Infotainment
A neural predictor of cultural popularity
Gregory Berns & Sara Moore
Journal of Consumer Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We use neuroimaging to predict cultural popularity - something that is popular in the broadest sense and appeals to a large number of individuals. Neuroeconomic research suggests that activity in reward-related regions of the brain, notably the orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum, is predictive of future purchasing decisions, but it is unknown whether the neural signals of a small group of individuals are predictive of the purchasing decisions of the population at large. For neuroimaging to be useful as a measure of widespread popularity, these neural responses would have to generalize to a much larger population that is not the direct subject of the brain imaging itself. Here, we test the possibility of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to predict the relative popularity of a common good: music. We used fMRI to measure the brain responses of a relatively small group of adolescents while listening to songs of largely unknown artists. As a measure of popularity, the sales of these songs were totaled for the three years following scanning, and brain responses were then correlated with these "future" earnings. Although subjective likability of the songs was not predictive of sales, activity within the ventral striatum was significantly correlated with the number of units sold. These results suggest that the neural responses to goods are not only predictive of purchase decisions for those individuals actually scanned, but such responses generalize to the population at large and may be used to predict cultural popularity.
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Major League Baseball Attendance and the Role of Fantasy Baseball
Todd Nesbit & Kerry King-Adzima
Journal of Sports Economics, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many explanations exist for the resurgence of the Major League Baseball (MLB) fan base following the 1994-1995 strike. The most prevalent explanations include the 1998 McGuire-Sosa homerun race and Cal Ripken Jr.'s consecutive games record. While such explanations certainly impacted fan interest in the sport, it is remiss to ignore the impact of online fantasy baseball leagues, which surfaced in 1997. This article examines the extent to which participating in a fantasy baseball league influences the MLB game attendance. The results strongly suggest that fantasy baseball participation positively influences MLB game attendance.
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Writing the news: A comparison of objective, religious, and political opinion presses
Jennifer Young Abbott
Journalism, April 2011, Pages 349-365
Abstract:
In 1997 in Washington, DC, the Christian men's group Promise Keepers organized a large rally that drew attention from mainstream newspapers, religious publications, and political opinion journals. Scholarship of this news coverage has downplayed differences across media and suggested, instead, that nearly all favored Promise Keepers. This study attempts to correct that oversight by contrasting the news stories in The Washington Post, Christianity Today, and several political opinion journals. Based on this analysis, I argue that The Washington Post produced the most positive coverage of Promise Keepers, while Christianity Today published more skeptical reports, and political opinion journals provided the fairest coverage. I suggest the writing practices associated with each type of journalism help to account for the differences in reporting. In the end, this study reveals the impact of journalistic formats on news coverage and reminds us that all news reflects a particular perspective.
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YouTube-ification of Political Talk: An Examination of Persuasion Appeals in Viral Video
Kristin English, Kaye Sweetser & Monica Ancu
American Behavioral Scientist, June 2011, Pages 733-748
Abstract:
In 2008, U.S. Internet users watched 14 billion videos on YouTube. During the 2008 presidential campaign, voters rated watching YouTube political videos as one of the top three most popular online political activities. But to what degree are YouTube political videos influential of viewers' perceptions, and to what degree does the source of the video make an impact? Similar to all other new forms of online communication, the effects of YouTube clips on consumers of political information, and the credibility of these messages, have yet to be understood. This study takes a step into that direction through a three-cell posttest-only experimental design that exposed participants to three YouTube clips about health care, each clip containing a different persuasive appeal (source or ethos, logic or logos, and emotion or pathos). Results revealed that the ethos appeal ranked as the most credible appeal, followed by logos and pathos, a somewhat promising finding that users resist being swayed by emotion or hard numbers and pay attention to message source. No relationship was found between the appeals and political information efficacy or the political cynicism of participants.
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LeeAnn Kahlor & Matthew Eastin
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Spring 2011, Pages 215-231
Abstract:
This study approached cultivation from a feminist, ecological perspective that recognized television at the macrosystem level as a purveyor of cultural norms embedded in a culture of violence towards women. The results suggest that general television consumption is related significantly to first- and second-order rape myth beliefs among men and women. Data also indicate positive relationships between soap opera viewing and both rape myth acceptance (second order beliefs) and the overestimation of false rape accusations (a first order belief), and a negative relationship between crime-show viewing and rape myth acceptance. Gender was a significant predictor of rape beliefs above and beyond the contributions of television viewing and other individual- and micro-level variables.
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Andrew Weaver et al.
Media Psychology, Winter 2011, Pages 49-70
Abstract:
It is widely assumed that children like violence in cartoons, but this assumption has not been supported in existing studies that show nonviolent programs are liked just as much or more than violent programs. The present experiment extended enjoyment of media violence research by testing whether violence and action (independently manipulated) influenced children's liking of slapstick cartoons. We also proposed a path model to test potential indirect effects of violence and action on liking. Using animation software, four versions of a slapstick cartoon were created that varied in terms of violence (present, absent) and action (high, low). A total of 128 elementary school children watched one of the four versions of the program. Violence had no direct effect on the liking of the cartoon, but did indirectly decrease liking for males by decreasing boys' wishful identification with the anthropomorphized characters. Action increased liking for males but not for females.
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Advertising and labour supply: Why do Americans work such long hours?
Keith Cowling, Rattanasuda Poolsombat & Philip Tomlinson
International Review of Applied Economics, May/June 2011, Pages 283-301
Abstract:
This paper advances the view that the intensity of creation of wants through advertising and marketing might be an influence on decisions made by Americans about how much time they should devote to paid work and how much time to leisure. In exploring this argument, we employ vector auto-regression analysis to estimate long-run supply schedules for US workers in the twentieth century. We find that advertising expenditure is significant in determining US hours of work, thus providing support for the hypothesis that preferences over work-leisure choices are malleable and are manipulated by the marketing effort.
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An Experiment of Campaign Effects during the YouTube Election
Terri Towner & David Dulio
New Media & Society, June 2011, Pages 626-644
Abstract:
The 2008 US presidential election was called the ‘YouTube Election'. However, scholars know little about how the internet influences attitudes toward politics. To address this, we conduct an experiment to test the effects of exposure to the YouTube channel, ‘YouChoose'08', on young adults during the 2008 US presidential election. We find that those exposed to YouChoose'08 exhibit more cynicism toward the US government, yet also had a heightened sense that they influence the political system. Exposure to YouChoose'08 had no influence on attitudes toward candidates or internet sources.
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Bling bling taxation and the fiscal virtues of hip hop
Per Engström
Social Choice and Welfare, June 2011, Pages 139-147
Abstract:
The article extends Ng's (Am Econ Rev 77(1):186-191, 1987) model of optimal taxation of diamond goods - goods that are valued solely for their costliness. We extend his findings by analyzing how other goods should be taxed in the presence of pure diamond goods; modified Ramsey rules are derived in a basic single-type model as well as in a two-type model with redistribution. One key finding, that may be surprising and rather provoking, is that close complements (hip hop music) to diamond goods (bling bling) should be heavily subsidized.
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"Rhymes with Blunt": Pornification and U.S. Political Culture
Karrin Vasby Anderson
Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Summer 2011, Pages 327-368
Abstract:
In this essay, I contend that political culture and campaign journalism during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign was "pornified." Examination of broadcast journalism, viral videos, online commentary, political pop culture, and get-out-the- vote campaigns reveals the ways in which pornographic metaphors, images, and narratives infiltrated U.S. political culture during the 2008 presidential primary and general election season. I assess the media framing of candidates Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, as well as that of female voters as a group, arguing that the emergence of the pornification frame signals a backlash against the gains women have made in the U.S. political system.
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Karyn Riddle et al.
Media Psychology, Spring 2011, Pages 168-191
Abstract:
Using Shrum's (1996) heuristic processing model as an explanatory mechanism, we propose that people who hold vivid autobiographical memories for a specific past experience with media violence will overstate the prevalence of real-world crime versus individuals without vivid memories. We also explore the effects of frequency and recency on social reality beliefs. A survey was administered to 207 undergraduate students who were asked to recall one violent television program or movie seen in the past. Participants were asked to write essays describing the violence, which were coded for vividness. Results support not only cultivation theory, but also the effects of memory vividness: participants with more vivid memories of blood and gore gave higher prevalence estimates of real-world crime and violence than participants with less vivid memories. Findings also suggest that females had more vivid memories for prior media violence than males. Implications for cultivation, the heuristic processing model, and vividness research are discussed.
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A Meta-Analytical Review of Selective Exposure to and the Enjoyment of Media Violence
Andrew Weaver
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Spring 2011, Pages 232-250
Abstract:
A primary argument for the widespread production of media violence is that audiences want to watch violent content. This assumption is examined in this meta-analytic review of existing research on both selective exposure to and enjoyment of violence. The results show that violence has a significant effect on both selective exposure and enjoyment, but in different directions. Specifically, violence increases selective exposure but decreases enjoyment of content. Potential explanations for these effects and moderators that could influence the results (e.g., sex, aggressive personality traits, type of content) are considered, and the practical implications of these findings are discussed.
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Visual activity in Hollywood film: 1935 to 2005 and beyond
James Cutting, Jordan DeLong & Kaitlin Brunick
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, May 2011, Pages 115-125
Abstract:
The structure of Hollywood film has changed in many ways over the last 75 years, and much of that change has served to increase the engagement of viewers' perceptual and cognitive processes. We report a new physical measure for cinema-the visual activity index (VAI)-that reflects one of these changes. This index captures the amount of motion and movement in film. We define whole-film VAI as (1 - median r), reflecting the median correlation of pixels in pairs of near-adjacent frames measured along the entire length of a film or film sequence. Analyses of 150 films show an increase in VAI from 1935 to 2005, with action and adventure films leading the way and with dramas showing little increase. Using these data and those from three more recent high-intensity films, we explore a possible perceptual and cognitive constraint on popular film: VAI as a function of the log of sequence or film duration. We find that many "queasicam"
sequences, those shot with an unsteady camera, often exceed our proposed constraint.
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Kenneth Herbst et al.
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Two experiments demonstrated that fast (vs. normal-paced) end-of-advertisement disclaimers undermine consumers' purchase intention toward untrusted brands (both trust-unknown and not-trusted brands), but that disclaimer speed has no effect on consumers' purchase intention toward trusted brands. The differential effects of disclaimer speed for untrusted versus trusted brands were not due to differences in consumers' familiarity with the brands (experiment 1). Consistent with the hypothesis that fast disclaimers adversely affect purchase intention via heuristic rather than elaborative processes, the disclaimer speed × brand trust interaction effect remained robust even when the disclaimer presented positive information about the advertised product (experiment 2).
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Eszter Hargittai & Eden Litt
New Media & Society, forthcoming
Abstract:
What motivates young adults to start using the popular microblogging site Twitter? Can we identify any systematic patterns of adoption or is use of the service randomly distributed among internet users of this demographic? Drawing on unique longitudinal data surveying 505 diverse young American adults about their internet uses at two points in time (2009, 2010), this article looks at what explains the uptake of Twitter during the year when the site saw considerable increase in use. We find that African Americans are more likely to use the service as are those with higher internet skills. Results also suggest that interest in celebrity and entertainment news is a significant predictor of Twitter use mediating the effect of race among a diverse group of young adults. In contrast, interest in local and national news, international news, and politics shows no relationship to Twitter adoption in this population segment.
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Pretending to Be "Postracial": The Spectacularization of Race in Reality TV's Survivor
Emily Drew
Television & New Media, July 2011, Pages 326-346
Abstract:
While race is usually an implicit discourse in reality television, making it an explicit discourse seems to have little effect on challenging the prevailing representations of race in prime-time television. This research demonstrates how Survivor's "race wars" season attempted to reinforce a "postracial" narrative that race no longer matters in contemporary U.S. society while simultaneously perpetuating the familiar representations that reproduce racial ideology. Using data derived from a systematic content analysis, the author argues that Survivor spectacularized race by (1) using racial logic to explain the success and failure of teams as well as the failure of individuals to survive within their teams, (2) essentializing people of color's racial identity as biologically and culturally bound while simultaneously making whiteness invisible and normal, and (3) promoting color-blind and postracial assertions that contradicted the clear salience of race in shaping contestants' "survival." The author considers what this explicit racialization of the program reveals about the potential for-and pitfalls of-addressing race in reality television.
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Magical Thinking and Consumer Coping
Yannik St. James, Jay Handelman & Shirley Taylor
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Magical thinking is often regarded as a cognitive distortion, whereby consumers irrationally invoke mystical, supernatural forces to cope with stressful situations. Adopting a culture-based theoretical lens, this article examines magical thinking as an integral element of contemporary consumer society, a cultural practice of meaning negotiation that works to restore the experience of interconnectedness when this experience has been broken. The analysis of interview and blog narratives of consumers attempting to lose weight reveals how they adopt practices imbued with magical thinking in the form of creative persuasion, retribution, and efficient causality. Magical thinking allows participants to construct a space of uncertainty and ambiguity that transforms impossibilities into possibilities, thus sustaining their hope in the pursuit of goals. In so doing, consumers demonstrate a chimerical agency where they creatively blur fantasy and reality to cope with cultural expectations of control.