5 - Connecting the Personal and the Political: Media as Facilitator or Inhibitor?

Summary

The role assigned to mass media in the theoretical model discussed thus far has been fairly straightforward: Media help determine the perceptions of collective experience that are, in turn, quite important to political judgments. Figure 5.1 expands on the model originally proposed in the top panel of Figure 3.1 by incorporating the sociotropic pattern discussed at length in Chapter 4. Since media may impart information that is at odds with people's day-to-day experiences and personal contacts, it has the capacity to cultivate gaps between people's personallevel and collective-level perceptions. In a sense, then, media have the capacity to alienate people's political judgments from their immediate lives and experiences and to distance them from a politics rooted in everyday life. Without media, their perceptions of mass collectives would, of necessity, be based on generalizations from their own lives and experiences. When attitudes are based instead on media-influenced perceptions of collective experience, accountability may well suffer.

Although these implications can logically be drawn from this model, it is important to recognize that this is not the only conclusion consistent with this model. In fact, based on this very same theoretical model, one could also argue precisely the opposite: that by conveying information about others with similar experiences, mass media encourage the politicization of personal life experiences, and encourage greater accountability.

In this chapter I present the major arguments and evidence behind these two seemingly contradictory theoretical perspectives that have been advanced in this area of research.