How Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies Effect Human Emotion - Term Paper Example

How Media, Communications, and Cultural Studies Effect Human Emotion A. Understanding Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies: A Definition of Terms 1. A Perspective on Communication The process of sending information to oneself or another entity usually via language is known as communication. A language is a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures or written symbols which communicate thoughts or feelings (Wikepedia 2004). Communication is defined by differing emphases on information exchange and personal engagement across culturally different discourse genres. (Thorne, 2000) Communication is a broad field which specializes on different aspects like mass communication, conversation analysis, linguistics, pragmatics, semiotics, discourse analysis, communication technology, etc. Mass communication is a section specifically conceived and designed to reach a very large audience. Mass media is a channel of mass communication. Communication technology, on the other hand, had an enormous impact on society by changing the distribution of information and assimilation of knowledge. (Hart 2002) Communication is often studied along three major dimensions: content, form, and destination. Communication content includes acts that declare knowledge and experiences, give advice and commands, and ask questions. These acts may take many forms, including gestures (nonverbal communication, sign language and body language), writing, or verbal speaking. The form depends on the symbol systems used. Together, communication content and form make messages that are sent towards a target. The destination can be oneself, another person (in interpersonal communication), or another entity such as a corporation or group. In a so-called risk communication, there is an interactive process of exchange of information and opinion among individuals and groups, and institutions. It involves multiple messages about the nature of risk and other messages (not strictly about risk) that express concerns, opinions, or reactions to risk messages or to legal and institutional arrangements for the management of risk. 2. Media in Society When we talk about radio, newspaper, television, internet and other channels of mass communication, we are obviously referring to media. The media is all around us. Indeed, it plays a significant role in our society today. From the shows we watch on TV, the music we listen to on the radio, to the books, magazines, and newspapers we read each day. Media facilitates the flow of information which is important for the development of communities. Media workers are in essence interpreters of information. Without the media, people in societies would be secluded, not only from the rest of the world, but from law-makers, government, and neighboring towns and cities. One of the most powerful strengths the media has is the ability to effect change, both on a social and governmental level. The media reflects, reinforces and sometimes even challenges social beliefs and ideologies that may affect how people think, speak, and interact with one another. (Perry 2002). The media also educates. It has an important role in public understanding about different issues and concepts like science. The media do provide the discussions in which the relationship between science and the public is constructed and pursued, and it is in this argument that the public make moral judgements about science. Scientists use popular accounts and popular media to reach each other, and even writing up a piece of research for a scientific journal involves a certain amount of "popularisation" - of writing for people who do not know what they are going to read, and writing in a way which matches their expectations and suits their background and sensibilities. (Gregory 2000) On the other hand, media have fostered a shared consumer identity through which we accept rather than debate what is happening in our world. In advertising, media-nurtured consumer culture encourages people to identify with media images, and to buy products to fit their media-based self-identities. This encourages individuals to identify with symbols such as brands of clothing, genres of music, and hairstyles that can unite diverse perspectives under a presumption of shared ideology. (Hart 2002) 3. Cultural Studies Certain points of agreement and commonalities of practice distinguish the cultural studies project from other intellectual enterprises to lessen the difficulty of constructing a singular definition of cultural studies. In its most simplistic terms, cultural studies are concerned with the study of the everyday cultural beliefs, practices, and artifacts of a society. Cultural practices comprise the ways people do particular things (such as watching television, or eating out) in a given culture. Particular meanings attach to the ways people in particular cultures do things. Rather than simply replicating a form of cultural study performed by historians, anthropologists, or sociologists, cultural studies combines multiple disciplinary borders and encompasses numerous disciplines: linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, history, philosophy, musicology, and others. The goals of cultural studies critique differ from those of other academic disciplines. Instead of simply practicing a modified form of literary criticism—by using cultural practices as texts—most cultural studies practitioners are concerned with interrogating power relations and instituting actual change. Thus, rather than being a traditional discipline, cultural studies can be seen as an intellectual exercise in critical thinking that takes as its objects of study—and seeks to interrogate—numerous diverse cultural forms: art, architecture, advertising, literature, music, film, television, theatre, dance, fashion, and so on. Cultural studies critics consider a culture—and its cultural formations—within its specific social, historical, and political context. This focus on context transforms cultural studies into both an intellectual and a pragmatic undertaking wherein a culture becomes both an “object of study and the location of political criticism and action”. Cultural studies is not a unified theory but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches, methods, and academic perspectives; as in any academic discipline, cultural studies academics frequently debate among themselves. However, some academics from other fields have criticised the discipline as a whole. It has been popular to dismiss cultural studies as an academic fad. 4. Relationship of Media, Communication, and Cultural Studies Communication is a component of culture. Study of culture is a form of communication. And media are avenues and tools of communication and culture. While people/audience participates in communication and culture. The production, processing and dissemination, reception, and the study of culture and culture products are activities and processes that exist in all societies and cultures. Culture is understood here as a system of communicative action with several sub-systems of such communicative actions including all types of communication in all media. Following the theoretical and applied framework of comparative cultural studies. The production of culture in and of communicative action consist of (1) The process of production, including the producer and products (2) The processing of the product, including its distribution and dissemination; (3) The audience and reception of the product; and (4) The post-processing of the product (e.g., the criticism and the study of the product and the system itself and in its parts). Cultural studies and mass communications, contribute to media influence research. Cultural studies contribute to the media influence debate by looking at politics, ideology, and psychology to evaluate the interactions of media and culture. Some cultural studies researchers are concerned with the social construction of culture through the normalization of behaviours characterized in media. Average students, for example, watch 5,000 hours of television before they ever get to school, so they may not recognize media bias about race, economics, gender, politics, and morals. According to some researchers, cultural studies methods have evolved from reception research and audience ethnography to social construction. Cultural studies research has moved from audience "uses and gratifications" and "mass culture" to perspectives of the interactions among audiences, media, and culture. On the other hand, the media play an important role in risk communication and the formation of public views on an issue. Daniel Yankelovich views the media as an information source that actually helps the public form an opinion on risk. Despite its importance, however, the extent of the media’s impact on public perception and management of risk remains somewhat of a mystery and is the subject of much ongoing research. It is widely accepted that the media are not only an important source of risk information to the public, but also have a role to play in bringing issues to the attention of the public, which as a result helps create a sense of urgency around them. B. Human Emotion 1. Emotion as an Evolutionary Trait Scientists who study human evolution have made great discoveries into the origins of human emotions and how they affect people and interpersonal relationships. Emotions are physical expressions, often involuntary, related to feelings, perceptions or beliefs about elements, objects or relations between them, in reality or in the imagination. Emotion is sometimes regarded as the antithesis of reason. This is can be seen in common phrases like appeal to emotion or your emotions have taken over. Emotions can be undesired to the individual feeling them; he or she may wish to control but often cannot. Thus one of the most distinctive, and perhaps challenging, facts about human beings is this potential for entanglement, or even opposition, between will, emotion, and reason. Some state that there is no empirical support for any generalization suggesting the antithesis between reason and emotion: indeed, anger or fear can often be thought of as a systematic response to observed facts. In any case, it is clear that the relation between logic and argument on the one hand and emotion on the other is one which merits careful study. It has been noted by many that passion, emotion, or feeling can add backing to an argument, even one based primarily on reason - particularly regarding religion or ideology, areas of human thought which frequently demand an all-or-nothing rejection or acceptance, that is, the adoption of a comprehensive worldview partly backed by empirical argument and partly by feeling and passion. Moreover, it has been suggested by several researchers that typically there is no "pure" decision or thought, that is, no thought based "purely" on intellectual logic or "purely" on emotion - most decisions and cognitions are founded on a mixture of both. Human emotion is basically a giant puzzle. But now that the puzzle is completed, it’s simple to understand. It has seemed unsolvable for all of recorded history because a few critical pieces have only been discovered within the past few years. However, people have been trying to solve the puzzle for all of recorded history, and now that these critical pieces have been discovered, all the pieces suddenly fall into place. All human emotions serve very specific functions in the original conditions of our evolution. (We don’t live in the original conditions of our evolution, in case you hadn’t guessed.) Emotions cause psychological effects in people that cause them to act in whatever way best serves their evolutionary survival. They also cause physiological effects in people that prepare them physically for that course of action. For example, when people are faced with some overwhelming threat to their safety, they feel afraid. That fear causes them to want to run away, which is usually the best way to survive an overwhelming threat. It also makes them feel cold because it diverts a lot of blood to their legs to help them run. At other times when people (and especially men) feel angry, they suddenly feel like bashing things with their hands and their bodies start diverting blood to their hands to help them do it, because for most of human evolution that was the best way people had to deal with things that made them angry. Things that make people feel disgusted cause them to gag, lose their appetite, and to flare their nostrils, because for most of human evolution that was the best way people had to keep from eating rotten food. And so on… Likewise, all human emotion is caused by an interaction of five evolutionary traits of humanity. First are the two evolutionary instincts shared by all animal species: survival and reproduction. The other three are the three basic mental abilities that combine to form human intellect: the ability to imagine abstract ideas, the ability to perceive the passage of time, and the ability to communicate abstract ideas among members of the species. Other animals have these abilities to some degree, but humans have a clear advantage in all of them over all other species. 2. Factors Influencing Human Emotion It has been hypothesized that emotions typical of human beings have evolved and changed in many ways since the species first emerged. Nonetheless, as noted above, it may well be the case that human and non-human animal emotional responses lie on a constant continuum, rather than being two completely distinct categories of human and animal. Much of what is said about emotions, as well as the history of what has been said about them, is conditioned by culture and even politics. That is to say specific emotional responses, as well as a groups interpretation of their significance, may be influenced by cultural norms of propriety. For instance, certain emotions such as love, hate, and the desire for vengeance are treated very differently in differing societies. This methodological relativity is entirely different from the question of whether emotions are universal or are culturally determined. Many researchers would agree that a vast proportion of human behavior, no matter how close to the lowest biological substrates - including sexual behavior, food consumption, feelings in response to physiological changes and responses to environmental conditions - are conditioned based on social surroundings and non-human environmental factors. Thus it is not difficult to defend the position that emotion is, to a high degree, dependent on social phenomena, expectations, norms, and conditioned behavior of the group in which an individual lives. The influence of politics, religion, and socio-cultural customs can be sometimes traced or hypothesized. Among many pertinent examples: behaviors or activities considered highly cruel in some societies may in fact provoke responses of enjoyment in others; or, sexual acts considered highly desirable in some cultures would provoke shame or disgust in others. But contrary to this view, Paul Ekman has shown that at least some facial expressions and their corresponding emotions are universal across human cultures and are not culturally determined. These universal emotions include anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise. C. Direct Link Between Media, Communication, Culture, and Human Emotion 1. Media and Culture Influence Human Emotion For a long time emotions have been kept out of the deliberate tools of science; scientists have expressed emotion, but no tools could sense and respond to their affective information. Laboratory aimed at giving computers the ability to comfortably sense, recognize, and respond to the human communication of emotion, especially affective states such as frustration, confusion, interest, distress, anger, and joy. Two main themes of sensing--self-report and concurrent expression—are described, together with examples of systems that give users new ways to communicate emotion to computers and, through computers, to other people. In addition to building systems that try to elicit and detect frustration, our research group has built a system that responds to user frustration in a way that appears to help alleviate it. This paper highlights applications of this research to interface design, wearable computing, entertainment, and education, and briefly presents some potential ethical concerns and how they might be addressed. Not all computers need to "pay attention" to emotions or to have the capability to emulate emotion. Some machines are useful as rigid tools, and it is fine to keep them that way. However, there are situations in which human-computer interaction could be improved by having the computer adapt to the user, and in which communication about when, where, how, and how important it is to adapt involves the use of emotional information. Findings of Reeves and Nass at Stanford University suggest that the interaction between human and machine is largely natural and social,[1] indicating that factors important in human-human interaction are also important in human-computer interaction. In human-human interaction, it has recently been argued that skills of so-called "emotional intelligence" are more important than are traditional mathematical and verbal skills of intelligence.[2] These skills include the ability to recognize the emotions of another and to respond appropriately to these emotions. Whether or not these particular skills are more important than certain other skills will depend on the situation and goals of the user, but what is clear is that these skills are important in human-human interaction, and when they are missing, interaction is more likely to be perceived as frustrating and not very intelligent. Giving computers skills of emotional intelligence in the broad sense originally described by Salovey and Mayer involves more than giving them the ability to recognize and respond to human emotions. It involves other aspects of affective computing--computing that relates to, arises from, and deliberately influences emotion--as well as other nonaffective capabilities, such as sensing of and reasoning about a context. Another situation can be seen in Mass media which reflects culture of a society and reinforce norms or offer insights into alternative ways of thinking. Entertainment content depicting sexual norms, stereotypes, double-standards, and sexual roles may have a profound influence on teens emotions about sex, body image, and social norms. Teens who watch sexual content on television are more likely to engage in sex; teens who watch a lot of television tend to have negative attitudes about being a virgin; and teens that see sexual content as being more real are more impacted by the sexual content. Age and gender may also influence how teens select media, according to one study that found older teens were more likely to tune in to sexual content, and that females were more likely to learn about sex and relationships from sexual content in the media. Music Television (MTV) is another example of electronic media programming that barrages teens with sexual messages. From the beginning, MTV transformed music into television programming by using fast-paced visuals to grab the attention of a very specific youthful audience - a new generation that had been raised with television and had different ways of processing information 2. Communication can effect Human Emotion Sometimes, in non verbal communication, when a person communicates with anyone, he is attempting to evoke a favourable response from the person. He wants the other person to react in a certain way, so he is communicating to try to get them to feel like reacting in the way you want. Of course, the other person is doing the same thing to him. In general, the best way to make the situation turn out favourably is to find a way to make it turn out favourably for the other person too. The face is the "organ of emotion," and we constantly read facial expressions to understand what others are feeling. The face also contains other powerful clues. Our identity is captured in our features, and our eyes reveal important truths about us, even those we would prefer to conceal. Our face also plays a critical role in physical attractiveness. So the organ of emotion is perhaps the most powerful "channel" of nonverbal communication. We "encode" messages in our own facial expressions, and we simultaneously "decode" the faces of the people around us. In even the most simple interaction, our attention naturally gravitates to the face, seeking to read some of the vital information we know is "written" there. We constantly monitor the face because it provides vital clues to an impressive variety of possibilities: attraction, whether a person likes or dislikes us, the complexity of emotions, identity, age, humor, and a persons regional and even national background. References: Carroll, David (2004) Psychology of Language, Thompson Learning Inc. 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Audience Research. Special Issue of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Literature, the Media and the Arts 21.4 (1992): 239-376. Niesen, Ezra (2006) Evolutionary Science as an Implement of Personal Empowerment, Available from: http://www.ucimc.org/newswire/display/132283/index.php [Accessed: 14 August 2006] Human Emotion (2002), Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_emotion [Accessed: 16 August 2002] Goldstein, Bruce (2002) Emotions, Sensation and Perception Sixth Edition, Thompson Learning Inc. Printed in USA, p 461- 465. Picard, R.W. (2000) Toward computers that recognize and respond to user emotion, CHI 99 Short Papers, Pittsburgh, PA, Available from: http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/393/part2/picard.txt [Accessed: !6 August 2006] Omdahl, Becky (2001) Understanding the Communication of Emotion, The Review of Communication p 209- 211, National Communication Association, Available from: http://www.natcom.org/pubs/ROC/one-two/Omdahl.pdf. 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