The Frankfurt School Effects Theory

The Frankfurt School was a group of german social theorists, that developed concerns about the power of the modern mass media or propaganda, in the early to mid 1920's. They fled Germany during the Second World War, and took refuge in America. There they refined their model in an era of expanding media output in post-war America. They instantly had a negative opinion on the media, given the background they had come from, they believed it to be brainwashing.

They created the Effects theory, which was the original model for the audiences, stressed the fact that media was a hypodermic needle, that it was being pumped into your blood. This was the ideology of the Nazi propaganda, most totalitarian states and dictatorships, believe that a strict regulation of media, will help in controlling entire populations. An example of this would be the Tiananmen Square protest, where a man stood in front of a line of tanks as a anti-war protest, this can be found if we search on Google, but if we search in the Chinese equivalent, there are only pictures that portray Tiananmen in a positive light.

There have been concerns about members of society being corrupted by sexual explicit, violent, or otherwise offensive material. For example the video game Grand Theft Auto, after certain people have played it, they feel compelled to commit crimes.

Bandura was a phycological experiment where children were put into the same room as adults and a Bobo doll for ten minutes. Studies showed that when the adults were aggressive towards the doll, children mimicked them. But when the children weren't aggressive. The main issue with this experiment is that it assumes we are all the same, but logically we aren't, so we would have different responses.