Alexia Borghi

Do the media manipulate social beings?A critical perspective of communication

SELF MANAGEMENT, SOCIAL PARTICIPATION AND POLITICS

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Introduction

Nowadays, societies are surrounded by information and media have become more and more predominant through ages. The multiplication of TV channels, the role of newspapers, the rise of the Internet are some facts that permit us to understand mass media as the “fourth power” along the executive, the legislative and the judiciary powers.

To explain this trend, we can evoke the thought of Tocqueville. He asserts that society has been destroyed by a process of democratization. For him, democracy has a hidden defect that we know under the word individualism. He goes further by saying that democracy is responsible for the destruction of social link because of the incessant circulation of individuals, disconnecting them from each other. Among the solutions he proposed, one caught my attention: for him, media are a way to recreate social bonds, meeting the interests of the group and those of the individual, permitting men to communicate.

The concept of communication can be defined according to two different perspectives. On the one hand, in a normative view, communication reflects an ideal, promoting the idea of sharing and bounding up men together. On the other hand, in a functional way of thinking, we are communicating to meet specific needs and interests. Thus, communication can be seen as a fundamental anthropological experience, a natural feature in social life but also as a set of technics and means to provide information. When speaking about the concept of communication, we need to take into account the package of technics and their economic implications as well as the representations and symbols linked to social and cultural lives.

To better illustrate the notion of communication, we can speak about the so-called cybernetic theory of Wiener (1948). He is the first theorist to consider communication as a circle, more precisely as a system of exchanges, with the idea of feedbacks: the receiver does not have a passive role but an active one, permitting to correct the information first provided.

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The issue that comes next is the question of the excesses of communication. The advent of a communication society and the emergence of mass media triggered the birth of new theoretical currents, sharing the idea that media are getting more and more influential, somehow manipulative. The reflection I propose will deal with this issue: do the media manipulate us? Are we inclined to be influenced by them?

I. The emergence of a mass society

Before starting our reflection about mediatic manipulation, we should define what mass society and mass culture mean.

When speaking about the concept of mass society, we have to think about the industrialization period in Europe. Industrialization has brought several social transformations like division of labour, rise of mass movements like trade-unions and political parties. The idea of circulation of goods and people, the notion of movement thus became a crucial point to create wealth, communication being understood as the “blood” of society, a tool for the socio-economic organization.

Soon, the concept of mass culture followed: mass culture refers to how culture is created, more precisely a culture that is mass produced, distributed and marketed. Somehow it’s a set of cultural values that arise from the common exposure of each invdividual to the same cultural activities, the same music, the same art, etc. The process of mass culture is in essence linked with mass mediatization and the development of modern ways of communication. Thus, culture becomes a market as every other.

I. The Frankfurt School

This current was born in Germany at the Institute of Social Researches of the University of Frankfurt. Being really skeptical toward the transformations of contemporary societies, well-known thinkers merged together in order to report the situation and to criticize what was happening before their eyes. Forced to flee Germany with the rise of Nazism, they later moved to the United States.

Two main facts aroused their curiosity and permitted them to develop their theory:

- First, with the rise of Nazism and the genocide that followed, they started asking themselves: how did the media participate in the process of ideological blindness? How did the media manage to blind people?

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- The second observation they made is linked with their arrival in the United States. Here they discovered that media and entertainment were actually industrialized fields, as well as other markets.

Soon, they started developing a radical critic of media, accusing them of alienating individuals and corrupting reasons. For them, media could be considered as an ideological state apparatus according the French Marxist philosopher Althusser: this term denotes institutions like education, family, churches, trade unions, etc. which are theoretically not under the control of the state but, in practice, they are used to transmit state values and to maintain order in society. Media thus propose a uniform discourse, serving the interests of the state.

1. The cultural industry theory of Adorno

From now on, culture is produced to realize one goal only: to feed consumer society. The production of art meets the same criteria as the production and the commercialization of a lambda product. It leads to the fact that the work of art is not unique anymore but standardized. Mass society has generated mass individual: we are all listening to the same music, watching the same movies or animated cartoons, reading the same books. Cultural producers are creating an illusion of choices, although it is not the case.

To go further, Adorno admits that this cultural standardization involves another dimension: an ideological conformity. The cultural industry is trying to remain by implementing in cultural products the conditions for its survival. In other words, cultural industry ensures its survival by promoting behaviors that fit with consumer society’s needs and capitalism’s interests. Through manipulative technics, cultural industry subjugates the individuals and wants them to adopt the same behavior: buying, obeying, and not thinking. Theodor Adorno, for instance, saw in the figure of Donald Duck the dystopian habituation of the masses to their oppression. As another example to illustrate this idea, we can speak about the process of product placement in films: it is common that, when you’re watching a movie, you can recognize a brand of car or food. This process tends to influence individuals’ behaviors and to stimulate them to buy one type of products.

As an aftermath, the man becomes the one who always agrees and not the one who opposes. Cultural industry is seen as an instrument in the service of capitalism, killing every possible contestation from the individuals. With the rise of entertainment society, people would have lost the perception of reality, becoming pawns of capitalism.

Adorno once said: “the phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of

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self-loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured”. Here he went further by asserting that humans themselves desire to be deceived, our acceptation is conscious, thus asking for conventional goods. By mixing culture and entertainment, privileging standardization, cultural industry triggered a cultural depravity.

2. The public sphere of Habermas

Habermas tries to analyze communication through another dimension by using the concept known as the public sphere. The notion of public sphere appeared during the 18th century: it is defined by the thinker as an “ideal speech situation”. An ideal speech situation could be explained as followed: it is a situation when individuals are purely and truly communicating; every participant to the discussion is supposedly able to understand the arguments of each other and every assertion is based on the use of reason, without using coercive behaviors. Those discussions are conducted to realize one goal: to obtain a rational consensus. Therefore the concept of public sphere denotes the places and institutions where those discussions could be held, in coffee shops or in salons, everyone making publicly use of his reason.

However, Habermas notices that the public sphere has been degenerating. He explains this phenomenon: during the 19th century, we saw the shift from a culture based on reason to a culture ruled by consumption. Public sphere has become the place where competing interests are confronting at the expense of the use of reason, thus ruled by market laws. Now the public sphere is dominated by the media and has become a subjugated arena of the power. Here we can point the similar reflections with Adorno.

Nevertheless, I think it is needed to qualify those approaches which are somehow pessimistic. Then we have to keep in mind that both of them were thinkers belonging to the School of Francfort, current that is recognized for its intellectual proximity with Marxism.

Is the public as subjugated as Adorno thought it was? Is the public sphere really disintegrated? That will be our next point.

II. Can we resist manipulation? The Cultural Studies approach

The Cultural Studies is an intellectual current that was born in the 1960s in reaction to the thought of the Frankfurt School that considers mass culture as a social wrong. Their work consists in trying to analyze the effects of mass culture on

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individuals. Here I am going to focus on the work of one author, Richard Hoggart (1918-2014) and his well-known book The Uses of Literacy (1957). Here he focuses on the way the working class is receiving mass culture: to write his book, he made several observations, spending time with ordinary people, analyzing their relationships and cultural practices. He is the first to relativize the damaging effect of mass culture and the omnipotence of media.

He shows that the working classes and individuals in general are not as gullible as previous theorists were thinking. Even if working classes are the main consumers of mass culture products, they are considering mass culture with distance: there are no such things as a strong attachment. They are consuming those products with irony and suspicion: there is no confusion between reality and fiction. Mass culture is providing pleasure but everyone is able to notice that it is not real.

In working classes, mass culture is seen as a way to communicate. For example, you can speak about a TV show, not only to discuss about it, but above all to create social link. Here mass culture is seen as way to improve communication.

His approach is radically criticizing the work of the School of Frankfurt, blaming them for using a bourgeois perspective to describe culture and despising popular culture.

Conclusion

As a conclusion, we can say that communication is at the basis of every human relationship. Communication has to be thought on a wide scale because, as a concept, it covers diverse perspectives and dimensions. If somehow communication can be seen as a way to ensure peace, there are hidden interests at stake which can be related to economics, society, power, etc.

Nowadays, information is everywhere and media are in charge of broadcasting them as much as they can. What we can keep in mind, when thinking about the Frankfurt School, is that media tend to be largely manipulative. Nevertheless, we are not at their mercy in a sense that we are able to take distance and to criticize them. The point is to try to be informed about how media are dealing with information and culture in general.

1909 words

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

WIENER Norbert, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948, Hermann & Cie/MIT Press

DE TOCQUEVILLE Alexis, Democracy in America, 1835, Paris ALTHUSSER Louis, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus, 1970 ADORNO Theodor, HORKHEIMER Max, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944 HOGGART Richard, The Uses of Literacy: aspects of working class life, 1957 HABERMAS Jürgen, The structural transformation of the Public Sphere, 1962

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