ABSTRACT
For many years, mass communication scholars viewed the mass communication consumption process in a somewhat linear and unidimensional manner—mediated stimuli were viewed, heard, or read; then, after being subjected to unknown processes within the consumer, they were perceived as causing some observable behavior. Instead of trying to determine why people selected certain media messages over others or what processes allowed for individual variations in responses among different audience members consuming the same messages, these early researchers were more interested in the behavioral norm of media effects, or the averaging of all observable response categories. In doing so, they sought to determine the most frequently observed response to a given media message, temporarily ignoring any mental processing that led to this behavior.
