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The missing child panic is an illustrative example, but not isolated. In fact, we know in general that media coverage of crime and violence is associated with greater fear among heavy viewers of television, a phenomenon that has been called the “mean world syndrome” (Gerbner & Gross, 1976; Shanahan & Morgan, 1999; Morgan, Shanahan, & Signorielli, 2012). While especially true of television, frequent users of all media are exposed to a relatively heavy diet of violence and mayhem, much more than what they would see in “real life.” Thus, it is not surprising that they also tend to see the world in more violent ways than others:

we have found that one lesson viewers derive from heavy exposure to the violence-saturated world of television is that in such a mean and dangerous world, most people “cannot be trusted” and that most people are “just looking out for themselves” (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorielli, 1980). We have also found that the differential ratios of symbolic victimization among women and minorities on television cultivate different levels of insecurity among their real-life counterparts, a “hierarchy of fears” that confirms and tends to perpetuate their dependent status. (Gerbner et al., 1986, p. 28)

While we can postpone the discussion of the causality of these relationships until later in this book, mean-world findings are consistent with the sorts of things that were also going on in the missing child case.

As they develop reasons to account for the differences between reality (the actual statistics) and perception (what they think about reality), people are starting to conceptualize what we call “media effects.” If we begin to see that our perception of reality can be influenced – either positively or negatively – by what we see reported or portrayed in the media, we are then also beginning to explain the importance of the role of media in not just our entertainment but also in our decision-making processes as well. If media can play a shaping role in something as important as how we raise our children, can their power extend to other domains?

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This book is about a large body of research that deals with this issue. Most of us are likely to agree with the idea that media “matter.” It is not unusual to harbor personal views about media effects, especially in relation to what we see as their damaging consequences. Whether it is in relation to violence in the media, to material we see as dangerous to children (such as content featuring drug use or sexuality), or to media usage practices that are harmful (too much media use, media “addiction”), at most any time there are vigorous debates ongoing about various aspects of the media scene that need reforming.

And it has been ever thus. Society became mass-mediated roughly in the 1830s, which was the time of the introduction of the popular newspapers, then known as the “penny press.” With these and the other new media that were introduced over the years (film, radio, TV, Internet, etc.) came social hand-wringing, moral panic, and more serious research-based concern about the effect of each new medium.

Concerns about media and violence (and other problematic content) have produced many moral debates. Drotner provides an apt summary of how these debates are usually conducted. She, along with many others, has noted that debate about a new medium results in emotional reactions, sometimes verging on panic. In the debate,

the discussion is highly emotionally charged and morally polarized (the medium is either “good” or “bad”) with the negative pole being the most visible in most cases; the discussion is an adult discussion that primarily focuses on children and young people; the proponents often have professional stakes in the subject under discussion as teachers, librarians, cultural critics or academic scholars; the discussion, like a classic narrative, has three phases: a beginning often catapulted by a single case, a peak involving some kind of public or professional intervention, and an end (or fading-out phase) denoting a seeming resolution to the perceived problems in question. (Drotner, 1999, p. 596)

We can see what Drotner is speaking about with a few examples. At the end of the 1800s, attention focused on “dime novels.” Dime novels were cheap serial fiction that were considered to be “low” and of questionable morality by the better segments of society. They were normally sold on newsstands, and were distinguished by their cheap production (hence the term “pulp fiction” sometimes applied to them). The New Medal Library, one such series, described itself as follows:

This is a line of books for boys that is of peculiar excellence. There is not a title in it that would not readily sell big if published in cloth-bound edition at $1.00. One of the best features about these books is that they are all of the highest moral tone, containing nothing that could be objectionable to the most particular parents. Next in importance, comes interest, with which every one of these books fairly teems. No more vigorous or better literature for boys has ever been published. New titles by high-priced authors are constantly being added, making it more and more impossible for any publisher to imitate this line.³

The offerings were action-oriented, highly popular, and often illustrated with garish cover graphics. Moral authority figures questioned whether young people should be exposed to them, and some wondered whether children should be exposed to any fiction at all.

Here is the type of thing – the actual text – that had people worried, from the story Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood:

Instantly Buffalo Bill dashed over the ridge of the hill that concealed him from the view of the Cheyennes, and rode directly toward the band going to attack the two white horsemen.

They halted suddenly at sight of him, but, seeing that he was alone, they started for him with wild yells.

But still he kept on directly toward them, until within range, when he opened upon them with his matchless Evans rifle, a thirty-four-shot repeater, and a hot fight began, for they returned the fire.

This was just what Buffalo Bill wanted, for the firing alarmed the horsemen and placed them on their guard, and he knew that the Indian volleys would be heard at the command and hasten them forward.

Having dropped a couple of red-skins and several ponies, Buffalo Bill wheeled to the rightabout, dashed up to the top of a hill, and, signaling to the two whites to follow him, headed for the command at full speed. (Beadle’s Boys’ Library, 1882)

Conservative elements of society wondered: what would exposure to these types of stories do to impressionable children, and how could society hope to protect against them when they were so popular? Now, of course, these texts that gave so much concern seem hopelessly quaint, having been surpassed by the far more graphic accounts of violence and romance that we see in today’s media. But they were a harbinger of what would come. As media became ever more accessible and vivid, concerns about their effects increased. In the end, there were active efforts to ban certain types of dime novels, but overall not much could be done to stem people’s exposure to them.

The appearance of movies kicked up the level of debate. As films became more popular – dealing with the same themes as dime novels did, but now with moving pictures – research efforts found a considerable number of images of violence in movies, as well as negative effects upon adolescents. The case is instructive, with concern about film rising almost as soon as it started to reach wide audiences in the early 1900s. When it was introduced, film was quite new in terms of the experience that it offered. The riot of image collages and narratives that it made popular could be somewhat un-nerving. Very early films that could be viewed by the public were often just visual records of popular vaudeville-style entertainments, or even things that were naughty or raunchy, such as burlesque dancers. The films appealed to a working-class aesthetic, and brought with them a concern among the well-to-do that films would exert a corrosive social effect. These worries were exacerbated as film developed a more accomplished technical vocabulary that made it appeal to even wider audiences. As film developed in popularity, it was also seen, by some, to pose a social danger.

Self-appointed social guardians responded to film in ways that would become typical across the history of mass media. A new medium introduces affordances for disseminating messages that are seen as socially problematic (e.g., film makes violence and sex available to young people), but it also becomes a vehicle for explaining intractable problems that might have been due to other sources (e.g., rising crime or violence rates). In the case of film, these concerns were brought to the fore in a series of early studies that was one of the first forays into the world of media effects research. Spurred by social reformers who were also publicity seekers, social scientists were encouraged to collaborate on studies that would explicate how people (especially children, as an often-perceived “vulnerable” group) would react, and to see whether the movies and their messages were in some way injurious to a harmonious social fabric. These were the “Payne Fund Studies” (Charters, 1933; Jowett, Jarvie, & Fuller, 1996).

The Payne Fund studies were notable because they were the first that brought together social scientists in addressing media concerns, and they are the place where media effects work as we know it today really begins. As we have seen, there were those who had written or speculated about media and their influence well back into the age of the penny press. But during those early print days, there was not much of a social science apparatus to deal with media effects questions systematically. By the 1920s and 1930s the scene had changed greatly, with disciplines of psychology and sociology setting themselves in place to answer social questions with something approaching the rigor of the natural sciences.

Of the great body of films that were examined, the studies found that:

the average is heavily weighted with sex and crime pictures. An analysis of a smaller sampling of pictures shows a predominance of undesirable, often tawdry “goals” in life, and with a population of characters to match the goals. By this over-loading, moreover, life as presented upon the screen is too often inevitably distorted, so that the young and especially children, so far from being helped to the formation of a true picture of life, often derive its opposite. (Forman, 1934, p. 275)

There are two ways to look at such a quote. One is to see it as a relic of a time during which socially reactionary forces could use the appearance of a new medium in a nostalgic project to retard the development of society. Another would be to look at it as a legitimate concern about the social noise that could hinder young peoples’ development in a healthy and natural way. The reality of media effects research lies somewhere between these two poles; at times we are reacting to precipitous new developments in media technology that are poorly understood, at other times we are struggling to find where the “human” still is in all the forward rush of technology.

The discussion did not end with film. Radio in the 1930s and 1940s was not immune to similar criticism (Dennis, 1998). In the 1950s, comic books were seen by some as particularly nefarious, “seducing” innocent child readers into a sordid life of violence and depravity (Wertham, 1954). The emergence of television then provided a fresh target for these fears. Since television seemingly combined all previous media into one (it was aural, visual, and immediate), its presumed effects were greater. And now fingers point to other media such as video games and the Internet.