The Hypodermic Needle Theory

Here is a short video i have found during research of the hypodermic needle theory explaining it in brief. The source was YouTube and was uploaded by Brett Lamb.











Basically in brief the hypodermic needle theory was created over 80 years ago during the first world war. It tells us how mass media affects the audience and almost offends a modern day audience as it represents the audience as being stupid and naive and believes that an audience will accept anything they are fed without using their own minds to question and think about the information they are being given. This model is very dated and was mainly used for propaganda during the war. It suggests that the mass media can affect the way we behave and the decisions we make. This model has been linked with modern day audience in the form of rap music and the sexual representation of stars thinking that an audience may copy these without taking in and using their minds to think about what message they are sending out.
The theory then proved ridiculous to media researchers and they then came up with the Two - Step theory. I have taken the following information form the website www.mediaknowall.com and it is a brief paragraph on the two step flow diagram which was discovered during my research of the hypodermic needle model....
"The Hypodermic model quickly proved too clumsy for media researchers seeking to more precisely explain the relationship between audience and text. As the mass media became an essential part of life in societies around the world and did NOT reduce populations to a mass of unthinking drones, a more sophisticated explanation was sought.
Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet analysed the voters' decision-making processes during a 1940 presidential election campaign and published their results in a paper called The People's Choice. Their findings suggested that the information does not flow directly from the text into the minds of its audience unmediated but is filtered through "opinion leaders" who then communicate it to their less active associates, over whom they have influence. The audience then mediate the information received directly from the media with the ideas and thoughts expressed by the opinion leaders, thus being influenced not by a direct process, but by a two step flow. This diminished the power of the media in the eyes of researchers, and caused them to conclude that social factors were also important in the way in which audiences interpreted texts. This is sometimes referred to as the limited effects paradigm."