The now discredited hypodermic needle model of communication
"The Hypodermic Needle Theory is a linear communication theory which suggests that media messages are injected directly into the brains of a passive audience. It suggests that we're all the same and we all respond to media messages in the same way.
This way of thinking about communication and media influence is no longer really accepted. In the 1930s, many researchers realized the limitations of this idea and some dispute whether early media theorists gave the idea any serious attention at all. Nevertheless, The Hypodermic Needle Theory continues to influence the way we talk about the media. People believe that the mass media has a powerful effect. Parents worry about the influence of television and violent video games. News outlets run headlines like 'Is Google making us stupid' and 'Grand Theft Auto led teen to kill'."
(Brett Lamb, 12 April 2013)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Intertextual Enterprises: Writing Alternative Places and Meanings in the Media Mixed Networks of Yugioh
"The media mix of Pokemon, and subsequent series such as Digimon and Yugioh, create a virtual world that manifests in multiple media forms, and though which consumers can craft their own narrative trajectories through play with video and card games (Allison 2002; Tobin 2004a). This is a networked world of expanding reference that destabilizes the prior orthodoxy of children's media (Tobin 2004a). Rather than spoon–feed stabilized narratives and heroes to a supposedly passive audience, Pokemon and Yugioh invite children to collect, acquire, recombine, and enact stories within their peer networks, trading cards, information, and monsters (Buckingham and Sefton–Green 2004; Yano 2004) in what Sefton–Green has called a 'knowledge industry' (Sefton–Green 2004, 151). These media mixes challenge our ideas of childhood agency and the passivity of media consumption, highlighting the active, entrepreneurial, and technologized aspects of children's engagement with popular culture. They also create a proliferating set of contact points between practice, media, and imaginings, as players perform and identify with media characters in multiple and often unexpected ways.
An early draft of a paper published in Debbora Battaglia Ed. Encountering the Extraterrestrial: Anthropology in Outerspaces. Duke University Press. 2005. This paper was first presented at the 2002 meetings of the American Anthropological Association"
(Mimi Ito)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
