Hypodermic Needle Theory — Is the Mass Media the Ultimate Influencer?
Do you ever question the influences of mass media and social media on your opinions and behaviors in society? As an avid media consumer, I have recently pulled away from using mass media outlets as I found each report increasingly perpetuated doom and gloom, which I felt started to impact my everyday life, mood, and behavior. Maybe it’s my “covid fatigue” to blame or that I began to lose hope for a positive future. Nonetheless, I genuinely believe it’s important to be aware and educated on what’s happening in the world, but why does all of the news always seem to be so negative?
According to the eye-tracking research results of Mark Trussler and Stuart Soroka’s Consumer Demand for Cynical and Negative News Frames, politically interested participants are more likely to select negative stories. Furthermore, regardless of what participants say, they prefer negative news content. This human phenomenon is known as a “negative bias,” which is our tendency and collective hunger to register negative stimuli more readily and to dwell and remember the negative events more often (Trussler & Soroka, 2014). So, with that being said, along with my personal experience, could it be that media outlets leverage our negative bias to generate more traffic, clicks, views, and shares for profit? Or is it because our human sense makes us focus more on the negative than the positive out there?
Many have resulted in the theory that the media can control our minds, behaviors, bias, etc. This sort of belief of mass media strategy and impact on communication delivered to the public is similar to that of the Hypodermic Needle Theory, which is how media controls what the audience views and listens to and the effects, which can be immediate or seen down the road. This theory originated in the 1920s and 1930s and is a linear communication theory that suggests that media messages are injected directly into the brains of a passive audience. It indicates that we’re all the same, and we all respond to media messages in the same way (Lamb, 2013).
Paul Lazarsfeld and others debunked the Hypodermic Needle Theory. They claimed a two-step communications flow was more realistic where opinion leaders received and interpreted messages before being communicated to the public (Postelnicu, 2014). Though I take all news with a grain of salt, I do not believe it is all untrue. What I do think is that headlines and stories are cherry-picked and modified to highlight only the bad, and this, in turn, can impact our mental health as a collective down the road. I think the Hypodermic Needle Theory can be applied in a sense by focusing on Social Media as Mass Media and considering different variables to explain how 24/7 access to news and opinion leaders through our smartphones can impact society’s behaviors as a whole.
Example #1: An example of Social Media impacting audiences to commit behaviors in society is when former President Donald Trump Tweeted a suggestion that the 2020 election would be rigged. Soon after this Tweet, many Facebook groups began to form around the topic of “stop the steal,” echoing Trump’s language (Jones, 2021). Though Facebook attempted to block these groups, it was too late as more than 2,000 supporters stormed the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. on January 6th, 2021, in an attempt to end the so-called voter fraud that Trump exclaimed in his Tweet (NPR, 2022).
Example #2: Another example on Social Media where the Hypodermic Needle Theory can be applied is with the 2017 Monkey Pox Killer Vaccine Rumour. In the South-Eastern states of Nigeria, a social media rumor spread that Nigerian soldiers were in the states to inject children with deadly vaccines with the hope of infecting them with the monkeypox disease. This chaos began with social media reports of the alleged deaths in the schools after the vaccine was forcibly administered and caused parents to rush to schools to withdraw their children without second-guessing if the online information was true or not (Sahara, 2017).
Example #3: A pizza shop called Comet Ping Pong began receiving death threats after false tweets widely spread on social media claiming that the establishment was the base for a pedophile sex ring involving Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and members of her campaign. The day before the voting in the presidential election, the hashtag “#pizzagate” appeared and as the number of people who believed in the “pizzagate” conspiracy grew, the threats directed at the pizza shop also increased. Although social media surrounding the topic was banned, the threats continued with even the incident of a 28-year old man showing up at the pizza shop with a rifle to investigate if pizza gate was true (Lopez, 2016).
We continue to see the ability of media types to engrain messages and false beliefs into viewers’ minds through conspiracy-based news platforms such as QAnon and opinion leaders such as Donald Trump. As of now, various social media platforms have taken the action of limiting the ability of these groups to spread misinformation, but other platforms such as Parler allow for these conversations to still be had (Heilweil, 2021).
Overall, I like to believe we still have a choice to decide what we want to consume, how often, and how we let it affect us, hence why I reduced my consumption of the media both on Social Media and TV. Though many conclude that mass media outlets should be taken with a grain of salt, there are still many viewers who are now going to the extreme of following falsified sources for news. My only hope is that after reading the news that people take the opportunity to continue to have essential conversations for the greater good, whether utterly outrageous or untrue information continues to spread. Finally, to also know when to take a mass media break from the overwhelming negative headlines for our own mental health’s sake.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1940161214524832
