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Mass media: cultural effects
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Mass media: cultural effects
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What we may refer to, in broad terms, as the 'Marxist' critique of the media developed in Great Britain mainly during the 1970s onwards. An excellent summary of this point of view is provided by Curran and
Gurevitch:
Marxists view capitalist society as being one of class domination; the media are seen as part of an ideological arena in which various class views are fought out, although within the context of the dominance of certain classes; ultimate control is increasingly concentrated in monopoly capital; media professionals, while enjoying the illusion of autonomy, are socialized into and internalize the norms of the dominant culture. The media, taken as a whole, relay interpretive frameworks consonant with the interest of the dominant classes, and media audiences, while sometimes negotiating and contesting these frameworks, lack ready access to alternative meaning systems that would enable them to reject the definitions offered by the media in favour of oppositional definitions.
Curran and Gurevitch (1977) pp. 4-5
The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the Leicester Centre for Mass Communication Research became particularly well known. Particularly important and influential research in the British Marxist tradition was carried out by the Glasgow University Media Group causing a storm of protest from broadcasters, whom the Group had accused of being far less impartial and objective than they claimed.
There are differences of emphasis in the approaches of these academic researchers. The Leicester University group, for example, tended to be much more concerned with economic determination of media content, whereas the CCCS was more concerned with cultural processes. In this respect, the Leicester group were rather closer to 'classical Marxism', which sees the economic base of society as determining everything else. In Britain this approach is perhaps most commonly associated with Murdock and Golding. From this point of view, the 'culture industries' (to use Adorno's term) are primarily driven by an economic imperative to maximize their audiences, thus, for example, greatly emphasizing sex and violence.
Gurevitch et al (1982) suggest that it is possible to distinguish three broad strands within the Marxist approach to the media:
Perhaps the most influential British approach, dominated by the work of the CCCS, is more properly referred to as cultural studies, since the tendency is to see the mass media, as well as audiences as part of broader social and cultural practices. Unlike the Frankfurt School, whose 'critical theorists' tended to celebrate the emancipatory potential of high modernist art and dismiss the products of the culture industries as debased and inauthentic, the British students of culture paid a great deal of attention to the products of 'popular culture', though it should be said that they too were, certainly in the early years, also suspicious of the mass produced products of popular culture, though they were prepared to engage with them, rather than simply dismiss them. Since the British owed much to the French research in semiotics, psychoanalytic theory and social theory, it became common to speak of the Birmingham - Paris axis in cultural studies.
Generally, cultural studies focuses on the actual message or discourse of communication and its implied reader positions, audience readings of media texts frequently being assumed to correspond mainly to what Stuart Hall calls the preferred reading and, especially since its entry into the academy in the USA, it has moved ever further from the political economy approach of Murdock and Golding, to the point where one could almost imagine that 'culture' takes place in a sociological and economic vacuum. The political economy approach has, as Murdock rightly laments,
often been seen as stale, passé, out of touch with the new times, which is paradoxical since the explosive growth of cultural studies within the academy has coincided almost exactly with the era of privatization and the rapid extension of cultural commodification. Commodities certainly have sign values .... But they also come with prices attached, which organize access and use in important ways. Markets are always systems of economic transaction as well as of symbolic exchange. The trick is to find ways of exploring their interplay.
Murdock (1997 : 100)
Students of the British tradition of cultural studies generally seem to credit Richard Hoggart with 'founding' the movement. His book The Uses of Literacy (1958) broadens the applicatiion of literary studies to take in newspapers, magazines, popular music and so on. Moreover, he examines the interconnexions between these and the structures of individuals' everyday lives. In this respect he shows popular culture to be worthy of more serious attention than, say, other literary critics such as the Leavises (see the section on literary criticism) were prepared to allow. To an extent, this no doubt reflects his own working class background, which is indeed very much to the fore in his book. Nevertheless, while favourably disposed to pre-war popular culture, which he sees as forming an organic whole, he - not unlike the Leavises - ultimately condemns the post-war 'mass' culture, which he considers trivial and subversive of the authenticity of working class culture.
The Uses of Literacy made Hoggart a highly influential commentator on British cultture and the media. Hoggart's focus on working class culture and the interconnectedness of its experience had a significant influence on the further development of cultural studies. He also founded the highly influential CCCS. Raymond Williams
Another of the 'big guns' of the early days of cultural studies in Britan was Raymond Williams. Like Hoggart, Williams came from a working class background. Though still to an extent using the methods of Leavisite literary analysis, Williams turned his attention from 'high culture' to culture as a 'whole way of life, material, intellectual and spiritual' (1966, p.16). Although this focus on popular culture and everyday life may be seen as a step forward there remains in Williams' work something of the same nostalgia found in Hoggart's for a period when there was, supposedly, an 'organic culture' which is contrasted with the debased mass popular culture of today.
In his book Communications (1962) he turns his attention to the relationship between cultural developmments and the new communication technologies and industries. This book is heavily influenced by the American empiricist tradition, which makes it seem a little dated, but it nevertheless marks an important step towards understanding the culture industries, rather than simply deploring their products and it helped to take us further towards attempting to develop methods of criticism which could deal with all modes of culture rather than merely those privileged by the élite. Williams, like the Frankfurt School theorists, found the term 'mass culture' unacceptable because of the implication that the products of the culture industries are produced by the masses and also because it implies a distinction between 'high' and 'low' culture, the latter being favoured by the masses - it is therefore a term which is contemptuous of the 'masses'. This move away from a particular kind of 'high' culture as being the only kind worthy of serious study by the literary academic is a significant step indeed, taking us ultimately towards the contemporary lack of refusal of any qualitative distinction beween 'high' and 'low' culture, where popular culture is no longer studied, from above or from outside, by the sociologist or social anthropologist conducting fieldwork. I would not wish to claim that this is a development which Williams himself would have approved of, critical as he was of the output of 'Tin Pan Alley', but it is certainly a development to which he contributed considerably in that he showed a willingness to engage with popular culture.
As his work developed, Williams became more clearly Marxist and his work benefited from his exposure to semiotics, Althusserian Marxism and Gramsci, which enabled him to knit together a study of everyday life which embraced history, politics and ideology. Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall replaced Richard Hoggart as the director of the CCCS in 1969. During his time there he oversaw a tremendous flowering of British cultural studies, his own work and the work of others in the CCCS being having an enormous influence.
Early on, Hall rejected the contrast between the supposed organic culture of the past and today's mass culture and turned his attention to a serious evaluation of mass culture on the same terms as high culture.
The cultural theorist, John Hartley, chooses the following quotation from Hall as emblematic of the project of cultural studies:
What we have to do is to begin to disentangle what is real and what is phoney in the responses of young people today. What is real are the feelings and attitudes involved, the interests aroused: what is phoney are the ways the feelings are engaged, the trivial and inconsequential directions in which the aroused interests are channelled. The revolt and iconoclasm of youth today arises because of the contradictions between the true and the false elements in their culture: because the wave of post-war prosperity has raised them to cultural thresholds which offer rewards unequal to the expectations aroused. Instead, therefore, most young people compensate for their frustrations by an escape into the womb-world of mass entertainments
Hartley comments:
If that isn't the Genesis of Cultural Studies, it is certainly the Exodus; fleeing the tyranny of high culture towards a promised land where culture may be analysed in terms of class, where consciousness may be true or false, where feelings and attitudes may be political not psychological, where economics (prosperity) connects with meaning, and where, crucially, it is important to understand "the womb-world of mass entertainments".
Hartley (1991)
(Further discussion may be found also in the section on News International under Media Ownership)
Hypodermic needle model
Empiricism
Uses and gratifications
Recent developments
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