Hypodermic Model

The Hypodermic Model

“Religion is the opium of the masses” Karl Marx

The Frankfurt school took a Marxist perspective and essentially applied it to mass media and what they called the culture industry.

This laid down the foundation for the ‘manipulative or instrumentalist’ position. Or what we can call the media centric position, that is that the media affect the audience.

Hypodermic model

Mass Media – Effects – Mass Audience

From this perspective all mass culture is identical.

History and Orientation

The "hypodermic needle theory" implied mass media had a direct, immediate and powerful effect on its audiences. The mass media in the 1940s and 1950s were perceived as a powerful influence on behavior change.

Several factors contributed to this "strong effects" theory of communication, including:

- the fast rise and popularization of radio and television

- the emergence of the persuasion industries, such as advertising and propaganda

- the Payne Fund studies of the 1930s, which focused on the impact of motion pictures on children, and

- Hitler's monopolization of the mass media during WWII to unify the German public behind the Nazi party

Core Assumptions and Statements

The theory suggests that the mass media could influence a very large group of people directly and uniformly by ‘shooting’ or ‘injecting’ them with appropriate messages designed to trigger a desired response.

Both images used to express this theory (a bullet and a needle) suggest a powerful and direct flow of information from the sender to the receiver. The bullet theory graphically suggests that the message is a bullet, fired from the "media gun" into the viewer's "head". With similarly emotive imagery the hypodermic needle model suggests that media messages are injected straight into a passive audience which is immediately influenced by the message. They express the view that the media is a dangerous means of communicating an idea because the receiver or audience is powerless to resist the impact of the message. There is no escape from the effect of the message in these models. The population is seen as a sitting duck. People are seen as passive and are seen as having a lot media material "shot" at them. People end up thinking what they are told because there is no other source of information.

New assessments that the Magic Bullet Theory was not accurate came out of election studies in "The People's Choice," (Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet, 1944/1968). The project was conducted during the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 to determine voting patterns and the relationship between the media and political behavior. The majority of people remained untouched by the propaganda; interpersonal outlets brought more influence than the media. The effects of the campaign were not all-powerful to where they persuaded helpless audiences uniformly and directly, which is the very definition of what the magic bullet theory does. As focus group testing, questionnaires, and other methods of marketing effectiveness testing came into widespread use; and as more interactive forms of media (e.g.: internet, radio call-in shows, etc.) became available, the magic bullet theory was replaced by a variety of other, more instrumental models, like the two step of flow theory and diffusion of innovations theory.

Example

The classic example of the application of the Magic Bullet Theory was illustrated on October 30, 1938 when Orson Welles and the newly formed Mercury Theater group broadcasted their radio edition of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds." On the eve of Halloween, radio programming was interrupted with a "news bulletin" for the first time. What the audience heard was that Martians had begun an invasion of Earth in a place called Grover's Mill, New Jersey.

It became known as the "Panic Broadcast" and changed broadcast history, social psychology, civil defense and set a standard for provocative entertainment. Approximately 12 million people in the United States heard the broadcast and about one million of those actually believed that a serious alien invasion was underway. A wave of mass hysteria disrupted households, interrupted religious services, caused traffic jams and clogged communication systems. People fled their city homes to seek shelter in more rural areas, raided grocery stores and began to ration food. The nation was in a state of chaos, and this broadcast was the cause of it.

Media theorists have classified the "War of the Worlds" broadcast as the archetypal example of the Magic Bullet Theory. This is exactly how the theory worked, by injecting the message directly into the "bloodstream" of the public, attempting to create a uniform thinking. The effects of the broadcast suggested that the media could manipulate a passive and gullible public, leading theorists to believe this was one of the primary ways media authors shaped audience perception.

Other considerations

Sivlio Berlesconni – major media owner and Prime Minister of Italy

Tony Blair’s courting of the Murdoch press before being Elected to power in 1997. The famous Sun headline “It wos the Sun wot won it”

Hitler’s rise to power mentioned above – propaganda etc

Theorists

Often associated with the work of Katz & Lazarsfeld (1955) but I prefer to reference the Marxist thinkers of the Frankfurt School. See below for some key quotes and ideas.

The Frankfurt School

The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood.... Thus emerges a pattern of one dimensional thought and behaviour in which ideas, aspirations and objectives that, by their content, transcend the established universe of discourse and action are either repelled or reduced to the terms of this universe. (Marcuse 1968 pp 26-7)

The media, then define for us the very terms in which we are to think or not to think about the world.

The threat they embody is that they inhibit thought itself by inducing us to live, mentally, in a world of hypnotic definitions and automatic ideological equations which rule out any effective cognitive mediation on our part.

Marked differentations such as those of R&B or Jazz, or stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend, not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organising and labelling consumers.

The most intimate reactions of human beings have been so thoroughly reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves now persists only as an utterly abstract notion: personality scarcely signifies anything more than shining white teeth and freedom from body odour.

Within the social and cultural fabric of monopoly capitalism, however, art is said to have been deprived of its oppositional value.

So art - even the most subversive art - may be good for business, deprived of its critical value in being reduced to the level of a mere means for the self-reproduction of capital.

What might be called use value in the reception of cultural commodities is replaced by exchange value. The prestige seeker replaces the connoisseur.  No object has an inherent value; it is valuable only to the extent that it can be exchanged.

Technology acquires power over society ... this is the power of those whose economic hold over society is greatest.

No rejoinder technology has been devised there is very little private broadcasting. They are denied freedom, must accept organisation from above and are dubbed amateur.

The development of the culture industry has led to the predominance of the effect, the obvious touch and the technical detail over the work itself.

Summary

·         Control over the production and distribution of ideas is concentrated in the hands of those who own the means of production.

·         The views of this group are given a privileged position over other viewpoints and they come to dominate the thinking of the subject groups.

·         These dominant ideas play a significant role in maintaining the status quo, that is, they help to reproduce class inequalities.

Criticisms

This theory is seen as too deterministic.

Assumes the media speaks with one voice

Assumes the audience is a homogeneous Mass without individual consciousness.