Media, Communication, Culture E-Book

James Lull

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 534

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Media, Communication, Culture offers a bold and comprehensive analysis of developments in the field amidst the effects of postmodernism and globalization. James Lull, one of the leading scholars in the discipline, draws from a wide range of social and cultural theory, including the work of John B. Thompson, Thomas Sowell, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Anthony Giddens and Samuel P. Huntington, to formulate a well balanced and highly original account of key contemporary developments worldwide.

The first edition of Media, Communication, Culture became a well established introductory text. For this new edition coverage has been expanded from six to ten chapters, and has been thoroughly updated to include all new developments in the field. In his familiar and accessible style, Lull brings to life a diverse range of examples and mini case studies which will prove invaluable to the reader. These range from the hip-hop hybrids of New Zealand's Maori youth and the vastly divergent meaning of race and culture in Brazil and the United States to the global impact of McDonalds and Microsoft. Complex theoretical ideas such as globalization, symbolic power, popular culture, ideology, consciousness, hegemony, social rules, media audience, cultural territory, and superculture are explained in a clear and engaging way that challenges traditional understandings.

By connecting major streams of theory to the latest trends in the global cultural mix, the book provides a fresh and unsurpassed introduction to media, communication and cultural studies. It will prove essential reading for undergraduates and above in the fields of media studies, communication studies, cultural studies and the sociology of culture.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

The global gaps

Social class

The technology gap

Structure and agency

Structuration theory

Communication and connectivity

About this book

2 Ideology and Consciousness

Ideology

Ideology and the mass media

Image systems

Ideational image systems

Mediational image systems

Consciousness

The subconscious

Temporal and spatial consciousness

Domestic time, space, and place

The role of culture

3 Hegemony

The role of media and popular culture

Global capitalist hegemony

Communist hegemony

Counter-hegemony: Do we really do what we’re told?

Conclusion

4 Social Rules and Power

Rule

Rules in society

Exceptions to rules

Rules and culture

Power

Lines of authority

The special authority of electronic media

Public images and private practices: media, rules, and the macro/micro question

Rules in perspective

5 Media Audiences

Direct effects

Limited effects

Uses and Gratifications

A uses and gratifications approach

The functionalist tradition

The mass audience

The mass society

Rethinking the mass audience

The audience and technological change

Fragmentation and segmentation

Polarization

Conclusion

6 Culture

Ideology and culture

Emotion and culture

Language and culture

Race and culture

Internal cultural patterns

Social class and culture

Habitus

Conclusion

7 Symbolic Power and Popular Culture

Popular culture

Popular reception

Popular emotions

Emotional “branding”

Mediated feelings

Story, genre, discourse

Cultural uses of symbolic power

Culture and the material world

Popular cultural capital: black gold

Carnival culture

Conclusion

8 Meaning in Motion

Media and cultural imperialism: a brief review

The zones of indeterminacy

Communication sources: institutional diversity

Communication channels: unmanageable technology

Communication messages: shades of significance

Conclusion

9 Globalization and Cultural Territory

Communication receivers: the making of global cultures

The global cultural mix

Image nations

The dynamics of global culture

Deterritorialization and migration

Cultural melding and mediation

“Glocalization”

Reterritorialization and diasporas

Circular migration

Ramp-up to postmodernity

10 Culture, Superculture, Sensation

Surviving the culture crash

New communication skills and the personalization of culture

The superculture

The cultural spheres

Cultural actualization

Sensations

Experience without culture

Conclusion

Glossary

References

Index

Copyright © James Lull, 2000

The right of James Lull to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published 1995

Reprinted in 1995, 1996, 1999

This edition published 2000 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

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Acknowledgements

My work is made possible by contributions from wonderful people in many parts of the world. It seems impossible to acknowledge everyone who has influenced the work because this book reflects an accumulation of professional and personal experiences that date back to long before I began to write the first edition.

Among those who certainly should be mentioned are Agnes da Silva, Janet Breit, Joe Verballis, Eduardo Neiva, Heloisa Aguiar, Pertti Tiihonen, Mirja Liikkanen, Katarina Eskola, Terhi Rantanen, Juha Kytömäki, Dalmer Pacheco, Tomas Pereira, Guillermo Orozco Gómez, Klaus Bruhn Jensen, Toshie Takahashi Sato, Debbie Johnson, Michael Marx, Steve Hinerman, Maria Immacolata Vassalo Lopes, Dave Morley, Leoncio Barrios, Bo Reimer, Karl Erik Rosengren, Renata Veloso, Stephanie Coopman, Ted Coopman, Dave Elliott, Dennis Jaehne, Tim Hegstrom, Serena Stanford, Mike Real, Paul Messaris, Ien Ang, Thomas Tufte, Federico Varona, Laura Nguyen, Walter Neira, Zhang Li-fen, Lucia Castellon Aguayo, Marcia Terlaje-Salas, Stefanie Izumi, Miguel de Aguilera, Romaldo Lopez, Sam Koplowicz, Marsha Siefert, Brian Sparks, Brett Garland, Patricia Martinez Iguínez, Héctor Gómez, Ricardo “Oso” Morales, Andrew Goodwin, Teresa Velázquez, Juan José Perona Páez, Amparo Huertas Bailén, Juan Luis Manfredi, Nilza Waldeck, Marisa Leal, Rita Monteiro, Robert Avery, Brian Moeran, Claudio Avendaño, and Eleonora Pires.

Very insightful comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript were made by John Tomlinson and Charlotta Kratz.

The staff at Polity Press has been extremely helpful, as always. Once again I wish to thank John B. Thompson for his constant intellectual stimulation, professional advice, and personal friendship. Julia Harsant, Lynn Dunlop, Fiona Sewell, and Sandra Byatt were very encouraging and helpful editors, and Sue Leigh carefully supervised production. Thanks as well to the North American co-publisher of this volume, Columbia University Press, especially Ann Miller and Alexander Thorp, for their enthusiastic editorial guidance and support.

The considerable time I have spent in Brazil and Mexico in recent years has taught me much about media, communication, and culture. In particular, I wish to thank Jorge González, Director of the Culture Program at the University of Colima, Mexico, for sharing with me his great fascination with and knowledge of contemporary Mexican and Latin American culture, as well as his limitless energy and personal kindness. The staff of the Culture Program in Colima, especially Irma Alcaraz, Ana Uribe, Ana Isabel Zermeño, Angelica Rocha, and Genaro Zenteno, have all greatly expanded my knowledge and made life ever so much more enjoyable.

James Lull San José, California([email protected]; home page: http://members.aol.com/JamesLull)

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders. However, if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

The cover painting, ‘AD 2000: New York City,’ is by the Canadian artist René Milot. Commissioned by the National Geographic Society (of the United States), the painting displays a young woman sitting in her New York apartment, windows barred against urban threats. When not out with friends, she is connected to the world via computer, cell phone, television, and radio – living life remotely, in a barrage of information. A caged iguana, dusty telescope, and potted plant hint at the nature world she has little time to enjoy. Cultural trinkets litter her room, disposable as a pizza box. Craving stimulation, she wouldn’t live anywhere else. (By permission of the National Geographic Society, Washington, DC.)

1

Introduction

I grew up here when California was full of, you know, California type people. Now it’s international.

My plumber, San José, California, 1999

The global is the true state of affairs.

Friedman 1994: 3

As the middle-aged, middle-class professors from the Philippines droned on sadly about how their traditional island musics were being replaced by Anglo-American sounds and modern popular music from Manila, my mind drifted back to my childhood. I recalled my days as a teenager when I so desperately wanted out of the little “island” where I was born and raised – a small farm town of Nordic immigrants in southern Minnesota. I depended so much then on top forty radio stations from Minneapolis and Chicago to feel free, sexy, and connected to other places. I wanted to explore the unknown, break the chains, feel alive. I loved the cool music, the smooth, fast-talking deejays, the dances, the clothes, the city girls – especially Marianne Fitzgerald, who was by far the cutest ninth grader in all of Minnesota, and one of the regular dancers on Minneapolis’s version of American Bandstand.

The big sounds of the metropolis connected so powerfully with my body, my senses, my dreams. Listening and moving to the big city beat, I imagined just how much more complex, interesting, and exciting life could be. And I was right! I knew then that I wanted to be more than just another midwestern American kid who never left home.

Wake up! Back to reality – an academic conference on popular music. Filipinos lamenting their imagined lost utopias at the hands of the corrupting international music industry and the modern sounds from Manila. I understand where they’re coming from, but …

Photo 1.1 Hanno Möttölä – the globalized Finn

(photo by University of Utah Athletic Department)

This book begins where the wistful Filipino professors’ argument leaves off, and concludes much more optimistically. We begin this complex journey into twenty-first-century media, communication, and culture with an example of a truly globalized man – a young professional basketball player from Finland who lives in America. We will then summarize how the gaps in comparative socioeconomic status, technology use, information, and knowledge between and among peoples of the world have reached very disturbing levels. We then briefly introduce structuration theory as it can be applied to media, communication, and culture. Structuration theory is a useful framework for analyzing how people’s lives are structured by, but not limited to, the powerful ideological and cultural forces that surround them.

Box 1.1 International Sport and the Globalized Finn

(The following is based on personal communications with National Basketball Association player, Hanno Möttölä. … )

Got his first pair of Air Jordans when he was ten years old. Grew up watching the National Basketball Association (NBA) on TV. Loved the Lakers, hated the Celtics. Really liked Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon, but Magic Johnson was by far his favorite player. Played hoops with his older brother and friends at the local YMCA. Into U2, Springsteen, and the Rolling Stones.

Some kid from Kansas City?

Try Helsinki.

Head down, fists clenched, arms pulling front to back, a look of great determination on his face, Hanno Möttölä runs down the court to assume a defensive position. He has just scored another two points inside with a fluid duck-under move, a lethal complement to his excellent outside shooting. The big blond is the first man ever from remote, sparsely populated Finland to play in the NBA.

Basketball has become a truly international sport, rivaled only by soccer and hockey. The NBA features famous players from Nigeria, Venezuela, Australia, Germany, France, Serbia, Croatia, Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, Lithuania, Holland, Russia, and several Caribbean islands, among many other global locales.

The rich diversity of players in the NBA today is one spectacular indication of how international sport in particular, and popular culture in general, have been globalized at the outset of the twenty-first century. Hanno Möttölä’s story reveals just how connected we have become across the boundaries of time and space.

Not only did Hanno lace up his Air Jordans, watch the NBA on TV, and crank up Bono and U2 on his stereo in Helsinki as a kid, he learned to speak English and Swedish, traveled the world playing for the Finnish national basketball team, and spent a year in San Antonio, Texas, as a foreign exchange student. His father serves as an advisor for Finland’s foreign ministry in international relations, and his mother edits the culture section of Helsinki’s major daily newspaper.

The globalized Finn maintains constant contact with friends and family via email and telephone, and checks the hockey and soccer scores on-line every day. His family watches him play basketball on America’s NBC satellite Superchannel in Finland, and on the Internet.

And what about the game of basketball itself? To watch Hanno play in the NBA is to observe a striking contrast in style. Basketball is the “black man’s game” in America, with more than 80 percent of the professional players claiming African-American heritage. For Hanno, “that makes the game much more interesting … faster, tougher, more athletic.” Still Hanno values and exhibits tremendous discipline, toughness, maturity, and team play – qualities brought from Finland that were refined under coach Rick Majerus where Hanno played college ball – the University of Utah.

In sharp contrast to subdued and modest Finnish culture, the Big American Pop Culture Show has caught up a reluctant Hanno in its midst – lots of money, screaming fans, cheerleaders, pressure to win at all costs. And nationalism: “In the United States you hear the national anthem at every sports game and you see lots of American flags everywhere. Back home these things are not so obvious … they’re sacred.”

Can glitz, glamour, and big money seduce the soul forever? Certainly. But Finland’s first NBA player so far resists the temptation. He says he’ll go back to Helsinki when his basketball career is over. He loves the history and tradition there. The beautiful old buildings. The people. The culture. The silences. A true cosmopolitan child of globalization who has benefited tremendously from all the advantages the ultra-modern world can bring, Hanno Möttölä still believes one thing:

“You’ll always be the person from the place you come from … ”

That place is the most wired nation in the world. Finland has the highest percentage of its population connected to the Internet – way over half. Finns are also among the world’s most active users of cellular phones, and the country is home to Nokia, the famous mobile phone maker.1 Finland’s appetite for the latest personal communications devices is more than remarkable given that its people are famous for their quiet, some would say “uncommunicative,” social style. Finland is also among the world’s leaders in quality education, and despite some rough times in recent years, the country has developed a very high standard of living for the vast majority of its people.

The global gaps

Globalization divides as much as it unites; it divides as it unites.

Bauman 1998: 2

Finland is one of the world’s “have” nations. Finns have money and high technology. They have a high literacy rate and an excellent educational system. They have professional opportunities and social guarantees. Finland has the world’s most equal social distribution of wealth.2

But when we survey all the world’s nations and peoples, we find that Finland is truly exceptional in all these respects and is, after all, a small nation with fewer than six million inhabitants. A very troubling trend confronts us as global citizens as we proceed through these early years of the twenty-first century.3 To put it simply, the world’s rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer. Real differences between social and cultural groups in the world are increasing by the minute, and the differences become more striking with every technological advance.

Europe and North America accounted for more than half the world’s wealth at the turn of the century, while the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (with exceptions like Brazil, Chile, China, and Taiwan) account for a only small percentage. But this is changing. The gaps between and among many of the world’s nations are actually getting smaller rather than larger. As a proportion of the world’s wealth, European and North American economies are losing ground.

Social class

I am against the kind of globalization that allows one US gentleman to have $90 billion, while another sleeps under a bridge.

Fidel Castro, accepting a medal as an honorary citizen of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1999

The real gap in socioeconomic status around the world exists between members of the middle class and the truly poor populations in all countries. The size of the international middle class is increasing, but the world’s underclass population is expanding simultaneously at an even greater rate, and the poor keep getting relatively poorer.

Socioeconomic disparities inside Third World (or “newly industrializing countries,” NICs) are particularly extreme. In Asia and Latin America, for example, a tiny number of super-rich people benefit tremendously from international trade and modern information technology while the poor – who procreate at rates much higher than the rich, and therefore increase their numbers faster in absolute and relative terms – fall farther and farther behind.

China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Russia have been identified by the World Bank as the largest newly emerging world economies. Their likely future success as nations, however, does not mean that most people or families living in these countries will benefit. National economic development in countries where the differences in socioeconomic standing are great creates explosive social conditions. The World Bank predicts that while China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, and Russia will double their economic output from about 8 to 16 percent of the world’s total by the year 2020, serious “social turbulence” will accompany the growth. Indeed, clear symptoms of widespread unrest are manifest in all those countries already. So, while economic development in the coming years will gradually reduce the gap between many nations of the world and expand the size of the middle class in all the emerging world economies, poverty will also grow at a frightening rate. This is not a determined consequence, of course, because nations could direct revenues and resources in ways that would reduce the suffering. But of the five large economies mentioned above, China’s socialist system may be the only one able to provide an effective social safety net for its poorest people.

Americans, Brits, Japanese, and Australians are by no means exempt from these global trends. The same internal gaps are developing. Of all the world’s large, industrialized countries, the United States has become the most divided by income and wealth. The “gentleman” that Fidel Castro referred to in Brazil is Bill Gates, the world’s wealthiest man. The disparity between rich and poor in the United States is systemic. Statistics indicate that roughly the richest 20 percent of the American public now controls more than 80 percent of the nation’s wealth, a trend that keeps growing.

The technology gap

Technology never functions in an undifferentiated field of social relations. In our own individual countries, and in the global context too, some people have much greater access to communications technology than others. Socioeconomic class is the most obvious predictor of this difference.

While cellular phones, fax machines, digital video disc players, and all other modern communications technologies are concentrated disproportionately in the hands of the relatively well-to-do, the personal computer really separates rich from poor. While more than 50 percent of North American families had a computer in the home at the turn of the century, information technology remains largely a white-collar phenomenon. Well-paid, highly-educated, young male professionals are most likely to own and use a computer, especially for Internet access.

A US Department of Commerce report explains how the differences between rich and poor in the United States are related to race and technology. Poor people of all races in the United States have few computers in their homes. Blacks and Hispanics make up a disproportionately higher percentage of the American poor, so they are far less likely than whites or Asians to have computers. That clearly limits their opportunities.

This trend is not just related to social class, however. The rate of computer ownership among blacks and Hispanics of all social classes is comparatively low in the United States. More than a third of North Americans who did not own a personal computer in 1998 said they have absolutely no interest in ever having one. Exclusion from and resistance to high technology (and to higher education) thus is related to disadvantages imposed by low social class, but also by cultural values and ways of life.

Higher education, computers, and all forms of high technology are keys to economic success for individuals, families, and nations. Those who do not use computers in today’s globalized environment are left behind in many ways. This is what is meant by terms such as the technology gap, the information gap, and the knowledge gap. This worldwide social crisis could not be solved easily even if technological resources were abundant and accessible to everyone, which they most assuredly are not. Technological development cannot simply be mandated in situations where people’s basic needs are unfulfilled, where their opportunities are greatly limited, or where their cultural values do not match up well with the razor-sharp rationality of high technology and the competitive demands of global capitalism.

And in global terms, how can we talk about the empowering potential of computers, the Internet, and information technology for India, China, and most countries in Africa and Southeast Asia when the vast majority of families there don’t yet have a telephone? With the exception of the relatively small middle-class populations of nations like South Africa and Zimbabwe, sub-Saharan African peoples don’t have access to computers at all. The unwired countries of Africa and elsewhere simply function outside the Global Information Infrastructure. In Africa, the technology gap interacts with political turmoil, corruption, the AIDS crisis, and poverty to greatly limit opportunities for economic growth – a goal which requires access to the information superhighway to be realized.

At the same time, the upper classes in developing countries are very sophisticated users of high technology. Many of them have satellite receivers, computers with Internet access, cell phones, DVD machines, fax machines, and every other communications gadget in their homes and offices. They operate in Bombay, Lagos, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, and Kuala Lumpur at a First World standard, safely tucked away in guarded fortresses which isolate them from the threatening, anonymous poor who occupy the streets nearby. The few computers and other information technologies which do exist in developing countries are used mainly to make money rather than improve health, education, family planning, and economic opportunities for the general population.

We have cast our discussion of the global gaps so far mainly in terms of economics and technology. This is a necessary critical orientation, and the world scene in these respects obviously is troubling. But life is not limited to money and computers, and gaps between social groups should not be addressed solely in these terms. Love, beauty, passion, pleasure, and romance, for example, are not taken into account when we focus on the differences between people strictly in terms of economics, technology, and information. By expanding the analysis into culture, which includes the emotional dimensions of life as well as the rational sides, we open up lots of interesting possibilities. These will be explored in the chapters which follow.

Structure and agency

We will wrestle mightily with one central theoretical problem throughout this book. The critical issue is by no means unique to the analysis presented here. In one way or another, theorists and writers from all the social sciences have long tried to understand the dynamic relationship between two basic, powerful, and seemingly opposing forces. These forces reflect tensions that have already been raised in this brief introduction.

On one side of the issue, we have structure. There are many kinds of structure, but generally we can say that structure is any force that systemically limits or contains people. Structures can be quite abstract, and are in some ways even invisible because they can be huge and are therefore taken for granted. The fields of politics, economics, ideology, and culture, for example, all structure social interaction in ways that favor the interests of some people over others. The comments of Zygmunt Bauman and Fidel Castro quoted earlier, for instance, call attention to what these men consider to be structural inequalities in globalization and socioeconomic relations.

On the other side of the issue is human agency. This positive force refers to the energy, creativity, purposefulness, and transcendent abilities that individual persons and subgroups set in motion, even unconsciously, to make their lives meaningful and enjoyable. Agency is the force of liberation and growth. Agency is exercised at personal and collective social levels.

Apparently we’ve got a classic “bad guy, good guy” pairing of opposing forces here. In simplified terms, human beings can overcome the confining structures that surround and limit them by exercising their human potential – their agency. This contrasting, dynamic tension provides a productive platform from which we can now begin our explorations and commentaries about global media, communication, and culture.

Structuration theory

The most far-reaching and comprehensive approach for analyzing the controversies of social power that takes structure and agency as its point of departure is the famed British sociologist Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration (see especially Giddens 1984; Lull 1992b). A detailed explanation of this very complex social theory goes beyond our purposes here and will not be attempted. But the spirit of the theory can help us find our way round the mosaic that makes up this text. Essentially, Giddens’s theory integrates “macrosocial” conditions (reflecting the constraints of structure) with “microsocial” processes (where agency takes form). Structuration theory is particularly valuable because it explains how structure and agency need not be thought of as entirely opposing forces. This is a crucial advance in thinking because while structuration theory recognizes the constraints structure clearly imposes on individuals and societies, it does not programmatically blame external forces for everything wrong in the world, an overly simplified conclusion that crops up all too often in “critical” academic theorizing.

We must strike a balance in our thinking about structure and agency in order to fairly evaluate what’s really going on in media, communication, and culture at the global level. We want to keep the issue of social power in the forefront of the analysis, of course, but we do not want to simply assume an a priori point of view that is overloaded on one side of the social power equation or the other. Too much emphasis on structure exaggerates constraint, making it appear that established social institutions and rules somehow determine our realities in an airtight fashion. But by the same token giving too much attention to agency naively grants unwarranted power to individuals and underestimates how dominant forces and guidelines do in fact influence individuals and societies, often even against their best interests.

Communication and connectivity

Communication is necessary for cultural innovation, and cultural innovation is necessary for human survival. This was true more than 40,000 years ago when the first cave art and other symbolic artifacts appeared in Europe and Africa, and it was also true some 400,000 years ago when Homo sapiens first developed the physical ability to utter sounds and interact through speech (Kay, Cartmill, and Barlow 1998).

Through communication we create culture, and when we communicate, we communicate culturally: “Culture can be understood as the order of life in which human beings construct meaning through practices of symbolic representation … [that is] by communicating with each other” (Tomlinson 1999: 18). In today’s complex world communication is the social nexus where interpersonal relations and technological innovations, political-economic incentives and sociocultural ambitions, light entertainment and serious information, local environments and global influences, form and content, substance and style all intersect, interact, and influence each other.

Photo 1.2 Do you speak MTV? Globalized media and popular culture like MTV Asia challenge traditional values in every corner of the world, including China

(printed with permission of MTV)

Human communication is just as necessary today as it was hundreds of centuries ago, but social exchange and the cultural domains that human interactions help create assume radically different forms and formats in the era of globalization. As British sociologist David Chaney points out, “traditionally, social institutions such as family and religion have been seen as the primary media of [cultural] continuity. More recently … the role of ensuring continuity has increasingly been taken over by … forms of communication and entertainment” (Chaney 1994: 58).

We live today in an ever-increasingly hyper-interconnected world, a “global ecumene” of communicative interactions and exchanges that stimulates profound cultural transformations and realignments (Hannerz 1996: 7). Any study of culture in the globalized, mass-mediated, Internet-influenced world we live in, therefore, must seriously take into account the most sweeping dimension of communication – connectivity. With the Internet and information technology come incredible social opportunities. This is because communication is ultimately an open, undetermined space where the unlimited creativity of people can take form.

Even the most basic, non-mediated, minimally connected communication codes and processes assure tremendous latitude in symbolic exchange. The Canadian anthropologist Grant McCracken offers the analogy of linguistic structure and the way people use language to demonstrate the limits of structure and the vitality of agency in routine social interaction:

Each speaker of a language is both constrained and empowered by the code that informs his language use. He or she has no choice but to accept the way in which distinctive features have been defined and combined to form phonemes. He or she has no choice but to accept the way in which the phonemes have been defined and combined to form morphemes. The creation of sentences out of morphemes is also constrained, but here the speaker enjoys a limited discretionary power and combinatorial freedom. This discretionary power increases when the speaker combines sentences into utterances. By this stage the action of compulsory rules of combination has ceased altogether. (1990: 63)

About this book

Moving forward then with an overarching philosophy that life’s vital trajectories are not predestined, we shall now explore the dynamic interaction of three themes that will make up the core of this book: mass media and information technology, patterns and processes of human communication, and the social construction of diverse cultures.

The book is international, multicultural, and multidisciplinary. Many of the examples refer to cultures outside North America, the United Kingdom, and continental Europe. We study capitalist and communist systems, the First World and the Third, the rich and the poor, the mainstream and the margins. We evaluate media, communication, and culture stretching from California to China, by way of England, Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, and scores of other places. Theorists from outside the northern loop are prominent contributors to the points of view that evolve in the following pages. We will travel theoretical terrain that encompasses key concepts and issues from communication studies, sociology, cultural studies, political economy, psychology, and anthropology. We visit the premodern, modern, high modern, and postmodern eras.

No facile, easy answers to complex, tough questions will be found in these pages as we strive to explain the forces of structure and agency in contemporary media, communication, and culture. Given the choice of privileging structure over agency, or agency over structure, however, I choose the latter. I prefer to stand in the sunshine, not in the shadows, and I hope that by the end of our journey together readers of this volume will be inspired to do the same.

Notes

1 Nokia is Finnish, not Japanese.

2 It must also be said, however, that Finland has maintained a very restrictive immigration policy over the years, a fact that minimizes socioeconomic differences within the nation.

3 The statistics and trends discussed here are supplied by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Paris.

2

Ideology and Consciousness

We move forward with this critical analysis of media, communication, and culture now by exploring concepts that should be part of any college student’s working vocabulary. Ideology and consciousness are the subjects of this chapter, and a related idea, hegemony, will be the focus of the next. We will refer to ideology, consciousness, and hegemony throughout this book. The concepts are complex and overlapping, though each has a unique emphasis and role in social theory. To introduce the first two, we can say that ideology is a system of ideas expressed in communication and consciousness is the essence or totality of attitudes, opinions, and sensitivities held by individuals or groups.

Ideology

In the most general sense, ideology is organized thought – sets of values, orientations, and predispositions that are expressed through technologically mediated and interpersonal communication. Ideologies are internally coherent ways of thinking. They are points of view that may or may not be “true;” that is, ideologies are not necessarily grounded in historically or empirically verifiable fact. Ideologies may be tightly or loosely organized. Some are complex and well integrated; others are fragmented. Some ideological lessons are temporary; others endure. Some meet strong resistance; others have immediate and phenomenal impact. But the varying character of ideology should not obscure its importance. Organized thought is never innocent; it always serves a purpose. Ideologies are implicated by their origins, their institutional associations, and the purposes to which they are put, though these histories and relationships may never be entirely clear. In fact society’s power holders often prefer that people don’t understand or question where ideas come from, or whose interests are served by ideologies, and whose are not.

Ideology is a term we can use to describe the values and public agenda of nations, religious groups, political parties, candidates and movements, business organizations, schools, labor unions, even professional sporting teams, urban gangs, rock bands, and rap groups. But most often the term refers to the relationship between organized thought and social power in large-scale, political-economic contexts. Ideology, therefore, is fundamentally a large-scale, “macro”-level concept. Selected ways of thinking are advocated through a variety of channels by those in society who have widespread political and economic power. The ongoing manipulation of public information and imagery by society’s power holders constructs a particular kind of ideology – a dominant ideology which helps sustain the material and cultural interests of its creators.

Ideology as a system of ideas has persuasive force only when such ideas can be represented and communicated. Naturally, then, the mass media and all other large-scale social institutions play a vital role in the dissemination of ideologies. Fabricators of dominant ideologies become an “information elite.” Their power, or dominance, stems directly from their ability to publicly articulate their preferred systems of ideas. Ironically, in today’s world many of society’s “elites” must depend on non-elite cultural forms – the mass media and popular culture – to circulate their ideologies in order to maintain their elevated social status.

The origins of ideology as a critical concept in social theory can be traced to late eighteenth-century France (Thompson 1990). Since then, by one definition or another, ideology has been a central concern of historians, literary critics, sociologists, philosophers, semioticians, political scientists, rhetoricians – theorists representing virtually every niche in the humanities and social sciences. European intellectuals in particular have given ideology a sharp critical edge. British social theorists, for example – living in a blatantly class-divided society famous for its kings and queens, princes and princesses, lords and ladies – often define ideology in terms of how information is used by one socioeconomic group (the elite or “ruling class”) to dominate the rest – especially the poor and the working class. Raymond Williams, one of the most respected communication theorists of years past, called ideology “the set of ideas which arises from a given set of material interests or, more broadly, from a definite class or group” (1976: 156; italics mine). He was saying that ideology is closely connected to economic interests. Persons and institutions with political or economic power will try to use ideology to maintain their privileged position at all costs. To give a particularly consequential example, during the Vietnam War of the 1960s and early 1970s the corporate manufacturers of military weapons, equipment, and supplies vigorously supported the ideological assertion, “My Country Right or Wrong!” in order to keep the profitable war going as long as possible.

Because “systems of ideas” are used in ways that favor the interests of some people over others, we must never trivialize the meaning of ideology. For this reason, the British sociologist John B. Thompson insists that ideology is best understood in the aforementioned, more narrow sense of “dominant ideology,” wherein “symbolic forms” including language, media content, political platforms, institutional messages from governments, schools, organized religion, and so on are used by those with power to “establish and sustain relations of domination” (1990: 58). However, Thompson argues, “specific symbolic forms are not ideological as such: they are ideological only in so far as they serve, in particular circumstances, to establish and sustain systematically asymmetrical relations of power” (Thompson 1995: 213). The socioeconomic elites can saturate society with their preferred ideological agenda partly because they have great influence, often ownership, over the institutions that author and dispense symbolic forms of communication, including the culture industries and the mass media.

Ideology, then, is a very good place to begin a critique of media, communication, and culture. Our reflection begins with the term itself. Simply to refer to any system of ideas as “ideology” calls attention to the nature of that system of ideas, and opens the door for meaningful analysis. The expressions “capitalist ideology” and “socialist ideology,” for example, call attention to the fundamental principles that make up the two contrasting, often competing, political-economic-cultural systems. Using the term “ideology” directs attention to the values and practices of capitalism and socialism as political-economic-cultural schemas that are constructed and represented rather than natural and self-evident. It problematizes capitalism and socialism as sets of values, perspectives, and conforming social practices. A seemingly minor shift of language – from “capitalism” to “capitalist ideology,” for example – thus facilitates analysis and debate. That is a main reason why ideology is a favorite term of critical observers and theorists. However, the term can also be used in a way that discourages critical reflection. Some American politicians, citizens, and media complain of the “communist ideology” of “Castro’s Cuba” or of “red China,” for example. When used in this pejorative manner, the term “ideology” nearly becomes a synonym for “communism.” It is the communists who suffer from ideology, according to this interpretation, as if Americans and others in the “free world” don’t have to worry about any such political manipulations.

Ideology and the mass media

Some ideologies are elevated and amplified by the mass media, given great legitimacy by them, and distributed persuasively, often glamorously, to large audiences. In the process, ideas assume ever-increasing importance, reinforcing their original meanings and extending their social impact. Television has the unparalleled ability to expose, dramatize, and popularize cultural bits and fragments of information. It does so in the routine transmission of entertainment programs, news, and commercials. The bits and fragments then become ideological currency in social exchange. People talk a lot about what they read, see, and hear on the mass media and the Internet. Media fragments don’t stand alone – not in the media, and not in our conversations. Various bits of information often congeal to form ideological sets that overrepresent the interests of the powerful and underrepresent the interests of the less rich or simply less visible people. Although television may be the most obvious conveyer of such dominant ideologies, all mass media, including seldom recognized forms such as postage stamps, store windows, breakfast cereal boxes, automobile bumper stickers, tee-shirts, grocery receipts, golf tees, matchbook covers, restaurant menus, even the bottom of urinals carry messages that serve the interests of some groups and not others. Consider, for instance, the (dominant) ideological lessons given in these familiar American bumper stickers:

He Who Dies with the Most Toys Wins.I Owe, I Owe, So Off to Work I Go.My Other Car is a Porsche.My Boss Was a Jewish Carpenter.

Image systems

Image … is everything.

Tennis professional Andre Agassi in a TV commercial for a Japanese camera manufacturer

Image … is nothing.

Professional basketball star Grant Hill in a TV commercial for an American soft drink company

The Sprite commercial, of course, is meant to be heavily ironic. The soft drink company depends on Grant Hill’s image to claim that “image is nothing!” Appearances are extremely important in a mass-mediated world. The effective spread of dominant ideologies – those mainstream sets of ideas that reinforce the status quo – depends on the strategic use of image systems, of which there are two basic types: ideational and mediational (figure 2.1). Ideational image systems refer to how ideas take form. Mediational image systems refer to how ideas circulate in society. The key word in both cases is “system.” Ideologies make sense because their internal elements hang together in systematic patterns. Those patterns then become familiar and accepted because they are delivered to us systematically via the mass media, and are further circulated in the personal conversations we have with our families, friends, co-workers, teachers, fellow students, neighbors, email correspondents, chat-room partners, and others. Image systems, therefore, refer to the articulation of layers of ideological representation and the tactical use of modern communications technology to distribute the representations, which, when successful, encourage audience acceptance and reproduction of the dominant themes, thus reinforcing relationships of power that are already in place. We use the term “image systems” to emphasize that ideology depends on the patterned construction, representation, and transmission of ways of thinking in order to be influential.

Figure 2.1 Image systems

Ideational image systems

Let’s concentrate first on ideas. As we are learning, ideas are never neutral and they rarely stand alone. They are grouped together for strategic purposes, refer to each other, and reinforce each other. A comparison with language may help clarify how systems of ideas work. When people speak a language, they utter sounds that are organized into words, phrases, sentences, and so forth. Language as a system encourages certain responses and understandings, and not others. It is not a closed system – there is room for misunderstanding, disagreement, and invention – but it is a system that is structured sufficiently well so that people who share the code can communicate and coordinate their actions according to mutually intelligible assumptions and rules. The same basic process characterizes how systems of ideas take shape and move about.

Let’s consider an extended example of an ideational image system – commercial advertising – a $200-billion industry in the USA alone. What commercial advertisers sell are not just products, services, or isolated ideas. Advertisers sell multilayered, integrated ideational systems that embrace, interpret, and project interdependent images of products, cheerful consumers benefiting from the products, corporations that profit from sale of the products, and, most important, the overarching political-economic-cultural structure – and the values and social activity it embraces – that presumably makes all the consumer activity possible. Advertisers want people not only to like the brands and product groups they put up for sale, but to believe in the economic system that underlies the very idea that “to consume is good.” Some ideas thus are acceptable to the economic elite who sponsor the advertising, while other idea are not. One idea that does not fit well with the ideational image system of advertising, for example, is the well-documented scientific claim that current patterns of natural resource consumption on a global scale – especially at rates evident in the more developed countries of the northern hemisphere – are destroying the earth’s ecological balance and threatening the planet’s very survival.

Without much regard for environmental or social consequences, advertisers try to turn media audience members into consumers. Through advertising people are encouraged to become personally involved with commercial products by imagining contexts – the physical scenes, emotional circumstances, and actual social situations in which they would be able to use various products. These projected imagined situations are grounded in an overarching value structure with which the consumer is already familiar. Advertising’s success thus depends largely on the interpretative chemistry of plausible imagined consumptive situations interacting with familiar and accepted value structures. So, for example, a Nissan automobile commercial encourages viewers to buy one of their sleek-looking but competitively priced cars “Because rich guys shouldn’t have all the fun!” These eight words sell much more than Nissans. They are used to construct an imagined situation framed by a value structure that embraces unabashed materialist competition, a commodified definition of pleasure, reinforcement of the “naturalness” of a socially stratified society, an assumption that social aggressiveness is the territory of men, and permission to use the product in order to deceive others into thinking you’ve got a car that reflects high socioeconomic status. This example demonstrates how the various internal elements of a television commercial – the audiovisual cues, cultural values, and assumptions – all work together to create an ideational image system.

Repetition is extremely important. Repeated presentation of dominant ideological messages continues to define or “indicate” culture, particularly for people who are heavily exposed to media. For example, the “heavy viewer” of television (30 hours or more per week) tends to perceive the world in a way that is much more consistent with the images presented on the tube than those who watch less than ten hours weekly (Gerbner 1973; Gerbner and Gross 1976). Mass media greatly influence how people make sense of even the most basic features of their societies. The media give strong, repeated impressions about society’s racial and gender composition and roles, for example, as well as its vocational alternatives, political options, and levels of violence. In the United States we see lots of white and black people on TV, but few Latinos, Asians, or Middle Easterners. Most jobs apparently are quite glamorous, men are single and women married, very few children or elderly people exist, there are only two political parties, almost everybody is heterosexual, and the chances are excellent you will be shot the minute you walk out your front door. Television’s common themes regularly stereotype people and things, reinforce the status quo, and support the dominant ideology that is behind these ideas. As Gerbner and Gross say, “TV is an agency of the established order and as such serves primarily to extend and maintain rather than alter, threaten, or weaken conventional conceptions, beliefs, and behaviors … its chief cultural function is to spread and stabilize social patterns” (1976: 175). Consistent with the perspective we are developing in this chapter, Gerbner and Gross consider the content of television to be an ideologically loaded “message system.”

The flood of commercials capitalizing on the national mood in the United States following the Gulf War in the early 1990s illustrates well how culturally based value structures can be used to sell products. In these commercials, sponsors positioned their products inside the emotional context of nationalism, patriotism, and militarism that swept America after Iraq surrendered – to “go with the glow,” in advertising terms. Post-war accolades in political rhetoric and corporate advertising incessantly celebrated what was called America’s freedom-loving spirit, its selfless determination, and its technological superiority. As we’ve seen, a fundamental objective of corporate advertising is to gain and maintain credibility by embedding specific messages in more abstract and encompassing ideologies in order to create ideational image systems. In the case of the post-Gulf War rhetoric, commercial messages were reinforced almost daily by former president George Bush’s pronouncements of America’s prominent role in what he called the “New World Order.” The “New World Order” is actually an ideological term created to promote US political and economic interests on a global scale.

Photo 2.1 Freedom to consume … if you’ve got the money. American advertising links ideology and nationalism with a marketing strategy, even in Moscow

(photo by James Lull)

Nationalist rhetoric and flag waving in television commercials long predate the self-congratulatory indulgences that saturated the airwaves following the Gulf War or the more current exercises in Japan and China bashing. A common technique has been to ridicule other nations and peoples. Films, television programs, and commercials chastised Germans and Japanese for years after World War II ended. The Cold War ideological standoff in effect after World War II until the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the ultimate disintegration of the Soviet Union provided a political context in which American nationalism and capitalism were exalted by blatant negative stereotyping of communist nations and peoples. The typical strategy has been to create or promote good feelings about American culture (of which the product is a part) by encouraging the audience to laugh at the dramatized cultural (and racial) incompetencies of foreigners. Russians were frequent targets in the 1980s (Real 1989). Since China’s military crackdown at Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, the Chinese often have been posed as the feared and hated “other,” a perspective that emanates from, and fuels, political purposes on the right and the left in the USA. The action movie Red Corner, for example, is a particularly horrible and misleading representation of Chinese culture.

The red, white, and blue flag-shaped logo of the Tommy Hilfiger line of sports apparel is a noteworthy recent example of how familiar, patriotic symbolism continues to be used as a marketing strategy. But in the multicultural realities of today, the “market for loyalties” (Price 1994) is complex. One of the Spanish-language radio stations in San José, California, for instance, uses the red, white, and green colors of the Mexican flag in all its public promotions to compete with other stations. Inside Mexico, red, white, and green banners are used by the powerful political party Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), a tactic some observers believe tricks semi-literate voters into thinking that when they vote for a PRI candidate, they are voting for Mexico.

Commercial advertising not only asserts, references, and reinforces preferred ideologies, it often suggests that products and services exist to help create a better world, despite strong evidence to the contrary in many cases. Specific campaigns are designed to sell images of companies as socially responsible as much as to sell their products. This indirect technique is called institutional advertising. Warm, fuzzy, incomplete, often misleading claims – all designed to make us feel good about the sponsor and about ourselves – are regularly made on TV to accomplish this goal. International Business Machines (IBM), for example, claims to be “helping to put information to work for people,” without spelling out which people benefit, in what ways, and at whose expense. A West Coast telephone company claims that “technology will give people more time to be more human” and that we should turn responsibility for managing the technology over to them. Dow Chemical, the company that scorched Vietnam with napalm and Agent Orange, now presents dreamy National Geographic-style visuals on its TV ads while claiming to be the company that “protects wildlife.” Xerox unblinkingly says it is “documenting the world.” Citicorp Bank opines that its services are necessary “because Americans want to succeed, not just survive.” Federal Express is “the way the world works.” A TV “public service announcement” produced by the Ad Council, a federation of American advertising agencies, tells citizens that “people cause pollution, people can stop it,” ignoring the fact that the most damaging environmental polluters are industrial corporations who refuse to accept the responsibility.

Advertising reinforces the class-based structure of society by symbolically rewarding workers’ contributions to the system, thereby further legitimating the system itself. The working class is commonly saluted on American television. The humor and lifestyles of the working class are imitated in television programming, especially situation comedies, reinforcing many central beliefs and values held by American workers and their families, thereby helping to keep them amused with representations of themselves while they are encouraged to keep working and consuming. Working-class spirit – a great Western culture myth – is especially celebrated in American beer commercials. Blue-collar work settings and leisure-time activities are shown while the narrator gives the verbal reward: “For all the men and women who have served this great country, this Bud’s for you” or “Buy that man a Miller.”

Explicit advertising claims are sometimes repeated so frequently over time that they become part of audience members’ assumptive worlds. Perhaps the best example is Bayer aspirin. The assertion for years that Bayer is the “best” aspirin has contributed, along with other marketing strategies, to a widespread perception of this brand as superior to its competitors, even though Bayer, like all other brands, contains only five-grain aspirin. Similarly, General Motors’ fictitious, friendly, fair, and ever-so-competent “Mr Goodwrench” became America’s generic mechanic thanks to an advertising campaign that went on for years. Even the body can be normalized ideologically. In an American television commercial for the cosmetic product Porcelaire (a cream that covers liver spots), a woman calls the spots on the back of her hands “beauty spots.” The spokeswoman for the product quickly interjects, “Some people call those age spots!,” correcting a healthy perception of the woman’s skin to conform to the sponsor’s objectives. And when things go wrong in marketing and advertising, sheer repetition of a positive message in the face of criticism – commercial stonewalling – is a way to overcome a damaging perception. A major lumber company indicted for irresponsibly slashing and cutting the emerald hills of America’s Great Northwest, for example, referred to itself for years in TV commercials as “the tree growing company.” In the unctuous wake of the Alaska oil spill some years ago, Exxon still vigorously promotes an “environmentally conscious” image.

Dominant ideologies reflect the values of society’s politically or economically powerful institutions and persons, regardless of the type of system in place. In capitalist countries, corporate executives greatly influence media content by sponsoring programs and advertising products. Because media content in those nations is not financed directly by government or associated in the minds of most people with administrative authority, its ideological tones and trajectories are not easily detected, a fact that helps magnify the ideological impact. Dictators in authoritarian regimes, on the other hand, restrict access to information and to communications technology in order to maintain control. Socialist nations use mass media to promote political, economic, and cultural programs that are decided upon democratically in some cases, imposed in others. In the few remaining communist nations, party officials develop explicit ideological objectives and lessons which are then sent to the people through media programming. In China, for example, television and other media remain full of glaringly biased news reports, programs that salute “model workers” and “model citizens,” politically correct dramas, documentaries that praise socialism and the Communist Party, and bluntly didactic editorials. Communist ideology is straightforwardly prescriptive, no apologies made. The Communist Party, after all, supposedly acts in the best interests of the people who are said to need and want ideological supervision.

Sources of ideology and the image systems they help create often go unrecognized. To refer to a profitable use of computer software as a “killer app” (application), or to say that a marketing scheme remains “on target,” locates such businessworld activity within a familiar lexicon that subtly reinforces aggression and militarism. City skylines, the height and shape of skyscrapers, bridges, theme parks, and tourist sites are all developed to create certain impressions and feelings inspired by global competition for business and tourist dollars. At county fairs in Mexico, the tallest, most exciting, and most expensive ride children and adults can experience is “Kamikaze” (sometimes known in the USA as “The Hammer”). This huge pendulum features two opposing silver-colored, cylindrical cabins which hold people as they swing violently, right-side up, upside down, round and round for a few terrifying minutes. As the cabins slice through the air, huge national flags attached to the pods stream along gloriously to increase the visual impact for viewers on the ground and attract riders. Which national flags are chosen for this awesome power display? The United States, Germany, and Japan.

Mediational image systems

Ideology in any political-economic-cultural context is represented partly in language and interpreted through language and other highly elaborated codes and modes – including visual forms and music – which are then further interpreted and used by people in routine social interaction. These communication processes all contribute to the ideological effect. They comprise mediational image systems, which can be further divided into technological mediation and social mediation.

Technological mediation refers to the intervention of communications technology in social interaction. Let me again use the case of commercial advertising to illustrate the point. Billions of dollars are spent each year to find just the right mediational systems for the purposes of profit-obsessed commercial advertisers. Advertisers’ strategies take advantage of the full range of mass media’s persuasive potential. Selection of corporate spokespersons, visual logos, audio jingles, catchy slogans, the style and pace of commercials, special technical effects, editing conventions, product packaging, and the melding of print, electronic media, and interactive media campaigns, to name several central factors, all combine to generate the desired result, selling big and bright products and the political-economic-cultural infrastructure that goes along with them.

Even mass media’s presentational formats cue certain expectations and responses. When commercial advertising first appeared on television in the United States, for example, sponsors concentrated strictly on the attributes of their own products. No mention was made of competitors’ products, except for occasional comparisons with “Brand X.” This advertising practice changed in the 1970s so that names of marketplace rivals were mentioned in commercials. When this happened, the public cried “foul!” Many people complained that it is unethical to identify the loser in a product comparison, even though this practice was never legally prohibited. The public reaction to the change reveals a crucial dimension of mass media’s role as a transmitter and shaper of ideology – its power to establish and uphold widespread patterns of thought not only by repeatedly calling positive attention to particular objects of content, but by framing content in such a way that standardized presentational formats themselves connote particular ways to think. Such conventions influence not only audiences, but the creators of popular culture too. Most pop musicians, for instance, have adopted a song-writing style where the predictable formula – verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus – has become the norm. Global advertising, news programs, talk shows, and music television formats are likewise structured, imitative, and predictable.

Modern communication technologies deliver values, perspectives, and ideas to people of various cultures, social classes, and ages all over the world. Young children, of course, are particularly enthusiastic media users. Consequently, pervasive popular culture figures (human and otherwise, it doesn’t matter much) such as Ronald McDonald, Will Smith, Madonna, Tony the Tiger, Michael Jordan, the Spice Girls, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Xuxa become celebrated acquaintances and purveyors of ideology – and not just in media-saturated North America or Europe. A compilation of Walt Disney cartoons, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, became the most popular television program in the People’s Republic of China by the late 1980s. Its characters challenged the sanctity and popularity of children’s Chinese folk heroes such as Chi-kung, the “crazy Buddha.” In order for Chi-kung to maintain an elevated position in Chinese culture today, he must appear on television. Donald Duck and his family of Disney pals have also become more familiar to children in some South American countries than the heroes of their own history and folklore (Dorfman and Mattelart 1972). Brazilian villagers could more easily identify Michael Jackson from a photo than they could any of their own presidential candidates in a recent election, although, in general, Brazilian media are far more attentive to their own cultural heroes than they are to foreign personalities (Kottak 1990). A transformation of folkloric characters and stories from print media to television is taking place all over the world.

A mass medium is not just a “vessel” which carries ideas from one place to another, but is itself a subjective, interpretative, ideological form (Martín-Barbero 1993: 102). As the famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan put it: “the medium is the message.” This means that the technical form used to move information from one place to another communicates something itself that is just as important as, if not more important than, the medium’s apparent “content.” As a simple example from American culture, there is quite a difference between sending mother a card on Mother’s Day and calling her by telephone with a greeting. The way the message arrives will itself mean something important to dear old mom. What it means, however, is not the same for every person. Some mothers prefer cards because they believe cards show planning and thoughtfulness on the part of the sender. Other moms would much rather hear their child’s voice, and may consider a card to be a “cold” way to send a personal greeting. Preferences often differ by culture; the more print-oriented northerners of the world frequently prefer cards, while oral traditions of the southern regions may suggest that for others a spoken message is better. The new global personal communications medium – email – combines features of print (written, private) and orality (immediate, informal) to make the choice of which medium to use even more complex.

Just as language and other communication codes are learned and reinforced in everyday social interaction, ideology is likewise made familiar and normal in routine social intercourse. These are the processes of social mediation.