The Media Studies Toolkit

Michael Z. Newman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000538229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In this critical primer, Michael Z. Newman introduces newcomers to the key concepts, issues, and vocabulary of media studies.

Across ten chapters, Newman examines topics from text and audience to citizenship and consumerism, drawing on a myriad of examples of media old and new. Film and TV rub shoulders with mobile games and social media, and popular music and video sharing platforms with journalism and search engines. While the book takes a critical, cultural approach, it covers topics that apply across many kinds of media scholarship, bridging the humanities and the social sciences and looking at media as a global phenomenon. It considers media in relation to society and its unequal structures of power, and relates media representations to their conditions of production in media industries and consumption in the everyday lives of audiences and users. Spanning the historical periods of mass media and online participatory culture, it also probes assumptions about media that were formulated in a previous era and looks at how to update our thinking to address an ever-changing digital mediascape.

With its clear and accessible style, this book is tailor-made for undergraduate students of media, communication, and cultural studies, as well as anyone who would like to better understand media.

1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781003007708-1

You already know a lot about media. Anyone who has come of age in the past century in most parts of the world has been exposed to a constant stream of reproduced images and sounds, storytelling, advertising, updates, and diversions – a torrent of information and entertainment. For modern folks like us, knowing about media is like knowing about driving automobiles or eating factory-made foods like canned soup and Doritos. It’s just a normal, unremarkable part of life. But historically, these are all very recent experiences that would have been unfamiliar to our ancestors just a few generations back. We have known only a media-saturated world, though over time it feels like the saturation keeps getting more intense. In our own lifetimes, we have experienced so much media change.

Over the years, media has come to mean many diverse things as new forms of culture and technology have fallen under its umbrella. A hundred years ago, the media business was often called “the press” (after the printing press technology essential to newspaper publishing). Beginning in the 1940s in English-speaking places, cinema, radio, and television, along with print technologies like newspapers and magazines, were coming to be known as “the mass media.” In later times, when dropping “mass” from “mass media,” we lost the connotation of a one-to-many flow of culture from a small number of powerful sources like the broadcast networks and Hollywood studios. But we have retained the idea of many different kinds of published or transmitted culture belonging together in one category: books, shows, stories, songs, films, photos, videos, and games are all media. Of course there is considerable heterogeneity among these different media, but we persist in thinking of them belonging together in one category.

So in the early decades of the 21st century, media covers journalism but also all kinds of popular culture, from movies to mobile apps. It refers to the channels and platforms that bring us content, like Netflix and Facebook, but also to the companies that make the media products we consume, or sell us access to them, like Disney and Comcast. Sometimes it seems as if practically everything is media, as we use our networked digital devices to shop, pay bills and exchange money, work and attend school, socialize, and express ourselves. As media historian Richard Popp (2021, 601) observes, “each generation of ‘new media,’ among other things, has generally meant more things count as media.”

This book is about how we can make sense of this environment of media all around us and use what we already know to go deeper. At its heart is a set of concepts, of words and ideas. These concepts are tools for knowledge. Put together, they make up a toolkit to be employed in understanding media and their significance to our lives and in the world around us. Just as a screwdriver or a pair of pliers each has its purpose, each concept in this book allows you to accomplish a certain kind of task of understanding something better. This kind of understanding is the purpose of media studies, a loosely organized academic field made up of researchers and teachers whose focus is media of many kinds. Media scholars are experts, but not necessarily in making media, though many of us have some experience in media production. Our specialty as scholars is in understanding media, in creating new knowledge about specific media topics, and sharing that knowledge and understanding with others via our writing, speaking, and teaching.

The purpose of this book is to reveal the ways that experts think about media and help you think about media the way we do, using our vocabulary and background assumptions and our informed sense of media’s past and present. In opening up the toolkit, I want to show you how each of the items inside works: how they help us to increase our knowledge about aspects of media by placing them in a meaningful context, and by making connections among ideas and examples. You might have encountered these concepts already, and some of them are similar to terms that come up in contexts other than media studies. But in this book they are explored as tools for use in particular kinds of analysis and interpretation within a field, a community of scholars who share common intellectual perspectives and investments, even as they may also disagree about some things.

Why should we want tools for making sense of media? For starters, media are among the most important ways that we are informed about the world beyond our immediate everyday experience. We live in large and diverse societies, where our fellow citizens number in the millions or the hundreds of millions. Our sense of our place in the world – and of the relationship between ourselves, our communities, and the broader social environment – comes largely via media. We need to know how we take in this information, what kind of information it is, and whose interests are served by its circulation. This helps us function effectively as citizens: as participants in our communities who feel a sense of belonging to them. Thinking critically about the relationship between media, ourselves, and our communities can ultimately make us better at participating in civic life.

Media are also the format and the conduit for much of our cultural life. While human societies once told stories, sang and danced, and participated in religious rituals in ways that we would regard as tech-free, our culture is largely mediated. Understanding media is understanding the whole symbolic universe of modern life. It means grappling with a media culture that plays a key role in shaping our social and political environments. Working toward a world characterized by equity and justice can be accomplished in many spaces. We should demand a media culture that addresses our problems rather than contributes to them, and media studies can help us appreciate these cultural dynamics, and maybe even work toward changing them.

For many people who find themselves in a media studies class, their ambitions also go beyond earning credits toward a diploma or degree – or learning for its own sake – to include working in a media industry, whether on the creative or business side or in some combination. If this describes you, understanding media can be instrumental in helping you become a well-informed and thoughtful, socially responsible producer. The critical and analytical perspectives informed by traditions of media studies research can serve you well by orienting you toward problems in media that should be on the minds of those with the power to do something about them.

Whether this book can help you become a more critical consumer of media or a more critical producer of media or both, the “so what” of it all really comes down to this: media are a crucial force in modern societies that have the power to shape our individual imaginations, our identities, and our sense of the world around us. The more we know and understand about these things, the better off we will all be.

Analytical, Critical, Cultural

Some key terms in this discussion so far have been analytical, critical, and cultural. The tools in this book’s toolkit are meant to be all of these things. To be analytical is to break things down into their parts and appreciate how they fit together. Analyzing media means getting up close, and taking seriously even types of media that might seem trivial or ephemeral. It means wanting to know about how media products are made and how they are used and understood. These processes include the constraints on media production and consumption, the forces that give shape to media. And analyzing means exploring meanings and implications, and making connections between different examples of media and the ways they relate to the social world.

To be critical is not necessarily to be negative. In scholarly circles, a critical perspective typically includes questioning and probing, and digging beneath the surface to discover underlying assumptions. Just as critical thinking means testing the logic and evidence behind different perspectives, a critical approach to media studies casts a skeptical eye and asks, why is this the way it is, and how might it have been different? How can we imagine a media environment other than the one we have come to know?

In academic circles, critical also frequently has another shade of meaning suggesting a political investment. A critical media studies approach would not pretend to be objective in observing media. It would, rather, see the media of modern, Western nations as having important connections to an unequal and unjust social structure characterized by inequality of many kinds on a global scale. To be critical of media is to be critical of this status quo, to look at how media and larger structures are related, and to consider how current arrangements might be challenged.

Not all media scholars take a critical perspective, but no one book can represent every possible point of view. My orientation as a critical media scholar points me toward a perspective that takes media as one key institution within a capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist society. The critical perspective in this book is concerned with media’s role in either maintaining or resisting these forms of inequality and oppression. This isn’t to say that every chapter and every section of every chapter addresses such matters directly. Some topics in media studies are closer to this critical discussion than others, and sometimes politics is an undercurrent rather than being at the surface. But the overall perspective takes media as having political functions within a given society, which only makes sense considering how pervasive and influential media tend to be.

Our third critical term, cultural, is always a challenge to define. The cultural theorist Raymond Williams (1983, 87) famously named it “one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.” To see media as culture is to recognize it as a part of our way of life and our everyday experience. It also means seeing culture as a system of symbolic objects and activities that have shared meaning and purpose within particular communities.

In its anthropological sense, culture is a vast area that includes language and food and religious practice and living arrangements. All media is culture, but not all culture is media. By this way of thinking, culture contrasts with nature and refers to all of the ways human societies construct meaning and organize our lives. It’s our nature to speak a language, but it’s our culture to speak North American English or any other particular language. In a different, more elitist sense, culture can refer to works of art, literature, and performance, practices valued for their beautiful or expressive qualities, and can also extend to “popular” forms like movies and TV, comics, and rock and hip-hop music, hence the term “pop culture.” (What’s elitist here is distinguishing culture proper, which is associated with class privilege, from popular culture, which is defined as being “of the people.”) Thinking of media as culture draws upon both of these senses of the word. Media is deeply ingrained in our way of life, and media is also made up of many different kinds of cultural products that have their own qualities and meanings that we can approach critically and analytically, wherever they fall on a dubious cultural hierarchy.

Culture has one additional connotation in media studies. It relates to a particular school of thought called cultural studies, originally a British movement of the left that became influential in the 1970s and 1980s. For this tradition of media scholarship, separating the notion of culture from the elitist concept was a key move. Another was to recognize that culture is a site of struggle between groups in society, an arena in which the powerful assert their dominance and impose their ways of thinking, but in which less powerful groups can also exercise resistance.

One key contribution of cultural studies was to regard media (and other cultural objects) as part of a circuit that links production and consumption within a social world and its unequal structures. To do cultural studies of media can mean looking at all kinds of media products or experiences as worthy of our critical attention, as significant in playing a role in everyday life, and as potentially political. It can mean looking at media as the product of the social world and also as contributing to its systems of meaning and value.

To see media culture as a circuit, we have to cast aside the simplistic idea that producers create meanings that are transmitted via media to consumers who receive and understand them. This “communication model,” in which a media text’s purpose is to convey information from one party to another, is too simplistic according to a cultural approach to media studies. In place of this linear notion of transmission, the circuit of culture pictures a circle in which producers, texts (media content) and their representations, consumers or users, and the social world are all linked together by lines of influence, and the whole environment matters for creating meaning.

This requires taking into account many different things. As Richard Johnson (1986–1987, 46) describes his formulation of this circuit, “if we are placed at one point” on it, “we do not necessarily see what is happening at others.” But to adequately study a cultural text, argues Paul Du Gay (2013, xxx–xxxi), drawing upon Johnson’s theorizing, we must pass through all of the steps in its circuit. In reference to the example of the Sony Walkman, Du Gay argues that “to study the Walkman culturally one should at least explore how it is represented, what social identities are associated with it, how it is produced and consumed, and what mechanisms regulate its distribution and use” (xxx). Different versions of a circuit of culture might vary in their specifics, but they have in common a notion that conditions of production, consumption, and the social world all matter to the cultural study of media, and that we can better understand each one by thinking of it in relation to at least some of the others. The Media Studies Toolkit shares this basic orientation to the critical analysis of media, which comes from cultural studies.

Surveying the Terrain

Media studies is an unusual kind of field, and a relative newcomer to many colleges and universities. As media have grown and multiplied and become ever more enmeshed in our moment-by-moment existence, scholarly discourse about media has tried to keep pace. There was no field called media studies already established a few decades ago, and the study of media grew wherever hospitable conditions existed. The field as it exists today is the product of its origins in different kinds of fertile environments and its spread on the fringes of other academic disciplines. This can make media studies seem less cohesive than some academic areas of study, or more like a set of different clusters rather than one unified field. One introductory book cannot be representative of every approach to a sprawling topic like media, but I have tried in the Toolkit to present concepts that are widely shared and relevant to many kinds of topics.

One tradition of media studies, which is the one I come from, began in the humanities as an offshoot of English literature. (I was an English major as an undergraduate and earned a PhD in Communication Arts with a Film Studies concentration, and now I teach in an English department.) First film and later TV studies grew out of literature research, applying many of the concepts of textual interpretation and analysis to audiovisual media. Popular music and game studies have some things in common with this tradition as well, though these pursuits are also connected to other disciplines like musicology or anthropology. Humanities approaches to studying media often overlap with qualitative studies in the social sciences, and scholars from these different traditions can coexist within a department and draw on common theories and assumptions about media. But within the humanities tradition, it is more common to regard media as artistic forms of expression and to center authors, texts, genres, and representations in analysis, though this hardly accounts for all kinds of inquiry in this tradition.

Another strain of media studies, more distant from my own experience, began in the social sciences and has often been known as “mass communication” research. Journalism, public opinion, media effects, and other aspects of mass media have often been studied in settings that draw upon traditions in psychology, sociology, political science, and related areas. Whereas humanities research tends to be textual and interpretive, mass communication research follows a more objective approach in adherence with the scientific method. Whereas humanists might speak of doing readings of their objects of research, social scientists might speak of collecting and analyzing data about them. Actually both groups do both kinds of activities, but they surely differ in their worldviews and orientations toward their topics of study, and the way they formulate questions about them.

Both of these kinds of media studies grew as students wanted to take courses in media topics like journalism, advertising, public relations, and film and video production. They also grew as scholars in many disciplines wanted to understand more about media. As a new and hybrid field, media studies incorporated many ideas and approaches from other parts of the scholarly world. This book contains insights and concepts from an array of disciplines, including English/literary studies, communication, history, sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, economics, and philosophy, as well as science and technology studies, gender and ethnic studies, and law. Media studies poaches concepts, blending them opportunistically. Different kinds of research borrow different kinds of ideas. It follows that media is not so much a discipline defined by the marriage of a subject and method as it is a broad topic to be approached by varied methods as they suit the agenda of the researcher. This book aims to be useful across these differing approaches by focusing on concepts that inform many kinds of media research. This book covers journalism and entertainment, old and new media, traditional one-to-many broadcasting and networked digital platforms. It aims to show that the tools in the toolkit can be useful across these distinctions.

Scholars, like any people organized into groups defined by their shared identities, sometimes draw boundaries aroun...