© Polity Press 2013

This file should be used solely for the purpose of review and must not be otherwise stored,

duplicated, copied or sold

CHAPTER COMMENTARY

Communication – the transfer of information from one group or individual to another – is a

core element of social life and this chapter places great emphasis on recent developments in

information and communications technologies, considering the impact of these within a

global context. Are we, as McLuhan foresaw, now inhabitants of a global village? A broad-

brush description of these changes opens the chapter – boundaries have been eroded

between types of media, and the Internet is at the heart of these changes, as newspapers,

video clips and radio can all be accessed through it, in addition to millions of other

information sources. Mass media are so called because they address a mass audience. Often

they have been discussed in the context of entertainment but equally they are important in

the formation of public opinion and increasingly as sources of information on which social

activities depend. Brief overviews are given of the development over time of the Internet

and worldwide web, film, television, music and newspapers.

Starting with digitization and the Internet aims to engage students, most of whom are under

25, by encouraging reflection on a form of communication they may well take for granted

and every day in a variety of different contexts such as home, work and pace of study. The

Internet gives access to millions of pages of information and new online communities are

formed through chat rooms. Rheingold’s study of ‘virtual community’ is used to illustrate

these developments. It also offers new opportunities for identity formation; you can choose

to be whomever you like in cyberspace. As with all technologies, there are two broad

responses to these developments. The positive view stresses the opportunities presented by

increased access to information, new ways of keeping in touch with others and forming

online communities and creatively transforming working life. The negative view sees

increased isolation and atomization, a reduction in human contact, a blurring of the

distinction between home and work with a consequent erosion of personal ‘quality time’.

The recent development of ‘cloud computing’, whereby computing resources are delivered

as a service/utility direct to users, is discussed and looks set to revolutionize how we use IT.

Film is discussed in relation to the dominance of Hollywood in the production and global

marketing of films and its cultural consequences. India’s Bollywood is held up as a larger

producer of films but with less global distribution and appeal. Television has become

ubiquitous in the developed world and as Silverstone points out, although people have had

to learn how to incorporate the medium into their lives, new generations take it entirely for

granted as a feature of modern life itself. In the UK for instance, individuals over the age of 4

spend, on average, 25 hours per week watching television. The work of both Postman and

Putnam offer pessimistic accounts of television’s social consequences. For Postman, the era

The Media

156

dominated by print media was one in which rational and complex argument could be

popularized, developed and sustained. Television, by contrast, encourages the superficial

and transient, amusement rather than sustained thought. Putnam offers a correlation

between the growth of television in the US and the decline in membership of social

networks that encourage mutual obligations and trust. A counter argument is developed in

Using Your Sociological Imagination Box 18.1 (pages 780-1) which suggests that television

may be losing young people to games consoles, iPods, Internet chatrooms and radio. A

discussion of digital television rounds off the section.

The section on music includes Adorno’s ideas on jazz, Attali’s theory of the prophetic role of

music in societies, Petersen and Berger’s ‘production of culture’ perspective, and DeNora on

music in everyday life, which students may be encouraged to use in relation to other forms

of media. The work of Held et al and Wikström is included to show how the digitization of

music is leading to severe problems of ownership and copyright in the music industry,

notably through the phenomenon of illegal online downloading. A brief history of the

development of newspapers follows and the shifting balance between news and

entertainment is debated.

Four very different and influential theories of the media are considered. Functionalist

accounts of the media as agents of social cohesion are discussed and presented in the

context of recent work arguing that the media does function to support continuity and

cohesion. Both Chomsky and the Frankfurt School are considered as conflict theorists.

Habermas is placed in the context of the Frankfurt School and their generally gloomy

assessment of mass culture. The Glasgow Media Group’s research programme is presented

as a Classic Study, exploring the systematic production of bias and ideology in ‘bad news’

reporting. GMG’s work is seen as one form of discourse analysis in which, texts of all kinds

are dissected and analysed. Whilst the active and interpretative nature of viewing is stressed

throughout the chapter, the role of ideology provides a necessary link between the creation

of meaning and the exercise of power. Two contrasting uses are identified: the neutral

conception, which views ideology as simply the study of ideas and their influence, and the

critical conception, derived from Marx and used by many conflict theorists, which equates

ideology with the exercise of symbolic power, distortion which acts in the interests of

powerful groups. Whilst mass communications could act to open up the public sphere of

political debate, enabling greater and more informed participation, Habermas’s Classic Study

sees a public sphere cluttered up by media events and image management which act to

lessen the possibility of rational discussion and turns politics into vacuous entertainment.

John Thompson’s symbolic interactionist approach identifies three forms of communication

which coexist in the everyday lives of people today: face-to-face interaction, mediated

interaction and quasi-mediated interaction. Habermas, he argues, treats individuals as too

passive, failing to recognize the extent to which even the messages of quasi-mediated forms

such as television are actively read by viewers and carried into other forms of interaction

where they are discussed and reread. So-called ‘reality television’ shows are examples of this

process. In contrast to Habermas, the struggle to save the Enlightenment Project has no

place in the world of Jean Baudrillard’s postmodern theory. For him, questions of accuracy,

distortion and rationality fundamentally misunderstand the nature of contemporary life,

where the boundaries between the social and the cultural, reality and representation, have

been dissolved. Television does not represent the world; it constitutes it. There is no reality

external to the hyperreality of television, where messages are constructed with reference

only to other messages – simulacra, whereby signs derive their meaning not from their

relationship to real things or events but from their relationship to other signs.

The Media

157

Now the text turns from the production of media content to its consumption in the sub-field

of ‘audience studies’. One of the first theories of the impact of media on the audience is the

simple hypodermic model in which content is passively imbibed. This idea has largely been

rejected and today emphasis is placed upon the active part played by viewers in constructing

and interpreting the material they view. For example the gratification model looks at how

audiences use media content to their own ends. Later reception theories explore the way

that people’s socio-economic and cultural backgrounds have differential impacts on the way

they make sense of media content. Even studies into the effects of television violence upon

young viewers have produced conflicting findings. Children, like adults, are sophisticated

viewers who actively read the text.

Television provides an endless stream of images into our living rooms – in constructing this

stream as meaningful, a key element of interpretation is the understanding of genre. Genre

acts as a grammar, providing both structure and predictability to programmes. Soap opera

or ‘continuing drama’ is considered, its enduring popularity across the globe is seen as a

mechanism by which individuals deal with universal properties of emotional and personal

life. The representation of major social divisions in film and television soaps – class, gender,

ethnicity and disability – is also discussed.

Today media extend beyond national boundaries. This poses particular problems for media

regulation. National governments find it increasingly difficult to promote particular values or

political agendas through the media or to limit information flows, as exemplified by China’s

attempts to limit its citizens’ access to parts of the Internet (Global Society Box 18.2, pages

811-2). This globalization of the media is further considered, drawing upon the work of David

Held, which identifies five major shifts bringing about the global media order: increasing

concentration of ownership, a shift from public to private ownership, transnational

corporate structures, diversification over a variety of media products and a growing number

of corporate media mergers. Music and cinema are both products with global reach where

output predominantly flows out from the US, but ‘world music’ and Indian cinema show that

the flow is in both directions between the developing and developed world. The merger of

Time Warner’s content with AOL’s Internet distribution capabilities provides another

example of the double-edged nature of the new media.

Simplistic accounts of media imperialism are rejected; consumers are not simply cultural

dopes. Islamic states have shown a range of responses to cultural invasion but those seeking

to ban the material are losing ground but at the same time the reach of the distinctive voice

of Al-Jazeera is growing. Other attempts to counter global media empires by using new

technologies to facilitate alternative forms of news gathering include Indymedia, a global

collective of independent media outlets associated with the anti-globalization movement,

creating open access online platforms, enabling political activists and citizens to upload their

own videos, images and reports as well as live streaming of protest events.

The social implications of technological change are hard to predict, but so far the worst fears

of the pessimists have not been realized. However, it is safe to say that those of us alive

today are currently experiencing a digital revolution that is changing the media landscape

forever. But that revolution is not just happening somewhere ‘out there’. We are all part of

it, and how we respond to and make use of the new technologies and media outlets will be

just as important in determining their social impact.

The Media

158

TEACHING TOPICS

1. Making sense of television

Television delivers into our homes an endless stream of images and sounds which we are all

so used to interpreting and rendering meaningful that we barely notice we are doing it. The

chapter stresses that viewing is not a passive activity that messages are constantly

interpreted and decoded both through the viewers’ understanding of the conventions of

television grammar and through their wider understandings and lived experience. This topic

encourages students to become aware of just how sophisticated they are at decoding media

messages.

2. Public opinion and public debate

The selectivity of media news coverage has long been debated within sociology and provides

an interesting case study in the debates between modernist and postmodernist critics. This

topic links the discussion of the study of TV news to some of the larger questions posed by

Habermas and Baudrillard.

3. New technologies and social life

The final sections of this chapter consider the development of new information technologies

and their possible social consequences. This issue is also touched upon in Chapter 8, ‘Social

interaction and everyday life’, and Chapter 20, ‘Education’, and offers an opportunity to pull

those threads together and link them via John Thompson’s model of interaction.

ACTIVITIES

Activity 1: Making sense of television

Read the section ‘Audiences and media representations’.

A. At three different times during a day, spend a few minutes sitting in front of the television

with a remote control ‘channel hopping’. Record the answers to the following questions:

1. What types of programme did you find? (e.g. soap operas, costume drama, detective

mystery …)

2. When you ‘hopped’ to a new channel, how long did it take you to realize what sort of

programme you were watching?

3. Were you already expecting different sorts of programme because of the time of day?

4. What cues made you realize what sort of programme you were looking at?

B. Christine Geraghty has analysed the genre of the soap opera in terms of the way it

handles time, space and character. Her analysis forms the basis of the following exercise:

Compare a single episode of a British soap (e.g. Eastenders, Hollyoaks, Coronation Street)

with a single episode of a series (e.g. Holby City, Doctors, Glee) and with a single episode of a

serial (recent examples have been Call the Midwife, Mad Men, Homeland) by answering the

following questions:

1. The programme actually lasts for an hour or less, but what time-span does the story

cover?

2. How many different plot lines are running through the episode?

The Media

159

3. How many of those plot lines had been established in an earlier episode?

4. How many of those plot lines will be carried over into future programmes?

5. Has the main story been resolved in this episode?

6. How many different locations does the episode visit?

7. How many of these locations are already familiar to regular viewers?

8. Does the main plot revolve around regular characters or new characters who will only

appear in this episode?

9. When do you expect to find the resolution of the main story-line?

Answering these questions should give you a clear idea of the rules of the soap, the series

and the serial. You will see that they share some things in common: many series now contain

elements of soap within them by keeping a running narrative about the personal lives of the

regular characters which develops across the whole series, whilst individual main stories are

resolved in each episode.

C. Take any genre – soap, series, serial, game show, quiz show, current affairs series,

documentary series, cookery programme, ‘reality’ show – and write an outline proposal for a

new programme.

Activity 2: Public opinion and public debate

The section covering conflict theories and bias in the media (pages 789-95) describes the

work of the Glasgow Media Group. In one study Greg Philo interviewed people some time

after the end of the miners’ strike and found that key images and phrases from the news

coverage of the dispute had become incorporated into people’s own accounts of that time.

Here is an extract from a piece Philo wrote about this study. It is followed by some questions

which ask you to think about your own knowledge of that dispute, which will depend very

much on your age, and also to apply the same questions to a current series of disputes:

It is clear that we can bring a great deal of our own history, culture and class

experience to our reception of media messages. But we should not underestimate

their power and especially that of television to influence public belief. Most of the

people in this study did not have direct experience of the events of the strike and

did not use alternative sources of information to negotiate the dominant message

on issues such as the nature of picketing. Over half the people interviewed for our

main sample believed that picketing was mostly violent. Both television and the

press were given as key sources of information, but people spoke of the special

power of television, saying that its images were ‘more immediate’ and ‘stuck more’.

As one resident of Glasgow put it, ‘Seeing is Believing’.

This was apparently so for a large number of people, at least in relation to their

beliefs about picketing. In all, 54% of the main sample had believed that most

picketing was violent. The source of this belief seems very clearly to have been the

media. It is something of an indictment of news journalism that after coverage

virtually every day for a year, such a large proportion of people had apparently no

idea what a typical picket line was like. In the course of the interviews for this

research, I sometimes read out the eye-witness accounts which had been given by

the police and others of experience on the picket lines. These were greeted with

genuine surprise by many in the groups, who were convinced that what they had

seen on the news was typical. Sometimes there was a sense of shock that they had

The Media

160

been misled. As one woman from a group of workers in London commented:

‘People always say don’t believe what you hear in the media, but this really gives

you something to think about.’

(Greg Philo, ‘Seeing Is Believing?’, Social Studies Review, May 1991, pp. 174–7)

1. What do you know about the miners’ strike?

2. Where have you got this information from?

3. How does your own ‘history, culture and class’ influence the knowledge you have about

this event?

4. Recent years have witnessed a number of street protests by ‘anti-capitalism’ or ‘anti-

globalization’ groups associated with meetings of the International Monetary Fund and

the World Bank. Ask yourself the same three questions again about these protests.

5. Do you think you could make an informed decision about the issues surrounding these

protests?

6. Articles about these protests can be found on the Internet sites of all the leading

newspapers. Access some of these to get a flavour of the coverage. A starting point

would be www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive.

7. Read the Classic Study 18.2 on Habermas on pages 794-5 of Sociology. Do you think the

media coverage of the anti-globalization protests enhances public debate of these issues?

8. Read the section on Baudrillard’s postmodern theory on pages 798-800. How might it be

argued that ‘The anti-globalization protests did not happen’?

Activity 3: New technologies and social life

Types of interaction

Interactional

characteristics

Face-to-face

interaction

Mediated

interaction

Mediated quasi-

interaction

Space–time

constitution

Context of co-

presence; shared

spatial-temporal

reference system

Separation of

contexts;

extended

availability in

time and space

Separation of

contexts; extended

availability in time

and space

Range of symbolic

cues

Multiplicity of

symbolic cues

Narrowing of the

range of symbolic

cues

Narrowing of the

range of symbolic

cues

Action orientation Oriented towards

specific others

Oriented towards

specific others

Oriented towards

an indefinite range

of potential

recipients

Dialogical/

monological

Dialogical Dialogical Monological

(Source: John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1995, p. 465]

The Media

161

This table (Table 18.2 on page 797 of Sociology) offers a very compact version of Thompson’s

model of interaction: in making it that concise, though, it relies on quite difficult and

sometimes quite technical language.

1. Read the section on Thompson on pages 796-7 of Sociology and construct a new version

of the table that uses everyday language and gives an example for each cell of the table.

Your version will be much bigger than the original.

Now read the section ‘Media in a global age’, pages 768-88. Also look at the section ‘The

future of education’ (pages 909-13) from Chapter 20.

2. Make a list from these sections of all of the different types of media discussed and their

possible uses.

3. Choose three examples from your list and write a paragraph on each which uses

Thompson’s model to analyse them.

REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Making sense of television

What kind of evidence of the social effects of violence on television would be

conclusive?

Is the BBC ‘a good thing’?

How much work do we do interpreting media messages?

What is ‘real’ about ‘reality TV’?

Public opinion and public debate

What’s the point of reading a newspaper?

Should the media be regulated by government?

How is the presentation of television news on the ‘rolling news channels’ different from

its presentation in news bulletins on BBC1 and ITV?

How interactive is interactive television?

New technologies and social life

What are we interacting with when we use interactive media?

What is the ‘global village’ going to be like?

Can too much information be a bad thing?

How can new information technologies support families and friendships?

ESSAY QUESTIONS

1. How do different communications media influence the social experience of space and

time?

2. How significant is the ownership of the institutions of the mass media in analysing their

content and social influence?

3. To what extent do Albert Square, Weatherfield and Emmerdale have a real social

existence?

The Media

162

4. Will the ‘global village’ necessarily mirror existing global inequalities?

5. How real are online communities?

MAKING CONNECTIONS

Making sense of television

The discussion of genre could be used as a case study in the social construction of reality

discussed in Chapter 8. Also from that chapter there are links to the ordering of time and

space and ethonomethodology as reading genre could be treated as an ethnomethod. The

possibility of gender affinities with particular genders links well to the discussion of gender

socialization from Chapter 8 and the social construction of gender and sex from Chapter 15.

Public opinion and public debate

Habermas’s views on the relationship of television to the public sphere could be examined

further by referring to the outline of Habermas as a contemporary theorist in Chapter 3. The

chapter also links Putnam’s account of the decline of social capital to the growth of

television: Putnam’s broader arguments are presented in Chapter 19. Students may well

benefit from a wider discussion of democracy to contextualize arguments about the

importance of the public sphere, this can be found in Chapter 22.

New technologies and social life

The impact of new information and communication technologies is discussed at a number of

points in the text. Chapter 5 considers social interaction in cyberspace, Chapter 17 touches

on the spread of religious ideas through new media, Chapter 20 explores the implications of

new technologies for education and Chapter 21 for cybercrime.

The Media

163

SAMPLE SESSION

Public opinion and public debate

Aims

To consider the role of the news media as a source of information and opinion.

To explore the notion of the public sphere.

Outcome: By the end of this session students will be able to

1. Describe Habermas’s concept of ‘the public sphere’.

2. Identify sources of information about recent anti-capitalism events.

3. Reflect on their information seeking skills.

4. Locate their skills as accomplishments of a particular socio-historical moment.

5. Discuss the role of the media in the context of the notion of ‘the public sphere’.

Preparatory tasks

Read the sections ‘Theorizing the media’ (paying particular attention to conflict theories)

and Classic Study 18.1 on the Glasgow University Research Group’.

Classroom tasks

1. Tutor introduces session and puts definition of the ‘public sphere’ on board for

reference throughout the session. (5 minutes)

2. Tutor takes feedback from group on their sources of information about the anti-

capitalist protests and records these on the board grouping them into ‘print media’,

‘broadcast media’, ‘Internet’ and ‘personal contact with participants’. Link this back to

Philo’s research on the miners’ strike. (10 minutes)

3. Divide the group into three small groups and distribute the articles which students have

brought with them. Each group to consider which voices are reported in the articles,

which voices are seen as authoritative and what conclusions the articles draw. (25

minutes)

4. Report back from groups. (20 minutes)

Assessment task

You are members of an anti-capitalist group and have been asked to plan a strategy to gain

maximum publicity for your cause. Write a report outlining your strategy and explaining

the considerations which have influenced your decision (e.g. Might you consider direct

action or attempt to gain fair representation in the news media?)