"The Hypodermic Needle Theory-Critique"

The hypodermic needle theory of mass communication is the notion that media messages are somehow shot into us. Sometimes it's called the bullet theory, sometimes the hypodermic theory, and they somehow affect us in some way that we have no control over. If I shoot some particular medicine in your arm, it's going to affect you in some way. There may be interactions, but a certain number...most people are going to be affected in pretty consistent ways, depending on what chemicals you put in them. And from the earliest days of mass communication, there have been concerns that the media operate like a hypodermic needle. The message is injected into us, it's shot into us, and we have no control. It is completely...we are completely at its mercy. It takes us over, it tells us what to do, it controls us. And people often point to the hypodermic needle theory as a way to dismiss research on media and say, "Well, of course, that's silly. It doesn't affect people that way. If media violence affected people that way, then we wouldn't need research because we'd all be dead because everybody would be so affected by seeing all this mayhem and murder every single night. You would...people would respond by going and shooting their next door neighbor." We don't do that. So the hypodermic needle theory, in some ways, was created as a kind of straw issue by people who try to dismiss the entire field of media affects research. We're often presented with that when we learn about mass communication research, but if you actually go back decades and decades in research, you will never find any actual researchers that believed it. No researcher ever said, "I am working on the hypodermic theory model." In fact, it's a way to critique research. It's a way to oversimplify the views of the public. The way media messages affect us are much more complex and much more subtle than that."