8 Reasons We Need Media Psychology
We need media psychology because media technologies are everywhere. They change at the speed of light, and every change brings new opportunities and challenges. These technologies are redefining the way we work, play, communicate, and ultimately, think. Media psychology is important. Here's why.
Media psychology:
- Helps people adjust to and anticipate the rapid pace of technological change
- Holds colleagues, authors, and journalists accountable to professional standards when new conducting and disseminating research
- Evaluates and translates research into plain English and actionable information
- Promotes healthy media use through media literacy, critical thinking, and digital citizenship
- Promotes an understanding of individual differences, cultural variations, environmental context, and personal and social goals in analysis
- Applies psychological theory to media design and production to support positive outcomes
- Raises awareness about the ethical and moral assumptions and implications of technology design, data us,e and information distribution
- Replaces fear with reason and evidence
Rapid Change is Hard
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 addresses this dilemma. Media psychology studies the interaction among individuals, groups, society, and technology to help consumers, developers, communicators, and society at large make good decisions. Media and technology are powerful and have the potential for tremendous good but unchecked, tremendous evil. Media psychology, like psychology as a whole, focuses on the alleviation of problems and the promotion of positive and productive outcomes.
Media psychology became an official academic discipline in the early 1980s, but the advent of the Internet and social media has brought it to the fore. It draws on many years of valuable and interesting theory and research drawing on multiple fields and disciplines. Our collective anxiety over the impact of traditional media on individuals and society, such as the impact of media on children, portrayals of violence, consumer manipulation, and information overload, fueled a lot of research. The advent of social media has made the landscape more interrelated and complex.
From Broadcast to Networks
Information flows from traditional media to social media and back again, creating narratives that frame how we see the world. The quantities of media sources are beyond the ability of any single person to consume and process, creating self-curated filter bubbles and undermining trust. It is not surprising that this complexity raises anxiety and that researchers focus on society's problems. There are no easy answers, especially because media and technology behaviors occur in context, not in isolation in laboratory settings. Researchers with the best of intentions are not immune to bias and tunnel-vision as they react to social and moral panics. It is a natural tendency to reference the "good old days" and use prior times as a baseline model for how things should work and how the world should be. This also skews research by framing 'was' as a gold standard and measuring what 'is' as a deviation. As our understanding of media becomes more nuanced, more research focuses on the positive uses of media technologies and the upside of what 'could be,' not what is missing.
Even Socrates Worried About Media
Fear of change is a normal human reaction. As far back as Ancient Greece, Socrates feared that writing relied on external things, neglected the mind, and lacked flexibility because the written word was literally "cast in stone." Kenyon College's President, S. Georgia Nugent (2005) drew 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 the 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 (2005) notes 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." (para. 23). Homer and Plato feared secrecy as a byproduct of the inherent privacy of individual writings. Now we worry that social media and data science have left us exposed and vulnerable, not only threatening our lack of privacy but the promotion of misinformation and the loss of trust in institutions, official processes, and science itself.
We're Hardwired to Detect Change, Not to Like It
From a biological perspective, we know that human brains are hardwired to notice change because a change in the environment increased the probability of danger. On the Savannah, it was important to notice things that moved. Saber-toothed tigers moved and were dangerous. Trees did not and were harmless. Nothing was more important to survival. But we live in a new world with brains hardwired for an old one—change is not the threat it may seem to be, however, innate our resistance to change may be.
The concept of equilibrium is appealing; with balance, the world is explainable and certain. But even physics lets us down. The laws of thermodynamics describe how energy in a system changes, creating drastic rather than smooth transformations as matter goes from one state to another. These phase transitions, like water turning into ice, occur all at once, not little by little (Rutledge, 2015). Systems follow different mathematical laws that are often counter-intuitive to our innate cognitive biases, similar to our inability to deal rationally with probabilities.
Change Causes Conflict
We like to think there are clear answers and causes because it makes us feel safe and comfortable. If everything stayed put, we wouldn't have to worry about the implications of things we don't understand. But they don't. Sometimes they change dramatically. The telegraph, the printing press, and the Internet all triggered an abrupt change with widespread social implications. If knowledge is power, then technology that hampers the ability to control information isn't very popular among the gatekeepers. This causes conflict and an uncomfortable level of change from how we conduct daily life to the political environment.
Media Psychology Helps Understand and Anticipate Change
Media psychology bridges this gap by helping us better understand and anticipate change. Researchers hypothesize, operationalize, and quantify the impact of media to inform better choices among users and producers. All of us play the role of consumers, producers, and distributors, and our choices impact what we think and what others see.
As order-seeking creatures, we want to understand why things happen and attribute causality to make things explainable. That's increasingly hard to do. Even in psychological science, as in any field, the quality of research varies, as do the conclusions drawn from it. Research is largely influenced by how you ask a question, define what you measure, measure it, and interpret the findings. This is complicated by several cognitive biases: we assume numbers are facts, some representative of "truth;" we tend to seek information that confirms our world view; we overweight things that we saw recently, and we are susceptible to framing. Add to that the common misunderstanding of the difference between correlation (related to) and causal (caused by), and you can see how research isn't as cut and dry as you'd hope. This is further complicated by the fact that many "findings" that go on to influence public opinion and public policy are based on press releases from the sponsoring institutions or on a 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 of arguments for reciprocity between individuals and our cultural environment (e.g., Baudrillard, Freud, McLuhan, and Vygotsky), Bandura's model of social cognitive theory is one of few psychological or media theories are system-based, integrating the effects of a system of actions and influences among individual consumers, providers, and the social environment in spite of the distinct dynamics of social networks.
Environments Shape How We Think
Neurobiology and evolutionary psychology have shed light on social interaction's impact on the formation of internal structures, identifying variations in human brain plasticity and cognitive processing over the lifespan. Birth to early adulthood is a period of high plasticity in brain maturation and is subject to shaping by the environment. Once past early adulthood, change in the human brain derives more 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.
This shift from environmental to cognitive influences provides one explanation for the discrepancy in the attitudes toward media use between generations. The things we grow up with feel normal. This is the foundation of our cognitive schema about how the world works. The things we experience in adolescence are exciting. This is when our bodies are changing so rapidly, making us more open to embracing new things. Change in adulthood challenges our mental models and sense of "how things work," making them suspect or scary. Every generation will make their mark on the environment to support their mental models and will reflect changes in technologies and media. This is a biological description of Marc Prensky's (2001) metaphor of the young as "digital natives" versus older generations of "digital immigrants."
Media Psychology in Action Starts with Media Literacy
Time is the only truly scarce resource. Media succeeds by attracting and holding our attention. Thus, media companies deliver technology experiences that consumers want and use. These experiences can be compelling, annoying, engaging, boring, or rewarding. But we talk about them as if the device was in charge. It's not. Every off button is under our control. The challenge facing us is waking up to that fact. Critical thinking, self-awareness, and self-regulation are essential to setting boundaries and achieving a healthy, balanced relationship with media. This is true of everything in life where consumption is by our own hand. Media psychology argues that we have a moral imperative to prepare future generations with the right set of skills so that they can engage positively and productively with media, and, by the way, these are universally applicable skills that predict success in life. No regulations on social media companies will teach these. Sensible regulations, like enforcing age limits, are good, but relying on regulations is like playing whack-a-mole. It's on the user. This is a reciprocal relationship between individuals and media because AI-based algorithms everywhere from TikTok and Amazon to Netflix, Amazon recommenders generate more of whatever you consume.
Whether or not you pine for the good old days, time has the inconvenient habit of going forward—technology isn't going away. It's time we make learning to use it well a priority in our schools, our lives, and our society.
References
Berthet, V. (2022). The Impact of Cognitive Biases on Professionals' Decision-Making: A Review of Four Occupational Areas [Review]. Frontiers in Psychology, 12. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.802439
Nugent, S. G. (2005). If Socrates Had Email [Commencement Speech], http://www.kenyon.edu/x29475.xml
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Do They Really Think Differently? On the Horizon, 9(6), 1-8. Retrieved September 15, 2007, from
Rutledge, J. (2015). Economics as Energy Framework: Complexity, Turbulence, Financial Crises, and Protectionism. Review of Financial Economics, 25(1), 10-18.
Dr. Pamela Rutledge is available to reporters for comments on the psychological and social impact of media and technology on individuals, society, organizations and brands.