ABSTRACT
Popular interest in the effects of the communications media tends to focus on their most manifest, perhaps most startling contents: e.g. sex, violence, bad language. Contributions to section 2 have indicated the dangers of inferring effects from content, and the difficulties of establishing that alleged effects have actually occurred. It is difficult even for researchers to be neutral in their assumptions about effects, for example to describe content without using language which in itself signals that certain effects are anticipated. The decision as to what should count as a discrete item of ‘content’ may disguise researchers’ assumptions about what a viewer is likely to regard as significant. In the study of television violence for instance, does it make sense to look just at the gun firing, or should we take into account the heroism, shall we say, of the person who fired – perhaps to save the life of a friend at risk to his own? Or one can ask whether violence in cartoons carries equivalent weight to violence in more naturalistic portrayals. What in any case is content? Does it include the very structure of the narrative as well as its surface unfolding, or the dramatic strategies which contrive to grab our attention, keep us in suspense, play for our sympathy? Is the gun firing to the accompaniment of loud music and high-pace action of equivalent weight to a silent shot of smoke curling upwards from the gun barrel?
