Why Study the Media?

Roger Silverstone

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780761964544, 9780761964537
• eBook ISBN: 9781446236437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"It?s easy to be snobbish about media culture; the great merit of Roger Silverstone?s book is to make the reader understand just how important that culture is."
- Richard Sennett, New York University

"A remarkable book which argues for a new paradigm for the study of the media."
- Daniel Dayan, Centre National de la Recherche

"A persuasive and sophisticated discussion of the role of the media in modern life at the threshold of the twenty-first century."
- Ellen Seiter, University of California

"A very important book, one that moves media theory and argument on at long last. This is an attempt to get people to think differently about the media - not just when they are writing essays, but also when they are arguing about media in everyday life."
- Simon Frith, University of Stirling

The centrality of the media, all media, to human experience - from the conduct of everyday life, to the exercise of power, to the creation of culture - is inescapable. We live in an intensely mediated world.

Yet the academic study of the media has rarely made its own insights accessible and relevant to those outside its own limited sphere. Indeed it is constantly under attack for its lack of rigour, apparent failure to address the needs of industry and its inability to tell us anything substantive about the world in which we live.

Written as a manifesto and in order to set a new intellectual agenda, Why Study the Media? argues for the importance of the media in our culture and society and the consequent necessity of taking the media seriously as an object of enlightened but rigorous investigation.

At once human and humane, Why Study the Media? will be welcomed by all those in search of new ways of thinking about our mediated world.

1 The texture of experience

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Jerry Springer’s day-time talk show, 22 December 1998. Repeated for the nth time on the satellite channel, UK Living. He talks to men who work as women. Two rows of transvestite and transsexual men discuss their lives, their relationships and their work. They are baited by the television audience. They are asked questions about having children. A couple exchange rings: ‘After all, we’ve not done it before and it is national television.’ Jerry wraps up with a homily on the normality and lack of seriousness of such behaviour, reminding his audience of Milton Berle and Some Like it Hot, of performances in a more innocent age in which drag was not seen as some kind of perversion.

A moment of television. Exploiting but also exploitable. A moment easily forgotten, a sub-atomic particle, a pin-prick in media space, but now, if only here on this page, noticed, noted, felt, fixed. A moment of television which was local (all the characters worked in a theme restaurant in Los Angeles), national (it was originally transmitted in the US) and global (it’s over here). A moment of television scratching at the surface of suburban sensibility, touching margins, touching base.

A moment of television which will, however, serve perfectly. It represents the ordinary and the continuous. It is, in its uniqueness, entirely typical. It is an element in the constant media mastication of everyday culture, its meanings dependent on whether we indeed do notice, whether it touches us, shocks, repels or engages us, as we flick in and out and across our increasingly insistent and intense media environment. It offers itself to the passing viewer and to the advertisers who claim his or her attention, increasingly desperately perhaps. And it offers itself to me as the starting-point of an attempt to answer the question – why study the media? It does this contrarily, of course, but also quite naturally, because it raises so many questions, questions that cannot be ignored, questions that emerge from the simple recognition that our media are ubiquitous, that they are daily, that they are an essential dimension of contemporary experience. We cannot evade media presence, media representation. We have come to depend on our media, both printed and electronic, for pleasures and information, for comfort and security, for some sense of the continuities of experience, and from time to time also for the intensities of experience. The funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales is a case in point.

I can note the hours spent by the global citizen in front of the television, alongside the radio, flicking through newspapers and, increasingly, surfing the Internet. I can note, too, how those figures vary globally from North to South and within nations, according to material and symbolic resources. I can note quantities: the global sales of software, variations in cinema attendance and video rental, the personal ownership of desktop computers. I can reflect on patterns of change and possibly, if foolhardy enough, hazard projections about future trends of consumption. But in doing all or any of these things I am skating across the surface of media culture, a surface which is often sufficient enough for those who are concerned to sell, but which is clearly insufficient if we are interested in what media do, as well as what we do with media. And it is insufficient if we wish to grasp the intensity and insistence of our lives with our media. For that we have to turn quantity into quality.

I want to argue that it is because the media are central to our everyday lives that we must study them. Study them as social and cultural as well as political and economic dimensions of the modern world. Study them in their ubiquity and complexity. Study them as contributors to our variable capacity to make sense of the world, to make and share its meanings. I want to argue that we should study the media, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, as part of the ‘general texture of experience’, a phrase which touches the grounded nature of life in the world, those aspects of experience which we take for granted and which must survive if we are to live and to communicate with each other. Sociologists have long been concerned with the nature and quality of such a dimension of social life, in its possibility and in its continuity. Historians too, at least in Berlin’s view, cannot escape their dependence upon it, for their work, like all those in the human sciences, in turn depends on their capacity to reflect upon and understand the other.

The media now are part of the general texture of experience. If we were to include language as a medium, this would ever be so, and we might wish to consider the continuities of speech, writing, print and audiovisual representation as indicative of the kind of answers to the question I am seeking; that without attention to the forms and contents, to the possibilities, of communication, both within and against the taken-for-granted in our everyday lives, we will fail to understand those lives. Period.

Berlin’s characterization, of course, is principally a methodological one. The why necessarily involves the how. History is to be a humane undertaking, not scientific in its search for laws, generalizations or theoretical closure, but an activity premised on the recognition of difference and specificity and a realization that the affairs of men (how tragically gendered is the liberal imagination!) require a sort of understanding and explanation somewhat removed from Kantian and Cartesian injunctions for pure rationality and reason. My claim for the study of the media will be thus, and I will also return from time to time to its methods.

Berlin also talks of the appropriate kind of explanation being related to moral and aesthetic analysis:

in so far as it presupposes conceiving of human beings not merely as organisms in space, the regularities of whose behaviour can be described and locked in labour saving formulae, but as active beings, pursuing ends, shaping their own and others’ lives, feeling, reflecting, imagining, creating, in constant interaction and intercommunication with other human beings; in short engaged in all the forms of experience that we understand because we share them, and do not view them purely as external observers. (Berlin, 1997: 48)

His reliance on a sense of our shared humanity is touching, and is at odds, perhaps, with contemporary received wisdom, but without it we are lost and without it the study of the media becomes an impossibility. This, too, will inform my analysis and I will return to it.

There are other metaphors in the attempts to grasp the media’s role in contemporary culture. We have thought of them as conduits, offering more or less undisturbed routes from message to mind; we can think of them as languages, providing texts and representations for interpretation; or we can approach them as environments, enfolding us in the intensity of a media culture, cloying, containing and challenging in turn. Marshall McLuhan sees media as extensions of man, as prostheses, enhancing both power and reach, but perhaps, and maybe he saw this, both disabling as well as enabling us as we, both media’s subjects and objects, become progressively entwined in the prophylactically social.

Indeed we could think of the media as prophylactically social in so far as they have become substitutes for the ordinary uncertainties of everyday interaction, endlessly and insidiously generating the as-ifs of everyday life and increasingly creating defences against the intrusions of the unwelcome or the unmanageable. Much of our public concern about media effects is focused on this aspect of what we see and fear in, especially, the new media: that they will come to displace ordinary sociability and that we are breeding, mostly through our male children, and most especially through our male working-class and black children (still the locus of most of our moral panics), a race of screen junkies. Marshall McLuhan (1964) does not go so far despite his ambivalence. On the contrary. Yet his vision of cyborg culture predates Donna Haraway’s (1985) by some 20 years.

These metaphors are useful. Indeed without them we are condemned to look at our media as if through a glass darkly. But like all metaphors the light they throw is partial and ephemeral, and we need to go beyond them. My purpose is to do just that. The answer to my question will involve tracing media through the ways in which they participate in contemporary social and cultural life. It will involve an examination of media as process, as a thing doing and a thing done, and as a thing doing and a thing done at all levels, wherever human beings congregate both in real and in virtual space, where they communicate, where they seek to persuade, inform, entertain, educate, where they seek in a multitude of ways, and with varying degrees of success, to connect one to the other.

To understand media as process, and to recognize that the process is fundamentally and eternally social, is to insist on the media as historically specific. Media are changing, have changed, radically. Our century has seen the telephone, film, radio, television become both objects of mass consumption and essential tools for the conduct of everyday life. We are now confronted with the spectre of a further intensification of media culture, through the global growth of the Internet and the promise (some might say the threat) of an interactive world in which nothing and no one cannot be accessed, instantly.

To understand media as process also involves a recognition that the process is fundamentally political or perhaps, more strictly, politically economic. The meanings that are offered and made through the various communications that flood our everyday lives have emerged from institutions increasingly global in their reach and in their sensitivities and insensitivities. Barely oppressed by the historic weight of two centuries of advancing capitalism and increasingly dismissive of the traditional power of nation states, they have established a platform for, it has to be accepted, mass communication. This is, despite its increasing diversity and flexibility, still its dominant form. It constrains and intrudes upon local cultures even if it does not overpower them.

Movements among the dominating institutions of global media are tectonic in scale: gradual cultural erosion and then sudden seismic shifts as multinationals emerge like new mountain ranges from the sea, while others sink and, like Atlantis, are only remembered mythically as once perhaps passably and relatively benevolent. The power of these institutions, the power to control the productive and distributive dimensions of contemporary media, and the correlative and progressive weakening of national governments to control the flow of words, images and data within their national borders, is profoundly significant and unarguable. It is a central feature of contemporary media culture.

Much contemporary debate draws on a sense of the speed of these various changes and developments, but mistakes the speed of technological change, or indeed of commodity change, for the speed of social and cultural change. There is a constant tension between the technological, the industrial and the social, a tension that must be addressed if we are to recognize media as indeed a process of mediation. For there are few direct lines of cause and effect in the study of the media. Institutions do not make meanings. They offer them. Institutions do not change evenly. They have different life-cycles and different histories.

But then we are confronted by another question, and then another and another. Who mediates the media? And how? And with what consequences? How might we understand media as both content and form, visibly kaleidoscopic, invisibly ideological? How do we assess the ways in which the struggles over and within the media are played out: struggles over the ownership and control of both institutions and meanings; struggles over access and participation; struggles over representation; struggles which inform and affect our sense of each other, our sense of ourselves?

We study the media because we want answers to these questions, answers that we know cannot be conclusive, and indeed must not be conclusive. Attractive though it may be, and often superficially persuasive, there is no single theory of the media to be had. Indeed, it would be a terrible mistake to try to find one. A political mistake, an intellectual mistake, a moral mistake. Yet at the same time our concern with the media is always at the same time a concern for the media. We want to apply what we have come to understand, to engage with those who might be in a position to respond, to encourage reflexivity and responsibility. The study of the media must be a relevant as well as a humane science.

My answers, then, to my own question will be premised on a sense of these complexities, complexities that are at once substantive, methodological and, in the broadest sense, moral. I am dealing, after all, with human beings and their communications, with language and speech, with the saying and the said, with recognition and misrecognition and with media as technical and political interventions in the processes of making sense.

Hence the starting-point. Experience. Mine and yours. And its ordinariness.

Research in the media has often preferred the significant, the event, the crisis, as the basis for its enquiry. We have looked at disturbing images of violence or sexual exploitation and tried to measure their effects. We have focused on key media events, like the Gulf War or disasters, both natural and man-made, to explicate the media’s role in the management of reality or the exercise of power. We have focused too on the great public ceremonials of our age to explore their role in the creation of national community. There is a point to all of this, since we have known since Freud how much investigation of the pathological, or even the exaggerated, reveals about the normal. Yet continuous attention to the exceptional provokes inevitable misreadings. For the media are, if nothing else, daily. They are a constant presence in our everyday lives, as we switch in and out, on and off, from one media space, one media connection, to another. From radio, to newspaper, to telephone. From television, to hi-fi, to Internet. In public and in private, alone and with others.

It is in the mundane world that the media operate most significantly. They filter and frame everyday realities, through their singular and multiple representations, providing touchstones, references, for the conduct of everyday life, for the production and maintenance of common sense. And it is here, in what passes for common sense, that we have to ground the study of the media. To be able to think that the life we lead is an ongoing accomplishment, requiring our active participation, albeit so often in circumstances over which we have little or no choice, and in which the best we can do is merely to make do. The media have given us the words to speak, and ideas to utter, not as some disembodied force operating against us as we go about our daily business, but as part of a reality in which we participate, in which we share, and which we sustain on a daily basis through our daily talk, our daily interactions.

Common sense, of course neither singular nor undisputed, is where we must begin. Common sense, both the expression of, and the precondition for, experience. Common sense, shared or at least shareable and the often invisible measure of most things. The media depend on common sense. They reproduce it, appeal to it but also exploit and misrepresent it. And, indeed, its lack of singularity provides the stuff of everyday disputes and dismays as we are forced, as much as anything through media and increasingly perhaps only through the media, to see, to confront, the common senses and common cultures of others. The fear of difference. Middle-class horror at the pages of the yellow or tabloid press. The hasty and arguably philistine dismissal of the aesthetic or the intellectual. The prejudices of nations or genders. The values, attitudes, tastes, the cultures of classes, ethnicities and the rest, which are reflections and constitutions of experience, and as such are key sites for the definition of identities, for our capacity to place ourselves in the modern world. And it is through common sense that we are enabled, if we are indeed enabled, to share and distinguish our lives with and from others.

This capacity for reflection, indeed its centrality, is one that has been noted often enough by those seeking to define the determining characteristics of modernity and post-modernity, yet their own reflections tend towards seeing the reflexive turn more or less exclusively in the specialist texts of philosophy or social science. I want to claim it too for common sense, for the everyday and, indeed, from time to time, even, or perhaps especially, for the media. The media are central to this reflective project not just in the socially conscious narratives of soap opera, day-time chat show or radio phone-in, but also in news and current affairs, and in advertising, as through the multiple lenses of written, audio and audiovisual texts, the world about us is displayed and performed: iteratively and interminably.

What other qualities might we ascribe to experience in the contemporary world and media’s role in it?

Forgive me if I find myself engaging in spatial metaphors to attempt to begin an answer, for it seems to me that space does provide the most satisfying framework for addressing the issue. Time too, of course, but time, and it is now a commonplace of post-modern theory, is no longer what it was. No longer a series of points, no longer clearly demarcated by distinctions of past and present and future, no longer singular, no longer shared, no longer resistant. We can say all of this, knowing, however, that such a dismissal is not quite right, or at the very least it is premature; knowing that lives are led in time, and that those lives are finite; knowing too that sequence is still central, that time is not reversible (except, of course, on the screen) and that stories can still be told. We know that we lead our lives through the days, weeks and years; lives marked by the iterations of work and play, of the repetitions of the calendar, and of the longues durées of barely perceived and perhaps increasingly forgettable history. Yet the media have a lot to answer for, and especially the latest generation of computer-based media, for whereas the broadcast was always time based, even if programme content was not, the computer game is endless, and the Internet immediate. Can time survive, as Lewis Carroll might once have enquired, such a beating?

So space it must be, at least for the time being. And space in multiple dimensions, accepting perhaps that space is itself, as Manuel Castells (1996) suggests, no more than simultaneous time. Let me propose, and it is not an original idea, that we think of ourselves in our daily lives, and in our lives with the media, as nomads, as wanderers, moving from place to place, from one media environment to another, sometimes being in more than one place at once, as we might, for example, think ourselves to be as we watch the television or surf the World Wide Web. What kinds of distinctions can be made here? What sorts of movements become possible?

We move between private and public spaces. Between local and global ones. We move from sacred to secular spaces and from real to fictional to virtual spaces, and back again. We move between the familiar and the strange. We move from the secure to the threatening and from the shared to the solitary. We are at home or away. We cross thresholds and glimpse horizons. We all do all these things constantly and in none of them, not one of them, are we ever without our media, as physical or symbolic objects, as guides or as traces, as experiences or as aides-mémoires.

To switch on the television, or open a newspaper in the privacy of one’s own front room, is to engage in an act of spatial transcendence: an identifiable physical location – home – confronts and encompasses the globe. But such an action, the reading or the viewing, has other spatial referents. It links us with others, our neighbours both known and unknown, who are simultaneously doing the same thing. The flickering screen, the flapping page, uniting us momentarily, but at least during the twentieth century quite significantly, in a national community. Yet to share a space is not necessarily to own it; to occupy it does not necessarily give us rights. Our experiences of media spaces are particular and often...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 The texture of experience
• 2 Mediation
• 3 Technology
• Textual Claims and Analytical Strategies
• Dimensions of Experience
• Locations of Action and Experience
• Making Sense
• References
• Index