Mass-Media

Peter Sorlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138161757
• eBook ISBN: 9781136128042
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a much needed short, reliable and stimulating guide to the mass media in present day society. Incisive, surprising and stimulating it will become an essential text in thinking and writing about the mass media.

1
Audiences

Sceptics sometimes wonder whether sociology can teach us anything that other disciplines, anthropology, or psychology, or political sciences do not already know; the answer is that sociology alone tries to understand why human beings, unlike most living beings, cannot live but in permanent interaction with one another. Sociologists have always been anxious to illuminate the kinds of links which exist inside mankind and their postulates, contradictory though they are, will help us to see how the relationships between the media and those who practise them influence social cohesion.

Durkheim distinguished two sorts of cohesion characteristic, respectively, of 'traditional' and 'industrial' societies. Of course, these types are pure artefacts. We must not believe that they have ever been realized. We are even obliged to recognize that Durkheim's model is a typical, almost caricatured example of structural partition. Let us see what it may still tell us. According to Durkheim, the members of less-advanced societies share the same beliefs and perform the same rituals.¹ As we shall see, the practice of media use is highly ritualized. Our buying of 'our' papers is perfectly routinized and we are aware of the fact that, every night, about ten million listeners switch on their television set for the Nine O'clock News.

We shall also see that the media create myths, not because of what they 'say' but because they offer us patterns to observe our universe by contrasting, for instance, politics and short news items. The expectations of the reader/listener, renewed day after day, create the dimensions of an unwitting, purely 'mechanical' to borrow Durkheim's expression - type of 'solidarity', although the texts or programmes which are being diffused do not call for cohesion. What counts is not the impact on their minds of what readers/listeners learn (for this will usually remain unverifiable, especially since what is told by media is often a matter of opinion, not of 'pure' fact) but rather the force of repetition it carries. Durkheim was aware of the existence of 'mechanical' solidarities in industrial, more advanced societies, but he saw them as a persistence of older beliefs. It is therefore interesting to point out that, besides rituals inherited from the past, new rituals, rituals born from industrialization itself (for instance the industrial production and distribution of papers or broadcast information), can appear in a modern society.

What makes one feel uncomfortable about Durkheim's division is its strictness: this or that (even if that encroaches upon this). Weber's model which contrasts sociation and communaiity² looks as rigid but Weber is intent on explaining that these are only two opposed poles and that there is a wide range of actual combinations between them. In a sociation, people gather for a precise task; they may differ, and even be hostile, about everything, but their common aim reunites them, at least temporarily. New media, in the earliest phases of their development, have generally created sociations; in the first half of the nineteenth century, neighbours or friends joined to subscribe to a paper which was much too expensive for any of them; today, in underdeveloped countries, a radio or a television set is often owned collectively. We shall enlarge later upon this extremely important question. Suffice to note, for the time being, that media are likely to create a passing solidarity between otherwise indifferent people. Communaiity, in Weber's view, is not as precisely defined as sociation. It exists when people have something in common - ideas, beliefs or even kinship. Unlike sociation, communality may be deprived of any material organization. How can we, then, decide that there is a community? By evaluating the chances that, given their state of mind, people will perform a certain type of action or conform to a certain behaviour. Do you avoid calling your friends during television's 'prime time'? If you do, your motivation is that your friends might be disturbed. Your compliance with the television time table, your behaviour, adapted to that of the others, show that you are a member of the communality of the 'prime-timers'.

We do not want to carry on with Durkheim or Weber's categories. These were coined in a universe different from ours where newspapers, advertisements and even cinema were already of paramount importance, but were not given the dignity of 'media'. Weber, who scrutinized carefully the nature of power and the functions of political parties in Economy and Society, did not speak of the press in his book and yet, at the time he was writing it (1911-1913), the circulation of dailies, in Germany, was larger than today and all political groupings had their own press. Practical activities and concepts do not develop at the same pace and the notion of media began to be used well after the launching of most media.³ This does not mean that we do not care about the evolution of the different means of communication: many changes cannot be fully understood without a minimal knowledge of what happened previously. It is even necessary, in some aspects, to go as far back as the early seventeenth century. If the intellectual framework in which Durkheim or Weber conceived of social exchange is inadequate for our research because it does not allow us to raise the question we would like to explore, it is still worth noticing that their models force us to take into account the variety of connections involved in the practice of the media.

There is no immunity against the media. Even people who never read a newspaper and have no television set are surrounded by messages, be it only advertisements stuck on walls, which they cannot ignore. With the whole world being thus a latent public, it is vital for the companies which run magazines or television networks to know how many customers they can reach. Hence, the fortune of specialized organizations which 'measure' the size of actual or potential audiences; measurement attains an impressive degree of sophistication. The system called Computerized Continuous Preference Indication is said to check the behaviour of all the members of a panel and even to test the depth of their participation. Firms have collected a vast amount of data that social scientists might use to evaluate the comportment, inclinations and options of readers or viewers. 'Meaning', that is to say the content of papers or broadcast programmes, is not necessarily involved in this process; we shall try, later, to work out why messages emitted by the media make sense for those who get them, but what we would like to examine, first, is another, much simpler thing: media sell goods (their messages) that people buy directly (a paper, a seat in a cinema) or indirectly (a broadcast programme): how is it possible to account for the various attitudes of the consumers? Journalists are often criticized for delivering false or exaggerated news but we must not forget that they work under the pressure of a permanent demand; the desire for media is relatively stable, it cannot be simply equated with a hunt for information or entertainment. Statistical surveys seem to provide us with exceptionally good material, but we have to verify whether it fits in with our research.⁴ And if it does not, even partially, we must find out how audiences can be best described.

The Media and 'Their' Public

From people to public

Media are directed towards an anonymous entity, the public. David Chaney considers the notion of 'public' to be an example of a fiction,⁵ which does not mean that it is a pure fantasy but that it is mostly characterized by its narrative construction. When we say that the public is the set of people who get their information and opinion from mass media, we set up a fictitious entity, a collective person who buys newspapers or switches on the television, receives news and assimilates it; the narrative sequence explains very well how the readers/listeners get the messages and are influenced by them, but we are not allowed to assert that this very simple process is the dominant one. Things might be rather different if we did not take for granted the inescapable succession of stages such as desire, fulfilment and acceptance. We shall therefore open this chapter by questioning the very notion of public.

The term 'public' itself is a strange word which can be traced back to the sixteenth century; it sounds more or less alike in most Indo-European languages and its spelling has not changed since it was first found in texts. It is a 'fossilized' word all the more open to various interpretations since its form is immutable. It derives from the Latin populus which has also given rise to 'people' (something that the Spanish understand very well for the Spanish word for 'people' is pueblo). The word 'public' begins to be widely used in the eighteenth century and it means 'the people' as opposed to aristocracy. Politics, it was assumed at the time, should no longer be the exclusive concern of a minority, it should be 'publicized' and discussed publicly. The sphere of public life has long been an open space. It has developed in meetings, conversations in the street and debates in pubs. Yet, significantly the word 'public' tends more and more to refer to an unorganized, amorphous body which is merely a nominal plural.

How can we account for that shift in meaning? A possible answer can be found in the development of cheap, easily accessible means of information at the end of the nineteenth century. Significantly, the Daily Mail, the paper with the biggest circulation at the start of the twentieth century, was launched in 1896, the year in which the cinema became a public entertainment. In the same period, education improved dramatically. A huge literate public previously deprived of tradition came into being and it was to cater for this that the popular newspapers were published and films were made. Mass production implied the division of labour in 'public' activities. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century almost everyone could print and circulate hastily made leaflets, whereas since then, the press has become an expensive, highly specialized business. By making sales figures their only preoccupation, the press barons modified the function of papers. They provided their reader with private news and trivial events which, unlike political (= public) facts, could not give way to arguments, thus destroying the close interdependence between the journalists and their customers and transforming an active public into a group of news consumers.

Later, we shall try to determine whether the changes which occurred at the outset of the present century were as radical as is often said. Let us acknowledge, for the moment, that the theories we have just mentioned are important because they stress extremely important modifications. In doing so, they do not explain why a given word has taken on another meaning. David Chaney is perfectly correct when he calls the 'public' a fiction. It is too vague a term and tends to unify a huge variety of behaviours behind a common label. Why do media, instead of speaking of an abstract entity, not talk of their patrons, that is to say, of fairly different people? The fiction is widely accepted, even by those who study the politics of information, and we must therefore understand why it is so convenient: determining how the media imagine their public to be is a preliminary step to our enquiry.

Measuring audiences

Publishers have always noted how many of their books they could sell. Theatre directors have anxiously controlled, night after night, the variations in the size of their audiences. But the notion that what was so carefully observed could be defined as 'our public' came late, when the Treasury, or other financial institutions, were interested in checking how much money had been collected. The best, most reliable figures have been arranged for taxation. The British statistics for television have been exceptionally precise since the 1950s, not because the British are more mathematically oriented than other people but because the licence fee is particularly high in the United Kingdom and because advertisement was authorized earlier here than in most other countries. Sociologists know that fiscal documents have something to tell us about taxation rules, sometimes about the revenue from tax, but do not reflect actual practices, since many people, willingly or not, escape the law. An amusing example concerns French radio; up until 1935, there was a steady increase in the acquisition of radio sets in France but, in 1936, the number fell heavily. It might be tempting to infer from statistics that, the year the Popular Front came to power, France was losing her interest in politics, but there is a much simpler explanation: notably, the licence fee was raised at the beginning of 1936 and many buyers did not give their name; as a result we have no way of correlating the number of potential listeners with the events which stood out in that year.

Statistics, which are first and foremost collections of numbers, are sometimes seen as explanatory since they enable certain phenomena to be understood in the form of simple, indisputable data. All too often, audience surveys infer decisive changes from personal tastes or empirical observations and fail to place individuals in the social settings in which choices are made. To say that the Sun increased its sales after it had been transformed into a tabloid newspaper is an imprecise, arguable statement, whereas to observe that sales jumped from one to three million copies within two years (1970-72) is evaluative and more conclusive. If we go as far as comparing figures relating to different tabloids, we may detect recurrences which reveal habits and then establish a series which could be an explanation for why the newspaper sales increased in Britain, in the 1970s. Statistics which seem to speak for themselves (a trebling is an impressive result) have gradually come to be seen not as useful tools but as facts, as real phenomena which can account for other phenomena. It is tempting to bypass challenging questions by resorting to statistical evidence; peaks in sales can be read as a triumph in reader interest, the number and length of quotations in other media is easily interpreted as favourable reception and if these two series coincide, who would deny that a newspaper has won a popular audience? In fact, we are not allowed to take sales figures as the basis for inferences about popularity. The only possible conclusion is that the clientele has increased but we don't know whether or not they read a newspaper or watch television attentively. There may be more readers or viewers and a lower level of attention. What is more, changes in attitude towards the media are often erratic so that in attributing some significance to an impressive but specific infatuation we are in danger of overrating the importance of statistics and mistaking a passing fancy for a revolution.

The issue at stake, where media are concerned, is money. Newspapers, television and publicity are relentlessly in search of a larger audience.⁶ The field of ratings research, which will determine the distribution of profits, is a controversial one; rivalry between media has generated fanciful methods of evaluation. Yet, despite instruments as sophisticated as the so-called 'people meter' which should indicate who is in front of the television set at any one time and even measures peoples' attention span, the real people behind the statistics are in danger of being neglected. Media are not interested in understanding what readers/viewers feel, they merely need a 'thermometer' for measuring the foreseeable benefits and share them. Theirs is an arithmetical logic which has nothing to do with social practices experienced by concrete agents. The illusion that public opinion might be easily fooled by publicity or propaganda has been long abandoned. The most refined techniques are uniquely used to decide between competitors and are not meant to provide social scientists with objective data.⁷ A humorist has said it is now proven beyond a doubt that smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics. In other words, it is because there is a sharp competition between them that the tobacco industry finds it necessary to take a census of customers. Let us take the statistics for what they are: a financial indicator, a quantification of answers given to precise questions which are not intended to reflect, in any way, audiences' feelings, interests and preferences.

All such arguments about statistics do not imply that they are negligible; on the contrary, they can help us detect hidden trends in the evolution of audiences and make us correct prejudiced opinions. There is, for instance, a feeling that radio listening is an increasingly declining habit particularly among the young. However, statistics suggest that, after a fairly rapid fall in the 1960s when people bought television sets, radio attendance grew slowly and has been surprisingly high since the beginning of the 1980s: listening and viewing coexist very easily at the end of the twentieth century. Is that enough, do statistics point out a 'fact'? Of course not, since the situation is much more complex. If we look at their schedules, we see that both radio and television tend to broadcast the same sort of programmes, namely rap and other kinds of pop music. Statistics signal a tendency. They cannot say more and they do not answer the final question: why? Is it that radio has been borrowing the hits of the small screen to pull an audience in? Is it, on the other hand, that television imitates radio to cut down on expenses? Or, alternatively, is the flow of pop so overwhelming that no section of the media is able to resist it? Statistics do not encompass that kind of query and we will not find a solution unless we look for systematic relationships among diverse aspects of viewers'/listeners' behaviour.

A final point which must not be forgotten is that percentages are weapons used in the competition for easier sales to advertisers. When cable television was launched in the United States, in 1970, its promoters were keen on convincing everybody that most households would be soon equipped; the start was very quick and the companies believed they could project the initial results into the future; they did not cheat on their potential customers but they organized their statistics so as to give the impression of a permanent, irresistible growth whereas a different presentation of the same elements would have anticipated a decrease in growth, which actually occurred after a decade. In that instance, as in many others, statistics were biased because they aimed to demonstrate something.⁸

What, then, is to be done with statistics and percentages? First of all, avoid what is patently obvious: we do not need a detailed statistical survey to guess that those Londoners who attend the Barbican or the National Theatre probably buy the Independent and listen to Radio 4 and it sounds a bit ridiculous to quote statistics to prove that the peak hours for television are from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. or that elderly people spend more time in front of their television screen than do middle-aged people.

A second rule might be that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Audiences
• Chapter 2 Contents
• Chapter 3 Media makers
• Conclusion
• Suggestions for further reading
• Index