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Britannica Media Dependency Theory

What I Found: Britannica Lists a summarized and easy to understand definition of how Media Dependency Works and how the spine of the framework functions. Its is basically a relationship in which the fulfillment of a party's needs is reliant on the resources that media provides. A sort of dependency relationship that an audience has with modes of media.

Basic Definition:

Media dependency theory, a systematic approach to the study of the effects of mass media on audiences and of the interactions between media, audiences, and social systems. It was introduced in outline by the American communications researchers Sandra Ball-Rokeach and Melvin DeFleur in 1976.

"Two of the basic propositions put forward by Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur are: (1) the greater the number of social functions performed for an audience by a medium (e.g., informing the electorate, providing entertainment), the greater the audience’s dependency on that medium, and (2) the greater the instability of a society (e.g., in situations of social change and conflict), the greater the audience’s dependency on the media and, therefore, the greater the potential effects of the media on the audience."


In addition, Britannica clearly lists three types of effects that come from one's dependency of media; being cognitive, affective, and behavioral. 

"Affective effects include, for example, the development of feelings of fear and anxiety about living in certain neighborhoods as a result of overexposure to news reports about violent events in such areas."

"Cognitive effects are changes in an audience’s attitudes, beliefs, and values, including changes brought about by the media."

"Behavioral effect is “deactivation,” which occurs when individual members of an audience refrain from taking certain actions that they would have taken had they not been exposed to certain messages from the media" (such as voting)

 

Lin, Y. (n.d.). media dependency theory. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved March 7, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/media-dependency-theory 

 

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