Potter, Introduction to Media Literacy 1e 1
Introduction to Media Literacy, 1st edition
W. James Potter
Chapter 6: Mass Media Audience: Individual Perspective
Lecture Notes
Learning Objectives:
1. Distinguish between exposure and attention.
2. Recognize the three criteria for exposure.
3. Explain how media experiences vary across the four exposure states.
Outline:
I. Exposure is not the same as attention.
A. Exposure
i. The physical criterion
a. The person and the message must occupy the same physical space.
b. Physical proximity is necessary but not sufficient.
ii. The perceptual criterion
iii. The psychological criterion
a. There must be a trace element created in a person’s mind.
a. The element can enter the mind consciously through the
central route, or it can enter the mind unconsciously
through the peripheral route.
B. Attention
i. People must meet all three criteria for exposure for attention to occur.
C. Exposure states
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a. People in the automatic state may not be paying much
attention to what they are doing (i.e., browsing the
Internet).
b. We are in the automatic state often in our lives (i.e., getting ready
for and driving to work).
c. Most media exposure happens in the automatic state.
ii. Attentional state
a. People are aware of the messages and actively interact with them.
b. There is a range of attention from awareness to in-depth analysis.
iii. Transported state
iv. Self-reflexive state
II. Decisions during exposures
A. Filtering decisions
i. If a person’s phone alerts her or him that she or he has received a message,
she or he consciously decides whether or not she or he is going to respond.
ii. Spam filters are programmed to keep out negative messages.
iii. The media create our filtering codes by conditioning us for repeat
exposure.
a. Amazon recommends books for us.
b. Netflix personalizes our rental suggestions.
iv. Marketers use algorithms to target desirable audiences and filter out ones
that are not as useful to them.
B. Meaning matching decisions
C. Meaning construction decisions
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III. Increasing media literacy
A. Natural abilities, including cognitive and emotional abilities, are more evolved in
some people than in others.
i. Field independency is your natural ability to distinguish between the
signal and the noise in any message.
a. The noise is the chaos of symbols.
b. The signal is the information that emerges from the chaos.
ii. Conceptual differentiation refers to how people group and classify things.
b. A sharpening strategy looks for the differences.
iii. Emotional intelligence is our ability to understand and control our
emotions.
iv. Tolerance for ambiguity is the degree to which we can handle
discrepancies.
B. Analyzing decisions