Social Factors of Learning
a) Visualization, Media and Perception
In a society in which advertising images can lure people into a sense of emotional security while undermining their health, in which political images can affect emotional response before critical analytical abilities are invoked, and in which mass media entertainment images of violence can have devastating provocation effects, the nature of battle for survival has changed considerably since our brains evolved from the primal environmental – response pattern. Visual media such as television, video and computers are the main channels in getting the messages perceived by the mass audiences.
Those theorists that deal with perception accept that it is largely confined to individual consciousness and is subject to differing sensory abilities. They also agree that perception is continually affected and often substantially altered by memory and emotion (Barry, 1997). In building up perception through our senses vision plays a crucial role. Vision is a result of a number of subsystems functioning independently of each other and is beyond all introspective understanding (Wolfe, 1983). Perception is not only liable to misrepresentation it is highly vulnerable to emotional manipulation on an unconscious level, which in turn affects our conscious thinking. Lightning, shadow, and colour can be changed to produce a more positive or negative emotional impact; context can be subtle but suggestive enough to alter our conscious option of the subject within it. These entries occur before we knowingly form a judgment that we believe to be informed, objective, and unbiased. When reality is mediated in print, photography, television and film what we see is a synthetic reality highly sensitive to manipulation. Bandura’s Social Learning Theory claims that shocking experiences may later mix with actual occurrences in memory and render them indistinguishable from one another. Media fare may then play a substantial role in developing mental maps that blend media and reality together as a single mental experience, which in turn directs our interpretation of the present, further revises memory and affects the direction of our thoughts and actions (Barry, 1997). If our perception is an internal, creative, problem-solving process, we may never really know what is “out there”. Our judgment is only efficient, never sufficient for survival. Even on the most basic level our vulnerability to illusion should give us pause - especially since in understanding our environment today we have come to rely heavily on media as an extension of our senses. The story of the couple that saw the volcano start to erupt is a good example; they saw the smoke with their own eyes, found the smell of the sulphur, heard the noise from the mountain, but to be absolutely sure they turned the radio on.
b) Television
Developments in computer technology and telecommunication are of much interest today but the power of television as a media is presumably the single most important development of the past thirty years.
In the 1950s and 60s there was a rapid growth in the development of television. Previously books and other printed media had been the source of information (Meyrowitz, 1996, p.74):
“While books are based on abstract symbols and a linear and sequential structure that encourages logical thinking, television is image- and sound-based, concrete, visceral, sensual, holistic, emotional, nonlinear, simultaneous, and constantly in flux”
With the beginning of television as a media many educators, academics and cultural critics saw this as an end to literacy and saw our society transformed by the sort of technology represented by the box in the living room (Meyrowitz, 1996). According to Herbert Marshall McLuhan a Canadian 20th- century communication theorist the modes of thinking, behaviour, and social organization generated from literacy and printing are not natural or everlasting and that five hundred years of increasing influence is coming to an end. Linear progress is a myth (McLuhan, 1996). He says (McLuhan, 1996, p. 8):
“Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. The alphabet, for instance, is a technology that is absorbed by a very young child in a completely unconscious manner, by osmosis so to speak. Words and meaning of words predispose the child to think and act automatically in certain ways. The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology fosters and encourages unification and involvement. It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the working of media”
Studies have show that an average child spends more time watching television than any other activity except school and sleep. Nearly all households in western societies possess a TV set, and the average time the TV set is switched on is about five to six hours a day, but different members of the household are watching at different times of day (Giddens, 1994). In table 2 the statistics from the Nordic countries show the average viewing time 1992-1995 (min/day)
Table 2.
Average viewing time of television 1992-1995 (min/day)
Denmark / Finland / Iceland / Norway / SwedenYear / Age 4+ / Age 10+ / Age 12-80 / Age 12+ / Age 3+
1992 / 143 / 116 / … / 122 / …
1993 / 147 / 126 / 134 / 133 / 124
1994 / 154 / 138 / 134 / 140 / 139
1995 / 157 / 141 / 146 / 143 / 143
Note: All figure come from TV-meter ratings, exept for Iceland
Source: Gallup Denmark, Finnland & Audience Research, Social Science Institute at the University of Iceland, MMI Norway, and MMS.
All the countries show a steady increase in viewing time. Broadcasting hours of television are also increasing. Statistics in table 3 show the nationwide transmission time of television in the Nordic countries in 1990 – 1995
Table3.
Nordic countries. Nationwide television: transmission time 1990-1995 (hours/week)
Year / Denmark / Finland / Iceland / Norway / Sweden / Total1990 / 60 / 169 / 127 / 61 / 128 / 545
1991 / 116 / 185 / 130 / 116 / 123 / 670
1992 / 198 / 185 / 131 / 247 / 261 / 1022
1993 / 194 / 206 / 132 / 276 / 224 / 1032
1994 / 218 / 221 / 140 / 324 / 256 / 1159
1995 / 253 / 243 / 240 / 363 / 264 / 1363
Note: All figure come from TV-meter ratings, exept for Iceland
Source: Gallup Denmark, Finnland & Audience Research, Social Science Institute at the University of Iceland, MMI Norway, and MMS.
Increases are bound to have the result that television will have an ever-stronger influence factor on mass audiences. The increase in transmission time suggests growing numbers of broadcasting channels, often resulting in a viewing habit of flicking through the programs and seldom seeing a whole programme through.
Many surveys and studies have been made to assess the effects of television programmes on viewers, and especially on children. Violence in television programmes has been of great concern since the early days of television and the increased level of immunity to violence, horror and pornographic content is also of great worry.
In the 1960s an American psychologist Albert Bandura investigated children who had seen violent behaviour on film and found out that these children were more likely to be aggressive in their play afterwards. From his famous Bobo doll experiment Bandura’s Social Learning Theory (SLT) was developed. It suggests that “learning is primarily a cognitive, representational process in which the representations are mentally transformed, stored either symbolically or iconically, and retrieved before being manifested as imitation” (Spencer, 1991, p. 194).
In his book "Children Talking Television" David Buckingham suggests that the relationship between media text and audience response, sociocultural structure and human agency, is one which by definition is always played out in relation to children’s social locations, purposes and competence. For example, the trend to which the narrative logic of the latest MTV video or mini-series fixes a dominant cultural ideology, or makes available multiple identities and reading positions, is itself a product of the complex interactions of home, community, school and peer cultures (Buckingham, 1993).
Buckingham points out that television viewing is mainly a social activity, which usually takes place in the company of others, where viewers talk to each other or even to the screen, instead of sitting passively absorbing what they watch. Even when we watch television by ourselves, we talk about it with others and that has become a vital element of our everyday social lives. He also suggests (Buckingham, 1993, p. 40):
“…talk about television may carry a significant social charge. It is an arena in which we may - deliberately or inadvertently - display our moral values, our social and political affiliations, and our perceptions of ourselves and of others".
Talking about television is a process of bringing out the meanings that work for particular audience groups, which then, in turn, go to activate those meanings in the next viewing. In this way solitary viewing can be experienced as group viewing, because the viewer knows well that other members of the group are viewing at the same time (Fiske, 1987). In this way a common experience reinforces a shared culture.
Television lifts many of the old veils of secrecy between children and adults, men and women, and politicians and average citizens. By blurring “who knows what about whom” and “who knows what compared to whom”, television cultivates the blurring of social identities, socialization stage, and ranks of hierarchy. The electronic society is portrayed by more adultlike children and more childlike adults; more career-orientated women and more family-oriented men; and by leaders who conduct themselves more like the “person next door” just as the average citizens insist on having more say in local, national, and international affairs (Meyrowitz, 1996).
The emergence of the television in the 1950s and 1960s influenced the manner in which politicians could get their message across. The relationship between them and journalists are continually evolving in ways that can significantly affect the substance and tone of the media report. Greater value and increased priority are given on image-making skills and getting the appearance of things right.
The professionalization of political advocacy is manifested in many ways: increased trust of technical experts who supposedly know the media ropes, public advisers, public relations specialists, campaign management consultants; the belief among politicians that the key to competitive success is in superior agenda setting, getting the main news outlets to give more high-flying and more positive attention to one’s favourite issue than those of one’s opponents; tactics of close message control, focusing only on those issues that may help one’s course, never straying from the chosen theme of the day, and bombarding journalists with deluges of complaints to show that they are being watched; and adoption of a hardball publicity ethic, based on the principle that the quickest and most effective way to act on the balance of public opinion is to mount strongly negative attacks on one’s opponent (Blumer and Gurevitch, 1997). It also depends on the ownership of the media if the message is amicable to the policy of the given media company.
Media companies try to control all aspects of their operation, usually summarized as production, distribution and retailing. They take a stake in other media as well and even diversify into other business. They are becoming more transnational in ownership, financing, organization, production, distribution, content, reception and even regulation (McQuail, 1997).
c) Audiences
Change is not only refashioning the media companies and organizations, technologies, markets and resources; it is also transforming the social conditions of media audiences. Blumer and Gurevitch (1997) list in the book Mass Media and Society what they find to be the most significant developments in those changes (Blumer and Gurevitch, 1997, p. 127):
1. The breakdown of traditionally authoritative institutions that once anchored many people’s identities and loyalties.
2. A related weakening of traditional agencies of socialization and public order, such as families and schools.
3. The advance of individualistic, consumerist lifestyles, associated with expectations of rising income and educational levels, aggressive commercial advertising and the ascendance of philosophies that cater to consumption-oriented populations.
4. Increased mobility, not only geographical, occupational and social but also psychic, with more identities to assume and more cultural perspectives to meet.
5. An altered, albeit contested, status of certain groups – women, ethnic minorities and young people.
6. A decline in moral certitude and consensus, blurring formerly more clear boundaries of taste and acceptability, and provoking greater conflict over the boundaries between the permissible and forbidden
7. The onset in the civic sphere of relatively intractable problems, such as those of economic management, safeguarding the environment, escalating demands and costs of social provision and rising rate of crime, drug addiction and other manifestations of social breakdown
These trends demand more of authorities, whose capacity to cope has been reduced. They have also created a more communication-dependent society at the very moment when – due to the forces of commercialisation, proliferation of media outlets and globalisation – regularity powers of societies and instruments over the major communications media are weakening (Blumer and Gurevitch, 1997). The convergence of communication technology, as represented by the computer, has set off a fear of demassification, as audiences become more and more fragmented. The credibility of the computer as a mass media is also put into question. Traditional media hire editors and checkers to determine what information is accurate whereas source credibility will vary on the Internet. A much greater burden is placed on the user of the Internet to determine how much faith to place on a given source. According to this the importance of teaching analytical methods of the media has never been greater.