Introduction
There are three words which yield up again and again in the study of mass media. Sometimes they are used interchangeably. They are ‘hegemony’,’ mass’ and ‘media’. These terms are used so often they are like familiar objects that we take for granted. Yet in reality they point to a variety of processes and activities and part of our concern at the outset is to disentangle these.
Humans communicate with each other. This is an essential part of what it is to be human since it makes us social individuals (, and , 1998, ). There is a physical dimension to this. Contact is possible through shared settlements. Contact between settlements (rural and urban, coastal and inland, international) becomes possible through means of communication: roads, rivers, canals, sea-routes, trains, and airways. They speak of these as means or systems of communication, but more often refer to them in terms of modes of transport. Without these physical developments, which have both promoted and responded to the process of urbanisation, what we now know as the modern communications industry would not have emerged.
“Mass media” is a deceptively simple term encompassing a countless array of institutions and individuals who differ in purpose, scope, method, and cultural context ( and , 1998, ). Mass media include all forms of information communicated to large groups of people, from a handmade sign to an international news network. There is no standard for how large the audience needs to be before communication becomes “mass” communication. There are also no constraints on the type of information being presented. Accurate media representation of world issues is crucial. Whenever media reports are censored or biased, the people’s basic rights are systematically undermined. In these situations, violations and unaccountability often go unnoticed and suppressed viewpoints become commonplace. Most people get their view of the world from the media.
Representation refers to the construction in any medium (especially the mass media) of aspects of ‘reality’ such as people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. Media representation is an active, creative process through which images signify different meanings rather than merely presenting themselves as objective reflections of reality (, 2000). The term refers to the processes involved as well as to its products. For instance, in relation to the key markers of identity representation involves not only how identities are represented (or rather constructed) within the text but also how they are constructed in the processes of production and reception by people whose identities are also differentially marked in relation to demographic factors .
These things has greatly affected how cultures now were shaped, and especially how nations and different people with different backgrounds are able to associate with each other because of the perceived information that they received from these devices used for communication (, 1997, ). The environment in which we as interactive beings move together in order to create a semblance of order in our minds. The Medium Theory has been one of the most popular discussions in the academic arena particularly in the discipline of communications as induced by the ever-emerging communication gadgets and technologies. The Medium Theory encompasses explanations, assumptions and claims regarding the interaction of the communication media and the audience utilising such technology on how information and messages are given meaning and interpretation.
Mass Media and Society
If society is impossible without communication and, through communication, socialisation takes place (for example in the settings of home, school, work, religious activity, leisure activity), it follows that through communication the possibility exists for influencing the attitudes and behavior of others and of being influenced ourselves (, and , 1997, ). This leads us to ask about the communication process: who is communicating with whom, by what means, for what purposes, with what effects, and in whose interests? The answers to such questions tell us much about the kind of societies we live in and the ways in which power and control operate. It cannot be assumed that the process of communication is always benign. That is why, in the lexicon of communications research, we encounter such terms as ‘propaganda’, ‘indoctrination’, ‘manipulation’, ‘ideology’, ‘distortion’ and ‘deception’.
Today society is saturated by media of different forms, shapes, and sizes and every day the average citizen spends a large amount of his or her time in the consumption of media products, whether as readers, listeners, or viewers (, 1999, ). The dominance of the mass media in our lives has led people to blame the media for a range of social ills. Whether it is increased violence in society, the growth of juvenile delinquency, football hooliganism, riots, terrorism, permissive behaviour, falling educational standards, political apathy, or any other social problem we are ready to attribute ‘fabulous powers’ to the mass media. As Connell says, it is very usual to blame the mass media for ‘the spread of this or that social problem by being carriers of all manner of distortion or misunderstanding (, 1997,). This is a view of media power as total and all-embracing. Such a view of the power of the media is often couched in the assumption that this is something new. It is associated with the conditions of modernity. However, the history of mass communications shows that the emergence of every new medium of mass communication or popular amusement has been accompanied with great claims about the power of the medium to change the behavior of men, women, and children as well as the values and mores of society.
The Concept of Hegemony in Understanding the Role of Mass Media in the Society
’s hegemony is a structuralist especially when talking about the mass media because it has integrated dynamic contributions, including linguistics, the structural anthropology of Lévi-Strauss, the semiotics of and ‘s reworking of psychoanalysis. In order to have an in depth understanding to the role of mass media in the society, the social structure, struggles and culture must be discussed first; this is according to the concept of hegemony by (, 1997, ). The central and substantive concern has been with the systems and processes of signification and representation, the key to which has been seen to lie in the analysis of ‘texts’; films, photographs, television programs, literary texts and so forth. Structuralist studies in this area have been closely linked with some crucial reformulations of Marxist theories of ideology which, although bitterly attacked by those who have wished to remain on more traditional Marxist terrain, have played a positive part in by-passing and moving beyond certain impasses within Marxist accounts of the media associated with the idea of ideology as a reflection of the economic basis of media industries and society.
‘s reformulation of a theory of ideology, for example, clearly indicated an important shift in Marxist thinking. ‘s view of ideology as a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals with the real conditions of their existence moved the notion of ideology away from ‘ideas’ which constituted a distorted reflection of reality (, 1999, ). ‘s work stressed that ideology expressed the themes and representations through which men relate to the real world. For ideology always had a material existence. It is inscribed within an apparatus and its practices. Ideology operates here to interpellate individuals as subjects, ‘hailing’ individuals through the apparently obvious and normal rituals of everyday living. Ideology, rather than being imposed from above and being, therefore, implicitly dispensable, is the medium through which all people experience the world. Although retains both the overall form of the base/superstructure metaphor and the notion of determination in the last instance by the economic he also emphasises the irreducibility and materiality of ideology. Determination in the last instance by the economic is a necessary but not sufficient explanation of the nature and existence of the ideological superstructures (, 1986, ). The media within an framework operate predominantly through ideology: they are ideological state apparatuses as opposed to more classically repressive state apparatuses. Thus the effectivity of the media lies not in an imposed false consciousness, nor in changing attitudes, but in the unconscious categories through which conditions are represented and experienced.
The combination of and semiotics provided the initial impetus for sustained work on media texts (, and , 1997, ). By largely suspending the traditional Marxist concern with the external social and economic determinants of ideology, in favor of a focus on the internal relations of signifying practices, such as film or television, structuralist media research formed the theoretical space within which to carry out detailed textual analysis. The early projects of Screen, for example, which examined the classic narrative cinema of Hollywood, avant-garde films and televisual forms, were, whatever their limitations, a very positive advance over approaches to media content which stressed ‘reflection’ whether in Marxist or pluralist terms (, 1997, ). At the very least, such work showed a continuing concern to establish the autonomy and effectiveness of particular film and television forms, taking as a basis the idea that the ideology embodied in film and television is an important and necessary area of ideological struggle.
Structuralist studies have, however, moved beyond an problematic in a number of ways. First, through attempting to combine the analysis of media-signifying practices with psychoanalysis, there has been an attempt to theorise the relationship of texts to subjects (, 2000, ). The subject, constituted in language, in terminology, is not the unified subject of the formulation and traditional Marxist view, but a contradictory, de-centred subject displaced across the range of discourses in which he or she participates. Although this is a relatively undeveloped area in Marxist studies of the media and in Marxism generally, this line of development indicates some crucial absences both in Marxism and in earlier structuralist studies. A second movement within structuralism has involved a rejection of the base/superstructure model for a focus on the articulation of autonomous discourses. First, for example, suggests that the idea of the ‘relative autonomy’ of ideology and the linked notion of representation is inherently unstable in its juxtaposition of ideas (the relative autonomy of the ideological and the determination of ideology by the economic base) which are logically opposed to one another. In this view there can be no middle ground between the autonomy of ideological practices such as the mass media and straightforward economic determinism.
Of course, ‘idealism’ and ‘economism’ are terms which are readily exchanged in arguments between Marxists, each protagonist invoking the name of the master and the spirit of historical materialism. The location of media power in the economic processes and structures of media production. In a return to the base/superstructure metaphor, ‘political economists’ conceive of ideology both as less important than, and determined by the economic base. Ideology is returned to the confines of ‘false consciousness’ and denied autonomous effectiveness ( and , 1998, ). Also, since the fundamental nature of class struggle is grounded in economic antagonisms, the role of the media is that of concealing and misrepresenting these fundamental antagonisms. Ideology becomes the route through which struggle is obliterated rather than the site of struggle. and (2004, ) contend that the pressure to maximize audiences and revenues produces a consistent tendency to avoid the ‘unpopular and tendentious and draw instead on the values and assumptions which are most familiar and most widely legitimated’. The role of the media here is that of legitimating through the production of false consciousness, in the interests of a class which owns and controls the media. The main concern of this form of media research is, therefore, the increasing monopolization of the culture industry, through concentration and diversification.
Valuable though such research may be in summarizing the evidence on the ownership of the media, there are problems with this return to the classic model of base and superstructure ( and , 1998, . ). The advocates of ‘political economy’ ‘conceive the economic level as not only a “necessary” but a “sufficient” explanation of cultural and ideological effects. Yet the focus on general economic forms of capitalism dissipates distinctions between different media practices and allows little in the way of specific historical analysis beyond the bare bones of ownership. There is obviously some justification in the arguments by political economists that ideology has been given priority at the expense of serious consideration of the economic determinants of the mass media. Yet political economy, in its present state of development, would return us to the view of the media as a distorting mirror, a window on reality, which misrepresents reality ( and , 1998, ). This view of the media, combined with a predilection for empirical analysis in the area of ownership and media organisations, frequently seems to give political economy more in common with pluralist accounts of the media than with other Marxist accounts.
On the other hand, cultural studies incorporate a stress on experience as the ‘authenticating’ position and a humanist emphasis on the creative, which is very much at odds with the structuralist position outlined earlier (, 2000, ). Where structuralism had focused on the autonomy and articulation of media discourses, culturalist studies seek to place the media and other practices within a society conceived of as a complex expressive totality.
Conclusion
This view of media power is present in recent work which attempts a combining of culturalist and structuralist views. Although theoretically eclectic in its bold, if not entirely successful, compound of a theory of hegemony derived from , sociology of ‘moral panics’, and an account of the social production of news, retains a view of society as an expressive totality. The crisis in hegemony which the authors identify has its basis in the decline of the British economy after the post-war boom but is resonated in the production of popular consent through the signification of a crisis in law and order in which the mass media play the key role. The media play their part in combination with other primary institutional definers (politicians, the police, the courts) in ‘representing’ this crisis. In the area of news, however, media definitions are ‘secondary’ (, 1999, ). The media are not the primary definers of news events but their structured relationship to powerful primary definers has the effect of giving them a crucial role in reproducing the definitions of those who have privileged access to the media as ‘accredited sources’. They are partners in the signification spiral through which distinct and local problems, such as youth cultures, student protests and industrial action, are pulled together as part of a crisis in law and order. The framework again emphasises the expressive interconnections of the culturalist position. There are, of course, some unresolved problems in this approach, not least of which is the unevenness of the theoretical synthesis achieved. Hence, while the media are represented as a ‘key terrain where consent is won or lost’, they are also in other formulations conceived of as signifying a crisis which has already occurred, both in economic and political terms.
The theoretical perspectives on the mass media contained within Marxism share a general agreement that the power of the media is ideological but there are distinct differences in the conceptualisation of ideology, ranging from the focus on the internal articulation of the signifying systems of the media within structuralist analysis, through to the focus on the determination of ideology in ‘political economy’ perspectives and to a culturalist view of the media as a powerful shaper of public consciousness and popular consent (, and , 1997, ). Although disagreements about the role of the media as an ideological force within these approaches may be similar in their intensity to earlier debates on the nature of the power of the media, these are in no sense simple repetitions of earlier debates. The theoretical ground has shifted. Increasingly, work on the media has focused on a related series of issues: the establishment of the autonomy, or relative autonomy of the media and its specific effectiveness; tracing the articulation between the media and other ideological practices; and attempting to rethink the complex unity which such practices constitute together (, 1997, ). The way in which questions in these areas have been posed does vary in relation to different Marxist and other perspectives, but it is in relation to these issues within Marxism that intellectual work on the nature of media power proceeds at present.
References
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