COMM526/Class notes

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Contents

Week 1, January 15, 2009

Article critique due October 30

  • Select an "offbeat" method or approach
  • Locate article using this method

Proposal

Consider all aspects of the project

  • Funding
  • Timelines
  • Staffing

Prepare a personal project management solution

Diff types of proposals

Money for Annenberg

  • Shorter
  • Looking for "great" and "do-able" idea

Govt proposals

  • "Building" research, building on previous research
  • Applied, they have questions and need help answering them

Templates exist for many of the bigger agencies

  • DoD
  • NSF
  • State Dept
  • Bigger foundations

Book proposals include different considerations

Week 2, Goffman, 20 Jan 2010

Housekeeping

  • Blackboard was updated today

Group presentations

  • I am group A

Planning research

  • Aiming to produce a journal article
  • Ideally every class results in a publication
  • Aside, Procrustes: Greek mythological figure would allow people to stay in his bed. Chop their feet, stretch them out to make them fit. Procrustean articificially altered to fit.

Big Question

  • Must pass the "so what" test
  • Worth spending time on
  • Too big to study
  • Doesn't "fit under your microscope"

Previous research

  • Review of literature
  • Helps you get from BQ to RQ
  • Avoid duplication
  • Need to compress for a journal article
    • Not a diss/thesis lit review

Research Question (RQ)

  • Fits under the microscope
  • Study-able, encompass-able
  • Within the resources that you command
    • Time
    • Location
    • Equipment
    • Subjects
    • Staff
    • Access
  • Feasibility

Method, design

  • What method will allow you to illuminate, investigate questions?
    • Questions are never answered
Types of research

Longitudinal studies

Panels

  • Repeatedly survey the same sample over time

Systematic observation

  • Live events taking place before you
    • Field notes after the fact
      • Like trying to remember dreams
      • Complicated skill
    • Record the event
      • Chronographic pen recorder
      • Encoding group conversation
      • Audio, video tape

Content analysis

  • Events being analyzed have some permanency
    • Recorded nightly-news broadcasts
  • Tends to be quantitative look at a collection of data
  • You likely ALSO take notes
  • Just as often used to analyze artifacts
    • e.g. blog posts
  • Reliability is an issue
    • The study can be repeated

Fire engine research

  • Responding to unscheduled/emergency events
  • Rarely can do "really good" research on unexpected events
  • e.g. Moloch and Lester, focusing on oil spill off coast of Santa Barbara
General social survey

Cultural indicators project, Gross

  • Depended on GSS
  • Useful because they added a question about TV viewing
    • "On an average day, how many hours of television do you watch?"
    • "How much TV did you watch yesterday?"
      • Day of the week uncontrolled, weekend/weekday
    • Used as an ordinal measure
      • Grouped according to "high", "medium", "low"

Conduct research

  • Keep this separate from both design and analysis phase
    • Lots of prep
      • Some times a pilot study is necessary
    • Do not look at data during experiment

Analyze results

  • Don't be too stubborn
  • Look at what you have and let it lead you

Return to BQ

  • How did the findings illuminate the BQ?
  • Go broad again
  • You may also need to return to the lit review

Carey on McLuhan, Innis

  • Connecting to Eisenstein and the printing press

McLuhan in context

  • McLuhan a "product of a specific moment"
  • Friend of Madison Ave
    • Invited to speak, present
    • "Let them off the hook"
  • Often doesn't hold up to empirical research
  • Gutenburg Galaxy, early advertising analysis

Innis

  • Telegraph crosses geographic boundaries
    • But is time-bound
    • Limited information transfer, dot-dash alphabet
  • Photography
    • Initially dagguerotype one-off prints
    • Later reproducible

Gross, Visual communication

Much of our information about the world comes through images

  • Despite all we know about the technology, how do we read these images?
  • Can you "unring the bell", unsee what you've seen?
  • Dominance of narrative realism
    • Conventions of storytelling that purport to be reportorial
      • See also Ian Watts on the history of the novel, narrative convention

What is exposition in storytelling?

  • Random character starts telling you what's going on
  • "Information dump"
  • Characters would already know the backstory
  • How do you fill in the audience?

Epistolary novels

  • Lost diaries
  • Lost journals
  • Letters back and forth between characters

Narrative

  • Fischer
  • Bruner (psychologist)

Fourth wall

  • Illusion of other space

Magical realism

  • Breaks conventions
  • Realistic
  • Occasionally break the realistic moment

Mediated reality

  • Intertwined with direct experience
  • Impossible to divide these epistemologies
  • Numerous narratives accessible via internet

Attribution theory

  • Social psychology
  • Interpreting other people's intentions
  • Two types of interpretation
    • Situational, the context demanded that behavior
    • Trait, you're THAT kind of person
    • Role, set of relationship rules, e.g. son, teacher, cop
  • Types of characteristics
    • Transitory, age, career,
    • Stable, race, demographic
"In a bank, people behave bank. In a post office, people behave post office."
  • Walter Michel argued that the research on traits should be thrown out, that it's mostly situational
    • Labeling theory, Chicago School
    • If you treat people a certain way, they will act that way.
    • We tend to observe people in limited circumstances, can't triangulate
  • Trend in the last decade has been bio-chemical, genetics
    • Good science asserts that there are always social-cultural factors

We are all multiple-role inhabitants

  • Occupying several roles
  • Different situations accentuate different roles
    • You are a different person in each role
  • You generall encounter other people in consistent role contexts
    • Regularly encounter parents in parent-child scenario

Some status markers change

  • Instantly, 21+ drinking age
  • Or must be negotiated, relationship with parents, transition to adulthood

Actor v. Observer

"Behavior engulfs the field."
  • Depending on how you "cast" a scene, you get a different result
  • For the observer, the actor dominates
  • We have more information about ourselves,
    • We know that we might be more complex than we are being treated

John Kerry, ASC student in 70s

  • Observed transitions in film from 20s-70s
  • Cuts, wipes, fades
  • Transitions across time and space
    • e.g. Murder Hitchcock, man walks out of courtroom
      • Goes home, stays over, shaves
      • Transition to get him to next scene
      • Audiences don't need this now, They can cut
    • Calendars flipping
    • Seasons changing
    • Trains moving
    • Indicators of time passing
  • How do children know that the commercial is not part of the show?
  • Expert, Vorkapitch, 180 degree line
  • Re: Bordwell, Thompson, classic Hollywood cinema
    • Classic Hollywood editing style: invisible style
    • Rope, Hitchcock attempted to create a film that appeared to have no cuts

Goffman

  • Of The Chicago School of Sociology
    • Derives from George Herbert Mead
    • Students collected and published his lecture notes
    • Self and society
      • We know ourselves through interactions with other people
    • Symbolic interaction theory
    • But how does such a complex social system work?
      • Everett Hughes, Howard Becker
      • Not covered as much by Goffman
      • Goffman thinks it works because people are constantly communicating that they are "part of the system"
      • Interacting with strangers could be anxiety producing to the point of paralysis
      • People tend to behave themselves even when there are no police around
  • Puts footnotes at the bottom of the page

Framing

Somewhat diff from contemporary "labeling" approach

  • More dramaturgic, performative

Asylums

  • First blockbuster
  • Based on fieldwork in an asylum
  • See paper, Definition of the Situation
  • Looking at strategies, negotiations
  • How to get out of the asylum?
  • Figure out what sane behavior looks like and model it
    • Expectations
  • Introduced the term "total institution"
    • Context in which you are completely controlled
    • Sometimes military institutions are thought of in this way
      • Navy lets you go on "liberty" when you're off the ship
    • Boarding schools, convents, monastaries
    • Using total institution as a metaphor: family

Stigma

  • "Management of a spoiled identity"
  • Strategies of ppl whose visible presentation is "spoiled"
    • Disabled
    • Disfigured
  • Non-normative presentation

Strategic interaction

  • Manipulate your own behavior strategically
  • Con games, swindles
  • "Cooling the mark"
  • Fieldwork in Vegas

Relations in public

  • Elaborates many of the ideas in Presentation

Radio talk

  • Use of language

Interaction ritual

Presentation of self

These selections are "dipping toes in a swimming pool"

  • This is his first of many books
  • "Instant classic"

The ways that we

  • Read other people and
  • Want to be read by others

Cultivation, mass media, 27 January 2010

Side notes:

  • "Television and the cultivation of gender roles in japan." Journal of Communication, 57:3.
  • Theodicy: why do bad things happen to good people?
    • Re: Book of Job

Gerbner notes

  • Gerbner never read Berger
  • Writing in context of mass comm
    • Concerned with "women, children, and the poor"
    • The effects of film, radio, comics, TV on "underclasses"
      • The Moon Is Blue in trouble for using the word "virgin"

Learning, reproducing society

Via educational policy

  • Compulsory education
  • Curricular debates
  • U.S. education is most decentralized
  • Curriculum standards at state level
    • Testing
    • Textbooks

Informal curriculum

  • Via entertainment, pop
  • Non-compulsory
  • Ad-supported
  • Ad world values reflected in pop narratives
    • Product placement only the most blunt instantiation

Watching fiction

  • Acquiring information from the "setting"
  • Subconscious apprehension of "facts"
  • Is learning specific facts about a professional different from ambient information about social demographics?
    • e.g. ER versus number of black doctors

Social indicators

Poli sci move counter to use of economics to measure a society

  • What else should you use to assess the condition of a country?
  • Advantage of econ: objective, quantified, comparable
  • Social indicators: looking at "quality of life", more difficult to measure

Cultural indicators

Gerbner believed you should measure the state of culture

  • To assess status of a society
  • G switched to "symbolic environment" later
  • Tried to start "cultural environment" movement
    • Connect to McChesney "media reform" movement

Gerbner identified "good" done

  • Not as pessimistic as other Frankfurt descendents
  • Erased some regionalism
  • Positive side of "mainstreaming", engages more people in national convo

Television in the 1960s uniquely suited to making generalizations about the culture

  • Because it had pulled together "largest, most heterogeneous audience in history"
  • Gerbner: "television like pre-industrial religion"
    • Content that could bring communities together
  • Bringing people together across traditional distinctions (class, especially):
    • Justification for use as barometer

Obviously we don't reach the numbers that programs routinely achieved last night

  • But is that necessary?
  • If everyone in ASC watches

Obviously we don't reach the numbers that programs routinely achieved last night

  • But is that necessary?
  • If everyone in ASC watches

Obviously we don't reach the numbers that programs routinely achieved last night

  • But is that necessary?
  • If nearly everyone in ASC watches Jersey Shore, is it effectively operating the same as 60's primetime?
    • Obviously dividing, segmenting us
    • But in terms of identity, etc..

Cultivation

First article

  • Gerbner, G. & Gross, L. (1976) Living with Television

Never asked about television

Surveys

  • Concerned about world view
  • Claim ("overstated") that the fundamental patterns were the same
    • Safer assumption in 1960s network era
  • When you ask about "television", you might contaminate the results
    • Pushing people to think about it in an uncommon fashion

Interviews

  • Possible to access TV experience through follow up questioning
  • Not asking directly about TV but ask about people's thinking and they share TV experiences

Methodological challenges

Industry structures

  • "Sweeps"
    • Stories to anticipate sweeps week
  • Seasons
  • Re-runs
  • Introduction of cable and satellite

Measuring subtle, ambient details w/ content analysis

  • Difficult to account for among coders

Secondary analysis

  • Using General Social Survey (GSS)
  • You have to rely on questions that others have chosen
  • Only one question added, re: television

Projection test

  • Kids presented with a table of faces
  • "Pick the judge"
  • "Pick the doctor"

Changes from TV to cable

Initial assumption

  • Things would not change terribly
  • Much of the content was re-runs

Spread of internet connectivity

Comparison to early print era

  • Printing presses all over the place
  • A.J. Leibling, "The press is free to the one who owns one."
  • Greater ability to define, target, develop a niche
    • Writing for the "long tail"

Mainstreaming

Gerber was not convinced

  • Gross and Michael M. found it, "tackled" George with it
  • Gerber preferred "bending, blurring, b..."

Gross, L. (1980) "Mainstreaming of america."

  • "privileging of the center"
  • notion that the truth lies in the middle
  • everything else is ideology
  • certainly a weakness of a single-axis political mapping
  • higher rate of TV watching : more likely to self-identify as "moderate"

Mean world syndrome

Anomie scale, Leo Srole

  • Term comes from Durkheim
  • Anomie a kind of alienation
    • Isolation, discomfort
  • Criminological approach: strain theory
  • Included on the GSS
  • Mean world construct built from anomie questions

Cultural, historical context:

  • Urban riots, sense of community fragmentation
  • Assassination Malcolm, Martin, Kennedys
  • Wartime
  • Stress, anxiety, anomie
  • Seemed like more prevalance of violence in mass media

Culture Industry, Base/Superstructure, E/D, 3 February 2010

German historical context

Powerful university model

  • American university system an adaptation of the German university model
    • Johns Hopkins was the first to adopt the German model

How does barbarism take over a country at the "height" of civilization?

  • Arts
  • Philosophy
  • Education

Academics were shocked at the rise of Fascism

  • Not only among the oi polloi but all classes
  • Nazi: "Coordination", "Alignment", "With us/ against us"
  • Heidegger's participation

European emigrees/exiles in LA

  • "Weimar of the Pacific"
  • "Somewhat uptight" German Jewish exiles
    • Mixture of fascination, enjoyment, cynicism, contempt
  • Social scientists focused on power of the group over the individual
    • Conformity
    • Persuasion
    • Propaganda
      • Origin of the term: propagation of the faith: Catholic church
      • How to understand, to counter?

Adorno, Horkheimer, The authoritarian personality

  • Writing about authority and family
  • Incorporating psychology
  • Father internalizes the workplace authority
    • Reproduces it in the home
  • F-scale, http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm
    • Milton Rokeach did research on this
      • Problem with scale is that it conflated personality with ideology
      • Created alternate Dogmatism Scale
  • Concern with power of social institutions over behavior
    • Especially over expected norms

The Torch

  • Satirical magazine
  • Karl Krauss
  • "[German people] swadle the stick they are beaten with"

Conformity studies

Asch Study

Milgram study

Contemporary examples, replication?

Wartime US

1941, entering the war

  • Army draft from rural, small towns
  • Largely undereducated

Mass education, justification for killing

  • Why we fight films
    • Hollywood produced propaganda
    • Office for War Information
    • Became the Yale Attitude studies
  • Similar to Nazi propaganda?

Why wasn't Germany nuked?

  • Why the concern for rebuilding Germany?
  • Establishing a bullwark against Russia
  • Establishing US position in Europe

Mass culture debate

Anxieties

  • Effects?
    • Positive, negative

Conditions, late-18th

  • Technology change
    • Printing press
    • Telegraphy
    • Film
    • Wireless radio
  • Industrialization

Cultural changes

  • Authorship
  • Publisher
  • Marketplace
    • For fiction

Middle-class women of leisure

  • Biggest audience for popular fiction in 19th c.
  • Produces anxiety
    • Dramatized in Madame Bovary
  • Connected to medical conditions
    • Hysteria

Children, youth

  • Another large market for popular fiction
  • 20th c. anxiety
    • Corrupting
    • Stunting
      • Physiologically
      • Psychologically

Mid-20th c. debate concerned disappointment

  • Liberal progressive success: leisure time, autonomy
    • Wasted on pop culture?
    • Lazarsfeld: "Instead of Columbia University ... Columbia Records."

Dilution of high culture:

  • Opt-out book clubs
    • Like BMG, Columbia, etc.
  • Reader's Digest
    • Magazine and condensed books
  • Critics effectively attacking the middle
    • "Mid-cult"

Critical distinctions:

  • High, serious, culture
  • Low, "folk", "popular"
    • Valued by the leftists for its "authenticity"
    • Connect to 50s, 60s folk music revival
    • Jon, Alan Lomax (Commies) archive of Southern folk music
      • Blues, Leadbelly
      • Largely African-American musics
  • Mid, Middle-brow
    • Object of fiery critique from the Left
    • Cynical industrial products
    • Produced by "hacks"
    • Seducing, duping the innocents (infantalizing)
    • "Narcotizing disfunction"
  • (Note: Contemporary revision)
    • (The mid brow artifact is a folk artifact)
  • Is the gap between high/low a measurable distance?
    • Points of contact
    • re: Lawrence Levine, on farcical Shakespeare
    • Waltz (Haydn, etc) drawing on folk dance

(Note: 1980s audience / cultural studies challenges these assumptions)

  • Radway, Jan. Reading the romance
    • Contra feminist patriarchical critique, high cult snob critique
    • Connected to uses & grats
    • Radway was not (yet) connected to cultural studies (Birmingham style)
  • Audiences are not passive

Contextualizing British cultural studies

Post-war Britain

  • Churchill is out
  • Labour party comes to power
  • Moral consequence of the war
  • Rise of working class culture
    • In contrast to the dominating British elite
    • "Oxbridge", F.R. Levis, Matthew Arnold
  • Early theorists: Hoggart, Williams
    • Upwardly mobile
    • Left-leaning
    • Williams' career begins in adult education
  • Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham
    • Stuart Hall
    • Central political concern

Nationalism:

Succession in new media ascendence

  • Re: French critical move toward auter theory
    • Somewhat arbitrary (perhaps erroneous) selection of the director

February 10, 2010

Classification of cultures, running through social theory

  • Fussell on "class X"
  • Richard Florida, "creative class"
    • Urban planning angle: what to encourage if you want these people?

Kinging by religious authority in Western history

  • Lead religious figure will crown and annoint with oil
  • First king of Israel was Saul, annointed by prophet Samuel

French revolution

  • Regicide
  • Where did that happen before? With different consequences?
  • Pope was nearby but Napoleon crowned himself
  • Class Termoil

Sumptuary laws

Sumptuary in Stonewall-era raids

Feinburg, Stone butch blues

  • One could be arrested if not wearing 3 articles of gender-appropriate clothes
  • These laws can't be found on the books?
  • Police and judges believed that these laws existed but they didn't?
  • Possibly apocryphal connection with Judy Garland event and drag
  • Was the naming of the bar (Stonewall) critical to its discursive power, symbolic spark

Stonewall wasn't the only bar in which they fought back

  • Also the "Black Cat" in SF and a bar in LA?

Silvia Rivera fought back

  • Cops retreated into the bar
  • Everyone else was rioting outside
    • Setting cans on fire and throwing them through windows

Imaginary laws

Behavior, speech is chilled by a widespread belief in a law that does not actually exist

  • May be shared among citizens, law enforcement, and/or judiciary
  • Stonewall example

Mobility

Narrative: "Upward mobility at the price of community"

  • Anomie, lack of connection
  • Teacher, educated person (also an outsider? Perhaps unmarried woman?) taps a young person for mobility
  • How Green Was My Valley
  • Raymond Williams tells a similar story
  • Goffman, Cooling the mark, telling ppl who aren't moving up that they are better off where they are
  • "You can't go home again."
  • Salariat, people who earn salaries, comparative security
  • Social capital, even lower class parents can cultivate in children

Class recognition

  • Speech, slang, accent, timbre
  • Taste, Bordieu (deconstructing naturalization and Kant)
  • Alma mater, e.g. USC, B.A. == Cultural/social capital

Paul DiMaggio

Canon wars

  • Connection to Bordieu and other deconstructions of (European) class
  • Literary canon being critiqued

Sub-cultural capital

Re-thinking Bordieu

  • Other kinds of hierarchies
  • Second-nature of their knowledges
  • Little innovation on the theory or logic of Bordieu
  • Grounding it in a new context based on empirical research

Logic of mass industrialization

  • Lower unit cost
  • Built-in obsolesence
  • Higher yield
  • Larger market
  • Turn workers into consumers

Fashion as an industry

  • Turns on seasons
  • Symbolic value added to survival/safety functions
    • Georg Simmel, elite group wears certain type of dress, others immitate, thus elite must revise (or pass sumptuary laws!)
    • Veblin, conspicuous consumption
    • Lowenthal, idols of consumption (movie stars)
  • Is the bottom-up diffusion of non-elite youth more powerful than the 19th c. top-down?
    • Examples, The Wild Ones, "What are you rebelling against?"/"What you got?"
    • Single best example? Blue-jeans, dungarees, denim

Decline and venerating the old

Herman. Idea of decline in western history

Traditionally, the old is valued, trusted, wise

  • American hubris is a suspicion, disregarding of tradition
  • Connects to Rogers' diffusion of innovation
  • How do you get people to abandon their traditional, old ways?
  • Murry at Harvard, Achieving society, interventions in culture by having parents tell different stories to their children
    • Achievement

But is there not a notion of decline?

  • Perhaps it is micro-scaled?
  • Young people nostalgic for even 5 years before
  • Seemingly pervasive sense of decline

Progress emerging in the 18th c.

  • Derided, optimistic whiggish, pollyanna histories

Is it a feature of history-making communities/cultures?

  • Alternative: "Same as it's always been", "same shit different day"

Etic / emic distinction

  • Pike

Feb 17, 2009

  • C. Wright Mills, Decatur study
    • The power elite
    • Troublemaking sociologist
    • Died young

Discussion of the book

  • Personal Influence

Early journalism

  • Interwoven with pamphleteering
    • most popular, Thomas Paine's Common sense
  • Unabashedly opinionated
  • Partisanship may be the historical, transcultural norm
    • Unbiased, just the facts, is a recent ideal

Photographical tech

  • 1839, dagguerotype
  • Ability to "affix object images" is manifest
  • Photograph accepted not as an image but as a "recording of fact"
  • Bias, expectation, belief, selection, framing

Mug shot

  • Used for identification

Blending, merging, segmenting, categorizing audiences

  • National, racial, political, ethnic, religious
  • Role of advertising?
  • How it might relate to nation-building projects?
    • India? EU?

"Yellow" journalism

  • Comic strip with a yellow boy in it

Psychology starts in 1870

  • Wilhem Vundt
  • Established psychology lab in Germany
  • More evidence of Germany origin of contemporary disciplines
  • Projects to organize info into a schema

Urbanization

  • Transitioning from small town to big city
  • Celebrity gossip as substitute for village gossip

Colonial implications of anthropology

  • Anthropologists in Thailand shared data with Thai government
  • Government used the data to select villages to be bombed

Chicago school of sociology

  • Park, Robert and Burgess
  • Ask by us, about them
  • Surveillance function

Early immigrant press

  • Not in English
  • Transmitting info about socialism, communism

IQ

  • Leon Kaymin, intelligence testing
  • IQ, mental age/ actual age
    • how to assess mental age? test many many ppl of same age and create normal curve
  • Alternate scales, Wexler, Stanford-Binet

Persuasion research

  • Was: voting, selling
  • Is: health
  • Unit of analysis is a change

Middletown

  • Middletown becomes Everytown

Polling

  • Emerges in 20s, 30s, 40s
  • Gallup and others

Sociometry

The long road to Decatur, Personal influence

Lazarsfeld "took care of" refugees from Germany

  • On methodology, "don't cheat"

Mills, Texan

  • Portrayed as anti-empiricism, grand theorist
  • "Nothing could be further from the truth"

Interview from

  • John Summers
  • Peter Simonson

Decatur study

  • Funded by True Story, a magazine aimed at mid class women
  • Elihu Katz
  • Interviewed 800 women about their everyday choices
  • 1940s

Two-step flow

Media messages flow first to opinion leaders

  • Second to the people around them
  • Optimistic take: other person is editing, refracting, mediating
  • Pessimistic way: "media are wholesalers, o.l.'s are retailers", messages intact

Anaylsis difficulties

  • 1945, Mills "worries about the figures going screwy"
  • Having trouble with the analysis
  • Didn't have the "skills" nor the "interest" to complete the project
  • 1947, Mills offered to write a narrative account. Lazarsfeld fired Mills

Midterm

  • Purchase Sunday NYT or LAT
  • Locate one or more stories that illustrate or relate to one or more of the theories we've been discussing in class
  • March 10

Persuasion model

  • Attention
  • Comprehension
  • Persuasion
  • Retention
  • Action

More on persuasion

Hovland

  • Yale attitude
    • Fishbein, later work on persuasion
  • Died somewhat young

Lewin

  • Field theory

You can be manipulated when nothing is at stake

  • Buying toothpaste
    • Low commitment
    • Low impact on identity

Jump offs

  • Katz & Lazarsfeld, Personal influence
  • Mills, The sociological imagination, "tore into" dominant thinkers of the time, politically engaged

24 February 2010, review paper drafts

"lead pants", stubbornness

  • just being there

People

  • Kraut
  • Bruckman
  • Lih
  • Harggattai
    • recent paper, trust, on larry's journal

Type II error

  • How do you poll the poeple who were turned off and left, uncontactable?

3 Mar 2010

Third person effect

  • Recurring concerns about children (and other "vulnerable" groups) being exposed to dangerous information
    • Kids and porn
    • Women and novels

Source credibility

  • Expertise
  • Disinterestedness (no motive, impartial)

Reception / change model

"Mark off change", at each stage there's a change that you won't continue

  • Exposure
  • Reception
    • Attention
    • Comprehension
  • Change
    • Yielding (Attitude change)
    • Retention
    • Action

Tacit assumption in persuasion: attitude change is weakness.

  • It is never improvement
  • It is always yielding to another

Compare with similar Learning chain:

  • Instead of "yielding", we have "learning"
  • Retention is ascertained through "testing"
  • Certainly complicated by "transfer", "authentic learning", context

"Dissonance reduction" theory

  • Social psych
  • If you comply, your attitude changes
  • People adjust attitudes to match what they are actually doing

Types of internalization

  • Internalize
  • Compliance
  • Identification
    • Ideal
    • Similarity

Spiral of silence

  • Social pressures on people to conform
  • Gerbner was editor of JoC when this was published
  • Alport, 1920s, "pluralistic ignorance"

Managing classwork and IRB

  • When does research start?
  • How do you manage consent?
  • What are the ethics?
  • Becker, "say you're an artist and this is performance art"

Jump offs

  • Sennett & Cobb, The hidden injuries of class
  • Willis, Learning to fail, British cultural studies working in a boys' school in Northern England, enforced norm of failure
  • Hall, Sign and language, distinguishes "formal" and "technical" learning
  • Becker, Tricks of the trade: how to think about your research while you're doing it
  • Becker, Telling stories about society

10 March 2010, Journalism, News media

  • Gay Tuckman, Chicago School sociological tradition
    • Edward Hughes, major figure
    • Retired and moved to Tufts (where Tuckman studied under him)
    • Becker's work is like this
    • Unromantic view of industry: how does the work actually get done?

Field studies

  • Four or five all conducted in the 1970s and 80s (see jump offs)
  • Very few studies since then
  • The body of literature has gone obsolete

What is the news?

  • If not professional journalism + traditional production/distribution

Assumptions in some of this criticism

  • Assuming a certain journalistic ideal, principles
  • Concerned with failure to meet this ideal
  • Was the model of journalism discussed here ever viable? Or was it always anomalous?
  • Non-partisan assumption
    • Is it expired?
    • Was 20th c. an exception?
    • Did it ever really exist?

Business / editorial division

  • When there was plenty of money, journalists didn't feel that they needed to know about the biz
  • As the money started to shrink, stakes raised, interests blurred
  • Cyncial view: people who would buck the system were filtered out earlier

Beholden to the unexpected

  • Gotta print a paper everyday
  • But you have to work with whatever is available
  • One solution: Beat assignments
    • Areas where things are likely to happen
    • Near newsmakers
    • City hall
    • Red sox
    • Court house, police station
  • What do you do if you're not an automatic, legitimate "newsmaker"?
    • How do you gain access?
    • Make trouble?

Event-making

  • Unofficial: Demonstrations, arrests, trouble-making
  • Official: non-events/pseudo-events so that there is something to cover
    • Congressional hearings are pseudo-events
    • Demonstration for constitutents
    • Real negotiation occurs in private
  • This only works because the news media has a need to fill the paper

What has changed?

Sidenote: on "McCarthyism"

  • Long pre-dates the man and long outlasted him
  • Anxiety re: influence of Communism
  • 1990 Palmer Raids
  • House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC)
    • Martin Dies
  • Before 1941, we weren't exactly enemies of Soviet Union
  • After 1945, "premature anti-Fascists" were ppl actively resisting fascim before Dec 7, 1941 when anti-Fascism because official policy
  • In 1930, Communists "riddled throughout" the government went underground

Prime change: Thinking change

  • People are accustomed to change
  • Thinking about new models
  • Thinking about the state of the news media

Limited scalability of access

  • Access to "newsmakers"
  • Information "tribunes" from newsmakers to journalists
  • "Press pass"
  • To maintain access, journalists must play by the rules
  • AJ Liebing, a journalists' journalist
    • "Freedom of the press is guaranteed to he who owns one."

Resources

  • Foreign bureaus
  • Arts coverage

Ritual, habit

  • Same news as yesterday

Standards, "quality"

  • Journos post and readers accept different quality news

Article chunk size

  • Snippets, clips, tweets

Plagiarism

  • Easier to do, easier to find

Jump offs

  • Tuckman, Making news
  • Making the papers
  • Deciding the news
  • Fishman
  • Epstein, News from nowhere
  • Heatwave, analysis of news media response of a terrible heatwave in Chicago that turned into an urban crisis
  • Fighting for air, political struggles over consolidation, regulation of spectrum, scarcity
  • McChesney, Death and life of american journalism
  • Oscar Gandy, Beyond agenda setting, lays out model of relationship between news sources and news media, information subsidy
  • Goodnight and goodluck, film
  • Face in the crowd, film
  • Operation abolition, film, key element in spurring the rise of the New Left
  • Cass Sunstein, The daily me
  • Jeff Jarvis
  • Frank Stanton, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Stanton
  • Walter Annenberg, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Annenberg

March 24, 2010 - Transnationalism

  • Next week, Cody, Sheila
    • Readings are on blackboard
  • Following week, Andrea Hollingshead
    • Readings forthcoming
  • Week after that, parasocial interaction
    • Horton and Wall
    • Might include discussion of reality programming
  • May have an opportunity for additional topics

Gross' upcoming arts course

  • Simultaneous celebration, marginalized
  • What do different arts communicate?
  • Hubris and "core cultural understandings"
  • A class "transformed" by new media technologies
    • No longer necessary to go to slide library to acquire images

Saul Worth asked Levi-Strauss

  • "Why do you people write like that?"
  • L-S: In our culture if you don't write like that you aren't taken seriously

Translation

  • Understudied as a field in Communication
  • "Public sphere", "spiral of silence" products of translation
  • Where does one find translation studies?
    • Holland, Belgium
    • "Intensely multi-lingual"
    • Contested languages Flemish/French
      • Different names for the same places makes navigation difficult
      • Words literally scratched off of signs (scratches remain)
    • Tel Aviv

Body:Map dualism

  • Head/north
    • Rational, cold
  • Body/south
    • Passionate, hot

Connect to theories of national character

Migration

  • In some cases, people who live in a place are the people who didn't leave
    • Tension between long-time Oklahoma residents and descendents from Okies
  • For a long time, the norm was that people did not move far from their place of birth
    • Is there something to be observed in the character of peoples who move?

"Natives", "immigrants"

  • Parents relying on childrens' technical skills

Rapid change makes extant things seem novel

  • Consumer culture was long present among elites
  • But mass production spread it very quickly to everyone

Analogies for industrial production

  • Gerbner, industrial pollution

Empirical?

  • "Playing against the house"
  • Test validity of ideas in a context that makes it "hard for you to win"
  • Falsifiability
  • Guard against overwhelmingly powerful human impulse to find what you're looking for
  • Find ways to prove yourself wrong
  • Try to prove the null hypothesis
  • Reproducibility

Jump offs

Mar 31, 2010 : Cody, Murphy visit

  • Based on persuasion theory
    • Initial attention-getting step
    • Public school curriculum less entertainment-oriented because the students' presence is mandated
  • Hollywood, Health, Society are a resource
    • Not lobbyists, not lecturing to Hollywood people

Entertainment education (EE)

  • "Intentional placement of educational content in entertainment messages" (Singhal & Rogers, 2002, p.117)

Abbreviated history of EE

  • 1951, The Archers, radio drama with information about pig farming
    • Archers is still running. Longest-running radio soap!
    • BBC, government had 100% control
  • 1969, birth control storyline in Simplemente Maria
    • Migel Sabido, telenovela producer
    • Followed by sharp reduction in the number of children per family
    • Guatemala, Mexico
  • 1970s, 1980s, lots of EE outside of the US
    • US for-profit system offers little opportunity for government control
  • 1992, CDC adds "prevention" to its mandate
    • Previously solely concerned with tracking
    • Jeff Koplan becomes director of CDC
  • 1996, ER is very popular + CDC formalizes EE
  • 2002, CDC establishes HH&S at Annenberg's Norman Lear Center to work with TV writers+producers

Criticism of early EE projects

  • Little rigorous evaluation
  • Atheoretical
    • No cumulative knowledge
  • Did it work?
  • Why did it work?

Hollywood, Health and Society

Attempts to use popular TV programs to educate general public about health issues

  • Writers workshops on health topics
  • Meeting with specific TV programs
  • Experts directory
  • Health awards for various daytime/primetime health
  • Partnering with academics to eval impact

KAP model

Rubric for determining success of a public health intervention

  • Knowledge
  • Attitudes
  • Practices (behavior)

Attitude-Behavior Consistency Problem

  • 1934, LaPiere's study highlights "attitude-behavior consistency problem"
    • Calls and visits hotels and restaurants regarding Chinese patrons
    • Do they deny?
    • 92% said they would not accommodate Asians
    • But in practice, they actually DID
    • Major measurement issue!
    • People's reports in survey research are inaccurate!
  • 1935, Allpost proposes that attitudes are multi-dimensional rather than unidimensional
    • Attitudes inconsistent over time
  • 1960s, Attitude-behavior Converse's finding of nonattitudes
    • Should we stop working with attitudes? Focus exclusively on behavior?
  • 1967, Ajzen and Fishbein introduce Theory of Reasoned Action
    • Person's behavior is determined by
      • Intention to perform the behavior
      • Intention is a function of his attitude toward the behavior
      • Subjective norm regarding the behavior
    • Preserve focus on attitude

Theory of Reasoned Action (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1977)

Theory is limited by correspondence/specificity between attitudes and behaviors being predicted

  • Action?
  • Target?
  • Context?
  • Time?

Attitudes are likely to predict behavior

  • Direct personal experience
  • Environmental, situational norms
  • Strong attitudes
  • Consistent with other values, beliefs
  • Directly related to specific behavior being predicted

Integrative Model of Behavior (Fishbein, 2000)

  • Ajzen also developed his own follow-up called Theory of Planned Behavior
  • Both are elaborations of the TRA
  • IMB involves Bandura's concept of self-efficacy
    • Whether or not you'll do it depends on if you think you can do it
  • Also introduces background characteristics

Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura)

  • People are more likely to mimic a behavior that they've seen than a behavior that has only been recommended

Organ donation example

  • Several storylines about organ donation
  • Many riled people up to donate organs
    • But only Numb3rs depicted people actually going to the DMV and becoming donors

Subjective norm

  • Behavior related to social norm

Prospect Theory

  • (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981)
  • Two scenarios:
    • Sure gain of $250 / 25% chance of gaining $1000, 75% at nothing
    • Sure loss of $250 / 75% chance of losing $1000, 25% at nothing
  • People are "risk averse" and protective

Framing

  • "Frame is central organizing idea for making sense of relevant events and suggesting what is at issue" (Gamson, 1992, p. 157)
  • Frame promotes "particular problem definition, casual interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or tretament recommendation for the item dsescribed" (Entman, 1993, p. 52)
  • Another example of frames from early 1990s, Gulf War:Vietnam or Hussein:Hitler

Priming

  • Argued that cognitive activiation or "priming" yields increased likelihood that same concept or related associations will come to mind (Berkowitz & Macauley, 1971)
  • Priming happens without consciousness, "automatic", "effortless" (Miller and Krosnick, 1996)

Transportation

  • (Green & Brock, 2000)
  • Narrative engagement where "emotions are heightened", "disbelief is suspended"

Future project: Narrative and KAP

New NIH grant app opens with:

  • "What caused Pinocchio's nose to grow?"
  • "What was the name of your 2nd grade teacher?"

Lewin

"Nothing so practical as a good theory"

"Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice." (Lewin 1946, reproduced in Lewin 1948: 202-3)

7 April

  • Missed the Hollinshead presentation

Ben's notes

class notes

Andrea's talk -- background in experimental social psychology

  • group think -- irving janis, who coined the term, her undergrad advisor.
  • group v. team -- she uses them the same.
  • multi-disciplinary area (more than interdisciplinary);
  • purposes of groups: task performance, knowledge dissemination, governance and agents of social change, identity + community + belonging
  • traditional focus: comm+social (rhetoric, process/skills, procedures); psych+org (intra-group, groups on individuals, input-process-output); psych/management (org context and effectiveness) -- these are the three areas she publishes in most.
  • how'd she get interested? she's an oldest child. noticed people act differently in groups. brother acted worse in groups, she often did all the work in groups. * transactive memory: based in premise that experience improves performance
    • if you want to know more about TM, Wegner's 1995 model ("social cognition") with computer network analogy. ** knowledge types: differentiated and integrated knowledge
    • sees MMORPGs as good places to study TM
    • TM is a latent construct -- never directly observable
  • Andrea sees the assigned Wegner article as one of the most interesting, that inspired much of her work. (Although others in my cohort suggested it could be skipped.)
  • Community of Practice connection? She liked my question. Thinks it hasn't been explored much. That it might be worth looking for connections between the literature.
  • Q: what does she think of Scott Page's The Difference?

Ludic constructions, Ben

  • Ludic approaches to encouraging civic engagement
  • Demand side:
    • Are everyday citizens more ready for this than the institutions?
  • Lance Bennet argues a generational divide
    • Previously civic orgs appealed to sense of responsibility
    • Games pull younger people in and engage them
  • People enjoy activies that yield skills, confidence
    • Learning and play (ludic)
  • Existing ludic characteristis of civic life

Corrections policies, Elisheva

Corrections policies

  • Many media orgs change the actual texts
  • Newer "bloggy" orgs don't even have corrections policies
  • Spoke to folks at NYT and WPost about corrections policies
    • Location of corrections notice
    • Top? Bottom?
    • Again, new media don't appear to deal with this
  • What do readers think?
  • When Larry got NYT early edition in Philly, it was always full of typos
    • These would be corrected in later versions
  • Some publications differentiate locus of error: reporter, photographer, editor
    • WPost doesn't do it
  • Headlines change between print/web based on SEO

Latino/Korean relationship in Koreatown, Minhee

  • "Othering" effect among readers of different ethnic media
  • Is there much intersecting?
  • To what extent are there bridges between these communities?
  • How to access? Interviews, focus groups?

Apr 14, Parasocial

  • Dave Garroway, first leading light of the daytime talkshow
    • NBC's Today Show

Count sheep

Parasocial

  • People feel like they've "spent time" with the celebrity
    • Especially powerful with the "intimate social distance" of television framing
    • re: Edward Hall

The close up

  • Some people emphasize the LARGE cinema screen, overwhelming
  • But television is a small, intimate screen

Celebrities

  • Understood in terms of secrets
  • Hidden, known, circulated, revealed
  • Audience wants to know the real star

Jump offs

Apr 21, Porn

  • Larry started to write a book and ended up stopping
    • Wrote about outing instead
    • Porn work got boring, so much research happening
  • Not sure it could stand on its own
    • Too big for an article
    • Too short for a book
  • Also, after early-90s, the field dropped out of sight
    • Political changes, Clinton wins 1992
    • Meese commission was organized to galvanized the porn issue as an election issue
      • Tested a porn referendum in ME and it flopped
      • "Not a horse you can ride"
    • Attention shifted from adults to kids
      • Communication Decency Act of 1996, etc
    • Also, the rise of the IRB
      • Lasting influence of the Milgram study
        • Some weird reality TV show in France used it as a game device
      • Provocation / Excitation / ____
      • Comparing social research within and without the IRB regime

Zillman / Gross debate

  • Plays out in the Journal of Comm
  • Zillman essentially says that the only people arguing with his work are lovers of porn

Dolf publication strategy

  • Planning multiple overlapping studies
    • One set of subjects passes thru multiple tasks
  • 3 or 4 papers produced from it

Debriefing

  • If "debriefing" is actually a restorative process, "making whole" the damage of porn
    • it seems more than something that ought to be implicit.

Experimental design from subjective position

  • One must put himself into the shoes of the subject
    • Set up a kind of "play" in which everyone but the subject is a confederate, "part of the show"
  • Festinger, Schacter
    • Ash, Milgram
  • Subjects almost always know about the experiment
    • And they can figure out what is being tested
    • Experimentalists must develop a cover story

Bystander intervention, Kitty Genovese

  • Kitty was murdered near a housing project
    • In the popular imagination, it was an example of callous big city life in which strangers won't intervene
  • Various experiments presented realistic-seeming attacks, child abuse, etc. and measured strangers' responses

Subway project on IND (now ACE) express in Manhattan

Rode and Rossen's, JBSP

  • "Tempered naturalism" field study
  • ~5-8 minutes in a closed car
  • Three confederates on the car
    • One is taking notes w stopwatch
    • Two actors
  • Events
    • One actor falls down
    • If no one helps in 45s, the other actor will help pick them up
  • "Deserving victim" variations
    • Actor is wearing a raincoat
    • With a cane
    • With a liquor bottle
  • A "natural" version would be waiting around for someone to fall
  • Another version involved eye-contact as a variable

Politically explosive research topics

  • "Intergenerational sex" research
    • No data to support many of the assumptions
  • Likewise, pornography research had terrible methdological problems
  • Funding at stake
    • Kinsey study lost its Rockefeller funding

Social science applied to policy-making

  • Congress decides to engage in a "show trial"
    • Hold hearings on various things

90s examples

  • The Parents Resource Council (TPRC)
    • Evaluating pop lyrics
  • V-chip

How does this work?

  • Some complaints
  • Politicians call in the industry reps
  • Industry promises to self-regulate
  • Everyone shakes hands on camera
  • Classic example: MPAA, Jack Valenti

Media violence in the 70s

  • Social psych research from the 60s suddenly picked up and applied to media violence
  • The violence of the historical period made considerable money available
  • Arousal wears off fast

Decency

  • 1873, Anthony Comstock concerned about obscenity in the "mails"
  • 1973, Roe v. Wade (along w school prayer) catapulted the Christian right into politics
  • Random House had obscenity issue with customs officials stopping importation of Ulysses
  • Protests against an exhibition of Mapplethorpe in Cincinnati
    • Simon Lays

Censorship

  • Americans do not like it
  • Direct govt censorship is a losing battle
  • Distribution and ratings systems make the material unavailable
  • Also grant agencies: Piss Christ controversy
    • NEA stopped giving individual grants

"Media effects"

  • Nearly always refers to "bad" effects
  • Born of moral panic

Christian history of sex

  • St. Paul
    • Famous organizer of the early church
    • Paul had complicated, negative views about sex
  • Augustin
    • Believed sex was inherently sinful
    • Man is born between shit and piss
    • Sex is unclean but unfortunately necessary because of a verse in Genesis: "be fruitful and multiply"
    • The only non-sinful sex, therefore, is procreative
    • Of course, one must be married and with procreative intent
  • St Alfons Legori
    • Catholic theologian
    • Female sexual pleasure is required because it encourages procreation
      • Consistent with Talmud
  • Missionaries toured the world teaching people about sex
    • Missionary position
    • In the dark, bedroom, at night
  • Conference on sexuality during JP2
    • Closing talk was about natural law
    • Approved Condom of the church is pricked with a pin

Marital aids

  • "Big unspoken secret of sex is boredom and unnaturalness of monogamy"
  • Many of the sex conventions from the missionaries are broken
  • Eventually mid-20th century, the monogamy taboo is broken

Remaining taboos

  • Age of consent, 18+
    • Statutory rape
    • Intergenerational sex

"Erotophobic"

  • Imported church laws via English law
  • Commercial v state
    • Commercial appeals to the human interest
    • State is regulating, restricting

Legal challenges

Married couples

  • Right to purchase condoms
  • Right to watch obscene movies in their homes

Over time, the debate shifted from First amendment to right of privacy:

  • 1890, Warren & Brandeis wrote article in the Harvard Law Review about one of the unenumerated rights: the right to privacy
    • "Implied" by the Constitution
    • Stimulus: growth of the commercial mass media
    • "What was whispered in the closets is now shouted from the rooftops"

Privacy

  • Liberalization of sexuality turned on privacy
    • Explicitly allowing private behaviors
    • While regulating public activities

Jump offs

  • This film is not yet rated (film)
  • Jupiter Metrics, "Neilsens for the internet"
  • Rubin, Gayle. () Thinking sex.
    • Long time as a PhD student
  • Sex and the confessional, book written after making recordings in confessional booths
  • Total woman, early 70s bestseller, how to keep your man interested
    • Greet him at the door wrapped in saran wrap
  • Griswold v Connecticut, 1965, SCOTUS, married couple went to court over their legal right to purchase contraception
  • Pitulo, an argument for discrimination, young people are "fluid", in the absence of discrimination, young people may not be sufficiently convinced of the advantages of heterosexuality
  • Anna De Veer Smith

Apr 28, Meet the faculty

Brandeis thesis

Lengthy interviews about creativity with psychology:

  • McKlellan
  • Skinner
  • Maslow
  • Bruhner
  • Rokech
  • Herbert Simon, decision theory, economics
    • Pioneer of computer modeling, Nuel, Shaw, Simon

Social-psychology because it connected to art + culture

  • Was unhappy with the behavioral tradition and its "psychology of art"

Sequential theories were very influential

  • Stages, draw from Freud, evolution/biology
  • Piaget
  • Ericksson

Columbia grad school

  • Social psychology
  • Somewhat "experimental" because it was in contrast to behaviorists
  • Schachter, advisor
  • Thesis was an experiment with 180 rats about adaptive eating behavior

Hired by Annenberg, Penn

  • Spring 1968
  • Had been talking to Psych programs in NE
  • Someone from Penn had been on sabbatical and chilling at Columbia
  • Called Larry and suggested he apply
  • "Come down and talk to us about art"
  • Didn't realize it was a job talk!

Social indicators movement

  • Gerbner pushes "cultural indicators", especially TV
    • Content, images, etc
    • Folklore
  • Gross + Gerbner, putting TV in the background
    • No reliable way to get clear measures of exposure
    • Second-order analyses are cheaper than specialized national surveys

Activism in the 1970s

  • Intersection of activism w/ media studies
  • Increasingly building activism in
  • Chair of Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Taskforce
    • Often working w local media, producing PSAs
    • Studies documenting incidents of violence, 80s-2002
    • 1000s of respondents
    • "Put something on the agenda"
    • Biggest challenge: schools

Gay studies

  • "The Body Politic", Tom Wahl, fac at Concordia
    • Early "non-academic" venue for gay studies
    • Tended to be history, and to some extent, sociology
    • Bringing back the denied + erased histories
  • Duberman, Martin; Hidden from history
  • Gross. Up from invisibility
  • Katz, Jonathan - wrote one of the first books about gay history, Gay american history
    • Likely, undeniable history of gay ppl in the US
  • Recruiting other people into working on anthropology
  • Academics working in this area hurt
  • Heavily empirical
    • In the 80s, caught up in essentialism v social constructionism
    • Social constructionism "overinterpreting Foucault" history of sexuality
    • Both sides over stating
    • Some vicious debates at conferences, in Amsterdam and elsewhere
    • Hostility learned in the sectarian left

Visual communication

  • Visual anthropology

Communication and social change

  • Penn in the 70s had a taken-for-granted critical stance
    • Left
  • Undergird mass media comm
  • This assumed critical stance waned to some degree in the 80s
    • Right-centrism, neo-liberalism
  • Today the demand is high
    • Market-based arguments by economists
    • Deregulation in the 80s-90s, ppl believed that abundance would ensure that the market would supply variety
    • Empirical evidence suggested otherwise but it happened anyway
  • Consolidation, net neutrality
    • Neither left nor right is interested in this kind of monopoly biz

Jump offs

  • Premature anti-fascists
  • Skinner, critical essay about the "seamless success narrative" in psych publishing
  • Bruhner on the value of mistakes
  • Maslow found that people were not theorizing health(y psychology)
    • As opposed to an illness/deficiency-based approach
  • Thomas Kuhn on science and paradigm-shifts
  • Coleburg sequence theory of moral development
    • Carol Gilberg countered later by making an essentialist gender arg
  • Shapiro started at Columbia as a freshman, stayed there for his entire career
    • Important art historian
  • Semantic differential
  • Critique by historians of critical theorists taking up space in History depts, obliviousness/ignorance to prior work in diff fields
  • Kenneth Pike, emic/etic, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic
  • Holsti, article on content analysis from a methods handbook
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