The Transformation of the Media

Globalisation, Morality and Ethics

Nicholas Stevenson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317887294
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: History

The changing pattern of contemporary media is one of the most striking and important transformations of our age. This major new work seeks to understand the implications of a series of mediated processes in relation to public cultures and modern identities. In The Transformation of the Media the author leads the reader through a number of complex theoretical issues, connecting the nature of modern communication to the affects this has on our common moral and ethical lives. Most significantly, he argues that a number of perspectives as diverse as Marxism, post-modernism, liberalism, communitarianism and technological determinism can all be found wanting in this regard.

The Transformation of the Media attempts to situate the media, and more theoretical concerns, within a broad sociological framework. The volume adds to our shared understanding of the media's relation to contemporary cultural transformations including globalisation, the development of informational capitalism, the changing nature of the public sphere and the impact of new social movements. More specifically, through a discussion of the 'new media order' and the Rwandan genocide a critical prism is held up to existing debates concerning the globalisation of the media.

Key features:

• an extremely topical and accessible analysis of the media's implications for
• contemporary cultural transformations
• combines a theoretical and empirical approach
• presents complex theoretical ideas in an accessible way

This book will be essential reading for students studying globalisation, the global media, new media technology, identity and cultural development in cultural studies, media studies, and sociology and politics courses.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

The transformation of the media at the end of the twentieth century is one of the most important social changes currently facing advanced industrial and indeed global societies. These changes, as this book will make clear, have economic, political and cultural implications for our shared world. Our culture is more profoundly mediated than any other that has existed within human history. From the reporting of the sex lives of politicians to the tragic consequences of war and famine, the spatial flows of the media put us in touch with the lives of people we have never met, while stretching the outlines of our community. If we compare our ‘common’ world to those that lived at the end of the nineteenth century then one of the major differences we could point towards would be the genuinely mass development of public systems of communication. It is indeed hard to imagine what our lives would be like without the mass media. News from the world’s four corners taking months rather than seconds to arrive, politicians escaping the visible public scrutiny of the cameras and no cinemas to visit with our friends and family. The mass media, in one shape or form, have become part of the rituals of everyday life. Yet as we come to the century’s close these shared networks of communication are arguably undergoing a change as deep seated as the initial provision of mass television. The emergence of new technologies in respect of digital television, video recorders, the internet and a host of other features are reshaping our shared cultural landscape. Yet what is the ‘real’ significance of these changes? Do they necessarily make us a more communicative society? How do these elements bear upon the current times in which we live? It is these sorts of questions that this book seeks to map out through a range of issues and concerns.

The media: capital, nation and the public

In seeking to understand the structures and discourses that shaped the media during the twentieth century we need to investigate the interconnections between capitalism, the nation-state and notions of the public. While the specific interrelations between these concepts have impacted differently depending upon particular histories and societies it is possible to uncover a more general story. These overlapping dimensions have defined the outline of media cultures for much of the preceding century and will continue to have an important bearing upon the next. However, as we shall see throughout this book, the theoretical and practical complexity of the media has been added to by processes of globalisation and more ‘uncertain’ political frames of reference.

Capitalism during the twentieth century ushered in a mass culture that was based upon standardisation, commodification and conformity. Media industries were invested in in order to gain profits irrespective of questions of value. The mass culture of capitalism then was built upon the order of tried and tested packages which were deeply suspicious of cultural innovation and avant-guardist forms of experimentation. The fear that dominated this particular era was that dominant cultural producers (read the United States) would both push minority cultures to the margins while diminishing more literary and educated sensibilities. Recent transformations however have begun to ask questions of this particular narrative. The age of informational capitalism has meant that advertising, magazines and television programmes have become more explicitly targeted in terms of certain lifestyle niches. This has meant that capitalism is becoming less associated with a culture of mass conformity than with the catering of products to meet the preferences of explicit population groupings. Increasingly television programmes, advertisements, magazines and films are produced with the cultural make up of a particular audience segment in mind. Further, this inevitably creates a situation where commercial media cultures are increasingly orientated around the requirements of social groups who are in full-time employment. For example, the recent development of satellite broadcasting and pay TV can be seen in these terms. In the British context the dominance of Sky TV over certain sporting events (most importantly premiership football) has created a situation whereby access to viewing televised soccer is increasingly determined by ability to pay. We could also point towards the expansion of cable services and the internet and argue that, in addition to more explicitly targeted media cultures, ‘informational’ capitalism is also creating an increasing divide between the technological rich and the technological poor. This is not to argue however that the mass culture thesis has been completely displaced by a more information segmented culture. One only has to point towards Hollywood’s current reworking of popular television serials from the 1960s and the 1970s (The Avengers and Lost in Space have both been released this summer) to argue that it continues to rely upon previously established genres and taste communities. Here my argument is not so much that we are entering into what Poster (1995) has called a second media age, but that mass forms of culture continue to work within so-called post-modern processes of fragmentation and differentiation.

Since the advent of the printing press the idea of the nation has been a relatively permanent feature within the popular imagination. The development of the press and television have all been specifically ‘national’ in focus, ownership and control. Many television programmes, films and newspapers took the idea of a recognisable national identity for granted while symbolically contributing to its construction. The national ‘we’ is discursively present in the vast majority of the media that we consume on a daily basis. The content of the media of mass communication continues to provide a rough and ready guide as to whether the nation is defined in civic or ethnic terms. Media cultures therefore have been central in helping define the limits of the community. However, two major changes are discernible at this conjuncture. First, the media, as we shall see, are increasingly owned and controlled by large-scale trans-national concerns that only maintain the most minimal of ties to specifically national cultures. These communications conglomerates that are based upon product differentiation and the power of distribution networks are genuinely global institutions in that they sell their products the world over. This has meant that the main agent of governance in terms of communications is no longer the state but the market. The determination of our communicative futures therefore will be driven by the needs of capital rather than the state. Secondly, the transgressing of national boundaries by symbolic goods and peoples has given national cultures a more cosmopolitan orientation. Modern citizens are increasingly used to living in shared cultural environments that are composed of different ethnicities and regularly keep them up to date with developments in different corners of the globe. Arguably then, if the communications media at the beginning of the century were specifically national, at the end they have a more hybrid and global orientation. At this point however my analysis differs sharply from many of the others currently on offer in that I argue that while the nation-state has lost much of its power it is still in a position to maintain its influence. Here I argue that notions of community remain more than contingently tied to ideas of nationhood, and that states still have the ability to shape the communicative identities of their citizens. These arguments press the importance of obligations over rights and of the interconnection between state and civil society more generally.

Finally, the role of the media in the shaping of the public sphere as opposed to commercial and national cultures is an important one. Whereas commercial cultures are concerned with economic exchange, national cultures with common forms of identity and belonging, notions of the public are intimately connected to democratic will formation. That is they depend less upon a structurally determined identity and more on our shared capacity to be able to participate within public debates. This inevitably, as we shall see, opens questions of a moral and ethical nature. In other words, while notions of the public grew up with capitalism and the nation, they remain analytically separable. Ideas of the public meant that the media had an obligation to provide information that would embarrass nation-states, blow the whistle on the exploits of capital and allow a diverse community critically to debate the important issues of the day. If capitalism defined the people as consumers, the state as a nation or nation’s, then notions of the public took them to be citizens with rights and responsibilities. Critical notions of the public have served to make citizens aware when their common cultures were racist or sexist, when certain broadly accepted viewpoints served powerful interest groups, or when the well-polished spin of political or scientific experts were interrupted in the interests of a broader community. Yet while the public might have been ‘comfortably’ identified with the nation for much of this century this is no longer the case. The public sphere is a spatially differentiated concept that works at the level of the local, national and the global. Hence public discussion of ecological issues can involve the school magazine, the national press and CNN news all at once. The media spirals of dialogue, discussion and outrage in an age of instantaneous communication also open out new temporal dimensions and less formally rationalistic perspectives. The cacophony of noise that can greet genuinely ‘global events’ like the impeachment of an American president or the reporting of a genocide moves us beyond spatially stable notions of the public sphere.

The more global orientation of the media also involves us in moral and ethical questions far removed from the communities we physically inhabit. Documentaries that present us with pictures of human suffering insistently ask us amongst other questions ‘what should we do’? In addition, the gaze of the media has changed the balance between public and private life opening out the intimate dimensions of many people’s lives about whom we know little personally. This then poses new questions in terms of what the limits of legitimate public reflection should be, why certain ‘events’ rather than Others appear on our screen, and what a fully ‘inclusive’ public dialogue would look like? These questions and others form the ‘heart’ of the book in that they open out a number of complex moral and ethical questions posed by new media environments. However, to be clear, the debates do not so much resolve these and other questions, but open them out for wider forms of reflection, while suggesting some of the paths that we might fruitfully take.

Undoubtedly the account given above in respect of changing media cultures is Eurocentric. The narrative however continues to have a resonance inside North American and Western European societies marginalising other more differentiated histories and trajectories. Globalisation, if it has taught us anything, has asked us to think again about projecting our own backyards onto the rest of the world. In this respect, I attempt, partially at least, to deconstruct this way of thinking while recognising that it is a tradition that many of us with good reason continue to follow. For some I will have gone too far in this process, while for others I will not have gone far enough. In other words, what is contained in the following pages is an attempt to defend a pluralist public realm that may find a foothold in a variety of cultural settings. This book then is written at a particular point in the study of mass communications where old paradigms are breaking down and newer ones are just beginning to emerge into the light. Yet my overwhelming concern is not so much to map out the ‘empirical’ changes evident within mass forms of communication, but to ask what they mean for genuinely moral and ethical dimensions of thinking.

In this respect, the volume opens by considering whether a case can still be made for a critical public sphere through the writing of Raymond Williams and Jurgen Habermas. Here I point to the similarities and differences between these two writers when it comes to considering questions of a moral and ethical nature in terms of the media, while pointing to some of their limitations in this respect. Of key importance here is their mutual concentration upon an ethics of dialogue that needs to be rejoined with one of responsibility. In the next chapter, I argue that to be concerned with moral and ethical questions in a global media age opens up questions of justice, recognition and notions of meaningfulness in respect of contemporary media cultures. The aim here is to develop a set of moral and political criteria that takes the debate beyond earlier questions of bias in media reporting and the more contemporary stress on the fragmentation of identity fostered by post-modern accounts. These dimensions I argue are likely to become more rather than less important as the media become increasingly central to the definition of social and political life. Following on, the third chapter opens out current debates around cosmopolitanism and nationalism, policy and citizenship, and obligations and rights in respect of the working of contemporary media cultures. My argumentative strategy here is that critical questions regarding morality and ethics can no longer be contained solely within questions related to the public sphere, but must engage with a wider range of discourses and debates. These concerns enable us to formulate the concept of ‘cultural citizenship’ and thereby discuss processes of inclusion as well as exclusion from the cultural sphere. The fourth chapter centrally addresses the question as to how we might understand issues related to the media and globalisation in terms of a set of debates in media studies that stem from the 1960s. Here I juxtapose debates in respect of media imperialism and McLuhan’s notions of the global village with more contemporary concerns in respect of post-colonialism, the risk society and the ‘new’ political economy of media. This neatly links into my case study about the reporting of the 1994 Rwandan genocide by both local and global media. The specific example of the political history and global position of a small African nation is used as a foil to throw light upon some of the current claims being made by both academics and media entrepreneurs alike in respect of the so-called new global media age. Finally, the last chapter considers the claims made by those who argue that the global media needs to be reformulated through the acceptance of a human rights agenda, while simultaneously considering the polarities involved in assessing the argument that a more participatory media culture is likely to be ushered in by new technologies. This section looks critically at the prospects for a more engaged and participatory public sphere emerging in the age of ‘informational’ capitalism. These considerations then set the scene for some ‘minimal’ policy recommendations in respect of contemporary media cultures.

Overall then this book is meant to contribute to both a critical theory of the media and open out new possibilities in terms of morality and ethics more generally. Whether I succeed in either of these ventures is not for me to judge.

Media and cultural studies today

Finally I would like to say something of where this text fits into the tradition of media and cultural studies as a whole. There has been much talk recently of certain absences and retreats within media and cultural studies. A point made by writers as different as Edward Said (1993) and Richard Rorty (1998) has concerned cultural studies’ neglect of political economy and practical political questions in the public sphere. Here a picture is painted of university courses being excessively concerned with ‘theory’ at the cost of an engagement with certain more gritty realities. Whereas Said points to the academies’ silence or acquiescence on issues concerning the continuation of American imperial power, most notably evident in the Gulf War, Rorty is more concerned that identity politics has come to replace a concern with class and economic divisions within America. We might add to this, in my own context, by pointing that much of the talk that goes on within cultural studies under the rubric of globalisation is bland and forecloses important political questions. Of these issues more later; for now my own argument is both sympathetic to these projections while pointing to different absences. Questions of political economy and the public sphere, as should already be obvious, are central to the issues opened out by this volume. Yet while there is much to agree with in terms of Said’s and Rorty’s respective claims they are at least currently finding a more receptive climate.¹

My concern, as I have already indicated, maps on to these issues and yet has a slightly different trajectory. This is that media and cultural studies has an at best uneasy relationship with issues that are moral, ethical and ‘political’ in nature. I think that some of the reasons for this are evident if we consider for a moment the history of cultural and media studies in the British context. Here I want to look at the figures of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson who were arguably two of the most important intellectuals on the British New Left, and major theorists of the first wave of post-war British cultural studies. Both of these writers combined a moral and political agenda that linked the study of class and culture to the need for a socialist society. While both Williams and Thompson sought to defend a romantic literary tradition that linked a range of writers from Morris to Blake, they inhabited a certain moralism when it came to the understanding of commercial forms of popular culture. To writers in the second generation of cultural studies trained in semiotics, discourse analysis and structuralism this neglected to analyse the specific ideologies, pleasures and subjectivities mobilised by popular material cultures. This neglect was taken not only to be elitist, but also lacked any appreciation of the complex and contradictory nature of much of contemporary popular culture. My argument here is not that such views are wholly mistaken, but that the critique is simultaneously accurate and somewhat overdone.²

For Williams and Thompson the achievement of a ‘socialist’ society would lead to a more complex and participatory civil society and more concerted forms of engagement with educated culture. These connections, as are my own, are the product of certain times and places. Since their time we have witnessed the collapse of state socialism, the globalisation of the media and the flows of capital, the opening up of ecological questions, more fluid gender identities, the rebirth of ethnic nationalism and the diminishing power of the state amongst other frames. This is reason enough not to start ‘lifting’ cultural agendas from earlier waves of theorising. Yet both Williams and Thompson were concerned to link questions of political economy, the public sphere and progressive political agendas in a way that was mostly absent from the second wave of cultural theorising. Arguably in the critique of their moralism we also discarded questions of a moral and ethical nature. Where perhaps I differ from both generations of cultural theorising is in both wanting to preserve the nature of these concerns while adding a deeper uncertainty and ambivalence in terms of the ‘answers’ that it leaves us with. One of the reasons why it seems so short-sighted to ignore the moral and ethical dimensions of media cultures is that in an increasingly mediated world this is precisely the domain where they are most likely to be raised publicly. Yet while wanting to open questions that are concerned with morality and ethics I am perhaps less certain as to how these dimensions might be decided, theorised and acted upon. Arguably then my concerns are not properly addressed by either of the two generations of cultural studies in that such issues open out the importance of an active civic culture that has given up the politics of certitude.

Such a view steers a critical path between the more certain moral and political universe inhabited by Williams and Thompson and the absence of moral and ethical terms in much contemporary theorising. In this respect, I am indebted to both Jurgen Habermas and Zygmunt Bauman for clearly demonstrating the continued purchase of such questions. While I am critical of their writing in many respects, I think that both writers open out a sustained concern with moral and ethical matters while pointing to the undoubted political nature of such questions. Both Habermas and Bauman, in their different ways, have sought to maintain an understanding of the ‘harder’ features of modernity from the colonising imperatives of capital to the dangers of bureaucratic forms of reason, while linking them to the rise of a more thoroughly mediated social world. This does not so much point to the ‘impossibility’ of moral and ethical dimensions, but their renewed urgency in a world that since the collapse of the Cold War is defined by more ‘uncertain’ political parameters. What Milan Kundera (1994) has termed the ‘lightness of being’ speaks as much of a shared human ontology as it does the current contours of post-traditional societies. That our shared moral and ethical futures depend as much upon the continuing structural coordinates of modernity, more uncertain post-modern frames and the ways in which we choose to act in a mediated world encompasses much of what I am trying to say.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Media, morality and modernity
• 3 Global media and technological change: social justice, recognition and the meaningfulness of everyday life
• 4 Cultural citizenship
• 5 Global media cultures: contours in village life or cultural imperialist dominance?
• 6 Post-colonialism and mediated violence: Rwanda, genocide and global media cultures
• 7 The future of public media cultures: questions of critique and ambivalence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index