How can intelligent people believe that relatively brief TV ads are a very powerful medium for conveying information and influencing attitudes, and yet at the same time hold fast to the notion that representations of sex and violence and the moral and ethical attitudes presented in various mass media entertainment are irrelevant to informing the moral and ethical postures a person assumes in living their lives?
I don’t know about others but I think most criticisms of mass media and its effect on the population are not limited to just advertising and ignore what is out there as a whole.
I see plenty of complaints about violence and sex in TV shows and games and such.
Maybe I misunderstand your question though.
MY post is addressed to those who acknowledge the power of advertising yet when people (young people and children specifically) act out in dangerous and anti-social ways maintain that the content of TV shows bears no responsibility for the moral and ethical attitudes of those who consume them. In other words they will readily acknowledge the linkage between ads and their influence on attitudes, but not acknowledge the same linkage between the content of mass media and the attitudes of those taking in the product.
ie- "Ads will make you keep buying Coca-Cola, but seeing great numbers of people killing and injuring each other should not desensitize you to violence. "
The OP’s question comes down to this: MANY people, particularly (but not exclusively) on the left, roll their eyes when anybody complains that there’s too much sex or violence on TV. Suggest that “Sex and the City” is undermining morality, and many such people will sneer, “Come on, it’s just a TV show! Nobody really bases their own lives or their own morality on a freaking sitcom!”
That sounds reasonable enough.
But, the OP then asks, if TV doesn’t really influence our behavior or our attitudes, then why do corporations spend billions of dollars on TV advertising? SOMEBODY thinks TV is a powerful force in swaying the public.
That sounds reasonable, too.
You make an excellent point. The two go together hand-in-hand, part and parcel. It’s obvious ads can have a powerful effect on influencing public perception. Tv shows are like one long ad that’s saying sex/violence are cool.
Depictions of sex and violence on TV, in movies, etc., do have an effect, because it all has an effect, but it’s not going to be as simple as encouraging the viewers to go out and do the same.
Do people watching a show about the Second World War want to go out and start another war? Perhaps, instead, they draw the moral that war is a bad thing, and so WW2 should not be repeated.
Do thirteen-year-old girls seeing Romeo and Juliet draw the moral that they should go out and get married, and shortly after kill themselves? There are various morals that they might draw from the play, but I don’t think that’s one of them.
Ok.
I’ll play Devil’s Advocate:
An advertisement is an explicit call to action. “Buy Coke!” and such. They are overtly encouraging you to a specific action (of course there are gray areas such as “image” advertising but overall goes that way).
Sex and the City is not explicitly promoting pre-marital sex. Hill Street Blues is not promoting crime or violence. The Sopranos is not promoting organized crime. It is entertainment, not advertising.
It’s an interesting question; and even on the left, people have stressed the importance of TV in shaping certain things. For example the suggestion of regular, mainstream gay characters in shows.
I guess one answer off the bat to the OP is that advertisers don’t try to shape opinions in the same fashion, but instead try to associate their product with something that is already within the moral/ethical attitudes of the target audience. It’s a lot harder, I’d argue, to convince people that killing is a legitimate solution to a problem than it is to get tehm to associate a particular brand of detergent with a happy family. The “happy family = good” concept is already in the target audience; all the advertizer is trying to do is piggy back it.
But that explains why advertizing might have a greater effect. I’ve got little doubt TV can, over time, have an important impact on societal ethics and morality. I think it certainly affects how we look at our surroundings and our interactions with people different to ourselves. But trying to break down fundamentals, such as turning us all into homicidal killers; well it just seems that is on an order of magnitude far greater than what we think of advertising as doing.
Your underlying assumption is that if you can shape someone’s preferences for products, then you can shape their core ethical attitudes. That might be true, but is it safe to merely assume it?
There are scientific studies on the effects of TV on various behaviors. There’s not strong evidence that watching a lot of violent TV causes violent behavior. The data just isn’t there. In the absence of such data, it might make intuitive sense to think that watching violent television causes real-life violence, but it also makes intuitive sense to think the Earth is flat, or that you could go faster than the speed of light if you tried. Just because something makes sense doesn’t make it true.
You can inoculate a child to it by discussion. Talk to them about what the see on TV.
Violence and sex were always cool. Television just ran with it.
Of course many people point out that depictions of sex on TV tends to generate a lot more complaints (esp. from conservatives) than depictions of violence.
Watching the roadrunner cartoons always made me want to fall off cliffs. You know, 'cause it’s cool.
I’ll certainly agree that television can influence attitudes - particularly in the direction of encouraing attitudes. But it doesn’t encourage everything it shows; it encourages the behavior of characters that you’re supposed to like which don’t backfire in their face all the time.
Which means that kids tie towels around their necks and pretend to be superman and batman, but don’t decide to become the criminals they beat up (unless such roles are needed for the game - and they still wish they got to be the hero). And just becuase kids like curious george doesn’t mean that they perpetrate mass havok in imitation - they know they’re not supposed to. If anything, the shows educate in what not to do.
Also, I think that people realize that just because a TV character does something, that doesn’t mean that the viewer can do it. So, few people become masked vigilantes, and most adults realize that just because TV characters are magically protected from pregnancy and stds, that doesn’t necessariy apply to everybody.
One thing that does continue to effect people is the notion that non-backfiring behaviors that are perpetrated by hero characters are cool, and thus, somewhat more acceptible. So, smartmouthed people, gay people, independent women, people of different countries and races and the like can become more culturally accepted via mass media exposure.
Forget advertising; you’re introducing an extraneous element into the mix. All you have to compare and contrast are movies/shows that promote positive morality and those that promote negative ones:
If a sympathetic character is engaged in morally questionable behavior, you get the stock-issue “it’s only a TV show” (movie/album/whatever) .
If however, it’s a “Very Special Episode” or a movie with a universally-approved message, everyone involved will be quite eloquent about how they hope the production will Encourage Adoption/Fight Breast Cancer/Raise Environmental Awareness/ etc.
As to how they can believe these things … self-righteousness and profit motive go a long way in enabling cognitive dissonance.
Who says that TV ads are powerful? The fact that somebody spends money on them doesn’t prove that; people spend money on horoscopes, scientology, and cell phone booster antennas.
Thank you.
These are just not the same issue as far as I’m concerned. Ads try to introduce a product and associate it with desireable qualities, and people know that. Whatever the hell “moral content” is, most non-children are able to tell the difference between fact and fiction, so the argument that they are being influenced is not as strong. Further, when discussing this issue, people presume the messages from TV shows are clear and unambiguous. In real life, that’s rarely the case.
I would venture to say that the people making 6 and 7 figure salaries that approve the final decisions on ad buys have IQs that are at least as high as yours and mine.
I’ve wondered about this exact question many times myself. It seems to me quite plain that some violent episodes on TV do promote violent thinking in the viewer. This may not necessarily manifest itself in actual acts of violence by the viewer, but certainly in their attitude towards violence. Does anyone seriously doubt that the makers of 24 intend to justify torture as a means of combating terrorism? Does anyone doubt that they must have been successful in shifting the attitudes of some of their viewers in that direction?
The things we see (and hear and read) are part of our experience. They have definite effects on how we think. If every show, album, and book we encounter treats a certain behavior as normal, we eventually shift towards accepting that behavior as normal. I can name certain works of fiction that had a very distinct effect on the way I thought. Doubtless there are others that affected me in ways I did not notice.
The bottom line is what every beginning student of marketing learns: everyone thinks they’re too smart to be manipulated by what they see on TV, but no one actually is.
I think you are underestimating the effect of conventional wisdom. People believe ads work, so they buy them. They test their marketing campaigns but they’re not inclined to do studies on the effectiveness of advertising as a whole. Either way, this is a separate issue from “moral content.”