Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Van Dijk • News Analysis: Case Studies o f International and National News
in the Press
Robert Kubey
Rutgers University
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
University of Chicago
Routledge
R Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First Published by
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers
365 Broadway
Hillsdale, New Jersey 07642
and Isabella
— MC
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Contents
Preface xi
Appendices 223
References 244
Author Index 269
Subject Index 277
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Preface
By current estimates the first hum an beings em erged on Earth approx
imately 2 million years ago. In this vast stretch of time, approximately
100,000 hum an generations have lived and died, and yet ours are
am ong the first to live in a world where much of daily experience is
shaped by widely shared, instantaneous mass communication. Foremost
am ong the mass media is television.
T he A. C. Nielsen Company (1989) currently estimates that people in
the United States view upwards of 4 hours of television each day. Given
the likelihood that such estimates are inflated, let us assume a m ore
conservative estimate of 2 lA hours of television viewing per day over the
period of a lifetime. Even at this m ore conservative rate, a typical Ameri
can would spend m ore than 7 full years watching television out of the
approxim ately 47 waking years each of us lives by age 70— this assuming
an average o f 8 hours of sleep per day.
Such a figure is even m ore striking when we consider that Americans
have about 5*/2 hours a day of free time, or approximately 16 years
available for leisure of the same 47-year span. From this point of view
and based on a conservative estimate, Americans are spending nearly
half of their available free time watching television.
Still, the num ber of hours spent viewing continues to creep upward
by a few minutes each year, and people throughout the rest of the world
seem every bit as attracted to the medium as do Americans. In fact,
television is growing in popularity in almost every country on the globe.
Programs such as “T he Cosby Show” and “Dallas” are viewed by enor
mous audiences throughout the world— “Dallas” has aired in over 90
countries— and have caused the desertion of cafes and movie theaters,
and forced public events to be rescheduled during broadcast hours. At a
1988 international meeting of television program buyers and sellers in
Cannes, one estimate set U.S. television program sales to Europe at $2.7
billion for 1992, a 1,200% increase since 1983 (Miller, 1989). So great is
the attraction of television that the East Germ an city of Dresden experi
enced a crisis in labor supply when many residents moved closer to the
western border to watch program s being broadcast by stations in West
Germany (Cantor & Cantor, 1986).
Suffice it to say that television has become our species’ preferred and
most powerful means of mass communication. But although television
xl
x li PREFACE
cles and books on the effects of television, we still do not fully under
stand how television is used and experienced in everyday life. And it is
certainly the case that we lack a broad enough perspective from which
such understandings can be reasonably and usefully evaluated.
To what realistic alternatives is television watching being compared?
W hat social and psychological costs do those alternatives have? Only an
integrated view of hum an activity that considers a broad range of alter
natives and consequences will make an understanding of television view
ing possible.
In writing this book, we were exposed to the ideological pressures,
pro and con, that the discussion of television inevitably engenders.
Nevertheless, there is one safeguard built into this volume. T he research
m ethod underlying our findings was not designed to test a particular
hypothesis about television. Rather, it was designed to provide a picture
o f the way people feel as they move through everyday life, from leisure
to work, from eating meals to driving their cars— and of the way they
feel when they are watching television. T he experience of television
viewing is studied in its natural context, em bedded in its everydayness,
and much of what we say about the quality of that experience is in
comparison with the other daily activities that comprise the rest of life.
In addition to showing how television viewing fits into people’s time
schedules, the m ethod has perm itted us to assess how people feel when
watching television in comparison with how they feel when they eat,
work, or converse with their friends. W hen are people most apt to report
that they are concentrating hard? T hat they are happy? T hat they want
to do what they are doing? By m apping out thousands of events against
each other on such dimensions, we can begin to assess in a comparative
m anner the nature of the cultural practice we call television viewing.
But before we examine the findings, we first attem pt to create a
conceptual and historical context in which they might be m ore m ean
ingfully interpreted. This is our intent in the first two chapters.
Chapter 1 presents a theoretical model by which the inform ation
value of any activity, including television viewing, can be assessed. In
chapter 2 we place television viewing in the context of other leisure
activities. Few would claim that television is good because it strengthens
the body, or because by watching it we will find eternal happiness. But
television viewing may be an excellent way to relax and recuperate and
may therefore be an optimal form of leisure. In fact, in a recent large-
scale national survey it was found that m ore Americans reported getting
pleasure from television than from sex, food, hobbies, religion, m ar
riage, money, or sports. So far so good— But what is leisure?
Many o f the great thinkers of the past, from Aristotle to Marx, have
set forth their opinions on what leisure and its role in hum an life should
x iv PREFACE
ACKNOW LEDGMENTS
In any long-term enterprise few people work alone and we are no excep
tion. T he research that m ade this book possible was supported by many
people, institutions, and foundations.
Robert Kubey especially appreciates the support of the National In
stitute o f Mental Health, the Richard D. Irwin Foundation, the Rutgers
University Research Council, and the McGannon Communication Re
search C enter for the Study of Issues in Policy and Ethics at Fordham
University, which helped make possible many of his studies on television
as well as the data analysis and much of the writing presented in the
xvl PREFACE
Robert Kubey
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
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CHAPTER 1
We start with a few working principles that have inform ed our thinking.
Inform ation can be thought o f as anything that produces changes in
consciousness— a perception, a sensation, an emotion, a memory, a
thought. Odors, sounds, the slanting rays of the sun coming into a room,
the words lined up on this page, all contribute bits o f inform ation to a
person’s consciousness.
For inform ation to become meaningful, signs must pass through at
tention. If you stop paying attention to these words, they cease to have
m uch inform ation value. Attention, then, can be thought of as a general
resource for cognitive processing (Hasher & Zacks, 1979) or the energy
added to a structure that permits processing of inform ation through
that structure, the structures in question being links of previous infor
m ation such as perceptual and semantic codes (LaBerge, 1975).1
T he im portance of attention can hardly be overestimated. As Zucker-
m an (1988) has written:
ORDER A N D COMPLEXITY
o f the receiver. W hat counts most is not the structural order or complex
ity o f the message, but how the message is processed. We believe in the
utility o f taking the subjective reality of the recipient as the starting point
for our model.*
Order, then, refers to a subjective state in which a person experiences
no substantial conflict am ong the elements of consciousness. Inner o rder
is constituted by desires organized around a hierarchy of needs or goals.
These hierarchies differ from person to person, but their main struc
tural lines tend to be quite similar, at least within the same culture and
historical period.5
W hen something appears to decrease the probability of achieving our
goals, it will produce conflict, and therefore, disorder in consciousness.
D epending on the nature o f the goal that is im peded, the disorder will
take the form o f a unpleasant emotion such as anger, sadness, loneliness,
guilt, or anxiety. But when we make progress in reaching a goal, or
obtain the goal itself, o rder is restored in experience and so we feel joy,
happiness, or a similar pleasant emotion.
W hen any new bit o f inform ation (a perception, sensation, memory,
feeling, or idea) enters awareness, it potentially affects the dynamic bal
ance in consciousness either by increasing o rd er— if the inform ation
supports our goals— or by increasing disorder—if it implies a frustra
tion o f the goals in awareness. O f course quite often inform ation has
little or no bearing whatsoever on what we desire, in which case it leaves
the balance of o rd er unaffected, and our experience and m ood u n
changed.
Thus, each piece of inform ation can be thought to possess a negative
entropy, or negentropy quotient (NQ), depending on the am ount of order
it produces in consciousness. T he concept of entropy as posited in the
Second Law o f Therm odynam ics refers to the inability of a system to do
work, or to the loss o f energy. Entropy is also a m easure of the degree of
disorder in a system.
We are certainly not the first to use concepts from physics or the
*Klapp’s (1986) exam ple o f “museum fatigue” well illustrates the importance that must
be placed on the individual’s subjective experience o f information:
A person visits a museum with the best intentions o f seeing it all with deep apprecia
tion within an hour or so. But, to his surprise and embarrassment, for all his
enthusiasm, his fatigue mounts, legs tire, and eyes glaze after seeing only a few halls
full o f treasures. . . H e suffers from an overload o f information, a boredom result
ing from the am ount and variety, not the quality, o f the information he tried to
assimilate in a limited time. (p. 123)
A WAY TO THINK A BO UT INFORM ATION RECEPTION 5
A theory is more impressive the greater is the simplicity o f its premises, the more
different are the kinds o f things it relates and the more extended its range o f
applicability, (see Miller, 1971, p. 46)
For Frederick Soddy, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, the laws o f thermodynamics neces
sarily explain all activity, including hum an activity: the laws “control, in the last resort, the
rise and fall o f political systems, the freedom or bondage o f Nations, the m ovements o f
com m erce and industry, the origins o f wealth and poverty, and the general physical welfare
o f the race” (Rifkin, 1980, p. 8). See also W iener (1961) and Beniger (1986) in this regard.6
6 CHAPTER 1
division potentially have a high NQ, because they will allow her to solve
problems with m uch less effort and frustration. To a m an who wants to
bake a birthday cake, the recipe for a chocolate torte m ight have a high
NQ. For someone who has suffered a series of personal tragedies and is
at the end of his rope the “message” of the Gospels could have the
highest NQ, because it allows him to re-order experience around new
goals, thereby making m ental energy available again.
T he model implies that the quality o f inform ation is best evaluated in
term s of individual goals. Because people have different and multiple
goals and therefore different and multiple needs, the value o f a message
is necessarily relative.8
At the same time, the im portance of some goals is shared widely
enough to make messages relevant to them have a nearly universal and
predictable NQ. This is true both for the kinds o f extremely basic inter
nal inform ation our bodies generate (we all need to eat and sleep with
some regularity in ord er to prevent disorder in experience) as well as for
inform ation that comes from outside. For example, the piece of infor
mation: “You have ju st won $1 million in a sweepstakes, tax free,” if
coming from a credible source, will make most people happy, because it
offers a solution to many goals that previously could not be reached—
buying a house, paying long overdi^e bills, or sending one’s children to a
better school. On the other hand, the message: “You have a term inal
disease,” if coming from a medical authority and if true, will obviously
alter most any person’s plans, and has a low NQ or a high entropy
quotient.
A lthough few messages have either as high or as low a potential for
negentropy as the two examples above, it can be useful to consider all
acts of communication as lying on a continuum between these two ex
tremes, depending on whether they produce harm ony or conflict in
consciousness.9 And of course, there are other much m ore common
forms of inform ation that can either disrupt or help provide ord er to
experience, forms o f inform ation that we normally take for granted and
that we even help produce unconsciously as we make our way through
life. T h e inventions o f the “days of the week” and “the hours o f the day,”
as ju st two examples, have enorm ous influence on structuring when we
sleep, eat, work, play, or watch television, and thus help provide order
and regularity to our existence.
People are also constantly taking in inform ation about their environ
m ent and, if this inform ation is suddenly quite different from what one
normally expects, one experiences disorder in consciousness. In other
words, without regular reassurance that the world is as we think it is, it
would become impossible to pursue our goals. T he penchant for o rder
also helps explain why people talk so m uch about their environm ents,
A WAY TO THINK A BO U T INFORM ATION RECEPTION 7
about themselves, and the people around them (Berger & Luckmann,
1967). People talk about these things, in part, to help maintain assurance
in their world as they know it— they engage in “reality-maintenance”
work. Indeed, the constructivist approach in communication theory (De
lia, O ’Keefe, & O ’Keefe, 1982) and much psychological research provide
num erous examples of how the hum an mind goes about seeking and
providing order for itself.
So, although people are attracted by novelty and complexity, they also
very m uch seek familiarity and order. And television is capable of
providing inform ation anywhere along the continuum that we have just
described. Although it is certainly rare, there are people who first
learned directly from television that they had won $1 million or that a
loved one had died. And as with the rest of everyday life, most television
inform ation obviously falls somewhere between these two extremes in
terms o f its potential to create order or disorder in experience. Indeed,
am ong its ordering functions may be the very kind of everyday reality-
maintenance work that we have just described. One of our tasks in the
chapters that follow is to consider where on the continuum most televi
sion viewing falls and why it falls where it does.
But to know the value of a bit of inform ation or its ability to create
o rder in experience, is not enough to know whether it makes a person
happy here and now. It is also im portant to know whether the message
has the potential of being used in a m ore complex fashion in helping the
person become better able to cope with new situations that might arise in
the future.
If consciousness processed only simple, redundant inform ation it
would be unequipped to handle difficult tasks. Learning means to pro
cess inform ation that stretches one’s present capacity to assimilate it.
Thus, complexity defines another particularly relevant dimension of com
munication. Generally, a complex message is one that requires mental
energy to encode and to decode. T herefore, each message has a certain
complexity quotient, or CQ, depending on how m uch effort it will take to
process it.10
Complexity without order typically leads to confusion and anxiety.11
But when o rder is also present, complex messages are m ore likely to
result in positive experiences that also lead to learning and growth. In
fact, in chapter 7 we illustrate this relationship (see p. 143) between
order and complexity and show why experience high in complexity and
high in order often leads to personal growth.
But given the fact that both order and complexity depend on mental
energy, or attention, which is a scarce resource, communication that will
perm it enjoyable, growth-prom oting experiences is likely to occur less
frequently than other forms of communication. Instead, much comm u
8 CHAPTER 1
nication may be used simply to preserve the status quo and will be rather
red u n d an t and boring, or low on complexity.12 Next in frequency m ight
be the state of affairs in which CQ and NQ are both average.
A nother implication of the model is that to tu rn a confusing message
into one that will produce learning, attention m ust be invested into it
until the inform ation is integrated into an existing way of thinking (cog
nitive structure) or until a new way of thinking develops that can accom
m odate the message.13 In fact, many learning experiences start in anx
iety and confusion and have value or can be enjoyed only after enough
attention has been invested in the inform ation to decode the message.
Indeed, because people tend to avoid inform ation that increases entropy
they will sometimes change information, deny it, or virtually not process
it if it contradicts what they already believe. Instead, they may prefer to
seek out inform ation that confirms what they already know (Carter,
Pyska, & G uerraro, 1969; Festinger, 1957; Freedm an & Sears, 1965).14
Similarly, to transform a boring condition into an enjoyable one, the
person m ust also invest attention to make the inform ation m ore com
plex. Portions o f a long car trip can be m ade enjoyable if the passengers
attend closely to the scenery, or use surplus attention to make plans, play
games, listen to music, or talk to each other.
Both these changes, from confusion to enjoyment or from boredom
to enjoym ent require the allocation of scarce mental energy to the infor
mation at hand. T he same extra investment is needed to tu rn a pleasur
able experience into an enjoyable one.
Pleasure, for o ur purposes, is different from enjoyment. Pleasure gen
erally comes from processing “messages” that our genetic inheritance
has m ade congruent with the biological goals of the body, such as the
sensations we get from eating when hungry, from sex, from the relish we
take in a healthy body. These messages may tem porarily produce o rder
in consciousness, but not psychological growth. Enjoyment requires a dif
ferent form o f active involvement to produce a positive inner state.
But although we have begun to develop a model that will help explain
the reception o f inform ation, whether it be from scenery, from a book,
or from television, it is clear that the attem pt to find an unequivocal,
absolutely objective standard must eventually be doom ed to failure. We
have suggested that televised inform ation, like any other inform ation,
will be valuable to the extent that people can use it in the service o f their
goals. W hether an instance o f television viewing creates order or disor
der in consciousness depends on what the person wants and needs and
what other options he or she has. As the patterns of goals vary, so does
the potential value of television. Ideally, then, the value of the viewing
experience would be assessed in terms of the total psychic economy of
each viewer.
A WAY TO THINK ABO UT INFORM ATION RECEPTION 9
ENDNOTES
!O f course there are other ways o f thinking about attention. For exam ple, although
Kahneman (1973) would agree that attention is a capacity for arousal and the perform ance
o f mental work, he does not believe that it is a filtering mechanism.
2G eorge Miller (1967) claimed that people have difficulty discriminating am ong senso
ry alternatives that exceed 7 in number.
3Our use o f psychic energy is similar to Freud’s (1900/1965) early use o f the term to
describe mobile attention. In later writings, Freud equated psychic energy with libido or life
force.
4T h e importance o f order and complexity as basic organizing principles has been
recognized for som e time. As early as 1920, Fry (cited in Berlyne, 1971) noted the impor
tance o f both order and “variety” in organizing and stimulating the senses. George
Birkhoff (1933) also introduced complexity and order into his formula o f “aesthetic m ea
sure,” although like many, he considered complexity and order to be features o f the object
o f perception rather than psychological phenom ena linked to stimuli. Bennett and Land-
auer (1985) asked whether order and complexity are the same thing and came to the
conclusion that they are not. T hese concepts are also discussed by Attneave (1954) and
Berlyne (1958, 1960, 1971). Additional contributions on com plexity have been made by
Rosenbleuth, Wiener, and Bigelow (1943), Walker (1973), and by H eyduk (1975) who
contends that the degree o f preference for an event is inversely related to the distance
between the event’s psychological complexity and the individual’s optimal or preferred
psychological complexity level.
R udolf Arnheim (1971) has also written on complexity and offered a critique o f the
inform ation-theory approach to the concept o f order. See Finn and Roberts (1984) for a
review o f the entropy concept in inform ation and communication research, and Ritchie
(1986) for an evaluation o f Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) m odel. See Arnheim (1971) and
Schwartz (1969) for broad reviews o f the entropy concept in hum an behavior.
M easuring order in television materials has received less attention than developing
com plexity indices (Rice, Huston, Sc Wright, 1982; Watt & Krull, 1974; Watt & Welch,
1983) that have been applied in studies by Rimmer (1986), Thorson, Reeves, and Schleu-
der (1985), Wartella and Ettema (1974), am ong others. T horson et al. provided a useful
review o f the television complexity literature.
5For Maslow (1954), needs that are low in his seven-tier hierarchy need to be at least
partially met before those above them can becom e important sources o f motivation or
themselves be met. T he hierarchy starts with physiological needs (hunger, sleep, and
thirst), then com e safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs (to achieve, be
com petent, gain approval and recognition), cognitive needs (to acquire knowledge and
understanding), aesthetic needs, and finally self-actualization needs (finding self-fulfill-
m ent and realizing on e’s potential).
10 CHAPTER 1
6A lthough Freud apparently never referred directly to the Second Law, his notions
about the “constancy principle” and tension reduction have led many to assume that his
thinking was influenced by N ewton and the prevailing mechanical principles o f the day.
David Riesman (1954) claimed that Freud “understood man’s physical and psychic behav
ior in the light o f the physics o f entropy and the econom ics o f scarcity” (p. 60). Carl Jun g
also conceived o f the psyche as having the potential to combat entropy.
7A similar negentropy concept applied to inform ation processing has been developed
by Klapp (1986) who holds that entropy is the negative o f inform ation. Actually, Shannon
showed how a system high in entropy potentially conveys more inform ation than one low in
entropy. In this view, a bit o f data com ing from a highly diverse and disorganized system
may convey m ore inform ation than a bit o f data com ing from a hom ogeneous and orga
nized system. (See Wright, 1988, pp. 8 7 -8 9 , for a simple explanation o f this.)
D epending on o n e’s point o f view, then, information can be equated with entropy or
negentropy. We have chosen to use the more accepted understanding that order helps
convey inform ation. It should also be noted that in a closed system, disorder m ight neces
sarily be created at the same time that there is an im provem ent in order elsewhere. As we
are thinking about it, the psyche is an open system.
8Many research findings support this view. See Zillmann and Bryant (1985) for a review
o f som e o f the relevant literature. In a study by Pearson (1971), for readers with low needs
for arousal, stories on unimportant topics and those supporting the views o f the respon
dents resulted in significantly m ore positive m ood change and greater overall preference
for continued exposure than those on important topics and those containing discrepant
information. For those individuals with high needs for arousal, m ore important topics
generated more positive m ood change and greater preferences for continued exposure.
But even for high need subjects, the need for arousal was exceeded when subjects were
exposed to discrepant inform ation, resulting in preferences for discontinuing exposure.
9T h e first two o f Zillmann and Bryant’s (1985) six propositions for a “theory o f affect-
depend en t stimulus arrangem ent” are relevant here:
10We recognize that this is a simple way to conceptualize complexity. However, our
thinking is similar to som e o f the conceptualizations o f “cognitive complexity,” a concept
that dates in nam e at least to Bieri (1955) and Crockett (1965). See Streufert and Streufert
(1978) for a com prehensive review.
According to Walker (1973), people generally prefer m oderate com plexity to extrem e
com plexity or simplicity. Note, however, that as with order, complexity need not be “in” the
message itself. In this regard, Reeves and Thorson (1986) have shown that som e televised
messages that were rated as “com plex” in pictorial inform ation or verbal content were
easier to process than less com plex material. In explanation, they make a distinction be
tween global and local complexity. For them, local complexity involves the intake o f m es
sages. H ere, more com plex messages did require more effort by viewers. Global com plex
ity, on the other hand, is related to m eaning and it is here, for them, where greater
com plexity may be m ore easily processed.
11Klapp (1986) drew a similar distinction between “good” and “bad complexity,” where
A WAY TO THINK ABO UT INFORM ATION RECEPTION 11