Lost causes: Mass media exposure's empirical meanings in survey research. A critique and introduction to commodity relations. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

Standard conceptions of mass media exposure do not capture empirical mass communicators. Media effects research is thus left without social agents on which to pin theories of causal force. The dimensions of content, medium, time, and individual cognition are reviewed in chapters 2 through 7. Content poses numerous problems, whether the approach be content analysis, structuralist message systems analysis or the message discrimination technique. The medium's empirical meanings are operationally impoverished. Cognition's explosive conceptual growth is regarded as pathological: Mass communication involves at least two classes of agents in interrelation. If one class is missing, the other must do double duty. Only individual time, discussed mostly by retracing Hirsch's critique of cultivation research, emerges as promising. Commodity relations, a three-category theoretical taxonomy, is introduced as a bridge to the social and is operationally defined with individual time, media devices, and knowledge of how financial arrangements structure temporal flows of content into aggregate households. Categorical differences in how media organizations standing within these relations would handle feedback from households are used to define distinct knowledge effects to explore with surveys. Three research designs with the knowledge gap and mass political belief systems are offered in the final chapter.