Theoretical Perspectives Cultural Studies Media Culture and Technology

Theoretical Perspectives – Cultural Studies Media Culture and Technology Spring term - 2011

Outline • • • Cultural Studies Ideology and Communication The Encoding/Decoding model Media as technology Mc. Luhan – Social Uses of technology

What culture? • CCCS – 1963 Birmingham University • Richard Hoggard and Raymond Willians • Working-class culture was the ”culture of no culture” (Scannell, 103)

The culture and the masses • 19 th 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 1960 s • 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 Machado. Borges 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 • Mc. Luhan 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 • Mc. Luhan 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