Media Psychology: Why You Should Care (Part 2)

Media psychology uses the lens of psychology to understand human interaction with technology. Don't believe Chicken Little. The sky is not falling.

We need media psychology because media technologies are proliferating at the speed of light with new toys and gadgets on the market every day. These technologies are introducing capabilities that are redefining the way we work, play, and communicate. As I see it, a media psychologist can add value in five ways:

1. Helping people adjust to the rapid pace of technological progress
2. Holding authors and journalists accountable to professional standards when new research reports make headlines by actually reading the ports
3. Explain the difference between correlation and causality
4. Remind everyone that the experience of media technologies varies by person, culture, context, and what you are trying to achieve
5. Helping people understand that the sky is not falling

The rapid introduction of technology is unsettling and has triggered a spectrum of reactions, from enthusiasm to distrust. We all come to grips in our own ways with change. As technology changes our lives, we are forced to change how we view the world. Human beings are not really very good at that.

Media psychology is the response to this dilemma. It is a relatively new field and hard to define. [See “Media Psychology: Why You Should Care (Part 1)."] Media psychology seeks to understand the interaction among individuals, groups, society, and technology and make sense out of it so we can make decisions and go about our lives in the most positive and productive way possible.

Media psychology only recently become an “official” academic discipline. Yet, the last 50 years have produced valuable and interesting work in media psychology-related research and study, much of it from outside of psychology. Our collective anxiety over the impact of media on individuals and society, such as the portrayals of violence, consumer manipulation, or information overload has fueled a good bit of the research. In contrast, relatively-speaking, very little research exists on the positive uses of technologies. My grandmother used to say “you find what you’re looking for.”

Fear of change is a normal human reaction. As far back as Ancient Greece, Socrates feared that writing relied on external things and neglecting the mind and that it lacked flexibility, the written word being literally “cast in stone.” Kenyon College’s President, S. Georgia Nugent (2005) draws an apt analogy from a narrative pattern: “Kill the bearer of the message” saying that the earliest references to the ‘technology’ that enabled writing in Western tradition are of profound distrust. Where Socrates worried about fixity, we worry about the fluidity of electronic media and the fuzzy boundaries between author and reader, consistent with St. Augustine’s reflections that language links our interior with our exterior creating permeable boundaries between self and body. Nugent notes that that those who do not understand new technology often want to control the “facile exchange between the inside and the outside made possible by this particular information technology.”She says:

“Confronted with a new technology for communication, we find, in both Homer and Plato, the fear that it will introduce dangerous secrecy, an undesirable development of privacy. Today, we worry that IT will usher in an untoward openness of communication, a lack of the privacy we have come to value.” (Nugent, 2005, para. 23)

From a biological perspective, we know that human brains are hardwired to notice change because the a change in the environment increases the probability of danger. On the Savannah, it was important to notice things that moved: tigers moved and were dangerous and trees were immobile and harmless. Nothing was more important to survival, yet nothing has such potential to cause problems today. Our resistance to change is a function of how we project our cost/benefit analysis, yet old habits die hard.

Equilibrium doesn’t really exist, except in our fifth grade science textbooks. But we like to think it does because it makes us so much more comfortable. We like everything to stay put, like the trees. The human reaction to change--resistance--is normal. Humans also have the added gift of selective memory to help maintain cognitive comfort. We pine for the “good old days" and use memories of prior times as a baseline model for how things should work and how the world should be.

Media psychology bridges this gap by helping us better understand some of the implications of technological change. Researchers hypothesize, operationalize, and quantify the impact of media. Research in media psychology, however, is difficult; complicated by the fact that it’s hard to realistically measure things that are so integrated in the fabric of everyday life. It’s extraordinarily tricky to separate out confounding variables in our complex world. Today, we are media consumers, producers and distributors and our choices have direct impact on what others produce for us to see.

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Nevertheless, as order-seeking creatures, we are looking for how to assign responsibility for change in individual and group behaviors, the social zeitgeist, and all moral failings. As in any field, these factors have stimulated a mixed bag of research—some very important and well done and, unfortunately, some agenda-driven research with less rigorous academic integrity. Research is, after all, largely influenced by how you ask a question, define what you measure, measure it, and interpret the findings. Reading the methodology section and statistical results of a research report is valuable and seldom done. This is particularly important for civic responsibility because reading apparently journalists are not required to read the actual report in order to cover it in the national press. Many articles are based on press releases from the sponsoring institutions or, worse yet, on another journalist's interpretation.

Most of the research that we would consider to be media psychology focuses on mass media and for good reason. Mass media was a game-changer, bringing information, images, and culture to a broader segment of society and the world. Researchers looked to understand what was perceived as a unidirectional flow of influence from media conglomerates, advertisers, and government bodies on the public. This media effects tradition has produced various theories—such as, the silver bullet (targeted impact), media framing (we don’t tell people what to think, we tell them what to think about), and uses and gratifications (people use media to gratify needs)--and they have evolved from viewing media consumers as a homogeneous and passive audience to one driven by individual differences and motivations.

In spite arguments for reciprocity between individuals and our cultural environment (e.g. Baudrillard, Freud, McLuhan, and Vygotsky), few psychological or media theories actually focus on media as part of a dynamic interactive system including media content providers to media consumers, co-evolving in a social environment. Bandura’s model of social cognitive theory does this, but his earlier work on social learning is much more common as the theoretical framework for media effects research.

Recent work in neurobiology and evolutionary psychology has begun to shed light on the impact of social interaction on the formation of internal structures. We are beginning to indentify variations in human brain plasticity in response to the environment and variations in cognitive processing over the lifespan to achieve psychological consonance. Birth to early adulthood is a period of high plasticity in terms of brain maturation and is subject to shaping by the environment. Once past early adulthood, change in the human brain derives from cognitive intervention–which is, as we all know, a lot more difficult. Thus, from adulthood onward, humans find it “easier” to alter the environment to suit their cognitive structures than the other way around. Human alterations include physical structures, laws, codes of behavior, language and the arts. Every generation will make their mark on the environment to support their mental models and with the vast changes in technologies and media today, this goes a long way toward describing the discrepancy in the attitudes toward media use between generations. This is a biological description of Marc Prensky’s (2001) excellent metaphor of the young as “digital natives” versus older generations of “digital immigrants.”

Because the media survives only by arresting and holding the attendance of the audience, they deliver technology and content that viewers want. We must recognize the evolving media environment. Part of the job of media psychologists will be to take up the challenge of training the next generation to engage positively and productively with media; part will be easing the fears of the digital immigrants about the new media world.

We also need to place the study of psychological processes within the context of mediated communications and recognize the dynamic role of these processes in interpersonal relations, social interaction and social structures. We need to acknowledge the reciprocal relationship between individuals and media, in other words, to own our own responsibility for what circulates in the system.

As if that weren’t enough of a moving target, we need to keep this all in context. Individual experience is, well, individual, and depends on a number of factors. Goals are equally individual and not always “rational” by someone else’s standard. For example, there have been recent articles about media technologies altering brain activity, particularly as it impacts attention. But before we feel compelled to draw conclusions about something being good or bad, we need to ask questions beyond “is it different.” We need to ask what thinking skills people need to succeed in the world today and tomorrow, not in times past. Whether or not you pine for the good old days, time has the inconvenient habit of going forward—technology isn’t going away.

In Part 3, I will discuss what media psychologists do.

Follow me on Twitter: mediapsychology

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Sources:

Nugent, S. G. (2005). If Socrates Had Email. Commencement Speech. Gambier, OH: Kenyon College. Retrieved June 8, 2010 from http://www.kenyon.edu/x29475.xml

Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. On the Horizon, 9 (5). Retrieved September 15, 2007 http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Images:

Chicken Little (The Movie) http://www.chickenlittle-movie.com/

Word collage: http://ww.wordle.com