Friday, April 11, 2008
JAWS!
As we spoke in class today about how film and tv influences our (the public's) knowledge and perception of science, one movie that immediately came to my mind was JAWS. While we questioned in class today the idea of whether or not movies can truly influence public perception and actions, the movie JAWS is clear proof that movies can actually have this influential effect. In fact, after its release in 1975, the film conjured up so much fear that beach attendance actually went down in the summer of 1975. Today, the horror classic is widely recognized as being responsible for fearsome and inaccurate stereotypes about sharks and their behavior. Furthermore, the book's author, Benchley has said that he would never have written the original novel had he known what sharks are really like in the wild, and what the repurcussions of the movie on public perception of sharks would be. In an attempt to combat the misunderstandings that JAWS created, Benchenly actually penned two other boooks -- Shark Trouble, a non-fiction book about shark behavior and Shark Life, another non-fiction book describing his dives with sharks. Conservation groups have likewise bemoaned the fact that the film has made it considerably harder to convince the public that sharks should be protectedOverall, Benchley was so sorry that he wrote this book, or at least the repercussions it and the movie had on the public perception of sharks that he has spent the last few years of his life being a spokesperson for conservation of these animals. Based on this, I think we can definitely conclude that movies do have a very real impact on public perception and knowledge. Furthermore it highlights some of the key questions brought up in class about whether exaggeration makes a threat seem more or less real and how long term these effects can potentially be.
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6 comments:
Jaws is a very interesting example! Here's a relevant excerpt from an article written by Katherine McComas, another professor in the Comm Depertment:
"The public's reaction to the shark attacks off the East Coast offers an example of how affect can guide behavior (e.g., images of shark attacks, perhaps even primed by the movie Jaws, provoke a visceral aversion to the water). It also provides an example of what social scientists have termed the social amplification of risk, which is said to occur when risk events interact with psychological, social, institutional, and cultural processes in ways that amplify or attenuate people's risk perceptions and subsequently their risk behavior (Kasperson & Kasperson, 2005; Pidgeon, Kasperson, & Slovic, 2003). An integrative framework, it aims to describe why some risks that scientists consider to pose relatively little threat to society receive a disproportionate amount of attention, whereas other risks considered to pose more serious risk receive scant notice (Kasperson et al., 2003). Potential consequences of risk amplification or attenuation include not only harm to public health but also increased liability, economic costs, loss of trust in institutions, and stigmatization. In essence, the framework represents an effort to capture the dualistic nature of risk as both an objective event as well as a social construct."
Citation: McComas, K. A. (2006). Defining Moments in Risk Communication Research: 1996–2005. Journal of Health Communication, 11(1), 75. doi: 10.1080/10810730500461091.
In case you are interested
I've been a big nerd since elementary school. I used to only read nonfiction books about animals. I was one of those kids who thought sharks and snakes and all those "icky" animals were fascinating. When I saw the movie Jaws, I was confused. What happened to the amazing nature of these animals? I feel as if the movie itself, with all its scenes on the beach, might have given me a poorer impression of spending time at the beach, more so than what it did to my opinion of sharks. Granted, I grew up not close to any ocean or shore, but since I watched the movie with much greater background knowledge than most, it did not alter my opinion of sharks. I think this makes a pretty decent argument that our schemas affect how we evaluate and "digest" what we see in the media.
The power of movies, in my opinion, lies their ability to frame scientific information. It's much easier for me, and for many, to comprehend a concept when its application is both observed in context and illicits an emotional reaction/connection. The problem is created when writers, producers, and directors take that science and distort it in some way. We already know that public opinion is shaped by media, and policy is shaped by public opinion. Therefore, the shaping power of movies on attitudes about science is significant and those attitudes are fundamental to policy creation. Without a stronger a social conscious among movie producers, I'm unsure of how this problem can ever be overcome.
This is a great example of how media shapes the average persons way of thought. This particularly affects those who have never really experienced the phenomenon and therefore have to rely on what others assume to be true, such as whats depicted in movies. Schemas are a big part of whats causing this effect. People who are marine biologists and know a lot about sharks maybe harder to persuade with a movie such as "Jaws" than ordinary movie goers. People who don't have much experience with sharks are affected the most in terms of building schemas about the nature/behavior of sharks. Its only when the professionals and specialists who openly talk about the misconception that ordinary people tend to sway from one ideology to another. Overall, I feel that an in-depth knowledge about a certain topic, as well as first hand experience builds the correct schemas whether it may be about sharks. This is turn enables us to be even more critical and alert about what we see, hear, or communicate and what we process to be true.
I totally forgot about the "JAWS effect" and how the movie generated such a public fear of sharks. The facts about the author and his opinion are very interesting. It was obvious the reaction people had towards shark, but I wonder (since we just went over this in class) how people saw scientists after this film? (or maybe they were just too concentrated on the sharks themselves to notice the people!)
It’s actually kind of scary to think about how much film and television influences our (and the public’s) knowledge and perception of science. Children are especially vulnerable as they have a hard time distinguishing between reality and fantasy. But adults are also affected. Heavy television viewers tend to believe that the way the world is portrayed on television is accurate to the real world—that the mediated world depicted on television, in movies, and in magazines, is similar to the actual world. In another one of my comm classes, we learned a theory that states: frequent exposure to scary or frightening media can lead someone to believe that the world is scarier or meaner than it actually is. This theory might be able to explain why many people, after seeing Jaws, were reluctant to go to the beach the following summer. It is good to bring attention to the way television has such an effect on our beliefs and actions. The more aware we are of television’s influences, the better our perception is.
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