Chapter Summary for Chapter 17
The chapter is concerned with communications, in particular the mass media of communication including television, newspapers, films, magazines and the Internet, which all reach very large audiences.
The digital revolution of the late twentieth century has transformed the mass media of communication. Four technological developments have enabled this revolution: continuous improvements in the capacity of computers, the digitization of data, satellite communications, and fibre optics.
The Internet – a global network of interconnected computers – originally developed within the Pentagon in the USA and now enables instantaneous global communication and the transfer of knowledge and capital electronically. The most widely known use of the Internet is the World Wide Web, a type of global multimedia library. Estimates suggest that around 10% of the global population were connected to the Internet by 2007 and this continues to grow.
One significant impact of the Internet is the creation of the virtual world of cyberspace with its multitude of virtual communities, online businesses and individuals. In cyberspace, new kinds of interaction between individuals are possible, along with the adoption of many identities. Opinions on the Internet have become polarized between those who see it as offering many new opportunities and others who see it as destructive of real social relations and home to new forms of criminality and abuse.
Film production has long been dominated by Hollywood and the USA film industry. India’s Bollywood film industry actually produces more movies than Hollywood, though its sales are not yet globalized in the way of Hollywood’s ‘blockbusters’. Radio and television are unlike film as they are media which are rooted in the home. Television in particular has entered into the routines of daily life and become a largely taken-for-granted and basic aspect of modern life. The advent of digital television is changing viewing habits by providing much more choice of channels and programmes on-demand.
Music is a form of communication that is as old as human societies. Studies of music have been dominated by the production of culture approach which analyses the conditions under which music is produced, alongside the organization of the means of that production. In recent years, empirical studies have drawn on interactionism to explore how people use music in the construction of personal experience. Globalization and the Internet present challenges for the music industry as music sharing across the globe threatens its profits.
Newspapers developed in the nineteenth century with the daily newspaper emerging towards the end of the century. Newspapers came to be dominated by a few rich entrepreneurs. Today the tabloid press exists in an intimate relationship with celebrity culture and newspapers have had to embrace the Internet with many newspapers now available on the web.
Functionalist theories of the media tended to be largely descriptive, viewed the audience as relatively passive and overemphasized the integrative function of the media in society. By contrast, many conflict theorists point to the fit between the culture industries and the wider demands of capitalism for a compliant workforce.
The political economy approach views the economic interests of media owners and large corporations as working to exclude critical voices and systematically producing a one-dimensional view of the world. The Glasgow Media Group argue that media coverage, especially news and current affairs, acts to represent the world in the interests of the dominant social class and thereby performs an ideological function.
The Frankfurt School’s critical theory saw the culture industry as undermining individuals’ capacity for critical thought. Similarly, Habermas considered the media in the broader context of a vibrant public sphere of debate and discussion. Despite the obvious potential of the mass media to facilitate the public sphere, the latter has in fact degenerated into mere spectacle and entertainment.
Thompson developed a model of different types of interaction: face-to-face, mediated interaction and mediated quasi-interaction. Today, the balance has shifted towards the latter two types, though this tends to bring more issues into the public domain not less and may be leading to more public debate than Habermas suggests.
Baudrillard’s postmodern theory argues that a fundamental shift towards hyperreality has occurred in which mass media no longer simply represent social life, but social life itself has become a thoroughly media-saturated event. Media reports are now constitutive of our social reality.
Early audience studies tended to view audiences as passive recipients of media messages: the hypodermic model. Later work, such as Hall’s reception theory, stresses the ways in which people actively make sense of the messages the media broadcast via their own experiences. Interpretative theory sees audiences partly shaping media content through their acceptance and rejection of media output.
Many studies have found that media representations of social class, gender and ethnicity tend to conform to social stereotypes. Although such representations may not actually cause discrimination, it has been argued that they do reinforce negative ideas of particular social groups.
All countries have some degree of media regulation, some voluntary, some legally enforced, such as restricted access to the Internet in China. Held et al. point to five major shifts which have established a new global media order: increasing concentration of ownership; shift from public to private ownership; transnational corporate structures; diversification of media products; a growing number of media mergers. Media super-companies have seen mergers that link companies which own ‘content’ with companies that own platforms for its distribution.
The concentration of so many companies in the hands of so few have led to concerns of media imperialism, where the views of the dominant classes of Western society will be imposed throughout the world. However, the growth of media sources such as Al-Jazeera shows that some resistance to Western media domination is in evidence.
