Mass Media Influence on Youth Smoking and Digital Media

Media's Role in Shaping Society

It has long been established that the media exerts a strong influence on the public. When television and other media present powerful messages on any particular topic — smoking, for example — society is measurably affected. This paper draws on quality references to cover important aspects of the media: the issues it promotes, its history, its tactics, and its impacts.

Author Paul Boyer explains that through "mediated communicative processes" individuals help to shape society. Within those communicative processes are found "complex interactions of human agency, social institutions," along with the various media-driven communicative processes that form the foundations of society (Boyer, 2012). The media people use — including today's Internet, television, print media, and radio — shapes both "national political conversations" and numerous aspects of social relationships (Boyer, 2013).

Since the emergence of multiple cable channels and the 24-hour news cycle on CNN and other cable networks, a wide variety of socially relevant information — and what some would consider propaganda — has proliferated in the United States. Included in the socially relevant messages broadcast into homes are commercials and public service announcements aimed at changing, or at least influencing, certain behaviors related to public health.

Antismoking Campaigns and Adolescent Smoking Rates

When it comes to the issue of adolescent smoking, an article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Consumer Affairs notes that there have been decades of antismoking campaigns presented through the media. Even though the federal government (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — HHS) had hoped to reduce the percentage of adolescent smokers to 16% by 2010, the percentage remained at 20% that year (Paek, et al., 2011).

An updated statistic from the Office of Adolescent Health (HHS) shows that "nearly one in fifteen high school seniors" — just 7% — was a daily smoker in 2014 (HHS, 2015). That represents a substantial reduction from 2010. The HHS figure relates specifically to high school seniors rather than all adolescents; the statistic for all high school students, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was 9.2% in 2014. This is well down from the 2010 data, and the trend clearly indicates that antismoking messages delivered through various media are having a positive effect.

Peer Perception and the Influence of Presumed Influence Model

The article by Paek et al. focuses on how adolescents perceive the effects of media on their peers. "Adolescents are known to be particularly susceptible to peer perceptions," largely because adolescents are acutely concerned about the impressions they make on others in their peer group (Paek, 124). Moreover, studies show that perceptions often determine the influence peers have over each other more than peer behaviors themselves do. The model known as influence of presumed influence (IPI) holds that people — in this case, youth — perceive "some influence of a communication on others," and as a result of that perception, they may change their own attitudes or behaviors (Paek, 124).

In other words, what an adolescent perceives when a friend — or a member of a peer group — responds to a media message about smoking, for example, affects how that first adolescent may shift his or her own attitude and behavior toward antismoking messages. The authors break the IPI concept down into three components that help explain why an adolescent's perception of how a friend responds to antismoking public service announcements matters.

The first IPI component, "perceived exposure," refers to the assumption that adolescents judge the extent of their peers' exposure to media messages based on their own exposure to the same public service announcement (Paek, 127). According to researchers Gunther and colleagues (2006), as cited by Paek, adolescent exposure to both antismoking and pro-smoking messages on television was "positively related to the perceived exposure of peers to the same messages" (127).

Secondly, the extent to which an adolescent perceives other adolescents being exposed to media messages will determine the extent to which that adolescent believes those others are being influenced by the same messages (Paek, 127). The third component of the IPI model shows that, even more than adults, adolescents form, develop, and alter their attitudes and behaviors in response to their judgments about what other adolescents think and believe regarding the same media message — in this case, about smoking.

Is Smoking Viewed as Filthy or Fashionable by Youth?

An article published in the scholarly Health Education Research journal in 2003 differs considerably in scope and theme from the 2011 article discussed above. The 2003 article examines how youth culture is influenced by portrayals of smoking in the media. The researchers conducted focus groups with 117 students, asking participants to rate certain images of smoking drawn from print and audiovisual sources. Notwithstanding the young people's full awareness of the "harmful health effects" of cigarette smoking, participants perceived the act of smoking in the presented clips as "cool," "normal," and "acceptable" (Watson, et al., 2003).

The upshot of this research is that images of smoking in movies and on television have "the potential" to minimize the perceived health risks associated with cigarette smoking. The research also showed that a more "tolerant" attitude toward smoking among young people — shaped by media images — might counteract public service announcements urging adolescents not to smoke (Watson, 554).

The authors note that in the early 2000s, the tobacco industry was cultivating ties with the fashion and film industries in order to "seek influence" — that is, to shape decisions in film and fashion regarding cigarette smoking (Watson, 554). This was especially evident in Australia, but similar dynamics can reasonably be assumed to exist with respect to Hollywood and the U.S. fashion industry.

The authors also propose — with the caveat that their assumption may not be universally correct — that adolescents are "more likely to learn and imitate behaviors" when their role models behave in certain ways, especially if a role model, such as an actor, is associated with a scene or situation in which a "positive outcome" is depicted (Watson, 555). It is worth noting that male adolescent role models today are more likely to be professional athletes or musical artists than actors, making it difficult to imagine an NFL player smoking cigarettes or a hip-hop artist appearing in a Camel or Marlboro advertisement.

The authors' study of youthful perceptions of smoking as depicted on television, in movies, and in magazines and newspapers in Western Australia found that 78% of participants (ages 13 to 16) commented on smoking images in the media they were shown "when unprompted by the facilitator" (Watson, 558). Those participants who responded positively to smokers in media clips did so because the smokers represented "success, sociability, coolness, popularity and reward" (Watson, 558).

What most respondents regarded as "cool" were "attractive and fashionable people" and actors appearing in "exciting movie scenes" (Watson, 560). For some 16-year-olds, if a female appeared attractive and relaxed while smoking, the habit seemed harmless and therefore cool. However, if a male or female appeared stressed or in a bad mood while smoking, it was considered uncool. The authors concluded that when films and television normalize smoking, adolescents who already smoke are likely to continue and to discount the messages of health campaigns (Watson, 566).