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Mass media: cultural effects
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Mass media: cultural effects
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The development of cultural studies in Britain was strongly influenced by the Frankfurt School, Althusser and other Marxists, but it is perhaps the views of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci which proved the most fruitful.
Both Marcuse's views and Althusser's tend to portray the great mass of ordinary men and women as incapable of recognising and resisting the appeals of the system of commercial cultural forces around them. Victims of false consciousness, they are seen pretty much as the passive victims of a capitalist conspiracy. As Fred Inglis expresses it, that view assumes that ordinary people are 'bloody fools' (Inglis (1970???)).
A very important influence on the development of cultural studies was the the Italian Marxist Gramsci and his notion of bourgeois cultural hegemony. Although Gramsci died while Althusser was still a student, his influence was felt later because his Selections from the Prison Notebooks were not translated until 1971. 'Hegemony' in this case means the success of the dominant classes in presenting their definition of reality, their view of the world, in such a way that it is accepted by other classes as 'common sense'. The general 'consensus' is that it is the only sensible way of seeing the world. Any groups who present an alternative view are therefore marginalized:
the supremacy of a social group manifests itself in two ways, as 'domination' and as 'intellectual and moral leadership'
and
The 'normal' exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterised by the combination of force and consent, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent
Gramsci (1971) p.215 in Storey (1994)
In Gramsci's view, however, there is not in any sense a single dominant class, but, rather, a shifting and unstable alliance of different social classes. The earlier notion of a dominant ideology is replaced by the idea of a field of dominant discourses, unstable and temporary. From this point of view, the media are seen as the place of competition between competing social forces rather than simply as a channel for the dominant ideology.
According to Gramsci's view there are on the one hand the dominant classes who seek to contain and incorporate all thought and behaviour within the terms and limits they set in accordance with their interests. On the other hand there are the dominated or subordinate classes who attempt to maintain and to further the validity and effectiveness of their own definitions of reality. There is therefore a continuing struggle for dominance between the definitions of reality (or
ideologies) which serve the interests of the ruling classes and those which are held by other groups in society.
Culture, according to this view, is seen as the product of a much more vigorous struggle than is suggested in, for example,
Althusser's view of ideology. Cultural domination arises from a complex play of negotiations, alignments and
realignments within society:
...the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed
Gramsci (1971) p.216 in Storey (1994)
Domination is not simply imposed from above, but has to be won through the subordinated groups' spontaneous consent to the cultural domination which they believe will serve their interests because it is 'common sense'. In this sense,
Culture for both [Gramsci and Freud] is an amalgam of coercive and consensual mechanisms for reconciling human subjects to their unwelcome fate as labouring animals in oppressive conditions
Eagleton (1991) pp. 179-180.
As Ien Ang summarizes Gramsci's importance,
The Gramscian concept of hegemony is mostly used to indicate the cultural leadership of the dominant classes in the production of generalized meanings, of 'spontaneous' consent to the prevailing arrangement of social relations - a process, however, that is never finished because hegemony can never be complete.
Ang (1996)
Fiske similarly emphasizes that hegemony is never complete:
Hegemony is a constant struggle against a multitude of resistances to ideological domination, and any balance of forces that it achieves is always precarious, always in need of re-achievement. Hegemony's 'victories' are never final, and any society will evidence numerous points where subordinate groups have resisted the total domination that is hegemony's aim, and have withheld their consent to the system.
Fiske (1987) p. 41
For a fascinating and impassioned account of the abandonment of Gramsci by 'progressives' and his appropriation by the political right, see Rob van Kranenburg's article 
Right-Wing Gramscism in Undercurrent
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The dominant classes use mass culture in their response to this struggle by constructing these other groups into target markets and consumers who are addressed by the culture and advertising industries according to their 'demographic' characteristics their social class, their disposable income, their age, sex and so on.
(Further discussion may be found also in the section on News International under Media Ownership)
Hypodermic needle model
Empiricism
Uses and gratifications
Recent developments
Gramsci's hegemony theory and the ideological role of the mass media
by Stuart Hainsworth
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