Introducing Media Studies Introducing Media Studies E-Book

Ziauddin Sardar

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 117

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

The media is ubiquitous. Every day we watch hours of TV, listen to the radio, read newspapers and magazines, go to the cinema, sit in front of videos or surf the Web. These information commodities exercise enormous influence and power over all of us. Introducing Media Studies explores the complex relationship between the media, ideology, knowledge and power. It provides a scintillating tour of media history and presents a coherent view of the media industry, media theory and methods in media research. It explains how 'the audience' is constructed and how it in turn interprets the content and meaning of media representation. We also learn how to analyse film, deconstruct advertising and appreciate how TV and the press shape public opinion. The media is a condition of our existence and, in an unprecedented way, the pervading shape of our history. No one can afford to neglect a critical understanding of its omnipresence. Here is an entertaining and informative book, accessible to students and general readers concerned with the increasing power, influence and proliferation of the media.

Leseprobe

Published by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPEmail: [email protected] 

ISBN: 978-184831-184-8

Text copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

Illustrations copyright © 2012 Icon Books Ltd

The author and illustrator has asserted their moral rights

Originating editor: Richard Appignanesi

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Why Should We Study the Media?

Media as Industry

Television

Film

Newspapers, Magazines and Alternative News

The Evolution of Media Studies

Sunday the Theory

Saucy Saussure & The Meaning of Life

“It’s a Time of the Signs” Claims Top Boffin

The Sunday Theory

If You Can See It or Hear It, You Can Read It

Varieties of Media Studies

The Politics of Integrity

Negotiated Autonomy

Structural Studies of the Media

Beyond Structuralism

Political Economy

Examples of Political Economy

Culturalist Studies of the Media

Pallas

Forms of Retelling

Nationwide: Another Audience Study

Situating the Audience

Representation

The Hegemonic model

The Pluralistic Model

Stereotypes

Marginalizing the Stereotype

“Moral Panics”

Youth Culture Coverage

Racist ideology

Representations of Women

The Trouble with Eve

Digital Manipulation

The Story and its Value

Criteria of News Value

Right to Know

War Reporting

Investigative Reporting

Bad News

Comics

Down Marketing Radio

Advertising…… …Exists to Create

Everything for Sale

Ad Formats

Ad Techniques

Television

Television Production

The Building Blocks of Production

Filming

Post-Production

The End Result

Arguments Against Television

Public Service Broadcasting

Quality is the Thing

Film

Cinematic Codes

Editing

Alien Angst

Other ID Characters

The Rightful Place for Women

Hollywood Stereotypes

World Cinema: Bollwood

Hong Kong Cinema

Cinema Elsewhere

Third Cinema

The Video Revolution

Fake Videos

New Technologies

Cable and Satellite TV

The Web

Criticisms of the Web

Ownership

What is Synergy?

Mega-Conglomeration

Media Imperialism

Celebrity

Manufacturing Fame

The Future

Reading List

Index

Why Should We Study the Media?

The News at 7, with Walter MacMedia.And——Hello, Good Evening and Welcome to Media Studies.Here are the headlines…

Ms Blimp: a Black, Lesbian, Isolated, Marginalized Person.

Now, the details… There is concern tonight over gridlock in the media.

Television channels – terrestrial, satellite and digital – and countless radio stations are clogging up the airwaves. Newspapers, magazines, books, comics, films, videos and animation are competing for our precious time. Advertising is almost impossible to escape. Surfing the Web is now a daily chore for most of us living in the industrialized world.

Experts say that our societies and cultures are now media saturated.Get off my screen you white, Anglo-Saxon, middle class, Protestant person with pretentious black hairdo.

I am joined by Sean Cubitt, Reader in Video and Media Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. Mr Cubitt, why should we be concerned with media saturation?More WASPS!The media exercise enormous influence and power on our daily lives…This is the main rationale for media studies.

Desktop publishing and the Net have increased access to production and distribution for everyone. The media now offer more diversified choice. The genres available in each medium have also multiplied. Satellite, digital TV and Hollywood blockbusters are so expensive only a handful of corporations can be financially successful. This creates a tendency towards central control over the media.

But production is only half the story. When we watch TV or surf the Web, we are creating our own meanings and emotions. We need to understand our own work as creative and become critical users of other people’s media.

So, what is media studies?What are media studies? Let’s start by pinning down the term media…

The media mediate. You might think news reporting is immediate, but it isn’t. It’s mediated. Like all human communication, it has to be put into a material form – words, gestures, songs, pictures, writing. The point of mediating things is to communicate across space and time with as many people as possible. So the first thing to consider is that the media can reach vast numbers of people. Second, the messages nowadays are mediated by highly advanced technology.

Third, while there is the choice of making our own music or drawing our own cartoons, most of us opt to be consumers of the professional productions of relatively few corporations. These mega-companies are pretty much closed and centralized, but the reception is public and dispersed.

Fourth, there is virtually no communication between the source and the receiver.

What do you mean there is no communication? The media is all about communication.Are email and home shopping part of the media? And how about paperback fiction – it is popular, accessible and mass produced.

They are all media, of course, like holiday snaps, diaries and scrapbooks.

Pop fiction falls between the private and personal world of the home and the outside world of the publishers, studios, record labels and broadcasters, massive corporations which threaten to turn the most fundamental quality of human beings – our unending love of communication – into big business and, at its worst, propaganda.

So why should we study the media?Is this your interview or mine?Because studying the media is the best way to understand ourselves.

On average, we spend over 15 years of our waking lives just watching television. Films, videos and the time spent reading newspapers and magazines, listening to music and surfing the Net, means that we spend one-third of our lives immersed in the media. Our abilities to speak, think, form relationships with others, even our dreams and our own sense of identity are now shaped by the media. So, studying the media is studying ourselves as social creatures.

Let me bring in Jonathan Margolis, journalist and critic for the London Observer. You are saying media studies has no educational value, it is shallow and disposable.Yes. Media studies is a pseudo-social science and puffed-up nonsense masquerading as academic discipline. An appreciation of what is good and bad on the telly and in the print media should be a spin-off of real academic disciplines, not a subject in its own right.A pseudo-academic discipline, Mr Cubitt?Our ideas come from linguistics, sociology, psychology, even maths and physics, as well as film, communication and cultural studies. The open and interdisciplinary nature of media studies terrifies and angers our critics – plus the fact that we have a more radical understanding of contemporary life than any other way of thinking about the world.

My point is that understanding the (fairly obvious) concept that you can’t believe everything you read in the papers or see on the TV is partly a matter of politics, partly literature and partly sociology. Teach those to the most basic levels and you’ve got automatic “media studies” without even knowing it.To study the media in isolation, however, is like taking a degree in punctuation instead of English Lit – a diploma in socks rather than a degree in fashion.Knit one… pearl one… @*&§¶#!?!

In today’s globalized and interconnected world, it is foolish to imagine that anything can be studied in isolation.

Only the most snobbish and self-satisfied critic could believe that the best understanding we can get of the contemporary world comes from reading five-hundred-year-old poetry or studying the British constitution.

The written word is only one medium in an audio-visual world. Changing the media changes everything: all politics, all literature, all society. Media studies is larger than these other disciplines. It tells us why politics, art and society are like they are, and how the future can be shaped for the best. These ideas can’t just be conjured out of the haphazard opinions of metropolitan literati. They have to be studied systematically.

I am afraid we have to leave it there.

In another development, the British Broadcasting Standards Commission has recommended that media studies should be taught at primary school. In tonight’s Special Report our reporter, Richard Autocue, looks at advertising and children.It came from nowhere. Last year, no one had heard of Sunny Delight. This year it is all the rage among children.

How has Sunny Delight become Britain’s third best-selling drink in such a short period?Simple. Its’ done with the cunning use of advertising.

The advertising for Sunny Delight is a classic example of “pester power”. It was linked to a healthy lifestyle for children and putting parents at ease. Since it contained vitamins A, B (1&6) and C, the parents thought it was healthier than conventional brands such as Coke and Pepsi. Sunny Delight also sponsored the English Basketball Association and blitzed schools with balls sporting the drink’s logo.

Kids across Britain went glassy eyed with desire for Sunny D and pestered their parents for it in the supermarkets.Mums complied and packed the drink into their children’s lunch boxes.

But the Food Commission, an independent watchdog, has now declared Sunny Delight to be no better than conventional carbonated drinks. Its main ingredient is refined white sugar.

Food Commission Spokesperson:

Sunny Delight is full of thickeners, colours and flavourings to make it look like a fruit juice, when it is basically just a very sugary drink. It is just a marketing con.

Advertising has always been a form of propaganda. But now younger and younger children are being targeted. Deregulation has meant that there is no control on the amount of advertising that children are subjected to.

Many children’s cartoons are little more than programme-length commercials. The first of these was the He-Man cartoon which promoted action figures and dolls of the same name.

Children are being sold everything from GI Joe to Teletubbies in the guise of TV shows.

Advertising for multinational products like McDonald’s hamburgers, computer games and football T-shirts are specifically directed towards children. Hence the concern of Broadcasting Standards Commission.

BSC spokesperson:

We are concerned about the effect of advertising on children. This is why we are recommending that media studies should become part of the regular curriculum at primary school. We need to ensure that children are given the means to develop critical viewing skills from the earliest possible age.

Toddlers deconstructing the news! What next?… And finally, cows in a Texas farm have learned to play the piano…

This rubbish is drowning me!

Media as Industry

Television, radio, films, videos, newspapers, magazines, comics are all cultural productions.

It can also be seen as a classic with a universal message that can originate equally well from Hollywood in the form of The Magnificent Seven…(1960)

Cultural products are different from mundane products such as microwave ovens or vacuum cleaners. They contain meanings, values, ideas and are a form of communication. Moreover, they work on several levels.

…or from India’s own Bollywood in the shape of Sholay. (1975)

But like microwave ovens and vacuum cleaners, media products are mass-produced and marketed as consumer goods. Tabloid newspapers and lifestyle magazines sell in millions. TV programmes are watched by tens of millions. Films and videos are seen by hundreds of millions. And like industrial products, they require constant innovation and have to be sold as cheaply as possible.

Just as last year’s “hot” model of car loses its shine, so there is a constant thirst for novelty in cultural production.The longest queues are for the latest films with the latest, biggest and the best special effects.

Television

It is not surprising that we speak of the media as an “industry”. So how do different media resemble industrial production?Now do you believe in aliens, Scully?I can’t hear you, Mulder – I’m stuck in this alien’s nostril.

Like all industries, television makes products that come off an assembly line. “Series” like The A-Team or The X-Files have recognizable formats, the basic unit of calculation for TV production and programme scheduling, and are sold all over the world as branded products. Soap operas are products aimed at local markets. Programme-making involves set industrial procedures. “Management” (controllers, managers, executive producers) and “workers” (producers, editors, researchers) are always at odds with each other. In most cases, ratings and advertising dictate what the viewers see on their TV screens.

Film

Studios act as manufacturers nursing their products from conception to mass-marketing. Hollywood was most industrialized during the 1930s and 40s. Major companies such as MGM and Warner Brothers formed a monopoly – the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America – preventing any new competition.

They had support from the banks and bought up studios, networks and cinema chains, thus controlling the availability of their products. Later, major studios went on to make similar acquisitions abroad.

The structure of films became very stylized – “problem” followed by “solution” – because this was a commercial success. Variation became limited and audiences were presented with easily recognizable products. Although “independents” have more opportunity nowadays, big studios, such as Disney, still call most of the shots.

Newspapers, Magazines and Alternative News

This is a fiercely competitive industry in which price-cutting, free offers, “takeovers” and mergers are not uncommon. The rise of alternative sources of news, from the Internet to 24-hour news channels (such as CNN, BBC News 24 and Sky News), has increased the competition. Niche marketing – the targeting of a specific group of consumers – has also appeared to encourage particular types of consumers and advertisers.

Media studies looks at the whole of the media industry from a number of different perspectives.

What is produced? How is it produced? What do these products mean? Who controls the means of production? What impact do media products have on society? How are various groups of people represented by and in the media? Who buys and consumes media products? How do the consumers interpret media products?

Attempts to answer these questions have been based on a number of different approaches which are reflected in the history and evolution of media studies.

The Evolution of Media Studies

The History Channel Pre-film script for a documentary on the history of media studies.

OPENING SEQUENCE

MACMEDIA on an inner city street. Lower Frame Super: Walter MacMedia, Star Presenter, Globelink TV

PRESENTER TO CAM