Just found a handful of loving written in 1960 by Joseph Klapper. I love it when I think I'm a brilliant supergenius based on work and study, analysis, comprehension and all the other things that go into developing a personal theory or perspective, and then I run into something that articulated 50 years ago my thoughts precisely.
Klapper argued that media effects are not hypodermic and direct. Instead, “communication itself appears to be no sufficient cause of the effect, but rather to function amid other factors and conditions, which, though external to the communication, seem to mediate its influence in such a way as to render it an agent of reinforcement rather than change” (p.18). Some of these factors include our internal rehearsal processes as well as selectivity in exposure, perception, and retention. I will add one caveat to Klapper’s statement – that is that communication can spark curiosity and imagination, which leads to exploration, and possibly creation and/or de facto reinforcement. This is facilitated by interactivity.
Klapper (196) cites five mediating factors and conditions regarding reinforcement. It is “abetted by”
1) Predispositions and the related process of selective exposure, selective perception, and selective retention,
2) The groups, and the norms of groups, to which the audience members belong,
3) Interpersonal dissemination of the content of communications,
4) The exercise of opinion leadership, and
5) The nature of mass media in a free enterprise society.
Arguably, these factors make the difference in limited and powerful effects. Klapper (1960) then explains how media effects occur.
People tend to expose themselves to things consonant with existing views and avoid things that challenge those views. Selective perception refers to perceiving something in a way that fits with existing thoughts. In a diffusion experiment (Allport & Postman), a photo of a white guy with a razor arguing with a black guy on a train was shown to people. People then talked about what they saw in the photo. Like “gossip” or “telephone,” the story changed as it diffused. The razor tended to end up in the black guy’s hand. I think of the “You lie, boy” politician. Among people who thought he was a racist, their minds added the “boy” part to make his statement fit with pre-existing cognitions. Selective retention refers to exactly what it suggests: people remember messages or parts of messages that are consonant with their existing beliefs.
Klapper stops short of cultivation theory when he notes that “what might happen to the selective processes over such a period [of continuous exposure to propaganda] is as yet largely a matter of speculation” (p. 25).
Klapper, J. T. (1960). The effects of mass communication. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.