ABSTRACT
Marshal McLuhan (1964) proposed in his well-known book, Understanding Media, that the form of the medium in which a message is delivered, not solely the content of the message, infl uences how a message is processed and perceived by people. Since then, a growing number of media scholars have focused their attention on how noncontent features of media independently infl uence media message processing. The content of a message refers to ‘the story, its characters, plot, and actions’ (Geiger and Reeves 1993). A defi nitive defi nition of noncontent features of media may be more diffi cult to fi nd. Following in the tradition of early research on the formal features of television (e.g., Huston and Wright 1983), Geiger and Reeves (1993) identifi ed noncontent features of television as audio and visual structure of a medium, which are comparable to a grammatical syntax, and include the cuts and edits, pacing, camera angles, and image size.1 While these features are indeed an integral part of mediated messages, they represent a distinct class of attributes that vary independently of content. Systematic investigation of these attributes over the past three decades has helped to signal a shift away from simplistic media effects research that examines the infl uence of particular portrayals and depictions (i.e., content) on knowledge attitudes and behavior. Studies of structural and presentation attributes generally refl ect an information-processing perspective and aim to provide a more holistic understanding of how people interact with media and what kinds of outcomes are likely under various conditions (Lang et al. 2009).
