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The foregoing material describes only one story about how people have studied media effects. While it is easy to over-generalize, much of the work described above looks at media from a perspective that can be termed “informational.” That is, media messages are usually seen as pieces or streams of information that can be absorbed by recipients. The questions of Lasswell lend themselves quite easily to this outlook; the methods of social science like to be able to boil things down to single quantifiable variables. Across hundreds and even thousands of studies, the goal of this kind of media effects research (even today) is to determine to what degree these absorptions are effective. Media effects has been, in many ways, a vast elaboration of the basic ideas of persuasion research. We will be examining this perspective in greater detail in later chapters.

Distinguished from this, there are approaches that look at media effects from an ideological perspective. These “critical” approaches have identified media institutions as the arm of an economic, political, and cultural order that describes and enforces norms in a world where power means everything. In these types of studies, effects are seen as emerging from the explicit or implicit encoding of ideological perspectives, outlooks, assumptions, and worldviews into messages, which then become the dominant way of looking at the world for media audiences. These approaches from media studies or cultural studies often use the term “effects” pejoratively. There has been a consistent tendency to denigrate effects research as an overly simplistic quantification that ultimately can’t prove its own point. However, even while abjuring the term effects, these scholars and thinkers have consistently put forward views of the media as quite powerful. Although they did not seek to make empirical demonstrations of their hypotheses through social science methods, their views were quite influential, either as a tocsin or call to arms about the need to understand media’s critical role, or as a counterpoint or whipping boy to the ideas of the informational theorists.