Do Modern Audiences Shape Modern Media?

Or how a $19 Strawberry illustrates the changing world of media effects.

Okay, I’ve taken a bit of a liberty here because, outrageous as it undoubtedly is, the $19 Strawberry isn’t, of itself, indicative of how our understanding of the way the media affects our behaviour has changed over the past 25 years.

What’s actually the focus here is people’s beliefs about how a $19 Strawberry sold in a luxury outlet is supposed to look and taste – and, perhaps more importantly, how superior it is to an ordinary, store-bought, 30 cent Strawberry.

As the following clip from the Jimmy Kimmel Show demonstrates, when people believe a situation is real, it is real in its consequences (the Thomas Theorem). In this instance people were stopped in the street and asked if they would like to try a “$19 Strawberry” – something actually sold in Erewhon, a luxury grocery store in Los Angeles.

While each respondent believed they were sampling a luxury Strawberry, what they were actually tasting was a bog-standard 30-cent store-bought Strawberry…

What this clip demonstrates is how our understanding of the world is shaped by how we are encouraged to see that world and while this idea is by no means new (see, for example, Gerbner’s Cultivation Theory and Mean World Syndrome in particular) it does suggest a different way of looking at how the mass media affects an audience.

Or, if you prefer, how audiences affect the media.

For most of the past century the conventional way of looking at the relationship between the media and their audience is to focus on the power of media to influence – overtly or covertly, consciously or unconsciously – people’s understanding of the world.

This is as true of overtly manipulative models (such as the hypodermic syringe) as of apparently less manipulative cultural effects models that see media power in hegemonic terms (whereby people are co-opted rather than coerced into believing whatever the media are promoting).

Whichever model you prefer, the implication here is that “the media” shape their audiences for good or ill. The only difference between the various models is the extent to which these effects are either direct (hypodermic syringe type) or indirect (2-Step Flow, Cultural Effects type).

A different way of understanding the mass media in the 21^st century is the extent to which the fragmentation of both audience and media has resulted in a charged relationship between the two: one where there is no-longer a “simple”, top-down, one-way relationship between them, whereby specific media messages are imposed or integrated into an audience’s general understanding of the world.

In this respect fragmentation operates in two ways:

firstly, the development of various forms of social media have served to break-up a media landscape where entry was determined by capital. If you were rich enough and powerful enough you could develop a media presence that reported and broadcast to a largely passive – and captive – mass audience.

secondly, while this model still exists, it’s no-longer the dominant force because audiences too have fragmented across a wide range of social boundaries, but particularly those of class, age, gender and ethnicity.

The argument here, therefore, is that whereas 20^th century media had a more-or-less mass audience at their disposal, in the 21^st century that audience has deconstructed into a variety of niches, each using different forms of media in different ways.

The outcome of this change is that modern media don’t seek to dominate the whole of a society or appeal to as wide an audience as possible because that’s no-longer an option: if there is no-longer a “mass, relatively-undifferentiated, audience” it makes little sense to try to appeal to something that no-longer exists.

So, while we have a situation where large-scale media organisations still exist, the mass audiences they once dominated do not, and squaring this circle involves understanding the way modern media is delivered. Rather than chasing “the undifferentiated mass”, media organisations are focused on capturing “the differentiated niche”, which in news terms involves identifying which niche audiences you want to capture and, not to put too fine a point on things, giving them what they want.

Information, in this respect, is consequently tailored to what an audience wants to hear. It involves delivering information that doesn’t question or challenge the audience’s worldview. To paraphrase Marx (Groucho not Karl), contemporary media organisations broadly inform their audience “These are our principles. And if you don’t like them, we have others”.

The 21^st century media landscape, in this respect, consists of a series of cultural bubbles within which media and audience co-exist in a relationship that is both symbiotic and mutually-beneficial: media companies find a guaranteed audience to which they can profitably sell advertising or merchandise. An audience’s beliefs are continuously confirmed and reaffirmed by the media they consume, which in turn leads to media organisations providing more of what their audience want in order to maintain audience share. If such media don’t provide it, the audience moves on to media that will supply it. This situation creates a Positive Feedback Loop – a circular relationship whereby media organisations target niche audiences and reflect the audiences’ beliefs back to them.

There’s also what’s called an Investment Effect going on here in the sense that once an audience becomes invested in a particular worldview it becomes very difficult to question its beliefs without calling into question an entire view of the world. In this respect, every event, every piece of information an audience receives has to be interpreted in the light of the worldview – a form, if you prefer, of what Festinger called Cognitive Dissonance.

And this is where a $19 Strawberry comes into play.

Once an audience worldview is set, such as in the idea that more expensive = better, everything they encounter is filtered through their worldview. And this leads to a refusal to believe something demonstrably true if it runs counter to those beliefs.

In this instance, an audience is told a  $19 Strawberry must taste better.

And so, of course, it does.

The “superior qualities” of a $19 Strawberry are assumed – even when the Strawberry in question is actually worth 30 cents.

I’m sure you can think of similar examples that don’t involve Strawberries…