Understanding Media Culture

Jostein Gripsrud

• Éditeur: Bloomsbury Academic
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781849663762
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Negocios y empresa
• Sous-sujet: Industria de medios y comunicaciones

The mass media open our private lives to the world around us. They are central to economic, cultural and political processes, through words, images and music. They address us in innumerable genres - from advertising to news journalism, from soap operas to sports coverage, from political debates to feature films and novels. This refreshingly different introduction to media studies offers an understanding of the mass media which is critical but which does not deny the pleasures they offer. Reflecting the trends of today's media and cultural studies courses, it introduces students both to social scientific approaches and those of the humanities and aesthetics. The central debates of media and communication studies are presented, starting from the individual's relation to the mass media and exploring questions of identity, influence and social differences. It then introduces the different methods used in analysing media texts, and concludes with a discussion of the public sphere and democracy, media technology, institutions and production. Each topic is presented in such a way as to encourage the reader to take part in discussions and further work. Understanding Media Culture is written in an engaged and engaging way and offers an invitation to a deeper understanding for anyone interested in the field.

PART 1

The audience and the media

1

Identity: the media and our understanding of ourselves

The media and the world around us

I knew a woman of almost 90 who had a problem. Every evening she had total strangers visiting; they filled her living room and made her feel angry and afraid. Some younger relatives solved her problem, at least temporarily. They explained to her that the strangers were only appearing on TV and did not really invade her home in any other way.

Most people do not feel the media to be quite as intrusive as television was for this old lady. However, when radio was first introduced, in the 1920s, broadcasters thought of themselves precisely as uninvited guests in people’s homes, and this had consequences for how programmes were made (Scannell, 1996: 19). Now we are so used to the media as intruders in our homes and everyday lives that we have stopped worrying: people are awoken by clock radios; the radio in the kitchen is switched on as the morning tea or coffee is prepared; the morning paper is skimmed while the radio or TV, or both, churn out news, chat or music in the background; driving to work or school, the car radio or stereo will be on; and both cyclists and pedestrians use personal stereos; those who travel by bus or rail may take a newspaper or book too; the streets are lined with advertising boards; at work or school there are computers linked to the Internet; and, in the evening there’s the cinema, novels, radio, TV, CDs and so on. The media are simply everywhere.

It is hard to read the newspaper while shaving or searching for something in the fridge. Radio, on the other hand, may follow us everywhere in our more or less complicated morning rituals. It is a perfect secondary medium. That is, it is – contrary to what has been called a primary medium – a medium that we can use while doing something else. Radio is thus possibly the medium that best illustrates how our everyday lives are pervaded by mass media. We can hardly live in modern society without using mass media for a large proportion of each day. It is possible that more and more media are a sort of secondary media – at least part of the time. We often use them in a pretty distracted way, only half engaged in what they present.

This may be the media’s fault or our own, or no fault at all. It is still true that the media connect us to the world outside of our home, our neighbourhood and workplace. They remind us that we are members of a society and a world with as many planes or levels as there are in the addresses children sometimes construct for themselves: 221 Maple Street, Birch Hill, Oxbridge 2XR 5PL England, United Kingdom, Europe, Planet Earth, The Milky Way, The Universe. Since so many people use radio, newspapers and television, not least as a ritual part of the start of a new day, there are reasons to believe that most of us feel a need to be (re)connected to this extensive, multidimensional social reality that is outside of our immediate surroundings, every day. Why? Because we are, or have become, social beings; we are part of the world and want to feel as such. This chapter is to be about how we have become as we are, and the roles the media play in our development, not least the development of our understanding of ourselves.

Socialization

Most of us scream when we are born, but it takes a while before we start talking. We sip our mother’s milk, fill our nappies, are washed, cuddled and cared for. While we just cry, babble and dribble, mummy, daddy and passers-by talk and sing to us. There is quite a bit of coochie-coo, twiddly-dee and twiddly-doo, possibly also boo-boo-bee-doo, in what they say, but there are also more ordinary words and they may, in addition, sing some sweet or slightly melancholy songs. This is to say that the process of socialization begins before we have even uttered a word, through all the forms of communication just mentioned, through body contact, looks, humming and so on.

The acquisition of language is still a fundamental and decisive step in our development. As we start using and understanding language we simultaneously become both members of the cultural community among human beings, and aware of the difference between others and ourselves. We emerge as individuals through interaction with others, and language plays an increasing role in this interaction after the nappy stage.

The aspect of socialization that takes place among those closest to oneself, in some version of ‘the family’, is referred to as primary socialization by sociologists and social psychologists. Secondary socialization is the common term for processes of socialization that take place within and in relation to a series of social institutions outside of the family: kindergarten, school, sports club, church, workplace or whatever. We are told something about who we are in all such contexts, and about what is expected from us. Such information is also provided, to a high degree, from what may now form the most important institution of secondary socialization: the mass media.

We get to know them from a very early age – the radio and the TV set, the first simple books, the CD player and our parents’ newspapers. They provide pleasure, information, anxiety, and opportunities or inspiration for play. They are partly incomprehensible, partly addressing us directly: ‘... and now, I’ll tell you a story!’ They address us in our homes, and so they are different from all other forms of secondary socialization. The media are in a sense the long arm of society, leading in to what we can call the sphere of intimacy (we will focus on the public sphere and democracy in Chapter 8); they compete for our attention with mum and dad, boyfriends or girlfriends, the dog, and whomsoever else is more or less part of the household; they interfere in conversations or interactions in a number of ways.

The media contribute significantly to the definition of the world around us, and thereby also to the definition of ourselves. They present ways to understand the world, to represent the world, in images, sounds and writing. They suggest ideas of what is important and what isn’t, what is good and bad, what is boring and what is fun. They present parts and dimensions of the world that we ourselves have not experienced directly, and may never come to experience directly. As recipients of all this we simply have to form some sort of opinion about where we are located, so to speak, in the complex landscapes presented to us, about who we are, about who we would like to be – and about who or what we would definitely not like to be or become. This complex perception of oneself is called identity. It is a problematic word.

The concept of identity

Identity actually means ‘one-ness’ or ‘same-ness’. When we sort out impressions, both from our fellow human beings and the media, we form opinions on the similarities and differences between all the others and ourselves. For instance, we find out early on that some of the people around us are differently equipped between their legs, and this is a decisive discovery. We check out our own equipment and can then conclude that we resemble either mum or dad. Siblings and kindergarten pals can be classified accordingly. But even before we reach such conclusions for ourselves, someone else has done the thinking for us and treated us correspondingly. Whether we are in the boys’ team or the girls’ team, it will soon be clear to us that we are on the kids’ team, which now and then will be in opposition to the grown-ups’ team. Gradually it also dawns on us that those of us who live on this side of the bridge are different from those on the other side, not to mention those who live in London or New York or Farawayland.

The mass media may not say very much about the difference between this and that side of the local bridge, but they say a great deal about the differences between those with fannies and those with willies, and also a lot about London, New York and Farawayland. To a greater or lesser extent, the media here also function along with parents, schools and other authorities. At an early age we get to know that the nation-state in which we live is separate from the rest of the world and that all those who belong to ‘our’ nation-state have something in common that sets them apart from all others. We learn songs and stories we are supposed to love. We learn, if we’re British, that people in London are as British as those in Newcastle – they all know the same songs and stories, and speak and write more or less understandable English.

This sort of national community has, since the 1920s, been confirmed and further developed on a daily basis by the institution of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). In other countries, such as the USA, the same job may have been shared by a small handful of broadcasting companies. Locally and regionally, there may be local broadcasting or newspapers that may tell us something about the world at large but that most certainly will keep us updated on the cow that ran loose on Main Street, old Mrs Jones who won in the lottery and the plans for a new road to Cottonfield. The media are, locally, regionally and most obviously perhaps on the national plane, creators of imagined communities, to use a term coined by Benedict Anderson (1983). Anderson emphasized the role played, historically, by print media. The daily press provided the first impressions of a national community of people that not only live in the same defined geographical space, but also make up a community of experience within or at the same time. Broadcast media, and especially their live programming, very much strengthened this function (cf. Johansen, 1997). Such imagined communities can in certain situations make us feel, perhaps surprisingly, quite strongly tied to people we have never actually met, who are very different from us in many ways and live far away from us. The strength of the imagined community, ‘the nation’, is, as Anderson points out, ultimately demonstrated in people’s willingness to kill or be killed in war for its sake – even if the nation for the most part might consist of people we otherwise would not care very much about even getting to know.

One could say, then, that the media assist other social institutions in telling us what it means to be a boy or a girl, what it means to come from Los Angeles or Bournemouth, what it means to be American or French or British, what it means to be black or white, to be a child or a student, and so on. Our ‘identity’ is thus actually a patchwork of identities, a complicated set of similarities and differences in relation to other people.

It can be useful to distinguish between two main types of identity. On the one hand we might talk about our social or collective identity and, on the other, something we can call a personal identity. The two are, of course, closely tied to each other, but they are not necessarily completely ... identical. Our social identity is, at the outset, the identity we get by way of other people’s perceptions of us and the collective contexts we are part of: we come from a particular city in a particular country, we are males or females of a certain age, we have parents with such and such jobs, we have this or that education and a set of hobbies or cultural preferences that lead us to play in a rock band or join the local football team. Other people’s perceptions of all of these features will, to a greater or lesser extent, become part of our perception of ourselves, our self-image, that is to say part of our identity. But which parts of this social identity we experience as important to us may vary according to the situation we are in. Sometimes, for instance, at a particular soccer match, the part of town we come from may be important, but which nation we belong to is totally irrelevant. When travelling in a foreign country, preferably one very far from home, however, our nationality may be enough to lead to a conversation with someone from ‘our’ country, even if the person in question would not be a natural choice of interlocutor back home.

Our personal identity, on the other hand, is what we might suggest as an answer when we ask ourselves ‘Who am I?’ We then ask about what is unique about ourselves, what makes us distinguishable from other people we know or know of, what makes our own experiences, emotions and moods special and not necessarily easy to share with others. As many people have experienced, not least when young, that this is a question one may feel it is important to ask, but that it is hard to answer in a totally satisfactory way. There are several reasons for this difficulty, and the complexity of our social identity is not the only one.

In the western world it has been common – at least since the cultural-historical epoch we call Romanticism (roughly the early part of the nineteenth century) – to think of the human psyche (‘soul’) as something that is divided and precisely not whole or ‘one’ (that is, identical). A well-known example of how such a conception is expressed in art and literature is the novel Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which Robert Louis Stevenson published in 1886. The physician, Jekyll, drinks a mixture that brings out another and totally gruesome personality he has hidden inside, namely Mr Hyde (Hyde/hide). In the book, Jekyll reflects on his life and finds that he has had to discipline himself so hard while growing up and in his adult life that strong, dangerous forces have built up beneath his civilized surface – forces that are now breaking through in the shape of Mr Hyde. This is a way of thinking that the Austrian neurologist and psychotherapist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was later to give a scientific form in his psychoanalytic theory, developed on the basis of his experiences as a doctor and therapist for the Viennese bourgeoisie.

Freud thought that a person’s psyche was divided into different parts, to which the will and conscious thoughts only had partial access. The best known of his models for this is the one in which he divided the psyche into id, super ego and ‘I’, or ego. The id is the unconscious – some psychic processes, more or less shared by all human beings, that go on without our knowledge of them, we only notice them as symptoms in more or less incomprehensible dreams, involuntary emotional reactions to certain phenomena and the like. The super ego is a set of norms for right and wrong that we have learned from our parents and other authority figures in society, and which has become a part of ourselves without our conscious control. Between these two – the id and the super ego – lies the ego, the conscious I, trying to find a kind of balance and space for acting freely under pressure from the unconscious forces from ‘below’ and the external demands from ‘above’.

Freud’s theories have been tremendously influential in most later psychology thinking, not least in terms of psychological understanding in art and culture, and among most people. It is important to note, however, that his model of the psyche still contradicts just as widespread ideas about the whole and indivisible individual with its equally singular personality. The idea of a human being’s whole, singular personality, which is totally in control of him- or herself and his or her destiny, which controls nature both within and without, has historically been tied to modern society (sometimes referred to as modernity) and is central to its general system of ideas (its ideology), often referred to as modernism. Modernism, in this sense, is something other than the movement of the same name in the fields of art and literature, although the two ‘modernisms’ are closely related. The modern(ist) understanding of the individual is a precondition for the role of the modern artist as a creator. It is also connected to an understanding of history where it is taken more or less for granted that the world, in spite of everything, must move forwards – not least through technical advances whereby the new in general takes on great value. Such ideas are also central to artistic modernism.

Certain types of leftist and feminist theoreticians have seen modernism and its understanding of the individual as representing the interests of the social class known as the bourgeoisie and, more specifically, the men of this class. The many varieties of the sort of social and cultural theory called postmodernism all share the idea that the subject or personality today is fragmented (divided), complex and partially contradictory. It is thus assumed that the (masculine?) ‘identical’ subject has collapsed. Hence, we live in post- or after-modernity – modernity and its subject has ceased to exist. However, at least as a historical thesis, this idea is quite problematic. As we have just seen, there are split, complex subjects both in nineteenth-century novels and in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, produced in the modern(ist) period. It is probably better to regard the ideas of a totally identical, unified subject as an ideological response to a modern, underlying awareness of splits and contradictions. The ‘postmodern’ is here, as elsewhere (e.g., in industrial design, where the term designates a more or less playful emphasis on form rather than function), perhaps best seen as an aspect of the modern, an aspect that is more prominent in some periods and some areas than in others. In our day and age, the idea of the unified subject – the strong personality, full of will-power and determination – is very much alive even if philosophers, psychologists, artists and others claim that we are all deeply split and utterly fragmented. These two positions have actually co-existed since at least the early twentieth century.

Identity in complexity

If our psyches are divided and our social identity is decided by a mish-mash of belongings, roles and experiences, how can it be that most of us still feel we are, for the most part, one and the same person? The greater part of our identity has not been chosen by us. One does not, as we all know, choose either one’s parents or, consequently, one’s social-class background, one’s race, gender or mother tongue. Moreover, many of the most important choices we do make – in terms of higher education, for example – are to a great extent conditioned by our backgrounds, which thus also influence our educationally related attitudes, lifestyles and so on. The end result is a quite high degree of consistency in our social and personal identities.

It is, however, also true that these days we also consciously choose certain elements of our identity more freely than was the case in the past. This sort of freedom, which we will return to later in this book, is not something that developed only recently. It is, basically, a central element of modern, as opposed to traditional, culture. In the latter case, a person was, at birth, already destined to end up in a certain position and pursuing a certain function in the world. This is, as we all know, no longer the case. In recent years, however, there has been a tendency among some scholars and theoreticians to exaggerate modern (not to mention postmodern) freedom of choice here. It is as if one can choose to be almost anything or anyone at any time – a strict businesswoman in the daytime, an artist experimenting with sex and drugs at night, and a nun every other Sunday. But, just as ‘weekend hippies’ were easily picked out by the genuine article in the 1960s, the chief executive who plays in an amateur rock band now and then will also be r...