presentation on the role of media in society

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2.1 The Role of Mass Media in Society

Learning Objectives

• Trace the historical evolution of communication media, tracing its development from paper to modern technologies like the Internet, and analyze how these advancements have shaped global communication, influenced society, and created a dynamic relationship between mass media and social structures.
• Investigate the impact of mass communication on culture and society, including the legal setup of media systems, the role of mass media in transmitting culture, and the balance between mass media control and societal influence, as well as reflect on technological utopianism and the challenges of coexisting in a digitally connected world.
• Delve into the origin and development of mass media, including the role of the Gutenberg printing press and the penny press, evaluate why some mass media products resonate with audiences while others fail, and consider the role of affordability and accessibility in the dissemination of mass media.

More than one hundred years ago, John Dewey wrote in Democracy and Education that society is not only supported by various forms of communication but also enveloped in communication. Dewey reiterated what philosophers and scholars had noted for centuries: small groups, larger communities, and vast institutions — all the things that make up a society — function in relation to how communication flows within and between groups.

Communication structure refers to a combination of information and communication technologies (ICTs), guidelines for using those technologies, and professional workers dedicated to managing information and messages. In the mass communication field, communication structures are more than computers and transmission networks. The guidelines for using networks to create and distribute messages for mass consumption are a matter of corporate policy as well as law.

It has been noted that a society is made up of small groups, larger communities, and vast institutions. A more complete definition of the term comes from the field of sociology. A society is a very large group of people organized into institutions held together over time through formalized relationships. Nations, for example, are made up of formal institutions organized by law. Governments of different sizes, economic institutions, educational institutions, and others all come together to form a society.

By comparison, culture — the knowledge, beliefs, and practices of groups large and small — is not necessarily formalized. Culture is necessary for enjoying and making sense of the human experience, but there are few formalized rules governing culture.

Mass communication influences both society and culture. Different societies have different media systems, and the way they are set up by law influences how the society works. Different forms of communication, including messages in the mass media, give shape and structure to society. Additionally, mass media outlets can spread cultural knowledge and artistic works around the globe. People exercise cultural preferences when it comes to consuming media, but mass media corporations often decide which stories to tell and which to promote, particularly when it comes to forms of mass media that are costly to produce, such as major motion pictures, major video game releases, and global news products.

More than any other, the field of mass communication transmits culture. At the same time, it helps institutional society try to understand itself and whether its structures are working.

The Mass Media Dynamic

The mass media system is an institution itself. What sets it apart is its potential to influence the thinking of massive numbers of individuals. In fact, the ideas exchanged in organizational communication and interpersonal communication are often established, reinforced, or negated by messages in the mass media. This is what it means for societies “to exist in transmission, in communication.” Different types of communication influence each other.

But the mass media are also shaped and influenced by social groups and institutions. This is the nature of the mass media dynamic.

Individuals and groups in society influence what mass media organizations produce through their creativity on the input side and their consumption habits on the output side. It is not accurate to say that society exists within the mass media or under mass media “control.” Social structures are too powerful for mass media to completely govern how they operate. But neither is it accurate to say that the mass media are contained within societies. Many mass media products transcend social structures to influence multiple societies, and even in societies that heavily censor their mass media, the news of scandals and corruption can get out. The mass media and society are bound together and shape each other.

Almost everything you read, see, and hear is framed within a mass media context; however, mere familiarity is no guarantee of success. Products in the mass media that fail to resonate with audiences do not last long, even if they seem in tune with current tastes and trends.

The Mass Communication Origin Story

In his book, John Dewey notes how, in the early 20th century, the mass media were beginning to connect large institutions in new ways. The production of mass media messages accelerated with the development of the telegraph and the popular newspaper. The spread of telegraph technology that began in the mid-1800s continued through the early 1900s to network the globe with a nearly instantaneous information transmission system. Much of the growth of newspapers occurred as a result of improvements in telegraph technology.

Thus, a primary function of the global mass communication system is to save time. People have a need to understand what is going on in the world, and they desire entertainment. Global electronic telecommunication networks collapse space by transmitting messages in much less time than the older, physical delivery systems.

The dynamic between society and mass media that is so prevalent today developed throughout the 20th century. Starting near the end of the 1800s, communication flows began to move at electronic speeds. More people knew about more things than ever before, but scholars are quick to point out that communication is not synonymous with understanding.

Dewey wanted to focus on educating people so that they could live and work well in societies heavily shaped by global telecommunication networks. For him, education was the meaning of life, and the global information and communication system needed to be molded into an educational tool. Many of us still hold out hope for Dewey’s educational goals, but as ICTs have advanced over the past century or two, it has become clear that the mere existence of global mass communication networks does not ensure that societies will learn to coexist and thrive.

This can be difficult for people to acknowledge. Shortly after the widespread dissemination of the telegraph , the radio , broadcast television, and public internet access, some form of communication utopia was imagined or even expected. The telegraph collapsed space. Radio enabled instantaneous mass communication. Television brought live images from one side of the globe to the other for even larger mass audiences, and internet access gave individuals the power to be information senders, not just receivers. At each step, hope and imagination flourished, but social and cultural clashes persisted. Communication systems can be used as weapons. The evolution of mass communication tools is the story of increased capacity to do the same good and evil things people have always done in societies and between them.

Looking beyond technological utopianism — the idea that new technologies (particularly ICTs) will lead to greater social understanding and better conditions for the global population — we are left with a tedious but massively meaningful project. We must find ways to coexist with other societies even as we are constantly aware of our differences and of possible threats that may have existed before but now are much easier to see.

Perhaps if we are to make the best of our digital global communication network, it would help to track the evolution of different forms of mass communication. This text very briefly touched on the continuum from telegraph to widespread internet adoption, but the first mass medium was ink on paper.

The First Mass Medium

The first global medium, besides the spoken word, was neither the Internet nor the telegraph. In fact, it was not a mass medium at all. It was paper. Via trade routes, messages in the form of letters moved around the world in a matter of weeks or months. It was global communication, but it was slow.

The development of a global telegraph network made it possible for messages to spread in minutes. When the telegraph was wed to mass-consumed newspapers, the world saw the rise of fast, global, mass communication that had the power to potentially influence large groups of people at once.

Books transmitted messages widely and inspired literacy, but they did not establish a channel for consistent, timely communication meant for mass audiences. After the Gutenberg printing press was developed around 1440, the Gutenberg Bible was slowly mass-produced and disseminated around the Western world. It opened up access to sacred texts that had been bound up for centuries by large institutions like the Roman Catholic Church, and its dissemination helped fuel the Protestant Reformation. Still, it was an outlier. Most other books, even those that were mass-produced from around the 1500s to the 1800s, were not disseminated as widely as the Gutenberg Bible. They were simply too expensive.

Nevertheless, mass literacy slowly paved the way for mass newspaper readership to emerge in the 20th century. After the telegraph was invented and developed for wide-scale use and after the cost of printing newspapers dropped, publishers could share news from around the globe with mass audiences. The newspaper, specifically the penny press, was the first mass medium.

What distinguished the penny press was affordability. These papers were published in tabloid format, which used small-sized pages and was cheaper to produce. Penny papers were written for and read by working-class audiences starting in about the 1830s. They covered all manner of current events. Soon, major institutions such as political parties and unions developed their own papers to cover the topics that suited their agendas and to promote the cultural values that they held dear.

• Communication has evolved historically from paper to modern technologies like the Internet, shaping global communication and influencing society, with mass media playing a crucial role in transmitting culture and helping institutional society understand itself.
• The relationship between mass media and society is dynamic, with mass media having the potential to influence thinking on a large scale but also being shaped by social groups and institutions, and neither completely governing nor being contained within societies.

The development of global telecommunication networks, from the telegraph to the internet, has collapsed space and time, but the mere existence of these networks does not ensure societal coexistence and thriving, requiring a focus on education and understanding beyond technological utopianism.

• The origin of mass media can be traced back to the Gutenberg printing press and the penny press, with affordability and accessibility playing key roles in the dissemination of mass media and the success of mass media products depending on resonance with audiences and alignment with current tastes and trends.

Key Takeaways

• The development of global telecommunication networks, from the telegraph to the Internet, has collapsed space and time, but the mere existence of these networks does not ensure societal coexistence and thriving, requiring a focus on education and understanding beyond technological utopianism.
• Trace the evolution of communication from paper to the Internet by creating a detailed timeline. Include key milestones such as the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, the telegraph, radio, television, and the rise of the Internet. Analyze how each advancement has shaped global communication and influenced society. Present your findings in a visual format, such as a poster or digital presentation.
• Select one successful and one failed mass media product, such as a popular movie and a box office flop. Write an analysis comparing the two, focusing on why one resonated with audiences while the other failed. Consider factors like content, marketing, audience preferences, and alignment with current tastes and trends. Conclude with insights on what makes mass media products succeed or fail.
• Research the development of global telecommunication networks, such as the telegraph and the Internet, and how they have collapsed space and time. Prepare for a class debate on whether these advancements have led to greater social understanding and better global conditions, or if they have simply increased the capacity for both good and evil in societies. Consider the text’s insights on technological utopianism and the challenges of coexisting in a digitally connected world.

Media Attributions

• The Penny Paper © Wikipedia is licensed under a Public Domain license

Introduction to Communication and Media Studies Copyright © 2024 by J.J. Sylvia, IV is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Chapter 16. Media and Popular Culture

16.2 Sociological Frameworks for Understanding Media

William Little and Ron McGivern

The theme of how different sociological paradigms or perspectives frame research into the specific topics of sociology has been developed throughout this textbook. Studying the effects of media and the nature of mediated society is no different. Positivist approaches tend to formulate the research in terms of cause-and-effect relationships between measurable variables. These causal relationships can also be modelled on the different social functions that media perform in supporting and perpetuating the processes of society. Critical sociological approaches focus on the influence of power structures on media, particularly the ideological messaging of media gatekeepers, the circulation of damaging stereotypes in the media, and the effects of turning communications into commodities. The interpretive approaches emphasize the ongoing processes in which meanings are actively constructed in the media and then actively deciphered by audiences.

Positivism and Functionalism

Media effects.

A glance through popular video game, television and movie titles geared toward children and teens shows the vast spectrum of violence that is displayed, condoned, and acted out. It may hearken back to Popeye and Bluto beating up on each other, or Bugs Bunny getting the better of Elmer Fudd, but the graphics and actions have moved far beyond the Loony Tunes brand of slapstick violence.

When 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot more than two dozen students and staff members of Sandy Hook Elementary School as well as his own mother in 2012, an old debate about the influence that violent video games has on young people was reignited. The free online game, Kindergarten Killers, a game Lanza played, was blamed: playing violent games makes people violent. But others argue that it is people with violent tendencies that are drawn to violent games. The question remains: are violent video games the cause of violent behaviour or are they merely the manifestation of violent tendencies?

This is essentially the same debate people have about media effects in general. Historically, it has been regarded as intuitive that media has a tremendous effect on audiences, not only in the case of violent media, but also with respect to political propaganda, advertising, moral panics, pornography, racial stereotyping, and other influential media content. The positivist model of explanation is drawn from behaviouralism — a linear sequence of sender/message/receiver in which the message is a stimulus and the reception is a measurable response in the audience: effects, uses, gratifications, behaviours, etc.

For example, George Gerbner proposed a cultivation model of violent media effects: the more people watch television and are exposed to its violent content, the more likely they will be to perceive their society or the world around them as being more violent than it really is (Gosselin et al., 1997). Violent television cultivates a perception of the world as violent. Research has shown that establishing causation is not as easy as it seems, however.

Children’s play has often involved games of aggression — from cops [police] and robbers, to water-balloon fights at birthday parties, to acts of social aggression (social exclusion, public humiliation, and personal rejection). Where does this aggression come from and how do media influence it?

Gosselin et al. (1997) studied Canadian television in the 1990s and found that children’s programs were more violent than adult programs. They contained four times more violent scenes per hour, and 76.9% of these programs contained violence compared to only 58.9% for adult programs. Moreover, the violence shown to children originated almost exclusively from cartoons. Of these, 79.5% contained violence, averaging 24.8 violent scenes per hour. In addition, 57.7% of the main cartoon characters were violent.

The media effects approach links violent media and violent behaviour. Reviewing three major American studies spanning 3o years, Alter (1997) reports that violence on television has been associated with three different types of effect: viewers exhibiting increased aggression or violence toward others (the aggressor effect); increased fearfulness about becoming a victim of violence (the victim effect); and increased insensitivity about violence among others (the bystander effect).

Similarly, psychologists Anderson and Bushman (2001) reviewed 40+ years of research on children’s violent video game use and aggression. They found that children who had just played a violent video game demonstrated an immediate increase in hostile or aggressive thoughts, an increase in aggressive emotions, and physiological arousal that increased the chances of acting out aggressive behaviour (Anderson, 2003). They found that repeated exposure to this kind of violence leads to increased expectations regarding violence as a solution, increased violent behavioural scripts, and making violent behaviour more cognitively accessible (Anderson, 2003). In short, people who play these games find it easier to imagine and access violent solutions than nonviolent ones, and are less socialized to see violence as a negative.

However, subsequent re-evaluations of this literature have shown that the correlations are weak, non-existent, or sometimes contradictory. Gosselin et al.’s (1997) study of university students self-reporting on the effects of watching violent television showed television viewing did not have any influence on the emotion people feel about the surrounding world (i.e., fear), but did affect their cognitive beliefs about the level of violence in society. A recent meta-analysis of the literature on violent video games and aggression showed negligible relationships between violent games and aggressive behavior, small relationships with aggressive emotions and cognitive beliefs, and stronger relationships with desensitization to violence (Ferguson et al. 2020). Similarly, the American Psychological Association has acknowledged that violent video games strongly correlate with aggressive behavior, as well as anti-social behavior, but distinguishes between aggression and violence. They conclude that there is little evidence for a causal or correlational connection between playing violent video games and actually committing criminal violence, but that violent game use is a risk factor for violence (APA Task Force on Violent Media, 2015).

Establishing causation is extremely difficulty in media research due to the multiple factors that are present. Most media research relies on content analysis and surveys where the subjects are asked to self-report. This has been criticized as unreliable, and at best can only establish a correlation. To demonstrate causation, all other factors must be controlled. Usually this can only take place under laboratory conditions and not in a real-life context where factors are complex and unpredictable.

Media Functions

Structural functionalism focuses on how media performs key social functions that contribute to smooth operation of society. A good place for students to begin to understand this perspective is to write a list of functions they perceive media to perform for them. The list might include the ability to find information on the internet, the entertainment provided by going to movies, or how advertising algorithms uncannily guess what products they are searching for. Students might also think about the latent functions media perform by communicating social norms of fitness, attractiveness, heroism, and knowledgeability. These latent functions often take the form of creating a common collective consciousness in which, like it or not, people come to share a common perception of attractive body types, racial stereotypes, desirable status symbols, moral vs. immoral behaviour, etc.

Social Solidarity Function

Emile Durkheim argued that “essentially social life is made up of representations,” however “these collective representations are of quite another character from those of the individual” (Durkheim, 1952/1897). The collective representations that are shared and circulate through the media —  media stories, images, narratives, musical expressions, celebrity characters, film clips, etc — are part of a collective conscience , “the totality of beliefs and sentiments common to average citizens of the same society” (Durkheim, 1937/1895). Like other social facts he describes (see Chapter 1. An Introduction to Sociology ), the collective conscience “forms a determinate system which has its own life,” independent of the private thoughts and mental images of individuals (Durkheim, 1937/1895).

The contemporary media function to create this shared space of collective representations of the world — all “the ways in which the group conceives of itself in relation to objects which affect it” (Durkheim, 1937/1895). One element that made the collective conscience distinct from the isolated minds of individuals was its “unusual intensity.” “Sentiments created and developed in the group have a greater energy than purely individual sentiments” (Durkheim, 1985). This is evident to anyone who has attended a lively hockey game, a large wedding, or a spiritual ceremony. Whatever any individual feels about these events, the feelings are inevitably amplified by sharing them with others. Similarly, it is one thing to suspect shady goings-on and secret conspiracies and another to discover a corner of the internet where many people share these beliefs and have one’s beliefs affirmed.

This is the source of the function of the collective conscience in social life: to overcome the tendency towards individual isolation and dispersion in society and create social solidarity. Collective representations are a means of binding individuals together in coordinated action and perception through the power of shared ideas, beliefs, and feelings. “[F]ollowing the collectivity, the individual forgets himself [sic] for the common end and his conduct is directed by reference to a standard outside himself” (Durkheim, 1985). When an element of collective conscience determines an individual’s conduct, “we do not act in our personal interest; we pursue collective ends” (Durkheim, 1985). The media creates a collective conscience that functions to integrate individuals into societal goals.

Durkheim was writing in the late 19th and early 20th century when newspapers and other print forms were the dominant media, so his tendency was to examine their function in creating social solidarity at a national or societal level. Today the role of new media forms in reaching and penetrating the consciousness of individuals seems even more powerful and widespread. The new media create a common, thoroughly mediated, experience of the world that is global in scope. Arjun Appadurai (1996) describes the formation of a global mediascape . Like a landscape, the mediated environment of the global citizen creates a common stock of media images, celebrities and news events that circulate around the world through digital and other media.

Mediascapes, whether produced by private or state interests, tend to be image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives, their own as well as those of others living in other places (Appadurai, 1996).

Mediascapes are also like landscapes in the sense that they look different depending on where someone is situated, but are nevertheless composed of the same fields, hills, and sky. In this analogy, mediascapes are the common, imagined worlds created by the global circulation of images in the media. However, the function of creating social solidarity through collective representations can be thoroughly ambiguous. It is through these shared imaginings of the other and of the shared global condition, that people in distant parts of the planet can band together to recognize the dignity of universal human rights or the existential threat of climate change, but they also circulate false or inflammatory information that leads to burning Korans in Denmark and fierce global counter-protests.

Social Coordination Function

As discussed earlier in the chapter, mediated forms of communication function to coordinate the activities of society, especially when they get too large or complex for face-to-face communication to be effective. Harold Innis (1951) separated the militaristic societies that sought to control vast areas of space from the religious societies that sought to control vast periods of time by how their dominant forms of communication functioned. Light and ephemeral paper media were suited to distributing administrative messages over space, while durable and permanent stone or clay media were suited to supporting the transmission of eternal values and connection to the ancestors through time. The mass media of the 19th and 20th centuries were key to creating the public spheres and common sources of information needed for the formation of democracy and national societies. In a huge, regionally distinct and disperse country like Canada, the mass media functioned as key institutions in creating a common sense of Canadian citizenship. In similar fashion, Castells (2010 [1996]) described the way that new digital technologies of media functioned to enable contemporary networked forms of global coordination to function.

Another example of the social coordination function of media is advertising. Companies that wish to connect with consumers find television and digital media irresistible platforms to promote their goods and services. Television and internet advertising are highly functional ways to meet a market demographic where it lives and thus coordinate circuit of commodity production, distribution, sale, and consumption more effectively and efficiently. In the era of television, sponsors used the sophisticated data gathered by network and cable television companies about their viewers to target their advertising accordingly. They used advertising to sell to audiences. Today the way they reach consumers is changing. It might be more accurate to say that the big social media platforms not only sell to audiences, but sell audiences themselves, i.e., their demographic information, likes, preferences, browsing history, searches, on-line shopping habits, etc. The trend towards niche marketing to small but valuable consumer groups becomes ever more customized as consumer preferences and decisions become more accurately modeled and predictable based on the vast amounts of data accumulated by social media platforms. Consumers know that they are thoroughly integrated into the cycle of commodity production when the advertising algorithms know what they want before they do themselves.

Entertainment Function

An obvious manifest function of media is its entertainment value. Most people, when asked why they watch television, go to the movies or stream YouTube clips, would answer that they enjoy it. Media function to give people pleasure, to allow them to relax, or to provide means of escape from the grind and obligations of everyday life. In their entertainment function, media provide forms of popular culture that do not require much effort to access, consume or digest. One YouTube clip leads to another and pretty soon a couple hours have gone by. In this form, their function is not practical —  in the sense of building useful work skills or academic knowledge — nor is it self-cultivating and self-expressing, but it may provide stress relief.

The easily digestible format of most media entertainment allows people to release tension and replenish their energy to return to the challenging tasks of work, family life, relationships with others and so on. This can enable people to find balance in their lives, but as noted earlier in the chapter, critics of the culture industry point to the passive, uncritical attitude of “distraction and inattention” in which most media entertainment is consumed (Adorno, 1991/1941). This does not lead to a sustainable enjoyment of life, let alone critical examination of the reasons for stressful and unsatisfying work or family conditions. Instead, it leads people to simply adjust psychically and submit to the world as it is.

On the media technology side, as well, there is some ambiguity to the entertainment factor of the use of new innovations. From online gaming to chatting with friends on Facebook, technology offers new and more exciting ways for people to entertain themselves. Of course, the downside to this ongoing information flow is the near impossibility of disconnecting from technology, leading to an expectation of constant convenient access to information and people. Such a fast-paced dynamic is not always to people’s benefit. Some sociologists assert that this level of media exposure leads to narcotizing dysfunction , a term that describes when people are too overwhelmed with media input to really care about the issue, so their involvement becomes defined by awareness instead of by action about the issue at hand (Lazerfeld and Merton, 1948).

Socialization Function

Even while the media is often seen as a means of escape, it also serves to socialize people, functioning to enable societies to pass along norms, values, and beliefs to the next generation. In fact, people are socialized and resocialized by media throughout their life course. All forms of media teach people what is good and desirable, how they should speak, how they should behave, and how they should react to events. The division of fictional or non-fictional characters into heroes and villains for example conveys powerful messages about what is morally admirable or despicable in a society. Media also provide people with cultural touchstones during events of national or global significance. They announce what is important or historical for societies. How many older relatives still recall watching the first landing of astronauts on the moon on the first colour televisions, or the 1972 Canada-USSR Summit Series? How many of them saw the events of September 11, 2001, unfold on television? How many readers of this textbook saw the Russian invasion of Ukraine on television or clips on the internet?

Where the family remains a key institution of socialization, family members often spend more time with media than with each other. In 2021, Canadians 18 years and older spent an average of five hours and 26 minutes with digital media each day and four hours and 48 minutes with traditional media (TV, magazines, newspapers, and radio) (Guttman, 2023). Children between 2 years and 11 years watched 10.5 hours of TV a week and teenagers watched 10 hours (Stoll, 2022). While teenagers only accounted for 2.5% of all social media users in Canada in 2021 (Dixon, 2022), a Statistics Canada survey from 2018 showed that 92% of teenagers were regular internet users (Schimmele et al., 2021).

It is clear from watching people emulate the styles of dress and talk that appear in media that media has a socializing influence. Sometimes this has a positive effect in expanding people’s horizons. Other media influences, like social media “challenges” to eat packages of detergent or to drink enough Benadryl to become delirious, seem more dubious. Digital media in particular is especially engrossing and influential on identity formation. Twenge, Spitzberg and Campbell (2019) observe that adolescents in the “iGeneration” (those born in the 1990s) are spending less time on in-person social activities than previous generations of adolescents — a change that parallels the increases in time spent on digital media. This raises questions about whether these new media of communication are functional or dysfunctional as agents of socialization. According to the authors, feelings of loneliness are comparatively higher among adolescents in the iGeneration. The highest levels of loneliness are found among youth with low amounts of in-person social contact and high amounts of social media use.

The findings of Statistics Canada’s 2018 Canadian Internet Use Survey also show that intense smart phone use was associated with anxiety/depression, feelings of envy, and frustration/anger (see Figure 16.13 below). This casts doubt about the extent to which online social relationships are a source of companionship, emotional sustenance, and social support that contribute to mental health and wellbeing, particularly in the absence of face-to-face interactions (Helliwell and Huang 2013). In other words, it raises questions about ability of smart phones and digital media to socialize teenagers and young adults effectively.

Making Connections: Sociological Research

Socialization and social media: risk factors.

Schimmele et al. (2021) summarize the literature on the positive and negative outcomes associated with social media use, and their associated risk factors:

Age has been viewed as a risk factor for a number of reasons. A comparative lack of self-regulation among children and adolescents may impede their ability to avoid risks such as overuse of social media or use at inappropriate hours (Keles, McRae and Grealish, 2020). Both sleep duration and sleep quality have been linked to daily time spent on social media and nighttime use, which tend to be higher among adolescents and young adults than among older individuals (Reid Chassiakos et al., 2016; Woods and Scott, 2016). In general, lost sleep has been found to contribute to daytime dysfunction, such as having trouble concentrating (Reid Chassiakos et al., 2016). Furthermore, disrupted sleep has been found to be a key link between the quantity of time that youth spend on social media and depressive symptoms (Kelly et al., 2018; Reid Chassiakos et al., 2016). Disrupted sleep may also be an outcome of poor-quality interactions on social media such as exposure to online harassment or bullying, which are also negatively correlated with mental wellbeing (Kelly et al., 2018; Pew Research Center, 2018). The age of social media users also matters as a risk factor for negative outcomes given developmental processes underway through adolescence. Identity formation is one such process and involves social comparison and feedback-seeking (Nesi and Prinstein, 2015). Social media is a unique interpersonal environment in this context as it can provide a near-continuous flow of interactions and an immense basis for social comparison and feedback (Vogel et al., 2014). Evidence suggests that social media has increased the influence of peer groups on the wellbeing of adolescents, facilitating and magnifying the effects of self-comparison at this age (Kelly et al., 2018; Seabrook, Kern and Rickard, 2016). In addition, users on social media platforms may strive for “positive self-presentation” using flattering images and information about exciting activities, material success and personal accomplishments (Tandoc, Ferruci and Duffy, 2015; Verduyn et al., 2015). For browsers, frequent exposure to, and comparison with, such representations can lead to idealized perceptions of other peoples’ lives, with increased potential for negative social comparisons and feelings of social deprivation, lower self-esteem and unhappiness (Georges, 2009; Nesi and Prinstein, 2015; Primack et al., 2017; Tandoc, Ferrucci, and Duffy, 2015;). Nesi and Prinstein (2015) report that social comparison poses a greater threat to the mental wellbeing of adolescent girls than boys, possibly because girls place more emphasis on social comparison when assessing their self-worth. While most studies of social media impacts have focused on negative outcomes, others have documented positive outcomes. Social media is an efficient tool for interacting with friends and relatives, maintaining relationships across distance, and facilitating scheduling and communication among household members. Social networking sites connect individuals with shared interests, values, and activities, and enable individuals to interact with extended networks that would be difficult to maintain in an offline context (Boyd and Ellison, 2007; Verduyn et al., 2017). Some studies report that having a large number of online contacts predicts higher levels of life satisfaction and self-perceived social integration (Manago, Taylor and Greenfield, 2012; Seabrook, Kern and Rickard, 2016; Verduyn et al., 2017). Social networking sites can also reduce barriers to social participation (Ellison, Steinfield and Lampe, 2007). Several studies have documented correlations between social media and positive outcomes, such as emotional support and diminished social isolation and loneliness (Ellison, Steinfield and Lampe, 2007; Keles, McRae and Grealish, 2020; Oh, Ozkaya and LaRose, 2014).

Literature review by Schimmele et al. (2021), used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence .

Social Control Function

Like the functions of social solidarity, social coordination and socialization, media perform the function of producing conformity to social norms and are thereby a means of exercising social control over populations. As noted in Chapter 8. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control , all societies practice social control , the regulation and enforcement of norms. Social control can be defined broadly as an organized action intended to change or correct people’s behaviour (Innes, 2003). The underlying goal of social control is to maintain social order , the ongoing, predictable arrangement of practices and behaviours on which society’s members base their daily lives.

A prime example of this function of the media is the “true crime” show, which often sensationally reiterates and reinforces the qualities of heroic law enforcement and villainous criminality. By showing law enforcement, victims and model citizens in the best light and criminality in the worst light, this genre of media reinforces social beliefs about who deserves punishment and who deserves rewards. Similarly, true crime podcasts like Someone Knows Something that re-investigate cold cases, the lives of serial killers, child abductions, the procurement techniques of cults and so on, draw on the minutia of transgressions surrounding major crimes like murder to reinforce the need for societal vigilance. Vicary and Fraley’s (2010) research shows that women in particular are drawn to the true crime genre because of “ the potential life-saving knowledge” they provide. “ For example, by understanding why an individ ual decides to kill, a woman can learn the warning signs to watch for in a jealous lover or stranger” (Vicary and Fraley, 2010).

Media are also direct means of surveillance and social control. The panoptic surveillance envisioned by Jeremy Bentham and later analyzed by Michel Foucault (1975) is increasingly realized in the form of technology used to monitor people’s every move. This surveillance was imagined as a form of complete visibility and constant monitoring in which the observation posts are centralized and the observed are never communicated with directly. Today, digital security cameras capture people’s movements, satellite technologies track people through their cell phones, and police forces around the world use facial-recognition software.

Critical Sociology

In contrast to theories in the positivist perspective, the critical perspective focuses on the creation and reproduction of power relations and inequality through the media — social processes that tend to destabilize society and create conflict rather than contribute to its smooth operation. The focus of critique is to provide the conditions for positive change that address systematic patterns of inequality and exclusion.

A key concept of the critical approach is the critique of ideology , the presentation of a partial view of the world as objective and universal. As Karl Marx put it, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas” (Marx and Engels, 1998/1846). The media present an image or idea of the world from the narrow point of view of the wealthy and powerful, or dominant class. For Marx this was at odds with the worldview and the interests of the working class who form the vast majority of a society’s population. “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently, also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it” (Marx and Engels, 1998/1846).

As the media, as “means of mental production” are mostly privately owned, the critical sociological focus on media concentration and corporate ownership of the media is largely a question concerning whose ideas, messages and points of view are being transmitted and whose are not. This does not mean that the media only present the world view of the ruling class. Just as the power of the ruling class is contested in society as a whole, media representations are also contested. The key point is that in sociology the term ideology does not refer simply to a set of ideas (like conservativism, liberalism, socialism, racism, environmentalism, etc.) but to a set of ideas that conceal, distort, or justify power relations in a society. Ideology critique is the practice critical sociologists use in the study of media to analyze and challenge the underlying ideological assumptions of media texts.

For example, news coverage concerning the economy often focuses on stock markets, corporate takeovers, quarterly earnings, interest rates, commodity prices and the like. Economic “growth” is a good news story, whereas economic “contraction” or “stagnation” is a bad news story. This is a picture of the economy from the point of view of large investors of capital. From their point of view, this is the way the economy works, and these are the events that interest them. In other words, it is a partial view of the economy, which is very different from the lived experience of most people who go to work, are seeking jobs, or live off a wage or salary. Moreover, from Marx’s point of view, it is a picture of the economy conceals or distorts the reality of the actual economy that most people experience because the everyday social relations of class, concerns with precarious employment and making ends meet, quality of work life, hyper exploitation and global inequality, environmental destruction, etc. are simply not part of the picture.

Critical sociologists also look at who controls the media, and how media promotes the norms of upper-middle-class white demographics while minimizing the presence of the working class, marginalized groups, and racialized minorities.

For example, a study from Gilchrist (2010) showed a large disparity in the amount and content of coverage in a sample of white and Indigenous women who were missing and suspected victims of violent crimes. Newspapers gave the Indigenous women three and a half times less coverage; their articles were shorter and were less likely to appear on the front page. The white women were often described in news reports as being “gifted” or “cherished,” while Indigenous women were describe as being “pretty” or “shy.” The amount of personal information included in accounts of the White women far outweighed the amount and depth of information presented about the Indigenous women. The overall effect, Gilchrist argues, is that “the systematic exclusion, trivialization, and marginalization of missing/murdered Aboriginal women can be described as symbolic annihilation” (Gilchrist, 2010). Whereas the white women’s lives were represented as newsworthy — “legitimate, worthy, and innocent” —  Indigenous women’s victimization was represented as routine and their lives were erased. Moreover, “the lack of coverage might also create a vicious cycle, whereby inattention to Aboriginal women’s victimization by the police and community is reinforced by the lack of coverage” (Gilchrist, 2010).

This is also a problem of stereotypes used in the media to present oversimplified ideas about groups of people based on rigid generalizations. They do not bear up under close examination but are repeated often enough to become shorthand ways to characterize whole groups of people. The white women Gilchrist studied fell into well established and romanticized representations of white womanhood —  purity, cleanliness, vulnerability, and virginity (Dyer, 1997) — but the Indigenous women were represented with colonial stereotypes of the “squaw” — uncivilized, dirty, lazy, degraded, easily sexually exploited and incapable of rescue (Gilchrist, 2010).

Similarly generalizing stereotypes are used to characterize young Black males in Canada: the gangsta image, which characterizes Black males as dangerous, defiant and criminal, and the entertainer image, which characterizes them as athletic or musically and theatrically talented (Manzo and Bailey, 2008). One young Black offender interviewed by Manzo and Bailey described representations of Blacks in the media:

They look like — like criminals and stuff like that. Only some, only some ’cause some Black people are talented and positive people, you know, sometimes. But sometimes they just, I don’t know, sometimes they look bad. Like I know like when you’re sitting watching TV and stuff, they make them look like people from the ghetto and stuff like that all the time. Like every Black person’s from the ghetto and stuff, and do a lot of crime and stuff like that. . . . lots of people think of Black people as thugs and robbing people and stuff, you know . . . . Like some people think that a Black person’s not normal. They just think — like how there’s a lot of crime and stuff because of movies and stuff, you know, and how Black people that are in the movies, they all live in ghettos and stuff and all do crime and stuff like that. I just think that that’s how people see us (Manzo and Bailey, 2008).

Manzo and Bailey (2008) note that, “[m]ass-cultural images of Black Canadians, it would seem, not only motivate stereotyping on the part of those who are not Black: they … also influence racial identities and related self-concepts among Black persons themselves.”

Gatekeeping and Media Ownership

Powerful individuals and social institutions have a great deal of influence over what kind of media is available for popular consumption and what messages circulate in society, a form of gatekeeping. Shoemaker and Voss (2009) define gatekeeping as the sorting process by which thousands of messages are shaped into a mass media–appropriate form and reduced to a manageable amount. In other words, the people in charge of the media decide what the public is exposed to, which, as C. Wright Mills (2000/1956) famously noted, is the heart of media’s power.

Media is also big business, and the underlying motive of the commercial media is to profit from the circulation of media content. The network media economy includes communication infrastructure companies (wired and wireless telecoms, Internet services, cable, satellite, and fibre TV), digital and traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines) and internet application companies (online advertising, search, social platforms). This sector generated $94.6 billion in Canada in 2021, up from $89 billion in 2019 (Winseck, 2022).

Since the 1990s, corporate mergers and consolidation have lead to the concentrated ownership of the Canadian media into six multimedia companies: Bell, Telus, Rogers, Québecor, the CBC and Corus. These six Canadian companies accounted for 69% of network media economy revenue in 2021 (Winseck, 2022). When media ownership is highly concentrated like this, the concern about gatekeeper power is that a few dominant players can limit competition and control news and media content.

• Bell Media Inc. Owned by Bell Canada (BCE) and based in Montreal. Its operations include telecoms (Bell Canada, Bell Mobile), television broadcasting and production, radio broadcasting, digital media and Internet properties. Bell Media owns 35 local television stations led by CTV, Canada’s most-watched television network, and the French-language Noovo network in Québec; and 27 specialty channels, including leading specialty services TSN, MTV Canada, and Much. It owns Crave TV and the Montreal Canadians hockey team. Its revenue was reported as $23.96 billion 2019.
• Rogers Communications Inc. Owned by the Rogers family and based in Toronto. Its operations are primarily in the fields of wireless communications, cable television, and Internet services, with significant additional mass media companies. Rogers owns City TV, 13 local TV stations, sports channels (Sportsnet), network and satellite-to-cable programming and 55 radio stations across the country. It owns the Toronto Blue Jays baseball team. In 2023, it bought Shaw Communications, which had been the third largest media corporation in Canada, and was able to expand its home telecommunications services to Western Canada. Its revenue was reported as $13.9 billion in 2020, but adding Shaw Communications, which reported a revenue of $5.5 billion in 2021, will make it the second largest media conglomerate in the country.
• Telus Corp. Owned by the Bank of Montreal (as largest shareholder) and based in Vancouver. Its operations are primarily in the fields of telecommunications products and services including internet access, voice, entertainment, healthcare, video, smart home automation and IPTV (internet protocol) television. Its revenue was reported as $15.34 billion in 2020.
• Québecor. Owned by the Péladeau family and based in Montreal. Québecor Media Group has a significant hold on French Québec media and is the largest owner of French-language media in Canada. Québecor owns TVA, Le Journal de Montréal, Le Journal de Québec, 24 hrs, and Videotron. It acquired Freedom Mobile from Shaw Communications as part of the regulatory approval of the Rogers/Shaw merger. Its revenue was reported as $4.122 billion in 2017.
• CBC/Radio Canada. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is Canada’s public broadcaster. Created by an Act of Parliament in 1936, the government-owned company provides services in both of Canada’s official languages, English and French. All told, the CBC operates two television networks, four radio networks, a cable television service, an international shortwave radio service and a commercial-free audio service. CBC operates approximately 100 radio and television stations across Canada. Its revenue was reported as $1.9 billion (including approximately $1.4 billion in government subsidy) in 2021.
• Corus Entertainment. Owned by the Shaw family and based in Toronto. Not included in the sale of Shaw Communications to Rogers, Corus Entertainment owns Global News and Global TV, which is Canada’s second most watched television network after CTV. The Television segment is comprised of 33 specialty television networks, 15 conventional television stations, digital assets, a social media digital agency, a social media creator network, technology and media services, and the Corus content business. The Radio segment includes 39 radio stations, situated primarily in urban centres in English Canada, with a concentration in the densely populated area of Southern Ontario (Institute for Quantitative Social Science, 2023). Its revenue was reported at $1.65 billion in 2018.

Also notable in terms of dominant media content producers in Canada are the PostMedia Network, owned by US private equity firm Chatham Asset Management (who also own the National Enquirer in the US), and Thomson Reuters, owned by the Thomson family who are reportedly Canada’s richest family (Institute for Quantitative Social Science, 2023). Postmedia own The National Post, The Financial Post, The Montreal Gazette, The Calgary Herald and Sun, The Vancouver Sun, The Ottawa Citizen, London Free Press, Edmonton Journal , canada.com and canoe.com, whereas Thomson Reuters own the Globe and Mail and the global news service Reuters.

One of the unique features of Canadian media ownership is its high level of vertical integration , which is when a corporation owns different businesses in the same chain of production and distribution. In Canada this means that the biggest media content producers (television, radio, newspapers, etc.) are owned by the biggest communication infrastructure corporations (wired and wireless telecoms, Internet services, cable, satellite and fibre TV). In a report on global media ownership published in 2016, Canada had the third highest level of vertical integration out of the 28 countries examined (Winseck, 2022).

Apart from the CBC, Postmedia, and Thomson Reuters, the digital and traditional audiovisual content media in Canada provide only a small percentage of overall corporate revenue, suggesting that the production of media content has largely become “ornamental” in the overall corporate strategies. This does not necessarily affect their gatekeeping role, but does emphasize that whatever media content is produced, the bottom line for the corporate media is to maximize profits. Winseck (2022) argues that content producing media “are important, but their real purpose seems to be to drive the take-up of the companies’ vastly more lucrative wireless, broadband Internet, and cable, satellite and IPTV services.” For Bell, Rogers and Québecor, 80–90% of their revenue flows from the communications infrastructure/services side of their business rather than from media content services.

Gatekeeping and Digital Media

Increasingly however, the domestic, vertically integrated media conglomerates find themselves in competition for Canadian audiences, consumers and advertising revenue with the US-based internet corporations Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft, who had 15.3% of network media economy revenue in 2021 (Winseck, 2022). Smaller players in Canada are Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok.

Some argue that media ownership concentration is therefore no longer a problem because the range of information sources and the ways people communicate have expanded significantly (Public Policy Forum, 2017). As an example, the rise in TV concentration seen between 2010 and 2014 has since reversed on account of the rise of online video services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+ (Winseck, 2022). Moreover, as the new digital media evolved from the 1990s on, they displaced many traditional forms of “legacy media” (broadcast television, radio, newspapers, and magazines). The traditional mass media were centralized, one-to-many media, allowing a culturally diverse society to be dominated by one race, gender, or class. In ideological fashion, the media could impose the dominant group’s worldview as a societal norm. Digital media appear to render the gatekeeper role less of a factor in information distribution. Any citizen who has an internet connection and a computer or smart phone can produce mediated content.

On the other hand, even though digital and social media enable one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many forms of discourse, the economic model of the world’s most popular websites works through a mechanism similar to traditional mass media: selling the attentive capacities of audiences to advertisers. This is done in a much more targeted way however, which has implications for the new media’s gatekeeping power. 

There are an estimated 2 billion websites in 2023 but they are obviously not all equal (Visual Capitalist, 2023). Using traffic rankings, Figure 16.20 shows the 50 most popular websites in 2022. The top 10 are: Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Baidu, Wikipedia, Yandex, Yahoo, and WhatsApp. Aside from Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia which is managed by the Wikimedia foundation and is a not-for-profit entity, every other site on the list is a profit making privately owned entity, most of whom generate funds through extracting user data and selling targeted advertising (Sytaffel, 2014).

The corporations which own these Websites, such as Google (Google and YouTube), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) and XCorp (Twitter) are all multibillion dollar private companies, whose economic model is underpinned by the creation of platforms: websites or applications that enable two or more individuals or groups to interact (users, content creators, customers, advertisers, service providers, producers, suppliers, and even physical objects with 3D printing). This is the basis of platform capitalism , a business model in which value and competitive advantage are extracted from the data of platform users (Srnicek, 2017a). “By providing the infrastructure and intermediation between different groups, platforms place themselves in a position in which they can monitor and extract all the interactions between these groups. This positioning is the source of their economic and political power” (Srnicek, 2017b).

By controlling the digital platforms through which communication and information is exchanged, the media’s gatekeeper power has evolved and changed focus. At the level of communications networks and digital platforms, gatekeeper power works to shape people’s access to news and media content (Winseck, 2022). Digital platforms are themselves “gates.” (1) Because media content increasingly passes through them, it means that already financially precarious news and entertainment media become further dependent on the digital corporations to distribute this content on the internet. These transactions then become a means to harvest and use personal information to sell to advertisers (and back to the content producers), which is the basis of the business model. (2) In addition, the more powerful internet, communication, and media companies become, the greater their ability to influence government regulation and set exploitative privacy and data protection policy norms that differ from what people say they want. (3) Finally, gatekeeper power stays intact to the degree that (a) the platforms’ algorithms sort, rank, recommend, or personalize information for users. As increased traffic means increased revenue, one effect of this has been to magnify divisive political and social positions which attract views and create algorithmically generated, self-confirming “echo chambers.” This has radically altered the nature of discourse in the public sphere and undermined evidence-based decision making. (b) The platforms also regulate which content and apps gain access to their operating systems and online retail spaces. “These are the ‘hidden levers of power’ that determine whether Alex Jones, Donald Trump or adult content on Tumblr stay up, come down, or are limited in their visibility” (Winseck, 2022).

Media bias refers to the bias of media content in the selection of the events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. Sometimes media bias is defined by explicit promotion of a particular political position, lack of objectivity and “balance,” the personal subjective bias of the content producer, or a transgression of professional standards. In critical sociology however, the focus is on the ways that bias in media messaging supports dominant economic and political structures of power while marginalizing dissent.

One prominent approach to media bias in critical sociology is Herman and Chomsky ‘s (2008) propaganda model . They argue that “t he media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them” (Herman and Chomsky, 2008). The authors argue that:

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behaviour that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda ( Herman and Chomsky , 2008).

As Noam Chomsky (Achbar & Wintonick, 1992) clarifies, “all of this has nothing to do with liberal or conservative bias. According to the propaganda model, both liberal and conservative wings of the media, whatever those terms are supposed to mean, fall within the same framework of assumptions.” The focus of this critique of media bias is not on conservative vs. liberal media, but on how the dominant media discourses serve to “manufacture consent” to social inequality, corporate power and state interests.

Sometimes the bias of the news media is explicit, as with Fox News in the US. However, Herman and Chomsky (2008) describe a series of more subtle mechanisms or media filters through which “the powerful are able to fix the premise of discourse, to decide what the general populace is allowed to see hear and think about.” Specifically, they describe five filters:

• Ownership: The dominant media firms are large, concentrated corporate conglomerates. They have common interests with other major corporations, banks, and government, including the commitment to an economic system of market driven profit. These interests influence and constrain journalists, editors and media content.
• Advertising: The economic model of the media is based on generating revenue from advertising, giving advertisers the power to influence content. The media’s dependence on advertising makes it less likely that media will produce content that advertiser’s find offensive.
• Sourcing: The reliance on “trusted sources,” press releases, and news conferences often means using government or corporate spokespeople who spend vast sums on public relations, spin and lobbying. Using unofficial sources requires more work and these sources are often only consulted for reactions to, or minority positions on, news stories rather than being the primary source.
• Flak: Flak is the ability of financially or politically privileged actors to attack or legally harass journalists and sources who have provided critical media coverage or challenged official and corporate points of view.
• Ideology: The use of ideological filters like “anticommunism” during the Cold War period (1945–1989) mobilize the population against an enemy and are fuzzy enough to frame any criticism or alternate viewpoint of the system as an “Us versus Them” issue. Contemporary examples include the belief in the “the free market,” post 9-11 anti-terrorism discourses or attacking “wokeness.” Herman and Chomsky (2008) note that whenever the ideological filter is triggered, the normal requirement for rigorous journalistic evidence is suspended and charlatans, informers, and other opportunists can thrive as evidential sources and experts, even after their lack of credentials or truthfulness has been exposed.

Quantitative analyses of media have tried to see how changes in media ownership affect media content, particularly in relation to the issue of media bias (Winseck, 2022). Evidence regarding the link between media ownership and bias is “mixed and inconclusive” (Soderlund, Brin, Miljan & Hildebrandt, 2012), however, the research is premised on the idea that different owners will have different biases. The consistent finding of “no effect” between ownership and bias might be better seen as emblematic of how the media preserves the status quo (Gitlin, 1978), which is what Herman and Chomsky predict.

Another type of criticism of the propaganda model has to do with the degree to which the public is manipulated by the media. The focus on the production of biased media content tends to obscure the diverse range of audience responses to the information and perspectives they receive in the media. To be fair, Chomsky and Herman are clear that they are not discussing media effects —  the idea that a biased media will necessarily produce a biased population —  but media structure and performance —  what the media does and what constraints it faces. “The propaganda model describes forces that shape what the media does; it does not imply that any propaganda emanating from the media is always effective” ( Herman and Chomsky , 2008). Sociologists can turn to interpretive sociology to concentrate on the processes by which audiences take or create meaning from media texts.

Interpretive Sociology

In contrast to positivist and critical approaches to the media, interpretive sociology emphasizes the processes by which media producers and audiences actively create and interpret meanings in the media. As Brym et al. (2013) explain, “people are not just empty vessels into which the mass media pour a defined assortment of beliefs, values, and ideas.” Interpretive approaches to media emphasize that both media production and interpretation are social processes. Media producers take an active role in deciding how an event, idea or thing will be represented. Media audiences take an active role in figuring out what the meaning of a media product is and how they will “use” or incorporate it into their daily life. This approach contrasts with the functionalist and critical traditions that tend to see the media as a monolithic source of culture that either reinforces the core values of society or imposes an ideologically distorted representation of society.

In mediated societies, the media have become central agents in the creation and spread of symbols that become the basis for a shared understanding of society. Sociologists working in the symbolic interactionist perspective focus on this social construction of reality as an ongoing process of social interactions in which people subjectively create and understand reality. Media representations provide a key source of images, identities, characters, and ideas through which this social construction is accomplished. Consider kids enthusiastically acting out scenes from a TV show or movie they liked or a family watching the news and making comments on the events as they are reported.

Media and audiences construct reality in a number of interactive ways. For some audience members, the people they watch on a screen or meet with on social media forums can become a primary group : the small informal groups of people like families who are closest to them and most influential. For others, media provide reference groups : groups to which an individual compares himself or herself, and by which they judge their successes and failures. (See Chapter 5. Socialization on media as an agent of socialization).

Katz and Lazarfeld (1955) describe the two-step flow of communication in which an intermediary — an opinion leader or influencer — intervenes between the sender of a message and the audience. People do not simply change their attitudes and behaviours or go out and buy a product because the media tells them to. Instead, the influence often comes from a third party, usually a person of status seen as having greater access to information. The influencer is an authority able to filter, interpret and explain media messages to an audience (Mwengenmeir, 2014). It is the credibility of the film critic or Rotten Tomatoes rating that persuades the individual to shell out money to see a movie. It is a favourable impression by social media “thought leaders,” late show TV hosts, or religious leaders who expound on the messages released by politicians that sway people’s political beliefs.

Thought leaders and influencers have in fact become the center of a multibillion-dollar influencer marketing industry. Influencer marketing is a form of social media marketing that involves product placements and endorsements from online personalities who use their social media followers as a ready-made market. Internet stars on platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok are used to promote brand visibility, drive engagement, and impact purchasing decisions for millions of users. Global spending on influencer marketing stood at $16.4 billion U.S. in 2022, having more than doubled since 2019 (Dencheva, 2023). A key component of the influencer’s role in the two-step flow of communication is the establishment of their authenticity —  a form of charismatic authority to make l ifestyle suggestions to followers based on the perceived “realness” or truth of their messages (Hund, 2023). The influencer’s ability to express themselves “authentically” is typically not based on their credentials, expertise or training but by their perceived sincerity and ability to follow through on claims they make about themselves. In a mediated society where authenticity, trust and “realness” are elusive, and influence is sold as a commodity, the study of what makes an influencer authentic is a fascinating sociological topic.

Media Representations

Media representations are the main way in which people access information about the world beyond their immediate milieu. Representations refer to media “texts” (images, books, films, newspaper articles, television shows, tweets, internet memes, etc.) that use signs and symbols to stand in for, or re-present , directly lived experiences. The process of translation from “thing” to representation is central to understanding the role of media as an institution of cultural transmission. As Stuart Hall puts it, an “event must become a story before it can become a communicative event” (Hall, 1980). How do events become media stories and what happens to them when they do?

For example, in March 2013, two high school football players in Steubenville, Ohio, were convicted of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl who was drunk at a party. A reporter covering the trial described the verdict in terms of the damage done, not to the girl, but to the “two young men who had such promising careers” (Scowen, 2013). This is a case in which the raw event of the sexual assault, captured on film by bystanders and broadcasted on social media, was turned into a story about the young athletes and their promising careers, rather than a story about the crime committed against the young girl or sexual violence against women more generally.

The important point is that the story is not factually “untrue” or even deliberately biased; it can be taken to represent the reporter’s honest emotional reaction to the events. However, encoded into the story were messages about the importance of athletes in American society, the class background of the young men (i.e., their “promising careers”), and the stigmatized status of the young woman who had been drunk at the party. Not told in the story was an alternative set of meanings that would have focused more appropriately on the seriousness of sexual assault as a crime, the effect of assault as a traumatic experience on the victim, and the cultural attitudes that permitted the young men to think about the young woman in this way in the first place.

With respect to this example, the crucial point regarding the nature of the audience’s mediated experience of the event is that in the shift from the reporter’s immediate, emotional response to seeing the young men sentenced in court to the production and broadcast of the event as a media story is a process of encoding or messaging. Encoding is enacted in the decisions that the reporter and the media producers made about how to re-present the event as a story. Encoding is the act whereby the events or raw reality depicted in a story are turned into messages that convey specific cultural meanings or emphases. In a mediated culture, the audience often does not have direct access to the event; the audience only has access to the codes that turned the event into a story.

Making Connections: Big Picture

Codes of violence.

Earlier in the chapter, the idea that violence in the media impacts audiences was discussed as a media effect . This framework is based on a positivist or causal model of explanation in which media content is the independent variable or stimulus and audience response is the dependent variable. Generally, the evidence presented in research on media effects is statistical in nature, meaning that to the degree that a media effect can be demonstrated, not everyone who watches a violent program will become more aggressive, fearful, or insensitive. Instead the research shows an overall pattern of effects or tendencies that emerge across the sample. On balance, viewers become more aggressive, fearful, or insensitive.

The causal model of explanation is drawn from behaviouralism — a linear sequence of sender/message/receiver in which the message is a stimulus, and the reception is a measurable response in the audience. The interpretive approach has a different focus. For a media “effect” to take place it has to pass through the processes whereby the meanings of media texts are firstly created by the sender and secondly interpreted by the receiver. In other words, rather than modelling media effects as stimulus and response, interpretive sociology examines the processes of meaning construction and interpretation.

In interpretive sociology violence in the media can be examined with regard to the process of encoding. Hall (1980) writes, “representations of violence on the TV screen ‘are not violence but messages about violence’.” There is a difference between violent imagery as a stimulus and violent imagery as a meaning or message.

It could be argued that Dirty Harry and Foghorn Leghorn are equally violent in terms of the number of acts of violence they depict, but the messages about violence they convey are quite different. The violence is encoded differently. In the Dirty Harry movies of the 1970s, where the violence is drawn from the tradition of Hollywood film noir and action thrillers, the message is that a “true man” must follow his convictions, even by violence. Other styles of masculinity that involve non-violence, reason, internal reflection, duty, rational discussion, compromise, and respect for the law are somehow not true to the core of manhood. In the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, where the violence is drawn from the tradition of carnival and slapstick comedy, the message of the violence is that those who are overly pompous or conceited will be cut down to size. The effect of these codes is to show violence as means of comic reversal in the fortunes of the characters.

Would the audience enjoy the violence in the Dirty Harry movies or identify with the hero, if they were fully conscious of their connection to toxic codes of masculinity or if the violence was real? Are viewers able to laugh at Foghorn Leghorn getting a kick in the butt if all they see is a painful or violent act, or a bad role model for children?

Decoding and Audience Reception

It is worthwhile to pursue Hall’s (1980) ideas a little further to get at the entire circuit of a media message (see Figure 16.x). The first step of the circuit describes the process of translation from event to story in a particular media outlet as a process of encoding. The events or raw reality depicted by the story are turned into messages that convey specific cultural meanings or emphases. These are the meaning structures 1 in Figure 16.26 . Hall notes that this process takes place under specific conditions including the frameworks of knowledge used by the encoders (background knowledge that affects how they see or interpret the story), the relations of production of the encoders (workplace conditions, assigned tasks, market pressures, etc.), and the technical infrastructure used by the encoders (the types of media and technology used to present and circulate the story). These conditions all affect how the message is encoded.

Through the process of encoding the audience does not have direct access to the raw event through the media; they have access to a story about the event. The terms “event” and “story” are most appropriate to the discussion of media news stories, but the same principles apply to the creation of fictional stories about imagined events, the production of social media memes or the selection and presentation of visual images of actual people or places, etc. In each case, people are not only told what things are but what they mean . If a code is like a set of instructions for how to assemble the elements of a story into a coherent whole that makes sense to an audience (the programme as ‘meaningful’ discourse in Figure 16.26 ), in making choices about how to tell a story, the media can be seen to encode certain messages into their texts while excluding others.

On the other side of the process is audience reception : how the audience receives the media messages. Hall describes decoding as the process whereby the audience actively interprets or decodes the meaning of the story or media text. Sometimes this occurs through the intermediary of influencers, as discussed above, and sometimes not. In either case, the audience is not a passive recipient of media messages. Audiences are active in producing and receiving codes; they actively use codes to decode the messages in the media, receiving some messages and rejecting others. These are the meaning structures 2 in Figure 16.26.

These audience-produced codes are not necessarily the same as those used by the media producers. The audience uses its own frameworks of knowledge to interpret media texts and programs. These vary according to both individual factors such as sense of humour, perceptiveness, cultural knowledge, and social factors such as class (“relations of production” in Figure 16.26 ), gender, ethnicity, education, age, rural/urban location, etc.). B y no means is it certain that the messages encoded by the media are those that are received by the audience. For example, a massive Twitter and Facebook reaction arose to the story about the sentencing of the young athletes in Steubenville, Ohio. For most of these commentators, the media’s focus on the damaged futures of the young men was a gross injustice considering the actual damage done to the young woman.

As a result, Hall (1980) describes the power of the media as a “complex structure in dominance.” While the media is a means of circulating the “dominant or preferred meanings” of a society, as both positivist and critical sociology suggest, there is no guarantee that these meanings are received, accepted, or reproduced by the audience. He suggests that there are at least three “hypothetical positions from which decodings of a televisual discourse can be constructed” (Hall, 1980). In other words, there are three general frameworks in which audiences interpret what they view on TV or other media:

• The dominant‐hegemonic position : When the viewer decodes the media text in terms of the dominant or preferred meanings of society. These are often the meanings that seem natural or common sense in a society. For example, in watching a political debate the viewer might lean one way or another in terms of their political party preference but accept the underlying premise that lowering corporate taxes to attract business investment to Canada is in the national interest. Or, they might watch a show in which Muslim characters are presented as fanatics and terrorists and not question the stereotypes because they fit an image reinforced by news reports or anti-terrorism ideological “filters,” not to mention the history of action thriller villains.
• The negotiated position : When the viewer largely accepts the dominant or preferred meanings of society but makes exceptions to the rule based on specific situations or local conditions. For example, the viewer might accept that attracting business investment to Canada is the goal of government at the level of the national interest but remember that subsidies and tax credits did not work to keep their local mill in operation. As a result, their politics “on the ground” might be quite different than the political positions they accept during national debates. Similarly, they might accept stereotypes about Muslims in the media they consume but not connect these stereotypes with the friendships they have with their Muslim neighbours or work colleagues.
• The oppositional position : When the viewer rejects the dominant or preferred meanings of society and replaces them with a set of oppositional meanings or an alternative frame of reference. For example, when the viewer who listens to the debate on the need to attract business investment interprets every mention of the ‘national interest’ as ‘ruling class interest’ they are decoding the debate from an oppositional position. Or, every time they see Muslims represented as fanatics and terrorists in a movie or TV show, they reinterpret the plot in terms of the history of colonization of the Middle East and Asia.

Functionalist, Critical, and Interpretive Approaches to Advertising Images

Advertisement is a specific type of media representation. It uses language and visual imagery to persuade an audience to do something, usually to buy a product, but in the posters above to enlist in the army or buy war bonds. As rhetoric is the art of using language to persuade or influence others, Roland Barthes (1977) refers to using photographs in advertising as “the rhetoric of the image.” This emphasizes that advertisement uses images to make an intentional or calculated message. Advertisers try to use the image to convey a specific set of messages to an audience about a product or campaign with the goal of convincing them to take action or hold some sort of belief. How can sociologists analyze the relationship between media and society through the study of advertising images?

Howard Becker (1974) argues that photographs contain a wealth of information of interest to sociologists.

“Every part of the photographic image carries some information that contributes to its total statement; the viewer’s responsibility is to see, in the most literal way, everything that is there and respond to it. To put it another way, the statement the image makes — not just what it shows you, but the mood, moral evaluation and causal connections it suggests —  is built up from those details. A proper “reading” of a photograph sees and responds to them consciously.”

How might this approach to reading photographs be applied to reading advertisement communications? Functionalist, critical and interpretive sociologists would frame their reading in different ways.

The structural functionalist analysis focuses on identifying the functions of advertising. In commercial advertising the main function of ads is to inform consumers about a product to integrate the production of goods with their sale on the market (the social integration function). This is a key function in making a market economy work. In addition the ads perform other functions, like creating a consensus about the meaning of the product (solidarity function), socializing the audience about the norms and values of society (socialization function), or controlling the behaviour of audiences and consumers, i.e., to buy one product and not another (social control function).

In the three propaganda posters above the functions are similar except that instead of selling a product, they are performing the function of mobilizing the population to support the war effort though enlistment or buying war bonds. In each case, a fictional or real figure has been chosen to stand in for or symbolically embody the country or nation — Uncle Sam for the US, Lord Kitchener for the UK, a Canadian infantryman (Tommy Canuck) for Canada —  and to bring out feelings of solidarity, unanimity and patriotic duty. It is interesting that the Canadian poster relied on an anonymous “everyman” figure as opposed to the mythic Uncle Sam or Secretary of State for War Lord Kitchener. The infantryman serves as an emblem for sacrifice, nobility and purity but also Canadian modesty it would seem. Canada was a young country at the beginning of WW1, less than 50 years old, and did not have an established national identity or set of unifying “great” national traditions or symbols to draw from. In fact, many historians have argued that Canada’s experience in WW1 was a pivotal moment in the function of nation-building: the birth of Canada as an independent nation (Vance, 1997). The function of the Tommy Canuck image was to align the population with a unifying national identity and mobilize them to support the war effort.

Critical sociological approaches would examine the use of propaganda, nationalism and patriotism in these posters. They are instances of larger discourses of power in which the bottom line is citizens sacrificing their lives to obtain state objectives. In democracies, state objectives including war are represented as the will of the people, but when this will conflicts with instincts of self-preservation it has to be constructed and reinforced through propaganda and other means. The use of Uncle Sam, Lord Kitchener, and the Canadian infantryman to symbolize the unity of the nation, national interest and duty is one way to secure this consent. Instead of seeing WW1 as a struggle between rival European imperial powers over colonial expansion, a bloody war in which  61,000 Canadians died and 172,000 were wounded (Canadian War Museum, 2017), it becomes a war in which a “We” is threatened by a “Them.” Rather than a matter of critically examining the causes of the war, the stern pointing finger of each of the figures frames the issue of enlistment or war bonds at an emotional level as a matter of duty and heroic sacrifice. The pointing fingers imply that non-compliance would be an act of cowardliness and shirking. Contemporary efforts to describe WW1, or specific events like Vimy Ridge, as the birth of a nation, have also been used ideologically in attempts to rebrand Canada as a “warrior nation” rather than a “peacekeeper nation,” a precedent that would set Canada on the path to participating in future foreign wars rather than promoting diplomatic solutions (McKay and Swift, 2012).

Interpretive approaches focus on the different variables involved in interpreting and decoding the messages in the posters. Each poster addresses a “You,” both in the text and with the pointing finger. But who is the “You” who is being addressed exactly? The audience is not unified. Different segments of the population interpret the message differently according to their dominant, negotiated and oppositional positions. For example, the Uncle Sam figure, portrayed as a white northern Yankee, might alienate racialized Americans and southerners rather than unify them. Women would interpret the three posters differently than men because it was only men who were being asked to enlist or buy bonds. In fact, when mandatory conscription was announced in Canada in 1917, women’s support had to be enticed with the “Wartime Elections Act,” which allowed female relatives of soldiers to vote in federal elections. Women were in the position of having to witness the casualties of war, and they feared for the lives of partners and sons who were forced to enlist in the Canadian army. In Canada there were also deep divisions between the French in Quebec who felt no allegiance to defending Great Britain in the war, rural Canadians who needed human labour to work the fields, and English-speaking urban Canadians who largely supported the war. Each group interpreted the poster with a different set of concerns and meanings.

Finally, as images enter into popular culture and circulate they take on different meanings and associations. Fans of zombie movies might read a different set of meanings into the Tommy Canuck image in “Buy Your Victory Bonds” because of its remarkable resemblance to the zombie character played by Donald Sutherland in the final scene of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Zombie films have been used as metaphors for a variety of contemporary social issues, from the hazards of contemporary biotechnologies, to mindless consumerism, to the social disintegration of modern society. A zombie reading of Tommy Canuck might suggest that the mindless, devouring walking dead are symbols of patriotism and nationalism.

Media Attributions

• Figure 16.9 Guns of the Patriots – Tribute  by Kevin Wong, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY 2.0 licence.
• Figure 16.10 Émile Durkheim-vignette-png-9 by verapatricia_28 [uploader], via Wikimedia Commons, is used under a CC BY SA 4.0 licence.
• Figure 16.11 Vintage Ad #457: Chew Vel-X by Jamie, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY 2.0  licence.
• Figure 16.12 Watching tv on my new setup.. woohoo HD tivo.. by Dennis Yang, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY 2.0 licence.
• Figure 16.13 Chart 2: Percent social media users attributing selected outcomes to their use of social media, by age group and smart phone use, Canada, 2018  by Schimmele et al. (2021) at Statistics Canada, is used under the Statistics Canada Open Licence .
• Figure 16.14 Happy with smart phone  by cloud.shepherd, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY 2.0 licence.
• Figure 16.15 True Gangster Crime Cases. Vol. 2, no. 10 (November, 1940s) / True Gangster Crime Cases, vol. 2, no 10 (novembre, années 1940) by BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY 2.0  licence.
• Figure 16.16 1930s Nazi Germany propaganda children’s booklet cutout paper figures  by unidentified artist/illustrator from the Weiner Holocaust Library, via Wikimedia Commons, is used under a CC BY-SA 4.0  licence.
• Figure 16.17 Camera Obscura , 1910 by Fizyka, via Wikimedia Commons, is in the public domain .
• Figure 16.18 Porträt einer Squaw  by Will Soule, via Wikimedia Commons, is in the public domain .
• Figure 16.19 Figure 2: The Network Media Economy in Canada — What the CMCR Project Covers, in The Network Media Economy in Canada by D. Winseck (2022, p. 2) is used under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Figure 16.20 The Top 50 Most Visited Websites in the World by Nick Routley and Joyce Ma is used by permission of Visual Capitalist .
• Figure 16.21 Noam Chomsky  by Andrew Rusk, via Wikimedia Commons, is used under a CC BY 2.0 licence.
• Figure 16.22 Vulcan cosplayer   by Gage Skidmore, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY-SA 2.0 licence.
• Figure 16.23 Polski: Domy Towarowe “Centrum” w 2000 roku by Cezary Piwowarsk, via Wikimedia Commons, is used under a GNU Free Documentation Licence .
• Figure 16.24 Dirty Harry by Paul, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.
• Figure 16.25 Sylvester, Barnyard and Foghorn in “Crowing Pains” (1947) by Warner Bros, via Wikimedia Commons, is in the public domain .
• Figure 16.26 Figure 1 in Encoding/Decoding (Hall, 1980).
• Figure 16.27 Watching TV and joking around by Wonderlane, via Flickr, is used under a CC BY 2.0  licence.
• Figure 16.28 J. M. Flagg, I Want You for U.S. Army poster (1917)  by J. M. Flagg, via Wikipedia , is in the public domain .

Introduction to Sociology – 3rd Canadian Edition Copyright © 2023 by William Little and Ron McGivern is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Article contents

Media and the microfoundations of social norms change, unesco’s campaign: a media intervention in san bartolomé quialana, research design, empirical strategy, how does media influence social norms experimental evidence on the role of common knowledge.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2018

• Supplementary materials

How does media influence beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? While many scholars have studied the effect of media on social and political outcomes, we know surprisingly little about the channels through which this effect operates. I argue that two mechanisms can account for its impact. Media provides new information that persuades individuals to accept it (individual channel), but also, media informs listeners about what others learn, thus facilitating coordination (social channel). Combining a field experiment with a plausibly natural experiment in Mexico, I disentangle these effects analyzing norms surrounding violence against women. I examine the effect of a radio program when it is transmitted privately versus when it is transmitted publicly. I find no evidence supporting the individual mechanism. The social channel, however, increased rejection of violence against women and increased support for gender equality, but unexpectedly increased pessimism about whether violence would decline in the future.

A central concern across social sciences has been to understand the extent to which mass communication can influence social and political outcomes. Indeed, many scholars have shown that media effects abound and cover a wide area of topics, anywhere from political support and electoral behavior up to the perpetration of violence. However, we know little about the underlying mechanisms behind these effects. That is, how is it that media influence beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors? In particular, how does media influence social norms?

The process underlying media influence can be broadly decomposed into two potential effects: (1) an individual or direct effect, and (2) a social or indirect effect. In the former, media provides information about new norms and persuades individuals to accept them (Bandura Reference Bandura 1986 ; DellaVigna and Gentzkow Reference DellaVigna and Gentzkow 2010 ). In the latter, the information provided also serves as a coordination device. Coordination is needed because one can conceptualize social norms as coordination problems, that is, situations in which each person wants to participate only if others participate as well (Mackie Reference Mackie 1996 ; Chwe Reference Chwe 1998 ). As such, the provision of public information can enhance coordination on that norm through the creation of common knowledge (Mackie Reference Mackie 1996 ; Chwe Reference Chwe 2001 ).

While the individual mechanism would have an effect regardless of the dissemination method, the social one would be stronger when dissemination has a public component. Hence, I argue that information has a differential effect when it is transmitted individually and privately (e.g., through leaflets) than when it is transmitted through more social or collective outlets (such as mass media or public meetings). That is, how information is provided is important to fully understand the mechanisms behind its influence. Critically, however, media itself has a public component, and media related interventions in the literature have naturally been public. As such, by design, media is able to induce common knowledge precluding the isolation of the social component from the individual one, and thus making the task of fully understanding the microfoundations of media influence a daunting one.

This paper fills this gap by disentangling the extent to which media influence acts through the individual mechanism (via persuasion) versus the extent to which it does so through the social mechanism (via higher-order beliefs). To do so, I combine a plausibly natural experiment with a randomized field experiment, conducted in partnership with the UNESCO. Specifically, I analyze the effects of a norms campaign—a media (audio soap-opera) intervention—on a particular set of values and behaviors, namely attitudes and norms surrounding violence against women.

The issue of violence against women is an important and well-suited case for studying the influence of media. First, violence against women is a global concern. It is a violation of human rights and has extensive pernicious consequences that range from the direct physical and mental harm for women and their children to economic losses at the individual and national level. Second, in past years, development programs aimed at improving women’s economic, political, and social status have attracted substantive attention from researchers and policy-makers alike. A particularly popular type of intervention has been media and social norms marketing campaigns, with a special emphasis on “edutainment” (e.g., Paluck and Green Reference Paluck and Green 2009 ). It is crucial to enhance our understanding of the mechanisms behind these policy interventions in order to improve their design and efficacy. Finally, the case of violence against women lends itself for studying the influence of media on social norms as existing evidence points to the link between them. Jensen and Oster ( Reference Jensen and Oster 2009 ) show that the introduction of cable television in India exposed viewers to new information about the outside world and other ways of life, decreasing the reported acceptability of violence toward women. But this effect could also be explained by the publicity of the media, which can plausibly influence social norms via coordination—that is, influencing perceptions of what others think as desirable, and hence promote the rejection of violence because of the expectation that others will reject it as well.

The intervention manipulated the social context in which individuals were able to receive the program. To do so, the research was conducted in San Bartolomé Quialana, a small rural, indigenous community in Oaxaca, Mexico, during May to June 2013, where I combine (1) a plausible natural experiment on the broadcast’s reach with (2) randomly assigned invitations to listen to the program. San Bartolomé Quialana is broadly representative of rural communities, where violence against women is a serious problem (UNESCO 2012 ). With these elements in mind, an audio soap-opera program designed to challenge norms of gender roles and, in particular, discourage violence against women, was broadcasted via the community loudspeaker. This particular loudspeaker had a special characteristic, however. Topography conditions affected its reach, precluding part of the community from accessing the broadcast. This is important because only the area outside the loudspeaker’s reach provides the leverage to test the individual mechanism. Within this area, households were randomly invited to listen to the program, individually and privately, using an audio CD ( Audio CD treatment). Here, individuals were unaware of others listening to the program, precluding common knowledge creation and coordination, thus isolating the individual effect. On the other hand, the area within the loudspeaker’s reach allows us to test the social mechanism. In this area, the program was broadcasted once such that households were able to listen to it ( Village Loudspeaker treatment). In addition, households were randomly invited to listen to the program at a community meeting type of set-up. That is, they were invited to listen to the same program at the same time, but to do it physically copresent with other members of the community ( Community Meeting treatment). This treatment might facilitate the generation of common knowledge and, importantly, aims to match the invitation component of the Audio CD treatment. Overall, the design created four groups as shown in Table 1 .

Table 1 Groups Created by the Research Design

Measuring norms, attitudes, and behavior with a survey of 340 individuals in 200 households, I find that media influence is driven by social effects rather than individual persuasion. I also find that social interactions such as community meetings are not always necessary conditions for such effects. The evidence suggests that the social channel decreased personal and perceived social acceptance of violence against women and increased support for gender equality roles while also increasing pessimism on whether violence will decline in the future. In contrast, results show that the individual channel had no effect.

A competing explanation is that systematic differences may exist between the areas within and outside the loudspeaker’s reach, which could potentially affect beliefs and behaviors related to violence against women. I argue that this is not the case and show that a battery of individual and household characteristics are balanced between the two areas. Given the small size of the town and the nature of the treatment conditions, another concern is that the design could have been vulnerable to spill-overs. However, as I further discuss below, the experiment was designed to address this issue to the greatest extent possible, and most importantly, the presence of spill-overs would bias against the findings of the paper.

This study joins the growing literature demonstrating that exposure to information provided by mass media can influence a wide range of attitudes and behaviors. This paper contributes to this literature by empirically distinguishing the individual and social effects of media influence. This is important for several reasons. First, it improves our understanding of the mechanisms via which media impacts attitudes and social norms; these estimates help resolve an extant puzzle in the empirical literature on media influence. Second, such estimates are critical for thinking about questions of policy interventions. Third, it also sheds light on the way media interventions may have pernicious or unintended effects.

Norms are important because they are standards of behavior that are based on widely shared beliefs of how individual group members ought to behave in a given situation. As such, these customary rules of behavior coordinate individuals’ interactions with others (Young Reference Young 2008 ), and because of this, they are highly influential in shaping individual behavior, including discrimination and violence against a specific group, such as women. Norms can protect against violence, but they can also support and encourage the use of it. For instance, acceptance of violence is a risk factor for all types of interpersonal violence (Krug et al. Reference Krug, Dahberg, Mercy, Zwi and Lozano 2002 ). Indeed, behavior and attitudes related to violence toward women are shaped and reinforced by social norms in general, and gender stereotypes and expectations within the society in particular. These norms persist within society because of individuals’ preference to conform, given the expectation that others will also conform (Lewis Reference Lewis 1969 ; Mackie Reference Mackie 1996 ). That is, participation in such norms and behaviors (or the diffusion of new ones) is a coordination problem. This is because people are motivated to coordinate with one another when there are strategic complementarities: Social approval is only accrued by an individual if a sufficient number of people express their attitudes and behave in a similar way. Conversely, social sanctions can be inflicted on those with different expressed attitudes and behaviors if others do not join them (Coleman Reference Coleman 1990 ). For instance, these sanctions can take the form of shaming, shunning, or any other form of social ostracizing (Paluck and Ball Reference Paluck and Ball 2010 ). Other scholars argue that norms are self-sustaining irrespective of the threat of punishment. Two other mechanisms sustaining norms are (i) negative emotions such as guilt or shame that are triggered when norms have been internalized and (ii) the desire to avoid intrinsic costs that would result from coordination failure (Young Reference Young 2008 ). In short, beliefs about the acceptability of a given behavior, such as violence against women, are a key factor in explaining their occurrence (Mackie Reference Mackie 1996 ).

One might object that violence against women might be driven by different forces as it is often a private interaction in the household, and presumably people will not engage in violent acts simply because they think others do. But a person engaging in violence might often think about the overall social context. For instance, whether people who find out about these actions will understand it as a crime, and report it. Bancroft makes this point when discussing the psychology of abusive men as follows: “While a man is on an abusive rampage, verbally or physically, his mind maintains awareness of a number of questions: ‘Am I doing something that other people could find out about, so it could make me look bad? Am I doing anything that could get me in legal trouble?’” ( Reference Bancroft 2003 : 34). Furthermore, even if the physical consequences of domestic violence can be hide publicly, other behaviors surrounding gender inequality, such as early marriage or lack of financial independence, are more visible.

Because of these considerations, numerous policies and programs have embarked on ambitious campaigns to address social issues like violence against women by promoting changes in social norms. Many of these strategies take the form of media-driven information interventions, such as TV or radio soap operas (Paluck and Ball Reference Paluck and Ball 2010 ). These efforts raise fundamental questions about the extent to and the conditions under which media can influence social norms in general, and about the microfoundations of such process in particular. Media influence can be broadly decomposed into two effects: (1) an individual or direct effect, and (2) a social or indirect effect.

Individual Effect

The individual or direct effect of media relies on persuasion . The emphasis is on the persuasive power of the content, which ignites an individual learning process, updating personal values and beliefs (Staub and Pearlman Reference Staub and Pearlman 2009 ; DellaVigna and Gentzkow Reference DellaVigna and Gentzkow 2010 ). This “individual educational process” is in line with arguments put forward by social learning theory, where the educational effect of media works via educational role models (Bandura Reference Bandura 1986 ). These educational role models are able to perform an instructive function, and transmit knowledge, values and behaviors among others.

Social Effect

Media can also have an effect via a social mechanism . Here, media influence is rooted in the fact that it can provide information in a way that enhances coordination on a norm or action through the creation of common knowledge (Chwe Reference Chwe 2001 ) This is because media’s method of delivery is a public one. Information that is known to be publicly available helps individuals to form an understanding of their shared beliefs. Public information not only causes individuals to update their personal beliefs, but also allows them to update their beliefs about how widely these beliefs are shared (Morris and Shin Reference Morris and Shin 2002 ). That is, public information is used to know that others received the information, and that everyone who received the information knows that everybody else that received the information knows this, and so on, creating common knowledge. In this vein, some authors argue that “attempts to change public behaviors by changing private attitudes will not be effective unless some effort is also made to bridge the boundary between the public and the private” (Miller, Monin and Prentice Reference Miller, Monin and Prentice 2000 : 113).

Moreover, a social effect might be present even in the absence of an individual effect. That is, people might adjust their behavior and publicly expressed attitudes, but not necessarily their private beliefs. Such inconsistency between private and public is known as pluralistic ignorance , which describes situations in which most members of a group privately reject group norms, yet they believe that most members accept them (Miller and McFarland Reference Miller and McFarland 1987 ). Such erroneous social inference facilitates a social effect in the absence of an individual effect.

Consequently, I argue that the method of dissemination is a significant driver of individuals’ beliefs (and higher-order beliefs), and consequently, of their behavior. A public transmission of information—vis-à-vis a private one—facilitates the creation of common knowledge, thus increasing its influence on social norms. Footnote 1 This is the main hypothesis of this paper:

Hypothesis 1: (Common Knowledge). The effect of information on attitudes and norms is greater when the method of delivery is public.

A public method of dissemination helps bring about, but by no means guarantees, common knowledge, and coordinated action (Chwe Reference Chwe 1998 ). Individuals might not know with certainty that others received the information, and thus everyone who received such information might not know with certainty that everybody else that received the information knows that others received the information, and so on. That is, a public promotion may nonetheless be affected by uncertainty surrounding higher-order beliefs. However, this uncertainty is influenced by the type of social interactions created by the conditions under which norms’ promotion is received. In particular, certainty can be bolstered through face-to-face interactions, such as community meetings (Mackie Reference Mackie 1996 ; Chwe Reference Chwe 2001 ).

To address this heterogeneity within the public dissemination of information, I explore the extent to which different levels of uncertainty and potential social interactions moderate the diffusion of norms. Within the common knowledge framework, I analyze whether the publicness of the information is a sufficient condition for media influence and whether face-to-face interactions enhances such influence. That is, I disaggregate Hypothesis 1 into two secondary hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2a: (Public Signal). A public method of delivery is a necessary and sufficient condition for information to influence attitudes and norms (i.e., no social interaction is required).

Hypothesis 2b: (Face-to-Face). A public method of delivery of information with face-to-face interactions enhances the effect of information on attitudes and norms.

To test these hypotheses, I conducted a media intervention in San Bartolomé Quialana, in partnership with the UNESCO Office in Mexico. San Bartolomé Quialana (or simply Quialana) is a small rural, indigenous community located in the state of Oaxaca. Its key features are broadly characteristic of rural municipalities in the rest of Mexico. (Section A1 provides further details.) For the purposes of this paper, an important aspect of Quialana is its cultural homogeneity. For example, as of 2010, out of the 2470 habitants, 2412 were born, and raised in Quialana. This is important because the ability to focus on a single community, holding cultural, and social aspects “constant,” makes it easier to isolate the individual-level informational mechanisms that drive media influence on attitudes and social norms.

The Soap-Opera

The intervention consisted of an audio soap-opera designed to challenge gender role norms and discourage violence against women. Entitled Un nuevo amanecer en Quialana ( A new dawn in Quialana ) it was produced in conjunction with a regional partner non-governmental organization (NGO) and it included four episodes of ~15 minutes each, for a total running time of 57 minutes. The soap-opera was embedded in the local context, featuring common reference points such as “Tlacolula’s market,” as helping the audience to directly relate to the situations portrayed can increase its effect (La Ferrara, Chong and Duryea Reference La Ferrara, Chong and Duryea 2012 ). The plot evolved around a young couple who fell in love and started a family in Quialana. The narrative was developed such that the leading male character gradually transformed from a loving and caring husband to a violent and aggressive figure. Research shows that the male figure should not be displayed as a completely violent character from the outset so that listeners can create a rapport with him and not disregard his behavior as an exception (Singhal et al. Reference Singhal, Cody, Rogers and Sabido 2003 ). Moreover, the language of the script used injunctive norms (Paluck and Ball Reference Paluck and Ball 2010 ). For instance, instead of arguing “beating women is wrong” the soap-opera would say “citizens of Quialana believe that beating women is wrong.” This actually biases against the main hypothesis of this paper because those in the Audio CD treatment are exposed to these injunctive norms. One caveat of the narrative, however, is that it did not contain channel factors to act out these norms. Footnote 2

Un nuevo amanecer en Quialana was broadcasted using the community loudspeaker as a special event: the premier of the first-ever locally produced soap-opera, and the first time the community loudspeaker was used for entertainment purposes.

The research design combines two sources of variation. Specifically, the social context in which people are able to receive the intervention is manipulated by (1) exploiting arguably exogenous variation generated by the topography of the community (i.e., within community variation of “broadcast access”), and (2) randomly inviting households to listen to the program. I further describe each one below.

Natural Experiment: Loudspeaker, Topography, and Sound Check

While Quialana did not have a local radio at the time of the intervention, it did posses a loudspeaker—located on top of the Town Hall, in the center of the community. Before the intervention, the loudspeaker primarily and only sporadically announced sales of small-scale household goods, such as construction materials, like bricks, or other livestock. It was never used for other announcements like news, weather, etc. Perhaps for these reasons the variation in the loudspeaker’s reach (and it’s sharpness) described below came as a surprise to many of our local partners who had previously taken for granted that nearly everyone in the community had access to the occasional announcements.

Leveraging variation in the loudspeaker’s reach, I define two areas within Quialana: (1) the area within the loudspeaker’s reach , and (2) the area outside the loudspeaker’s reach . This within community variation is mainly a product of topography conditions. For example, from one end of the municipality to the other there is an altitude difference of more than 500 ft. More specifically, in some areas, the slopes become high enough that they preclude the sound to travel with clarity. Footnote 3 That is, the source of variation is not a function of distance to the loudspeaker per se , but mainly of altitude difference. That is, two households can be located at the same distance from the loudspeaker and still one of them can fall within the loudspeaker’s reach and not the other. Figure 1 shows the loudspeaker’s reach, which was determined via a sound-check process from the ground (further explained in Section A2).

Fig. 1 San Bartolome Quialana and its loudspeaker’s reach Note : Population (green), households (brown). Red line: loudspeaker’s reach. Red filled circle: Loudspeaker.

A valid concern is that systematic differences may exist between these two areas, which could potentially be correlated with attitudes and norms related to violence against women. One of the advantages of conducting the study within a single, small (slightly more than a mile long) community is precisely being able to leverage the cultural homogeneity and ameliorate concerns about such potential differences. Based on informal and formal discussions with UNESCO personnel, NGO partners, and citizens of Quialana there is no qualitative evidence of sorting into one area or another based on attitudes and behavior related to gender inequality. Qualitative analyses and focus groups organized by UNESCO suggested that violence was widespread equally across the community (UNESCO 2012 ). I complement these on-the-ground accounts with quantitative evidence. Specifically, I rely on data from the 2012 National Housing Inventory to show that a battery of individual and household characteristics are balanced between the two areas (Table A2).

While the focus on a very small community, alongside the qualitative and quantitative evidence strengthens the plausibility of the natural experiment, such interpretation might be threatened if unobservables linked to each of the two areas are also linked with attitudes and behaviors towards women. This should be taken into account when interpreting the results.

Randomization: Audio CD and Community Meeting

Within each area, households were randomly invited to listen to the soap-opera via systematic sampling with a random start, creating the Community Meeting and Audio CD treatments. Here, the experiment was able to hold the content of the media program constant while varying the social context in which it was received. In the area within the loudspeaker’s reach, households were invited to listen to the program in the cafeteria next to the Municipal building (i.e., Community Meeting ). In the area outside the loudspeaker’s reach, households were invited to listen to it in their homes using an audio CD (i.e., Audio CD treatment). The regional partner NGO served as the public face of the treatments, presented as part of an initiative to create a local radio station and as such, there was no mention of UNESCO’s involvement.

To test the individual mechanism, the invitation to listen to the soap-opera (via the audio CD) had to be privately delivered to the household. Here, caution was taken to prevent households from believing that other households were also receiving the program—although as argued before, this would bias against my hypotheses. Enumerators were trained to keep away from sight any material that would signal that other households were also being approached. Further, when reaching out to the household, enumerators emphasized that the audio CD was a pilot program, arguably a one-time opportunity to preview it and provide feedback. While not explicitly saying that the household was the only one selected to receive the audio (to avoid deception), enumerators were trained to hint at that possibility and to frame such opportunity as something very novel, exclusive and private—which might explain the perfect level of compliance. As such, audio CDs were handed out along with a short questionnaire meant as a listening-check device: the enumerator would leave the audio CD and questionnaire sheet and then stop by a couple of hours later to pick up the sheet, and based on this, compliance was 100 percent Footnote 4 . Because of this set-up and based on comments from enumerators, in some cases all family members were present at the time and reportedly all listened to it, but in other cases not every household member was present at the time, and hence did not listen to it.

To test the social mechanism, the design created a comparable treatment group, the Community Meeting , where the invitation to listen the soap-opera matches the invitation component of the Audio CD treatment. Moreover, the Community Meeting provides leverage to explore the effects of public information. By creating a very particular form of social interaction (or at least the knowledge about it), namely the community meeting, this treatment might increase the level of certainty individuals’ have about others receiving the information, and so on. At the same time, this common knowledge mechanism might be confounded by other potential interactions facilitated by the meeting, such as deliberation. To be clear, during the community meeting there was no deliberation (out of respect to other listeners, conversations were not allowed). However, deliberation and exchange of opinions could have occurred after the meeting. Inasmuch these interactions are indeed facilitated by the creation of common knowledge, the design is able to disentangle the social and individual mechanisms of media influence (however, it cannot unbundle face-to-face certainty from deliberation). Finally, people from roughly one in four households invited to the Community Meeting actually went to the cafeteria—that is, complied with the Community Meeting treatment. Anecdotally, during the broadcast people did stop by the Town Hall, just outside the cafeteria where the community meeting was taking place, and listen to the soap-opera (or a least parts of it) from just outside. Other accounts point to the fact that many simply listened to the soap-opera from their own houses.

However, to fully understand the social mechanism, I explore whether the public transmission of information is a sufficient condition to influence norms as well the extent to which the face-to-face interactions can enhance the effect on norms. To potentially address this, the design created a public treatment without imposing such social interactions: households who were able to listen to the broadcast by being within the loudspeaker’s reach but were not in the Group condition constitute the Village Loudspeaker treatment.

Finally, households outside the loudspeaker’s reach who did not receive the audio CD represent the baseline group . These four conditions are summarized in Table 1 .

An unbiased estimation of the mechanisms relies on two dimensions: one, facilitating the creation of common knowledge in the social conditions, and two, precluding it in the individual condition (i.e., no spill-overs). First, for the broadcast to facilitate the creation of common knowledge, it should be the case that people who listens to it know that other people are hearing it too. This is less of a concern in the Community Meeting treatment because information is explicitly given to the household, so they know that others are also receiving the invitation, and so on. However, a person in the Village Loudspeaker treatment might believe that she has heard the broadcast, say because she lives close to the Town Hall or because she believes she has particularly good hearing but that few of her neighbors actually have heard it. I attempt to address this in two ways. First, I include distance to the Town Hall as a control covariate in the empirical analysis. This variable is also a relevant covariate inasmuch it also works as a proxy for population density, which might be a potential confounder with respect to the perpetration of violence. Second, as discussed below, the empirical strategy relies on the estimation of intention-to-treat effects (ITT) precisely because individuals might fail to comply with the treatment—in the case of the Village Loudspeaker , individuals might not listen to the program nor realizing that others are listening to it as well, and so on. As such, it represents a conservative or lower bound estimation.

The second dimension is linked to the notion that those who receive the individual treatment should be unaware of other treatments. Given the small size of the town and the nature the treatment conditions, the design was vulnerable to spill-overs. However, such spill-overs would bias against the main hypothesis of the paper. This is because those in the individual condition might find out that other people were also receiving the soap-opera. Nevertheless, in order to minimize potential spill-overs, invitations for the Community Meeting were given out on a Friday. Both treatments were administered the next day: the Audio CD treatment was conducted on Saturday—starting early in the morning, and the Village Loudspeaker and Community Meeting broadcast was also implemented on Saturday, during the evening.

Similarly, the design faced a trade-off between minimizing these spill-over concerns and maximizing the intensity of the treatment. For the former, the ideal was to minimize the time between the treatments and the survey. For the latter, an alternative was to implement a weekly soap-opera over several weeks or months. Given that the main goal of this study was to analyze the underlying mechanisms of media influence, I prioritized addressing the spill-over concerns at the expense of a limited intensity of the treatment. Nonetheless, experiments where only one day or even 1-hour interventions were implemented have found profound effects (e.g., Ravallion et al. Reference Ravallion, Walle, Dutta and Murgai 2015 ). Given these considerations, the norm intervention was implemented as a one-day event only, and the surveys were administered over the following few days.

Outcome Measurement

The regional partner NGO also served as the public face of the survey, presented as a mean to retrieve the opinion of Quialana citizens to inform an initiative for starting a community radio. Footnote 5 In the survey, three questions measured respondents’ beliefs and estimation of others’ beliefs and actions with respect to violence against women, and three other questions measured attitudes and individual actions related to it. Hence, I evaluate six outcomes of interest, which I describe in detail below.

The first dependent variable is a measure of Personal beliefs aimed at capturing the extent to which people believe and are willing to state that violence against women is a recurring problem in the community. The question asked was “Do you think that violence against women is something that happens here in Quialana?” and it was coded from 1 (“No, this never happens here in Quialana”) to 5 (“This happens too much in Quialana”). Given the qualitative evidence that violence is pervasive in Quialana (UNESCO 2012 ). This item was designed not to capture such factual scenario, but instead the respondent’s personal beliefs about the desirability of (and hence, willingness to expose) certain actions. In other words, the intuition behind this question is to capture the shift from a perception where “husbands are never violent to their wives—they might engage in some aggressive behavior but that is not violence” to a situation in which “that” type of behavior is recognized as violence, and moreover, it is socially appropriate to judge it as serious problem.

The second variable of interest captures the Perceived social rejection . That is, the extent to which an individual believes that the community believes violence is a problem. The question was “Do you think that that the community, the neighbors, and other families see violence against women as a serious problem here in Quialana?” with responses coded from 1 (“No, they do not see it as a problem at all”) to 4 (“They see it as a serious problem that needs to change”). As in the previous question, this item aims to measure the shift in norm perception from a norm where violence is tolerated (e.g., the community experiences violence but sees it a routine and excusable) to a norm where violence is rejected.

The third variable, Expectations about the future , measures individual expectations that this type of violence will decline in the future. The question was “Do you think the next generation of Quialana males …?” with answers being coded from 1 (“Will abuse women more”) to 4 (“Will never abuse women”). That is, higher values represent more optimistic views about the future.

While these three measures are able to retrieve individuals’ perception about norms surrounding violence against women, they do not directly measure individual attitudes, beliefs, nor actions regarding gender roles or domestic violence. Outcomes four through six address this, including a behavioral outcome embedded in the survey.

The fourth outcome, Value Transmission , measures the extent to which the respondent would educate a child with gender equality values. This captures the parents’ decisions concerning which values to inculcate in their children, which are affected by perceived prevailing values in the society (Tabellini Reference Tabellini 2008 ). In particular, it focuses on attitudes toward equality regarding household chores, which is seen by many as one of the key challenges for achieving gender equality (World Bank 2012 ). The question was “Would you educate your child so that domestic chores, such as doing laundry and cooking, are as much a responsibility of the men as they are of the women?,” with the answer being coded 1 if the respondent supports this type of education, 0 otherwise.

The fifth variable captures the individual Reaction to an episode of violence . The question was “If you see or hear a neighbor’s wife being beaten by her husband, what would you do?.” Responses are collapsed into a binary variable in the following way: Reaction to violence takes a value of 1 if the respondents answers that they would interrupt the couple so to stop the violence and/or call the police so they intervene, and is coded 0 if the answer implies that they would not take any action at the moment. Footnote 6

The sixth variable retrieves a behavioral outcome. Survey respondents were asked if they would sign a petition to support the creation of a violence against women support group: the variable Petition signature is coded 1 if they signed the petition, 0 otherwise.

To account for multiple testing I also analyze an Index variable created using standardized inverse-covariance-weighted (ICW) averages of the previous variables. The scale of the resulting index is in control group standard deviations, and higher values can be interpreted as higher levels of rejection and perceived rejection of violence against women and increased support for gender equality.

Three key covariates were collected, namely gender, age, and education. A total of 200 households were surveyed; this represents about one in every three households in Quialana. When available, both the male and female heads of the households were surveyed. This generated a maximum of 340 observations. Table A8 shows descriptive statistics and Section A4 shows randomization checks.

The empirical strategy relies on estimating ITT effects. In this particular set-up, however, the invitation to the Community Meeting (i.e., the assignment to treatment) matches the theoretical motivation behind the treatment itself. That is, the invitation provides specific information about how the soap-opera is going to be disseminated (i.e., there will be a broadcast and an event where people are able to receive the program together), thus facilitating the creation of common knowledge. This also has implications for estimating local average treatment effects (LATE) as it may be read as a violation of the exclusion restriction—this precludes an unbiased estimation of the LATE, providing further reasons to focusing on the ITT estimation.

I conduct the analysis using ordinary least squares, with two empirical strategies, namely (1) Community Meeting versus Audio CD and (2) all four treatment conditions. Footnote 7

Social and Individual Mechanisms: Community Meeting Versus Audio CD

The first empirical strategy focuses on testing the Community Meeting and Audio CD treatments against each other, as follows:

The coefficient of interest in Equation 1 is α ; it captures the social mechanism underlying norms diffusion. Hypothesis 1 predicts α >0. Nonetheless, I test it with a two-sided test.

All Treatment Conditions: Full Sample

The estimates of the Community Meeting are able to isolate the social effects induced by common knowledge. However, they might be influenced by the increased certainty created by the face-to-face interaction, and might potentially be confounded by other social interactions—facilitated by the community meeting—such as deliberation. To address this and understand the extent to which a public method of delivery is a sufficient condition to influence norms, I rely on the full sample, as follows:

where Y i , h represents the outcomes (continuous variables are expressed in standard deviations of the distribution of responses in the baseline condition). The vector of controls, Community Meeting and Audio CD are defined as before. VillageLoudspeaker is an indicator for whether a household is within the loudspeaker’s reach but was not invited to the meeting. Finally, those living in the individual area without treatment represent the baseline category .

In Equation 2, the coefficients of interest are α , β , and γ . They measure the effect of the intervention and, by design, can shed light on the different potential mechanisms. Here, Hypothesis 1 predicts α > β and γ > β , and more specifically, Hypothesis 2a predicts γ >0 while Hypothesis 2b predicts α >0 with α > γ .

Community Meeting Versus Audio CD

Table 2 displays the results for each outcome of interest using two different specifications. The first one displays a specification using only the Community Meeting indicator (i.e., α ), while the second one includes the vector of control covariates.

Table 2 Community Meeting Versus Audio CD

Note : Standard errors clustered at the household level in parentheses.

Covariates: age, female, education, distance.

ICW=inverse-covariance-weighted.

+ p<0.10, *p<0.05, **p<0.01.

Results regarding to the influence on personal beliefs suggest that those invited to the community meeting were more likely than those invited to the Audio CD to state that violence against women is a recurring problem in Quialana. The parameter estimate gains precision when introducing controls but remains stable ranging from 0.33 to 0.35 SD relative to the Audio CD condition (p-value=0.065 and p-value=0.052, respectively).

When looking at the perceived social rejection, the evidence points in the same direction, with stable (0.66 and 0.65) and precise estimates.

The community meeting effects on expectations about the future are negative, very stable (−0.48 and −0.42) and statistically significant at conventional levels, suggesting that those invited to the meeting became more pessimistic about the decrease of violence in the future. This arguably perverse effect could be explained by several factors. One explanation might be that, while the community meeting induced coordination around a new injunctive norm (i.e., people in Quialana should reject violence) it also raised awareness and facilitated coordination around a more subtle descriptive norm, namely that violent behavior is prevalent in the community. This more precise belief about the current situation of the community, coupled with the fact that the soap-opera did not offer any channel factors to act upon it, might have induced pessimistic expectations for the future extent of violence. Another explanation is that, as a result of the new common knowledge, individuals may foresee an increase opposition to violence against women, which in turn may potentially lead to a backlash effect. For instance, more women may speak out and oppose violence, creating a more violent response from a subset of men. While the data does not allow me rule out or pin down a particular explanation, it nonetheless shows that this effect is driven by a social mechanism.

The analyses of individual actions also support the social mechanism. Those invited to the community meeting were 16 percentage points more likely (Model 8) than those invited to the Audio CD to say they would educate their children on gender equality values, 20 percentage points more likely to react to a violent event (Model 10), and 20 percentage points more likely to sign the petition (Model 12).

The ICW Index analysis confirm these results. Subjects invited to the community meeting have an index of responses 0.45 SD higher than those invited to the Audio CD.

To address concerns about the plausibility of the natural experiment, Table A11 replicates the analysis restricting the sample to households within 300 m of the Town Hall, finding similar results.

The overall evidence is clear. Media influence, captured by changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, is primarily driven by a social channel. However, creating common knowledge might also facilitate a more precise belief of the status quo, thus setting negative expectations about future change, as suggested by the evidence on beliefs about the future prevalence of violence.

All Treatment Conditions

Table 3 displays the results for the full sample, without and with controls.

Table 3 All treatment conditions.

The analyses on personal and perceived social rejection show that the informational effects on beliefs and norms are driven entirely by the social mechanisms. When analyzing the expectations about the future, the estimated parameters for social treatments are similar in size, ranging from 0.20 to 0.24, and once again showing a negative sign. In contrast, the Audio CD parameters are positive but far from statistically significant.

These first set of results support both the community meeting and Village Loudspeaker treatments. While the analyses of individual attitudes and actions also support the social mechanism, the evidence is stronger for the community meeting—supporting Hypothesis 2b. A similar pattern emerges when analyzing the ICW Index.

Additionally, I estimated several F -test of inequality of coefficients. When comparing either one of the social conditions to the Audio CD ( β ), they tend to show a statistically significant difference at conventional levels, supporting Hypothesis 1. When pushing further the analysis of the social mechanism, the evidence shows that publicness in and of itself can be a sufficient condition to diffuse norms, in favor of Hypothesis 2a. Nonetheless, some of the evidence also suggests that face-to-face interactions can indeed enhance such effect, providing some support for Hypothesis 2b.

As before, I replicate the analysis by analyzing households within 300 m from the Town Hall, finding the same results (Table A12).

Overall, these findings again suggest that social mechanisms are the main drivers behind media influence on attitudes and norms.

A valid concern when interpreting the results is the extent to which they represent a one-off case in a unique setting. As noted before, in many aspects, Quialana is similar to many other municipalities in Mexico as a community with high levels of media consumption and issues with gender inequality and violence against women. Similarly, as a large and diverse society aiming to empower women so to overcome social challenges, Mexico has much in common with other developing and even developed countries. (See Section A6 for a more detailed discussion.) Yet, to what extent are the results from this study externally valid in the sense that they generalize beyond Quialana? While there are numerous variations in context or treatment design that could change the estimates presented here, the results nonetheless speak to a plausibly phenomenon; the notion that public information, via common knowledge and coordination, can induce differences in norms and behavior is often stated as a general proposition instead of stated as applying to a particular context (Chwe Reference Chwe 2001 ).

Three particular results merit further exploration. First, the negative results on expectations about the future was arguably surprising. Further understanding the conditions under which these type of backlashes occur and can be precluded (e.g., emphasizing channel factors ) is theoretically and policy relevant. Second, the mixed results on the Village Loudspeaker point to the need for more inquiry into the conditions under which public information is a sufficient condition to influence norms and the conditions under which securing common knowledge via social interactions is actually necessary. Third, the Audio CD results suggest that private persuasion in this context was ineffective. From the point of view where social norms are deeply embedded in a community, this result is arguably not surprising precisely because it does not have such link with the community. However, it might also be specific to the issue at hand—perhaps, in less sensitive issue areas, where social pressures might carry relative less weight, individual persuasion might be more effective.

Finally, there are potential concerns about whether the changes in reported attitudes, represent changes in behaviors, or just in reporting. Despite the behavioral evidence on the petition signature , one may be still concerned that public treatments only change what respondents think other people want to hear and see about the acceptability of violence, but does not actually change the incidence of abuse. Without directly observing people in their homes, however, it is difficult to conclusively separate changes in reporting from changes in behavior. However, if media interventions only change what is reported, it still represents social norms change and progress. Changing social norms is a necessary (Jensen and Oster Reference Jensen and Oster 2009 ) and can be sufficient step toward changing the desired outcomes (Mackie Reference Mackie 1996 ).

It is well know that exposure to information provided by the media outlets can influence a wide range of attitudes and behavior. However, less is known about the specific mechanisms behind such influence. Two broad mechanisms can account for such effects, namely an individual mechanism based on persuasion and a social mechanism based on higher-order beliefs and coordination. This paper examines these mechanisms and disentangles their effects at the individual level, studying attitudes, and norms toward violence against women.

The evidence presented here shows a very consistent story: media influence on attitudes and social norms is driven mainly by social effects rather than individual persuasion. First, I show that a public method of delivery was able to decrease personal and perceived social acceptance of violence against women and increased support for gender equality roles, whereas a private delivery had no discernible effects. I also show that public information is no panacea as it also increased pessimism on whether violence will decline in the future. Second, I present evidence that a pure public method of delivery (i.e., without social interactions) can be a necessary and sufficient condition to influence attitudes and norms.

Overall, further understanding the interaction between individual beliefs and different types and sources of information can shed light on the social mechanism purported here.

Eric Arias, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, Princeton University, 432 Robertson Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544 ( [email protected] ). This research was carried out as part of a UNESCO Mexico program. the author especially thanks Samira Nikaein at the UNESCO Office in Mexico, Michael Gilligan and Cyrus Samii for their help and support. The author also thanks Michaël Aklin, Karisa Cloward, Livio Di Lonardo, Pat Egan, Jessica Gottlieb, Macartan Humphreys, Malte Lierl, Sera Linardi, Alan Potter, Peter Rosendorff, Shanker Satyanath, David Stasavage, Scott Tyson, participants at ISPS-Yale, WESSI-NYU Abu Dhabi, APSA, MPSA and PEIO for their suggestions and comments. All errors and interpretations are the author’s alone and do not necessarily represent those of UNESCO. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2018.1

1 Arguably, “strong” and “weak” hypotheses can be derived. The strong hypothesis would imply that only by increasing the publicness of the information above a certain threshold one should expect an effect, that is, a “tipping-point” argument (Finnemore and Sikkink Reference Finnemore and Sikkink 1998 ). The weak version would postulate that by increasing publicness one is able to increase the effect. Differentiating between these two is beyond the scope of this paper. See also Gottlieb ( Reference Gottlieb 2015 ).

2 Channel factors are small but critical factors that facilitate or create barriers for behavior, for example, the promotion of a telephone hotline number that provides information and can refer callers to service providers (Singhal et al. Reference Singhal, Cody, Rogers and Sabido 2003 ).

3 For examples, see Figures A2 and A3.

4 Almost all households played the audio CD on their own stereo systems, and when they did not have one, enumerators would offer to lend “their personal” portable CD player. The questionnaire consisted on rating the soap-opera, asking the name of the character with whom they identified the most, and providing space for comments.

5 Surveys were collected at the respondents’ households from June 3 to June 5.

6 Answers that take the value of 1 are of the type “call the police” and/or “interrupt them to stop it,” while answers coded 0 are “do nothing, because it’s a private matter between husband and wife” or “do nothing at the moment, but ask what happened later.”

7 Results using logistic models are substantially the same (see Online Appendix).

Arias supplementary material

Online Appendix

Arias Dataset

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The Role and Effects of Mass Media in Modern Societies

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Mass media are a major focus of attention in modern societies, primarily because of their perceived effects on individuals and society — although this is not their only social significance, as we shall see later in this chapter. If mass media have significant effects, then analysis of how they represent subjects such as race, violence, women — and men — is of major social significance. If, on the other hand, mass media do not have any significant effect on society, then their content is much less relevant.

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Macnamara, J.R. (2006). The Role and Effects of Mass Media in Modern Societies. In: Media and Male Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625679_5

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Christian E Rieck

Mukul Sharma

MODERN politics is largely a mediated politics, experienced by most citizens through their broadcast and print media of choice. Any study of democracy in contemporary conditions is, therefore, also a study of how the media report and interpret political events and issues, and how media itself influences the political processes and shapes public opinion. Thus, media has become central to politics and public life in contemporary democracy. Access to media is one of the key measures of power and equality. Media can shape power and participation in society in negative ways, by obscuring the motives and interests behind political decisions, or in positive ways, by promoting the involvement of people in those decisions. In this respect the media and governance equation becomes important. Media occupies a space that is constantly contested, which is subject to organizational and technological restructuring, to economic, cultural and political constraints, to commercial pressures and to changing professional practices. The changing contours of this space can lead to different patterns of domination and agenda-setting and to different degrees of openness and closure in terms of access, patterns of ownership, available genres, types of disclosure and range of opinions represented. Although it is intrinsically difficult to theorize about the complexities implied in this formulation, the implications of the empirical outcomes of the struggle over this terrain are crucial for the ways in which they help or hinder democratic governance. For this reason journalists and their audiences, when they first read, hear or see news, should always ask the irreverent question: 'Says who?' This may be bad news for the official managers of society, but it will be good news for democracy. In a democratic society, therefore, the role of the media assumes seminal importance. Democracy implies participative governance, and it is the media that informs people about various problems of society, which makes those wielding power on their behalf answerable to them. That the actions of the government and the state, and the efforts of competing parties and interests to exercise political power should be underpinned and legitimized by critical scrutiny and informed debate facilitated by the institutions of the media is a normative assumption uniting the political spectrum. It has been further remarked by Davis Merritt, in his work Public Journalism and Public Life that what journalists should bring to the arena of public life is knowledge of the rules – how the public has decided a democracy should work – and the ability and willingness to provide relevant information and a place for that information to be discussed and turned into

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Role of media in society

• . Update: Jul 5, 2024 10:54 am

Table of Contents

Role of media in society:

• Media refers to channels of communication that deliver information to the public . Newspapers, Television, Digital media, Radio are different types of media.
• Media is regarded as the fourth pillar of democracy . It questions the decisions of government, exposes corruption and injustice and thereby influences public opinion . It also informs common people about their rights. So, media strengthens democracy.
• It acts as a watchdog . It forces those in power to take responsibility for their actions, which affect common people.
• Now, we have 24/7 news channels and digital media which give information to the public almost immediately.
• With more and more channels, fake news has become a common thing in the present times.
• These days several media channels are broadcasting unimportant news for TRPs (Television Rating Point).
• Some channels are creating paid news . This type of commercialization of media is causing a decline in media standards.
• Many news channels are in the hands of a few corporations. Contacts between politicians and businessmen are resulting in broadcasting biased news by many channels.
• By broadcasting biased and paid news, the media is making people politically polarized .
• The media should give information to common people without fear. But in some countries, government controls media by censoring news that affects the ruling party’s reputation.
• But with increased awareness, common people are able to differentiate between biased news and genuine news .

Conclusion:

The media should inform news to common people without fear. It should strengthen democracy. Even though some news channels are deteriorating the media standards by broadcasting paid news, biased news, media is still very important for society. It is informing the public about government policies, investigative reports and conducting debates to help the public in forming opinions.

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The Role of the Media in a Democratic Society

Jul 17, 2014

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The Role of the Media in a Democratic Society. Different forms of media. What do the following concepts mean?. Free Press: A press that is not hindered in its ability to comment on political or social questions (except if it interferes with a person’s democratic rights.) .

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Presentation Transcript

Different forms of media

What do the following concepts mean? • Free Press: A press that is not hindered in its ability to comment on political or social questions (except if it interferes with a person’s democratic rights.)

Def: Democratic society A community which is ruled by representatives of the nation. In a democratic society there is freedom of speech, freedom of the individual and freedom of the judiciary. Free and fair elections take place on a regular basis.

Def: Freedom of speech The freedom to voice your opinion without fear of intimidation – (however you may not infringe on others’ democratic rights in the process.)

Def: Mass Media The broadcasting of information to a large number of people. This includes: the radio, newspapers, magazines, the internet and television.

“ A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular” How can the media make themselves unpopular with governments, both elected and unelected? The media has the ability to influence popular opinions = openly criticise government = can influence election results. In a country without democracy, a journalist who criticizes the govt, can be arrested, intimidated, assaulted and/or jailed.

Do you feel that any restrictions should be placed on the media? A lack of privacy is often the price one pays for being a public figure. The mainstream media usually stays away from pornographic material or material which will make the public unhappy. In most demographic countries there are sensor boards but they seldom limit political commentary.

What is the “watch dog” role which is ascribed to the media? If no-one keeps watch, the government and politicians could get away with anything. It is therefore the role of the media to be on the look out and to inform the public of anything of which they should be aware. The fear of negative publicity is often a deterrent for public figures when they need to decide how to behave in various situations.

Do you think a journalist or a newspaper can ever be objective? • Possibly not. A certain amount of subjectivity is usually unavoidable. • However, reporting can be fair. Both sides of the story can be given and then it can be left to the reader to make up his/her own mind. • The omission of certain facts can also lead to prejudicial reporting.

The Role and Responsibility of the Media Opposing Viewpoints

More information about the functions and responsibilities Functions include informing the public about: • What is happening around them so that they can make informed decisions and choices based on relevant and accurate information. • Rights issues and • Political issues and agendas, ensuring that various political viewpoints and policies are given.

The media are responsible for: • Ensuring that there is a clear distinction between fact and opinion. • Protecting sources of information if and when necessary. • Being professional at all times, verifying facts and information before printing or broadcasting them. • Getting permission before printing or reporting on a story and • Giving the facts clearly and correctly.

The S.A. Constitution states the following in Section 16 (1): Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which includes: • Freedom of the press and other media • Freedom to receive or impart info or ideas • Freedom of artistic creativity • Academic freedom and freedom of scientific research. • Govt institutions e.g. Judicial Services Commission, Independent Broadcasting Authority, the Public Protector and the Auditor-General further support freedom of expression.

Does the media reflect our society? The media presents us with a picture of society that is meant to reflect what is “normal”. In fact, the media often don’t reflect what society is like at all. For example in South Africa:

Who is rejected/left out? • Which groups of people are predominantly shown on television? • Does the media reflect society? Why or why not? • How women should look • The way men should behave • What is important • What success means • Who commits crime • What Africa is like • Who are the experts/worthy of being quoted • The way gay people are viewed in society • The way differently-abled people are viewed in society.

Promotion of Access to Information Act Aims: • To ensure that the state takes part in promoting a human rights culture and social justice. • To encourage openness • To create voluntary and compulsory ways that give the right of access to information in a speedy, cheap and effortless way. • To promote transparency, accountability and effective governanceof all public a private companies. Use your notes to evaluate the credibility of the media.

Some careers in the media • Advertising manager • Attorney • Editor • Journalist • Librarian • Media liaison officer • Publicist • Radio announcer • TV producer • Web designer

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Social media's growing impact on our lives

Media psychology researchers are beginning to tease apart the ways in which time spent on social media is, and is not, impacting our day-to-day lives.

Social media use has skyrocketed over the past decade and a half. Whereas only five percent of adults in the United States reported using a social media platform in 2005, that number is now around 70 percent .

Growth in the number of people who use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat and other social media platforms — and the time spent on them—has garnered interest and concern among policymakers, teachers, parents, and clinicians about social media's impacts on our lives and psychological well-being.

While the research is still in its early years — Facebook itself only celebrated its 15 th birthday this year — media psychology researchers are beginning to tease apart the ways in which time spent on these platforms is, and is not, impacting our day-to-day lives.

Social media and relationships

One particularly pernicious concern is whether time spent on social media sites is eating away at face-to-face time, a phenomenon known as social displacement .

Fears about social displacement are longstanding, as old as the telephone and probably older. “This issue of displacement has gone on for more than 100 years,” says Jeffrey Hall, PhD, director of the Relationships and Technology Lab at the University of Kansas. “No matter what the technology is,” says Hall, there is always a “cultural belief that it's replacing face-to-face time with our close friends and family.”

Hall's research interrogates that cultural belief. In one study , participants kept a daily log of time spent doing 19 different activities during weeks when they were and were not asked to abstain from using social media. In the weeks when people abstained from social media, they spent more time browsing the internet, working, cleaning, and doing household chores. However, during these same abstention periods, there was no difference in people's time spent socializing with their strongest social ties.

The upshot? “I tend to believe, given my own work and then reading the work of others, that there's very little evidence that social media directly displaces meaningful interaction with close relational partners,” says Hall. One possible reason for this is because we tend to interact with our close loved ones through several different modalities—such as texts, emails, phone calls, and in-person time.

What about teens?

When it comes to teens, a recent study by Jean Twenge , PhD, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, and colleagues found that, as a cohort, high school seniors heading to college in 2016 spent an “ hour less a day engaging in in-person social interaction” — such as going to parties, movies, or riding in cars together — compared with high school seniors in the late 1980s. As a group, this decline was associated with increased digital media use. However, at the individual level, more social media use was positively associated with more in-person social interaction. The study also found that adolescents who spent the most time on social media and the least time in face-to-face social interactions reported the most loneliness.

While Twenge and colleagues posit that overall face-to-face interactions among teens may be down due to increased time spent on digital media, Hall says there's a possibility that the relationship goes the other way.

Hall cites the work of danah boyd, PhD, principal researcher at Microsoft Research  and the founder of Data & Society . “She [boyd] says that it's not the case that teens are displacing their social face-to-face time through social media. Instead, she argues we got the causality reversed,” says Hall. “We are increasingly restricting teens' ability to spend time with their peers . . . and they're turning to social media to augment it.”

According to Hall, both phenomena could be happening in tandem — restrictive parenting could drive social media use and social media use could reduce the time teens spend together in person — but focusing on the latter places the culpability more on teens while ignoring the societal forces that are also at play.

The evidence is clear about one thing: Social media is popular among teens. A 2018 Common Sense Media report found that 81 percent of teens use social media, and more than a third report using social media sites multiple times an hour. These statistics have risen dramatically over the past six years, likely driven by increased access to mobile devices. Rising along with these stats is a growing interest in the impact that social media is having on teen cognitive development and psychological well-being.

“What we have found, in general, is that social media presents both risks and opportunities for adolescents,” says Kaveri Subrahmanyam, PhD, a developmental psychologist, professor at Cal State LA, and associate director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles .

Risks of expanding social networks

Social media benefits teens by expanding their social networks and keeping them in touch with their peers and far-away friends and family. It is also a creativity outlet. In the Common Sense Media report, more than a quarter of teens said that “social media is ‘extremely' or ‘very' important for them for expressing themselves creatively.”

But there are also risks. The Common Sense Media survey found that 13 percent of teens reported being cyberbullied at least once. And social media can be a conduit for accessing inappropriate content like violent images or pornography. Nearly two-thirds of teens who use social media said they “'often' or ‘sometimes' come across racist, sexist, homophobic, or religious-based hate content in social media.”

With all of these benefits and risks, how is social media affecting cognitive development? “What we have found at the Children's Digital Media Center is that a lot of digital communication use and, in particular, social media use seems to be connected to offline developmental concerns,” says Subrahmanyam. “If you look at the adolescent developmental literature, the core issues facing youth are sexuality, identity, and intimacy,” says Subrahmanyam.

Her research suggests that different types of digital communication may involve different developmental issues. For example, she has found that teens frequently talked about sex in chat rooms , whereas their use of blogs and social media appears to be more concerned with self-presentation and identity construction.

In particular, exploring one's identity appears to be a crucial use of visually focused social media sites for adolescents. “Whether it's Facebook, whether it's Instagram, there's a lot of strategic self presentation, and it does seem to be in the service of identity,” says Subrahmanyam. “I think where it gets gray is that we don't know if this is necessarily beneficial or if it harms.”

Remaining questions

“It's important to develop a coherent identity,” she says. “But within the context of social media — when it's not clear that people are necessarily engaging in real self presentation and there's a lot of ideal-self or false-self presentation — is that good?”

There are also more questions than answers when it comes to how social media affects the development of intimate relationships during adolescence. Does having a wide network of contacts — as is common in social media—lead to more superficial interactions and hinder intimacy? Or, perhaps more important, “Is the support that you get online as effective as the support that you get offline?” ponders Subrahmanyam. “We don't know that necessarily.”

Based on her own research comparing text messages and face-to-face interactions, she says: “My hypothesis is that maybe digital interactions may be a little more ephemeral, they're a little more fleeting, and you feel good, but that the feeling is lost quickly versus face-to-face interaction.”

However, she notes that today's teens — being tech natives — may get less hung up on the online/offline dichotomy. “ We tend to think about online and offline as disconnected, but we have to recognize that for youth . . . there's so much more fluidity and connectedness between the real and the physical and the offline and the online,” she says.

In fact, growing up with digital technology may be changing teen brain development in ways we don't yet know — and these changes may, in turn, change how teens relate to technology. “Because the exposure to technology is happening so early, we have to be mindful of the possibility that perhaps there are changes happening at a neural level with early exposure,” says Subrahmanyam. “How youths interact with technology could just be qualitatively different from how we do it.”

In part two of this article , we will look at how social media affects psychological well-being and ways of using social media that are likely to amplify its benefits and decrease its harms.

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The power of online media: the role of strengthening voices and choice in gender equality

Document Type : Research Paper

• mahmoudreza rahbarqazi
• reza mahmoudoghli

University of Mohaghegh Ardabili

The power of online media: the role of strengthening voices and choice in gender equality 1. Introduction The study of Iran's online media is of significant importance, as these media have a profound impact on the awareness and critical thinking surrounding gender issues. By examining online media, individuals can gain a more profound analysis and a wider range of perspectives on gender issues, as well as a deeper understanding of the challenges and opportunities related to gender equality. Moreover, studying online media allows for the identification of emerging trends and developments in the field of gender equality in Iran. By introducing projects and activities related to this field, it is possible to facilitate the promotion of this topic in society. Therefore, the study of online media in Iran is of great importance for a more comprehensive understanding of gender issues, the raising of awareness, and a more nuanced understanding of gender equality. It is therefore essential to give this issue special attention. In this regard, the goals of this research are: 1. The objective of this study is to analyze the direct and indirect effects of online media on citizens' attitudes towards gender equality. Specifically, the study will: 1. Analyze the direct effects of online media on citizens' attitudes towards gender equality. 2. Analyze the indirect effects of online media on citizens' attitudes towards gender equality through the value of the right to choose. 3. Analyze the indirect effects of online media on citizens' attitudes towards gender equality through the value of people's voices. 2. Theoretical Background A number of consistent theories have been proposed regarding the impact of online media on people's attitudes towards women's rights and, in particular, gender equality. One of the theories regarding the impact of online media on the women's rights movement is the theory of cyber feminism. This theory posits that online media is a potent instrument for amplifying the visibility and participation of women in public spheres. Online activities afford women the opportunity to access information, express their opinions, and communicate with one another, thereby facilitating the development and strengthening of women's rights (Mohanty & Samantaray, 2017). The second theory in this field is the theory of network feminism, which posits that online media facilitate the emergence of novel forms of activism based on women's rights (Fotopoulou & Fotopoulou, 2016). This theory posits that online media platforms and blogs associated with the women's rights movement facilitate communication among supporters across geographic boundaries, thereby accelerating the spread and impact of activism. The third theory in this field is the theory of Feminist consciousness-raising 2.0. This theory posits that online media can be a platform for increasing awareness of women's rights and promoting empowerment in the new digital context (Anderson & Grace, 2015). Modern feminism represents the fourth theory to analyze the influence of online media on people's gender beliefs, values, and attitudes. This theory posits that online media can play an important role in shaping or changing gender beliefs and human motivations. It seems that online media, in addition to direct effects, also affects women's rights indirectly by strengthening the voices of marginalized groups. In this regard, the theory of Intersectionality 2.0 in online media emphasizes the importance of creating diverse and inclusive spaces for the discourse and activism of different social groups (Crooks, 2016). Furthermore, online media can influence the values of gender equality by expanding the right to choose for women. In this context, theorists of network individualism posit that online media can serve as advocates for women's rights by expanding individuals' right to choose through increased access to information, diversity of views, and the empowerment of individual institutions (Rainie & Wellman, 2019). 3. Methodology In order to test the research theories, the seventh wave of the World Values Survey data (Haerpfer et al., 2022) has been employed. The seventh wave of data for Iran, which was collected between 2017 and 2022, includes 1,499 Iranian citizens. Of these, 74% were urban residents and 26% were rural residents. Additionally, 51% of respondents were male and 49% were female, with an average age of 39.5. Additionally, in order to analyze the information and data, the partial least squares method and SmartPLS software were employed in this research. 4. Research Findings Table 2 presents a summary of the results of the structural part of the research and explains the direct and indirect effects of online media variables. The results indicate that the value of t in all structural relationships is greater than 1.96, thereby demonstrating the significance of these relationships. In other words, the use of online media can directly and significantly increase citizens' desire for gender equality in society. In other words, the findings demonstrate that online media exerts an indirect and significant influence on the desire for gender equality in society, through both the variables of voice and the choice. 5. Conclusion As previously stated, the objective of this research was to assess the direct and indirect impacts of online media on the desire of Iranian citizens for gender equality. In this regard, the research results indicated that online media exerted a direct and significant positive effect on gender equality, leading to an increase in such tendencies among Iranian citizens. In the contemporary era, online media play a pivotal role in the dissemination of information and values within society. Given that the majority of Iranian youth rely on online media for information and content, the influence of these media on citizens' desire for gender equality is considerable. Consequently, online media can at times enhance public awareness and comprehension of this matter by furnishing content that espouses gender equality. For instance, the dissemination of articles, videos, interviews, and reports pertaining to the matter of gender equality can enhance the attention and sensibility of citizens with regard to this issue. Moreover, advertisements and social advertisements that reference the values of gender equality can alter the desires and attitudes of citizens. In light of the fact that online media are regarded as one of the most powerful information and advertising tools, it can be argued that they play an important role in increasing citizens' desire for gender equality. This role is not limited to increasing awareness and attention to gender issues; it can also help to realize gender equality and societal progress by changing cultural and social attitudes.

• gender equality
• Online media
• people'؛ s voice

Main Subjects

• Political sciences

Articles in Press , Accepted Manuscript Available Online from 31 August 2024

• Article View: 50
• PDF Download: 31

rahbarqazi, M., & mahmoudoghli, R. (2024). The power of online media: the role of strengthening voices and choice in gender equality. Woman in Development & Politics , (), -. doi: 10.22059/jwdp.2024.376412.1008448

mahmoudreza rahbarqazi; reza mahmoudoghli. "The power of online media: the role of strengthening voices and choice in gender equality", Woman in Development & Politics , , , 2024, -. doi: 10.22059/jwdp.2024.376412.1008448

rahbarqazi, M., mahmoudoghli, R. (2024). 'The power of online media: the role of strengthening voices and choice in gender equality', Woman in Development & Politics , (), pp. -. doi: 10.22059/jwdp.2024.376412.1008448

rahbarqazi, M., mahmoudoghli, R. The power of online media: the role of strengthening voices and choice in gender equality. Woman in Development & Politics , 2024; (): -. doi: 10.22059/jwdp.2024.376412.1008448

Associate Director DDIT ISC Forensics

About the role.

Major Accountabilities (may include but not limited to):

• Support specific IT forensic investigations and operations, including
• The extraction of data and electronic evidence from information technology in a way that ensures that the data is seized in compliance with computer forensic standards and in compliance with chain of custody guidelines.The subsequent analysis of this electronic evidence where allowed and relevant.
• Work with Group Legal department on forensic litigation support by providing expert advice, performing acquisition and discovery work, and writing summary reports
• Actively participate in incident response team and efforts; perform evidence collection and root cause analysis of compromised devices
• Create forensic images of electronic media and devices; including but not limited to servers, laptops, mobile phones, and portable storage devices
• Continually keep current with emerging IT forensics trends, technologies and software.
• Conduct investigations into security alerts and coordinate root cause analysis of IT Security incidents
• Interface with engineering teams to design, test, and implement playbooks, orchestration workflows and automations that support forensic activities
• Research and test new technologies and platforms; develop recommendations and improvement plans
• Manage the development of tools, policies and processes to support the digital forensic program
• Develop metrics and KPI reports for management, including gap identification and recommendations for improvement
• Recommend or develop new forensic tools and techniques
• Provide mentoring and coaching of other CSOC team members
• This position will be located at the Cambridge, MA or East Hanover, NJ site and will not have the ability tobe locatedremotely.  

What will you bring to the role:

• 4+ years of experience in Digital Forensics
• Experienced IT administration with broad and in-depth technical, analytical and conceptual skills
• Experience in reporting to and communicating with senior level management (with and without IT background, with and without in depth risk management background) on incident response topics
• Excellent written and verbal communication and presentation skills; interpersonal and collaborative skills; and the ability to communicate information risk-related and incident response concepts to technical as well as nontechnical audiences
• Excellent understanding and knowledge of general IT infrastructure technology and  systems
• Proven experience to initiate and manage projects that will affect CSOC services and technologies

Preferred Experience

• Good mediation and facilitation skills
• Good knowledge of IT Security Project Management
• Experience with digital forensics related to medical/manufacturing devices
• Knowledge of (information) risk management related standards or frameworks such as COSO, ISO 2700x, CobiT, ISO 24762, BS 25999, NIST, ISF Standard of Good Practice and ITIL
• Host and network based forensic collection and analysis
• Proficient with Encase, Responder, X-Ways, Volatility, FTK, Axiom, Splunk, Wireshark, and other forensic tools
• Research, enrichment, and searching of indicators of compromise
• Very strong team and interpersonal skills along with the ability to work independently and achieve individual goals.
• Coordinate with other team members to achieve the specified objectives.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills; interpersonal and collaborative skills; and the ability to communicate IT security and IT Security risk-related concepts to technical and nontechnical audiences.

The pay range for this position at commencement of employment is expected to be between $151,200 and $226,800 per year; however, while salary ranges are effective from 1/1/24 through 12/31/24, fluctuations in the job market may necessitate adjustments to pay ranges during this period. Further, final pay determinations will depend on various factors, including, but not limited to geographical location, experience level, knowledge, skills and abilities. The total compensation package for this position may also include other elements, including a sign-on bonus, restricted stock units, and discretionary awards in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits (including 401(k) eligibility and various paid time off benefits, such as vacation, sick time, and parental leave), dependent on the position offered. Details of participation in these benefit plans will be provided if an employee receives an offer of employment. If hired, employee will be in an “at-will position” and the Company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.

Why Novartis: Our purpose is to reimagine medicine to improve and extend people’s lives and our vision is to become the most valued and trusted medicines company in the world. How can we achieve this? With our people. It is our associates that drive us each day to reach our ambitions. Be a part of this mission and join us! Learn more here: https://www.novartis.com/about/strategy/people-and-culture You’ll Receive : You can find everything you need to know about our benefits and rewards in the Novartis Life Handbook. https://www.novartis.com/careers/benefits-rewards Commitment to Diversity & Inclusion: Novartis is committed to building an outstanding, inclusive work environment and diverse teams representative of the patients and communities we serve. Join our Novartis Network : If this role is not suitable to your experience or career goals but you wish to stay connected to hear more about Novartis and our career opportunities, join the Novartis Network here: https://talentnetwork.novartis.com/network

Why Novartis: Helping people with disease and their families takes more than innovative science. It takes a community of smart, passionate people like you. Collaborating, supporting and inspiring each other. Combining to achieve breakthroughs that change patients’ lives. Ready to create a brighter future together? https://www.novartis.com/about/strategy/people-and-culture

Join our Novartis Network: Not the right Novartis role for you? Sign up to our talent community to stay connected and learn about suitable career opportunities as soon as they come up: https://talentnetwork.novartis.com/network

Benefits and Rewards: Read our handbook to learn about all the ways we’ll help you thrive personally and professionally: https://www.novartis.com/careers/benefits-rewards