Correlation Between American Culture and Communication

Introduction

It is common thought that mass media drives and fuels American Society. Americans are constantly putting in time, effort and money into the thing that shapes and defines them; media. Tom Cooper (2008) stated that some people are concerned with the lack of honesty, privacy and safety however they are still enslaved by mass media practices. This results in having a culture that is highly dependent on constant absorption of information. This especially affects young children because they are unable to distinguish between fact and fiction thus simulating confusion (CNN 1998).

By examining mass media practices and their effects, you are able to visualize the theories that are behind why and how it controls the American culture and how it communicates.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Cognitive Dissonance is a theory that was first proposed by Leon Festinger in 1957. His theory suggest that humans have an inner drive that harmonizes behaviors and attitudes to avoid disharmony (Festinger 1957). When applied to communication, conflicting thoughts may arise in certain situations or actions that contradict a person’s beliefs and the mental discomfort (Griffin, 2009).

In these situations, it is important that the dissonances is controlled because beliefs and opinions could be compromised. To avoid this, one may start to omit any information that does not pertain to what they believe in (Griffin 2009). This is also done on a larger scale, such as censorship. Corporations start to control the media and censor the viewpoints that are exposed to the public(VC 2010). Many of these companies are recognizable, such as Time Warner, The Walt Disney, and Sony.

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These companies often send out statistics on what is educational, popular and most viewed. They aren’t necessarily in complete control of what media is popular however they are able to push a certain types of content to influence the onlookers.

Another example of suppressed dissonance is through consumerism or “buyers remorse”. The American society thrives on capitalism and its need to buy things whether they can afford it or not. This stems from the idea or ownership and doing what they please with the money they earn. The media plays a huge part in this by promoting lavish products to push the idea of obtaining wealth. The industry of advertisement constantly works on persuading society to participate in the consumerism by using every avenue of media to promote and advertise their products; making us mass consumers. Bandel L. Works did research in 1964 about the sudden popularity of advertisements in the media. He stated that advertising plays a huge role in influencing, reinforcing, and activating popular beliefs (Works 1964). This encourages the consumers to process the reassurance for decision making and basing it on how important the decision was. Knowing this, the key to reducing dissonance is the power of justification. If you can justify your decision you can avoid dissonance.

Groupthink Theory

In 1972, Irving Janis researched and coined the term Groupthink. Groupthink is the idea of maintaining group cohesiveness is more important than considering the facts. In Naom Chromsky’s, Media Control, she was able to show how Americans justified their involvement in the Vietnam War through their government’s achievements in propaganda (Chromsky 2002). She showed that by staying strong in American’s mentality of doing what was right, and stating that protecting the country was more important than what it actually was, was a great example of using minimal justification to reduce dissonance throughout the entire country. With minimal justification, the goal is to stimulate an attitude change in others to elicit behaviors against their normal beliefs (Griffin, 2009)