Brill, Dale Allen; PhD
THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE, 1996
MASS COMMUNICATIONS (0708); JOURNALISM (0391)
The purpose of this study was to examine the advertising industry's reaction
to the introduction of a new
communications medium: cable television. Advertising Age was chosen as the trade
industry publication
that would serve to gauge reaction to the medium and from which potential frames
were delineated and
examined. Selective attention to different particular topics and themes constitute
frames. The consumer
adoption cycle borrowed from the diffusion literature was used to demarcate
time periods in which
advertising industry frames might emerge and shift. There were several findings.
First, Advertising Age
discussed the impact of cable television in business terms rather than cultural
terms, giving rise to a
commercial variation of futures rhetoric. Second, there was a statistically
significant co-occurrence
between frames reflecting advertising industry concerns and consumer adoption
cycles. Advertising
Age's preoccupation with Regulation issues occurred during the Innovator and
Early Adopter stages of
diffusion of cable television, when there were few consumers using this new
medium. However, the
emphasis in Advertising Age coverage shifted to Delivery issues in 1975, and
this corresponded with
shifts in consumer usage of cable television as reflected in the Early and Late
Majority stages of diffusion.
The use of the diffusion of innovation paradigm to trace an industry's reaction
to the introduction and
eventual diffusion of a new communications medium has given rise to the idea
that there may be a 'rite of
passage' that new media go through. This ritual, should it be documented to
exist through careful
retrospective studies of the diffusion of other media, could serve as a useful
tool for gauging how and
when an industry might itself adopt a new medium so that risks are minimized
and advantages maximized.
The usefulness of frame and concept mapping to study industry reaction to a
new medium also could be
extended to the arena of issues management. This methodology has the ability
to handle very large
text-based data sets and can be used to systematize identification of issues
and issue shifts important to
organizations as they seek to stabilize the social, political and economic environments
in which they
operate.
Social
Systems Simulation Group
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