In the wake of growing concern over the role played by social media and other pathological internet formations in shaping the tenor of contemporary political discourse, the discussion of so-called "media effects" keeps bubbling up to the surface.
The term serves primarily as an epithet (except in somewhat rarefied and self-enclosed realms of experimental research) sometimes shorthanded by the dismissive nomenclature of the "hypodermic needle model."
It is worth nothing, in this regard that the "hypodermic model" and the "silver bullet theory" are not actual theoretical approaches to the media. Rather these term emerges as dismissive insults: foils for the so-called "limited effects" model.
Recently, when these models are invoked, it is with the goal of disparaging ostensibly overblown claims about the impact of social media on political polarization, shortened attention spans, and so on.
This is not to say that there have not been attempts to demonstrate media effects that embrace the media model implied by the charge of "hypodermicism".
The typical problem with all such experiments and with more general claims about the "direct effects" of media artifacts is that it is difficult if not impossible to isolate the media as a causal factor in a real world setting. When experiments are conducted in a laboratory setting there is the related problem of generalizing these findings to the world outside the lab. There is a very good reason for these difficulties: the "media" do not stand outside and separate from the social realm -- they are an integral part of society. This is the substance of the fundamental claim against "direct effects" models: that they fetishize and abstract "the media" from their broader social context.
But this same claim applies to the attempt to absolve the media through the dismissive charge of "silver bulletism" or "hypodermicism." When the accusation of naive "direct effects" is used to imply that the media are not to blame -- that the problem lies "somewhere else" in society, the same fetishization is at work. If the media cannot be abstracted from society, the converse is also true: society cannot be abstracted from the media. In other words, the pathologies of society are also the pathologies of the media, which play an important role in reproducing them, just as other communicative and representational practices do. To say, then, that polarization is caused "elsewhere" and the media merely "reflect" it is to inadvertently align oneself with a debunked hypodermic model, by underwriting the abstraction of media from society.
