Media Studies: Theories and Approaches E-Book

Dan Laughey

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

Seitenzahl: 208

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2010

Beschreibung

You've got TV, internet, phone, radio, movies, music, magazines and newspapers - and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Unless we live on a desert island, there is no escape from media communications of one sort or another. So how do we begin to understand today's all-embracing media culture? In this book, all the key issues and debates in media studies are covered in a lively and accessible style. You will learn about the main features of global media corporations, and approaches to the study of media effects, consumer power, celebrity, journalism and new media. From surveillance to simulation, genre to gender, political economy to the postmodern, the reader will be guided through a matrix of intellectual endeavour on all media matters. Whether you are a student, researcher, practitioner or just someone with a general interest, Media Studies will serve as a handy reference guide on your journey through this complex but fascinating subject.

Leseprobe

Dan Laughey

MEDIA STUDIES

Theories and Approaches

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Ion Mills and Hannah Patterson for commissioning the book, and Anne Hudson for so expertly copy-editing it. This book sets out to recruit as many apprentices as possible to the wonderful world of media studies, so may I congratulate new recruits in advance – you’re all hired! I would also like to acknowledge Open University Press/McGraw-Hill for permission to allow me to adapt material from Key Themes in Media Theory (© Dan Laughey 2007).

CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Take Five

1. Media Studies Matters

2. The Medium is the Message 

3. Media Effects 

4. Consumer Power 

5. Political Economy

6. Representation 

7. Postmodernism

8. Information and Surveillance Society

9. Moral Panics

10. Celebrity and Fandom

11. Narrative and Genre 

12. New Media

13. Reference Materials 

Notes

Copyright

INTRODUCTION: TAKE FIVE

One: on a warm May night back in 1984, a young boy watches live televised coverage of Liverpool Football Club’s victory against Roma in the European Cup Final. He will go on to support Liverpool for the rest of his life, through good times and bad, despite the dreadful memory of watching the same final a year later, when his team loses 1-0 to Juventus and fighting fans kill one another in the bloodshed of the Heysel stadium. The shocked refrain of ‘lost for words’ TV presenter Jimmy Hill will tarnish forever this innocent memory.

Two: visitors are arriving for a housewarming party. The hosts – a young couple, first-time buyers – have spent years saving up to afford their first home, and several months’ hard labour on fixing, drilling, plastering, sanding, decorating and all the rest. Guests arrive, wipe their feet on the HOME SWEET HOME doormat, hang up their coats in the newly painted vestibule, perch their butts on the matching pair of new leather sofas, glare at the wood-burning fireplace and drink from crystal wine glasses. Conversation begins on a tense note when someone, clearly oblivious to all the hard labour, says, ‘Oh, I do like your new telly,’ and is met sharply with, ‘Yes, we got it interest-free – would you like it switched on?’ The TV is the lifeblood of most people’s living rooms, even when it’s not supposed to be.

Three: the parents of a teenage boy decide to sell their business in order to fund their son’s ballet tuition at the number-one ballet academy in the country. Echoes of the film Billy Elliot (2000), you may well hear, but what really drove this young man to ballet was the children’s TV character Angelina Ballerina. While most toddler chaps mimic the kung-fu kicks of Power Rangers or play shoot-’em-up video games, this boy grew up learning ballet steps and making ballet his chosen path.

Four: amid Friday-night rush-hour in suburban Bangkok, a young man hails a taxi from the wrong side of the road. Dodging several lanes of traffic, he runs towards his target and shoots the driver point-blank in the head. He throws the dead body out of the car and drives the taxi for several miles, weaving in and out of traffic and shooting indiscriminately. Eventually he is arrested by police who seek an explanation for his actions. He tells them about his addiction to Grand Theft AutoIV (2008), a joyriding role-play video game, which is subsequently banned from distribution in the Kingdom of Thailand.

Four scenarios, all different, all plausible, all evidence of the media infiltrating and infecting ordinary people’s lives. So what? Well, let’s think of a fifth scenario.

A high-flying business executive decides she’s had enough of life in the fast lane. She puts her career on hold, ditches all her belongings (notebook and BlackBerry to boot), books a one-way flight to a remote island in the South Pacific, and removes herself from any trace of her previous existence. Instead of text messaging, she blows strange wind instruments and smoke rings; instead of Facebook, she does face-paint; instead of browsing the web, she learns to dodge poisonous spiders’ webs. Google is no use in the jungle – not even Google maps (you try comparing one tree with another!). Three years drift slowly by and she comes to realise her previous life was not that bad after all. She returns to the City, takes up a junior role with her former employer, and connects up again with friends and colleagues. But problems are immediately obvious: the technologies are now more advanced, new networking sites have replaced the old, everyone’s mobile numbers have changed, txt speak is not the same as it used 2b, and 60,000 emails are sitting in her inbox.

Did you spot the difference? Answer: the first four scenarios are believable, the fifth is not.

The truth is that ‘getting away from it all’ is more and more impossible – the media, in all their technological forms, provide something akin to a global presence in twenty-first-century life. Of course, many earthly places remain untouched by satellites and cables, but then most of the earth is uninhabited. The vast majority of the populated world, however, is able to access – and to be accessed by – the same media and communications technologies. Compared to the Cold War era of radio-signal jamming (nothing like the Bob Marley variety), today promises a liberated digital-media age. It is this global state of media affairs that makes our fifth scenario an unlikely story. People can and do connect to media technologies wherever they go – and it is rare for anyone (even the reclusive backpacker type) to be far away from connections of one sort or another for any considerable period of time. Indeed, anyone who does disconnect themselves from others and the media is usually deemed to be either strange, or dead. The thirst for information and communication is very much a part of contemporary life’s rich tapestry. Withdrawal symptoms are endemic.

So the media matter. Not just for politicians, not just for journalists, not just for advertisers, celebrities, PR agencies, media trainers, sportspeople, spokespeople, big businesses, banks, stock markets, religious institutions. The media matter for us all – and our pets. And that, in a nutshell, is why media studies matters too (and by the way, in case you were wondering, the boy in ‘One’ was me).

MEDIA STUDIES MATTERS

How many times do you hear expressions like ‘don’t believe what you read in the press’ or ‘the media is to blame’ or ‘journalists exaggerate things’ or ‘pop music is all manufactured’ or ‘TV makes you stupid’? As well as their negativity, what these expressions have in common is a view of the media as monolithic and ‘all the same’. ‘The media does this’, ‘the media does that’ – and everyone who works in the media has the same objectives, the same politics, the same haircuts, the same cars, eating and drinking habits. We know, for sure, that ‘the media’ is not a singular entity – and media students are far more knowledgeable than other folk when it comes to deciphering the complexities of different media industries, practices, products and audiences. And yet the big bad media retain an oddly mystical presence. We talk about ‘the media’ in the same way that we talk about ‘the government’, ‘the church’, ‘the crown’, ‘the law’ and other institutions of grandeur.

It is difficult to explain why the media are ‘the media’ (hell, let’s go a step further and write ‘THE MEDIA’ – with bells on). After all, the media are now more fragmented and heterogeneous than ever before. Gone are the days of just a few TV channels, radio stations, film studios, pop and rock producers, phone networks and so on. As we will see, although media ownership and control are concentrated in the hands of the few, what gets produced and consumed these days is really rather diverse. Mainstream fare like talent shows, sweet tunes, ‘rom-coms’ and tabloid tales will never die – but plenty of alternative and niche provision is out there too, not least thanks to new digital media technologies, industries and entrepreneurs. Moreover, new media give old fare like talent shows a fresh injection of turbo-charged hype. Add together Susan Boyle, YouTube, Simon Cowell and a multi-million-dollar media business, and what have you got? That’s right…

BRITAIN’S GOT MEDIA

Take the media in Britain, for example. What some might call ‘the media’ actually amounts to a whole array of mediums that  includes:

Five national ‘free-to-air’ terrestrial TV channels.Dozens of digital TV channels (distributed via cable and satellite) – the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) alone has six digital networks in addition to BBC One and BBC Two – and over 20 million households with multichannel TV. Eight BBC and three commercial national radio stations.40 BBC and about 200 commercial local radio stations, with total radio reach standing at 45 million. About 1,000 newspapers, including 12 national dailies and 14 national Sunday papers (broadsheet and tabloid formats), and hundreds of local and regional titles. Countless consumer magazines catering to all tastes and interests, with total sales in excess of one billion copies per year. Hundreds of independent TV and film production companies that receive commission for their output from content providers like the BBC and Channel 4. EMI (though no longer British-owned) and its assortment of music labels, as well as various ‘indie’ (independent) record producers.Advertising and public relations firms targeting all kinds of sectors, with approximately £20 billion per year spent on advertising alone. And, of course, the web (which is immeasurable) and over 15 million networked households, with the BBC iPlayer now the flagship convergence technology.

Trying to compile a comprehensive British list is futile (Digital Britain indeed!) – so imagine trying to chart the global media! Perhaps the most effective means of classifying the media is to divide them into types.

SEVEN TYPES OF MEDIA

Propaganda media: this type is controlled by certain individuals or groups, particularly governments. Chinese media are state-owned and state-controlled. All content (TV, films, newspapers, etc) is carefully pre-recorded and regulated before it reaches the public eye. Furthermore, undesirable content from external media sources is blocked or edited in order to prevent sensitive information from leaking out. Propagandists defend themselves using the principle of ‘public interest’ – they hold their people’s best interests close at heart. Yet the major problem is not propaganda per se but its authoritarian ends. People don’t like having the wool pulled over their eyes. Ask the people of Romania or the former Czechoslovakia, who helped overthrow authoritarian communist regimes in the late 1980s. Most democratic countries steer clear of propaganda media. And yet some level of state ownership and interference is commonplace in many countries, including Malaysia, Thailand, Russia and even France. Public service media: this type is not state-owned or intended for propaganda purposes, though from time to time it may require government approval to continue operating. Public service media therefore enjoy quite a substantial degree of independence and freedom – much like privately owned media corporations – but they must always remain accountable to the public and its representatives (i.e. politicians). This requires them to broadcast a range of different content aimed at serving the varied tastes and opinions of a wide cross-section of the viewing population. The best-known public service broadcaster is the BBC. Most of its funding comes from viewers’ mandatory annual licence fees (the government reviews the BBC licence fee every ten years or so – and no government has yet refused to grant it, though the licence fee deal is rarely as much as the BBC requests). Commercial interests are strictly forbidden and profit-making is not the main goal (except in the case of BBC Worldwide, which does rather well at selling BBC programming to overseas providers and distributors). For the sake of comparison, public service media like the BBC occupy the middle ground between state-owned propaganda media and our next type. Advertising media: also known as commercial or corporate media, this type is the most prevalent in Western countries. The American model of commercial broadcasting set the precedent in the 1920s. American advertising media were exported and replicated throughout the world. In the sense used here, advertising media mean media funded by advertising (the ads themselves are relatively inconsequential). A typical daily newspaper may cost less than one pound per copy – but its price would be far higher were it not for the more lucrative profits to be had from advertising revenue rather than actual sales alone. This is why advertising media effectively function as advertisements themselves. Newspapers are forever selling themselves to advertisers and readers alike. Commercial TV and radio are prostitutes to advertising and the buying public too – the big-spending demographic being the most sought after. Pop-music videos are essentially ads for pop stars and their records (not to mention the bumper music-video-compilation DVD) Advertising media serve the public interest by giving people what they want – or, more accurately, what the advertisers want them to want. Cult media: if advertising media are driven by the ‘here and now’, the cult media type is a step removed from the commercial bandwagon. This is not to say that cult media are non-commercial – this would be far from the truth – but they tend to carry certain values and properties that make them stand out from the riffraff. Indeed, they may have belonged to some other media type at a previous moment in time, but now they have acquired the status of classics or groundbreaking feats of genius. Certain films take on emblematic qualities; certain albums are universally recognised as ‘greats’; certain TV dramas or sitcoms become the stuff of endless repeats. Cult media are high cultural, classical, canonical, the best of what has been said and done. They become part of the furniture associated with a national or common culture at a particular moment in history. Elvis Presley captured the American teen spirit of the 1950s, Citizen Kane(1941) reflected the power struggles of its day, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74) served up absurdist comedy for fast-changing times. Cult media are also notable for their influence upon the media that follow – they become trendsetters for an emerging style, sound, genre, tradition. Few came before them, many will go after them. Alternative media: unlike cult or advertising media, the alternative media type is entirely unmoved by the profit motive. Alternative media exist to champion a particular cause not given sufficient coverage across the mainstream media. Terms like ‘underground’, ‘subcultural’ and ‘DIY’ are synonymous with this type. In fact, alternative media share something in common with propaganda media in that they have an axe to grind, an agenda to set, a political purpose to fulfil. But the big difference in practice is that propaganda media are operated by the powerful, whereas alternative media people tend to be powerless (though in mediating their minority concerns, their intention may well be to court more power and publicity). Alternative media, by challenging consensus, effectively draw on diverse cultural and ethnic influences. White, middle-class, middle-aged people are the least likely to indulge. Alternative media serve the interests of people in poverty, people with AIDS, unemployed people, supporters of marginal political parties like the Green Party, feminists and other non-conformists. Yet some forms of alternative media are not at all welcome, no matter what you believe (e.g. child pornography sites and pseudo charities). Occasionally, alternative media with an underground following go ‘overground’ and hit the mainstream. Two outcomes are then possible: alternative media producers either sell out to the ‘big boys’ (their alternative media become someone else’s advertising media) or they desperately try to protect their property against mainstream interests. If the latter wins the day, this may well open up a ‘best-of-both-worlds’ path through to cult media status. Social media: this type is the least overtly public (its key point of departure from the alternative type), though social media are by no means private either. Traditional forms like the telegram and telephone provided neat, two-way communication, and were not really like other types of media at all. But the internet and mobile phones have changed that. Social media today are among the most popular types. Social networking sites, message boards, blogs and other forums for user-generated content (UGC) enable ease of communication between groups of people of different backgrounds from different parts of the world. Why watch TV when you can interact with online friends and acquaintances inside your own personalised media bubble? Changes in social media in the last few years have been truly astonishing. But talk of a digital revolution in media communications may be overstating the case. Social media may allow us to connect with people on a grander and more public scale than we could possibly have imagined in the pre-internet age, but the profit-driven interests of advertising media brandish their claws in our direction all the same. Every move we make on the web is recorded for the benefit of personalised database marketing agendas. The books we buy, the food we eat, the jobs we do, the places we go, the cars we drive, the towns we live in, the videos and blogs we post, all this personal data and much, much more is at the mercy of corporate interests. The fantastic interactivity of social media offers opportunities and threats in equal measure. Psychic media: clairvoyance, telepathy, spiritual mediums, fortune-telling, Ouija boards, you know the score. Yes, our final type is not the sort of thing we’d usually bracket together with the media today. But the psychic media type is the root of all fears about evil and malign media effects on human behaviour. Video games mesmerise us into irrational acts of violence; movie ‘weepies’ leave us helplessly in tears; travel shows carry us vicariously from one exotic location to another; music has a strangely emotional and hypnotic effect on us. Media technologies of every kind, no matter how sophisticated they may be, cast a psychic media spell on all who come in contact with them. The very act of transmitting messages over vast distances has an oddly psychic quality. The influence of media celebrities on people’s identities may also be explained in psychic terms. Celebrities provide us with simulated role models of how to be successful, how to dress, how to sing, how to act, how to spend money and so on. We project ourselves onto them, we feel compelled to aspire to their riches. Celebrities are today’s divine prophets – and what they say, sing and do are today’s sermons, hymns and parables. Indeed, the whole history of the media is wrapped up in psychic resonances and undertones. When technologies like cinema, radio and TV first entered people’s lives, they became adorned with magical and mystical powers – and people treated as gospel everything they heard and witnessed. And psychic media are wrapped up in the whole history of media studies too.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEDIA STUDIES

Media studies proper began life about a century ago. The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries witnessed the expansion of mass-circulation newspapers and advertising, the beginnings of popular cinema and recorded (gramophone) music, and the invention of the radio and telephone among other media developments. At about the same time, several universities based in the United States and Canada began researching the political, psychological and social consequences of these mass-produced, mass-distributed, mass-consumed media. But North American researchers used the term ‘communication’ rather than ‘media’ studies to define their subject. ‘Communication’ embraced both the mediated and interpersonal variety – and social scientists wanted to know whether and how the media impinged upon people’s lives, communities, conversations, relationships and attitudes to the world beyond their horizons.

Mass communication research expanded rapidly between the two world wars. Before the 1940s, academic and public opinion generally agreed that the media were very powerful agents, able to influence and change people’s beliefs about important matters such as politics and religion. The spectacular power of media propaganda in Nazi Germany during the 1930s seemed to prove precisely this. But, by the middle of the twentieth century, a new generation of academics began to challenge previous assumptions, instead claiming that the media were limited in their effects, and that interpersonal communication was still more significant in opinion formation. Forget the TV – teachers and parents were still the real agents of influence. More recently, a happy consensus has grown up around moderate media effects – yes, the media do make a difference, but their influence should not be overstated – and the North American communication studies tradition has experienced something of a rebirth, thanks to spiralling concerns about the effects of the internet. Like TV and radio before it, the internet has split the academy, with one side of the debate considering it a potent (and potentially manipulative) tool of social change, and the other side treating it as a harmless addition to the information and entertainment mix.

Media studies in the British and European context has experienced a very different history from its North American counterpart. Instead of communication and social science, European media studies became absorbed into the humanities – especially the study of mass culture and literature. The empirical study of the media (surveys, experiments, interviewing, etc) was largely left to those across the pond. European intellectuals, by contrast, theorised and scrutinised the media in the same way that they studied poetry, novels, the theatre, classical music and so on. The emergence of what is known as ‘cultural studies’ is particularly associated with a British academic tradition grounded in critical theory, with Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud as the central protagonists. Media studies and cultural studies have been largely indistinguishable since their inceptions in Britain. And for the last 50 years or so the North American communication and the European cultural studies traditions have gradually left their intellectual mark on one another.

Media studies as a subject taught in universities, schools and colleges has mushroomed in importance and popularity since the first courses appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite occasional dips and troughs, the 1980s, the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century brought rapid growth spurts. It is now increasingly common for people working in the media to have an academic qualification in the subject. However, a stigma still hangs over media studies (and several other academic subjects) because some commentators (including academics and teachers of other subjects) label it as a ‘soft subject’, a ‘Mickey Mouse course’, a ‘doss-house degree’, a ‘one-way ticket to unemployment’. The latter statement is actually untrue – media studies has an excellent employability record – and the others are highly debatable, to say the least. Mathematics and the physical sciences are hard subjects, it is true, but there is no pedagogical reason why media studies is any softer than subjects similarly based in the humanities and social sciences, like literature, history and psychology, for instance.

Right now, media studies is firmly engrossed in the ever-changing landscape of social media. Indeed, internet studies is now almost a distinct subject of its own. This follows on from recent tendencies to separate media studies into television studies, radio studies, journalism studies and so on, rather than use the generic term. But media studies is still the grand total of all these newly named parts (whereas film studies, on the other hand, has always lived somewhat apart from media studies because of its different theoretical and methodological emphases). And there’s still a hell of a lot of merit in studying the whole media mix – not just one medium or another – because we all ultimately operate in a mixed-up, multi-media environment. So long live media studies!

Rather than a name change, perhaps the most pressing issue for media studies is the promised union of media theory and media practice. The two have hardly been united up until recently. But revelations of present-day media distortion and falsehood coupled with persuasive demands for institutionalised professionalism in journalism, in addition to other aspects of media ethical practice (see Nick Davies’s tour de force Flat Earth News, published in 2008) and timely calls to perk up the real-world applicability of academic media discourse, suggest the great divide may be closing up. All the great professionals – doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers, accountants, architects and the like – require theory to do their jobs well. You even need theory to drive a car! And journalists should not be immune from theoretical rigour and responsibility either. Plus, uniting best theory and best practice would lay bare the reasons why media studies matters so much – theoretical, practical, policy-related, political, economic, social, cultural, geographical, psychological, legal, ethical, moral, logical, commonsensical. This media studies guide casts the widest possible net over theorists and practitioners, present and future, in the hope of catching both.