Chapter 2
A Narrative Perspective

The field of communication research is an odd one, divided as it is among many different subdisciplines. Without a doubt, media effects has been one of the more important of these divisions, and some scholars have even argued that the communication field itself, as it was formed in the American university context, is more or less the scientific study of persuasion through media. On its way to dominance of the discipline, media effects acquired for itself the various hallmarks of rigor necessary to a modern social scientific endeavor, including advanced quantitative methodology and theory-testing in the traditions informed by Bacon and Popper. With this came a tendency to separate from the subdisciplines that did not adhere to these practices. There are many such subdisciplines in the communication field from which media effects could distinguish itself, but one of the more interesting separations was from rhetoric.

Media effects scholars often attempt to distance themselves from the study of rhetoric. The disciplines are sometimes taught in separate departments, and the means and methods used by the two types of researchers differ substantially. Nevertheless, both share assumptions about what they are doing. In Jesse Delia's history of communication research, the discipline of communication itself (including both media effects and rhetoric) is identified as being about persuasion, or "the processes by which communication messages influence audience members" (Delia, 1987, p. 21). There have been times in the field's history when it has been debated whether all communication is ultimately persuasion of some sort. Though we have moved past those debates, the power of the metaphors and images associated with persuasion as a human activity have remained very influential in our fields of inquiry. Both media effects and rhetoric have been mostly concerned with persuasion in self-identified ways, with methodological outlook being the main thing that separates the two.

It behooves us to look backward at the origins of persuasion scholarship, particularly with an eye toward determining whether the long-range prospects for persuasion ideas in media effects research are beginning to look dimmer. In looking back for intellectual roots, media effects scholars must in fact turn to rhetoric, that discipline from which they often seek to separate themselves.

What Aristotle intended for the field of persuasion is useful for our purposes:

Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character of the speaker; the second in putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof or apparent proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. (Aristotle, 1984, p. 2155)

In separating rhetoric from "dialectic," Aristotle brought formal features of communication such as pathos (emotion) and ethos (character of the speaker) to the fore. While still retaining a focus on content (logos), rhetoric, as it developed as a field of study, tended to focus widely across all content areas, with the idea that the rhetorician can provide expertise on almost any subject matter.

These ideas survived over the centuries. Persuasion researchers and media effects scholars, even if they were unaware of the rhetorical perspective, were unable to avoid treading over the same ground. For instance, influential "transmission" models such as the Yale SMCR (Sender, Message, Channel, and Receiver) model (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953) answered questions quite similar to those originally posed by Aristotle. The S ("source") in mass media effects research can be equated with ethos in the Rhetoric. The whole stream of research on "source credibility" stems directly from classical ethos concerns. Logos (rationality) and pathos (emotion) are M (message characteristics). Lasswell's questions about media effects ("who says what to whom, etc.") are of the same ilk. The ultimate concern with persuasion in media effects is not that far from what Aristotle was also concerned with, which was to develop an art of persuasion. Modern scholars obviously sought to make the research more precise and scientific, and while most social scientific media scholars don't frequently cite rhetorical work, the parallels are worth noting. In essence, Aristotle got to some of the obvious and key questions about persuasion first, and we have been working them over ever since.

One of the tensions that faces rhetoric also faces media effects work. As noted as early on as Plato's Gorgias, those who seek to proclaim expertise in rhetoric were often implicitly or explicitly suggesting that their expertise crossed topic areas. That is, one could teach rhetorical skill to anyone regardless of subject matter expertise; a skilled rhetorician could be more persuasive about medicine than a doctor, more effective about law than a lawyer, and so forth.1 Plato (1987), in the Gorgias, attempted to demolish this view; he thought that truthful argument could defeat effective persuasive arts. Those who supported the idea of rhetoric as its own competency tended to argue that there is something in the form of communication, in addition to or even more than its substance, that can make communication effective.

The separation of communication substance from its form is an analytical strategy that persisted into the modern investigations of communication, especially in media effects work. It results in the strange fact that media content is often of lesser importance in the research than the media's formal aspects. Others have noted it: "The contribution of media content to guide selective exposure or to predict media effects has received relatively little attention on both the theoretical and empirical levels" (Valkenburg, Peter, & Walther, 2016, p. 323). And, "likewise, a comprehensive edited volume on media effects contained no integrating theory on how media content may enhance or constrain media effects" (Valkenburg, Peter, & Walther, 2016, p. 323). Because communication study crosses so many (or all) topical domains, the content is often left to those in academic disciplines studying those areas, such that political scientists would have the expertise on political media content; medical media content could be studied in medical journals and so forth.

This is not just a feature of media effects theory, but of the communication field in general, which sometimes struggles to identify what it's about. One strategy for resolving the tension has been to claim that communication does more than simply "present" or "transmit" a message, but rather that communication as a process plays an active role in constructing the meaning of that message. If the ultimate meaning of a message is dependent not just on its content but also on how it is constructed, its context, and on the interactions of those involved in the communication, there can be a healthy role for communication as a field of study.2

But even if we agree with this perspective, there is still a strong urge within our field to leave the content of the message itself to other experts. In media effects, our subliminal reliance on concepts derived from Aristotle means a self-limitation toward the informational kinds of studies that we described above. We ask primarily about the impact of placing bits of information in various formats and settings, with the actual information itself of less importance. We might ask: what would happen if we could discard some of these self-imposed limitations, particularly by re-admitting or strengthening the role of media content within our research domain?

The narrative perspective

We needn't go far to find an alternative. Aristotle himself realized that communication was more than just persuasion; he formulated an approach to an entirely different kind of communication in the Poetics. Poetics is concerned with the making (the Greek term poesis means "making") of valid narratives in forms such as drama. Since so many of the instances of media that we currently investigate in media effects are in dramatic form, it is surprising that we have not turned much to these concepts for this type of inquiry. We have tended to leave it to literary theorists or critics. But as we will see, media effects research, along with other forms of social science, has been more recently consistently turning toward narrative. What had been an interesting bywater of communication research is more and more turning out to form the main stream of it.

A narrative is simply a telling of events, in some specific order, usually by a narrator. The narrator can be someone involved in the story, or can be an all-seeing and all-knowing observer who carries us into all aspects of the narrative world. While we can speak of narratives as being "effective" or not, and as having certain impacts on the listener, the effect is not necessarily one that can be comprehended from a persuasion perspective. The author of the narrative may or may not intend certain persuasive effects, and likely has other dramatic goals in mind. Nevertheless, the narrative can often have a point (or a lesson or "moral"). There are thus a variety of ways that we can start to get into media effects from a narrative perspective.

Another feature of narrative is...