Media culture

Last updated

Media Culture in Cultural Studies

In cultural studies, media culture refers to the current Western capitalist society that emerged and developed during the 20th century under the influence of mass media. [1] [2] [3] The term highlights the extensive impact and intellectual influence of the media, primarily television, but also the press, radio, and cinema, on public opinion, tastes, and values.

Contents

The alternative term mass culture suggests that such culture arises spontaneously from the masses, similar to the development of popular art before the 20th century. [4] However, the term media culture implies that this culture is largely a product of mass media. Another related term is image culture, which further emphasizes the visual and symbolic aspects of media influence. [1] [2]

"Popular culture and the mass media have a symbiotic relationship: each depends on the other in an intimate collaboration."

— K. Turner (1984), p. 4 [5]

The news media draws from the work of scientists and scholars, presenting it to the general public with an emphasis on elements that are inherently appealing or astonishing. For example, giant pandas, a species native to remote Chinese woodlands, have gained significant recognition in popular culture, while parasitic worms, despite their greater practical importance, have not. Both scientific facts and news stories are often altered during popular dissemination, sometimes to the extent of becoming entirely inaccurate.

Media Culture as the "Dumbing Down of Society"

Hannah Arendt's 1961 essay "The Crisis in Culture" argued that a market-driven media would lead to culture being replaced by the demands of entertainment. [6] Similarly, Susan Sontag suggested that values originating from entertainment industries increasingly dominate modern culture, normalizing shallow or sensationalist topics. [6]

Critics argue that popular culture promotes a "dumbing down" of society, exemplified by:

This change has been described as replacing high-quality art and genuine folk traditions with mass-produced items designed to cater to the broadest and simplest tastes. [6] Critics contend that post-World War II popular culture furthered the concentration of media into a few multinational conglomerates. These conglomerates reduced substantive news content, replacing it with entertainment and sensationalism that amplify "fears, prejudice, scapegoating processes, paranoia, and aggression." [6]

Media's Influence on Television and Cinema

Altheide and Snow propose that media culture increasingly shapes other institutions, such as politics, religion, and sports, constructing them alongside a media logic. [7] Since the 1950s, television has been the dominant medium for shaping public opinion. [8]

A clapperboard, a tool widely associated with filmmaking, used to synchronize audio and video during production Clapperboard, O2 film, September 2008.jpg
A clapperboard, a tool widely associated with filmmaking, used to synchronize audio and video during production

In Rosenberg and White's book "Mass Culture," Dwight Macdonald observed that popular culture makes light of profound aspects of life, such as sex, death, failure, and tragedy, by emphasizing simple and fleeting pleasures. Over time, audiences conditioned by this content begin to prefer unchallenging and shallow cultural products. [6] Van den Haag similarly criticized mass media for intensifying individuals’ isolation from reality and personal experiences. [6] [9]

The pursuit of ratings has diluted television content, prioritizing superficial and eye-catching material. Hollywood films increasingly emphasize shock value, superficial thrills, and special effects. Themes often cater to aggression, revenge, violence, and greed, resulting in formulaic plots, bland characters, and un-engaging dialogue. These trends fail to accurately represent real-life complexities or explore creative storytelling. [6]

More recently, scholars studying the mediatization of culture describe how media influences cultural processes. Media not only serves as cultural artifacts but also shapes other domains, further integrating media logic into diverse aspects of society. [10]

Social Media and Modern Filmmaking

Social media and streaming platforms in shaping modern movie and television consumption. Social media.png
Social media and streaming platforms in shaping modern movie and television consumption.

The rise of social media platforms has introduced new challenges and opportunities for the film industry. Social media has become a powerful tool for filmmakers to market their work, connect with audiences, and experiment with storytelling techniques. However, it has also shifted content priorities, emphasizing visually striking moments and easily shareable clips over intricate narratives. This trend reflects a broader cultural shift, where audience preferences shaped by digital platforms encourage filmmakers to adopt formulaic approaches, focusing on viral appeal rather than experimental storytelling. [11]

Media Culture and Religion

Media culture's mass marketing has been likened to the role of traditional religions in the past. [12] [13] [14] Waves of consumer enthusiasm and exaltation for products have been compared to the ecstatic rituals of religious fetishism. [15] [16] Conversely, the Catholic Church has been retrospectively seen as early examples of public relations, marketing their beliefs to worshippers in ways similar to modern media strategies. [17] [18]

Symbolic Consumption

Consumer decisions are influenced not only by the material utility of goods but also by their symbolic value in constructing identity and group affiliation. Products help individuals create a narrative about who they are and who they aspire to be. [19] Scholars regard symbolic consumption as a social construct, with shared perceptions about a product's meaning conveyed through advertising, magazines, and television. [20]

Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that objects and even people could become part of an extended self-concept. Consumption choices allow individuals to maintain or redefine their identity, create continuity with their past, or signal changes in their sense of self. The symbolism of goods relies on shared societal beliefs, shaping how people use consumption to navigate personal and social identities. [19]

Feminist Approaches to Media Culture

Feminist approaches to media culture emerge from feminist theory, exploring how media impacts women, portrays their roles, and perpetuates or challenges societal perspectives. [21] Angela McRobbie’s analysis of teenage girls’ magazines like " Jackie" exemplifies this. Using structural feminism, McRobbie identified how codes of romance, domesticity, fashion, and beauty shaped young women’s identities. [22] Her more recent work continues to reveal the lasting effects of media culture on women.

Feminist analysis also critiques postfeminist influences in media, such as the sexualization of young girls through fashion marketed with postfeminist ideologies. While postfeminism has societal significance, it raises concerns about how certain media perpetuate harmful stereotypes and norms. [23] This particular concept, is not to disregard the meaning that postfeminism approach provides for society and women, but to see how a specific way of feminist thinking has affected women and media culture. While feminist approaches are significant, they represent just one lens for understanding and dissecting media culture. Other perspectives also contribute to a fuller understanding of media’s influence.

Media Culture as Manipulation

Media culture, particularly through advertising and public relations, is often viewed as a system designed to influence and manipulate society. [24] Corporate media frequently serves to reinforce dominant ideologies, as theorized by Theodor Adorno. [25] [24] Media culture’s association with consumerism has earned it the alternative label of "consumer culture." [1] [3]

See also

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 Jansson (2002)
  2. 1 2 Thoman (1992)
  3. 1 2 Thomas (2012) p.30 quotation:
    The twenty-first century Western world, driven by American corporate and consumer ideology, is a perpetual media culture that depends on sound bites and the next thing, leaving the public reduced to media consumers never allowed time to reflect on the information. Volume and speed have consumed and obliterated nuance, ethics, and accuracy.
  4. ↑ Adorno (1963) quotation:
    ...the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of popular art.
  5. ↑ Shuker, Roy (1994). Understanding Popular Music, p. 4. ISBN   0-415-10723-7.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 "Dumbing down". Nomuzak.co.uk. Archived from the original on October 29, 2010. Retrieved August 25, 2012.
  7. ↑ Altheide, D. L., & Snow, R. P. (1979). Media Logic. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  8. ↑ Diggs-Brown, Barbara (2011) Strategic Public Relations: Audience Focused Practice p. 48
  9. ↑ Van den Haag, in Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, Mass Culture, p. 529.
  10. ↑ S. Hjarvard; L. N. Petersen (2013). "Mediatization and cultural change". MedieKultur (54): 1–7.
  11. ↑ Africa, Canon Central and North. "The impact of social media on filmmaking". Canon Central and North Africa. Retrieved December 13, 2024.
  12. ↑ from Debord (1977) thesis 20: "The spectacle is the material reconstruction of the religious illusion."
  13. ↑ Debord (1967) thesis 25 on the spectacle and the sacred
  14. ↑ Nomai (2008) p.176
  15. ↑ Debord (1977) Thesis 67
  16. ↑ from Debord (1977) thesis 132: "The masters who make history their private property, under the protection of myth, possess first of all a private ownership of the mode of illusion: in China and Egypt they long held a monopoly over the immortality of the soul ... The growth of their real historical power goes together with a popularization of the possession of myth and illusion."
  17. ↑ Ballardini, Bruno (2006) Gesù lava più bianco. Ovvero come la chiesa inventò il marketing. Review and excerpts .
  18. ↑ Ballardini, Bruno (2011) 'Gesù e i saldi di fine stagione. Perché la Chiesa non «vende» più. Review .
  19. 1 2 Wattanasewan, Kritsadarat (2005). "The Self and Symbolic Consumption" (PDF). Journal of American Academy of Business: 179.
  20. ↑ Hirschman, Elizabeth (1981). "Comprehending Symbolic Consumption: Three Theoretical Issues". Symbolic Consumer Behavior. Vol. SV-04. Association for Consumer Research. pp. 4–6.
  21. ↑ The handbook of media and mass communication theory. Volume 1. Robert S. Fortner, Mark Fackler. Chichester, England. 2014. ISBN   978-1-118-76997-3. OCLC   878119490.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
  22. ↑ Laughey, Dan (2010). Key themes in media theory. Open University Press. ISBN   978-0-335-21813-4. OCLC   771128584.
  23. ↑ Jackson, Sue; Vares, Tiina; Gill, Rosalind (May 2013). "'The whole playboy mansion image': Girls' fashioning and fashioned selves within a postfeminist culture". Feminism & Psychology. 23 (2): 143–162. doi:10.1177/0959353511433790. ISSN   0959-3535. S2CID   145092969.
  24. 1 2 Bignell (2007) pp.21-2
  25. ↑ Nomai (2008) pp.5, 41

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theodor W. Adorno</span> German philosopher, sociologist, and theorist (1903–1969)

Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Situationist International</span> International organization of social revolutionaries (1957–72)

The Situationist International (SI) was an international organization of social revolutionaries made up of avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and political theorists. It was prominent in Europe from its formation in 1957 to its dissolution in 1972. The intellectual foundations of the Situationist International were derived primarily from libertarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Guy Debord</span> French philosopher and Marxist theorist

Guy-Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, philosopher, filmmaker, critic of work, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International. He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Commodity fetishism</span> Concept in Marxist analysis

In Marxist philosophy, commodity fetishism is the perception of the economic relationships of production and exchange as relationships among things rather than among people. As a form of reification, commodity fetishism presents economic value as inherent to the commodities, and not as arising from the workforce, from the human relations that produced the commodity, the goods and the services.

The term culture industry was coined by the critical theorists Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), and was presented as critical vocabulary in the chapter "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception", of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), wherein they proposed that popular culture is akin to a factory producing standardized cultural goods—films, radio programmes, magazines, etc.—that are used to manipulate mass society into passivity. Consumption of the easy pleasures of popular culture, made available by the mass communications media, renders people docile and content, no matter how difficult their economic circumstances. The inherent danger of the culture industry is the cultivation of false psychological needs that can only be met and satisfied by the products of capitalism; thus Adorno and Horkheimer perceived mass-produced culture as especially dangerous compared to the more technically and intellectually difficult high arts. In contrast, true psychological needs are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness, which refer to an earlier demarcation of human needs, established by Herbert Marcuse.

<i>The Society of the Spectacle</i> 1967 book by Guy Debord

The Society of the Spectacle is a 1967 work of philosophy and Marxist critical theory by Guy Debord where he develops and presents the concept of the Spectacle. The book is considered a seminal text for the Situationist movement. Debord published a follow-up book Comments on the Society of the Spectacle in 1988.

Postfeminism is an alleged decrease in popular support for feminism from the 1990s onwards. It can be considered a critical way of understanding the changed relations between feminism, femininity and popular culture. The term is sometimes confused with subsequent feminisms such as fourth-wave feminism, postmodern feminism, and xenofeminism.

In general, spectacle refers to an event that is memorable for the appearance it creates. Derived in Middle English from c. 1340 as "specially prepared or arranged display" it was borrowed from Old French spectacle, itself a reflection of the Latin spectaculum "a show" from spectare "to view, watch" frequentative form of specere "to look at." The word spectacle has also been a term of art in theater dating from the 17th century in English drama.

In media studies, mass communication, media psychology, communication theory, and sociology, media influence and themedia effect are topics relating to mass media and media culture's effects on individuals' or audiences' thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors. Through written, televised, or spoken channels, mass media reach large audiences. Mass media's role in shaping modern culture is a central issue for the study of culture.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spectacle (critical theory)</span> View of media, markets and commodities as sovereign, central to Situationist thought

The spectacle is a central notion in the Situationist theory, developed by Guy Debord in his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. In the general sense, the spectacle refers to "the autocratic reign of the market economy which had acceded to an irresponsible sovereignty, and the totality of new techniques of government which accompanied this reign." It also exists in a more limited sense, where spectacle means the mass media, which are "its most glaring superficial manifestation."

Mediatization is a method whereby the mass media influence other sectors of society, including politics, business, culture, entertainment, sport, religion, or education. Mediatization is a process of change or a trend, similar to globalization and modernization, where the mass media integrates into other sectors of the society. Political actors, opinion makers, business organizations, civil society organizations, and others have to adapt their communication methods to a form that suits the needs and preferences of the mass media. Any person or organization wanting to spread messages to a larger audience have to adapt their messages and communication style to make it attractive for the mass media.

Mediation in Marxist theory refers to the reconciliation of two opposing forces within a given society by a mediating object. Put another way "Existence differs from Being by its mediation"...."The Thing-in-itself and its mediated Being are both contained in Existence, and each is an Existence; the Thing-in-it-self exists and is the essential Existence of the Thing, while mediated Being is its unessential Existence ..."

John Brookshire Thompson is a British sociologist. He is a sociology professor at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Jesus College.

Popular culture is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output and objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. The primary driving forces behind popular culture, especially when speaking of Western popular cultures, are the mass media, mass appeal, marketing and capitalism; and it is produced by what philosopher Theodor Adorno refers to as the "culture industry".

Also known as reception analysis, audience reception theory has come to be widely used as a way of characterizing the wave of audience research which occurred within communications and cultural studies during the 1980s and 1990s. On the whole, this work has adopted a "culturalist" perspective, has tended to use qualitative methods of research and has tended to be concerned, one way or another, with exploring the active choices, uses and interpretations made of media materials, by their consumers. Can also be known as reception theory, in which producers encode with a desired response, then the audience decode.

Consumer culture theory (CCT) is the study of consumption from a social and cultural point of view, as opposed to an economic or psychological one.

Jonathan Beller is a film theorist, culture critic and mediologist. He currently holds the position of Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. He is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including Mellon, J.P. Getty and Fulbright Foundation grants and honors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Culture jamming</span> Form of protest to subvert media culture

Culture jamming is a form of protest used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to "expose the methods of domination" of mass society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosalind Gill</span> British sociologist and author (born 1963)

Rosalind Clair Gill is a British sociologist and feminist cultural theorist. She is currently Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at City, University of London. Gill is author or editor of ten books, and numerous articles and chapters, and her work has been translated into Chinese, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Marxist cultural analysis</span> Anti-capitalist cultural critique

Marxist cultural analysis is a form of cultural analysis and anti-capitalist cultural critique, which assumes the theory of cultural hegemony and from this specifically targets those aspects of culture that are profit driven and mass-produced under capitalism.

References

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.