Download Theoretical Perspectives * Cultural Studies

Theoretical Perspectives –
Cultural Studies
Media Culture and Technology
Spring term - 2011
Outline
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Cultural Studies
Ideology and Communication
The Encoding/Decoding model
Media as technology
McLuhan – Social Uses of technology
What culture?
• CCCS – 1963
Birmingham University
• Richard Hoggard and
Raymond Willians
• Working-class culture
Working-class culture
was the ”culture of no
culture” (Scannell, 103)
The culture and the masses
• 19th century British literature did not relate to
working-class readers
• Economic growth 1950 – disposable income
and time – how would they be spent?
• Classic literature vs. Radio and newspapers
Shifting meaning of culture
• Culture in the daily lifes
of ordinary people
• Everyday experience
”Them” and ”Us”
’They’ are the agents of
the official culture that
looms over and above
working class life; the
doctors, teachers, vicars,
policemen and
magistrates who bos you
about and tell you what
to do. They are ’the vast
apparatus of authority as
it intrudes on working
class life.
Democratic view of culture
• Culture – not only special privileged kinds of
things and practices as if they and they alone
where expressive embodiments of ’culture’
• Definition of Culture – not only arts and
literature
• Culture is a way of life
Raymond Williams’ Marxism
• Williams’ refused to recognize himself as a
Marxist untill the 1960s
• He criticized burgeois Marxist intellectuals for
speaking too condescendingly about the
masses.
• He refused the view that the only culture to
speak of was the culture of the burgeoisie.
Communication and community
• Common culture is a collective open-ended
conversation
• Emphasis on willingness to listen
• Democratic system of communication
Participation
• ’Communication is something that belongs to
the whole society and depends on the
maximum participation by individuals in the
society’
• ’We have to think of ways which would
disperse the control of communications and
truly open the channels for participation’
(Williams, 1961)
Stuart Hall
• Director of CCCS from
1968 – 1974
• ’the media’ – press,
radio and television
• Television – most
popular source of
entertainment and
political information for
most British people
Ideology
• Critical Theory – alienation and reification
capture the false consciousness
• Hall has a different take on ideology
• Refusal to use mass culture
• ’How the rulling class ideas actually get into
the heads of individuals and, once there, how
effective they might be securing their
acceptance?’
Social relations of cultural production
• How television ’works’?
• Rejection of the idea of powerful media which
injected passive media consumers with their
messages
• Production of media output, transmission and
reception.
Encoding/decoding
• Response to media effects research
• American mass communication sociology at
the time was criticized for being to positivist
and too focused on quantitative studies of the
mass media
• Commmunications between the elites
(producers) and audiences is a form of
’systematically distorted communication´
Models of communication process
Hall criticized these
models for being too
linear and focusing on
message exchanges
Hall’s Alternative
• A model based on Marx’s commodity
production
• Stages of production, circulation and
distribution/consumption and reproduction
• Notion of mass media as content –producing
organizations
Encoding/Decoding
Research
• Current affairs, news programmes:
Nationwide, Panorama
• No access to the BBC for academics
• Only the ’decoding’ part of the model was
tested then
Readings
• Preferred reading
• Negotiating reading
• Oppositional reading
Audience studies
• Social conditions and circumstances of
readings
• Participant observation
• The question of encoding disapeared from
sight
• Study of television as a part of daily life – uses,
rituals, power relations.
Thaïs MachadoBorges
Only for you –
Brazilians and the
Telenovela Flow
Social uses of technology
• Global significance of the
new medium – television
• Oral cultures, written and
print cultures, global
electronic communication
• Relationship between
communication,
technology and society.
The Medium is the Message
• McLuhan was more
concerned with the
characteristics of new
media as means of
communication than
with their content.
• Media are extensions of
our senses
• Non-judgemental
approach to media
impact
The global village
• Tribalized and de-tribalized societies, the
communal and the individual
• Electronic media retribalize the world into a
single global village
• Rise of the computer and global spread of TV
Criticism
• Not very scientific
• Ideologue of corporate America
• No research
• Deterministic
Future teller?
• Cable television, broadband, satellite
transmission
• Internet
• Convergence and hypertext
Technological determinism
• McLuhan focused on the impact of media in
the contexts of daily life and the ways in which
they restructured our perception and
experience
• Technological determinism argues that
machines make history
Technologies and social change
• Is there some direct cause-effect connection
between new technologies and social change?
• Are technologies the direct agents of social
change ?
Raymond Williams – Television.
Technology and Cultural Form
• Deterministic view – development of
technologies is an internal process of scientific
invention that creates new societies and new
social relations.
• Symptomatic view – technological innovation
is the product of already existing social
processes.
Communicative affordances
• Human beings respond to things that they
encounter in the world in terms of their
affordances
• Useable properties of natural or man-made
things
• ”Potential” of technologies is realized by
human beings