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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Global Media Studies is unique in its coverage of places, peoples, institutions, and discourses. Toby Miller and Marwan M. Kraidy provide a comprehensive �how-to� guide to the study of media, going far beyond the established English-language literature and drawing on the best methods and research from around the world. They look at political economy, global policymaking and governance, and the past and present manifestations of cultural imperialism.
In addition to providing a survey of the field, the book introduces a new form of textual analysis, with a special focus on reality television, as well as models of audience research. The authors include original analyses of the US, European, Latin American, and Arab worlds, and case studies of mobile telephony, the impact of US media, and reality television.
This original and uniquely global textbook will be an essential resource for students of global media and international communication.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
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Contents
Cover
Abbreviations
Introduction
Notes
1 Media Studies
The Beginning – Media Studies 1.0
A Brief History of Media Inquiry
New Directions – Media Studies
Notes
2 Global Studies
Imperial and Neocolonial Development
Conclusion
Notes
3 Political Economy
Hollywood Work
TV Trade
Notes
4 Policy and Governance
Comparative Media Systems
The Emergence of Global Media Policy
Global Media Governance
The Rise of Transnational Policy/Governance
A Pan-Arab Model?
Challenges to National Media Policy
Saudi Media Policy
Lebanese Media Policy
UAE Media Policy
Emergent Transnational Media Policy
Conclusion
Notes
5 Mobile Telephony (with Richard Maxwell)
Utopia: Cell Phones Make You Free
Dystopia: Cell Phones Make Others Unfree
Materiality: Cell Phones and the Environment
Conclusion
Notes
6 The United States of America as Global Media Behemoth (with Bill Grantham)
Cinema
Television
Games
Producers
Blockbusters and Co-Productions
Public Subvention
Citizenship
Conclusion
Notes
7 Textual Analysis
Genre
Case Studies
Conclusion
Notes
8 Reality Television
Conclusion
Notes
9 Audiences
Media Effects
Active Audiences
Surveillance
US TV and Sport
Conclusion
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Global Media Studies
TOBY MILLER AND MARWAN M. KRAIDY
polity
Copyright © Toby Miller and Marwan M. Kraidy 2016
This book has benefited from a publication subsidy from the Project for Advanced Research in Global Communication Press, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
The right of Toby Miller and Marwan M. Kraidy to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2016 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN: 978-0-7456-9306-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller, Toby, author. | Kraidy, Marwan M., 1972- author.Title: Global media studies / Toby Miller, Marwan M. Kraidy.Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016000784| ISBN 9780745644318 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745644325 (pbk. : alk. paper)Subjects: LCSH: Communication, International. | Globalization.Classification: LCC P96.I5 M55 2016 | DDC 302.2--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016000784
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Abbreviations
AEJMC
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
API
American Petroleum Institute
ARABSAT
Arab Satellite Organization
ASBU
Arab States Broadcasting Union
ASTC
Arab Satellite Television Charter
ASU
Arizona State University
AVML
Audio-Visual Media Law
BEA
Broadcast Education Association
BRIC
Brazil, Russia, India, and China
DARPA
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DMC
Dubai Media City
DVRs
Digital Video Recorders
FCTC
Framework Convention on Tobacco Control
GNI
Gross National Income
IAMCR
International Association for Media Communication and Research
ICA
International Communication Association
ICANN
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
ICTs
information and communication technologies
IGF
Internet Governance Forum
ISI
import substitution industrialization
MBC
Middle East Broadcasting Center
MeCCSA
Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association
MERCOSUR/MERCOSUL
Mercado Comun del Sur/Mercado Comum do Sul
MSA
Master Settlement Agreement
NAFTA
North American Free Trade Agreement
NCAVM
National Council of Audio-Visual Media
NFL
National Football League
NICL
New International Division of Cultural Labor
NIDL
New International Division of Labor
NWICO
New World Information and Communication Order
OCIAA
Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs
PGA
Producers Guild of America
PR
public relations
PRC
People’s Republic of China
RCA
Radio Corporation of America
SCA
Speech Communication Association
SCMS
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
TLCAN
Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del Norte
TSN
The Sports Network
U&G
uses and gratifications
UAE
United Arab Emirates
UDC
Union for Democratic Communications
UNESCO
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation
WTO
World Trade Organization
Introduction
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, twins in real life, starred as babies, toddlers, and ’tweens in the US ABC TV network situation comedy Full House from 1987 to 1995, sharing the role of Michelle Tanner. During those years, a merchandising company emerged to capitalize on the girls’ prominence via music, books, and videos. By the time the teenaged twins launched a clothing line, Hollywood Reporter magazine nominated them as “the most powerful young women in Hollywood.” At 18, each was worth over US$130 million, derived from US$1.4 billion in sales (Shade and Porter, 2008).
Numerous Bangladeshi women (whose names we do not know) made the clothing that was owned and endorsed by the cute-as-a-button Olsens, clothing that the New York Times acclaimed as “ashcan chic,” “homeless masquerade,” and “[d]umpster dressing” (La Ferla, 2005). These employees worked for between US$189.28 and US$436.80 a year, and were denied mandatory paid maternity leave until the third sector intervened and embarrassed the cuddly designers (Mensch, 2006).
A New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL), of which more below, thus saw a fashion line neatly – and gruesomely – index the difference in choices between the Olsens and their employees. Meanwhile, pro-anorexia websites highlighted the twins as role models, and 2011 found the bubbly twosome releasing an alligator backpack retailing at US$39,000 (Shade and Porter, 2008; Lipczynska, 2007).1 The Times of India praised their “sisterly bond” and the Guardian called 2015 the year when they became “the go-to brand for minimal chic” (Cochrane, 2015).2
The Olsens’ careers have seen them move across shifting discourses of femininity, in a world where women may stand for domestic values, be high-profile actors in public life, or live as low-paid, exploited workers – sometimes next door, sometimes next continent. As part of that shift, from a very early age the Olsens were both embroiled in and representative of complex commodity and labor relations, for which they were held responsible. Their struggles with education, weight, and love made them subjects of identification for many others dealing with the impact of feminism – without its ideological, organizational, and interpersonal buttressing (Probyn, 2008). Their arms-length exploitation of others is less visually central to their image, but materially crucial to it.
The lesson of this anecdote is that the media engage a multitude of topics and sites and require multiple analytic approaches if they are to be understood, and that a purely media-centric approach, focused on, for example, the Olsens’ renowned TV program, will be as inadequate as a US-centric approach would be. A more comprehensive and varied view is required, one that takes into account processes of production, distribution, text, and use, including how the media reproduce sociocultural norms, values, identities, and ideologies on a regional, national, and global scale. This necessitates consideration of the conditions that underpin the Olsens’ world in order to draw attention to a dialectical struggle between their privileged, if sometimes traumatic, lives, which are routinely subject to public scrutiny, and the infinitely harsher, equally gendered, frequently invisible labor processes on which their affluence depends.
In keeping with that brief exemplar, understanding the media requires studying them up, down, and sideways. That means researching production and distribution, cross-subsidy and monopoly profit, national and international public policy, press coverage, meaning, audience interpretation, and environmental impact, inter alia. We must tease out the manifold complexities of media production, signification, and reception.
For that reason, this book covers a very wide terrain, and in varied forms. Each chapter is animated, either overtly or implicitly, by three elements that are at play in the Olsen twins’ labor narrative:
theories (in this instance, political economy, psychology, and feminism);
genres (situation comedy, fashion, and celebrity); and
places (the United States and Bangladesh).
Those three tendencies are heuristic rather than substantive divisions; theories use genres and articulate to places. But we find the distinction useful because it enables three key forms of media analysis:
theorization, whether everyday understandings or academic norms;
generic distinctions, based on themes and qualities; and
places, or the locations in which theories and genres occur and are modified.
This book also engages some perennial questions that have been posed by and of media studies:
who runs the media?
who makes the media?
what is on media platforms?
what is the audience to them? and
how do the media enter the public sphere and human consciousness as they circulate sounds, images, ideologies, and waste?
To engage such questions, the issues we address include policy, production, genre, audience, and environment. Our goal is to acknowledge the equal importance and achievements of work done in political economy, textual analysis, and reception, the principal fields that address such matters. We do so in a way that seeks to enlarge those fields both conceptually and geographically. We believe in mixing methods – connecting numbers to meanings (for instance, tying ratings analysis to textual analysis) and acknowledging that meaning matters when it is linked to numbers (such as discerning both the deep meaning of specific texts and how representative they are). We think the distinctions between qualitative and quantitative methods that underpin much of US social science need to be compromised.
Each section of the volume (i) presents relevant topics for debate, poses new questions, and opens new horizons; (ii) contextualizes theories, methods, and traditions of intellectual reflection and empirical research, giving recognition both to mainstream and marginal, established, and emergent voices and norms; and (iii) explains the historical, social, economic, and political conditions that have contributed to the inception, support, and decline of approaches, where appropriate. Our intellectual agenda is thematically internationalist, politically socialist, and methodologically promiscuous. It is equally influenced by feminism, postcolonialism, Marxism, and social movements. We seek a blend of market and non-market principles that derive from the French Revolutionary cry, liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, solidarity) and the Argentine left’s contemporary version, ser ciudadano, tener trabajo, y ser alfabetizado (citizenship, employment, and literacy). The first category concerns political rights; the second, material interests; and the third, cultural representation.
We are not the first to tread this path. One of our inspirations is Clare of Assisi, a teen runaway from the thirteenth century originally named Chiara Offreduccio. The first Franciscan nun, she is also the patron saint of television, having been canonized in 1957 for her prescient bedridden vision of images from a midnight mass cast upon a wall. Seven hundred years later, Pius XII decreed this to have been the first TV broadcast (Pius XII, 1958).3 We are indebted to her example as the earliest media celebrity and theorist – a rare combination.
The need for most academic books to be written in English militates against complex cultural analysis. We originally planned to mitigate this limitation, at least in terms of research, by writing this volume with South Asian and Chinese co-authors, but that did not eventuate. As veterans of such arrangements will know, many collaborations do not take root as first envisaged, and tend to develop organically. Our linguistic limitations as scholars therefore condition much of what follows. We are most fluent in English, Arabic, French, and Spanish, which immediately limits the purview of a book called Global Media Studies. That said, we hope that our years spent living and working across the world, and learning from others who think, listen, watch, speak, write, read, and live differently, will make the project worth our readers’ time.
Chapters 1 and 2 lay out the state of play. We begin with media studies – where it came from, what it does, and what it ought to do. This is followed by a contextualization of such work inside the shift in discourse from international communication to global media. Chapters 3 and 4 look at institutional methods for comprehending the global media. After explicating and illustrating how to undertake political economy, we examine global policymaking and rule. Chapters 5 and 6 look in depth at mobile telephony and the impact of the US media – two virtually universal phenomena. Chapters 7 and 8 are dedicated to textual analysis, once more offering both metacritical and applied commentary and exemplification, with a heightened focus on reality television. We conclude with an investigation of audiences.
This book has been a long time in the making. Other projects and life situations have intervened, as sometimes happens. But our collaboration has been stimulating and even fun, and we hope you enjoy its result. Many people around the world have contributed in ways small and big to our understanding of the global life of media. We especially wish to thank our collaborators and friends Richard Maxwell and Bill Grantham, whose insights and prose make them co-authors of chapters 5 and 6 respectively.
Notes
1.
See also “The Surprise Luxury Label,”
The Wall Street Journal
(May 14, 2014):
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303627504579558221512719340
.
2.
See:
http://www.globallabourrights.org/press/maternity-leave-campaign-mary-kate-and-ashley-olsen
;
Times of India
, “Ashley and Mary-Kate’s Sisterly Bond” (August 11, 2007):
https://web.archive.org/web/20071217163654/
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Entertainment/International_Buzz/Ashley_and_Mary-Kates_sisterly_bond/articleshow/2273415.cms
.
3.
See also:
www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=215#wiki
.
1Media Studies
The word “media” is often used in a very limited fashion, to designate a small number of discrete communications technologies and platforms: newspapers, magazines, film, radio, and television.1 But the wider field of communications, from cable to satellite to telephony, have become key sites for producing and receiving the media, and there is increasing overlap between such sectors, as black-box techniques and technologies, once set apart from audiences, become part of public experience and debate.
“Medium,” the singular form of the word “media,” has been in English usage since the seventeenth century. It refers to something that lies between two objects and links them. With that in mind, we use the term “media” as a portmanteau word to cover a multitude of cultural and communicative machines and processes that connect people, processes, institutions, meanings, and power in the material world.
The media constitute and are constituted by:
technologies, which form their conditions of possibility;
policies, which determine the field in which they operate;
genres, which organize texts as drama, music, sport, information, and so on;
workers, who make media texts through performances and recordings;
audiences, who receive and interpret the ensuing content; and
the environment, which is affected by the creation, use, and detritus of the media.
There is increasing convergence across the different media. In 1940s sociology and 1960s economics, the term “convergence” referred to capitalist societies that were becoming more centrally planned even as state-socialist ones grew more capitalist (Galbraith, 1967). In 1980s communication theory, convergence explained the processes whereby people and institutions share expressions and issues (Bormann, 1985).
Today, convergence is occurring across media platforms. Consumer electronics connect to information and communication technologies (ICTs) and vice versa: televisions resemble computers, books are read on telephones, newspapers are written through clouds, and so on. Genres, gadgets, and bodies that were once separate are now linked to produce what the US Television Advertising Bureau calls a “Great Circle of modern consumerism” – while audiences watch programs on TV, they use their tablets to buy the products that are being advertised.2 Film, radio, newspapers, television, and so on can no longer be considered as individually autonomous media, isolated from the internet and mobile telephony. Convergence is at play and work through blogging, fan sites, ringtones, and music and video downloads and applications.
Throughout our investigations, we’ll bear another core concept in mind: “culture.” It derives from the Latin colere, a verb to describe tending and developing agriculture. With the advent of capitalism’s division of labor, culture came both to embody instrumentalism and to abjure it, via the industrialization of farming, on the one hand, and the development of individual taste, on the other (Adorno, 2009: 146; Benhabib, 2002: 2).
Eighteenth-century German, French, and Spanish dictionaries bear witness to a metaphorical shift during this period from agricultural cultivation to spiritual elevation. As the spread of literacy and printing saw customs and laws passed on, governed, and adjudicated through the written word, cultural texts supplemented and supplanted physical force as guarantors of authority. With the Industrial Revolution, populations urbanized, food was imported, and textual forms were exchanged. An emergent consumer society produced such events as horse racing, opera, art exhibits, and balls. The impact of this shift was indexed in cultural labor: poligrafi in fifteenth-century Venice and hacks in eighteenth-century London wrote popular and influential conduct books. These works of instruction on everyday life marked the textualization of custom and the development of new occupations. Anxieties about cultural imperialism also appeared, via debates over Western domination that occupied intellectuals, politicians, and moral guardians beyond the West, particularly in what is often referred to as “the Muslim world” (Briggs and Burke, 2003; Kraidy, 2010; Mowlana, 2000; Sabry, 2010). Welcome to the foundations of media studies.
In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant ideologized these commercial and imperial changes, arguing that culture ensured “conformity to laws without the law.” Aesthetics could generate “morally practical precepts,” schooling people to transcend particular interests via the development of a “public sense, i.e. a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation . . . to weight its judgement with the collective reason of mankind” (1987; also see Hunter, 2008). Kant envisaged an “emergence from . . . self-incurred immaturity,” independent of religion, government, and commerce (1991: 54). In other words, if readers could interpret art, literature, and drama in logical, emotional, and social ways – and comprehend the difference between them – they could be relied upon to govern themselves.
The Beginning – Media Studies 1.0
The media have usually been understood in two quasi-Kantian registers, via the social sciences and the humanities. They emerged as secular alternatives to deistic knowledge (Schelling, 1914) focused on dual forms of “self-realization” (S. Weber, 2000) – truth and beauty.
A heuristic distinction in the sixteenth century, this bifurcation became substantive as time passed (Williams 1983: 38). The media came to be understood as markers of differences and similarities in taste and status within and between groups. These qualities were explored interpretatively or methodically, with the social sciences animated by empirical facts and the humanities exercised by aesthetic qualities.
Today’s social sciences focus on the languages, religions, customs, times, spaces, and exchanges of the media, as explored ethnographically or statistically. The humanities analyze the media through textual criticism and institutional history.
So whereas the social sciences articulate differences within populations through social norms (for example, correlating media usage with health), the humanities do so through symbolic norms (for example, providing some of us with the cultural capital to appreciate high culture) (Wallerstein, 1989; Bourdieu, 1984).
The media’s connection to collective and individual identity and conduct has produced some powerful reactions to emergent media technologies and genres. In the nineteenth century, theorists from both right and left argued that newly literate publics would be vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues. This Kantian concern has continued ever since. For its part, contemporary bourgeois economics may assume that rational consumers determine what is popular in the media, but its sacerdotes are equally concerned that people can be bamboozled by unscrupulously fluent media organizations. On the other side of politics, Marxism has often viewed the media as a route to false consciousness that diverts the working class from recognizing its economic oppression, but also as an opportunity for agitprop. Feminist approaches have moved between condemning the media as distractions from gendered consciousness and celebrating them as distinctive parts of women’s culture; and cultural studies has regarded the media as key locations for symbolic resistance to class, race, and gender oppression (Smith, 1987; Hall and Jefferson, 1976).
From an array of political and epistemological perspectives, there has therefore been an emphasis on the origin, number, and conduct of media audiences: where they came from, how many there were, and what they did as a consequence of being present. Such concerns are coupled with a focus on content: what were audiences watching when they . . . . And so both audiences and texts are conceived as empirical entities that can be known, via research instruments derived from sociology, psychology, history, literary criticism, demography, linguistics, communications, anthropology, accountancy, economics, and marketing.
Perhaps the foremost early theorist of the media in critical thinking of the kind represented in this volume is the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose opposition to fascism in the 1920s and ’30s is an exemplar for progressive intellectuals. Gramsci maintained that each social group creates “organically, one or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the social and political fields” – the industrial technology, law, economy, and culture of such groups. The “‘organic’ intellectuals that every new class creates alongside itself and elaborates in the course of its development” assist in the emergence of that class, for example via military expertise. Media intellectuals operate in “[c]ivil society . . . the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private,’ that of ‘political society’ or ‘the State’.” They comprise the “‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society” as well as the “‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the State and ‘juridical’ government.” Ordinary people give “‘spontaneous’ consent” to the “general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group” (Gramsci, 1978: 5–7, 12). In other words, the media legitimize socioeconomic-political arrangements in the public mind. They can be sites of struggle as well as domination.
Gramsci’s notion of hegemony has had global purchase. The Welsh cultural critic Raymond Williams (1977) developed the idea of residual, dominant, and emergent hegemonies to describe the process whereby class formations compete over media narratives that legitimize social control. At the time he wrote, in the 1970s, examples of these categories included the remains of empire (residual), a modern mixed economy (dominant), and neoliberal transformation (emergent). Extensive use has been made of hegemony theory beyond the Global North. In Latin America, Gramsci’s notion of the national popular harnessing of class interests is common sense for both left and right (Massardo, 1999). The same applies in South Asia and segments of the Middle East and Africa (Patnaik, 2004; Dabashi, 2013; Marks and Engels, 1994).
While hegemony theory is alert to struggle rather than absolute domination, some critiques of the media suggest that its commercial manifestations “impress . . . the same stamp on everything” because their organizational form necessitates repetition rather than difference via the factory-like production of films, songs, news bulletins, radio formats, and programs – as if they were cars. This perspective derives from the Frankfurt School, a group of anti-Nazi scholars writing around the same time as Gramsci. The principals of that School, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1977), saw consumers and citizens as manipulated from the social order’s economic apex, with “domination” masquerading as choice in a “society alienated from itself.” Consumers were not active agents engaging the media, but its objects, just as much as programming or poetry.
For Adorno and Horkheimer, the media are industrial products, ruled by dominant economic forces that diminish ideological and generic innovation in favor of industrial standardization – a blend of political and economic calculation. The result? Whereas they might have begun as reflections of reality, commodity signs on show in the media necessarily displace representations of the truth with false information. Then these two delineable phases of truth and lies become indistinct. Once underlying reality is lost, signs become self-referential, with no residual correspondence to the real: they have adopted the form of their own simulation (Baudrillard, 1988).
People are said to buy commodities to give meaning to their world because societies no longer make them feel as though they belong. This concatenating simulation has implications for the aesthetic and social hierarchies that “regulate and structure . . . individual and collective lives” (Parekh, 2000: 143) in competitive ways that harness the media to social and commercial purposes. For this reason, analysts discern close ties between industrial power and ideological impact.
A further transformation has occurred during the twenty-first century: the media are not just superstructural forces that provide ideological support to the real substructure of the economy. These days, they are at the heart of that economy. The inaugural President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and noted music theorist Jacques Attali explains that a new “mercantile order forms wherever a creative class masters a key innovation from navigation to accounting or, in our own time, where services are most efficiently mass produced, thus generating enormous wealth” (2008: 31). He recognizes that a prosperous economic future lies in finance capital and ideology rather than agriculture and manufacturing – seeking revenue from innovation and intellectual property, not minerals or masses. It is no surprise, then, that the global trade in culture increased from US$559.5 billion in 2010 to US$624 billion in 2011 (United Nations, 2013).
As a consequence, the canons of aesthetic judgment and social distinction that once separated social science and humanities approaches to the popular – distinguishing aesthetic tropes, economic needs, and social norms – are collapsing in on each other. Positive discourses about the media say they can elevate people above ordinary life, transcending body, time, and place, or settle us into society through the wellsprings of community, as part of daily existence. A discourse about popularity idealizes media fun, promising secular transcendence (Frith, 1991: 106–7).
The media are now more than textual signs or everyday practices, more than objects of subcultural appropriation and re-signification. They offer important resources to markets and nations – reactions to the crisis of belonging and economic necessity occasioned by capitalist globalization. Crucial to advanced and developing economies alike, the media can also provide the legitimizing ground on which particular groups (e.g., African Americans, lesbians, the hearing-impaired, evangelical Protestants, women, or artists) claim resources and seek inclusion in national and international narratives (on Latin America, see Yúdice, 2002; Martín-Barbero, 2003; on the Arab world, see Colla, 2012; Kraidy, 2010; Kraidy and Khalil, 2008; Pahwa and Winegar, 2012; Sakr, 2004; on China, see Yang, 2009; on Ghana, see Boateng, 2008).
Some analysts argue that the media form a high stage of social and political development. Rather than encouraging alienation, they stand for the expansion of civil society, the moment in history when the state becomes receptive to, and part of, the general community. The entire population is now part of social development, rather than being excluded from the means and methods of political calculation. This coincides with other changes, such as a lessening of traditional authority, the promulgation of individual rights and respect, and a newly intense, interpersonal, large-scale human interaction. These transformations are necessitated by industrialization and aided by communication. The spread of advertising is taken as a model for the breakdown of social barriers, exemplified in the triumph of popular culture (Shils, 1966; Hartley, 1992). This was the fulcrum of founding BBC Director-General John Reith’s famous broadcasting philosophy: “The best of everything to the greatest number of homes.”3
Cultural studies has offered a productive, nuanced response to popular culture in general and the media in particular. Historical and contemporary analyses of slaves, crowds, pirates, bandits, minorities, women, and the working class have utilized archival, ethnographic, and statistical methods to emphasize day-to-day noncompliance with authority, via practices of consumption that frequently turn into practices of production. For example, UK research has lit upon Teddy Boys, Mods, bikers, skinheads, punks, school students, teen girls, Rastas, truants, drop-outs, and romance-fiction readers as its magical agents of history – groups who deviated from the norms of schooling and the transition to work by generating moral panics. Scholar-activists examine the structural underpinnings to collective style, investigating how bricolage subverts the achievement-oriented, materialistic values and appearance of the middle class. The working assumption has often been that subordinate groups adopt and adapt signs and objects from dominant media culture, reorganizing them to manufacture new meanings. The oppressed become producers of new fashions, inscribing alienation, difference, and powerlessness on their bodies (Leong, 1992).
There remains a paradox and possibly a contradiction in cultural studies’ account of the media: corporations have learnt to respond, almost gratefully, to critical subcultures. For instance, even as the press and politicians in the Global North announced across the 1970s that punks were folk devils, setting in train various moral panics about their effect on society, the fashion and music industries were sending out spies to watch and listen to them as part of a restless search for new trends to market. John Fiske (1989) uses the example of blue jeans to illustrate this: as marginal groups “personalize” denim, for example happily displaying holes that result from normal wear and tear and limited economic resources to replace beat-up clothes, the industry begins selling brand new jeans with holes in them. Relatedly, whenever the politics of spectacle is used effectively by social movements, advertising agencies watch on and parrot what they see. Advertising executives were involved in branding Lebanon’s 2005 independent intifada as “the Cedar Revolution” in Washington, DC, while the aesthetics of protest evident in downtown Beirut were later recycled on the advertising billboards that dominate Lebanese highways. Capitalism appropriates its appropriators.
The need for an awareness of this double-edged investment in commodities, as objects of resistance whose very appropriation can then be recommodified, makes socioeconomic analysis via critical political economy a good ally of representational analysis via close reading. A certain tendency on both sides has maintained that the two approaches are mutually exclusive: one is concerned with structures of the economy, the other with structures of meaning. But this need not be the case. Historically, the best critical political economy and the best close reading have worked through the imbrication of power and subjectivity at all points on the cultural continuum, bringing together the insights of Gramsci and Frankfurt in analyses that are attentive to local context. We seek to model this in the chapters to come.
A Brief History of Media Inquiry
As they have developed over time, the media have given rise to three related topics of scholarly inquiry:
technology, ownership, and control – their political economy;
textuality – their meaning; and
audiences – their public.
Within these categories lie three further divisions. First, approaches to technology, ownership, and control vary between neoliberal endorsements of regulation by the state in order to protect property and guarantee market entry for new competitors, Marxist critiques of the bourgeois media for controlling the sociopolitical agenda, and environmental investigations of the impact of media gadgetry on energy use and electronic waste (e-waste). Second, approaches to textuality vary between hermeneutics – which unearths the meaning of individual programs and links them to broader social formations and problems, such as the way that social identities are represented – and content analysis, which establishes patterns across significant numbers of similar texts, rather than close readings of individual ones. Third, approaches to audiences vary between social-psychological attempts to validate correlations between television and social conduct, political-economic critiques of imported texts threatening national culture, and celebrations of spectators’ interpretations.
These tasks articulate to particular academic disciplines, which in turn are tied to particular interests of state and capital:
engineering, computing, public policy, journalism, and “film” schools create and run media production and reception via business, the military, the community, and the public service;
communication studies focuses on such social projects as propaganda, marketing, and citizenship;
economics theorizes and polices doctrines of scarcity, as well as managing overproduction through overseas expansion;
Marxism points to the impact of ownership and control and cultural imperialism on the media and consciousness; and
cultural criticism evaluates representation, justifies protectionism, and calls for content provision.
Table 1.1
Today, major engagements with the media come from the psy-function (psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis), other social sciences (sociology, economics, communication studies, anthropology, political science, and law), and the humanities (literature, cinema studies, television studies, languages, and cultural studies).
This complex melange offers seven principal forms of inquiry, which (i) borrow ethnography from sociology and anthropology to investigate the experiences of audiences; (ii) use experimentation and testing methods from psychology to establish cause-and-effect relations between media use and subsequent conduct; (iii) adapt content analysis from sociology and communication studies to evaluate texts in terms of generic patterns; (iv) adopt textual analysis from literary theory and linguistics to identify the ideological tenor of content; (v) apply textual and audience interpretation from psychoanalysis to speculate on psychic processes; (vi) deploy political economy to examine ownership, control, regulation, and international exchange; and (vii) utilize archival, curatorial, and historiographic methods to give the media a record of their past. (See Table 1.1.)
So where did this hybrid creature come from? Media studies emerged from a complex blend of the social sciences and the humanities, from qualitative and quantitative sociology and communications, from language and literature departments, and various formations across these and other domains, such as area studies.
A key source has been speech communication, which was founded in the United States a century ago to assist with the assimilation of white, non-English-speaking migrants into the workforce. It became the first home of media education, because the engineering professors who founded radio stations in colleges during the 1920s needed program content, and drew volunteers from that area. These stations became laboratories, with research undertaken into technology, content, and reception (Kittross, 1999).
Table 1.2
International Association for Media and Communication Research
Union for Democratic Communications
Broadcast Education Association
Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
National Communication Association
International Communication Association
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
American Association for Public Opinion Research
American Journalism Historians
Asociación Latinoamericana de
Association
Investigadores de la Comunicacion
Association for Chinese Communication Studies
Association of Internet Researchers International Association for Media and History
Chinese Communication Association
European Consortium for Communications Research
European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research
Global Communication Research Association
International Association for Media History
Southern African Communication Association
Media, Communications & Cultural Studies Association
Canadian Communication Association
This was a period of massively complex urbanization and the spread of adult literacy, democratic rights, labor organization, and socialist ideas, which gave rise to a social science equivalent to the study of speech: mass communication. First cinema, then radio and TV were simultaneously prized and damned for their demagogic qualities, which it was hoped and feared could turn people into dutiful consumers or devious communists.
Universities across the United States also introduced degrees to prepare students for media work, whether through film and journalism schools or broadcast radio and television majors. In Britain, Granada TV endowed a research position into television at Leeds University in 1959. Then the Society for Education in Film and Television and the British Film Institute began sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping forms of stimulus in the 1960s and ’70s, from seeding teaching posts to publishing critical dossiers. This ultimately fed into major formations of UK media studies influenced by continental Marxism and feminism, then by similar social movements as the US4 (Bignell et al., 2000: 81; Bolas, 2009).
Some of the bodies listed in Table 1.2 see themselves as feeder groups and even advocates for the industry; some identify as purely scholarly entities; and others call for progressive change. Let’s consider key instances, mostly from the Anglo world.
The Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) describes itself as “a multicultural network of practitioners.” Founded in 1912, AEJMC seeks to “advance education in journalism, cultivate better professional practice and promote the free flow of information, without boundaries,” while the National Communication Association, formerly the Speech Communication Association (SCA, which began in 1914) says it is “[d]edicated to fostering and promoting free and ethical communication.”5
The Broadcast Education Association (BEA) commenced in 1948 as an educational arm of the US radio then TV industry through the National Association of Broadcasters, which has provided it with resources to fund events and publications (Kittross, 1999). The BEA bears the lineaments of a heritage “preparing college students to enter the radio & TV business.”6
The (US) Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) says it is “devoted to the study of the moving image.” Founded in 1959, the Society aims to “promote all areas of media studies” and “advance multi-cultural awareness and interaction.”7 Attempts to bring other media into the former Society for Cinema Studies were roundly rejected in the 1990s by cinéphiles. It may be that the eventual expansion of their rubric to incorporate “media studies” derived from “the higher-prestige if loosely defined field of new media studies” (Boddy, 2005: 81): US universities “tend to value anything called new media” thanks to its applications to militarism, and its ability to draw hefty research money through governmental and commercial fetishes for new technology. The upshot is that “studying anything that comes over the Internet . . . has somehow become more legitimate than studying television itself” (Spigel, 2005: 84).
The International Communication Association (ICA), which started in 1950 as a breakaway from SCA focusing on mass communication, avows that it exists:
to provide an international forum to enable the development, conduct, and critical evaluation of communication research;
to sustain a program of high-quality scholarly publication and knowledge exchange;
to facilitate inclusiveness and debate among scholars from diverse national and cultural backgrounds and from multi-disciplinary perspectives on communication-related issues; and
to promote a wider public interest in, and visibility of, the theories, methods, findings and applications generated by research in communication and allied fields.
8
Britain’s Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) is the newest of these bodies (it was established in 2007). MeCCSA presents itself as a service to students, rather alarmingly suggesting that “[m]any of the jobs you will go into once you have finished your degree have not yet been invented.” The Association suggests that obtaining employment may flow from “the ability to produce high-quality research, to analyze sociological trends, to work effectively with people, to organize events, to think creatively and to write well.”9
The International Association for Media Communication and Research (IAMCR) – started by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 1957, and the only body discussed here that is not Anglo-dominated – says that it “aims to support and develop media and communication research throughout the world. It particularly encourages the participation of emerging scholars, women and those from economically disadvantaged regions.”10 In the 1970s, ICA was known jocularly as the CIA and IAMCR as the KGB – a mutual alphabetic, acronymic parody.
By contrast with the jobs, legitimacy, and inclusivity emphases of these associations, and the aesthetico-historical goals of SCMS, the US Union for Democratic Communications (UDC, founded in 1981) sees itself as an organization of communication researchers, journalists, media producers, policy analysts, academics, and activists dedicated to:
critical study of the communications establishment;
production and distribution of democratically controlled and produced media;
fostering alternative, oppositional, independent and experimental production;
development of democratic communications systems locally, regionally and internationally.
11
This is a transformative rather than a parthenogenetic project: UDC works toward a different world, as opposed to generating new cohorts of producers, scientists, rhetoricians, journalists, and aesthetes to populate the existing one.
Clearly, there is no single professional association to go to in order to see how academia makes sense of the media. And we could just as easily have listed relevant segments of professional bodies within the different disciplines.12 There would be considerable overlap as well as many epistemological, methodological, focal, national, and political differences.
The same applies to journals. Table 1.3 lists a huge, diverse, yet only partial, list. Some of these journals are the organs of professional associations: authors may be obliged to join in order to publish there, and will be expected to cite the work of powerful fellow-members. Others are journals of tendency, which seek new and transformative work rather than the reiteration of normal science. Some are tied to particular regions or countries.
It should be clear from this schematic account of scholarly bodies and publications that media studies is fractured by objects of study, politics, nations, disciplines, theories, languages, and methods. This is hardly surprising, given that it derives from the spread of new media technologies over the past two centuries into the lives of urbanizing populations, and from the policing questions that both state and capital have had to face up to: what would be the effects of these developments, and how would they vary between those with a stake in maintaining society versus transforming it?
More than half a century ago, Dallas Smythe explained that audience attention – presumed or measured – is the commodity that TV and radio stations sell to advertisers (2004: 319–20). Texts are therefore not so much consumer items as “symbols for time” (Hartley, 1987: 133). Audiences participate in the most global (but local) communal (yet individual) and time-consuming practice of making meaning in the history of the world. The concept and the occasion of being an audience are links between society and person, yet viewing and listening may equally involve solitary interpretation.
Production executives invoke audiences to measure success and claim knowledge of what people want, regulators to organize administration, psychologists to produce proofs, and lobby groups to change content. Hence the link to panics about education, violence, and apathy supposedly engendered by the media and routinely investigated by the state, psychology, Marxism, feminism, conservatism, religion, and others. The audience as consumer, student, felon, voter, sexist, heathen, progressive, and fool engages such groups. Media effects and ratings research wanders the world, traversing the industry, the state, and criticism. Academic, commercial, and regulatory approaches focus most expansively on audiences as citizens and consumers, far more than media technology, law, or even content.
Table 1.3
International Journal of Cultural Policy, Entertainment Law Review, Transnational Television Studies, Global Media Journal, Television & New Media, Global Media and Communication, Poetics, Journal of Media Economics, Media International Australia, European Journal of Communication, Media Culture & Society, International Communication Gazette, Media Law and Practice, Feminist Media Studies, Comunicaço & Politica, International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Communications Law and Policy, Asian Journal of Communication, Games & Culture, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, Revista Electrónica Internacional de Economía Política de las Tecnologías de la Información y de la Comunicación, Entertainment and Sports Law Journal, Asian Media, Comunicaçao e Sociedade, Convergence, Loyola Entertainment Law Journal, Columbia VLA Journal of Law and the Arts, Loyola Entertainment Law Journal, Cultural Studies Review, Mediascape, Communication Review, Cultural
Politics, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Cinema Journal, Journal of Media Sociology, Democratic Communiqué, Television Quarterly, Cultural Sociology, Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research, Journal of Creative Communications, Media Development,
Canadian Journal of Communication, Visual Anthropology, Visual Anthropology Review, NORDICOM Review of Nordic Research on Media and Communication, Journal of International Communication, Asian Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Historical Journal of Radio, Film & Television, Journal of Communication, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Journalism History, Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, Media History, Women’s Studies in Communication, Public Opinion Quarterly, Political Communication, Gamasutra, Federal Communications
Law Journal, Fordham Intellectual Property, International Journal of Press/ Politics, Popular Communication, Media & Entertainment Law Journal, Topia, Cultural Studies, Communications, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of British Cinema & Television, Social Semiotics, Journal of E-Media Studies, Critical Studies in Television, Chinese Journal of Communication, Jump Cut, Screen Education, Screen, Velvet Light Trap, Flow, Journal of Film & Video, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Journal of Popular Film & Television, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Political Communication, Media Psychology
Each new media innovation since the advent of print has brought an expanded horizon of texts to audiences. In keeping with this history, texts and viewers come to be defined in both market terms and through a regulatory morality of conscience and taste: “a new practice of piety” accompanies each “new communications technology” (Hunter, 1988: 220). As a consequence, moral panics are common amongst the denizens of communication studies, pediatrics, psychology, and education, who largely abjure cultural and political matters to do with the media in favor of experimenting on their viewers, listeners, players, and readers. This is the psy-function at work.
As we have seen, media studies also covers political economy, which focuses on ownership and control rather than audience responses. Because the demand for texts is dispersed but much of their supply is centralized, political economy as per the Frankfurt School argues that the media are diminished in quality and diversity by the search for standardized production. Far from reflecting already-established and -revealed preferences of consumers in reaction to tastes and desires, the media manipulate audiences from the economic apex of production, with coercion mistaken for free will. The only element that might stand against this leveling sameness is said to be individual consciousness. But that consciousness has itself been customized to the requirements of the economy and media production: maximization of sameness through repetition and minimization of innovation and newness, in order to diminish risk and cost (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1977).
There are significant ties between critical theory, which calls for a resistive consciousness through artisanal rather than industrially created texts, and political economy, which calls for diverse ownership and control of the industry. The first trend is philosophical and aesthetic in its desire to develop modernism and the avantgarde, the second policy-oriented and political in its focus on institutional power. But they began as one with lamentations for the loss of a self-critical philosophical address and the triumph of industrialized cultural production. The two approaches continue to be linked via a shared distaste for what is still often regarded as mass culture (Garnham, 1987).
From many perspectives, the media are said to force people to turn away from precious artistic and social traces of authentic intersubjectivity and lose control of their individual consciousness. This part of media studies is frequently functionalist, neglecting struggle, dissonance, and conflict in favor of a totalizing narrative in which the media dominate everyday life. Together, these theories and methods amount to Media Studies 1.0.
New Directions – Media Studies
Something happened in the mid-1960s to counter these two forms of knowledge: the advent of a more conflictual version of media studies, often influenced by Gramsci. The Italian medievalist, semiotician, columnist, and novelist Umberto Eco (1972) developed notions of encoding–decoding, open texts, and aberrant readings by audiences. He looked at differences between the way meanings were put into Italian TV programs by producers and how they were deciphered by viewers. Eco’s insights were picked up by the English political sociologist Frank Parkin (1971) and the Jamaican-British cultural studies theorist Stuart Hall (1980).
There have been two principal methodological iterations of the encoding–decoding approach: uses and gratifications (U&G) and ethnography/cultural studies. Uses and gratifications operates from a psychological model of needs and pleasures, cultural studies from a political one of needs and pleasures. U&G focuses on what are regarded as fundamental psychological drives that define how people use the media to gratify themselves. Conversely, cultural studies’ ethnographic work has shown some of the limitations to claims that viewers are stitched into certain perspectives by the interplay of narrative, dialogue, and image. Together, they have brought into question the notion that audiences are blank slates ready to be written on by media messages.
Drawing upon these findings, some denizens of media studies argue that today’s new media represent the apex of modernity, the first moment in history when central political and commercial organs and agendas became receptive to the popular classes. This perspective differs from the idea that the apparatus is all-powerful. It maintains instead that the all-powerful agent is the audience: the public is so clever and able that it makes its own meanings, outwitting institutions of the state, academia, and capitalism that seek to measure and control it. In the case of children and the media, anxieties about turning Edenic innocents into rabid monsters or capitalist dupes are dismissed.13 Welcome to media studies 2.0.
This tendency has reached its apogee in the era of the internet, when new technologies supposedly obliterate geography, sovereignty, and hierarchy in an alchemy of truth and beauty. Today’s deregulated, individuated media world allegedly makes consumers into producers, frees the disabled from confinement, encourages new subjectivities, rewards intellect and competitiveness, links people across cultures, and allows billions of flowers to bloom in a post-political cornucopia.
Sometimes, faith in the active audience reaches cosmic proportions, such that the media are not held responsible for anything. Consumption is the key, with production discounted, work neglected, consumers sovereign, and research undertaken by observing one’s own practices and those of one’s friends and children. This is narcissography at work, with the critic’s persona a guarantor of audience revelry and Dionysian joy (Morris, 1990). Welcome to “Readers Liberation Movement” media studies (Eagleton, 1982): everyone is creative and no one is a spectator. Internally divided – but happily so – each person is “a consumer on the one hand, but . . . also a producer” (Foucault, 2008: 226). We shall look into these competing notions again in chapter 9.
Media studies 1.0 buys into, while condemning, corporate fantasies of control – the political economist’s arid nightmare of music, movies, television, and everything else converging under the sign of empowered firms. Media studies 2.0 incarnates individualist fantasies of reader, audience, consumer, or player autonomy – the libertarian intellectual’s wet dream of music, movies, television, and everything else converging under the sign of empowered fans. Those antinomies shadow the fetish of innovation that informs much talk of media technology and consumerism, while ignoring the environmental destruction and centralized power that underpin them (Maxwell and Miller, 2012).
Media studies today thrives in the context of a reformist, even reactionary formation, which rejects the field’s past in favor of hitching itself to the new surge in cultural industries represented by upbeat public policies and investment patterns. This has involved consultancies on behalf of the media, museums, copyright, pornography, schooling, and cultural precincts. Instrumental policy people and scholars argue for an efflorescence of creativity, cultural difference, import substitution, and national and regional pride and influence, thanks to new technologies and innovative firms – with capitalism an ally, not a foe (Hartley, 2005; Florida, 2002).
This position connects with a new model of consumer freedom that derives from subcultural politics. The two developments share little in terms of commitments to social justice. The working assumption they have in common is that corporate popular culture is being overrun by individual creativity in a Marxist/Godardian fantasy where people fish, film, fornicate, and finance from morning to midnight.
This new world supposedly destroys the inequalities and injustices personified by the Olsen twins and their nameless employees. The Magna Carta for the Information Age, for instance, proposes that political-economic transformations have been eclipsed by technological ones:
The central event of the 20th century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth – in the form of physical resources – has been losing value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things. (Dyson et al., 1994)
Time magazine exemplified this love of a seemingly immaterial world when it chose “You” as 2006’s “Person of the Year,” because “You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world” (L. Grossman, 2006). The Guardian newspaper is prey to the same touching magic: someone called “You” headed its 2013 list of the hundred most important people in the media.14
Most media and some academic discourses on activism, during twenty-first-century Arab uprisings in particular, but other social movements as well, focus on media technologies rather than forces of history, labor, social inequality, cultural norms, and other factors that shape how activists used media.
Utopian media studies 2.0 discourse takes one or several of the following tacks:
because of new technologies and inventive practices of consumption, concentration of media ownership and control no longer matters – information is finally free, thanks to multi-point distribution and destabilized hierarchies;
consumers are sovereign and can transcend class and other categories;
young people are liberated from media control;
journalism is dying as everyone and their owl become sources of both news and reporting;
creative destruction is an accurate and desirable description of economic innovation;
when scholars observe media workers and audiences, they discover that ideology critique is inappropriate;
Marxist political economy denies the power of audiences and users and the irrelevance of boundaries – it is pessimistic and hidebound;
cultural imperialism critiques miss the creativity and resilience of national and subnational forms of life against industrial products; and
media-effects studies are inconsequential – audiences outwit corporate plans and psy-function norms.
What is left out of these seemingly dynamic and innovative, but in fact tired and venerable lines? Here are areas with unanswered – in fact, unasked – questions that media studies 3.0 must pose and resolve:
the ecological impact of the media;
questions of labor and life in the cognitariat;
the experiences of those who essentially live outside consumption, beyond multinational markets – beyond an electricity grid and potable water, for example;
citizenship;
concentrated ownership and obedient regulation;
cultural imperialism’s resonance with populations and activists;
the fact that the supposedly new vulnerability of media organizations to the power of the young, the rebelliousness of consumers, and the force of new technology is as old as these organizations themselves;
the expansion of newspapers outside the Global North – people still line up in Barranquilla by the dozen each morning to place classified advertisements in the local paper, for instance; and
the use of new technologies – for example, people citing one another’s sexting or Facebook and Twitter activity in family courts to undermine claims to parental responsibility, leading to judgments that decide child-custody cases.
15
In an exciting blend of 1.0 and 2.0, an emergent media studies 3.0 can be skeptical without being cynical, rigorous without losing optimism, and committed to popular democracy. It has seen analyses devoted to key issues that go beyond the psy-function, political economy, and active audiences, while drawing on their insights. A brief list might include:
feminist concerns over the representation of women, both on- and off-screen;
critics’ desires to reach beyond bourgeois-individualistic accounts of creativity in favor of generic analyses;
studies of postimperial social control in the Global South via domestic and global media dominance;
Marxist aesthetics reading stories against ideologies; and
voices from below, heard through participant observation of workers, audiences, and activists.
Foundational debates since 1990 have put leftist, queer, disabled, feminist, multicultural, and postcolonial formations in play. Such staples as cultural-imperialism critique and national media history have been supplemented by work on regional, global, diasporic, First Peoples, women’s, and activist textuality. Ideology critique has been enriched by Gramscianism, racialization analysis, queer theory, and policy studies. This is in keeping with broader intellectual developments and political trends, such as social movements, the globalization and privatization of the media in the wake of the Cold War, and the rise of neoliberalism.
As higher education has grown and opened up to these critical tendencies within the human sciences, social movements, and more instrumental, conservatory-style training, media studies has often been deemed simultaneously too progressive and too applied by many traditionalists. Unlike, for instance, neoclassical economics or the psy-function, it has attracted intense opprobrium.
Within the bourgeois media, the Village Voice dubs us “the ultimate capitulation to the MTV mind . . . couchpotatodom writ large . . . just as Milton doesn’t belong in the rave scene, sitcoms don’t belong in the canon or the classroom” (Vincent, 2000). For the Times Literary Supplement, media and cultural studies form the “politico-intellectual junkyard of the Western world” (Minogue, 1994: 27). The Wall Street Journal describes our work as “deeply threatening to traditional leftist views of commerce,” because its notions of active consumption are close to those of the right: “cultural-studies mavens are betraying the leftist cause, lending support to the corporate enemy and even training graduate students who wind up doing market research” (Postrel, 1999). The Observer scornfully mocks via a parental parody: “what better way to have our little work-shy scholars rushing off to read an improving book than to enthuse loudly in their presence about how the omnibus edition of EastEnders [1985–] is the new double physics?” (Hogan, 2004). The Telegraph thunders that media studies is “quasi-academic” and delights whenever enrolments diminish (Lightfoot, 2005; Cairns, 2013), while the Daily Express deems it “worthless” (Douglas, 2011).
Alan Sugar, UK inquisitor for The Apprentice
