Media Psychology
Media Psychology is an emerging field with the excitement and burden of defining the path, a subspecialty in psychology that studies the influence of television, film, radio, the Internet, social media, advertising, mobile communications, and various other media on people’s thoughts, perceptions, emotions, beliefs, behaviors, and relationships. It is a new, rapidly developing branch of theory and practice of journalism, the subject area of which is the description of a person’s behavior, conditioned by their exposure to mass media; the study of individual and group media effects and core components of media culture, identifying psychological patterns of human attitude and behavior in multicultural media environment; a research into psychological phenomena and mechanisms of perception of media texts
Today, we spend most of our waking hours saturated in media and technology. As a result, media psychology has become a vital area of investigation. However, the field’s interdisciplinary nature and the constantly changing ways people interact with media in all aspects of their lives, from work to education to entertainment to social engagement, makes it difficult to define.
How do we define media psychology? While it is, at its root, the application of psychological science to human interaction with media and technology, that doesn’t tell us much. It’s a broad field that has no clearly-defined career paths, and no easy answers in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. Yet it adds value anywhere human behavior intersects media technologies.
Currently, the area focuses on a number of ways in which digital media affect people. Jeremy Bailenson directs the Virtual Human Interaction Lab and studies the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. Jeff Hancock uses computational linguistics to analyze interpersonal relations in social media. Gabriella Harari studies the ways the digital technologies we use everyday reveal our personality structures and shape our life outcomes. Nilam Ram studies the dynamic interplay between psychological and media processes and how they change from moment-to-moment and across the life span. Byron Reeves utilizes physiological measures to understand media effects in multiplayer game technology, and develops applications for using those networked games to address critical issues such as global warming.
Psychology is key to understanding the implications of technology. The mass media is an important tool of political management and provision of mass loyalty to the current government, which is determined by embeddedness of the media into the establishment, their status, and the position taken in political relations — between the government and the people. In the political process, the media carry both a destructive and a positive charge.
Consequently, it seems like it should be pretty straightforward to define media psychology. For some reason, though, it’s not. I have had discussions with colleagues for hours (or at least it seems like it) about what constitutes media, mediated communication, and technology and what we mean by psychology in the context of media — and we’re not even philosophers.
Psychological peculiarities of the profession of a journalist and journalism as creative work: The professional culture of a journalist depends on their individuality, creative talent, and ability to go beyond the borders of something customary and traditional. While studying creativity, psychology views the most important revelation of mechanisms, connected with creative activities of a person. A special area of media psychology is dedicated to the study of creativity as a process of creation of something new and original in different spheres and activities of a media worker, and formation and development of his creative potential. Scientists accentuate understanding of the role and the place of scientific methods in productive thinking, as well as motivational and personal factors in the creation of an information product (Misonjnikov, 2011).
Both media and psychology have made major contributions to western culture throughout the 20th century. Can you imagine The New Yorker without Freudian references or Jason Bourne without operant conditioning? The term “media,” however, used to be confinable to a bucket labeled “mass media.” Our awareness of media, however, has reached the collective consciousness, as if we all woke up yesterday, awakened by our programmable alarm with the iPod attachment, and over our coffee made automatically by our coffeemaker, checked our blackberry for emails and headline news and then looked up shocked to see that our kids are doing much the same. This awareness is leaving people clamoring for a new level of understanding. There is an infiltration of media applications and information technologies into nearly every aspect of our lives.
“Be transparent. Let’s build a community that allows hard questions and honest conversations so we can stir up transformation in one another.”
The goal of media psychologists is to try to answer those questions by combining an understanding of human behavior, cognition, and emotions with an equal understanding of media technologies. Unlike some types of media studies, media psychology is not just concerned with content. Media psychology looks at the whole system. There is no beginning and no end. It is a continual loop including the technology developer, content producer, content perceptions, and user response. Just as Bandera describes social cognitive theory as the reciprocal action between environment, behavior, and cognition, so does media psychology evaluate the interactive process of the system. There is no chicken, no egg to this system. They all coexist and coevolve with each other.
From social media and mobile apps to big data, there is an increasing awareness of the importance of understanding how media impacts society and how society, in turn, impact media and technology use and development.
There is a significant cross-disciplinary aspect of media psychology. Not all people working in media psychology are psychologists. In fact, much of the early work came from marketing and advertising and the bulk of the research in media psychology has been published in academic and applied disciplines beyond psychology, such as sociology, communications, anthropology, media studies, education, computer, and information sciences, as well as business management and marketing. What has often been challenging is the lack of intellectual cross-pollination. Media psychology seeks to address that by bringing together all these approaches and vocabularies with the recognition that communication, cognition, and emotions are fundamental to human experience and therefore have, by definition, foundations in psychological thought.
Fear of change is a normal human reaction. As far back as Ancient Greece, Socrates feared that writing relied on external things and neglecting the mind and that it lacked flexibility, the written word being literally “cast in stone.” Kenyon College’s President, S. Georgia Nugent (2005) draws an apt analogy from a narrative pattern: “Kill the bearer of the message” saying that the earliest references to the ‘technology’ that enabled writing in the Western tradition are of profound distrust. Where Socrates worried about fixity, we worry about the fluidity of electronic media and the fuzzy boundaries between author and reader, consistent with St. Augustine’s reflections that language links our interior with our exterior creating permeable boundaries between self and body. Nugent notes that those who do not understand new technology often want to control the “facile exchange between the inside and the outside made possible by this particular information technology.”
“Confronted with a new technology for communication, we find, in both Homer and Plato, the fear that it will introduce dangerous secrecy, an undesirable development of privacy. Today, we worry that IT will usher in an untoward openness of communication, a lack of the privacy we have come to value.” (Nugent, 2005, para. 23)
From a biological perspective, we know that human brains are hardwired to notice change because a change in the environment increases the probability of danger.
Humans also have the added gift of selective memory to help maintain cognitive comfort. We pine for the “good old days” and use memories of prior times as a baseline model for how things should work and how the world should be.
It also is good to help with understanding how the media impacts us. How does one new news report impact people? How does the slight change in words from say CNN to Al Jazeera impact the way we think about it? It can play a huge part in this, and it is a huge aspect of how we understand the psychology of people.
Then there is the fact that it reminds people that media experiences vary based on the person, the culture, the context, and what they are trying to achieve. Someone getting a report about a person may react differently than another person, since they do work with the impact that this has on this.
Finally, it helps people understand that the sky isn’t falling and that it isn’t as bad as it is. It helps people understand why aspects are sensationalized, and also the impact of media on our brains, and how we may end up assuming the worst. It does happen, especially if you look at how some react to news reports and such. Media psychology helps out with this, and it can make your life easier in certain manners, and it can help you to become more positive, along with productive in many different ways.
Mass communication has a psychological nature. This explains the rapid development of the science of human behavior under the influence of mass media. Being a media psychologist is not being a psychologist in the media or promoting psychology in the media. The tools of media psychology can only help us, though, if we are also willing, as individuals, to take responsibility for our part in the system. It is the only way we can develop better technologies and use them well.
