The Hypodermic Needle (or Magic Bullet) Theory is a linear model of communication deeply rooted in behavioural ideologies of the 1930s. It is thought to have first been conceptualised by the Frankfurt School in Germany when they published a study of human behaviourism. The main concept of the theory is that the audience is a passive thing that is directly influenced by the message being sent by the mass media in its purest meaning. The idea of a bullet or a needle is that it gets placed right into the receiver by the sender without any sort of interaction between the two. The theory stresses that because this has such a powerful and immediate effect on the audience that the mass media can make people make uniform decisions because they are helpless to resist the impact of the message. This theory paints the mass media as a potentially dangerous weapon because it affects people so greatly.
The main problem with this theory is that it is so simple. There are no other factors that affect it; there is merely the sender, the message and the receiver. It is also flawed in the sense that the audience is in fact not a passive thing but something that thinks for itself; filters information presented to them and makes decisions influenced by other factors of the world besides the mass media.
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