSD is one way of explaining why certain media thrive that depend on an unusually high degree of engagement by the audience—such as long-running soap operas or superhero comic books, which have large casts of characters and complex backstory that cannot be mastered casually. Viewers who become dependent on their media for specific gratification may be drawn to these seemingly foreboding forms precisely because they will reward that dependence and always offer more material to discover.

While UGT and MSD address media consumption from an audience-centered framework, cultivation theory is more interested in how media consumption impacts a person's worldview and has other psychological effects. One of the most prevalent theories in mass communication journals, cultivation theory focuses primarily on television, and rests on some version of the premise that long-term television viewing leads to the belief that what the viewer sees on television accurately reflects real-world norms and behavior—and further, that television is fundamentally different from other media, and so effects may be caused by television viewing that would not be found even in film viewing. The theory is particularly associated with studies of violence in entertainment, pornography, the impact of television on children, and the idea that exposure to ideas and images in entertainment leads to being numbed to them even in real life. Despite its popularity, there are numerous criticisms, both of individual studies and of the field's overall approach and assumptions. A common criticism, for example, is that too few studies differentiate between types of violence, types of portrayals of violence (the slapstick of the Three Stooges or Bugs Bunny versus the Saw film franchise), and contexts of violence (such as whether it is glorified or condemned, and whether its consequences are shown).

One of the key concerns in media consumption theory is measuring media consumption. In the United States, the Census Bureau has been tracking reading habits since the 1940s, which provides a source of data that is valuable for its sample size (especially when investigating the drop in literacy rates from 1982–2002) but limited in the period of time it covers. Twenty-first century studies of literacy frequently focus on functional literacy—the ability to read and write at a level sufficient for typical job tasks and everyday life—which makes sense when treating illiteracy as a social ill, but again results in a limit on the type of data available in the largest studies.

Studies done within an industry often have the granular data that sheds real light on media consumption. The Nielsen ratings are the best known form of audience measurement. Nielsen Media Research began providing statistics on radio listenership in 1947, and after moving into television in its early days, established the norms of audience measurement for the industry. The two main measures Nielsen reports are ratings and share; the rating of a television program is the percentage of people in TV households watching a given program, while the share is the percentage of television sets tuned to that program, out of the number in use when it airs. Nielsen's ratings are based on samples; like a polling service, the company surveys a representative sample of the population, and from that sample extrapolates a picture of the whole. It uses two main methods—self-reporting by diary, and a TV-connected device that records viewing habits. Nielsen's methods have been challenged for underrepresenting some populations, and many argue that since the 1990s, its margin of error has grown because of the sheer number of viewing options. So-called time-shifted viewing, meaning shows watched on DVR or on demand shortly after airing (but not on DVD or Netflix months later), further complicates the picture. Since 1996, Nielsen has also gathered data on video games and Internet usage.

Audience measurement is complicated by media multitasking or multi-communicating—that is, the practice of using multiple media at once, such as reading on one's tablet while watching TV, texting during a movie, or using a television's picture-in-picture function to watch two television programs at once (such as monitoring the score of a basketball game while watching a sitcom). Multitasking is a misleading term, though an unavoidable one; studies consistently show that people are actually very poor at multitasking, reducing their engagement or success at one task as a cost of performing another. Notably, this is consistently shown even in studies designed to prove multitasking efficacy, and individuals are shown to be poor self-reporters—that is, they are rarely aware that multitasking is causing them to pay less attention to the movie or conversation, or that even listening to music while driving makes their driving worse. However, most research on media multitasking, especially with large and diverse sample sizes, has focused on safety concerns, such as the aforementioned driving example. The research on loss of engagement in relatively trivial tasks—such as whether playing Candy Crush while watching TV makes you play worse and miss plot points—is scanter, though generally compelling.

In some contexts, media multitasking involves multiple related tasks, rather than separate ones. For example, it has become common for television writers and actors to "live tweet" while their program is airing, engaging with fans online even as those fans watch the new episode. Popularized by ABC's Scandal, the practice is nearly as old as Twitter. Here, it seems any loss of engagement should be characterized differently; in a sense the viewer is engaging with multiple aspects of the same media experience. The Internet has resulted in television and movie viewership embracing a social element to a degree not previously practical; for dedicated fans, the experience of watching a show like Supernatural, Game of Thrones, or Grey's Anatomy is one that necessarily includes this social engagement with other fans and people connected to the show.

Issues

One of the oldest forms of media consumption theory is the complaint or caution about consumption of a new media type or format. The Swiss scientist and writer Conrad Gessner compiled the first "universal" bibliography, the Bibliotheca universalis, in 1549, listing all the known books printed in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew over the previous century (the printing press having been invented around 1440). The advent of the printing press had drastically reduced the cost, time, and required skill level for disseminating texts; arguably nothing as radical would happen again in Western media history until either the radio or the Internet, and historians sometimes call the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the first information age. One of Gessner's motivations was to warn people of the overwhelming amount of information in print; he did not revel in this plethora of books that new technology had made possible, but rather warned against a "harmful and confusing abundance" (what is now termed information overload) as a consequence of the lowered threshold. Key to understanding Gessner's concern is that the change over the previous couple generations had indeed been profound: There had been a time when the intellectual elite could have been expected to be familiar with all the major written works in circulation, but the printing press made that impossible (without changing the criteria for "major"). This kind of resistance would happen again as it became common to print works in the vernacular instead of classical languages; the desire to distinguish a high-culture intellectual work from a low-culture work intended for the masses was one of the motivations behind continuing to publish in Latin (which remained the lingua franca of the educated in Western Europe until supplanted by French and English).

Implicit in the concern about too many books is that of too many authors—and too many readers. The printing press was a boon to literacy simply because it made reading materials more easily available, but even literacy was an innovation to be cautioned against: some two thousand years earlier, Socrates had warned that learning to read and write could be harmful to the memory (because things could be recorded rather than forcing one to remember them) and that children should not be exposed to improper stories for the sake of their psychological development. The warning that literacy would harm memory was repeated in the late Middle Ages as the general public became more literate; there is even some truth to it, insofar as few people in literate cultures have the need to memorize extraordinarily long works as they do in oral traditions.

As newspapers became more common during the Enlightenment, the public's reliance on them as sources of news was criticized because it made news consumption a solitary activity, rather than one that required socializing in order to hear the latest news by word of mouth. Not long thereafter, as formal education for children became more common and public education the norm, schooling was declared suspect because it would tire children out by forcing them to jump from one subject to the next; further, excessive interest in books or learning was listed as the cause of many nineteenth century mental illness diagnoses, especially for women. In the twentieth century, radio, recorded music, comic books, television, and video games were all held as harmful media either inherently or when insufficient care was taken safeguarding against bad content; Congressional hearings were even held over the supposed effects of comic books on 1950s children. Those concerns were repeated in the following century, centering on e-mail, web browsing, social media, smartphones and mobile games, and video games again, despite those technologies having the greatest and most granular controls over access and content that parents have ever had. It is, of course, possible if not plausible that all of these concerns over a 2,500 year span were correct; it is more likely that changes in media consumption raise alarm not because of their effects but because change itself will always be a source of alarm.

A concern in the 2020s is how media consumption relates to conspiratorial thinking, such as whether the 2020 presidential election was rigged in favor of Joe Biden. Experts have found that those who follow the news regularly have high political knowledge and tend to interpret events accurately. Those who avoid following the news had less political knowledge than others and tend to use social media more often. These are the people who are the most likely to have conspiratorial thinking.

Bibliography

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