After the Media

Culture and Identity in the 21st Century

Peter Bennett, Alex Kendall, Julian McDougall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415586825
• eBook ISBN: 9781136732270
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This provocative text considers the state of media and cultural studies today after the demolition of the traditional media paradigm, and engages with the new, active consumer culture.

Media Studies, particularly within schools, has until recently been concerned with mass media and the effects of 'the media' in society and on people. As new media technology has blurred the boundaries between the audience and the media, the status of this area of education is threatened. Whilst some have called for a drastic re-think (Media Studies 2.0), others have called for caution, arguing that the power dynamics of ownership and gatekeeping are left intact.

This book uses cultural and technological change as a context for a more forensic exploration of the traditional dependence on the idea of 'the media' as one homogenous unit. It suggests that it would be liberating for students, teachers and academics to depart from such a model and shift the focus to people and how they create culture in this contemporary 'mediascape'.

1

POWER AFTER THE MEDIA

The knowledge which is preferred and privileged at any given moment is so simply because influential members of the concerned community have subscribed to it.

(Crowley, 1989: 46)

Elsewhere, we have described three ‘myths for media teachers’, which sum up much that is both questionable and ‘common sense’ about media studies as a subject (McDougall, 2004):

1. During a discussion about whether media studies is a ‘valid’ subject, sceptics concede that ‘the media’ are incredibly important and powerful, and that young people need to be ‘aware’ of it, or be media-literate.

2. Justifying the study of soap opera to a parent, the media teacher explains that the student is never ‘just watching’ Dr Who, that the subject matter may be far more ‘popular’ and ‘accessible’ than, say, a Shakespeare play, but the tools of critical analysis are the same. The parent is amused but seems convinced.

3. In England, the Times Educational Supplement publishes a report on the intention of an exam board to introduce a topic within the A-level Media Studies specification on computer games and the representation of conflict. Various national newspapers follow up this lead, with varying degrees of scepticism as to the academic legitimacy of such analysis. The Independent includes the item in its editorial, suggesting that the power of the gaming industry justifies such classroom attention.

These stories present a subject that feels the need for self-justification, as if, like Kafka’s Josef K, it has been convicted in its absence of an unspecified crime. Unfortunately the subject seeks its validation unwisely. What is patterned across these tales are assumptions about value which form part of a discourse wherein various kinds of power are exercised. In attempting to site itself credibly, media studies almost inevitably finds itself constructed and positioned in a limiting way within this discourse. Where media studies does relate to power, though, is as a form of resistance to the tangible power of ‘the media’, and acquiescently as a unquestioned response to the economic power of the gaming industry, which is required to seek no further validation.

If we are to attempt to reconceptualise media studies ‘after the media’ we must first acknowledge this starting point and its construction by discourses of schooling and formal education rather than by notions of what can be known in the world. Subjects as academic disciplines are produced by contingent cultural practices as forms of identity, knowledge and legitimation. Subject media is a technology and a discourse constructed from and framed by its entire history, and in particular the inherent tensions between its ‘spirit’ (a sort of Barthesian myth constructed by its participant community) and its ‘word’, how it performs itself (being taught, assessed and managed). This discourse is necessarily concerned with the exercise of power both within and beyond its formulations which relate to not only the status of the subject but also its proposed and performed content and its project of emancipation and empowerment of learners.

This chapter represents the first play in a systematic deconstruction of subject media which is the first stage in a reconceptualisation of the media studies ‘project’. We will argue that framed as it is within the patronage of subject English, subject media has become, in the age of the iPads, more and more untenable since its ‘system’ has become irreparably uncoupled from the lifeworld (Habermas, 1984: 153). This is not a matter of embodying significant contradictions, but rather about failing to make these competing discourses a central object of study (Fraser, 1990). This has led progressively to a focus on ‘the media’ which has become less and less convincing, at once both refuge and ambush, poison and cure. Our ‘ounce of civet’, as Peim’s was for an equally ailing and arguably more entrenched subject English, is cultural theory, but this time ingested rather than merely juxtaposed. A central paradox of subject media is that media studies, though informed by poststructuralist theory to a point, in so much as representations are taken seriously as constructions for analysis, is still immersed in a way of thinking about the world wherein ‘the media’ is given agency to send ‘messages’ to ‘the audience’ within the workings of ‘ideology’.

Our address comes from a cultural studies viewpoint, ironically one of the original wellsprings from which media studies would emerge – in the United Kingdom at least. Stuart Hall’s identification of the four distinct components of this intellectual departure remains useful:

• Cultural studies moved away from behaviourist stimulus-response approaches to media influence.

• The notion that media texts are transparent bearers of meaning was rejected in favour of a semiotic approach.

• An active view of audience was taken, looking at varied decodings and the importance of political and social motivation.

• British cultural studies broke with the notion of a monolithic mass culture and mass media.

(as described by Schulman, 1993)

In finally calling time on ‘the notion of a monolithic mass culture and mass media’, we are keen to pursue how, where and by whom power is being exercised ‘after the media’. This takes us partly into the dynamics of an increasingly participatory culture where power and resistance are continually negotiating spaces wherein new dispensations can be formulated. Only by seeing these negotiations in the fullest cultural contexts can we genuinely hope to find space for an emancipatory pedagogy. There is a vertical discourse that needs to be disrupted if the expertise of media studies students is not to add a sharp sting to the taste of their disempowerment by a dominant discourse. Such a discourse requires them to render this expertise in a language ‘other’ to their experiences in a model that is every bit as monologic as that ascribed to the once thought monolithic mass media.

Reissue, repackage, repackage: power and the Industrial Revolution

What haunted us later

was not the cool dispensing

of sacrament

in the burnished doldrums

but something more exotic –

that sense

of a slight shift of cargo

while becalmed

(Pauline Stainer, Sighting the Slave Ship)

The Hellenists taught us that the household in classical Greece was watched over by two deities; Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, at the shadowy, feminine centre of the house; and the outward-looking Hermes, god of the threshold, protector of exchanges and of the men, who monopolised them. Today the television and the computer have replaced the hearth. Hermes has taken Hestia’s place.

(Auge, 2008: viii)

This chapter might well have been titled ‘Industry after the media’ save for the fact that, such has been the speed of industry’s fall from grace as an essential media studies focus, it might have seemed incongruous in our revised list of concerns. This is not to imply that media industries have ceased to exist, though many are reformulating business models or that media ownership is no longer an issue in economic terms. It is rather to register a decisive shift of emphasis for many who see the ‘proper’ focus of media studies as the ways in which media create, negotiate and circulate meanings across a globalised world. In this pragmatic and semantic domain the industrial model has run out of steam. Various kinds of power might still be readily available to the Murdochs and Berlusconis of the post-digital media landscape but the power to make sense of the world on our behalf is nostalgic. This was confirmed in the United Kingdom some few expedient months before the 2010 General Election when Murdoch’s prize UK tabloid, the Sun, declared for David Cameron’s compassionate Conservatives. In 1992 a narrow Conservative victory was widely put down to the Sun’s virulent campaign against Labour leader Neil Kinnock which included the polling day headline ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights.’ This was followed a day later with the equally famous ‘It was the Sun wot won it.’ In 2010 it was a non-event, eclipsed by the rumour that Simon Cowell was going to host the first presidential-style televised debates between party leaders. Throughout the 1980s the Sun was a cause célèbre and liberals worried about the presence of Rupert’s fat fingers in the minds of UK voters. Singer-songwriter Billy Bragg articulated the concerns of the broad Left in the song ‘It says here’:

If this does not reflect your views you should understand

That those who own these papers also own this land.

(Bragg, 1983)

Even to the most diehard Marxist–Leninist this now seems untenable. Murdoch will always be a hate figure but his major current concern is finding feasible ways to drain revenue from on-line content in the form of a paywall. This is not to suggest that hitherto ‘media moguls’ are faced with a choice between finding new revenue streams and strengthening their ideological hold on the free world, or that forms of right-wing corporate dominance have suddenly become meaningless. However, it does imply that their equally important symbolic power is on the wane as their desire to contain and define the news agenda becomes less feasible. Little more than a decade ago a respected commentator like Anthony Giddens was able to make the following statement without compunction:

The media … have a double relation to democracy. On the one hand the emergence of a global information society is a powerful democratising force. Yet, television, and the other media, tend to destroy the very public space of dialogue they open up, through relentless trivializing, and personalizing of political issues. Moreover, the growth of giant multinational media corporations means that unelected business tycoons can hold enormous power.

(Giddens 1999: np)

Little more than ten years later and we find ‘television, and the other media’ in a somewhat bewildered state, trying to keep track of that ‘public space’ that they would once, according to their detractors ‘tend to destroy’. Emily Bell of the Guardian predicted an ‘apocalyptic’ period for mainstream traditional media. ‘We are standing at the brink of what will be two years of carnage for western media. Nobody in my business has got a grip of it yet,’ said Bell. This doesn’t sound like a media capable of destroying anyone save perhaps itself. ‘We are’ said Bell, ‘at the meeting point now of a systematic down turn and a cyclical collapse’ (Oliver, 2008).

Bell went on to predict the demise of perhaps five national newspapers, ‘the regional press heading for complete market failure’ and no commercial UK-owned broadcaster except for the BBC. And all this in the context of having to meet the online need to produce differentiated content amongst what Bell called a ‘hurricane of knowledge and publishing’ caused by the growth of self-publishing online, such as blogging’ (ibid.).

The BBC are an interesting exception here since it can be argued that the changing landscape has made the job of this well-funded public service broadcaster (PSB) significantly easier and its position in the market place significantly more secure. The provision of differentiated content across a range of platforms supported by an unparalleled archive and an active iPlayer makes the public service more transparent somehow. The PSB commitments are almost synonymous with the iPlayer’s categories by which we might search content, despite the elusive nature of the internet viewing service in relation to the licence fee, of course. The blog, meanwhile, is an index of the unforeseen consequences of the digital age, the kink in innumerable fine theories about where we are and where we are going. It is the unwelcome splash of water in the face of the determinist agenda. To the technological determinist Neil Postman, technological change is the driver since each stage of development provokes its own mindset. He famously exemplified this in the following way:

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Why stop there?

To a man with a pencil, everything looks like a list.

To a man with a camera, everything looks like an image.

To a man with a computer, everything looks like data.

(Postman, 1998)

But what about the woman with a broadband connection? This problematic yields immediate clues: To a woman with broadband, everything looks like a social network. It is this shift of intellectual cargo that provides us with things to explore. Whereas all the other models lead to a new point of focus, this shift is of the focus itself. Suddenly this feels like an act of emancipation rather than appropriation, a restoration of something essential. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers, writing on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, detailed our responsibilities in this regard: ‘Philosophic truth sees all human beings as possible others with whom it remains our task to communicate’ (in Myerson, 2003: 146). With technologies able to provide the means, are we simply relearning who we really are?

Certainly for Bell, the sea change is clear and explicit. She talks of ‘the age of representation’, where media organisations offered what they thought readers should know, being brought to an end essentially by the blogosphere. Thus we are entering an ‘age of participation’ where content will be much more audience aware and interactive. The notion of news, for example, as a conversation rather than an exposition, gives some indication of the shift. As early as March 2010 with the release of a nine-minute video to promote Lady Gaga’s single ‘Telephone’ on YouTube (which prompted some 20 million hits), commentators were declaring the effective demise of MTV (with a history lasting from ‘Thriller’ to ‘Telephone’).

Manchester United fans wearing gold and green in semiotic resistance to the corporate workings of their US owners provide a ‘mutation’ in the sense that de Certeau uses it when he talks of active reading; ‘This mutation makes the text habitable, like a rented apartment’ (de Certeau, 1988: xxi). In the corporate world of top-level sport where club owners sell audiences to media corporations, this is beyond frivolity. Discordant messages do not please sponsors – let alone owners – particularly when the messages themselves lack the conciliatory tone we expect from corporate communication. Once fans might have stood around braziers and disrupted programme sales, now they ‘flame’ on websites that ensure that the action is both local and international. This same impulse and organisation put Rage Against the Machine into the UK music charts at Christmas 2009 in order to prevent what had become the obligatory X Factor ‘Christmas number one’. Even US TV’s highest paid performer and X Factor franchise owner Simon Cowell had to concede that ‘the people had spoken’ and the mode of address was both pointed and nihilistic. Not only was the point made specifically by the band’s name, but equally and simultaneously this was a demonstration of raw power. Jon and Tracy Morder conceived of the response as mirth, Tracy pointing out: ‘It was one of those little silly ideas that make you laugh in your own house.’ Ultimately though it went, in Jon’s words ‘stratospheric’, earning Rage Against the Machine a record for downloads in a single week on a song that was not actually ‘released’ or physically available anywhere (accessed at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8423340.stm).

It’s good to talk: the audience speaks back

Struggling for credibility in all this is any notion of a monologic ‘meanings-imposed’ approach. The simple truth is that any text, what Bakhtin would call a ‘living utterance’ – ‘cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue’ (Lillis, 2003: 197). The need to have dialogue not only with but also about texts has been made self-evident ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Power After the Media
• 2 Genre After the Media
• 3 Representation After the Media
• 4 Ideology After the Media
• 5 Identity After the Media
• 6 History After the Media
• 7 Audience after the media
• 8 Narrative after the media: from narrative to reading
• 9 Technology After the Media
• Conclusion
• References
• Index