Listening Beyond the Echoes

Media, Ethics, and Agency in an Uncertain World

Nick Couldry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317256618
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book Nick Couldry, media and cultural theorist from the London School of Economics, asks what are the priorities for media and cultural research today - at a time of the intensified mediation of all fields of social life, threats to democratic legitimacy, and serious instability on the global political stage. The book calls for a "decentered" media research that rejects easy assumptions about media's role in holding societies together and instead looks more critically at the difference media make on the ground to the material conditions of our lives. In what detailed ways do media transform knowledge and agency in daily life? How do media contribute to the culture of democratic politics? And, most difficult of all, how can we live, ethically, with and through media? Couldry's previous work is well known for its breadth, ranging across media sociology, media theory and cultural theory. Here he draws also on political theory and ethics to develop a tightly-argued account of how media and cultural research must now reorient itself if it is to remain relevant and critical. Nick Couldry is Reader in Media, Communications and Culture at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author or editor of five books including Media Rituals: A Critical Approach (Routledge 2003), The Place of Media Power (Routledge 2000) and (coedited with James Curran) Contesting Media Power (Rowman and Littlefield 2003).

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Introduction: Listening Out for Connections

I wanted to make a sociology that will look back and talk back.… [It is] the project of creating a way of seeing, from where we actually live, into the powers, processes, and relations that organize and determine the everyday life context of that seeing.

—Dorothy Smith

In these words, Dorothy Smith, the Canadian feminist sociologist (1987: 8–9), expressed as well as anyone the point of a critical sociology: to look back at, to talk back to, structures of power that are deeply embedded in the contexts and forms of our daily life. But one term is missing, although perhaps implicit: to listen. Listening out for new forms of critical connection is the point of this book.

In introducing an aural metaphor, I do not want to suggest that sound should be privileged over sight, even though the dominance of the visual in Western modernity has often been noted (Levin, 1989). This book’s title is instead an attempt to characterize a way of addressing the density of the contemporary, media-saturated world that does not, necessarily, accept it on its own terms (generally characterized visually). I want in these chapters to develop a way of responding to media saturation that does not look back to the stream of media images and signals, but instead listens out for wider patterns and disruptions.

Grasping the significance of media in the contemporary world is like trying to assess the speed and noise of daily life by standing in the mouth of a motorway tunnel. While there may be other realities a short walk away, none can rival the incessant rush of oncoming traffic for the person standing close by. So too with the daily stream of media: often it seems to be the main reality with which we must engage (cf. Gitlin, 2001), and yet we know that it takes just a short journey to find a site from where we might reflect critically on whether media are the main reality to which we must attend. There is an issue, then, of where we need to stand to get the best vantage point on media’s contributions (good and bad) to contemporary life.

How is the tradition of critical research on media and popular culture in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere placed on this issue? There is no doubting the importance of this tradition, stretching back more than four decades and given various overlapping and contested names (communication research, media studies, cultural studies); without its empirical sensitivity and theoretical sophistication, our understanding of media institutions and representational practices and, more fundamentally, the ways people live with, and around, media would be poor indeed. Yet from the beginning, such research has been on the defensive. Against those academics (still far too many) who would like to block their ears, it has insisted that we must understand how media work and the role they play in people’s lives: ignoring the motorway tunnel is no answer! But the historic success of this strategy since the 1970s in establishing a position within the academy for media and cultural research, even if an embattled one, is no guarantee of its usefulness for the future.

Key to media research’s strategy to date has been a critical focus on the main dimensions of media as product: the media text, the institutions that produce it, and (from the 1980s onward) the audiences that interpret it. Central to the tradition of cultural studies has been the argument that culture and particularly popular culture must be taken seriously as a site of meaning, creativity, agency, and identity. At first glance, it is not obvious why these strategies should change. However, not only are both traditions mature enough now to review where they are heading, but also these are challenging times: times of democratic disengagement, state and corporate lies on a huge scale, increasing poverty even in the most developed countries, and the impoverishment of political discourse by spectacle.

What if now we need to imagine different strategies for media and cultural research, a different formulation of our priorities and purpose? This is the possibility the book explores.

What if, to grasp better how media work with and against particular ways of organizing social and private life, we need to move across the landscape: looking at the buildings and fields beside the motorway as it emerges from the tunnel; walking along the routes connected by the motorway but also, of course, connectable by other routes; noting the byways not linked directly to the motorway system at all—before returning to the sites alongside the tunnel that the motorway displaced? If we are to understand how media work in contemporary societies, we must also know how to walk—slowly, attentively, with our ears open and not blocked—away from the roar of the traffic. That way we may be able to hear different connections—provided, of course, our ears aren’t so worn down that we hear only repetitions of the traffic’s din.

If the resources to tell stories and have others listen to them are, in contemporary societies, highly concentrated and if media institutions benefit from a large proportion of that concentration (undeniable, however interactive media formats become), then the symbolic power (as we might call it) of media institutions is surely a major theme for critical sociology, that is, a sociology that cares about analyzing power.¹ Indeed, a large part of media research over the past half century has addressed aspects of this issue, or at least its consequences for social representations, if often with surprisingly little recognition from mainstream sociology. This book is an attempt—inevitably from the partial perspective of one writer—to review how the elements of that critical strategy now hold together as a model for the future: both a model of future research and, through that, a possible framework for public debate about the differences (good and bad) that media make to the world. This introductory chapter aims to give an advance map of the terrain we cover, while at the same time asking why these questions are so difficult, and why resistance to confronting them should be so great.

False or Missing Trails

The fallacy, sadly, of much postmodern reflection on media from Baudrillard onward, for all its insights, is to mistake the damage media’s incessant messages have done to its hearing for a nuanced understanding of media’s actual workings in the social world. Media work in ways more complex, uneven, and open to challenge than postmodernist theory allows.

Take the example of terrorism. This is a dimension of today’s mediated world that postmodernism appeared to have encompassed in advance (Baudrillard, 1983). But we can see now, particularly after 9/11, which was in part an attack on a city, New York, that represented one of the world’s largest concentrations of symbolic power, how Baudrillard was wrong in his earlier reading of terrorist attacks as “hyperreal events, no longer having any particular contents or aims, but indefinitely refracted by each other” (1983: 41). This misinterpretation stemmed from forgetting that the inequality in the conditions of symbolic production that underlies the mediated surface of world events remains real, not hyperreal, and hence something it is meaningful to contest as such. Postmodernism’s philosophically driven readings of the media’s social consequences are blind to the real unevennesses in how the benefits and costs of media’s particular disposition of symbolic resources differentially affect individuals, groups, classes, countries, and even religions. This is why postmodernism mistakes terrorism for a dispute within the discourse of the sign, when in part it is a contest about the authority of the sign, and about the material conditions of its production (cf. chapter 6).

By contrast, other social thought gives us only a rather blurred tracking of media’s social significance. Take this startling image: “The goal of sociological analysis must now be to discover what freedom, solidarity, and equality might mean in a social situation in which the centre … is empty, and in which the throne room is full of draughts and has been invaded by bands of speculators and paparazzi” (Touraine, 2000: 11).

Here, toward the beginning of his book Can We Live Together? the French sociologist Alain Touraine provokes us to think about the complex ways in which our times are out of joint. The image of the paparazzi in the throne room startles because their presence seems so obviously illegitimate. But who or what are the paparazzi photographing? Is it just the chaos left by a fading political regime? Is it the tired figures of Western democracy’s old ideals that Touraine argues we must move beyond? Or is it the celebrities who, as Touraine’s image at least implies, have been installed in the throne room instead of the old royal family?

This blurring in Touraine’s otherwise brilliant image is perhaps symptomatic of a more general blurring in how social and political thought addresses media: the media are there, their trace caught inevitably in our image of what is happening to the social world, but the figure is blurred. So questions of what exactly media do, and why they matter, go partly unanswered, even unformulated.

If we put postmodernism-influenced sociology to one side, some sociological thought does acknowledge the importance of media and has done so for three decades (Giddens, 1975). But a difficulty—perhaps one reason for the blurring we see in Touraine’s image—is that media span both the most general and the highly particular. Media are, in a sense, everywhere, and yet wherever we look, the substance of media and how they work is highly particular: this image, this news story, this interview. Media are a pervasive, highly regular, reliably structured process for representing the social world both in its particularities and its generality, a process that never stops although it often claims finality and definitiveness for itself. It is extremely difficult therefore to isolate any particular consequence of media—the classic problem of media effects whose implications are discussed in chapters 2 and 3. As a result, it has often been easier to ignore media than to consider how far media compel the rethinking of elements of social analysis.

Sometimes there is a good alibi: the edifice of classical thinking about democracy and ethics evolved well before the full emergence of modern media institutions. Media don’t integrate well into either political theory or ethics because, historically, they were not intended to. As a result, while the consequences of mediated access to the political process should be a central consideration within political theory, they are surprisingly marginal. The absence of media ethics as a reference point in the negotiations of everyday life is also surprising, and perhaps more suspicious. We at least know where to begin in challenging the unauthorized intrusion of a policeman or doctor or social worker into our private lives, but who knows how to challenge media representatives when they seek to intervene in our lives? There is, of course, much generalized popular scepticism, even hostility, toward what media do, for example, in relation to hounded celebrities. But that scepticism is not the same as a developed ethical framework for deciding what citizens in a democracy should do about media. Perhaps this absence has something to do with the influence of media institutions over what is articulated as the contestable issues within everyday life.

And yet the pervasive presence of media raises specific issues for understanding power in relation to politics or ethics that we cannot ignore. In the case of politics, particularly as fears for the health of democratic engagement grow in the United States and the United Kingdom, we must ask What is the contribution of people’s media consumption to their possibilities of being political agents? There is a wider link here to cultural studies’ theme (from Raymond Williams onward) of the search for a common culture and the promise of democracy (explored further in chapters 4 and 5).

In relation to media ethics, problematic cases are easy to come by, even if articulating their wider implications is difficult. A vivid example comes from the film City of God (director Fernando Meirelles, 2002) about conditions in a favela of Rio de Janeiro. The only way out of the favela for any character in the film is when a young man takes photographic images that get used in the Rio newspapers, bringing glamour to the favela’s gang leaders and exposing gangland violence to ultimately corrupt police intervention. In the end nothing is resolved by the circulation of these images, except that the photographer narrator finds a way out of the favela, and so the film’s story comes to be told. But what of the power issues raised by the taking of those images, and what of the ethical implications of this process? The film doesn’t raise them, and they are not easy to formulate—typical, perhaps, of the uncertain area of media ethics. From which standpoint can we offer such a formulation? This is not obvious, and in chapter 7 we will have to do a great deal of work to build even the starting points for a framework of media ethics.

Listening Out

Where to go from here? If media are a problematic object for social science to register—both enormously pervasive and highly particular—then maybe “picturing” media neatly in the social terrain is doomed to failure. We need another way of thinking about how to register media’s social presence. And here perhaps a shift of the sense of perception that dominates our metaphors may help.

If media are something like an environment or “ecology” in contemporary societies (Chaney, 2002: 53),² then we cannot, and should not, separate out the issues of factual analysis from the issues of ethics. Indeed, in thinking about the media environment, analysis and evaluation are inseparable: We study and analyze media from a place within the media environment, so we cannot not care about that environment’s consequences for us and for others.

This sense that what we do as researchers is embedded in the very process we are studying is captured better by aural than by visual metaphors; as John Dewey put it, “vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator” (Dewey, 1946: 219). David Michael Levin (1989) has done much to bring out the distinctive features of the sense of hearing and therefore to suggest its advantages as a source of metaphors for thinking about the social world. Key in his account are the reciprocal, embodied nature of listening, its embeddedness always in an intersubjective space of perception. This captures exactly the point I wish to suggest: that how we deal, as researchers and as individuals, with media is not a remote question, but integral to the quality of contemporary life—hence it embraces all aspects of theory and analysis up to and including ethics.

It is striking that one of the sharpest and oldest questions asked about media’s social consequences was formulated in aural terms. Written in 1936, Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” examines the decline in storytelling and its implications for the “communicability of experience” (1968: 93). Although aspects of Benjamin’s argument have little to do with media (his reflections on the consequences for returning soldiers of the horrors of World War I), part of it remains relevant to and controversial within media research.³ Benjamin suggests that stories have increasingly been replaced with information—facts that come with an explanatory context (or at least the assumption of one) but are at the same time detached from the less definitive presence of the human storyteller: “No event any longer comes to us without already being shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information” (1972: 89).

Benjamin implies that storytelling is more and more detached from the human qualities of the storyteller and therefore that the ethical questions that would automatically arise with a story become increasingly difficult to attach to the social flow of information. If in the early twenty-first century we repeat Benjamin’s question—stories or information?—we surely recognize its salience; most o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Listening Out for Connections
• 1 Media, Social “Order,” Agency
• 2 Decentering Media Research: Social “Order,” Knowledge, and Agency
• 3 Theorizing Media as Practice
• 2 Culture, Agency, Democracy
• 4 The Promise of Cultural Studies
• 5 In The Place of a Common Culture, What?
• 3 Ethics and Media
• 6 Beyond the Televised Endgame?: Reflections After 9/11
• 7 Toward a Global Media Ethics
• Postscript
• References
• Index
• About the Author