My Hypodermic Needle is Not Your Magic Bullet

While reading about the Hypodermic Needle/ Magic Bullet Theory, I struggled to relate it to the media landscape as we know it today. The dramatics of assuming the media’s message is a “bullet fired from the ‘media gun’ into the viewer’s ‘head’ made it sound more like the propaganda from World War II we learned about in grade school. With the technology available to media viewers today, this theory is next to impossible to apply.

The Hypodermic Needle Theory, also known as the Magic Bullet Theory, is an illustrated description of the media’s power on its viewer. As the name of the theory suggests, it is the belief that the media can “inject” ideas into every viewer’s mind to create one collective opinion.

There are multiple reasons why this theory is not as successful today. Technology has significantly improved. During the 1920 and 1930s when this theory was created, media output was limited. Newspapers were the main source of news media. The theory also suggests that people are passive and what they see or take in, they will believe.

Things have changed a lot over the last hundred years. Access to multiple different types and kinds of media is at our fingertips. News and information travel in seconds. While this would have made the population of the past even more susceptible to the media’s message, the access to media in seconds also means that there are multiple outlets for the media, and not all media is on the same page. In fact, some media sources pump out “fake news.” Fake news is so common now that a lot of the population doesn’t know what to believe and they have been forced to form their own opinions. What makes fake news even more dangerous is the use of algorithms. Algorithms tailor a person’s newsfeed to fit what it thinks the person would want to see. Feed algorithms [might] limit our selection process by suggesting contents similar to the ones we are usually exposed to creating an echo chamber. When viewers only see one opinion over and over again in their media echo chamber, they believe it.

This phenomenon is apparent in two recent current events, the controversial election in 2016 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Fake news swirled about political candidates creating huge political divisions that algorithms just pushed wider. Fake News and misinformation added to the dangers of the COVID-19 pandemic. People didn’t know what to believe and began to seek out news sources that fed their confirmation bias.

Netflix's original film, Don’t Look Up provides a perfect commentary on the media’s influence on today’s population. The film starring big names like Leonardo Dicaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and Ariana Grande, was about how two scientists (Dicaprio and Lawrence) discovered that an asteroid was going to impact the Earth, killing the entire world’s population. When Dicaprio and Lawerence’s characters tried to inform the government, they brushed it off. So they went to media outlets that didn’t take their warning seriously. Dicaprio and Lawrence continue to try to generate worry to combat the issue, but the media outlets continued to downplay the event while others started to take it seriously. The mixed messages from the media and government officials led to huge divisions which ultimately led to the asteroid impact, killing the entire planet.

While the Hydrodermic Needle/ Magic Bullet Theory might have been successful in creating uniform thinking in the past, technology has advanced past this theory. The concept of the media manipulating the population still exists, but there are way too many outlets and opinions for all populations to be swayed in the same way.