ABSTRACT
When my alarm clock goes off in the morning, I wake to the sounds of my local National Public Radio station’s morning news show. While fixing myself a cup of tea, I frequently turn on my laptop so that I can check my work and home email accounts. If a major news event was breaking the previous night, I may check CNN.com, my local newspaper’s website or Twitter to get the latest updates. If my schedule permits, I may check my Facebook page to see what friends have posted. If I go for a run, walk or bike ride, my smartphone comes with me. On my drive to work, I pick up the print copy of my local newspaper and listen to NPR’s “Morning Edition” on the car radio. At the end of the day, I’ll tune in again on the way home, or perhaps I’ll listen to music – either on the radio or via my iPod. If I stop at the grocery store, I’ll have time to read the cover blurbs on the magazines while standing in the check-out line. At home, there are books and magazines to read, or I watch a TV show or stream a movie through my sons’ Wii console. After dinner, I’m likely to be back at the computer, checking the news again, making travel reservations or shopping, paying bills electronically, responding to email, searching for information I need either for work or for my family, uploading readings to an e-learning site for my students, perhaps posting to Facebook. While other individuals’ specific interactions with mass media will differ from mine, most of us share this basic reality. In much of the world today, people live media-saturated lives. A 2013 report from the University of Southern California’s Institute for Communication Technology
Management predicted that by 2015, average daily media use per person in the United States would equal 15.5 hours per day – not including media consumption at work (Short, 2013). Assuming an eight-hour working day for most people and at least six hours’ sleep, that figure gives “multimedia” a whole new meaning. Many of us, during at least some part of our day, are interacting simultaneously with multiple media channels. The notion that the average person will soon spend substantially more than half of every day interacting with some sort of media raises significant questions about how so much media consumption affects us, both individually and as a society. Surely we should expect numerous impacts – economic, political, intellectual, sociological. However, the more specific focus of this book is on how interaction with media affects our health, including both media’s effects on our individual health behaviors and on the health environments in which we live. To illustrate, let me return for a moment to my daily media routine. When NPR wakes me up in the morning, I generally turn it off before I’m awake enough to process any news story that may be running at that moment. But as I head downstairs to make tea, I clip my Fitbit to my pajamas to start monitoring my steps for the day. As soon as I sit down in front of my laptop, it will automatically sync to my account, and, if I choose, I can log in to see how well (or poorly) I’ve met my activity goals for the week. Email may bring updates about recent health or health policy research or events, or a prayer request from my pastor may inform me about a health problem someone in my church is experiencing. Even if there’s no health information in the emails themselves, advertising surrounding my home email account encourages me to check out some new supplement described as the “holy grail for weight loss” or to see what “amazing” new discovery Dr. Oz is touting on TV. A check of CNN.com (in mid-September 2015) offers me the “Restaurant report card grades on antibiotics in meat supply,” providing information about how the use of antibiotic-laden meat from restaurants like McDonald’s or Denny’s may be contributing to the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The entertainment section updates the story of Caitlyn Jenner’s gender change. My local newspaper’s website reports that my county is part of a pilot program aimed at improving coordination of area mental health services. At home, National Geographic’s October 2015 issue includes a story about the health risks its story-tellers often face, from being run over by hippos or
elephants, attacked by sharks or abducted by guerilla fighters, to being bitten by venomous snakes or by swarms of sand-flies that carry potentially fatal parasites. In the grocery store check-out line, the cover of Cosmopolitan promises to tell me how to have “Sex For One” and “What Works, What Doesn’t” in removing cellulite. If my radio station is playing Beyoncé and Jay Z’s 2013 song “Drunk in Love,” I’ll hear lyrics that – according to some critics, at least – make light of domestic violence. If I listen to radio news or turn on the evening TV news broadcast, I’ll hear about the latest violence in Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria and other troubled places in the world. If I log in to Facebook, I can see a friend’s update reporting her doctor’s diagnosis of the cause for her chronic insomnia problem (adrenal fatigue) and another friend’s “shared” pictures offering mental health advice, such as “Stop holding on to what hurts and make room for what feels good.” Other friends offer updates about their children’s health issues, ranging from the minor to the chronic and potentially lifethreatening, while yet another, whose husband has early-onset Alzheimer’s disease, may have posted a message advocating for more research on improved treatment options. In short, not only do we live media-saturated lives, but that media saturation exposes us to a steady stream of messages about health. Over the past 40 years, researchers have attempted to determine what impact that river of health messages has on us, both as individuals making health decisions for ourselves and our families, and as communities and societies creating policies and regulations, through our elected and appointed officials, that influence the health opportunities available to us all. This book is intended to review the research on the most important and most thoroughly studied topics related to mass media’s impact on health, to offer some conclusions about what we do and do not know about media effects on health, and to identify key areas for future research. To establish a context for this discussion, this chapter first examines in more detail recent data on individuals’ interactions with the media environment, focusing primarily on the United States. The next section summarizes the health environment, drawing on multinational studies to show how the health status of U.S. citizens compares to that of individuals in other developed countries throughout the world. The chapter then introduces a matrix for categorizing health impacts of mass media
based on whether the health effect is an intended or unintended outcome of the mass media message, whether the effect is positive or negative, and whether it occurs at the level of individual behavior or public health policy (Brown & Walsh-Childers, 1994).
