Architects of Communication Scholarship – Larry Gross on How Media Cultivates the World

1:47AM Apr 28, 2022

Speakers:

Ellen Wartella

Jeff Pooley

Larry Gross

Keywords:

media

communication

people

question

annenberg school

messages

world

larry

understanding

social psychology

penn

gay

began

television

society

interest

form

ica

research

katz

ICA presents.

Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Larry P. Gross. Larry Gross is Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. He's past president of the ICA, winner of our Aubrey Fisher Mentorship Award, and an elected fellow of the ICA. From 1971 to 1991, he co-directed with George Gerbner the Cultural Indicators Project at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. Larry is editor and author of nine books and founder and editor of the International Journal of Communication and the Annenberg Press Book Series. Today, Larry Gross is in conversation with Jeff Pooley, Professor of Media and Communication at Muhlenberg College and Director of mediastudies.press, an open access scholarly publisher. Here is Jeff Pooley.

I'm Jeff Pooley, and I first met Larry Gross while I was a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School at Penn, introduced by the late Elihu Katz, Larry's office neighbor. In the year since, my interest in history of the field has led to work with the Annenberg School's archival initiative, including an oral history project whose most recent subject is Larry himself, which is just to say that we've been in lots of conversation recently. Today, I'll be asking Larry about his journey from studying psychology in undergrad to becoming a communication scholar, his research on media messaging and how modes of communication affect the ways we understand the world, and his contributions to LGBTQ studies and activism. So hello again, Larry, it's great to chat with you about your work.

Nice to talk with you, Jeff.

So let's just start off with how you ended up at Brandeis University for your undergraduate, and maybe you could say a word about your undergraduate thesis.

Well, I ended up at Brandeis University in 1960, I suspect as many young people choosing colleges, not knowing too much about what I was doing. Brandeis had been built quickly. It had taken advantage of a lot of émigré scholars and a lot of scholars who were either too Jewish or too left or both for the mainstream Academy, and it was an exciting place to be. And my interests developed in particular in psychology, which was my major, and in the arts and society. And when I came to do an undergraduate honors thesis, I embarked on what turned into a fairly ambitious project to interview six psychologists about their own work. I could do oral histories, if you like, of their creative process and understand their work in a way that I might not, say, if I were interviewing physicists or even musicians. Probably the most famous is my mentor and advisor Abe Maslow. Several of the subjects said, "Well, I'm doing my own memoirs, and I don't want to just be published." But now, it's, you know, long in the past. If they had any memoirs to write, they did it. So I am in fact going to publish it, because I think actually, having reread it, there is material there that will be of interest. And from there, I went to Columbia University, where I was in the department of social psychology.

So I think many of our listeners would be surprised to learn that you had a social psychology doctorate and that your dissertation involved rats and eating. And so I suppose I would wonder, like, what was it that led you from wrapping up that doctoral program at Columbia, not having really done anything called communication?

My ending up at the Annenberg School at Penn was an example of total serendipity. Somebody who had been spending time at Columbia from Penn connected me with the Annenberg School. I arrived at the same time as the first cohort of the PhD program. The friend who connected us thought that my interests in art would kind of resonate with a school of communication that at that point was very broad and somewhat unfocused. There was a film program, a photography program, a television program, a writing. The overlap between social psychology and communication research was strengthening at that point. The core theory and methods that were being applied was the question of, how can the mass media move people to do good things? And how can we prevent the mass media from making people do bad things?

So one of the ironies of your time at Penn was that you didn't really work in that tradition of the social psychology of persuasion. I mean, instead, you had collaborations, one with Sol Worth, on visual anthropology and art and aesthetics.

My collaborations with Sol largely focused on questions of how viewers interpret visual messages. And this grew in large part from Sol's perspective. He was a painter turned filmmaker turned anthropologist who was very interested in the question of how people can use film to tell stories, particularly their stories. This led to the, sort of a constant question about how people understand the difference between something that is just being photographed and something that is intended to communicate something. The kinds of questions that we, Sol and I, were examining with our students are today questions that wouldn't even be asked, because everybody today is so much more aware of the constructed nature of visual media. One of the consequences of the internet and social media is that everybody is behind the camera, as well as in front of the camera. And this led, for example, myself, and Jay Ruby, an anthropologist who unfortunately, just died, and John Katz, a filmmaker, to put together a book we called Image Ethics. And later, we put together a second book called Image Ethics in the Digital Age. And we were asking questions about, you know, what are the moral implications of these technologies that allow people, with great ease, to construct powerful visual images of the sort that are easily misunderstood or that can intrude into the privacy of individuals? You know, what are the obligations of those of us who have at our disposal technology of a power that would have been unimaginable up until the middle of the 19th century, or really, the 20th century?

I'm going to prompt you then to talk about this other collaboration. It was 1968. And there was already some of this, what became the Cultural Indicators Project underway, and you were kind of brought in, and one way I would describe your early role was as a methodologist, in a way, to introduce new ways of asking what were really thorny questions given the thesis of there being a central storyteller in the form of television.

One of my earliest intellectual engagements when I arrived at Annenberg was with George Gerbner, and his approach to thinking about the role of television in American culture in the late 60s through the 70s and the 80s, a period of domination by a small number of broadcasters who addressed audiences of a size that is really unprecedented today. American academics, American scholars, American thinkers, American public thinking about the media in the middle of the 20th century were enormously concerned with the question of how populations could be influenced through the media, through what would be called propaganda. If the bad guys were doing it. Because they had experienced in the middle of the 20th century the horrific barbarism that originated from the most civilized part of Europe. I mean, Germany was the center of European science and culture and civilization. And a lot of the credit or blame was given to the ability of Hitler and his allies to reach everybody, and to sort of bring them into a common worldview and a perspective through media. There was also a sense of the media being a way for good leaders to reach and mobilize people, and the impact of Franklin Roosevelt speaking to Americans through the radio in what were called Fireside Chats. And this question of the danger of the media to influence behavior repeatedly focused on the question of popular media that were making people, particularly young, people do bad things. And by the 50s and 60s, these bad things had a lot to do with whether media violence was stimulating violence in society. The 60s were a tumultuous era in American society. We have a series of high profile, significant assassinations. The media were a convenient target. You know, you could say the media were doing it with all this violence in movies and now in television that comes into the house and is seen by children. To use a phrase that George Gerbner liked to use, television tells most of the stories to most of the people most of the time. Television had become the storyteller that was giving people a sense of how the world worked. One thing I brought to this discussion was an interest in realism as the modality of visual storytelling. And the point here really is that when a photographic medium like film is telling a story that is realistic, the world you see is presumed to be the way the world works. These media inform the public how the world really works in a way that complements what they see on the news. The news may give you a 30 second or a 90 second account of some crime story or some political story, but when you see that, you have available a whole array of visual images of how it works. Most people who watch television have never been in an operating room awake during an operation or in a corporate boardroom or in jail. But we all have very vivid images of how that works. And we're actually pretty off base. My methodological contribution here was in thinking about ways to assess the difference that would make in the way people understood the world if they were very heavily exposed to this, you know, mediated world. Almost all of the research models used in media effects research in that period came out of the persuasion research that had begun in the 40s and 50s, in which, essentially, it was, here's a message, where are you now? You know, the difference between your post-message attitude, views, behavior and where you were to begin with. Our view was fundamentally different. Young people, they have seen 1000s and 1000s of examples of media violence before you ever see them. Why would you assume that one more exposure is going to make a difference? Our question was much more, how does this influence the assumptions they make, what their values are. In instances of media violence, women and people of color may get to hurt the good guys, but the good guys kill them. So we were very interested in the messages about who can do what to whom. And in that sense, we were talking about the way in which the media teach everybody about the structure of society, what you can and can't aspire to, what you can and can't get away with. One of the core messages of mass media that includes violence is the message that it's a dangerous world, and there are people out there protecting us, sometimes been called the hired hands of the ruling class – detectives, police cowboys – and very often they have to bend the rules or break them in order to get the bad guys, because there are these legal technicalities that get in the way. And one of the continuing messages is, you get to see why it's necessary for them to go around the rules to achieve real justice. It conveys this message that we need protection even if it has to tread on those namby pamby effeminate rules that prevent real justice from going on. This is very much the thinking that leads to Trump world.

On the note of the present, does cultivation analysis, which is another phrase often used to describe this Cultural Indicators Project, have relevance today, in a media fragmented world.

The fragmentation of the media is undeniable. There are hundreds of channels. There is user-generated content. But the common denominator across the earlier broadcast era and today remains consumption. Programs are there because somebody is willing to spend money to get your attention in the hope of influencing some purchasing behavior or voting behavior, some action on your part. Years ago, people talked about a grammar of narratives and that the simplest story is status quo, problem solution. Well, that's a commercial. Here's a problem. Here's the solution. Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, Google, what made them into economic giants was advertising. The big turning point was when Google figured out how to sell microads and how to monetize your attention even more than the television networks had ever been able to do, because they knew who you were. User-generated content of influencers who come from nowhere and suddenly are significant cultural figures, that's only because some sponsors think they have the potential to attract viewers and begin to pay them and begin to manipulate their profiles to make them more and more successful.

Yes, I agree. And to pivot from the kind of capitalism meets art, I suppose I want to ask you about a thread in your intellectual trajectory: how you became a sociologist of art.

Well, my interest in art became a sort of interest in the way in which knowledge is communicated in a variety of modalities. We have inherited, in the modern West, a sense that information or knowledge is really communicated, you know, verbally, that if you can't explain it in words, then you don't really understand it. And the fact is, it doesn't really work that way. And when I suddenly found myself in a school of communication, it seemed like the natural environment to try and think through these ideas about different symbolic modes. Education really needs to respect the independence of these various modes rather than reduce everything to reading and writing and fairly limited mathematics or arithmetic.

Well, I want to touch on another sphere of your research activity, Larry, that you, even from the mid 1970s, you were involved in LGBT activism in Philadelphia at the local level, and by the mid 1980s or so, you were writing about issues like visibility and the closet and went on to do landmark work on LGBT in media and communication. So how did that academic interest evolve? And, you know, how is it connected to your personal life in activism.

By the early 70s, things were changing. The radical impulses and movements of the 60s, – in particular the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the women's movement – had developed an approach of vocabulary, if you like, of social action, which was dominated by young people, it was in the streets and in your face. And the gay movement that exploded famously after Stonewall – but certainly didn't start with Stonewall, Stonewall was sort of the symbolic explosion that set it off – was very much one of we're tired of being hidden, and we want our space in the world. This became possible, I believe, because in the post-Second World War era, actual communities had formed. The gay community was a meaningless phrase until the 50s into the 60s, when actual self-sufficient urban communities began to form as, you know, what were then called gay ghettos, gay neighborhoods in big cities. And as they grew, they began to accrue economic and political power in cities. And this began to generate a sense of identity. And this motivated a politics of demanding respect, employment, housing, public accommodations. And in the 70s, this was happening in Philadelphia. At Penn, I was tenured and began to make demands of the university successfully. They agreed to put in non-discrimination policies. So it was not too surprising in some ways for me that I was able also to build on my academic work or make them connect in several ways. I could use my credentials as a professor at the Annenberg School at Penn to influence local media, to say, stop treating us badly. Because we understood, and I certainly understood, that the media shaped, in particular, the way the public understood groups that they didn't actually have direct contact with. This was a period in which almost all gay people were in the closet. And people form their images of gay people largely based on media images. So this was a natural congruence of both my ability to leverage this research, or these credentials as an activist, but also to begin to ask questions about the impact of media on images of gay people in society. Technically, this became possible for me in the mid 80s, when the General Social Survey, which is a very powerfully useful body of yearly studies of attitudes and beliefs, began finally, after a lot of effort on the part of George and myself, to include a question about television viewing. I could begin to look at television viewing as an independent variable and attitudes, including towards gay people, as a dependent variable. So charting these messages was completely consistent with the general model of cultivation, which is to say, how is the world portrayed to people and, you know, what are they going to see?

I want to wrap up with a last question. This podcast series is titled Architects of Communication Scholarship. What would you say you have built in your career?

I think probably my most significant or influential contributions would have been one, being part of the group working with George Gerbner, with Michael Morgan, with Nancy Signorielli, Jim Shanahan, to understand this notion of commercial, industrialized mass media as a culture-forming force that envelops members of society in a set of ways of understanding the world, understanding message systems, understanding cultural systems, and understanding the degree to which they all reflect an underlying economic imperative. The term "cultivation" is a reasonably good way to capture that sense of media or of messages as cultivating worldview. I think I'm probably also responsible for helping to build an understanding of the experiences of LGBTQ people as members of society and the way in which the media in particular have shaped their understandings of themselves, others' understanding of them, and their chances in the world. I have lived through a period of astonishing change in this regard. When I started out as an academic, before Stonewall, a gay person was an individual criminal, an individual sinner, or an individual mental patient. That has changed dramatically, because society is having to come to terms with variance in a way that was never comfortable in the more authoritarian and theocratic worldviews in which things are supposed to go according to a fairly strict set of expectations. That's all broken open.

Well, thank you, Larry, for our conversation today, which was a pleasure and an honor.

Always good to talk to you Jeff.

This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship podcast series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network and is sponsored by the School of Communication at Hong Kong Baptist University. Our producer is Susanna Kemp. Our executive producer is Aldo Diaz Caballero. Our production consultant is Nick Song. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening.