Media Effects Research – Monday

READING SUMMARY

Media and its content affect us greatly, today more than ever with technology. These questions about how media impacts us can be answered by social scientists. The three methods used by these scientists are content analysis, survey, and experiment. This reading focuses on the first method, content analysis. Content analysis lets the researcher describe the effects of the content of communication. It is the starting point for investigating the effects of media, as the content might be the cause of certain effects. However, inferences cannot be made about content effects based on the findings of a content analysis. Content analysis has multiple researchers that analyze the same content (objective), has a set of rules and procedures for coding (systemic), and concludes with data (quantitative). Coding, in the situation of content analysis, means examining content and sorting it into categories. Content analysis focuses on manifest content, which is content that actually appears and doesn’t need as much interpretation. A content analysis starts with a random sample and then a specific unit of analysis is coded, like the scenes of a television show. The content of a message is coded by categories, and the data is coded by multiple coders. All the coders must then agree on statistics, which is also called the coding agreement, and this results in coding reliability. After coding reliability is found, the data can be put into statistics. The results are then summarized and discussed, even though they, again, cannot conclude the effects of media.

OUTSIDE EXAMPLE

Media affects us in so many ways every day, and while I have not done a content analysis, I can see some of the effects that media has on us. The one that first comes to mind is how social media has decreased our attention spans, as we are immediately hooked by a post or short video, whether it’s due to the content of it or simply the short time span. We’ve lost the patience to watch slower, longer movies and read many books and articles, and it is suspected that this is due to social media. YouTube, Instagram, and other social media sites have short videos and posts whose content is engaging for just a short amount of time, and algorithms give us exactly the content we want to see, possibly connecting to this shorter attention span. For example, I haven’t read books in a few months, and over break I had a whole stack of books that I was determined to get through. However, I found that I could only read a few chapters at a time before feeling like I had to move or do something else. I only ended up getting though only one book over break, but in high school, I used to be able to read a whole book in just a week. Is it due to the mass amount of content in books that I don’t have the attention span for, or is the content of them not interesting anymore?

READING CONNECTION

A content analysis could be used to figure out how social media has affected our attention spans, though it would need to focus on something more specific. Media has definitely changed something among us as a society, where we hear news instantly and are always moving onto the next thing. There could also be a content analysis done on the connection between reading books and social media; this has really where I’ve seen my attention span decrease, and I believe it’s due to social media. The content of these things, especially social media, is not very much (time-wise, or size-wise), but it’s obviously very interesting to us for a short amount of time. A content analysis could occur to figure out if the actual content of media has an impact on attention spans, or if it’s just the amount of content.