Most people have likely formed an opinion about media effects: the degree or type of effects certain types of media use has on us. They likely talk about this in terms of media technologies (TV, radio, internet) or types of media texts (violent video games, Fox News). I think that we're using an outdated way of talking and thinking about the question of media effects.
We know that we spend more time using media - at home, at work, on the move - than ever before. And we know that there is a greater quantity of media options (in terms of content options and affordances of the technologies or applications) than ever before. I think that these two facts, by themselves, should prompt everyone (even skeptics) to reconsider the degree and type of media effects, and the ways in which we go about assessing these effects.
First, things have changed on the level of media technology. The question of media effects arose at a time at which the types of media (identifiable by their affordances) were limited. Producing and distributing a widely used communication technology that was functionally different than another communication technology took a lot of capital. Once the vast broadband and mobile online networks were established, it became significantly easier to create and distribute applications that, functionally, differ from other communication technologies. Much the same way the establishment of the electrical network permitted growth in the variety of machines in our lives and the establishment of the highway and railway systems permitted the growth of transportation, this network growth has increased diversity. Before the establishment of the electrical grid, you could make plenty of generalizations about machines and their effects on humanity because the number of widely used machines was quite limited. Afterward, those generalizations didn't make as much sense given the variety of machines that people used. Was the effect of a television the same as a toaster? Using pre-electrical network logic, the answer was yes.
Lumping all the uses of the internet or all the uses of Facebook together creates a similar problem. We still want to use the frames that were established by scholars and researchers during the 20th century for understanding media now. We talk about (and study) the effects of Facebook, of the internet, of texting, in the same way we talked about the effects of television 30 years ago: as if these things were discrete entities. But this approach doesn't make sense in a world in which the media forms to which we give names quickly change in fundamental, functional ways. The internet of 2011 is likely no more similar to the internet of 2000, in terms of its uses and effects on users, as radio (or a toaster, for that matter) is to the internet of either era. Yes, some useful things can be said about the effects of all online experiences just as some useful things can be said about the effects of the use of all machines (studies of modernity), but most of these general ways of thinking are just reflections of a time when "machine" or "online experiences" were easier to generalize about, before the network made new technologies and texts easier to create and distribute.
There is a similar problem with the way we think about the effects of types of content. If we talk about the possible effects of a particular film or television show, we do so because we believe that the principles at work are generalizable beyond that one text and that one audience. A film scholar writes about their experience viewing a certain film, but implicit in their writing is the assumption that other people will experience the film in a certain way and/or that other people will experience other similar films in a certain way. When the number of texts explodes, as it has done for the past several years, the question of what one particular person (or type of person) does with one particular text reveals less about the overall experience of media consumption. This just wasn't a problem when the number of texts was lower, when readers could be expected to have seen "classic" texts.
This isn't to say that there won't likely be some media texts that will be experienced by large numbers of people over long periods of time. Our thirst for common experiences will ensure the persistence of canons, but these canons will consist of a smaller and smaller sliver of our overall media use. Figuring out the effect of the two hours I spend watching Citizen Kane is worthwhile, but what about the effects of the thousands of hours I spend online? How do we go about assessing that? Do we break the texts into genres, like we did before? Do we pretend that Facebook or social networking sites are media technologies in the way that radio or television are media technologies? What happens when Facebook's online movie-watching feature takes off? Is its effect on users the same as it was 5 years ago? This seems ludicrous, and yet studies that purport to be about the effects of "Facebook" do not take it into account.
How do we adapt? We identify characteristics of media experiences that cannot be made obsolete by developments in technology and we base our theories on the presence or absence of those characteristics. How many people does a media application connect a user to? How often is it used? Is its use planned or spontaneous? What emotions is its use typically associated with? What parts of the brain light up when we're using it? What are the gratifications sought by the users? If you look at technology this way, you can make sense of the effects of television and toasters without having to conflate the two, and without having to re-invent your theories when the next contraption is invented. These approaches to media effects seem suited to an era in which there will be too many different texts and media technologies for any human to keep track of.
