The Chronicle Review is running a fascinating deconstruction of the infamous 1938 broadcast of Orson Welles’s War of The Worlds radio broadcast that should be required reading for anyone interested in word of mouth or viral marketing. The widely reported hysteria was pretty tame in reality, but it was spun into something greater by a self-important media in love with a story about the power it possessed.
So what accounts for the legend? First — and perhaps most important — the news media loved the story, and Welles loved the news media. The panic became a global story literally overnight. Even the Nazis could not resist commenting, noting the credulity of the American public. Americans certainly appeared gullible, but they were not alone. The news media, handed a sensational story of national scope, reported every detail (including fictional ones) about Welles, the program, and the reaction.
Welles’s greatest performance that evening wasn’t in the studio; it was in a hallway, at the improvised news conference, when he feigned a stunned, apologetic demeanor. In reality, as Paul Heyer notes in The Medium and the Magician, Welles carefully concealed his satisfaction with the hysteria while expressing concern over the rumors of deaths attributed to the program.
The only firsthand study of the event with any scientific credibility actually disproved then-present-day perceptions of mass-media’s role in human psyche as some sort of great controller… It showed that people are not easily manipulated, at least not with predictable results.
The hypodermic model of media effects, which prevailed at the time, posited that the media injected ideas, more or less directly, into the consciousness of the audience. The book’s data seriously undermined that model, demonstrating empirically that each member of the mass audience filters the media’s messages through a matrix of personal variables (education, critical ability, class, etc.). Those data complicated media theory tremendously and intensified the research focus on the complexities of audience reception.
Lazarsfeld surprised many by concluding in The People’s Choice, his classic study of the 1940 election, that the media’s effects are, in general, much more selective and limited than we assume. Other forms of communication, from those in the education system to religious communication to interpersonal communication, were apparently more powerful. The mass media were but one part of a larger web of influence, and as one factor, their actual influence was mediated by several other variables. Thus, the media’s ability to control us was far less pronounced than assumed.
That is the ultimate irony behind “The War of the Worlds.” The discovery that the media are not all-powerful, that they cannot dominate our political consciousness or even our consumer behavior as much as we suppose, was an important one. It may seem like a counter intuitive discovery (especially considering its provenance), but ask yourself this: If we really know how to control people through the media, then why isn’t every advertising campaign a success? Why do advertisements sometimes backfire? If persuasive technique can be scientifically devised, then why do political campaigns pursue different strategies? Why does the candidate with the most media access sometimes lose?
The answer is that humans are not automatons. We might scare easily, we might, at different times and in different places, be susceptible to persuasion, but our behavior remains structured by a complex and dynamic series of interacting factors.
Something to keep in mind next time you have big plans for your market.
The Hyped Panic Over ‘War of the Worlds’ – The Chronicle Review.