Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies This Page Intentionally Left Blank Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies 8Th Edition

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Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies This page intentionally left blank Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies 8th edition

James Watson and Anne Hill

Eighth edition published in 2012 by: Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP, UK and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Copyright © James Watson and Anne Hill 2012 First edition published in Great Britain in 1984 Second edition 1989 Th ird edition 1993 Fourth edition 1997 Fifth edition 2000 Sixth edition 2003 Seventh edition published by Hodder Education in 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. CIP records for this book are available from the British Library and the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-1-84966-528-5 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-84966-562-9 (ebook) ISBN 978-1-84966-563-6 (ebook PDF) Th is book is produced using paper that is made from wood grown in managed, sustainable forests. It is natural, renewable and recyclable. Th e logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin, Cornwall. Cover images: Shutterstock www.bloomsburyacademic.com Preface to the 8th edition

If there is one word which defi nes the evolution of media since the 7th edition of this Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies in 2006 it is participation: the audience is king; and this has largely come about as a result of the opportunities for feedback and interactivity made possible by new and improved technology. Once upon a time there were TV sets. Th e whole family sat in front of them and the choice was either, or. Today young people see less of their parents. Th ey retire to their rooms, click a button and a universe of information, entertainment, games opens up to them. Th ey can contact their hundreds if not thousands of ‘friends’ on Facebook, watch a score of fi ve-minute videos a night on YouTube – and may appear to have less need to interact with real people in the real world. Ironically, for this same generation many educational experiences will be shared with others, in the traditional manner, in seminars and lectures. True cyberspace will be available on electronic whiteboards, but what happens on a daily basis is little diff erent from the educational experiences of their parents and or indeed their grandparents. We ask, has the bounty of the Internet, the access our smartphones have made possible, changed culture that much? Are people meeting each other less frequently, reading less, watching conventional TV less; is the newspaper on the verge of extinction? Also, taking into account the fashionable political mantra, the ‘big society’, in which we all rise up and take command of the heights of decision-making, opening our own schools, choosing where we’ll have our babies or our heart surgery, are we experiencing the beginning of a world turned upside down, of power rising from the depths to assert itself over former privilege, of the power of smart mobs? Whether the answer is a qualifi ed yes or no, what is important is who is asking and attempting to answer the question. For example, has power of a sort shifted to social networks (see networking: social networking), where petitions and protests can be organized swiftly and on a large scale? Faced with public opinion expressed online, do the power elites (see elite) adjust their position, promise more public consultation in future, reverse their decisions – or do they wait till online interactivity returns to the more normal, ‘I hate Monday mornings’/ ‘So do I’ discourse?

Interactive culture Technological innovation is not the only source of change confronting the twenty-fi rst-century citizen. To use Eric M. Eisenberg’s phrase, the sociocultural ‘surround’ in which much everyday social interaction takes place has also changed for many of us. Most Western societies have seen a growth in cultural diversity. Th e challenges this presents for successful interaction has been the focus of much contemporary research within the fi eld of interpersonal communication and the entries for this fi eld of study have been revised to refl ect such developments. Arguably the forces of globalization usher-in social fragmentation and uncertainties – not least uncertainties about self-identity. So, research focused on the contemporary odyssey of the search for self-identity, which Anthony Giddens terms the project of self, is considered. Th e potential of everyday communication to contribute to the forging of a sense of self-identity informs numerous entries, such as those for dress, gender, the johari window, performativity, role model and self-disclosure. v Preface to the 8th edition

Much of modern life is mediated and thus the interplay between interpersonal and mass communication also needs to be considered. advertising and other aspects of media culture contain many messages that may impact on the development of a sense of identity; the entry on self-identity thus embraces discussion of second-life identities. Th e arrival of facebook and other social networking sites also opens up the debate about what it is to have a ‘sense of self’. Th e Internet has not so much taken over and transformed traditional media as appropriated the way we think about the broad spectrum of communication. Change has been in the air, but how fundamentally has hegemony been shaken, how seriously has it been stirred? A key issue concerning claims to ‘democratization’ and popular involvement in the exercise of power is whether the ‘usual suspects’ – the corporations, the ﬁ nancial organisations, the mass media – have at any time of late lost or surrendered their powers. It could be that we are so busy talking among ourselves, networking, vanishing into the magic whirlpools of our iPods, iPlayers and iPads that we fail to notice something: the power elites have not gone away; nor have they undergone any Pauline conversion except to embrace the opportunities, for commerce and control, that the Network Society oﬀ ers the alert entrepreneur.

Paging Mr Murdoch Th is is not to say that predictability rules. Until the summer of 2011 the global media empire ruled by Rupert Murdoch was widely seen as an unstoppable force, a threat to the plurality of media and a malign infl uence on governments, obtaining from them concessions in return for a generally supportive press: ‘Touch Your Forelocks to Mr Murdoch’ was embossed on the dance-card of every politician ambitious to achieve power or hold on to it (see british sky broadcasting, bskyb). Th e phone-hacking scandal (see journalism: phone-hacking) involving News International’s News of the World, and the dramatic closure of the 168-year-old paper in July 2011, may well have brought about a sea-change, not only for the murdoch effect specifi cally but for the media generally in its relation to politics and policing. Some would say it is ‘not before time’ that politicians and public in the UK paid attention to the systemic practice of prying electronically (and illegally) into the lives of citizens high and low. Public outrage and a united parliament forced Murdoch to retreat, at least temporarily, from his ambition to own the whole of BSkyB; something Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt had, until revelations turned from a trickle to a tsunami, been ‘mindful’ of accepting. It is fi tting to celebrate the true purpose of journalism in action, holding power – that of government, corporations, institutions, the police and the media themselves – to account. Varyingly called ‘the best political thriller of our times’ and likened to the ‘crumbling of the Berlin Wall’, the hacking scandal – fearlessly revealed by the Guardian, initially alone in the UK and battling against denial and indiff erence – raised wider issues concerning media ownership and its connection with politicans and police. Not least among public concerns was the way the Murdoch empire did everything in its power to hush up the scandal. Th e Daily Mirror editorial of 15 July declared that ‘News International has mishandled the crisis engulfi ng it with the fi nesse of an elephant trying to tap-dance on an oil- smeared fl oor’. History was truly made when Rupert Murdoch, his son James, Chairman of News International, and (just resigned) Chief Executive Rebekah Brooks were summoned to appear before House of Commons special committees for questioning; this in the same week as the Commis- sioner of the London Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Stephenson, and his Assistant Commissioner, John Yates, resigned following evidence of their connections with the under-scrutiny organization. For the present, we leave it to media watchers to monitor the after-shock of such seismic events; to track how far remonstration, indignant headlines, mass petitions, committees of inquiry actually impact, in the long run, on the status quo; and whether a new dawn will produce a less exploitative, more balanced media more answerable to public interest, to the law and to media ethics.

vi Preface to the 8th edition

Meanwhile, back on the ground Less sensational than the hacking saga, but of equal interest and sometimes of concern in the study of media trends, is what Graeme Turner calls ‘the demotic turn’. In Ordinary People and the Media: Th e Demotic Turn (Sage, 2010) Turner writes: ‘For a start we can say that the institutional model of the media has given way to a more thoroughly commercial and industrial model; that, in many instances, the idea of a national media is giving way to a more conjectural blend of national, transnational and sometimes even local formations; and that the media audience is mutating from a model of receptiveness we might identify with broadcasting, towards a range of more active and more demotic modes of participation that vary from the personalized menu model of the YouTube user to the content creation activities of the citizen journalist or the blogger.’ As for whether increased public (demotic) participation is, as some commentators believe, also empowering (see digital optimism), whether the new media are a force for democratization, Turner remains sceptical, believing that outcomes ‘are still more likely to be those which support the commercial survival of the major media corporations rather than those which support the individual or the community interests of the ordinary citizen’. Th e demotic turn is a shift ‘towards entertainment’ and this ‘may prove to have constituted an impoverishment of the social, political and cultural function of the media; the replacement of something that was primarily information – as in, say, current aff airs radio – with something that is primarily entertainment – as in, say, talk radio – is more realistically seen as generating a democratic defi cit than a democratic benefi t’. Th is edition of the Dictionary recognizes the options and the possibilities with regard to technology and cultural change, but also acknowledges that the pace of change of one is more rapid than the other. It is undoubtedly true that the Internet has opened portals to individual and group participation and interactivity that permit a diversity of viewpoint and expression rarely, if ever, experienced in the past. Cyberspace is a constellation of bloggers, a territory of streams emerging from and fl owing into and across contemporary life, and on a global scale. Salem 9, blogging from Iraq, fed an information-hungry Western society glimpses of life in an invaded and occupied country that traditional news reporting could not match. During the so-termed African Spring of 2010–11, blogger Slim Amamou’s invitation to join the interim government of Tunisia was described by Jo Glanville in her Index on Censorship (No. 1, 2011) editorial, ‘Playing the long game’, as ‘one of the most remarkable acknowledgments of the role of digital activists in civil society, not to mention the symbolism of his appointment in a country that has stifl ed free speech for decades’. Yet for every optimist such as Glanville there is a pessimist such as Evgeny Morozov, whose Th e Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World (Allan Lane, 2011) puts the case that the ‘twitter revolution’ might do more harm than good to the cause of democratization. Th e jury is out, as it is on the effi cacy of what has come to be termed citizen journalism (see journalism: citizen journalism). Th is raises lively issues concerning the relationship between amateurs and professionals, particularly in the light of the cost-cutting in news services by traditional media organizations intent on putting profi t before public service; the result, Graeme Turner’s ‘impoverishment of the social, political and cultural function of the media’. Equally we note the concerns of Tim Wu, inventor of the term net neutrality (and author of Th e Master Switch: Th e Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Knopf/Atlantic Books, 2011), when he posits the theory that traditional media moved from the freedoms of the open prairie to corporate enclosure and that this process may be being repeated in the Network Society. Already, he writes in his introduction, ‘there are signs that the good old days of a completely open network are ending’. Acquisition, alliances, expansion, synergies are pursued with missionary zeal by the new leviathans. Industries become empires. Jostling for attention becomes jostling for control, not unlike that exercised by governments rarely hesitant about legislating against freedom of expression.

vii Preface to the 8th edition

Looking on the bright side, it could be said that the diﬀ erence is that new technology has greatly loosened up patterns of hierarchy and may even have made inroads on hegemony. Students of communication would do well to carefully scrutinize competing visions of the future of the ‘networking society’, in particular the role of information and knowledge in a context driven by economics and ‘must have it now’ public attitudes. Above all, the case must be made and remade that in the information age the communications industry is, in Tim Wu’s words, ‘fundamental to democracy’, needing to be resistant to wholesale appropriation and to the controlling ambitions of governments.

Th e 8th edition of the Dictionary of Media and Communication Studies has over 100 new entries. Th e main labour has been the revision and updating of existing entries, a task that affi rms just how much has changed on the media and communication scene since 2006. For example, in the light of the growth of the Internet, entries such as agenda-setting, gatekeeping, effects of the mass media and news values have not only had to be updated but also reinterpreted; and it has been worth asking whether they might have undergone such shifts in practice that they need to be placed within inverted commas or deemed anachronisms. Th e Dictionary opens its columns to new kids on the block – assertive, expansionary; Davids intent on becoming Goliaths (if they are not these already), risk-taking and fl eet of foot. In come entries on facebook, google, myspace, twitter, yahoo! and youtube (and belatedly apple macintosh, amazon and microsoft windows). Social networking commands its own substantial entry and its impact permeates many other new and revised entries. What has not changed in this edition is the alphabetic format, a detailed Topic Guide (useful for linking subject-related topics; handy for essay-writing, we feel), ample cross-referencing and plenty of end-of-entry suggestions for further reading. In book references, partly to make space, we have dropped the inclusion of country of origin. A note on the terms text, texts and texting. Except when referring to texting specifi cally, we write of text and texts in the broadest sense, using the terms to describe all forms of communicative content from a poem to a newspaper report, painting, poster or fi lm (see text). Equally, every message we text on our mobiles is a text, even if it is reduced to a smiley (no entry). As writers committed to the principle of open source, we express a soupçon of disappointment at the charges publishers make for models/diagrams which have been as familiar as road signs to students of communication, sometimes for generations. Where an actual model does not appear with its analysis, the reason is either that we consider an accompanying diagram not strictly necessary, or that we baulk at the publisher’s fee. Authors who feel as we do about open source and who wish their work to be given the public attention it deserves should contact their editors. Our Appendix: Chronology of Media Events aims to provide readers with a time-line of discoveries, inventions and developments from 105 ad when paper from pulp was introduced to the world in China. A quiz of media history we once gave to new undergraduates during Freshers’ week had a rather depressing number of them opting for the eighteenth century as being the period when moveable type was introduced in Europe. Old John of Gutenberg (1450) can, at least for readers of this book, cease to turn in his grave, though whether he would have been among the fi rst to mail a birthday card to Rupert Murdoch (80 in March 2011) or a note of commiseration to the News of the World (deceased 12 July 2011) is anybody’s guess. James Watson and Anne Hill

viii A checklist for use

Words in small capitals mean to, including resistance to, social subordination. that there is a separate entry. See culture; highbrow; taste cultures; youth culture. Use is made of an arrow (▶) at the ▶ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Routledge, 1984) and end of some entries: here books The Field of Cultural Production (Polity Press, 1993). of special interest or value for Cultural Indicators research project See further reading on the topic are mainstreaming. Cultural industry See frankfurt school of recommended. theorists. Cultural memory That which the community recalls, re-encodes in a process of making sense of the present. Cultural memory contrasts Source references are included in with what has been termed instrumental or electronic memory – that which can be numeri- the text of the relevant entry rather cally encoded and recorded, as on a computer. than presented in an end-of-dictionary In Communication, Culture and Hegemony: bibliography. From the Media to Mediation (Sage, 1993), Jesus Martin-Barbero writes, ‘In contrast to instrumental memory “cultural memory” does not work with pure information or as a process of linear accumulation’; rather, it is ‘articulated

Communication models are for the most part listed using the name of the person(s) who conceived them (e.g. shannon and weaver’s model of communication, 1949), and commissions/committees on the media are referred to by the name of the chairperson(s) (e.g. pilkington commission report on broadcasting (uk), 1962).

A star symbol (★) is used to denote that an illustration of that communication model is included.

ix Acknowledgments

Th e authors and publishers are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: AEJMC for ‘White’s gatekeeper model, 1950’, from Journalism Quarterly 27 (1950); ‘Wesley and MacLean’s model of communication, 1957’, from Journalism Quarterly 34 (1957); ‘McNelly’s model of intermediary communicators in news fl ow, 1959’, from Journalism Quarterly 36 (1959); and ‘Bass’s “double action” model of internal news fl ow, 1969’, from Journalism Quarterly 46 (1969). American Psychological Association for ‘Newcomb’s ABX model of communication, 1953’, from ‘An approach to the study of communicative acts’ in Psychological Review 60 (1953). Cengage Learning for ‘Berlo’s SMCR model of communication, 1960’, from Th e Process of Communica- tion: An Introduction to Th eory and Practice, by David K. Berlo, Holt, Rinehart & Winston (1960); and ‘Andersch, Staats and Bostrom’s model of communication, 1969’, from Communication in Every- day Use (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969). Hans-Bredow-Institut for ‘Maletzke’s model of the mass communication process, 1963’, from Th e Psychology of Mass Communications, Verlag Hans-Bredow-Institut (1963). HarperCollins Publishers for ‘Barnlund’s transactional models of communication, 1970’, from Founda- tions of Communication Th eory edited by K.K. Sereno and C.D. Mortensen, Harper and Row (1970). International Communication Association for ‘Eisenberg’s model of communication and identity, 2001’, from Building a mystery: toward a new theory of communication and identity by Eric A. Eisen- berg, published in the Journal of Communication, September 2001. Mary Schramm Coberly for ‘Schramm’s models of communication, 1954’ from W. Schramm (ed.) Th e Process and Eff ects of Mass Communication (University of Illinois Press, 1954). National Press Books for ‘Th e Johari window’, from Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingram Luft’s Of Human Interaction (National Press Books, 1969). Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. for ‘Th e news revolution model’ fromNews Revolution by Mark D. Alleyne (1997). [Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan] Ronald Yaros for ‘PICK model 2009’ from Journalism and Citizenship: New Agendas in Communica- tion (Sage, 2009, ed. Zizi Papacharissi). SAGE Publications Ltd. for ‘Rogers and Dearing’s agenda-setting model, 1987’, from Communica- tion Yearbook 11; ‘Westerstähl and Johansson’s model of news factors in foreign news, 1994’, from European Journal of Communication, March 1994; ‘McLeod and Chaff ee’s “kite” model, 1973’, from ‘Interpersonal approaches to communication research’ in American Behavioural Scientist 16 (1973); and ‘Models of audience fragmentation’ from Audience Analysis by Denis McQuail, 1997. Sam Becker for ‘Becker’s mosaic model of communication, 1968’, from the University of Minnesota’s Spring Symposium in Speech Communication (1968). Springer for ‘Gerbner’s model of communication, 1956’, from ‘Towards a general model of communication’ in Audio Visual Communication Review 4. University of Chicago Press for ‘Bales’s interaction process analysis’ from R.F. Bales’s Interaction Process Analysis: A Method for the Study of Small Groups (1950). Every eff ort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers would be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the fi rst opportunity.

x Abbreviations: a selection

AA Advertising Association AAP Association of American Publishers ABA Australian Broadcasting Authority AFDC Australian Film Development Corporation AFP Agence France-Presse AI Amnesty International AIJ Association of Investigative Journalists ALCS Author’s Lending & Copyright Society AOL America On Line AP Associated Press AR Audience Research ASA Advertising Standards Authority BAFTA British Association of Film & TV Arts BARB Broadcasters Audience Research Board BBC British Broadcasting Corporation BFI British Film Institute bit binary digit BMIG British Media Industry Group BSkyB British Sky Broadcasting BT British Telecom CCTV Closed-circuit Television CD Compact Disc CDN Content Delivery Network CIR Copyright Infringement Report CMC Computer Mediated Communication CMCS Computer Mediated Communication Systems CPBF Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom CPJ Campaign to Protect Journalists CPSR Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility CPU Central Processing Unit CSCW Computer-supported Cooperative Work CSS Content Scrambling System CTR Click Th rough Rate DAB Digital Audio Broadcasting DBS Direct Broadcasting Satellite DIT Digital Imaging Technology DMB Digital Multimedia Broadcasting DoS Denial of Service DP Data Processing DVB-S Digital Video Broadcasting-Satellite DVB-T Digital Video Broadcasting-Terrestrial DVD Digital Video Disc EBU European Broadcasting Union

xi Abbreviations: a selection

ECHR European Convention on Human Rights EDP Electronic Data Processing EFF Electronic Frontier Foundation ENG Electronic News Gathering FAIR Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (US) fax facsimile FCC Federal Communications Commission (US) FM Frequency Modulation FOIA Freedom of Information Act GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters GFA Global Framework Agreement GPS Global Positioning System GUI Graphical User Interface HBO Home Box Offi ce (US) HDTV High-Defi nition Television HDVS High-Defi nition Video System HF High Frequency HTML Hypertext Markup Language HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure IAD Internet Addiction Disorder IAMCR International Association for Media & Communication Research IC Integrated Circuit ICA International Communication Association IFJ International Federation of Journalists IMC Independent Media Centre Intelsat International Telecommunications Satellite (Consortium) IPA Institute of Practitioners in Advertising IPC Interpersonal Communication IPR Intellectual Property Right ISBN International Standard Book Number ISA Ideological State Apparatus ISP Internet Service Provider IT Information Technology ITU International Telecommunications Union ITV Independent Television IWMF International Women’s Media Foundation JICNAR Joint Industrial Council for Newspaper Audience Research JICTAR Joint Independent Committee for TV Advertising Research LAN Local Area Network laser light amplifi cation by stimulating emission radiation LED Light Emitting Diode LSI Large-scale Integration MEF Media Education Foundation MO Mass Observation modem modulator-demodulator MPAA Motion Picture Association of America MR Motivation Research NBC National Broadcasting Company (US) NFT National Film Th eatre NGO Non-Governmental Agency NN Net Neutrality NPA Newspaper Publishers Association (UK) NSM New Social Movement xii Abbreviations: a selection

NT National Th eatre NUJ National Union of Journalists (UK) NWIO New World Information Order OB Outside Broadcast OCR Optical Character Recognition Ofcom Offi ce of Communications (UK) OVP Online Video Platform PA Press Association (UK) PC Politically Correct; Personal Computer PCC Press Complaints Commission (UK) PDF Portable Document Format PEN Poets/Playwrights/Editors/Essayists/Novelists: Pen International PII Public Interest Immunity PKC Public Key Cryptography PLR Public Lending Rights PR Public Relations PSB Public Service Broadcasting PSI Parasocial Interaction PSN Public Switched Network P2P Peer-to-Peer RAJAR Radio Joint Audience Research (UK) RI Reaction Index RIPA Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (UK) RP Received Pronunciation rpm revolutions per minute RSA Repressive State Apparatus RSF Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters Without Borders) RSI Repetitive Strain Injury RSS Rich Site Summary; Really Simple Syndication SEO Search Engine Optimization SIGINT Signals Intelligence SMS Short Message Service SXSW South by South West SYNCOM Synchronous Communication Satellite TAM Television Audience Measurement TBDF Trans-Border Data Flow TNC Transnational Corporation TTL Th rough Th e Lens UDC Universal Decimal Classifi cation UDHR Universal Declaration of Human Rights UHR Ultra High Frequency UNESCO United Nations Educational Cultural & Scientifi c Organization UNI Union Network International URL Uniform Resource Locator VDU Visual Display Unit VHF Very High Frequency VHS Video Home System VR Virtual Reality WELL Whole Earth Lectronic Link (US) WPFC World Press Freedom Committee WSET Writers & Scholars International Trust www World Wide Web

xiii Topic guide

Entries are summarized under the following topic headings: ADVERTISING/MARKETING AUDIENCES: CONSUMPTION & RECEPTION OF MEDIA BROADCASTING COMMISSIONS, COMMITTEES, LEGISLATION COMMUNICATION MODELS COMMUNICATION THEORY GENDER MATTERS GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION LANGUAGE/DISCOURSE/NARRATIVE MEDIA ETHICS MEDIA: FREEDOM, CENSORSHIP MEDIA HISTORY MEDIA INSTITUTIONS MEDIA ISSUES & DEBATES MEDIA: OWNERSHIP & CONTROL MEDIA: POLITICS & ECONOMICS MEDIA: POWER, EFFECTS, INFLUENCE MEDIA: PROCESSES & PRODUCTION MEDIA: TECHNOLOGIES MEDIA: VALUES & IDEOLOGY NETWORK SOCIETY NEWS MEDIA REPRESENTATION RESEARCH METHODS TEXTUAL ANALYSIS Th e Topic Guides include basic references rather than attempting to incorporate every relevant entry, though all the models referred to in the Dictionary are named under communication models.

ADVERTISING/MARKETING Advertising; Advertising Standards Authority (ASA); Attention model of mass communication; Audience: active audience; Audience: fragmentation of; Audience differentiation; Audience measurement; Brand; Campaign; Cognitive Consistency theories; Consumerization; Consumer sovereignty; Consumption behaviour; Content analysis; Culture: consumer culture; Custom audience research; Demographic analysis; Eff ects of the mass media; Epistle; Ethnographic (approach to audience measurement); Focus groups; Gantt chart; Glocalization; Hidden needs; Hot buttons; Identifi cation; Idents; Image; Image: rhetoric of; Infomercials; JICNARS scale; Johnson and Scholes: stakeholder mapping; Marketing; Market research; Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; Motivation; Moti- xiv Topic guide vation research (MR); News: public relations news (PR); Niche audience; Nielsen ratings; Opinion leader; PIE chart; Psychological Reactance theory; Product placement; Public Aff airs; Public Relations (PR); Reception studies; Sampling; Sponsorship; Sponsorship of broadcast programmes (UK); Stakeholders; Subliminal; Role model; Tactics and strategies; Ten commandments for media consumers; Uses and Gratifi cations theory; VALS typology.

AUDIENCES: CONSUMPTION & RECEPTION OF MEDIA Accessed voices; Attention model of mass communication; Audience; Audience: active audience; Audience: fragmentation of; Audience diff erentiation; Audience measurement; Boomerang response; Brand; Button apathy; Catharsis; Cognitive Consistency theories; Commercial laissez-faire model of (media) communication; Compassion fatigue; Complicity of users; Consensus; Consistency; Constituency; Consumerization; Consumer sovereignty; Consumption behaviour; Cultural capital; Culture: consumer culture; Culture: globalization of; Demotic turn; Dependency theory; Disem- powerment; Desensitization; Displacement eff ect; Dissonance; Dominant, subordinate, radical; Eff ects of the mass media; Emancipatory uses of the media; Empowerment; Epistle; Ethnographic (approach to audience measurement); Expectations, horizons of; Focus groups; Frankfurt school of theorists; Gossip networks; Glocalization; Hegemony; Hot buttons; Hyperdermic needle model of communication; Identifi cation; Information blizzards; Information gaps; Intervening variables (IVs); J-Curve; JICNARS scale; Kuuki; Latitudes of acceptance and rejection; Misinformed society; Mobi- lization; Motivation research (MR); Networking: social networking; Network neutrality; Niche audience; News: audience evaluation, six dimensions of; Ofcom: Offi ce of Communications (UK); One- step, two-step, multi-step fl ow model of communication; Open source; Opinion leader; Panopticon gaze; Parasocial interaction; Passivity; Pay wall; Psychological Reactance theory; Public opinion; Publics; Reception studies; Refl exivity; Reinforcement; Resistive reading; Role model; Self-fulfi lling prophecy; Self-identity; Semiotic power; Socialization; Surveillance society; Ten commandments for media consumers; Uses and Gratifi cations theory; VALS typology.

BROADCASTING Annan Commission Report on Broadcasting (UK), 1977; Balanced programming; BARB; BBC digital; BBC, origins; Beveridge Committee Report on Broadcasting (UK), 1950; British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB); Broadband; Broadcasting legislation; Cable television; Campaign for Press & Broadcasting Freedom; CCTV: closed-circuit television; Channel Four; ‘Clean-up TV’ movement; Commercial radio: origins; Commercial radio (UK); Communications Act (UK), 2003; Community radio; Cross-media ownership; Digitization; Duopoly; Hankey Committee Report on Television (UK), 1943; High-deﬁ nition TV; Hunt Committee Report on Cable Expansion and Broadcasting Policy (UK), 1982; Hutton Report (UK), 2004; Independent Television (UK); Interactive television; Internet: wireless Internet; News Corp; Ofcom: Oﬃ ce of Communications (UK); Pilkington Committee Report on Broadcasting (UK), 1962; Pirate radio; Podcast; Podcasting; Public service broadcasting (PSB); Radio broadcasting; RAJAR; Reality TV; Reithian; Satellite transmission; Scheduling; Selsdon Committee Report on Television (UK), 1935; Sitcom; Soap opera; Soundbite; Sponsorship of broadcast programmes (UK); Teletext; Television: Television broadcasting; Televi- sion drama; Television news; Ullswater Committee Report on Broadcasting (UK), 1936; Video; Web or online drama; Web 2.0; Westminster view; YouTube.

COMMISSIONS, COMMITTEES, LEGISLATION Annan Committee Report on Broadcasting, 1977; Broadcasting Act, 1980; Broadcasting Act, 1990; Broadcasting Act, 1996; Broadcasting legislation; Butler Report (UK), 2004; Commissions/committees on the media; Communications Act (UK), 2003; Cross-media ownership; Communications Decency Act (US); DA (Defence Advisory) Notices; Defamation; Digital Economy Act UK (2010); Fairness Doctrine (USA); Franchises for Independent Television (UK); Franchises from 1993; Freedom of Information Act (UK), 2005; Human Rights Act (UK), 2000; Hunt Committee Report

xv Topic guide on Cable Expansion and Broadcasting Policy (UK), 1982; Hutton Report (UK), 2004; Libel; Phillis Review of Government Communications (UK), 2004; Prior restraint; Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) UK, 2000; SLAPPS; Sponsorship; Sponsorship of broadcast programmes (UK); Terrorism: Terrorism, Crime and Security Act (UK), 2001; Video Recording Act (UK), 1984; Wireless Telegraphy Act, 1904; World Trade Organization (WTO) Telecommunications Agreement, 1997.

COMMUNICATION MODELS Alleyne’s news revolution model, 1997; Andersch, Staats and Bostrom’s model of communication, 1969; Attention model of mass communication; Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur’s dependency model of mass communication eff ects, 1976; Barnlund’s transactional models of communication, 1970; Bass’s double action model of internal news fl ow, 1969; Becker’s mosaic model of communication, 1968; Bernstein’s wheel, 1984; Commercial laissez-faire model of (media) communication; Dance’s helical model of communication, 1967; Eisenberg’s model of communication and identity, 2001; Galtung and Ruge’s model of selective gatekeeping, 1965; Gerbner’s model of communication, 1956; Grunig and Hunt: four models of public relations practice, 1984; Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model (see consent, manufacture of); Hypodermic needle model of communication; Jakob- son’s model of communication, 1958; Kepplinger and Habermeier’s model of media events, 1995 (see event); Lasswell’s model of communication, 1948; Maletzke’s model of the mass communication process, 1963; McCombs and Shaw’s agenda-setting model of media eff ects, 1976; McLeod and Chaff ey’s ‘kite’ model, 1973; McNelly’s model of news fl ow, 1959; McQuail’s accountability of media model, 1997; McQuail’s four stages of audience fragmentation (see audience: fragmentation of); Newcomb’s ABX model of communication, 1953; Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence model of public opinion, 1974; One-step, two-step, multi-step fl ow models of communication; Riley and Riley’s model of mass communication, 1959; Schramm’s models of communication, 1954; Rogers and Dearing’s agenda-setting model, 1987; Self-to-Self model of interpersonal communication, 2007; Shannon and Weaver’s model of communication, 1949; S-IV-R model of communication; Tripolar model of competing agendas (see rogers and dearing’s agenda-setting model, 1987); Wesley and MacLean’s model of communication, 1957; Westerstähl and Johansson’s model of news factors in foreign news, 1994; White’s gatekeeper model, 1950; Yaros’ ‘PICK’ model for multimedia news, 2009.

COMMUNICATION THEORY Attribution theory; Audience; Codes; Codes of narrative; Communication; Communication: intercultural communication; Communication models; Communication, Non-verbal (NVC); Congruence theory; Convergence; Culture; Cybernetics; Decode; Deconstruction; Dependency theory; Discourse; Eisenberg’s model of communication and identity, 2001; Encode; Frankfurt school of theorists; Functionalist (mode of media analysis); Hegemony; Identifi cation; Ideology; Interpersonal communication; Johari Window; Linguistics; Marxist (mode of media analysis); Mass communication/mass self-communication; Meaning; Media theory: purpose and uses; Medium; Message; Metamessage; Narrative; Narrative paradigm; Noise; Normative theories of mass media; Panopticon gaze; Paradigm (paradigmatic); Paradigms of media; Play theory of mass communication; Postmodernism; Postulates of communication; Primacy, the law of; Proxemics; Queer theory; Roles; Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis; Scripts; Self-concept; Self-fulfi lling prophecy; Self-identity; Semiology/Semiotics; Sign; Social action (mode of media analysis); Supervening social necessity; Symbolic convergence theory; Symbolic interactionalism; Technique: Ellul’s theory of technique; Technological determinism; Texts; Transactional analysis; Uses and Gratifi cations theory.

GENDER MATTERS Empowerment; Expectations; Feminism; Gender; Gender and media monitoring; Gendered genre; Genderlects; He/man language; Ideology of romance; Intimization; Male-as norm; News: xvi Topic guide the ‘maleness’ of news; Patriarchy; Pleasure: active and reactive; Profane language; Queer theory; Report-talk, rapport-talk; Representation; Semiotic power; Stereotype.

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVES al-Jazeera; Blogging; Blogosphere; Communication: intercultural communication; Consumer- ization; Convergence; Core nations, peripheral nations; Culture: globalization of; Cyberspace; Ethnocentrism; Europe: cross-border TV channels; Globalization (and the media); Globalization: three engines of; Global media system: the main players; Glocalization; Hybridization; Internet; Localization and transnational TV; M-time, p-time; MacBride Commission; McDonaldization; McWorld Vs Jihad; Media imperialism; Media Studies: the internationalization of Media Studies; Media moguls: four sources of concern; Mediapolis; Murdoch eﬀ ect; Network neutrality; News: globalization of; Organization cultures; Post-Colonial Studies; Postmodernism; Press barons; Publics; Transculturation; Yamousoukrou declaration; Workers in Communication and Media; World Trade Organization (WTO) Telecommunications Agreement, 1997.

INTERNET See MEDIA: TECHNOLOGIES; NETWORK SOCIETY.

INTERPERSONAL COMMUNICATION Accent; Apache silence; Assertiveness training; Attitudes; Attribution theory; Bad language; Brit- ish Black English; Civil inattention; Closure; Cognitive Consistency theories; Communication; Communication: intercultural communication; Communication, Non-verbal (NVC); Congruence theory; Confi rmation/disconfi rmation; Conversational styles; Defensive communication; Dress; Eisenberg’s model of communication and identity, 2001; Elaborated and restricted codes; Empathy; Eye contact; Facebook; Facework; Facial expression; First impressions; Framing; Ethnophaulisms; Interpersonal; Gender; Gesture; Gossip; Groups; Groupthink; Halo eff ect; Id, Ego, Super-Ego; Identifi cation; Impression management; Indicators; Infl uence; Insult signals; Integration; Inter- personal communication; Intervening variables (IVs); Johari Window; Kineme; Kinesics; Latitudes of acceptance and rejection; Leadership; Life positions; Listening; Mother tongue; Metamessage; Metasignals; M-time, p-time; Multicultural London English; Networking: social networking; Newcomb’s ABX model of communication, 1953; Non-verbal behaviour: repertoire; Orientation; Other; Overhearing; Perception; Personal idiom; Personal space; Postural echo; Posture; Projection; Proxemics; Pragmatics; Psychological Reactance theory; Roles; Role model; Scripts; Self-concept; Self-disclosure; Self-fulfi lling prophecy; Self-identity; Self-monitoring; Self-presentation; Self-to- Self model of interpersonal communication, 2007; Silence; Spatial behaviour; Strategy; Stigma; Territoriality; Tie-signs; Touch; Transactional analysis; Twitter; Values.

LANGUAGE/DISCOURSE/NARRATIVE Arbitrariness; Bad language; British Black English; Codes; Codes of narrative; Cognitive (and aﬀ ective); Communication: intercultural; Cultural memory; Cultural modes; Culture; Deep structure; Determiner deletion; Diachronic linguistics; Dialect; Discourse; Disqualifying communication; Dominant discourse; Eisenberg’s model of communication and identity, 2001; Elaborated and restricted codes; Emotive language; Ethnophaulisms; Gendered genre; Gossip; Ideational functions of language; Idiolect; Journalese; Kineme; LAD (Language Acquisition Device); Language pollution; Langue and parole; Lexis; Linguistic determinism; Linguistics; Metaphor; Metonomy; Modality; Morphology; Mother tongue; Multicultural London English; Narrative paradigm; Object language; Onomatopoeia; Open, closed texts; Paradigm; Performatives; Personal idiom; Phatic language; Phoneme; Phonetics; Phonology; Pragmatics; Profane language; Projection; Propp’s people; Prox- emics; Reading; Realism; Received Pronunciation (RP); Redundancy; Reﬂ exivity; Register; Report- talk, rapport-talk; Rhetoric; Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis; Semantics; Semiology/ semiotics; Sentence meaning, utterance meaning; Sign; Slang; Soaps; Style; Traditional transmission; Verbal devices in speech-making.

xvii Topic guide

MEDIA ETHICS Advertising: pester power; Alter-EU; Butler Report (UK), 2004; Commercial confidentiality; Communications Decency Act (US); Data protection; Democracy and the media; Human Rights Act (UK), 2000; Human Rights Watch; Index; Internet: monitoring of content; Journalism; Journal- ism: phone-hacking; McQuail’s accountability of media model, 1997; Media activism; Mediapolis; Media theory: purpose and uses; Normative theories of mass media; People’s Communication Charter; Privacy; Reithian; Supervening social necessity; Taste; Television: Ten commandments for media consumers; Universality.

MEDIA: FREEDOM, CENSORSHIP ‘Areopagitica’; Article 19; Butler Report (UK), 2004; Clipper chip; Commercial confi dentiality; Communications Decency Act (US); Conspiracy of silence; DA (Defence Advisory) Notices; Data protection; Democracy and the media; Defamation; Digital Economy Act (UK), 2010; Echelon; First Amendment (US, 1791); Freedom of Information Act (UK), 2005; Gagging order; Hays Offi ce; H-certifi cate; Historical allusion; HUAC: Hutton Report (UK), 2004; House Un-American Activi- ties Committee; Human Rights Act (UK), 2000; Human Rights Watch; Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI); Internet: monitoring of content; ‘Libel tourism’; Journalism: phone-hacking; Lord Chamberlain; Milton’s paradox; Network neutrality; News management in times of war; Offi cial Secrets Act (UK); Open source; Oz Trial; Panopticon gaze; Paperwork Reduction Act (US), 1980; Phillis Review of Government Communications (UK), 2004; Prior restraint; Privacy; Psyops; Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) (UK), 2000; Re-regulation; SLAPPS; Spycatcher case; Stamp Duty; Street View (Google Maps); Super-injunction; Supervening social necessity; Surveillance society; Taste; Tactics and strategies; Terrorism: anti-terrorism legislation (UK); USA – Patriot Act, 2001; Video nasties; WikiLeaks; World Press Freedom Committee; World Trade Organization (WTO) Telecommunications Agreement, 1997; Zinoviev letter, 1924; Zircon aff air.

MEDIA HISTORY Agit-prop; Agora; Alexandra Palace; BBC, origins; Beveridge Committee Report on Broadcasting, 1950; British Board of Film Censors; British Film Institute (BFI); Calotype; Camera; Cigarette cards; Cine-clubs; Cinema legislation; Cinematography, origins; Cinéma Vérité; ‘Clean up TV’ movement; Comics; Commercial radio: origins; Communications Act (UK), 2003; Computer; Cylinder or rotary press; Daguerreotype; Digitization; Fourteen-Day Rule (UK); Fourth estate; Franchises for Independent Television; Franchises for 1993; Gramophone; Hays Offi ce; H-certifi cate; HUAC: House Un-American Activities Committee; Kinetoscope; Linotype printing; Lithography; Lord Chamberlain; March of Time; Mass Observation; McGregor Commission Report on the Press (UK), 1977; Minority Report of Mr Selwyn Lloyd; Miracle of Fleet Street; Monotype printing; Newspapers, origins; Newsreel; Nickelodeon; Northcliff e revolution; Persistence of vision; Photography, origins; Photogravure; Photo-journalism; Picture postcards; Pilkington Committee Report on Broadcasting (UK), 1962; Pirate radio (UK); Poor Man’s Guardian; Posters; Press barons; Printing; Privacy; Public service broadcasting (PSB); Radio broadcasting; Radio drama; Reithian; Roll fi lm; Satellite transmission; Selsdon Committee Report on Television (UK), 1935; Shawcross Commission Report on the Press (UK), 1962; Sound Broadcasting Act (UK), 1972; Stamp Duty; Stereoscopy; Synchronous sound; Telegraphy; Telephone; Telerecording; Television broadcasting; Th aumatrope; Typewriter; Ullswater Committee Report on Broadcasting (UK), 1936; V-discs; Victim funds; Video; Vitaphone; War of the Worlds; Watergate; Wireless telegraphy; Yellow Kid; Zinoviev letter, 1924; Zoopraxog- raphy.

MEDIA INSTITUTIONS Advertising Standards Authority (ASA); BBC, origins; Amazon.com; Apple Macintosh; British Board of Film Censors; British Film Institute (BFI); British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB); Casualiza- tion; Commanders of the Social Order; Commercial radio; Communications Act (UK), 2003; xviii Topic guide

Conglomerates; Core nations, peripheral nations; Deregulation; Deregulation: fi ve myths of; Diver- sifi cation; Europe: cross-border TV channels; Facebook; Globalization (and the media); Google; Guard dog metaphor; Independent producers; Independent Television (UK); Institution; Media Imperialism; Microsoft Windows; Network; Network neutrality; News agencies; News Corp; News: globalization of; News management in times of war; Newspapers, origins; Normative theories of mass media; Ofcom: Offi ce of Communications (UK); Organization cultures; Power; Press; Press barons; Press Complaints Commission; Public service broadcasting (PSB); Radio Broadcasting; Regulatory favours; Underground press; World Trade Organization (WTO) Telecommunications Agreement, 1997; Yahoo!.

MEDIA ISSUES & DEBATES Audience: active audience; Censorship; Churnalism; Consumerization; Core nations, peripheral nations; Culture: globalization of; Data protection; Dependency theory; Deregulation; Deregula- tion: fi ve myths of; Disempowerment; Eff ects of the mass media; Empowerment; Ethnocentrism; Feminism; Freedom of Information Act (UK), 2005; Gatekeeping; Globalization (and the media); Hegemony; Hyperreality; Ideological state apparatuses; Ideology; Impartiality; Information gaps; Information surplus; Journalism; Journalism: citizen journalism; Journalism: phone-hacking; ‘Libel tourism’; Liberal Press theory; McDonaldization; McQuail’s accountability of media model, 1997; McWorld Vs Jihad; Media activism; Mediapolis; Media Studies: the internationalization of Media Studies; Media theory: purpose and uses; Mobilization; Murdoch eff ect; Network neutrality; News management in times of war; News: the ‘maleness’ of news; Objectivity; Open source; Other; Polysemy; Pornography; Power; Predatory pricing; Privacy; Privatization; Professionalization (of political communication); Public opinion; Public service broadcasting (PSB); Public sphere; Queer theory; Racism; Right of Reply; Showbusiness, age of; Sponsorship; Surveillance society; Tabloid, tabloidese, tabloidization; Text, integrity of the text; Virtual reality; Wedom, Th eydom.

MEDIA: POWER, EFFECTS, INFLUENCE Accessed voices; Agenda-setting; Attribution theory; Ball-Rokeach and Defl eur’s dependency model of communication eff ects, 1976; Bigotry; Catalyst eff ect; Colonization; Compassion fatigue; Consensus; Consent, manufacture of; Conspiracy theory; Consumerization; Contagion eff ect; ‘Coups and earthquakes’ syndrome; Crisis (definition); Cultivation; Demotic turn; Deviance amplifi cation; Digital optimism; Disempowerment; Displacement eff ect; Eff ects of the mass media; Frankfurt school of theorists; Hypodermic needle model of communication; Ideological state apparatuses; Ideology; Information blizzards; Inheritance factor; Intervening variables (IVs); Journalism; Kuleshov eff ect; Kuuki; Labelling process (and the media); Legitimation/delegitimation; Main- streaming; McCombs and Shaw’s agenda-setting model of media eff ects, 1976; Media imperialism; Media moguls: four sources of concern; Mobilization; Moral panics and the media; Narcotizing dysfunction; Network neutrality; News management in times of war; Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence model of public opinion, 1974; Pornography; Power; Power law phenomenon; Primacy, law of; Public opinion; Self-fulfi lling prophecy; Showbusiness, age of; Signifi cant spiral; Sleeper eff ect; Slow-drip; Smart mobs; Stigma; Survivors and the media; Twitter; VALS typology; Virtuous circle; Visions of order.

MEDIA: OWNERSHIP & CONTROL Berlusconi phenomenon; British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB); Casualization; Churnalism; Citizen Kane of the Global Village; Class; Commercial conﬁ dentiality; Communications Act (UK), 2003; Cross-media ownership; Conglomerates; Consumerization; Convergence; Cultural apparatus; Culture: copyrighting of culture; Culture: globalization of; Deregulation; Diversiﬁ cation; Elite; Europe: cross-border TV channels; Frankfurt school of theorists; Functionalist (mode of media analysis); Globalization (and the media); Globalization: the engines of; Hegemony; Ideological state apparatuses; Ideology; Leadership; Marxist (mode of media analysis); Mass communication/

xix Topic guide mass self-communication; McGregor Commission Report on the Press (UK), 1977; McLeod and Chaff ee’s ‘kite’ model, 1973; Media control; Murdoch eff ect; Network neutrality; News Corp; News: globalization of; News management in times of war; Northcliff e revolution; Ofcom: Offi ce of Communications (UK); Power elite; Press barons; Privatization; Public service broadcasting (PSB); Publics; Public sphere; Regulatory favours; Social action (mode of media analysis); Sponsorship of broadcast programmes (UK); Synergy; Technology: the consumerization of technology; World Trade Organization (WTO) Telecommunications Agreement, 1997.

MEDIA: POLITICS & ECONOMICS Accessed voices; Alleyne’s news revolution model, 1977; Berlusconi phenomenon; Butler Report (UK), 2004; Consent, manufacture of; Conspiracy of silence; Core nations, peripheral nations; Cultural apparatus; Cultural, or citizen’s rights and the media; Culture: globalization of; Democracy and the media; Deregulation, ﬁ ve myths of; Elite; Empowerment; Frankfurt school of theorists; Functionalist (mode of media analysis); Freedom of Information Act (UK), 2005; Gagging order; Guard dog metaphor; Glocalization; Hegemony; Human Rights Act (UK), 2000; Hutton Report (UK), 2004; Ideological state apparatus; Ideology; Intervention; Leaks; Lobby practice; Legitima- tion/delegitimation; Machinery of representation; Market liberalism; Marxist (mode of media analysis); Media imperialism; Media moguls: four sources of concern; McWorld Vs Jihad; Misin- formed society; News Corp; Orientalism; Politics of accommodation; Post-Colonial Studies, Power; Press barons; Privatization; Professionalization (of political communication); Public opinion; Public service broadcasting (PSB); Public sphere; Synergy; Technology: the consumerization of technology; USA – Patriot Act, 2001; Zinoviev letter, 1924.

MEDIA: PROCESSES & PRODUCTION Agenda-setting; Anchorage; Blogging; Churnalism; Computer; Convergence; ‘Coups and earthquakes’ syndrome; Culture globalization of; Demonization; Diff usion; Digitization; Fly on the wall; Framing: media; Gatekeeping; Hammocking eff ect; Historical allusion; Immediacy; Impartiality; Intensity; Journalism; Journalism: citizen journalism; Journalism: data journalism; Journalism: investigative journalism; Label libel; Labelling process (and the media); Legitimation/delegitimation; Mainstreaming; Mediation; Mediatization; Mobilization; News; One-step, two-step, multi- step models of communication; Open source; Packaging; Personalization; Podcast; Programme fl ow; Representation; Scheduling; Socialization; Streaming; Tabloid, tabloidese, tabloidization; Th ree-dimensional (3D); Vox popping.

MEDIA: TECHNOLOGIES Apple Macintosh; BBC digital; Biometrics; Blogosphere; Bookmark (electronic); Broadband; CCTV: closed-circuit television; Computer; Cyberspace; Cylinder or rotary press; Daguerrotype; Data footprint; Digitization; Digital retouching; Digital video disc (DVD); Downloading; e-book; Fibre-optic technology; Gramophone; Google; High-speed photography; Holography; Internet; Kinetoscope; Kuleshov eﬀ ect; Linotype printing; Lithography; Microsoft Windows; Mobilization; Omnimax; Open source; Photography, origins; Photomontage; Phototypesetting; Podcasting; Printing; Projection of pictures; Satellite transmission; Speech-recognition technology; Stereos- copy; Streaming; Technique: Ellul’s theory of technique; Technological determinism; Technology: the consumerization of technology; Telegraphy; Telematics; Telephone; Telerecording; Television broadcasting; Th ree-dimensional (3D); Tor; Typewriter; Video; Vitaphone; Web: World Wide Web (www); Web 2.0; Wireless telegraphy; Xerography; Zoetrope; Zoopraxography.

MEDIA: VALUES & IDEOLOGY Accessed voices; Agenda-setting; Agenda-setting research; Audience; Balanced programming; Bias; Bigotry; Censorship; Chapultepec, Declaration of, 1994; ‘Clean up TV’ movement; Communications Decency Act (US); Consensus; Consent, manufacture of; Conspiracy of silence; Conspiracy theory; xx Topic guide

Cultivation; Cultural apparatus; Culture: copyrighting culture; Culture: globalization of; Culture of deference; Culture: popular culture; Defamation; Democracy and the media; Demonization; Deregulation, fi ve myths of; Deviance; Discourse analysis; Disempowerment; Emancipatory use of the media; Emotive language; Empowerment; Ethnocentrism; Feminism; Fiction values; Free- dom of Information Act (UK), 2005; Globalization (and the media); Global scrutiny; Hegemony; Glocalization; HUAC: House Un-American Activities Committee; Human Rights Act (UK), 2000; Ideological presumption; Ideological state apparatuses; Ideology; Impartiality; Information gaps; International Federation of Journalists (IFJ); Issues; Jingoism; Journalism: phone-hacking; Kuuki; Labelling process (and the media); Legitimation/delegitimation; Mainstreaming; McCombs and Shaw’s agenda-setting model of media eff ects, 1976; McQuail’s accountability of media model, 1997; Media activism; Media imperialism; Mediapolis; Moral entrepreneurs; Moral panics and the media; News: the ‘maleness’ of news; News values; New World Information Order; Normative theories of the mass media; Objectivity; Open source; Other; People’s Communication Charter; Pornography; Post-Colonial theory; Preferred reading; Prejudice; Privacy; Propaganda; Public Aff airs; Public opinion; Public service broadcasting (PSB); Public sphere; Racism; Reithian; Representation; Rogers and Dearing’s agenda-setting model, 1987; Sexism; Status quo; Surveillance society; Teledemocracy; Underground press; Values; Violence and the media; Visions of order; Watchdogs; Watergate; Wedom, Th eydom; Whistleblowing.

NETWORK SOCIETY Amazon.com; Apple Macintosh; Blogging; Blogosphere; Computer; Computing: cloud computing; Convergence; Cybernetics; Data footprint; Digital Economy Act (UK), 2010; Digital optimism; Downloading; e-book; Facebook; Digital natives, digital immigrants; Google; Green Dam; Hacker, hacktivist; Hyperreality; Information surplus; Internet; Internet: monitoring of content; Internet: wireless Internet; Journalism: citizen journalism; Mass communication/mass self-communication; Microsoft Windows; Mobilization; MySpace; Networking: social networking; Network neutrality; N-Gen; New media; Online campaigning; Open source; Paywall; Plasticity: neuroplasticity and the Internet; Podcast; Podcasting; Power law phenomenon; Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) (UK), 2000; Signature ﬁ les; Smart mobs; Streaming; Technology: the consumerization of technology; Teledemocracy; Text: integrity of the text; Television: Catch-up TV; Tor; Transcultura- tion; Twitter; USA – Patriot Act, 2001; Virtual reality; Web or online drama; Web: World Wide Web (www); Web 2.0; Wiki, Wikipedia; WikiLeaks; Yahoo!; Yaros’ ‘PICK’ model for multimedia news, 2009; YouTube.

NEWS MEDIA Agenda-setting; Agenda-setting research; Alleyne’s news revolution model, 1997; al-Jazeera; Anchorage; Bass’s ‘double action’ model of international news fl ow, 1969; Churnalism; ‘Coups and earthquakes’ syndrome; Critical news analysis; Embedded reporters; Event; Fiction values; Framing: media; Frequency; Gagging order; Galtung and Ruge’s model of selective gatekeeping, 1965; Horse- race story; Immediacy; Impartiality; Indymedia; Intensity; J-curve; Journalism; Journalism: celebrity journalism; Journalism: citizen journalism; Journalism: data journalism; Journalism: investigative journalism; Journalism: phone-hacking; Journalism: ‘postmodern journalism’; Knowns, unknowns; Kuuki; McLeod and Chaff ee’s ‘kite’ model, 1973; McNelly’s model of news fl ow, 1959; News; News agencies; News: audience evaluation, six dimensions of; News elements: breaking, explanatory, deep background; News Corp; News: globalization of; News management in times of war; News: public relations news (PR); News: the ‘maleness’ of news; News values; News waves; One-step, two-step, multi-step fl ow models of communication; Paywall; Personalization; Photojournalism; Pool system; Representation; Rogers and Dearing’s agenda-setting model, 1987; Signifi cant spiral; Spot news; Television news: inherent limitations; Visions of order; War: four stages of war reporting; Westerstähl and Johansson’s model of news factors in foreign news, 1994; White’s gatekeeper model, 1950; WikiLeaks; Yaros’ ‘PICK’ model for multimedia news, 2009; YouTube.

xxi Topic guide

REPRESENTATION Caricature; Chronology; Colonization; ‘Coups and earthquakes’ syndrome; Demotic turn; Devi- ance; Deviance amplifi cation; Dominant, subordinate, radical; Ethnocentrism; Folk devils; Gender; Gender and media monitoring; Hegemony; Invisibility: Label libel; Labelling process (and the media); Machinery of representation; Mediapolis; Narrative; News: the ‘maleness’ of news; Orien- talism; Other; Paraproxemics; Pornography; Primary, secondary defi ners; Propaganda; Public opinion; Publics; Queer theory; Racism; Realism; Reality TV; Representation; Self-fulfi lling prophecy; Self-identity; Sign; Soap operas; Stereotype; Stigma; Style; Visions of order.

RESEARCH METHODS Agenda-setting research; Analysis: modes of media analysis; Audience measurement; Consump- tion behaviour; Content analysis; Control group; Critical news analysis; Custom audience research; Demographic analysis; Discourse analysis; Ethnographic (approach to audience measurement); Experimental group; First impressions; Focus groups; Functionalist (mode of media analysis); Glasgow University Media Group; Groups; HICT Project; Interviews; JICNARS scale; Marxist (mode of media analysis); Mass observation; Media theory: purpose and uses; Motivation research (MR); Narrative paradigm; Nielson ratings; One-step, two-step, multi-step fl ow models of communication; Paradigms of media; Participant observation; People meter; Pleasure: active and reactive; Proxemics; Public opinion; Reception studies; Research centres (into the media); Sampling; Segmentation; Semantic diff erential; Sleeper eff ect; Social action (mode of media analysis); Socio- metrics (and media analysis); Viewers: light, medium and heavy; Vox popping.

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS Aberrant decoding; Anchorage; Bad language; Berlo’s SMCR model of communication, 1960; Bowdlerize; Bricolage; Codes; Codes of narrative; Connotation; Content analysis; Conventions; Cultural metaphor; Culture: consumer culture; Culture: copyrighting culture; Culture: popular culture; Decode; Deconstruction; Deep structure; Discourse; Discourse analysis; Dominant discourse; Dominant, subordinate, radical; Encode; Encrypt; Establishing shot; Exnomination; Expectation, horizons of; Film noir; Framing: media; Gendered genre; Genre; He/man language; Hybridization; Hypertext; Iconic; Ideology; Interpretant; Intertextuality; Journalese; Kineme; Kinesics; Kuleshov eff ect; Lexis; Linguistics; Machinery of representation; Male-as-norm; Mean- ing; Mediation; Medium; Message; Metamessage; Metaphor; Metasignals; Metonymy; Mimetic/ semiosic planes; Montage; Morphing; Multi-actuality; Narrative paradigm; Naturalistic illusion (of television); Open, closed texts; Phoneme; Polysemy; Pragmatics; Preferred reading; Propp’s people; Reaction shot; Referent; Representation; Resistive reading; Reterritorialization; Rhetoric; Semantic diff erential; Semantics; Semiology/semiotics; Shot; Sign; Signal; Signifi cation; Signifi cation spiral; Sound-bite; Special effects; Stereotype; Storyboard; Storyness; Symbol; Syntactics; Syntagm; Syntax; Tabloid, tabloidese, tabloidization; Tag questions; Text; Text: integrity of the text.

xxii Acculturation, deculturation

researchers have noted, individuals can and do A A adjust their use of accent and dialect to fi t in AA-certifi cate, A-certifi cate See certifica- with the social context. B tion of films. Trudgill also points out that among certain Aberrant decoding See decode. groups within society a ‘covert prestige’ can Abstraction, ladder of See narrative: ladder be attached to accents generally viewed as not C of abstraction. prestigious, especially when they are part of ABX model of communication See ‘non-standard’ speech. Such accents and ‘non- D newcomb’s abx model. standard’ speech may also be used to convey an Accent Th e entire pattern of pronunciation typi- image of toughness and masculinity in certain cal of a particular region or social group. Accent situations, irrespective of the actual social status E is a feature of dialect and can be classed as an of the speaker. aspect of non-verbal communication. Th e Accessed voices Within any society, these are F use of most languages is marked by differing the people who have a ready and privileged

dialects and their accompanying accents. In access to the channels of mass communication: G Britain a range of regional accents still survive politicians, civil servants, industrialists, experts and are important signs of regional identity of various kinds, pundits, royals and celebrities; and affiliation. Simon Elmes commenting on and it is their views and styles that are given H contemporary uses of accent found in the BBC voice in preference to the views of others in Voices survey in his book entitled Talking for society. Roger Fowler in his Language of News: I Britain: A Journey through the Nation’s Dialects Discourses and Ideology of the Press (Routledge,

(Penguin Books, 2005) notes that, ‘A striking 1991) writes of this selectivity, ‘The political JK feature of many of the … interviews has been eff ect of this division between the accessed and the way in which specific accents and words unaccessed hardly needs stating: an imbalance are identifi ed as belonging very narrowly to a between the representation of the already privi- L particular village or town.’ leged, on the one hand, and the already unprivi- Regional accents also appear to have the poten- leged, on the other, with the views of the offi cial, M tial to infl uence social evaluations; evaluations the powerful and the rich being constantly that can aff ect perceptions of both the sender invoked to legitimate the status quo.’ N and content of the message. In an article entitled, With the advances in communicative exchange ‘It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it’, brought about by the internet the public has in the UK Independent (15 October 1997), Emma more choice in terms of who and what they O Haughton identifies Received Pronunciation access. However, though there is less reliance on (RP), Refi ned Scots, Welsh and Irish, Yorkshire traditional channels of mass communication, the P and Estuary English as being favourably received ‘usual suspects’ as listed by Fowler still dominate but Brummie, Belfast, Glaswegian and West the press and national broadcasting. R Country accents as being viewed unfavourably. Accommodation, politics of See politics of Judgments will vary, though; an individual with a accommodation (in the media). Brummie accent may not share the general view. Accountability of media See mcquail’s S Peter Trudgill in Sociolinguistics: An Introduc- accountability of media model, 1997. tion to Language and Society (Penguin, 2000) Acculturation, deculturation Th e process by T argues that evaluations of the use of accent and which a society or an individual adapts to the dialect tend to be social rather than linguistic, for need for cultural change. The conditions for U ‘there is nothing at all inherent in non-standard such change occur, for example, when encoun- varieties which makes them inferior’. Reactions ters with other cultures continue on a prolonged to regional accents are also subject to change. basis such as in colonization, emigration and V Diff erences in accents will often refl ect diff er- immigration. In analysing the process by which ences in the social structure of a society, and in individuals adapt to life in a new country, Young W particular its patterns of social stratification. Yun Kim in ‘Adapting to a new culture’ in Larry Peter Trudgill notes a pattern as regards this Samovar and Richard Porter, Intercultural relationship in Britain. Typically those from the Communication: a reader (Wadsworth, 1997) XYZ higher social classes are more likely to use stan- comments, ‘Th ey are challenged to learn at least dard dialect and an accent close to RP, the pres- some new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting tige accent, whilst those from the lower classes – an activity commonly called acculturation ... are more likely to use non-standard dialect and At the same time, they go through the process a localized, regional accent. However, as several of deculturation ... of unlearning some of their

1 Accusatory studies

previously acquired cultural habits at least to Adaptors See non-verbal behaviour: reper- the extent that new responses are adopted in toire. situations that previously would have evoked old Advertising The extent of the reliance of all ones.’ forms of mass media upon advertising can be Such a process produces stress and anxiety gauged by glancing at any monthly edition of and necessarily affects the communicative brad, which comprises some 400–500 pages performance of those undergoing it. However, of information on where advertisements can be communication with those in the new culture is placed and how much they will cost. Everything essential to adaptation. Interestingly Kim argues is there – the national and local press, TV and that the mass media can be a useful source radio, cinema, posters, bus shelters, parking of information for those trying to acclimatize meters, litter bins and transport advertising. to a new culture, as the messages they carry Powerfully occupying the driving seat is inter- ‘explicitly or implicitly convey the world views, net advertising (see advertising: internet myths, beliefs, values, mores and norms of the advertising). culture’. See communication: intercultural If advertising merely sold products, it would communication. cause less critical concern than it does. But it ▶ Young Yun Kim, Becoming Intercultural: An Inte- also sells images, dreams, ideal ways of life, ideal grative Th eory of Communication and Cross-cultural images of self; it sells, then reinforces time and Adaptation (Sage, 2001). again, values – those of consumerism; and it Accusatory studies Jib Fowles in Th e Case for trades in stereotypes. In Th e Shocking History Television Violence (Sage, 1999) uses this term to of Advertising (Penguin, revised edition, 1965), describe the research studies that have focused E.S. Turner states that ‘advertising is the whip on the eff ects of screen violence. Th e studies are which hustles humanity up the road to the Better ‘accusatory’ in the sense that they purport to Mousetrap’. prove the connection between screen and real For some analysts, advertising is a kind of violence, the one likely to instigate the other, or magic. Raymond Williams in Problems in Mate- to desensitize audiences in their response to real rialism and Culture (Verso, 1980) argues that it violence. Such studies, in Fowles’s view, ‘amplify has the ability to ‘associate consumption with the derogatory discourse’ concerning violence human desires to which it has no real reference. in the cinema and on TV. See violence on tv: Th e magic obscures the real sources of general the defence. satisfaction because their discovery would Action code See codes of narrative. involve radical change in the whole common way Active-audience thesis See audience: active of life’. Judith Williamson in Decoding Advertise- audience. ments (Marion Boyars, 1978, 1998) shares a simi- Active participation Occurs in situations where lar concern: ‘Advertisements obscure and avoid media interest in a news story becomes involve- the real issues of society, those relating to work, ment, and the story takes on a media-induced to jobs and wages and who works for whom. Th e direction. An appetite for stories of scandal and basic issues in the present state of society which sensation, and the cut-throat competition for do concern money and how it is earned, are circulation, can lead newspapers into playing sublimated into “meanings”, “images”, “lifestyles”, the role of agent provocateur, as handy with the to be bought with products not money.’ chequebook as the reporter’s notebook. Further, the magic of advertising may mean Activism See media activism. that we believe commodities can convey Actuality Material from real life – the presenta- messages about ourselves; this leads to us being tion in a broadcast programme of real events and ‘alienated from ourselves, since we have allowed people to illustrate some current theme or prac- objects to “‘speak” for us and have become tice. radio, in parallel with fi lm documentary, identifi ed with them’. Such alienation may well pioneered actuality in the 1930s. Producers such lead to feelings of fragmentation and discomfort as Olive Shapley and Harry Harding were early within the self; feelings which could fuel a desire innovators in this fi eld. Th e radio programme to seek solace in further consumption. Time to Spare, made in 1934, documented A number of critics point to the danger that unemployment, broadcasting the voices of the advertising messages and the consumption unemployed and their families and creating an they partly fuel may undermine and distort impact that was both moving and disturbing. self-development. Anthony Giddens writes in Actualization See maslow’s hierarchy of Modernity and Self-Identity (Polity Press, 1991) needs. that ‘the consumption of ever-novel goods

2 Advertising

becomes a substitute for the genuine develop- advertising – health warnings, for example. A ment of self: appearance replaces essence’. (6) Charity advertising, seeking donations for Self-actualization is ‘packaged and distributed worthwhile causes at home and abroad. (7) B according to market criteria. Mediated experi- Advertising through sponsorship, mainly of ence is centrally involved here. Th e mass media sports, leisure and the arts. Th is indirect form of routinely present modes of life to which, it is advertising has been a major development; the C implied, everyone should aspire’. For Don Slater risk is that recipients of sponsorship come to rely in Consumer Culture and Modernity (Polity more and more heavily on commercial support. D Press, 1997), ‘Consumer culture “technicizes” the Sponsors want quick publicity and prestige for project of self by treating all problems as solvable their money and their loyalties to recipients are through various commodities.’ very often short-term. E Not all would agree with such criticisms. Th ose Th e eff ect of advertising upon newspaper and subscribing to the doctrines of nineteenth- broadcasting editorial and programme content is F century Liberalism, for example, would argue rarely overt; rather it is a process of media people that consumer culture, of which advertising is an ‘internalizing’ advertisers’ demands. Ad-related G integral element, liberates rather than oppresses, newspaper features have grown enormously in in providing the individual with many opportu- the post-Second World War period, especially in nities to rationally pursue his/her self-interest. the ‘quality press’, such as, in the UK, Th e Times, H Th e range of choices off ered by consumer culture Guardian, Independent and Daily Telegraph, and post-traditional society is to be celebrated which derive over half their revenue from adver- I rather than seen as a cause for concern – to be tising. In press advertising, numbers count for able to choose being seen as the essence of being less than the estimated purchasing power of the JK human. It should also be borne in mind that the target readership. Th is explains why two major messages of advertising have to compete with a UK newspapers with big circulations – the Daily range of other infl uences on behaviour in their Herald (see miracle of fleet street) and the L battle for hearts, minds and identities. News Chronicle – were closed down in the 1960s. Tony Yeshin in Advertising (Thomson Th ey simply did not appeal to the advertisers. M Learning, 2006) reminds us of the important Advertising has suffused our culture and economic role played by advertising. ‘Although our language, helping to form a consumer N it is widely criticised, it can be argued that adver- culture (see culture: consumer culture). tising, particularly within a capitalist society, Its infl uence has been felt in modern art move- provides the means for encouraging competi- ments such as pop art; its snappy techniques as O tion. By making information about competing developed for TV have been widely adopted in products and services widely available, it ensures the cinema. It has drawn into its service actors, P that no single product can, ordinarily, dominate celebrities, artists, photographers, writers, a market.’ Arguably, advertising has speeded designers and fi lm makers. It is often said that on R the introduction of useful inventions to a wide TV the adverts are better than the programmes; as distinct from a select circle of consumers; it there is a grain of truth here, as there is in the has spread markets, reduced the price of goods, claim that it is because of the adverts, and the S accelerated turnover and kept people in employ- goals of those who commission and make ment. It also funds a diverse range of media. them, that the programmes are not better, more T The many modes of advertising may be original or more challenging. See advertising categorized as follows: (1) Commercial consumer standards authority (uk); advertis- U advertising, with its target the mass audience ing: targeted advertising; aida model; and its channel the mass media. Latterly, of commercial radio (uk); brand: graphic course, the Internet has become the new fron- revolution; harmonious interaction; V tier for commercial advertising. (2) Trade and product placement; sponsorship; spon- technical advertising, such as ads in specialist sorship of broadcast programmes (uk); W magazines. (3) Prestige advertising, particularly subliminal. that of big business and large institutions, gener- ▶ Anne M. Cronin, Advertising and Consumer XYZ ally selling image and good name rather than Citizenship: Gender, Images and Rights (Routledge, specifi c products (see pr: public relations). 2000); John Tullock, Watching Television Audiences: (4) Small ads, directly informational, which are Cultural Theories and Methods (Arnold, 2000); the bedrock support of local periodicals and the Peter N. Stearns, Consumerism in World History: basis of the many giveaway papers which have The Global Transformation of Desire (Routledge, been published in recent years. (5) Government 2001); Sean Brierley, The Advertising Handbook

3 Advertising: ambient advertising

(Routledge, 2002); John O’Shaughnessy and Nicholas facebook, Bebo and myspace, in tweets and Jackson O’Shaughnessy, Persuasion in Advertising in social networking generally (see network- (Routledge, 2004); Ken Burtenshaw, Nik Mahon ing: social networking) we make ourselves and Caroline Barfoot, Th e Fundamentals of Creative easy targets for advertisers. Our sharing is an Advertising (AVA Publishing, 2006); David Ogilvy, advertiser’s opportunity, hence the growth of Ogilvy on Advertising (Prion, 2007); Vance Packard, behavioural targeting. Th e Hidden Persuaders (Ig Publishing, 2007 edn with Not only do advertisers track our activities, introduction by Mark Crispin Miller); Mark Tungate, our patterns of behaviour, and then match them Adland: a global history of advertising (Kogan Page, with appropriately directed commercials, they 2007). encourage us – in the spirit of the Internet – Advertising: ambient advertising Adver- to participate in our own marketization: we tisements that feature in contexts other than purchase a romantic novel online and a galaxy the printed page, on film or in broadcasting, of other romances are presented for our delecta- which we encounter in everyday life situations tion. For ad purposes, we have been typecast; we and are designed to surround and confront the have become consumer-engaged. prospective customer – in the street, on bus Ads appear on personal and group blogs (see shelters, in underground stations and trains, in blogging), in many cases allowing bloggers airports, public lavatories and latterly in places to recoup their costs. Marketers have quickly of education; indeed wherever there is space for come to recognize that ‘in-your-face’ advertising the advertiser to press home image and message. meets resistance online, while a key strategy is An alternative term is captive audience adver- to make ads seem more informational, and more tising. David Bollier of the Annenburg School personal and more discreet. of Communications, in an article entitled ‘Th e Online ad-dramas such as Bebo’s Kate Modern grotesque, smirking gargoyle: Th e commercial- (2008) have integrated advertising into the ization of America’s consciousness’ published narrative, usually with a degree of fi nesse that on the tom.paine.com website (8 August 2002), avoids detracting from the story. ‘Integrations’, writes of advertising ‘ambushing people as they as the ad business refers to them, are the Net’s use public restrooms, gas pumps, elevators … By version of product placement in fi lms and ones and twos, such actions generally are incon- TV, only with Net ad-drama the viewers them- sequential. In aggregate, however, the sheer selves can be integrated into the story by, for pervasiveness of commercialism in public spaces example, inviting them to be fi lm extras. and contemporary life has the malodorous whiff Production costs have remained problematic: of a Corporate Big Brother’. Bollier believes that sponsors want their products integrated, thus the ‘sheer ubiquity of marketing in hundreds of the number of sponsors has to be limited to nooks and crannies of daily life has become a the number of products or services that can defi ning framework of cultural values’. be reasonably absorbed in the drama. Bebo Advertising boycotts Th e reliance of the press pulled out of funding ad-drama in 2009 despite and of commercial television upon advertising the success, albeit temporary, of a number of for revenue indicates the important infl uence online productions such as Kirill, The Gap advertisers and their clients can wield over the Year, Gotham Girls and Zombie Bashers. See media. Where a newspaper may be deemed to be advertising: targeted advertising; web publishing material or expressing views which or online drama. might be detrimental to consumerist interest, Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) Inde- companies pull out their expensive advertise- pendent body set up by the advertising industry ment – or threaten to do so, and thus exercise to police rules incorporated in advertising codes. censorship. Th e fi nancial consequences of such On 1 November 2004 the ASA became the boycotts can be devastating. regulatory authority for broadcasting advertising Advertising: Internet advertising There following the communications act, 2003 and is consensus that the internet has had the the creation of the Offi ce of Communications eff ect of redrawing the landscape of advertis- (Ofcom). The Authority’s mission is to ‘apply ing. Essentially, advertisers know more about the advertising codes and uphold standards us as consumers because, as we use the Net, in all media on behalf of consumers, business operate our Internet-accessible mobile phones, and society’. It off ers a ‘one-stop’ approach to we reveal more information about who we customer complaints, a ‘single point of reference are, what our tastes are and how we exchange for consumers, advertisers and broadcasters, information about ourselves with others. On while respecting the diff erent obligations inher-

4 Aff ect displays

ent in broadcast and non-broadcast media – the or on behalf of, any organization or individual A one licensed, the other not’. whose objectives are or appear to be wholly or Th e Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) mainly concerned with religion, faith or other B revises and enforces the CAP Code, which is philosophies or beliefs (b) any other advertising ‘primarily concerned with the content of market which appears to have a doctrinal objective (c) communications’. Th e ASA endorses and admin- advertising for commercial products or services C isters the Code, ensuring that the self-regulatory which reﬂ ect doctrine’. system works in the public interest. Th ere are While the TV Code seeks to ‘prevent causing D codes for non-broadcast media, radio and TV offence to viewers generally or to particular and text services. Th e Non-Broadcasting Code groups in society (for example by causing signiﬁ - covers topics such as Decency, Honesty, Truth- cant distress, disgust or insult, by offending E fulness, Matters of Opinion, Fear and Distress, against widespread public feeling)’, it recognizes and Safety. legitimate differences of opinion on certain F For example, Section 11, on Violence and matters: ‘The ASA and BCAP will not act …

Anti-Social Behaviour, states that ‘marketing where advertising is simply criticized for not G communications should contain nothing that being in “good taste” unless the material also condones or is likely to provoke violence or anti- off ends against generally accepted moral, social social behaviour’, while Section 13, Protection or cultural standards. Apart from freedom of H of Privacy, urges marketers ‘to obtain written speech considerations, there are often large and permission before referring to or portraying sometimes contradictory differences in views I members of the public or their identifiable about what constitutes “bad taste” or what possessions’; however, ‘the use of crowd scenes should be deplored.’ JK or general public locations may be acceptable On matters of redress, the ASA states: ‘Th e without permission’. vast majority of advertisers, promoters and direct Th e Broadcasting Committee of Advertising marketers comply [with the codes]. Th ose that do L Practice (BCAP) is under contract from Ofcom not may be subject to sanctions. Adverse publicity to supervise advertising on radio and TV. may result from the rulings published by the ASA M Section 9 of the Radio Code deals with Good weekly on its website. Th e media, contractors and Taste, Decency and Off ences to Public Feeling: service providers may withhold their services or N ‘Each station is expected to … take into account deny access to space. Trading privileges (includ- the sensitivities of all sections of its audience ing direct mail discounts) and recognition may when deciding on the acceptability or scheduling be revoked, withdrawn or temporarily withheld. O of advertisements.’ Pre-vetting may be imposed and, in some cases, Under Section 11, Children and Younger non-complying parties can be referred to the P Listeners, the code states that ‘prices of products Offi ce of Fair Trading for action, where appropri- advertised to younger listeners must not be mini- ate, under the Control of Misleading Advertise- R mized by words such as “only” and “just”’; nor ments Regulations.’ should ads ‘lead children to believe that unless Th e ASA publishes regular news and reports they have or use the product advertised they on its adjudications of high-profi le ad campaigns, S will be inferior in some way to other children or and it carries on its website (www.a.s.a.org. liable to be held in contempt or ridicule’. Inviting uk) instructions on how the public can make T children to ask Mum to ask Dad to buy an adver- complaints, including a complaint form with tised product also breaks the rules. Section 13 of space for 1,500 words of explanation. See spon- U the Radio Code, Racial Discrimination, declares sorship: broadcast programmes (uk). that advertising ‘must not include any material Advertising: targeted advertising Each which might reasonably be construed by ethnic consumer leaves a ‘purchasing trail’ registered V minorities to be hurtful or tasteless’. either at the checkout of a shop or store or The TV Code covers similar ground to the by ordering goods and services online. This W other codes. Section 4, Political and Controver- trail constitutes a personal story in which the sial Issues, states that no advertisement ‘(a) may consumer’s tastes and patterns of consump- be inserted by or on behalf of any body whose tion can be measured. Prior knowledge allows XYZ objects are wholly or mainly of a political nature companies to more accurately predict purchas- (b) may be directed towards any political end (c) ing behaviour. See surveillance. may have any relation to any industrial dispute Aesthetic Code See codes. (with limited exceptions)’. Section 10 on Religion, Aff ect displays See non-verbal behaviour; Faith, Systems of Belief forbids ‘(a) advertising by repertoire.

5 Aff ective

Aff ective See cognitive (and affective). the attributes of each object. Just as there is an Agenda-setting Term used to describe the way agenda of public issues, political candidates, or the media set the order of importance of current some other set of objects, there is also an agenda issues, especially in the reportage of news. of attributes for each object. Both the selection Closely linked with the process of gatekeeping, by journalists of objects for attention and the agenda-setting defi nes the context of transmis- selection of attributes for detailing the pictures sion, establishes the terms of reference and of these objects are powerful agenda-setting determines the limits of debate. In broadcast- roles.’ ing the agenda is more assertive than in news- Th e authors point out that ‘although object and papers where the reader can ignore the order of attribute salience are conceptually distinct, they priorities set by the paper’s editorial team and are integral and simultaneously present aspects turn straight to the small ads or the sports pages. of the agenda-setting process’. In their research Broadcasting is linear – one item following after into public attitudes to candidates at the 1996 another – and its agenda unavoidable (except election in Spain, the following attributes of the by switching off ). Interviewers in broadcasting major contenders were measured: the ideology/ are in control of pre-set agendas. Th ey initiate issues position of rival candidates, biographical and formulate the questions to be asked, and details, perceived qualifi cations and integrity. have the chairperson’s power of excluding areas Th e function of mass media as agenda-setters of discussion. Very rarely does an interviewee has, to a degree, been diluted by internet break free from this form of control and succeed rivals, in particular the advent of the blogo- in widening the context of debate beyond what is sphere. Zizi Papacharissi in her chapter, ‘Th e ‘on the agenda’. citizen is the message: alternative modes of civic G. Ray Funkhouser and Eugene F. Shaw in engagement’ in the book she edited, Journalism an article entitled ‘How synthetic experience and Citizenship: New Agendas in Communica- shapes social reality’ in Journal of Communica- tion (Routledge, 2009), writes: ‘For monitorial tion, Spring 1990, subdivide agenda-setting into citizens, blogs present the space where what is micro-agenda-setting and macro-agenda-setting. defi ned as public, can be challenged, and where Th e fi rst describes the way the mass media are hierarchies of issues determined by power elites able, through emphasis on content, to infl uence can be revised, and agendas re-aligned … A public perceptions of the relative importance post on a blog, a video log in YouTube, even the of specific issues. The second they define as practice of following a blog represents public follows: ‘The potential of electronic media to expressions of private dissent, albeit mild, with colour, distort, and perhaps even degrade an a mainstream media agenda determined by entire cultural world view, by presenting images elite power constellations.’ See demotic turn; of the world suited to the agenda of the media facebook; journalism: citizen journal- (in the US case, commercial interests), we might ism; mccombs and shaw’s agenda-setting term “macro-agenda-setting”’. model of media effects, 1976; prototyping In recent years agenda-setting has been viewed concept; rogers and dearing’s agenda- as working from two levels, that of subject and setting model, 1987; twitter; youtube. that of attribute; and the theory is that the Agenda-setting research A key area of media’s attention to the attributes of a subject research into the relationship between mass is met with a corresponding image in the mind communication and audience consumption of of the public. Level 1 of agenda-setting concerns media, agenda-setting research generally takes the central theme or object of a public issue/ two forms. James W. Dearing and Everett M. news story; Level 2, the salient characteristics of Rogers in Agenda-Setting (Sage, 1996) explain the theme or object as emphasized by the media. that research has traditionally taken a hierarchi- In an article, ‘Agenda-setting in the 1996 Span- cal form; this they describe as ‘one-point-in-time ish General Election’, published in the Journal correlation comparisons of media content of Communication, Spring 2000, Maxwell with aggregated responses by the public to McCombs, Esteban Lopez Escobar and Juan survey questions about issue salience’, that is, Pablo Llamas refer to ‘agendas of attributes, those their perceived importance. More recently the characteristics and traits that fi ll out the picture research approach has been through longitudinal of each object’. Some attributes are emphasized, studies. Such investigations ‘include over-time given prominence, others de-emphasized, ‘while participant observation in media organizations’ many are ignored’. McCombs and his colleagues as well as the analysis of quantitative variables explain: ‘Just as objects vary in salience, so do such as real world indicators.

6 al-Jazeera

Longitudinal studies can detect trends and capital. Some 400 TV sets, each costing around A directions of infl uence; tease out whether media 100 – the price of a small car – were in use. coverage prompts public awareness and interest With the coming of the Second World War, TV B or whether the media perch on the ‘bandwagon’ broadcasts came to an abrupt end on 1 Septem- of public opinion. The over-time study can ber 1939, by which time there were an estimated identify variants of events and issues and thus, as 20,000 TV sets in operation. The Alexandra C Dearing and Rogers put it, ‘illuminate the nature Palace studios opened for business again on 7 of media eff ects with special clarity …’ June 1946 but had to briefl y shut down trans- D A further focus of research into agenda-setting mission once more in early 1947 because of the involves what Dearing and Rogers term ‘trigger acute fuel crisis. Th e Alexandra Palace studios events’. Th ese act as a ‘cue-to-action that occurs remained in service until 1955. See broadcast- E at a point in time’, each trigger event serving ‘to ing; television. crystallize attention and action’. A trigger event Alienation As a concept, derives largely from the F essentially ‘simplifi es the nature of a complex work of Karl Marx (1818–83), who argued that

issue into a form that the public can more easily the organization of industrial production robbed G understand’. people of opportunities for meaningful and Agitprop The Department of Agitation and creative work, performed in cooperation with Propaganda was created in 1920 as part of the others and over which they had some control. H Central Committee Secretariat of the Commu- Researchers have posed the question whether nist Party of the Soviet Union. Its responsibility the mass character of the modern communica- I was to use all available media – especially tions industry produces a sense of alienation in

fi lm – to disseminate information and ideas to its own workers. Lewis Coser in Men of Ideas JK the population of the world’s fi rst Communist (Free Press, 1965) believes that the industrial state. Th e term ‘agitprop’ has come to be used mode of production within media organizations to describe any unashamedly political propagan- hamstrings the individual producer by deny- L dizing. ing his or her creativity in the quest for a mass Agora In the city states of ancient Greece the agora culture, and that this results in alienation. M was the place of assembly where the free citizens Th e term has a wider application. Alienation debated matters of public concern; where public is seen as a socio-psychological condition which N opinion was formulated and asserted. Public aff ects certain individuals. William Kornhauser spaces have long been surrendered to enclosure in The Politics of Mass Society (Free Press, or to shopping malls, but the concept remains; 1959) argues that the breakdown and decline of O its practice continues at second remove – the community groups and the extended family in media speak for the people, purporting to modern society produces feelings of isolation P articulate and defend public interest in their role and increases the possibility that people will be as watchdogs, guarding the public from the infl uenced by the appeals of extremist political R abuses of state. public service broadcasting groups. Some theorists view alienation as a (psb) is perceived as an extension of the agora; potentially signifi cant variable in determining an hence the concern often expressed about the individual’s receptivity to mass communication. S privatization of broadcast media, that it is turn- Th ere are echoes of the notion of the alienated ing the agora into a marketplace of commodities and isolated individual in the mass society T rather than a marketplace of ideas and debate. theory of the media, for example. See anomie; However, it could be claimed that a modern, and intervening variables (ivs). U expanding, form of the agora is the internet. ▶ Denis McQuail, Mass Communication Theory See blogosphere; information commons; (Sage, 2010). mediasphere; public opinion; salon Alignment See framing. V discourse. al-Jazeera Arab satellite TV network, sharing AIDA model Guide to the principal stages of news and current affairs in high-definition. W advertising a product or service: A – create Started up in 1996, al-Jazeera grabbed world Awareness; I – create Interest; D – promote headlines with its exclusive news footage from Desire; A – stimulate Action or response. Taliban-held areas during the war in Afghani- XYZ Alexandra Palace Birthplace of television in the stan, 2002 and the US pursuit of Osama bin United Kingdom. Th e fi rst TV broadcasting took Laden, thought to have masterminded the events place from London’s ‘Ally Pally’ on 2 November of 11 September 2001. Translated as ‘Peninsula’, 1936. Initially the service reached only a few al-Jazeera scooped rival Western channels with hundred privileged viewers in and around the bin Laden’s pre-recorded video messages. Th e

7 Alleyne’s news revolution model, 1997

channel’s coverage of world affairs, including deals limited TV access to America, but AJE’s the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict and the second services were readily available online and promi- Gulf War (2003) and the occupation of Iraq, has nently carried on YouTube. offered alternative perspectives and analysis, ▶ Mohammed El-Nawawy and Adel Iskander, braving censorship whenever it is threatened. Al-Jazeera: Th e Story of the Network Th at Is Rattling Often referred to as the Arab world’s BBC, Governments and Redefining Modern Journalism al-Jazeera is based in Qatar, and is substantially (Westview, 2003); Mohamed Zayani, ed., The funded by its liberalizing emir. It was through Al-Jazeera Phenomenon: Critical Perspectives on New al-Jazeera that viewers were able to witness Arab Media (Pluto, 2005); Hugh Miles, Al-Jazeera: the destruction by the Taliban of the giant How Arab TV News Challenged the World (Abacus, Bamiyan Buddhas. Noureddine Miladi in 2005). ‘Mapping the Al-Jazeera Phenomenon’ in War ★Alleyne’s news revolution model, 1997 In and the Media: Reporting Confl ict 24/7 (Sage, News Revolution: Political and Economic Deci- 2003), edited by Daya Kishan Th ussu and Des sions about Global Information (Macmillan, Freedman, says that with a regular audience of 1997), Mark D. Alleyne offers a model which 35 million and available to most of the world’s ‘is both a description of the international news 310 million Arabs, al-Jazeera ‘has redefined system’s political economy and a theory of the Arab broadcasting’: ‘Th e weekly talk shows and international relations of that system’. Th e Global discussion programmes often tackle crucial yet News System comprises ‘the system of compa- taboo subjects, like human rights, democracy nies, organizations and people that produce and political corruption, women’s freedom, the world’s news’. It works according to two banned political groups, polygamy, torture and necessities, Economic and Democratic, the latter rival interpretations of Islamic teachings’, which describing ‘the body of reasons used to justify other Arab channels ‘would not even consider the existence of the news media’ – the political screening … Th e animated political discussions justifi cations; and these Alleyne classifi es as (1) that were confined to private spaces in Arab watchdogs on government; (2) ‘conduits for the countries have been brought into the open after two-way flow of information between people decades of stagnation and state censorship, to be and their government’; and (3) ‘as a source of debated at a transnational level …’ information in the so-called marketplace of Unmediated by Western media influences, ideas’. al-Jazeera has incurred the wrath both of the Along with political justification there is West – the US in particular – and of Arab economic necessity: ‘The press system and governments. In a UK Guardian article entitled the economic system interact at a basic level ‘Reality Television’ (21 April 2004), writing whenever the media carry advertising. At a more of his time as London correspondent for the sophisticated level, the media perform the infor- website al-jazeera.net, Arthur Nelsen refers to mation functions needed for trade, currency, al-Jazeera’s ‘track record of honest and accurate equities, and bond markets to perform.’ Not least reporting’, commending its ‘principled plural- of the factors relating to economics is the capac- ism in face of brutal and authoritarian regimes ity of the media to attract or deter capital: ‘News within the region, and increasingly from those of political instability scares away investors. without’. Th is, in Nelsen’s view, ‘is why it has been More positive news attracts them.’ vilifi ed, criminalized and bombed. It is also why Th e Global News System operates in relation it should be defended by those who genuinely to three structures of power/authority: the politi- believe that successful societies depend upon an cal structure (states, international organizations, independent media’. etc.); the production structure (international A signifi cant advance occurred with the intro- trade in goods and services); and fi nancial struc- duction of al-Jazeera English (AJE) in November tures (markets in currency, fi nancial services, 2006; and global interest in the organization’s etc.). Th e model identifi es a dynamic of interact- news service accelerated as it reported the ing and sometimes conflicting claims, which massed rallies of popular protest against North often operate in a process of exchange – what African and Arab regimes in 2010 and 2011 (see Alleyne terms a ‘trade in claims’; what the media mobilization). want from the power structures and what those al-Jazeera English is available in over a structures want from the media with regard to hundred countries and broadcasts from Doha, the nature of information and its fl ow. Kuala Lumpur, London and Washington DC. Says Alleyne, ‘Like the news media, these Th e reluctance in the US to strike distribution actors [states, companies, international orga-

8 Amazon.com

L Alleyne’s news revolution model, 1997

M nizations] like to manage what information may reject a message which contradicts what you the news media disseminate about them. Th ey think you know. As Myers and Myers conclude, N do this through censorship and propaganda. ‘Th e allness attitude may do much to prevent you Like the news media, these actors seek self- from developing satisfying relationships with preservation, and the actors operating in the others and from communicating eff ectively with O market place are particularly concerned with them.’ getting information that will help them make Allusion See historical allusion. P effi cient decisions.’ Alleyne’s own claim for his Alternative computing See hacker, hack- model is that it ‘takes us from the stage of merely tivist. R describing the wonders of new technologies and Alternative (radical) media See media activ- assuming positive political consequences from ism. the so-called information revolution to a clear Amazon.com US Seattle-based electronic S explanation and understanding of how the news superstore selling everything from books to media function in international relations’. computers, from cameras to furniture, from T Allness attitude Gail and Michelle Myers in Th e gourmet food to health products, clothing and Dynamics of Human Communication (McGraw- groceries worldwide. Named after the earth’s U Hill, 1985) refer to what Alfred Korzybski termed longest river and with ambitions to be the fi rst ‘allness’, that is the attitude that you can know and biggest online shopping mall, Amazon was or say all there is about a person, group, issue founded in 1995 by Jeff Bezos, beginning life V and so on. As Myers and Myers point out, the with books only and achieving profi tability by

allness attitude can constitute a considerable 2001. Th e company soon began to run the retail W barrier in communication. It may mean that you websites of major corporations, at the same communicate with certain people on the basis time acquiring network-related enterprises such that you know all there is to know about them or as Bookpages (UK), Telebook (Germany) and XYZ the topic under discussion, and few people take the Internet Movie Database that would drive kindly to such assumptions. forward Amazon business. Th e company moved Th e attitude may also aﬀ ect how you receive into online music retailing in 1998, launching the messages. For example, you may believe you Amazon MP3 in 2007 and the e-book reader, already know all that you are being told, or you Kindle, in the same year.

9 Amplitude

As with all the online traders, diversifi cation or contextual factors are at the centre of the has been key to survival and prosperity; the communication model devised by Elizabeth company partnered 20th Century Fox in a fi lm G. Andersch, Lorin C. Staats and Robert N. production, Th e Stolen Child in 2008. Amazon Bostrom and presented in Communication also ensured that it was in the vanguard of enter- in Everyday Use (Holt, Rinehart & Winston). prises supporting the increase of independent, Like barnland’s transactional model, print-on-demand (POD) publishing, creating this one stresses the transactional nature of the in 2010 Amazon Encore (republishing works communication process, in which messages and of quality that had gone out of print, suff ered their meanings are structured and evaluated by neglect, or both) and Amazon Crossing (trans- the Sender and subjected to reconstruction and lating and issuing French works into English, the evaluation on the part of the Receiver, all the fi rst of these being Th e King of Kahel, 2010). while interacting with factors (or stimuli) in the Like other online operators Amazon has environment. See topic guide under commu- been involved in controversies concerning anti- nication models. competitiveness, price discrimination, censor- Anecdote A short narrative, usually of a personal ship and acting outside international copyright nature, used to illustrate a general issue. laws. It took fl ak in 2010 for putting a bar on Anecdotes are often used in media coverage to wikileaks’ business, justifying its decision heighten the emotional aspect of an issue. Colin on the grounds that the whistleblower had Seymour-Ure in Th e Political Impact of the Mass broken Amazon’s rules for usage. Media (Constable, 1974) recounts the use made Amplitude See news values. of one such anecdote by the politician Enoch Analysis: modes of media analysis See Powell in his eff orts to bring the immigration discourse analysis; ethnographic issue to public attention during 1967 and 1968. (approach to audience measurement); Powell claimed to have received a letter from a functionalist; marxist; social action correspondent in Northumberland expressing (modes of media analysis). concern about an elderly widow in Wolverhamp- Anarchist cinema Epitomized in the work of ton who feared harassment by newly arrived French film-maker Jean Vigo (1905–34) who immigrants in the area. Th is anecdote was widely was twelve when his anarchist father, known reported by the press, yet, despite strenuous as Miguel Almereyda, was found strangled in a eff orts, no trace of the elderly widow could be French police cell in 1917. In A propos de Nice found. Th e story did, however, do much to fuel (1930), Vigo expressed the anarchist’s views on the emotive manner in which the immigration inequality, contrasting the luxurious, suntanned issue was discussed in the popular press. See life of wealthy holidaymakers with the underfed, loony leftism. deformed bodies of slum children. In his comic Animatic Sequence of drawings representing the masterpiece Zero de Conduite (Nought for story of a television advertisement, prior to fi lm- Conduct) produced in 1932, Vigo used anarchist ing. Another term for storyboard. friends as actors. His theme was the rebellion of Animation Th e process of fi lming still drawings, schoolchildren against the rigidity of the school puppets, etc. in sequence to give the illusion of authorities. It was immediately banned by the movement; also the actual direct drawing and French authorities. Vigo was a direct inspiration painting on to positive or negative stock or on to for the ‘anarchistic’ film of a modern, public clear celluloid itself. Long before cinematog- school rebellion in Lindsay Anderson’s If, made raphy was invented, devices were in use which in 1968. (Anarchy: complete absence of law or gave drawings the illusion of movement. By 1882 government.) Emile Reynauld had combined his Praxinoscope Anchorage Th e part that captions play in helping with a projector and a decade later opened the to frame, or anchor, the meaning of photographic Th éâtre Optique in the Musée Grevin in Paris. images, as reproduced in newspapers and Live-action cinema became all-important magazines. French philosopher Roland Barthes once the Lumière brothers had shown its possi- used this term to describe the way captions help bilities in 1895, but animation soon captured ‘fi x’ or narrow down the choice of meanings of interest, from 1908 onwards, with the work of the published image. He defi nes the caption as J. Stuart Blackton in the US and Emile Cohl in a ‘parasitic message designed to connote the France. New York Herald cartoonist Winsor image’. McCay made Gertie the Dinosaur in 1909, and ★Andersch, Staats and Bostrom’s model in 1919 the fi rst animated feature, Th e Sinking of of communication, 1969 Environmental the Lusitania.

10 Animation

Andersch, Staats and Bostrom’s model of communication, 1969 P

R In November 1928 Walt Disney (1901–66) Among the most celebrated movie examples presented Mortimer, later Mickey Mouse, to the using performance capture are Andy Serkis’s world using synchronous sound, in Steamboat Gollum in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: S Willie, along with his Skeleton Dance (1929), one The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), and James of the true classics of animation fi lm. Th e labo- Cameron’s Avatar (2009), the highest grossing T riousness of producing thousands of drawings film of all time. Here, the Na’vi, inhabitants for fi lming was dramatically altered in the 1980s of Pandora, are seven-foot CG fantasies yet U by the introduction to animated fi lm-making of capturing human motion and emotion with an computer graphics. amazingly heightened sense of reality. Cel (handdrawn) animation was generally At one time during the making of Avatar V displaced by computer-generated (CG) anima- the New Zealand visual eff ects company Weta tion, increasingly in the fi lm industry in 3D (see Digital employed 900 people, an indicator of W three-dimensional (3D). Live action using the prodigious scale and expense of Cameron’s actors is integrated by CG imaging, blending the innovative enterprise. real with the synthetic. What has been termed Motion capture animation has also become XYZ motion capture (extensively used in video games) familiar in projects for TV, an example in the records actor movement to activate digital char- UK being Headcases (2008), a satirical current acter models. When facial expression and fi nger aff airs show created by Henry Naylor for ITV, movement are included, the process becomes using 3D animation in the style of Spitting Image performance capture. (ITV, 1984–96).

11 Annan Commission Report on Broadcasting, 1977

▶ Paul Wells, Understanding Animation (Routledge, Dissatisfied ambition is a target for much 1998); Wikipedia. advertising and is often seen as a desirable trait Annan Commission Report on Broadcast- in modern capitalist societies – a perspective ing, 1977 Historian Lord Annan chaired the reinforced by some of the outpourings from the Royal Commission on the Future of Broadcast- mass media. A question of concern, then, is the ing, whose main task was to decide what should contribution of the mass media and in particular happen to the broadcasting industry once the advertising to the condition of anomie. Anomie right to broadcast of the radio and television can lead to extensive personal as well as social companies lapsed at the end of July 1979. Th e breakdown, to suicide and mental illness as well Annan Commission was also asked to make as to crime, delinquency, drug addiction and recommendations on a fourth television channel. alcoholism. What Annan wanted above all was a shift from Anticipatory compliance Phrase used by duopoly to a more diverse system of broadcasting Bruce Dover in his book Rupert’s Adventure in in Britain: ‘We want the broadcasting industry China (Tuttle Publishing, 2008) to describe how to grow. But we do not want more of the same editors working for the Murdoch media empire … What is needed now are programmes for the know by nature, rather than directive, what they diff erent minorities which add up to make the can or cannot publish or broadcast. Dover, a majority.’ Annan also declared that there was ‘a former vice-president of Murdoch in China, widely shared feeling that British broadcasting writes ‘Murdoch very rarely issued directives or is run like a highly restricted club –managed instructions to his senior executives or editors’. exclusively by broadcasters according to their What was expected was ‘a sort of “anticipatory own criteria of what counts as good television compliance”. One didn’t need to be instructed and radio’. about what to do, one simply knew what was in The then Labour Government published one’s long-term interests’. a white paper, Broadcasting (July 1978), in Anti-language According to Martin Montgom- response to Annan, but before there was time ery in An Introduction to Language and Society for legislation, the Conservatives came to power (Routledge, 1995), anti-languages ‘may be under- in May 1979. Th e Queen’s Speech promised the stood as extreme versions of social dialects’. fourth channel to commercial television and Typically, anti-languages are developed by sub- the Annan proposal for an Open Broadcasting cultures and groups that take an antagonistic Authority was rejected. See channel four. stance towards mainstream society. Th is stance See also topic guide under commissions, may be general or relate to a specific area of committees, legislation. social activity. Further, the core activities of the Anomie It was Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), a group – those around which the anti-language French sociologist, who fi rst used this term to often develops – may well be illegal. Th e anti- describe a state of ‘normlessness’ in which the language serves both to establish a boundary and individual feels that there are no eff ective social a degree of separateness between the group and rules governing behaviour, or that those rules society, and to make its activities more diffi cult and values to which he/she is exposed are for outsiders to detect and follow. confl icting and therefore confusing. Th e anomic By their nature anti-languages are diffi cult to state is most likely to occur when contact with study, but Montgomery discusses several types others is limited. Durkheim linked anomie including those developed in Polish prisons and with the disturbance caused by social change those used by the Calcutta underworld. Another and upheaval, and saw it as a temporary social example could be that of Polari, described by phenomenon. Several contemporary observers Ian Lucas in ‘Th e colour of eyes: Polari and the consider it a more permanent feature of modern Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’ in Anna Livia industrial society. and Kira Hall, eds, Queerly Phrased: Language mass society theorists have tended to Gender and Sexuality (Oxford University Press, view those suffering from anomie as being 1997) as a kind of ‘British gay slang’. Polari was particularly vulnerable to over-infl uence by mass popular among the homosexual community communication. Observers have also found that in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s, before some behaviour that was considered anomic was crossing over into the mainstream. It has some- in fact sub-cultural. Another feature of anomie is times been employed in the comic portrayal of that the individual may react to it by becoming camp characters. Th ere is thought to be limited ceaselessly ambitious, and this in some cases can contemporary use of Polari by the homosexual lead to severe agitation and discontent. community.

12 Apple Macintosh

Anti-languages are created by a process of Jobs to the company the Mac revolution picked A relexicalization – that is, the substitution of new up apace. Innovations such as the HyperCard, vocabulary for old, usually those words which the MultiFinder, the Powerbook, the iMac – B refer to the activities which mark the group off advanced and stylish – and the iBook (Apple’s from the wider community. The grammar of first laptop computer) did good business and the parent language is often preserved. Making established the company as a world leader. C up new words happens frequently in anti- In 2005 came the MacMini, a relatively inex- languages, thus making them even more diffi cult pensive version of the Mac, proving immensely D to penetrate. Overlexicalization is often also a popular and profi table. Jobs has been quoted as feature of anti-languages. Here a variety of new saying, ‘I get asked a lot why Apple’s customers words may refer to an activity and may be used are so loyal. It’s not because they belong to the E interchangeably in order to mislead or confuse church of Mac! It’s because of the best service ‘outsiders’. and the quality of Apple’s products.’ F Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act Apple is associated with ‘the next big thing’

(UK), 2001 See terrorism: anti-terrorism, in computing, creating landmarks such as the G crime and security act. iPhone, the iPod and sensationally in 2010, Apache silence The complex meanings of the iPad tablet which in three days in June silence, as observed by the North American registered sales of a quarter of a million and H Apache tribes, have been tabulated by K.H. within six months was approaching sales of ten Basso in ‘To give up words: silence in Western million. Th e iPod, a portable media player, was I Apache culture’ in P. Giglioli, ed., Language and introduced in 2001, taking 90 per cent of the

Social Context (Penguin, 1972). Basso describes US market and selling a hundred million by JK Apache silence as ‘a response to uncertainty 2007. PC World Magazine judged that the iPod and unpredictability in social relations’. Often had ‘altered the landscape for portable audio baffl ing to the outsider, Apache silence was an players’. It has proved as useful for business as L important element in the courtship process; for entertainment. Th e music software iTunes when meeting strangers; even when greeting Store, opened for business in 2003, soon off ered M children back from a long journey; and in the movies and computer games. In 2007 iTunes presence of other people’s grief. See communi- Wi-Fi Music Store followed, and the celebrated N cation, non-verbal. iPhone in the same year. ▶ Adam Jaworski, Th e Power of Silence: Social and In 2011 Apple introduced its iCloud service, Pragmatic Perspectives (Sage, 1993). allowing people to listen to music purchased O Apocryphal stories Th ose of doubtful origin, online for any Apple device with Internet false or spurious. See demonization; folk connection, this in competition with similar P devils; loony leftism; myth; rumour. offerings available from rivals amazon and Apple Macintosh Name derives from an apple google. R cultivar, the McIntosh (called ‘the Mac’), popular Like other global operators such as Google in New England and fi xed on by the founders and microsoft, Apple Inc. has been involved of Apple Computers, Steve Wozniak and Steve in controversy and litigation. In June 2006 the S Jobs, 1 April 1976, though the names of other UK Mail on Sunday reported on the suicides of pioneers of the personal computer (PC) – Jef several workers at a factory run by Taiwan-based T Raskin, Burrell Smith and Bill Atkinson – should electronics firm, Foxconn, manufacturer of be equally celebrated. From its inception Apple components for Apple (and Dell, HP and Nokia). U has been synonymous with innovative excellence Evidence of guards at the Shenzhen factory beat- and good design. ing workers was captured on video – a situation A David in the PC world compared with the the Apple management rushed to remedy. V Goliath of microsoft, Apple (commanding 4 Similar problems arose in China in August 2009 when it was revealed that another Apple per cent of the computer market globally) never- W theless is a chart-stopper in terms of admiration supplier at the Wintek factory in Suzhou, for its computer hardware and software and for Jiangsee Province, incurred a strike following its enterprise in the fi eld of digital telephony. illness breaking out among workers as a result of XYZ Both in terms of innovation and business the illegal use of n-hexane instead of (the more success Apple languished in the 1990s, this in expensive) alcohol to clean screens of mobile part because the dynamic Jobs fell out with the phones. company’s Chief Executive Offi cer and took his Apple has taken legal action to protect its energies elsewhere. However, with the return of apple trademark. In April 2000 the Beijing

13 Arbitrariness

Number One Intermediate People’s Court ruled right to freedom of expression. Th is right shall in favour of the Guangdong Apples Industry include freedom to hold opinions and to receive Company, manufacturers of leather goods, and impart information and ideas without keeping its (winged) apple trademark. However, interference by public authority and regardless in 2008 the Shenyang Municipal Intermediate of frontiers. (2) Th e exercise of these freedoms, People’s Court found against the New Apple since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, Digital Technology Company, judging that a may be subject to such formalities, conditions, trademark infringement had taken place and restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law was a case of unfair competition, although the and are necessary in a democratic society, in the claimed damages were reduced. interests of national security, territorial integrity Though Apple’s triumph with the multi- or public safety … for preventing the disclosure functional iPad boosted the company’s profi ts of information received in confidence, or for and reputation for innovation, the death of Jobs maintaining the authority and impartiality of the in October 2011 cast a shadow of uncertainty judiciary.’ over Apple’s future. Th e upholding of the Convention is the task of Arbitrariness One of the characteristic features the European Court of Human Rights, based in of human language is that between an object Strasbourg. Th e article gave birth to a pressure described and the word that describes it there group, Article 19, centred in London, using elec- is a connection which is purely arbitrary – that tronic media to monitor state censorship around is, the speech sound does not refl ect features the world. See censorship and topic guide of the object denoted. For example, the word under media: freedom, censorship. ‘chair’ describes the object, chair, because the Arqiva Commercial Radio Awards See English have arbitrarily decided to name it thus commercial radio (uk). as a matter of convention. In contrast, onomato- Assertiveness To be assertive is to be able to poeic expressions are representative rather than communicate one’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, arbitrary in that they refl ect properties of the attitudes, positions and so on in a clear, confi - nonlinguistic world (for example, clatter, buzz, dent, honest and direct manner; it is in short fl ap – and snap, crackle and pop). to be able to stand up for oneself whilst also ‘Areopagitica’ Title of a tract or pamphlet by taking into consideration the needs and rights of the English poet John Milton (1608–74) in other people. Anne Dickson in Women at Work defence of the freedom of the press, published (Kogan Page, 2000) argues that, ‘Being assertive in 1644. Milton spoke out, with eloquence and … springs from a fulcrum of equality. It springs courage, following the revival of censorship by from a balance between self and others …’ parliamentary ordinance in 1643 (traditional Being assertive diff ers from being aggressive in press censorship had broken down with the that aggressiveness involves standing up for one’s Long Parliament’s abolition of the Star Chamber own rights and needs at the expense of others. in 1641). The title was taken from the Greek, In recent years there has been much interest Areopagus – the hill of Ares or Mars in Athens, in assertiveness training – that is, in enabling where the highest judicial court held its sittings; people to develop techniques and strategies, a ‘behind closed doors’ court. verbal and non-verbal, for interpersonal Milton celebrated the power and influence communication which will encourage them to of the printed word: books ‘do preserve, as in a assert themselves in social situations. Th e ability vial, the purest effi cacy and extraction of that to be assertive is linked to self-esteem and self- living intellect that bred them. I know they are confi dence and thus to a positive self-concept. as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those Such training provides the opportunity for fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and considerable exploration of the relationship down, may chance to spring up armed men. And between the self-concept and interpersonal yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, behaviour. as good almost kill a man as kill a good book: Whilst assertiveness in communication may who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s be encouraged in some individualistic cultures, image; but he who destroys a good book, kills such as those of the US or UK, collectivistic reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in cultures, like those of Japan or China, tend to the eye’. See milton’s paradox. stress the importance of respect for others, tact, Article 19 Th is clause in the European Convention politeness and the maintenance of interpersonal for the Protection of Human Rights and Funda- harmony. Thus in such cultures assertiveness mental Freedom states: ‘(1) Everyone has the may be perceived as rudeness. Larry A. Samovar,

14 Attribution theory

Richard E. Porter and Edwin R. McDaniel note in object or situation predisposing one to respond A Intercultural Communication: A Reader (Th om- in some preferential manner’. son Wadsworth, 2006) the degree to which Attitudes are learned from direct experience B concern for the face of others may be taken in or through socialization and are capable of being Japanese culture: ‘So strong is that concern changed. Attitudes may vary in their direction for the feelings of others that the Japanese are (that is they may be positive, negative or neutral), C notorious for avoiding the word “no,” which they their intensity and in the degree of importance ﬁ nd harsh.’ attached to them. It is possible to discern three D These different perspectives on assertive- component elements of an attitude: the cognitive ness can be found within a culturally diverse component, that is the knowledge one has, true society. Larry Samovar and Richard Porter in or false, about a particular subject which may E Communication Between Cultures (Wadsworth/ have been gathered from a wide range of sources; Th omson Learning, 2001) provide the following the aﬀ ective component, that is one’s emotional F example from the US: ‘In yet another experiment response or feelings towards a particular subject

Caucasian mothers tended to interpret as posi- which will be linked to one’s beliefs and values; G tive those aspects of their children’s speech and and the behaviour component, that is how one behaviour that reﬂ ected assertiveness, excite- reacts with respect to a certain subject. ment and interest. Attitudes cannot be seen. Th eir existence can H ‘Navajo mothers who observed the same only be inferred from what people say or do. It behaviour in their children reported them as is for this reason that accurate attitude measure- I being mischievous and lacking discipline. To the ment is considered to be highly problematic:

Navajo mothers, assertive speech and behaviour people may not be willing to communicate what JK reﬂ ected discourtesy, restlessness, self-centred- they really think or feel. It is basically through ness, and lack of discipline …’ It would seem that communicating with others that one develops assertiveness in communication is a potential attitudes. Attitudes, once developed, inﬂ uence L barrier to successful intercultural communica- the way in which we perceive other people tion. See communication: facework; inter- and thus how we behave towards them. The M cultural communication; high and low mass media may shape, reinforce or challenge context communication. attitudes. For example, in conveying stereo- N ▶ Sue Bishop, Develop Your Assertiveness (Creating types, mass media messages may shape people’s Success) (Sunday Times/Kogan Page, 2010). attitudes towards groups with which they have Attention model of mass communication had little, if any, contact. campaigns, such O Denis McQuail in Mass Communication Th eory: as advertising campaigns, may be designed An Introduction (Sage, 1987; 6th edition, 2010) to change people’s attitudes towards a certain P writes that ‘the essence of any market is to bring product. goods and services to the attention of potential Attribute dimensions of agenda-setting See R customers and keep their interest’. Th us, in mass agenda-setting. media terms, the attention model is about stimu- Attribution theory Concerned with the lus to buy: communication is considered to have psychological processes by which individuals S succeeded as soon as audience attention has attribute causes to behaviour. Such attribution been won, regardless of how this was brought can be dispositional – behaviour attributed to T about. Th is paradigm contrasts with the trans- such factors as personality and attitude; or situ- mission model of mass communication ational – behaviour attributed to factors in the U which essentially relates to notions of public situation. We may, for example, blame a person’s service broadcasting; that is, the function failure to gain employment on his/her laziness of communication is to deliver messages; to (dispositional attribution) or on the state of V transmit information, knowledge, education the economy (situational attribution). Richard

and enlightenment as well as to entertain. Hence Gross in Psychology: Th e Science of Mind and W public service. See audience-as-public and Behaviour (Hodder Arnold, 2005) explains that audience-as-market in the entry on audience. such attributions are subject to the fundamental Attitudes We all hold a range of attitudes on attribution error, that is ‘to the general tendency XYZ a variety of topics and issues. An attitude, to overestimate the importance of personal/ according to Milton Rokeach in ‘Th e nature of dispositional factors relative to situational/ attitudes’, Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences environmental factors as a cause of behaviour’. (Collier-Macmillan, 1965), is ‘... a relatively We seem particularly prone to this error when enduring organization of beliefs around an making judgments about other people’s behav-

15 Audience

iour, but are more likely to recognise the infl u- confl icts’. He goes on, ‘Th e problems surround- ence of situational factors on our own behaviour. ing the concept [of audience] stem mainly from Carole Wade and Carol Tavris in Psychology the fact that a single and simple word is being (HarperCollins, 1993) note that ‘when it comes applied to an increasingly diverse and complex to explaining their own behaviour, most West- reality.’ erners tend to choose attributes that are favour- McQuail’s book addresses these problems able to them ... Th is self-serving bias means that in an interesting and illuminating manner. We people like to take credit for their good actions know that audiences exist; the trouble is that and let the situation account for their bad ones’. without rigorous and sustained monitoring Dispositional attribution can be difficult to through research in one form or another, they change as evidence suggests that we are unwill- are liable to ‘escape’, that is from agencies of ing to discard dispositional attributions even control, whether these are governments, institu- when they are discredited. Th is may help explain tions, advertisers or organizations that exist to the persistence of stereotypes and prejudice. place audiences under surveillance and produce Several studies have, however, noted cross- the data on which decision-making is based. cultural diff erences in the attribution process. McQuail does not go as far as agreeing with For example, J.G. Miller conducted a study some commentators that the audience for mass comparing subjects from the US with Hindus media is verging on the extinct. In his chapter in India as regards the use of dispositional on ‘Th e future of the audience concept’ there is a and situational attribution. In ‘Culture and the subhead, ‘Th e audience lives on’, suggesting that development of everyday social explanation’ in the determination of communicators to hold the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on to mass audiences along with that of those (1984, issue 46) Miller reported his discovery who measure and monitor responses, has been that the subjects in the US were more likely than suffi ciently successful to rescue audience from the Hindu subjects in India to employ disposi- escape. tional rather than situational explanations for In other words, fragmentation has been behaviour. checked if not halted. Audiences for mass ▶ William Gudykunst and Young Yun Kim, Commu- media have been slower to switch allegiance – nicating with Strangers: An Approach to Intercultural from public-service broadcasting services, for Communication (McGraw-Hill, 1997). example – than some have predicted; and a look Audience Students of media communication at the popularity of many programmes off ered in recognize the term audience as overarching all the UK by the BBC and independent television the reception processes of message sending. would give substance to that argument. We may Th us there is the audience for theatre, televi- still, in the words of the title of Ian Ang’s 1991 sion and cinema; there is the radio listener. publication, be Desperately Seeking the Audience Th ere is the audience for a pop concert or at a (Routledge & Kegan Paul), but research indi- public meeting. Communicators shape their cates, as McQuail points out, that the ‘dispersion messages to fi t the perceived needs of their audi- of [audience] attention among channels has been ence: they calculate the level of receptiveness, marked by moderation and gradualness’. the degree of readiness to accept the message Current defi nitions and evaluations of audi- and the mode of delivery. ence, however, take in the enormous expansion Audience is readership too, and the success of internet communication which, with the in meeting audience/readership needs relies advance of easy-to-use digital technology, allows extensively on feedback; also, perhaps more audiences also to be creators of media texts in signifi cantly of late, identifi cation of what audi- all their forms. In an online post to Press Th ink ence actually is. Does it in any meaningful sense (2006), Jay Rosen writes of ‘people formerly actually exist, bearing in mind the inevitable known as the audience’. Th at ‘humble device’ the fragmentation of the traditional audience for blog ‘has given the press to us’, while podcast- media as a result of the diversifi cation of the ing ‘gives radio to us’. Rosen celebrates the fact modes and channels of mass communication that now ‘the horizontal fl ow, citizen to citizen, on the one hand, and the accelerating growth of is as real and consequential as the vertical one’. In network communication on the other? other words, people are fast turning the ‘one-to- Denis McQuail in Audience Analysis (Sage, many’ media experience to a ‘many to many’ one. 1997) writes of the ‘audience problem’, acknowl- Graeme Turner in Ordinary People and the edging that ‘there is much room for diff erences Media: Th e Demotic Turn (Sage, 2010) writes, of meaning, misunderstandings, and theoretical ‘In a context within which media outlets and

16 Audience: fragmentation of

platforms are multiplying and audiences are particular, Th ompson counters Schiller’s view A fragmenting, for many elements of the media that American cultural imperialism has wreaked the search for a mass audience is fast losing its havoc with indigenous cultures throughout the B rationality as the basis for doing business.’ world, and that it is a seemingly unstoppable See blogosphere; demotic turn; digital force. Th ompson is of the opinion that ‘Schiller optimism; journalism: citizen journal- … presents too uniform a view of American C ism; mobilization; networking: social media culture ... and of its global dominance’. networking; web 2.0. See also topic guide The landscape of media-use has been D under audiences/consumption and recep- substantially altered with the advent of network tion of media. communication (see networking: social E ▶ Pertti Alasuutari, ed., Rethinking the Media Audi- networking). Mass media has lost some of its ence: Th e New Agenda (Sage, 1999); Andy Ruddock, centrality in relation to audience; and audiences Investigating Audiences (Sage, 2007); Michael have become much more proactive not only F Higgins, Th e Media and Th eir Publics (Open Univer- in receiving messages, but also in becoming

sity, 2007); Dan Hind, Th e Return of the Public (Verso, producers of messages. Th ey are able as never G 2010); Philip M. Napoli, Audience Evolution: New before to pick and choose their online sources, Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audi- to feedback more readily, to become practised ences (Columbia University Press, 2011). communicators through blogs and enrolling H Audience: active audience An age-old media on various platforms of social interaction. debate centres on the nature of audience reac- See audience: fragmentation of; blogo- I tion to traditional mass-media messages. Th e sphere; facebook; myspace; twitter; self-

notion of the active audience considers audi- identity; semiotic power; youtube. JK ences to be proactive and independent rather ★Audience: fragmentation of In Audience than docile and accepting. Th e active audience Analysis (Sage, 1997) Denis McQuail publishes is seen to use the media rather than be used by the following models, with acknowledgment to L it (see uses and gratifications theory). Jan van Cuilenburg, illustrating in four succeed- Th is perception has come about substantially ing stages how audiences for mass media have M through fi ndings of research which has observed become fragmented since the early years of TV. members of audiences consuming media in their Th e Unitary Model ‘implies a single audience N own homes (see ethnographic approach to that is more or less coextensive with the general audience measurement). public’. Th e texts of media – broadcasting in Writing in the 1980s, American media analyst particular – were shared by all, and homogenous. O Herbert Schiller took issue with the optimistic With the expansion of provision and the view of the active or resistive audience. In increase in the number of channels, diversity P Culture Inc.: Th e Corporate Takeover of Public is shown in the Pluralist Model, representing Expression (Oxford University Press, 1989) a ‘pattern of limited internal diversification’. R Schiller argues that transnational corporations The Core-Periphery Model ‘is one in which have colonized culture and cultural expression, the multiplication of channels makes possible in the US and globally. He writes of ‘corporate additional and competing alternatives outside S pillaging of the national information supply’ and this framework’. the ‘proprietary control of information’. Such At this stage, says McQuail, ‘it becomes T manifest power, he believes, calls into question possible to enjoy a television diet that diff ers the active-audience paradigm: ‘A great emphasis signifi cantly from the majority or mainstream’. U is given to the “resistance”, “subversion”, and Th e Breakup Model is characterized by ‘exten- “empowerment” of the viewer. Where this resis- sive fragmentation and the disintegration of the tance and subversion of the audience lead and central core. Th e audience is distributed over V what eff ects they have on the existing structure many different channels in no fixed pattern, of power remain a mystery.’ and there is only sporadically shared audience W In turn Schiller has been criticized for under- experiences’. estimating the potential resistance of audience McQuail says that for the most part the ‘core’ to ‘corporatization’. John B. Th ompson in Th e still dominates audience use of TV: ‘Th e reasons XYZ Media and Modernity: A Social Th eory of Media lie primarily in the near-universal appeal of (Polity, 1995) says that ‘even if one sympathizes mainstream content and the advantages to media with Schiller’s broad theoretical view and his organizations of continuing with mass provision, critical perspectives, there are many respects in plus the continuing habits and patterns of social which the argument is deeply unsatisfactory’. In life.’ Th e author believes that ‘media change is

17 Audience diff erentiation

Models of audience fragmentation

not enough on its own to disrupt established In the UK, audience measurement of one kind patterns of shared culture’. Th e Breakup stage ‘is or another has operated since the beginning certainly becoming more possible’, but it is ‘still a of broadcasting. Once the monopoly of the hypothetical pattern and has not been realized’. airwaves held by the BBC gave way to competi- See topic guide under network society. tion with the advent of commercial television, Audience differentiation Like the ‘mass’, audience preferences became increasingly audiences – for radio, television, cinema or significant and audience measurement was readers of the press – are often simplistically quickly regarded as a duty and a lifeline for regarded as a homogeneous lump. It is easier to survival. make generalizations that way, but misleading. Two key terms are ratings and shares. A rating Audience diff erentiation works from the premise is defi ned as the estimated percentage, in the that analysis of audience response to media case of television, of all the ‘TV households’ or messages can only be purposeful if it recognizes of all the people within a demographic group that the mass is a complex of individuals, diff er- who view a specifi c programme or station. A entiated by gender, age, social class, profession, share refers to the percentage of the overall education and culture. See analysis: modes viewing fi gures which a particular programme of media analysis. commands. Audience measurement Investigation of the As long ago as the 1980s, in Inside Prime size and constitution of mass media audiences Time (Pantheon, 1983) Todd Gitlin dubbed the evolved into one of the world’s major service obsession of the TV networks with ratings ‘the industries. Initially, audience measurement, fetish of immediate numerical gratification’. or audience research (AR) is about number- Th is fetish now extends to ways of measuring crunching: how many readers? How many listen- audience response using sensory devices that ers or viewers? Th is data is then broken down register viewing habits, but the trickiest problem along lines of class, gender, spending-power, concerning audience measurement is fragmen- age, occupation, etc. Th ere are two categories tation of use, through cable, video, DVD, satel- of measurement – quantitative and qualitative lite, network communication and the multiple – with pressure always to translate the one into functions of hand-held device, not to mention the other. the difficulties facing measurement with the

18 Balanced programming

zapping and zipping that goes on, facilitated by and dialects and the use of ‘non-standard’ A the remote control pad. See ethnographic English. Several studies have shown that the approach to audience measurement. evaluation of language as ‘bad’ in a particular B ▶ Shaun Moores, Interpreting Audiences: Th e Ethnog- instance will depend on a number of variables, raphy of Media Consumption (Sage, 1993); James S. which include the degree to which taboo words Ettema and D. Charles Whitney, eds, Audiencemak- or words relating to taboo behaviour are used, C ing: How Media Create the Audience (Sage, 1994); the social context and the social roles, age and Raymond Kent, ed., Measuring Media Audiences gender of the interactors. D (Routledge, 1994); Denis McQuail, Audience Analysis So bad language can be diﬃ cult to pin down. (Sage, 1997); Marie Gillespie, ed., Media Audiences Edwin L. Battistella in Bad Language: Are Some E (Open University, 2005); Michael Higgins, Th e Media Words Better Th an Others? (Oxford University and Th eir Publics (Open University, 2007). Press Inc., 2005) argues that ‘… good and bad Audience needs See uses and gratifications language cannot be deﬁ ned in absolute terms. F theory; maslow’s hierarchy of needs. See Th e standard language of one era, generation,

also topic guide under audiences/consump- medium, or region might well diﬀ er from the G tion & reception of media; media: power, standard of another’. effects, influence. The media also has to be mindful of the Autocue Or teleprompt. A device which uses limits of acceptability as regards bad language, H angled mirrors to project the words of a script or complaints will ensue. The Broadcasting on to a screen just below the lens of the TV Standards Council, for example, undertook a I camera. Th is enables a presenter to ‘read’ a script study in the early 1990s to explore perceptions of

without looking down. and attitudes towards bad language in response JK Avaaz See online campaigning. to the number of complaints received about its Avant-garde Th e innovative, advance guard in use, particularly on television. Th e results were any art form; usually assaulting tradition and published in a report edited by A. Millwood L boundaries of acceptability. Th e phrase was used Hargrave entitled A Matter of Manners? – Th e as early as 1845 by Gabriel-Desire Laverdant, and Limits of Broadcasting Language (Broadcasting M the anarchist Michael Bakunin named a periodi- Standards Council, Research Monograph Series: cal L’Avant-garde in 1878. 3, John Libbey, 1991). N The time of viewing and social context in which the programme was likely to be viewed, B particularly the likelihood of children being O Bad language Lars Gunnar Andersson and Peter around, were key variables aff ecting judgments Trudgill in Bad Language (Penguin, 1990), whilst regarding the acceptability of language used. P acknowledging that the term ‘bad language’ is Generally speaking, the study found that the far from clear and unambiguous, refer to it as ‘all possibility that a word might off end others to be R those things (sounds, words and phrases) that an important factor in judging the acceptability may be dangerous to use. Language contains of its use. explosive totems that should be handled with Bad or off ensive language in UK broadcasting S care’. Th e authors state that bad language can is dealt with in Section 1 of the Broadcasting be usefully analysed by explaining the possible Code of ofcom, Protecting the Under-Eigh- T explosions which may be caused by certain teens. words, pronunciations or use of grammar. Back region, front region See impression U Th ey also argue that ‘“Badness” is not found in management. the language itself but in people’s views of the Balanced programming The pilkington language’, indicating the importance of examin- report, 1962, put forward three criteria for the V ing the values, attitudes and ideologies within creation of balance in TV programmes. Balance

societies that underpin the evaluation of some would be achieved, Pilkington stated, if channels W language as ‘bad’. provided the widest possible range of subject- When ordinary people are asked, Andersson matter; if the fullest treatment was given to each and Trudgill argue, ‘What do you think of when subject within the range; and if scheduling did XYZ you hear the phrase, bad language?’, most of not create imbalances by concentrating certain them will certainly say ‘swearing’. However, types of popular programmes at peak viewing Andersson and Trudgill point out that the term times while relegating others, deemed less acces- is also used to refer to the use of slang and jargon, sible, to inconvenient times. the incorrect or misuse of words, certain accents Balance has a more controversial, politi-

19 Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur’s dependency model of mass communication eff ects, 1976

cal connotation, when it is seen as a device the eff ects may be to activate or de-activate; to to counter and control bias. More than any formulate issues and infl uence their resolution. other medium, public broadcasting aspires to Th ey may stimulate a range of behaviours, from equilibrium. Being fair to all sides can have para- political demonstrations to altruistic acts such doxical results: if one programme, for example, as donating money to good causes. Th e authors condemns the destruction of Amazon rainfor- cite the model as avoiding ‘a seemingly unten- ests, must the balance be sustained by allowing able all-or-nothing position of saying either that a programme which defends that destruction? the media have no signifi cant impact on people It is questionable whether fairness is actually or society, or that the media have an unbounded achieved by giving air-time to ideas which fl out capacity to manipulate people and society’. the very principle of fairness. Where the model is open to most serious criti- Balance might ultimately mean always sitting cism is in its assumption that the societal struc- on the fence; it may indicate a position which ture and the media structure are independent of considers all standpoints to be tenable. Yet the one another, and that these are in some sort of balanced position – the fulcrum, as it were – equilibrium with audience. In many cases the from which other viewpoints are presented, has media are so interlinked with power structures to be decided by someone whose impartiality that a free interaction is more likely in theory in turn might be questioned by others. than in practice. See cognitive (and affec- Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur’s dependency tive); cultural apparatus; hegemony; model of mass communication effects, mediation; power elite. 1976 (See also, dependency theory.) Sandra Band-wagon effect See noelle-neumann’s Ball-Rokeach and Melvyn DeFleur’s model poses spiral of silence model of public opinion, the question, to what extent is contemporary 1974. society dependent, for information and for view- Bandwidth Range of frequencies available for points, on the all-pervasive mass communication carrying data and expressed in hertz (cycles per industry; and, arising from this question, how far second). Th e amount of traffi c a communication are we dependent on the media for our orienta- channel can carry is roughly proportional to its tion towards the world beyond our immediate bandwidth. See broadband. experience? In ‘A dependency model of mass BARB Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board; media effects’ in Communication Research, 3 organization responsible for collecting and (1976), the authors argue that the nature and collating TV viewing fi gures in the UK. Th e data degree of dependency relate closely fi rst to the is gathered from over 5,000 homes of indepen- extent to which society is subject to change, dent TV-owning households representative of confl ict or instability and second to the functions the whole of the UK. Viewing habits are elec- of information provision and attitude-shaping of tronically monitored, requiring householders to the mass media within those social structures. register their presence in the room where a TV is Th e model emphasizes the essentially interac- located and switched on, and to deregister when tive nature of the processes of media effect. they switch off or leave the room. See audience Th ere are societal and media systems, and these measurement. interact with audience, producing cognitive, ★Barnlund’s transactional models of aff ective and behavioural eff ects, inducing vary- communication, 1970 In ‘A transactional ing degrees of dependency; in turn audience- model of communication’ in K.K. Sereno and response feeds back and infl uences society and C.D. Mortensen, eds, Foundations of Commu- media. nication Th eory (Harper & Row, 1970), Dean C. The cognitive effect is that which relates Barnlund attempts to address the ‘complexities to matters of the intellect and the affective of human communication’ which present ‘an to matters of emotion. In the cognitive area, unbelievably diffi cult challenge to the student the following areas of effect or influence are of human aff airs’. His models pay due respect to identifi ed: creation and resolution of ambiguity; this complexity. For Barnlund, communication attitude formation; agenda-setting; expansion both describes the evolution of meaning and of people’s belief systems; value clarification. aims at the reduction of uncertainty. He stresses Under the aff ective heading, the media may be that meaning is something ‘invented’, ‘assigned’, perceived as creating fear or anxiety; increasing ‘given’ rather than something ‘received’: ‘Mean- or decreasing morale and establishing a sense of ings may be generated while a man stands alone alienation. on a mountain trail or sits in the privacy of his In terms of the third category, behaviour, study speculating about internal doubt.’

20 Barnlund’s transactional models of communication, 1970

XYZ

Barnlund’s transactional models of communication, 1970

21 Barrier signals

Within and around the communicant are transaction, and few models have explored so cues of unlimited number, though some carry- impressively the inner dynamics of this process ing more weight – or valence – than others at as Barnlund’s, which also has useful application any given time. Barnlund’s model indicates to the dynamics of mass communication. See three sets of cues, each interacting upon one topic guide under communication models. another. Th ese are public cues, private cues and Barrier signals Used as personal defence mecha- behavioural cues. decoding and encoding are nisms in communication situations, gestures visualized as part of the same spiralling process such as the placing of hands and arms across – continuous, unrepeatable and irreversible. the body, or folding the arms across the chest. Public cues Barnlund divides into natural – According to Allan and Barbara Pease in Th e those supplied by the physical world without Defi nitive Book of Body Language (Orion Books, the intervention of people, such as atmospheric 2005) the ‘Crossed-Arms-on-Chest’ posture ‘is conditions, natural occurrences – and artifi cial, universal and is decoded with the same defensive those resulting from people’s modifi cation and or negative meaning almost everywhere’. manipulation of their environment. For example, Barriers can be formed with physical objects Barnlund places his communicant, Mr A, in as well as the body. For example, as Samovar and a doctor’s waiting room which contains many Porter note in Communication Between Cultures public artificial cues – a pile of magazines, a (Wadsworth/Th omson Learning, 2004) furni- smell of antiseptic, a picture by Joan Miro on the ture can be used as a barrier to social encoun- wall. ters. In the business world, the classic defensive Private cues emanate from sources not auto- barrier is the desk. On its role in the relationship matically available to any other person who between the executive and this modern version enters a communicative fi eld: ‘Public and private of the old moated castle and drawbridge, much cues may be verbal or non-verbal in form, but has been written – about the size and domi- the critical quality is that they were brought into nance of the desk, its angle to the offi ce door, the existence and remain beyond the control of the distance between the desk and the chair placed communicants.’ Th e third set of cues – behav- for those who approach the boss’s territory. ioural – are those initiated or controlled by the Basic needs See maslow’s hierarchy of communicant him/herself and in response to needs. public and private cues, coloured by the commu- ★Bass’s ‘double action’ model of internal nicant’s ‘sensory-motor successes and failures in news fl ow, 1969 A development of two earlier the past, combined with his current appetites classic models addressing the processes of and needs’, which will establish ‘his set towards media news production – white’s gatekee- the environment’. peer model, 1950 and mcnelly’s model of In the second diagram, intrapersonal news flow, 1959. In his article, ‘Refi ning the communication becomes interpersonal gatekeeper concept’ in Journalism Quarterly, communication, with the multiplication of 46 (1969), A.Z. Bass argues that the most cues and the introduction of the message (M). important ‘gates’ in the exercise of gatekeeping Barnlund emphasizes the transferability of cues. are located within the news organization. Bass Public cues can be transformed into private divides the operation into a news-gathering ones, private cues may be converted into public stage and a news-processing stage. ones, while environmental and behavioural cues Writers, reporters and local editors are closer may merge. In short, the whole process is one of to the ‘raw’ news, the event, than those involved

Bass’s ‘double action’ model of internal news ﬂ ow, 1969

22 BBC digital

in Stage II of the gatekeeping process, while of the control of ‘the Six’. After thirty-four A those involved at Stage II are closer to the power meetings, the Committee recommended – and centre of the organization and therefore more the government accepted – a single receiver B subject to the organization’s norms and values licence of 10 shillings to cover all types of radios, and to pressures from competing stories. See and the ban was raised on foreign receivers. maletzke’s model of the mass communi- Most importantly Sykes forecast the eventual C cation process, 1963. replacement of private by public operation: ‘... Baton signal Chieﬂ y manual gestures with which We consider that the control of such a potential D we beat time to the rhythm of spoken expression power [of broadcasting] over public opinion and and which give emphasis and urgency. Th ey are the life of the nation ought to remain with the the stock-in-trade of declamatory communica- State, and that the operation of so important E tion, especially that of politicians. It is not only a national service ought not to be allowed to the hands which are employed in baton signals; become an unrestricted commercial monopoly.’ F the head, shoulders and feet are involved too. A new committee under the chairmanship

See non-verbal behaviour: repertoire. of the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, set up G BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation): in 1925, led to the Charter and Licence which origins The BBC began life as the British created the British Broadcasting Corporation Broadcasting Company, incorporated on 15 and authorized it to broadcast for ten years from H December 1922 and receiving its licence to 1 January 1927. It was established on three prin- broadcast on 18 January 1923. It was a private ciples which were to apply to British broadcast- I company made up chieﬂ y of manufacturers of ing until the coming of commercial television:

broadcasting equipment. The company was broadcasting became a monopoly, fi nanced by JK incorporated with 100,000 shares of stock worth licence fees and administered by an independent 1 each. Any British wireless manufacturer could public corporation. join by purchasing one or more shares, making ▶ Asa Briggs, The History of Broadcasting in the L a 50 deposit and agreeing to the terms that had United Kingdom (Oxford University Press, vol. 1, been drawn up by the negotiating manufacturers 1961; vol. 2, 1965; vol. 3, 1970; vol. 4, 1979); Andrew M and the Postmaster General. Crisell, An Introductory History of British Broadcast- Th e six largest manufacturers, in return for ing (Routledge, 1997). N guaranteeing the continuing operation and BBC See bbc digital; bbc worldwide; fi nancial solvency of the company, were given broadcasting; broadcasting legislation; control. Although other manufacturers could public service broadcasting (psb); radio O buy stock and be admitted to membership, the broadcasting; reithian; selsdon commit- principals could choose six of the company’s tee report on television, 1935; television P nine directors and these in turn had the power broadcasting; ullswater committee to select its chairman. Each wireless-set owner report on broadcasting, 1936. See also R had to pay a 10 shilling (50p) licence fee to the topic guide under broadcasting. Post Offi ce annually, and the government agreed BBC digital Th e UK BBC anticipated, in 2001, to issue licences only to people using receivers the eventual shift from analogue to digital trans- S made by members of the company. Thus the mission of TV and radio, with a digital supple- manufacturers were guaranteed protection ment to BBC One, giving viewers equipped with T against competition. digital sets, or set-top conversion boxes, access Th e company was to establish eight broadcast- to a broader range of programmes, including an U ing stations in diff erent parts of the British Isles. interactive facility, than those available to view- Only news originating from four established ers with analogue sets. Th e same extra provision news agencies (such as the Press Association became available to viewers of BBC Two. On V and Reuters) could be used in broadcasting and air shortly afterwards were the following new there was to be no advertising. By April 1923 the services: CBBC, a channel for children aged W Postmaster General had appointed a seven-man between six and thirteen; Cbeebies, for children investigating committee to review the status of under six; BBC Four, an in-depth culture chan- the British Broadcasting Company, headed by nel; BBC News 24; and BBC Choice, aimed at a XYZ Sir Frederick Sykes, with a mandate to consider young adult audience, eventually to be retitled ‘broadcasting in all its aspects’. BBC Three (soon retreating from its youth The Sykes Committee faced questions on remit) and given the go-ahead by government in widespread evasions of the equipment monopoly September 2002. and condemnation by Beaverbrook newspapers With the collapse in 2002 of ITV Digital, a pay

23 BBC: Government White Paper, 1994

service, the BBC was permitted by government (Blackwell, 1991) by Scannell and David Cardiff , to take up the shortfall in digital services, making the Archives ‘must surely be one of the most these an impressive – and free – alternative to important historical depositories in Britain’ on existing commercial digital channels. Switch- all aspects of British life. They are located in over for all TV channels in the UK is schedued the grounds of the BBC Monitoring Service at for 2012. Caversham Park, Reading, and contain at least Access to digital radio via the BBC has been 200,000 fi les on all aspects of broadcasting from available since 1995 on BBC Radio 1, 2, 3, 4 and the early 1920s to the early 1960s. Five Live. From 2002 a number of new services Beamwidth Th e angular width of a radio or radar came on stream – BBC Five Live Sports Extra; beam. 6Music, this being rescued from closure in 2010 ★Becker’s mosaic model of communication, by public demand; and Radio 7, initially special- 1968 Messages are rarely single, coming along izing in drama and children’s programmes, and one line, so the concept of a mosaic as a model later limiting its content to the archives of Radio of the communication process is a useful variant 4 and renamed 4 Extra. Th e BBC Asian Network on the linear theme. Samuel L. Becker in ‘What was closed down in 2010. Th e longstanding BBC rhetoric (communication theory) is relevant for World Service became available in the UK digi- contemporary speech communication?’, a paper tally in 2002. Th e BBC estimated that its digital presented at the University of Minnesota Spring radio services would be available to 90 per cent Symposium in Speech Communication, 1968, of the UK population by 2011. posed the theory of a ‘communication mosaic’ BBC: Government White Paper, 1994 The indicating that most communicative acts link future of the BBC was guaranteed for another message elements from more than the immedi- ten years by the White Paper, Th e Future of the ate social situation – from early impressions, BBC: Serving the Nation, Competing Worldwide. from previous conversations, from the media, In renewing the Corporation’s charter, the White from half-forgotten comments: a mosaic of Paper confi rmed that the BBC would continue source infl uences. as the main provider of public service Th e layers of Becker’s mosaic cube correspond broadcasting (psb). It should contribute to to layers of information. Some elements of the the growth of cable and satellite services; further mosaic assert themselves, others are blocked develop commercial TV services worldwide; out. Th e model illustrates the complexity of the continue to provide a broad spectrum of TV many layers of the communication process and and radio programmes; guarantee special the interaction between its ‘cubes’ or ‘tesserae’ of support for news, current aff airs and educational information, showing the internal as well as the programmes; and cover cultural and sporting external world of communication; that which activities which ‘bring the nation together’. As is isolated or unique, that which is recurring in well as recommending that more attention be a dense and ever-changing pattern. See topic given to the views of audience on matters of guide under communication models. taste and decency, the White Paper proposed the Behavioural cues See barnlund’s transac- merger of the Broadcasting Standards Council tional models of communication, 1970. with the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, Behavioural targeting See advertising. the function of the new council being to monitor Behaviourism A school of psychological thought standards and provide guidance. See communi- which maintains that a scientifi c understanding cations act (uk), 2003. of human behaviour can only be attained from BBC iPlayer Launched in December 2007, this is objective, observable action. Consciousness, the BBC’s catch-up tv service. It off ers both a feeling and other subjective aspects of human streaming and a downloading of the last seven behaviour are not regarded as suitable bases for days’ worth of TV programmes for internet investigations. consumption. ★Berlo’s SMCR model of communica- BBC Worldwide Commercial arm of the BBC, tion, 1960 David K. Berlo, who studied with responsible for marketing the corporation’s Wilbur Schramm (see schramm’s models programmes and media products worldwide; of communication) at the University of also involved in joint ventures with major opera- Illinois, produced the model opposite in his tors in the private sector. The Process of Communication: An Introduc- BBC Written Archives In the words of Paddy tion to Theory and Practice (Holt, Rinehart Scannell, in A Social History of British Broad- & Winston, 1960). It is a development in a casting, Vol. 1 1922–1939: Serving the Nation sociological direction of the shannon and

24 Berlo’s SMCR model of communication, 1960

L Becker’s mosaic model of communication, 1968

M weaver’s model of communication, of elements are implied rather than made 1949. Features of the process have been made explicit. N explicit, due acknowledgment being made of In a successful act of communication, Berlo’s the significance to both Source and Receiver model suggests, the skills of Source and Receiver of the culture and the social system in which must, to a considerable extent, match each other. O the act of communication takes place. Berlo’s Th e same may be said for attitudes or values; and model does not record the flow of communica- knowledge must be acknowledged. Th e model P tion, though the assumption must be that it is rewards analysis and testing out, especially its conceived as linear – in a line from Source to elegant portrayal of the message. See topic R Receiver. Both feedback and the interaction guide under communication models.

XYZ

Berlo’s SMCR model of communication, 1960

25 Berlusconi phenomenon

Berlusconi phenomenon Term used by zation. Th is in turn is located in the context of its Gianpietro Mazzoleni in ‘Towards a “Videoc- industrial or commercial sector and its country racy”? Italian political communication at a of origin. Each of these contextual factors will, turning point’ in the European Journal of of course, have an impact on the nature of the Communication, September 1995, to describe communication activities. the remarkable entry into politics, and election Th e inner circle of the wheel represents the to Prime Minister of Italy in March 1994, of options available as regards channels of commu- the media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. Mazzoleni nication that may be used to reach the designated identifi es a number of interconnected factors publics: advertising, correspondence, point of that led to Berlusconi’s success in forming a sale, public relations, personal presentation, political party, Forza Italia, and in less than fi fty impersonal presentation, product, literature, and days of electioneering, displacing the traditional placement media. duopoly of political power in Italy (the Christian At the outer circle of the wheel are the vari- Democrats and the Communists). ous publics to be reached: the trade, the media, Forza was essentially the party of commercial- government, financial, customers, general ization and it won popularity because Berlus- public, internal, local, and influential groups. coni, the media man, calculated the needs of A message may of course be designed to reach the nation’s electorate-as-audience. Because of several publics, and it may be appropriate to his dominant control of commercial TV in Italy, divide them into primary and secondary publics Berlusconi has been able to provide himself with or audiences. the kind of ‘tame press’ every politician dreams The wheel can be spun such that the inner of. circle can turn within the outer circle to match However, Mazzoleni is of the opinion that to channels to publics. Th us the wheel can be used attribute Berlusconi’s electoral success solely to when planning which types of publics need to be his media power is a short-sighted reading of reached and by what means. Several channels the complexity of the Berlusconi phenomenon. may be used to reach any one public. In Company Rather his message, greatly aided by the power to Image and Reality (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, communicate it across the nation, ‘was success- 1984) David Bernstein argues that the wheel ful because it found several ears ready to listen to is designed to ‘stimulate some fresh thoughts it’. Further, Berlusconi understood perhaps more and encourage the thinker to regard corporate clearly than any other media mogul that today’s communications as a totality rather than a series elections are not only fought out on the televi- of discrete messages to discrete audiences’. He sion screen, but are also about grabbing popular continues, ‘A company needs to take a holistic attention by combining the emotive with the view of communication because it is communi- entertaining. cating all the time (even if it doesn’t want to or Though Berlusconi’s first premiership was doesn’t realize it), to all of those nine publics.’ short-lived – he resigned offi ce within months Beveridge Committee Report on Broadcast- – it set agendas for the future of political ing, 1950 Both from a theoretical and a practi- communication; and to prove that his electoral cal point of view, the Committee chaired by Lord success was not a fl ash in the pan, Berlusconi Beveridge conducted the most thorough exami- was returned to offi ce in the Italian elections of nation of broadcasting in Britain since its incep- 2001, narrowly defeated in 2006 but restored to tion. Beveridge went to considerable lengths to power in the election of April, 2008. His posi- identify and discuss the dangers of monopoly, tion as Prime Minister has allowed him indirect as then held by the BBC. Nevertheless proposals control over state broadcasting. for competitive broadcasting were rejected on Berlusconi’s reputation for womanizing and the grounds that programmes would deterio- controversial statements seemed to do his popu- rate in quality if there were rival corporations. larity with the Italian public no harm – until Beveridge was equally firm in believing that Italy’s Eurozone fi nancial crisis in the autumn broadcasting should be independent of govern- of 2011 forced his resignation. See topic guide ment control, and declared against suggestions under media: ownership & control. that the power of the BBC should be curbed Bernstein’s wheel, 1984 Refers to a model through closer parliamentary supervision. designed by David Bernstein to aid the planning To prevent broadcasting becoming an uncon- of an organization’s communication activities, trolled bureaucracy, Beveridge recommended for example public relations and associated more active surveillance of output by the BBC’s activities. At the hub of the wheel is the organi- Board of Governors and a ‘Public Representation

26 Blogging

Service’ to bridge the gap between the BBC and succeed in doing this among all sections of the A the general public. Additionally, the Committee viewing audience or have a tendency to reinforce proposed regional and functional devolution bigotry. See racism. B of some of the Corporation’s activities, more Binary opposition See polarization; seman- comprehensive reports by the BBC on its work, tic differential; wedom, theydom. and five-year reviews by small independent Black English See communication: inter- C committees. A major recommendation which cultural communication. made no headway was that the monopoly of Blacklisting See huac: house unamerican D broadcasting be extended to local authorities activities committee. and universities, allowing them to operate FM Biometrics Th e analysis of human body char- radio stations. acteristics chiefly by technological means. E Commercial broadcasting in the US style was Biometrics scrutinises and banks information not approved of: ‘Sponsoring … puts the control drawn from DNA, fingerprints, earlobes, the F of broadcasting ultimately in the hands of people retinas and irises of the eyes, voice patterns

whose interest is not broadcasting but the selling and signatures, the prime aim being to identify G of some other goods or services or the propaga- a person’s unique characateristics for a range tion of particular ideas.’ Interestingly, four of of purposes centring around verifi cation. It is the eleven committee members (including Lord used in all aspects of security, crime prevention H Beveridge) dissented from the majority verdict and general social, political, commercial and against any form of commercial advertising. See employment surveillance. See cctv: closed- I topic guide under commissions, commit- circuit television; surveillance society. Blogging tees, legislation. Derives from weblogging, the practice JK Bias, biased From the French, biais, slant; a by thousands worldwide of ‘diary writing’ for one-sided inclination of the mind. Th e student consumption on the Internet. Fascination with of communication approaches this term with other people’s lives, their intimate thoughts and L extreme caution, for bias generally belongs to refl ections, is only one factor explaining what the realm of perception, and other people’s draws visitors to blogging. For example, Salam M perceptions at that: like beauty, bias lies in the Pax, recording his experiences from the heart eye of the beholder whose vision is coloured by of Baghdad during the second Iraq War (2003), N values and previous experience. Th e accusation provided a unique insight into the situation of an of bias tends to be predicated on the assumption ordinary Iraqi subject to the awesome fi repower that there is an opposite – objectivity; that of the Coalition forces of the US and UK. A O there is an attainable ideal called impartiality; woman’s take on the military occupation of Iraq, that freedom from bias is not only possible but Bagdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq, written P desirable. under the pseudonym Riverhead, was published To speak, publish or broadcast without bias in 2005 in the US by the University of New York R would imply the use of language which is Press and in the UK by Marion Boyars. The value-free. Yet however careful we might be in book was a prize-winner in the lettre ulysses what we say, we disclose something of ourselves: awards for the art of reportage, 2005. S what shaped and formed us; what counts with In ‘Disruptive technology: Iraq and the Inter- us; what we value. When other people appear to net’ published in Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and T call that value into question, we may be tempted Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq (Sage, to classify them as biased. 2004), edited by David Miller, Alistair Alexander U ▶ Barrie Gunter, Measuring Bias on Television cites blogging as a signifi cant contributor, along (University of Luton Press, 1997). with message boards and mailing lists, to the Bigotry An inability and/or unwillingness to dissemination of alternative narratives to those V consider views, beliefs, values and opinions provided by traditional mass media – such

other than the ones you already hold. Th e term narratives serving as ‘a tool for mobilizing a W refers to the rigid way in which an individual may global protest movement on an unprecedented hold his/her views, beliefs and so on. Bigotry scale’. is often allied with prejudice. Clearly bigotry ‘Weblogs,’ says Alexander, ‘provide an open- XYZ is a cause of noise within interpersonal source platform for engaged individuals to communication. As regards the process of challenge professional journalism on their mass communication, one area of debate is own terms.’ Indeed professional journalists are whether or not television programmes designed themselves writing their own weblogs, ‘further to ridicule bigotry, particularly racial bigotry, blurring the lines between the traditional news

27 Blogosphere

culture and the “blogosphere”’ (see blogo- ▶ Matthew Hindman, Th e Myth of Digital Democracy sphere). (Princeton University Press, 2009); Graeme Turner, Inevitably blogging has excited the attention Ordinary People and the Media: Th e Demotic Turn of authorities anxious to curtail, if not censor (Sage, 2010). altogether, bloggers’ freedom of expression. In Body language See communication, China, for example, the information industry non-verbal; gesture; interpersonal ministry ordered that by the end of June 2005 all communication; non-verbal behaviour: owners of blogs or bulletin boards would have repertoire; proxemics; touch. See also to be registered or shut down. Pursuit of blog- topic guide under interpersonal commu- gers by those in authority remains a hazardous nication. undertaking, considering that some 80,000 Body of European Regulators in Electronic new weblogs are created every day worldwide, Communications (BEREC) Association of though many of these are shortlived. twenty-seven regulators of the European Union, In her introduction to Blogging (Polity Press, formed in 2009; held its inaugural meeting in 2010), Jill Walker Rettberg refers to blogs as January 2010. Th e body succeeds the European ‘part of the history of communication and Regulators Group (ERG), its aim to coordinate literacy’ and deems them ‘emblematic of a shift regulation between EU member states and from uni-directional mass media to participa- improve consistency of implementation of the tory media, where viewers and readers become Unions’ regulatory framework. See ofcom. creators of media’. See agenda-setting; echo Boomerang effect Term used by Gail and chamber effect; journalism: citizen jour- Michele Myers in The Dynamics of Human nalism; networking: social networking; Communication (McGraw-Hill, 1985) to describe network neutrality; power law phenom- a situation in which a message falls within your enon; project of self; public sphere; latitude of rejection, that is the known views on yaros’ ‘pick’ model for multimedia news, any given issue which you do not accept. It has 2009. the eff ect of then shrinking or narrowing your Blogosphere Term reflecting the exponential latitude of acceptance: positions on that issue growth in internet blogging in the twenty-fi rst which might have been acceptable or tolerated century. New technology has made it possible before will now be rejected. Th e authors argue for any computer user to set up his or her own that messages which threaten your attitudes and blog and broadcast it to either a few readers or views may produce this eff ect. See latitudes subscribers, a hundred of them, or a million or of acceptance and rejection. more. Th e blogosphere resembles a fi rmament of Boomerang response Eff ect of a mass media countless stars, being created, surviving a while, message which, in terms of audience reaction, then becoming eclipsed by lack of time, energy proves to be the opposite of that which was or commitment. intended. In March 2007 Technorati, a search engine B-Picture In the 1940s and 1950s it was tracking the blogosphere, reported over 70 cinema practice to put on two fi lms, the main million weblogs – 120,000 new ones a day – and feature – the A-Picture – and a cheaply and daily postings of 1.4 million. Blogs make incur- quickly made supporting fi lm – the B-Picture. sions on the public sphere, long the commu- Th e equivalent of the ‘fl ip-side’ of a popular nicative monopoly of traditional mass media, record, the B-Picture, or B-movie, was by news feeds, comment, analysis, protest and invariably Budget and almost invariably Bad. propaganda, often political or cultural in orenta- Time, however, lends enchantment and fi lm tion though more characteristically focusing on enthusiasts often have a soft spot for a ‘genre’ the personal and the interactive. the like of which just is not made any more. The blogosphere in recent years has acquired Examples are Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy galactic structures as a result of the growth of (1949), Nathan Juran’s Attack of the 50 Foot networking providers such as facebook, myspace, Woman (1958) and Roger Corman’s Little Shop twitter and youtube, all facilitating contribu- of Horrors (1960), which the director claimed tion and exchange; between them commanding to have made in two days. the attention of the public which previously was Brand A brand enables a company to diff erentiate the preserve of newspapers, radio and TV. See its products from those of its competitors – even agenda-setting; demotic turn; journal- though there is often, arguably, little actual diff er- ism: citizen journalism; net neutrality; ence between them. Tony Yeshin in Advertising networking: social networking. (Thomson Learning, 2006) comments that ‘a

28 British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB)

brand is defi ned as a name, term, design, symbol in 1912 to approve fi lms for public showing. Th e A or any other feature that identifi es one seller’s right of local authorities to ban fi lms had been good or service as distinct from those of other granted in the Cinematography Act of 1909, and B sellers. A brand name may identify one item, a resulted in a chaos of contradictory judgments. family of items or all items of that seller.’ Brand Th e Cinematograph Exhibitors Association and attributes are both tangible and intangible and the main production companies set up their own C they have both a functional and a psychological vetting offi ce – the BBFC. Th e Board consists of purpose. To be successful a brand needs to have a president and a secretary, both appointed by D a strong, distinctive identity and personality that the fi lm industry. resonates with consumers and generates brand Like most censorship bodies, the Board lagged loyalty. Th us the process of branding a product behind public tastes for decades and was suscep- E requires a well-considered communication strat- tible to influence by government. Under the egy, particularly with regard to advertising. more liberal regime of John Trevelyan (1958–71) F As Yeshin argues, ‘advertising exists to commu- it acquired a new image, casting off its earlier

nicate information about and promote brands’. reputation for over-cautiousness. Since then the G Examples of well-known brands include Nike, general trend of the Board’s activity has been Coca Cola, McDonald’s, apple macintosh and towards greater toleration while at the same Virgin. time maintaining a protective attitude towards H ▶ Celia Lury, Brands: Th e Logos of the Global Economy children. (Routledge, 2004); Peter Cheverton, Understanding British Broadcasting Company/British I Brands (Kogan Page, 2006); Laura Hill, ed., Super- Broadcasting Corporation See bbc (british

brands Annual 2011: An Insight into Some of Britain’s broadcasting corporation): origins. JK Strongest Brands (Superbrands, 2011). British Film Institute (BFI) An outcome of the Breakup model of audience fragmentation Report of the Commission on Educational and See audience: fragmentation of. Cultural Films, fi nanced chiefl y by the Carnegie L Bricolage Term derived from anthropology, trustees (1929–32), the BFI was set up in 1933 to referring to the construction of meaning through foster the use of fi lm for educational purposes to M an improvised combination of communicative preserve the cultural heritage of commercial fi lm elements originating prior to their current in the vaults of the National Film Library. Today N creative use. According to John Clarke in ‘Style’, the BFI’s services to fi lm in the UK are consid- published in Resistance Th rough Rituals: Youth erable. Th ey include: the national fi lm archive; Subcultures in Post-War Britain (Hutchinson, the National Film Th eatre on London’s South O 1976), edited by Stuart Hall and Tom Jeff erson, Bank; the fi nancing of fi lms by British directors; bricolage is a ‘reordering and recontextualiza- widening commitments to fi lm education; and P tion of objects to communicate fresh meanings’. the publication of works on cinema. Perhaps the most famous ‘bricoleurs’ were British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) Part of the R the Surrealists, who took familiar images and media empire of Rupert Murdoch (see news objects out of their traditional contexts and rear- corp), BSkyB was launched in 1990 having ranged them in juxtapositions that startled and merged with a rival, British Satellite Broadcast- S initiated new discourses. As Dick Hebdige states ing (BSB). It supplies by satellite-transmission, in Subculture: the Meaning of Style (Methuen, programmes of sporting events, films and T 1979; reissue, Routledge, 2002), ‘the teddy boy’s entertainment to over ten million susbscribers in theft and transformation of the Edwardian style Britain and Ireland. U revived in the early 1950s by Savile Row for The organization has proved a formidable wealthy young men about town can be construed contender in the competitive market of non-PSB as an act of bricolage’. With the advent of new television provision. Its key policy features have V media the term has been used to describe the been growth and dominance of the market. In

nature of message-assembly, of the recombina- November 2006 BSkyB bought a stake in ITV W tion of communicative elements characteristic of plc, heading off a bid by NTL for an ITV-NTL digital-age online interactivity. See mediation. merger. Th is led to a complaint by NTL to the XYZ ▶ Mark Deuze, ‘Participation, remediation, bricolage: UK Offi ce of Fair Trading, which took no action. Considering principal components of digital culture’, An HD (High Defi nition) TV service was on Th e Information Society, 22 (2), 2006. off er by May 2006 and 3D television broadcast- British Black English See communication: ing in 2010, shortly followed by the acquisition of intercultural communication; ethnic. Virgin Media Television (MVtv), renamed Living British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) Set up TV Group, the public hi-fi network Th e Cloud

29 Broadband

(in anticipation of SkyAnywhere, 2011), and – for etc. – transmitted over airwaves, copper or fi bre an estimated 125m – Amstrad, manufacturer of wires to a personal computer, telephone, televi- satellite boxes. In February 2011, teaming up with sion or electrical appliance. Some of the most HBO of America, Sky launched the Sky Atlantic substantial advances in the use of broadband channel, while pressing ahead with its ambition are occurring in 3G (third generation) mobile to convert Murdoch’s 39 per cent holding of handsets. A 2005 report by Ofcom, the UK Sky into 100 per cent ownership and control. broadcasting regulator, predicted that over 99 Objections to what has been widely viewed as per cent of British homes would have access to a threat to media plurality were raised by other a broadband connection by the end of that year. media and the public alike, the issue being See digitization. presented fi rst to Ofcom (see ofcom: office of Broadcast and narrowcast codes See codes. communications, uk), which recommended Broadcasting See topic guide under broad- that the matter be referred to the Competition casting. Commission. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt Broadcasting Act (UK), 1980 Receiving its Royal declined to do this and was ‘of a mind’ to give Assent on 13 November 1980, the Act extended Murdoch what he wanted, conditional upon the life of the Independent Broadcasting Author- safeguards. Murdoch proposed to partly offl oad ity (IBA) until the end of 1996 (see next entry); Sky TV news under an independent chairman defined the Authority’s responsibility for the for a period of ten years. new channel four; set out special measures A YouGov survey commissioned in March for the Fourth Channel in Wales, Saniel Pedwar 2011 by the campaign network Avaaz found that Cymru (S4C); and contained a number of other over 60 per cent of the British public felt that important provisions relating to the future of Murdoch was already too powerful to be permit- broadcasting, including the establishment of a ted total control of BSkyB. Alice Jay, Campaign broadcasting complaints commission. Director of Avaaz, was of the opinion that ‘the Broadcasting Act (UK), 1990 Ushered-in deal gives one man the keys to the media king- far-reaching and controversial changes to dom’, adding that ‘Rupert Murdoch’s so-called broadcasting in Britain. Th e Act constituted “safeguards” of BSkyB’s independence are about a further and substantial assault on the part of as reliable as a British airport in a blizzard’. It has government upon the traditional duopoly (BBC/ been estimated that BSkyB’s income would be IBA) of broadcasting control that had prevailed twice that of the BBC by 2015. since the birth of commercial television in the Such a deal, which the coalition government of UK in 1956. The Conservative government’s the UK was willing to accept, met with a wide- White Paper, Broadcasting in the ’90s: Competi- spread and hostile reception. It was described tion, Choice and Quality was published in 1988. by Sly Bailey, Chief Executive of Trinity Mirror, Th e Observer (13 November 1988) called it ‘the as a ‘whitewash’, while according to a London biggest bomb put under British TV in half-a- Evening Standard editorial (3 March 2011) it did century’. ‘not smell right’. A leader headline in the Daily Th e White Paper proposed a fi fth TV channel, Telegraph declared it a ‘body blow to the notion an expansion of Direct Satellite Broadcast- of a vibrant, diverse press’. ing (DSB), more local TV stations, three However, the Murdoch empire was shortly new national radio networks and a growth in afterwards engulfed in a sensational phone- localized radio. Th e Act of 1990 wound up the hacking scandal. Th is resulted in the dramatic Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) and closure of the chief off ender, the 168-year-old replaced it with a ‘light-touch’ Independent Tele- News of the World (see journalism: phone- vision Commission (ITC), whose most impor- hacking), the resignation of the Chief Execu- tant fi rst task was to select companies for the tive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, and new commercial TV franchises to operate from 1 the appearance before a House of Commons January 1993 (see franchises from 1993). Committee of Brooks, Rupert Murdoch and Controversy raged over the manner in which his son James. Temporarily at least, Murdoch’s the franchises were to be allocated – through ambition to acquire BSkyB in its entirety was secret auction. Would-be future franchise- put on hold. See conglomerates; murdoch holders were invited to put their case for selec- effect; pluralism; regulatory favours. tion and make a money bid, without any idea Broadband High-speed electronic facility that of what a reasonable bid might be. Th e result allows for multiple informational and entertain- was regarded in many quarters as farcical: some ment use – of fi lms, computer games, music, companies bid vast amounts; others very little.

30 Butler Report (UK), 2004

Th e highest monetary bidder was not automati- Independent Broadcasting Authority). adver- A cally selected, for there was an extra qualifi er, a tising was to be kept separate from program- so-called ‘Quality Th reshold’, though at no time ming. Requirements were laid down to govern B were the criteria for quality ever spelt out. programming content. Prior to the announcement of the franchises Th e Copyright Act, 1956 initiated copyright by the ITC (on 16 October 1991), existing protection of broadcast material. In 1972 the C franchise-holders had tightened their fi nancial Sound Broadcasting Act inaugurated commer- belts – cutting back on programme investment, cial radio and the ITA became the IBA. The D laying off staff – in order to have enough cash to Independent Broadcasting Authority Act, 1979 place a winning bid. Decisions on the future of empowered the IBA to create channel four, the BBC were not dealt with in the Act. while the Broadcasting Act (1980), among E A study by the Third World and Environ- other regulations, created the Broadcasting mental Broadcasting Project was to report that, Complaints Commission, later to be merged F following the 1990 Act, signifi cant reductions with the Broadcasting Standards Council, which

occurred in documentary and current aff airs in turn was absorbed into the Offi ce of Commu- G programmes on all terrestrial TV services in the nications – Ofcom, the ‘super regulator’ borne UK. On commercial channels there was a drop of the communications act (uk), 2003. In of 80 per cent in documentary programmes 1984 came the Video Recording Act requiring H dealing with international issues. See deregu- the certifi cation of all new video releases. Th e lation; public service broadcasting (psb); Cable and Broadcasting Act of the same year set I ofcom: office of communications (uk); up the Cable Authority, whose task was to select

privatization. operators for particular areas and to oversee JK Broadcasting Act (UK), 1996 A key piece of organizational and programming stipulations. deregulatory legislation in the UK, the Act Broadcasting research See audience removed regulations preventing independent measurement. L TV companies from owning more than two Broadsheet Traditionally most newspapers were licences, opening up the fi eld for a new round broadsheets, the term generally referring to the M of takeovers. However, no company would be large size of the page as contrasted with the permitted to own in excess of 15 per cent of total tabloid. Th e implication is also that broadsheets N TV output. are ‘serious’ (sometimes ‘heavy’) in comparison Newspaper companies were permitted for with the tabloid paper. In the UK Th e Times, the the fi rst time to control TV companies, though Guardian and the Independent remain ‘broad- O newspapers with more than 20 per cent of sheets’, even though they have become tabloid in national circulation were barred from owning size, because they are seen as ‘quality’ papers for P ITV licences – a ruling directly aff ecting Rupert ‘discerning’ readers. Only the Daily Telegraph Murdoch’s News International and the Mirror has persisted with the broadsheet size. Tabloid R Group. dailies such as the Sun, Daily Mirror and Daily A central focus of the Act was the future of Star are also referred to as the Red Tops. See digital television. Proposals for the digitiza- tabloid, tabloidese, tabloidization. S tion of the airways off ered the prospect of many BSkyB See British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB). more TV channels, with the BBC being awarded Butler Report (UK), 2004 Lord Butler was T its own digital TV multiplex. See bbc digital. appointed to scrutinize, and report on, the Broadcasting Code (UK) See ofcom: office intelligence made available to the British govern- U of communications (uk). ment concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass Broadcasting legislation (UK) Th e fi rst act of destruction (WMDs), the threat of which was its kind in the world was the Wireless Telegraphy deemed justification for military invasion of V Act of 1904, in which the British government the country by the US and UK in 2003, and the

commanded substantial powers over the regula- overthrow of the incumbent president of Iraq, W tion of wireless telegraphy. The Act gave the Saddam Hussein. Postmaster General the duty to license all wire- Reporting in the knowledge that Iraq’s WMDs less telegraphy apparatus. Th e British Broadcast- were never found, Butler judged that the govern- XYZ ing Company received its licence from the Post ment’s September 2002 key dossier ‘did not Oﬃ ce in 1923. make clear that the intelligence underlying these Th e television act, 1954 created commer- conclusions was very thin … How grave a fault cial television in the UK with the formation of that was in the context of the lead up to war is,’ the Independent Television Authority (later the Butler believed, ‘a matter on which people will

31 By-line

and should reach their own conclusions. But transmit TV to areas which received poor ‘off - we regard it as a serious weakness, a weakness air’ signals. Reception problems were also the which subsequently came home to roost as the reason for the US ‘cabling up’ in the 1950s. Until conclusion about deployable stocks of chemical the election of the Conservative government in and biological weapons have turned out to be 1979, the commercial potential of cable in devel- wrong’. oping information technology had stimulated In other words, Britain went to war on inad- only modest interest. In March 1982 the Tory equate and unreliable information against a Cabinet’s Information Technology Advisory threat that did not exist. Th e Report is scathing Panel (ITAP), appointed in July 1981, recom- about a ‘high proportion’ of unreliable sources mended a rapid and substantial expansion of of information; the inadequate way in which cable networks, to be established and operated MI6 verifi ed its sources; reliance on third-hand by private companies. reporting; and the ‘seriously fl awed’ information The Hunt Report (see hunt committee provided by external agencies. report on cable expansion and broad- However, Lord Butler drew back from appor- casting policy (uk), 1982) also urged the tioning blame; indeed he seemed to be saying ‘wiring up’ of the nation, with a minimum of that nobody was culpable, a judgment that rules and regulations. Today cable networks prompted amazement in many quarters, though compete in broadcasting and internet services as one commentator put it, the public was with satellite transmission, often carrying the served up a ‘typical English compromise’: things same TV programmes. In the UK, examples were badly wrong, but not by deliberate inten- of cable TV providers are Challenge, Dave and tion. Th e conclusion was taken by New Labour G.O.L.D., the dominant provider being Virgin government as exoneration. Media. In the US the best-known cable services Shortly after the publication of the Butler are ESPN, HBO, USA Network and Nickelodeon. Report, John Scarlett, the head of Joint Intel- See fibre-optic technology. ligence Services which had been so robustly Cahiers du Cinéma French film magazine criticized, was appointed by Prime Minister founded by Andre Bazin in 1951; associated Tony Blair to become the new head of the Secret with, and very often written by, the Nouvelle Intelligence Service. See consent, manu- Vague, or New Wave directors such as Claude facture of; disinformation; freedom of Chabrol and François Truff aut. Th e young critics information act (uk), 2005; hutton report of Cahiers reacted against the current ideologi- (uk), 2004; phillis review of government cal conservatism in the fi lm world – against its communications (uk), 2004. reluctance to face up to or to express the facts of By-line Use of the journalist’s/author’s name contemporary life. on a report or article. Th ese are very common Calcutt Committee Reports on Privacy and now in the press, but at one time the granting Related Matters, 1990 and 1993 Lawyer and of by-lines was a rare honour, to distinguish top Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, David writers or as a reward for outstanding reportage. Calcutt was the government-appointed chairman in 1990 of a committee set up to examine British press intrusions into personal privacy, C after complaints from many quarters. Calcutt’s Cable and Broadcasting Act (UK), 1984 chief recommendation was the creation of a Drawn up by the Conservative government with non-statutory press complaints commis- the intention of facilitating the ‘cabled society’, sion. Th e tenor of Calcutt’s fi rst report was a the Act followed most of the recommendations warning to the newspaper industry – either set of the hunt committee report on cable your own house in order, or it will be done for expansion and broadcasting policy (uk), you by government legislation. 1982, which proposed a cable network for Britain Subsequent high-profile press ‘intrusions’ with the minimum of rules and regulations. into the ‘private’ lives of the Royal family and of Th e Act set up a Cable Authority to select cable government ministers – stories that incidentally operators for particular areas and to maintain an proved very popular with the newspaper-buying overview on general matters of organization and public – decided Calcutt that the voluntary programming. route to better press behaviour had not worked. Cable television Below-ground cable networks Calcutt’s 1993 report, a solo eff ort, was greeted were established in the 1930s in the UK to relay by Lord McGregor, Chairman of the Press radio broadcasts. Th ese were later adapted to Complaints Commission, child of Calcutt Mk

32 Camera obscura

1, as potentially ‘a disaster for democracy’ and mass-produced at the time. The prototype of A ‘direct censorship for the fi rst time in 300 years’. the Leica was constructed by Oskar Barnack in Calcutt recommended: (1) A statutory code of 1914; Rolleifl ex was put on the market by Franke B practice for journalists and other press practitio- and Heidecke Braunschweig in 1947, and Voigt- ners; (2) A press complaints tribunal comprising lander’s zoom lens was introduced in 1959. a judge and two lay assessors appointed by the In the 1960s and 1970s the application of C Lord Chancellor; (3) New criminal off ences to electronics revolutionized camera and lens cover invasion of privacy, including bugging design. Th e silicon chip allowed amazing feats D and the use of telephoto lenses. His report was of miniaturization. In 1963 Eastman Kodak was highly critical of the performance of the introduced the 126 ‘instant loading’ cartridge, Press Complaints Council, which had not been a modernization of an old idea going back to E constituted, or evolved, in line with his 1990 the Expo Watch camera of 1905. In 1972 they recommendations. He dismissed the PCC as an produced the pocket 110, an ultraminiature F ineff ective regulator, too much in the hands of cartridge-load camera. Polaroid, in the same

the newspaper owners. year, launched the SX-70 instant photo system, G The first government response to Calcutt which abandoned the method whereby a protec- Mk 2 was cool towards statutory enforcement tive covering had to be peeled oﬀ the print; with through recommendations (1) and (2), but more SX-70, the photo image develops automatically H persuaded concerning Calcutt’s third recom- in the light, protected by a plastic coating. mendation – although not suﬃ ciently persuaded 1976 saw Canon introduce its famous AE-1, I to take any legislative action. Two decades later, a fully automatic SLR camera incorporating

the situation remained as it was when Calcutt very advanced digital electronic technology, JK made his reports. See defamation; journal- produced by automated methods. In the early ism: phone-hacking. See also topic guide 1980s Kodak launched its disc-camera. Th ree- under commissions, committees, legisla- dimensional (3D) cameras also came on to the L tion. market at this time. An off shoot of the 35mm Camera Th e fi rst photographic camera on sale camera is the Advanced Photo System (APS) M to the public was produced by London optician off ering smaller, lighter cameras in which 35mm Francis West, for ‘Photogenic Drawing’ (1839). fi lm is inserted into the camera in cassette form. N In the same year Baron Saguier introduced a digitization – for popular rather than lightweight bellows camera with three ‘fi rsts’ in professional use – made fi lm redundant. Picture equipment – a darkroom tent, a photographic storage and transmission online soon became O tripod and a ball-and-socket head. Binocular- commonplace, as was still picture-making and type cameras were introduced as early as 1853, video combined in the same camera. Mobile P by John Benjamin Dancer of Manchester. In phones quickly became cameras, their pictures 1858 Th omas Skaife introduced his ‘Pistolgraph’: capable of being sent as swiftly as voice messages R a spring shutter worked by rubber bands was and text. Current developments focus on released by a trigger. He once aimed his Pistol- improving high-speed image resolution for graph at Queen Victoria and was nearly arrested scientifi c and popular use. S for an attempt on her life. 1880 saw the fi rst twin- Th e availability of digital cameras at moder- refl ex camera, a quarter plate with a roller-blind ate cost has made possible the arrival of citizen T shutter attached to the taking lens, made by R. & journalism (see journalism: citizen jour- J. Beck of London. nalism), where members of the public record U George Eastman produced the first camera events, often in advance of the professionals, and incorporating roll-film, calling it the Kodak swiftly transmit news pictures to the media. See (1888). Th e simplicity of this camera (‘Pull the high-speed photography; photography, V string – turn the key – press the button’) made origins. Camera obscura mass photography possible, especially as East- Latin for ‘dark chamber’; an W man recommended the return of the camera to early means of projecting an image – a box or the factory for development and printing. Minia- room with a lens at one end and at the other a ture cameras, as scientifi c precision instruments, refl ector which throws an external image upon XYZ were produced from 1924 (the Ermanox made by a screen or table. Antonio Canaletto (1697–1768) the Ernemann Works of Dresden). used the camera obscura to considerable eff ect In 1912 George P. Smith of Missouri produced in his paintings of Venice, though the device was a 35mm camera taking one by one-and-a-half referred to as early as Aristotle (384–322 BC). inch pictures on cine-film which was being It was French army offi cer Joseph Nicéphore

33 Campaign

Nièpce (1765–1833) in 1826 who fi rst exposed a and political satire. Though the best known, metal plate coated with a layer of bitumen to the Punch was only one among many magazines image in a camera obscura. Th e light hardened carrying cartoons in the nineteenth century. In the bitumen, which was washed away to reveal England, Vanity Fair (founded 1868) proved a the fixed image. Photography, or as Nièpce rival. In the US, Puck (1876), in France, Le Rire termed it, ‘Heliography’ – sun drawing – was (1894) and in Germany, Simplicissimus (1896) born. made the cartoon the most impactful form of Where the camera obscura possessed a refl ec- printed illustration prior to the regular use of tor, the camera lucida had a prism. When placed photography. Best known of all US magazines in front of an artist’s eye the prism projects image carrying cartoons, the New Yorker, was founded onto paper, thus allowing accurate copying. in 1925. Campaign Th is term is most often used in the Cartoons In fine art, a cartoon is the final media-studies context to refer to a conscious, preparatory drawing for a large-scale painting, structured and coordinated attempt at persua- tapestry or mosaic. Th e Leonardo cartoon in the sion. Th e goals of such persuasion are varied. National Gallery, London, is a notable example advertising campaigns for example aim to – ready for fi nal working, but never completed change people’s choice of product or to persuade by the artist. In modern terms, the cartoon is a them to buy new products. humorous illustration or strip of illustrations. In Election campaigns aim to reinforce or change 1841 a series of fi ne-art cartoons was designed people’s voting behaviour. pressure groups for paintings in the new Houses of Parliament in use campaigns to alert the public to a particular London. Th e satirical magazinePunch , founded issue, to infl uence the public’s opinion on that in that year, poked fun at the drawings, with issue, and to mobilize support and pressurize sketches entitled ‘Punch’s Cartoons’. those in power to take some desired action. According to Alan Coren in his foreword to Access to the mass media is often crucial for a W. Hewison’s The Cartoon Connection (Elm pressure group’s successful campaign. Media Tree Books, 1977), cartoons were born ‘in the far personnel may also initiate campaigns to raise Aurignacian days of 20,000 BC’, when ‘a squat, their audience’s awareness of certain issues – hirsute, browless man one morning dipped his child abuse, for example. Indeed such campaigns stick in a dark rooty liquid, bent straight again, can be seen as part of the mass media’s agenda- and, on the cave-wall of Lascaux, drew a joke setting role. One focus for media research about men running after buff alo’. has been the measurement of how effective Hewison calls the cartoon ‘drawn humour’ campaigns are. and lists the following cartoon categories: (1) Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Recognition humour (where the viewer recog- Freedom UK organization founded by John nizes the workings of human nature); (2) Social Jennings in 1979 as a broad-based non-political comment (very often Recognition humour party pressure group dedicated to making Brit- with a message); (3) Visual puns; (4) Zany (or ain’s media more open, diverse and accountable. screw-ball); (5) Black humour (or sick, or in bad It is a stalwart supporter of public service taste); (6) Geometric (where, for example, lines broadcasting (psb). Th e Campaign publishes are made to fall in love with dots); (7) Faux Naïf a bi-monhly bulletin, Free Press. (pretended naïvety) – ‘When an ideas man can Campaigning See online campaigning. draw but cannot develop a satisfactory comic Captive audience advertising See advertis- style of cartoon drawing, he quite often throws ing: ambient advertising. in the towel and adopts a deliberately childlike Cards See cigarette cards; picture post- style’; and (8) the Strip cartoon, the originator of cards. which was Wilhelm Busch (1832–1904). Caricature A distorted representation of a On the screen, Walt Disney has dominated person, type or action. Though we generally the fi eld of the animated cartoon but there have associate caricature with humorous cartoons, been many others: Paul Terry’s Terrytoons, Pat the process of distortion has played an important Sullivan’s Felix the Cat, Tex Avery’s Chilly Willy, role in art. Known to the Egyptians and Greeks, the endlessly warring Tom and Jerry created by caricature was revived by Italian artists of the William Hanna, Joe Barbera and Fred Quimby, Renaissance and developed throughout Europe along with countless others such as Top Cat, in the eighteenth century. In England artists Scooby Doo and the Flintstones, Walter Lantz’s such as Rowlandson (1756–1827) combined high- Woody Woodpecker and Terry Gilliam’s Monty quality draughtmanship with trenchant social Python’s Flying Circus.

34 Censorship

Among those artists who have attempted demotic turn; journalism: celebrity jour- A to push the cartoon on film in an innovative nalism; reality tv; reinforcement. direction are the Hungarian John Halas and his Cellular radio Comprises radio frequencies B wife Joy Batchelor, Richard Williams and Bob divided up into ‘cells’ of air waves facilitating, in Godfrey. In recent years Matt Groening’s Th e particular, personal communications systems. Simpsons has become arguably the world’s most For example, anyone operating a car telephone C watched TV cartoon. Today’s TV and movie will be switched automatically from one radio cartoons have vastly beneﬁ ted from advances in frequency to another as the operator passes D computer-generated imaging. through the air-wave cells. See media tech- Catch-up TV See television: catch-up tv. nology. Catalyst effect Where a book, newspaper, Censorship Pre-emptive censorship is censor- E film, TV or radio programme has the effect ship before the event; punitive, after the event. of modifying a situation, or taking a mediating They often work in tandem: one punishment F role. Th e actual presence of TV cameras may, it serves as a warning to others. Censorship

is believed, infl uence the course of events. Th e involves the curtailment, usually by or on behalf G debate continues as to whether such eff ects are of those in authority, of the major freedoms – of substantial or marginal, for reliable proof is hard belief, expression, movement, assembly and to come by. See mediation. access to information. Th e most common form H Catharsis From the Greek, ‘purging’, catharsis is of censorship is that applied by the self: a thing the eff ect upon an audience of tragedy in drama is not expressed because of the risk of external I or the novel. Th e Greek philosopher Aristotle censorship – from the law, from organizations

perceived the function of great tragedy to be the and institutions, from pressure groups. Th us JK release of pent-up emotions in the audience. As a we have censorship by omission or evasion. consequence, the mind is cleansed and purifi ed. Few if any communities tolerate completely Th e so-termed catharsis hypothesis suggests that free expression. In the UK, for example, laws of L violence and aggression on fi lms and TV has a defamation exist to protect persons against therapeutic eff ect. Exponents of this idea argue acts of communication which may offend or M that the involvement in fantasy aggression may injure them, or their reputation in the commu- serve as a form of displacement, providing a nity. Equally protective are restrictions upon N harmless ‘release’ from hostile impulses which material transmitted to children (see certifica- might otherwise be acted out. See effects of tion of films). Such forms of censorship meet the mass media. with general approval, but they represent only O CCTV: Closed-circuit television One of the the tip of a large legal iceberg. key means of public and private surveillance The UK’s Official Secrets Act is one of the P (see surveillance society). Used in public most far-reaching weapons of legal censorship locations in the UK as early as the coronation of ever devised. Th e Act (or Acts, 1911–91) makes R Queen Elizabeth II, in 1953, and as a permanent it an off ence for anyone to obtain and commu- fi xture in London from the 1960s. By 2006 it nicate documents and information that could be was estimated that there were in excess of four harmful to the safety and interest of the State. S million CCTV cameras operative in Britain, In addition, the State protects a commonality one for every fourteen citizens. Th at fi gure has of interests with a wide range of laws. Th e UK’s T increased substantially, to the point where the Public Order Act of 1936 restricted the way we British people are considered not only the most behave, or what we say, in public. If an individual U ‘watched’ people in Europe, but, diff erences in uses threatening or insulting words, likely to population being taken in to account, camera cause a breach of the peace, this is a punishable surveillance outstrips that in the US. In urban off ence. Th e common-law off ence of Sedition, V areas a person can expect to be captured on of long standing, protects the sovereign, the government and its institutions from individuals camera some 300 times a day. See biometrics; W echelon; regulation of investigatory or groups causing intentional discontent and powers act (ripa)(uk), 2000. hatred, while the Incitement to Disaff ection Act Ceefax Trade name of the teletext service off ered of 1934 made it an off ence to try to persuade a XYZ by the BBC since September 1974, giving view- member of the armed forces to an act of disloy- ers access to information on a wide range of alty. Equally, the Police Act of 1964 made it an services. Th e commercial television equivalent off ence to promote unfaithfulness by a police is Oracle. offi cer towards his duties. Celebrity See culture: popular culture; It remains an offence to issue a Blasphemy

35 Centrality

– this is, to speak or communicate in writing, uk). Multicultural societies such as Britain are etc. matters which may cause hatred, contempt, having to learn how to cope with religious ‘certi- insult or ridicule against the Church. It is a tudes’, whether Christian, Moslem or Sikh; and rarely used law, but a law’s potency lies in its writers, artists, fi lm-makers and broadcasters existence – in the knowledge that it can always are having to steer a course between freedom be used when free speech appears to be getting to express (and thus criticize) and the rights of out of hand. One of the fi rst pieces of legislation others to protect what they deem sacred. See brought in by the New Labour government anticipatory compliance; blogging; cctv: after its re-election in 2005 was the Incitement closed-circuit television; commercial to Religious Hatred Act, outlawing comments confidentiality; defamation; digital made in public or in the media as well as written economy act uk (2010); genre; ‘libel tour- material likely to incite religious hatred. Critics ism’; journalism: phone-hacking; privacy; expressed grave concern that the new legislation regulation of investigatory powers act would stifl e free comment and debate. (ripa) (uk), 2000; terrorism: anti-terror- Obscenity too has occupied the minds of ism, crime and security act (uk), 2001. lawmakers. Since the seventeenth century, See also topic guide under media: freedom, certain types of indecent expression or behav- censorship. iour have been subject to punishment by the ▶ Julian Petley, Censorship: A Beginner’s Guide (One law. Material considered likely to ‘deprave and World, 2010); Mickey Huff , Peter Phillips and Project corrupt’ has often been subject to punitive Censored, Censored 2011: Top Stories 2009–10 (Seven legal censorship (see oz trial). Defi ning what Stories Press, 2010); Brian Winston, A Right to is obscene and what is liable to deprave and Off end: Free Expression in the Twenty-fi rst Century corrupt has proved immensely diffi cult. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011); Index on Censorship The targets of censorship tend to be those (published quarterly). actions or expressions which appear to endan- ★Centrality Within the communication struc- ger, by subversion, ridicule, defi ance or just plain ture of any social group, some members will disrespect, the values and value systems of the derive certain advantages or disadvantages dominant hierarchy of society – its establish- resulting from their position in that structure; in ment. In the UK, ‘sacred cows’ have been the particular, from the frequency with which they Monarchy, the Church, Nationality, the Family, communicate with other members of the group. Defence, each a symbol in some way or other By using a sociogram such as that illustrated of law and order; of control. Censorship is a opposite, the centrality of a person within the weapon to counter the ever-present threat – real communication structure can be measured: the or imagined – of social, and therefore political, sociogram indicates that D’s centrality index destabilization. is highest; it is arrived at by taking the total The internet has become the most number of communication links between group signifi cant and controversial domain attracting members and then dividing that by the total censorship. In its early days perceived as free of number of such links between one member and controls by those in authority, the Net has, in the other members of the group. In the diagram, many countries, been reined in by legislation D’s centrality may arise because of his/her status, designed to facilitate surveillance (see surveil- role, articulacy, personality, etc. lance society). The concept of a centrality index enables Even so, exercising Net censorship presents observers to estimate quantitatively the degree immense challenges simply because of the of influence members of the group may have ease and speed with which information can be by virtue of their position in the group. The transmitted, between a few users, thousands more central a member is in a communication or millions. Recently the chief driving force of network, the sooner he/she will be in posses- government censorship has been the so-termed sion of all the information at the disposal of the ‘war on terror’ following the events in the US group. Infl uence is closely related to possession of 9/11 (the terrorist destruction of New York’s of information, because the possessor has the Twin Towers and the attack on the Pentagon) and power to choose what information to pass on, the terrorist bombings in London in July 2005, and to whom. Communication networks diff er both prompting legislation aimed at increasing in the degree of centrality and the number of national security, but with serious implications levels of centrality possible within them. for free speech (see usa – patriot act, 2001; However, more information would be needed racial and religious hatred legislation, other than that provided by a sociogram alone

36 Channel capacity

Example of a sociogram H

in order to ascertain the precise role that D is see formerly restricted ﬁ lms – such as Spider- I playing in the sociogram illustrated; in particu- Man – as long as they were accompanied by an

lar, information would be needed about the adult over 18. JK content of the communication and of the pattern The 12A certificate marked the arrival of of interaction over time. It may be that D is not former civil servant Sir Quentin Th omas as chief normally that central to the group’s communica- censor. It brought Britain into line with other L tion, and that when this sociogram was drawn countries, including the US, Canada, Japan, he/she was playing a ‘blocking’ role in the group Ireland, New Zealand and Spain. Th e fi rst fi lm M and receiving criticism. See interaction to carry a UK 12A certifi cate was Th e Bourne process analysis. Identity starring Matt Damon. 12A certifi cation N Centres for research into the media See requires that posters advertising such films research centres (into the media). should carry warnings about scenes involving Certifi cation of fi lms (UK) For several years violence, sex and bad language. Th e 12 rating O until December 1982, the british board of remains for fi lm videos. See h-certificate. film censors had the following system of Chamberlain, Lord See lord chamberlain. P certifi cation: X, denoting fi lms with high sex and Channel Each message-carrying signal requires violence content or other disturbing subject- a route along which it is transmitted from R matter which those under 18 were not permitted the sender to the receiver and along which to see in cinemas; AA fi lms, from which children feedback may be obtained. Channels may under 14 were barred; A fi lms, to which children be physical (our voices or bodies), technical S were admitted if accompanied by an adult; and (the telephone) or social (our schools, media, U-certifi cate fi lms admitting all. etc.). In business organizations or institutions T Th ese were replaced in 1982 with: 18 (permit- they may be vertical, hierarchical, formal and ting admission for those aged 18 and over); 15 predominantly one-way – from the boss down- U (replacing AA, and raising the admission age wards; or horizontal, democratic, informal and from 14 to 15); PG (Parental Guidance, a symbol two-way as between workmates and groups with used in the US, and intended to show that a fi lm common tasks, interests and sympathies. Like V contains some scenes which individual parents country paths, channels need to be kept open

may feel unsuitable for children); and U as and frequented – and sometimes repaired – if W before. A 12 certifi cate was introduced in 1989, they are to continue to be recognized as viable. mainly to target the first film in the Batman See cosmopolite and localite channels; series. jakobson’s model of communication, 1958; XYZ In August 2002 the British Board of Film phatic (language); shannon and weaver’s Classifi cation, under pressure from a number of model of communication, 1949. sources, including that of parents and children, Channel capacity C.E. Shannon and W.E. made an adjustment to the 12 certifi cation by Weaver use this term to describe the upper limit adding a 12A rating, meaning that children could of information that any communication system

37 Channel 4 (UK)

can handle at a given time. To discover this limit, Broadcasting in October 1995. It began broad- it is fi rst essential to know how much uncertainty casting in January 1997. – or entropy – a given signal will eliminate. See Chapultepec, Declaration of, 1994 Adopted redundancy. on 11 March in Mexico City by the Hemisphere Channel 4 (UK) Under the direction of Jeremy Conference on Free Speech, organized by the Isaacs, in 1982, C4 became the UK’s fourth Inter American Press Association (IAPA), the TV channel; the ‘quality’ arm of commercial Declaration states that ‘A free press enables television. Jean Seaton argued in James Curran societies to resolve their conflicts, promote and Jean Seaton’s Power without Responsibility their well-being and protect their liberty.’ Th e (Routledge, 1997) that Channel 4 was ‘… an defence of the freedom of the press is absolute important (and perhaps the last) reinterpreta- and unqualifi ed: ‘No law or act of government tion of the public service role of broadcasting. In may limit freedom of expression or of the press, this version, the freedom of creative individuals whatever the medium.’ Chapultepec rejects to risk making the programmes they want to prior censorship (Clause 5), the imposi- make is seen as the guarantor of public good’. tion of licences for the importation of paper, Seaton identifies a number of reasons for newsgathering equipment and the assigning of the establishment of Channel 4: the need for radio frequencies (Clause 7), and asserts that television fare to better refl ect Britain’s growing no news medium or journalist may be punished cultural diversity; the need to widen the terms of for publishing the truth or for criticizing or political debate on television; the need to foster denouncing government (Clause 10). See greater creativity in programme-making; and talloires declaration. the need to address the requirements of niche Characteristics of mass communications or minority audiences. In addition there was See mass communication: seven charac- also the desire of the then Conservative govern- teristics. ment to subject the duopoly to the infl uence Chequebook journalism A euphemism for of market forces. Th e adoption by Channel 4 of bribery – newspapers paying someone for exclu- the publisher–contractor model for programme- sive rights on his or her story. Th e police pay making, and the subsequent boost to the inde- their ‘snouts’ or ‘grasses’ for the common good; pendent production sector, was one of the ways the press pay their informants for tomorrow’s it was hoped that these needs would be met. headline, to serve the public’s ‘right to know’ and Th e new organization quickly became a major to boost sales in the war for circulation. While sponsor of independently made movies, drama the UK Bribery Act (2010) which came into force series and documentaries. From the start the in July 2011 is primarily targeted at the worlds channel set out to challenge established ways of business, commerce and industry, it applies and attitudes. Much of its programming was equally to the media, covering both individual international in theme, whether the subject and organizational behaviour. was poverty in the Th ird World or American Chronology News narratives on TV are often football. Th e new channel proved the argument compared to those of fictional stories (see for broadcasting – mixing popular viewing with storyness) but there are obvious differ- minority-interest programmes and showing that ences, an important one being divergence over the entertaining could be combined with the chronology. ‘In news,’ writes Allan Bell in Th e serious without sacrifi cing standards. Language of News Media (Blackwell, 1991), ‘order C4 became the first channel to provide a is everything but chronology is nothing.’ Indeed, full hour of news daily. It was to create a high in the news narrative the climax is reported fi rst, reputation for the funding of feature fi lms, some whereas in a story this usually comes at the end. of which, like Four Weddings and a Funeral Chronology has a low priority in the construc- (1994), proved worldwide cinema successes. tion of news stories to the point where audience Th e broadcasting act, 1990 cleared the way has to be highly news-literate to follow what is for C4 to negotiate directly its own advertising going on. Bell says, ‘Th e time structure of news revenue. The Welsh fourth channel is called stories can make the shape of a diffi cult fi lm or Saniel Pedwar Cymru (S4C). See communica- novel look straightforward in comparison.’ See tions act (uk), 2003; ofcom: office of agenda-setting. communications (uk). Churnalism When journalism is subjected Channel 5 (UK) The Independent Television to demands for more and faster news content Commission of the UK awarded Britain’s fi fth in an era of 24-hour media provision and national terrestrial TV channel to Channel 5 demand, it is in danger of ‘churning’ out copy,

38 Cine-clubs

text and pictures; then it becomes churnalism. 1900s there were around fi fty companies issu- A Pressures of competition and commercialization ing cards in the UK and Ireland. Refl ecting the result in corner-cutting, facts not checked-out dominance of the British Empire, the cards B thoroughly, dependence on single rather than a represented many military issues, along with variety of sources and over-readiness to opt for major inventions of the time – the motor car and sensation over verifi able truth. the aeroplane. Exploration and discovery, and C In Flat Earth News: An Award-winning the Edwardian craze for collecting things – birds’ Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and eggs, butterfl ies, porcelain – were prominently D Propaganda in the Global Media (Vintage refl ected in the choice of subject-matter, as were Books, 2009), Nick Davies writes that pressures the music hall and the scouting movement. on modern journalists are such that ‘only 12 Early in the First World War (1914–18) the E of their stories turn out to be their own work; Wills company actually issued cards as minia- and only 12 of their key facts are eff ectively ture recruiting posters, while Gallahers put out F checked’. several series of Victoria Cross Heroes in 1915

Davies believes that the ‘problems of churnal- and 1916. Carreras issued Women on War Work G ism have become even worse with the arrival of and Raemaekers’ War Cartoons portraying the news websites involving reportage whose prime Germans as barbarians. principle is speed imposed on reporters for the Later examples of these cultural ephemera H press and TV alike’, the majority activity being were Gallahers’ Boy Scouts, Fables and Their recycling second-hand stories. He writes of ‘the Morals; Wills’s Cinema Stars and Radio Celebri- I tendency for the media to recycle ignorance’, ties. Ogdens produced a series on Broadcasting.

producing what he terms ‘flat earth’ stories With the approach of the Second World War JK – news stoked up by conjecture and headline- (1939–45) Carreras produced Britain’s Defences seeking but with questionable, or no, substance. (1938); Players issued Aircraft of the RAF in the Th e author cites as a fl at earth story the wild same year, and in 1939, Modern Naval Craft. Th e L predictions concerning the Millennium Bug most ambitious cigarette-card enterprise of the which, according to media predictions, would period was the Imperial Tobacco Company’s Air M cause catastrophic mayhem as computers Raid Precautions, made available in a variety of adjusted from 1999 to 2000. As it turned out, cigarette brands. N nothing could have been smoother; a transition Cigarette-card production remained popular without fuss. Blame is laid at ‘the behaviour of in the post-war era, though the 1960s saw a the new corporate owners of the media who have marked decline. In the 1970s came the much O cut editorial staffi ng while increasing editorial sought-after series from Player, Th e Golden Age output, slashing the old supply lines which used of Motoring, packed in Doncella cigars. The P to feed up raw information from the ground; Golden Age continued with Steam (1976), Flying and, with the advent of news websites, added the (1977) and Sail (1978). See picture postcards. R new imperative of speed’. See the Media Stan- Cine-clubs Th ese played an important role in dards Trust website churnalism.com, created to the development of cinema in many countries. track and publicize cases of churnalism and to Where, in the commercial fi lm theatres, popular S expose plagiarism. entertainment monopolized programmes, the Cigarette cards: cultural indicators A US cine-clubs showed new experimental and often T company, Allen Ginter, produced the forerun- non-fi ctional work. John Grierson (1898–1972) ner of the fi rst British cigarette card when they organized the first British showing of Sergei U packed with their Richmond Gem brand a pair Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin at the London of oval cards held together by a stud, one section Film Society (formed in 1925) in 1929, along with of which was a calendar for 1884, with UK parcel his own seminal documentary Drifters. Minister V postage rates on the back. By the 1890s the larger of Propaganda in Nazi Germany, Goebbels,

British tobacco companies were issuing cards, outlawed all cine-clubs because of their ‘subver- W beginning with advertisements then progressing sive’ nature and a similar fate befell the cine-club to series on particular themes such as soldiers, movement in pre-Second World War Japan. ships, royalty, sport and famous beauties. Th e Depression and the failure of the media XYZ Th e ﬁ rst company to issue photographic ciga- to meet its causes head-on helped give belated rette cards on a large scale was Ogdens who, in birth to the US cine-club movement. Th e Work- 1894, began their Guinea Gold and Tabs cards ers’ Film and Photo League, soon renamed the covering, in the next thirteen years, practically National Film and Photo League, was formed in every facet of life of that period. In the early New York in 1930. Members of the League made

39 Cinema

films as well as watched them, concentrating circular design opposite a mirror, worked the on fi lming the hunger marches and other mass same little miracle. Th e zoetrope or ‘wheel of protests of the time. Among their creations was a life’, invented by Englishman W.G. Horner (1834), Workers’ Newsreel, which the League persuaded off ered a revolving drum with strip sequences some commercial cinemas to screen. inside, enabling fi gures to jump, gallop or even Cinema See cinematography, origins; film. do cartwheels. Emile Renauld’s Praxinoscope of Cinema legislation Th e fi rst legislation in the 1877 improved on the Zoetrope by removing the UK relating to cinema use was the Cinemato- slots of the drum and using mirrors to refl ect the graph Act of 1909. It concerned the licensing of images, thus avoiding the dizziness to viewers exhibition premises and the safety of audiences. caused by the Zoetrope; and the wonder of this In 1922, the Celluloid and Cinematograph Film device was extended with the Projecting Prax- Act drew up safety rules for premises where inoscope using a revolving disc-blade shutter to raw celluloid or cinematograph fi lm was stored project animated images on to a screen. and used. The Cinematograph Film Produc- Th e main impetus in the development of cine- tion (Special Loans) Act, 1949 established the matography came, however, from another direc- National Film Finance Corporation and in the tion. Working in the US, English photographer same year came the British Film Institute Act. Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) in the 1870s Th e Cinematograph Films Act, 1957 provided took multiple photographs of animals, birds a statutory levy on exhibitors and exhibitions to and humans in movement. His most famous be collected by Customs and Excise and paid to experiment was one in which a line of cameras, the British Film Fund Agency, which would use using exposures of less than one-thousandth of the monies to support fi lm production in the a second, ‘fi lmed’ a galloping horse. Th e horse UK and the work of the Children’s Film Foun- triggered each camera as it passed – and proved, dation. Th is made the formerly voluntary levy, incidentally, that there are moments in a horse’s the British Film Production Fund, compulsory. movement when all its hooves are clear of the Th e Cinematograph (Amendment) Acts of 1982 ground. extended provision of the 1909 Act to include ‘all The next step was the projection of these exhibitions of moving pictures for private gain’, in-sequence pictures. In 1890 William Friese- bringing under regulation pornographic cinema Green (1855–1921) revealed the potential and video ‘clubs’. Th e Acts exclude from regula- of moving film when he set up a small slide tion bona fi de fi lm societies. projector in which the usual slide carrier had Th e Films Act, 1985 abolished the Cinemato- been replaced by a glass disc bearing a ring of graph Films Council and the Eady Levy, and pictures. Friese-Green’s revolving disc was later dissolved the National Film Finance Corpo- demonstrated, to eager crowds, in the window of ration, replacing it with the British Screen his studio in Piccadilly. Finance Consortium. Th e government provided In France meanwhile Étienne-Jules Marey a ‘starter’ of 1.5m for five years to the loan (1830–1904) had invented a photographic ‘gun’ fund of the BSFC, whose function would be to (1882) to take pictures of birds in fl ight; he soon raise funds independently of state support. See followed this with a camera capable of snapping broadcasting legislation. sixty pictures a second on a paper-based fi lm. CinemaScope Wide-screen process copyrighted In the US, Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) by 20th Century Fox in 1953 but invented much produced his Kinetograph to take moving earlier by Henri Chrétien. pictures and his Kinetoscope to show them. Cinématographie Word fi rst used by G. Bouly Th e viewer looked through a peephole in the in 1892 in a French patent specification for a foot-high box. Th e 50 feet of fi lm ran for about movie camera. 13 seconds. ‘Kinetoscope parlours’ were set up in Cinematography, origins Among the earliest which people could view fi lms by putting a coin moving-picture inventions was the Thaumat- in the slot. ropical Amusement of Englishman Henry Fitton Th e most important year in the development (1826). Exploiting the phenomenon of persis- of cinematography was 1895, with the invention tence of vision the Th aumatrope consisted of of projectors in the US by Th omas Armat and a round box inside of which were a number of Woodville Latham, in France by the Lumière discs, each with a design on it. When the discs brothers – Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis were twirled round, the images merged and gave (1864–1948) – and in the UK by Robert Paul. the impression of a single movement. With the arrival of the Lumières on the scene, Joseph Plateau’s Phenakistoscope (1833), a the cinema was truly born.

40 Class

Their vision and entrepreneurialism turned sonal communication observed by Erving A experiment into performance, private screenings Goffman in Behavior in Public Places (Free into public, commercial profi t. ‘What did I do?’ Press, 1963), where, after initial eye contact, B Louis Lumière is reported to have said. ‘It was a person quickly withdraws visual attention in the air.’ Auguste Lumière was less modest from another to avoid any further recognition or than Louis: ‘My brother,’ he said, ‘invented the need for further contact. As Goff man says, ‘In C cinema in one night.’ On 28 December 1895, the performing this courtesy the eyes of the looker Lumières, already highly successful in the photo- may pass over the eyes of the other, but no D graphic business, opened in the Salon Indien, in “recognition” is typically allowed.’ Th e ritual of the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines. civil inattention, Goff man explains, is one that Seats were priced at one franc. Within weeks ‘constantly regulates the social intercourse of E they were a worldwide success. Immediately the persons in our society’. See indicators. Lumières trained a brigade of cameramen-cum- Clash of Civilizations See mcworld vs jihad. F projectionists and sent them abroad to several Clapper board See shot.

foreign countries; in quick time, some 1,200 Claptrap See verbal devices of speech- G single-shot ﬁ lms were produced, including the making. Diamond Jubilee procession in London. Class A factor of vital importance in the analysis Cinéma vérité Or Catalyst cinema. In a 1961 of interpersonal and mass communication is H documentary, Chronique d’un Été (Chronicle the concept of class; and the most signiﬁ cant of a Summer), Jean Rouch, instead of simply impact on the development of that concept was I recording the daily routines of Parisians, chal- made by the German philosopher Karl Marx

lenged them to face the camera and answer (1818–83). For him, class denoted a relationship JK the question, ‘Tell us, are you happy?’ Rouch to the means of production in any given society. and co-producer Edgar Morin were suddenly Marx identifi ed two main classes: the owners on-camera participants. Th eir subjects, having of the means of production (land, factories), L been fi lmed, were invited to see the fi lm rushes. whom he called the bourgeoisie, and those who Their discussion of these was filmed and were obliged to sell their labour to the owners to M recorded and used as part of the end-product. make a living – the proletariat. Although aware Th e style was named cinéma vérité in homage of other classes, he considered them of minor N to the Russian movie pioneer Dziga Vertov (see importance. spinning top), and translated from the term Marx argued that as a result of their position used by Vertov and his associates, kino pravda, in the economic order, members of each class O film truth. Erik Barnouw in Documentary shared common experiences, lifestyles and (Oxford University Press, 1974) writes, ‘The certain political and economic interests. He P direct cinema documentarist took his camera believed that there was and would remain, in a to a situation of tension and waited hopefully capitalist society, an inevitable confl ict between R for a crisis; the Rouch version of cinéma vérité the interests of the bourgeoisie and the prole- tried to precipitate one. Th e direct cinema artist tariat. He further argued that group identity, aspired to invisibility; the Rouch cinéma vérité class-consciousness and collective political and S was often an avowed participant.’ economic action would develop in the course Cinerama Extra-wide screen system invented of economic and political confl ict. Proletarian T by Fred Waller and fi rst demonstrated in Th is class-consciousness was particularly likely to is Cinerama (1952). Three projectors, elec- emerge as its members were thrown into serious U tronically synchronized, created a three-section diffi culties and close daily associations at work. picture on the screen, giving a disturbing visual Th e dominant class – the bourgeoisie – would, wobble at the joins. Th e fi rst fi lm story using according to Marx, seek to impose its culture V the process was How the West Was Won (1962). upon the rest of society. Its culture would become the culture, its ideology Shortly afterwards the three-camera system was dominant W abandoned in favour of ‘single-lens Cinerama’, the dominant ideology. Consequently the practically identical to cinemascope, though communication systems of society would refl ect with higher defi nition. the dominant culture of the bourgeoisie and XYZ Circumvention tools Alternative term to also the confl ict between the two classes. From describe online anti-censorship tools. See tor. a Marxist viewpoint, control of many facets of Citizen journalism See journalism: citizen the mass media by the ownership of capital gives journalism. that class the opportunity to disseminate its own Civil inattention Phenomenon of interper- culture and ideology. Such control, in Marxist

41 Classic FM

terms, plays a vital role in the maintenance of varying advantages depending on the particular hegemony. conditions under which the communication is Th e term is also commonly used when what presented, including the audience’s predisposi- is meant is social class. Social class member- tion and the type of matter being transmitted. ship is based, primarily, upon occupation Similar concepts are the law of primacy (see rather than ownership or non-ownership of primacy, law of) and the law of recency. the means of production. For the advertising Clipper chip A microchip, called the spy in industry and media management, social class is the computer, the ‘sleeping policeman on the a signifi cant factor in the profi le of an audience. superhighway of information’. It was feared in Market researchers are primarily interested in the mid-1990s that this would become a compul- income and spending power. For those media sory element in US-made computers, allowing organizations that are dependent on advertis- government agencies, by means of an electronic ing revenue, the social class composition of its back door, to snoop on data into and out of audience is of obvious importance. Th e inter- computers. Such was the determination of users relationships between the social class structure of the internet and their campaign against and the communication processes of society the clipper chip that the Clinton government are complex, and research in this area is wide- temporarily retreated from its plans. ranging; of particular concern is whether the However, in February 1996 Clinton signed a narrowness of social class backgrounds of those Telecommunications Bill requiring that from who control and work in the media is refl ected 1998 all TV sets with a screen size of 13 inches in its output. See topic guide under media: or more should be fi tted with a ‘V’ (for violence)- values & ideologies. chip. In the same month the European parlia- Classic FM Commercial radio station broadcast- ment voted in favour of a similar measure – the ing nationwide in the UK since the autumn of insertion of V-chips into every new TV set sold 1992. Its menu of popular classics presented in in Europe under the Television Without Fron- a lively and unpatronizing way, together with tiers directive. See encript; privacy. a policy of winning audience loyalty through Clique A close-knit group of people within a competitions and sponsored musical events, has social system whose communication is largely proved a notable success. with each other. Clique analysis is used to deter- ‘Clean up TV’ movement Established in mine communication groupings within a social Birmingham in 1963 by Mary Whitehouse and system, and its main tool is sociometrics. others; later called itself the National Viewers’ Closed text See open, closed texts. and Listeners’ Association (NVLA). Over the Closure Occurs in a communication situation years the movement has succeeded in gaining when one participant, usually the receiver of access to practically every forum in which the information, closes down attention, and thus issues of broadcasting are discussed; addition- defl ects the message or the messenger, or termi- ally, the NVLA has been active as a ‘morality nates an encounter. Th e reasons for closure may watchdog’ in other arts, especially the theatre relate to the unacceptability of the message: it and publishing. NVLA thinking is based on may confl ict with the attitudes, beliefs or values traditional Christian ethics; the belief that the of the receiver; it may be an ‘uncomfortable values of chastity and the family underpin all truth’ which causes in the receiver a feeling of that’s best in Western society, and that such dissonance. Alternatively it may have some- values are constantly under threat and have to be thing to do with the messenger rather than the protected. Of equal concern to the NVLA is the message – personal dislike of the sender on the increase in the display, in fi lm, on TV and in the part of the receiver, or a simple unwillingness to theatre, of scenes of violence. See broadcast- receive this kind of message from this messen- ing standards council; censorship; moral ger; or it may simply refl ect a wish to terminate entrepreneurs. the encounter and move on. Climate of compliance See kuuki. The means of closure will involve NVC Climax order In the process of persuading others, (Non-verbal Communication) as well as verbal the order in which arguments and evidence are strategies. Th e term is also used in relation to placed is of considerable importance. Research narrative, in the sense of narrative closure. has been conducted into the climax order and Th is does not mean bringing the narrative to a anti-climax order, that is when the best point of close, but employing narrative devices to close an argument is reserved till last (climax) or used down alternative readings or interpretations. See at the outset (anti-climax). Th e two orders have open, closed texts; preferred reading.

42 Codes of narrative

Cloud computing See computing: cloud some avant-garde, subject to textual rather A computing. than commonly recognized cues to mean- Cocktail party problem In On Human Commu- ing. Much modern art, for example, has been B nication (MIT Press, 1966) Colin Cherry writes, encoded in visual languages accessible only ‘One of our most important faculties is the to a small number of people. However, over ability to listen to, and follow, one speaker in time, innovative aesthetic encoding becomes C the presence of others. Th is is such a common conventionalized. Th e obscure code has become experience that we may take it for granted; we familiar. A case in point is Surrealism, whose D may call it “the cocktail party problem”. Th at is, intention was to shock cultural convention, how do we fi lter out a barrage of communication yet whose dream symbols and often disturb- messages, selecting one to concentrate upon?’ ing juxtapositions of objects have become a E Cherry experimented with two diff erent taped commonplace of mass advertising. What began readings being played at once, with the instruc- as a code specifi c to itself has been transformed F tion to the subject to concentrate on one and to one given its meaning by cultural convention.

ignore the other. See codes of narrative; decode; dominant, G Though the tapes produced a ‘complete subordinate, radical; elite; highbrow; babel’, and though wide-ranging texts were semiology/semiotics. used, considerable success in deciphering the Codes of narrative Roland Barthes in S/Z H message was demonstrated, illustrating the (Blackwell, 1990; translated from the French by importance of ‘our ingrained speech habits at Richard Miller) applies a number of narrative I the acoustic, syllabic, or syntactic levels’. Cherry codes in a book-length analysis, or decon-

and his colleagues also experimented to see struction, of a twenty-three-page short story, JK what happened when a subject was asked to Sarrasine, written by Honoré de Balzac in read a text out loud while simultaneously listen- 1830. Barthes describes ‘fi ve major codes under ing to another one. This process – of testing which all the textual signifi ers can be grouped’ L the subject’s ability to select from competing in a narrative. The Proiaretic or Action code message channels, they called ‘shadowing’. (the Voice of Empirics) tells us of events – of M Code of broadcasting (UK) See ofcom: office what happens, and thus is instrumental in the of communications. sequence of the story. N Codes of advertising practice See advertis- The code of the seme or sign (‘semantically ing standards authority (asa); ofcom: the unit of the signifier’) refers to character office of communications. and is categorized by Richard Howard in the O Code of semes See codes of narrative. Preface to S/Z as the Semantic code (though Codes A code is generally defi ned as a system Barthes does not actually use this term in the P into which signs are organized, governed by text). Barthes speaks of this as the Voice of the consent. Th e study of codes – other than those Person. Under the Hermeneutic or Enigma code R arbitrary or fi xed codes such as mathematics, (the Voice of Truth) ‘we list the various (formal) chemical symbols, Morse Code, etc. – empha- terms by which an enigma can be distinguished, sizes the social dimension of communication. suggested, formulated, held in suspense and S We have codes of conduct, ethical, aesthetic finally disclosed’. Cultural or Referential and language codes (see elaborated and codes ‘are references to a science or a body of T restricted codes). knowledge’ – ‘physical, physiological, medical, Non-verbal communication is carried on psychological, literary, historical, etc.’. Th ese are U through what have been classified as presen- the Voice of Science. Finally there is the Symbolic tational codes: gesture, movement of the eyes, code, the Voice of Symbol. expression of the face, tone of voice. A represen- Barthes writes of the codes that they ‘create a V tation code can be speech, writing, music, art, kind of network, a topos [Greek: a place, location] through which the entire text passes (or architecture, etc. Speech itself has non-verbal W characteristics: prosodic codes aff ect the mean- rather, in passing, becomes text)’. Th is taxonomy ing of the words used, through expression or of codes is widely used in the analysis of texts pitch of voice. of all kinds. Nowhere, however, does Barthes XYZ Th e media are often referred to as employ- suggest that such coding is prescriptive or exact. ing broadcast and narrowcast codes in gearing He writes, ‘Th e code is a perspective of quota- content, level and style to expected audiences. tions, a mirage of structures; we know only its Aesthetic codes are crucially affected by their departures and returns.’ cultural context, some of it highly conventional, Barthes talks of a ‘galaxy of signifi ers, not a

43 Cognitive (and aff ective)

structure of signifi eds’. For him the text ‘is not anced triads. An example of a balanced triad unitary, architectonic, fi nite’ and the approach would be when you and the other person like to it is characterized by ‘blanks and looseness each other and you both like Coldplay. However, of analysis’. The meaning of the ‘readerly’ as if you and the other person disliked each other contrasted with the ‘writerly’ text is ultimately but both liked Coldplay, an imbalanced triad elusive. would be formed. Heider argued that people Cognitive (and aff ective) Th at area or domain prefer balance and seek to establish or restore of human behaviour which can be described balance but can tolerate imbalance. as intellectual – knowing, understanding and Osgood and Tannenbaum (1955) sought to reasoning – is often referred to as the cognitive. investigate the eff ect of diff erences in the degree A substantial amount of media communication of like or dislike between the elements on the is aimed at producing cognitive responses in process of dealing with imbalance. Th e principle the receiver. Th at area which is involved with of congruity as advanced by Charles Osgood and attitudes, emotions, values and feelings is Percy Tannenbaum in ‘Th e principle of congru- termed the aff ective. Obviously the two overlap ity in the prediction of attitude change’, Psycho- and intertwine. logical Review 62 (1955) holds that when change Whether the content of a message is cognitive in evaluation or attitude occurs, it always occurs or aff ective in its orientations will greatly infl u- in the direction of increased congruity with the ence the mode chosen for its communication. prevailing frame of reference. Th at is, it will be If the content of a message is judged to be of the weaker attitude or belief that will give way. cognitive intent, then language will generally Th e opposite of cognitive balance is cognitive be couched in neutral terms; presentation will dissonance, a notion analysed by Leon Festinger strive after objectivity and balance. An aff ective in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Row message will be more likely to be framed in Peterson, 1957). Cognitive dissonance results emotive language, its imagery directed towards from a lack of consistency between two cogni- emotional responses. tions – attitudes, values, beliefs, ideas and so on. However, recent media research has been Festinger argued that cognitive dissonance moti- directed towards a more critical analysis of the vates the individual to try to resolve the resulting allegedly objective modes of cognitive messages. lack of harmony, and he identified strategies Th ere is concern as to whether the dissemination by which individuals try to achieve this. Th ree of apparently neutral information – especially such strategies are: to change the less important if that dissemination is of some frequency cognition; to deny evidence that the cognitions and consistency of treatment – influences are in confl ict; or to change the importance of an audience’s perception of national and world the cognitions. Take for example the dissonance events. From the mass of available information, that might be felt by a heavy drinker who values the media select and reject. Th ey give emphasis their health. To reduce the dissonance they – and legitimacy – to some issues rather than could cut down on their alcohol consumption, others, and they set the order of priorities (see or they could deny the validity of the evidence agenda-setting) as well as seeking to establish that suggests that heavy drinking is bad for one’s links between occurrences and their causes in the health, or they could decide that it is much more minds of the audience. See effects of the mass important to continue heavy drinking and enjoy media; glasgow university media group. life than to live for longer. Cognitive capture See impartiality. Th e theory predicts that people will seek out Cognitive Consistency theories The basic information that confi rms existing attitudes and premise of cognitive consistency theories is that views of the world or reinforces other aspects people prefer consistency among the various of behaviour. Similarly it predicts that people elements of their cognitive system, for example will avoid information which is likely to increase between attitudes and beliefs. Heider (1958) dissonance. If you dislike a person, and you investigated reactions to balance or imbalance in dislike his/her views, what he/she says is unlikely to dyads and, particularly, triads of elements. Th e cause cognitive dissonance, for there is a congru- triads are known as POX triads. P represents the ence here. Dissonance is acute when a liked person person ‘you’; O represents the other person and says something seemingly ‘out of character’ or fails X represents a stimulus, for example an object to accord with expectations or the image held of or event. The relationship between any two him/her. Clearly, cognitive dissonance theory can elements can be positive or negative and their shed much light on why acts of communication combination can produce balanced or imbal- may be resisted and rejected.

44 Comics

Psychological Reactance theory, developed by Ridout and Cliff ord Witting say in Th e Facts of A Brehm (1966), can also be classed as a consis- English (Pan Reference Books, 1973), ‘the slang tency theory. Psychological reactance occurs of yesterday becomes the colloquialism of today’. B when we are restricted from doing something See dialect; jargon; register. that we were previously free to do and we Colonization Term used to describe the process perceive that restriction to be illegitimate or by which various cultural material is acquired C unjustifi ed. Psychological reactance motivates us from a variety of contexts and then reassembled to restore the threatened freedom of action. Th e to construct particular messages. In this process D degree of reactance we experience will depend the meaning of the original signs is often upon the extent of the restriction placed upon changed, if not subverted; their use may appear behaviour, how important that behaviour is to to celebrate differences between people, but E us, and whether there are similar alternative the goal to which they are put may have as its choices open to us. Th ere are also some individ- purpose the reinforcement of the dominant F ual diff erences in our response to restrictions on culture, and the denial of diff erences and the

our behaviour. Take for example the imposition conﬂ ict which they bring. G of censorship. Robert Cialdini notes in Inﬂ u- Advertising messages contain many examples ence: Science and Practice (Pearson Education, of colonization. For example, the signs and Inc., 2009) that ‘almost invariably, our response symbols widely associated with certain youth H to banned information is to want to receive that cultures are often employed to sell goods and information to a greater extent and to become services to various audiences – whether young I more favourable toward it than we were before people themselves, or older consumers who are

the ban’. presumed to identify with a particular youth JK Theodore Newcomb (1953) developed a culture. Ironically, whilst youth cultures are version of balance theory – the ABX model of often a site of resistance and challenge to the communication (see newcomb’s abx model) dominant culture, their signs and symbols are L – that focuses upon equilibrium within interper- in this way used to draw them further into the sonal communication. Our preference for cogni- dominant culture, for instance through encour- M tive consistency can leave us prey to its use in aging certain patterns of consumption. persuasive communication. As Robert Cialdini Comic impetus See sitcom. N comments in Influence: Science and Practice Comics Th e ﬁ rst newspaper comic-strip is gener- (Pearson Education, Inc., 2009), ‘Th e drive to be ally considered to be that which appeared on 16 (and look) consistent constitutes a highly potent February 1896 in the New York Sunday World. It O weapon of social inﬂ uence, often causing us to was a three-quarter-page feature in colour called act in ways that are clearly contrary to our own ‘Th e Great Dog Show in M’Googan’s Avenue’. P best interest.’ See cognitive (and affective); Kids in the city’s slum backyards were organizing defensive communication; effects of their own dog show; the hero, dressed in a bright R the mass media; groupthink; resonance; yellow nightgown, soon became the ‘Yellow Kid’ symmetry, strain towards. See also topic and ‘Hogan’s Alley’ achieved immediate popu- guide under communication theory. larity as a long-running comic strip (see yellow S Cognitive dissonance See cognitive consis- kid). tency theories; congruence theory; The idea was not new. English cartoonist T dissonance. Thomas Rowlandson (1757–1827) created a Cold media, hot media See hot media, cold comic character, Dr Syntax, who was popular U media. with the public, and considerably earlier William Collocation Th e tendency of words to occur in Hogarth (1697–1764) included speech ‘balloons’ regular association; words set together through in his engravings satirizing London life. George V customary usage such as ‘fair’ and ‘play’, ‘auspi- Orwell took comics seriously enough to write

cious’ and ‘occasion’. about them. W Collodion or wet-plate process See photog- In ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ (1939), published in raphy, origins. Selected Essays (Penguin, 1957), Orwell analysed Colloquialism An expression used in common, the social and political connotations of early XYZ informal speech, but not as far removed from publications in the genre. What seemed to acceptable modes as slang. If your comments characterize comics in Orwell’s day was their ‘cut no ice’ with somebody, that is a colloquial- social changelessness – deep down, if not in ism; if you are told to ‘keep yer ’air on’, that is the surface detail. Orwell did ﬁ nd diﬀ erences slang. It is a modest distinction, for as Ronald between the older and the new generation of

45 Commanders of the social order

weeklies, however: in the new, ‘better technique, art) and of public spectacle (sport) have been more scientifi c interest, more bloodshed, more colonized by corporations – particularly in the leaderworship’; in ‘social outlook there is hardly US, but increasingly in the rest of the world. See any advance’. audience: active audience; berlusconi As life appears to have become more complex, phenomenon; consensus; elite; hegemony; and society more complicated, the stereotype manufacture of consent; power elite; of the hero has had a sustaining appeal. Picture- press barons; public sphere. See also topic strip heroes such as Clark Kent, alias Superman, guide under media: ownership & control. who fi rst made his appearance in Action Comics Commercial confidentiality A censorship (1938) in the US, have not only led popular (and device employed to prevent the media transmit- charmed) lives on the printed paper but have ting, or the general public receiving, information also translated into immensely popular film on the grounds that such information might be heroes. The debate concerning comics, and commercially damaging (regardless of whether comic books, centres around the extent to which that information might be in the public interest). they seem to legitimize dominant social values. One particularly sensitive area of commerce A comic which has reversed this tendency is which is shrouded in mystery is the arms trade. Viz, started up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1979 For example, Britain is among the world’s top by brothers Chris and Simon Donald and Jim arms-trading nations. Its government maintains Brownlow with a fi rst issue of 150 copies. In a UK an arms marketing and advisory service, the Guardian article ‘All in the worst possible taste’ Defence Exports Services Organization, yet this (18 November 2004), William Cook described organization is notoriously secretive whenever Viz as ‘a brilliant hybrid of punk fanzine and journalists seek to find out about its work, kids’ comic’; the comic proved immensely popu- invariably answering that information cannot lar and circulation temporarily rose to a million be supplied for reasons of ‘commercial confi - copies. dentiality’. Louis Blom-Cooper, Chairman of the Viz mercilessly (and hilariously) satirizes the Press Council in 1990, expressed the view that UK tabloids, public fi gures and politicians, issu- ‘traditional English law places a higher value on ing spoof news stories and adverts. Among its commercial interests than on the public’s right many comic characters have been the Fat Slags to know’. See freedom of information act (Sandra and Tracey), Spoilt Bastard, and Roger (uk), 2005. Mellie the Man on Telly. Commercial Laissez Faire model See liberal Among the Viz annuals have been the Five press theory. Knuckle Shuffl e, the Full Toss, the Pork Chopper Commercial radio: origins Although pirate and the Dogs’ Bollocks. In Cook’s opinion, Viz radio attempted to buck the broadcasting ‘changed the sense of humour of the nation’. In monopoly of the BBC during the 1960s, legiti- 2009 an exhibition of the original artwork of Viz mate commercial broadcasting in the UK was was held at London’s Cartoon Museum. not in operation till the 1970s, following the ▶ William Cook, Th e Silver Plated Jubilee – 25 Years of Conservative government’s Sound Broadcast- Viz (Boxtree, 2004). ing Act of 1972. Th e Independent Broadcasting Commanders of the social order Term used by Authority (IBA) had, by 1983, thirty-seven Herbert I. Schiller in Culture, Inc.: Th e Corporate commercial radio stations operating under Takeover of Public Expression (Oxford University licence throughout the UK and plans for over Press, 1989), referring to the vast transnational sixty more. corporations which, he argues, have come In the US the fi rst commercial radio station to dominate and shape culture; establish was KDKA of Pittsburg, which went on the prevailing discourses; set political, economic air on 2 November 1920. In 1921 there were and cultural agendas; and call the tune of mass eight commercial radio stations; by 1922, 564. media. Schiller talks of the privatization of Development of radio in the US was spectacular public space: in a literal sense (public areas being and chaotic. In 1927 (the year that the BBC, by transformed into privately owned and controlled Royal Charter, was given a monopoly of radio shopping malls and pleasure domes); and in broadcasting in the UK) Congress passed a an intellectual sense, through the ‘corporatiza- Radio Act setting up the Federal Communica- tion’ of arts, literature and media. He cites the tions Commission to allocate wavelengths to extent to which the entire world of information broadcasters. (libraries, museums, universities, mass commu- Four radio networks were created as a hedge nication), of expression (architecture, music, against monopoly – National Broadcasting

46 Commercial radio (UK)

Commission (NBC), Columbia Broadcasting awarded in 1973, to bring into existence the all- A Service (CBS), Mutual Broadcasting System news London Broadcasting Company (LBC) and (MBS) and the American Broadcasting Capital Radio for London, with regional stations B Company (ABC), while the FCC worked towards following soon afterwards. Additional franchises the growth of projects of educational interest. were granted by the IBA in 1981. By 1988 there Despite the BBC’s monopoly in the UK, were forty independent local radio stations C commercial broadcasts in English were trans- (compared to twenty-seven BBC local stations). mitted from abroad as early as 1925. Radio Paris, Th e broadcasting act, 1990 separated out D broadcasting from the Eiff el Tower, presented a the statutory overseeing of radio and televi- fashion talk in English, sponsored by Selfridges. sion, creating for TV (in place of the IBA) the Only three listeners wrote to the station to say Independent Television Commission (ITC) and E they had heard the broadcast, but the commer- for radio, the Radio Authority. These bodies cial lobby was undaunted. were empowered to assign frequencies, appoint F In the 1930s Captain L.F. Flugge, who had licensees and regulate programming and adver- arranged the fashion talk, formed and ran the tising. Th ey were also required to draw up and G International Broadcasting Company. The periodically review codes of practice concerning IBC’s Radio Normandy transmitted 15-minute programmes, advertising standards and other shows for several hours a day from 1931; by the matters. Both the Radio Authority and the ITC H following year twenty-one British firms were ceased to exist with the inaguration of the Offi ce paying sponsorship money for commercial of Communications (ofcom), born out of the I broadcasting, and the UK was being beamed at communications act (uk), 2003. See televi- commercially from Th e Netherlands, Spain and sion broadcasting. JK Luxembourg. Commercial radio (UK) Licensing of UK The IBC actually set up offices in Portland commercial radio stations is the responsibility of Place, London, and had its own outside ofcom: the office of communications. By L broadcasting vehicles, each painted black with the end of 2009 there were over 370 local radio ‘Radio Normandy 274 metres’ on the side. An stations, more than 200 providing for dab (Digi- M important part of the company’s operation was tal Audio Broadcasting) reception and in excess the International Broadcasting Club, formed in of 350 streaming their services for online recep- N 1932, with free membership. By 1939, the IBC tion. Th ere are three national stations, Absolute had 320,000 members. Radio, Classic FM and TalkSPORT, and eighteen Radio Luxembourg began broadcasting on regional stations such as Magic (London), O 1191 metres long wave in 1933, its fi rst two spon- Galaxy (North East, Central Scotland and York- sors being Zam Buk and Bile Beans. Th ough the shire), Real Radio (London, East Midlands, West P UK Post Offi ce conducted a sustained campaign Midlands, North East and North West) and the to close down these commercial stations, it was Coast (Solent). R Adolf Hitler and the Second World War that The commercial radio landscape is subject did the trick: many transmitters were either to flux as individual stations change hands; destroyed by the Nazis or taken over. Radio ownership is rarely if ever local, more generally S Luxembourg became Hitler’s major propa- constituting part of the portfolio of large media ganda weapon against the British. companies. Global owns (at the time of writing) T Of the commercial stations, Luxembourg Capital Radio (London), Galaxy, Heart (London, was the only one to start up again after the war East Midlands and West Midlands) and two U (fi nally closing down in 1992). Th e fi rst accred- other London stations, LBC 97.3 and XFM, while ited commercial radio station on British soil was Bauer Media own Kerrang! (West Midlands), Manx Radio, which began broadcasting in 1964. Kiss (London, East of England and the Severn V With the election of the Conservatives in 1970, Estuary) and Wave 105 (Solent). National Radio the Minister of Posts and Telecommunications Wales is part of the Town and Country holding. W produced a White Paper, An Alternative Service Th e UK has the biggest dab network in the of Broadcasting, proposing a network of about world, with 103 transmitters and fi fty-one digital sixty commercial stations under the Indepen- stations available in London alone. Th e switcho- XYZ dent Television Authority (to be renamed the ver date to dab is 2015. By 2009, 35 per cent of Independent Broadcasting Authority). the UK population had dab, though the fi gure From the beginning, in 1972, local independent for adults with mobile-phone access to radio radio was to broadcast on stereo VHF as well transmission was 89 per cent. as medium wave. The first franchises were While for most commercial radio stations

47 Commissions/committees on the media

music is the chief fare, news broadcasting is a and interprets the message, returning a signal requirement. Ofcom guidelines stress ‘localness’, in some way that the message has or has not that is content and approach of specifi c local been understood – that is, provides feedback. relevance ‘which off ers a distinctive alternative to Th e models of Shannon and Weaver (1949) and UK-wide or nations’ service’. All stations ‘should Osgood and Schramm (1956) were early repre- broadcast local news at least hourly throughout sentations of this process. peaktime’ both on weekdays and weekends. Osgood and Schramm’s model also highlighted RadioCentre, the trade body of commercial the importance of the process of encoding and radio companies, estimated that in 2009 decoding in the exchange of meaning. Commu- commercial radio had an audience of over 30 nication requires codes and codes require signs. million. Standards are not only monitored by Th us semiology/semiotics and the ideas of Ofcom, but celebrated by the Arqiva Commer- theorists such as Charles Pierce or Ferdinand de cial Radio Awards, Bauer Radio winning fi ve of Saussure are integral to a study of communica- these in 2010. See wi-fi. tion (see sign; signification). Commissions/committees on the media See Shannon and Weaver’s model highlighted topic guide under commissions, commit- what has been termed noise, or interference, tees, legislation. that may impede the message. Th e concept of Common sense In the study of media communi- noise points to the potential barriers to eff ec- cation and its links with culture and politics, the tive communication: technical, semantic or term ‘common sense’ connotes an over-readiness psychological. Noise may be internal (resistance to believe in the apparently obvious. Th e Ital- to the message or to the sender, for example, on ian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) the part of the receiver) or external (actual noise, defined common sense as being a composite distraction, language level, etc.). During the of the attitudes, beliefs and assumptions of the communication process, sender, message and mass of the people, and operating within a hier- receiver are subject to a multitude of cues which archical social order. infl uence the message, such as a person’s appear- Common sense tends towards conformism ance, his/her known status or the expression on to the ideology of the dominant social order, his/her own face as the message is communi- and in part is the product of that ideology. It cated or responded to (see barnlund’s trans- accepts ‘the way things are’ – the status quo actional models). – as ‘the way things should be’. Indeed such Schramm’s model, for example, identifies structures and circumstances are so obvious the importance of common ‘fields of experi- (so commonsensical) that they do not warrant ence’ on the part of sender and receiver for being questioned. successful communication, whilst Berlo’s model Gramsci believed that what he termed the (1960) further provides a useful indicator of ‘chaotic aggregate of disparate conceptions’ the complex range of factors to be found in comprising common sense should be chal- the communication process; these include lenged by intellectuals, and the complacency of psychological and cultural variables. Lack of common sense explained and exposed. Many shared attitudes, values, knowledge, experiences commentators have focused on the role the or cultural expectations can be a significant media play in nurturing and reinforcing rather source of noise (see schramm’s models of than unpacking commonsensical visions of soci- communication, 1954; berlo’s smcr model ety. See exnomination; hegemony. of communication, 1960). Commons knowledge See genre. While interpersonal communication is Communication While the definitions of that which occurs between two or more people, communication vary according to the theoreti- intrapersonal communication is what cal frames of reference employed and the stress you say within and to yourself. Inner thoughts, placed upon certain aspects of the total process, impressions, memories interact with external they all include five fundamental factors: an stimuli to create a silent discourse, continuously initiator; a recipient; a mode or vehicle; a changing and renewing itself and influencing message; and an eff ect. Simply expressed, the your perceptions of self and the world. communication process begins when a message It is important to hold in mind, as Raymond is conceived by a sender. It is then encoded – Williams points out in Keywords (Fontana, translated into a signal or sequence of signals 1976), the ‘unresolved range of the original – and transmitted via a particular medium or noun of action, represented at its extremes by channel to a receiver,who then decodes it “transmit”, a one-way process, and “share” ...

48 Communication: intercultural communication

a common or mutual process’. Th is polarity of active trio of forces: communication, mood and A meaning – of the one-way process as against personal narrative. (See eisenberg’s model of aspects of communion, of cultural exchange – is communication and identity, 2001.) B fundamental to the analysis of communication, A precept that few commentators would chal- hence the attempt to generalize the distinction lenge is that it is impossible not to communicate. in such phrases as manipulative communication By saying nothing, by remaining blank-faced, C and participative communication. by keeping our hands stiﬄ y to our sides, we are Frank Dance in ‘Toward a theory of human still communicating, however negatively. We D communication’ in the book he edited, Human are still part of an interaction, whether we like Communication Th eory: Original Essays (Holt, it or not. For Jurgen Ruesch, communication is Rinehart & Winston, 1967), observes that ‘all those processes by which people inﬂ uence E communication is something that changes one another’ (in ‘Values, communication and even while one is in the act of examining it; it culture’, J. Ruesch and G. Bateson, eds, Th e Social F is therefore an interaction and a transaction. Matrix of Psychiatry (W.W. Norton, 1951)). At

Dance and C. Larson in Th e Functions of Human fi rst we may resist the claim that whatever we do, G Communication: A Th eoretical Approach (Holt, we are exerting an infl uence. Yet by trying not Rinehart & Winston, 1976) detail their examina- to infl uence, we are arguably still aff ecting the tion of 126 defi nitions of communication. Th ey patterns of communicative action, interaction H specify notable differences but also common and transaction. In our absence from the scene – agreement that communication is a process. from our family or work group, for example – as I Th e authors conclude with a defi nition of their well as in our presence, we may still exert infl u- own: ‘the production of symbolic content by an ence, however little, however unintended. See JK individual, according to a code, with anticipated communication: intercultural commu- consumption by other(s) according to the same nication; communication, non-verbal code’. Or, as Colin Cherry succinctly puts it in (nvc); semiology/semiotics. L On Human Communication (MIT Press, 1957), Communication: intercultural communica- communication is ‘essentially a social aff air’. tion Larry A. Samovar, Richard E. Porter and M As early as 1933, Edward Sapir diff erentiated Edwin R. McDaniel in Communication between between explicit and implicit modes of commu- Cultures (Wadsworth, 2010) note that ‘… inter- N nication, while T.R. Nilson in ‘On defining cultural communication involves interaction communication’ in Speech Trainer (1957) – and between people whose cultural perceptions and reprinted in K.K. Sereno and C.D. Mortensen, symbol systems are distinct enough to alter the O eds, Foundations of Communication Theory communication event’. Such distinct diff erences (Harper & Row, 1970) – distinguishes between do not only occur across societies but also P communication which is instrumental, that between the various co-cultures found within is intended to stimulate a response, and situ- one society, especially those with a wide mix of R ational, in which there need not be any intention people from diverse cultural backgrounds such of evoking a response in the transmission of as the US or Britain. Intercultural communica- stimuli. tion, then, can take place both within and across S Most recently, Eisenberg’s model (2001) societies. focuses on the role of communication in the William B. Gudykunst and Young Yun Kim in T search for identity in an uncertain world. Communicating With Strangers: An Approach Eisenberg argues that communication is the to Intercultural Communication (McGraw- U means by which we search for, define and Hill, 1997) note that ‘the underlying process of establish personal identity. In late modernity communication between people from diff erent this quest takes place within a dynamic and cultures or sub-cultures is the same as the under- V fl uid ‘surround’; thus in a changing world a key lying process of communication between people challenge will be that of ‘developing a robust but from the same culture or sub-cultures’. We W dynamic conception of identity that continually should not, therefore, overestimate the diff er- adapts to a turbulent environment’. Th e forces ences and underestimate the similarities. To within the ‘surround’ infl uence both how we see explore the dynamics of intercultural communi- XYZ ourselves and how we activate ourselves towards cation they propose a model that focuses on the others, and thus how we communicate with potential infl uence of four types of perceptual them. Th ese forces include spiritual, biological, fi lter: cultural, sociocultural, psychocultural and cultural, economic and interpersonal factors. At environmental. Each of these fi lters infl uences the centre of the surround is a dynamically inter- the exchange of messages and meaning in the

49 Communication: intercultural communication

process of intercultural communication. communicate with each other compared to their language and non-verbal communica- communication with members of out-groups. tion clearly vary across cultures, but the In contrast, cultures in which individualistic impact of culture may go further than causing tendencies predominate stress the importance the obvious problems of translation. Th e sapir- of the individual and the individual’s aims, whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis interests, achievements and self-development. proposes that language determines thought and Individuals are expected to be self-reliant and thus diff erent languages may carry with them take responsibility for themselves and their diff erent perceptions of the world. Th is hypoth- close family. Individuals may be members of a esis remains controversial, but a number of number of in-groups – most of which will have researchers would argue that whilst language relatively limited and specific influence over may not determine thought, it does infl uence it. their members. Individuals are encouraged to Richard Hudson, for example, in Sociolinguistics be competitive, to speak out and to stand out. (Cambridge University Press, 1996) comments, Th ere are likely to be fewer marked diff erences ‘In short, language does aff ect thought in ways between the ways in which people communicate that go beyond the rather obvious effects of with in-group and out-group members. the specifi c lexical items. On the other hand, It should be borne in mind, however, that language is not the only kind of experience people in any culture may have both collectiv- which does aff ect thought.’ istic or individualistic orientations, even though A number of theorists have sought to explore one will tend to be stronger. Further, not all key cultural variables and clearly these have the people will necessarily identify strongly with the potential to impact on the process of intercul- predominant tendency of the culture in which tural communication. In Culture’s Consequences: they live. Comparing Values, Behaviours, Institutions and There are many cross-cultural contexts in Organisations across Nations (Sage, 2001) Geert which the variable of Individualism versus Hofstede identifi es fi ve dimensions along which Collectivism aff ects communicative behaviour. cultures can be compared: Power Distance; One is the approach taken to confl ict manage- Uncertainty Avoidance; Masculinity-Femininity; ment. Stella Ting-Toomey in Communicating Long versus Short-term Orientation; and Indi- Across Cultures (Guildford Press, 1999) notes vidualism versus Collectivism. that those from individualistic cultures tend to Another widely used profile of key cross- focus on outcomes and the achievement of goals cultural variables is that developed by Fons in contrast to those from collectivistic cultures, Trompenaars and Charles Hampton-Turner. In who focus on the process and on behaving Managing People Across Cultures (John Wiley appropriately. & Sons, 2004) they identify seven key variables: Marieke De Mooij in Global Marketing and Universalism versus Particularism; Individual- Advertising: Understanding Cultural Paradoxes ism versus Communitarianism (similar to Indi- (Sage, 1998) discusses the impact of the Indi- vidualism versus Collectivism); Specifi c versus vidualism versus Collectivism variable in the Diff use; Neutral versus Aff ective; Achievement encoding and decoding of advertisements. One versus Ascription; Sequential versus Synchronic example here is that of a lone fi gure featuring Time; and Internal versus External Control. in an advertisement. Th is image is likely to be A key variable is, arguably, that of Indi- interpreted in a negative light in collectivistic vidualism versus Collectivism, and it is one that cultures, as it runs the risk of suggesting that appears to impact considerably on communica- the person has ‘no friends, no identity’ – not a tion. A culture may be predominantly, though connotation that advertisers normally wish to not exclusively, collectivistic or individualistic. have associated with their products. So in collec- Cultures in which collectivistic tendencies tivistic cultures people are often shown in groups predominate stress the importance of the ties enjoying the product, whereas in individualistic and obligations attached to membership. Th ese cultures it is not unusual to see just one person will exercise considerable and general infl uence and individualistic appeals in advertisements. over members (for example, the family, faith- An important infl uence of the same variable groups). Th e interests of the in-group are seen as on communication lies in its relationship to more important than those of individuals, whose the use of what Edward Hall in Beyond Culture duty is to abide by the norms and values of the (Doubleday, 1977/81) terms high-context and in-group. There are often marked differences low-context communication. High-context between the manner in which in-group members communication relies heavily on the aspects of

50 Communication: intercultural communication

the context, for example the status diff erences with other key factors – for example, social iden- A between the communicators, to provide mean- tities, those of age, gender, social class and ing, and considerable use is made of non-verbal ethnicity. Th us, for example, the genderlects B signs. noted by Deborah Tannen in You Just Don’t Hall writes, ‘When talking about something Understand: Men and Women in Conversation that they have on their minds, a high context (Virago, 1992) could be expected to modify the C individual will expect his interlocutor to know degree to which, say, the cultural variable of what’s bothering him, so he doesn’t have to be individualism infl uences a person’s communica- D specifi c. Th e result is that he will talk around tive performance. Also part of the equation are and around the point, in eff ect putting all the psychocultural infl uences such as stereotyping, pieces in place except the crucial one. Placing ethnocentrism and prejudice and environ- E it properly – this keystone – is the role of the mental influences such as population density interlocutor. To do this for him is an insult and a and terrain. F violation of his individuality.’ Encounters between people of different

As Gudykunst and Kim argue, ‘High-context cultures can also be reflected in language; a G communication can be characterized as being Pidgin, for example, may be generated. In trad- indirect, ambiguous and understated with ing and doing business with the English in the speakers being reserved and sensitive to listen- Far East, the Chinese and other peoples, such as H ers.’ High-context communication is favoured the Malays, communicated in a very basic, utili- by collectivistic cultures, such as that of Japan, tarian mode of half-English. Pidgin is a Chinese I in which the centrality of in-group membership corruption of the word ‘business’ but the term is ensures the degree of shared knowledge and more widely used to to denote such basic means JK understanding of contextual factors, essential for of communication. According to Elizabeth Closs its eff ective use. Traugott and Mary Louise Pratt in Linguistics Individualistic cultures, such as that of Euro- (Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1980), a Pidgin L pean Americans, on the other hand, favour low- may be ‘roughly defi ned as a language that is context communication. Here, such a degree nobody’s native language’. M of shared knowledge and understanding of Pidgins are developed in situations where contextual factors cannot be taken for granted, people with differing native languages are N so meaning is made obvious and less use is brought together, some often in a relatively made of non-verbal signs – especially silence. powerless position, and have to communicate. As Gudykunst and Kim comment, ‘Low-context Pidgins, though, tend to meet only the basic O communication ... can be characterized as being needs of communication and are strongly reli- direct, explicit, open, precise and consistent with ant on the accompanying use of non-verbal P one’s feelings.’ communication for their effectiveness. Whilst the cultural variable of Individualism/ Creoles are normally developed by the children R Collectivism may predispose individuals to of Pidgin speakers and these are more complex favour one pattern over another, they may in and more fl exible languages. Over time, through certain circumstances employ the contrast- the process of decreolization, a Creole often S ing pattern. So whilst those in individualistic changes to resemble more closely the predomi- cultures may generally employ low-context nant or prestige language that was its base, if this T communication, in certain situations, for language is still used in the area. Th is was the case example when talking to a longstanding friend, with Jamaican Creole. In Britain, British Black U they may use high-context communication. English, derived largely from Jamaican Creole, In cross-cultural encounters confusion and is widely used by people with Afro-Caribbean possible confl ict can occur when high-context origins as a linguistic marker of ethnic identity, V meets low-context. Those from collectivistic, and typically is part of a linguistic repertoire high-context communication cultures, for that also includes other varieties of English. See W example, may fi nd the direct, open approach of apache silence; assertiveness; facework; those from individualistic, low-context cultures m-time, p-time. XYZ socially inept and tactless; whilst those from ▶ Sang-Pil Han and Sharon Shavitt, ‘Persuasion and individualistic, low-context cultures may get culture: advertising appeals in individualistic and frustrated with the failure of those from collec- collectivistic societies’, Journal of Experimental Social tivistic, high-context communication cultures to Psychology, Vol. 30 (4) 1994; Fons Trompenaars and ‘get to the point’. Peter Woolliams, Marketing Across Cultures (John Th e infl uence of cultural variables interplays Wiley & Sons, 2004); Harry C. Triandis, Individual-

51 Communication, functions

ism-collectivism (Westview, 1995); Richard D. Lewis, amount of NVC in the repertoire of diff erent When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures peoples and nations varies considerably in range, (Nicholas Brealey International, 2006); Marieke De emphasis, frequency and rules for use. Mooij, Global Marketing and Advertising: Under- Some non-verbal signs appear to be universal, standing Cultural Paradoxes (Sage, 2009); Marieke for example the eyebrow fl ash used in greeting. De Mooij, Consumer Behaviour and Culture: Conse- There are also many cultural differences in quences for Global Marketing and Advertising (Sage non-verbal communication, for example the Publications Inc., 2010). rules regarding proximity, that is the amount of Communication, functions Many and varied space or distance people should keep between listings have been made by communications them when communicating. Th ese are diff erent analysts. The following eight functions are for Middle-Eastern countries when compared usually quoted as being central: instrumental with our own. Th e use of non-verbal communi- (to achieve or obtain something); control (to get cation may also be infl uenced by aspects of an someone to behave in a particular way); informa- individual’s personality. Extroverts, for example, tion (to fi nd out or explain something); expres- are thought to be more expansive in their use of sion (to express one’s feelings or put oneself over gestures. Some gender diff erences have been in a particular way); social contact (participating noted in the use of NVC. Several studies have in company); alleviation of anxiety (to sort out a shown that women are more likely to touch each problem, ease a worry about something); stimu- other in conversation than men are. lation (response to something of interest); and Ambiguity often surrounds the interpretation role-related (because the situation requires it). of non-verbal signs, not least because quite a See jakobson’s model of communication. lot of body movement is not communicative in Communication integration See integra- intent and it may be diffi cult for the receiver to tion. know whether a particular sign was intended to Communication, interpersonal See inter- communicate a message or not. Judy Gahagan personal communication. in Social Interaction and its Management Communication, intrapersonal See intra- (Methuen, 1984) argues that the ambiguity personal communication. surrounding the interpretation of non-verbal Communication: mobile concept of See signs is essential to one of their major functions mobilization. in communication – dropping hints. Communication models See topic guide People may wish such messages to be open under communication models. to varied interpretation so that the hint can be Communication, non-verbal (NVC) Michael retracted later, if necessary. Non-verbal signs Argyle in Bodily Communication (Methuen, thus provide what Gahagan calls ‘diplomatic 1988) identifi es the main codes of NVC: touch fl exibility’. As she remarks, ‘non-verbal commu- and bodily contact; spatial behaviour nication is a language adapted for hints and (proxemics and orientation); appearance; innuendo’. See accent; bart; non-verbal facial expression; gesture and head behaviour: repertoire; object language; nods; posture; gaze (eye movement and eye silence. contact); and non-verbal vocalizations. ▶ Roger E. Axel, Gestures: Th e Do’s and Taboos of Varyingly, NVC conveys much of what we wish Body Language Around the World (John Wiley & to say, and much of what we would wish to with- Sons, Inc., 1998); Stella Ting-Toomey, Communicat- hold. Common functions of non-verbal commu- ing Across Cultures (Guildford Press, 1999); Desmond nication include: the conveying of interpersonal Morris, People Watching (Vintage, 2002); Allan and attitudes; the display of emotional states; Barbara Pease, Th e Defi nitive Book of Body Language self-presentation; the regulation of interaction; (Orion, 2004); Ted Polhemus and UZi PART B, the giving of meaning to verbal communication; Hot Bodies, Cool Styles: New Techniques in Self- the maintenance of interest in a communicative Adornment (Th ames and Hudson, 2004). encounter; the provision of advance warning of Communication postulates See postulates the kind of verbal communication to follow; and, of communication. very importantly, the provision of feedback in Communications Act (UK), 2003 Legislation communication. bringing far-reaching changes to the landscape Affi liation, sexual attraction, rejection, aggres- of telecommunications and broadcasting in sion, dominance, submission, appeasement, fear, Britain; and creating a ‘super regulator’ in the grief, joy are often best expressed – and in some Offi ce of Communications (ofcom). Telecom- cases can only be expressed – through NVC. Th e munications and broadcasting are seen in

52 Community radio

the Act to be twin parts of the same pattern of and signed by President Bill Clinton in Febru- A technological convergence. ary 1996, designed to ban pornography on Deregulation, or at least ‘light touch’ regula- the Internet (see internet: monitoring of B tion, was the guiding principle of the Act, the content). The measure has faced a number key focus the interests of broadcasting as a of formidable and ongoing obstacles; ﬁ rst, the business rather than, as some critics have stated, means of exercising censorship on the Net; C the interests of audience. Rules concerning second, arriving at any deﬁ nition of ‘decency’ (as cross-media ownership were largely aban- compared, for example, with ‘obscenity’) which D doned: there is now no bar to foreign ownership can win consensus in America; third, control- of British media and thus no impediment to ling indecency across frontiers (it is easy for corporate media interests worldwide competing American citizens to ‘emigrate’ across the Net E for swathes of British commercial broadcasting. by transmitting under the guise of ‘anonymous Gillian Doyle in an article ‘Changes in media remailers’); and fourth, persuading other nations F ownership’ in Sociology Review (February 2004) to introduce similar legislation. Perhaps the

wrote, ‘In effect these changes allow unprec- strongest impediment to the Communications G edented opportunities for major commercial Decency Act has been the United States Consti- radio and television broadcasters to expand their tution, the First Amendment of which prohibits share of the UK media market.’ Congress from ‘abridging the freedom of speech’. H The Act scrapped the following regulatory See regulation of investigatory powers rules: (1) those preventing single ownership of act (ripa) (uk), 2000. I ITV; (2) those preventing ownership of more Communication theory See topic guide

than one national commercial radio licence; under communication theory. JK (3) those preventing joint ownership of TV Communication workers See workers in and radio stations; (4) those obstructing large communication and media. newspaper groups from acquiring Channel 5 Communicative rationality Jürgen Habermas L TV or radio licences; and (5) those preventing in his vast and seminal work on communication non-European ownership. and the public sphere, Th e Th eory of Communi- M ofcom took over regulatory responsibilities cative Action, Vol. 1: Reason and Rationalization from fi ve bodies: the Broadcasting Standards (Beacon, 1981), and Vol. 2: Th e Critique of Func- N Commission, the Independent Television tionalist Reason (Polity, 1983), poses the notion Commission (ITC), the Office of Telecom- of communicative rationality as being character- munications (Oftel), the Radio Authority, and ized by truth, appropriateness and sincerity. Th e O the Radiocommunications Agency. It has a operation of these criteria in public life rests ‘statutory duty to further the interests of citi- upon the existence of free, open and egalitarian P zens and consumers by promoting competition discourse – an ‘ideal speech situation’ – which and protecting consumers from harmful or in turn makes understanding between elements R off ensive material’. It is empowered to conduct of society more likely. Communicative rational- research, develop policies, create codes of prac- ity rests essentially on an equality of opportunity tice, consult widely, make recommendations to participate in communication. S concerning not only independent broadcasting Communicology The study of the nature, but also the BBC (which in terms of control does process and meanings systems of all forms of T not come under Ofcom’s remit) and deal with communication in what Dean C. Barnlund has complaints. described as ‘the totality of time, space, person- U Pressure from various bodies, including many ality and circumstance’ (in ‘A transactional MPs and a media committee chaired by Lord model of communication’, K.K. Sereno and C.D. Puttnam, brought about government modifi ca- Mortensen, eds, Foundations of Communication V tions to the original Bill. A ‘public interest plural- Th eory, Harper & Row, 1970). ity’ clause was inserted into the Act, allowing the Community radio Because radio broadcast- W Secretary of State to block any deals which might ing is the cheapest form of mass communication, be judged to compromise plurality. See british it lends itself to ‘grass roots’ use by communities media industry group; commanders of of interest – geographical, cultural, political. Its XYZ the social order; regulatory favours. potential is to be run by and for local communi- Communications conglomerates See ties, special interests and followings. Th e devel- conglomerates: media conglomerates. opment of local radio in the UK has made some Communications Decency Act (US) Law progress towards the community ideal, but full passed overwhelmingly by the US Congress independence in terms of appointments, policy,

53 Compassion fatigue

fi nancing, programming, etc. remains at levels voices, on the grounds of possible interference other than the local. with high-power transmission. Th ough the term ‘community radio’ was prob- As internet services have expanded, so has ably fi rst used in the UK by Rachel Powell in a interest in, and development of, web-radio, often pamphlet Possibilities for Local Radio (Centre referred to as ‘web-casting’. Both public and for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University private radio broadcasters already make available of Birmingham, December 1965), the idea goes programmes on the Web, but the opportunities as far back as the beveridge report, 1950, for individuals, groups and communities to off er which proposed the use of VHF frequencies to alternative broadcasting services through the ‘establish local radio stations with independent Net have burgeoned worldwide. programmes of their own. How large a scope Web-radio draws benefit from low start-up there would be in Britain for local stations costs and relatively cheap equipment, as illus- broadcasting programmes controlled by Univer- trated by Groovera (formerly OverXposure sities or Local Authorities or public service FM) of Seattle, US, where Tim Quigley webcast organizations is not known, but the experiment programmes from his sitting room from 2003. of setting up some local stations should be tried Paris-based Deezer claims over 4m users, while without delay’. Whole Wheat Radio (WWR) of Talkeetna, In 1962 the pilkington report recom- Alaska, off ers 24-hours-a-day music run by an mended that the BBC provide ‘local sound all-volunteer community. broadcasting’ on the basis of ‘one service in Former London pirate radio Rinse FM received some 250 localities’, stations having a typical its broadcasting licence in June 2010, while Forge range of 5 miles. Th e 1971 government White Radio (formerly Sure Radio) broadcasts in term- Paper launched commercial radio, but radio time at Sheffi eld University. Cost and increased broadcasting through the next decades was to competition prove constant hazards, as the Isle remain under the duopoly of the BBC and the of Wight station, Wight FM, found in 2009 – Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA). starting up on 1 February and closing down in Pressure to produce a ‘third’ force in broad- December of the same year. See dab: digital casting in the UK, to consist of highly individual audio broadcasting; podcast; radio and genuinely local stations, grew in the 1980s. ‘shock jocks’; streaming; youtube. Throughout the country, groups dedicated to Compassion fatigue Media reportage of world the furtherance of community radio multiplied, suff ering risks aff ecting mass media audiences providing information, exerting pressure at in unintended ways, often prompting resistance national and local levels. Th e question that needs rather than empathy. Th e news becomes too to be asked in identifying and characterizing much to bear, causing what is termed compas- community radio is whether, as well as aiming to sion fatigue. Susan D. Moeller in Compassion serve the perceived interests of the community, Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, that radio is also run by the community. War and Death (Routledge, 1999) defi nes it as Th ough the most familiar model is generally a ‘defence mechanism against the knowledge associated with public service broadcast- of horror’. Moeller is highly critical of what she ing (psb) initiatives, variations on community terms ‘formulaic coverage’ of world disasters radio are to be found throughout the world, which, in American reporting, suff ers what she particularly in the United States. Here, in sees as Americanization of events (see event: January 2000, the Federal Communications americanization of). Commission (FCC) approved the use of Low Ultimately, Moeller argues, the fault lies in Power FM (LPFM) or micro-radio services piecemeal, often haphazard, selective and poten- that would be used for community-orientated tially hysterical media coverage of foreign news: programming, to serve schools, civic clubs, state ‘Compassion fatigue, and even more clearly, and local governments, churches and other non- compassion avoidance are signals that the cover- profi t-making organizations. age of international aff airs must change.’ Th at, However, the fullscale development of this she asserts, means a need for ‘great reporters, microcasting met with the obstacle of vested producers and editors’ and a will ‘to invest in interest as represented by corporate radio. Th e such an un-sexy news beat as international National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), aff airs’. She urges that events beyond our shores working on behalf of the commercial sector, should be reported ‘day in day out, year in year pressurized Congress for legislation that had out’; in short, ‘to get back to the business of the eff ect of eliminating the majority of the new reporting all the news, all the time’. See coups

54 Computing: cloud computing

and earthquakes syndrome. ical Engine. Babbage was assisted by Augusta A Competence In linguistics, a term used to Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1842), describe a person’s knowledge of his/her own daughter of Lord Byron, whose expertise quali- B language, its system of rules; his/her compe- fi ed her to be called the fi rst female computer tence in understanding an unlimited number of programmer. In her honour the US Defence sentences, in spotting grammatical errors, etc. Department named a programming language C Compliance See anticipatory compliance. after her – ADA – in the 1980s. Compliance, climate of See kuuki. The story of the computer comprises the D Compliance, identifi cation and internaliza- diversifi cation of its uses, the speed of its operation See internalization. tion and the progressive reduction of its size, Complicity of users Term employed by Cees from mainframe to desktop, to laptop to palm- E J. Hamelink to describe the reluctance of audi- top. Events boosted progress, in particular the ences to be told the truth about crises – particu- Second World War (1939–45); the Z3 computer F larly war situations, but also in cases concerning developed by Konrad Zuse was used to design

government and corporate matters. In ‘Ethics airplanes and missiles while Colossus, Britain’s G for media users’ published in the European code-breaking computer, was specifically Journal of Communication, December 1995, designed to decipher German war communica- Hamelink cites ﬁ ndings that indicated nearly 8 tions. H out of 10 Americans supporting restrictions on Technical specifications improved perfor- information imposed by the Pentagon, while 6 mance and reduced size rapidly, vacuum tubes I out of 10 said they believed the military should and resisters giving way to transistors, and once

have exercised greater censorship. ‘The [1st components could be fi tted on to single chips JK Gulf] war demonstrated that offi cial censorship, – semiconductors – programming advanced journalistic self-censorship and the users’ refusal dramatically. The Intel chip of 1971 proved a to be informed reinforced each other.’ Hamelink landmark in computer design at a period when L goes on, ‘Th e complicity of users was an essen- diversification of computer functions was tial component in the reduction of freedom of matched by growing public interest. M media performance.’ See news management Soon the computer was central to the opera- in times of war. tion of practically every aspect of modern life, N Compression technology A key science in from defence to building-design, typesetting to the Age of Information, in particular the era of criminal investigation, satellite communication digitization: the more data becomes available, to the automobile industry, fi lming to fashion, O the broader the available bandwidth, the greater electronic voting and gaming to word process- the requirement to compress information, to ing and traffi c control. A key expansion was the P compact data for transmission. See broadband. microprocessor making possible the introduc- Computer Name derives from the French, tion by the IBM company in 1981 of the first R computer, to calculate and the Latin, putare, personal computer, followed three years later by to think, determine by number. Th e computer a global rival, the apple macintosh. is a general-purpose information processor, its Networking of computers followed, using S origin reaching back over a thousand years to telephone lines or Local Area Networks (LAMs) the abacus. It then progressed via the Pascaline, and, for better or worse, the e-mail. Soon the T a numerical wheel calculator, invented by French computer was to lead us into the Digital Age – philosopher (then a teenager), Baise Pascall one of breathtaking new developments, many U (1623–62). This was improved by a German amazing, some worrying; an age, of course, mathematician named Gottfried Willem touched upon throughout this dictionary. von Leibnitz (1646–1716), who extended the ▶ To follow the story of the computer in the late V machine’s capacity for addition to multiplication. twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries, see the thorough and readable account by Paul A. Friebeger By general consent, the true father of the W computer was English professor and mathemati- and Michael R. Swaine in the online Encyclopaedia cian Charles Babbage (1791–1871). In 1822 he Britannica, or the entry ‘Computers: history and XYZ introduced the concept of a steam-powered development’ in the Jones Telecommunications and Diff erence Engine, as he called it. It was – in Multimedia Encyclopaedia; also, for a detailed tech- theory, for the machine was never built – the fi rst nical analysis, Wikipedia. automated computer with a stored program; its Computing: cloud computing internet purpose was to perform diff erential equations. computing system in which sources are shared Th is was followed a decade later with the Analyt- in similar ways to an electricity grid, with key

55 Conative function of communication

providers such as google, amazon, yahoo! gies built around “synergies” which exploit the and microsoft. Works by customers renting overlaps between the company’s diff erent media usage from a third-party provider. Th e system interests.’ (See also Curran, ed., Media and Soci- attracts in particular small and medium business ety, 5th edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2010). enterprises (SMEs) which on their own might be A communications conglomerate is an unable or reluctant to invest in capital expendi- amalgam of corporations such as Sony, Disney, ture in traditional IT. Users are billed, or charged Time Warner, Bertelsmann and News Corpora- through subscription, only for what they use. tion (see news corp) which operate mainly or Conative function of communication See wholly with communications or leisure interests jakobson’s model of communication, 1958. and function globally. Signifi cant sectors of the Concurrence-seeking tendency See groups, communications industry are part of general groupthink conglomerates whose main business concerns Confederates See slider. are outside the communications fi eld. Confirmation/disconfirmation Through Th e mass media can be seen as related to the communication with others we gain feedback industrial system in two ways: fi rst, they are part on our self-concept. Several authors, among of it as large-scale buyers and sellers and makers them Gail and Michele Myers in Th e Dynamics of profi t; second, they are preachers of its (indus- of Human Communication (McGraw-Hill, 1985), try’s) messages (see media imperialism). use the terms confi rmation and disconfi rmation Th e concentration of ownership, the increased to describe the kind of messages about yourself potential for power which it facilitates, and the and your view of the world you may receive in interrelationship between the communications feedback. Confi rming responses tend to confi rm industry and other industrial and commercial or validate the view of yourself you have put interests constitute important areas of current forward and/or the views you have expressed in media research; in particular the focus of conversation. Examples of confi rming responses attention is on the role of conglomerates in the include direct acknowledgment of your message, world of the internet. Considering that in the agreement with the content of your message and UK alone Net advertising has been estimated expression of positive feelings about you. (in 2010) to be worth in excess of 100 billion, Disconfirming responses are likely to leave corporate ownership and control is a hot issue you feeling confused, dissatisfied, and maybe of the day. undermined. Th ey are not clear expressions of What big business is uneasy about is the Net either approval or rejection; they are ambiguous. allowing free use of online content, a worry Such responses include the impervious response which in 2010 decided Rupert Murdoch’s News when the receiver gives no acknowledgment of International to introduce charges for the online your message; the interrupting response when services of its fl agship newspaper, Th e Times. See the receiver does not let you fi nish your message; agenda-setting; berlusconi phenomenon; and the incongruous response when the receiver’s blogosphere; communications act (uk), non-verbal response is clearly contrary to the 2003; globalization (and the media); verbal response he/she is making; for example, global media system: the main players; when a fi xed smile accompanies words of praise. mobilization; murdoch effect; network Conglomerates: media conglomerates Th e neutrality; world trade organization increasing cost of entering the media market has, (wto) telecommunications agreement, in part, fostered a concentration of ownership 1997. See also topic guide under media: in the various sectors of the communications ownership & control. industry. Peter Golding and Graham Murdock ▶ Tim Wu, Th e Master Switch: Th e Rise and Fall of in an article entitled ‘Culture, communications Information Empires (Knopf/Atlantic, 2010). and political economy’ in Mass Media and Connotation Roland Barthes’ second order of Society (Arnold, 1996), edited by James Curran signification in the transmission of messages. and Michael Gurevitch, write, ‘The rise of Th e second order comprises connotation and communications conglomerates adds a new myth. Denotation, the fi rst order of signifi cation, element to the old debate about the potential is simply a process of identifi cation. Th e word abuses of owner power. It is no longer a simple ‘green’ represents a colour; but green, at a higher case of proprietors intervening in editorial deci- level, can connote the countryside, permission sions or fi ring key personnel who fall foul of their to go ahead, the Irish, etc. Connotation is the act political philosophies. Cultural production is of adding information, insight, angle, coloura- also strongly infl uenced by commercial strate- tion, value – meaning, in fact, to denotation.

56 Consent, manufacture of

▶ Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paladin, 1973). as the Arab-Israeli conﬂ ict, or with regard to A Consensus Th at which is generally agreed; an Central American politics, is rigorously commit- area or basis of shared agreement among the ted to one side or the other, alternative options B majority. Th ree elements crucial to the function which the public might be interested in consid- of consensus are: common acceptance of laws, ering, are declared out of bounds – through what rules and norms; attachment to the institutions Chomsky describes as ‘suppression, falsiﬁ cation, C which promulgate these laws, rules and norms; and Orwellian manipulation’. and a widespread sense of identity or unity, of Th e process of consent manufacture is most D similar or identical outlook. Th e opposite term comprehensively analysed in Manufacturing is dissensus. Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass The elements of consensus obviously vary Media (Pantheon, 1988; Vantage paperback, E independently, yet the strength of any one helps 1994) by Edward S. Herman and Chomsky. to strengthen the others. Consensus, states the They pose a model of propaganda, and that F International Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences propaganda issues from the media on behalf of

(ed. D.L. Sills; Macmillan and Free Press, 1968), the interests of the power elite in any society. G ‘operates to restrict the extension of dissensus Essentially this is a gatekeeping model in the and to limit conﬂ ict ...’. Beliefs about consensus sense that the media select and shape material ‘usually concern the rightness and the qualiﬁ ca- that aligns with the interests and values of H tions of those in authority to exercise it’ and those who exercise control; in turn, the media thus relate to the legitimacy of institutions, censor material which may run counter to those I accepted standards and practices, and dominant interests and values.

principles. Because the media are largely owned, JK Such beliefs tend to affi rm existing patterns controlled and run by institutions, it follows that of the distribution of authority. Consensus, the media ‘toe the line’ with the ideologies therefore, is largely defi ned by those who have of those institutions and those who run them. L the power and the means to disseminate their Herman and Chomsky argue that the propa- definition; and the definition is employed as ganda model describes ‘the forces that cause M a means of acknowledging and reinforcing the the mass media to play a propaganda role’ and legitimacy of the powerful. Equally important assert that ‘the workings of the media … serve N in this context is the close affi nity of outlook to mobilize support for the special interests that of the central cultural system with the central dominate the state and private activity’. institutional system. Stuart Hood in Hood on Leaders of the media ‘claim that their news O Television (Pluto, 1980) says, ‘It is the essence choices rest on unbiased professional and of the idea of consensus that it attempts, at a objective criteria, and they have support for the P conscious and unconscious level, to impose the contention within the intellectual community. If, view that there is only one “right” reading. Th is however, the powerful are able to fi x the premises R assumption derives from the view that we – that of discourse, to decide what the general populace is the audience and the broadcaster – are united is allowed, to see, hear, and think about, and to in one nation in spite of class or political defi ni- “manage” public opinion by regular propaganda S tion.’ See cultural apparatus; hegemony; campaigns, the standard view of how the system impartiality; newcomb’s abx model of works is at serious odds with reality’. T communication, 1953. Herman and Chomsky refer to fi ve intercon- Consent, manufacture of Noam Chomsky has necting fi lters in the processing of mass commu- U defi ned the manufacture of consent as a complex nication news which serve to regulate and process whereby powerful interests inside constrain. Th ese are: (1) ‘the size, concentrated democracies such as the US and the UK create ownership, owner wealth and profi t orientation V in the public mind patterns of acceptance. In an of the dominant media fi rms; (2) advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; article written for Index on Censorship, 1 (1987) W entitled ‘No anti-Israeli vendetta’, Chomsky (3) the reliance of the media on information refers to ‘devices of thought control’ in demo- provided by government, business, and “experts” cratic societies ‘which are more pertinent for us funded and approved by these primary sources XYZ than the crude methods of totalitarian states’. and agents of power; (4) “fl ak” as a means of The devices arise from such aspects of the disciplining the media [see flak]; and (5) “anti- media process as control over resources and the communism” as a national religion and control locus of decision-making in the state and private mechanism’. Such fi lters ‘interact and reinforce economy. Where state policy on an issue such one another’.

57 Consistency

The authors are of the view that the media Consonance, hypothesis of See news values. constitute an ideological apparatus for the elite Conspiracy of silence The tacit agreement (see ideological apparatuses), but their among those with significant information to theory has incurred both criticism and the ‘keep mum’ about it – say nothing. An early use occasional academic cold shoulder – arguably of the phrase is ascribed to the head of BBC News for the reason that certain truths, while being in 1938 at the time of the Munich crisis, refer- self-evident, are too uncomfortable to accept. ring to the Corporation’s failure to broadcast Th e manufacture of consent becomes particu- any close examination of Neville Chamberlain’s larly imperative in times of crisis. Following the policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and New York’s See censorship; noelle-neumann’s spiral Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 (9/11), public of silence model of public opinion, 1974. consent to the war in Afghanistan, while needing Conspiracy theory Not so much a theory, more little coaxing from a shocked nation, neverthe- a hunch or suspicion. As far as the media are less progressed in part as a result of the denial concerned, the ‘conspiracy’ relates – in the view of opportunities for critics to suggest alternative of those who claim it exists – to the practice responses. of manipulating messages in order to support William Blum points out in Rogue State: A those who own the means of communication, Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Zed their social class (i.e. middle and upper) and Books, 2002), ‘Many critics of the bombing their interests. Th e conspiracy theorists argue campaign, who were in vulnerable positions, that in a capitalist society where the media are suff ered consequences: a number of university owned or strongly infl uenced by the capitalist teachers who had spoken out against the war establishment, information is shaped to lost their positions or were publicly rebuked by underpin existing social, economic and political school offi cials … the only members of Congress conditions (see consent, manufacture of). who voted against the “Authorization for Use of In his introduction to the glasgow Military Force” received innumerable threats university media group publication Bad and hate mail …’ News (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), Richard A similar scenario played out when Ameri- Hoggart ventures to locate two levels or forms can (and British) forces invaded Iraq in 2003. of conspiracy theory, High and Low – the one Support for the war and occupation was almost aligning with the Marxist view of media opera- universal in the US, and critics were accused of tion; the other with the generality of people who being unpatriotic. By 2005, however, both media at some time or another suspect that the media and public support began to slip as the deaths in project the interests and value systems of those Iraq and Afghanistan of American servicemen who own, control or run them. See hegemony. and women increased: sooner or later the manu- Contiguity See yaros’ ‘pick’ model for facture of consent bends to the force of evidence. multimedia news, 2009. Th e process thus enters a new phase, usually by Constituency Term generally applied to an shifting the grounds of justifi cation: what was to electoral area which returns a parliamentary be a swift war is now to be a long-haul. candidate, but it is also used by researchers to With the the multiplication of information refer to the readership of a newspaper, and sources brought about by the Internet, and the carries with it the implication that the reader’s opportunities networking off ers for audiences to political views may be infl uenced by the paper’s express their own opinions (see blogosphere; coverage of events. Th e notion of audience as mobilization), some commentators have constituency was particularly prevalent in the predicted a lessening of the power of mass media age of press barons such as – in the UK – Lords to cultivate consent, if only because people are so Northcliff e, Rothermere and Beaverbrook, who busy surfi ng the Net that mass media messaging claimed access to political decision-making on is increasingly ignored. See agenda-setting; the strength of the constituency of their papers’ demotic turn; digital optimism; discourse; readership. hegemony; journalism: citizen journal- Consumerization Describes a vision of contem- ism; news management in times of war. porary life dominated by the marketplace and See also topic guide under media: politics & prompting fears that, with the global advance of economics; media: values & ideology. transnational corporations, and their substantial Consistency See cognitive consistency buying-in to media and culture generally, theories; effects of the mass media; society has become one-dimensionalized – the frequency; intensity. consumer dimension.

58 Contagion eff ect

Some commentators see consumption as being eties. See mcdonaldization; technology: A a modern substitute for religion – spending as a the consumerization of technology. substitute for praying – while the cathedrals of ▶ Jeff Hearn and Sasha Roseneil, eds, Consuming B today are shopping malls. Big business spon- Cultures: Power and Resistance (Macmillan, 1999); sors art and thereby brings it under the wing Peter N. Stearns, Consumerization in World History: of consumer criteria – is there a market for it, The Global Transformation of Desire (Routledge, C and will it directly or indirectly make a proﬁ t? 2001); Paul Ransome, Work, Consumption and

Big business also sponsors schools and thus is in Culture (Sage, 2005). D at least a pole-position to appropriate education Consumer sovereignty A phrase used in the itself. Peacock Report, 1985, summarizing the attitude American writer Herbert J. Schiller, until towards broadcasting of the Committee on E his death in 2000, proved himself a scourge of Financing the BBC. The Committee took the corporate intrusions into the life of communi- market-place view that the customer knows best F ties. In Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover and that consumer tastes should be the guiding of Public Expression (Oxford University Press, principle of radio and television program- G 1989), Schiller believed that ‘the Corporate voice, ming. See public service broadcasting not surprisingly, is the loudest in the land’ and (psb). it also rings around the world. He was of the Consumption behaviour Term used by H view that consumerism ‘as it is propagated by researchers to describe the ways in which audi- the transnational corporate system and carried ences respond to product marketing – attitudes I to the four corners of the world by new informa- towards advertising, knowledge of commer- tion age technologies, now seems triumphant’. cials and people’s buying behaviour. At the nub JK He talked of ‘corporate pillaging of the national of market research into consumption behaviour information supply’ and the ‘proprietory control is motivation. Why do people watch a TV of information’. commercial, what makes them pay attention and L Even the museum has ‘been enlisted as a heed the message? corporate instrument’: history is adopted for Regularly cited are three major reasons for a M corporate use through sponsorship. Th us even- positive audience response: (1) social utility – tually museums become reliant on corporate watching commercials in order to gain informa- N ‘approval’ of the past. Th e pressure upon them tion about the ‘social signifi cance’ of products or is to choose to record the kind of history that brands, and the association of advertising objects suits the corporate purpose. Corporate power in with social roles and lifestyles; (2) communica- O the fi eld of communication is so great, Schiller tion utility – watching in order to provide a argued, that the active-audience paradigm is basis for later interpersonal communication; P called into question: ‘A great emphasis is given (3) vicarious consumption – participating at to the “resistance”, “subversion”, and “empower- second-hand in desired lifestyles as a means of R ment” of the viewer. Where this resistance and indirect association with those people possess- subversion of the audience lead and what eff ects ing glamour or prestige. See vals typology. they have on the existing structure of power ▶ Martin Evans, Ahmed Jamal and Gordon Foxall, S remain a mystery.’ Consumer Behaviour (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). He expressed the view that ‘it is not a matter Contagion eff ect Power of the media to create a T of people being dupes, informational or cultural. craze or even an epidemic. Examples of this are It is that human beings are not equipped to the so-called Swastika Epidemic of 1959–60, in U deal with a pervasive disinformational system which an outbreak of swastika-daubing in the – administered from the command posts of US was accelerated by media coverage, and the social order – that assails the senses through all UK Mods v. Rockers seaside battles of the 1960s. V cultural forms and channels’. Debate continues as to whether media cover- Schiller’s theme is echoed in the work of the age ‘worsens’ or prompts the street riots, often W French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whose named Copycat Riots. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures Stanley Cohen in ‘Sensitization: the case of the made its fi rst appearance in English – translated Mods and Rockers’ in Th e Manufacture of News XYZ by Chris Turner and published by Sage – in (Constable, 1st edition, 1973), edited by Cohen 1998. A question engaging twenty-fi rst-century and Jock Young, writes, ‘Constant repetition commentators is the extent to which the digital of the warring gangs’ image ... had the eff ect of age of the internet has seen challenges to giving these loose collections a structure they corporate ambitions to consumerize world soci- never possessed and a mythology with which

59 Content analysis

to justify the structure’, and the court scenes at different nations; or by comparing media which those arrested by the police were tried content with some explicit set of standards or were ‘arenas for acting out society’s morality abstract categories. On the basis of the existing plays’. body of quantitative and qualitative research, In relation to ‘loose connections’ being given a several broad generalizations may be hazarded ‘structure’, claims have been made by commenta- about the content of mass communication: tors in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist assault what is communicated by the mass media is on New York’s twin towers, that the directing of a highly selected sample of all that is avail- attention to Al-Qaeda had a similar contagion able for communication; what is received and eff ect: even though there was very little evidence consumed by the potential audience is a highly that Al-Qaeda was a worldwide organization, selected sample of all that is communicated; treating it as such has been in danger of becom- more of what is communicated is classifi able as ing a self-fulfilling prophecy. See empow- entertaining rather than informative or educa- erment; moral panics and the media. tive, and, because the mass media are aimed at Content analysis David Deacon, Michael the largest possible audience, most material is Pickering, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock simple in form and uncomplicated in content. in Researching Communications: A Practical See audience measurement; ethnographic Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural Analy- (approach to audience measurement); sis (Hodder Education, 2007) note that, ‘The glasgow university media group. See also purpose of content analysis is to quantify salient topic guide under research methods. and manifest features of a large number of texts, Control group In comparative research meth- and the statistics are used to make broader ods, the group against which the behaviour inferences about the processes and politics of of the experimental group is measured. The representation.’ Content analysis thus seeks experimental group is exposed to the variable to to compare material as presented in diff ering be tested and the control group is not. So, to take sources in order to identify any patterns or trends an example of a possible experiment: in attempt- in coverage or representation. Typical sources ing to ascertain the infl uence of a celebrity on include newspapers, magazines, websites, adver- the audience’s willingness to be persuaded by an tisements, and television programmes. argument, the experimental group might hear Th e media content is compared using stan- the argument from a well-known celebrity and dards or categories. For example, a researcher the control group might hear the argument from may seek to discover diff erences in the coverage an unidentifi ed source. Th e groups could then be given to fi nancial matters between UK tabloid tested for their attitude towards the argument and broadsheet newspapers during the week in and these could be compared to the results of the which the spring Budget is announced. Examples prior testing of their positions on this argument. of categories that might be used are the number Eff orts would be made in forming the composi- of column inches devoted to coverage, and the tion of the groups to reduce the infl uence of any number of negative terms and positive terms other signifi cant variables – for example, prior employed in the coverage. knowledge of the topic under discussion. Th us, Deacon et al argue that as a quantitative in the case of audience measurement, the method, content analysis is best used to capture test group is exposed to a TV programme, for the broad ‘big picture’ and manifest levels of example, and their responses analysed against meaning. It is not that suitable for exploring identical monitoring of the control group who implicit or latent levels of meaning, so it is often have not seen the programme. combined with other research methods such as Control of the media See media control. interviews or focus groups to provide a more Conventions Established practices within a rounded and in-depth analysis. So, using the particular culture or sub-culture. Conven- above example of coverage of the budget, whilst tions are identifi able in every form of communi- content analysis may tell us the number of posi- cation and behaviour – some strict, like rules of tive and negative terms used by broadsheet and grammar; others open to wider application, such tabloid newspapers, focus group discussions with as dress. Conventions are largely culture-specifi c samples of readers might be able to tell us how and context-specifi c. It is an accepted convention the readers interpret and react to such terms. that a candidate dress smartly for a job interview, Content analysis serves an important function yet it would be deemed unconventional if he/she by comparing the same material as presented appeared on the beach clad in the same manner. in diff erent media within a nation, or between Media practices have established many

60 Core nations, peripheral nations

conventions which have become so familiar Moreover, the flow of cultural artefacts is A that they appear ‘the natural way to do things’. arguably more complex than is suggested by the television news holds to the convention of cultural or media imperialism thesis. A number B having on-screen newsreaders; documentaries of theorists point to the essential heterogeneity generally hold to the convention of having a of culture(s) and argue consequently that it is voice-over narration. Innovators – for example unlikely that cultural convergence would occur. C in the arts –break with convention. Th e shock See cyberspace; digitization; mobiliza- of the new often stirs among the conventional tion; new media. See also topic guide under D a sense of aﬀ ronted values. Th e chances of the media: processes & production. new becoming conventionalized will depend on ▶ Michael Kackman et al, Flow TV: Television in the E various factors, such as opinion leaders, preva- Age of Media Convergence (Routledge, 2011). lent tastes and fashions, even newsworthiness. Conversational styles In a study of conversa- See leadership; redundancy. tion among friends at dinner, entitled Conver- F Convergence Th e coming-together of commu- sational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends

nication devices and processes; a major feature (Ablex, 1984), Deborah Tannen identifies G of the development of media technology in diﬀ erent conversational styles which she terms the 1990s onwards. In Of Media and People ‘High Considerateness’ and ‘High Involvement’. (Sage, 1992), Everette E. Dennis writes of forms Each style has different priorities. The ‘High H converging ‘into a single electronically based, Considerateness’ style places a premium on computer-driven mode that has been described being considerate of others in conversation, of I as the nearly universal integration of systems not interrupting, of listening to what someone is

that retrieve, process, and store text, data, saying. Th e ‘High Involvement’ style on the other JK sound, and image’; in short, multi-media. Dennis hand is characterized by enthusiastic involve- points out that convergence is far more than ‘the ment in a conversation, and this may be at the stuff of hardware and software: it is the driving expense of giving suffi cient space to others. L force that has spurred major change in the media One style is not necessarily better than the industries and almost everywhere else’. other, but often refl ects cultural diff erences; for M Convergence has operated at the technical and example, in her study, the Briton was the most operational level and at the level of ownership considerate of all. However, this categorization N and control. Just as individual items of hard and can help explain problems in interpersonal software have been centralized into one multi- communication. To the highly considerate media outfit, so media production has been speaker the highly involved speaker may seem an O centralized into fewer corporate hands, most of exhibitionist, whilst the highly involved speaker these transnational. may perceive the highly considerate speaker as P A further question is whether technical and aloof or distant. operational convergence will lead to transcul- Co-orientation approach See mccombs and R tural convergence and extend the reach of what shaw’s agenda-setting model of media some would see as the already well-established effects, 1976. strategy of cultural and media imperialism. For Copycat eff ect See contagion effect. S those who support this thesis, globalization Copyrighting culture See culture: copy- fosters homogeneity and works in the interests righting culture. T of Western – chiefly American – cultural Core nations, peripheral nations Cees dominance, whilst undermining the indigenous Hamelink makes this differentiation with U cultures of the less-powerful receivers of such regard to the distribution of information in and artefacts. between nations in ‘Information imbalance: However, such a view is seen by others as core and periphery’ in Questioning Th e Media: V underestimating the degree to which those who A Critical Introduction (Sage, 1990), edited by receive such artefacts adapt them in the process John Downing, Ali Mohammadi and Annabelle W of absorbing them into the host culture. The Sreberny-Mohammadi. Hamelink argues resultant blend may limit the degree of conver- that the transnational picture of information gence. It should also be noted that artefacts distribution is one of imbalances between core XYZ destined for a wide market are often tailored – usually industrial – nations such as the US, to take account of differentiation within the Canada, Western Europe, Japan and Australia market, and in this process characteristics of the and the economic periphery, predominantly diff ering host cultures may be considered in the rural countries such as Africa, parts of Asia and construction of the artefact. Latin America.

61 Corporate speech

Peripheral countries, in comparison with core belong to diff erent social systems or sub-systems nations, possess fewer newspapers, broadcast- is referred to as cosmopolite. Localite channels are ing stations and telephones, and less computer those in which both sender and receiver belong to hardware. Hamelink believes that ‘information the same social system or sub-system. imbalance ... undermines cultural self-determi- Cosmopoliteness In most social structures there nation’. A number of critical questions arise from are individuals who have considerable awareness this situation. Might, for example, imbalances of other social situations and frequent contact be resolved through greater integration – links with those outside their own social structure. In – between core and peripheral nation systems? general the more cosmopolite an individual, the Should peripheral nations bargain for ‘fairer more receptive he/she is to messages containing schemes and terms of trade, for cheaper transfers new ideas. of technology’ by pooling resources and energy? Couch potato US term for a confi rmed and dedi- Or, more radically, should the peripherals disso- cated TV viewer. 20th Century Words (Oxford ciate themselves – de-link – from international University Press, 1999), edited by John Ayto, networks that hamper development? says that the term was fi rst used in 1979, its ‘neat Collective eff ort across the periphery, argues encapsulation of vacuous indolence’ ensuring ‘its Hamelink, ‘in itself requires the solving of many success in the censorious 1980s’. old and difficult conflicts among the poorer Counter-culture A type of sub-culture fi rmly countries themselves’. In addition it requires ‘a antagonistic to the dominant or prevailing visionary leadership willing to forego the imme- culture of a community. Th e term is generally diate benefi ts of links with the core’. See infor- used to describe the collection of mainly middle- mation gaps; yamousoukrou declaration. class youth cultures which developed in the ▶ Jan van Dijk, Th e Deepening Divide: Inequality in 1960s, and whose central feature was the call for the Information Society (Sage, 2005). the adoption of alternative social structures and Corporate speech Best defi ned in a US context: lifestyles. In ‘Sub cultures, cultures and class’, that speech which is employed in the public John Clarke and others in Resistance Th rough domain by corporations, most obviously in Rituals (Hutchinson, 1976), edited by Stuart terms of advertising, but applicable to a Hall and Tony Jefferson, explore some of the whole host of discourses in which industry and distinguishing features of such a counter-culture commerce address the public. Corporate speech as compared with other types of youth sub- in the US is classifi ed as having the same right as cultures. Its opposition to the dominant cultures the speech of individuals, and is thus protected took very open political and ideological forms, by the First Amendment of the US Constitu- and went beyond the registering of complaint tion that guarantees freedom of speech. Th us, and resistance to the elaborate construction of a tobacco company cannot be restrained from alternative institutions. propagandizing, through public advertisement, More recently, examples of counter-cultural its products. In such a case, corporate speech protests that have received significant media could be deemed life-threatening. attention are those surrounding ecological issues Even taxes on advertising have been fought – protests which challenge many of the envi- against by corporations. An attempt to impose ronmental assumptions and values of Western an advertising tax by the State of Florida in 1987 societies. ‘Eco-warriors’, as the more radical of was repealed within six months, due to corpo- the protesters are sometimes called, may adopt rate pressure. According to Herbert I. Schiller in a radically diff erent lifestyle based on the prin- Culture, Inc.: Th e Corporate Takeover of Public ciples underpinning their protest. Expression (Oxford University Press, 1989), A favoured communications device of corporations use the First Amendment to do contemporary counter-cultures is the internet, two things: protect their profi ts, and duck social its global reach aiding the international nature of accountability. protests concerning corporate and state threats Corporations and media See conglomer- to the environment. Through the Net, the ates: media conglomerates; consumeriza- likeminded can bond, plan and organize – most tion; culture: consumer culture; culture: famously focusing on protests wherever the globalization of; network neutrality; nations of the World Trade Organization meet privatization. See also topic guide under – and, by their collective protests, command media institutions. global media attention. Cosmopolite and localite channels Th e situa- Countermodernization See culture: tion in which the sender and receiver of a message globalization of.

62 Critical news analysis

Coups and earthquakes syndrome Term they may be committed by the central criminals. A coined by American journalist Mort Rosen- Contextual crimes may also be unrelated to blum to describe the Western attitude to news the McGuffi n, the primary crime, ‘but portray B emanating from developing nations in, for aspects of the wider society’. example, Africa and South America. For events Chief among McGuffins, say Allen, Living- in such countries to be deemed of news value stone and Reiner, is homicide, 48 per cent of C they must come under the category of ‘coups and their sample fi lms having a homicide McGuffi n earthquakes’ – the overthrow of governments – contrasting substantially with crime fi gures D by force or natural disasters. Rosenblum wrote in the real world, where 90 per cent of recorded Coups and Earthquakes (Harper & Row) in 1979, off ences are property crimes. Th e authors note but current practice seems not to have improved. an increase in contextual crimes during the E Referring to the ‘coups and earthquakes’ 1960s: ‘Th is is signifi cant because it is contextual syndrome, Mark D. Alleyne in News Revolution: crime perhaps even more than the McGuffin F Political and Economic Decisions about Global which creates a sense of society as a whole being

Information (Macmillan, 1997) writes, ‘It some- threatened by crime.’ G times seems that there is a malicious attempt Th is trend is linked to the ‘increasing predomi- to stereotype these countries, and this attitude nance of police heroes rather than amateur might be propelled by various factors, including “sleuths”’; ‘towards an increasingly graphic H racism, political idealogy and ethnocentrism.’ representation of violence in the portrayal of Alleyne believes that ‘in this way, international crime’; the degree to which crime traumatizes the I news can be seen as a weapon of those with victim; and the perception that crime has social

power in the international system, a tool to origins. In their analysis, the authors emphasize JK maintain the status quo, at least in regard to the complexity of the representation of crime in the inferior status of some peoples and nation- contexts of the ‘collapse of moral certainties’ in states’. society, the dominance of Hollywood, the retreat L The key problem lies with prevailing news from strict forms of censorship and the demo- values, for the defi nition of news ‘controls the graphic nature of audience – largely made up of M way in which journalists decide what is impor- young people. tant’. At the same time ‘journalists often use Crimes of self-publicity See terrorism as N vague, shorthand terms to describe complex communication. issues and regions’. See compassion fatigue. Crisis defi nition How do we know when a crisis Creole See communication: intercultural is a crisis? One answer is – when the media O communication. tell us it is a crisis. Th eir capacity for agenda- Crime: types of crime on screen A number setting, of selecting the front-page headlines P of types of on-screen crime are identified by or the lead stories, can not only crystallize the Jessica Allen, Sonia Livingstone and Robert notion of crisis in the public mind but also in R Reiner in an article entitled ‘True lies: changing some cases help precipitate one, at least in the images of crime in British postwar cinema’ in sense that people in authority – such as govern- the European Journal of Communication, March ments – can be forced into a crisis response to a S 1998. Th e authors surveyed 1,461 crime-related crisis stimulus. films released between 1945 and 1991, and Critical news analysis Generic term for a wide- T popular with the public, reporting that ‘contrary ranging and complex approach to the analysis to general beliefs about increased crime content of the presentation of news in the mass media. U of the media ... our data shows a constant rate Perhaps the most infl uential starting point in the of representation, at least in the cinema over 50 UK for this critical analysis is the book by Stanley years’. Cohen and Jock Young, eds, Th e Manufacture of V Th e authors discuss primary, consequential, News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass

collateral and contextual crimes. To the first Media (Constable, 1973). Th ey, along with other W – that which animates the narrative – they commentators of the time – such as Professor ascribe the term mcguffin, borrowed from fi lm Stuart Hall and colleagues at the University director Alfred Hitchcock, ‘to refer to the object of Birmingham, and research teams such as XYZ whose pursuit provides the driving force of the the glasgow university media group – narrative’. Consequential crimes are those which contributed to a developing awareness that the are committed in the course of, or in order to news is socially constructed and that it is both cover up, the McGuffi n, while collateral crimes a social and an ideological construct. In other are not directly related to the McGuffi n though words, news isn’t neutral. Critical news analysis

63 Cropping

focuses on content, presentation and language. communications act (uk), 2003. It is a Emphasizing the importance of the linguistic requirement that Ofcom report on the owner- assembly of messages in his book Language in ship-of-media situation every three years and to the News: Discourse and Ideology and the Press make recommendations to government. Usually (Routledge, 1991), Roger Fowler says that ‘there these shift in the direction of relaxing rules of are diff erent ways of saying the same thing, and ownership, and are based upon complex criteria they are not random, accidental alternatives’; concerning overlapping ownership, these oper- thus there can never be ‘a value-free reflec- ating in a context of technological change and tion of “facts”’. Two processes occur: selection mergers of ownership. (see agenda-setting; gatekeeping; news Differention is made between viewpoint values), followed by transformation according plurality and ownership plurality, the latter being to the dictates of the medium and the infl uences easier to defi ne than the former. Ofcom’s Review upon all the encoders involved. See hegemony; of Media Ownership Rules (2006) states that impartiality; journalism; sapir-whorf ‘ownership plurality does not necessarily ensure linguistic relativity hypothesis. editorial or viewpoint diversity. Whilst diversity Cropping Photographs for publication are rarely of ownership may have an eff ect on plurality, it printed exactly as they emerge from the original may also be the case that diff erent sources of negative or electronic transmission. They are news off er the same perspective’. very often ‘cropped’, that is cut to fulfi l certain Rules of media ownership (MO) in the US, for objectives: the space requirements of a page; to example, prevent any one individual or organiza- maximize impact; to serve aesthetic or ideologi- tion from owning more than one of the main TV cal criteria. Generally pictures are cropped to get networks: ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC. In Australia, rid of redundant detail that might detract from working on a ‘national interest principle’, foreign the central thrust and drama of the picture’s ownership is not permitted; this contrasts with message. See anchorage; preferred read- the situation in Finland and Luxemborg, where ing. there are no restrictions on foreign ownership. Cross-media ownership Th at is, where a press In Sweden, periodical publication owner- baron or corporation owns a range of media, ship is restricted to the European Economic newspapers, TV and radio stations within Area, while in Denmark, licences for regional what, in the US, are described as designated broadcasting are only granted if the majority market areas (DMAs). Resistance to cross-media of board members reside in the local area. All ownership acts on the principle that to own the of the above are subject to constant pressures press and broadcasting in any particular area for change as traditional media grapple with – city, district or region – constitutes a threat the challenges and opportunities brought to media diversity and hence to the plural- about by the Network Society. See privatiza- ity of the media; and such resistance has been tion; ofcom: office of communications incorporated in many countries in regulations (uk); regulatory favours. See also topic designed to prevent monopoly. guides under media: ownership & control; In contrast, the corporate position is that network society. regulation of cross-media ownership is an Cryptography Secret language; the transfer unnecessary inpediment to business practice of messages into secret codes. A cryptograph is and the making of profi ts. It follows that corpo- anything written in cypher. See data protec- rate owners of media seek deregulation by tion. pressurizing governments to abandon rules Cues See barnland’s transactional models (generally made in the public interest) in favour of communication. of the free market (generally operating to the Cultivation As used by US communications advantage of the corporations). analyst George Gerbner, the term describes The issue of cross-media ownership has the way the mass media system relates to the become a matter of profound concern, at least culture from which it grows, and which it among media-watchers if not the public, because addresses. The media ‘cultivate’ attitudes and it trails other critical issues, such as the mainte- values in a culture. For example, audiences nance of quality, the integrity and independence are cultivated into rejecting certain acts of of information; in short, the preservation of violence while at the same time being cultivated public service in the media. into accepting or tolerating others. See main- In the UK the job of regulating cross-media streaming. ownership rests with Ofcom, following the Cultural apparatus ‘Taken as a whole,’ writes

64 Cultural metaphor

C. Wright Mills in Power, Politics and People to be read as such by someone unfamiliar with A (Oxford University Press, 1963), ‘the cultural either. apparatus is the lens of mankind through which The notion of cultural capital is linked to B men see; the medium by which they interpret class, gender, ethnic identity and status, in and report what they see.’ It is composed of ‘all that some cultural capital is more highly valued the organizations and milieux in which artistic, than others by the dominant groups within a C intellectual and scientiﬁ c work goes on, and of society – and indeed possession of such cultural the means by which such work is made available capital is often widely taken as a sign of member- D to circles, publics and masses’. ship of these groups. There is among these The cultural apparatus features large in the groups a tendency to denigrate popular cultural processes of guiding experience, deﬁ ning social capital. Popular cultural capital on the other E truths, establishing standards of credibility, hand can be seen as a rich source of responses image-making and opinion-forming, and is to, including resistance to, social subordination. F ‘used by dominant institutional orders’. It confers See culture; highbrow; taste cultures;

prestige, and the ‘prestige of culture is among youth culture. G the major means by which powers of decision ▶ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Routledge, 1984) and are made to seem part of an unchallengeable Th e Field of Cultural Production (Polity Press, 1993). authority’. Cultural Indicators research project See H Wright Mills goes on to argue that, no matter mainstreaming. how internally free the ‘cultural workman’, as Cultural industry See frankfurt school of I he names the artist or intellectual, he/she is theorists. Cultural memory intrinsically part of the cultural apparatus which Th at which the community JK tends in every nation to become a ‘close adjunct recalls, re-encodes in a process of making sense of national authority and a leading agency of of the present. Cultural memory contrasts nationalist propaganda’. culture and authority with what has been termed instrumental or L overlap, and this overlap ‘may involve the ideo- electronic memory – that which can be numeri- logical use of cultural products and of cultural cally encoded and recorded, as on a computer. M workmen for the legitimation of power, and In Communication, Culture and Hegemony: the justifi cation of decisions and policies’. See From the Media to Mediation (Sage, 1993), N consensus; hegemony; ideological state Jesus Martin-Barbero writes, ‘In contrast to apparatuses. instrumental memory “cultural memory” does Cultural capital French philosopher Pierre not work with pure information or as a process O Bourdieu (1930–2002) makes the distinction of linear accumulation’; rather, it is ‘articulated between economic capital and cultural capital – through experience and events. Instead of simply P the latter being the knowledge, tastes, attitudes, accumulating, it fi lters and weighs’. values and assumptions which individuals or It is not, says Martin-Barbero, ‘a memory we R groups possess with regard to various cultural can use, but the memory of which we are made’. artefacts and endeavours, in particular those What threatens cultural memory infl icts damage of what might be termed legitimate culture – on culture itself, particularly in cultures where S though defi nitions of such legitimacy are open tensions exist, dramatically, between tradition to debate. An individual’s cultural capital clearly and progress. Says Martin-Barbero, a part of T may infl uence the way in which messages are whose book focuses on media development in encoded or decoded. Advertisers, for example, South American countries, ‘in the dilemma U often make assumptions about the cultural of choice between under development and capital of the target consumer groups when modernization, cultural memory does not count constructing advertising messages. and has no place’: a situation he and other schol- V A popular record of the late 1960s may be used ars of cultural change view with dismay. Cultural metaphor as the soundtrack in a television commercial not Generally an image, or a W just because of its musical merits, but because series of images, seen to represent a culture. Th e its location within a particular youth culture expression ‘An Englishman’s home is his castle’ may be felt to give the product connotational attempts to classify the English – perhaps even XYZ and ideological meanings related to the desire stereotype them – by means of a dominant image for freedom and independence. Th e messages or practice. In this case a number of character- may be read this way, though not necessarily istics are drawn together in the image of home accepted, by consumers familiar both with the as something to be defended as though it were song and with the youth culture, but is unlikely a castle – private, self-contained, constructed to

65 Cultural modes

be resistant to outside intrusions and infl uences. and aspirations in their own voice’. According to Martin J. Gannon and associates The exercise of ‘full citizenship’, Murdock in Understanding Global Cultures: Metaphori- argues, depends upon the media fulfi lling these cal Journeys Th rough 17 Countries (Sage, 1994), rights of information, experience, interpreta- the use of identifying metaphors can assist us tion and participation. See topic guide under in grasping the nature of our own and other media ethics; media issues & debates; cultures. The authors take the view that ‘the media: values & ideology; representation. dynamics of the culture of a particular nation Cultural racism See racism. can be best understood through the use of one Culture The sum of those characteristics that dominant metaphor that refl ects the basic values identify and diff erentiate human societies – a that all or most of its members accept without complex interweave of many factors. Th e culture question or conscious thought’. of a nation is made up of its language, history, Th ey cite the following metaphors that repre- traditions, climate, geography, arts, social, sent some of the cultures on their ‘metaphorical economic and political norms, and its system of journey’: American football (US), the dance of values; and such a nation’s size, its neighbours Shiva (India), the family altar (China), the opera and its current prosperity condition the nature (Italy), wine (France), lace (Belgium), ballet of its culture. (Russia), the symphony orchestra (Germany), the There are cultures within cultures. Thus bullfi ght (Spain), the kibbutz (Israel), the garden reference is made to working-class culture (Japan), the stuga or summer home (Sweden), or middle-class culture. Organizations and the market place (Nigeria) and the coff ee house institutions can have their own cultures (see (Turkey). For Ireland, home of the Blarney Stone, organization cultures). We refer to cultural the authors perhaps appropriately select as the epochs resulting from developments – social, country’s presiding metaphor, conversation. political, industrial, technological – that create Cultural modes Th e literate mode is rooted in cultural change. Mass production and the mass the written word; the oral mode is spoken or media have contributed immensely to cultural visual. Traditionally these have been aligned to change, giving rise to what critics have termed class diff erences; that is, the better-educated ‘mass culture’ and disapprovingly portrayed as upper-classes have lived by a literate mode of manufactured, manipulated, force-fed, marketed cultural interaction – the dominant culture like soap powder and, because of its unique – while the more ‘untutored’ classes have relied access to vast audiences, open to abuse of the upon oral modes. With the advent of electronic mass by the powerful. media the oral mode has become increasingly Alan Swingewood in The Myth of Mass assertive. It is essentially the mode of fi lm and Culture (Macmillan, 1977) argues, however, television, though both media still tend to be that there ‘is no mass culture, or mass society; run by a class educated in the literate mode and but there is an ideology of mass culture and whose perceptions are conditioned by such a mass society’. Th e ideology is real enough, but mode. the thing itself he describes as myth: ‘If culture Cultural or citizen rights and the media In is the means whereby man affi rms his humanity ‘Rights and representations: public discourse and his purposes and his aspirations to freedom and cultural citizenship’, in Television and and dignity then the concept and theory of mass Common Knowledge (Routledge, 1999), edited by culture are their denial and negation.’ J. Gripsrud, Graham Murdock poses the follow- Culture is transmitted through socializa- ing citizen rights – what citizens have the right tion to new members of a social group or to expect from the mass media: (1) the right to society. Th e media play an important role in this information; (2) the right to have access to ‘the process. A central concern of culturalist studies greatest possible diversity of representations of the media is the degree to which the media’s of personal and social experience’; (3) the right output may both refl ect and communicate the to knowledge, that is access to ‘frameworks of culture of the more powerful social groups in interpretation’ which facilitate understating of that society at the expense of the less power- the links between issues, the causes that lead to ful. By asserting one culture against others, the eff ects, and the processes by which knowledge media help to nurture a dominant culture and is assembled and represented to the public; and relegate rival cultures to the realms of deviance. (4) the right to participation in a contemporary Today’s cultures have to be examined through context where there is a demand from individu- the lens of the Network Society, which has als and groups ‘to speak about their own lives brought about profound shifts in terms of the

66 Culture: globalization of

nature of communications. In the world of blogs measures to protect intellectual property from A (see blogosphere), the rise and rise of the piracy. Th e Berne Convention laid initial guide- mobile phone and its multitude of applications lines on protection that eventually materialized B (see mobilization), in a cyberspace populated in the Agreement on Trade-related Aspects by facebook and youtube, the traditional of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the dominance of the mass media – their power to World Trade Organization. This included the C deﬁ ne, legimitimize and lead culture – is in rapid extension of protection to databases, computer transition. programs being classiﬁ ed as literary works and D ▶ Nick Stevenson, Understanding Media Cultures therefore subject to copyright. (Sage, 1995); Colleen Roach, ed., Communication Texts are not only protected, their universal E and Culture in War and Peace (Sage, 1995); Andrew access – working within a global free market – is Tudor, Decoding Culture: Theory and Method in also protected; thus, for example, the attempts Cultural Studies (Sage, 1999); David Hesmondhalgh, by one country to protect its own cultural prod- F The Cultural Industries: An Introduction (Sage, ucts from cultural ‘invasion’ becomes an area of

2002); John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of contention. Th e result, fears Bettig, threatens to G Popular Culture: Th eories and Methods (Edinburgh be an economic domination of the information- University Press, 2003); James Curran and David rich nations over the information-poor. Morley, Media and Cultural Theory (Routledge, Economic dominance brings with it ideologi- H 2005); Jeﬀ Lewis, Cultural Studies ( Sage, 2nd edition, cal inﬂ uence. Copyright becomes a device for the 2008); James Curran, ed., Media and Society (5th privatization of knowledge where ‘the views and I edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2010); Graeme accounts of the world held by the capitalist class

Turner, Ordinary People and the Media: Th e Demotic and aligned class factions and groups are broadly JK Turn (Routledge, 2010). disseminated and persistently publicized’. In Culture: consumer culture Arguably practice, however, global agreements have a consumer culture is the prevailing culture of mother of all battles in the war against piracy. L late modernity in Western societies. Don Slater See downloading; information commons. in Consumer Culture & Modernity (Polity Press, Culture: globalization of Considered by many M 1997) argues that ‘it is more generally bound up commentators as a paramount trend in the late with central values, practices and institutions twentieth century, in which cultures and cultural N which deﬁ ne Western modernity, such as choice, practices of chieﬂ y Western nations – the US in individualism and market relations’. particular – spread through the world, dominat- For Slater its ‘defining feature’ is that it ing native, home-grown cultures. The media O ‘denotes a social arrangement in which the rela- are seen to be the channels through which the tion between lived culture and social resources, globalizing torrent has poured; and those chan- P between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic nels have been largely under the direction and and material resources on which they depend, control of transnational corporations. Under R is mediated through markets’. Th e media and the umbrella of globalization we encounter a cultural industries obviously play a pivotal role couple of key, linked and interactive phenomena: in the operation of consumer culture, and the consumerization and media imperialism. S nature of this relationship is the focus of much With cultural dominance, fear some commen- research. See consumerization. tators, comes ideological dominance, and that T Culture: copyrighting culture In the global ideology centres around the processes of context of communication, and in view of the production and consumption and the targeting U open-access properties of the internet, a ques- of audiences in their role of consumers. Todd tion of growing importance is – to whom does a Gitlin in his chapter ‘Prime time ideology: the text or work belong? (See text: integrity of hegemonic process in television entertainment’ V the text.) R.V. Bettig, in Copyrighting Culture: in Television: Th e Critical View (Oxford Univer-

Th e Political Economy of Intellectual Property sity Press, 1994), edited by Horace Newcomb, W (Westview Press, 1996), addresses this concern, was of the opinion that ‘the dominant ideology arguing that with information/knowledge has shifted toward sanctifying consumer satis- becoming one of the chief commercial industries faction as the premium deﬁ nition of “the pursuit XYZ in the current age, the control of culture has of happiness”’. fallen to a number of transnational corporations Corporate domination of the economy extends (TNCs) through their ownership of copyright. to corporate dominance worldwide of culture, TNCs fear copyright piracy on a world at least those cultures through which proﬁ ts may scale and their ambition is to extend, globally, be obtained. It is not happiness alone that global

67 Culture: intercultural communication

corporatization promises, says Gitlin, but liberty, monic project by a new modern, technocratic, equality and fraternity: all can ‘be affirmed internationalist elite’ speaking ‘the language of a through the existing private commodity forms, new international, a new world order’. However, under the benign, protective eye of the national Tehranian perceives the ‘periphery’ reacting security state’. against the ‘core’ in a number of potentially Th e vision of a world dominated by American confl icting, even explosive, ways. cultural products is challenged by observers who He speaks of countermodernization as a signif- see in localism a force of resistance, or if not icant contemporary trend, in which pressure resistance, assimilation. Roland Robinson off ers groups such as some traditional religions react us a useful term in this respect – glocalization (in against modern ideas and dominant ideologies ‘Globalization or glocalization?’ in the Journal – the resurgence, for example, of fundamentalist of International Communication, 1 (1994)), that religion in the face of scientifi c and technological is the ability of people in their own cultures to advances; while a contrary trend, demoderniza- deal in their own way with the cultural imports tion, is expressed by the voices of environmen- from the West; to absorb them, to adapt them, to talists or feminists; and by those ‘localites’ (as glocalize them. contrasted with ‘cosmopolites’) whose advocacy John B. Th ompson in Th e Media and Moder- is inspired by the notion that ‘small is beautiful’. nity: A Social Theory of Media (Polity, 1995) The nature and degree of globalization of urges us to see trends of dominance within culture will continue to be fi ercely debated, and historical perspectives: ‘Rather than assuming such debate will inevitably have to take into that prior to the importation of Western TV account inequalities of wealth, provision and programmes etc. many Th ird World countries media technology across nations. See news: had indigenous traditions and cultural heritages globalization of; information gaps; which were largely unaff ected by external pres- slapps. See also topic guide under global sures, we should see instead that the globaliza- perspectives. tion of communication through electronic ▶ Peter Golding and Phil Harris, eds, Beyond Cultural media is only the most recent of a series of Imperialism (Sage, 1996); Daya Kishan Thussu, cultural encounters, in some cases stretching ed., Electronic Empires: Global Media and Local back many centuries, through which values, Resistance (Arnold, 1998); Barry Smart, ed., Resisting beliefs and symbolic forms of diff erent groups McDonaldization (Sage, 1999); George Monbiot, have been superimposed on one another, often Captive State: the Corporate Takeover of Britain in conjunction with the use of coercive, political (Macmillan, 2001); Mike Savage, Gaynor Bagnall and and economic power.’ Brian J. Longhurst, eds, Globalization and Belonging Thompson maintains that the media- (Sage, 2004). imperialist position underestimates the power Culture: intercultural communication See of audiences to make their own meanings from communication: intercultural communi- what they read, listen to or watch. ‘Th rough the cation. localized process of appropriation,’ Th ompson Culture jamming See genre. believes, ‘media products are embedded in sets of Culture of deference In an article entitled practices which shape and alter their signifi cance.’ ‘Pressure behind the scenes’ and subtitled ‘A Evidence for the process of glocalization is history of deference, and cosy relationships in off ered by Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz in Th e Westminster, have made self-censorship accept- Export of Meaning: Cross Cultural Readings of able’ (Index on Censorship 4 & 5, 1991), journalist Dallas (Oxford University Press, 1990; Polity, Richard Norton-Taylor writes of a ‘deep-seated 1993). Their researches indicated that the culture of deference’ existing between many American soap Dallas was read in quite diff erent British editors and journalists in their relation- ways by people of diff erent origins, cultures and ship with those in authority (see power elite). outlooks. It was Dallas which was dominated, This, Norton-Taylor claims, arises out of an not the audience for Dallas. anxiety to be accepted by and be a part of the Majid Tehranian in his chapter ‘Ethnic Establishment. The deference has its ‘origins discourse and the new world dysorder’ in in the centralization of the British state and in Communication and Culture in War and Peace Britain’s imperial past – where there was virtu- (Sage, 1993), edited by Colleen Roach, argues ally unchallenged consensus about the Empire’s that the levelling-out which is said to be a benefi t “civilizing mission”’. of globalization is more apparent than real. In Deference, says Norton-Taylor, continues fact the ‘levelling’ has camouflaged ‘a hege- to be applied to institutions of the State such

68 Cybernetics

as Whitehall, the Monarchy, the courts and ethnographic (approach to audience A Parliament. Th is deference also helps create and measurement); response codes. supports consensus against ‘enemies’, against ▶ Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Studying B foreign rivals, in war or in business. See jour- Popular Culture (Routledge, 2000); Graeme Turner, nalism. Understanding Celebrity (Sage, 2004); Annette Culture: popular culture Something of a Hill, Reality TV: Audiences and Popular Factual C redundant term in that all culture is to a degree Television (Routledge, 2005); P. David Marshall, ed., ‘popular’; otherwise, if it is ‘unpopular’ – that is, Celebrity Culture Reader (Routledge, 2006); Anita D if it does not attract or involve an audience – it Biressi and Heather Nunn, eds, Th e Tabloid Culture vanishes. Th e term has come to mean the culture Reader (Open University, 2007); Sean Redmond and E of ‘ordinary people’, of the working class, the Su Holmes, eds, Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader non-elite majority as contrasted with so-termed (Sage, 2007); Matt Briggs, Television, Audience and high or highbrow culture. Popular culture gener- Everyday Life (Open University, 2009). F ally signiﬁ es cohesion, high culture diﬀ erence Cultures of organizations See organization

– diﬀ erence, that is, from popular culture and cultures. G those with whom it is associated. Custom audience research That which is Popular culture has traditionally been looked commissioned or undertaken by a company down on as something banal, trashy, unchalleng- or client into audience response to the media H ing or even potentially harmful: an elite stand- marketing of its product or services, generally point. In their time, theatricals, dancing, ‘pulp targeting specific media outlets. Such studies I ﬁ ction’, the press, posters, postcards, comics, produce rich, focused data while at the same

soap opera, the hit-parade and the cinema have time incurring doubts concerning the objectivity JK varyingly been defined as the kind of culture of that data. In contrast, syndicated studies are which contains the potential for subversion – grander in scope as, like the Nielson ratings, they usually of ‘standards’. measure the audiences of multiple media outlets L According to the French philosopher Pierre of audience response. Bourdieu, popular culture is basically associated As Peter V. Miller says in ‘Made-to-order and M with that section of the population who lack standardized audiences: forms of reality in audi- both economical and cultural capital. Since ence measurement’ published in Audiencemak- N at least the 1960s popular culture has become ing: How the Media Create the Audience (Sage, the focus of critical attention and re-evaluation: 1994), edited by James S. Ettema and D. Charles it is studied – analysed, measured; in short, Whitney, ‘the unique, made-to-order nature of O taken seriously. the custom study is both its chief beneﬁ t and its In Cultures and Societies in a Changing World major cost’. He goes on, ‘Th e syndicated study P (Pine Forge Press, 1994), Wendy Griswold writes, offers comparative, longitudinal information ‘Scholars examining previously despised works, about audiences that can be used to sell advertis- R genres and systems of meaning found them to ing space and time. Unlike the custom study, the contain complexities and beauties; at the same syndicated eﬀ ort provides the advertisers with time, deconstructing previously esteemed a standard way to judge alternative vehicles for S works, genres and systems of meaning, they their messages.’ See audience measurement. found widespread representations of class, hege- Cybernetics Th e study of communication feed- T mony, patriarchy, and illegitimate canonization.’ back systems in human, animal and machine. Culture, whether popular or ‘elitist’, cultivates, Taken from the Greek for ‘steersman’, the term U hence its fascination for researchers, commenta- was the invention of American Norbert Wiener, tors and students of media. Television, it has author of Cybernetics: Or Control and Commu- been claimed, has appropriated popular culture nication in the Animal and the Machine (Wiley, V and by doing so redefined the term to mean 1949). Essentially an interdisciplinary study, ‘that which is popular on TV’. The nature of cybernetics ranges in its interest from control W participation by the populace in generating and systems of the body to the monitoring and taking part in popular culture has not been lost control of space missions. Cybernetics concerns on TV programme-makers: audience participa- itself with the analysis of ‘whole’ systems, their XYZ tion is the key to popular quiz and competition complexity of goals and hierarchies within programmes and to so-termed ‘reality’ tv contexts of perpetual change. Th e Greek steers- series, in many cases turning that which tradi- man used the feedback of visual, aural and tactile tionally has been private and intimate into public indicators to chart his passage through rough display. See audience: active audience; seas. Today we have computers: the potential for

69 Cyberspace

accuracy and rapidity of feedback and control is erich Koenig. Born in Saxony, Koenig moved to vastly greater, and so is the potential for disaster London in order to set up a works to manufac- should the feedback systems go wrong. ture the new machines (1812). He demonstrated Cyberspace See also internet and new media. that a cylinder press machine could take off Term probably fi rst used by William Gibson in impressions at the rate of over 1,000 copies an his novel Neuromancers published in America hour. On 28 November 1814 one of the presses by Ace Books in 1984. Gibson describes cyber- was used to print The Times. Its editor, John space as ‘a consensual hallucination ... [People Walter, described the cylinder press as ‘the are] creating a world. It’s not really a place, it’s greatest improvement connected with printing not really space. It’s notional space’. By pressing since the discovery of the art itself’. As a result of computer keys, and by grace of a modem and its advantage in using Koenig’s press, Th e Times telephone line, the operator has access to poten- became the dominant and most influential tially infi nite information and endless exchanges newspaper of the nineteenth century in the UK. with other users. See topic guide under media: technologies. According to Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen in Imagology: Media Philosophy (Routledge, 1994), itself a mercurial sortie into cybergraph- D ics, chief among cyberspace’s characteristics is DAB: Digital Audio Broadcasting The first speed. ‘Power,’ the authors declare, ‘is speed’ and DAB transmission took place in Germany, the ‘swift will inherit the earth.’ Much comment though the UK was the fi rst to establish DAB suggests that control, traditionally exercised by radio broadcasting stations after pilot broadcasts governments and powerful groups such as the were transmitted in several European countries transnational corporations, is shifting and will in 1996. The first DAB receivers were being rapidly continue to do so. Cyberspace is seen as marketed by 1999. By 2001 there were more a force for dismantling patriarchal structures in than fi fty BBC and commercial radio (UK) society and altering existing gender relations. services. Th e World DMB (Digital Mutimedia Fears about the posting of information Broadcasting) Forum represents over thirty about paedophiles on the Net, of information- countries worldwide. exchange between extremist factions, of freely Th rough multiplexing and compression, DAB available information on how to make weapons is considered twelve times more effi cient than of mass destruction, have surfaced on public analog-FM for national and regional networks. agendas to the point where, in many countries, However, automatic tuning display has proved those in authority have sought to ‘fence in’ the a harder drain on battery life and the jury is open prairies of cyberspace by legislation. Such still out in terms of the quality and reliability of moves have prompted many expressions of sound production. concern about the censorship of the Net. DAB+ consitutes a major upgrade, but older Equally, there are fears that the major transmitters cannot carry forward DAB+. DMB conglomerates are intent on colonizing is suitable for mobile radio and TV and can be cyberspace, converting the open prairie into added to any DAB transmission. Digital Radio virtual shopping malls. Many analysts take the Transmission, sometimes referred to as mobile view that the Net is unlikely to be a bridger TV, can operate via satellite (S-DMB) or terres- of the gap between information-rich and trially (T-DMB), South Korea being a major information-poor, that it is failing to redress the pioneer in this fi eld of development. Receivers balance between core and periphery; and some are integrated into car navigation systems, are of the opinion that cyberspace is largely laptop computers and digital cameras. off -limits to the poor, the ill-educated and the ▶ See Wikipedia for full technical data and updates unemployed. See core nations, peripheral on development. nations; information gaps; regulation DA (Defence Advisory) Notices British of investigatory powers act (ripa) (uk), government memoranda requesting the media 2000; surveillance society; wiki, wikipe- not to publish or broadcast specific items of dia. See also topic guide under digital age information considered by authority to pose a communication. security risk if widely disseminated. Notices are Cylinder or rotary press Th e most important issued by the Defence, Press and Broadcasting technical development in printing history Advisory Committee. They have no binding following the invention of movable type was the force at law, even in wartime, but defi ance of a steam-driven cylinder press invented by Fried- DA Notice may incur a harsher response from

70 Data protection

government by having avenues of information, via the use of the mobile phone. Th e evidence is A other than that which is classified, closed to open to the scrutiny of individuals and agencies, offenders. However, the Notices have little assisting all bodies, governmental or commer- B chance of combatting information, pictures or cial, involved in the surveillance of the public. fi lm posted on the internet. See censorship; For example, data footprints are a vital aid to officials secrets act (uk). targeted marketing, allowing companies to track C Daguerrotype Early photograph produced in the a user’s tastes and patterns of consumption. See manner of Louis Daguerre (1789–1851), a French cryptography; tor. D theatrical designer who teamed up with Joseph Data mining In a 1998 publication Data Mining: Nicéphore Nièpce (1765–1833), a founding father Staking a Claim on Your Privacy (IPC), Ann of photography, in 1830. Nièpce died three years Cavoukian, Ontario (Canada) Information and E later but Daguerre continued their work, fi xing Privacy Commissioner, defi nes data mining as images on metal plates coated with silver iodide, ‘a set of automated techniques used to extract F which he treated with mercury vapour in a dark- buried or previously unknown pieces of infor-

room. Daguerre was eventually able to reduce mation from large data bases’. The Commis- G the exposure time of a photograph from 8 hours sioner states that ‘successful data mining makes to between 20 and 30 minutes. His Daguerro- it possible to unearth patterns and relationship, type was taken up by the French government in and then use this “new” information to make H July 1839 and revealed to the world at a meeting proactive knowledge-driven business decisions’. of the Académies des Sciences in August. No Th e process illustrates the penetrative power I prints could be made from a Daguerrotype; thus of surveillance (see surveillance society)

Daguerre’s method was a cul-de-sac in photog- made possible by computer networking. Exten- JK raphy, though a vastly successful one at the time. sively used by governments and business, data See photography, origins. mining identifies patterns and trends in the Dance’s helical model of communication, seemingly disparate activities of citizens; such L 1967 The earliest communication models patterns and trends being used as indicators of were linear; their successors were circular, future policy and promotion. See journalism: M emphasizing the crucial factor of feedback in data journalism; privacy. the communication process. Frank E.X. Dance Data protection Th e increasing use of comput- N in ‘A helical model of communication’ in the ers and sophisticated information technology book he edited, Human Communication Th eory has greatly magnified the harm to individual (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1967), commends privacy that can occur from any collection, O the circular model as an advance upon the linear storage or dissemination of personal infor- one, but faults it on the grounds that it suggests mation, and many countries have legislated P that communication comes back full-circle, to against data abuse. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, exactly the same point from which it started – an Luxembourg, West Germany and France have all R assumption which is ‘manifestly erroneous’. legislated to protect both the public and private Th e helix or spiral, for Dance, ‘combines the sectors of society. In the US and Canada, data desirable features of the straight line and of the protection legislation only applies to the public S circle while avoiding the weaknesses of either’. sector and compliance with it is voluntary. He goes on, ‘At any and all times, the helix In the UK, the report of the Lindop Commit- T gives geometric testimony to the concept that tee (Report of the Committee on Data Protection, Communication while moving forward is at the 1978) urged the need for individuals to have a U same moment coming back upon itself and being right of veto on what information was dissemi- aﬀ ected by its past behaviour, for the coming nated about them, and how this would operate in curve of the helix is fundamentally affected the context of ‘the interests of the rest of society, V by the curve from which it emerges.’ Dance’s which include the eﬃ cient conduct of industry,

spiral concept parallels theories of education commerce and administration’. Becoming law W put forward by Jerome Bruner, and generally in the UK in 1984, the data protection act referred to as the spiral curriculum. See topic began operation in 1987 (see next entry). guide under communication models. cryptography, or what in modern parlance XYZ Data footprint Term describing the ‘trail’ inter- is termed privacy transformation, can be net users leave in their wake, the evidence of employed to ‘scramble’ data prior to storage in their identity, online activity, what they commu- order to guard against accidental or deliberate nicate about and to whom. Th e data footprint disclosures of information. Th e problem here is provides clues to every interaction online or how the key or code to the scrambling process

71 Data Protection Act (UK), 1984

is to be protected. In the US, the Hellman-Diffi e to those purposes; (4) hold only information method allowed for diff erent keys for the scram- which is adequate, relevant and not excessive for bling and unscrambling processes. the purposes; (5) hold only accurate information An alternative to this is the so-called electronic and, where necessary, keep it up to date; (6) not signature, which works by reversing the roles keep any information longer than is necessary; of scrambling and unscrambling keys. Another (7) give individuals access to information about mode is PIN – personal identity number, where themselves and, where appropriate, correct or everybody is issued with a personal key. PIN is erase the information; (8) take appropriate secu- already in use for the authorization of electronic rity measures. Persons feeling that any computer funds transfers. See echelon. See also topic user has broken one or more of the above guide under media: freedom, censorship. principles may complain to the Data Protection Data Protection Act (UK), 1984 Th e purpose Registrar. See privacy; secrecy. of the Act is ‘to regulate the use of automatically Decency: Communications Decency Act, processed information relating to individuals 1996 See communications decency act and the provision of services in respect of such (us). information’. From November 1987 the public Decisive moment French photographer Henri has been able to check if any organization holds Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) used this term to information on them; to see a copy of that infor- describe the instant when pressing the shutter mation, known as personal data; to complain release button produced the desired image. to the Data Protection Registrar about the way Indeed, some critics believe that Cartier- data has been collected or used; to have inac- Bresson’s timing, his ability to be at the ready curate computer records corrected or deleted in when destiny appeared to be bringing highly certain circumstances; and to claim compensa- photogenic elements together, this instinct tion through the courts if the ‘data subject’ has for the decisive moment, qualifies him to be suff ered damage by the loss or destruction of considered the fi nest of all twentieth-century personal data, or through an unauthorized photographers. disclosure or because of inaccuracy. Declaration on the Mass Media (UNESCO Designed to bring Britain into line with the General Council, 1978) See media imperial- Council of Europe Convention for the Protec- ism. tion of Individuals with regard to Automatic Decode The process of interpreting, analysing Processing of Personal Data, the Act provides for and understanding the nature of messages – the establishment of a data watchdog, the Data written, spoken, broadcast, etc. This requires Protection Registrar, and outlines eight data not just an understanding of the words, signs protection principles (see next entry). or images used but also a sharing of the values Th e test of any act protecting the citizen is and assumptions that underpin their encoding the size and scope of the exceptions. Th ere are into a message by the transmitter. A focus for three unconditional exemptions from registra- research in communication studies is the extent tion: personal data required to be exempt for the to which the receiver decodes the message in the purpose of safeguarding national security; data way the encoder or sender would prefer. Th is is which its user is required by law to make public; an important element in the debate on the power and personal data held by an individual and and infl uence of the media. ‘concerned with the management of his personal, If the message is received by an audience family or household aff airs or held by him only which does not share the same codes or values as for recreational purposes’. Subject access is the sender, it will be interpreted in an ‘aberrant’ barred on matters of prevention or detection way, that is a diff erent meaning will be assumed of crime, the apprehension or prosecution of to that which was intended; hence the term off enders, or the assessment or collection of any aberrant decoding. In short, it is a diff erence of tax or duty. ‘reading’ the message derived from a diff erence Data Protection Principles Listed in the data of experience, perception or evaluation. See protection act (uk), 1984 are the following preferred reading. See also topic guides eight principles governing data protection under communication theory; language/ for computer users handling personal data: discourse/narrative. computer users must (1) obtain and process the Deconstruction Th e process of deconstruction, information fairly and lawfully; (2) register the as a mode of textual and intertextual analysis, is purposes for which they hold the data; (3) not chiefl y associated with the ideas of the French use or disclose the information in a way contrary philosopher Jacques Derrida and his method of

72 Defamation

‘close-reading’ of minute particulars in a text. is rather a series of organized structures (see A Th e search is not for an ultimate meaning; on structuralism). Th is deep structure, or level, the contrary, Derrida sees meaning as undecid- supplies information that enables the reader or B able: signifi ers within linguistic contexts refer to listener to distinguish between alternative inter- further signifi ers, texts to further texts in an infi - pretations of sentences which have the same nite web of intertextuality. Deconstructors surface form, or sentences which have diff erent C such as Derrida seek to pry behind the dominant surface forms but have the same underlying expressions of a text, regarding these as serving meaning. D to exclude subordinate terms. Th e technique is When, for example, a publisher replies to a to reverse and displace, thus bringing about an budding author, ‘I will waste no time in reading upending – an overthrow – of the hierarchies your manuscript’, he presents a surface structure E which rule all forms of expression. with alternative possible meanings. Yet by alter- In the words of Madan Sarup in An Intro- ing the surface structure of the sentence ‘Th e F ductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and dog chased the cat’ to ‘Th e cat was chased by

Postmodernism (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), the dog’, the underlying idea is not altered. Th e G ‘deconstruction disarticulates traditional transformations that might occur between deep conceptions of the author and undermines and surface structure can be passive (‘My father conventional notions of reading and history ... was warned by the doctor to give up smoking’), H It kills the author, turns history and tradition negative (‘My father was not warned to give up into textuality and’ – we must gratefully note – smoking’), in question form (‘Was my father I ‘celebrates the reader’. If self can be constructed warned to give up smoking?’) or as an imperative

as a text, then self is subject to deconstruction, (‘Father was told – “Stop smoking!”’). See topic JK which displaces the notion of a stable self (see guide under language/discourse/narra- eisenberg’s model of communication tive. and identity, 2001). Th e only coherence, it ▶ Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (Harcourt L would seem, is fragmentation, leading to the Brace Jovanovitch, 1968). conclusion that there can be no meaning, only Deep throat Journalists’ parlance for ‘anonymous M interpretation. sources’. Perhaps the most famous of these Sarup’s phrase ‘textual undecidability’ usefully was the unknown telephone informant calling N sums up the position of the deconstructors, as himself ‘Deep Th roat’ who setWashington Post does the term ‘labyrinth of deconstruction’ used reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward on by Christopher Norris in Deconstruction: Th eory the trail in the watergate scandal that eventu- O and Practice (Methuen, 1982). ally led to the resignation of President Richard ▶ Jacques Derrida, Writing and Diff erence (Routledge Nixon. In 2005 Deep Th roat revealed his iden- P & Kegan Paul, 1976); Christopher Norris, Derrida tity, winning worldwide media attention. He was (Collins, 1987). Mark Felt, at the time of the revelations number R Decreolization See communication: inter- two at the American FBI, responsible for the cultural communication. investigation into the burglary at the Democratic Deep Dish TV See paper tiger tv. National Committee HQ in the Watergate apart- S Deep focus Film-making technique in which ment in 1972. Felt kept his secret for 33 years. objects close to the camera and those far away Defamation The UK Defamation Act of 1952 T are both in focus at the same time. made illegal any statement made by one person Deep structure Th ough the term was fi rst used that is untrue and may be considered injurious U by Charles Hockett, the concept was given to another’s reputation, causing shame, resent- widest currency by fellow US linguist Noam ment, ridicule or fi nancial loss. In permanent Chomsky in ‘Current issues in linguistic theory’ form, such as expressed in print, records, fi lms, V in J. Foder and J. Katz, eds, The Structure tapes, photographs, images or effi gies, defama-

of Language: Readings in the Philosophy of tion is classifi ed as libel. In temporary form, such W Language (Prentice-Hall, 1964). In its original as in spoken words or gestures, defamation is form, deep structure is an underlying abstract classifi ed as slander. level of sentence organization, which specifi es No legal aid is granted to plaintiff s or defen- XYZ the way a sentence should be interpreted. dants in defamation cases; thus persons even For Chomsky, the deep and surface structures, with the most genuine case for grievance must and the relationship between them, provide the think twice before deciding to incur vast legal essential bases of language which, far from being expenses in defending their reputation. merely a sequence of words strung together, Legal provisions against defamation apply

73 Defensive communication

equally to transmissions on the Internet which, Terrorism Protection Act, and the US House of while representing a massive challenge in terms Representatives launched a similar bill, the Free of monitoring, also opens up the communicative Speech Protection Act (2009). exchanges of individual Net users, bloggers, chat Th e incoming UK coalition government (2010) rooms, newsgroups, etc. to surveillance, not only recognized the archaic and punitive nature of in home countries but globally. existing defamation law and set in motion a new Prior to the Defamation Bill of 2011 it was Defamation Bill in March 2011. Justice Minister illegal not only to communicate potentially Kenneth Clarke promised that new legislation defamatory material, but also to republish it. As would ‘ensure that anyone who makes a state- well as the originator of the material, the website ment of fact or expresses an honest opinion can owner and the Internet Service Provider (ISP) do so with confi dence’, a key element being the have been liable. Th e culture of the Internet in its introduction of a public interest defence. Th e pioneering days was one which celebrated inde- Libel Reform Campaign deemed the proposals pendence and free speech; insults, or ‘fl aming’, to be ‘a great starting point’ but urged parliament between Net users was commonplace. to go further in key areas. See censorship; This culture has changed since cyberspace super-injunction; surveillance society. expanded to include young people and corporate Also, see topic guide under media: freedom, involvement, the one requiring a degree of censorship. protection from defamatory language, the other Defensive communication Occurs when sensitive about preserving the good name of the people hear what they do not wish to hear. company or corporation. The first corporate dissonance arises when messages cut across, e-mail libel case in the UK was fi led in 1997. or contradict, values and assumptions; the A report by English PEN and Index on Censor- reaction varies from not concentrating on the ship magazine, Free Speech Is Not For Sale message to deliberately misrepresenting or (2009), talked of ‘an intimidating complexity misunderstanding the sender’s motive as well as of English libel law’ and argued that it ‘has his/her message. served to discourage critical media reporting Climates of threat create defensive tactics, on matters of serious public interest, adversely just as supportive climates help reduce them. If aff ecting the ability of scholars and journalists we know that we are being tested or evaluated, to publish their work’. Th e report asserted that for example, our communication response will ‘the law was designed to protect the rich and be guarded. Equally we might resort to defen- powerful, and does not reflect the interests sive tactics if we feel the communicator of the of modern democratic society’, and made ten message is intent on winning control, exerting recommendations, including the case for except- superiority. We are less defensive in situations ing ‘interactive online services and interactivity in which spontaneity, empathy, equality and a chat from liability’. sense of open-mindedness about the nature of What has been termed libel tourism has the message are predominant. concerned the way that the UK, world famous Deference, culture of See culture of defer- for its repressive libel laws and sky-high fi nes ence. – Oxford University research has found that Deliberative listening See listening. defending a libel case in the England and Wales Democracy and the media Both the word is 140 times the European average – has become democracy and the idea are of Greek origin. the place to launch a libel suit. Indeed, London Demos means citizen body; thus democracy is has been named ‘the town named sue’. rule by the citizens, suggesting the right of all A case in point involved a book, Funding Evil, to decide on what are matters of concern, and published in New York by Rachel Ehrenfeld: possessing the power to decide on those matters. she and her publishers were sued in London Democracy implies a vote for every citizen of a by a named Saudi-Arabian businessman, even certain age, regular elections, a genuine choice of though only twenty-three copies of the book parties to represent citizens, and a range of rights were located in the UK. The court awarded – free speech, security from arbitrary arrest, the 130,000 damages to the businessman. freedoms of belief, movement and association. This case, referred to as Rachel’s Law, Th e media can be seen – and they often see prompted a number of states in America to pass themselves – as watchdogs of democracy; legislation protecting American citizens against journalists as articulators and defenders of the consequences of such foreign rulings. In democracy, the eyes and ears of the public. In his 2008 the New York Assembly passed the Libel analysis of whether new technologies, in partic-

74 Demotic turn

ular computer networks, enhance or diminish broadcasting (psb); public sphere. See A democracy, Darin Barney in Prometheus Wired: also topic guide under media: politics & Th e Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network economics; media: values & ideologies. B Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2000) ▶ John Street, Mass Media, Politics & Democracy identifi es three elements he considers essential (Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition, 2010); James in any serious defi nition of democracy – equal- Curran, Media and Deomcracy (Routledge, 2011). C ity, participation and ‘a public sphere from which Democratization See demotic turn. sovereignty emanates’. Demographic analysis Seeks to explore and D Barney speaks of equality of ability as well as quantify those factors about consumers that opportunity; and participation that is meaning- might identify whether or not they are in the ful rather than ‘frivolous or merely symbolic’. By market for certain products or services. It E this he suggests that ‘democratic participation is thus a key tool of consumer research. Key must be clearly and decisively connected to the demographic variables include age, generation, F political decisions that direct the activity of the gender, stage in family lifestyle, income and participants’ community’. Participation is not, occupation. However, information on demo- G he argues, confi ned to freedoms of ‘consumer graphic variables only takes the marketer or choice’, the preferred interpretation of democ- advertiser so far in understanding the consumer; racy by business. In Barney’s view many self- a psychographic profi le of the consumer(s) is H proclaiming democracies would not pass the often also needed. Psychographic analysis seeks test of equality, participation and power through to explore why a consumer might buy a product, I ‘collective decisions’. and looks at such factors as lifestyles, motiva-

It has often been suggested that the media, tions, personality traits, self-image, values JK through argument and advocacy, made and aspirations. See advertising; audience democracy possible (see journalism). From measurement. Thomas Paine’s seminal work Rights of Man ▶ Martin Evans, Ahmad Jamal and Gordon Foxall, L (Part 1 published 1791; Part 2 published 1792) Consumer Behaviour (John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2009). through to the age of the Radical press during Demonization What the media do, particularly M the nineteenth century, the cause of democracy the popular press, to those whose views they was championed by journalists and editors, perceive to be dangerous, destabilizing, bad N often risking life and liberty to make their case. for business or subversive. The process of Within a modern democracy, the media have an demonization begins with personalization, that ongoing responsibility to exercise vigilance – to is focusing on the personal characteristics or O nurture, protect and celebrate a range of features attributes (invariably negative) of the leader or that keep democracy healthy, preventing it from spokesperson advocating a cause or raising an P corruption, manipulation, misuse and apathy. issue, which the demonizers do not support. Th ese might be described as satellites of democ- Having rendered the cause or issue a ‘personal’ R racy, facilitators, the absence of which threatens matter associated with an individual, the aim of the democratic process; and they include full the media concerned is to destroy the credibility and fair transmission of information; plurality of the spokesperson and by doing so undermine, S of opinions and diversity of media provision. in the public mind, the cause for which he/she Th eir enemies are monopolization of media speaks. See folk devils; loony leftism. T outlets by the few (see convergence), the Demotic turn Term introduced by Graeme proﬁ ts-generated insistence on treating people Turner in Understanding Celebrity (Sage, 2004), U as consumers rather than citizens (see consum- returned to and developed in Ordinary People erization) and the consequent displacement or and the Media: Th e Demotic Turn (Sage, 2010), marginalization in media channels of informa- describing the increasing visibility of ordinary V tion, critical analysis, debate and investigation. people on TV – in particular the way ‘ordinari- In this sense, considering the nature of media ness’ is converted into celebrity by reality tv W ownership (see topic guide under media: programmes such as Big Brother, Pop Idol, Th e ownership & control), the media are as likely X-Factor, Wife Swap and Fame Academy. to subvert democracy, or at least relegate it in Turner writes (2010): ‘I use the demotic turn XYZ importance, as to be its defender and advocate. as a means of examining what I argue as a See agora; culture: popular culture; signiﬁ cant new development in how the media demotic turn; discursive contestation; participate in the production of culture.’ The disenfranchisement (of readership); author examines the demotic turn in the context framing; public opinion; public service of claims that participant formats are empower-

75 Denotation

ing, or, contrastingly, exploitative. He sees the expression of value confl icts (see deviance). media as a force for identity-making (or identity- Th e media play a signifi cant role in the estab- challenging) and draws the reader’s attention to lishment and maintenance of ‘we feeling’, that is the impact of Western-generated programmes communal solidarity and oneness; equally they featuring the demotic turn on other cultures may work towards the alienation of sections of such as those in the Middle East, Malaysia and the population who are traditionally discrimi- China, resulting in localization (or indigeniza- nated against – women, blacks, asylum-seekers, tion) or censorship. etc. On the issue of populating the airwaves with At critical decision-making times, such as elec- ‘ordinariness’, seemingly giving power to the tions, people have become increasingly depen- people as well as visibility, Turner is sceptical, dent on the media, especially TV, for election seeing ‘democratainment’ as an ‘occasional and information and guidance. Ball-Rokeach and accidental consequence of the “entertainment” DeFleur argue that the greater the uncertainty part and its least systematic component’. in society, the less clear are people’s frames of He reminds us that ‘celebrity still remains a reference; consequently there is greater audience systematically hierarchical and exclusive cate- dependence on media communication. gory, no matter how much it proliferates’. Access With the coming of the internet and its may be broadened as far as ordinary people are empowerment of individuals and groups, the concerned, but this does not necessarily connect role of traditional mass media as shapers and with democratic politics: ‘Diversity,’ believes influencers is being examined, researched Turner, ‘is not of itself intrinsically democratic and questioned, particularly with regard to irrespective of how it is generated and by whom.’ the challenge newspapers, TV and radio face Denotation See connotation. from the Net’s power to tap off readership and Dependency theory The degree to which audience and, perhaps most critically, adver- audiences are dependent upon the mass media tising. Dependency in terms of information constitutes one of the chief debates about the and opinion could become a thing of the past, functions and eff ects of modern communication with only entertainment holding its own. See systems. In ‘A dependency model of mass media ball-rokeach and defleur’s dependency eff ects’ in G. Gumpert and R. Cathcart, eds, Inter/ model of mass communication effects, Media: Interpersonal Communication in the 1976; blogosphere; demotic turn; effects Media (Oxford University Press, 1979), Sandra of the mass media; mobilization. See also J. Ball-Rokeach and Melvyn DeFleur believe topic guide under communication theory. that ‘the potential for mass media messages to Deregulation Describes the process whereby achieve a broad range of cognitive, aff ective, and channels of communication, specifi cally radio behavioural eff ects will be increased when media and TV, are opened up beyond the existing systems serve many unique and central informa- franchise-holders. Another term in current use, tion systems’. Th e fewer the sources of informa- ‘privatization’, emphasizes the practical nature tion in a media world, the more likely the media of the shift, from public to commercial control, will aff ect our minds and thoughts, our attitudes driven by the development of video, cable and how we behave. Further, that infl uence will television and satellite and accelerated by have increased potential ‘when there is a high digitization. Regulation is associated with degree of structural instability in the society due public service communications, for example to confl ict and change’. public service broadcasting (psb), deregu- However, just as the audience may be changed lation with the ambitions and practices of the by the information/messages it receives, in turn private sector of the communications industry. the media systems themselves are changed See communications act (uk), 2003; according to audience response. It is not one- conglomerates: media conglomerates; way traffi c. In the cognitive or intellectual sphere, consumerization. the authors cite the following possible media Deregulation, fi ve myths of In ‘Th e mythology roles: (1) resolution of ambiguity, and relatedly of telecommunications deregulation’ (Journal limiting the range of interpretations of situations of Communication, Winter, 1990), Vincent which audiences are able to make; (2) attitude Mosco of Carleton University identifies five formation; (3) agenda-setting; (4) expansion infl uential assumptions about the deregulation of people’s systems of beliefs (for example, the of telecommunications, which he describes as tremendous growth in awareness of ecological myths (see here Roland Barthes’ defi nition of matters); (5) clarifi cation of values, through the myth): deregulation lessens the economic role

76 Deviance

of government; benefi ts consumers; diminishes tradition of social responsibility rather than A economic concentration; is widely supported; sensation-seeking are honourable; and the and is inevitable. Because deregulation is dangers, of press subservience to government, B clearly in the interest of the non-public sector, obvious. See information society; media particularly corporations profi ting from the free imperialism. See also topic guide under market, it is in the sector’s interest to establish news media. C the benefi ts of deregulation as a natural truth – Deviance Social behaviour that is considered unquestionably a good thing. unacceptable within a social community is D ‘Whatever their basis in fact’, writes Mosco, deviant; and the defining of what constitutes ‘these myths continue to reflect significant deviance depends upon what norms of conduct political and economic interests. Moreover, they prevail at any given time in a society. Of primary E help to constitute those interests with a shared interest in the analysis of deviance is the ques- belief system ... promoting the dismantling of tion – who defi nes deviance, and why? Th ere F a public infrastructure and massive income are two main views on this: the fi rst maintains

redistribution up the social class ladder.’ Mosco that the defi nition of what is deviant behaviour G goes on, ‘In the long run they want to advance stems from a general consensus within society; the transformation of information from a public the second argues that it is the most powerful resource into a marketable commodity and a groups within a society who defi ne as deviant H form of social management control. Deregula- that behaviour which may constitute a threat to tion is more than a policy instrument; it serves themselves or their dominant position in society. I as a cohesive mythology around which those Deviance may then be in the eye of the who would benefi t from these short- and long- beholder, as Erich Goode and Nachman Ben- JK run interests might rally.’ Yehuda remind us in Moral Panics: Th e Social Desensitization Process by which audiences are Construction of Deviance (Wiley-Blackwell, considered to be made immune, or less sensitive 2009); ‘In other words, the very concept of what L to, human suff ering as a result of relentless expo- constitutes a threat is controversial, an expres- sure to such suff ering in the media. A constant sion of a diverse, socially divided, and multi- M media diet of violence, real or fi ctional, is widely cultural society. Deviants are not “folk devils” to believed to ‘harden up’ people’s tolerance of everyone, and what is regarded as wrongdoing or N violence. See compassion fatigue. deviance is itself contested.’ However, as they too Detachment, ideology of See impartiality. acknowledge, there are some acts of behaviour Determiner deletion A common stylistic prac- (such as rape) that are almost universally defi ned O tice of journalists whereby the characteristics of as deviant. a person and the name are linked without use Particular interest has been focused on the P of ‘the’ or ‘a’, in the interests of verbal economy role of the media in shaping defi nitions of devi- while at the same time having the eff ect of label- ance and then responding to those. While from R ling the named person. An example might be: a moral standpoint the media may disapprove ‘Ex-jailbird six-times married Joe Bloggs yester- of deviant behaviour, there is at the same time day told the press ...’ or ‘“Kiss-and-tell” Minister’s a reliance upon it: normative behaviour rarely S former live-in lover claims ...’ Allan Bell in Th e makes a good headline. Deviant behaviour, on Language of News Media (Blackwell, 1991) the other hand, is a news value and it might be T describes this practice as a form of titleness that argued that if deviance did not exist, it would be gives instant news value to the person being necessary for the media to invent it. U reported. See hyphenized abridgement; Several studies of deviance have been labelling process (and the media). concerned with the role of the mass media in Determinism See technological determin- both the defi nition and the amplifi cation of devi- V ism. ance. Leslie Watkins fi rst outlined the concept Developmental news of deviance amplifi cation in ‘Some sociological That which developing W nations consider will help rather than harm their factors in drug addiction control’ in Daniel M. prospects. ‘Western news’ is seen by developing Wilner and Gene G. Kassebaum, eds, Narcotics nations as essentially the pursuit of ‘bad’ news; (McGraw-Hill, 1965). He argues that the way in XYZ and bad news hurts. Th e term implies govern- which a society defi nes and reacts to deviance ment monopoly of information-flow in the may in fact encourage those defi ned as deviant interests of giving a developing country a ‘good to act in a more deviant manner. This would name’ and runs counter to Western notions of be particularly true for deviants excluded from free comment. Th e aspirations to a reporting or restricted in participation in normal social

77 Deviant

activities. If societal reaction to deviance is and non-standard dialects. Martin Montgomery strong it can lead to greater deviance, which in notes in An Introduction to Language and Society turn may lead to stronger societal reaction and (Routledge, 1995) that typical diff erences include so on, establishing a deviance amplification the use of vocabulary, pronouns, tenses, double- spiral in which each increase in social control is negatives and tags such as ‘you know?’. Several met by an increase in the level of deviancy. Th e authors have noted that there is greater use of contribution of the mass media in precipitat- non-standard dialects among those from lower ing and shaping such amplifi cation spirals has socio-economic groups. In Sociolinguistics: An proved a fruitful area of media research. Introduction to Language and Society (Penguin, Perceptions of deviant behaviour are at the core 2000) Peter Trudgill reminds us, however, that of moral panics (see moral panics and the many individuals can switch between the use of media). Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda standard and non-standard dialects depending note in Moral Panics: Th e Social Construction on the social context. of Deviance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), ‘… the key In discussing the relationship between ingredient in the emergence of a moral panic is dialect, regional identity and social background, the creation or intensifi cation of hostility toward Suzanne Romaine comments that ‘boundar- and denunciation of a particular group, category ies are, however, often of a social nature, e.g. or cast of characters. The emergence or the between different social class groups. In this re-emergence of a deviant category character- case we may speak of “social dialects” … Social izes the moral panic; central to this process is the dialects say who we are, and regional dialects targeting of new or past “folk devils”’. See folk where we came from’. Dialects, though they add devils; moral entrepreneurs. richness and variety to a language, can also, of ▶ Yvonne Jewkes, Media & Crime (Sage, 2011). course, form a barrier to communication. See Deviant See slider. accent; colloquialism; jargon; register; Diachronic linguistics Th e study of language slang. See also topic guide under language/ through the course of its history. In contrast, discourse/narrative. synchronic linguistics takes a fi xed instant as its Diary stories See spot news. point of observation (chiefly a contemporary Diffusion The process by which innovations one). Th e distinction was fi rst posed by Swiss spread to the members of a social system. linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). Diff usion studies are concerned with messages Dialect A dialect is usually regionally based that convey new ideas, the processes by which and is a variation within a language as regards those ideas are conveyed and received, and vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar. For the extent to which those ideas are adopted this reason Suzanne Romaine in Language and or rejected. Appropriateness of channel to Society (Oxford University Press, 2000) argues, message is particularly important. For example, ‘educated speakers of American English and mass media channels are often more useful at British English can be regarded as using dialects creating awareness – knowledge – of new ideas, of the same language’. In this case, she states, but interpersonal channels are considered to be the diff erences are likely to be more evident in more important in changing attitudes towards pronunciation and vocabulary than in grammar; innovations. Th e rate and success of diff usion is for example the American English speaker using very much aff ected by the norms, values and the word ‘elevator’ rather than ‘lift’. social structures in which the transmission of Though differences within Britain between new ideas takes place. See effects of mass the varying dialects of English may be declin- media. ing, Simon Elms argues that the fi ndings of the Digital activism See blogosphere; facebook; BBC Voices survey documented in his book global scrutiny; mobilization; network- entitled Talking for Britain: A Journey through ing: social networking; twitter; the Nation’s Dialects (Penguin Books, 2005) youtube. reveal that a considerable variation in dialect and Digital Economy Act (UK), 2010 If you accent is still to be found across the country. received a solicitor’s letter this morning accusing For example, numerous regional variations in you of breaching online copyright, demanding vocabulary continue to exist. Th us ‘butty’ might a substantial fine and threatening you with be used to refer to a friend in Wales, but to refer disconnection from the internet, you could be to a slice of bread and butter in Lancashire. a victim of the UK Digital Economy Act, made There also remain noticeable variations law in the dying days of the New Labour govern- between what are sometimes termed standard ment in April 2010. Controversial and chal-

78 Digitization

lenged in court by major broadband providers, internet users in his book, written with Gigi A the Act empowers companies to pursue illegal Vorgan, entitled iBrain: Surviving the Techno- users of their product; those deemed to have logical Alteration of the Modern Mind (Harp- B made available to others, for copying, songs, erCollins, 2008). Digital natives have inhabited TV programmes, movies, computer games, the terrain of the Internet from childhood; etc. Where there is proven evidence of piracy, they are those who have never known a world C companies can demand of Internet Providers without e-mail, mobile phones and texting. Th ey (IPs) the e-mail addresses of users. Responsibility tend to be impressive multi-taskers, jugglers of D for monitoring and reporting on the operation information in all forms and from all sources. In of the Act is that of ofcom in accord with an contrast, digital immigrants came lately to Net Initial Obligations Code and a Technical Obliga- communication, their hard-wiring having taken E tions Code. Th e Act has forty-two sections and place in an age dominated by single, one-at-a- two schedules, the most contentious of which time source materials such as books. F concern online breaches of copyright. Small and Vorgan argue that digital immigrants

The Act aims to protect the UK’s creative are better at reading facial expression and bodily G industries from piracy and the ﬁ nancial losses gesture, that is real-life interactive situations (see which result. Claims have been made that in non-verbal communication). Instead of the 2008 alone, companies lost 1.2 billion to piracy. digital native’s multi-tasking approach to knowl- H In brief, the Act empowers the industry to track edge and information, the digital immigrant is down wrongdoers by making it a legal require- more likely to take things step by step, address- I ment that where there is evidence of breaches ing one thing at a time. Th e authors believe that

of copyright by individuals or groups, IPs must this approach makes for deeper thinking and JK release details of e-mail addresses. Many fear more reliable decision-making. See plasticity: that they are being cast in the role of online neuroplasticity and the internet. police. ▶ Nicholas Carr, Th e Shallows: How the Internet is L Pursuit of wrongdoers is complex, gradual Changing the Way We Th ink (Atlantic Books, 2010). and with a number of safeguards, but as the Digital optimism Takes the view that online M process becomes routine the Act promises to interactive exchange typifi ed by the growth of be dynamic and ruthless: it begins with identi- blogging, social networking (see facebook; N fi cation followed by warning, then legal action myspace; networking: social networking; which may result in disconnection. youtube) and the rise of citizen journalism (see Dan Sabbagh in a Guardian online article, journalism: citizen journalism) has had O ‘Digital Economy Act likely to increase house- a profound and positive impact on traditional holds targeted for piracy’ (12 April 2010) writes, mass-media dominance and practices. Some P ‘Th e worry has to be that those keenest to use commentators argue that celebration is ahead the Act to threaten people with disconnection of the evidence. As Graeme Turner warns in R will be ruthless operators who act for owners of Ordinary People and the Media: Th e Demotic content that nobody would describe as main- Turn (Sage, 2010), ‘Often without the support of stream. If past experience is anything to go by, empirical data or accounting for historical trends S the number of complaints will rise, and miscar- in the relevant locations, digital optimists move riages of justice will increase too.’ into futurological mode at the drop of a hat.’ T In a follow-up posting to Sabbagh’s article, ▶ Matthew Hindman, Th e Myth of Digital Democracy Cyberdoyle puts the issue more dramatically, (Princeton University Press, 2009). U declaring that ‘the ambulance chasers have Digitization The computer works digitally: been given a golden goose with this stupid bill, information is broken down into a code of zeros but they will only persecute the innocent’. It is and ones (bits). Today, all forms of electronic V a genuine worry that the innocent will suff er as communication are converging through digital much as the intentionally guilty. For example, formats, and computer-mediated communica- W an illegal download in an Internet café by a tion now applies to newspapers, telephone passing stranger could make the café proprietor systems, broadcasting, film production as liable; equally, libraries, colleges and universities well as the internet. Digitization makes for XYZ become legally responsible for the activities of profusion – of television and radio channels users. See censorship; surveillance soci- and, in terms of use and reception, fragmenta- ety. tion. Digital natives, digital immigrants Neuro- Such are the possibilities in the ‘Digital Age’ scientist Gary Small off ers these defi nitions of that each viewer or listener ceases to be, as in the

79 Digital retouching

past, part of a recognizable audience. Special- Hamelink says that ‘the digital age arrives with ized, more targeted provision comes at an extra a monumental invasion of people’s privacy’ price. Where once the annual licence fee was the through the massive collection and sale of only payment for radio and TV services, now personal data, which he considers – referring reception depends more and more on subscrip- to the proliferation of electronic monitoring by tions, smart-cards and digital conversion boxes. employers of their employees – to be ‘a funda- Viewing is becoming almost as expensive as a mental violation of human rights’. He believes night at the opera. that digital technology is creating ‘transparent Take up the new digital technology, and you societies, “glass-house” countries that are very pick up the cost of development and the rush for vulnerable to external forces and to the loss of profi ts. Availability of what has been traditional their sovereign capacities’. screen fare for public service broadcasting Digitization is seen to be both empowering (to (psb) – that is, programmes available for the the already powerful) and potentially disempow- entire nation to watch – rapidly diminished in ering (to those with less of it in the fi rst place). the last decade of the twentieth century. British In relation to the trend towards deregulation, digital broadcasting began in 1998, with two Hamelink argues that ‘tension between public rivals in the fi eld, Ondigital and Sky Digital (in good and private commodity is increasingly which News International has a 40 per cent resolved to the latter’s advantage’. Consequently stake), with government insistence that they the ‘erosion of the public sphere by implication must produce compatible technology to mini- undermines diversity of information provision mize consumer confusion. ... everything that does not pass the market Digitization is the ultimate form of conver- threshold because there is not a sufficiently gence, technically but also in terms of control. large percentage of consumers, disappears. Th at All texts converge in the bit, but the investment may be good for markets, it may be suicidal for costs of turning the electronic world digital are democratic politics and creative culture’. See enormous, meaning not only that the competi- communications act (uk), 2003; disem- tion is to be between media giants, but that even powerment; downloading; journalism: the major operators will be continually at risk phone-hacking; mobilization. See also from their competitors. topic guides under media: technologies; At the same time there are serious worries that network society. in terms of quality of programmes and schedules, ▶ Jan van Dijk, Th e Deepening Divide: Inequality in more may turn out to be more of the same. A key the Information Age (Sage, 2005); Vincent Miller, question is whether segments of the population Understanding Digital Culture (Sage, 2011). will be left behind in the new age of subscription Digital retouching Or electronic retouching; and pay-per-view. Many commentators fear that process whereby laser and computer technology digitization favours the already information-rich are combined to retouch or re-create photo- and widens the information gap between graphs. A laser beam scans and measures images them and the information-poor. and pigmentations, then reduces them into a Cees Hamelink in World Communication: series of ‘pixels’, or minute segments. Th ese are Disempowerment & Self-Empowerment (Zed then recorded in digital form and stored in the Books, 1995) identifies four major trends in computer’s memory for eventual reproduction, world communications, citing digitization as which permits the rearrangement of the picture, the fi rst, and interacting and interlocking with a re-creation – or just plain faking. the others – consolidation, deregulation and Digital video disc (DVD) Or digital versatile globalization. Th e cost of developing digitiza- disc. One of a number of video compression tion leads to consolidation of ownership and systems, the size of a compact disc (CD) but control, which in turn demands the minimum of holding up to twenty-six times more informa- regulation in order to expand and traverse the tion. Th e DVD allows for four full feature-length boundaries of nation states, and in particular fi lms to be stored on a single disc, and permits regulations governing and protecting public- wide-screen format. Th e cost of duplication is interest communication. considerably less than that for VHS tape. DVDs Finally digitization provides the techno- can be encrypted, allowing the distributor to logical basis for globalization ‘as it facilitates the control viewing access, and in the case of parents global trading of services, worldwide fi nancial to empower them, through the use of a program networks, and the spreading of high-technology password, to restrict what their children view. research and development across the globe’. Originating in 1998, DVDs swiftly displaced

80 Discourse

videos as the technology of popular choice, and institution, whether marginally or centrally. A A with the introduction of Blu-ray, requiring high- discourse provides a set of possible statements resolution TV screens, the quality of picture about a given area, and organizes and gives B was vastly improved. So far, while it is easy to structure to the manner in which a particular lock in to speciﬁ c scenes in a disc, DVD fails in topic, object, process is to be talked about. In targeting exact moments – something video tape that it provides descriptions, rules, permissions C can do. DVDs are now in dramatic competition and prohibitions of social and individual action.’ with rival ‘picture house’ services such as web- The analysis of discourses is central to the D enabled set-top boxes (see streaming), games study of media, which is essentially about how consoles, the BBC’s iPlayer and Apple’s iPad. texts are encoded and how the meaning of Direct cinema Term used to describe the work those texts, operating within and influenced E of post-Second World War documentary by contexts, is decoded. Discourses are, in ﬁ lm-makers in the US, such as Albert Maysles the words of John Fiske, ‘socially produced’ F (Salesman, 1969 and Gimme Shelter, 1970), and a ‘socially located way of making sense of

who coined the phrase, Stephen Leacock (Don’t an important area of experience’. Reality is a G Look Back, 1968) and Frederick Wiseman (High constant part of experience – how is it recon- School, 1968). New, lightweight equipment structed into discourse? And how is it infl uenced and improved synchronous sound recording by other discourses? (See intertextuality.) H facilities made the work of these observer- All discourses are framed within narratives of documentarists an inspiration for fi lm-makers in one form or another. In news, or indeed in fi ction, I many other countries. Direct cinema went out the story is what happens, the discourse how the

into the world and recorded life as it happened, story is told and the connotations or mean- JK in the ‘raw’. ings embedded within it – the preferred read- An earlier, and British, link with this mode ings. Discourses struggle for attention; some are of fi lm-making was Free cinema, a short-lived dominant and thus hold the public key to the L ‘collective’ of directors in London, organized definition of reality. They rigorously conform by Karel Reisz (Momma Don’t Allow, 1956) and to conventions that work through mechanisms M Lindsay Anderson (O Dreamland, 1953). Direct of information control (see agenda-setting; cinema fi lm-makers had the technical edge on consensus; discourse of power; gatekeep- N Free cinema because of the availability of supe- ing) and are ideology-driven (see conflic- rior sound recording. See cinéma vérité. tual oppositions; demonization; news Disconfi rmation See confirmation/discom- values; photo-negativization; wedom, O firmation. theydom). Discourse A form, mode or genre of language Ultimately discourse is about ruling explana- P use. Each person has in his/her repertoire tions and thus contributes to the nature of a whole range of possible discourses – the myth. Christopher P. Campbell in Race, Myth R language of love, of authority, of sport, of the and the News (Sage, 1995) sees myth not as the domestic scene. In a media sense, an example of ‘grand storytelling tradition associated with a discourse would be the news, refl ecting in its ancient cultures’ but in the ‘sense of the stories S choice of language and style of presentation the that modern societies unwittingly create to social, economic, political and cultural context reduce life’s contradictions and complexities’. T from which the discourse emanates. This is what the discourse of news does; it Gunther Kress in Linguistic Processes in Socio- ‘comprises continuing stories which uphold and U cultural Practice (Deakin University Press, 1985) consolidate myth which ultimately focuses on provides the following useful explanation of order and disorder’. Campbell argues that ‘news discourse: ‘Institutions and social groupings have is a way of creating order out of disorder, off ering V specifi c meanings and values which are articu- cultural meanings, resolutions and reassurances’. Discourse serves (and services) myth, and lated in language in systematic ways. Following W the work particularly of Michel Foucault, I refer the desired end-product is common sense; to these systematically-organized modes of talk- in other words a state of aff airs in which that ing as discourse. Discourses ... give expression to which is defined by discourses is so patently XYZ the meanings and values of an institution. commonsensical that it cannot be seriously ‘Beyond that, they defi ne, describe and delimit contradicted. Campbell identifies the divisive what is possible to say and not possible to say rather than cohesive potential of commonsensi- (and by extension what is possible to do or not cal discourse: ‘Th e danger of the commonsense to do) with respect to the area of concern of that claim to truth is in its exclusion of those who

81 Discourse analysis

live outside the familiar world it represents.’ See granted resources and news space to present in dominant discourse. See also topic guide their own ways, and in their own words, their under language/discourse/narrative. own frameworks of understanding’. See disem- Discourse analysis Form of mass communica- powerment; framing: media. tion analysis that concentrates upon the ways in Discursive gap Term used by Roger Fowler in which the media convey information, focusing Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology on the language of presentation – linguistic in the Press (Routledge, 1991). Th e ‘gap’ is that patterns, word and phrase selection (lexical which exists between the mode of address of choices), grammatical constructions and story the newspaper – formal, bureaucratic – and that coherence. In particular, discourse analysis sets of the perceived reception mode of the reader, out to account for the textual form in which the informal and personal, especially readers of the mass media present ideology to readership or popular press. Fowler argues that ‘the funda- audience. See content analysis; modes of mental device in narrowing the discursive gap is media analysis. the promotion of oral models within the printed Discourse of power The French philosopher newspaper text, giving an illusion of conversa- Michel Foucault (1926–84), wrote that all argu- tion in which common sense is spoken about ments as to the truth are driven by the will to matters on which there is consensus’. power, that is to exert control. Clearly, in terms He believes ‘the basic task for the writer is of the media, discourses are perceived as means to word institutional statements (those of the of exerting infl uence and control over audiences. newspaper, and those of its sources) in a style Foucault saw the fi eld of a discourse in the same appropriate to interpersonal communication, way that a physicist sees the electromagnetic because the reader is an individual and must be fi eld: it is defi ned not by its will to truth, but by addressed as such. Th e task is not only stylistic, its will to power. A discourse seeks power, and but also ideological: institutional concepts have that is what marks out its range. See hegemony; to be translated into personal thought’. In brief, ideology. the press employs a range of devices to simulate a Discursive communication Susanne Langer sense of ‘orality’ which has the writer sitting next in Philosophy in a New Key (Harvard University to the reader around the kitchen table or in the Press, 1942) differentiated between what she pub and joining in a process of ‘co-production’; named discursive communication – prose and the product being consensus, an apparently logic – and non-discursive communication, such shared vision of the world. as poetry, music and ritual. Disempowerment The taking away from Discursive contestation Situation, usually individuals, groups, communities or nations occurring in the transmission of news, where of the power to have control over their lives. the audience is permitted room to challenge In World Communication: Disempowerment or disagree; where news texts passing through & Self-Empowerment (Zed Books, 1995), Cees frames of production are more open (to inter- Hamelink describes disempowerment as ‘the pretation) than closed. News formats either reduction of people’s ability to defi ne themselves facilitate discursive contestation or close down and construct their own identities’. It can be the its potential. result of a deliberate strategy or the unintended Simon Cottle in ‘Television news and citizen- outcome of developments locally, nationally or ship: Packaging the public sphere’, published internationally. As a strategy, says Hamelink, in No News is Bad News: Radio, Television and disempowerment ‘often employs the deceit of the Public (Longman, 2001), edited by Michael making people believe that existing conditions Bromley, talks of how ‘incredibly “restricted” are desirable and preferred out of free will. Th e some news formats are when reporting news most perverse form of disempowerment makes stories’. Conventionalized TV news formats people accept their own dependency and second frame and discursively ‘seal’ the text from alter- rate position’. native interpretations. On the other hand, where The privatization of communications ‘words are spoken by accessed voices’, that is by is seen as an agent of disempowerment: ‘As members of the public rather than media profes- knowledge is created and controlled as private sionals, news texts are more open to discursive property, knowledge as common good is contestation. destroyed.’ For Hamelink, the inherent meaning Cottle argues that formats should work of privatization is private = to deprive. Strategies towards what he terms ‘participatory control’ of empowerment include regulation, the provi- or alternative frames where ‘social actors are sion of power to people through human rights

82 Disqualifying communication

legislation (such as a freedom of information ings and emotions because he/she feels unable A act or laws facilitating a right of reply) or to express them towards their real target – the public-interest regulation (such as the Charter ‘kick the cat’ syndrome. The proposition that B of the BBC). we unconsciously develop such defence mecha- Regulation can also be seen in national press nisms can be useful in the study of interaction. councils, usually voluntary arrangements, An example of how displacement may affect C created to protect the public against abuses communicative behaviour is as follows: a waiter committed by newspapers and journals. The may feel that he has been unfairly treated by a D weaknesses of these forms of empowerment are customer, but also feels unable to do anything many and varied: voluntary watchdogs can so about this so instead later on picks an argument easily end up dogs without teeth, without the with a new and more junior member of staﬀ in E power to insist that media perform according to order to vent his feelings of frustration. empowerment principles; and all of this presup- In relation to studying the media, displacement F poses that the law itself is a force for equality, of eﬀ ect refers to the reorganization of activities

access and treatment. that takes place with the introduction of some G In the context of mass communication, a key new interest or attention-drawer, such as TV or tool of empowerment is media education – in surﬁ ng the Net. Activities such as reading may Hamelink’s words ‘the need to make people be cut down, or stopped altogether; in the case H critically aware of how media are organized, of social networking, displacing face-to-face how they function, and how their contents can interaction with online exchange. New media I be analysed’. Th e author quotes Len Masterman ‘displace’ or adjust the placement of other media.

in Teaching the Media (Comedia, 1985), who Cinema-going habits have been substantially JK believes that ‘media education is an essential aff ected by competition from TV, and in turn step in the long march towards a truly participa- television has been aff ected by video, DVD and tory democracy, and the democratization of our the multi-task possibilities of the mobile phone L institutions’. See freedom of information (see mobilization). Travellers by train will act (uk), 2005; people’s communication have noticed how the potential for a chat with M charter. fellow passengers has largely been displaced by Disenfranchisement (of readership) the prevalence of talk, gaming and fi lm-watching N Researchers have commented on the extent to on mobiles. which some newspapers refl ect an assumption Th e notion of functional similarity has often – possibly that of the owners and editors – that been applied as a yardstick to measure the extent O their readership is totally uninvolved and unin- and nature of displacement: if the new is func- terested in the political processes and events of tionally similar to the old, then the old is likely P the country. It is as if the readers were politically to be displaced. Functionally dissimilar activities disenfranchised, not able to participate in the are likely to hold their own. Th e problem lies in R political process, and thus news of political establishing what functions a medium actually aff airs is of no concern to them. Such papers aim serves, which means that displacement is all the to entertain, to concentrate on stories of human more diffi cult to assess. S interest and drama rather than to inform. As a result of TV, do people talk less, read Disinformation Derives from the Russian, less, go out with friends less, socialize less? T ‘Dezinformatsiya’, a term especially associated Does the internet mop up marginal activities, with the former Soviet Union’s secret service, the displace real with second-hand experience; does U KGB. It applied to the use of forgery and other it displace ‘day-dreaming’? Evidence concerning techniques to discredit targeted governments, people’s reactions to programmes is so open to persons or policies. Th e process of disinforma- infl uence from intervening variables (ivs) V tion is, of course, as old as mankind, and sowing that it is diffi cult to use it as a basis for reliable theory. See effects of the mass media; uses the seeds of disinformation is matched by accus- W ing the opposition of spreading disinformation. and gratifications theory. See also topic See effects of the mass media; news guide under communication theory. management in times of war. Disqualifying communication A form of XYZ Displacement eff ect In psychological theory, self-protection, or defensive communication displacement is one of the major mechanisms when, in a situation causing embarrassment, of ego-defence identified by Sigmund Freud. anxiety or uneasiness, people talk aimlessly Displacement occurs when an individual chooses about, say, the weather, or go into a variety of an alternative focus for the expression of feel- non-verbal responses in order to avoid direct

83 Dissolve

communication. See interpersonal commu- D-Notices See DA (Defence Advisory) Notices. nication. Documentary Any mode of communication Dissolve A process in camera-work by which one which, in addressing an audience, documents picture fades out and the following scene fades events or situations – books, radio, theatre, in on top of it. Also called a ‘mix’. See shot. photography, fi lm or TV. Usually based upon Dissonance Occurs when two cognitive recorded or observable fact, the documentary inputs to our mental processes are out of line. may aim for objectivity or propaganda; it may, Th e result is a certain amount of psychological however, in terms of human documentation, be discomfort. Action is usually taken to resolve the highly subjective. ‘Even when temperate,’ writes dissonance and restore balance. Several strate- William Stott in Documentary Expression and gies are commonly employed in order to achieve Th irties America (Oxford University Press, 1973), this: downgrading the source of dissonance; ‘a human document carries and communicates compliance with rather than acceptance of new feeling, the raw material of drama.’ expectations and ideas; changing one’s previous British film director, producer and theorist ideas and attitudes; and avoidance of the source John Grierson (1898–1972) is thought to have of dissonance. been the fi rst to use the word ‘documentary’, in a All messages, particularly those conveyed to a New York Sun review (1926) of Robert Flaherty’s mass audience, are potentially a source of disso- film Moana, a study of the way of life of the nance to someone. If they disturb the intended South Seas islanders. In fact, ‘documentary’ is receiver(s), then they may well be ignored or as old as the cinema itself. Louis Lumière’s early rejected. Th e need for messages intended for a short fi lms of 1895 – one showing the demolition mass audience to be successful, however, ensures of a wall, another of a train coming into a station that such messages are often well ‘laundered’ in – can be described as documentaries. order to reduce their potential off ensiveness. See The founding father of documentary film- cognitive consistency theories; congru- making in the UK and later in Canada, Grierson ence theory; newcomb’s abx model of never claimed scientific objectivity for such communication, 1953; selective exposure. fi lms. For him the documentary was far more Distributed denial of service (DoS) Process by than a straightforward reconstruction on fi lm of which computer hackers use special software reality. He spoke of the ‘creative use of actuality’ to take control of other people’s computers: a in which the director re-formed fact in order form of trespass or occupation in which endless to reach towards an inner truth. Indeed when – and spurious – requests for information block documentarists have felt it necessary to get at and disrupt the flow of genuine information the truth of a subject as they perceive it, they exchange. The practice of DoS has affected have not held back from fi ctionalization, often the websites of individuals as well as those of using actors, often turning the real-life person corporate giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and into an actor re-creating a scene. Yahoo. In the 1930s, film documentary ran parallel Diversifi cation In media terms, the spread of with radio documentary, the BBC showing ownership and control into a wide range of asso- considerable innovative enterprise in this fi eld, ciated, and often unassociated, products and especially its Manchester studio. In the US many services. Th us newspapers have moved into TV publications combined documentary evidence share-holding and online services; TV compa- with outstanding photography. The themes nies into set rentals, bingo and social clubs and were often those of the Depression: concern motorway catering services. In parallel, great at the plight of the poor, the unemployed, the corporations have moved into media ownership alienated; and the mode was largely to have the – oil companies buying up newspaper chains people speak for themselves rather than distance and investing in broadcasting interests, book the impact of their experience by using the publishing, record production and internet mediation of a commentator. platforms (see myspace; youtube). The Th e documentary approach has been a recur- result of diversifi cation is often, paradoxically, ring feature in modern theatre, especially since concentration of control, and a real danger to a the 1960s. Historical or contemporary events on newspaper, fi lm company or publishing house of stage are far from new: Aeschylus dramatized being just another ‘product’ on the shelf of the the victory of Marathon (490 BC) and Shake- multi-national conglomerate whose objective is speare reconstructed history, often to fit the profi t maximization above all other consider- perceptions of the Tudor monarchy, in a third of ations. See conglomerates; digitization. his output.

84 Dominant, subordinate, radical

German dramatist Rolf Hochhuth won world- of immediacy – indeed making the claims A wide attention with his documentary drama of authenticity made for reality TV pale in Th e Representative in 1963, on the subject of the comparison. B Papacy and the Jews during the Second World Immensely popular on both sides of the War (1939–45). He followed this up with Soldiers Atlantic have been Michael Moore’s docu- (1967) based upon the alleged involvement of mentaries, Bowling for Columbine (2002), a C British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the savage indictment of the US gun culture, and wartime death of the Polish General Sikorski. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), a critical exploration of D In the UK, Peter Brook’s highly successful US the Iraq war of 2003 and alleging links between (1966) was an indictment of American involve- President George Bush and top Saudi families ment in the Vietnam war. including the Bin Ladens. Fahrenheit 9/11 won E On-stage documentaries, in the US often the prestigious Palme d’Or award for best fi lm termed the Theatre of Fact, have frequently at the Cannes Film Festival. It was the fi rst time F been presented with the aid of offi cial and press that a documentary had won the top prize since reports, original diaries, projected photographs, Jacques Cousteau’s award for Silent World in G tape recordings and newsreel fi lms. In the case 1956. of the Royal Court production Falkland Sound Inevitably drama-docs have stirred contro- (1983), a moving and damning recollection of versy. Th e BBC’s Dirty War (2004), for example, H the Falklands War (1982) was presented through was too close for comfort for some critics, being the letters home of a young naval offi cer killed about a ‘dirty bomb’ explosion in London, while I in action. a few faint voices of protest were raised when

Faction or drama-doc are terms mainly associ- Channel 4’s Th e Taking of Prince Harry (2010) JK ated with TV documentaries in which actors simulated the abduction of the Prince while re-create historical lives, such as in the BBC’s Th e on military duty in Afghanistan. See cinema- Voyage of Charles Darwin (1978), or play the part tography, origins; cinéma vérité; direct L of famous people of the immediate past, such as cinema; fly-on-the-wall; radio ballads; Th ames Television’s Edward and Mrs Simpson soaps: docu-soaps; web or online drama. M (1978), Southern TV’s Winston Churchill – Th e ▶ John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modern- Wilderness Years (1981), and ITV’s Kennedy ism and British Culture (Oxford University Press, N (1983). To TV producers, faction has come 2000); Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, eds, New to represent an ideal synthesis of education, Challenges for Documentary (Manchester University information and entertainment, albeit highly Press, 2005); Sheila Curran Bernard, Documentary O selective and deeply coloured by contemporary Storytelling (Focal Press, 3rd edition, 2011). perspectives. Dolly A trolley on which a camera unit can be P Just as documentary has borrowed from soundlessly moved about during shooting; can fictional narratives, so fiction has taken on usually be mounted on rails. A ‘crab dolly’ will R the ‘guise’ of documentary. Such works are move in any direction. described as ‘mock’ documentaries and they aim Domestication of the foreign See news: to examine the borderline between the real and globalization of. S the invented. A memorable example is Woody Dominant culture See culture. ★ Allen’s Zelig (1983) in which he achieved remark- Dominant discourse In a general sense, T able results by combining newsreels, stills and discourse is talk; converse; holding forth in live footage (see Craig Hight and Jane Roscoe’s speech and writing on a subject. Refers both to U Faking it: Mock-documentary and the subversion the content of communicative exchanges and to of factuality, Manchester University Press, 2001). the level at which those exchanges take place, Early UK TV drama-docs of note are Ken and in what mode or style as well as to whom the V Loach’s Cathy Come Home (1965) and Peter discourse is addressed. A dominant discourse is Watkins’s Cullodon (1964) and Th e War Game that which takes precedence over others, reduc- W (1965). Th e popularity of reality tv has in the ing alternative content, subordinating alterna- New Millennium been matched by increased tive approaches to ‘holding forth’. All public interest on the part of audiences in the genre, discourse is socially and culturally based, thus XYZ outstanding examples being Kevin Macdonald’s it follows that the dominant discourse is usually Touching the Void (2003), Errol Morris’s The that which emanates from those dominant in the Fog of War and Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the social and cultural order. See elite; hegemony; Friedmans, both of 2004, each with powerful ideology; power elite. stories to tell and conveying a dramatic sense Dominant, subordinate, radical Th ree catego-

85 Double exposure

Dominant discourse

ries of response in terms of the reading of media have nothing to do with us’. See effects of the messages on the part of audience are posed by mass media; ethnographic (approach to Frank Parkin in Class, Inequality and Political audience measurement); polysemy. See also Order (Paladin, 1972). Do we accept what we are topic guide under audiences: consumption told, only half accept it, or substantially reject & reception of media. it? Parkin argues that it is our place in the social Double exposure Two pictures superimposed structure which conditions our response. Stuart upon one another on the same piece of fi lm. Like Hall in ‘Th e determination of news photographs’ reverse motion, double exposure in fi lming began in Stanley Cohen and Jock Young, eds, The as a simple visual curiosity before it became a Manufacture of News (Constable, 1st edition, fully fl edged means of artistic expression. It was 1973) supports Parkin’s view, with the same fi rst used in still photography, where double or categories but diff erent terminology. multiple exposure images produced what was Th e dominant system of response (Hall calls described as ‘spirit photography’. Georges Méliès it a dominant code) signifi es that the dominant (1861–1938) used double exposure in his fi lms values and existing society are wholly accepted from 1908; the technique has been employed to by the respondent; the subordinate response achieve many eff ects, chiefl y that of suggesting (Hall’s negotiated code) indicates general accep- the supernatural and of conveying the process of tance of dominant values and existing social thought and spirituality. structures, but the respondent is prepared to Doughnut principle See organization argue that a particular group – blacks, unem- cultures. ployed, women – within that structure may be Downloading With digitization facilitating unfairly dealt with and that something should the compression of electronic data, downloading be done about it. Th e radical response (Hall’s has been characterized by exponential growth. oppositional code) rejects the preferred read- As more and more people have invested in high- ing of the dominant code and the social values speed broadband transmission, the downloading that produced it. of music, programmes from radio and TV and David Morley’s research into audience full-length feature films has had a massive response, published in Th e Nationwide Audience impact on traditional modes of distribution. (British Film Institute, 1980), gave substance to Software enables users to download from Parkin and Hall’s division of response, but also a range of sources simultaneously, while emphasized other response-conditioning factors compressing DVD data to a tenth of its original such as education, occupation, political affi lia- size. Th e result is lost revenue on the part of tion, geographical region, religion and family. the producers, though significant profits for More recent commentators have expanded those who can adapt to what has caused a major on the response codes mentioned here; for shake-up in the communications industry. example, a popular response may be character- Mobile devices such as digital music play- ized by inattention on the part of audience or ers are the must-have toys of the twenty-fi rst the rejection of media messages because ‘they century, but they are in competition for market

86 e-book

▶ share with the mobile phone (see mobiliza- Dick Hebdige, Sub-Culture: Th e Meaning of Style A tion). Digital download subscription services (Methuen, 1979; Routledge, 2002); Ken Gelder and allow mobiles to store and play music in addition Sarah Th ornton, eds, Th e Sub-Cultures Reader (Rout- B to their capacity to tune into broadcast news, ledge, 1997); and, all from Sage Publications: Angela watch TV or movie clips, listen to the news on McRobbie, In the Culture Society: Art, Fashion and radio, take pictures (moving and still), connect Popular Music (1999); Stella Bruzzi and Pamela C to the Internet – and, oh, make phone-calls. See Church Gibson, eds, Fashion Cultures: Theories,

podcasting. Explorations and Analysis (2000); Chris Tilly, Webb D Dramadoc See documentary. Keane, Suzanne Kuechler, Mike Rowlands and Patri- Drama: television drama See television cia Spyer, eds, Handbook of Material Culture (2005). drama (uk). Dry-run TV programme rehearsal in which E Drama: web or online drama See web or action, lines, cues, etc. are tried out prior to the online drama. ﬁ nal rehearsal. F Dress Appearance and bodily adornment are Dub, dubbing In ﬁ lm-making, to blend speech,

important aspects of non-verbal communica- music, incidental sound and sound eﬀ ects on to G tion, and play an especially significant role ﬁ lm or videotape. At a later stage, the language when people are forming first impressions of of the ‘home’ audience may be dubbed on to the one another. Th ese features can send a range of sound track in preference to subtitles. See post- H messages about an individual: for example about synchronization. personality, cultural or group identity, gender, Duopoly A monopoly held by two organizations I class, status, ethnicity, faith, wealth, age, roles, rather than one. In broadcasting, the term

fashion-consciousness, stereotype, social was used to refer to the duopoly once held in JK context and historical context, to name but a few. the UK by the BBC and the IBA (Independent In Ted Polhemus and UZi PART B, Hot Bodies, Broadcasting Authority; succeeded in 1991 by Cool Styles: New Techniques in Self-Adornment the ITC – Independent Television Commis- L (Th ames and Hudson, 2004), Polhemus argues sion, in turn giving way to ofcom in 2003). See that in Western cultures a wide variety of arte- media control. M facts, adornments and styles from around the DVD See Digital Video Disc (DVD). world are on oﬀ er in what he terms the ‘global DVD games See video/dvd games. N 24/7 supermarket of style’. Th e trend is for young Dyad A communication dyad consists of two people to experiment and construct a style that persons interacting, and is the elemental unit of expresses personal rather than group identity, to interpersonal communication. O display a sense of uniqueness rather than group Dynamic mediation See impartiality. solidarity. This ‘DIY approach’ is in contrast P to an arguably earlier trend for style to signal membership of a youth sub-culture, such as E R those of the Mods, Rockers or Punks. However, Eady Plan, Eady Levy See british film it needs to be acknowledged that individuals are production fund. not always free to dress as they please. Norms, e-book Published and read electronically, the S conventions and dress codes frame expectations e-book ranks as one of the outstanding develop- in a number of circumstances and contexts. ments in modern publishing. As early as 1971 the T Many workplaces, for example, have a dress code. US Declaration of Independence was scanned An individual may consciously or uncon- into a Xerox mainframe computer by Project U sciously convey messages through dress, but Gutenberg founder Michael Hart. Today, hand- receivers may not of course decode these held electronic devices such as amazon’s Kindle messages in the way intended by the sender. can hold hundreds of books, and new ones can be V While personal style may be an open text, up loaded in seconds. Improvements in e-book uniforms often convey clear messages; unless of readability – clarity and size of print – have W course those uniforms are worn in inappropriate resulted in rapidly increasing sales, giving both circumstances – for instance, in the UK Prince publishers and authors new and more ﬂ exible Harry turned up to a fancy-dress ball in a Nazi opportunities. According to the Association of XYZ uniform and prompted a blaze of reprimands in American Publishers (AAP) the e-book market the nation’s press. See communication, non- increased sales by 500 per cent between 2007 verbal; object language. See also topic and 2010, this representing 15 per cent of trade guide under interpersonal communica- sales in the US. Th ere is evidence that e-reading tion. is proving more attractive to young people in

87 Echelon

particular than the traditional print medium. nineteenth century those in authority were of Echelon An automated global computer intel- the view that access by the mass of the popula- ligence-gathering network run in partnership tion to the printed word might turn docility into between the UK Government Communication uprising. Th e new mass-medium of the cinema Headquarter Agency (GCHQ) and the US was similarly accused of a wide range of ‘eff ects’, National Security, using the intelligence agen- while TV, in the eyes of some, is responsible cies’ own network of satellite and listening bases for many of the ills of our time, as though such and also operated in Canada, Australia and New media could be somehow divorced from the Zealand. It has been estimated that Echelon social, political and cultural environment which intercepts up to three billion communications produce them. a day. So-termed Echelon Dictionaries search A few generalized hypotheses about eff ects can intercepted messages according to target lists of be tentatively posited: the media are probably subjects and people. See surveillance. more likely to modify and reinforce attitudes ▶ James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and than change them; media impact will be greater the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (Anchor, among the uncommitted (‘fl oating voters’) than 2005); also his Th e Shadow Factory: Th e Ultra-Secret the committed; impact will be more infl uential NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America if all the media are saying more or less the same (Doubleday, 2008). thing at the same time (consistency); equally, Echo chamber eff ect Web publics are subject if the media are concentrating on a small rather to fragmentation, insulation from broader than diverse number of stories (intensity) and sources of information and comment, in danger if they are repeating messages, images, view- of being a number of enclaves, talking between points over and over again (frequency). themselves and only to themselves, in a chamber ‘The timing of communication processes,’ that only echoes their own discourses. In ‘Th e writes Colin Seymour-Ure in Th e Political Impact many faced “you” of social media’ published in of Mass Media (Constable, 1974), ‘is probably Journalism and Citizenship: New Agendas in one of the most important determinants of mass Communication (Routledge, 2009), edited by media eff ects.’ If the timing is right, the media Zizi Papacharissi, Sharon Meraz writes of ‘the can often be the arbiters of crisis, by being in the eff ect of limited argument pools and perspec- most prominent position to defi ne it. Because of tives’ in which the echo chamber eff ect can be their agenda-setting capacity, the media have seen as a threat to democracy ‘because of nega- infl uence upon the criteria which, in the public tive informational cascades, which result when domain, decide what is important and what is groups remain insulated and homogenous in not, what is normal and what is deviant, what both perspective and composition’. is consensus and what is dissensus, what is Th e echo chamber eff ect, argues Meraz, ‘can be signifi cant, or newsworthy, and what is marginal. exacerbated in social media environments that No summary of eff ects, however brief, should depend on friendships and social information neglect the role played, some would say most fi ltering to determine popularity’. Th is can lead powerfully, by the media in supporting, reinforc- to ‘collaborative fi ltering of news in some [blog] ing and cementing patterns of social control, not sites’. What has been described as the ‘tyranny least by maintaining and sometimes fashioning of the minority’ can prove detrimental to the the symbols of legitimate government. See openly democratic selection and presentation topic guide under media: power, effects, of news and comment on Net sites. See power influence. law phenomenon. ▶ Shearon A. Lowery and Melvyn L. DeFleur, Mile- Effects of the mass media Can be broadly stones in Mass Media Research: Media Eff ects (Long- defined as any change induced directly or man, 1995); Michael Xenos and Patricia Moy, ‘Direct indirectly by the recording, fi lming or reporting and diff erential eff ects of the Internet on political of events. Analysts of effects, or impact, are and civil engagement’ (Journal of Communication, concerned with the modification of attitudes December 2007); W. Lance Bennett and Shanto and behaviour of individuals and groups. Th e Lyengar, ‘A new era of minimal eff ects? Th e changing process of measuring these eff ects is immensely foundations of political communication’ (Journal of complicated as the ground upon which the Communication, December 2008). measurements are taken is constantly shifting. ★Eisenberg’s model of communication and Th e actual eff ect of the media on audiences, identity, 2001 In his article ‘Building a mystery: so far as it can be ascertained, is arguably less toward a new theory of communication and significant than the perceived effect. In the identity’ published in the Journal of Communica-

88 Elaborated and Restricted Codes

JK Eisenberg’s model of communication and identity, 2001 (the identity process, with three subprocesses operating within a surround) L

tion, September 2001, Eric M. Eisenberg opens Th e three core elements are interdependent M with the comment that a ‘primary challenge of and interactive, and the sense of empowerment human being is living in the present with the will depend on the nature of communication, to N awareness of an uncertain future’. His focus is put it briefl y, less target-orientated, less occupied identity, the search for it, the establishment of it, with the ‘ideology of clarity’, of objectivization, and its shifting nature, as it relates to processes less individualized, less defensive of self, value O of communication within a modern-day context and ideology and more communal, in essence, of fl ux and insecurity. more connective; indeed orientated towards the P Th e aim of contemporary discourse should be cultivation of a ‘planetary identity’. to work towards stability without transforming While Eisenberg does not wish to minimize R that into dogma, into single truths. Th e author the importance of ‘understanding’ in communi- cites the many wars being fought across the cative exchange, he sees in uncertainty its value globe ‘over truth claims of one kind or another’. as mystery, a vital counterbalance to strategies S Just as there is a multiplicity of truths, so there is that endanger sympathetic communion with fl uidity of identity, individual, group, communal others; for as the author acknowledges, ‘Despite T or national. unprecedented advances in science and culture, Th e model demonstrates the interconnected- brutal dictatorships, medieval forms of torture U ness of surround, that is a range of infl uences and genocide persist’ – all in the name of truth- upon human beings in communities, and the assertion and the notion of identity as some- process of communication, the dynamic of which thing fi xed and permanent. Th e stories we tell V arises from mood and personal narrative. Mood ourselves, our construction of identity through

is how we feel about ourselves, our thoughts and self-narrative, are predicated on the nature of W emotions, our physical as well as psychological communication itself, its ability to accommodate orientation to the world around us; to others the ‘fundamental indeterminacy of the future’ within the context of that world. It concerns our which, Eisenberg argues, ‘is an essential quality XYZ sense of power – power to take hold of our lives, of human experience’. See topic guide under shape them, and this connects to the stories we communication models. construct about ourselves, our identity; facilitat- Elaborated and Restricted Codes In Class, ing (or otherwise) what Eisenberg terms our Codes and Control Vol. 1 (Paladin, 1971), Basil ‘narrative possibility’. Bernstein posed a now-famous classiﬁ cation of

89 Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

language codes, the Elaborated and Restricted ▶ Basil Bernstein, ‘Social class, language and social- codes based upon research into the language- ization’, an extract from his major work, in John use of children. Bernstein maintained that there Corner and Jeremy Hawthorn, eds, Communication are substantial diff erences in speech between Studies (Arnold, 1993). middle-class and working-class children (see Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) US class), the former using the Elaborated Code, donor-funded independent organization formed the latter the Restricted Code. in 1990 to campaign for, and defend, public and The determinant of the code in each case consumer interest in the fi eld of digital rights. is the nature of the social relationships and Electronic mail: e-mail Th e sending and receiv- influences to which the child is exposed. A ing of e-mails – texts of all kinds through the close-knit, traditional working-class commu- ‘postal’ system of the computer – has become nity, Bernstein argues, has tended to use the the fastest-growing means of communication Restricted Code because a high degree of shared in business, within institutions and between meaning is assumed. In the more typically friends, families and total strangers across the loose-knit middle-class communities there are world. It has proved a useful tool in the exchange fewer grounds for making assumptions about of knowledge, the provision of advice, the shared meaning, and therefore a more explicit two-way transmission of research data and the – Elaborated – code is used. Th is is not to say sharing across social and national boundaries of that the middle classes do not possess their a myriad of problems. It serves as a link between own Restricted Codes in particular social or groups and communities of like interest, all at professional situations; the important point is the price of a local phone-call. that they have been able to move with ease from In 1992 only 2 per cent of the American popu- a Restricted to an Elaborated Code when it is lation used the e-mail service. Th is had risen in socially or educationally necessary. 1998 to 15 per cent. By 2010, 77 per cent of the Th e Restricted Code tends to be less complex North American population had e-mailing facil- than the Elaborated, with a small vocabulary and ity, an increase of of 146 per cent in the period simpler sentence structure; spoken rather than 2000–2010, according to statistics published by written. It is easy to predict (high in redun- Internetwordstatistics (www.internetworldstats. dancy) whereas the Elaborated Code is less com). The figure for population penetration easy to predict (high in entropy). Th e Restricted of e-mail use in Europe was 58 per cent, with Code is orientated towards social relations, Iceland topping the chart with 97 per cent towards commonality, while the Elaborated compared with Sweden (92), the Netherlands Code represents an emphasis on individuality (88), Denmark (86), the UK (82), Germany and individual diff erences. (79) and France (68). Albania’s 43 per cent Th e one is the language of the street, the home, penetration marked a 59,900 per cent growth. the playground, the pub; the other, very largely, These figures contrast dramatically with the language of school, the language of formal Africa’s 10 per cent penetration. While that of education. Th us, Bernstein indicates, within the Tunisia was 34 per cent, Egypt 21 per cent and educational context, the user of the Restricted South Africa 10 per cent, e-mailing was all but Code can be placed at a disadvantage. He does a stranger to the majority of the population of not argue that the Elaborated Code is superior to Chad (1), the Congo Democratic Republic the Restricted Code, only that it is diff erent and (0.5), and Ethiopia (0.5). Somalia’s 1 per cent more useful for upward social mobility. represented a growth of 52,900 per cent. Bernstein’s claims prompted considerable The rise in what has been referred to as debate, some of it critical, and a number of ‘computer babble’, both for business and leisure researchers argued that his classifi cation is infl ex- use, is such that e-mails now constitute a prob- ible. Martin Montgomery, for instance, in An lem as much as an opportunity. Th e Wall Street Introduction to Language and Society (Routledge, Journal has gauged that a typical worker in a 1995) writes, ‘Th ere is, for example, in the fi nal European company deals with an average of 150 analysis hardly any linguistic evidence to support e-mails a day. Allowing time to read these and the division of speech into two mutually exclusive reply, it would take some four to fi ve hours to codes or speech variants. And by the same token, process – a dramatic example of information Bernstein’s treatment of the social structure looks overload. Th e Journal reported that an executive with hindsight somewhat rigid and schematic.’ returning to the States from a business trip in See topic guide under language/discourse/ Europe found 2,000 e-mails waiting to be dealt narrative; representation. with.

90 Emancipatory use of the media

E-mails are also very public statements, open to rule, Marxist analysis stresses the continuing A to the scrutiny of those not intended to read and increasing polarization or separation of the them. Th en there has been the growth of junk ruling from the ruled class. Marxist analysis B e-mails – spam – and more seriously, phishing, of the media therefore concentrates upon the using spam e-mails to redirect users of online role of the media in propagating the ideas of banking to fake sites, often with devastating the dominant class in order to create a false C financial consequences for the victims. Even consciousness, or to create hegemony, which is more serious still is spoofi ng, where spammers instrumental in subjugating the rest. D use header information to convince you that The liberalist-pluralist school of analysis their message is genuinely from your bank or any sees the media as a kind of fourth estate other confi dential source. pressuring governing elites and reminding them E Th e eff ectiveness of Net industries will increas- of their dependency on majority opinion. Other ingly depend on systems of authentication, that commentators have pointed to the role played by F is making sure that all communications sent social elites in media coverage. Th e emphasis on

are valid and legitimate, while at the same time the activities and perspectives of leading politi- G blocking unwanted sources. See topic guides cians, celebrities and the royal family would be under digital age communication; media: examples here. In Mass Communication Th eory technologies. (Sage, 2010) Denis McQuail discusses the study H Elite A small group within a society who may be carried out by Bennett et al (2004) of media socially acknowledged as superior in some sense, coverage of the ‘Great Globalization Debate’ I and who inﬂ uence or control some or all sectors during the World Economic Forum meetings

of that society. Several defi nitions of the term held in 2001, 2002 and 2003; one fi nding was JK elite exist, and these infl uence the precise focus that the coverage focused disproportionately on of research into the relationship between the the WEF elite as opposed to those of activists media, elites, and society. and protestors and, further, that coverage of the L Early writers generally saw the elite as a ruling elite was signifi cantly more positive in tone. See group or oligarchy whose power is general and commanders of the social order; domi- M aff ects most aspects of society. Writers such as nant discourse; establishment; guard Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) and Gaetano Mosca dog metaphor; news values; power elite. N (1848–1941) regarded elites as being inevitable, ▶ W.L. Bennett, V.W. Pickard, D.P. Iozzi, C.I. Schro- whatever the political system. C. Wright Mills in eder, T. Lago and C.E. Caswell (2004), ‘Managing the a study of elites in US society entitled Th e Power public sphere: journalistic constructions of the great O Elite (Oxford University Press, 1956) points globalization debate’, Journal of Communication, 54 to the similarity of backgrounds, attitudes and (3): 437–55. P values, and power skills of the members of the Ellul’s theory of technique See technique: three elites which, he argues, dominate Ameri- ellul’s theory of technique. R can society: the military, the economic and the E-mail See electronic mail: e-mail. political. He also comments on the degree of Emancipatory use of the media Term personal and family contacts between elite employed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in S members and the interchangeability of person- ‘Constituents of a theory of the media’ in Sociol- nel between top posts in the military, economic ogy of Mass Communication (Penguin, 1972), T and political elites from which the ‘power elite’ edited by Denis McQuail, to contrast with what is recruited. he defi nes as the repressive use of the media. U This concept of elite cohesion has been of He characterizes the emancipatory use of the interest to media researchers who have sought to media as follows: decentralized programme (as investigate links between members of economic opposed to the repressive mode of a centrally V and political elites and those who own or control controlled programme); each receiver a poten- the media, and the eff ect such links might have tial transmitter (as opposed to one transmitter, W on media output. many receivers); mobilization of the masses (as The notion of a ruling elite or oligarchy opposed to immobilization of isolated individu- contrasts with the Marxist concept of a ruling als); interaction of those involved, and feedback XYZ class. Whilst elite theorists point out the (as opposed to passive consumer behaviour); necessity for the elite to recruit from outside a political learning process (as opposed to itself, to remain accessible to the infl uence of the depoliticization); and collective production, non-elite and to maintain a consensus among social control by self-organization (as opposed the non-elite which legitimates the elite’s right to production by specialists, control by property

91 Embargo

owners or bureaucracy). See blogosphere; to avoid such filtering, but to be empathetic democracy; dominant, subordinate, requires that an individual make an eff ort to avoid radical; internet; networking: social judging others on the basis of his/her subjective networking. experiences and perspectives – attempting to Embargo Restriction set upon a news item, see things from the other person’s point of view, indicating when that item can be published or whilst retaining his/her own perspectives, values broadcast. A press release from government or and so on. Clearly empathy has an important role industry, for example, will be headed ‘Not for to play in eff ective interpersonal communication publication/broadcasting until ... ’ and give a and in reducing barriers to communication. specifi c date. Empirical Based upon experience. Empirical Embedded reporters With the invasion of research in the social sciences centres upon Iraq in 2003 by American and British forces, fieldwork – the collection of evidence about the tactic of the authorities was to insist that observable human behaviour. reporters of the war were ‘embedded’ with allied Its evidence may be used to establish an military personnel – the aim being to exercise isolated proposition, to test certain theoretical control over the movements of reporters and to analyses against observable behaviour, or to gain ensure that reports were subject to censorship. insight into certain behaviours. Such evidence Equally, it was expected that reporters, attached may itself generate hypotheses, concepts, to operative units, would identify with those models and theories. units and subsequently develop an empathy ▶ David Deacon, Michael Pickering, Peter Golding with them, an emotional bonding that would and Graham Murdock, Researching Communica- make overt censorship unnecessary. tions: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and The advantage embedded reporters have Cultural Analysis (Hodder Education, 2007). over independents, or ‘unilaterals’, is that they Empowerment Giving to people, individually, have the chance to witness battle at fi rst-hand, as groups or as communities or nations, power share the experience of combat, learn with over their lives, of choice and decision. Th e role their soldier-comrades the nature of fear and of the media in advocating, assisting, blocking stress in which each individual relies on others or subverting empowerment is the subject of for survival. Th e downside is to be subject to keen debate as the media increasingly operate military influence and control. The system is on a global scale. Empowerment also refers to not new: reporters were embedded with British the ways in which audience responds to media troops during the First World War (1914–18). See messages; the degree to which it is capable of news management in times of war. resistive reading (see dominant, subordi- Emblem See non-verbal behaviour: reper- nate, radical). Th ose who are ‘empowered’ toire. are fi rstly capable of interpreting for themselves Emotive language To describe a crowd as a ‘mob’ the agendas and meanings of media communica- or a ‘rabble’ is to be emotive, to convey not only tion. Th ey are able to ‘make use’ of these agendas information but also one’s own attitude towards and meanings to further individual or communal the crowd and one’s intention of infl uencing the needs, ultimately with a political purpose: the receiver’s attitude towards it. Emotive language power is to change things. tells as much about the communicator as the Th ere is currently much debate on the extent message. It reveals what he/she thinks and very to which the internet is a force for empower- often how he/she thinks. ideology is the root ment, off ering opportunities for people to use and inspiration of the media use of emotive Net platforms to comment, exchange views language. Newspapers often use it on those they and campaign on agendas not set by authority disagree with, who appear somehow to threaten or by mass media. See blogosphere; demotic what the newspapers wish to preserve. In times turn; facebook; journalism: citizen jour- of national emergency such as a war, emotive nalism; mobilization; myspace; twitter; language is used to whip up support and fervour web 2.0; wikileaks; youtube. for the cause and to forge a sense of national unity. Encode We communicate by means of a variety Empathetic listening See listening. of visual and aural signals which are assembled Empathy Th e ability to put oneself into another according to certain rules or codes. If Person person’s position, into another person’s shoes, A wishes to convey to Person B a message and to attempt to understand his/her behaviour that Person B is likely to understand, then that and perspectives without fi ltering them through message has to be encoded with Person B’s one’s own value system. It is not possible totally ability to decode the message-carrying signals

92 Ethnic

well in mind. The meaning of a message is the implications of a corporation’s activities A something the receiver assigns in the act of for access to and distribution of information; decoding, which is itself part of an interaction and the nature of the legal environment and its B with the encoder. potential impact on the corporation’s behaviour. A glance at the andersch, staats and Establishing shot Opening shot or sequence bostrom’s model of communication, 1969 showing the location of a fi lm scene or a juxta- C helps here. Th is emphasizes the stages through position of characters who will be involved in the which the act of encoding passes. There is a subsequent narrative. D stimulus to a message, which is structured – put Establishment Th e elite in society, comprising together – and evaluated for its possible eff ect people who because of wealth, birth or position on the receiver before it is transmitted. The in government are able to exercise considerable E same process occurs on the part of the receiver: power and infl uence. Th e term is often associ- the message is registered; it is reconstructed ated with a study of power in Britain in the 1960s F according to the decoder’s perception of the conducted by Anthony Sampson and entitled

message and of the encoder who has delivered Anatomy of Britain (1962). Sampson pursued G the message; the response is then evaluated prior this study until the early 2000s and published to transmission. a number of updated versions of his original This is only the beginning of a continuing analyses. H circle of sending and receiving, encoding and The relationship between members of the decoding. Contributory to the perceptions of establishment and elected politicians has been I encoder and decoder in the process of commu- the focus of some debate. The latest and last

nication are such factors as previous experience, version of Sampson’s study is to be found in JK the current and future context of the interaction, Who Runs Th is Place?: Th e Anatomy of Britain and the feelings, opinions, assumptions and in the 21st Century (John Murray, 2005). Here values of the encoder and decoder. Th e terms he argues that since his series of studies began, L encipher and decipher are sometimes used power has shifted signifi cantly in favour of the instead of encode and decode. See deep struc- Prime Minister. M ture; elaborated and restricted codes. Certainly those who own and manage the Encrypt To ‘scramble’ signals – for satellite TV, various media organizations within society N for example, so that non-subscribers cannot could be considered to fi gure among such an tune into programmes. establishment. Th ey may not necessarily be in or Enculturation Th e process by which individuals act in agreement, however, with those in power- O acquire the values, language, skills, ways of ful positions in other institutions of society, for thinking and behavioural patterns of a particular example the City, large corporations, the Civil P culture that enable them to function effec- Service, the Law Courts, the Police, the Intelli- tively within it. See acculturation, decul- gence services, the Armed Forces, the Monarchy, R turation; intercultural communication; and the Universities. However, the nature of the m-time, p-time; sapir-whorf linguistic relationship between the mass media and other relativity hypothesis. key institutions is the subject of much research. S Enigma code See codes of narrative. See hegemony; power elite. ▶ Entropy See redundancy. Tom Lodge, Ship that Rocked the World: How Radio T Ephemera In communications terms, publica- Caroline Defied the Establishment, Launched the tions such as cigarette cards, picture post- British Invasion and Made the Planet Safe for Rock U cards, and posters produced for the moment, & Roll (Bartleby Press, 2010); Garrick Alder, Diana: conveying information for immediate use. Ironi- Unfi nished Business – Th e Princess of Wales Versus cally such ephemera are now collectors’ items, the British Establishment (Picnic Publishing Ltd, V illuminating records of our past. See cigarette 2011). Ethnic cards: cultural indicators. Term used in the social sciences to refer W EPISTLE Developed from a well-used technique to a community of people possessing its own called pest analysis, epistle is a technique for culture. Th e characteristics that identify an analysing the context in which a corporation ethnic group may include a common language, XYZ operates. In addition to analysing the political, common customs, faith and beliefs, and a economic, social and technological aspects of cultural tradition. A society may contain several the context, attention should be given to the ethnic groups, some of whom, but not all, may following: the environment and green issues also be racial groups. The UK contains many that might arise from a corporation’s operations; ethnic groups: for example, Caribbean, Chinese,

93 Ethnocentrism

Indian, English and Welsh. In a number of ways Ethnographic approach to audience ethnic background and identity may aff ect the research Ethnography has its roots in the manner in which an individual communicates. research traditions of anthropology and urban Th ose from the Caribbean-British community sociology. David Deacon, Michael Picker- may, for instance, use British Black English ing, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock in based on Jamaican Creole as a linguistic marker Researching Communications: A Practical Guide of ethnic identity. to Methods in Media and Cultural Analysis Current areas of research within the media (Hodder Education, 2007) comment that ethno- and communication field include the media’s graphic research is part of a tradition that seeks role in the representation and construction of to explore ‘the ways that people make sense of ethnic identities, ethnicity and language, ethnic their social worlds and how they express these diff erences in the use of non-verbal communi- understandings through language, sound, imag- cation, and the infl uence of ethnic background ery, personal style and social rituals’. on social interaction. See ethnocentrism; An important body of cultural research into hybridization; intercultural commu- the relationship and interaction between TV nication; orientalism; other; prejudice. texts and audience has been described as ethno- See also topic guide under media issues and graphic, that is describing a culture, emphasizing debates. the native point of view. Ethnographic studies Ethnocentrism Th e use of one’s own culture, have, for example, revealed the fact that people its norms and values, as a yardstick by which respond to TV programmes much less along to measure, to judge, the attributes and activi- lines of social class and in a much more varied ties of other cultures. Such judgement bears the way than some commentators have believed. implicit or explicit assumption that one’s own Ethnophaulisms See ethnocentrism. culture is superior. Harry C. Triandis in Individ- Ethnorelativism See ethnocentrism. ualism and Collectivism (Westview Press, 1994) Ethos In communication terms, the ethos of a is one of several researchers to argue that there communicator determines the image one has of is a tendency for all humans to be ethnocentric. him/her at any given time – either one person or If this is the case, then such a tendency could be a group. In their paper ‘A summary of experi- expected to have considerable impact upon the mental research in ethos’, Speech Monographs, way in which messages about other cultures are 30 (1963), Kenneth Anderson and Theodore interpreted and the way in which other cultures Clevenger Jr refer to research fi ndings that point are discussed in any one culture. to two general categories of ethos: extrinsic and Stella Ting-Toomey in Communicating Across intrinsic. Th e fi rst is the image, say, of a speaker Cultures (Guildford Press, 1999), with reference as it exists prior to a given speech; the second to work of several research studies, proposes a is the image derived from elements during continuum of communicative behaviour that the presentation of a speech, consciously or ranges from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism. unconsciously provided by the speaker. Th e fi nal At the far ethnocentric end is communicative impression is a mixture of extrinsic and intrinsic behaviour that often disparages those from factors. other cultures – the use of ethnophaulisms, Th e prestige of a speaker, his/her appearance, for example names, nicknames and sayings used likeableness, credibility, social class, voice, etc. to belittle others, is found here; whilst at the far contribute to his/her ethos. Anderson and Clev- ethnorelativistic end is communicative behav- enger assert that evidence from research proves iour that is supportive, inclusive and provides ‘that the ethos of the source is related in some encouragement to those from other cultures. way to the impact of the message’ and that this Ethnocentrism is seen by many commentators applies ‘not only to political, social, religious and on media performance to infl uence the coverage economic issues but also to matters of aesthetic of news. We see, and thus report, the world judgment and personal taste’. through the lens of our ethnocentric perception, Euphemism In polite circles, ‘belly’ is not often falling into the trap of envisioning that referred to, but ‘stomach’ is acceptable. Th at is world in terms of us and them (see wedom, a euphemism, the rendering of blunt, harsh or theydom). It follows that objectivity is often unpleasant terms in mild, inoff ensive or quaint at the mercy of how we see the world rather than language. Thus ‘to die’ may be rendered how it actually is. See agenda-setting; event: euphemistically as ‘to pass away’; a ‘bookie’ americanizing of; media imperialism; may prefer to seek more status by calling him/ news values; other; prejudice; stereotype. herself a ‘turf accountant’. In advertising, ‘budget

94 Event

items’ are preferred to ‘cheap goods’. In business, 1980s the number of cross-border TV channels A people are not ‘sacked’ but ‘the labour force is has risen to more than a hundred, some eighty slimmed’ or ‘downsized’. of these holding a licence from the UK Indepen- B Some euphemism is justifiable in inter- dent Television Commission (ITC, replaced by personal communication, for example at ofcom in 2003), whose licences are cheap and times of grief and tragedy; some is insulting to easy to obtain, the prime criterion being that C language and to human intelligence and dignity, such stations are based in the UK. such as the terminology of armed conﬂ ict where Th e expansion of cross-border transmission D ‘demographic targeting’ means the destruction was made possible, and encouraged by, three of cities in situations of war, ‘support structure’ is key factors: (1) deregulation, which occurred civilians, ‘collateral damage’ is dead civilians and through Europe (and elsewhere) during the E an ‘intelligence producing facility’ is a torture 1980s and 1990s; (2) the European Commu- chamber. nity’s Television Without Frontiers directive F In their chapter ‘Doublespeak’ in Weapons (see above), Article 2 of which prevents member

of Mass Deception: Th e Uses of Propaganda in states barring broadcasting emanating from G Bush’s War on Iraq (Tarcher/Penguin; Constable other member states; and (3) the possibilities and Robinson, 2003), Sheldon Rampton and brought about by satellite transmission. John Stauber cite ‘shaping the security environ- See localization. H ment’ as polite language for controlling people at Event Th e occurrence which gives rise to media gunpoint, while ‘critical regions’ is doublespeak coverage will have fulfi lled one or more or an I for ‘countries we want to control’. amalgam of news values. In the analysis of Euronet A consortium of national computer media, diff erent forms of event can be identifi ed. JK interests in a number of European countries, Primarily there is the key event triggering media working towards the creation of a mutually and subsequently public attention. Such an event compatible interconnection of European data- may, as in terrorist attacks in one country or city, L bases. Euronet is designed for reasons as much trigger a worldwide sense of crisis. political as economical, as a method of ensuring In ‘Th e impact of key events on the presen- M that in the long term the economic control of tation of reality’ in the European Journal of Europe remains in European hands, and thus, Communication, September 1995, Hans Mathias N inextricably, the control of information. Kepplinger and Johanna Habermeier refer to European Community and media: ‘Televi- events that are key, similar and thematically sion without frontiers’ Title of a Council related. These can be seen as genuine (inde- O of Europe directive, October 1989, the first pendent of the media), mediated (infl uenced by attempt by the European Community to regulate media) and/or staged (for the media). P and institutionalize broadcasting between Media coverage of events, especially if these member states; revised in 1997. Th e directive give ground for concern about causes and R requires EC members to guarantee unrestricted consequences, stimulates the ‘activities of pres- reception for audiences across Europe and to sure groups who see an opportunity of gaining avoid any strategies likely to limit retransmis- media attention, since their concerns fit in S sion in their territory of any EC broadcasts that with the established topic. Th e consequence is meet Community conditions. Th e directive lays an increased number of mediated and staged T down a policy of minimum regulation, granting events’. equal rights to commercial operators and public Equally, such coverage tends to exert ‘pres- U service broadcasters while at the same time sure upon decision-makers in politics, busi- requiring no legal obligations to enhance public ness, administration, etc.’. Th e authors give the discourse. example of how safety-rules for petrol tankers V Facing the TWF initiative in 2005 was the may be changed as a result of media conjecture about possible, rather than actual, accidents. monumental task of legislating for the vast W increase in internet and mobile phone traf- Coverage of key events will, say Kepplinger and fi c. Pressure for further deregulation came Habermeier, enhance the coverage of similar or from major corporations such as Time Warner, related events, and add interest and urgency to XYZ News International, Bertelsmann and Microsoft, events thematically linked. lobbying under the umbrella of the International Of course the nature of coverage will vary Communications Round Table (ICRT). See between media, for example between daily and fairness doctrine (usa); privatization. weekly newspapers or between broadsheets and Europe: cross-border TV channels Since the tabloids. The authors note a tendency in the

95 Event: Americanizing of

reporting of key events to give the impression of that they are beyond question and need not be an accumulation of such events (hence the sense referred to or justifi ed. Exnomination is integral of crisis), whereas what is actually happening is to the working of ideology, representing the an accumulation of another kind: similar stories, dominant code of a society. See common sense; being gathered together from the past as well as hegemony; myth. the present, are being reinvigorated and intensi- Exotica Interest in, and commodification of, fi ed as they compound information about the ethnic diff erences; most strikingly demonstrated new key event. in fashion. Key events thus trigger apparent waves of such Expectation, horizons of Describes the ‘readi- events when in reality only one has occurred: ness factor’ of audience in terms of its expecta- ‘Here one has to take into account that the news tions concerning a communicative text: is the coverage creates a false impression that events audience well-primed for what is to come, or likely accumulate and problems become more urgent.’ to be resistant out of unawareness, ignorance, See next entry. prejudice; and is the audience likely to conform to Event: Americanizing of Practice, in the US, of the preferred reading or aberrantly decode the reporting world events in relation to American text? (See decode.) Th e German literary critic interest or interests. As Susan D. Moeller points Hans Robert Jans uses the phrase in Towards an out in Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Aesthetic of Reception (University of Minneapolis Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (Rout- Press, 1982), referring to each reader of a text as ledge, 1999), ‘the American fi lter, the notion of approaching it with horizons of expectations relevance to the United States, is very important’. shaped by previous literary, cultural and social Speaking of the American public, Moeller says, experience. A text is interpreted on a basis of ‘Since our knowledge about the lands outside how it accords with or challenges expectations. our borders is minimal, even the abbreviated Such expectations need to be seen in relation to, version of events which makes it into news has and generally arising from and interactive with, to be translated for us’. (See ethnocentrism.) collective representations. In her conclusion to her analysis of compas- Expectations People come to have a collection of sion fatigue and how the media can strive to ideas about what is expected of them in terms of avoid creating or reinforcing it, Moeller believes their behaviour in certain social situations and, that the Americanizing of events ‘(once called in turn, of what they should expect concerning the “Coca-Colonization” of events) can be a the behaviour of others and of their treatment in positive force to attract the public’s attention to society generally. Research into human percep- a far-off event, but it should not be the defi ning tion has highlighted the important infl uence characterization of that event’, for ‘once in play, expectations have on an individual’s perception the Americanization can become a crutch, of new information. simplifying a crisis beyond recognition, and Expectations are formed from personal certainly beyond understanding’. experience and by information received from The author concedes that ‘Americans are various other sources. Information received already too self-involved’ and she blames from these other sources may modify previous the media’s ‘entrenched news net and news expectations, or play a particularly crucial role priorities’ as the cause ‘of their neglect of certain in shaping expectations about persons or social events or countries’. See historical allusion. situations of which the individual has no direct Excorporation The process by which those experience. An item of information will be more who are not members of the dominant group(s) readily accepted if it is compatible with existing within society, for example members of youth ideas and expectations; if it is not, then disso- cultures and sub-cultures, utilize the mate- nance may occur and the information may be rial resources provided by the prevailing system rejected or ignored. to fashion cultural statements that communicate Th e media are an important source of infor- their difference from or opposition to the mation about many social and political events of dominant culture. See bricolage; counter- which the individual has little or no fi rst-hand culture; style. experience. Several researchers have therefore Exnomination Roland Barthes uses this term sought to investigate the role played by the in Mythologies (Paladin, 1973) to describe the media in shaping an audience’s expectations assumption on the part of the communicator, about certain persons, social groups or social usually the mass media, that certain values are situations – those related to social unrest, for so basic and so widely shared, indeed so natural, example – of which the audience has little or no

96 Eye contact and gaze

direct experience against which to test the valid- of Human Interaction (McGraw-Hill, 1972) ‘that A ity of the media’s presentation. a whole vocabulary is necessary to distinguish The matter of concern here is that in such among the ways people look at each other.’ We B cases, individuals are more than usually vulner- stare, glower, peep, pierce, glance, watch, gaze able to propaganda. Also of interest is the and scan; and we do it directly or indirectly, role of the media in creating stereotypes by provocatively or furtively, confidently or C engendering a set of expectations and beliefs nervously. Eye contact and gaze play an impor- about particular individuals, social groups or tant role in the regulation of social interaction. D social situations. Gaining eye contact is usually the ﬁ rst step in Experimental group A research term for starting a social encounter, just as decreasing the group within an experiment to whom the eye contact is typically one of the signs that E experimental treatment is applied (for example, an encounter is ending – although increased the group may be asked to conform to a particu- eye contact is often given as the encounter is F larly rigorous procedure of communication actually concluded. During a conversation the

whilst performing a set task). Th e results from listener usually indicates attention by frequent G this group are then compared to those from eye contact with the speaker. The speaker, a comparable control group which was not however, looks less often at the listener but does subjected to the experimental treatment. Th e use eye contact to check for feedback. Lack of H control group provides the base-line against eye contact on the part of the listener will often which the eﬀ ectiveness of the treatment can be be read as a sign of lack of interest in what the I judged. Changes that take place in the behaviour speaker is saying. Listeners can therefore use lack

of the experimental group but not the control of eye contact to make a speaker feel uncomfort- JK group are likely to be seen as resulting from the able and to close a conversation down. treatment. See topic guide under research The smooth handing-over between speaker methods. and listener within a conversation also involves L Extracted information Youichi Ito, then Profes- the appropriate use of eye contact, according sor of Political and International Research at to Judy Gahagan in Social Interaction and its M the University of Keio, Tokyo, in ‘Climate of Mangement (Methuen, 1984). Michael Argyle opinion, kuuki, and democracy’ in William notes in Bodily Communication (Methuen, 1988) N Gudykunst, ed., Communications Yearbook, No. that participants in a conversation tend to use 26 (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002) used this term more eye contact if placed further apart than if to describe that which the public draws from closer together. Th e topic of a conversation can O sources other than the mass media, for example also infl uence the use of eye contact: typically from personal experience and observation, and less eye contact is used if the topic is diffi cult. P talking to others. People also display less eye contact if they are sad The more people talk to each other, argues or embarrassed. Th ose attempting to persuade R Ito, the less dependent they are on the mass may be more successful if they use increased eye media. Conversely, the less they talk among contact. themselves, the more media agendas dominate Argyle argues that the nature of relationships S the public’s way of thinking and perceiving. ‘If can also be revealed in the use of eye contact. people depend heavily upon mass media for Prolonged looking is typically a sign of a close T information,’ writes Ito, ‘and if personal infl u- or intimate relationship but it can also be a sign ence in political communication is weak, then of aggression and used to threaten or intimidate U the political influence of mass media may be – for this reason we may be uncomfortable overwhelming.’ See kuuki. with prolonged gazes from those with whom Extrapersonal communication That which we are not intimate. Factors of psychological V takes place without human involvement: dominance and submission are refl ected in the extent and nature of eye contact. A single glance machine-to-machine communication, for W example; a major growth industry of communi- may be all that is required for an individual to cations with the coming of computers, increased assert him/herself over others, to take initiative automation and the development of robotics. or leadership, whereas gaze aversion can be a XYZ Eye contact and gaze Perhaps the most subtle sign of submission. and signifi cant feature of non-verbal communi- Cross-cultural diff erences exist as regards the cation (see communication, non-verbal). degree of eye contact or gaze regarded as normal ‘So complex is mutual eye contact,’ notes C. in social encounters. Roger E. Axel in Gestures: David Mortensen in Communication: Th e Study Th e Do’s and Taboos of Body Language Around

97 Facebook

the World (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1998) notes, Facebook insists (unlike myspace) on users for example, that whilst direct eye contact is operating as their true identities. Its services expected in North America, Britain, Eastern have diversifi ed innovatively, with News Feed Europe and in Jewish cultures, less direct eye being introduced in 2006, followed by Photos, contact is expected by West Indians, Asians allowing unlimited photo-posting, Facebook and African Americans. See civil inatten- Notes, Gifts, Marketplace and Facebook tion; indicators; proxemics; regulators. Messages. Over 150 million users access Face- See also topic guide under interpersonal book through mobile-phone devices in sixty or communication. more countries. ▶ Desmond Morris, People Watching (Vintage, 2002); Facebook plays on the ‘flocking’ nature of Allan and Barbara Pease, Th e Defi nitive Book of Body human beings and in this it is ideologically Language (Orion, 2004). suited to derive synergy from consumerism. Indeed the fi nancial success of Facebook for its Silicon Valley masters is a triumph for consum- F erist ethics and on a global scale, a fact not Facebook One of the outstandingly successful overlooked by Digital Sky Technologies which social networks, with millions of subscribers, owns 10 per cent of the company. exponentially growing, its key feature being the Despite having a hard ride in Ben Mezrich’s gathering of ‘Friends’, facilitating not only scores book Accidental Billionaires: Th e Founding of if not thousands of contacts, but encouraging Facebook, A Tale of Sex, Money and Betrayal users to launch into their contacts’ contacts and (Doubleday, 2009), and something of a drub- their contacts’ contacts’ contacts in an eternal bing in the fi lm based on the book, Th e Social chimera of apparently opening doors. As with Network (2010), directed by David Fincher, Mark most social exchange on the internet, the Zuckerberg was deemed worthy of celebration dominant characteristic of exchanges is at the as Time magazine’s Person of the Year 2010. Th e level of ‘I’m not looking forward to work on ruthless competitiveness illustrated in book and Monday’ kind of trivia; comments then prompt- fi lm was on show in May 2011 when Facebook ing a response of followers, such as ‘Nor am I’. was revealed to have employed a PR firm to One can ‘like’ what’s being uploaded, and add a disseminate ‘bad news’ stories in the US press comment such as ‘Tuesdays are worse for me’. about Facebook’s rival google, with the specifi c On a more serious note, Facebook users have intention, commentators believed, to undermine influence. There are cases when users have Google’s social networking tool, Social Circle. moved beyond the homespun and the domesti- Facework In communicative encounters we often cally bizarre to unite in some cause, to pressurize need to have some concern for the image or decision-makers. Campaigns are possible, but reputation of ourselves as well as that of others; they remain leaderless and the tide of protest facework strategies are commonly employed to is rarely long-lived: individuals return to the achieve the desired outcome. Th ere are however specifi cs of everyday life. For some, Facebook cultural differences in the manner in which may be seen as a dating agency; for others, self- facework is employed. Stella Ting-Toomey in promotion; for others an opportunity to explore Communicating Across Cultures (Guidford online Net vistas by being something diff erent Press, 1999) argued that in Western cultures the from their real selves. What Facebook will rarely emphasis typically tends to be on protecting one’s if ever do is match real friendship. own ‘face’, whereas in Asian cultures the empha- Launched in 2004, the creation of Mark sis is on protecting the face of others, principally Zuckerberg and fellow Harvard computer stud- by showing respect and consideration when ies students Chris Hughes, Dustin Moskowitz in conversation. As several researchers have and Eduardo Saverin, Facebook became by 2009 cautioned, assertiveness is not a universally the most used social network in the Western admired aspect of an individual’s communicative world. From 2006 it was open to anyone over style. See impression management. the age of thirteen with an e-mail address. It has Facial expression Th e face’s main role in provid- encountered widespread blocking in a number ing non-verbal communication is in the expres- of countries and, as with most of the premier sion of emotions. Michael Argyle in Bodily online services, challenges concerning copyright Communication (Methuen, 1988) argues that the as well as raising doubts concerning issues of main facial expressions are those used to display privacy. It has been said that by its very nature it happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, anger, disgust, is prone to cyberstalking. contempt and interest. Facial expressions

98 Federal Communications Commission (FCC)

play a key role in providing feedback during which prized the private above the public, led A conversations. However, Argyle comments that to pressures to deregulate broadcasting. The our awareness of what our facial expressions FCC was persuaded that the broader and more B may reveal often leads us to control them, and diverse market-place would ensure plurality of that we can be quite successful in doing so. Th us opinion without regulation. there may be diﬃ culties in accurately judging In Democracy Without Citizens: Media and C emotional reactions from facial expressions the Decay of American Politics (Oxford Univer- alone. Despite attempts to conceal our reactions, sity Press, 1989), Robert M. Entman voiced deep D leakage may occur, that is other non-verbal scepticism about the idea of leaving controver- behaviour, often in the lower half of the body, sial matters in the hands of market forces. He may reveal our true reactions. For example, writes of the ‘dangers of basing public policy E whilst the face might be passive, a tapping foot on the assumption that the economic market might indicate that we are agitated by a message. inevitably nourishes journalism’s contribution F A number of studies suggest that the facial to democratic citizenship’; indeed, ‘decisions

expressions used to convey these emotions are rooted in this premise, as the FCC’s elimination G to a large extent universal, thus they are found of the Fairness Doctrine, might actually retard across all human cultures. The cultural rules progress towards a freer press and citizenship’. concerning the display of facial expressions See deregulation; privatization. H may, however, vary. For example, Larry Samovar Fatwa On St Valentine’s Day 1989, Iran’s Ayatollah and Richard Porter in Communication Between Khomeini issued a ‘fatwa’, or edict, against the I Cultures (Wadsworth/Th omson Learning, 2004) British novelist Salman Rushdie for his novel

note that in Korean culture, too much smiling Satanic Verses (1988). The book was deemed JK can be interpreted as a sign of shallowness. See blasphemous, guilty of containing scenes so communication, non-verbal. insulting to the Islamic faith that every true ▶ Stella Ting-Toomey, Communicating Across Moslem had a bounden duty to kill the author. L Cultures (Guildford Press, 1999); Allan and Barbara To carry out the fatwa would guarantee a place Pease, Th e Defi nitive Book of Body Language (Orion, in heaven. Rushdie went into hiding, with M 2004). police protection. Th e fatwa applied to all those Facsimile Exact copy; today, facsimile (or fax) involved in the publication of the novel. Book- N is the transmission of a printed or handwritten shops were fi re-bombed. Th e Japanese translator page or image by electronic means. As early as of the novel was attacked, beaten up and stabbed 1842 Scotsman Alexander Bain proposed the to death and an Italian translator stabbed. Th e O fi rst facsimile system, though it was not until the Iranian government distanced itself from the 1920s that the process was generally employed fatwa death sentence in 1998, without actually P for the transmission of news, photographs, withdrawing it offi cially. See censorship. weather maps and maps for military purposes. Fax See facsimile. R Newspaper editions can be transmitted across Federal Communications Commission continents for simultaneous publication; the (FCC) Set up by the US federal government in pictures of wanted criminals can be relayed 1934; a body empowered to regulate interstate S instantly to practically every police force in the and foreign communications such as radio and world, while the facsimile machine can combine TV. Its eff ectiveness in the role of protector of T with the domestic TV receiver to provide a public sector broadcasting against the ambitions permanent record of news and other items and predatory intentions of the private sector U appearing on the screen. in the US has long been questioned. In ‘An Faction See documentary. American view of UK terrestrial TV’, published Fade in Gradual emergence of a scene from black- in Free Press, journal of the Campaign for Press V ness to clear, full defi nition. Th e term is used in & Broadcasting Freedom (CPBF), July-August

radio as well as ﬁ lm and TV. 2002 edition, American documentary-maker W Fairness Doctrine (USA) A broadcast- and journalist Willams Rossa Cole states that US ing regulation in the US until 1987 when the government ‘regulation of content for the public Federal Communications Commission (FCC), interest has diminished consistently over the XYZ responsible for its observation, abolished it. Th e last decades’. He is of the view that the FCC ‘is doctrine required broadcasters to devote time so passive in the realm of television content and to controversial issues and to air varied opposed ownership that it might as well shut its doors to viewpoints. In the 1980s expansion in radio and save the taxpayer some money’. television channels, and a dominant ideology He quotes the-then FCC chairman, Michael

99 Feedback

Powell – ‘thoroughly pro-deregulation and pro- archal, assumptions about the behavioural market’ – as stating on his fi rst day in offi ce that diff erence expected of men and women and the he ‘had waited for a visit from the angel of public assignment of social roles and status that rests interest … but she did not come’. See deregula- on them; and what it perceives as a widespread tion; regulatory favours. devaluing of women’s attributes, experiences Feedback According to Chambers Twentieth and perspectives. Century Dictionary (ed. A.M. Macdonald, 1972), One focus of current research is the explora- feedback is the ‘return of part of the output tion of the role played by the media both in of a system to the input as a means towards fostering and reinforcing sexism and more improved quality or self-correction of error’; generally notions of femininity and masculinity, in A Dictionary of New English, 1963–1972 (eds, and media coverage of women’s rights issues and C.L. Barnhart, S. Steinmetz and R.K. Barnhart, the feminist movement and its ideas. Another Longman, 1973), feedback is ‘a reciprocal eff ect important research interest is the degree to of one person or thing upon another; a reaction which language and its use refl ect and perpetu- or response that modifies, corrects, etc., the ate sexism and assumptions about diff erences behaviour of that which produced the reaction or between masculine and feminine behaviour. response’. Without feedback – the signal that is See gender; performativity. See also topic stimulated by an act of communication, biologi- guide under gender matters. cal, mechanical, human or animal – meaningful ▶ Liesbet van Zoonen, ‘Feminist perspectives’ in contact halts and cannot make progress. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, eds, Mass Feedback is the regenerative circuit, or loop, of Media and Society (Arnold, 1996); Caroline Ramaza- communication. A student who submits his/her noglu and Janet Holland, eds, Feminist Methodology: essay to the teacher expects feedback in terms Challenges and Choices (Sage, 2002); Jennifer Coates, of comments and a mark. Unless this feedback Women, Men and Language (Pearson Education, occurs, the student lacks guidance for the 2004); Mary Crawford and Rhoda Ungar, Women and future; more, he/she is likely to be demotivated Gender: A Feminist Psychology (McGraw-Hill, 2004); and draw back from further communicative Lana F. Rakow and Laura A. Wackwitz, eds, Feminist interaction. When the student’s essay is returned Communication Th eory (Sage, 2004); Janet Holmes it may contain positive or negative feedback: and Miriam Meyerhoff , Th e Handbook of Language harsh comments, without encouragement, and and Gender (Blackwell, 2006); Charlotte Brunsdon a low mark might well be more demotivating and Lynn Spigel, eds, Feminist Television Criticism: A than not receiving any feedback at all. Praise and Reader (Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Educa- supportive criticism on the other hand are likely tion, 2008); Sue Th ornton, ‘Media and feminism’ in to produce a positive response – of greater eff ort James Curran, ed., Mass Media and Society (Blooms- and motivation. bury, 2010). Central to the purpose of feedback is control; Fibre-optic technology One of the wonder- that is, feedback enables the communicator products of the Information Age, fibre-optic to adjust his/her message, or response, to that cable is fi ne-spun glass, a mixture of silicon and of the sender, and to the context in which the oxygen, through which digital codes are passed communicative activity takes place. At the in pulsing light. Its impact on telephone technol- interpersonal level feedback is transmitted by ogy has been immense, and its potential for this, voice, expression, gesture, sight, hearing, cable television, and many other purposes turns touch, smell, etc. The greater the distance so rapidly into achievement and new possibili- between communicators, the fewer the ‘senses’ ties that even the experts fi nd it diffi cult to plan being employed to ‘read’ and return feedback, for fi bre’s accelerating capacity. the more diffi cult it is to arrange and control, Fibre-optic cable can carry ten times further and the more diffi cult it is to assess its nature than coaxial without requiring a booster. Over and meaning. See audience measurement; 7,500 different channels can operate along a cybernetics. See also topic guide under single pair of optical fi bres, though the potential communication theory. number lies in millions. Because fibre-optic Feminism Th ough embracing diff erent perspec- transmission is free from electrical interference, tives and schools of thought, fundamentally cable can be cheaply laid along existing railway feminism is concerned with the advancement lines; it can follow existing electricity pylons, and achievement of equal social and political enclosed in the earth wire. Fibre-optic cable has rights for women, and the fi ght against sexism. crossed the English Channel and the Atlantic Feminism challenges many traditional, patri- (1989).

100 First impressions

All forms of cable are limited in terms of the the early years of the Second World War and A span of the networks by the number of cable the late 1950s, and ranging from John Huston’s terminals. In contrast, satellite transmission has Maltese Falcon (1941) to Orson Welles’s Touch B a global reception capacity: the extension of one of Evil (1958). Hollywood ﬁ lm noir, says Michael is the opportunity of the other – the harnessing Walker in the Introduction to Th e Movie Book of cable and satellite within the same transmis- of Film Noir (Studio Vista, 1992), edited by Ian C sion systems. See topic guide under media: Cameron, features ‘heroes who are frequently technologies. victims of a hostile world’. Such movies are D Fiction values Th ese work with and as news characterized by a ‘distinctive and exciting visual values. Milly Buonanno in an article ‘News- style, an unusual narrative complexity’ and ‘a values and ﬁ ction-values: news as serial device generally more critical and subversive view of E and criteria of “fictionworthiness” in Italian American ideology than the norm’. fiction’, published in the European Journal of In the words of E. Ann Kaplan writing in F Communication, June 1993, argues that the Women in Film Noir (British Film Institute,

criteria for modern TV and ﬁ lm ﬁ ction parallel 1980, edited by Kaplan), women are ‘presented G news values. She cites, for example, the high as desirable but dangerous to men’. Th ey ‘func- social status of the protagonists (the elite tion as the obstacle to the male quest. Th e hero’s value of news) and the emphasis on proximity, success or not depends on the degree to which H that which is ‘happening in our own backyards’ he can extricate himself from the woman’s (an ethnocentric news value). manipulations’. Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity I Film See anarchist cinema; animation; brit- (1941), with Fred MacMurray as the (willingly)

ish board of film censors; british film manipulated male victim and Barbara Stanwick JK institute (bfi); british film production as the alluring manipulator, is a classic example fund; catalyst effect; certification of of the genre. films; cinematography, origins; cinéma ▶ Foster Hirsch, Film Noir: Th e Dark Side of the Screen L vérité; direct cinema; documentary; (Da Capo Press, paperback 1983 and later editions); double exposure; emotional dynamiza- James Chapman, ed., Th e New Film History: Sources, M tion; film noir; flashback; fly on the Methods, Approaches (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). wall; hays office; high-speed photog- First Amendment (US, 1791) Th e lynchpin of N raphy; hollywood; imax; kinetoscope; American freedom of speech and expression: kuleshov effect; march of time; mcguffin; ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an montage; multiple image; musical: film establishment of religion, or prohibiting the O musical; national film archive; newsreel; free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom new wave; omnimax; persistence of vision; of speech, or of the press; or the right of the P rushes; shot; slow motion; soviet mani- people peaceably to assemble, and to petition festo, 1928; special effects; synchronous the government for a redress of grievances.’ R sound; vamp; video; western; wipe; zoom First impressions There is evidence that we lens; zoopraxography. tend to give too much attention to the initial Film censorship See censorship; certifica- information we may receive about an individual, S tion of films. and relatively less to later information that may Film noir Term used by French ﬁ lm critics, nota- be contradictory; that is, we are biased towards T bly Nino Frank, to describe a particular kind of primacy effects (see primacy, the law of). dark, suspenseful thriller. A classic of the genre Evidence also suggests that negative ﬁ rst impres- U is French director Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève sions in particular can be resistant to change. (1939) – ‘Day Arises’, starring Jean Gabin. We First impressions can clearly count in situa- see the last doomed hours of a man wanted by tions where most of the information is received V the police for murder. He has barred himself in about a person in a fairly short, discrete period

his attic bedroom in an apartment block. He is of time, as in an interview. In this instance there W totally surrounded. He has no chance; but then, might be little opportunity for fi rst impressions Carné makes clear, the man never did have a to be modifi ed. chance. At dawn he shoots himself and, as he lies In some circumstances – as when a consid- XYZ dying, his alarm clock goes off , reminding him of erable time gap intervenes between sets of his otherwise intolerable life as a worker. information received about an individual or Described as ‘symbolism with a three o’clock in when there is regular, close contact with that the morning mood’, fi lm noir gained substantial individual – fi rst impressions can be modifi ed. currency in the US, generally thriving between Here the later information received may have

101 Five ﬁ lters of the news process

greater impact. This is known as the recency ▶ Laura Melvern, Th e End of the Street (Methuen, eff ect, because it is the more recent information 1986). that is the more infl uential. See topic guide Flow See programme flow. under communication theory. Fly on the wall Popular title given to a genre of Five fi lters of the news process See consent: documentary fi lm-making, for the cinema or manufacture of. TV, in which the camera remains concealed, or Five myths of deregulation See deregula- is handled so discreetly that the subjects forget tion, five myths of. they are being fi lmed. Richard Denton, producer Flak Term used by Edward Herman and Noam of the BBC documentary series Kingswood: Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: The A Comprehensive School (1982) described the Political Economy of the Media (Pantheon, 1988; approach in ‘Fly on the wall – designed to invade Vantage paperback, 1994), to describe a ‘negative privacy’, Listener (13 January, 1983), as attempting response to a media statement or programme, ‘to remove the process of fi lming so far from the and this may resemble fl ak in its wartime sense: a consciousness of the contributors that they will, blitz taking the form ‘of letters, telegrams, phone in theory, forget its existence and so behave in calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills a markedly more natural, truthful and realistic before Congress, and other modes of complaint, manner’. threat, and punitive action’. Denton speaks of two distinct problems: Th e authors argue that ‘if fl ak is produced on ‘The first concerns the question of accuracy a large scale, or by individuals or groups with and context ... Th e second, and probably more substantial resources, it can be both uncom- important, problem concerns privacy.’ Outstand- fortable and costly to the media’. Used by the ing examples of the fly-on-the-wall approach powerful such as the great corporations, fl ak is were the BBC’s Police series (1982), the work of intended to inhibit media activity, or bring about Roger Graef and Charles Stewart, and Channel the cessation of that activity. Flak can be aimed 4’s Murder Squad (1992). Of particular interest at media activity indirectly as well as directly for fly-on-the-wall documentarists has been ‘by [in the case of corporations] complaining to family interaction. First in the UK to win fame by their own constituencies (stockholders, employ- exposing their lives to the eye of the camera were ees) about the media, by generating institutional the Wilkenses of Reading, featured in the BBC advertising that does the same, and by funding series Th e Family (1974). In 1999 Granada Televi- right-wing monitoring or think-tank operations sion screened the lives of a mixed-race family designed to attack the media’. See consent: from Leeds, in Family Life. Later observational manufacture of. documentaries have meticulously and intrusively Flashback A break in the chronology of a narra- closed in on the lives and opinions of neo-Nazis tive in which events from the past are disclosed (100 White, Channel 4, 2000), the ‘realities’ to the reader, listener or viewer, and which have of giving birth in a hospital environment (One a bearing on the present situation. Flashback Born Every Minute, Channel 4, 2009) and SC4’s was a device used very early in the history of the documentation of the glories (and otherwise) of cinema: D.W. Griffi th’s epic Intolerance (1916) is the Caernarvon Town FC (2010). made up of four fl ashbacks. Used with a narrator, Sam Leith in a UK Guardian online article, the form achieved its greatest popularity in the ‘Fly on the wall has become surveillance TV: Big cinema in the 1930s and 1940s. Orson Welles’s Brother didn’t die. Its many cameras are pointing Citizen Kane (1941) is made up entirely of a at all of us’ (21 November 2010) refers to ‘rigged- dazzling series of fl ashbacks; equally inventive up’ documentaries, and compares current is the fl ashback narrative of the Ealing comedy, approaches to the genre, with the Panopticon Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). conceived by nineteenth-century philosopher Flat earth news See churnalism. Jeremy Bentham. Fleet Street Until the 1980s, the home of most Th is was a design for a prison (see panop- of Britain’s major national newspapers; indeed ticon gaze) in which every minute of an the name had become the generic term for the inmate’s life was subject to constant scrutiny, the nation’s press; a fi gure of speech (see meton- theory being that prisoners would modify their ymy). Th e advent of new technology linked with behaviour according to corrective expectations. the cost-cutting ambitions of newspaper owners, However, in the case of fl y-on-the-wall docu- both of which led to bitter confl ict with the print mentaries, there is the intervening variable unions, caused an exodus from ‘Th e Street’ of all of the need for such fi lms to be entertaining; in the major titles. other words, misbehaviour (as in reality tv

102 Fragmentation of audience

programmes) is more likely to capture audi- Footage Length of ﬁ lm expressed in feet. A ence attention than good behaviour; hence the Footprint Term used to describe the area in distortion rather than replication of reality. See which a signal from a communications satellite B cinéma vérité; direct cinema; surveil- can be received. See satellite transmission. lance society. Four stages in audience fragmentation See Focus groups Focus groups are frequently audience: fragmentation of. C employed in market research. Members of a Fourteen-Day Rule (UK) In the period after the group are brought together by a researcher to Second World War (1939–45) the BBC entered D discuss aspects of a product, be it soap powder, into an agreement with government whereby a political party or a television programme. Th e it would not try to usurp the functions of the group is often chosen to be a representative House of Commons as the supreme forum of the E sample of all those who are thought to be the nation by broadcasting on issues due to be actual or potential consumers of the product. debated in Parliament. An embargo was placed F As a qualitative research method, use of focus upon all such issues until fourteen days after

groups allows for in-depth discussion and Parliament had debated them. It was a crippling G exploration of consumers’ orientations towards intrusion upon the editorial rights of the corpo- and evaluations of a product. Focus groups are ration, and the beveridge committee report also widely used by governments and political on broadcasting (uk), 1950 called for the H parties as a gauge of public opinion on proposed abandonment of the Rule. Nevertheless, succes- or actual policies. See topic guide under sive governments held tenaciously to it. In 1956 I research methods. the House of Commons set up a Select Commit- Foe creation See wedom, theydom. tee to investigate the workings and effects of JK Folk culture Term generally applied to the the Rule: it recommended a reduction to seven culture of pre-industrial societies. Such societ- days. Pressure from broadcasters and the press ies have certain distinguishing features that are continued unabated, and within a year the Rule L thought to aff ect the elements of their culture: was abandoned altogether (1957). See topic work and leisure are undiff erentiated; there is guides under media: freedom, censorship; M relatively little division of labour; the commu- media history. nities are small, and social action is normally Fourth Estate The eighteenth-century parlia- N collectivist as opposed to individualist. Th us folk mentarian Edmund Burke (1729–97) is thought songs, for example, are usually fi rmly rooted in to have been the originator of this phrase the everyday experience and beliefs of both the describing the press and its role in society. O audience and the performer. According to Burke’s defi nition, the other three Folk devils Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and ‘Estates’ were the Lords Spiritual (the church), P Moral Panics (MacGibbon & Kee, 1972, 3rd the Lords Temporal (the judiciary) and the edition 2002) argues that societies are subject to Commons. ‘And yonder,’ he is believed to have R periods of moral panic in which certain groups said in Parliament, ‘sits the Fourth Estate, more are picked out as being a special threat to the important than them all.’ values and interests of society. Th e media and Th e implication is that the press, like the other S in particular the press play an important role in estates, serves the State, as diff erentiable from transmitting this sense of outrage to the general government, and thus functions as a force for T public. social, cultural and national cohesion. Underly- Such groups or individuals are usually those ing this argument is the assumption that while U transgressing the values of the dominant hierar- governments might be in error, the State is benign chy. It is further argued by Cohen and others that if not sacrosanct. A glance at states ancient and the castigation of such groups, such folk devils, modern would suggest otherwise. Th e classifying V by the media is a mechanism by which adherence of the press as the Fourth Estate points up the

to dominant social norms is strengthened, along ambivalent role of the media in society: does W with support for the forces of law and order and it tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing an extension of their powers. See loony left- but the truth; or, because the priorities of State ism; moral panics and the media. seem to require it, manipulate, conceal or deny XYZ ▶ Chas Critcher, ed., Critical Readings: Moral Panics that truth? See elite; guard dog metaphor; and the Media (Open University Press/McGraw-Hill media control; power elite; watchdogs. Education, 2006); Erich Goode and Nachman Ben- See topic guide under media history. Yehuda in Moral Panics: Th e Social Construction of Fragmentation of audience See audience: Deviance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). fragmentation of.

103 Framing: interpersonal

Framing: interpersonal Conversations are the protected as subordinate’. However, arguably often framed by metasignals that let observers because men and women are fundamentally and participants know what kind of activity is tuned to interpret some aspects of conversa- going on so that they are better able to interpret tion diff erently, the diff erence in relative status the conversation. For example, is the conversa- signalled by such comments may be more tion a serious argument or horseplay? apparent to men than women. Women may Such signals also allow people to recognize simply interpret them as indicating a desire to what Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis protect or be supportive rather than as indicative (Harper & Row, 1974) terms the alignment, that of women’s traditionally subordinate status in is the relative positions with regard to status, society. See gender; genderlects. intimacy and so on, being taken by the partici- ★Framing: media The process by which the pants – themselves included. If A, for instance, media place reality into frame; and the study of explains something to B in a condescending the process of framing is at the core of media manner, A is taking a superior alignment with analysis, hence the length of this entry. Framing regard to B. constitutes a narrative device. What is not on In You Just Don’t Understand: Men and the page of a newspaper is ‘out of frame’; what Women in Conversation (Virago, 1992), Deborah does not appear within the frame of the TV is Tannen argues that protective comments and off the public agenda. For the news, there is the gestures from men towards women ‘reinforce world – and 20 minutes (or 24 hours) to put it the traditional alignment by which men protect in the frame. Time, then – the extent of it – is women’. She goes on to argue that ‘the act of an important deciding factor. For a soap opera, protecting frames the protector as dominant and time also poses problems of framing. Th ere are

Framing reality

104 Framing: media

30-minute slots to be fi lled, each to conclude and/or solution.’ A with unfi nished business, preferably dramatic Th is approach is useful in analysing the encod- and suspenseful, while not being so dramati- ing of messages and gauging their eff ectiveness. B cally ‘fi nal’ that the series cannot continue day It emphasizes the subjective nature of encoding by day, week by week. Presented with such a by recognizing the ‘invisible’ schemata – psycho- time-frame, soaps require many characters and logical templates – which, however hard we try C many plots. To facilitate this requirement (and to be objective and impartial, deeply infl uence to capture and retain audience attention) our actions. D scriptwriters divide up the frame into quick-bite For successful communication, that is winning scenes – framing within frames. the interest and attention of the audience, and What happens outside the creative frame – perhaps even going beyond that in terms of E audience measurement, for example –infl uences gaining the audience’s assent or approval, there the nature of the frame and what goes on inside seems to be a need for a meeting of schemata: F it. Robert Entman in ‘Framing: toward clarifi ca- a common ground. Th e communicator selects, tion of a fractured paradigm’, in the Journal of then attempts to give salience to those parts of G Communication, 4 (1992), says that a crucial the story which may fi t with the existing sche- task of analysis is to show ‘exactly how framing mata in a receiver’s belief system. infl uences thinking’ for ‘the concept of framing Much of what we know about the past, about H consistently off ers a way to describe the power of history, is itself in frames – in ancient palaces a communicating text’. and tombs, on triumphal arches, the walls and I He argues, ‘Analysis of frames illuminates the ceilings of great monasteries and cathedrals. precise way in which infl uence over a human Th ese artefacts do not necessarily tell us what JK consciousness is exerted by the transfer (or life was like in those days; rather, they tell us communication) of information from one loca- what was considered salient by those with power tion such as speech, utterance, news report, or to make decisions. In Th e Nature and Origins L novel – to the consciousness.’ Essentially, fram- of Public Opinion (Cambridge University Press, ing constitutes selection and salience; what is 1992), J.R. Zaller says that framing is a central M perceived to be most meaningful, the one serving power in the democratic process: it is political the other. Entman suggests that framing serves elites who control the framing of issues. Such N four main purposes: (1) to defi ne problems; (2) to framing, Zaller believes, not only influences diagnose causes; (3) to make moral judgments; public opinion but also is capable of defi ning it. and (4) to suggest remedies. At a practical level, framing is governed by O Th ese will function varyingly according to the professional conventions, indeed by ritual: news- text, but they operate in four locations in the papers are framed by deadlines and publication P communication process: the communicator, the times. TV news is framed with music, graphics, text, the receiver and the culture. Communica- headlines and news readers. Each ritual presence R tors ‘make conscious or unconscious framing reinforces and increases the salience of the frame, judgments in deciding what to say, guided by its dominance over alternative frames. Th e study frames (often called schemata) that organize of media is an example of what Entman calls S their belief systems’. Before we frame, we are in counterframing in that it attempts to call the a frame. Th e text will not only be framed by the ritual frames into question by analysing them in T framer within a frame, it will also be shaped by the light of possible alternative frames. a number of factors – requirements concerning In ‘Framing European politics: a content U format and presentation, aesthetic consider- analysis of press and television news’, in the ations, notions of professionalism and pressures Journal of Communication, Spring 2000, Holli to meet the expectations of convention. A. Semetko and Patti M. Valkenburg identify fi ve V When the text comes to be ‘read’, the frames key frames in which the media present the news – attribution of responsibility, confl ict, economic as presented may be at variance with the frames W that guide the receiver’s thinking. For Entman, consequences, human interest and morality. In the culture is ‘the stock of commonly invoked their researches, the authors found less diver- frames ... exhibited in the discourse and thinking gence between press and TV and more between XYZ of most people in a social grouping’. ‘Framing serious and sensationalist press; the fi rst oper- in all four locations includes similar functions: ating within the attribution-of-responsibility selection and highlighting, and use of the frame, the second in the human-interest frame. highlighting elements to construct an argument See topic guide under media: processes & about problems and their causation, evaluation production.

105 Franchise

▶ Dietram A. Scheufele, ‘Framing as a theory of media resources available for programme-making and eff ects’, Journal of Communication, Winter 1999. thus for competing with the cheap products on Franchise Contractual agreement; most off er from the American television industry’. commonly associated with the licensing to Th e original plan of the Conservative govern- broadcast, for fixed periods, of commercial ment was to auction-off the franchises to the television and radio companies. highest bidder in a blind sale. This was later Franchises for Independent Television modified by the introduction of a so-called (UK) Royal Assent to the television act, ‘quality threshold’. Eight of the sixteen licences 1954 was received on 30 July, and on 4 August did not go to the highest bidder and thirteen the Independent Television Authority (later to applications were judged not to have passed the become the Independent Broadcasting Author- quality threshold. One notable characteristic ity) was set up by the Postmaster-General under of the new franchise-winners was the declared the chairmanship of Sir Kenneth Clark, and policy of running lightly staffed publisher- the fi rst commercial television franchises were broadcaster stations, on the lines of Channel issued in 1955, with the Associated Broadcast- 4, buying-in programmes from independent ing Company (ATV) beginning its fi rst London producers rather than the companies originating transmission on 24 September 1955, and its fi rst most of their own material. Midlands transmission on 17 February 1956. Frankfurt school of theorists Founded Franchises from 1993 (UK) What the UK in 1923, the Institute for Social Research in Guardian called ‘the biggest shake-up in Frankfurt became the meeting point of several television’s 36-year history’, with an estimated young Marxist intellectuals, among whom were loss of some 2,500 jobs, occurred in October Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Max 1991. Th e Independent Television Commission Horkheimer. Th e members of the ‘school’ placed (ITC) chaired by George Russell announced at the forefront of their thinking and analysis the winners of the ‘auction’ for sixteen regional the centrality of the role of ideology in mass commercial TV franchises, including a break- communication. When Hitler came to power in fast TV licence, to extend over ten years and 1933, the Institute moved to New York and until commencing on 1 January 1993. 1942 it was affi liated to the Sociology Depart- Four existing stations lost their renewal bids: ment of the University of Columbia. In 1949, Th ames Television (replaced by Carlton Commu- Horkheimer led the Institute back to Frankfurt, nications), Television South (Meridian Broad- though Marcuse remained in America. casting), Television South West (Westcountry Th e Frankfurt school posed the questions: why Television) and the breakfast station TV-am had the prospect of radical change in society so (Sunrise Television). Th e stations empowered little popular or natural support? Why was there to continued broadcasting through the 1990s so little consciousness of the need for politically were: Granada Television (for the North West), radical change – indeed how had that sense of London Weekend, Yorkshire, Anglia Television, need been apparently eliminated from popular Tyne-Tees (North East), Harlech Television consciousness? Marcuse, in One Dimensional (Wales), Ulster Television, Channel Television Man (Sphere Books, 1968), contended that in (Channel Islands), Central Television (Midlands) advanced societies capitalism appears to have and the Scottish channels Grampian, Border and proved its worth; by ‘producing the goods’ it is Scottish Television. Russell declared that though deemed a successful system and therefore one the process had caused ‘undoubted turmoil’ which has rendered itself immune to criticism. within ITV, ‘the quality and the viewers will win The Frankfurt school believed that culture out’. Th is point of view was not shared by George – traditionally transcendent of capitalist ethic Walden in an article ‘Is this merely a lottery, and thus in many ways potentially subversive of or is it a serious business?’ (Daily Telegraph, 17 it – had been harnessed by the mass media (see October 1991). ‘Sadly,’ he wrote, ‘what has been hegemony). Classical art had been popular- at stake in this lottery is the quality of British ized, yes; but in the process of media-adoption, television.’ it had been deprived of its oppositional values The Times leader of 17 October called the (see dominant, subordinate, radical). Th e whole aff air an ‘ITV auction fi asco’ and said ‘the Frankfurt school has had considerable infl uence government should never ask such a task again upon thinking about the media and its power ... auctioning terrestrial commercial television to shape cultures, but has been criticized for was always intended to benefi t the Treasury not condemning existing reality without proposing the television viewer. Th e result must be fewer how it might be changed for the better. See

106 Functionalist (mode of media analysis)

audience: active audience; cultivation; empowered to say ‘No’, though in many straight- A cultural apparatus; dominant discourse. forward cases the service is free. See also topic guide under communication The Act also created the role of Freedom B theory. of Information Commissioner but drew back ▶ Rolf Wiggershaus, Th e Frankfurt School: Its History, from granting him or her independent powers, Theories and Political Significance (Polity Press, subjecting the Commissioner’s actions to the C paperback edition, 1995). will of government ministers. A notable case Freedom of Information Act (UK), 2005 Th e of ongoing censorship and resistence to open D right of access by citizens to information of government was New Labour’s refusal through public interest is enshrined in legislation in many 2004 and 2005 to make public the advice oﬀ ered countries, in particular the United States. In the to Cabinet by Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney E UK in 1994 the Conservative government under General, on the legality or otherwise of the inva- John Major took a tentative step towards creat- sion and occupation of Iraq in 2003. See human F ing a degree of open government with its Code of rights act (uk), 2000; icelandic modern

Practice on Access to Government Information. media initiative (immi); regulation of G In opposition, the Labour government made no investigatory powers act (ripa)(uk), 2000; secret of its intention to end secret government, surveillance; terrorism: anti-terrorism, the future Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair crime and security act (uk), 2001. See also H promising that a Freedom of Information Act, topic guide under media: freedom, censor- should Labour be elected, would ‘signal a new ship. I relationship between government and people; a Frequency In a non-technical sense, and as used

relationship which sees the public as legitimate in relation to the media, frequency is the degree JK stakeholders in the running of the country’. Th e of repetition of topics of news or information in basis of this relationship was to be freedom of the press, on radio or TV. Th e more frequently information. a topic inhabits news headlines and news stories, L Once elected, the New Labour government the more likely it is to continue to do so; to be delayed implementing FOI (Freedom of Infor- deﬁ ned and accepted as ‘important’, and to have M mation) legislation, eventually producing an media impact. Act which a UK Guardian leader of 31 Decem- Negative frequency operates when stories are N ber 2004, described as ‘a pale shadow of the overlooked, or edged to the margins of attention. 1997 white paper’, Your Right to Know. Th e Act, Consequently they rarely have the chance either which became law at midnight on 31 December to improve their status as news or impart the full O 2004, gives the public rights of access to parlia- weight of their argument. Th e term may also be ment, government departments, local authori- used to refer to the way in which news items ﬁ t P ties, the National Health Service and education, the frequency – the time scale – of the mode of but not the security services or the courts. communication. See consistency; effects R Coming into force at the same time as the Act of the mass media; immediacy; intensity; were Environmental Information Regulations news values. (EIRs), implementing an EU directive freeing- Front See self-presentation. S up previously closely guarded information Front region, back region See impression about the environment and increased rights of management. T access under the data protection act (uk), Functionalist (mode of media analysis) 1984. Interprets social behaviour in terms of its U A welcome step towards more open govern- contribution to the assumed overall goals of ment, the Act nevertheless is cluttered with society, recognizing a consensus within soci- exemptions. Th e provision of information can be ety of common norms and values. Th e main V denied if it is likely to prejudice interests such as focus of functionalist analysis is upon the ways international relations, defence, the enforcement in which social systems maintain equilibrium. W of the law, economic and commercial interests. A functionalist would consider any social or As the Guardian leader points out, ‘about 75 cultural element in relation to its contribution of the disclosures in the Hutton and Butler to the survival, integration or stability of society. XYZ enquiries … would not be permitted under the Th e communication process features as a major new law’. See hutton report (uk), 2004. component in the ‘servicing’ of equilibrium. Freedom of information does not come Structural functionalism, a mode of analysis cheaply. If the cost of finding and extracting developed by US sociologist Talcott Parsons, information exceeds set limits, the authority is identifies common features of a complex

107 Functions of communication

industrial society that are central to its survival. structure of foreign news: The presentation Th ese include the delineation and maintenance of the Congo, Cuba and Cyprus crises in four of boundaries (social, cultural, etc.); the defi ni- foreign newspapers’ in the Journal of Interna- tion of major structural units of society and the tional Peace Research, 1 (1965) and reprinted connections between them; and an overriding in Th e Manufacture of News (Constable, 1973), concern with system maintenance. Th is school edited by Stanley Cohen and Jock Young, has of analysis has been particularly strong in the proved a focal point for those who ask the ques- US. tions: What qualifi es as news? What makes one Within the functionalist perspective, activities item of news predominate over another? that contribute to the survival of a system are World events stream towards a revolving door known as eufunctions; those which contribute of criteria for news selection, these operating to disturbance are known as dysfunctions. A according to media perception and undergoing distinction is also made between manifest and a process of gatekeeping. Th e more an event latent functions, the one intended and recog- fulfi ls one or several of the criteria, the more nized by the participants, the other neither likely it will be treated as news and the more it intended nor recognized. will continue to be regarded as newsworthy. For Th e functionalist approach makes challenge- a diagrammatic representation of the model, able assumptions about consensus over the see James Watson’s Media Communication: An goals of society, leaving untouched important Introduction to Theory and Process (Palgrave questions about the source of these goals and the Macmillan, 3rd edition, 2008), Chapter 5, ‘Th e degree to which an identifi ed source may infl u- news, gates, agendas and values’, page 158. For ence the nature of the social structure and social details of the criteria identifi ed by Galtung and action. Its tendency is to legitimize the status Ruge, see news values. See also topic guide quo and to emphasize the predominance of the under communication models. whole over the parts, overlooking alternative Games See transactional analysis. means of achieving the same or similar func- Gantt chart Named after Henry Lawrence tions. See marxist (mode of media analysis). Gantt and originally developed in the early Functions of communication See communi- twentieth century. Th e chart is still widely used cation, functions. in the communications fi eld to plan and track Functions of mass media See normative the schedule of activities required for events, theories of mass media. programmes or campaigns. Basically, activities are plotted from top to bottom (with the initial activity at the top and the last at the bottom) G along the vertical axis against a time-frame plot- Gagging order Issued by judges to restrain the ted along the horizontal axis. publication or broadcast of information where Gatekeeping To reach its intended target, every it is considered that such information breaches message has to pass through many ‘gates’; some the law. Companies in the UK may seek gagging will be wide open, some ajar, some tightly closed. orders to prevent communication to the public At work, the boss’s secretary is the archetypal that seems a threat to commercial confi dential- gatekeeper. She may be under instruction to ity; individuals may seek the imposition of such welcome callers or delay them, by letter, by orders to protect their personal privacy. telephone or physically by ‘guarding’ the boss’s Th e human rights act (uk), 2000, emanat- door (though it is interesting to conjecture on ing from the European Convention of Human how far the mobile phone has impacted on this Rights forbids, for example, publication of details cosy arrangement). of a person’s heath. Deemed a ‘private matter’, Gatekeeping in the media involves the selec- this nevertheless raises diffi cult questions when tion or rejection of material made according a person’s individual heath – say if he/she is a to news values which arise from the specifi c health worker suff ering from HIV – may have character and objectives of the medium (tabloid implications for the public. See topic guide newspaper, TV, etc.) and of the organization under media: freedom, censorship. through which the medium operates. Galtung and Ruge’s model of selective Th e process and eff ect of gatekeeping in the gatekeeping, 1965 Whenever ‘newsworthi- media have undergone substantial modifi cation ness’ is discussed and analysed, the names of in the digital age. Traditional media no longer Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge are likely to be have the monopoly of channels of communica- mentioned before all others. Th eir article, ‘Th e tion; the internet now challenges newspapers,

108 Gender

radio and TV as a multi-source not only of amount of interest in the way in which gender A information, but also as a means of opening up identity might influence and be influenced the airwaves to the public as communicators. by communicative behaviour. Language, B Consumers of communication now have at their non-verbal behaviour and the conventions of ﬁ ngertips the power to evade traditional modes everyday social interaction can be seen to carry of gatekeeping. Text, pictures, the latest movies, many messages pertinent to the construction C pop tunes have all become available for down- and display of gender identity. loading online; and if gatekeeping has always Richard D. Gross in Psychology: Th e Science D been a process of manipulation by the commu- of Mind and Behaviour (Hodder Arnold, 2005) nicators as well as selection, the consumer can notes that whilst sex is the term often used to do this too with the images and texts that he/ refer to ‘the biological facts about us, such as E she can summon up and print or broadcast (see genetic make-up, reproductive anatomy and youtube). functioning, and is usually referred to by the F As populations access the Net in increasing terms “male” and “female”, gender, by contrast,

numbers, there is the potential for a shift of is what culture makes out of the “raw material” G control from producer to consumer, to the point of biological sex’. when ‘manning the gates’ becomes near impos- Expectations of appropriate behaviour for sible and arguably pointless. Mass-media gates males and females can vary from one culture H continue to exercise power within their own to another and, over time, within a particular parameters, but out there is the blogosphere culture or society. Debate exists within our I – millions of content-providers competing with own society regarding expectations of gender traditional media, and with each other, for user roles and such debate has the potential to spill JK attention. over into confl ict. Th e link between gender and Further, news itself has lost dominance as male and female categories can be complex. A demand for social networking (see network- transvestite, for example, in playing out this L ing: social networking) has advanced in role adopts the appearance and other aspects of popularity, and as cost-cutting in the media behaviour usually associated with those of the M industry has resulted in newspaper closures opposite sex. and the retreat of fact-based programmes in TV Several researchers have argued that interper- N output. sonal processes play a crucial role in establishing, Th e crowding-out of traditional gatekeeping maintaining and changing notions of gender. It is also threatens to reduce the ability of govern- arguable that maintenance of a gender identity O ments to exercise intervention in the form of requires the individual to carry off a performance regulation and censorship, though not their in line with expectations others hold of suitable P desire to do so. Th e very freedom of expression behaviour for the identity claimed. Judith Butler, that electronic data-exchange offers people for example, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and R worldwide prompts many governments to seek the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1999) to curb this freedom by ever more sophisticated stresses the crucial importance of performance, blocking devices, new legislation directed at and thus of verbal and non-verbal communica- S service providers or covert deals in return tion, in the construction of gender identity. for rights to operate. See agenda-setting; Mary Crawford and Rhoda Ungar in Women T consensus; digitization; demotic turn; and Gender: A Feminist Psychology (McGraw- displacement effect; galtung and ruge’s Hill, 2004) make a similar point: ‘Gender is a U model of selective gatekeeping, 1965; mr kind of performance, and the actors must learn gate; mobilization; network neutrality; their lines and cues. Like acting, gender is best white’s gatekeeping model, 1950; yaros’ performed when it appears most natural.’ Th ese V ‘pick’ model for multimedia news, 2009. authors note that sociocultural expectations See also topic guides under media: processes exist as regards appropriate performances and W & production; news media. that social sanctions may be applied if these are ▶ Bu Zhong and John E. Newhagen, ‘How journal- challenged too much. However, whilst everyday XYZ ists think while they write: a transcultural model of performances may typically reinforce expecta- news decision making’ (Journal of Communication, tions, they also have the potential, over time, to September 2009). change them. Gender Gender is a socio-cultural variable with Ideas about appropriate gender behaviour considerable potential to infl uence behaviour. also lie at the heart of notions of femininity and In recent decades there has been a signifi cant masculinity and include assumptions about

109 Gender and media monitoring

sexual preferences. A current area of research example of a gendered genre would be the range focuses upon media portrayal of sexual prefer- of magazines that are targeted at either female or ences and, in particular, its portrayal of those male readerships. preferences assumed to be minority prefer- Th e text and its narrative patterns typi- ences – for example those of lesbians and gay cally refl ect such diff erences in audience and in men. Larry Gross in ‘Minorities, majorities and part, though not uncritically, assumptions about the media’ in Tamar Liebes and James Curran, gender roles and typical masculine and feminine eds, Media, Ritual and Identity (Routledge, behaviour. Soap operas, for instance, concentrate 1998) argues that traditionally in much of the on the family and local neighbourhood and the US media, portrayals of lesbians and gay men interplay of interpersonal relationships within have been limited and stereotypical, with the these contexts; whereas the crime series focuses underlying message being that such identities on action, heroic deeds and male bonding. Some are deviant. See feminism; gendered genre; researchers have argued that the concept of genderlects; he/man language; male-as- gendered genre over-simplifi es the potentially norm: news: the ‘maleness of news’; patri- complex relationship between the text, its narra- archy; performativity; pleasure: active tive form, its authors and its audience. and reactive; report-talk, rapport-talk; The term gendered viewing describes the representation; self-identity; self- diff erent perspectives, ways of seeing, between presentation; semiotic power; stereotype; genders in relation to cultural, social and histori- queer theory. cal contexts. Th is is not simply a matter of the ▶ Jennifer Coates, Women, Men and Language (Pear- ways in which men look, or perceive, compared son Education, 2004); Janet Holmes, Gendered Talk with those of women, for as Mary Ellen Brown at Work: Constructing Social Identity Th rough Work- asserts in Soap Opera and Women’s Talk: Th e place Interaction (Blackwell, 2006); Janet Holmes and Pleasure of Resistance (Sage, 1994), ‘gender role Miriam Meyerhoff , Th e Handbook of Language and characteristics of the one sex can be displayed Gender (Blackwell, 2006); Gavid Gauntlett, Media, by people of either sex’. Indeed, the ‘simple Gender and Identity: An Introduction (Routledge, delineations of masculine and feminine are 2008); Paula Pointdexter, Sharo Meraz and Amy also somewhat inappropriate because they Schmitz Weiss, Women, Men and News: Divided and imply masculinity as central and femininity as Disconnected in the News Media Landscape (Rout- marginal’. See feminism; genre; melodrama; ledge, 2008); Mary Celeste Kearney, ed., Th e Gender sexism. See also topic guide under gender and Media Reader (Routledge, 2011). matters. Gender and media monitoring Especially ▶ Bethan Benwall, ed., Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle since 1995, when the United Nations Fourth Magazines (Blackwell, 2003); Anna Gough-Yates, Conference on Women took place in Beijing, Understanding Women’s Magazines: Publishing, China, women’s groups have focused intensively Markets, Readerships (Routledge, 2003); Dorothy on the degree to which media globally have Hobson, Soap Opera (Polity Press/Blackwell, 2003); asserted male over female interests; at the same David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity: An time representing women in stereotypical ways. Introduction (Routledge, 2008); Mary Celeste Kearney, Th e Conference affi rmed the need for systematic ed., Th e Gender and Media Reader (Routledge, 2011). and ongoing monitoring of the media, judging Genderlects In You Just Don’t Understand: Men that evidence was the key to infl uencing hearts, and Women in Conversation (Virago, 1992), minds and practices. The weight of research Deborah Tannen argues that in conversation evidence would be the driving force behind while men ‘speak and hear a language of status lobbying for fairer representation. and independence’, women ‘speak’ and hear a ▶ Margaret Gallagher, Gender Setting: New Agendas language of ‘connection and intimacy’. These for Media Monitoring and Advocacy (Zed Book, with fundamentally diff erent orientations and their the World Association for Christian Communication, infl uence on perception are, she argues, impor- 2001). tant factors in creating confusion and misun- Gendered genre Term used in cultural analysis derstanding in conversations between men and to denote genres of fi lm or television which women. are seen to appeal to one gender rather than Th ese diff erences have led Tannen to conclude another. For example, soap operas have tradi- that men and women speak diff erent genderlects, tionally been seen as primarily directed at female and her book examines examples of how male audiences, whilst crime series are perceived and female differences in orientation, and to appeal more to male audiences. Another consequently in interpretation, can be observed

110 Genre

in many diﬀ erent contexts. See report-talk, Th is suggests that the boundaries of genre are A rapport-talk. elastic but have a natural tendency to return to ▶ Mary Crawford, Talking Difference: On Gender the norm. Referring to the genre of TV sitcoms, B and Language (Sage, 1995); Jennifer Coates, Women, Mills believes that traditional, conventional or Men and Language (Pearson Education, 2004); Janet basic formats will continue to appeal to writers, Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff, The Handbook of producers and audiences alike. C Language and Gender (Blackwell, 2006). Online communication has seen the creation Gender signals According to Desmond Morris, of a number of genres; among these are D an important feature of our non-verbal behav- e-mailing, personal websites, blogs and online iour is that it can transmit ‘gender signals’. In newspapers – their forms and purposes adapted People Watching (Vintage, 2002) Morris argues and modified by users, according to techno- E that such signals are prevalent in social interac- logical availability and the possibilities and tion and provide ‘clues that enable us to identify requirements of social contexts. Online genres F an individual as either male or female’, helping are essentially dynamic; they are interactive and

to conﬁ rm gender identities. Morris views many participative and very often operate as alterna- G of these signals as ‘invented’ rather than natural tives to traditional, media-dominated genres and thus as cultural markers of gender that can (see web or online drama). vary across time and cultures, as can be seen in Leah A. Lievrouw in Alternative and Activist H styles of male and female dress, for example. New Media (Polity Press, 2011) cites a number Genre Term deriving from the French, meaning of such alternative online genres. (1) Culture I type or classification. In literature the major jamming. This ‘critiques popular/mainstream

classic genres were epic, tragedy, lyric, comedy culture, particularly corporate capitalism, JK and satire, eventually to be followed by the commercialism and consumerism. Here media novel and short story. Genres, working at least artists and activists appropriate and “repurpose” approximately to basic ground rules of form and elements from popular culture to make new L style, are categories to be found in all modes works with an ironic or subversive point – put of artistic expression. In fi lms there are genres another way, culture jamming “mines” main- M of the western, gangster movies, film noir, stream culture to critique it’. Such jamming science fi ction, romantic comedy, horror, disas- invites or provokes ‘reverse jamming’, where N ter, costume drama, etc. In television there ‘radical or oppositional messages and styles are are sitcoms, soaps, crime dramas and ‘reality’ reappropriated … by mainstream marketers to programmes (see reality tv). give their products a cool, countercutural, or O Genres are rarely discrete or singular entities. anti-establishment image’. Th ey are subject to infl uence by other genres, (2) Hacktivism where skilled users – some- P and are often a mixture of genre elements. times referred to as ‘outlaws’, but largely with Indeed part of the pleasure audiences derive ethical intent – seek to expose corporate wrong- R from genre texts is their inventiveness, the way doing (see hacker, hacktivist; wikileaks). the codes of diff erent genres have been know- This genre also includes ‘the development of ingly manipulated, sometimes to satirical eff ect. systems that elude or sabotage state or commer- S In short, what attracts and fascinates is their cial surveillance and censorship, encrypt data intertextuality. Nick Lacey in Narrative and and communications, or disable digital rights T Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies (Palgrave management or copy protection schemes, in Macmillan, 2000) off ers a useful guide to the the name of preserving users’ privacy, govern- U analysis of media genres, listing six key aspects: ment or corporate accountability, or freedom of setting, characters, narrative, iconography, style information’. and stars. (3) Participatory journalism takes the form of V Writing in Acts of Literature (Routledge, 1992), ‘web-based alternative, radical or critical news French philosopher Jacques Derrida is of the outlets and services that adopt the practices and W opinion that there is ‘no genreless text’; thus the philosophy of public, civic, citizen, participatory way is open to classify TV news, party political or “open source” journalism to provide alterna- broadcasts, weather reports, quiz shows, chat tives to mainstream news and opinion’. (4) Medi- XYZ shows and consumer programmes as genres. ated mobilization ‘takes advantage of web-based In The Sitcom (Edinburgh University Press, social software tools like social network sites, 2010), Brett Mills argues that ‘the more genres personal blogs … to engage in live and mediated develop, the more they stay the same’ ( a good collective action’. question for a media studies essay, perhaps). (4) Commons knowledge, writes Lievrouw

111 Gerbner’s model of communication, 1956

‘relates to the content of culture itself – the variability in the perception of an event by a nature of knowledge and expertise, how infor- communicating agent and also in the way the mation is organized and evaluated, and who message is perceived by a receiver. He speaks decides’. Traditional formations and taxonomies of the essential ‘creative, interactional nature of fall short of encompassing ‘the sheer volume the perceptual process’. Equally important is the and idiosyncrasy of information online’ which stress placed upon the importance of context to has ‘driven the creation of new tools, such the ‘reading’ of messages, and of the open nature search engines and tags, that use searchers’ of human communication. own language rather than the predetermined For Gerbner the relationship between form controlled vocabulary (search terms or technical and context in the communication process (S languages) approved by experts, to locate and = Signal) is dynamic and interactive. It is also retrieve relevant sources’. concerned with access and control, dimensions Commons knowledge systems are ‘bottom- which inevitably aﬀ ect the nature and content up classification schemes for organizing and of communication messages – their selection, categorizing diverse, arcane, local, personal, or shaping and distortion. At the level of the mass amateur information sources, which often chal- media this is obvious, but access and control also lenge or critique expert disciplinary taxonomies’. operate at the level of interpersonal communi- See facebook; google; narrative; podcast; cation – teachers in classrooms, for example; twitter; wikipedia; youtube. speakers at public meetings, parents in the home ★Gerbner’s model of communication, situation. 1956 This is described by Denis McQuail in Back on the horizontal axis, Gerbner stresses Communication, (Longman, 2nd edition, 1993) the importance of availability. A literate as perhaps ‘the most comprehensive attempt yet electorate may have the capacity to read all the to specify all the component stages and activities facts about a political situation, all the pros and of communication’. Below is a modiﬁ ed version cons of an industrial dispute, but that capacity of George Gerbner’s model as presented in can only operate, and the pros and cons be ‘Towards a general model of communication’, properly weighed, if the necessary facts are in Audio Visual Communication Review, 4. M made available. What Gerbner’s model does not is responder to E (event) and may be human do is address itself fully to the problems of how or machine (such as a microphone or camera). meaning is generated. Th e form or code of the Gerbner’s emphasis is upon the considerable message (S) is taken for granted, whereas the

Gerbner’s model of communication, 1956

112 Glasgow University Media Group

advocate of semiology/semiotics would argue Morris in Manwatching: A Field Guide to A that meaning is of the essence. See topic guide Human Behaviour (Jonathan Cape, 1977) oﬀ ers under communication models. six categories of gesture: (1) Expressive; shared by B Gestural dance Term describing the way in other animals as well as humans, and including which gestures are employed to achieve inter- facial expression and manual gesticulations. (2) actional synchrony (similar timing) between Mimic gestures; exclusively human; ‘the essential C participants in an encounter. For example, the quality of a Mimic Gesture is that it attempts smooth handing-over of the conversational to copy the thing it is trying to portray’. Th is D ﬂ oor from speaker to listener is achieved by a category Morris subdivides into social mimicry combination of prolonged gaze, falling intona- (or ‘putting on a good face’); theatrical mimicry; tion, returning of the hands to a rest position partial mimicry (pretending your hand is a E and possibly the use of a gesture towards the gun, for example); and what he terms vacuum listener to invite a contribution. Th e listener may mimicry – gestures to indicate hunger or thirst. F have indicated a wish to speak by the use of rapid (3) Schematic gestures are those in which imita-

head nods. tions become abbreviated or abridged; a gestural G Gestural echo See posture. shorthand. (4) Symbolic gestures represent Gesture Several diﬀ erent parts of the body may be moods and ideas, such as the sign to indicate used to make gestures – most typically the arms, that you consider someone is ‘round the twist’. H feet, hands and head; head nods are usually (5) Technical gestures constitute specialized classed as a gesture. Desmond Morris in People signal systems recognized only by those in the I Watching (Vintage, 2002) notes that gestures trade or profession, such as those employed

can be ‘Primary’ or ‘Incidental’ as regards their by a TV studio manager or a fireman to his JK communicative intent. ‘Primary’ gestures are colleagues. (6) Coded gestures are based upon those intended to communicate a message, such formal systems, such as Deaf-and-Dumb Sign as pointing to the location of a shop when giving Language, Semaphore and the tic-tac signalling L directions, whereas ‘Incidental’ gestures occur of the race-course. for non-communicative reasons: for example an Many gestures carry universal meaning, but in M individual may wink if he/she gets grit in their general the meaning of a gesture is dependent eye. To an observer, however, the wink may be upon cultural context, timing and situation N interpreted as an intended act of communica- as well as other acts of verbal and non-verbal tion: a message signalling a desire to interact. communication. Gestures are not often used Michael Argyle in Bodily Communication in isolation. Th e meaning of a gesture can vary O (Methuen, 1988) divides gestures and bodily considerably across cultures; Morris (2002) movements into three main categories: Emblems, uses the term ‘multi-message gestures’ for such P Illustrators and Self-touching. Emblems are gestures. An example here is the ‘thumbs-up’ movements, often hand movements, that can gesture mentioned earlier. In Britain this means R easily be translated into speech in terms of their that things are going well; in Australia, however, meaning (they may stand in for speech) within a it means ‘up yours’. As Roger E. Axel reminds particular group or culture. Th e use, in Britain, us in Gestures: The Do’s and Taboos of Body S of the thumbs-up gesture would be an example. Language Around the World (John Wiley & Sons Illustrators are those gestures used to illustrate or Inc., 1998), gestures should be used with care T accompany speech, often to aid explanation – for in unfamiliar cultures. See barrier signals; example gestures used when giving directions. baton signals; communication, non- U Gestures can be used to regulate everyday inter- verbal; cut-off; gestural echo; metasig- action and to provide feedback; waving to a friend nals; non-verbal behaviour: repertoire; may indicate a desire to start a conversation, and proxemics; salutation display; shortfall V during a conversation the listener may use rapid signals; tie-signs. See also topic guide head nods to show agreement with the speaker’s under interpersonal communication. W comments. Self-touching normally indicates ▶ Allan and Barbara Pease, The Definitive Book of information about an individual’s emotional state, Body Laguage (Orion, 2004). such as the scratching of a face when anxious, Ghost-writer One who does literary work for XYZ but can also be used in displays of courtship someone else, usually a celebrity, who takes the and grooming. Morris (2002) argues that self- credit. touching can also be a displacement activity; for Glasgow University Media Group Set up with example a nervous passenger about to board a a grant from the UK Social Science Research plane may frequently tug his/her earlobe. Council, the Group has published research

113 Glasnost

fi ndings that have won considerable attention in the political roots of the conflict in which and not unexpectedly drawn fire from the ‘Israel is closely allied to the United States and media under investigation. By 1982 the Group there are very strong pro-Israeli lobbies in the had published three major works tabulating its US and to some extent in Britain’. exhaustive research into the way TV handles the Bad News from Israel (Pluto Press) by Philo news. First came Bad News (Routledge & Kegan and Mike Berry was issued in 2004 to be Paul, 1976), which exploded the generally held followed, on the same theme and with the image of broadcasters being substantially more same dire message about how ‘Israel continues objective and reliable in news reporting than the to spin images of war’, by More Bad News from press. Israel (Pluto) in 2011. See topic guide under ‘Our study,’ wrote the eight authors of the orig- research methods. inal study, ‘does not support a received view that Glasnost Openness; Russian term for greater television news is “the news as it happens”’. Th e freedom of expression and less state secrecy. Th e Group had monitored all TV news broadcasts word became universal currency with the elec- over a six-month period, from January to June tion to leadership in the Soviet Union of Mikhail 1975. Notable among the Group’s fi ndings was Gorbachev, who welcomed rather than shunned evidence of a bias in TV against the activities of world publicity and demonstrated an openness organized labour and a relentless emphasis upon within the Russian nation and in communication eff ects rather than causes. with other countries not experienced since the Later publications by the Glasgow University early days of the Russian Revolution (and only Media Group have been More Bad News (Rout- fi tfully experienced since). Linked with glasnost ledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), Really Bad News has been perestroika, meaning reconstruction – (Writers and Readers’ Publishing Co-operative, reform in relation to government practices and 1982) and War and Peace News (Open Univer- expectations. sity Press, 1985) about media coverage of the Globalization (and the media) A term bandied Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike of 1984 and about in all spheres – political, economic, Northern Ireland. The theoretical base from cultural, environmental – yet rarely satisfactorily which the Group works may be summarized by defi ned; or indeed defi ned at all. Th e clues are a quotation from More Bad News: ‘news is not many: does it mean cross-border, cross-nation, a neutral and not a natural phenomenon: it is cross-cultural? Does it essentially mean, as rather the manufactured production of ideology’. the Americans prefer the term, international; The GUMG was back in the news again in and what part in the advances in globalization 2002 with research fi ndings suggesting that TV do the media play? Is it about convergence or news has failed to inform young people about diversity, or both operating together; and how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Reporting on does globalization relate to such notions of the these in a UK Guardian article (16 April), ‘Miss- public sphere as the agora, and thus ideas ing in Action’, Greg Philo writes, ‘If you don’t concerning democracy? understand the Middle East crisis it might be A scrutiny of the commentators on globaliza- because you are watching it on TV news.’ Th e tion reveals some fairly dramatic differences research group interviewed 12 small audience of viewpoint. Th ere are those who have been groups involving 85 people with a cross-section called hyperglobalizers who predict the end of of ages. Th ese were asked a series of questions the nation state; transformalists who reckon that on the Middle East situation, and then the same globalization is a driving force for change; and questions were posed to 300 young people sceptics who claim that globalization is a myth. between the ages of 17 and 22. It was found that First it must be acknowledged that globalization ‘many of those questioned had little understand- is an all-purpose catchword requiring defi nition ing of the reasons for the confl ict and its origins’. and redefi nition. If we are referring to media Th e conclusion drawn from this research was (and other services) crossing borders, we need to that the failure to place events into a historical identify what we mean by borders: between what context occurred as a result of TV news exist- borders; for example, would we discuss displaced ing ‘in a very competitive market’ subject to populations, cultures within cultures, and are we anxiety about audience ratings: ‘In this respect talking about the fl ow of news or entertainment it is better to have great pictures of being in the in particular across borders? And in the domain middle of a riot with journalists ducking stones of eff ects, are we viewing processes of homogeni- than to explain what the confl ict is about.’ Th e zation (sameness) taking place as a result of the reluctance to contextualize, says Philo, also lies fl ow of news and entertainment across nations

114 Globalization: three engines of

and cultures, or heterogenization (diff erence), or scrutiny seasoned with alert scepticism. Hafez’s A both occurring simultaneously? own scepticism arises from what so-called In short we are swimming in a sea of uncer- globalization is failing to achieve – connectivity B tainties. If we are considering the way globaliza- and system change. Even where communities are tion has been heading, we can discern what on equipped with the technologies that potentially the face of it appear to be contradictory trends bring about cross-border, cross-cultural fusion, C – convergence and diversity. Convergence refers there is as much chance of intolerance of other to ownership and control and focuses on multi- occurring as tolerance and the will to connect. D national corporations extending their business Referring to multiculturalism, which has across the globe. Diversity focuses on the ways in often been named as one of the benefi ts arising which individual communities adapt or appro- from globalization, Hafez asserts that ‘there E priate the (predominantly Western) fl ow of news is no causal relationship between integration and entertainment to their own cultural uses and and media. The recent assumption that the F vision; what has been called ‘the domestication local is simply relocated through migration and of the foreign’. globalization is just as misleading as the one G Colin Sparks, in a paper entitled ‘What’s wrong that crossing borders works to open up cultures’. with globalization?’ presented to the Interna- A key focus for commentators on globalization tional Communication Association in New York is the part that is played, and might be played, H in 2007, argues that ‘there is no theory of global- by the internet in bringing about a world in ization that commands common consent’. Th e which peoples are more tolerant of each other, I term gets mixed up with modernity and media exercise greater equality and benefi t from cross- imperialism and can mean ‘anything that a given border interaction in what has been termed JK author wants it to mean’. What we have in place ‘civil society’. Hafez is not convinced, referring of evidence is opinions. Sparks is not among to uncertainties of information fl ow which ‘are those commentators who see in globalization generating an often “virtual” knowledge of the L major shifts away from Western (particularly world, which is almost impossible to harmonize American) political, economic and cultural with verifi able reality’. M dominance. Th e centre of gravity continues to Sparks in ‘What’s wrong with globalization?’ rest ‘very fi rmly in the developed world’. reminds us that 25 per cent of the world’s N A critic of the perceived benefi ts to communi- population is without access to electricity: ‘No ties of globalization is Tehri Rantanan. In Th e electricity, no Internet’; and leaves his audience Media and Globalization (Sage, 2005) the author with the comment, ‘A theory that is blind to the O writes that ‘globalization is without doubt, a very facts is blind to reality.’ See conglomerates; uneven process, which brings much misery consumerization; convergence; culture: P into people’s lives, either because they are globalization of; europe: cross-border tv excluded from it or because they are part of it’. channels; globalization, three engines R Rantanan believes media analysis should agree of; global media system: the main players; the ‘response necessary to address the negative glocalization; localization; mediapolis; consequences of globalization’ and engage with workers in communication and media. S such issues as how far the lives of people (all See also topic guides under global perspec- people) worldwide are benefi ting from global- tives; media issues and debates; media: T ization; what are the upsides and what are the ownership and control. downsides and what part do the media play in ▶ Colin Sparks, Globalization, Development and the U the process? Mass Media (Sage, 2007). Perhaps the most serious questioning of the Globalization: three engines of According media’s role in globalization comes from Kai to the Group of Lisbon publication Limits V Hafez in Th e Myth of Globalization (Polity, 2007, to Competition (MIT Press, 1995), the three translated by Alex Skinner), who sees fact being engines seen to be driving globalization are W mixed with ‘exaggerated projections’, fusing liberalization, deregulation and privatization, ‘truth and falsehood’. This isn’t to reject the the fi rst permitting companies to move capital ‘myth’ out of hand but to probe it with a view to and operations to locations off ering competi- XYZ reaching ‘an undistorted view of the world’. tive terms (such as low wages). deregulation Hafez argues that ‘casting light on the myth allows liberalization and, as a consequence, leads of “globalization” as it affects cross-border to privatization of public utilities. communication does not mean exposing it as Ultimately, many commentators fear, these pure fi ction’; rather it demands more exhaustive three engines of global fi nancial and industrial

115 Global media system: the main players

activity undermine, if not dismantle altogether, It would be a mistake to regard these behe- the welfare state of individual nations. The moths, as they have been described, as so authors of Limits to Competition argue that at the massive and powerful that they are impervious core of the dismantling process is the conviction to the tide of events. Time Warner’s merger with that the more labour costs are cut and related AOL (American On Line) proved an ill-starred social benefits reduced, the better will be the marriage, while Murdoch’s News Corp acquisi- country’s competitiveness. As the media are so tion of myspace turned out a shaky business substantially a part of the portfolios of TNCs venture (it was sold off at a substantial loss in (transnational corporations), the danger is that 2011). Indeed corporate ambition to colonize they will either advocate these trends or hold back online social networking platforms has proved from the public responsibility of subjecting them anything but a reliable, steady-state investment. to critical scrutiny. See network neutrality. See media magnates: four sources of Global media system: the main players Fewer concern. See also topic guide under media: than fi fteen transnational corporations (TNCs) ownership & control. dominate world media ownership. Th e ranking Global scrutiny Describes the vastly increased of these is subject to rapid shifts resulting from visibility of people and events on a global mergers, but the current players at the top of the scale, largely as a result of television. John media tree are: Time Warner, Vivendi, Viacom, B. Th ompson in Th e Media and Modernity: A Disney, Sony, Bertelsmann, News Corporation, Social Th eory of the Media (Polity, 1995) speaks Segram (snapped up by Vivendi in 2000), Poly of a ‘regime of visibility created by an increas- Gram and General Electric. ingly globalized system of communication’; and, Th e giant of giants is Time Warner (owning however structured (see framing), this power Time magazine, Time Life Books, Warner Music to scrutinize represents a ‘signifi cant historical Group, America On Line, Warner Brother development. For it means not only that politi- fi lms, HBO cable channel, CNN, etc.). A close cal leaders must now act in an arena which is in challenger is Disney (ABC, fi lm studios, theme principle open to view on a global scale, but also parks, record production, book publication, that recipients are able to see and experience global cable TV channels, etc.). Close busi- distant individuals and events in a way that was ness links between the media giants is a key simply not possible before’. See mobilization. feature of operations, alliances between them Global village See globalization of media; being more common than direct competition. mcluhanism. Rupert Murdoch’s news corp has equity joint Glocalization According to Roland Robinson in ventures in long-term alliances with Time ‘Globalization or glocalization?’ in the Journal Warner, Viacom, EMI, Granada TV and Globo of Communication 1 (1994), glocalization is of Brazil. Disney is involved in joint ventures a process that, arguably, often accompanies with Bertelsmann, NBC and Hearst Newspapers the process of globalization. Glocalization (not to mention Coca-Cola and McDonalds). occurs when global media corporations adapt or Bertelsmann of Germany has joint enterprises localise their operations and output to accom- with (in addition to Disney) Time Warner, Sony, modate local circumstances and culture. Richard Pearson publications (UK) and the BBC. Rooke in European Media in the Digital Age Th e objective of the great media corporations (Pearson, 2009), for example, discusses how is expansion worldwide, linked with a policy pressure to maintain audience share against of customizing or tailoring the media product growing local competition and thus secure local to local needs, tastes and expectations; thus advertising revenue led MTV to diversify. He Disney’s ESPN 24-hour-a-day sports channel notes that, ‘Today MTV Networks Europe has broadcasts in over 20 languages to more than regional channels in 26 diff erent languages and 160 countries (see europe: cross-border tv considerable amounts of content are produced channels). locally.’ See hybridization; mcdonaldiza- What applies to electronic communication tion; mcworld vs jihad. applies in equal measure to publishing, now ▶ Patrick D. Murphy and Marwan M. Kraidy, Global dominated by six major players – the largest, Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives (Routledge, HarperCollins, being part of the Murdoch 2003). stable, while Random House belongs to Bertels- Golden pen of freedom Annual award by the mann. Orion belongs to Hachette which in International Federation of Newspaper Publish- turn is owned by Lagadere Media linked with ers (FIEJ) based in Paris. Vivendi. Google Conceived by Stanford University

116 Gossip networks

computer-science graduate students Larry Page agreeing to conform to the Internet censorship A and Sergei Brin in 1995 and launched in 1997, requirements of the Chinese government. A Google experienced almost instant and expo- ‘cyber-attack’ in December 2009, suspected B nential growth, by 2000 becoming the world’s as coming from within China and targeting largest search engine. The original name was Google’s Chinese Gmail accounts, particularly BackRub. ‘Googal’ is a mathematical term coined those of human rights activists, proved the trig- C by Milton Sirotta, nephew of the US mathemati- ger for Google to threaten to pull out of China, cian Edward Kasner, for the number represented even at the prospect of the loss of a vastly lucra- D by 1 followed by 100 zeros; thus a ‘google’ stood tive market. for an extremely large number, reﬂ ecting the new David Drummond, corporate development company’s ambition to provide vast amounts of and chief legal oﬃ cer of the company, in a Google E information on the World Wide Web. blog (12 January 2010) wrote, ‘We have decided A cheque for US 100,000 from Sun Micro- we are no longer willing to continue censoring F systems founder Andy Bechtolsheim made our results on Google.cn … we will be discussing the launch of Google possible in 1998. One is with the Chinese government the basis on which G tempted to say, ‘And the rest is history.’ Google we could operate an unfiltered search engine now runs in exess of 150 million information within the law, if at all …’ Th e Chinese govern- searches a day. Shortly after its launch, Google ment renewed Google’s licence to operate in H was chosen by AOL (American On Line)/ the summer of 2010, though in the view of Ted Netscape as their web search service, traffic Dean of a Beijing-based company and reported I levels having risen to over 3 million. by BBC New Business (9 July 2010), ‘many of the

In June 2000 the company entered into issues around why Google shut down its Chinese JK partnership with Yahoo! Growth was dynamic search page in the ﬁ rst place are still there’. and brilliantly innovative. Image Search was ▶ Randall Ross, Planet Google: One Company’s Auda- launched in 2001 to be followed by G News cious Plan to Organize Everything We Know (Free L (2002), a content-targeted advertising service Press, 2008). (March 2003), Google Print and Google Book Gossip Traditionally gossip has been ranked as M Search in the same year. In 2004 the launch of ‘woman’s-talk’ and, within discourses and Orkut enabled Google to tap into the sphere of social structures that are male-dominated, N social networking (see networking: social given low status in the order of exchange, or networking). Google Local followed, and also even disparaged. Gossip, to outsiders, usually in 2004 users could begin keying into Google male, appears to be ‘going nowhere’, ‘undirected’ O SMS (Short Message Service), Desktop Search and ultimately pointless if not damaging. Such and Google Scholar. There followed Google judgments are essentially made from ideological P Maps, My Search Engine, Blogger Mobile, positions which view communication as less an Mobile Websearch, Google Earth, Google exchange of experience (a cultural exchange) R Talk, Google Reader, Google Analytics, Gmail and more a transmission of information: in for Mobiles (2005), Google News for Mobiles, short, ‘man’s talk’. Google Finance, Google Trends, Google Check- Gossip deserves more serious attention than is S out – all in the same year that Google acquired usually given to it. In ‘Gossip: notes on women’s YouTube (2006). oral culture’ in Women’s Studies International T Lateral thinking has been no stranger to Quarterly, 3 (1980), Deborah Jones defines Google: in 2009 the YouTube Symphony Orches- gossip as ‘a way of talking between women in U tra played at New York’s Carnegie Hall. All the their roles as women, intimate in style, personal way, Google has accumulated businesses such and domestic in topic and setting, a female as Keyhole (2004), a digital mapping company cultural event which springs from and perpetu- V whose technology proved the foundation for ates the restrictions of the female role, but also Google Earth. Others followed: Doubleclick gives the comfort of validation’. Jones lists four W (2008), reCAPTCHA (2009), Aardvark, Picnik, functions of gossip: house-talk, scandal, bitching ITA, Slide and Widevine (2010). Acquisitions and chatting. Such talk establishes and conﬁ rms represented both Google’s development needs the pleasures of interaction while at the same XYZ and their perceived direction; for example, time working to give them value and validity. As Widevine was a vendor of digital rights manage- such, it is potentially empowering. ment software, enabling broadcasters to safely Gossip networks A mode of resistance, by transmit video content online. women, to male-dominated discourses. Th e Google came in for widespread criticism in term is used by Mary Ellen Brown in Soap Opera

117 Gramophone

and Women’s Talk: Th e Pleasure of Resistance much high publicity as hi-fi . (Sage, 1994). Brown discusses how gossip The Second World War (1939–45) cut non- networks arise out of viewing soap opera, and military use of shellac, the material for the discs the use of such entertainment as a means of and principally imported from India, thus record constructing alternative meanings. Th e author production was severely curtailed. 1944 saw asks, ‘How can such a trivial or even exploitative the fi rst examples of Decca’s ‘ff rr’ sound reach- genre as soap opera be associated with the ing British ears. Th is was ‘full frequency range notion of empowerment for its viewers?’ She reproduction’ achieving standards of reproduc- responds to the question by arguing that the tion never previously heard. answer ‘lies in the invisible discourse networks In 1941, 127 million discs were sold; in 1947, it plugs into and helps solidify. Such discourse 400 million, a year before Columbia Records in networks, or gossip networks, are important for the US launched the unbreakable microgroove women’s resistive pleasure’. disc, with a playing time of 23 minutes per side. Gramophone Originally the Phonograph, Th e LP (Long Playing) Record had arrived. It invented by Th omas Alva Edison (1847–1931), bore between 224 and 300 grooves per inch his fi rst sketch of which was published in the compared to 85 grooves on the ordinary disc; Scientific American, 22 December 1877. His and it moved on the turntable at 33⅓rpm instead ‘talking tinfoil’ led to the creation in 1878 of the of the traditional 78. Not to be outdone, RCA Edison Speaking Phonograph Company, and Victor hit back with the 45rpm record, thus soon a single exhibition phonograph could earn beginning the so-called Battle of the Speeds, as much as US 1,800 a week. Concurrently diminishing trade in what turned out to be Edison designed different models including a a period of consumer uncertainty. It was the disc machine with a volute spiral that anticipated period too when recording by magnetic tape was later developments. rapidly expanding. Neither ousted the other: in Commercial recordings began in 1890, though fact they proved complementary and expanded sound reproduction remained poor, the wax together in the dynamic growth period of Rock cylinders could only play for two minutes and and Roll and the radio disc jockey. there was no way of mass-producing them. Stereophonic sound, or ‘two-eared listening’, Machines were driven by cumbersome, heavy- had been possible since the Bell Laboratories duty batteries and were very expensive to had put on binaural demonstrations at the purchase, that is until Th omas Hood Macdonald, Chicago World’s Fair of 1933, and Walt Disney’s a manager of Graphophone, rival company to fi lm Fantasia (1940) showed the possibilities of Edison’s, put on sale the fi rst mechanical phono- multi-source music reproduction in a cinema. graph (1894), retailing at US 75. The stereo effect was caught first on high- The Columbia company were the first to quality magnetic tape. Th en in 1957 the Westrex manufacture double-sided discs (1908), though Company devised a successful method of the next major innovation was electrical record- putting two stereo channels into a single groove. ing, initiated by Lionel Guest and H.O. Merri- By September of the following year every major men in 1920 when they recorded, by electrical record company in the US was off ering stereo process, the Unknown Warrior burial service in discs for sale. Westminster Abbey. Bell Laboratories in the US Th e tape cassette emerged from Philips who proved substantial pioneers in this area, which demonstrated its potential at the 1963 Berlin they termed orthophonic recording. Radio Show. They improved it substantially Th e miraculous rise of the gramophone was and in 1970 along came the Dolby system, just eventually hit by the more popular mass appeal at the time when tape machines were becoming of radio and the 1930s were lean years, though popular as in-car entertainment. the record industry in Europe did not plumb the An innovation in gramophone technology depths to the extent it did in the US where, by which never quite caught on was Quadrophony, January 1933, the record business was practically using four speakers rather than two, the addi- extinct. However, in September 1934, the RCA tional channels intended to convey ‘ambient’ Victor sales department off ered the Duo Junior, sound – fractionally delayed impulses refl ected consisting of an electrically powered turntable from the rear of the recording hall. Digital and a magnetic pickup, primitive but popular; recording is now standard and the CD (Compact and by 1935 the notion of ‘high-fi delity’ was born. Disc) dominates the music market. However, Station W2XR (later WQXR) in New York began vinyl is by no means a spent force; vinyl records ‘high-fi delity broadcasting’ in 1934, in truth, as are still manufactured, fulfilling the demands

118 Groupthink

of independent musicians and a substantial Rupert Brown in Group Processes (Blackwell, A number of enthusiasts who prefer the vinyl 2000) notes as regards in-groups, ‘Since part of sound to the ‘compression eff ects’ of its more our self-concept (or identity) is defi ned in terms B ‘advanced’ rivals. See topic guide under media of group affi liation, it follows that there will be a history. preference to view these groups positively rather Grip Person in a fi lm crew responsible for laying than negatively.’ C tracks, portable ‘railway lines’ for the smooth Triandis also notes that in-groups are likely to movement of the camera mounted on a dolly. have much more infl uence over their members D Groups A good deal of communication takes in collectivist cultures than is the case in indi- place within groups of one type or another. vidualistic cultures. In-groups and out-groups In Group Processes (Blackwell, 2000), Rupert may cooperate for mutual benefit but such E Brown argues that ‘a group exists when two or groupings may also be a source of intergroup more people defi ne themselves as members of it confl ict. Brown argues that a range of studies F and when its existence is recognised by at least reminds us that ‘the readiness for people to show

one other. Th e “other” in this context is some partiality for their own group (and its products) G person or group of people who do not defi ne over outgroups (and theirs) is not confi ned to themselves so’. Th e following criteria typically artifi cially created groups’. Th e resulting confl icts denote the existence of a group: common goals, are, arguably, much in evidence. H interaction between members and a structure for The performance of individuals is often that interaction, a measure of interdependence, a aff ected by group membership. Being in a group I stable relationship among members, a sense of can enhance or inhibit individual performance,

group identity and social integration. depending on such factors as the nature of the JK Robert A. Baron and Donn Byrne in Social task, the degree of effective leadership, the Psychology (Allyn & Bacon, 1994) suggest some cohesiveness of the group and the fl exibility of common characteristics of groups: allocation its communication networks. Th ese factors also L of roles, generation of norms and group determine the quality of group decision-making. ideology, cohesiveness and encouragement of In certain circumstances individuals may feel M conformity, and allocated roles may often have they need to make less eff ort in a group situa- diff ering degrees of status within the group. tion and become social loafers; alternatively they N Common structures found in groups are those may be motivated to work harder and become based on liking, role and status. social labourers. At times individuals may be Charles H. Cooley, one of the initiators of prepared to work harder to make up for their less O research into group behaviour and communica- energetic group members and thus contribute to tion, in his work Social Organization (Scribner, social compensation. P 1909) classifies groups into two main types. Robert A. Baron, Donn R. Byrne and Nyla Primary groups such as the family are defi ned as R. Branscombe in Social Psychology (Pearson R groups in which there is face-to-face communi- Education, 2006) argue that ‘contrary to popular cation; in which norms and mores are produced; belief, a large body of evidence indicates that in which roles are allocated and in which a feel- groups are actually more likely to adopt extreme S ing of solidarity is enjoyed. Secondary groups, positions than are individuals making decisions such as social class groups, are much larger alone’ – a dynamic termed group polarization. T aggregates. Several researchers have sought to A small primary group particularly has the determine the communication processes that potential to influence the perceptions of its U take place within groups and in particular the individual members and thus the way in which inter-relationship between a group’s culture, they interpret and respond to communication roles, status structure, cohesiveness, size, and from sources both within and outside the group. V type, and its communication processes. Secondary groups are not without influence It is also possible to classify groups as being either, in the communication process. An indi- W in-groups or out-groups, as identifi ed by Harry vidual’s accent and dialect, for example, can C. Triandis in ‘Collectivism vs. Individualism’ reflect their socio-economic background. See in G. Verma and C. Bagley, eds, Cross-cultural groupthink. XYZ Studies of Personality, Attitudes, and Cognition Groupthink Cohesiveness, or the desire for (Macmillan, 1988). In-groups are those to which cohesiveness, in a group may produce a we belong and which we value, whilst out- tendency amongst its members to agree at all groups are those to which we do not belong and costs. Sometimes the decisions brought about we may view some of these in a negative light. by such unanimity turn out to be disastrous.

119 Grub Street

Research by Irving Janis detailed in his study presentation of information can be selective. entitled Victims of Groupthink (Houghton Th is model does allow for two-way communica- Miffl in, 1972) demonstrated that what he termed tion with the audience and is an approach much ‘groupthink’ often leads to ineff ective decision- used by government institutions and agencies. making. Janis identified eight symptoms of Th e authors make the case that the need for groupthink, ranging from the group’s ‘illusion of propaganda, mainly as a consequence of the fi rst invulnerability’ to the existence within the group and second world wars, led to the development of ‘self-appointed mind guards’ – the latter being of the Two-Way Asymmetric model. Th is focuses group members who shield the group from upon the role of public relations in the process of information and ideas that might challenge the persuading audiences to change their attitudes consensus. When groupthink predominates, the and behaviour and is associated strongly with group does not subject its ideas and decision- another early public relations practitioner, making to careful scrutiny. Janis identifi ed other Edward Bernays. The model acknowledges variables likely to promote groupthink: a strong that research on human behaviour is useful dominant leadership that discourages open for constructing persuasive programmes and debate, a group’s relative isolation from outside campaigns. sources, the absence of strategies for evaluating In particular, research on the audience’s exist- decisions, and pressure being placed on the ing interests, values and attitudes is considered group to make decisions quickly. A number of important, as the audience is seen as best subsequent studies have investigated the eff ects persuaded by messages in line with these. Finally of groupthink. See groups. there is the later Two-way Symmetric model ▶ G. Moorhead, R. Ference and C.P. Neck, ‘Group associated with Scott Cutlip and Allen Center, decision fi ascos continue: Space Shuttle Challenger as well as with Bernays. Th is model stresses the and a groupthink framework’ in R.S. Cathcart, L.A. need to engage with the audience in order to Samovar and L. Henman, eds, Small Group Commu- establish a harmonious relationship: for example nication: Th eory & Practice (Brown & Benchmark, between an organization and its publics. 1996); Rupert Brown, Group Processes (Blackwell, Th is requires that, rather than just seeking to 2000). persuade its publics, the organization takes into Grub Street Description of any form of literary or consideration the needs and goals of its publics journalistic drudgery. According to Dr Johnson and adapts its own policies and practices to the (1709–84), Grub Street was ‘originally the name feedback received from them. Whilst express- of a street near Moorfields in London, much ing a preference for the Two-way Symmetrical inhabited by writers of small histories, diction- model, which is seen as a model of excellence aries and temporary poems, whence any mean for PR practice, Grunig and Hunt note that the production is called grub street’. choice of approach for any particular programme Grunig and Hunt: four models of public or campaign will be contingent upon situational relations practice, 1984 Proposed by James factors. Grunig and Todd Hunt in Managing Public Th e model has been open to criticism. One Relations (Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1984), particular criticism is that it fails to acknowledge these models have been widely used for analys- suffi ciently the infl uence of vested interests on ing public relations performance. Practices public relations activities. In response to such based on The Press Agentry/Publicity model criticisms, Dozier, Grunig and Grunig developed focus activities on gaining publicity, on one-way the idea further in the following studies: David communication with the audience through the M. Dozier, James E. Grunig and Larissa A. mass media. Th ere is little concern with gain- Grunig, Manager’s Guide to Excellence in Public ing feedback and evaluating the eff ectiveness Relations and Communication Management of messages. Th e Public Information model is (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995); Larissa E. seen to stem from the view of public relations Grunig, James E. Grunig and David M. Dozier, propounded by Ivy Lee – an early public rela- Excellent Public Relations and Eff ective Orga- tions practitioner – which emphasizes informing nizations: A Study of Communication Manage- the audience on issues by the presentation of ment in Three Countries (Lawrence Erlbaum facts, details and fi gures. Associates, 2002). They employed aspects of Additionally Grunig and Hunt argue that most game theory, and identified three models of practitioners of this model inform the public, practice, each of which denotes the degree of ‘with the idea of making the organization more symmetry likely in the communication process responsible to the public’. Clearly however any and whose interests are likely to be served. Th e

120 Hacker, hacktivist

Pure asymmetry model describes communica- at least it recognizes the existence of, and gives A tion practices that are one way and likely to be attention to, conflict. The greater the social used by an organization to dominate its public; diff erentiation within a community or nation, B the Pure cooperation model denotes a situation the more extensive is the reporting of confl ict. in which communication is used to convince Where there is ‘power uncertainty’ the media the organization of the public’s position; and in are likely to ‘display a tendency to concentrate C the Two-way model, communication is used to on individuals while accepting the structure. In achieve a win-win outcome for both the organi- doing so, the media are reinforcing the tendency D zation and its public. within the culture to emphasize great men and Guard dog metaphor A variation of (and personalities rather than individuals as actors in contrast to) the watchdog metaphor; in the system who are subject to the infl uence E representing one of the traditional functions of of social forces and processes’. See agenda- mass media. Th e term suggests that the media setting; news values. F perform as a sentry, not for the community but Guide signs Actions indicating direction,

for special-interest groups that have the power sometimes called deictic signals: ﬁ nger pointing, G and influence to establish and maintain their head pointing, eye pointing. Th umbs down and own security systems (see power elite). In ‘A thumbs up come into this category, and all the guard dog perspective on the role of media’ in the gestures of beckoning as well as repelling. See H Journal of Communication, Spring, 1995, George non-verbal behaviour: repertoire. A. Donohue, Phillip J. Tichenor and Clarise I N. Olien of the University of Minnesota argue

that the guard dog media ‘are conditioned to be H JK suspicious of all potential intruders, and they Habitus See taste. occasionally sound the alarm for reasons that Hacker, hacktivist Just as the tomb robbers individuals in the master households, that is, the of ancient Egypt broke into seemingly impreg- L authority structure, can neither understand nor nable pyramids and underground tombs, so prevent. Th ese occasions occur primarily when the ‘hacker’ breaks into computer codes and M authority within the structure is divided’. In computer systems. All the hacker needs is a communities where there is no apparent confl ict personal micro, know-how and persistence, N within power structures, ‘the media are sleeping and some of the world’s most closely guarded guard dogs’. information banks can be penetrated. What has Th e guiding principle appears to be: support been termed a hacktivist is a hacker with a social O the powerful unless the powerful are intruders. or political agenda, wherein hacking becomes a ‘Where diff erent local groups have confl icting form of protest. Chief among the targets of hack- P interests,’ say Donohue et al, ‘the media are more tivists is the nation state and the organization. likely to refl ect the views of the more power- Th e hacktivist pursues a range of tactics, from R ful groups.’ Consequently the guard-dog role simple e-mail protests to causing websites to works towards internal cohesion. Th e metaphor crash and diverting visitors to other sites. Th en contrasts with that of the media’s perceived there are ‘bombs’ – e-mails by the thousand S role as watchdog. Th e role in this case is one of directed at off ending sites; and, of course, the surveillance of the powerful on behalf of and in spread of viruses. T the interests of the public. Th e media serve as In general hackers are in favour of open freedom-seekers-and-defenders, hence the titles systems of communication, and their activities U of so many early newspapers – Sentinel, Voice are directed towards supporting and maintain- of the People, Champion, Justice, Poor Man’s ing online freedoms. Th ey have been described Guardian, Observer, Enquirer and Advocate. as white hat (the good guys on the side of V A third ‘dog’ in the repertoire of the media is emancipation) and black hat (the bad guys who that of the lapdog. As Donohue et al point out, launch computer viruses, for example). A less W ‘a lapdog perspective is a total rejection of the emotive term to describe hacking is alternative Fourth Estate view on all counts’. The lapdog computing. is submissive to authority and oblivious ‘to As subversives for good or ill, hackers have XYZ all interests except those of powerful groups’, long faced infi ltration into their ranks by agents and serves to frame all ‘issues according to the of authority such as, in the US, the Federal perspectives of the highest powers in the system’. Bureau of Investigation (FBI). They operate While the guard dog is characterized by either directly, by posing as hackers, or indirectly deference as contrasted with submissiveness, by enrolling existing hackers to spy and report

121 Halo eff ect

on their peers. See genre; journalism: phone- Act, 1919). Will H. Hays, Postmaster-General hacking; regulation of investigatory to the Harding administration, was invited to powers act (ripa)(uk), 2001; wikileaks. become president. ▶ Tim Jordan and Paul Taylor, Hacktivism and Cyber- In 1930 Martin Quigley, a Chicago publisher, wars (Routledge, 2004); Leah A. Lievrouw, Alterna- and Father Lord, Society of Jesus, reframed the tive and Activist New Media (Polity Press, 2011). Hays Office studio recommendations of 1927 Halo eff ect One way in which our perceptions of into a Production Code (Th e Hays Offi ce Code) others may be biased is through the operation of to meet the even more restrictive demands what has been termed the ‘halo eff ect’. In initial emanating from the recently formed Legion of encounters we tend to pick out one or two char- Decency, made up of leaders of the Roman Cath- acteristics of a person and let these infl uence olic church and other religious denominations. our general impression of them. For example, at A Production Code Administration was prised an interview, it may be assumed that someone out of the MPPDA under the direction of Roman who is well qualifi ed, neatly dressed and pleas- Catholic Joseph I. Breen who, between 1934 and ant in manner will perform well in the job and the anti-trust decree of 1948, supervised 95 per work hard. Such generalizations from one or cent of fi lms made in the US. Any fi lm released two characteristics are based on our implicit without Breen’s approval was liable to a US personality theory, that is our basic assumptions 25,000 fi ne and condemnation by the Legion. about which characteristics go together, and Political as well as moral attitudes and behav- how people are likely to behave. iour were subject to severe censorship. The Hammocking Strategy used by TV schedulers Legion, for example, supported the Fascists in to boost the viewing fi gures of a programme by the Spanish Civil War and generally opposed placing it between two popular programmes. any production with Leftish leanings. Th e Hays Hankey Committee Report on Television, Office Code remained operative until 1966. 1943 Set up under the Coalition War Govern- See huac: house un-american activities ment in the UK, chaired by Lord Hankey, the committee. See also topic guide under committee was requested to ‘prepare plans media: freedom, censorship. for the reinstatement and development of Head nods Head nods are an element of non- the television service after the War’. Hankey verbal communication and can be used to recommended a re-opening on the 1939 basis of communicate a range of messages. They are the 405-line system rather than waiting for the commonly used to give positive feedback development of any new, improved version. Th e to the sender of a message by indicating both Report was of the view that ‘it is in the televising interest and/or approval on the part of the of actual events, the ability to give the viewer a receiver; to indicate fl oor appointment, that is front-row seat at almost every possible kind of to signal whose turn it is to speak next; and to exciting or memorable spectacle, that Televi- give emphasis to speech. See communication: sion will perform its greatest service’. Hankey’s non-verbal. general conclusion was ‘that Television has come ▶ Allan and Barbara Pease, The Definitive Book of to stay ...’ See topic guide under commissions/ Body Langauge (Orion, 2004). committees/legislation. Hearsay See rumour. Hard times scenario See vals typology. Hedges Utterances such as ‘you know’, ‘sort of’ Harmonious interaction Fred Inglis uses this and ‘perhaps’ would be examples of hedges. phrase in Th e Imagery of Power: A Critique of Jennifer Coates in Women, Men and Language Advertising (Heinemann, 1972) to describe the (Pearson Education, 2004) notes that the precise friendly and mutually supportive relationship function of hedges varies with the social context between the media and the forces of advertising. and the relationship of the interactors. Coates Th is ‘harmonious interaction’ of advertising discusses the range of uses to which hedges may and editorial styles consistently reproduces and be put, such as expressing confi dence, suggest- endorses the consumer’s way of life, argues Inglis. ing uncertainty and enabling face-saving to Hays Office In the US for three decades the occur when sensitive topics are being discussed. Hays Offi ce meant censorship. In 1922 lead- Whilst women appear to use more hedges than ing fi gures in the fi lm industry formed Motion men in conversation, the interpretation to be Picture Producers and Distributors of America placed on this diff erence is a matter for debate. Incorporated (MPPDA) to protect their interests Hegemony Th e concept of hegemony owes much against a range of would-be fi lm censors in a to the work of Italian political thinker Antonio climate that had produced Prohibition (Volstead Gramsci (1891–1937). A state of hegemony is

122 Hierarchy

achieved when a provisional alliance of certain ideological state apparatuses; mcdon- A social groups exerts a consensus that makes aldization. See also topic guide under the power of the dominant group appear both media: values & ideology. B natural and legitimate. Hegemony can, however, ▶ Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (Knopf, only be maintained by the won consent of the 1964); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison dominated. It is therefore, like consensus, Notebooks (Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). C subject to renegotiation and ongoing redefi ni- Helical model of communication See tion. Also, the consensus may be broken as the dance’s helical model of communication. D ideologies of the subordinate cannot always be Heliological metaphor See visions of order. accommodated. He/man language Dale Spender in her book Institutions such as the mass media, the Man Made Language (HarperCollins, 1990 E family, the education system and religion play a edition) refers to the principle by which for key role in the shaping of people’s awareness and several centuries the terms he and man have F consciousness, and thus can be agents through been used to include women – for example, which hegemony is constructed, exercised and mankind. According to Spender, this principle G maintained. The definition and workings of has the eff ect not only of contributing to the hegemony have obviously undergone adapta- perspective of male-as-norm – of males as tion since Gramsci’s day. Th e power, reach and more worthy – but also of helping to construct H global penetration of the media as instruments the invisibility of women in language, thought of hegemony have intensifi ed issues of control and reality. Not everyone, of course, either I and infl uence, though these need to be viewed agrees with or employs this principle, and it has in relation to the impact over the last decade become the focus of some critical scrutiny in JK of internet communication, which some recent decades. commentators claim is in the process of under- Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model mining hegemony. See consent, manufacture of. L In the view of Todd Gitlin in his chapter, Hermeneutic code See codes of narrative. ‘Prime time television: the hegemonic process in Hermeneutics The science of interpretations M television entertainment’ in Television: Th e Criti- or understanding. Th e word is taken from the cal View (Oxford University Press, 1994), edited Greek, hermeneuein, and derives from Hermes, N by Horace Newcomb, hegemony is sustained by messenger of the gods; it means to make things the fl exibility of its ideology: ‘In the twentieth clear, to announce or unveil a message. In fi lm century, the dominant ideology has shifted study, a hermeneutic code, or ‘code of enigma’, O toward sanctifying consumer satisfaction as the explains by one device or another the myster- premium defi nition of “the pursuit of happiness”, ies of the plot – the situation or predicament P in this way justifying corporate domination of characters fi nd themselves in – and indicates the the economy. What is hegemonic in consumer process of resolution. R capitalist ideology is precisely the notion that Heterophily See homophily. happiness, or liberty, or equality, or fraternity Hidden agenda When the underlying objective can be affirmed through the existing private of an act of communication is diff erent from that S commodity forms, under the benign, protective which is stated. See impression management. eye of the national security state.’ Hidden needs Vance Packhard in Th e Hidden T In other words, consumerism and its playmate Persuaders (Penguin, 1960, with updated celebritization have become integral to a editions) cites eight ‘hidden needs’ which the U coalition of interests, including that of the state. adman can cater for. These are: emotional On the face of it, the internet has shown a security; reassurance of worth; ego-gratifi cation; maverick tendency to serve diff erent purposes creative outlets; love objects; a sense of power; a V because of the opportunities it provides to indi- sense of roots; and immortality. See advertis- viduals and self-generated groups largely free of ing; hot buttons; maslow’s hierarchy of W authority and supervision. needs; vals typology. The flexibility of hegemony both in prin- Hierarchy Classifi cation in graded subdivisions. ciple and practice which Gitlin remarks on must, Th e hierarchy of a company starts at the top with XYZ however, give us pause, for imperial ambitions the chairperson or managing director; a social exist as prominently on the Net as elsewhere. hierarchy is dominated by the elite classes, who As ownership and control increasingly become varyingly infl uence those class divisions below global phenomena, hegemony is as likely to fl ex them. In the media, the dominant hierarchy are its muscles as suff er diminishment. See elite; the owners, top executives, major shareholders,

123 High and low context communication

boards of directors, etc. See organization activities of ‘enemy’ peoples to Nazis, and to use cultures. past terminology such as ‘holocaust’ and ‘death High and low context communication See camps’. communication: intercultural communi- Following the terrorist assault on the US cation. Pentagon and the World Trade Centre in New Highbrow Someone considered to be a member York on 11 September 2001 (9/11), and the subse- of the intellectual and cultural elite, whose quent build-up to war by the US and UK, the tastes are, by definition, considered to be British Prime Minister Tony Blair was compared aesthetically superior to those of the majority, is in the media – varyingly and queryingly – with deemed a highbrow. Highbrow tastes are limited the pugnacious war-leader Winston Churchill, to the few. Th e terms middlebrow and lowbrow the nineteenth-century PM William Gladstone are used to indicate a level of intellectual capac- (whose mission was to ‘pacify Ireland’) and the ity of cultural appreciation judged against the gunboat-happy British Foreign Secretary Lord standards of the highbrow elite. See cultural Palmerston. Blair’s public performance follow- capital. ing the London bombings of July 2005 was High fi delity See gramophone. similarly described as Churchillian and recalling High-speed photography One of the wonders the London Blitz during the Second World War. of modern technology, but a preoccupation Such use of analogies and metaphors is seen of photographers from the earliest pioneering generally to serve to place events into contexts days, the high-speed fl ash process slows down, familiar to the public. However, in Compassion or magnifi es, time: the splash of a drop of water, Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, the trajectory of a bullet, can be reduced to slow War and Death (Routledge, 1999), Susan D. motion that permits astonishing revelations. Moeller issues a cautionary note on this practice. Foremost among developers of ultra-high-speed ‘Th e eff ect,’ she believes, has been ‘that read- electronic fl ash photography as a tool of scien- ers and viewers’ have come to ‘overlook the tifi c analysis was the American Harold Edgerton, complexity’ of reported confl icts, and ‘to believe inventor of the stroboscope. in the simplicity of comparisons’. Th e term stroboscopic photography, or strobe Historical revisionism Term addressed specifi - photography, refers to pictures of single or cally to attempts in the US and Europe to write multiple exposure taken by fl ashes of light from out of history the genocide of the Th ird Reich of electrical discharges, permitting objects moving Adolph Hitler; to deny that the atrocities ever at their natural speeds to be observed in slow took place. motion – the rate of the slow motion depending Hollywood Centre of the US fi lm industry, located on the frequency of the strobe and object. When in California, providing maximum sunshine for the fl ash frequency exactly equals that of the outdoor shooting and some magnifi cent scenery. rotation or vibration, the object is illuminated in In 1908 The Count of Monte Cristo, begun in the same position during each cycle, and appears Chicago, was completed in California and the stationary. fi rst Hollywood studio was established in 1911. In contrast to high-speed photography, time- Within a year another fifteen film companies lapse photography, by taking pictures at timed had set up in business. Th e Hollywood studio intervals of seconds, minutes, hours or days, system reached its peak in the 1930s; its fortunes speeds up, or telescopes, time. In a few moments have since fl uctuated, at fi rst knocked sideways of fi lm we can see the germination of a seed, the by the advent of TV, then restored by a simple hatching of an egg, or blow-fl y maggots consum- philosophy of ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’. ing a dead mouse. Both high-speed and time- Today Hollywood plays a key role in the US lapse photography are employed most widely to television industries, while its fi lm enterprises answer two questions: how is it done, and what are profi tably supplemented by global sales of went wrong? See photography, origins. movies on video and DVD. Historical allusion The practice in news ▶ Janet Wasko, Hollywood in the Information Age: reporting of making reference – alluding to Beyond the Silver Screen (Polity Press, 1994); David – events in the past perceived as being similar Bordwell, Th e Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style to current events, recognized by audience as in Modern Movies (University of California Press, such, and potentially capable of adding to the 2006; also a University Press Audiobook, 2010); James news value of a story. For example, a conve- Walters, Alternative Worlds in Hollywood (Intellect, nient (and often all-too-easy) way to demonize 2008); Matthew Alford, Reel Power: Hollywood an ‘enemy’ leader is to compare him to Hitler, the Cinema and American Supremecy (Pluto Press, 2010).

124 Hot media, cold media

Holography With the invention of the laser in Horse-race story Approach to news coverage A 1960 an intriguing new form of three-dimen- of elections anchored in the metaphor of horse sional photography, named holography, became racing (or any other competitive sport), in which B possible. Though the theory originated with the political party ahead in the opinion polls Dennis Gabor as early as 1947, development was is ‘winning at a canter’ or is losing ground to not possible until an intense source of ‘coherent’ the opposition, which is coming up fast on the C light became available, which the laser supplied. outside. Todd Gitlin in ‘Bites and blips: chunk Coherent light is light of ‘pure’ colour containing news, savvy talk and the bifurcation of American D waves of a single frequency whose wave-fronts politics’ in Communication and Citizenship: all move in perfect step. Journalism and the Public Sphere (Routledge, Derived from the Greek, holos, or whole, and 1991), edited by Peter Dahlgren and Colin E gram, message, the hologram is made without Sparks, calls this mode of campaign journalism a lens by splitting a laser beam so that part of an ‘enchantment – with means characteristic F it is directed at the subject and part becomes of a society which is competitive, bureaucratic,

a reference beam. When light reflected from professional and technological all in one ... Th is G the subject and light from the reference beam is a success culture bedazzled by sports statis- meet on the photographic plate, the wave-fronts tics and empty of criteria for value other than create interference patterns which contain all numbers to answer the question, “How am I H the visual information needed to construct a doing?” Journalists compete, news organizations three-dimensional image of the subject, amaz- compete, the channel aggression of the race is I ingly lifelike, and viewable from diﬀ erent angles. what makes their blood run’. See topic guide

Recent developments have enabled holograms to under news media. JK be made for viewing by ordinary white light. Hot buttons Barry Feig in Hot Button Marketing Holography has proved a boon to the world (Adams Media, 2006) argues that ‘consumers of business. Machine-readable refl ection holo- buy from motivations they are not even aware L grams store digital information in hundreds of of. Th ose motivations are the Hot Buttons of layers within the emulsion of a fi lm or plastic marketing … Hot Buttons are the keys to the M card. The holographed data on a credit card, psyches of your customers’. He claims, ‘People passport, security access card or ticket to a don’t buy products and services. Th ey buy the N high-priced event, forming a three-dimensional satisfaction of unmet needs.’ Feig identifies pattern, can be read electronically, thus provid- sixteen such emotional hot buttons that can be ing a formidable obstacle to counterfeiting. pressed to hook into the motivations of consum- O Home Service Name of the BBC’s prime talk ers. Th ese range from ‘the desire for control’ to radio channel, founded in 1939. The name the ‘wish fulfi llment’ hot button. Th e choice of P was changed to BBC Radio 4 in 1967. See bbc which hot button(s) to use will depend on factors digital; radio 1, radio 2, radio 3, radio 4, such as the needs, interests, values, lifestyles and R radio 5 live. priorities of the consumer group being targeted. Homo narrans See narrative paradigm. See hidden needs; motivation research Homophily Interacting individuals who share (mr); vals typology. S certain attributes – beliefs, values, educational Hot media, cold media Terms coined by background, social status – are said to be Marshall McLuhan, author of The Gutenberg T homophilous. Communication is commonly Galaxy (University of Toronto Press, 1962) and believed to be closer when between people who Understanding Media (Routledge & Kegan Paul, U are homophilous as they are more likely to share a 1964), and forming a basic tool of his analysis of common language-level and pattern of meaning. the media. For McLuhan, ‘hot’ media extend one On the other hand, heterophily refers to the degree sense-mode with high-defi nition data: examples V to which interacting individuals diff er in these of ‘hot’ media are radio and film. ‘Cold’ media

attributes. Generally, heterophilic interaction is provide, in contrast, low-defi nition data, requir- W likely to cause some disturbance and confusion to ing much more participation by the individual. the individuals concerned, and thus more eff ort Examples are TV, telephone and cartoons. As is required to make communication eff ective. See Ralph Berry queries in Communication Th rough XYZ cognitive consistency theories. the Mass Media (Edward Arnold, 1971), ‘all this Horizons of expectation See expectations, is highly controversial ... for example, the “hot- horizons of. cold” metaphor runs speedily into diffi culties (is Horizontal integration See integration: the living theatre signifi cantly diff erent in the vertical and horizontal. front or the rear stalls?)’.

125 HUAC: House Un-American Activities Committee

HUAC: House Un-American Activities Ring Lardner and Dalton Trumbo, fi lm directors Committee Inspiration for Arthur Miller’s Elia Kazan and Martin Ritt (see Ritt’s movie of play, Th e Crucible, which explored the nature of 1976, Th e Front, on the theme of blacklisting), community hysteria leading to the persecution writers Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman, of ‘suspected witches’. In the case of HUAC, set and actors Zero Mostel (star of Th e Front) and up by the US Congress in 1938 (and not wound Edward G. Robinson. During the 1960s HUAC’s up until February 1969), the witches were dominance of the hearts and minds of the Amer- Communists, alleged Communists or Commu- ican nationals was repeatedly challenged. Indeed nist sympathizers. Among the witch-finders its momentum had been seriously checked were Richard Nixon, later Republican president, by TV commentator Edward R. Murrow, who and the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy. produced a See It Now documentary (1954) in Every section of society was scrutinized which he suggested that McCarthy had repeat- for suspects, not the least the entertainment edly stepped over the fi ne line between investi- industry. One committee member, John Rankin gating and persecuting. – a ‘virulent bigot who equated Jews with The nightmare spell which McCarthy cast Communists and Negroes with monkeys’, as over a nation was mercifully broken when he Godfrey Ryan describes him in his three-part died of liver failure in May 1957. In 1969 HUAC series of articles, ‘Un-American activities’ (Index was reincarnated as the House Internal Security on Censorship 1, 2 and 3, 1973) – declared ‘one Committee which, learning the lessons of the of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for past, opted for low-key activities, holding fewer the overthrow of this government has its head- sessions and avoiding unpleasant confronta- quarters in Hollywood ... Th e information we get tions by not subpoenaing unfriendly witnesses. is that this is the greatest hot-bed of subversive See usa – patriot act (2001). See also topic activities in the United States’. guides under media ethics; media: freedom, HUAC’s pursuit of ‘subversives’ thrived in the censorship; media history. years of the Second World War and fl ourished Human Rights Act (UK), 2000 Incorporating even more in the years of the so-called Cold into British law the European Convention on War. In Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism: Th e Human Rights, the Act has been described as Hate Th at Haunts America (McGraw-Hill, 1972), the biggest change in UK law since the Bill of Roberta Fauerlicht writes, ‘Since the govern- Rights of 1688. Th e Act guarantees freedom of ment had to fi nd subversives before they could thought, conscience and religion; freedom of subvert, people were punished not for what they expression, and this right ‘shall include freedom did but for what they might do. Men and women to hold opinions and to receive and impart infor- found their loyalty questioned because they mation and ideas without interference by public liked Russian music, because they had books on authority and regardless of frontiers’. Communism in their libraries, or because they Freedom of expression is deemed to be subject believed in equality for blacks or civil liberties to ‘duties and responsibilities’ and conditional for Communists.’ One hundred and thirty-nine upon ‘restrictions and penalties as are prescribed government employees were fired as a result by law and are necessary in a democratic society, of HUAC investigations, although not a single in the interests of national security, territorial one was found guilty of subversive acts. Hearst integrity or public safety’. Th at freedom is equally newspapers were prominent in applauding the subject to criteria concerning ‘the prevention of work of HUAC. disorder or crime, for the protection of health Perhaps the most insidious result of HUAC and morals, for the protection of the rights of activities was blacklisting, whereby ‘suspects’ – others, for preventing the disclosure of informa- often mysteriously – failed to gain employment tion received in confi dence or for maintaining or were laid off from work for specious reasons. the authority and impartiality of the judiciary’. Blacklisting was keenly felt in the movie indus- Discrimination ‘on any ground such as sex, try and in broadcasting. It is a cruel irony that race, colour, language, religion, political or other where accusations were publicly proved to be opinion, national or social origin, association fraudulent, blacklisting increased rather than with a national minority, property, birth or decreased. other status’ is prohibited. Th e right to life, to Prominent victims of HUAC scrutiny were a fair trial, to respect for private and family life, Arthur Miller himself (he was refused a passport freedom of assembly, the right to marry are all by the State Department in 1956), the black confirmed. See topic guide under commis- singer Paul Robeson, Hollywood scriptwriters sions, committees, legislation.

126 Hyperreality

Human Rights Watch An independent, non- edly taken his own life. A governmental organization funded by private Lord Hutton took evidence from 74 witnesses individuals and foundations worldwide, with over 25 days and his report was 740 pages long. B oﬃ ces in New York, Washington, Rio de Janeiro He completely exonerated the government, and Hong Kong. Formed in 1978, the Human government communication services, the civil Rights Watch investigates and reports on the service and security services and directed the C state of human rights in Africa, the Americas, blame entirely towards the BBC. Ben Pimlott Asia, the Middle East and the signatories of the in a Guardian survey of opinions, ‘Returning D Helsinki accord on human rights, scrutinizing verdicts on the judge’ (30 January 2004), spoke of such matters as arms transfers, women’s and the Report’s prose style as ‘exemplary’, the clarity children’s rights and prison conditions. The ‘impeccable’ and the judgments ‘unambiguous’, E organization also makes grants to writers who yet the author knew of ‘no precedent for a major have suﬀ ered from political persecution. report so black-and-white in its conclusions, or F Hunt Committee Report on Cable Expan- quite so supportive of the powers that be’.

sion and Broadcasting Policy (UK), 1982 Th e publication of the report led to the resig- G Set up by the Conservative government, the nation of the Chairman of the BBC, Sir Gavyn three-man committee chaired by Lord Hunt, a Davies, the Director General, Greg Dyke and former top civil servant, was required to report Andrew Gilligan – and it stirred up a hornets’ H and make recommendations on the future of nest of protest and accusations that the report cable systems in the UK. In brief, the report, the had been a ‘whitewash’. See butler report I result of a hurried investigation begun in March (uk), 2004; phillis review of government

1982 and fi nalized by September, recommended communications (uk), 2004. JK a future pattern of cable transmission systems Hybridization Described by James Lull in marked by few regulations, many channels Media, Communication, Culture (Polity Press, and as much advertising as operators could 1995) as the ‘fusing of cultural forms’. Travel L attract. and the global nature of much of the media and Pay-as-you-view TV was not given the green music industries enable a cultural form which M light by Hunt on the grounds that major national originates in one culture to be disseminated events, such as the Cup Final or Wimbledon, quickly and easily to other cultures, where it N might be siphoned-off from national access and may well be infl uenced by and merge with local be seen only by those on cable and able to pay. cultural forms, thus producing a cultural hybrid. ‘Cherry picking’ – cabling just for the well-off Lull gives the example of rap music that has O suburbs of a city, for example – was also to be travelled widely from its roots in US inner-city barred. See cable television. ghettos and has become incorporated into other P Hutton Report (UK), 2004 In 2003, former Lord kinds of popular music in a number of other Chief Justice of Northern Ireland Lord Brian countries. See global village. R Hutton conducted an inquiry in public into the In particular, TV is seen as a prime agency suicide of a UK government weapons-expert, of hybridization (or hybridity). It represents Dr David Kelly. Th e terms of the inquiry were a site of travel in which people draw images, S ‘urgently to conduct an investigation into the ideology and visions of lifestyles other than circumstances surrounding the death of Dr their own. Arguments over hybridity centre T Kelly’. Th e context was the second Iraq war; the on whether TV as a travelling medium creates issue, whether government claims that Saddam cultural diversity or results in cultural homogene- U Hussain possessed weapons of mass destruction ity, or sameness. In addition to TV, and perhaps capable of being deployed on the UK within 45 more importantly, the internet can be seen as minutes had been ‘sexed up’. an agency of hybridization. V Th e trigger for this controversial claim was Hyperreality Just as hyperactivity is enhanced

an early-morning BBC radio report by journal- or beyond-the-normal activity, hyperreality, in W ist Andrew Gilligan. The source of Gilligan’s the age of mass production and reproduction, information, kept secret by the journalist but offers us reality-plus. Images, simulations of brought into the public domain via government reality, serve to extend and heighten the reali- XYZ ministries, was Kelly, who was sceptical of claims ties they represent, to the point, in the view of relating to WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruc- some commentators, that they are more real tion). Faced by a barrage of publicity, and of a than, and preferable to, actual realities. Both House of Commons panel of MPs asking sharp the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and the and often aggressive questions, Kelly had alleg- Italian semiologist Umberto Eco cite Disney-

127 Hypertext

land as having taken realities to a point where the eff ects of the mass media, the hypodermic they achieve hyperreality – a substitute that needle ‘model’ has formed a point of general supplants, even erases the original and replaces reference in crediting the media with power over it with the ‘reality’ of simulation. In short, that audiences. Th e basic assumption is that the mass which is imitating is more real, more signifi cant, media have a direct, immediate and infl uential than that which is imitated. eff ect upon audiences by ‘injecting’ information Baudrillard, in Selected Writings (Polity Press, into the consciousness of the masses. 1988), edited by Mark Poster, refers to the ‘society Th e audience is seen as impressionable and of the image’ in which the real is subsumed by ‘all open to manipulation. Like other early models the entangled orders of simulation’. Eco does not of communication flow from the media, it go so far as to say that the hyperreal supplants overlooks the possible eff ects of intervening the real, but in Travels in Hyperreality (Picador, variables (ivs) in the communication process, 1986) he states that imitations are indeed coming and presents the masses as being unquestioning to be preferred, by those who create them and receptacles of media messages. Th is sense of the those who consume them, to the original. He all-powerfulness of the media is a central feature refers to such fakes as deriving from ‘a present of early mass-society research. It is now regarded without depth’. He classifi es Disneyland as the as crude and simplistic. See audience: active home of the ‘total fake’. However, the real, he audience; commercial laissez-faire model believes, can be reasserted through a sense of of (media) communication. history that ‘allows an escape from the tempta- Hypothesis Th e fi rst step of the research cycle tions of hyperreality’. is the formulation of an hypothesis. Th is will Hypertext Electronic text on computer, inter- usually be based on an idea or hunch gained by faced with links or pathways to other, related the researchers from their own reading of earlier texts. For example the text of a novel might be the studies and/or their own observations of society. primary text while a web of supplementary texts Starting with this basic idea, a researcher usually – background notes, critiques, biographies – can proposes a working hypothesis that will guide the be instantly consulted and cross-referenced. research. Th e hypothesis proposes a relationship Hyphenized abridgement Herbert Marcuse between certain social phenomena: for example, (1898–1979) uses this term in One-Dimensional that people from a higher-education background Man (Sphere Books, 1968) to describe the are more likely to read what is regarded as the practice of the press of concentrating informa- quality press. tion by bringing two or more descriptive facts Not all hypotheses are expressed as formal together by using a hyphen. Thus: ‘Georgia’s statements: some can be a general collection high-handed-lowbrowed governor ... had the of ideas about particular social phenomena. stage set for one of his wild political rallies All hypotheses, though, must be capable of last week.’ Marcuse argues, ‘Th e governor, his empirical testing; that is, they must be capable function, his physical features and his political of being proved or disproved by facts and argu- practices are fused together into one indivisible ment. Th e hypothesis will determine the nature and immutable structure’ by the press employing of the research design – the method of collecting this device, ‘which in its natural innocence and the information that will prove or disprove the immediacy, overwhelms the reader’s mind. Th e hypothesis. structure leaves no space for distinction ... it Once this information has been collected and moves and lives only as a whole’. analysed, the hypothesis is reviewed. It may be Hyphenized abridgement, used repeatedly and proved, disproved or amended; indeed, in many assertively, ‘imposes images while discouraging, cases the original hypothesis may have been on the part of the reader, conceptualization; that modifi ed during the data collection stage of the is, it beats him/her with images, but impedes research. Alternatively it may be decided that thinking; and thus the media defi ne for us the further evidence is required before any conclu- terms in which we are permitted to think’. See sion is reached. See media analysis. determiner deletion; effects of mass Hypothesis of consonance See news values. media; frankfurt school of theorists; pseudo-context; tabloidese. Hypodermic needle model of communication More a metaphor representing a view of

128 Ideological presumption

plight has caught one’s sympathy; and to incor- A I porate characteristics of an admired person into Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI) one’s own identity by adopting that person’s B In 2008 the Icelandic parliament passed into system of values. law an idealistic initiative gathering together Identifi cation is used in a more specifi c sense best practices from all over the world in further- when we discuss the degree of infl uence that C ing and protecting freedom of information. persons, institutions and the media may have on Comparison has been made with off -shore tax others. In ‘Processes of opinion change’, Public D havens; only in the Icelandic case, what is being Opinion Quarterly, 25 (1965), Herbert Kelman given haven is information – access to it and the explores three basic processes of social infl uence reporting of it. with reference to opinion change and to commu- E Model practices from a number of countries nication. These are compliance, identification have been incorporated, based upon the and internalization. The first position in this F presumption of the public’s right to access ‘social infl uence theory’ refers to the acceptance

government documents and the notion that in of influence in the hope of either receiving a G the context of global communication, the media reward or avoiding punishment. Identiﬁ cation know no national boundaries. The initiative in this sense occurs ‘when an individual adopts arose following the banking collapse in Iceland behaviour derived from another person or a H during which vital information was kept from group because this behaviour is associated with the people of the country. Th e situation led to a satisfying self-defining relationship to this I demands for transparency from banking, busi- person or group’.

ness and government. See topic guide under As with compliance, change or infl uence is reli- JK media: freedom, censorship. ant upon the external source and ‘dependent on Iconic Describes a sign which, in some way, social support’. Internalization occurs when the resembles its object; looks like it, or sounds proposed change, the infl uence, is fully believed L like it. Picture-writing is iconic, as is a map. in, accepted, taken fully on board, because the onomatopoeia (word sounds that resemble real infl uenced person ‘fi nds it useful for the solution M sounds) is iconic. In semiology/semiotics the of a problem or because it is congenial to his iconic is one of three categories of sign defi ned by own orientation, or because it is demanded of N American philosopher C.S. Peirce (1834–1914): his own values’. where the iconic describes or resembles, the Linked to the analysis of the extent to which index is connected with its object, like smoke identifi cation takes place is the interest in how O to fi re; while the symbol has no resemblance or we identify along lines of age, class or gender. connection, and communicates meaning only Identity See self-identity. P because people agree that it shall stand for what Idents Channel identities; snapshot films, it does. A word is a symbol. Th e categories are reminding TV viewers in graphic, computer- R not separate and distinct: one sign may be made generated form which channel they are tuned to. up of all three categories. See topic guide under Idents are designed to establish an image of the language/discourse/narrative. channel, a channel branding. Th e generic ident is S Id, ego, super-ego See self-identity. basically suitable for any programme introduc- Ideational functions of language Th e use of tion, while specifi c idents create images closely T language to explore, interpret, construct and refl ecting the nature of particular programmes express views about ourselves and the world. or series. U Another major function of language, the inter- Ideological presumption Term describing the personal function, is that of establishing and view that journalists and the news media are maintaining relationships with others. Clearly necessarily and unavoidably ideologically impli- V both functions are often present in communica- cated in the message systems and discourses

tive encounters and the two are often related. to which they contribute. In Th e Foucault Reader W Identification The degree to which people (Random House, 1984) the French philosopher identify with and are infl uenced by characters, Michel Foucault states that the social relations fi ctional or otherwise, in books, radio, fi lms and of power produce and constitute knowledge, XYZ TV has fascinated media analysts, especially in and that socio-economic power lies at the root areas of behaviour where such identification of what we are, what we believe and what we are might lead to anti-social activity such as violence. shown – through the media. Th e position locates ‘To identify with’ has two common meanings: to journalists as cultural workers, in the service of participate in the situation of someone whose those with power and authority.

129 Ideological state apparatuses

Th e view is challenged by Matthew Kieron in translated by repeated usage through channels ‘News reporting and the ideological presump- of communication into wisdom as apparently tion’ published in the Journal of Communication, natural as fresh air; a process sometimes referred Spring 1997. He declares that the ‘presump- to as mystification. Within society there may tion’ is ‘either false, incoherent or trivial’; it is be a variety of contending ideologies at play, ‘overextended, misplaced and distortive’. Kieron representing different sets of social interests, argues that we should, in our scrutiny of journal- each seeking to extend recognition and accep- ism, acknowledge that in broadly free societies tance of its way of making sense of the world, there are suffi cient variables in interpretation its own capacity to give order and explain social and approach to escape the grip of the voice of existence. authority. Language itself may be seen not as a neutral Ideological state apparatuses This term medium, but as ideological, thus in its use ensur- derives from the work of the French philosopher ing that ideology is present in all discourses. Each Louis Althusser (1918–90). Ideological state may seek to become the dominant ideology, and apparatuses (ISAs) are those social institutions it can be argued that the capacity to make use of which, according to Althusser, help shape the channels of mass communication is crucial people’s consciousness in a way that secures to either achieving or maintaining this position. support for the ideology of those who control Th e use of the media in this respect is the focus the state; that is, the dominant ideology. Such of much research and analysis. German sociolo- institutions include education, the family, reli- gist Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) in Ideology and gion, the legal system, the party-political system Utopia (Routledge, 1936) distinguishes between and the mass media. Th e dominant ideology is ideas that defend existing interests, the status thus represented as both natural and neutral. As quo, which he terms ideologies, and ideas that a result it becomes almost unseen, taken-for- seek to change the social order, which he terms granted. utopias. See consensus; cultural appara- In contrast there is what Althusser calls the tus; discourse; dominant discourse; hege- RSA (Repressive State Apparatus), comprising mony; ideological state apparatuses; the law, police, military; these are brought into male-as-norm. See also topic guide under operation – using coercion or the threat of media: values & ideology. it – when the ISAs are failing to secure their ▶ Mike Cormack, Ideology (Batsford, 1992); Tuen A. objectives of social control through persuasion. van Dijk, Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach Authority relies on the media to serve as an (Sage, 1998). ISA and to support situations when the RSA Ideology of detachment See impartiality. is brought into action. See common sense; Ideology of romance An aspect of hegemony discourse; elite; hegemony; myth; power in which the perceptions and attitudes of elite. See also topic guides under media: women, in particular teenaged girls, are ‘shaped’ politics & production; media: values & by dominant discourses into accepting the ideology. roles of wife and mother within an essentially Ideology An ideology is a system of ideas and patriarchal social structure. Wendy Halloway in beliefs about human conduct which has normally ‘Gender diff erence and the production of subjec- been simplified and manipulated in order to tivity’ in Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social obtain popular support for certain actions, and Regulation and Subjectivity (Methuen, 1984), which is usually emotive in its reference to social edited by Julian Henriques et al, calls this mode action. Karl Marx (1818–83) used the term to of communicative conditioning a ‘to have and to apply to any form of thought that underpins the hold’ discourse which links acceptable behaviour social structure of a society and which conse- with monogamous relationships. quently upholds the position of the ruling class. The ideology of romance can be found Th e twentieth-century French philosopher Louis expressed and reinforced in magazines, fi lms, Althusser (see above), drawing on the work of pop songs, advertising and soap operas. It Marx, saw ideology as being an unconscious set is, in the view of Mary Ellen Brown, author of of values and beliefs that provide frames for our Soap Operas and Women’s Talk: Th e Pleasures thinking and help us make sense of the world. of Resistance (Sage, 1994), an ideology that ‘can Ideology can often be found to be hiding (or leave young women few options’. At the same hidden) under terms such as ‘common sense’, time the ideology of romance can be seen as a the ‘common sense view’, which Marx would rational response to, and a means of coping with, claim was merely the view of the ruling class material and economic subordination, encap-

130 Immediacy

sulated in the song Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best with images of the good life; they play upon our A Friend. Says Brown, ‘Such romantic ideology perceived needs (see hidden needs; maslow’s positions young women in such a way that they hierarchy of needs). Image is also something B can easily decide to buy into the system.’ Most we present of ourselves – our best face, the way feminist writers would argue that the ideology of we want the world to perceive us. Politicians romance is coterminous with the notion of the work at their images more than most, and these C ideology of dependence. are portrayed to fi t in with the image appropriate Ideology of silence Th e belief, held chiefl y by to a public fi gure whose aim is to impress voters D governments, that the best way of ‘getting things by his/her qualities of leadership and trustwor- done’ in, for example, attempts to win the release thiness. of political prisoners or hostages, is through Sometimes we talk of a person whose image E secret, behind-the scenes diplomacy. Th e same has ‘slipped’, which seems to indicate a connec- rule would apply in cases where one government tion between image and performance (see F may feel obliged, perhaps through public pres- impression management) and that it relates

sure, to protest to another country. Th e problem to an ideal. For the artist, whatever his/her G in such cases is that there is no real proof that medium, imagery is central to expression. It is a protest has been made and consequently no a part of style and a key to the construction evidence as to the nature of that proof. of meaning. See metaphor. See also topic H In an article entitled ‘Against silence’ in Index guide under representation. on Censorship (February 1987), Jacob Timer- Image, rhetoric of In its contemporary use, the I man, formerly a political prisoner in Argentina, word rhetoric is interchangeable with persua-

expands on the notion of the ideology of silence sion or propaganda; thus the rhetoric of the JK and concludes that ‘the only way to solve prob- image indicates the use of images as a means of lems of decency and civilization is to speak out’. persuasion; of inculcation or reinforcement of Idiolect An individual’s personal dialect which ideological positions. Th e power of the image is L incorporates the individual variations that exist employed, particularly in the news, to empower between people in their use of punctuation, the overt or covert message. Such images have M grammar, vocabulary and style. No two people the eff ect of closing off , by their dramatic and are likely to express themselves in exactly the emotional nature, alternative ways of reporting N same way. and interpreting realities. Idiot salutations See phatic language. IMAX Canadian fi lm-projection system developed Image A likeness; a representation; a visualization. in the 1970s, notable for the vastness of its screen O Th e term can have several meanings depending for 70mm fi lm; installed in the UK in 1983 at on the context in which it is used. It may refer to the National Museum of Photography, Film and P a visual representation of reality such as is seen Television in Bradford, and later in London. See in a photograph; it can also refer to a mental, omnimax. R imaginative conception of an individual, event, Immediacy A prime news value in Western location or object as, for example, one conjures newspaper, radio and television news-gathering up an image of a character in a novel. Th e image and presentation. At the centre of decision- S does not merely reproduce, it interprets; it has making and of news control is the time factor, added to it certain meanings. Th e writer, artist, usually related to the daily cycle. In his article T architect, photographer and advertising image- ‘Newsmen and their time machine’, in British maker all use assemblies of signs in order to Journal of Sociology (September 1977), Philip U represent or suggest states of mind, or abstrac- Schlesinger points out that in industrialized tions. Van Dyck’s equestrian portrait of Charles societies an exceptional degree of precision I portrays the monarch on a noble steed against of timing is necessary in our working lives. V a background suff used with dramatic light. All ‘Especially noteworthy are those who operate

the details of this painting converge to create an communication and transport systems ... News- W image of kingship, thus a process of symboliza- men ... are members of a stopwatch culture.’ tion has taken place. Immediacy shapes and structures the approach The purpose of image-creation obviously to news-gathering. Th e report of an event must XYZ varies, but all images are devised in order to be as close to the event as possible, and ideally evoke responses of one kind or another, usually the event should be reported as it happens; emotional. Images often serve as psychological the pure type of immediacy would be the live triggers eﬀ ecting responses that are not always broadcast. News, says Schlesinger, is ‘hot’ when easy to articulate. Advertisements regale us it is most immediate. ‘It is “cold”, and old, when

131 Immersion

it can no longer be used during the newsday in gathered under one banner, that of impartial- question.’ Immediacy is not only a vital factor ity – what Schlesinger refers to as the central in the selection of a story for treatment; it also mediating factor in news-processing at the BBC, helps fashion that treatment. Pace is what counts ‘the linchpin of the BBC’s ideology’. in presentation, especially in TV news where the Schlesinger found this a notion ‘saturated priority is to keep the audience ‘hooked’. with political and philosophical implications’ Th e danger with such emphasis on immediacy and classifi es the ‘ideology of detachment’ as in is that news tends to be all foreground and little essence an example of ‘latter-day Mannheimian- background, all events and too little context, ism’. In Ideology and Utopia (Routledge, 1936), all current happening and too little concentra- Karl Mannheim explained how a ‘socially unat- tion on historical and cultural frameworks. tached intelligentsia’ could play a role in society Schlesinger rounds off his article by saying that it that was above all confl ict, capable of represent- is plausible to argue ‘that the more we take note ing to society all relevant views. of news, the less we can be aware of what lies It is a theory which has regularly been behind it’. See effects of mass media. See also condemned as an unrealistic dream, though the topic guide under news media. doctrine has remained persistently attractive: Immersion Th e degree to which the virtual, the by virtue of their education, argued Mannheim, invented – as in virtual reality – submerges the intellectuals, déclassés, are exposed to the the real perception system of the user. Th e more ‘infl uence of opposing tendencies in social real- that VR works to the exclusion of contact with ity’; thus theirs is the potential to improve social the real, physical world, the more it is classifi ed integration, to produce a new consensus by as being immersive. Th e prospect of near-total means of ‘dynamic mediation’. immersion, on the part of some users, is a matter Th e theory implies that it is possible to view of interest and concern. As Frank Biocca says in the world in a value-free way, and to act accord- ‘Communication within virtual reality: creating ingly. Schlesinger calls value-freedom ‘a myth’, a space for research’ in Journal of Communica- yet one that in terms of the BBC’s aspiration to tion, Autumn 1992, ‘If people eventually use impartiality, to being above the fray, ‘is believed VR technology for the same amount of time by those who propagate it’ as well as being that they spend watching television and using ‘essential for public consumption’. Such beliefs, computers, some users could spend 20 or more Schlesinger argues, ‘anchor news production years “inside” virtual reality.’ in the status quo’. What the BBC produces as Impact of the mass media See effects of the news is ‘structurally limited by the organization’s mass media. place in Britain’s social order’ and the main Impartiality Just as Professor Stuart Hall doubts consequence of that position is that ‘the outputs the existence, in media terms, of objectivity, of broadcasting are, in general, supportive of the so Philip Schlesinger, in a remarkable study of existing social order’. the workings of BBC News, has cast doubt on Schlesinger’s fi ndings were a snapshot in time, the possibility of impartiality. Between 1972 and it would be interesting to survey them in and 1976, Schlesinger had a unique research relation to the trouble the BBC encountered opportunity to conduct in the newsrooms of with government in 2003 in their reporting of Broadcasting House and the Television Centre, the war in Iraq and their questioning of offi cial London; fieldwork which attempted ‘to grasp claims concerning weapons of mass destruction. how the world looks from the point of view of See hutton report (uk), 2004. See also topic those studied’ – the reporters, correspondents, guide under media issues & debates. editors and managing editors in the most Imperialism in information systems See prestigious media organization in the world. He media imperialism. interviewed more than 120 members of BBC Implication In the production of texts, particu- news staff and spent 90 days in observation. larly the news, much is left implicit: assump- His fi ndings were published in Putting ‘Reality’ tions about prior knowledge, expectations about Together: BBC News (Constable, 1978; Methuen/ response are implied rather than made manifest, University paperback, with new Preface, 1987). and this implication is generally if not always Several key words framed the basic principles ideological. As Tuen van Dijk says in ‘Media of news production: balance, objectivity, respon- contents: the interdisciplinary study of news as sibility, fairness and freedom from bias; and these discourse’, in A Handbook of Qualitative Meth- were, in the ‘ordinary discourse of newsmen’ for odologies for Mass Communication Research the most part ‘interchangeable’. Th ey could be (Routledge, 1991), edited by Klaus Bruhn Jensen

132 Independent Television (ITV), UK

and Nicholas W. Jakowsky, ‘Th e analysis of the franchises for independent television, A “unsaid” is sometimes more revealing than the uk). Th ey are currently licensed and supervised study of what is actually expressed in the text.’ by Ofcom (see ofcom: office of communi- B Th is would suggest a key aspect of the study of cation, uk) born of the communications media – a focus on what is omitted, or absent, as act (uk), 2003. Th e ITV landscape has altered well as what is included and present. substantially from the early days of commercial C Impression management Technique of self- television, largely in the direction of concentra- presentation deﬁ ned by Erving Goﬀ man in Th e tion of company ownership. For example, in 1992 D Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Anchor, Yorkshire TV bought up Tyne Tees TV, only to 1959; Penguin, 1971). Because most social inter- become part of Granada TV in 1997. action requires instant judgments, alignments South England witnessed similar convergence. E and behaviour, the individual must be able Following the collapse of ITV Digital in face rapidly to convey impressions of him/herself of competition from BSkyB (see british sky F to others, highlighting favourable aspects, and broadcasting, bskyb), the remaining major

concealing others. players, Carlton and Granada, merged and G Goﬀ man argues that impression-management became ITVplc (2004). Of the ﬁ fteen regional has the character of drama: all social roles, he broadcasters in the UK, the ITV Network believes, are, in a sense, performances in which controls eleven. H it is important to set a scene and rehearse a Concentration has been one trend; another role, and this means coordinating activities with has been the weakening of ITV’s commitment I others in the ‘drama’. Th us we put up a front, to the principles and practices of public service

‘that part of the individual’s performance which broadcasting (see public service broadcast- JK regularly functions in a general and fi xed fashion ing (psb)). What remains an imperative is the to defi ne the situation for those who observe the requirement to provide regular national and performance’. local news; provided nationwide by Independent L Our formal, public selves Goff man calls front Television News (ITN). region and our more informal, relaxed selves, Referred to as Channel 3 in order to diff er- M back region. Indeed Goff man believes that all our entiate it from the BBC’s Channels 1 and 2, and roles depend upon the performer having a back Channel 4, ITV programming is in the main N region; equally all front-region roles rely upon entertainment-based, targeting the kind and size keeping the audience out of the back regions. of audiences likely to appeal to commercial TV’s Teams as well as individuals operate in front taskmasters, the advertisers. Programmes with O and back regions: in a restaurant, for example, high audience-ratings such as Who Wants to Be the front-stage conduct of the team of waiters a Millionaire? and X Factor, and soaps such as P and other staff subscribes to formal rules and Coronation Street and Emmerdale, are the domi- rituals, even a mystique. Behind the scenes, nant and highly profi table fare of ITV; the loss R however, the performers relax. Th e need to unify has been the demise of quality current aff airs in sustaining an expected version of reality – of programmes such as World in Action (Granada) smartness, politeness, professionalism – gives and Th is Week (Rediff usion/Th ames). S way to a back-stage reality where individual In February 2011 product placement was diff erences can be freely aired without letting permitted in programme content for the fi rst T the team, or the performance, down. See self- time in the UK (for all broadcasters), off ering presentation. rich pickings for provider and advertiser alike U Independent Television (ITV), UK The but marking a worrying incursion of commerce broadcasting monopoly held by the BBC since into the creative process (see consumeriza- the inception of broadcasting in Britain ended tion; culture: globalization of). V with the UK Television Act of 1954. Th is set up ITV was closely involved with the BBC in the launch of Freeview in 2002 and Freesat in 2008. the Independent Television Authority (ITA), its W responsibility to establish, control and review After suffering dramatic losses in advertising independent commercial television (ITV). Th e revenue during the economic recession in the service opened in London in 1955 and in the UK in 2009, ITV sprang back to profi t in 2011, XYZ Midlands and North England the following though success in the highly competitive fi eld of year, each region having its own programme- commercial broadcasting depends on the sustain- producing studios. ability of current popular programmes and the ITV companies are licensed to broadcast for audience drawing-power of new ventures. limited periods (see franchises from 1993, uk; ▶ Wikipedia: comprehensive and reliable entries.

133 Index

Index Short for Index librorum prohibitorum, a consequence regulate the intake of alcohol at a list of proscribed books. Th e Council of Trent, in party if he/she were driving home – a decision attempting to turn the tide against the Protestant based upon deductive reasoning. See empiri- Reformation, drew up a set of rules about what cal; hypothesis. Roman Catholics should, or rather should not, Indymedia Exemplifi ng open-platform, activist read. In accordance with these rules the Index journalism, Indymedia are usually volunteer- was published by authority of Pope Paul IV in run, their aim to build a fairer and just society 1559. In its current form, the Index is a list not and involve citizens more fully in public life. only of works prohibited in their entirety to the The first IMC (Independent Media Centre) faithful but also of works not to be read unless or was created in Seattle, Washington, in 1999 in until they are corrected. advance of the the World Trade Organization The Index expurgatorius, or Expurgatory (WTO) conference of that year, with a view to Index (1571), specifi es passages to be expurgated counteracting the bland, uncritical reporting of in works otherwise permitted. Appropriately, such events by traditional mass media. Within the word has been used in the title of the UK two years the number of IMCs grew to 60, and magazine whose chief aim is to counter such by 2009 there were 170 worldwide. repressions of information and expression, Index Global liaison led to the formulation of a set of Censorship. of Principles of Unity (POU) in San Francisco Index as a sign See sign. in 2001 based on equality, decentralization and Indicators In interpersonal communica- local autonomy, favouring open-exchange and tion the means by which one communicator open access, ‘allowing individuals, groups and conveys his/her attitude and response to another organizations to express their views, anony- – feelings of attraction or rejection, of evaluation mously if desired’. or esteem of the other person. Proximity, for As with all volunteer-run enterprises, Indyme- example, is an ideal indicator of liking (unless, of dia need funding to survive and develop, hence course, it becomes a sign of threat or intimida- impermanence is built into their DNA. See tion). Also important as indicators are frequent blogosphere; genre; journalism: citizen eye contact, body orientations and spontaneous journalism. gestures. See proxemics. Inference According to Gail Myers and Michele Inductive reasoning Involves the drawing of Myers in The Dynamics of Human Commu- conclusions from collected observations and nication (McGraw-Hill, 1985), ‘A statement of data; from evidence. The acceptability of the inference is a guess about the unknown based on conclusions drawn depends upon whether or not the known.’ We often infer, that is make assump- the type and quantity of evidence can reason- tions, about people, events, behaviour and so ably be said to support them. It is important to on. In doing so we add these inferences to our recognize how limited such conclusions may be. observations. For example if we saw a young man Someone unfamiliar with traffi c observing traffi c running away from an elderly woman, we might fl ow between 10am and 2pm for one week, in a infer that he had stolen her purse; however we busy street, may for example note that when the might be quite wrong and he might be running red traffi c light is illuminated, cars in front of the for a bus. light stop. We automatically make inferences and in He/she may conclude that the illumination doing so rely on a range of factors such as past of the red traffi c-light caused the cars to stop experiences, stereotyping, values, attitudes – certainly at the times at which he/she was and beliefs. Yet inferences can mislead both observing the traffic. The observer, however, ourselves and others if they stray too far from could not reasonably draw conclusions about our actual observations or accepted facts. why this was the case, or whether or not this Clearly, in communication we need to be careful occurred at times when he/she was not observ- to distinguish between statements of fact and ing the traffic. That would require further statements of inference. investigation. Infl ection Th e patterns of alteration or modula- Deductive reasoning involves the application tion in the pitch of a person’s voice. of an already accepted generalization or gener- Infl uence of the mass media See effects of alizations to an individual case. It is the reverse the mass media. of inductive reasoning. Someone who has Info-rich, info-poor See information gaps. accepted, for example, that drinking too much Information blizzards Traditionally, a nation’s alcohol before driving is dangerous might as a citizens have been granted too little informa-

134 Information gaps

tion on which to base decisions and choices; of cultural expression, believes Bollier. He cites A yet by the late twentieth century, that position McDonald’s threatening ‘every food business appeared to have been reversed: nowadays that uses “Mc” in their names’ or Mattel threat- B there is too much information – blizzards of ening ‘legal action against art photographers it – and the result is not undernourishment who use images of Barbie dolls to comment on but confusion. John Keane in Th e Media and American beauty ideals’. See culture: copy- C Democracy (Polity Press, 1991) writes, ‘The righting culture; new media. world seems so full of information that what is Information gaps Many scholars have focused D scarce is citizens’ capacities to make sense of it. their studies on the inequality in the distribution Th e release of new opinions through the media of information among diﬀ erent groups in societ- rarely shatters unaccountable power. Publicity ies. Such inequalities are mostly the result of E better resembles the throwing of snowballs educational or social class diﬀ erences, with the into a blizzard – or the blowing of bubbles into advantage being enjoyed by the better-educated F warm summer’s air.’ and those in the higher-status groups. Th e role of

The term ‘blizzard’ has also been used to the mass media in creating, widening or narrow- G describe the multiple and interacting images we ing information gaps has prompted widespread encounter daily, brought to us with ever-new concern. associations by the media (see text). For the Th ere are diff ering kinds of gaps depending on H French cultural critic Jean Baudrillard, the sheer the nature of the information. volume of signifi ers in the contemporary world Gaps – between information-rich and infor- I of mass communication, so readily and regularly mation-poor – may close or widen with time. detached from their original signification, It had been thought that the increasing fl ow of JK results in meaning itself being too lost in the information from the mass media might help blizzard to be worth the trouble of attempting to narrow such gaps, but the evidence here is to defi ne it. Consequently in this cultural bliz- mixed. Whilst the media may have the potential L zard, anything can be made to mean anything. to close gaps, it seems that an advantage remains See Chapter 5, ‘Baudrillard’s blizzards’ in Nick with those with most communication potential M Stephenson’s Culture, Social Th eory and Mass and that new gaps open as old ones are closed. Communication (Sage, 1995), in which Baudril- Gaps exist between groups within the same soci- N lard’s ‘irrationalism’ is challenged. See informa- eties, but the greatest inequalities are between tion surplus. developed and less developed nations, most of Information commons Equivalent to ‘common the channels of global communication being O land’, that is space or territory accessible, by controlled by the former. right, to the public, without charge; thus infor- Th is means that not only have the developed P mation commons relate to public space, or the nations the potential to acquire and dissemi- public domain, with regard to information and nate more information, but they also have the R expression. Some commentators fear that the potential for considerable control of the fl ow and public domain as typifi ed by our shared culture content of the information going to less devel- has long been subject to a process of enclosure, oped nations. Th us the majority of information S or privatization, in which cultural artefacts flowing from info-disadvantaged countries is and practices, once part of the information raw, compared with the mediated information T commons, have been turned into private prop- that flows in the other direction. Informa- erty accessible only as commodity. tion gaps can also be generated, reinforced or U A particular area of concern is copyrighting, modifi ed through patterns of interpersonal which has extended far beyond the protection of communication. the works of writers, artists, musicians, etc. into Current research interest focuses on the V images, sounds, acronyms and names. In a tom. contribution the internet makes to traditional information gaps. In theory and much practice, paine.com online article (1 August 2002) entitled W ‘Stopping the privatization of public knowledge: the Net and the possibilities brought about the endangered public domain’, David Bollier by networking, both informational and social, of the Annenberg School of Communications, represent powerful forces for bringing about XYZ Philadelphia, talks of ‘content autocrats’ dedi- access to information as well as participation in cated to copyright enforcement operating in an the exchange of information worldwide – not atmosphere of ‘fully fl edged cultural pathology’. the least of the potential contributors to gap- Th e enforcement of copyright in the courts has closure being the mobile phone. See diffusion; proved a serious intrusion upon the freedoms discursive gap; information surplus;

135 Information society

j-curve; media imperialism; misinformed user, there is also the alluring potential for inter- society; mobilization. activity to the point where the user becomes the Information society Th e Japanese were the fi rst producer. to apply the tag to this stage in the growth of the Th e more enterprising traditional media have industrial era in which information has become already taken on board the need for diversifi ca- the central and most significant ‘commodity’. tion of approaches, for nurturing feedback Through the development of computers and and providing for interactivity, and professional associated electronic systems, such aspects of journalists these days operate their own blogs. national and international life as class relation- Further, the press off er free access to their own ships, government, economics and diplomacy online news, comment and information services. are being visualized as functions of information Rather than fi ghting off the ‘blogger opposition’ transfer. Indeed we are at the point when infor- they now scout the blogosphere for news mation and wealth are practically one and the feeds and comment. same thing. A problem for the future is whether news With the development of satellite surveillance organizations can continue to provide a slice of it is now possible for a country highly advanced their services for free. In 2010, Rupert Murdoch’s in informatics to know more about the topogra- News International decided that the online news phy of, say, a developing nation than that coun- services of Th e Times would only be available on try’s own government does. And information subscription. Th e jury remains out on whether is power that crosses national boundaries with users could be persuaded to pay for what they greater ease than invading armies. formerly had for free. Information is not only a commodity but also a Prevailing worries concerning information social and cultural resource, raising questions of surplus, audience fragmentation and competi- social allocation and control, with such associ- tion for attention relate to such trends as the ated problems as privacy, access, commercial switch of attention by online users – especially privilege and public interest. among young people, for whom newspaper Information suburbs See technological reading in particular is in decline – from news determinism. to entertainment. Information surplus Any situation in which Information technology (IT) Micro-electron- there is more information available than is ics plus computing plus telecommunications necessary, called-for or manageable, but most equals IT. Its formal definition is framed as relevantly for the study of communication, the follows in a UK Department of Industry publi- availability of information on the internet. cation (1981) for Information Technology Year In the age of digital distribution and reception (1982): ‘Th e acquisition, processing, storage and of information, surplus is standard; often to dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and the point of being information overload. The numerical information by a micro-electronics- problem of over-abundant information is based combination of computing and telecom- compounded by the fact that online, it is gener- munications.’ ally free and fast. Information Technology Advisory Panel What is in short supply – from the point of (ITAP) Report on Cable Systems See cable view of traditional media communication and television. equally of online communicators (bloggers, Infotainment Term used to describe the trend contributors to youtube and websites across towards enhancing the entertainment value of the board) – is attention. Users may only amount factual programmes in order to increase their to scores or hundreds; they may also amount to popularity with audiences. Th ere are concerns, millions; but how can their attention be captured expressed by a number of analysts, that news and preferably retained? – this in the context of and current aff airs coverage may become trivial- dramatic reductions in newspaper readership ized by such an approach. See documentary. wherever online activity has increased. ▶ Daya Kishan Th ussu, News as Entertainment: Th e A regular complaint concerning online news Rise of Global Infotainment (Sage, 2008). and entertainment websites is that they under- Inheritance factor Th e TV programme which cut traditional mass media, draw off audiences, captures a viewer’s attention paves the way for subvert the market for information and threaten those that follow. professional standards (see journalism: citi- Inner-outer directed See vals typology. zen journalism). Not only does much online Inoculation eff ect In the processes of persua- purveying of news and views come free to the sion, a relative immunity in an audience may

136 Integrity of the text

be induced by ‘inoculation’ prior to a concerted Syria means ‘Go to the blazes’ while in the UK a A exercise in persuasion: if an audience is fore- gesture of derision is to pull an imaginary lava- warned about an attempt to persuade it, when tory chain at the same time as holding the nose. B that attempt occurs, they are more capable of In Greece, pushing the fl at of the palm towards defence against influence. Studies have also another’s face is the ultimate insult signal; called shown that the inoculation eff ect can be achieved the moutza, the signal represents a thrusting of C by generating counter-arguments in people, fi lth into the opponent’s face, and has ancient through exposure to a mild version of arguments roots (see relic gestures). D against their opinions as well as to arguments Beyond the insult signal is the threat signal, supporting their existing views. Th is seemed to an attempt to intimidate without, necessarily, ‘inoculate’ them against being persuaded later having recourse to blows. Threat signals are E by more robust arguments against their beliefs, mostly substitutes for rather than prologues opinions and attitudes. to violence, because such signals are checked, F Insert shot In fi lm, a close-up inserted into a held back, and distance is maintained between

dramatic scene, usually for the purpose of giving threatener and threatened. Also, such signals are G the audience a view of what the character on often redirected – to the insulter’s own body, the screen is seeing, such as a newspaper head- such as mock strangulation. line, the title of a book, a cigarette, a letter, etc. Of obscene signals, the phallic-displaying H See shot. gesture is as old as civilized man. Th e Romans, Institution The term institution is generally for example, referred to the middle finger as I applied to patterns of behaviour which are estab- the impudent and obscene finger. The more

lished, approved and usually of some perma- expressive forearm jerk is common throughout JK nence. Such patterns of behaviour are normally the Western world and is employed particularly rational and conscious. Th e term can be applied in France, Italy and Spain as a threatening insult to both the abstract – for example, religion – and by one male towards another; however, in the L the concrete concept of an institution, such as a UK, the signal tends to be more a crude sexual media organization. Th e patterns of behaviour to comment than a direct insult. Th e V-sign, with M which this term is applied can vary, from simple palm facing the communicator, is the most routine acts to large complexes of standardized potent gestural insult in Britain along with its N procedures governing social relationships in a single-finger variant. See communication, large section of the population. non-verbal (nvc); non-verbal behaviour: All institutions embody a particular complex repertoire. O of norms, values, roles and role structures. Integrateds See vals typology. Th ey also, often, evolve relationships with other Integration New ideas and behaviour vary in P institutions. functionalist analysis tends to the degree to which they are incorporated into represent institutions as performing the func- the continuing operations and way of life of R tions essential to the maintenance of society, and members of a social system or sub-system. views them as being mutually sustaining. Some Th e term communication integration is used to research has, however, indicated the relative describe the degree to which the members/units S autonomy of most institutions and the often of a social system are interconnected by inter- confl icting goals to be found within them. Much personal communication channels. T research into the mass media has concentrated Integration: vertical and horizontal Vertical upon their corporate role as major social institu- integration occurs when an enterprise owns and U tions; upon their norms, values and relationships controls all the processes and stages involved in with other major social institutions. production. An example is where a fi lm company Insult signals Generally defi ned as those signals initiates ideas and facilitates all aspects of V which are always insulting, no matter what the production, marketing and advertising, as well

context in which the signal has been made; as having direct or associate interest in product W though these do vary substantially between dissemination and consumption, including nationality and nationality. Such signals may related promotional merchandise. In contrast, communicate disinterest, boredom, superiority, horizontal integration indicates concentration XYZ contempt, impatience, rejection and mockery. of ownership across rather than within products Dirt signals appear to be universal and refer to and producers – in media terms, cross-media human and animal waste-products on the basis, ownership and control. presumably, of: cleanliness – good; ﬁ lth – bad. Integrity of the text See text: integrity of Picking the nose with foreﬁ nger and thumb in the text.

137 Intellectual property

Intellectual property See culture: copy- types were then organised into four main righting culture; text: integrity of the categories relating to socio-emotional and task text. behaviour, as illustrated in the diagram on the Intensity Some news stories receive much following page. more concentrated, more intense, coverage by An example here might be: the media than others, and tend to dominate or Speaker 1 How do we all feel about these stifl e competing stories. Intensity, if appropriate proposals? (8) in terms of timing, and if given the promise of Speaker 2 They are far too complex. Can frequency, abetted by consistency of coverage, anyone explain them? (11) equals infl uence, at least in the sense of making Bales argued that IPA tracked not just the audiences aware. patterns of group interaction, but also the rela- General elections provide useful illustrations tionship between communicative acts and roles. of the intensity of media coverage. National For example, if an individual scores highly in the attention is focused on the event (usually more task categories, and especially in types 4–6, it on personalities than issues) and the legitimacy may be evidence that they are the task leader of of the event is given substance and fl avour. In the group. He also identifi ed common problems contrast, local elections derive neither substance encountered within groups – communication, nor fl avour from the media, who largely ignore evaluation, control, decision-making, tension them. See displacement effect; effects of reduction, and reintegration – and argued that the mass media; news values. IPA can monitor the way in which these are dealt Interaction Th e reciprocal action and commu- with by the group. nication, verbal or non-verbal, between two or ▶ Robert F. Bales, Interaction Process Analysis: A more individuals, or two or more social groups. Method for the Study of Small Groups (Chicago Successful negotiation of social interaction University Press, 1950). requires considerable mastery of the verbal and Interactive television Allows viewers to non-verbal communication deemed appropri- respond to programmes in ways ranging from ate to the social situation and the social roles seeking further programme information to being performed. As Judy Gahagan comments making contact with programme-makers or in Social Interaction and its Management providing instant feedback to questions put to (Methuen, 1984), ‘Th e mere presence of others them. Th e familiar red button invites the viewer introduces a degree of control over our demean- into more specialized scenarios, many of which our that we do not display when we are alone ... end up as marketing ploys. Early predictions for Th is control over demeanour suggests we follow interactive TV suggested a new age of instant quite strict sets of rules of conduct.’ Most of public response, of quick-fi re referendums, of these rules however are unwritten and learned, election and other polls ‘going electronic’. often unconsciously, through the process of Th e greater potential for interactivity of the socialization. Internet may have checked if not stalled the use There are arguably more ritual and rules of TV as an interactive device – unless of course involved in our everyday social interaction than the TV and computer are one and the same as we realise. Gahagan notes that ‘we are in fact typifi ed by the multi-functional mobile phone quite unaware of their existence until some- (see mobilization). However, for the majority one does something “odd”’. See impression of users the sophisticated mobile serves as an management; interpersonal communica- entertainment centre, interactivity focusing on tion; self-monitoring; self-presentation. the personal and the popular rather than issues ★Interaction Process Analysis, 1950 Robert of social or political concern. See reality tv. F. Bales devised an infl uential scheme for the Intercultural communication See communi- recording and analysis of interaction within cation: intercultural communication. groups, known as Interaction Process Analysis Internal credits See sponsorship of broad- or IPA. The aim of IPA is to track the acts cast programmes (uk). of communication that take place within an Internalization See identification. observed group discussion; the assumption Internationalization of Media Studies See being that group discussion is typically focused media studies: the internationalization on the completion of some kind of task. Bales of media studies. and his fellow researchers identifi ed twelve main International Commission for the Study of types of communicative acts that commonly Communication Problems Report, 1980 occur during group interaction. These twelve See mcbride commission.

138 Internet

1 Shows solidarity, raises other’s status, gives A help, reward B Socio-emotional 2 Shows tension release, jokes, laughs, shows A area: positive satisfaction C 3 Agrees, shows passive acceptance, understands, concurs, complies D

4 Gives suggestion, direction, implying autonomy for other E

5 Gives opinion, evaluation, analyis, expresses F B feeling, wish

6 Gives orientation, information, repeats, G clarifi es, confi rms Task area: neutral abcdef H 7 Asks for orientation, information, repetition, confi rmation I 8 Asks for opinion, evaluation, analysis, C expression of feeling JK

9 Asks for suggestion, direction, possible ways of action L

10 Disagrees, shows passive rejection, M formality, withholds help

11 Shows tension, asks for help, withdraws out N Socio-emotional D area: negative of fi eld O 12 Shows antagonism, defl ates other’s status, defends or asserts self P

Note: The coding categories in interaction process analysis and their major relations: (a) problems R of communication; (b) problems of evaluation; (c) problems of control; (d) problems of decision; (e) problems of tension reduction; (f) problems of reintegration; (A) positive reactions; (B) attempted S answers; (C) questions; (D) negative reactions.

T Interaction Process Analysis, 1950

U International Federation of Journalists commission; media imperialism; world (IFJ) Organization whose testament is that ‘the press freedom committee. V promotion of a new world order of information International Law Enforcement Telecom- munications Seminar (ILETS) is fi rst and foremost the business of journalists See inter- W and the trade unions and not of states, govern- net: monitoring of content. ments or any pressure group of whatever kind’. International Programme for the Devel- Th e IFJ is made up of chiefl y Western journal- opment of Communication (IPDC) See XYZ ists and was formed to monitor and counteract mcbride commission; media imperialism. moves through the United Nations Educational, Internet Th e introduction to the Internet Soci- Scientifi c and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) ety’s A Brief History of the Internet states: ‘Th e to ‘impose’, through government legislation, Internet has revolutionized the computer and a new world information order. See mcbride communications world like nothing before. Th e

139 Internet

invention of the telegraph, telephone, radio, and born not only of the vision of Berners-Lee, but computer set the stage for this unprecedented also that of US scientist Michael Dertonzos, integration of capabilities. The Internet is at whose notion of the Information Marketplace once a world-wide broadcasting capability, a contributed to the creation of the Web. mechanism for information dissemination, and Commercial interchange began in 1992, a medium for collaboration and interaction Delphi being the fi rst commercial online service, between individuals and their computers with- followed by America On Line (AOL), Prodigy out regard for geographic location.’ and CompuServe, to be dramatically followed in Basically, the Internet is the story of comput- the browser, server and Internet service provider ers being linked up and sharing information market by the arrival of Microsoft (see micro- – a story that began in the 1960s in the US, the soft windows). ideas and the developments emerging out of In many ways the Internet has evolved into a the universities but driven by the US govern- global agora, an open space in which public ment’s Advanced Research Project Agency discourse can be conducted without the (ARPA), which was anxious to link computers at mediation of those in authority and without research establishments and to form a network the gatekeeping and agenda-setting of the of information distribution which could survive mass media. Citizens speak to citizens, groups to a nuclear attack. groups, across geographical and political bound- In 1961 Leonard Kleinrock of the Massachus- aries (see blogging; blogosphere; network- sets Institute of Technology (MIT) published ing: social networking; web: world wide ‘Information fl ow in large communication nets’, web; web 2.0), and certainly governments are the fi rst paper on packet-switching (PS) technol- worried about the freedom of access to and ogy. Th e following year another MIT scientist, use of information which computer-mediated J.C.R. Licklider, proposed a global network of communication allows. computers to share information in research into Worries are regularly expressed about such scientifi c and military fi elds. Lawrence Roberts, issues as privacy, spam, identity theft and the also of MIT and later of the University of Cali- mental and physical health hazards of spending fornia (UCLA), connected the two universities ‘too much time on the Net’, especially now that using dial-up telephone lines. In 1966 Roberts’ networking is no longer tied to computers but paper ‘Towards a cooperative network of time- is available through smart phones wherever and shared computers’ outlined what would become whenever the user feels inclined. ARPANET, the precusor of the Internet as we The Internet makes for speed, for instant know it. Th is became a reality, coming online in exchange, but no old-fashioned postbox ever 1969 with four computers connecting universi- accumulated the mountain of e-mails which is ties, then swiftly increasing. the common lot of the majority of Net users. The term ‘Internet’ was not in general use Such mountains, however, are indicators of before 1974, but two years earlier e-mailing had the shifts in practice and activity in traditional become a familiar practice across the distribu- media systems, marketing and advertising: the tion network. Already by 1971 Project Guten- Internet has become the global marketplace, the berg, started up by Michael Hart, was making world’s shopping mall. electronically available copyright-free books, Remarkable is how free the Internet continues the fi rst being the text of the US Declaration to be, that is in terms of being charge-free, of Independence. Th e fi rst computer ‘chat’ was though on this the tide is slowly beginning to conducted at UCLA in 1972. change. Paywalls to free access are increasing, Th e fi rst desktop workstation was introduced since providing information and entertainment in 1983 and the Domain Name System introduced comes at a price that even online advertising the following year. In 1989 British scientist Tim does not sustain. Berners-Lee and others at the Geneva laborato- Th e Internet has thrived on freedom and it has ries of the European Organization for Nuclear also been viewed as a force for equality: there Research (CERN) proposed common protocols are few fi nancial, social or linguistic barriers to for computer intercommunication globally. Th e access and participation; a fact that increasingly basic idea of the world wide web (www) was concerns those organizations doing business on to merge the technologies of personal comput- the Net (see net neutrality). Concerns of ers, computer networking and hypertext into an another kind are exemplifi ed by widespread state easy-to-use global information system. Formed censorship of Net activity in many countries in 1994, the World Wide Web Consortium was worldwide. Paywalls are exceeded in height by

140 Internet: denial of service (DoS)

fi rewalls – blocking of messages, surveillance a fund earmarked for new school computers and A and repressive legislation which in some coun- broadband facilities. tries, such as China, condemns those whose Th e overall picture off ered by Internet prac- B online comments are considered dissident to tices and development is dichotomy typical of lengthy terms of imprisonment. public perspectives on new technologies – the Naturally crime has taken to the Internet with optimistic versus the pessimistic. E.M. Uslander C relish, prompting in 2001 the European Council in ‘Trust, civic engagement and the Internet’ to draw up a cybercrime treaty. Few countries published in Political Communication (No. 21, D have resisted bringing in legislation attempting 2004) believes the Net is ‘neither the tool of the to exercise control over Net use (see internet: Devil nor the new Jerusalem’. Where particular monitoring of content; regulation of attention might be concentrated is on the online E investigatory powers act (ripa), uk). habits of the younger generation, where there A regular focus of research is the issue of how is evidence that the Net is used for purposes of F far the Internet is a leveller; that is, through the entertainment and social interaction without the ease of exchange, helping to level up opportuni- compensating grace of online (or offl ine) seeking G ties for peoples of diff erent economic, cultural of information and debate. and political status. Does the Net help the Th e Internet Society’s Brief History concludes: poor – individuals, communities and nations ‘Th e most pressing question for the future of the H – or does it somehow threaten to increase the Internet is not how the technology will change, information gap (or digital gap) between but how the process of change and evolution I them and better-off individuals, communities itself will be managed … With the success of the and nations? Internet has come a proliferation of stakehold- JK In ‘Th e Internet and knowledge gaps: a theo- ers – stakeholders now with an economic as well retical and empirical investigation’ (European as an intellectual investment in the network. Journal of Communication, March 2002), We now see … a struggle to fi nd the next social L Heinz Bonfadelli focuses on the digital divide, structure that will guide the Internet in the identifying four barriers preventing people from future. M benefiting fully from the information society. ‘The form of that structure will be harder Th ese Bonfadelli lists as (1) a continuing lack of to find, given the large number of concerned N basic computer skills ‘and connected fears and stake-holders. At the same time, the industry negative attitudes especially among older and struggles to fi nd the economic rationale for the less educated people’; (2) restrictions on access large investment needed for the future growth O to the necessary hardware and software – in … If the Internet stumbles, it will not be because short, expense; (3) the lack of user-friendliness; we lack for technology, vision, or motivation. It P and (4) the actual use of the Net. Bonfadelli will be because we cannot set a direction and quotes research that suggests the ‘higher the march collectively into the future.’ See digital R educational background [of the user], the more natives, digital immigrants; plasticity: people use the Internet in an instrumental way, neuroplasticity and the internet; mobi- and the lower the educational background, the lization. S more people seem to use the Internet only for ▶ Lucy Kung, Robert G. Picard and Ruth Towse, entertainment purposes’. eds, Th e Internet and the Mass Media (Sage, 2008); T A UK report in 2010 by the charity Thee- James C. Witte and Susan E. Mannon, Th e Internet Learning Foundation confi rmed an increasing and Social Inequalities (Routledge, 2010); Tim Wu, U gap between the educational performance of Th e Master Switch: Th e Rise and Fall of Information rich and poor pupils in Britain, a million chil- Empires (Borzoi Books, 2011). dren from poorer families having no access to a Internet: denial of service (DoS) Internet V computer at home and two million with no Net service providers have the power to censor, and access. Th e Chief Executive of the Foundation, indeed they are often under a legal requirement W Valerie Th ompson, said that ‘without the use of to do so (see regulation of investigatory a computer and the ability to go online at home, powers act (ripa)(uk), 2000). When in the attainment gap that characterizes children 2010–11 wikileaks made public sensational XYZ from low-income homes is simply going to get documents produced by US ambassadorial staff worse’. The findings were made public at the around the world, a number of Net platforms same time as Michael Gove, Minister of Educa- ‘denied’ Wikileaks access, and more critically for tion of the UK Conservative-Liberal Democrat the survival of the organization, use of its funds; coalition government, had cut 100 million from in other words they froze its assets or refused

141 Internet: monitoring of content

to pay its bills. Th e action proved a risk for the See also topic guide under media: freedom, ‘deniers’ as Net commanders quickly organized censorship. an anti-denier campaign. Th is does not remove ▶ Jan van Dijk, The Network Society (Sage, 2nd the ongoing danger to Net users of denial, as the edition, 2005); Stephen Cole and Jay G. Blumler, Th e defence of Wikileaks arose from its celebrity. Internet and Democratic Citizenship: Th eory, Practice Internet: monitoring of content The ‘free- and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2009). dom’ of the Net has long been a matter of public Internet: wireless Internet Th e use of the Net concern, on the one hand by those in authority without cables or wires; transmission of Internet anxious about websites preaching political and messages by wireless technology. Developed in racial hatred or providing pornography, and the late 1990s, ‘wi-fi ’ (wireless fi delity) serves to on the other hand by those fearful of ambitions connect computers, smart phones and digital held chiefl y by governments, to censor network audio to the Internet via access points (WAP, exchange. Some commentators have argued that wireless access points) or ‘hotspots’. Th ese can the key to network systems is not freedom but be located over a few square miles or in a single surveillance. As Darin Barney points out in building, area, or even a garden shed. Prometheus Wired: Th e Hope for Democracy in Originally used in rural areas where cabling the Age of Network Technology (University of proved too costly, wi-fi soon moved into cities. Chicago Press, 2000), ‘networked computers Although it has liberated digital users from wires have emerged as surveillance technology par and cables, wi-fi suff ers from interference and excellence’. sudden disconnection, and data transmission is In May 1999 it was reported that European insecure. It is also subject to piggybacking where, Commission ministers were planning to without the subscriber’s permission or knowl- require manufacturers and operators to build in edge, wi-fi trespassers get their transmissions for ‘interception interfaces’ to the Internet and all free. See mobilization. future digital communication systems. Details Interpersonal communication Describes are set out in Enfopol 19, a restricted document any mode of communication, verbal or non- leaked to the Foundation for Information Policy verbal, between two or more people. While the Research, based in London. In an article entitled term medio communication has often been ‘Intercepting the Internet’ in the UK Guardian used to specify interpersonal communication (29 April 1999), freelance writer Duncan Camp- at a greater than face-to-face distance, such as bell reports on plans requiring ‘the installation of when the communication is by letter, e-mail or a network of tapping centres throughout Europe, telephone, it is most useful to keep the defi nition operating almost instantly across all national as wide and unprescriptive as possible. boundaries, providing access to every kind of Michele and Gail Myers in Th e Dynamics of communications including the net and satellites’. Human Communication (McGraw-Hill, 1985) According to Campbell, the plans were formu- write, ‘Interpersonal communication can be lated by an organization founded in 1993 by the defi ned ... in relation to what you do with it. First, American FBI, the International Law Enforce- you can use communication to have an eff ect on ment Telecommunications Seminar (ILETS), your “environment”, a term which means not made up of police and security agents from only your immediate physical surroundings but some twenty countries. ILETS has had success in also the psychological climate you live in, the persuading the European Community to adopt people around you, the social interchanges you its recommendations contained in a document have, the information you want to get or give in drawn up in Bonn in 1994, the International order to control the questions and answers of Requirements for Interception. These have your living. Second, you use communication to become law in the US. improve the predictability of your relations with At meetings in subsequent years, ILETS has all environmental forces, which act on you and tightened further its monitoring requirements. on which you act to make things happen.’ So far, the major obstacle to the fulfi lment of the A great many factors aff ect the sending and demands listed in Enfopol 19 has been the cost receiving of messages within the process of of enforcement. However, the ease with which interpersonal communication, only some of governments introduce laws of restriction, and which can be mentioned here. In constructing a the determination of those governments to message the sender may be infl uenced by his/her spy on the Net, promises a serious reining-in self-concept and perception of the receiver(s) of Internet freedoms. See regulation of and the knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, values, investigatory powers act (ripa)(uk), 2000. assumptions and experiences on which they rest;

142 Intervention

his/her personality; the role he/she is playing Basic Course (Pearson International Education, 2008). A at the time; the state of his/her motivation; Interpretant C.S. Peirce (1839–1914), generally his/her communicative competence; and the regarded as the founder of the American strand B context in which the communicative encounter of semiology/semiotics, used the word takes place. All of these factors and others aff ect interpretant in his model defi ning the nature of decisions about self-presentation. Th ey also a sign, which ‘addresses somebody, that is, it C influence the receiver(s) and how he/she will creates in the mind of that person an equivalent interpret messages sent. sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. The D Barriers often arise in interpersonal commu- sign which it creates I call the interpretant of nication, and these are categorized by Richard the fi rst sign. Th e sign stands for something, its Dimbleby and Graeme Burton in More Than object’ (from J. Zeman, ‘Peirce’s theory of signs’ E Words: An Introduction to Communication (4th in T. Sebeok, ed., A Perfusion of Signs; Indiana impression, Routledge, 2007) into three main University Press, 1977). Th e interpretant, then, F types: mechanical (physical barriers such as a is a mental concept produced both by the sign noisy environment); semantic (barriers arising itself and by the user’s experience of the object. G from an inability to understand the signs, verbal Peirce’s sign and interpretant fi nd a parallel in or non-verbal, being used by one or more of the the signifier and signified of the father of the persons involved in the transaction); and psycho- European strand of semiology, Swiss linguist H logical (barriers caused by a range of psycho- Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). logical factors, for example the message may be Intertextuality See text. I perceived as a threat to one’s values). Common Intervening variables (IVs) Th ose infl uences errors made in the process of social perception, which come between the encoder, the message JK such as stereotyping, also constitute psychologi- and the decoder are referred to as intervening cal barriers to eff ective communication. variables, mediating factors which infl uence the Speech and non-verbal communication are way in which a message is perceived and the L the main means by which messages are sent nature and degree of its impact. Time of day, in interpersonal communication; non-verbal mood, state of health can all constitute interven- M communication being particularly important in ing variables. More importantly, family, friends, providing feedback and in regulating interac- peer groups, respected persons, opinion leaders, N tion. Interpersonal communication is also aff ected etc. are capable of signifi cant mediation between by the context in which it takes place – in groups what we are told and what we accept, believe or or organizations, for example – and factors found reject. O there such as norms, mores, power relationships Whilst people may act as intervening vari- and so on. Good interpersonal communication ables between media messages and audience, P skills are valued and many techniques have been the media may also be intervening variables developed to try to improve them, assertive- between people. The TV socializes the child, R ness training and transactional analysis as do parents; it also ‘comes between them’ in being but two examples. Th ere is of course a rich the sense that it can stop interaction, modify it, interplay between the messages received in inter- improve it, rechannelize it (not to mention the S personal and mass communication and our dissonance it might cause in a family when, refl ection on them in the process of intraper- for example, it provokes controversy). See s-iv-r T sonal communication. To complicate matters model of communication. See also topic further, most of the factors infl uencing the process guide under communication models. U of interpersonal communication are formed and Intervention Chiefl y describes the policy and shaped through that process. See topic guide practice of governments to ‘intervene’ in, and under interpersonal communication. attempt to control, the nature and fl ow of infor- V ▶ Michael Argyle, Bodily Communication (Methuen, mation. Intervention operates through laws, 1988); Richard Ellis and Ann McClintock, If You Take regulations and surveillance. From earliest W My Meaning: Th eory Into Practice in Human Commu- times governments have, with justification, nication (Edward Arnold, 2003); Graeme Burton and believed that communication is power and an XYZ Richard Dimbleby, Between Ourselves: An Introduc- agent of change. Such power is a threat to exist- tion to Interpersonal Communication (Hodder ing power structures. Intervention remains high Arnold, 2006); Anne Hill, James Watson, Danny on the agenda of contemporary governments Rivers and Mark Joyce, Key Th emes in Interpersonal apprehensive about the freedoms of access and Communication (Open University Press/McGraw- expression brought about by online communica- Hill, 2007); J. Devito, Human Communication: Th e tion. See censorship; clipper chip; encrypt;

143 Interviews

internet: monitoring of content; news a role, as in a play or performance, which may management. conceal an altogether diff erent inner image or Interviews Though there are many forms performance. The so-called introvert, on the of interview and many different reasons for other hand, may, through the richness or assur- conducting them, the common goal is that of ance of inner resources, have opted out of public gaining more information from and understand- role-playing, or selected the role of introvert as a ing of other people, through a planned process public defence mechanism. of questions and answers. press and television Arising from both inner and outer stimuli, journalists use interviews as a means of collect- intrapersonal communication is a convergence, ing information and opinions. Interviews can be a coming-together, of both. A piece of music used to provide entertainment, as in chat shows; stirs in us, perhaps, previous memories; these they are the most common means of selecting memories of people or places may join with people for jobs or students for courses; they are immediate impressions of events to create an a major method of data collection in the social ongoing discourse, between ourselves in the sciences. past and our current selves, perceiving and Th e kinds of questions widely used in inter- perceived. views are: (1) open questions; these are broad, Through intrapersonal communication we usually unstructured and often simply introduce come to terms (or fail to come to terms) with the topic under discussion in a way that allows ourselves and with others. Th rough it we create the interviewee a good deal of freedom in bridges or battlements; we make connections answering; (2) closed questions; these are restric- or we sever them; we open ourselves up or we tive, off ering a fairly narrow range of answers establish self-defences. Most of us, it is impor- from which the interviewee must choose; (3) tant to note, are, as it were, on our own side. We primary questions; these introduce the subject use intrapersonal communication as a means of or each new aspect of the subject under discus- self-assurance, of confi dence-building or confi - sion; (4) subsidiary or secondary questions; these dence-maintenance as well as self-discovery (or follow up the answers to primary questions; indeed self-delusion). It is what makes us unique (5) neutral questions; these do not suggest any as individuals. preferred response; and (6) leading questions, Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) (UK), 2000 which suggest a preferred response and are not See regulation of investigatory powers normally used in research interviews. See topic act (ripa) (uk), 2000. guide under research methods. Invisibility That is, invisible to the public as Intrapersonal communication That which represented by media. Th e case is put by many takes place within ourselves: our inner mono- commentators that certain sections of the popu- logues; our reflection upon ourselves, upon lation are overlooked, neglected, denied rightful our relationships with others and with our attention by media, as though they did not exist. environment. What goes on inside our heads Ethnic minorities are seen to be ‘invisible’ or (or hearts) is conditioned and controlled by our ‘absent’ in mainstream representations, except self-view, and that self-view has emerged from when they are viewed as a ‘problem’, in which a vast complex of past and present infl uences case the spotlight of attention is trained upon – on the view we perceive others holding about them. Nations as well as individuals and groups us, on our past achievements and failures, on are cloaked in invisibility, fulfi lling news value memory-banks of good, bad and neutral actions only when there is trouble, confl ict, a perceived and impressions. threat to order. Our concept of self interacts with our view Visibility then comes at the price of stereo- of the world. Having been formed by experi- typing and the nurturing of ‘us and them’ (or ence, it is shaped and modifi ed by subsequent wedom, theydom attitudes). Tuen van Dijk in experience, though rarely straightforwardly. Th e Racism and the Press (Routledge, 1991) writes psychologist, for example, speaks of the extra- that ‘minorities continue to be associated with vert personality and the introvert personality. a restricted number of stereotypical topics, such On the face of it, the extravert is characterized as immigration problems, crime, violence (espe- by a confi dence in public performance that may cially “riots”), and ethnic relations (especially indicate inner assurance, while the introvert may discrimination), whereas other topics, such as demonstrate a public shyness or guardedness those in the realm of politics, social aff airs and refl ective of inner uncertainty. culture are under-reported’. See topic guide However, the outer confi dence may well be under media issues & debates.

144 J-Curve

Involvement See yaros’ ‘pick’ model for A multimedia news, 2009. J Issue proponents groups or individuals, often J-Curve One focus of communications research B significant others, who promote, or help has been the part played by personal contact in determine, the ranking of an issue on the media the diff usion of information about news events agenda. See agenda-setting. featured in the mass media. Th e assassination of C Issues Th ose social, cultural, economic or politi- President Kennedy in 1963 and the speedy diff u- cal concerns or ideas which are, at any given sion of the news of the event gave an impetus to D time, considered important, and which are this research. the source of debate, controversy or conflict. The J-Curve arose from the conclusions of What is an issue for one social group may not Bradley S. Greenberg, and stems mainly from E be considered such by another. Environmental work on the Kennedy assassination when Green- issues have arguably grown out of middle-class berg investigated the fi rst sources of knowledge F concern, in particular among the younger, often about eighteen diff erent news events. It repre-

college-educated members of that class. sents the relationship between the overall extent G Of vital interest to the student of communi- of awareness people have of such an event and cations are such questions as: how are issues the proportion of those learning of it through disseminated? Why do some issues ‘make it’ to interpersonal sources. H the national forum of debate while others fall by Greenberg argues that news events can be the wayside? What are the characteristics of a divided into three groups as regards the manner I ‘successful’ issue? What prolongs an issue? What of their diﬀ usion and the involvement of personal

factors, other than the resolution of the issue, are contact in it. Type 1 events are important to the J involved in the decline in attention paid to an few people who may be aff ected by them, but issue? And, running through all these questions, are of little concern to the general public. Such what role do the processes of communication events, though reported in the media, will be L play in the defi nition, shaping and promoting of most generally diff used by personal contact – the issues? announcement of an engagement, for example. M The media are, of course, themselves an Type 2 events such as those in typical main news issue, like all institutions wielding power and stories are generally regarded as important and N influence, and the issues involving the role command the attention of a large number of of the media in society are meat and drink for people. the student of communication. Th is has been News of such events is not likely to be passed O given due acknowledgment in communication on as information through personal contact, and media study syllabuses. Among the many although they may be discussed, as it will be P issues of current interest involving the media taken for granted that most people will either are: censorship; media ownership and control, know of such news or that it is not of vital R including the role of conglomerates in world- interest to them. An example here might be an wide media activity; the part played by the media earthquake in another country. Type 3 events are in the reinforcement of the status quo in dramatic, important and of very wide interest. S society; in socialization; in their claim to act Such events, like the assassination of President as the so-called fourth estate; in policing Kennedy, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, T the boundaries of social and political dissent; the destruction of New York’s World Trade in being largely unquestioning advocates of Centre by passenger planes hi-jacked by terror- U the capitalist consumer-orientated society. ists or the London bombings of 2005, get speedy Increasingly the issue dominating media debates and all-enveloping coverage from the media. concerns the impact on traditional mass media Th ey also mobilize interpersonal sources, and V of the internet and the relationships between the proportion of those who learn of the events them. See deviance amplification; effects from personal sources will be considerably W of the mass media; journalism: citizen higher than for type 2 news items. journalism; labelling process (and the Such events are, however, rare and are usually XYZ media); mainstreaming; mccombs and related to crisis situations. In the case of the shaw’s agenda-setting model of media Kennedy assassination, Greenberg and Parker effects, 1976; media control; media impe- found that the extent and speed of diff usion was rialism; news values. See also topic guide amazing: 99.85 per cent of the US population under media issues & debates. knew of the event within fi ve hours of its occur- ITV (UK) See Independent Television (UK). rence. About 50 per cent of people fi rst heard

145 Jakobson’s model of communication, 1958

about it through personal sources, and of these jargon, it is a useful if not vital means of commu- a fairly high proportion were strangers – reveal- nicating quickly between expert and expert. For ing the degree to which people departed from those outside, jargon appears to be an unneces- established communication patterns. sarily complicated alternative to plain speaking, By plotting the proportion of people eventu- and a barrier to good communication. Without ally aware of all types of events against the the growth of jargon words and expressions in proportion who heard about them first from Communication and Media Studies, this diction- personal contacts, it was possible to group them ary would not have been deemed necessary. into fi ve categories, and the line joining these JICNARS scale Administered by the Joint fi ve categories was J-shaped. It can be seen from Industrial Committee for National Readership the J-Curve that the size of the total audience Surveys in the UK, JICNARS measures audi- increases progressively, but the proportion of ence according to social class, occupation and those receiving information from interpersonal perceived economic status: Category A (upper sources does not and depends on the type of middle class; business and professional people, event. Th at proportion is higher for some of type considerable private means); Category B (middle 1 events than for type 2, but highest for type 3 class, senior people of reasonable affluence; events. See topic guide under communica- respectable rather than luxurious lifestyle); tion theory. Category C1 (white-collar workers, tradespeople, ▶ Bradley S. Greenberg and Edwin B. Parker, eds, supervisory and clerical jobs); Category C2 Th e Kennedy Assassination and the American Public: (blue-collar, skilled workers); Category D (semi- Social Communication in Crisis (University of Stan- skilled or unskilled members of the ‘blue collar’ ford Press, 1965). class); and Category E (those at the lowest level of Jakobson’s model of communication, 1958 subsistence, casual workers, those unemployed A linguist, Roman Jakobson was concerned with and/or dependent on social-security schemes). notions of meaning and of the internal structure Th is classifi cation has come under increasing of messages. His model is a double one, involving criticism over the years, especially regarding the constitutive factors in an act of communica- its emphasis upon targeting the occupation tion; each of these factors is then locked on to of the head of a household, traditionally male. the function it performs. More ‘with it’ methods of gauging patterns of Th us the constitutive factors are: consumption have concentrated on the notion Context of lifestyle as refl ected in people’s aspirations. Addresser Message Addressee Th e best known of these is VALS (Values and Contact Lifestyles). See hict project. Code Jingoism Extreme and uncritical form of national patriotism. Th e word derives from G.W. Hunt’s The functions form an identically structured song, written at the time of the Russo-Turkish model: War (1877–78) when anti-Russian feeling in the Referential UK was running high and the Prime Minister, (Reality orientation of message) Benjamin Disraeli, ordered the Mediterranean Emotive Poetic Conative fl eet to Constantinople: We don’t want to fi ght, (Expressive) Phatic (Eff ect of a message but by Jingo if we do/We’ve got the ships, we’ve got on addressee) the men, and got the money too. Th e Falklands Metalingual War of 1982 stirred up similar sentiments in Phatic here refers to the function of keeping Britain’s popular press, which used language the channels of communication open, and as declamatory and as sensational as anything Metalingual is the function of actually identify- employed during the Boer War, the two World ing the communication code that is being used. Wars or the British invasion of Suez (1956). See redundancy. See also topic guide under From the Sun (‘Th e paper that supports our communication models. boys’): ‘74 Days Th at Shook the World!’, ‘Lions Jargon The specialist speech of groups of Who Did The Impossible – By land, sea and people with common identity – of religion, air, our boys never faltered in their fi ght against science, medicine, art, trade, profession, politi- tyranny’ and, on the front page, in three-inch- cal party, etc. We can have educational jargon, high type, ‘We’ve Won!’ (15 July 1982). With cricket jargon, sociological jargon – that is, the the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, the Sun in-language of people with specialist knowledge showed that it had not lost its jingoist panache. or interest. For those creating and operating Under the resounding headline ‘Clobba Slobba’

146 Journalese

(referring to the Yugoslav leader Slobadan area. Th e blind area contains information about A Milosevic), the paper trumpeted ‘Our boys yourself that is not known to you but which is batter Serb butcher in Nato bomb blitz’. And at known to others, such as any irritating manner- B the foot of the page, ‘We go in: See pages 2, 3, isms you might have. Th e hidden area contains 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8’. Again from the Sun during the things you know about yourself but wish to keep allied invasion of Iraq, 2003: ‘How Major Dunc’s hidden from others, such as your lack of conﬁ - C Rats Raised Hell’, and ‘Harriers KO Nest of dence in certain situations. You normally take Vipers’ (24 March 2003). In contrast, the Sun’s action to protect this area from the scrutiny of D rival, the Daily Mirror, took a critical rather than others. Th e unknown area contains information a jingoistic stance: ‘Th is War’s NOT Working’ that neither you nor others are fully conscious of (1 April 2003). See topic guide under media: but which might still be inﬂ uencing your behav- E values & ideology. iour – unconscious fears, for example. ★Johari Window The term Johari Window The model can be used to analyse many F is derived from the first names of those who aspects of interpersonal behaviour. Through

devised the model in 1955, Joseph Luft and interpersonal communication we can come to G Harrington Ingram, who were working together understand ourselves better, increasing the size in the US on the analysis and development of of the free area and decreasing the size of the self-awareness. Effective interaction depends other three. For example, self-disclosure can H largely on the degree and growth of understand- reduce the hidden area and increase the free ing between the individuals concerned. Luft’s area, and thus enhance communication with I theory of the Johari Window, expounded in his others.

work entitled Of Human Interaction (National Feedback from others has the potential to J Press Books, 1969), is a useful way in which to reduce the blind area – although possibly at look at such factors of interpersonal commu- some cost to self-esteem – and further increase nication as self-disclosure and feedback the free area. Th e degree to which we may be L and the way these may influence our self- willing to make such changes to the relative size concept. Th e model, shown below, represents of the areas will of course vary with the situation M a way of analysing the self. and relationship. Generally speaking the greater Th e free area represents the public self: infor- the free area in any given situation, the easier the N mation about yourself that is known to you and interaction. to others, such as your gender or race. Th ere is Journalese A manner of writing that employs a free and open exchange of information in this ready-made phrases and formulas and which O

XYZ

The Johari Window

147 Journalism

breeds its own short-cut language and clichés, Mythologies (Paladin, 1973), myth ‘abolishes the rarely without some catchy word-rhythm: ‘Tory, complexity of human acts’. Tory, Hallelujah’ proclaimed the UK Daily By a process of elimination and emphasis, Express in 1982; in 1900, the paper’s headlines the journalist frames meaning (see framing). were equally ringing: ‘The Boers’ Last Grip In the study of media we are as interested in Loosened’. Th e aim is to squeeze out the most what does not appear in the frame as what does; dramatic expression with the minimum use of what is absent. Th e frame can also be seen as a words. Th e higher the pressure on space, the set of boundaries which journalism defi nes and more pronounced the journalese. See tabloi- patrols. Cultural, social or political deviance dese. is defi ned and labelled by the journalist. Th ere Journalism While many professions feature in are those – people, movements, ideas – that the public eye, journalism can be said to be the are demonized, defined as dangerous to the public eye. Journalism reports to the public, security of the community (see loony left- conveying to it information, analysis, comment ism). It might even be suggested that the media and entertainment while equally purporting to have a policing role in society and that journal- represent the public; to speak for it in the public ists, at least some of them, carry out the part of arena. ‘copper’s nark’. At the same time journalism is in the busi- The relationship between the role of the ness of representing to the public ‘the reality journalist and the exercise of power and control out there’. It is only at fi rst sight a curiosity that has been a keen focus of study. In Visualizing journalists refer to the reports they write, edit Deviance: A Study of News Organizations (Open or present as ‘stories’, yet many commentators University, 1987), Richard Ericson, Patricia have drawn close comparisons between jour- Baranak and Janet Chan speak of news journal- nalism and fiction. In an article entitled ‘The ists as a ‘deviance-defi ning elite’ who ‘provide nature of aesthetic experience’ published in the on-going articulation of the proper bounds International Journal of Ethics 36 (1926), George to behaviour in all organized spheres of life’. Herbert Mead defi ned two models of journal- American media analyst David Barsamian refers ism, the information model and the story model, to journalists as ‘stenographers of power’ in stating that ‘the reporter is generally sent out to Stenographers of Power: Media and Propaganda get a story not the facts’. Of course journalists are (Common Courage, 1992), meaning basically not always happy to be described as storytellers; that journalists are largely servants of the state, after all, the job of the serious journalist is to taking down verbatim their script from the provide information and analysis and not to turn power elite. Th is could be described as the news into entertainment. ‘Poodle to the Powerful’ model. Yet subsequent commentators have confi rmed While not being so dismissive, Alan Bell in Mead’s defi nition. John Langer in ‘Truly awful Th e Language of News Media (Blackwell, 1991) news on television’ published in Journalism and acknowledges that ‘news is what an authorita- Popular Culture (Sage, 1992), edited by Peter tive source tells a journalist ... Th e more elite Dahlgren and Colin Sparks, argues that ‘seri- the source, the more newsworthy the story’. In ous news is also based around the story model’. contrast, believes Bell, ‘alternative sources tend However, ‘it pretends that it is not – it declares to be ignored: individuals, opposition parties, that it is concerned with imparting the impor- unions, minorities, fringe groups, the disad- tant information of the day’. Langer is of the view vantaged’. In certain situations, particularly of that ‘the world of fact and the world of fi ction are national crisis such as wartime, the editors of bound more closely together than broadcasters Media, Crisis and Democracy: Mass Communi- are prepared to have us believe’. cation and the Disruption of Social Order (Sage, Th e implication here is that journalism has a 1992), Marc Raboy and Bernard Dagenais, argue storytelling function that has much to do with that the media become an ‘extension of the state’. values, telling stories about who we are, how we Th ey quote Anthony Lewis of the New York have become what we are and what we should Times describing the press during the fi rst Gulf become. Th e journalist to a degree is a maker, War (1991) as ‘a claque applauding the American or at least an upholder, of myth in the sense that generals and politicians in charge’; while televi- the French philosopher Roland Barthes has used sion behaved as the ‘most egregious official the word: mythologizing is essentially a mode lapdog during the war’ – an accusation that of explaining things – a giver of meaning, albeit proved equally as relevant during the second simplifi ed and clarifi ed. As Barthes puts it in Allied invasion of Iraq in 2003.

148 Journalism: citizen journalism

Th e contrasting model to the Poodle is that of McQuail, McQuail’s Mass Communication Th eory A the Watchdog, where journalism stands guard (Sage, 6th edition, 2010); Graham Meike, News over the public interest, tirelessly snapping and Online (Palgrave, 2010); Steven Barnett, Th e Rise and B snarling at injustice, corruption and abuse. Since Fall of Television Journalism: Just Wires and Lights in the birth of the printed word in 1450 (in the a Box? (Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). West, that is; the Chinese had developed print- Journalism: celebrity journalism Th e preoc- C ing much earlier) there have been ample cases cupation in modern print journalism with of conformity and rebellion (if not revolution) in recording the activities, sayings, scandals of D journalism. celebrities; described by Peter Hamill in News In the nineteenth century the courageous is a Verb (Ballentine, 1998) as a virus, and ‘the editors of the radical press, such as William most widespread phenomena [sic] of the times’. E Cobbett, Richard Carlile and Henry Hether- Hamill is of the view that ‘true accomplishment ington, spent long years in prison for writing is marginal to the recognition factor. Th ere is F about and publishing beliefs that ran counter to seldom any attention paid to scientists, poets, those of the ruling elite. In the twentieth century educators or archeologists’. G hundreds of journalists and news photographers Big names are the constant focus of attention have been killed while reporting events through- to the exclusion of other subjects. Th e obsession out the world, and the twenty-ﬁ rst century has with celebrity worries many media watchers, H seen no diminution in the death-toll of the for coverage of celebrity displaces the reporting bringers-of-news. of events, the analysis of issues which are in I In journalism there will always be the biased the public interest as contrasted with being of and the spurious; there will continue to be interest to the public; the issue here being the J invasion of privacy, nationalist hype, shame- swamping of important information by populist less and malicious stereotyping, wallowing entertainment. in scandal – all examples of contemporary ▶ Sean Redmond and Su Holmes, eds, Stardom and L journalism in action. Th ere will also continue to Celebrity: A Reader (Sage, 2007); Marina Hyde, be high-quality investigative journalism which, Celebrity: How Entertainers Took Over the World M in the words of John Keane in ‘Th e crisis of the and Why We Need an Exit Strategy (Vintage, 2010); sovereign state’ (in Raboy and Dagenais), ‘seeks Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton N to counteract the secretive and noisy arrogance University Press, 2010). of the democratic Leviathan’; which ‘involves the Journalism: citizen journalism With the patient investigation and exposure of political advent of the multi-purpose mobile phone, O corruption and misconduct’; which sets out to in particular its capacity to transmit instantly ‘sting political power, to tame its arrogance by online images, still and moving, newsgathering P extending the limits of public controversy and has been opened up to the man and woman in widening citizens’ involvement in the public the street. Citizen journalism is about being close R spheres of civil society’. See democracy; to, or involved in, events as they happen and embedded reporters; journalism: citizen transmitting pictures to the mass media, often journalism; journalism: data journalism; ahead of professional news teams. Th e capacity S journalism: phone-hacking; journalism: and potential of citizen-reporting of news as it ‘postmodern journalism’; mediasphere; breaks was most dramatically illustrated during T news management in times of war; patch; the terrorist bombings in London, the ﬁ rst wave public sphere; watchdogs; yaros’ ‘pick’ of which occurred on 7 July 2005. U model for multimedia news, 2009. See also Within minutes of the carnage of 7/7, news- topic guides under media ethics; media: rooms in and around the capital were swamped freedom, censorship; media: issues & with images and video footage, some of the V debates; news media. material actually transmitted by the victims. ▶ Alan McKee, Th e Public Sphere: An Introduction Mobile footage was on national news within 30 W (Cambridge Uiniversity Press, 2005); Brian Winston, minutes, while still pictures were soon to domi- Messages: Freedom, Media and the West from nate the front pages of the press worldwide. XYZ Gutenberg to Google (Routledge, 2005); Chris Atton Commentators have seen in citizen journalism and James F. Hamilton, Alternative Journalism (Sage, a shift in power from mass communication, 2008); Kevin Williams, Get Me a Murder a Day! A dominated as it is by corporate ownership, History of Media and Communication in Britain towards more democratic, more popular (Bloomsbury Academic, 2nd edition, 2009); Dan involvement in the news process. At the same Hind, Th e Return of the Public (Verso, 2010); Denis time, concern has been registered at the possible

149 Journalism: data journalism

unreliability of images published from unso- he believed that the future of journalism is ‘going licited, unchecked sources, as well as issues of to be about poring over data’ and employing ‘the privacy. tools to analyse it’, with a view to ‘seeing where it Of particular interest to researchers is how all ﬁ ts together, and what’s going on in the coun- professional journalists react to ‘competition’ try’. In 2011 London’s City University launched from citizen journalists. Reporting her research an MA course in interactive journalism, part of findings in ‘The Internet, mobile phones and its curriculum being data journalism. blogging’, published in Journalism Practice 2 ▶ www.city.ac.uk/study/courses/arts/interactive- (2008), Rena Kim Bivens records that the profes- journalism-ma.html. sionals are increasingly ready to make space for Journalism: investigative journalism Of all citizen contributions which supplement their journalistic forms, investigative journalism is the own work, and that they themselves operate one most at risk, even though the best investiga- in the blogosphere. Says Bivens, ‘the readily tive journalism is the jewel in the crown of media accessible blogosphere greatly expands potential communication. Today we have 24-hour news sources and knowledge of a wider range of demanding not better, more thorough, more discourses, and journalist blogging increases penetrating work from journalists, but more and engagement with audiences while amplifying faster. Time is money, and more and more media and extending the production process’. organizations are cutting back on the time- Th ere remain ‘credibility concerns, followed by consuming practices of investigating a story. antagonistic attitudes towards citizen-produced Th e November-December issue of the UK Free content and occasionally a lack of technological Press carried an article entitled Public Interest knowledge’. Citizen journalism is largely event- Journalism: Who’ll pay the price? by Adrian driven rather than institution-driven, and Bivens White, General Secretary of the International points out that ‘despite all these developments, Federation of Journalists, who laments that news organization remains firmly embedded ‘commercial news publishers are less and less within traditional power structures, with owner- willing to spend the money needed for the ship control and elite political power restricting proper in-depth reporting that citizens need in the limits of permissible debate and preserv- a democracy’. White writes, ‘Th e media obses- ing narrow news agenda’. See patch; yaros’ sion with celebrity and entertainment at the ‘pick’ model for multimedia news, 2009; expense of analysis and scrutiny of public aﬀ airs youtube. has created an information vacuum,’ raising the Journalism: data journalism That which question, ‘if commercial media no longer want focuses on delving into statistical data to this kind of story, who will provide them in produce news stories, and with a view to holding future – and who will pay?’ governments, organizations, institutions and Is the internet the answer? White is not local authorities to account. An outstanding optimistic, stating that ‘it is increasingly clear example of this was the revelation over months, that no amount of tweeting and social network- in 2009–10, by the UK Daily Telegraph of the ing will fill the void caused by the decline of widespread exploitation by members of parlia- thorough investigative journalism’. One possibil- ment (and of the House of Lords) of the system ity which White addresses is public funding, of parliamentary allowances. Offenders were quoting Dan Hind, who in his Th e Return of the named from all parties and included government Public (Verso, 2010) proposes public trusts to ministers (the minister responsible for immigra- share out funds to worthy investigative causes. tion was found to have claimed for nappies, Models of support of this kind would seem to women’s clothes and panty liners). raise new problems, particularly of journalistic The Telegraph’s team of data diggers also independence, but White believes ‘they deserve found that more than a hundred peers claimed consideration because without fresh thinking in excess of 50,000 each for their work in the about the institutional framwework for the Lords. Th e revelations seriously damaged the independent and democratic dispersal of public reputation of the UK parliament, and indeed of money, the initiative will rest with governments Britain itself. Transparency International, the alone’ – representing the biggest threat of all leading global index of corruption, placed the to independence. See journalism: citizen UK 20th in their annual league-table of ‘clean journalism; news elements: breaking, countries’, a drop of six places from 2006. explanatory, deep background. In a speech in November 2010, Sir Tim Journalism: participatory journalism See Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, said genre.

150 Jump cut

Journalism: phone-hacking Th e pressure on for supplying information on people in the news A journalists to ‘bring home the bacon’, to produce – proved a compelling sub-plot. news stories, particularly about royalty and 8 July 2011 was a ﬁ eld-day for newspaper head- B celebrities, can lead to practices which break the lines: ‘Hacked To Death’ (Th e Times), ‘Paper Th at law. With the advance of e-mailing and the use of Died of Shame’ (Daily Mail), ‘Shut In Shame’ mobile phones, the risk to personal privacy from (Daily Express), ‘Goodbye Cruel World’ (Daily C prying reporters has greatly increased. Obviously Telegraph) and ‘World’s End’ (Sun). phone-hacking is a secret activity and victims are Of public concern is the extent of phone- D seldom aware that their passwords, their e-mail hacking, for there is widespread belief that NoW address books and their online messaging are cannot be the only media outlet guilty of using being probed, tracked and potentially converted information illegally obtained by electronic E into hard copy and possible headlines. means. Further, criticism was addressed at the In the UK the most notorious case of phone- apparent ineffectualness of the newspaper- F hacking has involved the News of the World, a industry-funded press complaints commis-

Sunday paper in the Rupert Murdoch news sion (UK), which Ed Miliband, leader of the G corp stable. A private investigator working for Labour opposition, described as a ‘toothless NoW, Glenn Mulcaire, hacked into the mobile poodle’. In the light of phone-hacking revelations, phones of members of the royal household at the Prime Minister David Cameron announced the H behest of the paper’s royal editor, Clive Good- establishment of a public inquiry chaired by man. Both were jailed in January 2007. Lord Justice Leveson into lawbreaking by the I NoW’s defence was that this was a one-off press, the system of independent regulation and

case, while the editor of the paper at the time, the issue of cross-media ownership. J Andy Coulson (later to be appointed Director Journalism: ‘postmodern journalism’ A of Communications to the new Prime Minister broad and overarching term to describe a trend David Cameron), declared that he had not been in journalism away from serious reporting; in L party to the hacking or known about it. Follow- particular emphasizing the personal over the ing the suspension of Ian Edmondson, NoW’s political. It can be summed up as more tabloid, M assistant editor (news), the pressure on Coulson more consumerist, and focuses on disconti- increased. He resigned from his government nuities, celebrating diff erence over commonality N post in January 2011 as court cases began to line and stressing the confessional over the reporto- up from a range of celebrities, including John rial. Prescott, former deputy prime minister, football ‘Th is confessional and therapy style of news,’ O analyst Andy Gray, comedian Steve Coogan write Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner and and actress Sienna Miller, alleging breaches of Carole Fleming in Women and Journalism (Rout- P privacy. ledge, 2004), ‘is characterized by a profoundly Revelations that News Corp had paid hefty selective tolerance of some people’s failings and R sums in out-of-court settlements to Gordon misfortunes. It usually taps into sympathy for Taylor, Chief Executive of the Professional victims drawn largely from white, middle-class, Footballers’ Association, and PR agent Max heterosexual social groups of the same national- S Cliff ord challenged NoW’s case that the hack- ity as the national or regional newspapers and ing was simply the work of a ‘rogue reporter’. broadcast programmes. It ignores the misery T Persistent enquiries and further revelations by and distress of migrants and refugees, drug the Guardian newspaper proved that hacking addicts or prostitutes and of millions of people U was common practice for NoW, and soon both in developing nations suff ering from starvation paper and corporate owner, News Corp, were and war.’ engulfed in a scandal that led to the dramatic Postmodern journalism works towards the V closure of the paper on 7 July 2011. Th e fi nal decontextualization of events, and by skirting edition of the 168-year-old paper appeared on issues of power, it takes politics out of everyday W Sunday 10 July. life. In the words of Chambers et al, it ‘system- Th e hacking story emerged as far back as 2003, atically devalues issues concerning economic, but other than the Guardian (and the New York social and cultural power and techniques of criti- XYZ Times) the media showed little interest until it cal engagement and investigation’. Ultimately, became clear that the paper’s law-breaking prac- what happens in this postmodernist scenario is tices were systemic and were intrusive beyond the conversion of news into entertainment. See the limits of royalty and celebrity. Evidence of postmodernism. police collusion – payment of police personnel Jump cut Where two scenes in a TV news

151 Katz and Lazarsfeld’s two-step ﬂ ow model of mass communication and personal inﬂ uence

report are of the same subject, taken from the an inspection lens through which a single person same angle and distance, the ‘jump cut’ is to be could view the endless loop of celluloid fi lm that avoided; to get round this ‘jump’ from one shot passed below it. It was driven by a small electric to another that is virtually the same – usually motor and illuminated by an electric lamp. of someone being interviewed – a ‘cutaway’ Edison’s lasting contribution to cinematography shot is inserted, that is a reaction shot from the was his use of celluloid fi lm 35mm wide, with interviewer. four perforations for each picture. See cinematography, origins. ‘Kite’ co-orientation approach See mcleod K and chaffey’s ‘kite’ model, 1973. Katz and Lazarsfeld’s two-step fl ow model Knowns, unknowns In Deciding What’s News of mass communication and personal (Pantheon, 1979), Herbert Gans says that those infl uence See one-step, two-step, multi- who are famous in society, knowns, appear at step flow models of communication. least four times more frequently in TV news Kepplinger and Habermeier’s Events Typol- bulletins than do unknowns. Th e power elite ogy See event. and celebrities generally tend to be both the Kernal and satellite See narrative: kernal source and subject matter of news stories; and and satellite. by being so they further qualify themselves to Kindle See e-book. appear on the news as knowns. Gans states that Kineme A segment or fraction of a whole fewer than fi fty individuals regularly appear on communicative gesture; a kinetic parallel to a US news. It is not only the actions of knowns that phoneme (element of verbal language). Th e term qualify as newsworthy, but also their speech. As was invented by Ray Birdwhistell. In Kinesics and Allan Bell says in Th e Language of News Media Context (University of Philadelphia, 1970), Bird- (Blackwell, 1991), ‘Talk is news only if the right whistell draws up a vocabulary of sixty kinemes person is talking.’ Meanwhile the dominance which he found in the gestural/postural/expres- of the headlines by knowns, by the elite, leads sive movements of American subjects. He main- to other actors, other talk, being ignored. See tains that these kinemes combine to form large news values. units (kinemorphs) on the analogy of morphemes KPFA Radio In the US, the first listener- (or words). An example would be waving a fi st or supported independent radio station, founded prodding the air with a fi nger while at the same by Lewis Hill in 1949, broadcasting from Berke- time smiling or looking angry. See kinesics. ley, California. Sister stations were later intro- Kinesics Th e study of communication through duced – KFPK in Los Angeles (1959) and WBA1 gesture, posture and body movement. In in New York (1960). Working under the umbrella Communication (Open University, Block 3, link of the Pacifi c Foundation, the outspoken- Units 7–10, 1975), the OU course team loosely ness of the stations proved a thorn in the side of classify kinesics under fi ve headings: (1) informa- government and the establishment in America. tion (indicating, for example, welcome or ‘keep In 1970 KFPT went on air in Houston, Texas; it away’); (2) communication markers (head and was fi rebombed twice by the Ku Klux Klan, but body movements to give emphasis to a spoken broadcasts continued. See radio: micropower message); (3) emotional state (as expression of radio. feeling); (4) expression of self (in the way you sit Kuleshov eff ect Lev Kuleshov (1899–1970) was or walk or hold yourself); and (5) expression of in at the sunrise of Russian cinema. He was fi lm relationship (revealing attitude to others by how designer, fi lm-maker and fi lm theorist. In 1920 close you stand to someone, how you angle, tilt, he was given a workshop to study fi lm methods shift your body in relationship to others or by the with a group of students. His Kuleshov eff ect, way hair or clothes are touched, a tie adjusted). demonstrated in 1922, proved how, by altering See communication, non-verbal; non- the juxtaposition of fi lm images, their signifi - verbal behaviour: repertoire; proxemics; cance for the audience could be changed. touch. In 1929 he wrote, ‘The content of the shot Kinetoscope Early form of film projection in itself is not so important as the joining of invented in 1887 by Th omas Alva Edison (1847– two shots of diff erent content and the method 1931) and his assistant K.L. Dickson. On 14 April of their connection and their alternation.’ An 1894, the fi rst ‘Kinetoscope Parlor’ was opened experiment, aimed at proving his theory, showed on Broadway, New York. Th e Kinetoscope was a close-up of an actor playing a prisoner. Th is a wooden cabinet furnished with a peep-slit and is linked to two different shots representing

152 Language pollution

what the prisoner sees: first a bowl of soup, majority in more than two of the three sectors, A then the open door of freedom. Audiences were government, mass media and the public; (2) convinced that the expression on the man’s face when the majority opinion accounts for the B was diff erent in each instance, though it was the majority across the three sectors; (3) when the same piece of fi lm. See montage; shot. majority opinion increases over time; (4) when Kuuki Japanese term, shared by the Chinese and the majority opinion is escalating; and (5) when C Koreans, meaning a climate of opinion requiring the subject-matter ‘tends to stir up the “spirits” compliance. In an article entitled ‘Th e future of inherent in individuals such as basic values, D political communication research: a Japanese norms, prejudices, antagonism and loyalty to the perspective’ published in the Journal of Commu- collective or patriotism’. nication, Autumn 1993, Youichi Ito, Professor Ito states, ‘When these conditions are met and E at Tokyo’s Keio University, emphasizes that kuuki is created, it functions as a strong political kuuki refers less to generalities than specifi cs. or social force, resulting in the minority side F In ‘Climate of opinion, kuuki, and democracy’ becoming ever-more silent and acquiescent and

in William Gudykunst, ed., Communications changing or modifying its opinion on policy, or G Yearbook, No. 26 (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), the its members resigning from their positions.’ author states that kuuki, the pressure towards compliance, refers ‘to a certain speciﬁ c opinion, H policy, or group decision’; and this is usually L accompanied by ‘threats and social sanction’. Label libel A mcluhanism. Marshall McLuhan I As the author points out, the phrase ‘climate of (1911–80), media guru of the 1960s, wrote of

opinion’ has a long history and was probably fi rst the way in which the mass media stick labels JK used in the seventeenth century by the English on people, trap them in stereotypes, typecast philosopher Joseph Glanville (1638–80). Ito them, pigeon-hole them to the point that such suggests a parallel with the German term ‘zeit- generalizations become invidious and thus a L geist’, meaning spirit of the times. He cites the mode of defamation. Russo-Japanese war of 1905, in which the climate Labelling process (and the media) Howard M of opinion became in Japan one of fervent popu- Becker in a classic study, Th e Outsiders: Studies lar support for the war. Th e circulation of the in the Sociology of Deviancy (Free Press, 1963), N pro-war newspapers at the time grew dramati- analyses the process by which certain social cally, while that of the anti-war press shrank. actions or ideas and those who perform or Because kuuki, like zeitgeist, is more spirit than express them come to be defi ned as deviant; O the corporeal, it is neither as predictable nor as and which he calls ‘the labelling process’: ‘Th e controllable as more customary shaping devices. deviant is one to whom the label has successfully P However, when the climate is right, kuuki’s power been applied; deviant behaviour is behaviour can carry a nation. Ito sees a strong connection that people so label.’ R here with Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s ‘spiral Becker’s work highlights the role that powerful of silence’ (see noelle-neumann’s spiral of social groups and individuals play in defi ning the silence model of public opinion, 1974). limits of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour S Kuuki can work for good or ill. When it is through the labelling process. He argues that fi red by jingoism ‘it can be undemocratic and certain groups within society – moral entre- T destructive … Th e most dangerous case,’ writes preneurs – are particularly able to shape, via Professor Ito, ‘is when kuuki is taken advantage the mass media, new images of deviancy and U of by undemocratic groups or selfi sh and intoler- new defi nitions of social problems. See crisis ant political leaders. Even if the situation is not definition; issues. as bad as this, kuuki can make people’s viewpoint Language See topic guide under language/ V narrower and limit their policy options.’ discourse/narrative. Ito explains how kuuki may be nurtured by Language pollution According to Gail and W the media, by government or by the strength Michele Meyers in The Dynamics of Human of public opinion. Each is a source of infl uence Communication (McGraw-Hill, 1985), ‘when upon the others, operating in a tripolar way. language is used by people to say what in fact XYZ Where two of the major actors work in unison, they do not believe, when words are used, or alliance, the dominant partnership can force sometimes unwittingly, sometimes deliberately, the third actor into line. Ito lists fi ve conditions to cover up rather than to explain reality, our in which kuuki operates to powerful effect: symbolic world becomes polluted. Th is means when (1) the majority opinion accounts for the that language becomes an unreliable instrument

153 Langue and parole

for adapting to the environment and for commu- tion, 1956. In ‘Towards a general model of nicating’. Hence language pollution occurs. communication’ in Audio-Visual Communica- The authors identify three main types of tion Review, 4 (1956), George Gerbner off ers the language pollution and their common char- following formula: acteristics: confusion (unknown meanings), 1 Someone characterized by the use of foreign languages, 2 perceives an event unfamiliar words, technical jargon and 3 and reacts misused terminology; ambiguity (too many 4 in a situation meanings), characterized by vagueness, the use 5 through some means of words with multiple defi nitions and the use of 6 to make available materials very general imprecise statements, or terms; and 7 in some form deception (obscured meanings), characterized by 8 and context outright lies, distortion, and giving incomplete 9 conveying content information or non-answers to questions. 10 with some consequence. Langue and parole In his Cours de Linguistique See topic guide under communication Générale (1916), published after his death, Ferdi- models. nand de Saussure (1857–1914) defi ned La langue, Latitudes of acceptance and rejection Th e or language, as a system, while La parole repre- greater the gap between an attitude a person sented the actual manifestations of language in already holds and that which another wants speech and writing. Th e former he conceived as to persuade him/her to adopt, the less likely it an ‘institution’, a set of interpersonal rules and is that any shift in attitude will occur. Carol W. norms; the latter, events or instances, taking Sherif in Attitudes and Attitude Change (Green- their meaning from, or giving meaning to, the wood Press, 1982) argues that our responses to system. attempts to challenge or change our attitudes are ▶ De Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (English divided into three main types: (1) An individual’s translation; Fontana/Collins, 1974). latitude of acceptance contains the opinions, Lasswell’s model of communication, 1948 A ideas and so on about an issue that a person is questioning device rather than an actual model ready to agree with or accept; (2) Th e latitude of of the communication process, Harold Lasswell’s non-commitment contains the range of opinions fi ve-point approach to the analysis of the mass and ideas on the same issue that the individual media has nevertheless given enduring service. is neutral about; (3) The latitude of rejection It remains a useful fi rst step in interpreting the contains those ideas and opinions about an issue transmission and reception of messages. that the individual fi nds unacceptable. Further, In ‘The structure and function of commu- unacceptable statements tend to be interpreted nication in society’ in Lymon Bryson, ed., Th e as even more hostile and unfavourable than they Communication of Ideas (Harper & Row, 1948) really are – the contrast eff ect; while those that Lasswell suggests that in order to arrive at a due are not far removed from the latitude of accep- understanding of the meaning systems of mass tance may gradually be incorporated into it – the communication, the following sequence of assimilation eff ect. See boomerang effect. questions might be put: Laugh track Recorded laughter used on radio Who and TV programmes, chiefly sitcoms (see Says what sitcom). It functions as a stimulus to audience In which channel laughter with the hint that all of us listening To whom or watching are fi nding the programme funny. With what eff ect? There is no room on the laugh track for the Assuming that the last question would include dissenting sounds of those who wish to express the notion of feedback, Lasswell’s model could a contrary view. still do with an additional question: in what In The Sitcom (Edinburgh University Press, context (social, economic, cultural, political, 2010), Brett Mills writes that the laugh track aesthetic) is the communication process taking ‘presents the audience as a mass, whose place? Also Lasswell makes no provision for responses are unambiguous and who signal intervening variables (ivs), those mediat- a collective understanding of what is or isn’t ing factors that impact on the ways in which funny’. It ‘not only ignores alternative readings messages are received and responded to. It is of a comedy text, but also suggests there is useful to compare Lasswell’s list to the verbal pleasure to be had in going along with the rest version of gerbner’s model of communica- of the crowd’. In other words, it has ideological

154 Leaks

connotations. At the same time, says Mills, the Automatic, Persuasive, Consultative and Demo- A laugh track reminds individual viewers that they cratic. Research into leadership styles tends to are, in certain circumstances, responding diff er- point towards the democratic leadership style B ently from the crowd. See preferred reading. as being superior to the others. However the Law of minimal eff ects Point of view that the Contingency approach to leadership argues that media have little or no eff ect in forming or modi- eff ective leadership depends on a leader being C fying the attitude of audiences. See effects of able to adjust his/her style to suit the context. the mass media. Factors in the context that are thought to infl u- D LBC: London Broadcasting Corporation Th e ence the appropriate choice of style include the fi rst commercial radio station to come on air nature of the tasks, the position power held by in the UK, in October 1973; followed a few days the leader, and the nature of the relationships E later by Capital Radio. between the leader and subordinates. Leadership Leaders can generally be defi ned as Another theory within the Contingency F individuals within groups, or organizations who approach is the Situational Leadership Th eory

have infl uence, who provide focus, coordination proposed by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard G and direction for the activities of the group. It (1988). Th is maintains that key factors aff ecting may be argued that the purpose of leadership is the choice of eff ective style are the level of guid- to enable the group to function eff ectively and ance and support a leader is willing to provide, H achieve its goals, although in practice leadership and the degree of readiness among subordinates may not always have this eff ect. Leadership may as regards performance of the tasks. I be (and often is) invested in one person, but it Examples of key situational factors identifi ed

can also be shared. by a number of theorists as determining suitable JK Leaders may be emergent or appointed. An leadership styles include the nature of the task, emergent leader is one who comes to acquire the characteristics of the group and the organi- the role of leader through the process of group zational culture. More recently Daniel Gole- L interaction; he/she may, for example, be the man (2000) has identifi ed six leadership styles: person with the best ideas or communication Coercive, Authoritative, Affi liative, Democratic, M skills. An appointed leader is one who is formally Pacesetting and Coaching. Goleman argues selected; leaders in work situations are often that eff ective leaders are able to use all of these N appointed to their position. styles depending on the situation. He stresses A considerable amount of research has been the importance of emotional intelligence in the conducted with the aim of trying to ascertain deployment of these styles. O the qualities and interpersonal skills required In Organizational Behaviour (Prentice-Hall, for eff ective leadership, as well as the type of 2007), Andrzej Huczynski and David Buchanan P leadership needed for the optimum performance identify two trends in contemporary thinking of groups or organizations. An early perspective about leadership. One gives ‘recognition of the R was the trait approach to leadership, which role of heroic, powerful, charismatic, visionary argues that individuals who become leaders leaders’, whilst the other gives ‘recognition of have certain personality traits or characteristics the role of informal leadership at all levels’. S enabling them to cope well with leadership. Lucy Kung in Strategic Management in the The suggestion is that leaders are born, not Media (Sage, 2008) notes the work of Annet T made. However, this approach has been widely Aris and Jacques Bughin (2005), who ‘propose criticized for being simplistic and lacking in any two leadership styles for media organisations: U hard evidence to substantiate its claims. The an inspirational, charismatic, hands-on style; functional approach to leadership focuses on and a performance-orientated, structured style, identifying the behaviour needed from leaders involving systematic setting of strategic corpo- V so that particular groups and organizations may rate and individual goals’. achieve their goals. Th e implication here is that One point all approaches are agreed on is that W individuals can improve their leadership abili- a good leader has to be a good communicator. ties. ▶ Annet Aris and Jacques Bughin, Managing Media XYZ Another approach examines the varying styles Companies: Harnessing Creative Value (Wiley, 2009). of leadership that may be adopted and the char- Leakage See facial expression. acteristics of each style. An example here would Leaks A time-honoured way in which govern- be represented by the work of Robert Likert. In ments disseminate information, often through Th e Human Organization (McGraw-Hill, 1967), ‘sources close to’ the president or the prime Likert identifi es four main styles of leadership: minister; a way of authority manipulating the

155 Legislation

media. Leaks can always be denied. Sometimes, language constitutes a dictionary, a lexicon. of course, leaks are genuine, that is they are Lexicography is the overall study of the vocabu- true divulgences of information which those lary of language, including its history. in authority would wish to be withheld. Here, Libel See defamation. those close to the centres of power, perhaps ‘Libel tourism’ See defamation. disagreeing with decisions about to be made or Liberal Press theory Liberal Press theory affronted at the potential mismanagement of echoes the principles of the laissez-faire (‘leave power, disclose information with the intention of well alone’) model of the economy associated causing embarrassment and, through publicity, with classic nineteenth-century Liberalism. Th e a change of policy. See deep throat; secrecy; key principle of the laissez-faire model is that of wikileaks. the need for a free marketplace (that is, free from Legislation See topic guide under commis- government interference) in goods and services, sions, committees, legislation. in which producers compete with one another Legitimation/delegitimation In Ideology: to sell their products and services to consumers. A Multicultural Approach (Sage, 1998), Tuen Thus with regards to the media sector of the A. Van Dijk states that ‘legitimation is one of economy, media corporations are viewed as the main social functions of ideologies’. It is having to compete for the attention and loyalty the process whereby a group, society or nation of their consumers, the audience. Supporters of gives a status of acceptance – legitimizes – ways this model argue that the consumer is sovereign, of doing or saying things. By the same token, and thus that media corporations have to tailor a process of delegitimation occurs in which their products to suit consumer wishes, tastes the ‘We’ or ‘Us’ of a situation seek overtly, or and needs. covertly, to deny acceptance to other, or what David M. Barlow and Brett Mills in Reading Van Dijk refers to as ‘outgroups’. Reference, for Media Th eory: Th inkers, Approaches, Contexts example, to ‘illegal’ immigrants has the eff ect of (Pearson Education Limited, 2009) argue that delegitimating a host of diff erent ‘other’ and, in ‘concepts such as “freedom of the press”, “free- the public mind, creates antipathy, fear (of the dom of speech” and the “Fourth Estate” have ‘foreigner’) and rejection. informed – and continue to underpin – what is Legitimation is very much about being a variously referred to as the liberal theory of the member of a group and relies in some part upon press, or liberal press theory. Th is theory holds a recognition of what differentiates Us from that “the freedom of the press” is rooted in the Th em (those who are not part of the group). Van freedom to publish in the free market’. Th us the Dijk speaks of an ‘ideological square’ in which public interest is seen as best served by a free four main positions are taken in relation to legit- market in newspapers, magazines and so on. As imation/delegitimation. Th e square serves as a) James Curran points out in James Curran and a positive self-presentation and b) a negative Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: Press, ‘other’ presentation. Th e positions are as follows: Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain (Rout- (1) express/emphasize information that is posi- ledge, 2009), this model is not without its critics. tive about Us; (2) express/emphasize negative Th eorists have pointed out contemporary disad- points about Th em; (3) suppress/de-emphasize vantages such as the intrusion into personal information that is positive about Them; and privacy in some reporting, the concentration of (4) suppress/de-emphasize information that is ownership within the press, the potential infl u- positive about Us. ence of owners over content, and the diffi culty of Communicative strategies employed in legiti- radical voices being heard. See fourth estate; mation/delegitimation discourses are numer- press, four theories of. ous, depending on the nature of the communi- ▶ Denis McQuail, Mass Communication Theory cation and the contexts in which it takes place. (Sage, 2010). Th ey work through the implicit, by assumption; Life positions In his book, I’m OK, You’re OK by implication, presupposition, assertion and (Harper & Row, 1969), Th omas Harris identifi es manipulation; and their aim is the maintenance four life positions that can be used in transac- of power through the creation of compliance and tional analysis for exploring and examining consent. See hegemony; ideology. people’s feelings, attitudes or positions towards Lexis Linguist’s term to describe the vocabulary themselves and others, and the way in which of a language: a unit of vocabulary is gener- these infl uence their social interaction. Th e ‘I’m ally referred to as a lexical item or lexeme. A OK, You’re OK’ position is one in which an indi- complete inventory of the lexical items of a vidual believes in his/her own worth and that of

156 Listening

others; in which we accept ourselves and other would accept that the language at an individual’s A people, and base our transactions on this orien- disposal infl uences the way he/she thinks about tation. Harris argues that to reach this position the world. See sapir-whorf linguistic rela- B requires conscious decision and eff ort. tivity hypothesis. Harris believes many people hold an ‘I’m not Linguistics The scientific study of language. OK, You’re OK’ position as a result of early Diachronic or historical linguistics investigates C socialization which, in attempting to shape how language-use has changed over time; an individual’s behaviour into a pattern that is synchronic linguistics is concerned with the state D socially acceptable, contains a lot of messages of language at any given point in time; general critical of the individual – that is, not OK linguistics seeks to establish principles for the messages. Th is position may lead to a feeling of study of all languages; descriptive linguistics is E inferiority that shows itself in defensive commu- concerned with the analysis of the characteris- nication, such as game-playing. tics of specifi c language; contrastive linguistics F Experiences in early childhood, especially explores the contrasts between different

abuse and neglect, may result in an individual languages or families of languages; and compar- G forming the perspective that whilst he/she is OK, ative linguistics concentrates on common other people are not; hence the ‘I’m OK, You’re characteristics. Among a profusion of other not OK’ position, which may show itself in a linguistics-related studies are anthropological H characteristically hostile or aggressive commu- linguistics, biolinguistics, psycholinguistics and nicative style. ‘I’m not OK, You’re not OK’ is the sociolinguistics. See paradigm; semiology/ I position of those who feel that neither they nor semiotics; structuralism. Linotype printing others are OK; this negative perspective may Patented in 1894 by German JK show itself through a despairing and resigned immigrant to Baltimore, US, Ottmar Mergen- attitude when communicating with others. Life thaler. Th e operator uses a keyboard similar to positions influence the kinds of life scripts that of a typewriter. As each key is depressed, a L that individuals write for themselves. See topic brass matrix for that particular letter drops into guide under interpersonal communica- place. When the line is complete, the row of M tion. matrices is placed over a mould and the line of ▶ Ian Stewart and Vann Joines, TA Today (Lifespace, type is cast, the molten lead alloy setting almost N 1987); Amy and Th omas Harris, Staying OK (Arrow at once. See monotype printing; printing. Books, 1995); Abe Wagner, The Transactional Listening Though often taken for granted, Manager (London: Th e Industrial Society, 1996). listening is a crucial element of human commu- O Lifestyle See style; vals typology. nication, and poor listening can often lead to a Light Programme One of three BBC radio chan- breakdown in communication. Eﬀ ective listening P nels until the introduction of Radio 1 in 1967, may not always be that easy, given the number of and a change of names for the rest: Light became potential distractions in a typical social encoun- R Radio 2, Home Service became Radio 4, and the ter: examples here might be pressure of time, Th ird Programme became Radio 3. Th e Light frequent interruptions or background noise. Programme, for general entertainment radio, Th e nature of the relationship we have with the S was created in the year the Second World War speaker(s) may aﬀ ect the attention we pay to ended, 1945. what is being said. Th e content of the message T Lindup Committee Report on Data Protec- may challenge our attitudes, values and beliefs tion, 1978 See data protection. and we may, therefore, be reluctant to listen with U Linguistic determinism Th e proposition that an open mind. Th ere is some evidence that in a the language of a culture determines the way in group situation we may listen less carefully as which the world is perceived and thought about. each of us leaves the task of careful listening to V Th us in acquiring a language, an individual is others.

also acquiring a particular way of thinking about A number of researchers have identiﬁ ed diﬀ er- W the world; a particular world-view. The two ent listener preferences, and another problem linguists closely associated with this position is that we may stick with our preference even are Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir, though it may not be the most appropriate XYZ whose Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis helped to way to listen in all situations. In Small Group establish this particular view on the relationship Communication: Theory and Practice (Brown between language and thought. Though their and Benchmark, 1996), R.S. Cathcart, Larry proposition that language actually determines A. Samovar and L. Henman (with reference to thought has been much questioned, many the work of Watson, Barker & Weaver) identify

157 Lithography

four listener preferences: People-Oriented, Century of Spin (Pluto Press, 2008), David Miller Action-Oriented, Content-Oriented and Time- and William Dinan make the following comment Oriented, each of which has their own ‘pros on the situation in the UK: ‘… it is clear that those and cons’. Th e key to being a good listener, they in power or likely to assume power in Britain are argue, is to understand our own preference and in the grip of business ideologues, in the grip those of others, and to be willing to adapt to the more precisely of the professional idea warriors, most suitable listening preference for the situa- the think-tankerati, the spinners, the lobbyists’. tion. We need also to adapt our delivery to the Lobby Practice A book of rules of conduct listening preferences of others: ‘Just as we tend written by, and abided by, UK parliamentary to get in the habit of listening in only one way, lobby correspondents who operate from offi ces we also tend to speak to others in habitual ways. in the House of Commons and whose access to To make the most of interactions, think of the the centres of power is highly prized. Th e lobby best ways to package information so others will system in the British House of Commons goes as listen.’ far back as 1886. Correspondents meet daily at Lithography Printing from stone, slate or a Downing Street, the home of the prime minister, substitute such as zinc or aluminium, with and weekly on Th ursdays in the Commons for a greasy ink; invented in 1798 by Alois Senefelder. briefi ng by the PM’s press secretary. Lloyd’s List Th e oldest international daily news- Th e system has been subjected to considerable paper, founded in 1734; perhaps most noted for criticism on the grounds of its secrecy, alleged its role as almanac of world shipping movements cosiness and danger of collusion between and casualty reports. government and privileged lobby correspon- Lobbying Lobbying is a term usually used to refer dents. It has been varyingly called ‘an instrument to the various activities undertaken by individu- of closed government’ and the ‘real cancer of als, groups and organizations in order to infl u- British journalism’. At the heart of the criticism ence the public policy-making processes of local is the fact that the lobby correspondents receive and central government. Lobbying is at the core no more information than government wishes of the activities of pressure groups. As Ralph them to know; if they break the rules of Lobby Tench and Liz Yeomans note in Exploring Public Practice, they know their privileges will be with- Relations (Pearson Education Limited, 2009), drawn. See phillis review of government lobbying can be done by ordinary citizens or by communications (uk), 2004. professional lobbyists. Localization Th e process by which global media Professional lobbying developed considerably tailor their products for local markets and local in the 1980s and 90s in the UK, and in his book audiences. Th e 1980s and 1990s saw a dramatic entitled An Introduction to Political Commu- expansion of TV channels crossing national nication (Routledge, 2007), Brian McNair borders, and this trend was nowhere more describes political lobbying as a ‘huge industry manifest than in Europe. Companies such as throughout the world’; it is also one in which MTV, CNN, Sky News, BBC Prime, BBC World many public relations (pr) practitioners and National Geographical reached out for pan- are involved. As Ralph Tench and Liz Yeomans European audiences. explain, ‘Public Affairs is the much used PR Initially, channels such as MTV (launched in specialism that seeks to infl uence public policy the US in 1981 and in Europe in 1987) operated making through lobbying, done either privately in a global capacity, that is in the sense of an or publicly, along with media relations, or by increasingly homogenous culture, offering a combining both routes.’ Many powerful interest single brand regardless of national and regional groups see professional lobbying as an essential diff erences. Th ey were swiftly to recognize the part of their strategies of persuasion. importance of catering to local tastes. It is also the case that some former lobby- Jean K. Chalaby in ‘Transnational television in ists become politicians and former politicians Europe: Th e role of Pan-European channels’ in become lobbyists; further, that a significant the European Journal of Communication (June, number of politicians maintain their connec- 2002) writes that ‘these cross-border players tions with interest or pressure groups whilst awoke to the reality of national boundaries and in power. Lobbying may be an integral aspect cultural and linguistic markers and realized that of the political process in many countries, but there were limits to the exportability of their concerns exist about the relationship between programmes’. lobbyists – especially those representing power- Localization became an imperative, at first ful interests – and politicians. In their study A by opening local advertising windows, then

158 LP

by adapting programming itself, especially of that were simply untrue. For example, Th e Daily A entertainment, to local needs. Chalaby is of the Star printed a headline-story declaring that the view that while the ‘necessity for localization Hackney council, in its attempt to stamp out B can be interpreted as evidence of the limits of racism and racist language in the borough, had cultural globalization’, it nevertheless ‘accelerates banned the singing of ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ in the process of globalization, notably because playschools. C it allows global players to operate in a multi- Hackney had never considered banning the national environment’: true, the ‘music may nursery rhyme; however, newspapers throughout D become local’ but the ‘expansion plan remains the country and in the rest of the world picked global’. on this example of ‘Loony Leftism’. Once in print, Localization is less evident in news services the story gained momentum and credence: E such as CNN and BBC World. For them, the even Labour MPs took on board the Loony Left reporting of international events is their key slogan. Similar press treatment was handed out F function. In contrast, channels dedicated to to the authors of the Congestion Charge Scheme

children’s entertainment, such as Fox Kids or which came into force in London in February G the Cartoon Network, demand localization, 2003. Prior to this, the press subjected the the originating language being converted to the scheme, and its architect, Mayor Ken Living- ‘home’ language directly or through dubbing or stone, to villiﬁ cation and scare-stories. H subtitling. Th e tabloid paper the Sun called Livingstone Chalaby believes that ‘localized channels are ‘the madcap mayor’, ‘crazy’, ‘loopy’, ‘potty’, I not so much a “hybrid” cultural form’ as a ‘bridge ‘barmy’ and a ‘crackpot’. Reference to ‘Red Ken’

that helps the global reach the local’. See europe: appeared in the Sun twenty-nine times and the JK cross-border tv channels. ‘Loony Left’ ten times between January 2002 Looking behaviour See civil inattention; and May 2003. Th e broadsheet Daily Telegraph eye contact. referred to ‘Red Ken’ thirty-one times and L Lookism The theory that the better-looking the ‘Looy Left’ seven times, while the London you are, the more successful you will be in life. Evening Standard referred to the ‘Loony Left’ M Th e term was fi rst used as early as 1978, in the fourteen times. For detailed research-fi ndings Washington Post Magazine, but more recently on this topic, see Culture Wars: Th e Media & the N has been written about at length by American British Left (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) psychologist Nancy Etcoff in Survival of the Pret- by James Curran, Ivor Gaber and Julian Petley. tiest: Th e Science of Beauty (Little, Brown, 1999). See wikileaks. O In an age of images, the image dominates our Lord Chamberlain (UK) Until they were abol- perceptions, our thoughts and our judgements. ished in 1968, the powers of the Lord Chamber- P According to Etcoff, even mothers love their lain to censor plays in the British theatre went off spring just a little bit less if they are less than as far back as the reign of James I, though such R handsome. In the world of work, says Dr Etcoff , powers were not defi ned by statute until 1737. All ‘good looking men are more likely to get hired, plays, except those performed by theatre clubs, at a higher salary than unattractive men’. She were obliged to obtain a licence from the Lord S compares ‘Looking’ with sexism and racism. Chamberlain’s offi ce. Each script was vetted for However these are conscious, easily recog- bad language, subversive ideas and any criticism T nized attitudes, while Lookism works at a of monarchy, parliament, the church, etc. subconscious level. We are largely unaware of In 1967 a Joint Committee on Censorship U favouring the beautiful. Robert Cialdini in Infl u- of the Th eatre was set up by government. This ence: Science and Practice (London: Pearson, recommended freedom for the stage ‘subject to 2009) discusses a number of studies that demon- the overriding requirements of the criminal law’, V strate the advantages of physical attractiveness, and that managements and dramatists should be

and notes that we are also more likely to be protected from ‘frivolous or arbitrary’ prosecu- W persuaded by those we ﬁ nd physically attractive. tions. Th ese recommendations formed the basis Loony Leftism In the 1980s in the UK a mythol- of Labour MP George Strauss’s private member’s ogy was created by local and national newspa- bill that became law, liberating the theatre from XYZ pers about the policies of Labour-led councils, the Lord Chamberlain in the Theatres Act of particularly those in Greater London. ‘Loony’ September 1968. became the catchword whenever councils Lowbrow See highbrow. such as Hackney, Haringey or Islington were LP See gramophone. mentioned; the accusation arose from rumours

159 MacBride Commission

Th ey exercise ‘the power to represent the world M in certain ways. And because there are many MacBride Commission International Commis- diff erent and confl icting ways in which meaning sion for the Study of Communication Problems, about the world can be constructed, it matters chaired by Sean MacBride, former Secretary profoundly what and who gets represented, what General of the International Commission of and who regularly and routinely gets left out; Jurists. Its purpose was to deliberate on aspects and how things, people, events, relationships are of media interaction between Western and represented’. See discursive gap; hegemony; developing nations. In particular, the Commis- legitimation/delegitimation; power sion was to report on the impact of Western elite; preferred reading. media technology, and the subsequent fl ow of Magnum International cooperative agency of Western-orientated information, upon develop- photo-journalists, formed in 1947. Among its ing nations. early members were Henri Cartier-Bresson, Set up by the United Nations Educational, Robert Capa, Marc Bresson and Inge Morath. Scientifi c and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Magnum’s objectives have been: top-quality in 1978 with a committee of ‘fi fteen wise men photography, independence, objectivity and and one woman’, including Colombian novelist control – by the members – over the use of their Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Canadian media pictures. guru Marshall McLuhan, the Commission ▶ William Manchester, In Our Time: Th e World as produced a 484-page report in 1980. Seen by Magnum Photographers (Andre Deutsch, Th is urged a strengthening of ‘Th ird World’ 1989). independence in the field of information- Mainstreaming George Gerbner and a team gathering and transmission, and measures to of researchers at the Annenberg School of defend national cultures against the formidable Communications, University of Pennsylvania, one-way fl ow of information and entertainment conducted a massive and ongoing research proj- from Western capitalist nations, chiefl y the US. ect throughout the 1980s on the impact of tele- Faced with the antipathy and resistance of such vision broadcasting on cultural attitudes and nations, the Commission’s recommendations, attitude formation. A process is identifi ed that and their vision of a new world information Gerbner calls mainstreaming, whereby televi- order, were left dead in the water. See chapulte- sion creates a coming-together, a convergence pec declaration, 1994; information gaps; of attitude among viewers. In their article, ‘Th e media imperialism; talloires declaration, “mainstreaming” of America: violence profile 1981; yamousoukrou declaration. See also No. 11’ in Journal of Communication (Summer, topic guide under global perspectives. 1980), Gerbner, Larry Gross, Michael Morgan Machinery of representation In modern and Nancy Signorielli write, ‘In particular, heavy societies, the various forms of mass media have viewing may serve to cultivate beliefs of other- been named the ‘machinery of representation’ wise disparate and divergent groups towards a by Professor Stuart Hall in his chapter on media more homogeneous “mainstream” view.’ power and class power in Bending Reality: Th e Th e authors’ opinion is that TV’s images ‘culti- State of the Media (Pluto Press, 1986), edited vate the dominant tendencies of our culture’s by James Curran, Jake Ecclestone, Giles Oakley beliefs, ideologies, and world views’ and that and Alan Richardson. Hall writes of the ‘whole the ‘size’ of an ‘eff ect’ is far less critical ‘than the process of reporting and construction’ through direction of its steady contribution’. Th e light which reality is translated into media forms viewer is more likely to hold divergent views and – forms that the audience is expected to recog- the heavy viewer more convergent views: ‘For nize as reality. heavy viewers, television virtually monopolizes Yet reality, argues Hall, is not simply tran- and subsumes other sources of information, scribed in ‘great unassimilated lumps through ideas and consciousness.’ Convergence in this our daily dose of newspapers or our nightly diet sense is to the world as shown on television. of television’. He is of the opinion that the media Returning to this theme in an article for the ‘all work using language, words, text, pictures, American magazine Et cetera (Spring, 1987), still or moving; combining in different ways Gerbner writes, in ‘Television’s populist brew: through the practices and techniques of selec- Th e three Bs’, ‘Th e most striking political diff er- tion, editing, montage, design, layout, format, ence between light and heavy viewers in most linkage, narrative, openings, closures – to repre- groups is the collapse of the liberal position as sent the world to us’. the one most likely to diverge from and challenge

160 Maletzke’s model of the mass communication process, 1963

traditional assumptions.’ Th e three Bs referred to (Oxford University Press, 2000) comments that A in Gerbner’s article are the processes by which in the British National Corpus of 1995, ‘I found television brings about mainstreaming. First, the following usages: lady doctor (125 times), B television blurs traditional social distinctions; woman doctor (20 times), female doctor (10 second, it blends otherwise divergent groups times), compared to male doctor (14 times)’. into the mainstream; and thirdly it bends ‘the Other terms used for male-as-norm in relation C mainstream in the direction of the medium’s to language are androcentralism (male centred) interests in proﬁ t, populist politics, and power’. and masculist, as well as patriarchal. See topic D In a study conducted in the UK in 1987, guide under gender matters. researchers from the Portsmouth Media ★Maletzke’s model of the mass communi- Research Group, Anthony Piepe, Peter Charlton cation process, 1963 What is so useful about E and Judy Morey (see their article ‘Politics and the model constructed by German Maletzke and television viewing in England: hegemony or presented in Th e Psychology of Mass Communi- F pluralism?’ in the Winter 1990 edition of the cations (Verlag Hans Bredow-Institut, 1963) is

Journal of Communication) found that British the comprehensiveness of the factors operating G television ‘does not cultivate a single main- upon the participants in the mass communica- stream around which a heterogenous audience tion process, and at the same time of the complex converges’, as in the US, but that it contains two interaction of such factors. H message systems and constructs two audiences: Th e self-image of the communicator corre- that for essentially news-related programmes, sponds with that of the receiver: both act upon I which keep pluralist options open, and that for and are influenced by the message, which is

soaps which do, the researchers confi rm, hasten itself constrained by the dictates of the medium JK a mainstreaming tendency, particularly when chosen. To add to the complexity, the message is heavy viewing is involved. infl uenced by the communicator’s image of the In 1994 a study of TV infl uence on political receiver and the receiver’s image of the commu- L attitudes in Italy was published by Luca Ricolfi nicator. Maltetzke’s is a model suggesting that in of the University of Turin. According to his the communication process many shoulders are M findings summarized in ‘Elections and mass being looked over: the more shoulders, the more media. How many votes has television moved?’ compromises, the more adjustments. N (Il Mulino, 356), TV, public and commercial, had Thus not only is the communicator taking infl uenced 10 per cent of the Italian electorate into due regard the medium and the nature of and the commercial channels had signifi cantly audience, and perceiving these things through O assisted the shift of voters from the Left and the fi lter of self-image and personality structure, Centre to the Right. See cultivation; effects he/she is also keenly responsive to other factors P of the mass media; glasgow unversity – the communication team, with its own special media group; machinery of representa- set of values (see news values) and profes- R tion; mean world syndrome; resonance; sional practices. Beyond the team, there is the showbusiness, age of; violence on tv: the organization, which in turn has to look over its defence. shoulder towards government or the general S Male-as-norm In her introduction to Man Made public (see impartiality). Language (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) Dale Just as the communicator is a member of a T Spender says, ‘One semantic rule which we team within an organizational environment, so can see in operation in the language is that of the receiver is part of a larger context of recep- U the male-as-norm. At the onset it may appear tion: he/she is subject to infl uences other than to be a relatively innocuous rule for classifying the media message. Th ose infl uences may start in the objects and events of the world, but closer the living room of a family home, and the infl u- V examination exposes it as one of the most perva- encers might be the viewer’s or reader’s family, but there are contextual infl uences beyond that sive and pernicious rules that has been encoded.’ W Th e rules of society are man-made, and so, in the pub, at work, in the community. Spender argues, is the language we use – the Maletzke’s model provides students of the ‘edification of male supremacy’. Thus women media with a structure for analysis. By its XYZ are allotted a negative semantic space, illustrated complexity, by suggesting an almost limitless by the way in which women are often referred interaction of variables, it also indicates the to when they occupy a role traditionally the enormous diffi culty faced by research into the preserve of men. Suzanne Romaine in Language effects of the mass media. See topic guide and Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics under communication models.

161 Manufacture of consent

Maletzke’s model of the mass communication process, 1963

Manufacture of consent See consent, manu- ments profi tably’. Th e site goes on to state: ‘Th e facture of. central premise of marketing is that in order to March of Time Famous US newsreel series of the be successful, and eff ectively satisfy customers, 1930s, and a classic example of media interac- there are certain marketing fundamentals that tion. Roy Larsen, one of Henry Luce’s aides on you need to address.’ Th ese have been called the Time magazine, had arranged to have items from Ps of marketing: (1) the product or service must the magazine broadcast on radio, and these satisfy customer needs; (2) the price should be newscasts became so popular among listen- competitive and appropriate to the quality of the ers that they were developed into a network product and customers’ pockets; (3) there will programme, Th e March of Time. One attraction need to be eff ective promotion of the product was that the programme dramatized the news; or service to customers through the appropri- actors played ‘memorable scenes from the news ate employment of a range of communication of the week’. strategies and activities such as advertising, In 1934, Louis de Rochement, under Larsen’s public relations, sales promotion, personal supervision, adapted the radio format to fi lm selling, and direct marketing activities; (4) which, after early uncertainties, made a notable the product or service must be available in impact. Th e monthly fi lm panoramas of Ameri- the right place, at the right time. Similarly any can and international events alerted the public promotional communication with the customer to the growing menace of Fascism. Th ey carried must be accurately located; (5) people are also a an Academy award-winning report on life inside key element of the marketing process. All those Nazi Germany (1938) and an even more powerful who deal with the customer have the potential one on refugees. In 1935, 432 US cinemas were to influence the customer’s perception of the showing The March of Time, with its famous product or service. Th us the Chartered Institute end-of-programme words, ‘Time ... marches on!’ argues, ‘Th is means that they must be appropri- and by 1939 the number had trebled. Th e series ately trained, well motivated and the right type continued until 1953. See documentary. See of person.’ Good interpersonal communica- also topic guide under media history. tion skills are crucial here; (6) the process of Marginality See displacement effect. marketing involves a myriad activities, many Marketing Defi ned on the website of the Char- of them communication activities focused on tered Institute of Marketing (UK) in 2005 as ‘the delivery of the product or service to the satisfac- management process responsible for identifying, tion of the customer; (7) it is also important to anticipating and satisfying customer require- provide customers with physical evidence that

162 Market research

refl ects the benefi ts and quality of the product, the means of production is essentially private: A given that they are not able to experience the the ‘public’ denomination of private corpora- product in advance. tions has nothing to do with the public; rather, B Th e Ps need to be appropriately considered, it denotes shareholding by other ‘public’ bodies with reference to the product, service and and private individuals. Out of market liberalism consumers, but ‘together they form the basis for has sprung the concept of the free press; policies C any marketing plan’. According to the Institute, urging privatization of all mass communica- the fi rst fi ve are important for the marketing of tion (not to mention other public services D a product and all are important to the marketing such as education, health and transport); and of a service. Four of them – Price, Product, Place, deregulation. Promotion – are often described as being at the John Keane in The Media and Democracy E core of the marketing mix. (Polity Press, 1991) says that many market liberals Frances Brassington and Stephen Pettitt in ‘love to talk of the need for a free communications F Essentials of Marketing (FT/Prentice-Hall, 2007) market without censorship’. However, ‘they are ...

discuss the rise of a contemporary approach to unsympathetic or hostile to citizens’ attempts to G marketing known as relationship marketing – extend the role of law, to reduce the arbitrariness one that focuses on building the relationship and secrecy of political power’. Th us two compet- between buyer and seller. This is typical of ing principles are at work. The ‘free market’ H marketing activity in the business-to-business process coexists within ‘a powerful, authoritative sector, where longstanding relationships state which acts as an overlord of the market’. I between buyers and sellers is seen as a signiﬁ cant Th is amounts to a position where there is liberty

factor in the decisions made about purchases. It for some but not necessarily for all. JK is also increasingly used in other sectors. New Keane believes market liberalism ‘succours the technology and the rapid growth of online old doctrine of sovereignty of the state – permis- marketing have facilitated direct communica- sion for the state to defend itself by any means L tion with individual consumers, the building of should it feel threatened, including controlling closer relationships with the ordinary customer and regulating the liberties of the public’. Should M and the nurturing of consumer loyalty. there at the same time appear to be a threat to Brassington and Pettitt point out that, the free market, then the free market will collude N ‘Although relationship marketing over time with the state in seeking out and identifying focuses on customers’ needs and attitudes as ‘enemies of the state’. Private sector media, important points of concern, it can also embrace in particular the press, will have taken on the O social and ethical concerns …’ This may be role of guard dog. See commercial laissez- the case especially where an organization has faire model of (media) communication; P developed a Corporate Social Responsibility kuuki; hegemony. programme. A number of organizations have Market research A term that covers the wide R such programmes as a means of enhancing their range of research activities that may be under- reputation with both consumers and the wider taken to investigate aspects of an existing or national and international community. In part potential market. It may have a number of aims: S such programmes refl ect a growing awareness for example, to discover whether there is a need that a significant number of consumers are for a proposed new service; to ascertain consum- T concerned about the ethical behaviour, or other- ers’ views on the need to modify an existing wise, of companies. See culture: consumer; product; to test out ideas for promotional activi- U market research. ties; or to evaluate responses to a campaign. ▶ Terence A. Shrimp, Integrated Marketing Commu- With regard to its use in marketing activi- nications in Advertising & Promotion (Thomson ties, Brassington and Pettitt in Essentials of V South-Western, 2009). Marketing (FT/Prentice-Hall, 2007) comment Market liberalism ideology dominant in West- that, ‘Decisions on product range, packaging, W ern countries, adopted worldwide after the fall of pricing and promotion will all arise from a well- Soviet communism as a normative way of state, understood profi le of the diff erent types of need industrial and commercial governance; its key in the market.’ It is the role of market research XYZ principle – leave to market forces. It is essentially to help construct such profi les. Typical research capitalist, resistant to attempts to restrict free methods include observational techniques, enterprise by state control or regulation; these questionnaires, interviews and focus are considered to be ill-judged, an interference groups. See consumption behaviour; with the ‘natural order of things’. Ownership of sampling; segmentation.

163 Market threshold

▶ Terence A. Shrimp, Integrated Marketing Commu- needs; and the need for self-actualization. nications in Advertising & Promotion (Thomson Among the physiological needs are food, water, South-Western, 2009). sleep and sex. Safety needs include security, Market threshold Decisions on media produc- stability, protection, freedom from fear, from tion – whether to initiate, go ahead or continue anxiety and from chaos; the need for structure, with media enterprises – depend more and more order, law, limits; the preference for the familiar on whether there is a suffi ciently large percentage over the unfamiliar, the known rather than the of consumers to warrant investment. Th e market unknown; for religion. threshold is the critical point at which a media Maslow writes that the threat of chaos or artefact justifi es, fi nancially, its existence; and humiliation can be expected in most human the greater the competition within the market, beings ‘to produce a regression from any higher the more critical that threshold becomes. needs to the prepotent safety needs, so that a Marxist (mode of media analysis) Focuses common, almost expectable reaction, is the on social confl ict, which is seen as being essen- easier acceptance of dictatorship or of military tially derived from the mode of production in rule’ and this is ‘most true of those living near capitalist societies. Karl Marx argued that the the safety line’. Such people are ‘particularly culture – and communication process – of a disturbed by threats to authority, to legality, and capitalist society refl ects the norms and values to the representatives of the law’ (see main- of that section of the community which owns streaming). Belongingness and loving needs the means of production: out of the dominant include the ‘deeply animal tendency to herd, to class springs the dominant ideology which fl ock, to join, to belong’. the media serve to disseminate and reinforce in Maslow’s highest-order need is self-actualiza- the ‘disguise’ of consensus. tion, where a person seeks and fi nds fulfi lment: Marxist analysts have employed three main ‘A musician must make music, an artist must strategies of research (also used by other, non- paint if they are ultimately to be at peace with Marxist commentators): structuralist, political/ themselves.’ ‘What a man can be, he must be.’ economic and culturalist. The structuralist Th e term self-actualization was coined by Kurt approach examines the ideology embodied in Goldstein in The Organism (American Book, media content, concentrating on ‘text’ and the 1939), and means, in Maslow’s words, ‘to become source of the ideology. Th e political/economic everything that one is capable of becoming’. approach investigates the location of media The fulfilment of needs, Maslow argues, power within economic processes, and the depends on essential preconditions, obviously structure of media production. Th e culturalist at the physiological level the availability of food approach commences from the standpoint and water, but at the higher levels such condi- that all societies are made up of a rich variety tions as ‘freedom to speak, freedom to do what of group cultures, but seeks to indicate that one wishes so long as no harm is done to others, some groups, therefore some cultures, receive a freedom to express oneself, freedom to investi- disproportionate representation in the media in gate and seek for information, freedom to defend the process of shaping and defi ning consensus oneself’. In Maslow’s view ‘secrecy, censorship, and obscuring the roots of genuine confl ict. See dishonesty, blocking of communication threat- functionalist/social action (modes of ens all the basic needs’. media analysis); machinery of representa- An essential part of the process of self-actual- tion. See also topic guide under research ization is the desire to know and to understand, methods. ‘to systematize, to organize, to analyse, to look Maslow’s hierarchy of needs According to for relations and meanings, to construct a Abraham Maslow in his highly infl uential book, system of values’ and these aspects too tend Motivation and Personality (Harper & Row, towards a hierarchy: to know leads us to want to 1954), human behaviour refl ects a range of basic understand. Within this frame too are aesthetic needs that form a hierarchy. ‘For the man who needs. Maslow speaks of some individuals who is extremely and dangerously hungry,’ writes ‘get sick (in special ways) from ugliness, and are Maslow, ‘no other interests exist but food.’ When cured by beautiful surroundings’. that need is satisfi ed, ‘new (and still higher) needs Th e hierarchy as cited by Maslow is dynamic emerge’. In what he terms a holistic-dynamic and capable of reversal. Some people for theory of motivation, Maslow cites the follow- example may go for esteem before love (though ing basic needs: physiological needs; safety at the same time these individuals may ‘seek needs; belongingness and loving needs; esteem self-assertion for the sake of love rather than

164 Mass communications: seven characteristics

self-esteem itself’). There are artists who put been challenged by what has been termed mass A creation before all else; there is the psychopathic self-communication, that is a new world of personality suff ering from a permanent loss of blogging, indeed a blogosphere in which B the love needs; and there is the potential reversal thousands of ordinary people and groups have caused by the undervaluing of a long-satisfi ed modifi ed, if not as yet substantially altered, the need: ‘Thus a man who has given up his job landscape of mass communication. C rather than lose his self-respect, and who then Mass self-communication is characterized by starves for six months or so, may be willing to horizontal fl ows of activity, of communicative D take his job back even at the price of losing his autonomy opening up a scenario which Manuel self-respect.’ Cassells in an article entitled ‘Communication, Th e hierarchy is at its most reversible in situ- power and counter-power’, published in the E ations involving ‘ideals, high social standards, International Journal of Communication (Vol. high values, and the like. With such values 1, 2007), says is ‘self-generated in content, F people become martyrs’. Torture victims who self-generated in emission and self-generated

defy their oppressors also confound Maslow’s in reception by many that communicate with G hierarchy. It is further acknowledged by Maslow many’. that human behaviour is prompted by multiple Faced with competition from horizontal motivations. networking, corporate media have responded H It would be theoretically possible, he says, ‘to by following policies of coexistence leading to analyse a single act of an individual and see in absorption: at vast expense, social networking I it the expression of his physiological needs, his sites such as youtube (Google), myspace

safety needs, his love needs, his esteem needs, (Murdoch’s news corp, until sold off at a JK and self-actualization’. Equally, not all behaviour considerable loss in 2011) and Flickr.com is motivated; and motivation must also be (Yahoo!) become part of the porfolios of corpo- considered in the light of the ‘external fi eld’, the rate giants who, in Cassell’s words, ‘understood L pressures placed upon people to react in certain the need to enter the battle in the horizontal ways. See self-concept; vals typology. networks … buying social networking sites to M See also topic guide under communication tame their communities, owning the network theory. infrastructure to diff erentiate access rights, and N Mass communication Traditionally a term endless other means of policing and framing the describing institutionalized forms of public- newest form of information space’. See cultiva- message production and dissemination, operat- tion; cultural apparatus; demotic turn; O ing on a large scale, involving a considerable mass communications: seven character- division of labour in their production processes istics; mobilization; normative theories P and functioning through complex mediations of mass media; web 2.0. of print, fi lm, recording tape and photography. ▶ James Curran, ed., Media and Society (5th edition, R However, as Denis McQuail points out in Mass Bloomsbury Academic, 2010). Communication Theory (Sage, 2010), ‘Mass Mass communications: seven charac- communication, in the sense of a large-scale, teristics In Towards a Sociology of Mass S one-way flow of public content, continues Communications (Collier-Macmillan, 1969), unabated, but it is no longer carried only by Denis McQuail cites the following features T the “traditional” mass media. Th ese have been of mass communications: (1) they normally supplemented by new media (especially the require complex formal organizations; (2) they U Internet and mobile technology) and new types are directed towards large audiences; (3) they of content and fl ow are carried at the same time. are public – the content is open to all and the Th ese diff er mainly in being more extensive, less distribution is relatively unstructured and V structured, often interactive as well as private informal; (4) audiences are heterogeneous – of

and individualized.’ Mass communication many diﬀ erent kinds – in composition, people W systems are deeply involved in the processes living under widely different conditions in and debates surrounding culture, politics and widely diﬀ ering cultures; (5) the mass media can economics. establish simultaneous contact with very large XYZ With the advent of the internet and the numbers of people at a distance from the source, arrival of the mobile phone with its capacity and widely separated from one another; (6) the for instant text and picture transmission, the relationship between communicator and audi- media institutions that once held a monopoly ence is addressed by persons known only in their of national and global communications have public role as communicators; (7) the audience

165 Massiﬁ cation

for mass communications is ‘collectively unique generated television personality; followed by to modern society’. Roxscene, the fi rst female. Th e Max Headroom It is an ‘aggregate of individuals united by Show on the UK’s channel 4 won the Royal a common focus of interest, engaging in an Television Society’s Original Programme Award identical form of behaviour, and open to activa- in 1986. tion towards common ends’, yet the individuals McCombs and Shaw’s agenda-setting involved ‘are unknown to each other, have only model of media effects, 1976 The process a restricted amount of interaction, do not orient and effects of agenda-setting have been a their actions to each other and are only loosely central interest for media research and study. organized or lacking in organization’. Two important contributions to our understand- What occupies current media analysis is how ing of agenda-setting theory have been articles far the internet has modifi ed the seven pillars by Maxwell E. McCombs and Donald L. Shaw, of mass communications – indeed, shaken those ‘Th e agenda-setting function of mass media’ in pillars, fragmented the ‘common focus of inter- Public Opinion Quarterly, 36 (1972) and ‘Struc- est and threatened the very notion of collective turing the “Unseen Environment”’ in the Journal experience’. of Communication (Spring, 1976). Shaw followed Massifi cation However large the population, it these up with ‘Agenda setting and mass commu- is made up of individuals. Massifi cation, a US nication theory’ in the Gazette XXV, 2 (1979). term, is the process by which the population In their 1976 publication, the authors write, is regarded as, and treated as, a lumpen mass ‘Audiences not only learn about public issues with similar if not identical tastes and attitudes. and other matters through the media, they also Massifi cation serves as an excuse by society’s learn how much importance to attach to an privileged and elite to regard the mass as issue or topic from the emphasis the mass media ‘only capable’ of benefi ting from art, education, place upon it. For example, in refl ecting what information, entertainment if it is presented in candidates are saying during a campaign, the its simplest, most unchallenging form. Massifi - mass media apparently determine the important cation only makes headway when large numbers issues. In other words, the mass media set the of people accept the image of themselves as “agenda” of the campaign.’ Thus in the view projected by the purveyors of mass culture. See of McCombs and Shaw, the media are highly advertising; public service broadcasting influential in shaping our perceptions of the (psb). world: ‘This ability to affect cognitive change Mass manipulative model of (media) among individuals is one of the most important communication See commercial laissez- aspects of the power of mass communication.’ faire model of (media) communication. (See effects of the mass media.) Mass media See mass communication. Issues and events are given an X, and each X is Mass media eff ects See effects of the mass subject to diff erential media attention. Accord- media. ingly, the amount of media exposure an event Mass Observation An organization founded in or issue receives governs the size of the X in the 1937 by Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson with perceptions of the public. In other words, what the purpose of furthering the scientific study the media treat as important is consequently of human behaviour in the UK. Large numbers regarded as important by the public (a large X); of volunteer observers were used, recruited and what the media neglect, or fail to report, through advertisements in the national press; remains a miniscule X. at one time it is estimated that there were over Some writers have been critical of this model 1,000 such volunteers. The object of Mass for oversimplifying the process of media infl u- Observation was ultimately the ‘observation of ence, as it takes no account of infl uences other everyone by everyone, including themselves’. than the media in setting personal agendas in Data that has been collected is to be found in the relation to public issues. Another problem with Tom Harrisson Mass Observation Archives in the McCombs and Shaw model is highlighted by the University of Sussex. See media analysis. Denis McQuail and Sven Windähl in Communi- Mass self-communication See mass commu- cation Models for the Study of Mass Communi- nication. cations (Longman, 5th impression, 1998). Mathematical theory of communication See Th ey identify not one, but a range of agendas: shannon and weaver’s model of communi- ‘We can speak of the agendas of individuals and cation, 1949. groups or we can speak of the agendas of institu- Max Headroom The first male computer- tions – political parties and governments. Th ere

166 McGregor Commission Report on the Press (UK), 1977

is an important distinction between the notion care, travel, leisure, dieting, politics, the family, A of setting personal agendas by communication and virtually every other aspect of society’. directly to the public and setting an institutional Ritzer sees McDonaldization as showing every B agenda by inﬂ uencing the politicians and deci- sign ‘of being an inexorable process by sweeping sion makers.’ McQuail and Windähl perceive through seemingly impervious institutions and here a dual role for the media – influencing parts of the world’. McDonalds is America, and C public opinion, and inﬂ uencing the elite: ‘In wherever the Big Mac and fries are consumed, so reality there is a continuous interaction between is the American way of life, the American dream. D elite proposals and public views, with the media The author analyses his subject through the acting as carrier as well as source.’ frame of ideas posed by the German social theo- A third criticism of McCombs and Shaw’s rist, Max Weber (1864–1920), on the workings E model relates to the actual intentions of the of bureaucracy in the creation of an ‘iron cage’ media: do they initiate and select the issues which of rationality, that is a bureaucratic sameness of F they go on to amplify; climb aboard a ‘band- normative behaviour from which it is impossible

wagon’ of nascent public interest; or respond to escape. G chiefly to the promptings of the power elite? In Ritzer’s view, the universalization, the Further, it was early in the day for McCombs and rationalization of eating and other behaviours, Shaw to key into the shifts in public attention as represented and driven by the McDonald’s H and activity brought about by the internet empire, is based upon four ‘alluring dimensions’ and the online opportunities it has provided for of irresistibility: eﬃ ciency (‘the optimum method I greater participation and interactivity. for getting from one point to another’); calcu-

For a diagrammatic representation of the lability (‘quantity has become the equivalent to JK model, see James Watson’s Media Communica- quality’); predictability (‘there is great comfort in tion: An Introduction to Theory and Process knowing that McDonald’s off ers no surprises’); (Palgrave Macmillan,3rd edition, 2008), Chapter and control, a production/service discipline L 5, ‘Th e news: gates, agendas and values’, page 151. which applies equally to the customer as to those See blogosphere; consent, manufacture who serve them. M of; guard dog metaphor; intervening Crucial in the exercise of control is the use of variables (ivs); mainstreaming; mean technology, ‘the soft-drink dispenser that shuts N world syndrome; mobilization; noelle- itself off when the glass is full, the french fries neumann’s spiral of silence model of machine that rings and lifts itself out of the oil public opinion, 1974; one-step, two-step, when the fries are crisp’. Th is technology, says O multi-step flow models of communica- Ritzer, ‘increases the corporation’s control over tion; rogers and dearing’s agenda- workers’. P setting model, 1987; significant others. Ritzer acknowledges that McDonaldization See also topic guide under communication has ‘powerful advantages’, but he argues that the R models. foundations of its success as mentioned above ▶ McCombs and Shaw, ‘The evolution of agenda ‘can be thought of as the basic components of a setting research: twenty-fi ve years in the marketplace rational system’; his view is that ‘rational systems S of ideas’, Journal of Communication Spring, 1993; inevitably spawn irrationalities’ and ‘irrational James W. Dearing and Everett M. Rogers, Agenda- consequences’, not the least of them being T Setting (Sage, 1996). matters of ecological concern. Ritzer’s book McDonaldization Term formulated, and focuses on the ‘great costs and enormous risks of U introduced in his book Th e McDonaldization of McDonaldization’; its purpose is to help alert the Society (Pine Forge Press, 1992, revised edition, public to these and ‘to stem its tide’ while fearing 1996), by George Ritzer, and with the subtitle that ‘the future will bring with it more rather V ‘An investigation into the changing character of than less McDonaldization’. See slapps. See also topic guide under global perspectives. contemporary social life’. As Ritzer points out, W the book is not about the fast-food business, but ▶ Barry Smart, ed., Resisting McDonaldization (Sage, rather serves as a major paradigm of a ‘wide- 1999). ranging process I call McDonaldization’ – the McGregor Commission Report on the Press XYZ ‘process by which the principles of the fast-food (UK), 1977 Under the chairmanship of Profes- restaurants are coming to dominate more and sor Oliver Ross Gregor, the Royal Commission more sectors of American society as well as produced an interim report in 1976. Concerned of the rest of the world’; these eff ects are felt about the shaky finances of newspapers, the throughout culture, in ‘education, work, health Commission proposed that the State should give

167 McGuffi n

interest-relief on loans which papers would need dynamic in relation to X (the issue). McLeod if they were to modernize their printing meth- and Chaff ee take this model and apply it to mass ods and cut costs. Like so many inspired ideas communication. In ‘Interpersonal approaches emerging from royal commissions, the proposal to communication research’ in the American got nowhere. Behavioural Scientist, 16 (1973), they too refer to In its final report (1977), the Commission a ‘co-orientational approach’. recognized the anti-Labour bias in most of the In their model there are three major ‘players’ nation’s press: ‘We have no doubt that over most forming the frame of the kite – the elite, the of this century, the press had treated the beliefs public, and, in a mediating role, the media – and activities of the Labour movement with orientated towards each other and to the tail hostility.’ Th e Commission recommended that of the kite which represents current news, and the Press Council be strengthened, its infl uence issues in the news – an endless stream of new increased; that, for example, its lay members matter which the media process with the elite be equal in number to its press representation. and public in mind, and serving, as it were, both. Th is recommendation was accepted, though the Such a balanced, symmetrical arrangement is Council demurred at other advice. See commis- closer to the ideal than a refl ection of realities, sions/committees on the media. for quite clearly the elite (see power elite) McGuffin Film director Alfred Hitchcock have considerably more infl uence over media (1899–1980) was fond of using this expression performance than the public; indeed ownership to describe any device or element of plot that and control of media lie largely with the elite in captures the attention and interest of the audi- one form or another. ence, but which is intended to be, and acknowl- To obtain a more accurate representation of edged to be, merely a means to an end: an the co-orientational nature of the relationship amiable red herring. Hitch himself described the between the key players in the drama of media, McGuffi n as ‘that which spies are after (in fi lms) it would be necessary to shift the axis a little, but the audience don’t care’. See narrative. with the media being in much closer proximity ★McLeod and Chaffee’s ‘kite’ model, to the elite than to the public. However, the 1973 Th is is best studied in conjunction with kite metaphor remains a useful one, in that the newcomb’s abx model of communication, situation in which all the players fi nd themselves 1953. Newcomb focuses on interpersonal links in is unstable, and it is the stream of Xs – events, relation to issues, believing that each element innovations, developments, changes – which (Person A and Person B) forms a triangular causes that instability. Th is model should also

McLeod and Chaff ee’s ‘kite’ model, 1973

168 McNelly’s model of news ﬂ ow, 1959

be looked at in relation to agenda-setting sistible cultural spread that radio, television A models. See topic guides under communica- and film made possible throughout the world, tion models; communication theory. turning it into a global village. Radio he called B McLuhanism Th e archpriest of media analysis the Tribal Drum, photography was the Brothel- in the late 1960s was the Canadian professor, without-walls, TV the Timid Giant, the motor Marshall McLuhan (1911–80), creator of the car the Mechanical Bride. C Centre for Media Studies in Toronto. His head- Perhaps McLuhan’s most valuable analysis is line-catching assertions and prophesies about to be found in his examination of the impact of D the eﬀ ect of the new media, particularly TV, on printing on civilization in Th e Gutenberg Galaxy: society as we know it were aided and abetted by Th e Making of Typographic Man (Routledge & inspired phrase-making. Described by Northrop Kegan Paul, 1962). See hot media, cold media. E Fry as a ‘manic depressive roller-coaster of ★McNelly’s model of news flow, 1959 An Publicity’, McLuhan foretold the annihilation of improvement upon white’s gatekeeper F the printed word by the electronic media, yet his model, 1950. In ‘Intermediary communicators

books sold (and were read) in thousands. in the international news’ in Journalism Quar- G Th e most quoted McLuhanism is his phrase, terly, 36 (1959), J.T. McNelly identiﬁ es several the medium is the message, used as the heading of intermediary stages through which a news Chapter 1 in Understanding the Media (Routledge item passes from event to presentation in mass H & Kegan Paul, 1964; Routledge, 2002). McLuhan communication form. The author follows the was convinced that with electronic transmission, progress of a newsworthy event (E) taken up by I especially TV, content was everywhere swamped a foreign correspondent (CI) and then passed

by process. Equally he was concerned at the irre- through several agencies where the report of E JK

1 2 Keys to symbols in diagram: S, S , S , etc. = The report in a succession of V E = Newsworthy event altered (shortened) forms

C1 = Foreign agency correspondent R = Receiver W C2 = Regional bureau editor R1, R 2, etc. = Family members, friends, associates, C3 = Agency central bureau or deskman etc. XYZ C4 = National or regional home bureau editor S – R = Story as modifi ed by word-of-mouth C5 = Telegraph editor or radio or TV news transmission editor Dotted line = Feedback

McNelly’s model of intermediary communicators in news ﬂ ow, showing news passing diff erent ‘gatekeepers’ (after McNelly, 1959)

169 McQuail’s accountability of media model, 1997

is shaped and shortened (rather like the game of meaningful relationship with their audiences Chinese Whispers, though, hopefully, not with and those whom they aff ect, less ready to enter the same hilarious results). into dialogue.’ McQuail sees accountability as McNelly illustrates a very complex process being in a state of crisis. His article examines of mediation which continues beyond the possible ways of achieving accountability and production/presentation stage when readers or suggests how principles and practice might cope viewers pass on the news to others by word of with present and future developments. mouth. What the model does not do is address Concluding his analysis, McQuail cautions the criteria for news selection, the news values against overstating the ‘crisis of accountability’; which operate the operators of the gatekeep- after all, ‘the performance of media refl ects the ing process. See galtung and ruge’s model imperfections of society as much as their own of selective gatekeeping, 1965. See also failings’. We must realize that ‘free media have topic guide under communication models. the right to be “irresponsible” and that some McQuail’s accountability of media model, perceived “misuses” of autonomy will be a neces- 1997 In a number of books and periodical sary price for potential benefits of invention, articles, Denis McQuail has written searchingly creativity, opposition, deviation and change’. on the responsibilities of media to society. His ▶ Denis McQuail, Media Performance: Mass Commu- model illustrating the relationship between nication in the Public Interest (Sage, 1992); McQuail’s media freedom, responsibility and account- Mass Communication Th eory: An Introduction (Sage, ability is published in the European Journal of 6th edition, 2010). Communication, December 1997, and analysed McQuail’s four stages of audience fragmen- in the article ‘Accountability of media and soci- tation, 1997 See audience, fragmentation ety: principles and means’. of. The model is underpinned by principles of McWorld Vs Jihad A global confl ict in cultures, public service, that is the ‘best interests’ of represented by the transnational corpora- society in its broadest sense, and this framework tion bringing to the world ‘sameness’ and the includes people as voters and citizens as well counterforces of localism. Benjamin R. Barber as consumers. Free media have responsibilities in Jihad Vs McWorld (Times Books, 1995) and obligations, and they are answerable for investigates the dynamic scenario of localite their performance. Assigned obligations may resistance to the burgeoning power of all- be discerned, for example, in the broadcasting encompassing cultures emanating chiefl y from charters of public service broadcasting the United States (and sometimes referred to as (psb), while contracted obligations may relate Americanization). McWorld is characterized by to those bodies that commission and pay for ‘fast music, fast computers and fast food – MTV, media services. All the while self-imposed obli- Macintosh and McDonald’s – pressing nations gations work according to professional aims and into one homogenous global theme park …’ (see practices and the organizational contexts that mcdonaldization). infl uence them. Jihad on the other hand celebrates tribalism. Media have responsibilities to source, to audi- Th e resistance is seen to take the form of adop- ence, to the public at large, to minorities, and tion and assimilation of dominant imported obligations in relation to community and nation. cultures; what Roland Robinson has called Liability for harm caused can be seen to operate glocalization, turning the global into the local. when the media are brought to court on charges See his article ‘Globalization or glocalization?’ of defamation, though ensuring answerability in Journal of International Communication, 1 in relation to quality of performance is obviously (1994). more problematic. With the terrorist destruction of the Twin McQuail believes ‘we face a major dilemma Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York in reconciling the interests of society with on 11 September 2001, what had been perceived current trends of media development’. More as essentially a cultural confl ict passed into a than ever, control over the media has become new sphere of crisis, in which the government diffi cult to exercise, partly because of media’s of the US, aided by that of the UK, declared a proliferation into many models – brought about jihad (holy war) ostensibly on terrorism, but in by new technology – and because of the trans- the view of many commentors eff ectively deep- nationalization of media ownership: ‘Modern ening cultural and political divisions globally, in mass media are less inclined to make voluntary particular along fault-lines between Western and commitments to society, less able to have any Muslim nations.

170 ‘Mean world’ syndrome

In his book Th e Clash of Civilizations and the Th ere is a ready tendency to consider words A Remaking of World Order (Simon & Schuster, as the actual embodiment of the meaning they 1997), Samuel P. Huntington, whilst acknowledg- attempt to describe; in fact, they are approxima- B ing the tensions between Muslim and Western tions. Just as paper money has no intrinsic value, nations, presents a more nuanced view of the words have no intrinsic meaning: rather they are fault-lines between cultures or civilizations. He accredited with value or meaning by common C deﬁ nes a civilization as ‘a culture writ large’ and consent. Like currency, word-meanings are argues that ‘the post-Cold War world is a world subject to devaluation and manipulation. Ulti- D of seven or eight major civilizations. Cultural mately you can paper the walls with debased commonalities and diﬀ erences shape the inter- currency; debased language becomes a weapon ests, antagonisms, and associations of states. against meaning. E Th e most important countries in the world come A prevalent assumption is that an act or work overwhelmingly from different civilizations’. of communication has to mean something. Th us F Th us ‘global politics has become multipolar and a bemused spectator in front of, say, a work of

multicivilizational’. abstract art, might declare, ‘But what does it G Huntington identiﬁ es the following contem- mean?’ Th e short answer is that our spectator is porary civilizations: Sinic (China, and Chinese unfamiliar with (or resistant to) the nature of the communities in Southeast Asia and other discourse that has, in the ﬁ rst instance, taken H locations outside of China, as well as Vietnam place between the artist, his/her medium and and Korea); Japanese; Hindu (mainly in India); his/her environment (in place and time). Unless I Islamic (whose subcivilizations include Arab, the spectator can ‘tune into’ the codes operated

Turkic, Persian and Malay); Orthodox (located by the artist, unless the spectator can recognize JK mainly in Russia); Western (located mainly that a discourse is actually taking place, then the in Europe, North America, Australia and art he/she witnesses – for him or her, not neces- New Zealand); Latin American; and African sarily anyone else – is meaningless. L (although North Africa belongs to the Islamic On the other hand, the spectator might civilization, and much of the continent has been instinctively warm to a work of art, be attracted M subjected to Western influences). He further by its colour, shape, texture, and still be at a argues that ‘religion is a central defi ning char- loss to grasp its meaning. In this case, common N acteristic of civilizations’, noting that four of the ground between artist, work of art and spectator fi ve major world religions are linked to the major has been found. Communication has begun, and civilizations: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and so, arguably, has meaning. O Confucianism; the exception is Buddhism. Meaning, obviously, has to be worked at. Th e Huntington questions the view that popular codes or practices of specific communicative P culture and consumerism are necessarily discourses have to be recognized and eventually signifi cant factors in relationships between civi- understood, the relationship between speaker/ R lizations, arguing that ‘the essence of Western writer/artist/musician actor/dancer, etc. and the civilization is the Magna Carta not the Magna forms and conventions of the chosen medium of Mac. Th e fact that non-Westerners may bite into communication responded to, preferably sympa- S the latter has no implications for their accepting thetically and with empathy. the former’. Meaning can be said to be in a perpetual state T Meaning In communication terms, a dynamic of reworking or renegotiation. Th e artist’s mean- interaction between reader/viewer/listener, ing may never be the spectator’s meaning; but U etc. and the message. As John Fiske puts it in meaning is the property of neither. Indeed, to Introducing Communication Studies (Methuen, regard meaning as something universally deter- 1982; see also 3rd edition, Routledge, 2010), ‘A minable and fi xed is to create myth and to deal V reader is constituted by his socio-cultural expe- in propaganda. See deconstruction; deep structure; paradigm; polysemy; semiol- rience and thus he is the channel through which W message and culture interact. Th is is meaning.’ ogy/semiotics. When we say something is ‘a question of Meaning systems See dominant, subordi- semantics’, we are referring to the hazardous nate, radical. XYZ nature of actually pinning down, with any ‘Mean world’ syndrome It has been argued exactitude, the meaning of what a person has by commentators such as the American media communicated. The word ‘freedom’ on some analyst George Gerbner that the more people lips has quite a diff erent connotation than if watch television, the more likely they will expressed by others. consider that out there is a ‘mean world’. On

171 Media accountability

the small screen, content analysis tells us, crime tion – cultural, political, economic, social, rages about ten times more often than in real life. aesthetic and, in terms of prevailing systems Heavy viewers (see mainstreaming), accord- of communication, more guerilla warfare than ing to Gerbner in a series of published analyses something preplanned and formalized; it tends since 1980, overestimate the statistical chance of to be DIY action, ‘micromedia’ being a useful violence in their own lives (see resonance) and label. What activist groups have in common consequently harbour a heightened mistrust of is a commitment to bringing about change strangers. However, Gerbner’s conclusions have in society; they see themselves as agents of been challenged by recent researchers. change, their aim to draw public attention to While granting that Gerbner’s scenario of TV issues, their target to convert attention into cultivating in viewers a fear of crime is interest- public action. Their endeavours are generally ing, Guy Cumberbatch and Dennis Howitt in A small-scale, collective, often ephemeral and Measure of Uncertainty: Th e Eff ects of the Mass dependent for success on the media literacy, or Media (Broadcasting Standards Council/John awareness, of potential users, subscribers and Libbey, 1989) write, ‘All in all, few empirical followers. See bricolage; facebook; global studies lend full support to the original Gerbner scrutiny; mobilization; networking: hypothesis, while there are many failures to social networking; open source; twitter; replicate.’ wikileaks; youtube. Th is position is reinforced by Jib Fowles in Th e ▶ Jill Posener, Spray It Loud (Routledge & Kegan Case for Television Violence (Sage, 1999), who Paul, 1982); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: Th e Meaning refers to ‘substantial studies done outside labo- of Style (Routledge, 1979); John D.H. Downing (with ratories and with large numbers of respondents Tamara Vallareal Ford, Geneve Gil and Laura Stern), that could find no evidence of a relationship Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and between television violence and real-world Social Movements (Sage, 2001); Jonah Peretti, ‘My aggression’; further, such evidence indicated that Nike media adventure’, Th e Nation (9 April, 2001); ‘exposure on a large scale to violence was linked Chris Atton, Alternative Media (Sage, 2001); Sean to reduced aggressiveness and criminality’. Th e Cubitt, ‘Tactical media’ in Katharine Sarikakis and debate continues. See effects of the mass Daya Kishan Th ussu, eds, Ideologies of the Internet media. (Hampton Press, 2006); Manuel Castells, Communi- Media accountability See mcquail’s cation Power (Oxford University Press, 2009); Leah accountability of media model, 1997. A. Lievrouw, Alternative and Activist New Media Media activism A term that in the main refers (Polity, 2011). to a variety of online critiques, protests and Media control Four categories of media control revelations directed at authority, big business, are generally recognized: Authoritarian, Pater- corporate practices and mainstream media – by nal, Commercial and Democratic. Th ey can apply either individuals (as for example in blogs – see to an individual communications system, such as blogosphere) or by groups operating websites, ownership of a newspaper, or to a state pattern online newspapers, etc., the nature of such of control. Th e fi rst indicates a total monopoly protests being satirical, iconoclastic and subver- of the means of communication and control over sive; often employing modes of popular culture what is expressed. Th e second is what Raymond in order to subvert it. Williams in Communication (Pelican, 1966) An offl ine example of activism would be the terms ‘authoritarianism with a conscience’, that addition of graffi ti comments on public posters, is authority with values and purposes beyond the adding of words or images to existing text or those concerning the maintenance of its own image, thus appropriating the original, offi cial power. Th e third relates to control by market message. Online activist tactics such as culture forces: anything can be said, provided that you jamming (see genre) and hactivism (see genre; can aff ord to say it and that you can say it profi t- hacker, hactivist) tend to be the work of ably. issue-committed groups possessing advanced Democratic control is the rarest category, computer skills and seeking to get their message implying active involvement in decisions by the across in face of the traditional dominance of workforce and, indeed, the readership or audi- mass media; hence the need to shock, startle, ence. Control works at diff erent levels – at the provoke, entertain (sometimes to sabotage) with operational level (editors, producers, etc.), at the a view to creating a swift and growing volume of allocative level (of funds, personnel, etc.) and popular support. at the external level (government, advertisers, Media activism is essentially about interven- consumers).

172 Media imperialism

Trends in media control have been towards process of growth and reinforcement. Where the A greater concentration of ownership; towards trade went, so followed developing media prac- ownership by conglomerate organizations tice and technology, refl ecting the values and B and subsequently a series of ever-diversifying assumptions of those who owned and manned control networks in which international the service. fi nance has fi ngers in practically every commu- As developing countries reached indepen- C nications pie, from newspapers to cinema, from dence, much concern was felt at the degree of records to satellites and, in the opening decades penetration by Western media. In 1972, the D of the twenty-fi rst century, ownership of online General Conference of the United Nations services and platforms. Educational, Scientifi c and Scientifi c Organiza- Running parallel with these trends has been tion (UNESCO) drew attention to the way in E the development of multi-marketing of media which the media of the richer sections of the products – books, films, TV series, video world were a means towards ‘the domination of F cassettes, with such products being packaged for world public opinion or a source of moral and

worldwide consumption. Economies of size have cultural pollution’. Subsequently the movement G allowed conglomerates to incoporate marketing towards a new world information order grew in and advertising of their diverse products at costs vigour and strength. well below what smaller competitors can match. In 1973, in Algiers, a meeting of heads of state of H Where conglomerates fall short of monopoly, non-aligned countries agreed to take concerted they synergize with other giants in the field, action to promote a fairer, more balanced I making market alliances that become more exchange of information among themselves, and exclusive the more powerful they grow. See to release themselves from dependence upon JK global media system: the main players; the experts of the richer nations, demanding new media; normative theories of mass the ‘reorganization of existing communication media; paywall; synergy; world trade channels which are the legacy of the colonial L organization (wto) telecommunications past ...’ By 1978, the UNESCO General Council agreement, 1997. See also topic guide under agreed its new Declaration on Mass Media, M media: ownership & control. emphasizing the ‘balanced’ aspect of a concept Mediacy Term first given public prominence of information based on the principle of ‘free N at the 1983 British Association conference by and balanced fl ow’. Michael Weiss and Carol Lorac of the Commu- Developing countries have long held a heart- nication and Social Skills Project at Brighton felt belief that Western agencies only report the O Polytechnic. Deemed as important, in the bad news of what happens in their countries, and education curriculum of the future, as literacy that this bad news – based upon what Anthony P and numeracy are today, mediacy is defi ned by Smith in his book Th e Geopolitics of Information Weiss and Lorac as ‘the ability to understand and (Faber, 1980) terms ‘aberrational’ criteria for R manipulate recorded sound and vision. Informa- news selection – causes serious harm, especially tion technology and video are the machinery of when such countries are in need of Western mediacy: its pen and paper’. fi nancial support and investment. S ▶ Kathleen Tyner, ed., Media Literacy: New Agendas One proponent of the imperialist thesis, in Communication (Routledge, 2010); Elliot Gaines, Herbert Schiller, writing in the late 1960s, saw T Media Literacy and Semiotics (Palgrave Macmillan, American television exports as part of an attempt 2011). by the American military industrial complex ‘to U Media eff ects See effects of the mass media. subjugate the world’. He argued that the declin- Media: hot and cold See hot media, cold ing European empires had been replaced by an media. emergent US empire; one arm of this empire V Media imperialism Term used by some theo- being the US-based, transnational communications industries which Schiller saw as working in rists to refer to the activities of the Western W media by which they attempt to dominate devel- collaboration with Western (predominantly US) oping countries through global communication political and military interests. operations. Crucial to the notion of media or These communications industries were for XYZ cultural imperialism is the understanding of the most part funded privately by advertis- the relationship between economic, territorial, ing revenue and were thus extensively tied to cultural and informational factors. In the age of commercial interests. The cultural artefacts Western economic colonialism in the nineteenth exported – mainly from the US – to other century the flow of information was a vital countries were seen as promoting the values

173 Media imperialism

of consumer capitalism. As such they could be transnationalized media may well be exagger- seen as either reinforcing these values where ated. Globally, many distinct regional, national they already existed, as for example in Western (and subnational) cultures within Europe and European countries, or as undermining tradi- other regions are still strong and resistant’. tional values and supplanting them with those of However, as McQuail points out, this does not consumer capitalism in countries, such as Th ird mean that the media imperialism thesis has World countries, where capitalist modes of ceased to be valid, for ‘many features of the production were non-existent or less developed. world media situation attest to the even more It was, for Schiller, a means by which the US powerful grip of the capitalist apparatus and could encourage, among other things, demand ethos on media nearly everywhere, with no place for its own products. left to hide’. Schiller’s thesis has met with some criticism. What is not in dispute are inequalities of John B. Th ompson in Th e Media and Modernity wealth and therefore of cultural and media (Polity Press, 1995), for example, argues that it provision between so-called core nations and overlooks the multipolar nature of the global peripheral nations (see core nations, periph- economy in which Europe, Japan, South-East eral nations) and the serious and ongoing Asia and China have played an increasingly information gaps between them; gaps which important role. Thompson believes that, ‘It are unlikely to be bridged until the structures of would be quite implausible to suggest that this deprivation are removed. complex and shifting fi eld of global power rela- It is not only the inequalities in the distribution tions could be analysed in terms of the thesis of information which cause concern, but also of cultural imperialism. The thesis is simply the fl ow of that communication. Cees Hamelink too rigid and one-dimensional to do justice to a in World Communication: Disempowerment global situation which is in considerable fl ux.’ and Self Empowerment (Zed Books, 1995) says: Further, argues Th ompson, the thesis tends to ‘Information fl ows across the globe are imbal- overlook the fact that whilst messages may be anced, since most of the world’s information diff used on a global scale, many factors within moves among the countries in the North, less the locale of their reception can aff ect the way between the North and the South, and very little in which they are appropriated by the audience. flows among the countries of the South,’ and Both senders and receivers contribute to the that this ‘diff erential access to the management construction of their meaning. Tamar Liebes of information has put the developing countries and Elihu Katz, for example, in their classic at a serious disadvantage in the world political- study of audience reception of episodes of economy.’ This situation ‘compromises their Dallas, the American soap opera, Th e Export national sovereignty’ and in so far as developing of Meaning: Cross-cultural Readings of ‘Dallas’ nations have increased ‘their import capacity for (Polity Press, 1993), demonstrate the impact that communication technology, they have become cultural variables can have on the reading of more dependent upon the economic forces of television texts. the North’. Schiller in later writings did acknowledge some More recent contributions to the media of these criticisms of his thesis. Whilst there are imperialism debate focus on the impact that the now a number of large multimedia corporations internet is having on traditional structures of based outside of the US, it is still the major player communication and association, assessing the within the globalized media market.Whatever nature and potential of more popular, diffuse the criticisms of the media imperialism thesis, interactivity, of far more ‘bottom-up’ activity, less the concentration of symbolic power mainly vertical and more horizontal, less organizational in the US as a result of the ongoing process of and more individualized. See blogosphere; globalization of ownership within the media demotic turn; global media system: the and cultural industries cannot be denied. main players; intercultural invasion; Denis McQuail in Mass Communication hybridization; macbride commission; Th eory (Sage, 2010) notes that numerous theo- mediasphere; mobilization; news agencies; rists view the process of globalization as being news aid?; news values; non-aligned news accompanied by the process of glocalization; pool; talloires declaration; world press a process in which ‘international channels, such freedom committee. See also topic guides as CNN and MTV, adapt to the circumstances under global perspectives; media issues & of regions served’. He goes on to argue that ‘the debates; media: ownership & control. “problem” of potential cultural damage from ▶ Edward S. Herman and R.W. Chesney, The

174 Mediapolis

Global Media: Th e New Missionaries of Corporate press … is that it has been controlled so long by A Capitalization (Cassell, 1997); James Lull, Media, an oligopoly’. Leading on from this is the fourth Communication, Culture: A Global Approach (Polity concern, a ‘one-sided protection of our free- B Press, 2000); George Monbiot, Th e Capitalist State: doms’; on the one hand ‘a state of constant alert the Corporate Takeover of Britain (Macmillan, 2001); against the abuse of state power over media, Tehri Rantanen, Th e Media and Globalization (Sage, reflected in the development of numerous C 2005); Kai Hafez, Th e Myth of Media Globalization safeguards’, yet on the other hand ‘not matched (Polity Press, 2007); Colin Sparks, Development, by an equivalent vigilance and set of safeguards D Globalization and the Mass Media (Sage, 2007); directed against the abuse of shareholder power Zizi Papacharissi, ed., Journalism and Citizenship: over the media’. E New Agendas in Communication (Routledge, 2009); In other words, in the conﬂ ict between media Jonathan Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media power and public interest the latter is likely to (Sean Kingston Publishing, 2010). lose out. One consequence of what Curran F Media moguls: four sources of concern Th e describes as ‘the current quiescence’ (in the face

issue of global media ambitions on the part of of the media’s assertion of its own freedoms) G transnational corporations (TNCs) prompts ‘is that media conglomerates have been able to debate between those alarmed by the conver- persuade governments around the world to ease gence of ownership across the world, and monopoly controls’. See berlusconi phenom- H others who accept its inevitability while at the enon; cross-media ownership; global- same time arguing that ‘media moguls’ are not ization (and the media); global media I as all-powerful, or their progress as inevitable, as system: the main players; journalism:

some commentators believe. phone-hacking; murdoch effect; news JK Such a debate was conducted on the Open corp; ofcom: office of communications Democracy website (www.opendemocracy.net) (uk); regulatory favours. See also topic by analysts on both sides of the Atlantic. One guide under media: ownership & control. L contributor to this debate is James Curran who, ▶ James Curran, Media and Democracy (Routledge, in an online article, ‘Global media concentration: 2011). M shifting the argument’ (23 May 2002), as relevant Media-Most Media empire in Russia after the today as it was when written, discusses what he fall of Communism and the shift in that country N perceives as four sources of concern in relation towards a capitalist and democratic system. Th e to what he sees as a ‘pattern of domination’. ‘Rupert Murdoch’ of Media-Most was Vladimir First, Curran believes that ‘the private concen- Gosinsky, whose independence, and indeed O tration of symbolic power potentially distorts criticism of the state government under Vladi- the democratic process’. He cites the example mir Putin, led to the group’s destruction and P of Italian media mogul Silvio Berlusconi, whose dismemberment. ‘Th rough the selective applica- media empire helped catapult him ‘into the tion of tax and criminal law,’ writes Jonathan R premiership of Italy without having any experi- Becker in ‘Lessons from Russia: A neo-author- ence of democratic offi ce … Berlusconi would itarian media system’ in the European Journal not be ruling Italy now if he did not dominate of Communication (June 2004), ‘including the S a massive media empire that enabled him to invasion of Media-Most premises by hooded manufacture a political party’. and heavily armed tax police, the direct pressure T Th e second concern ‘is that the power poten- of the Ministry of Press, Radio and Television tially at the disposal of media moguls tends to be and boardroom intrigue, Medi-Most collapsed.’ U exerted in a one-sided way’, usually rightist and In Becker’s view, ‘Th e timing, form and tenacity consumerist-orientated. Curran refers to Rupert of governments actions sent a chill through non- Murdoch, who ‘may have presided over the state media, contributing to uncertainty and, no V subversive Simpsons but he is also the man who doubt, self-censorship.’ See censorship. bullied his British journalists to follow a right- Media: new media See new media. W wing agenda … part of a more general pattern Mediapolis ‘Polis’ is Greek for city, thus the term in which shareholder interventions sometimes envisages a city of media, but one that is global advance conservative or market-friendly posi- in reach and infl uence. It links with McLuhan’s XYZ tions, but more rarely their antithesis’. notion in the 1960s of the media turning the Curran’s third concern is that ‘the concentra- world into a global village. Th e mediapolis is the tion of market power can stifle competition’. agora, that open space in which community He believes that a ‘fundamental reason for the and communication come together, where the long-standing defi ciencies of the British national people and their leaders deliberate on ‘the aff airs

175 Media research centres

of state’, and ideally contribute, together, to and cultural meaning – as being in a constant decision-making. process of interaction with the mediasphere Roger Silverstone in Media and Morality: On and public sphere. He images the relationship as the Rise of the Mediapolis (Polity, 2007) describes resembling Russian dolls: the public sphere fi ts the mediapolis as ‘a site for the construction of within the mediasphere, which in turn fi ts within a moral order … commensurate with the scope the semiosphere. and scale of global interdependence’. It is an ideal The most salient feature of these interlock- founded in the principle of one world based upon ing spheres, argues Hartley, is journalism. It equality and civility; a very diff erent scenario was journalism that originated and nurtured from that which currently exists. concepts of freedom, of human rights, within Silverstone sees ‘no integrity within the societies. It served a key function in, and in turn contemporary midiapolis. The public space was served by, the success of the American and which it constitutes’, he believes, ‘is fractured by French revolutions. The public sphere of the cultural diff erence and the absence of commu- nineteenth century was created by journalism. nication, as much as it is by the homogenization Hartley believes ‘there would be no public’ and of global television and genuine, if only momen- consequently no progress towards the sover- tary, collective attention to global events, crises eignty of the people without the aid of journal- and catastrophes’. What we have is something istic writing. Th is served, and continues to serve, ‘manifestly … embryonic and imperfect; and as a counterforce to subordination; indeed it is even in its potential can never be imagined as ‘the mechanism for making these [democratic] fully realizable’. However, ‘it has to be seen as discourses generally available, and also for a necessary starting point for the creation of a articulating the diff erent forms of resistance’. more eff ective global space’. Ultimately, though, journalism’s power to What Silverstone is suggesting is a new moral defi ne and further the public sphere depends on order, one that challenges ‘the inequities of readership. Th e changing nature of readership representation and persistence of exclusion’ also alters the nature of the public and private characteristic of the exercise of media power spheres. Hartley believes that we have moved ‘both by capital and the state, and within the from the traditional adversarial mode of jour- ideological and prejudiced frames of unrefl exive nalism, with its public, political and masculine reporting and storytelling’. Key is ‘our relation- bias, to a postmodernist phase, driven in ship to the other, to the stranger’; our obligation particular by popular journalism (described by ‘to welcome the stranger … to listen and to Hartley as ‘the textual system of modernity’). hear’, and thus to acknowledge the need for the Th is gives emphasis not to public life ‘but to creation of ‘space for eff ective communication’. private meaning’. He identifies the following See accessed voices; democracy and the shifts in the nature of readership: from male media; emancipatory use of the media; to female; from old to young; from militant empowerment; globalization (and the to meditative; from public to private; from media); information gaps; open source; governmental to consumerist; and from law- people’s communication charter; public making to identity-forming. Hartley describes sphere; wedom, theydom. the mediasphere as ‘suff used with images and ▶ Shuang Liu, Introducing Intercultural Communica- issues which connect popular readerships and tion: Global Cultures and Contexts (Sage, 2010); popular meanings together ... the mainstream Alexander G. Nicolaev, ed., Ethical Issues in Interna- of contemporary journalism is fashion, gossip, tional Communication (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). lifestyle, consumerism and celebrity, and “news” Media research centres See research is private, visual, narrativized and personalized’. centres. It follows that the icon of the contemporary Mediasphere Term posed and defi ned by John mediasphere is ‘not the superpower but the Hartley in Popular Reality: Journalism, Moder- supermodel’. nity, Popular Culture (Arnold, 1996) to describe Th e shifts mentioned here are not, however, to the positioning of media, its range and breadth be seen as having become disengaged from the of influence, in relationship to the public past of journalism/readership: modern journal- sphere, and the notion of the Semiosphere put ism is, populist, yes. Yet it remains in the tradi- forward by Yuri Lotman in Th e Universe of the tion of the radical journalism that helped give Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Univer- birth to the American and French revolutions. sity of Indiana Press, 1990). Hartley sees the See democracy and the media. semiosphere – the sphere of cultural expression Media Studies: the internationalization of

176 Media theory: purpose and uses

Media Studies Media Studies took its early have implicit understandings or ideas with A dominant form from US-UK perspectives; it which they make sense of the media’. Such a was essentially English language-based, working theoretical level is important because of the role B along largely Western parameters; and study it plays in public debate on the media, though of media by and about the rest of the world often leading ‘to simplistic portrayals of the role either did not exist, or operated in the margins and inﬂ uence of the media’. Practioner theory C of course programmes more enthnocentric relates to the ideas which media practitioners than global in scope. In 2000 James Curran have about their world. It is also referred to as D and Myung Jin-Park edited a seminal book, operational theory, covering ‘the accumulated De-Westernizing Media Studies (Routledge). Its practical wisdom found in most organizational several contributors argued the case, expressed and professional settings’. E in the book’s introduction by Curran, that the Academic theory – the primary focus of study of media be broadened ‘in a way that takes Williams’s book, and indeed of the study of F account of the experience of countries outside media from GCSE and A level to degree work

the Anglo-American orbit’. and beyond – is what occupies scholarship, G In 2009 Routledge published another inﬂ u- and as far as media study is concerned, involves ential work, Internationalizing Media Studies, a broad range of academic ﬁ elds, including, as edited by Daya Kishan Th ussu. In his introduc- Williams lists them, sociology, psychology, H tory chapter, ‘Why internationalize Media Stud- social psychology, literary studies, anthropology, ies and how?’, Th ussu writes that ‘meaningful sociolinguistics, economics, political science, I endeavours at providing comparative models of philosophy, history, law, rhetoric and speech

media systems have ignored analysis beyond the communication, group and systems theory, ‘and JK Euro-American ambit, despite the extraordinary even mathematics’. expansion of the media, especially in Asia’. Any In the light of this diversity, says Williams, ‘it meaningful examination of the internationaliza- is not surprising that there are confl icts over the L tion of media study, states Th ussu, ‘must take assumptions, foci and methods of analysis in into account the rapid growth of China and India the fi eld and that contradictory hypotheses and M … which are increasingly making their presence theories are put forward’. Th is, of course, is part felt on the global scene’. of the fascination, indeed the open-endedness, N Th ussu talks of ‘a moral imperative to interna- of the study of media. Th eories must be exam- tionalize’, for despite ‘the exponential expansion ined and re-examined, subjected to close and in media in the non-Western world, its study in insistent scrutiny; in other words tested in terms O non-metropolitan centres remains largely insig- of relevance and reliability, and it must not be nifi cant, not to say tokenistic’. seen as something ‘detached from the day-to- P ▶ Katharine Sarikakis, British Media in a Global Era day issues of ordinary men and women’. (Bloomsbury Academic, 2004); Daya Th ussu, Inter- Th eory ‘guides research by helping scholars R national Communication: Continuity and Change organize how they gather facts and observe (2nd edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2006); Gerard the world. But good theory should also help us Goggin and Mark McLelland, eds, International- to understand and make sense of our personal S izing Internet Studies: Beyond Anglophone Paradigms experience and the wider structures and (Routledge, 2009). processes of daily life, and how they shape our T Media technology See topic guide under interaction with other people’. For Williams, media: technologies. the ultimate test of any theory ‘is the extent to U Media theory: purpose and uses In his which it furthers our understanding of the world introduction to Understanding Media Theory we live in’. As well as assisting us to develop (Arnold, 2003), Kevin Williams says that the our knowledge of mass media, theory helps us V purposes of media theory are fourfold: to answer ‘challenge the misleading ideas that have come to dominate public debate about their infl uence the question ‘What is going on?’; to explain how W and why; to suggest what might happen next; and involvement’. and, taking prediction into account, to serve as In terms of subject interest, theory focuses a guide to future behaviour and performance. He in the main on the production side of texts, XYZ identifi es three levels of theory, each of which the texts themselves (see semiology) and the interacts with, infl uences and is infl uenced by reception of those texts, all within the cultural, the others in the contexts where communication political, economic, technological and environ- takes place. mental contexts in which communication takes Th ere is commonsense theory in which ‘people place. During the early days of media study and

177 Mediation

research, the 1940s and 1950s, attention centred the mediation of press and TV; our perceptions almost exclusively on the communicators, and of events are coloured by the perceptions, preoc- there was the assumption that what was trans- cupations, values, of the mediators. mitted was simply received. With the advent of However, the construct of events is far from uses and gratifications theory the audi- a monopoly of the mass media; it is further ence became important and it became plain that mediated, and the process modifi ed or altered audiences put media to many uses, not always altogether, by those around us who exert infl u- the ones intended by the communicators. ence – friends, relatives, work colleagues, etc. At around the same time, in the 1960s and – and other so-called intervening variables 1970s, textual analysis came into its own (see (ivs) such as personal mood, time of day or state denotation, codes, connotation, signs). of health. Deconstruction of texts became a key activity. The term takes on fresh dimensions and Eventually interest turned to deconstructing the direction when applied to network communica- audience itself, using research methods such as tion (see new media; networking: social those pioneered in ethnography (see ethno- networking). In the digital age mediation is graphic approach to audience measure- characterized by the participation and interac- ment). Today there is general agreement that to tion of network users; patterns of mediation are focus on one area of study to the neglect of others more horizontal than vertical, more a process is to produce skewed results, and the validity and of exchange in which users become their own reliability of theory suff ers. Ultimately, however, message-makers and mediators; thus the the purpose of theory can be summed up in one scenario is more fragmented, individualized and phrase – the search for meaning. See topic in a perpetual state of fl ux. guide under communication theory. In Alternative and Activist New Media (Polity ▶ Stephen W. Littlejohn, Theories of Human Press, 2011), Leah A. Lievrouw writes that Communication (Wadsworth, 7th edition, 2002); ‘mediation is comprised of two interrelated Em Griffi n, A First Look at Communication Th eory modes of communicative action that contrast (McGraw-Hill, 5th edition, 2003); Steve Duck and with the production-consumption dynamics and David T. McMahon, Th e Basics of Communication: A linear “eff ects” or feedback models of associated Relational Perspective (Sage, 2008); Denis McQuail, with mass media’. McQuail’s Mass Communication Th eory (Sage, 6th Reconfi guration describes how users ‘modify edition, 2010). and adapt media technologies and systems Mediation Between an event and the reporting as needed to suit their various purposes or or broadcasting of it to an audience, mediation interests’. Remediation (a term originated by occurs, that is a process of interpretation – shap- Jay Bolter and Robert Grusin in Remediation: ing, selecting, editing, emphasizing, de-empha- Understanding New Media, MIT Press, 1999) sizing – according to the perceptions, expecta- occurs when ‘content, forms and structures of tions and previous experience of those involved communication relationships’ are mediated by in the reporting of the event; and in accordance users when they ‘borrow, adapt or remix existing with the requirements and characteristics of materials, expressions, and interactions to create the means of reporting. Between the event of a continually expanding universe of innovative a car accident or a murder and the report of new works and ideas’. Lievrouw cites these as such an event a whole series of inter-mediating ‘hallmarks of contemporary communication actions takes place. Th e event is translated into processes, creative work and media culture’. words or pictures; it is processed according to Reconfi guration and remediation ‘allow people the demands of the medium – for headlines, to work around the fi xity of traditional media for good pictures – and pressures such as time, technologies and institutional systems, and to space and contending messages. negotiate, manipulate, and blur the boundar- Even when, in interpersonal communi- ies between impersonal interaction and mass cation, person A communicates a message communication’. See audience: active audi- to person B which B conveys to person C, a ence; blogosphere; open source; s-iv-r process of mediation inevitably takes place: model of communication; web 2.0. B may rephrase the message, give parts of it ▶ Neil Washbourne, Mediating Politics: Newspaper, prominence and understate other parts, supple- Radio, Television and the Internet (Open University, ment or distort the information. Mediation is 2007); Philip M. Napoli, Audience Evolution: New inescapable: much of our knowledge of life and Technologies and the Transformation of Media Audi- the world comes to us at second hand, through ences (Columbia University Press, 2011).

178 Message

Mediatization Process whereby political or Message Th at which an act, or work, of commu- A indeed any public activity, having become reliant nication is about. For purposes of deﬁ nition and for its audience/electorate upon the media for analysis it is sometimes necessary to treat the B its messages to be communicated, adopts the message as something separable from the process principles and methods of media communica- of communication; but ultimately a message can tion. In particular TV has become the medium only meaningfully be examined in the context of C and channel of political communication. Conse- other elements, all of which are interlinked and quently political communication pays greater interacting. D attention to entertainment value as practised It is important to distinguish between the by TV, for example personalization, simpli- actual signal that carries the message and the ﬁ cation and an emphasis on using ‘media-genic’ message itself: a wink is a signal but what is its E players (see lookism) and stressing image over message? Th e answer depends on many factors content. – for example, who is winking, to whom and in F Media user ethics See ten commandments what context? (See sign.) While message-signals

for media consumers. in the form of visual or aural codes may be sent, G Media workers See workers in communica- the message may not be understood. Th us an tion and media. ambiguous smile may represent the signal that a Medio communication Th at mode of commu- message is being conveyed, but the receiver may H nication taking place between direct, face-to- fail to understand the message while recognizing face address and mass communication; into the signal. I this classification comes communication by The message may draw its initial shape or

letter, e-mail, fax or telephone. purpose from the Sender or Communicator: JK Medium The physical or technical means of it will be similarly infl uenced by the nature of converting a communication message into a the medium in which it is sent. Th e Receiver of signal capable of being transmitted along a given a message may be close at hand, in sight of the L channel. TV, for example, is a medium that Communicator, or some distance away. If the employs the channels of vision and sound. John message involves intrapersonal communi- M Fiske in Introduction to Communication Stud- cation, the Communicator and the Receiver ies (Methuen, 1982; see 3rd edition, Routledge, may be one and the same. Both the signal and N 2010) divides media into three categories: (1) the intended message may encounter noise, that Presentational media: the voice, face, body; the is physical or psychological interference that spoken word, gesture; where the medium is will aff ect its meaningfulness. Th e message may O actually the communicator. (2) Representational elicit feedback, which will further modify the media: books, paintings, photographs, etc., using message and indeed create a new communica- P cultural and aesthetic conventions ‘to create a tion situation and new signals and messages. “text” of some sort’; they become independent We can rarely, if ever, be certain of how other R of the communicator, being works of commu- people will interpret our signals, or whether we nication (whereas presentational media are will ‘get our message across’. Th us the message acts of communication). (3) Mechanical media: sent may be quite diff erent from the message S telephone, radio, TV, film, etc., and they are received, and while we think we are communi- transmitters of (1) and (2). Th e properties of the cating a single message we may, unconsciously, T medium determine the range of codes which it be putting across all sorts of other messages too. can transmit, and considerably aff ect the nature We are ‘selecting in’ and ‘selecting out’ a U of the message and its reception. barrage of message-carrying signals all the time, Medium is the message One of the classic and we give attention to them if we are motivated quotes of media literature and perhaps the to do so. Th e eff ectiveness of a message depends, V best-known of Marshall McLuhan (1911–80). at a basic, instrumental level, on the weight it carries in competition with other signals and ‘Th e medium is the message’ is the fi rst chapter W heading in his book, Understanding Media: the messages, but equally it depends upon the Extensions of Man (Routledge & Kegan Paul, signifi cance attached to it by the receiver(s). 1964; Routledge, 2002). What is said, McLuhan This in turn depends upon the ‘set’, or XYZ believes, is deeply conditioned by the medium preparedness, of the receivers for the Sender/ through which it said. Th e particular attributes Message/Medium. The message of a satirical of any medium help to determine the mean- cartoon, for example, might be completely lost ing of the communication, and no medium is if the reader knows nothing about the particular neutral. See mcluhanism. circumstances to which the cartoon refers. Even

179 Metamessage

a knowledge of the facts may not be enough to ment and debate using metaphors of confl ict, facilitate the intended interpretation, because and the notion of argument as ‘war’ is built into this may only occur if the reader shares the the culture we inhabit. social, political or cultural values of the cartoon- Even where peace is being referred to, the ist. In short, whether we ‘get our message across’ media are more than likely to express it in depends partly upon the context in which it is military terms: ‘War breaks out over classroom received; and the values, attitudes, perceptions peace plans’. Press language is riddled with the and knowledge of the receiver at a crucial part bombast of confl ict: things are axed, chopped, of that context. See dominant, subordinate, smashed, slashed; knives are constantly out; radical; intervening variables (ivs); prime ministers stick to their guns; oppositions metamessage; polysemy; preferred read- are routed. ing. We use metaphor to define the nature of Metamessage The underlying message in a communication as transmission or as ritual. communicative act. Th is may diff er from what We talk of homo narrens (see narrative on the surface appears to be the message. paradigm), casting the human being as the The metamessage is conveyed both verbally storytelling animal; or, with Erving Goff man, we and, often more crucially, non-verbally. The may use the dramaturgical model, the metaphor metamessage carries information about the of life as a stage. relationships of those involved in an encounter, In An Introductory Guide to Post-Structural- and the attitudes they have towards each other ism and Postmodernism (Harvester Wheatsheaf, and the topic in question. 1993), Madan Sarap states ‘that metaphors deter- The interpretation of the metamessage is mine to a large extent what we think in any fi eld. usually influenced by the way in which the Metaphors are not idle fl ourishes – they shape message is communicated; non-verbal commu- what we do. Th ey can help make, and defend nication thus plays a vital role in the sending and a world view’. As well as being ‘productive of receiving of metamessages. A simple question insights and fresh illuminations’, metaphors, such as ‘May I help you?’ asked by someone in according to Sarap, ‘can encapsulate and put a higher-status role, for example, can be inter- forward proposals for another way of looking at preted as a friendly gesture or as an accusation of things’. Th ey can serve as agents of change as well incompetence depending, in part, on the tone of as weapons of reinforcement (see stereotype). voice adopted. ‘Th rough metaphor,’ says Sarap, ‘we can have Metamessages can also help to frame a conver- increased awareness of alternative possible sation, as they help to defi ne the nature of the worlds.’ Th e so-called mixed metaphor, beloved encounter by, for example, defi ning the serious- of politicians seeking by their rhetoric to ness of the conversation and the relationships of attract media attention, contains in a statement those taking part. two or more ineptly linked images: ‘Lame ducks Metaphor A fi gure of speech or a visual device will be barking up the wrong tree if they think that works by transporting qualities from one government is going to bail them out every time plane of reality to another: ‘the camel is the ship profits take a hammering.’ Though the meta- of the desert’; ‘life for Mary was a bed of roses’. phorical allusions may be all over the place, the Without metaphor there would be no scope statement’s underlying ideology is, however, for the development of either visual or verbal crystal clear. language; it would remain clinical and colour- Few contemporary media phenonema have less. prompted so many and such varied metaphors Metaphor is not merely an expressive device as the internet. In addition to the World Wide but an integral part of the function of language Web (see web: world wide web (www)), the as a defi ner as well as a refl ector of reality. As Net has been described as an open prairie or a a rhetorical device metaphor is central to the superhighway of information, an ocean to be way in which media define reality, structure, surfed, a mail pigeon, an uncatalogued library, maintain and monitor discourse, uphold (and an amusement park, a maze, a bottomless pit, a sometimes challenge) hierarchies, service (and collective nervous system and a global village, sometimes undermine) hegemony. Metaphor each term attempting, constructively or destruc- provides us with the pictures by which we envi- tively, to get a grasp of exactly what the Internet sion the world: we define time by metaphor is, and how we perceive it. (‘time is money’); we view the public as inhabit- Because of the Net’s lack of physicality, we ing a ‘space’ (see agora); we defi ne public argu- translate its infi nite spaces into familiar imagery,

180 Microsoft Windows

such as transport; thus we refer to crashes, fast (PC) software that has bestrode the computer A and slow lanes and blocked traffi c; or we opt for world like the proverbial colossus. Harvard the experience of markets – shopping malls or graduates Bill Gates and Paul Allen, later joined B even the more humble fl ea-market. Th e compe- by Steve Ballmer, were among the fi rst entrepre- tition for labelling the Net is signifi cant. What neurs to spot the future of personal computers. names it goes by has an impact on the ways in They formed a business partnership in 1975, C which communities view and use it. See euphe- naming it Microsoft (microcomputer software). mism; metonymy; visions of order. See also By 1980 they were able to off er the world, via D topic guide under language/discourse/ the IBM company, M-DOS (Microsoft Disk narrative. Operating System), the fi rst personal, desktop Metasignal A signal that makes a comment computer (1981). E about a signal, or a set of signals: it directs us By 1983, the new Windows System (1.0) to their accurate meaning. For example, two described by Bill Gates as ‘unique software F people appear to exchange blows: is the fi ght real designed for the serious PC user’ hit the market,

or make-believe? Th eir smiling faces form the followed by Windows 2.0 (1987) with expanded G metasignal which indicates that, at least on the memory and increased desktop facility. Th ere surface, what we are seeing is a play-fi ght. followed, each an advance upon the last, fi fteen Body posture is among the chief metasignals. editions of Windows, among them Windows 3.0 H Equally, uniform serves eff ectively in this capac- (1990) and 3.1 (1992), this with advanced graph- ity; we react differently to the policeman in ics and add-on games such as Solitaire. I uniform than we might to the same person in Windows 95 (1995) came complete with

off -duty jeans and tee-shirt. Desmond Morris in built-in internet support, dial-up networking JK Manwatching: A Field Guide to Human Behav- and Plug and Play facilities, and featured for the iour (Jonathan Cape, 1977) says that ‘in a sense fi rst time the Start menu and task bar. Major the whole world of entertainment presents a improvements to networking and support for L non-stop Metasignal, in the form of the prosce- mobile computing and USB devices came with nium arch around the stage of a theatre, or the Windows 2000. Released in 2001, Windows M edge of the cinema or TV screen’. Audiences, he XP carried new design features and enhanced believes, can tolerate, and gain entertainment digital photo capabilities. Windows XP Profes- N from, fi lms and plays featuring dollops of death sional was followed between 2006 and 2008 and mayhem because of the metasignals which with Windows Vista (with advanced Windows indicate that ‘this isn’t real’. Morris argues that Media Player, known as Longhorn) available in O though the actors may aim at maximum reality thirty-fi ve languages. Windows 7 introduced the in their dark deeds, ‘no matter how convincing capacity for users to stream (see streaming) P they are, we still carry at the back of our minds music, videos and photos from the PC to a TV (even as we gasp when the knife plunges home) or stereo system. R the Metasignal of the “edge” of their stage’. Th e Microsoft company celebrated its twenty- ▶ Desmond Morris, People Watching (Vantage, 2002). fi fth anniversary in 2010. Over those twenty-fi ve Metonymy A figure of speech in which the years it encountered problems – and was faced S thing meant is represented by something that with court cases – concerning copyright. For is an attribute of the original. When we talk of example, in 1990 rival apple macintosh cited T the newspaper business, we refer to the press – 189 examples of what it claimed were copyright something that stands for the whole. infringements, the judge reducing these to ten U As far as images are concerned, the metonym instances. In 2001 the company was obliged by is a selection of one of those available to repre- the American Department of Justice to share sent the whole; and from that selection fl ows our (rather than hog) systems with a panel of experts. V interpretation or understanding of the whole. In 2003 the European Commission demanded that Microsoft produce a Windows package Th us the selection of a piece of fi lm of young W people lounging at a street corner, or strike pick- without Windows Media Player and to create ets in combat with the police, acts as the ‘trigger a version without Internet Explorer; all in all, of meaning’ for the way the teenager or the moves to counteract Microsoft’s perceived XYZ striker is defi ned. For this reason, metonyms are monopoly of the market. Microsoft initially powerful conveyors of reality; indeed they are so began such a version but then scrapped it in powerful that they can come to be accepted as favour of a ‘browser ballot’ allowing users to reality – as the way things actually are. make a choice between providers. Microsoft Windows The personal computer Windows has struggled to establish itself

181 Micro-myth, macro-myth

in the mobile consumer market, faced by the attached to the Majority beveridge committee entrepreneurial genius of apple macintosh report on broadcasting, 1950, and, contrary, with all its ground-breaking innovations in the to Beveridge, who supported a continued fi eld. However, diversifi cation has always been monopoly of broadcasting for the BBC, argued key to Microsoft’s ambitions. Th e company took that independent, and commercial, competition a US 240 million equity stake in facebook in would be a good thing. Author of the Minority 2007 and attempted to buy the platform in 2010. Report was Conservative MP Selwyn Lloyd, who It created Bing search engine to rival google produced a scheme for a Commission for British and this is now integrated with Facebook, allow- Broadcasting to be set up which would license a ing users to see, directly from search results, number of rival broadcasting stations. what their friends have ‘liked’. From 2010 Bing Lloyd wrote, ‘Having considered these argu- powered yahoo! searches in the US and Canada. ments put forward by the BBC on behalf of Micro-myth, macro-myth Philip Schlesinger in monopoly, I am of the opinion that independent Putting ‘Reality’ Together: BBC News (Constable, competition will be healthy for broadcasting.’ 1978; Methuen/University Paperback, 1987) His view had considerable support in the Tory examines the BBC news machine at work, party and in the business world: commercial and identifi es what in his view are two myths broadcasting in the UK was on the horizon. See entertained by those who work in BBC news: the topic guide under broadcasting. micro-myth, that production staff are permit- Miracle of Fleet Street Description by Lord ted autonomy within the organization; and the Northcliff e (1865–1922) of the redoubtable UK macro-myth, that the BBC is an independent Daily Herald (1912–64), a sometimes swash- organization, largely socially unattached. See buckling radical paper which, despite having impartiality. a substantial circulation and vast readership, Milieu Th e social environment of the individual, received little advertising. Th is was as a result group, culture or nation. partly of its left-wing views, but perhaps more Milton’s paradox On the one hand the English importantly because of its insistence on thor- poet John Milton (1608–74) is famous for his ough reporting of political issues, considered at stalwart defence of the freedom of expression that time to appeal more to male readers. When (see areopagitica); on the other, Milton did other national popular papers were priced at one not entirely practise what he preached. Domi- penny, the Daily Herald was forced to charge nant in Milton’s own life was anti-Catholicism. two pence. Yet it lost very little in circulation, Th e paradox arises from the diff erence between due to the energy and leadership of its greatest principle and practice: during the period of the editor, George Lansbury, MP (1859–1940). Interregnum, 1649–60 (the Commonwealth of The Herald was the first newspaper in the Oliver Cromwell) Milton was an offi cial censor, world to reach a circulation of 2 million – in though apologists argue that the poet was less mid-1933 – though it was soon overtaken by involved in censorship than in editing and Beaverbrook’s Daily Express. By the time the supervision. Herald had reached its peak circulation of 2.1 In ‘Milton’s paradox: the market-place of ideas million in 1947, the Daily Mirror and Daily in post-Communist Bulgaria’, in the European Express were pushing 4 million and by 1960, Journal of Communication, September 1997, sales had tumbled to 1.6 million. The Herald Ekaterina Ognianova and Byron Scott believe struggled on until 14 September 1964. See topic that ‘in a simplistic way at least, Milton repre- guide under media history. sents a perennial confl ict between general beliefs Misinformed society As the means of commu- and specifi c behaviour, between concepts and nication expand, the assumption that more practice when it comes to the question of how and diverse information equates with better- much freedom to permit’. informed citizens has been challenged by many Mimetic/semiosic planes In narrative, commentators. In asking the question, How far the mimetic is the plane of representation, the have media succeeded/failed to provide informa- semiosic the plane of meaning production. See tion for citizenship?’ Peter Golding argues that codes of narrative; connotation; narra- the so-termed information society ‘is a myth’. tive paradigm; propp’s people; semiology/ In ‘Telling stories: sociology, journalism and semiotics. the informed citizen’ in the European Journal Minneapolis City Council inquiry into of Communication (December 1994), Golding pornography See pornography. believes that we live in a media society, in which Minority Report of Mr Selwyn Lloyd Th is was information is available at a price, or not at all’,

182 Mobilization

and that a more accurate term for today would linked, deﬁ nition of mobilization refers to the A be the misinformed society: ‘Wherever we look, remarkable expansion, until it has become a in coverage of race, industrial relations, welfare, cultural phenomenon, of the use of the mobile B foreign relations, or electoral politics, the media phone linked with the internet. Few techno- have failed democracy. We live in a society in logical advances have become so much part blinkers.’ of modern communication at every level of C For Golding, the ‘information age’ constitutes society and so rapidly as the mobile, to the point not a devolution of the message systems reaching where reference is made to the m-generation, D ever wider into every part of society, but a scene to m-commerce and to the m-future, in which made up of media monoliths and a society which the dominance of the computer as the hub of has become increasingly centralized in terms of network transactions is seen to be giving way to E decision-making and the ‘reach’ of vital informa- the mobile, with all its manifold functions from tion. Golding’s misinformed society is marked by simple telephoning and texting to Internet use, F a narrowing range of media ownership, a reduc- downloading, listening to radio and watching

tion in the number of newspapers (especially TV. G in the US), the casualization of labour in media Of particular interest to the study of aspects of industries, and wholesale redundancies. mobilization – or in this case, as Manuel Cassells In terms of programming, Golding warns terms it, mass self-communication – is the way H of the marginalization of serious information public opinion can be mobilized across nations programmes on TV and an obsession with maxi- and globally. In an article entitled ‘Communica- I mizing ratings that threaten the range and diver- tion, power and counter-power in the Network sity of broadcasting. He sees the current fl ow Society’, published in the International Journal JK and quality of information as fragmenting rather of Communication (Vol. 1, 2007), Cassells writes: than unifying society, furthering not equality but ‘Th e spread of instant political mobilizations by inequality. Th e media of today render a ‘fl awed using mobile phones, supported by the Internet, L account of social reality’ and shirk the abiding is changing the landscape of politics.’ principle of a self-respecting media, ‘to tell the Cassell states that it ‘becomes increasingly M truth and make things better’. See globaliza- diffi cult for governments to hide or manipulate tion (and the media); information bliz- information. Th e manipulation plots are imme- N zards; journalism: citizen journalism; diately picked up and challenged by a myriad of journalism: investigative journalism; “eye balls”, as debate and mobilization are called privatization; surveillance society. upon by thousands of people, without central O Mix, mixing In fi lm-making a mix is a gradual coordination, but with a shared purpose, often transition between two shots where one dissolves focusing on asking or forcing the resignation of P into another. It is a soft fade, often used to denote governments or government offi cials’. the passage of time (see montage; shot; wipe). The rapid escalation of popular protests R Mixing is the process of re-recording all original against government in a number of North dialogue, music and sound eff ects on to a single African countries in 2010 and 2011 (the so-called master sound track. See synchronous sound. African Spring) was substantially aided by S Mobile concept of communication See mobi- what is termed digital activism. No longer is lization. information confi ned to the authoratitive few: T Mobile phone See next entry. today news spreads instantly via mobile phones Mobilization An important capacity of the to thousands and within hours or days vast U media is to mobilize public opinion, that is to numbers can be informed, united in a cause and arouse sympathy or concern about certain issues organized into action. to the point where action is taken by the public Th e brutal killing, caught on camera, of Khaled V themselves, or by those in authority. Th e classic Said by Egypt’s security forces in June 2010 received widespread Internet coverage, sparking example is the role played by the media in the W preparation of a nation for war. In such a case, protests that led to the January 2011 uprising that the media are instrumental in informing the toppled the country’s president, Hosi Mubarak. public about the situation, arguing the case for As one Egyptian activist tweeted during the XYZ action and then, when the action takes place, protests, ‘We use Facebook to schedule the reporting it – usually – from a strictly partisan protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to point of view. Th eir role becomes that of propa- tell the world.’ gandist. In her Index on Censorship (No. 1, 2011) edito- A twenty-fi rst-century alternative, but nicely rial, ‘Playing the long game’, Jo Glanville writes,

183 Modality

‘Th e invitation to the blogger Slim Amamou to attempts to show how the various elements of join the interim government in Tunisia was one a situation being studied relate to each other. of the most remarkable acknowledgments of Models are not statements of reality; only the role of digital activists in civil society, not to after much further research and testing would mention the symbolism of his appointment in a the model be considered viable. It could then country that has stifl ed free speech for decades.’ develop into a theory. Less sanguine about the ‘tweeting power’ that Th e term can also refer to a familiar process or brings about revolution is Evgeny Morozov. object that is used as a point of reference when In Th e Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the an attempt to explain the unknown is being World (Allan Lane, 2011) Morozov offers a made. An analogy is made showing the similari- counterview to that of the ‘cyber utopians’ as he ties between the phenomenon to be explained terms them, believing that online mobilization and one that is well known, i.e. the model. has ‘often strengthened rather than undermined Additionally, a model can be a person whose authoritarian rule’. Dissident voices become behaviour others wish to imitate; on whom they ‘outed’ and thus open to surveillance, playing wish to model themselves – a role model. into the hands of authority. Morozov believes Th e desire to model oneself on other people is that ‘many analysts fall into the trap of equating particularly strong in one’s teenage years, and liberalization with democratization’. See global the mass media play a signifi cant part in present- scrutiny; journalism: citizen journalism; ing teenagers with a variety of such models. See online campaigning; open source. hypothesis; identification. See also topic ▶ Gerard Goggins and Larissa Hjorth, eds, Mobile guide under communication models. Technology: From Telecommunications to Media Modem Device for converting analogue signals (Routledge, 2009). to digital signals and from digital to analogue. Modality Th e use of the words ‘may’ or ‘might’ are Modem is short for modulator/demodulator. referred to by linguists as modal auxiliaries, part Modes of media analysis See functionalist of the modal system of language. Modality serves (mode of media analysis); marxist (mode to insert ‘yes but’ into defi nitions, for example of of media analysis); social action (mode of truth or reality. Modality can be confi rming or media analysis). See also topic guide under disconfi rming by means of its degree of affi nity research methods. with that which is described, within the system Monofunctional In a media sense, the term or contexts in which it is described. Th us affi nity ascribing to a work – of literature, radio, fi lm, between a speaker and a listener will condition TV – a single function; for example, to entertain. the degree of modality: they may agree, ‘Th is is Research fi ndings over the years have seriously true’ or ‘Th is is real’ and agreement gives both a challenged assumptions that particular forms sense of security and status. of content are monofunctional. Adults declare Robert Hodge and Gunther Kress in Social a considerable interest in news programmes, Semiotics (Polity Press, 1988) write that ‘a high yet functional studies have shown that for degree of affinity indicates the expression of many viewers, the primary function of news solidarity between participants’. The authors is not informational. The news broadcast is, defi ne affi nity as ‘an indicator of relations of soli- apparently, more closely related to habit; it also darity or of power: that is, relations orientated aff ords to the individual, feelings of security and towards the expression of solidarity or of power of social contact. See effects of the mass (diff erence)’. Th us ‘modality points to the social media; surveillance. construction or contestation of knowledge- Monopoly, four scandals of According to the systems’. Agreement confi rms the status of ‘truth’ beveridge committee report on broad- and ‘reality’, disagreement disconfi rms or under- casting (uk), 1950, these were ‘bureacracy, mines that status. ‘Modality is consequently one complacency, favouritism and inefficiency’ of the crucial indicators of political struggle. It – indicators that the Committee saw in the is a central means of contestations, and the site performance of the BBC as monopoly-holder of the working out, whether by negotiation or of British airwaves. Nevertheless, Beveridge imposition, of ideological systems.’ recommended that the Corporation’s licence Model In social science research, a model is a be renewed, because the alternative – US-style tentative description of what a social process commercial TV – promised a system that was – say, the communication process – or system considered to be much worse. might be like. It is a tool of explanation and Monotype printing Invented in 1889 by Ameri- analysis, very often in diagrammatic form, that can Tolbert Lanston. Th e machine is in two parts.

184 Moral panics and the media

The first, operated by the keyboard, punches messages directly to the online public by using A coded holes into a paper tape; the second has the the various avenues of expression off ered by the tape fed into it and the code controls the casting internet, such as blogging and tweeting. B operation. In monotype casting, unlike linotype ▶ Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics (Rout- printing, every letter and space is cast separately. ledge, 2002); Chas Critcher, ed., Critical Readings: Monroe motivated sequence Five-step Moral Panics and the Media (Open University Press/ C sequence advocated by American Professor Alan McGraw-Hill Education, 2006); Erich Goode and Monroe in Principles of Speech Communication Nachman Ben-Yehuda’s note in Moral Panics: Th e D by Douglas Ehninger, Bruce E. Cronbach and Social Construction of Deviance (Wiley-Blackwell, Monroe (Scott Foresman, 1984) for use in orga- 2009). nizing speeches, especially those with an intent Moral panics and the media Individuals and E to persuade. Th e fi rst step is to command, and social groups can by their activities emerge maintain, audience attention by some eye- or as a focus for outrage expressed by infl uential F ear-catching device (such as a lively story, anec- members of society who perceive these activities

dote or dramatic set of statistics). Th e second as seriously subverting the mores and interests G step is to fulfil an audience need, achieved of the dominant culture. Such reactions are, through making the speech relevant. What says Stanley Cohen in Folk Devils and Moral follows is satisfaction, where possible solutions Panics (MacGibbon & Kee, 1972, edited by H are proposed and examined. Th e speaker then Cohen and Jock Young; 3rd edition, Routledge, proceeds to visualization, where the audience is 2002), disseminated by the mass media usually in I persuaded to see more clearly how the speaker’s an hysterical, stylized, and stereotypical manner,

information or ideas will help them. Step fi ve is thus engendering a sense of moral panic. JK action, a plea for response, for the taking-up of Generally such panics have occurred in relation the speaker’s points. to other, for example when immigrants or Montage From the French, ‘monter’, to assemble; asylum-seekers are perceived, via media cover- L the process of cutting up film and arranging age, and the repetition of that coverage over time – editing – it into the screened sequence. Th e and by agencies with political motivation, as a M Russian fi lm director Sergei Eisenstein (1898– threat; a problem about which those in authority 1948) explained montage as putting together seem to be doing nothing, or too little. N camera shots which, in combination, made a In the 2002 edition of his book, Cohen argues greater impact than did the sum of the parts that over the years, ‘the objects of moral panic – a creative juxtaposition. Separate elements belong to seven familiar clusters of social iden- O combine to produce a new meaning. Montage is tity’. Th e clusters and related fears are catego- the synthesis that gives fi lm its unique character. rized as follows: Young, Working-class, Violent P Montage is used as a narrative device and Males; School Violence: Bullying and Shootouts; an expressive device, the one concerned with Wrong Drugs: Used by Wrong People at Wrong R sequencing, ensuring the smooth continuity of Places; Child Abuse, Satanic Rituals and Paedo- action, the other with the intention of producing phile Registers; Sex, Violence and Blaming the a particular eff ect by the clash, comparison or Media; Welfare Cheats and Single Mothers; and S contrast of two or more images, often symbolic Refugees and Asylum Seekers: Flooding our or metaphoric in meaning. Th is use of montage Country, Swamping our Services. Th e individual T is often compared with collage in art, in that or group exemplars of these are the folk devils in it draws attention to itself as an exercise in an (otherwise) ordered society and perceived as U construction: it says, ‘Look at me as fi lm, not a threat to that ordered society. reality.’ See alienation effect; kuleshov Just as the focus for a moral panic may be effect; shot. predictable, so too, argues Cohen, are the V Moral economy See hict project. essential features of the way in which panics are Moral entrepreneurs constructed. Specifi c panics may be seen as new Howard Becker fi rst used W this term in Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology but also as ‘camoufl aged versions of traditional of Deviance (Free Press, 1963) to describe those and well-known evils’. Panics are of concern in members of the community who take upon their own right, but are also seen as ‘… warning XYZ themselves the role of guard dog, vigilant signs of the real, much deeper and more preva- against alleged attempts to subvert public lent condition’. Panics are ‘transparent … but also morals. Such individuals often try, sometimes opaque’ and ‘accredited experts’ are engaged to with success, to use the media to gain public explain the hidden dangers to the public. support for their views; or latterly to aim their Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda in

185 Moral rights (in a text)

Moral Panics: Th e Social Construction of Devi- through laws, informally through, for example, ance (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) examine a number social rejection. of moral panics and identify three theories of Some mores are particular to a specific moral panic. The ‘grassroots’ model explains society; others can be found in most societies. moral panics as stemming from unplanned, A majority of societies respects the sanctity of popular responses to perceived societal threats, human life, though this is varyingly weighed whilst the ‘elite-engineered’ model on the other against the sanctity of social order. Also, within a hand views moral panics as generated and society diff erent social groups may have diff er- manipulated by members of powerful elites for ent mores. Traditionally it is against the unwrit- their own purposes. Th e ‘interest group’ model ten law of school life for pupils to tell tales to locates the source of moral panics in interest teacher; the sanction against those who do may groups from ‘somewhere in society’s middle be their temporary isolation or ejection from the strata: professional associations, journalists with group, or reprisals after school. a mission, religious groups, social movement Mores may often prescribe both the tone organizations, educational institutions, in fact and content of communication. Diff erences in middle-level associations, organizations, groups, sexual mores, for example, underpin many of the and institutions of every description’. arguments about the dissemination of pornog- In his introduction to the 3rd edition of Folk raphy. Devils and Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen speaks Morphing In film-making, seamlessly joining of moral panics as ‘condensed political struggles together diff erent images; special eff ects most to control the means of cultural reproduction. notably used in horror movies, when images – Studying them is easy and lots of fun. It also faces, for example – ‘metamorphose’ into one allows us to identify and conceptualize the lines another or change dramatically in appearance. of power in any society, the ways we are manipu- Also employed in popular music videos. lated into taking some things too seriously and Morphology Study of the structure or forms of other things not seriously enough’. words, traditionally distinguished from syntax Anxiety has been widely expressed that modern which deals with the rules governing the society is in a near-permanent state of panic. combination of words in sentences. Generally Cohen notes that between 1984 and 1991 there morphology divides into two fi elds: the study of were eight citations of moral panics, and between infl ections and of word-formation. 1994 and 2001, an average of over a hundred a Morse Code See telegraphy. year. In his BBC Online blog (11 September 2009), Mother tongue A term used to refer to an ‘When panic shapes policy’, Mark Easton worries individual’s language of origin or native language about the broad social and political impact of – one learnt from birth, from the mother or targeting ‘folk devils’: ‘Our democracy is regularly other primary caregivers, and passed on through buff eted by panics which make rational, consid- the generations. Th e mother or other primary ered discussion impossible until the dust settles caregivers may of course provide a bilingual years later.’ See deviance (for deviance amplifi - or multilingual experience for the child. In a cation spiral); folk devils; labelling process culturally diverse society there is likely to be a (and the media); prejudice. range of mother tongues used, and therefore it ▶ David Altheide, Creating Fear: News and the may be the case for a considerable number of Construction of Crisis (Aldine de Gruyler, 2002); Chas people that their mother tongue diff ers from the Critcher, ed., Critical Readings: Moral Panics and the prestige or offi cial language of that society. Such Media (Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Educa- diff erences in perceived status can be the cause tion, 2006); Frank Furedi, Politics of Fear: Beyond Left of resentment. and Right (Continuum, 2006); Sean Hier, ed., Moral Keeping the mother tongue alive can be Panic and the Politics of Anxiety (Routledge eBook, an important aspect of ethnic identity for a 2011). community. In ‘Mothers and mother tongue: Moral rights (in a text) See text: integrity perspectives on self-construction by mothers of the text. of Pakistani heritage’ in Aneta Pavlenko and Mores Th ose social rules concerning acceptable Adrian Blackledge (eds), Negotiation of Identi- behaviour which it is considered wrong to break. ties in Multilingual Contexts (Multilingual Such rules play an important part in the main- Matters Ltd, 2004), Jean Mills discusses a study tenance of social order and cohesion; conse- she undertook with Asian mothers in the West quently breaches of mores usually meet with Midlands. She found that linguistic competence the imposition of sanctions by society, formally in the ‘mother tongue’ (Urdu, for example) was

186 MP3

regarded as an important element of Pakistani- See also topic guide under communication A British identity. The mothers felt they had a theory. responsibility to ensure that their children had Motivation research (MR) The key question B competency in the ‘mother tongue’ as well as in in MR is – what motivates people to buy, or in English. Th e ‘mother tongue’ was widely used media terms, what motivates them to tune in, within the family – indeed it was crucial for to read, to watch; in short, to respond; and how C communicating with the older generation and might that motivation be inﬂ uenced in order for relatives in Pakistan – and the local community. them to continue responding? MR’s traditional D Motion capture See animation. mechanisms of questionnaires, interviews and Motivation Th e concept of motivation is relevant focus groups have long been supplemented by to several areas of communication and media electronic devices such as the pupilometer to E studies. As Richard Dimbleby and Graeme measure respondents’ eye movements and the Burton remind us in More Than Words: An degree of ‘stopping power’ of, for example, an F Introduction to Communication (Routledge, audience member’s response to a TV advertise-

2007), ‘People must have a reason for commu- ment. G nicating. It is worth remembering that when Th ere are machines which oﬀ er voice-pitch people communicate, they may be fulﬁ lling more analysis; machines to tabulate brain waves. than one purpose at the same time.’ Motivation Not only is psychology wheeled into action in H theories can then help to provide a range of ideas the service of MR, but so are the findings of about why people want to communicate. psycholinguists, who study the mental processes I In Psychology: The Science of Mind and governing the learning and use of language. MR

Behaviour (Hodder Arnold, 2005) Richard Gross is involved in an ever-restless process of seeking JK notes that essentially, ‘motivation is concerned more and more sophisticated ways of ‘reading’ with why people act and think the way they do’ consumption, but it is seen by some commenta- and that ‘motivated behaviour is goal-directed, tors as being more and more into the business L purposeful behaviour’. Numerous theories seek of shaping or manipulating responses, not the to explore the mysteries of human motivation. least in the arena of politics. Th e arrival of the M Whilst the sources of motivation are varied and internet presented MR with new challenges, complex, there is general agreement that motiva- in particular with regard to social networking N tion arises from a desire to satify needs. A range (see networking: social networking). By of research has sought to defi ne these needs and 2011, online advertising in many consumerist the relative importance that individuals attach to areas was showing traditional ad locations a O them (see maslow’s hierarchy of needs). clean pair of heels. See advertising: internet Of relevance here is William Schutz’s theory advertising; amazon.com; blogosphere; P of interpersonal needs. Schutz, in The Inter- digital optimism; facebook; hot buttons; personal World (Science and Behaviour Books, google; mobilization; twitter; youtube. R 1966), identifi es three basic interpersonal needs See also topic guide under advertising/ which he argues underlie most interpersonal marketing. behaviour: the need for inclusion, the need for ▶ Vance Packard, Th e Hidden Persuaders (Ig Publish- S control and the need for aff ection. Th ese then ing, 2007 edn with introduction by Mark Crispin are the needs one might wish to have satisfi ed in Miller); Martin Evans, Ahmed Jamal and Gordon T interpersonal communication. Situations Foxall, Consumer Behaviour (John Wiley & Sons, in which others satisfy one or more of your needs 2009). U are likely to be valued; those situations in which MP3 Digitized music file with the potential to your needs are not met may well be avoided. revolutionize the music industry, and in the Another example of the use made of the words of David Edwards in a UK Daily Mirror V concept of motivation is in the consideration article, ‘CD R.I.P. Why your shiny new album of why and how people might be influenced collection is being made obsolete by the March W or persuaded to act in certain ways, by certain of MP3’, promises to change for ever ‘the way messages. Much eff ort is expended in the adver- people buy and listen to music’. The initial tising and public relations (pr) industries reaction by the music industry to the MP3 fi le, XYZ trying to devise strategies for selling products, which allows for music to be downloaded from services or people, by appealing to what are the internet, free of charge, was to resist it. thought to be the motivations of the general Napster, a company off ering free music on the public. See hidden needs; hot buttons; Net, was shut down following legal action by motivation research (mr); vals typology. the Recording Industry Association of the US. It

187 Mr Gate

was a pyrrhic victory and soon the industry was and collectivists ...’ off ering music and other downloads to subscrib- MTV Music Television; worldwide popular music ers. See downloading. video broadcasting service created by Robert Mr Gate American media analyst David Manning Pittman in the US in 1981, to take advantage of White in 1950 investigated the process of initially free programming provided by popular gatekeeping by studying the editing selec- video. Transmitted via satellite and cable tions by a copy-editor, ‘Mr Gate’, from the television, MTV is fi nanced by advertising and (then) three major American news agencies sponsorship. on a 30,000-circulation daily newspaper in the Multi-actuality Th e meaning of communication US midwest. ‘Mr Gate’ in one week used 1,297 signs – language – is not fi xed but subject to column inches – about one-tenth of the 11,910 diff ering interpretations according to context. column inches supplied. ‘Mr Gate’ confessed to The term originated with Valentin Volosinov a few prejudices which might well cause him in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language to put items on the spike (reject them), and to (Seminar Press, 1973; fi rst published in Russian, a preference: ‘I go for human interest stories 1929–30), who argued that the prevailing mean- in a big way’; but White also perceived how ing of a word or expression, such as democracy important the pressure of time was on the selec- or freedom, works towards the suppression of tion process. Th e nearer the next edition of the multi-actuality, except in terms of ‘social crises newspaper came, the stronger in news value a or revolutionary changes’. In other words, the story had to be not to be rejected. See white’s dominant hierarchy will strive to impose its gatekeeper model, 1950. own meaning – one meaning as opposed to M-time, P-time Edward Hall in Th e Dance of many. Signs, therefore, Volosinov believes, may Life: Other Dimensions of Time (Doubleday, become the ‘arena for the class struggle’ as the 1983) contends that cultures tend to adopt dominant group of interpreters of meaning either a monochronic (M-time) or polychronic strive to eradicate alternative meanings. See (P-time) perspective to managing time. The hegemony; ideology; metaphor. M-time perspective focuses on the clock: time Multicultural London English (MLE) A new is measured into units; time should be used dialect of English being studied by researchers at productively; punctuality and meeting deadlines Lancaster University and Queen Mary College, are viewed as important; time is represented as University of London. MLE is spoken by young having a linear pattern; and the focus is on doing people in inner city areas of London, particularly one thing at a time. those from ethnic minority backgrounds. It is In contrast the P-time perspective focuses on strongly infl uenced by British Black English but people and events, not the clock: time is fl uid contains a mixture of other linguistic infl uences and fl exible; activities have an evolving times- from West Asia and Africa. See www.lancs. cale; deadlines and appointments are not rigidly ac.uk/fss/projects/linguistics/innovators/. adhered to; several activities may be undertaken Multiplane Walt Disney (1901–66) used this at the same time; and tasks and conversations word to explain an innovation in the process are likely to be interrupted. Th ere is a tendency of animation, illustrated in Fantasia (1940). for individualistic cultures to be driven by Instead of building up a drawing by laying ‘cells’ M-time and for collectivistic cultures to embrace one directly on top of another, an illusion of the P-time perspective (see communication: depth was achieved by a space being left between intercultural communication). the celluloid images of foreground, background Such diff erences can be the cause of misun- and principal fi gures. derstanding and friction in intercultural Multiple image A number of images printed encounters. Stella Ting-Toomey in Communi- beside each other on the same film frame, cation Across Cultures (Guilford Press, 1999) often showing different camera angles of the discusses the problems that differences in same action, or separate actions. Abel Gance time rhythms can cause; to take one example (1889–1981) used this device to stunning eff ect in from confl ict-management situations: ‘M-time his masterpiece of 1926, Napoleon. people want to establish a clear timetable to Multiplier eff ect Where culture as a commod- achieve specifi c confl ict goals and objectives; ity – usually in the form of films and TV P-time people want to spend more time build- programmes – exported to other countries, ing up trust and commitment between the opens up markets for other goods. See media confl ict parties. Diff erent M-time and P-time imperialism. rhythms ... can further polarize individualists Murdoch eff ect Arising from the dominance of

188 Myth

the media by Rupert Murdoch and his global media conglomerates; globalization of A organization news corp, the term relates to media; ofcom: office of communications processes of acquisition, control, expansion (uk); predatory pricing. See also Dictionary B and the targeting of rivals in the fi elds of media, Preface. entertainment and sport which are seen to char- ▶ Michael Wolff , Autumn of the Moguls (Flamingo, acterize the Murdoch approach to business. In 2004); Bruce Dover, Rupert’s Adventures in China C terms of competition, it is ruthless; in terms of (Tuttle Publishing, 2008); A Chance for Change ideology, rightist; in media approach, populist. It (Campaign for Press and Broadcasting Freedom, D is also visionary and decisive. 2011), pamphlet dealing with questions of media and Murdochization is a related term describing democracy, ownership and regulation. the broader eff ect of Murdoch’s impact on the Musical: film musical Essentially the inven- E nature and processing of news and comment. tion and hallmark of the US, and of Broadway, In a UK Guardian interview with Stephen Moss New York in particular. Th ough Th e Jazz Singer F (‘I’m very pessimistic about the future of the (1927) was not by any means the fi rst fi lm to be

BBC’, 15 March 2010), veteran reporter John accompanied by music, it is nevertheless classi- G Simpson stated that Murdoch ‘and the newspa- fi ed as the fi rst fi lm musical as well as the ‘talkie’ pers he’s run have introduced an uglier side, an that made the break-through for synchronous abusive side, into journalism and life in general sound. The first all-talking, all-singing, all- H in this country’. dancing fi lm was Th e Broadway Melody (1929). He has ‘introduced an ugly tone which he has Colour in musicals was used with earliest I now imported into the US and which we see success in Th e Wizard of Oz (1939). every day on Fox News, with all its concomitant Th e hey-day of the musical stretched glitter- JK effects on American public life – that fierce ingly from the 1930s to the end of the 1950s, hostility between right and left that never used when vastly increased production costs and to be there, not to remotely the same extent’. the decline in mass audiences made musicals L More pro-Murdoch commentators argue that uneconomical. They were replaced in their Murdoch’s often-ruthless entrepreneurialism extravagance with musical stories such as M has benefi ted the media industry, showing the Oklahoma! (1955), West Side Story (1961) and My way for others to follow (or fall by the wayside, Fair Lady (1965), with Th e Sound of Music (1965) N if not into Murdoch’s lap). From the outset capping all at the box-offi ce. Imitations failed, Murdoch proved a predator, identifying compa- though Cabaret (1972) proved that old forms and nies that had grown feeble through complacence, old patterns could be creatively extended; while, O and targeting them. against the odds, Moulin Rouge (2000), directed Not the least of the features that make up the by the Autralian Baz Luhrmann, proved both a P Murdoch eff ect is the mogul’s high level of risk- critical and a box-offi ce success. taking. Between 1990 and 1993 News Corp was Music Television See MTV. R close to bankruptcy, yet in 1992 BSkyB (British MySpace Social networking service launched in Sky Broadcasting) outbid ITV for UK Premier Beverly Hills, California, in 2003; purchased in League soccer broadcasting rights. In the follow- 2005 by News Corp Digital Media (the Murdoch S ing year Murdoch swiped American football empire, see news corp) for US 580 million, from under the nose of the NBC network. only to be sold off for an estimated US 35 T For many, the most worrying aspect of million (21m) to Specifi c Media in June 2011. As the Murdoch effect is the mogul’s perceived with other social sites such as Bebo and Friends U influence on politics and politicians. In the United, MySpace failed to hold its own against UK both the Labour administration and its the rise in popularity of facebook; a third of Conservative-Liberal Democrat successor its workforce was laid off in 2009. New services, V (2010) have been accused of bending the knee like MySpace Karaoke, were added in order to to Murdoch in return for a favourable press. turn the business around, but January 2011 saw W In 2011 Murdoch’s ambition to increase his 39 further substantial job losses. See networking: per cent stake in BSkyB to 100 per cent looked social networking; youtube. certain to be accepted by Culture Minister Mystifi cation See hegemony. XYZ Jeremy Hunt, until the phone-hacking scandal Myth Th e generally accepted meaning of myth engulfi ng the News of the World (and the paper’s is of a fi ctitious (primitive) tale, usually involv- dramatic closure in July) put Murdoch’s plans ing supernatural characters embodying some on hold. See anticipatory compliance; popular idea concerning natural or historical berlusconi phenomenon; conglomerates: phenomena, and often symbolizing virtues or

189 Myths of deregulation

other timeless qualities. In everyday parlance, a myth is something invented, not true. For N analysts of the communication process, myth has Narcotizing dysfunction Term used as early more specifi c connotations. Myth is an interpre- as 1948 by Paul H. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. tation of the way things are; a justifi cation. For Merton in ‘Communication, taste and social Claude Levi-Strauss, myth is a force generated to action’ published in The Communication of overcome contradictions. Either way, at the heart Ideas (Harper & Row, 1948), edited by Lyman of myth is ideology, chiefl y the value-system of Bryson, to describe what they saw as one of the those at the top of society. chief social consequences of audience exposure Th e French philosopher Roland Barthes (1915– over time to the mass media. Th is rather awful- 80) ascribes myth to the second order of signifi- sounding affl iction, of fi rst being subdued, or cation, that is, connotation, but connotation ‘drugged’, and then put out of action, comes with a very special task – that of distorting the about, believed the authors, because audiences truth in a particular direction. For Barthes, myth are reduced to ‘mass apathy’ by a heroic eff ort is a weapon of the bourgeoisie which it uses to to keep up with the vast amount of information regenerate its cultural dominance. placed before them. In Mythologies (Paladin, 1973), Barthes writes, Th e authors feared that ‘mass communications ‘Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its may be included among the most respectable function is to talk about them; simply, it purifi es and efficient of social narcotics ... increasing them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a dosages of mass communications may be inad- natural and eternal justifi cation, it gives them a vertently transforming the energies of men from clarity which is not that of an explanation but active participation into passive knowledge’. See that of a statement of fact.’ compassion fatigue; effects of the mass Myth defines ‘eternal verities’ that may be media; uses and gratifications theory; neither eternal nor verities. And myth acts mainstreaming. economically, ‘it abolishes the complexity of Narration In, for example, a TV documentary, human acts, it gives them the simplicity of what the narrator or the voice-over tells the essences, it does away with all the dialectics, audience helps structure both programme and without any going back beyond what is immedi- response. Narration is the intermediary between ately visible, it organizes a world which is with- ‘raw information’ and the ordered discourse out contradictions because it is without depth, a or text. In his monograph Television Discourse world wide open and wallowing in the evident, and History (British Film Institute, 1980), Colin it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to McArthur argues that the ‘central ideological mean something by themselves’. function of narration is to confer authority on, According to Richard Cavendish in his intro- and to elide contradictions in, the discourse’. duction to Mythology: An Illustrated Encyclopae- Narration, therefore, serves to identify and help dia (Little Brown, 1999; Silverdale Books, 2003), further an ideological base. myth is a ‘charter of authorization for groups, Narration is as much a technical convenience institutions, rituals, social distinctions, laws and as an ideological mechanism. It is a time-saver; customs, moral standards, values and ideas … permits summary; allows for effi cient transition; [Myths] authorize the present state of aff airs’ is custom-built for an expensive, time-conscious and their power ‘transcends rational argument’. medium. Given creative independence, many Myth succours and supports the status quo; its programme producers have reduced the chief inspiration is order and its communication dominance of narration or done away with it mode is rhetoric. See semiology/semiotics. altogether, as much as possible letting the world See also topic guides under media: politics ‘speak for itself’ by using sound and vision with- & economics; media: power, effects, influ- out comment; allowing camera and microphone ence; media: processes & production; to eavesdrop on activities free from framing. media: values & ideologies; representa- Of course the process of mediation is ulti- tion. mately unavoidable: cameras have to be set up ▶ Jonathan Cuff er, Barthes (Fontana, 1983). in one place or another; pointed in one direction Myths of deregulation See deregulation, rather than another; decisions have to be made five myths of. about long-shot and close-up and fi nally the fi lm has to be edited. A text has been constructed. See codes of narrative; narrative; narrative paradigm; symbolic convergence theory.

190 Narrative

Narrative In Narratives in Popular Culture, (see structure of news: reassurance). A Media, and Everyday Life (Sage, 1997) Arthur In this multi-media age, narratives more than Asa Berger defines narrative as ‘a story, and ever before interact and overlap but for conve- B stories tell about things that have happened or nience, of analysis and study, they continue to be are happening, to people, animals, aliens from classifi ed under the heading of genres, each with outer space, insects – whatever. Th at is, a story its own narrative rules and traditions, each with C contains a sequence of events, which means that recognizable framing devices. In some genres narratives take place within or over, to be more the frame is tight, highly restrictive to the point D precise, some kind of time period. This time of being ritualistic. Other genres have ‘fl exible’ period can be very short, as in a nursery tale, or framing and off er the potential for change and very long, as in some novels and epics’. As Berger development. E picturesquely puts it, our lives are ‘immersed in soap operas have this potential, situation narratives. Every day we swim in a sea of stories comedies (sitcoms) less so, contends Jasper Rees F and tales ... from our earliest days to our deaths’. in the UK Independent, reviewing the second

The study of communication is very much festival of sitcoms run by the UK’s Channel 4. In G concerned with the study of narratives – how his article ‘Slap ’n’ tickle’, 30 July 1996, Rees says, they are put together, what their functions are ‘In a play, events take place which irrepressibly and what uses are made of them by those who alter the relationship between the characters. H read, listen to or watch stories. In the view of Whatever happens in a sitcom, you always go Michel de Certeau in Th e Practice of Everyday back to square one at the start of a fresh episode; I Life (University of California, 1984), narratives the idea of stasis is built into the design. No

‘articulate our existences’; indeed we as social, doubt sooner or later a writer will come along JK communal animals, are ‘defi ned by stories’ (see and create a sitcom which breaks new ground, myth). though this will depend as much upon external At the level of denotation, narratives tell us framing mechanisms such as programming and L what happened to whom and in what circum- popularity as the nature of the genre itself.’ stances; at the connotational level we enter Each genre contains a range of signifiers, M the realm of meaning, of signifi cation: what is of conventions that audiences recognize and the story really about? Th is applies as much to come to expect while at the same time readily N news stories as to fi ctional stories; indeed the accepting experiment with those conventions. news can be classifi ed as a genre, that is a mode Knowledge of the conventions on the part of of narrative which conforms (for the most part) audience, and recognition when convention is O to a set of particular rules. fl outed, suggests an active ‘union’ between the In 1926 George Herbert Mead (in ‘Th e nature encoder and the decoder. Audience, as it were, P of aesthetic experience’ in the International is ‘let in on the act’; and this ‘knowingness’ is an Journal of Ethics, 36) defined two models of important part of the enjoyment of narrative R journalism, the information model and the genres. When the hero in a Western chooses not story model, stating that ‘the reporter is gener- to wear a gun (a great rarity), audience (because ally sent out to get a story not the facts’. Th e we are familiar with tradition) recognizes the S storyness theme is taken up by Peter Dahlgren salience of this decision. Such recognition could in his Introduction to Journalism and Popular be said to constitute a form of participation. T Culture (Sage, 1992, edited by Dahlgren and We use our familiarity with old ‘routines’ as Colin Sparks). He writes that ‘storytelling ... is a frame for reading this new twist of narrative. U a key link which unites journalism and popular We wonder whether convention will be fl outed culture ... narrative is a way of knowing the altogether as the story proceeds, or whether the world’, and goes on: ‘Journalism offi cially aims rules of the genre will be reasserted by the hero V to inform about events in the world – analytical taking up the gun to bring about a resolution to mode – and does this most often in the story the story. For a soap opera time is a key element W mode’ which both ‘enhances and delimits the in the framing process. Th ere are 30-minute slots likely range of meanings.’ to be fi lled, each to conclude with unfi nished Above all, like social rituals generally, the story business, preferably dramatic and suspenseful, XYZ mode has the power to bring about a sense of while not being so dramatically ‘fi nal’ that the shared experience and shared values. Th is, it series cannot continue into an indefi nite future. might be said, is the ‘story’ of news, its conno- Soap narratives need time to bed down, to tational function: it is about cohesion-making unfold, and in their own time they refl ect the as much as it is about information-transmission timescales of audience. In some cases, the

191 Narrative codes

time-frame of the soap is as important as the and satellite; narrative paradigm; web time-frames within it. The soap ‘frame’, thus or online drama. See also topic guide under amply provided with time, requires many char- language/discourse/narrative. acters and many plots. Th e narrative template Narrative codes See codes of narrative. or mould out of which soaps emerge is, give or Narrative: kernel and satellite Terms defi ned take an adjustment, the same or similar to that by Seymour Chatman in Story and Discourse: which produces popular narratives of all kinds, Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Cornell including the news. Th ey must attract and hold University Press, 1978) to describe structural attention. Th ey must gratify both cognitive elements in narrative. The kernel is an event (intellectual) and affective (emotional) needs. crucial to the advance of the plot, serving to Th ey must facilitate identification, personal direct the story’s progress and development. reference as well as diversion (see uses and A satellite is a minor feature of the story that gratifications theory). Th ey must meet the embellishes the plot, adding detail, fl eshing out needs of a certain type of audience at a certain the narrative. time of day while at the same time fulfi lling such Chatman writes of kernels as ‘narrative criteria as commercial viability, which in turn is moments that give rise to cruxes in the direction conditional upon ratings and audience share. taken by events. Th ey are nodes or hinges in the Another key element of narratives is what is structure, branching points which force a move- termed binary framing, that is the story being ment into one of two (or more) possible paths’. structured in terms of opposites – heroes/ Satellites are secondary elements that feed into villains; good/evil; kind/cruel; tolerant/intoler- the kernal; their loss would not seriously hinder ant; beautiful/ugly. In Narratives Asa Berger the plot development. Without kernels, however, talks of ‘central oppositions’. Stories are built there would be no story. around protagonists who are archetypal, with Narrative paradigm Th eory that sees people character-traits that are readily recognized as essentially storytellers, defi ning humankind – heroes, heroines, villains and victims (see as homo narrans. A substantial section of the propp’s people). Something happens, an event Autumn 1985 edition of the Journal of Commu- producing a state of disequilibrium, of imbal- nication was devoted to an analysis, by a variety ance, which has to be corrected or resolved; of contributors, of the notion that if storytelling and in the resolution we may read a message, a is central to human discourse and interaction, moral, about valour or self-sacrifi ce. then the paradigm provides an important meta- Robert C. Allen, writing in Channels of phor for communications research, which has Discourse: Television and Contemporary its own story – its own narrative-base – rooted Criticism (Routledge, 1987, edited by Allen), in beliefs about truth and falsehood, fact and diff erentiates between what he calls the Holly- fi ction and the nature of reason. wood narrative mode and the Rhetorical mode. In ‘Th e narrative paradigm: in the beginning’, Th e fi rst hides the means by which the text is Walter R. Fisher, Professor of Communication created. It invites audience to believe that what Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern they are seeing is real: one is absorbed into the California, believes that rationality in humans is text without being, as it were, addressed by it. In determined by the nature of persons as narrative contrast, the rhetorical mode directly addresses beings: by ‘their inherent awareness of narrative the viewer. Th e news, Allen sees presented in probability, what constitutes a coherent story, this way – the news reader looks directly out and their constant habit of testing narrative at us; and similar formats can be recognized in fidelity, whether the stories they experience cooking, sports and gardening programmes on ring true with stories they know in their lives’. TV: ‘Th e texts are not only presented for us, but He goes on, ‘Th e world is a set of stories which directed out at us.’ must be chosen among to live the good life in a Asa Berger concludes his book by affi rming the process of continual recreation.’ importance of narrative analysis in the study of Narratives: grand narratives See postmod- communication: ‘We used to think of the stories ernism. we read, listen to, and watch as little more than Narrowcasting As contrasted with broadcast- trivial amusements to “kill time”. Now we know ing; the term describes the process whereby that people learn from stories, are emotionally programme-makers and advertisers aim at aff ected by them, and actually need stories to specialized-interest (or niche) audiences, from lend colour and interest to their everyday lives.’ gardening to golf, from astronomy to cookery; or See codes of narrative; narrative: kernel at special levels of audience distinguished by,

192 Network

for example, social class, education or spending construct of reality as perceived by those with A power. Th e internet has proved fertile ground the power to represent it, and transmit it to the for narrowcasting. public. See ideology. B National Film Archive (UK) Founded in May Necessity, supervening social necessity 1935, the NFA is the largest division of the brit- (technology) See supervening social ish film institute (bfi). Its role is to acquire, necessity. C preserve and make available for study a collec- Needs See maslow’s hierarchy of needs. tion of ﬁ lms and TV programmes of all kinds Negative news values See new values. D exhibited or transmitted in the UK from any Negative semantic space See male-as-norm. source and of any nationality. Particular empha- Negativization See visions of order. sis is placed on British productions, which may Negotiated code See dominant, subordi- E have lasting value as works of art, as examples of nate, radical. ﬁ lm or TV history, or as valuable records of past Neologism Th e invention or usage of a new word, F and present socio-cultural behaviour. or giving an old word a new meaning, such as

National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Associa- ‘viewer’ from the French ‘voyeur’ to indicate G tion (NVLA) See ‘clean up tv’ movement. someone who views other people’s sometimes Naturalistic illusion (of television) Th e visual illicit activities. One of the most picturesque qualities of TV can lead to the assumption that neologisms in the area of media is couch H it is merely a window on the world, showing potato. life as it really is. Stuart Hall in ‘Th e rediscovery Net See internet. I of “ideology”’ in M. Gurevitch, T. Bennett, J. ★Network Channels of communications that

Curran, and J. Woollacott, eds, Culture, Society are interconnected are termed networks, to be JK and the Media (Methuen, 1982) refers to this found in all communication in which numbers of phenomenon as the ‘naturalistic illusion’. TV people are involved, such as groups and orga- programmes are in fact the result of considerable nizations. In essence a communication network L planning and research. Elaborate procedures of consists of linked dyads in which the receiver framing, editing and the matching of images in one dyad is the source in the next. Such M with dialogue have to be undertaken in order to networks will vary in size, and not all members present an exposition. of the network will necessarily have equal access N During these procedures decisions are taken to information or participation. that may signifi cantly aff ect the fi nished presen- A communication structure is a network tation. Diff erent impressions can be given, for in which some channels are systematically O example, of a mass demonstration depending neglected. Generally speaking the greater the upon when or where the fi lm is taken and how number of links between members, and the P it is edited. In short, what TV produces is a closer the distance between them, the more

XYZ

Examples of communication networks

193 Networking: social networking

likely it is that information is distributed equally social network sites are so popular ‘is that they – assuming that all members communicate appeal to our instinct for collecting’. Th ere is also through all the links at their disposal. something of the herd instinct in expanding Net In a network with a high level of centrality it acquaintance. Rettberg writes, ‘Once enough of is likely that some members will possess more your friends have joined a social network site, information than others. Communication social pressure can make it very diffi cult not to networks may take several forms, such as the participate.’ two illustrated. Networks may vary as to the ease Th e Wikpedia defi nition of a social network is with which individual members can be isolated a ‘structure made up of individuals (or organiza- from fellow members, and some networks will tions) called “nodes” which are tied (connected) suff er more than others from the removal of a by one or more specifi c types of interdependency, member or a link. If a member or link is missing such as friendship, kinship, common interest, from a chain network, for example, the eff ect fi nancial exchange, dislike, sexual relationships is likely to be more serious than if either were or beliefs, knowledge or prestige’. J.A. Barnes is missing from a circle network. A network may credited with using the term in 1954 to describe also spawn a sub-network: a sub-network can be the nature and process of patterns of association. said to exist when the number of links between Social network analysis has become a rapidly certain members is greater than the number of expanding field of study, producing a new links between these members and others. generation of commentators and gurus matching Th e term network is used in broadcasting optimistic with pessimistic visions of the impact to describe the pattern of connection of the of social networking on users. Th e optimism of broadcasting stations of a broadcasting company American writer Clay Shirky shines through the or companies. Such a connection allows the title of his book published by Allen Lane in 2010, simultaneous broadcast of the same programme. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity To ‘network’ a programme means to broadcast it in a Connected Age. In an interview with the to the widest number of TV/radio stations both UK Guardian’s Decca Aitkenhead (‘If there’s a within one network and in other networks. In screen to worry about in your house, it’s not the the US, the term is used more specifi cally: the one with the mouse attached’, 5 July 2010), Shirky Networks are those companies that commission says the popularity of online social media proves programmes and programme-series. that ‘people are more creative and generous than Perhaps the most familiar use of the term we have ever imagined, and would rather use ‘network’ applies to those established electroni- their free time participating in amateur online cally. Computer networks (see internet) are activities such as Wikipedia – for no fi nancial key to practically every aspect of modern life, reward – because they satisfy the primal human at the personal, national and global levels, urge for creativity and connectedness … Instead while social networking constitutes a whole new of lamenting the silliness of a lot of social online dimension for the term – see the next entry. media, we should be thrilled by the social activ- Networking: social networking The ism also emerging’. internet has rapidly fulfi lled the prophecy of Shirky talks of the ‘civic value’ of this activ- media guru Marshal McLuhan that electronic ism and sees it as potentially revolutionary. He communication would turn the world into a acknowledges the downsides of Net anonymity, global village; indeed it can be said that, with which allows users to ‘behave more meanly’, but the exponential growth of social networking, it predicts a time when ‘we are slowly going to set has become a global backyard. Basically, social up islands of civil discourse’ in which norms are networking is hundreds and thousands of people established that encourage people to use their e-chatting and message-exchanging via the real names or some well-known handle. Th e chal- Net and sites such as facebook, LiveJournal, lenge for social networking is how ‘to maximize’ myspace and Bebo. Th ese are used for commu- the Internet’s ‘civic value’. See blogosphere; nicative exchange both with people you know – digital natives, digital immigrants; mobi- old school or college friends, for example – and lization; web 2.0; youtube. with new people you would like to get acquainted ▶ Jan van Dijk, Th e Network Society (Sage, 2nd edition with. Potentially these may extend into hundreds 2006, reprinted 2010); Gerard Goggin, Global Mobile or thousands, each serving as a node to future Media (Routledge, 2011); Leah A. Lievrouw, Alterna- personal, group and organizational connections. tive and Active New Media (Polity Press, 2011). As Jill Walker Rettberg says in Blogging Network neutrality Means ‘open’ and ‘equal’ (Polity Press, 2010), one of the reasons why – that is, open to all without discrimination,

194 Newcomb’s ABX model of communication, 1953

and equal in terms of access; in short, all Net months of coming into power; in November A postings, whether corporate or personal, must 2010, Communications Minister Ed Vaisey be treated alike and move at the same speed over announced a ‘two-speed’ Internet on the basis B the network. ‘No tolls on the Internet’ was the of the more you pay, the quicker you transmit. headline of a Washingtonpost.com article (13 In response to the announcement Open Rights June 2006) by Lawrence Lessig and Robert W. Group director Jim Killock protested that C McChesney, in which they ask whether network ‘removing Net neutrality is likely to reduce inno- neutrality can be preserved, ‘Or will we let it vation’ and curtail ‘people’s ability to exercise D die at the hands of network owners itching to their freedom of speech’. See conglomerates: become content gatekeepers?’ Th e authors argue media conglomerates; paywall. E that the ‘implications of permanently losing ▶ Tim Wu, Th e Master Switch: Th e Rise and Fall of network neutrality could not be more serious’. Information Empires (Borzoi Books, 2011). On 14 January 2007, in an article entitled ★Newcomb’s ABX model of communication, F ‘Protecting Internet democracy’, the New 1953 In contrast to the linear structure of the

York Times asserted that ‘on the information shannon and weaver’s model of commu- G superhighway, net neutrality should be a basic nication, 1949, Theodore H. Newcomb’s rule of the road’, echoing what has become the model is triangular in shape, and is the ﬁ rst to battlecry of millions of Net users across America introduce as a factor the role of communication H – that Net neutrality is the equivalent of the First in a society or a social relationship. A and B are Amendment guaranteeing freedom of speech for communicators and X is the situation or social I all. context in which the communication takes place.

Th e struggle to preserve network neutrality Both the individuals are orientated to each other JK against corporate ambitions to introduce a ﬁ rst and to X, and communication is conceived of class/second class post-style realignment of as the process that supports this orientational network content continues. ‘Backroom corpo- structure. Symmetry or balance is maintained L rate deals won’t protect Net Neutrality’ was the between the three elements by the transmission title of an August 2010 posting by the Free Press of information about any change in circum- M website, calling on the Federal Communications stance or relationship, thus allowing adjustment Commission of the US to act before ‘Industry to take place. N players carve up the Open Internet’. For Newcomb, the process of communication Aparna Sridhar feared that ‘Industry titans is one of the interdependent factors maintaining will propose rules that serve only their own equilibrium, or as Newcomb himself puts it in O interests … it’s time for the FCC to take back its ‘An approach to the study of communicative acts’ role as a policymaking body and act quickly to in Psychological Review, 60 (1953), ‘communica- P re-establish its authority over broadband and to tion among human beings performs the essential adopt meaningful rules to protect the openness functions of enabling two or more individuals to R of the Internet for all Americans’. maintain simultaneous orientation to each other As feared, Google and the Verizon Internet and towards objects of an external environ- service provider came to a private agreement ment’. See congruence theory; dissonance; S which threatened to terminate the once-sacred mccombs and shaw’s agenda-setting tenet that no form of content is favoured over model of media effects, 1976; mcleod and T others. In the UK the Conservative-Liberal chaffee’s ‘kite’ model, 1973; wesley and coalition government breached the dam within maclean’s model of communication, 1957. U

XYZ

Newcomb’s ABX model of communication, 1953

195 New media

New media Term referring specifically to the certain, new media have made possible commu- possibilities brought about by computers and nication across space more accessible to a wider telecommunication, encompassing the inter- section of the population, both national and net and all its manifest applications. New media international, than would have been dreamed of includes the mobile phone (see mobilization) a decade or so ago. Th e world of knowledge, once and is characterized by technological conver- limited to books and libraries, once guarded gence and, contrastingly in terms of its reach, by the secrecy of offi cialdom, once a ‘property’ divergence. accessible only to the privileged, has been prised New media diff er from ‘old’ media in a number wide open. of ways. Traditionally, control of any commu- In her introduction to Alternative and Activist nicative transmission beyond the field of the New Media (Polity Press, 2011), Leah A. Lievrouw personal has rested in the hands of institutions, cites four factors which make ‘new media’ new: both public and private. To communicate with (1) Recombination, that is the way users of media hundreds and thousands it was necessary to technology make up, as it were, their own menus own such institutions or work for them. Now and forms of communication, producing hybrids fresh territories have opened up for groups and or recombinations. What emerges is ‘the product individuals; communication is possible free of of people’s ideas, decisions and actions, as they institutional control. The airwaves buzz with merge the old and new technologies, uses and bloggers (see blogging; journalism: citizen purposes’. (2) Design and use based on networks journalism); it is as easy to tune into, and be (and networks of networks), the hyperlink being active with, cyber-journalists, cyber-philoso- ‘the quintessential feature of new media’. (3) phers, as it is to pick up a newspaper. Ubiquity, ‘the seeming presence of new media New media are interactive; they are two-way, everywhere, all the time which aff ects everyone multiple-way, where traditional media have in societies where they are, whether or not every tended to be one-way means of information and individual uses them directly’ (see informa- entertainment. No longer are we entirely reliant tion gaps). (4) Interactivity characterized by for news and comment on the press, radio or TV. the participation by users in innovative as well as Th e traditional vertical structure of communica- traditional intercommunicative ways. tions has tilted, and continues to tilt, towards the Th ese factors are mutually infl uencing, each horizontal. helping to shape the others, subject to ‘change What has been created by new media is a more rapidly than media systems have in the ‘downloading culture’; and the impact of being past’. Th ey ‘resist stablilization of “lockdown” and able to download texts of all kinds, from music to change continuously …’ See audience: active movies, is seen as both a marvellous opportunity audience; bricolage; demotic turn; genre. and a threat. If everything is for free, who pays ▶ Martin Lister et al, New Media: A Critical Introduc- the piper in the fi rst place? Across the board, tion (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2009); Jan van Dijk, Th e communications industries are having to adjust Network Society (Sage, 2nd edition, 2010). to the challenges of downloading. New media genre theory See genre. Not least, new media is characterized by the News Th e study of news is central to most, if not speed of its development, matched by the pace all, courses in communication and media stud- of absorption by the public, young people in ies. Like information itself, the news is a vital particular. Th e ‘old’ media have not, of course, component of the life of individuals, groups, been left behind. Now we can read newspapers communities and nations. News brings us online; popular photography has creatively and information 24 hours a day. Whether it is in profitably embraced the digital; our mobile print or broadcast form, the news re-presents to phones are fast becoming ‘infotainment centres’. us the world – reality; and every student soon In schools, electronic whiteboards are taking learns that the news is a process, or rather an over from chalk and duster; in higher education, amalgam of many processes, which mediate text-messaging is being given academic status information: select it, edit it, emphasize some and respectability with new courses. parts of it, distort it, even manipulate it. News, New media have made possible the rise of new that is the raw information that is eventually voices, new modes of communication – essen- constructed as news, is turned into narrative, tially, but not always, personal; expressions of a mode of storytelling, which by the application individuality. It remains to be seen how far these of certain professional practices – conventions expressions can move, consistently, beyond the – establishes what has come to be termed news personal to the communal. One thing is for discourse.

196 News agencies

In this sense, news can actually be described tion and presentation, we would be alert to the A as ‘olds’: what has by precedent been counted capacity of audience to choose alternative read- as news continues to be classifi ed and used as ings to the realities with which they are being B news. We become acutely aware of the selective presented. We will most certainly have noted nature of news, of the fact that, for example, the how news presentation has developed over the elite – persons, societies, nations – appear years; that it is more lively than ever before in C more often in the news than ordinary people or style and content; that it is more entertaining. less prestigious societies and nations. And there We might need to ask whether such develop- D is a reciprocal nature about inclusion in the ments have increased or decreased audience news: if you are important, the news covers what comprehension of the matters being presented: you do or say; if the news covers what you do or how much of what is read or seen on TV news is E say, what you do or say becomes better known. fully grasped, contextualized; indeed, how much You become a Known instead of an Unknown. of it has been retained as meaningful informa- F Th e focus of study will shift from the analysis tion? of news sources, to the predisposition, reporto- No form of public communication has a higher G rial approach, and the constraints upon that profi le than news production and management, approach, of the practitioners of news; and and issues relating to this concern a number their activities will be examined in micro and of high aspirations – objectivity, balance and H macro situations. At the micro level we would impartiality – each diffi cult to defi ne both in scrutinize the relationship of practitioners to the theory and in practice. Many commentators I organization that employs them and thus directs would argue that a more pressing issue is the and infl uences their professional activities. nature of ownership and control and whether, in JK At the macro level we would study the infl u- any given society, there is a plurality in the ways ences from outside the organization, from in which information and opinion are presented. society itself: what part in shaping news content Finally, news and news production have to L and presentation does big business have, or be seen in relation to trends – the impact of government, or the law? What social, cultural, new media technologies, the transnationaliza- M economic or political pressures are brought to tion of media ownership, the privatization of bear on news production that will infl uence the public media services and the globalization N shape and tenor of it as it reaches the audience? of message/meaning systems. See blogging; We would be equally interested in how the blogosphere; churnalism; journalism; news is put together, how decisions are made journalism: celebrity journalism; jour- O about what is considered important or less nalism: citizen journalism; journalism: important. Th is might lead us into an investiga- data journalism; journalism: investiga- P tion of agenda-setting, in turn providing us tive journalism; journalism: ‘postmodern with a useful guide to the processes of gate- journalism’; new media; news: audience R keeping. Th e agenda controls the gate; but what evaluation, six dimensions of; news: audi- controls the agenda? We would need to explore ences for news; news provision: three the basic principles of what information, at elements; news: structure of reassur- S any given time, is considered newsworthy. We ance; news: the ‘maleness’ of news; news would focus on the news values which both waves. For a full listing, see topic guide under T practitioners and media analysts have identifi ed news media. as infl uencing decision-making. ▶ Daya Kishan Th ussu, News as Entertainment: Th e U Very importantly, we would be interested in Rise of Global Infotainment (Sage, 2008); Stuart investigating how news is received by audience. Allan, News Culture (Open University, 3rd edition, We would attempt to discover how audiences 2010); Graham Meikle and Guy Redden, eds, News V actually use the news; how far it actually does Online: Transformations and Continuities (Palgrave inform them, and whether it infl uences them. Macmillan, 2010); Kaitlynn Mendes, Feminism in W We soon understand that news reconstructs the News: Representations of the Women’s Movement the world according to the perceptions of those Since the 1960s (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). who produce the news, and those who employ News agencies ‘The invention of the news XYZ or infl uence the news producers; and we would agency,’ writes Anthony Smith in Th e Geopoli- be interested in discovering to what extent audi- tics of Information (Faber, 1980), ‘was the most ences take on board the ‘reality’ presented by important single development in the newspaper news. industry in the early 1800s, apart from the rotary In examining the approaches to news produc- press.’ Th e early agencies – Reuter, Havas and

197 News Aid?

Wolff – carved up the world into spheres of countries’ citizens. Liam Kane in ‘Media Studies activity in much the same way as imperialist and images of the “Th ird World”’, in the Spring nations parcelled out ‘Th ird World’ territories 1994 edition of Media Education, comments that between them. ‘“Th ird World” people tend to be portrayed very In 1869 the major agencies signed an Agency negatively, as passive victims of an unexplained Alliance Treaty. Reuter was ‘granted’ the British poverty’. Th e consequence, he goes on to argue, Empire and the whole of the Far East; Havas, a is that we can ‘easily blame poverty on a combi- French agency, was granted Italy, Spain, France nation of “natural disasters” and the supposed and the Portuguese empire; and the Germany- ignorance, laziness or backwardness of Asians, based Wolff received Austria, Scandinavia and Africans, and Latin Americans’. Russia. America was awarded jointly to Havas What are often overlooked are the structural and Reuter. causes of these problems; in both national and Today, the biggest agencies are Th e Associated international inequalities in the distribution of Press (AP), the Press Association (PA, created resources and power. Also undervalued or not as early as 1868), Reuters and the United Press reported at all are the resilience and achieve- International. ment of ‘Th ird World’ citizens despite their often Out of the traditional, print-centred news formidably adverse circumstances. Another fear, agencies have developed international television of course, is that concentration on the symptoms news agencies distributing TV news mate- rather than the causes of disasters, like war and rial around the clock, both ‘raw’ footage and famine, may lead ultimately to a dulling of the complete news stories ready for transmission. audience’s sensibility to them. See compassion Concern has focused on the role of inter- fatigue. national news agencies in giving world news a News: audience evaluation, six dimensions Western ‘slant’ through the operation of news of In ‘Research note: Th e eff ects of live television values reflecting the ideology of Western reporting on recall and appreciation of political nations’ news fl ow; that is, the degree to which news’ in the European Journal of Communica- that fl ow is mediated and the dominant direction tion, March 2000, Roland Snoeijer, Claes H. of that fl ow. What has been termed raw news de Vreese and Holli A. Semetoko examine ‘the fl ows from the periphery to the centre, but on evaluative judgment that viewers make of televi- the way it becomes cooked news – constructed sion news’. Th ey pose six evaluative dimensions: according to Western production criteria; while Credibility, Importance, Involvement, Attrac- the fl ow of information from the centre is almost tiveness, Immediacy and Comprehensibility. invariably cooked, shaped, according to Western TV news scores highly in terms of audience news values. See event; media imperialism; belief in its credibility, in part because viewers non-aligned news pool. not only see what is happening, but, as a result of News Aid? Paul Harrison and Robin Palmer satellite transmission, can also see events use this term in their book News Out of Africa: as they are actually happening. ‘The concept Biafra to Band Aid (Hilary Shipman, 1986), to of importance,’ write the authors, ‘refers to the illustrate the ambivalent relationship between implications or impact that a story is believed to the media’s coverage of the dramatic and have for society as a whole,’ viewers taking their distressing eff ects of famine in the ‘Th ird World’, cue from ‘the importance of a story defi ned by particularly Africa. Th e authors note the media’s newsmakers’ (see agenda-setting). Involve- long-term reticence, in news or current aff airs ment relates to news values and centres programmes, to participate in a discourse around personal likes and dislikes, interests and about the underlying causes of such famine geographical proximity. and ways in which famines might be prevented. ‘Information,’ consider the authors, ‘is found Such reticence begs the question of whether or to be attractive if it is vivid, lively and attention not coverage of the eff ects of famine, however grabbing,’ though perceptions and responses galvanizing of public opinion and action in the vary in impact, some groups of people ‘fi nding short term, really aids fi nding a solution to the it very attractive, others disturbing’; and this problem. dimension, as with credibility, applies to both Indeed some commentators argue that the the content and the presentation of the news. media’s tendency to concentrate reporting of Th e speed at which TV news can report events ‘Th ird World’ countries around issues of natural – its immediacy – is highly appreciated by the disasters or confl ict leads to the perpetuation audience for news. Finally, viewers need to of negative and stereotypical images of those believe that ‘they have received the information

198 News elements: breaking, explanatory, deep background

in a comprehensible way’ and the success in this As well as providing popular film and TV A relates to the way news stories are structured entertainment, News Corp’s services are most and the way they tackle the complexity of events. closely identifi ed with sport – in the UK, premier B See framing: news. league football and test cricket in particular; News: audience for news Th e Pew Research areas seen by some commentators (and rivals) Center of the US in a phone survey conducted as veering dangerously towards News Corp C between April and May 1998 identified six monopoly (see murdoch effect). News groups of news consumers in America. The Corp makes large donations to the Republican D results, stated the Center’s research report, Governors’ Association and the US Chamber of indicated ‘how diff erently the generations are Commerce. responding to the information explosion’. Th e As well as BSkyB in the UK (see british sky E news-consuming groups identifi ed were (1) the broadcasting, bskyb), News Corp either owns Mainstream news audience, deemed to have or has a substantial stake in Sky Deutschland, F ‘middle-of-the-road’ preferences; newspaper Sky Italia, Star TV of India and Greater China

readers who also regularly tune into local and and Tata Sky, India. Th e main subsidiary of News G networked TV news shows; (2) the Basically Corp in Britain is News International, respon- broadcast audience, relying primarily for its sible for The Times, Sunday Times, Sun and news on TV; (3) the Very occasional audience (until it was dramatically shut down as a result of H which ‘only follows the news when something sensational revelations of phone-hacking – see major is happening’; (4) the Constant audience journalism: phone-hacking) the News of the I ‘that watches, reads and listens to just about World.

everything – seemingly indiscriminately’; (5) The foundations of the News Corp empire JK the Serious news audience, equally committed were badly shaken in July 2011 by the NoW but more selective; and (6) the Tabloid audience scandal. Th e chief executive of News Interna- which ‘rejects broadcast news and favours the tional, Rebekah Brooks resigned and she, Rupert L National Enquirer, tabloid TV and the tell-all Murdoch and his son James were summoned to talk show …’ appear before a UK House of Commons select M ‘Ironically,’ the Pew report states, ‘the daily committee while the government launched a newspaper, the oldest format, is the only news public inquiry to be chaired by Lord Justice N source used regularly by a majority of all groups.’ Leveson. News Corp’s ambition to secure full See topic guide under audiences: consump- control of BSkyB was put on hold. tion & reception of media. News elements: breaking, explanatory, deep O News consensus See consistency. background In an article ‘Public broadcasting: News Corp One of the world’s largest and most imperfect but essential’ posted on the openDe- P diverse media corporations, News Corporation mocracy website (www.openDemocracy.net), 26 was created by Australia-born Rupert Murdoch June 2001, Jean Seaton identiﬁ es three central R in 1979. Its portfolio includes newspapers, book elements of news provision: (1) Breaking news, publishing, film production, TV and satellite what she describes as ‘attention-grabbing top broadcasting, cable networking, integrated stories that are often visually dramatic … that S marketing and information services. attract audiences by virtue of their drama’; (2) In the US, News Corp controls 20th Century Explanatory or ‘understanding’ news – longer- T Fox and Fox News, Fox Interactive Media, Th e format news programmes such as the UK’s Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Channel 4 early evening news, ‘which provides U online game store Direct2Drive, the recruiting some context to understand headlines and agency Milkround and much more. breaking news’; and (3) Deep background news News Corp owns many national, metropolitan formats ‘that track issues to the root’. V and regional newspapers in Australia (not to In Seaton’s view, examples of element (3)

mention the Papua New Guinea Post-Courier ‘are rare – that’s part of the problem’, for she W and the Fiji Times). Th e organization’s expan- sees, in the light of new technologies, of digital sionary trajectory extends into cooperative convergence and remorseless pressures of ventures with other media conglomerates, such competition, the threat of cost-cutting and the XYZ as Disney and NBC Universal: for example in undermining of deep background, investigatory 2009 Fox’s Interactive Media TV’s immensely journalism. She considers that ‘mainstream popular American Idol was translated into Th e broadcast news is wilting under the pressure American Idol Experience at Disney’s Hollywood of the market and is losing intelligence, style, Studios theme park in Florida (see synergy). authority and audience’, and argues that ‘in a

199 News: ﬂ at earth news

world of globalized corporate power, full-scale Gurevitch et al identify what they call the detailed investigation is essential to provide the ‘domestication of the foreign’: stories from public with the truth about what is going on’. See abroad are ‘told in ways which render them deregulation; news, globalization of; more familiar, more comprehensive and more journalism: investigatory journalism. compatible for consumption by different News: fl at earth news See churnalism. national audiences’. TV news, then, anchored as News frameworks Consist of a shared set of it generally tends to be ‘in narrative frameworks assumptions by reporters and editors about that are already familiar to and recognizable by what is newsworthy. Th ese assumptions infl u- news men as well as by audiences situated in ence the selection of items for investigation and particular cultures … simultaneously maintains reporting, and to some extent how they will be both global and culturally specifi c orientations’. presented. Th is set of assumptions also enables The domestication of the foreign serves as a journalists and editors to relate news items to an ‘countervailing force to the pull of globalization’. image of society in order to give them meaning. See audience: active audience; commoditi- Th us the framework can provide a ‘ready reck- zation of information; conglomerates; oner’ for constructing as well as selecting news consumerization; globalization (and the that allows deadlines to be met. See framing: media); mediapolis; news corp. media; news values. ▶ Daya Kishan Th ussu, International Communica- News, globalization of Satellite technology tion: Continuity and Change (Hodder Arnold, coupled with trends in transnational media 2006); Th ussu, ed., Media on the Move: Global Flow ownership and control have created global and Contra-Flow (Routledge, 2007); Robert M. patterns of information transmission character- McChesney, Th e Political Economy of Media: Endur- ized by both convergence and diversity. TV ing Issues, Emerging Dilemmas (Monthly Review news services worldwide show marked simi- Press, 2008). larities of content and narrative approach when News-literate Term used by John Hartley stories of international dimensions are being in Understanding News (Methuen, 1982) to reported. In contrast, diversity is maintained describe the ability of a reader, listener or viewer when national and local stories are dealt with. to comprehend the norms, codes and conven- In ‘Th e global newsroom: convergences and tions of news programmes; to intelligently scan diversities in the globalization of television news’ the news, ‘recognize its familiar cast of charac- in Communication and Citizenship: Journalism ters and events’ and to be able to spontaneously and the Public Sphere (Routledge, 1991), edited ‘interpret the world at large in terms of the codes by Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks, Michael we have learnt from the news’. Gurevitch, Mark R. Levy and Itzhak Roeh News management Refers to the tactics write that convergence is in part predicated employed by those – usually in government or by the availability, worldwide, of pictures, and important positions in society – who wish to reinforces what the authors term a measure of shape the news to their own advantage, or to ‘shared professional culture’, a certain ‘common- control events in such a way as to win favour- ality in news values and news judgments, across able publicity. In recent years the operative all services’. word to describe news management is spin. Th e However, diversity asserts itself in ‘lesser so-termed ‘spin doctors’, drawn almost invari- items’, suggesting ‘that this sharing of news ably from the ranks of professional journalism, values is not complete and that national social are essentially in the business of propaganda, and political diff erences, as well as journalistic that is talking up the good news and concealing norms between nations, also play a part in as far as possible the bad news. shaping patterns of news coverage’. Examples Where the communication of bad news is are cited of how globally available fi lm footage is unavoidable, a favourite ploy of the spin doctors actually harnessed to national meanings – same is to issue that bad news when other events pictures, diff erent reading. Th is in the opinion of are attracting media and public attention. Th e the authors is a practice off ering ‘an important danger that accompanies the use of spin is risk of antidote to “naive universalism” – that is, to the public exposure and consequently cynicism, and assumption that events reported in the news eventually disillusion with those who manage carry their own meanings, and that the mean- the news. See next entry. ings embedded in news stories produced in one News management in times of war One of the country can therefore be generalized to news most famous quotations about the management stories told in other societies’. of information in times of war is encapsulated in

200 News management in times of war

the title of a book by Phillip Knightley, Th e First (as it has done from time immemorial) became A Casualty: A History of War Reporting (Harcourt a successful marketing strategy. At the same Brace Jovanovich, 1975). Th is was revised and time, the American media looked timorously B updated in 2000, issued by Prion in paperback over their shoulders at the nature of those who (reprinted 2004), with the new title of Th e First controlled them: who paid the piper called the Casualty: Th e War Corespondent as Hero and tune, and US corporations, counting as they C Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo; the fi rst did most of American media in their business casualty being the truth. portfolios, favoured the war. D Since the fi rst Iraq War (1999), followed by the In the UK the government of Prime Minister Al-Qaeda attack on New York and the Pentagon, Tony Blair could not expect the media to fall into and the second invasion of Iraq by American and line so easily with war plans – until presented E British forces (2003), the examples of war news with convincing evidence that war was justifi ed. management have been plain to see; and if they Th is evidence came in the form of allegations F have not been obvious, there have been books, of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) articles, TV and radio programmes and fi lms to capable, so Blair claimed, aided and abetted by G analyse these for the public. Britain’s MI5, of putting the UK in peril within Knightley bundles with news managament 45 minutes. Th ese, later referred to by critics as ‘lies, manipulation … propaganda, spin, distor- weapons of mass deception, were never found, H tion, omission, slant and gullibility of the cover- but by this time (if not long before) decisions to age of … war’ and believes ‘the sad truth is that invade Iraq had already been made. Th e truth I in the new millennium, government propaganda had been rendered irrelevant. prepares its citizens for war so skilfully that it is Once war is underway, action, rarely analysis, JK quite likely they they do not want the truthful, feeds the headlines. Violence sells, as does objective and balanced reporting that good war compassion for victims. Th ere are heroes (on our correspondents once did their best to provide’. side) to be feted; atrocities to be downsized or L Basically, the strategy on the part of the explained away as the inevitable consequences of authorities – governments – in times of war is war; and, very importantly, there is the need to M to exert control over what the media can and support ‘our’ troops in times of combat. cannot say about current military action. Th is Eventually, despite the eff orts by news manag- N can be done by direct censorship of reporting ers to supress it, the truth will out; although (as happened during the Falklands War of 1982). usually too late for anything but recrimination. However, as the media have become global President George Bush was re-elected by the O in reach, as media outlets have multiplied, as American people in 2004, and Tony Blair was internet communication bypasses national returned to government, albeit with a reduced P frontiers, censorship has become increasingly majority, in 2005. In other words, even though diffi cult to sustain. truth eventually made its escape from the R A better strategy is to win the media to your concrete bunker of news management, the side by providing access to the war situation, managers, at least in the short-term, had won only in strictly regulated ways (see embedded the day. S reporters). Th e aim is propaganda for the ▶ Greg McLaughlin, Th e War Correspondent (Pluto home side, and the home public; yet the more Press, 2002); Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, T complex a war situation, the more public opposi- Weapons of Mass Deception: Th e Uses of Propaganda tion there is to it (as was the case in Britain and in Bush’s War on Iraq (Constable & Robinson, 2003); U to a lesser extent in the US, concerning the 2003 John Simpson, News from No Man’s Land: Reporting invasion of Iraq and the military occupation of the World (Pan, 2003); Andrew Hoskins, Television Afghanistan), the greater the pressures to win War: From Vietnam to Iraq (Continuum, 2004); David V a ‘good press’. However, support for war can be Miller, ed., Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media created and sustained if the public is starved of Distortion in the Attack on Iraq (Pluto, 2004); John W the kind of information and analysis that allows Pilger, ed., Tell Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism them to make up their own minds. and its Triumphs (Cape, 2004); Mark Connelly and XYZ In the US, there was a consensus of media David Welch, eds, War and the Media (I.B. Tauris, support for the second war in Iraq. Govern- 2005); Judith Sylvester and Suzanne Huff man, eds, ment propaganda, supported by the media Reporting from the Front: Th e Media and the Military themselves, had made the war a prime issue of (Rowman & Littlefi eld, 2005); Andrew Hoskins and patriotism and loyalty; criticize the war, and Ben O’Loughlin, War and the Media: Th e Emergence you were deemed disloyal to the fl ag. Patriotism of Diff used War (Polity Press, 2010); Richard M. Perl-

201 Newspaper price wars

off , Th e Dynamics of Persuasion: Communication and by the King’s Messengers, practically at their Attitudes in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 4th discretion. Though several warrants were no edition, 2010); Susan L. Carruthers, Th e Media at longer legal after 1766, the Stamp Duty and other War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd edition, 2011); Garth taxes on knowledge were burgeoning until the S. Jowett, Propaganda and Persuasion (Sage, 5th middle of the nineteenth century, when massive edition, 2011). and sustained press and popular pressure led Newspaper price wars See predatory pric- to the reduction and eventual abolition of the ing. duties. Newspapers, origins Th e earliest newspapers in New technology, the growth of advertising Britain were far more internationalist in outlook and a more literate general public contributed to and interest than they tend to be today. The a massive expansion of newspapers in the latter reason for this was the extensive censorship of half of the nineteenth century. In 1821 there had home news by monarch and council. As early as been 267 newspapers, including weeklies, in the seventeenth century there was the so-called the UK; by 1861 there were 1,102. Newspaper Relation, the publication of a single news trains, which began running in 1876, meant story, usually related long after the events. Th e that the London papers could reach all parts of Coranto served to join individual Relations into the country, while telegraphy speeded news, a continuity, though still not appearing regularly. increasingly provided by the news agencies Th e Diurnall was a step forward, providing a (Paul Julius Reuter opened his London office weekly account of occurrences over several days. in 1851). By 1880 London had eighteen dailies; Like the others before it, the Mercury appeared in the English provinces there were ninety-six in book-like form, but bore more prominently dailies, four in Wales, twenty-one in Scotland the individual stamp of writers and tended to and seventeen in Ireland. be more immediate and more diverse. During The most dramatic example of the rise in the Civil War (1642–46) Mercuries appeared in the popularity of newspapers was the boom in great abundance, even on Sundays. Sunday papers, whose audience, writes Anthony Contemporaneous with the Mercury was the Smith in The Newspaper: An International Intelligencer, usually more formal, aspiring to History (Thames & Hudson, 1979), ‘came be ‘offi cial’; a notable example was Th e Publick increasingly to consist of the newly literate who Intelligencer published with the blessing of could not afford six papers a week and were Protector Oliver Cromwell. Indeed the street interested in non-political news. The Sunday journalism of all kinds that emerged in the heady journals traded in horrible murders, ghastly days of the English Civil War laid the basis for seductions and lurid rapes, but they were the popular journalism we recognize today. In combined with a distinct brand of radicalism’. the twenty years between 1640 and the restora- Edward Lloyd’s Weekly News, founded in 1842, tion of the monarchy under Charles II, 30,000 was the fi rst periodical to reach a circulation of news publications and pamphlets emerged in a million, leaving the highest-selling daily paper, London alone. the Daily Telegraph, with a 200,000 circulation Th e date usually cited for London’s fi rst regu- – well behind. lar daily paper is 1702. Th e intention of Samuel The pattern for the future was set: new Buckley’s Daily Courant was ‘to give news, give it technology facilitated (and made economi- daily and impartially’, and it continued for 6,000 cally necessary) massive print runs; journalism editions. By 1750 London had fi ve daily papers, aimed for vast readerships; advertising became six thrice-weeklies, five weeklies and several more and more the staple financial support other periodicals, all amounting to a circulation of the press; ownership rested with very rich of 100,000 copies a week. individuals or joint stock companies; readership Th e Stamp Act of 1712 heralded over a century patterns hardened along lines of social class; of increasing concern on the part of the authori- and competition became increasingly desperate. ties about the proliferation and influence of See democracy and the media; journalism; newspapers. Government agents reported on northcliffe revolution; photo-journal- the contents of newspapers and there was a ism; press barons. See also topic guide under bristling array of laws to use against the press, media history. such as seditious libel and profanation. Newspeak As opposed to Oldspeak in George Of dubious legality but considerable eff ective- Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), ness was the general warrant enabling arrests where private thought and individual language and seizures of unnamed persons to be made were crimes against the totalitarian state of

202 News: the ‘maleness’ of news?

Oceania, and where the TV screen could actually Companies in the US were the first to add A hear what viewers were saying and see whether sound to newsreels, and in the UK British they were indulging in one of the worst of all Movietone was the fi rst to adopt sound (1928). B crimes, private reading. Guardian of Newspeak, In the 1930s the outstanding newsreel in the US the offi cial language divested of all superfl uities was the march of time series. News on TV by the meaning defi ned by the State, was the eventually put an end to cinema newsreels. See C Ministry of Truth (which, incidentally, had a cinematography, origins; documentary. sub-section called Pornsoc). Newsroom, The Museum, research and educa- D Orwell’s appendix to the novel, Th e Principles tional centre set up in Farringdon Road, London, of Newspeak, explains that Newspeak was ‘not in 2002 by the Scott Trust, telling the story of the only to provide a medium of expression for the Trust’s sister papers, the Observer (the world’s E world-view and mental habits proper to the oldest Sunday newspaper, over 200 years old) devotees of Ingsoc (English Socialism), but to and the Guardian. Th e Newsroom contains exhi- F make all other modes of thought impossible’. bitions of photo-journalism, documents, diaries,

Though the word ‘free’ would be retained in etc. kept by some of the most distinguished G Newspeak, its meaning applied in the sense of of the papers’ writers; features a permanent ‘Th is dog is free from lice’. interactive exhibition telling the history of the News: public relations news (PRN) Deﬁ ned two papers, and an oral history recording staﬀ H by Karmen Erjavec in an article entitled ‘Hybrid recollections going back several decades; and public relations news discourse’ in the European has a 90-seat lecture theatre. Students have the I Journal of Communication (June 2005) as opportunity to use the archive’s resources, and

pertaining ‘to all published news that contains student groups are encouraged to produce their JK basically unchanged PR [public relations] infor- own newspapers using the latest technology. mation, that appears without citing the source News selection See agenda-setting; and attempts to promote or protect certain galtung and ruge’s model of selective L people or organizations’. Th e author talks of a gatekeeping, 1965; news values; proto- ‘colonization of news discourse by PR’, its typical tying concept; rogers and dearing’s M feature being ‘the fact that commercialization agenda-setting model, 1987. dictates its nature and prescribes the limits of News: structure of reassurance In Represent- N public interest’, a judgment echoed by a number ing Order: Crime, Law And Justice in the News of media analysts. See consent, manufacture Media (Open University Press, 1991), Richard of. Ericson, Patricia M. Barnek and Janet B.L. Chan O News: rage inducement What happens if a argue that in the construction of reality in news news service trades in emotions – those of the production, a guiding function of the journalist P audience – rather than facts and reason? You are and editor is to render things ‘plausible’ and thus likely to have ‘rage inducement’; that is, the way ‘provide a familiar discourse, based in common R the news is slanted, the way it plays on anxiety, sense and precedent’. Th is plausibility ‘in turn fear and prejudice both stirs those sentiments in provides a structure of reassurance, a tool of the audience and off ers a justifi cation for having acknowledging the familiar’: by asserting the S them. Commentators cite Fox News in the US plausible-become-familiar the news construc- (part of the Murdoch news corp stable) as an tion process silences alternative defi nitions. T exemplar of this approach. Rage inducement News: the ‘maleness’ of news? If the news could, in this sense, be regarded as a news is to be ascribed a gender classifi cation, some U value. commentators argue that it is essentially ‘male’: Newsreel Th e Lumière brothers fathered news- male-orientated in terms of decisions over reel fi lm at the birth of the cinema, from 1895, content, over news values and in the practical V but the first regular newsreel, Pathé-Journal, matter of who gathers, reports, edits and pres-

began in 1908, and French infl uence upon news ents the news. W on fi lm was considerable for many years. In Feminist Media Studies (Sage, 1994, new Th e First World War (1914–18) gave impetus edition 2000), Lisbet van Zoonen argues that to newsreel especially in Germany, and with the women journalists are often expected, by male XYZ Revolution in Russia (1917) propaganda-newsreel colleagues and by the organizations employing (see agitprop) was regarded by the Communist them, to perform professionally in a manner government as being of vital importance in the diff erent from men; to subscribe to expecta- war for hearts and minds. Dziga Vertov’s Kino- tions of ‘femininity’. ‘Women,’ writes van Pravda newsreel series ran from 1922 to 1925. Zoonen, ‘are confronted by social and cultural

203 News values

expectations of femininity and at the same time the storm, but also reveals the geographical and are expected to meet criteria of professional- cultural breadth of women in media. ism.’ While there is no evidence that women Tsering Woeser, in 2010 awarded the prize for constitute a different group of professionals her reporting of events and conditions in Tibet, from their male colleagues, there were diff er- stated in her acceptance speech that she saw ences in the topics and issues that women were herself as a ‘weapon of the powerless’ and that selected to cover. she had suff ered on their behalf at the hands of Sue Curry Jansen in ‘Beaches without bases: the authorities. Other winners have worked in the gender order’ published in Invisible Crises: countries dangerous for independent-minded What Conglomerate Control of the Media women and dangerous for the trade of journal- Means for America and the World (Westview ism: freelancer Vicky Ntetema reporting on Press, 1996), edited by George Gerbner, Hamid the persecution of albinos in Tanzania; Jila Mowlana and Herbert I. Schiller, states that Baniyaghoob, reporter and website editor, conditions and prospects for women are equally beaten, arrested and imprisoned in Iran; Belarus disadvantaged in the United States. For Jansen, reporter Iryna Khalip, arrested, beaten and the news generally, and international news subjected to all-night interrogation; Agnes Tailo, in particular, needs to be viewed through the human rights reporter in Cameroon, abducted, ‘prism of gender’. beaten and left for dead in a ravine. She talks of an institutionalized bias towards Among Western winners of the Courage in maleness: ‘In the United States men write most Journalism award is Christian Science Monitor of the front-page newspaper stories. Th ey are reporter Jill Carroll of the US, abducted in 2006 the subject of most of those stories – 85 per cent while reporting in Baghdad and kept prisoner for of the references and 66 per cent of the photos eighty-two days. Indeed, if ever there was a grim in 1993. Th ey also dominate electronic media, test of the equality of the sexes in a profession (in accounting for 86 per cent of the correspondents the front line, not in organizational hierarchies) and 75 per cent of the sources for US network it is demonstrated by the fact that women jour- television evening programmes.’ nalists receive no ‘special treatment’ by those In international news coverage, ‘women not who punish journalists officially or covertly. only are marginal but also normally absent’. Russian journalist and outspoken critic of Jansen says, ‘Under the present global gender government Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead order, policymakers and journalists fi nd it more in 2006 in the lift of her apartment block, and manly to deal with guns, missiles, and violent TV journalist Olga Kotovskaya ‘fell’ to her death confl icts than with matters like female infanti- from a fourteenth-storey building in Kaliningrad cide in China’ or ‘the increased trade in children in 2009, only months after freelancer Anastasia in the sex markets of Manila and Bangkok in the Buburova was shot dead on a Moscow street. wake of the AIDS epidemic …’ As far as the UK is concerned, Brian McNair Jansen’s views received support from data was already writing in 1999, in News and Journal- published in April 1997 by the UK Fawcett ism in the UK (Sage), that ‘as a new generation of Society. During a week’s monitoring of election women enters the profession from university … coverage during main news bulletins on the young female journalists … actually appear to be BBC, ITN and Channel 4, it was found that 80 doing better than men of the same age’. McNair per cent of news gathering and presentation was is of the opinion that while sexism is far from carried out by male journalists; and the number eradicated, it ‘appears to be on the retreat, with of women featured as spokespersons in the consequences not just for the gender structure news was similarly in a minority. Of twenty-six of the profession but the form and content of government offi cials asked for their views, none journalism’. was a woman. ▶ Penny Colman, Where the Action Was: Women War Th e picture in the twenty-fi rst century so far Correspondents in World War II (Random House, has arguably improved, at least in terms of the 2002); Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner and Carole number of women journalists who work in the Fleming, Women and Journalism (Routledge, 2004). most dangerous places on earth to report war, News values According to Harold Evans, former atrocity, famine and persecution. A glance at editor of the UK Sunday Times and Th e Times, in the International Women’s Media Foundation his book Th e Practice of Journalism (Heinemann, (IWMF) list of winners of the Courage in Jour- 1963), ‘news is people’. Long-time journalist and nalism awards not only illustrates how women later, politician, Denis MacShane in Using the journalists and photographers work in the eye of Media (Pluto Press, 1979) sums up what jour-

204 News values

nalists are on the look-out for with fi ve tenets: personal terms; and the more negative the event A confl ict; hardship and danger to the community; is in its consequences, the greater the likelihood the unusual (oddity, novelty); scandal; and of selection. Consequently, once a news item has B individualism. He quotes Lord Northcliffe been selected, what makes it newsworthy will be (1869–1922), one of the original press barons, accentuated (the authors call this stage Distor- who once declared, ‘News is what somebody tion). Selection and distortion will, it is argued, C somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is take place at all steps in the chain from event to advertising.’ Stuart Hood in Hood on Televi- reader (Replication). D sion (Pluto Press, 1980) refers to news sense as Although Galtung and Ruge’s study deals only ‘the ability to judge the language and attitudes with newspaper content, Jeremy Tunstall in permissible within the opinion-forming organi- Journalists at Work (Constable, 1971) adapts the E zation of our society’; well within consensus Galtung and Ruge thesis to the analysis of TV thinking. news values. He itemizes four points of diff er- F One of the most succinct and influential ence. (1) In TV the visual is given pre-eminence. explanations of news values is that of Norwegian Th e possession of fi lm footage of an event will G scholars Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge. In ‘Struc- often increase the prominence given to a news turing and selecting news’, fi rst published in the story. (2) News items which include fi lm of ‘our Journal of International Peace Research (1965), own reporters’ interviewing or commentating H the authors state that events will be more likely on a story are preferred. (3) TV makes use of a to be reported if they fulfi l any, some or several small fraction of the number of stories the news- I of the following criteria. (1) Frequency: if the papers carry, and even major TV items are short event takes a time approximate to the frequency compared with newspaper coverage. (4) Th ere JK of the medium. A murder, for example, is more is preference for ‘hard’ stories or actuality on newsworthy than the slow progress of a ‘Th ird TV news. World’ country. (2) Amplitude: the bigger, the In ‘Th e global newsroom: convergences and L better, the more dramatic, the greater is the like- diversities in the globalization of television news’ lihood of the story achieving what the authors published in Communication and Citizenship: M call ‘threshold value’. (3) Unambiguity: the Journalism and the Public Sphere (Routledge, more clear-cut and uncomplicated the events, 1991), edited by Peter Dahlgren and Colin N the more they will be noticed and reported. Sparks, Michael Gurevitch, Mark R. Levy and (4) Familiarity: that which is ethnocentric, of Itzhak Roeh write that ‘in a pictures-driven cultural proximity, and that which is relevant; so medium, the availability of dramatic pictures O things close to home matter most, unless things competes with, and often supersedes, other close to home are aff ected by faraway events. news considerations’. P (5) Correspondence: that is, the degree to which Th ey also argue that for an event to be judged the events meet with our expectations – our newsworthy ‘it must be anchored in narrative R predictions, even. In this case, say Galtung and frameworks that are already familiar to and Ruge, ‘news’ is actually ‘olds’. Th ey term this the recognizable by news men as well as by audi- ‘hypothesis of consonance’ – that which is famil- ences situated in particular cultures’; for ‘diff er- S iar is registered; that which is unfamiliar is less ent societies tell themselves – on television and likely to be registered. (6) Surprise: this forms an elsewhere – diff erent stories’. T antidote in terms of criteria to (4) and (5), and Th e news values posited by Galtung and Ruge works to the benefi t of good news: ‘Events have have had a justifi ably long life and a number of U to be unexpected or rare, or preferably both, to them still operate in an age of immensely greater become good news.’ (7) Continuity: that which media diversity. Paul Brighton and Dennis Foy in has been defi ned as news – which has hit the New Values (Sage, 2007) cite a number of major V headlines – will continue to be newsworthy trends which have altered the media landscape since Galtung and Ruge’s time – the internet, even if amplitude is reduced. (8) Composition: W the need for a ‘balance’ in a news-spread leads spin doctoring, rolling news, citizen jour- the producer or editor to feed-in contrasting nalism (see journalism: citizen journalism) elements – some home news if the predominant and advances in interconnectivity, between XYZ stories have been foreign; a little good news if communicators and audience and between the news has generally been gloomy. modes of transmission and reception. Not the Galtung and Ruge draw the following general- least of the new phenomena since the 1960s is izations: the more events concern elite nations what Brighton and Foy call ‘the burgeoning of or elite people, the more events can be seen in celebrity, an all-encompassing term that can be

205 News waves

applied to everybody from politicians to pop New Wave In the year 1959–60 an astonish- musicians and soap opera “stars”’. ing sixty-seven new directors made their fi lm Brighton and Foy acknowledge that the debut in France: this was the nouvelle vague as hypotheses of Galtung and Ruge ‘were absolutely Françoise Giroud described it. At the crest of the fi ne for their time and in their intended context wave were critics writing for the fi lm magazine of social and behavioural studies … But as Bob Cahiers du Cinéma, including François Truf- Dylan once put it, Th ings Have Changed’. Q u i t e faut (1932–84), Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930) and simply, media communication has become Claude Chabrol (b. 1930). Th eir fi lms were made global with the ‘emergence of borderless broad- cheaply, often with unknown actors, improviza- cast and publishing operations’. tion, hand-held cameras and location shooting, Fresh values are called for, applying to a multi- and without huge teams of technicians. plicity of media; and these values, in the view The New Wave were always a loose-knit of Brighton and Foy, ‘will vary from medium to grouping of individual directors, and it was medium, and from each individual package to the individualism – the belief in the fi lm director as next’. Th e authors off er their own listing of seven auteur – which was their common characteris- values. (1) Relevance (the signifi cance of a news tic. Th ey reacted against the studio product and item to the viewer, listener or reader). (2) Topical- produced films of extraordinary richness and ity (is it new, current, immediately relevant?). (3) variety. Others in the Wave have been Alain Composition (how a news item fi ts with other Resnais, Chris Marker, Eric Rohmer, Jacques items that surround it). (4) Expectation (does Rivette, Louis Malle, Roger Vadim and Agnès the consumer expect to be told about this?). (5) Varda. Unusualness (what sets it apart from other events N-Gen Short for Net-Generation, a term describ- that are not reported?). (6) Worth (does it justify ing young people familiar with, and users of, the its appearance in the news?). (7) External infl u- internet and digital technology in general. ences (is the content of a news item pure, or has it The ‘N-Geners’ are characterized by a level been corrupted by pressure from outside, such as of mediacy that marks them out from their a proprietor, an advertiser or a politician?). parents’ generation. Th e authors are also of the view that ‘position- ‘Niche’ audiences In the digital age where in ing, inclusion or exclusion, and juxtapositions terms of programming and advertising the [of news items] are all fi ltered through aesthetic internet has made inroads into traditional criteria to an extent greater than is widely media operations, audiences have become more appreciated’. See galtung and ruge’s model fragmented, less easy to target and arguably of selective gatekeeping, 1965; immediacy; respond with higher and more specifi c expecta- impartiality; news management in times tions; hence the increasing need for more closely of war. See also topic guides under commu- tailored approaches. The problem is not only nication theory and news media. locating more specifi cally identifi ed audiences, ▶ James Watson, Media Communication: An Intro- but also tracking an essentially volatile market duction to Th eory and Process (Palgrave/Macmillan, and ensuring that the ‘niche’ is suffi ciently broad 3rd edition, 2008), Chapter 5, ‘The news, gates, to match investment and future prospects. agendas and values’. Nickelodeon An early and primitive form of News waves Media coverage of an event ‘makes cinema, of immense popularity in the US by waves’, that is causes a momentum of its own; 1905, usually consisting of a long, narrow room the coverage becomes its own headlines. In a furnished with wooden bench seats and very European Journal of Communication article, basic equipment for fi lm projection; frequently December 2005 entitled ‘Media hype: self-rein- converted from a shop or store. The term is forcing news waves, journalistic standards and thought to have been used by showman John the construction of social problems’, Peter L.M. P. Harris, combining the Greek for theatre with Vasterman writes of a ‘mismatch between these the slang expression for the fi ve cents charged news waves and the real world the media are for admission. Th e English equivalent was the supposed to cover … During these news waves, penny gaf. the media not the event seem to be governing Soon the Nickelodeon gave way to the more the coverage’. Consequently ‘the media some- stately fi lm-houses. In 1913, Mitchell L. Mark times create a chain of events that would not bought the Strand Theatre, a 3,000-seater have taken place without their involvement’. on Broadway, New York, and set in motion a New visibility See demotic turn; panopti- fashion for neo-Baroque splendour. Th e movies con gaze; pornography. had moved upmarket. Much later, the jukebox

206 Non-verbal behaviour: repertoire

got referred to as the nickelodeon; a translation from expressing diverging or contrary views, but A in meaning testiﬁ ed in the post-Second World continues to hold them, or whether attitudes War hit song, ‘Put another nickel in/In the Nick- have actually been changed as a result of domi- B elodeon ...’ nant media voices. See kuuki. See also topic Nielsen ratings audience measurement guide under communication models. figures produced by the US company A.C. ▶ Kurt Neuwirth, Edward Frederick and Charles C Nielsen, the best-known and most influential Mayo, ‘Th e spiral of silence and fear of isolation’ (Jour- ratings information business. nal of Communication, September 2007); Andrew F. D Nine American lifestyles See vals typology. Hayes, ‘Exploring the forms of self-censorship: on the Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence model of spiral of silence and the use of opinion expression E public opinion, 1974 In her paper, ‘Th e spiral avoidance strategies’ (Journal of Communication, of silence: a theory of public opinion’ published December 2007). An outstanding example from in the Journal of Communication, 24 (1974), ﬁ ction on the theme ‘of keeping silent’ in the face of F German professor of communications research isolation and duress is Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin

Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann examines the inter- (Penguin, 2011), translated by Michael Hoﬀ man. G play between three communicative factors: the Noise Impedance or barrier between the sending mass media, interpersonal communication and receiving of communication signals. Claude and an individual’s perception of his/her own Shannon and Warren Weaver in The Math- H standpoint in relation to others in society. ematical Th eory of Communication (University Th e model is based upon the belief that people of Illinois Press, 1949) posit two levels of noise I are uneasy, suffer dissonance, if they feel problems: level A, engineering noise and, at the

themselves to be isolates with regard to general higher level, B, semantic noise. Level A is physi- JK opinion and attitude: that they are the odd one cal and technical and is defi ned as any distortion out. In response to a situation, we tend to ask, of meaning occurring in the communication what do other people think; what is the majority process which is not intended by the source, L or dominant opinion? A person may fi nd ‘that but which aff ects the reception of the message- the views he holds are losing ground; the more carrying signals and their clarity. Th e semantic M this appears to be so, the more uncertain he level is ‘noise’ or impedance in terms of codes – will become of himself, and the less he will be linguistic, personal, psychological, cultural, etc. N inclined to express his opinion’. Th is is the spiral Later writers have identifi ed psychological noise of silence. as a category in its own right: examples here The dominant view which the mass media could include lack of motivation, personality O express (see elite; hegemony; power elite) clashes and lack of shared experiences. exerts pressure to conform, to step into line; and ▶ Richard Dimbleby and Graeme Burton, More Th an P the more this view is expressed, the more the Words: An Introduction to Communication (Rout- dominant view is reinforced; the more dominant ledge, 2007). R it appears, the more diffi cult it becomes to hold Non-verbal behaviour: repertoire A useful a contrary view. In a sense, Noelle-Neumann’s classification scheme for the repertoire of model is a spiral within a spiral, the one an asser- non-verbal behaviour is suggested by American S tion, the other a withdrawal into a silence as the authors Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen in assertion grows stronger. ‘Th e repertoire of nonverbal behaviour: catego- T Th e spiral tapers towards silence under the ries, origins, usage and coding’ in Semiotica 1 infl uence exerted by opinion expressed as domi- (1969). Th eir fi ve categories of non-verbal move- U nant by the mass media. Th us a spiral of silence ment are: emblems, illustrators, aff ect displays, on the part of individual members of the public regulators and adaptors. refl ects the spiral of dominance represented by Emblems are non-verbal behaviours that V the media. At the same time counter-infl uence directly suggest specific words or phrases, can come to bear from interpersonal support for usually without vocal accompaniment. Th us the W deviant opinion. beckoning fi rst fi nger is the emblem for ‘Come Professor Noelle-Neumann’s definition of here’. Emblems are short-cut communication public opinion is that ‘which can be voiced in signals useful in many ways, especially where XYZ public without fear of sanctions and upon which verbal communication is diffi cult or inappropri- action in public can be based ... voicing opposite ate, for example when a person is thumbing a lift. opinions, or acting in public accordingly, incurs Illustrators accompany and reinforce verbal the danger of isolation’. Th e model prompts the messages: the nod of the head, a supportive question whether the public merely holds back smile, leaning forward to show interest, sketch-

207 Non-verbal communication

ing something in the air with fi nger or hand, to speed; and aspects of the personal voice quality give a point emphasis or clarity. Illustrators tend and accent. to be less culture-specifi c than emblems. Aff ect Larry A. Samovar, Richard E. Porter and Edwin displays are movements of the face and body that R. McDaniel in Intercultural Communication: hold emotional meaning: disappointment, rage, A Reader (Th omson Wadsworth, 2006) note a happiness, hopefulness, shock, etc.; indeed our range of cultural diff erences in the use of non- whole body language constitutes aff ect displays. verbal vocalizations; for example, ‘Members of For Ekman and Friesen, regulators are non- cultures with strong oral traditions, such as verbal actions that monitor and control the African Americans and Jews, tend to speak with communication of another individual. These more passion; Italians and Greeks talk much can take the form of encouragement of the other more and more loudly than Asians, who appreci- person to go on speaking, to explain more fully, ate silence as a way of showing politeness.’ to quicken up, slow down, or get to the point. Normative theories of mass media In Mass Here we use nods, smiles, grunts, ah-ha’s; we Communication Th eory: An Introduction (Sage, shake our heads, we glance away, blink, pucker 1983), Denis McQuail posits six normative theo- lips. Equally we can employ regulators in a nega- ries of the mass media: (1) Authoritarian Th eory; tive sense by using non-verbal behaviours to (2) Free Press Th eory; (3) Social Responsibility discourage the other person from talking. Th eory; (4) Soviet Media Th eory; (5) Develop- Adaptors are generally habitual behaviours ment Media Theory; and (6) Democratic- used to make a person feel more at ease in Participant Th eory. communication interactions: twisting a lock of By normative, we mean how the media should hair, scratching, stroking (the hair, the chin, etc.), be, what is to be expected of them rather than wringing hands, turning a ring round the fi nger, what necessarily happens in practice; and it fi ddling with jewellery, playing with matches – is out of the political, cultural and economic actions which are more private than public and context that the normative principles arise. are likely to undergo some modifi cation when Central to the normative theory is the way the the private actions extend into a public domain. media ‘behave’ in relation to the state, and the See communication, non-verbal; gesture; dominant expectations that the state has of the proxemics. See also topic guide under inter- role of the media. personal communication. Th e Authoritarian Th eory thus appertains in a Non-verbal communication See communi- state in which press or broadcasting freedoms cation, non-verbal. not only do not exist, but are not considered by Non-verbal vocalizations In communica- those in power, or those who support them in tion a number of sounds are used that are not power, desirable even as ideals. What Siebert speech but which convey important information et al call ‘Libertarian theory’ McQuail terms contributing to the overall meaning of the the Free Press Th eory, which is considered the message being conveyed. At times these sounds chief legitimating principle for the print media communicate a message without the need for in liberal democracies. Free and public expres- accompanying speech. sion is, implies this theory, the best way to arrive Michael Argyle in Bodily Communication at the truth and expose error. It is a principle (Methuen, 1988) identifies some of the main enshrined in the First Amendment of the Ameri- non-verbal vocalizations. Th ere are those that can Constitution. This states that ‘Congress aid the understanding and regulating of speech. shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of Th ese include prosodic signals, like the raising of speech of the press’. McQuail’s analysis of this pitch to indicate that what is being said is a ques- principle in practice is well worth noting, for he tion; synchronizing signals, such as the lowering asks searching questions about whose freedom; of pitch to indicate that one has fi nished speak- about monopolistic tendencies; about the close ing for the time being; and speech disturbances identifi cation of notions of freedom with profi t such as stutters and repetitions. and private ownership. Some are more independent of speech but Th e Social Responsibility Th eory believes in communicate emotions, attitudes or other freedom provided that it is harnessed to respon- social information that may aff ect the encoding sibility: independence is desirable only so long as and decoding of the message. These include it is reconcilable with an obligation to society. In emotional noises such as cries and laughter; this sense, the media are perceived as fulfi lling a paralinguistic noises that convey emotional role of public stewardship. Th ey are the watch- information by such means as pitch, volume and dogs of the common good against government

208 Norms

or private abuse of power or corruption. Th ere McQuail proff ers a set of defi ning principles A is an emphasis on neutrality and balance; most by which media performance can be judged, and of all, a belief in media accountability to society these relate to community values. He cites the B (see mediapolis). following as Public Communication Values: (1) Soviet Media Theory (worth noting even Freedom, acquiring its public defi nition through though the Soviet system has passed away) the independent status of the media, public C derives from the postulates of Marx, Engels and access to channels and diversity of supply; (2) Lenin. Here, the media serve the interests of the Equality, which concerns openness, access and D socialist state, the state being an embodiment of objectivity (characterized by neutrality, fair- all the members of a classless society. Because ness and truth); and (3) Order, a classifi cation the media are of the people, they belong to the relating to order both in the sense of solidarity E people. In practice, of course, they belonged to and in the sense of control (the one operating the people’s leadership. Th e tasks of media are bottom upwards, as it were, the other top down- F to socialize the people into desirable norms as wards). defi ned in Marxist doctrine; to educate, inform, The principles interrelate, interact and are G motivate and mobilize in the aims and aspira- obviously in constant confl ict with one another. tions of a socialist society. (See class.) McQuail acknowledges ‘deep fi ssures and incon- Development Media Th eory has arisen out of sistencies, depending on how they [the prin- H special needs in the ‘Th ird World’ developing ciples] are interpreted’. However, the application nations (see macbride commission; media of these principles to the changing patterns of I imperialism). Th is theory eschews bad news media operation provide ‘the essential building theory and favours positive reporting on the blocks for a quite comprehensive, fl exible and JK grounds that for developing nations, often strug- changing “social theory of media”, relevant to our gling for economic survival in competition with times and of practical value in the ever widening Western industrialized countries, reporting of circle of public discussion of the role of mass L disasters and setbacks can substantially injure media in society’. See journalism: citizen the process of nation building. journalism; mcquail’s accountability of M The Democratic-Participant Media Theory media model, 1997. emphasizes the individual rights of access, of ▶ Denis McQuail, McQuail’s Mass Communication N citizen and minority groups, to the media, in Th eory (Sage, 6th edition, 2010). fact the right to communicate; to be served by Norms Shared expectations or standards of the media according to a more democratic behaviour within a particular social group or O determination of need (see democracy and society. Any type of established group will the media). Thus the theory opposes the have norms, both peculiar to itself and shared P concentration of ownership and rejects the role with the wider community. Of those norms of audience as tame receiver. Media should be widely accepted in a society, some will operate R answerable, free of government or big-business on a high, some on a low consensus. Any intervention, small-scale, interactive and individual’s perception and interpretation of participative (see campaign for press and experience will be infl uenced by the norms of S broadcasting freedom; community radio; the social groups and society to which he/she right of reply). belongs. Individuals generally take such norms T In a later publication, ‘Mass media in the for granted. Communication between individu- public interest: towards a framework of norms als likewise refl ects certain norms, such as those U for media performance’ in Mass Media and of grammar and style of writing or norms of Society, edited by James Curran and Michael conduct that guide social interaction. Gurevitch (Edward Arnold, 1991), McQuail Norms arise from such interaction between V re-examines the validity of normative models various individuals and social groups; once because ‘attempts to formulate consistent developed, they are passed on through social- W “theories” of the press’ become increasingly ization to new members. Norms are not static: diffi cult to sustain ‘when media technologies and they are subject to renegotiation. Th ey play a distribution systems are multiplying and when signifi cant part in maintaining the social posi- XYZ there is less consensus about basic values than tion of particular groups and individuals and in the past’. Th e dissolution of the Soviet Union constitute an infl uential agent of informal social is a case in point, though it is arguable that the control. ‘Marxist’ Media Th eory continues to apply in Th e media, as agents of communication and China and Cuba. socialization, are in a position to both reinforce

209 Northcliff e revolution

general societal norms and to express the norms ‘... if it’s moved again, whoever does it is fi red’. of certain social groups. In addition, the media Curran and Seaton speak of how the personal have the potential to shape expectations of tastes of the Barons influenced the popular behaviour, particularly with regard to individu- journalism of the time: ‘Northcliff e had a lifelong als or groups with whom the viewer, listener or obsession with torture and death: he even kept reader is unfamiliar. It is this potential that has an aquarium containing a goldfi sh and a pike, aroused considerable research interest. See with a dividing partition, which he would lift up culture; male-as-norm; values. when he was in need of diversion.’ He told staff of Northcliff e revolution New schooling in the the Daily Mail to fi nd ‘one murder a day’. late nineteenth century in the UK, following Meddling with the content by newspaper the Foster Education Act of 1870, created a proprietors was not, of course, new. It had gone rapidly expanding readership of literature and on throughout the nineteenth century, but then news. Alfred Charles William Harmsworth interference had focused mainly upon political (1865–1922), later Lord Northcliffe, perhaps matters. What was diff erent with Northcliff e and the most dynamic and extraordinary of the his ilk was that the new proprietors meddled in press barons, built a press empire on the new everything. See newspapers, origins. See also fl ood-tide of literacy. Creator of the Daily Mail topic guide under media history. (1896) and the Daily Mirror (1903), Northcliff e ▶ Kevin Williams, Get Me A Murder a Day! A History combined a ‘popular-educator’ emphasis with a of Mass Communication in Britain (2nd edition, Get marketing sense that was energetic, imaginative, Me a Murder a Day! A History of Media and Commu- daring and ruthless. Northcliff e represents the nication in Britain, Bloomsbury Academic, 2009). fundamental shift towards the exploitation of, N-step theory See opinion leader. and increasing dependence upon, advertising NVC See communication, non-verbal (nvc). as a means of newspaper fi nance. Publicity was everything. Rivalry between papers, in terms of sensation-seeking and atten- O tion-grabbing stunts, resembled (as it continues Object See sign. to do today) the Battle of the Titans. Raymond Objectivity Professor Stuart Hall has expressed Williams in The Long Revolution (Chatto & the view that objectivity, ‘like impartiality, is an Windus, 1961) says, ‘Th e true “Northcliff e Revo- operational fi ction’ (in ‘Media power: the double lution” is less an innovation in actual journalism bind’, Journal of Communication, Autumn 1984). than a radical change in the economic basis of In examining the media, analysts encounter the newspapers, tied to the new kind of advertising.’ ‘Famous Four’: balance, consensus, impar- By 1908 Northcliff e’s press empire included the tiality and objectivity, upon which all good Mail, the Mirror, Th e Times, two Sunday papers reporting is said to be based. The questions (Observer and Dispatch) and an evening paper arising from this precept are: balance between (News), plus a host of periodicals such as Tit-Bits what and what? Consensus among whom? and Answers (whose circulation had leapt from Impartiality in what sense? Objectivity in whose 12,000 at its inception to 352,000 two years later). eyes? Considering the complex processes of Th ough the so-called Northcliff e revolution mediation between an event and its report was chiefl y characterized by the employment of in media form, is it possible to have value-free new technology, the drive for mass circulations information? and the wholesale reliance on advertising as the ‘All edited or manipulated symbolic reality,’ prime source of press revenue, the ‘fl avour’ of says Hall, ‘is impregnated with values, view- that revolution must not be overlooked, that is points, implicit theorizings, commonsense the style and content emanating from the Press assumptions.’ When there are differences Barons themselves. James Curran and Jean between what is objective and what is not, whose Seaton in Power Without Responsibility: The opinion wins the day? Press and Broadcasting in Britain (Routledge, Hall says of consensus that it is ‘structured 6th edition, 2003; see 7th edition, 2010, Power dominance’. The prevailing definition usually Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and rests with the power elite, the ‘power-ideology the Internet in Britain), write that ‘Northcliff e complex’ in any society whose control of and and Beaverbrook shaped the entire content of infl uence upon the media gives them a domi- their favourite papers, including their lay-out’. nant say in the definitions of objectivity. See When The Times changed the place in the cultural apparatus; elite; hegemony; paper of the weather report, Northcliff e raged, machinery of representation.

210 Ofcom: Offi ce of Communications (UK)

Object language According to Gail and Michele of Pablo Picasso (1891–1973) and mean not only A Myers in Th e Dynamics of Human Communica- the items of his work – paintings, sculpture, tion (McGraw-Hill, 1985), this term refers to ‘the pottery – but also, by implication, the nature or B meanings you attribute to objects with which character of that work. See opus. you surround yourself’. Th ese objects might be Ofcom: Offi ce of Communications (UK)A items of clothing, hairstyle, fashion accessories, ‘super regulator’ born of the communications C your house, your furniture, your car and so on; act (uk), 2003, and assuming its responsibilities and they may say something about you to others on 29 December 2003; inherited the duties of D – forming part of your self-presentation. the Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC), The objects may not always convey to others the Independent Television Commission (ITC), the message you wish them to: people can be the Oﬃ ce of Telecommunications (Oftel), the E unaware of their symbolic value or simply read Radio Authority and the Radio Communications into them different meanings from the ones Agency. F intended. And of course you yourself might not Such issues as telephone silence calls, copy-

be conscious of the messages you are sending right infringement and broadband speed-up G through the objects you possess. are dealt with by Ofcom, which is a member of Object language can be particularly important the recently formed BEREC (Body of European when people are forming ﬁ rst impressions of one Regulators in Electronic Communications) H another. A great deal of advertising certainly comprising twenty-seven regulators of the Euro- works on the assumption that consumer objects pean Union, which held its inaugural meeting in I have as their main appeal a symbolic rather than January 2010.

a purely functional value. Ofcom has responsibilities across the spec- JK As Jib Fowles comments in Advertising and trum of broadcasting and telecommunications in Popular Culture (Sage, 1996), ‘The individual Britain, and is required by statute to ‘further the looks at advertising imagery and the associated interests of citizens and consumers by promot- L commodity in the attempt to fi nd those pleasing competition and protecting consumers from ing signs that will defi ne oneself in distinction harm or offensive material’. Ofcom consults, M to others. Still, those signs must be readable by researches, produces codes and policies and others, so what the solitary consumer is buying deals with complaints. N is not so much self-definition in isolation as In May 2005 Ofcom published its Broadcasting participatory symbols.’ Code for television and radio. Th is acknowledges In their book Understanding and Sharing: An Euro-Community directives relating to TV, and O Introduction to Speech Communication (Brown, incorporates aspects of the Human Rights Act 1979; reprinted 1985), authors Judy Cornelia of 1998, in particular articles of the Convention P Pearson, Paul Edward Nelson and Donald Yoder relating to the rights to freedom of expression, use the term objectics, the study of ‘clothing, thought, conscience and religion; personal R adornments, hairstyles, cosmetics and other privacy; and freedom from discrimination. artefacts that we carry with us or possess’. Object Section One of the Code lays down broadcasting language conveys information about our age, benchmarks to protect the under-18s and deals S sex, status, role, personality, relationships with with programme scheduling; the coverage of groups and with other people, psychological and sexual and other off ences in the UK involving T emotional state, self-concept, and the ‘physical under-18s; drugs, smoking, solvents and alcohol; climate in which we live’. See communication, violence and dangerous behaviour; offensive U non-verbal (nvc); self-concept. language; sex and nudity; and excorcism, the Obscene signals See insult signals. occult and the paranormal. Obsolescence Generally, anything passing out Other sections of the Code deal with Harm V of date or out of use. In a communications and Off ence; Crime (‘To ensure that material likely to encourage and incite the commission of sense, it refers to the link between social habits W and media-using habits. Obsolescence can be crime or lead to disorder is not included in tele- defi ned as the abandoning of formerly institu- vision or radio services’); Religion; Impartiality tionalized modes of conduct related to some and Due Accuracy; Elections and Referendums; XYZ established cultural activity. Fairness (‘To ensure that broadcasters avoid Oeuvre French for ‘work’, generally the complete unjust or unfair treatment of individuals or orga- works of an artist, writer, composer, etc. The nizations in programmes’); Privacy; Sponsorship word refers to the work of the mind as well as of and Commercial References; and Other Matters. hand and eye. Th us we may refer to the oeuvre Of key and regular interest to the press and

211 Offi cial Secrets Act (UK)

public – and students of communication – are was widely seen as arbitrary and unwise and an Ofcom reports. These are wide-ranging and indication of government being ‘in the pocket’ address such matters as product placement of a seemingly all-powerful media mogul and and paid-for references to brands and products his empire. Clearly part of Leveson’s remit will on radio (December 2010), net neutrality be to consider the power, or lack of it, of Ofcom (June 2010), and the deregulation of commercial to assert principles of public interest and media local radio (April 2010). regulation. Ofcom has clout: in November 2010 it revoked Th e watchdog took the initiative of announc- the licences of four stations (Tease Me, Tease Me ing a review of whether those responsible for TV, and Tease Me 2 and 3) run by Bang Channels and running News Corp would qualify as ‘fit Ltd and Bang Media (London) ‘following serious and proper’ persons to run public media. Th e breaches of the broadcasting code’. Th is followed head of Ofcom, Ed Richards, said the regula- a 157,250 fine imposed on the companies in tor would ‘consider any relevant conduct of July. In its judgment Ofcom referred to a ‘wholly those who manage and control’ licences to inadequate compliance system’ that amounted broadcast. See british sky broadcasting to ‘manifest recklessness’. (bskyb); murdoch effect; press complaints At the close of 2010 the regulator fined commission; predatory pricing; regula- London-based Continental Telecom 50,000 tory favours. for failing to provide information to Ofcom as Offi cial Secrets Act (UK) Born in a spy scare part of its investigation into the fi rm for landline during the Agadir crisis of 1911, reinforced in mis-selling. 1920 during the Troubles in Ireland, and given In a more benign mood Ofcom celebrated further power as war broke out in 1939, the Act small community radio stations which it consid- censors information – access to and expression ered bring far-reaching benefi ts to communities of it – which might be of use to the nation’s – both to audiences and to the thousands of enemies. It is easier to define what the Act unpaid volunteers (40,000 of them nationwide) doesn’t cover than what it does; without ques- who help man the 181 stations (November 2010). tion, it is the single most comprehensive weapon Th e report cited one such, Diverse FM of Luton, of censorship with regard to the activities of which broadcasts in Bengali, Hindu, Gujarati, government in the UK, and has few parallels in Urdu, Pahari, Polish, Arabic, Swahjili and Patura. the ‘free’ world. Ofcom’s power over UK broadcasting For a time, the saving grace of the Act was is, however, far from absolute. In 2011, the the possibility of defending individual, group or Conservative-Liberal Democratic coalition media breaches of secrecy on the grounds that government ignored Ofcom’s recommendation such a breach was in the public interest. This that Rupert Murdoch’s news corp application was excised from the Act by the Conservative to increase its holding in BSkyB from 39.1 per government in 1990 and subsequent New Labour cent to 100 per cent be sent to the Competition administrations made no move to put it back. Commission. Th e Secretary of State for Culture Brian Raymond, solicitor to the civil servant Jeremy Hunt was ‘mindful’ to give Murdoch the Clive Ponting who was unsuccessfully pros- go-ahead based upon an off er to suspend direct ecuted under the Act for revealing information control of BSkyNews for a period of ten years; about the sinking by a British submarine of a deal described by the UK Daily Telegraph as the Argentinian battleship Belgrano, with the ‘little more than a carefully choreographed loss of hundreds of lives during the Falklands capitulation’ (Leader comment, ‘A body blow to War (1982), said: ‘Th e obliteration of the public the notion of a vibrant, diverse press’, 4 March). interest defence … amounts to a licence to cover However, such ambitions were dramatically up Government wrong-doing.’ See d-notices; put on hold as the Murdoch media empire was freedom of information act, 2005; regu- engulfed in scandal as revelations became public lation of investigatory powers act of extensive and systemic phone-hacking on the (ripa), 2000; secrecy; spycatcher case. part of the News of the World (see journalism: See also topic guide under media: freedom, phone-hacking). The 168-year-old, highly censorship. profi table Sunday paper was shut down in July Oligopolization Oligarchy is government by a 2011, swiftly followed by the establishment by small exclusive class or group; in media terms, government of a public inquiry headed by Lord oligopolization is the process of communication Justice Leveson. systems falling into the hands of a small exclusive Th e decision by Hunt to ignore Ofcom advice group of owners or corporations.

212 Onomatopoeia

Omnimax Spectator-surrounding fi lm projection ing and responsive individuals rather than of A technique developed, like imax, in Canada from the socially isolated, passive atoms of earlier a system invented by an Australian, Ron James. theories. B Though there are several Omnimax screens Th e multi-step model is a development of the in North America, the first in Europe, with other two, allowing for the sequential relay- the largest screen in the world, operates at the ing of a message. It is not specific about the C 55-hectare Paris exhibition complex, Cité des number of steps there will be in the relaying Sciences et de L’Industrie at Porte de la Villette, process; nor does it specify that messages must D which opened in 1986. originate from a source and then pass straight La Géode off ers a projection screen covering through the agencies of the mass media. The 10,000 square feet and surrounds spectators model suggests a variable number of relays in the E with a complete hemisphere, exceeding the communication process and that the receivers normal fi eld of vision. Like Imax, Omnimax uses may receive the message at various stages along F 70mm film which passes through the camera the relay network. Th e exact number of steps in

horizontally, producing a 5cm × 7cm fi lm image the process depends upon the following: (1) the G – approximately nine times the image area on intentions of the source; (2) the availability of the ordinary cinema fi lm. Camera and projector use mass media; (3) the extent of audience exposure a 25mm fi sh-eye lens with a scope of 172 degrees. to agencies of communication; (4) the nature of H A massive light source is required to project the message; (5) the importance of the message such a gigantic picture and Omnimax has a to the audience. I 15 kW water-cooled xenon lamp. Th e model allows the researcher to account for One-step, two-step, multi-step fl ow models diff erent variables in diff erent communication JK of communication Basically these are refi ne- situations. It may usefully be applied to commu- ments of the hypodermic needle model of nications on the internet where messages pass communication. Th e one-step model ignores between scores, hundreds or thousands of users, L the role of the opinion leader in the fl ow of each with the opportunity of modifying that communication and presents the view that the message. See mediation. See also topic guide M mass media communicate directly to a mass under communication models. audience. There is no suggestion, however, Online campaigning Widely acknowledged as a N that the messages reach all receivers equally or form of people power, online campaigning came that they have the same eff ect on each individual into its own in 2011 when human rights agencies in the audience. Th e model takes into account such as 38 Degrees (UK) and its US sister, Avaaz, O the influence of an individual’s perception, mobilized popular protest – by mass online memory and selective exposure on his/her petitions, activist protests and demonstrations – P particular interpretation of a message. which infl uenced government decision-making A study conducted by Paul Lazarsfeld and and corporate activity. R others of the 1940 presidential election in the Free Press, the journal of the uk campaign US threw doubt on the validity of the one-step for press and broadcasting freedom, in theory. Reporting in Th e People’s Choice (Duell, its July/August 2011 edition was of the opinion S Sloan & Pearce, 1944), the authors found little that online campaigners such as 38 Degrees evidence of the direct infl uence of the media; were instrumental in forcing the abandonment T indeed people seemed more influenced by by news corp, the empire of Rupert Murdoch, face-to-face contact with others. Lazarsfeld and of its ambition to obtain total control of BSkyB U his fellow researchers suggested that the fl ow (British Sky Broadcasting), following the hacking of communication to the individual is often scandal involving News of the World journalists. directed through an opinion leader, who plays a 38 degrees is the angle of slope when avalanches V vital role in both spreading and interpreting the take place; in this case, when avalanches of

information. protest command the attention of the powers W They thus proposed a two-step model of that be. communication fl ow which later research has Online drama See web or online drama. found to be generally useful. In highlighting the Onomatopoeia Words that imitate actual XYZ importance of the social context of the receiver sounds are onomatopoeic, such as bang, thud, in the process of the interpretation of mass crackle, hiss, quack and twitter. They are communication messages, this model differs mostly invented words. Th e fi rst ever attempts signifi cantly from earlier ones. It presents the at spoken language were probably onomatopoeic mass audience as being composed of interact- and such words continue to be invented, not a

213 Open, closed texts

few of them (zap, for example) starting life in networks’. See blogosphere; internet; media comics and cartoons. activism; mediation; networking: social Open, closed texts Italian semiologist Umberto networking; web 2.0. Eco has made this useful separation between Opera omnia Latin for ‘All his works’, the term texts that are varyingly articulated, to either denotes a total ban on an author’s writings permit little or no interpretation on the part of imposed by the Roman Catholic Index Librorum audience (closed texts) or to allow plenty of Prohibitorum, fi rst issued in 1559. A few such room for interpretation (open texts). A work of prohibited writers have been David Hume, Émile art – a poem, a painting, a piece of sculpture, for Zola, Jean-Paul Sartre and Alberto Moravia. See example – would represent an open text in that censorship; index. the intention of the writer, painter or sculptor is Opinion leader Someone able to infl uence infor- to express ideas or feelings which may be inter- mally other individuals’ attitudes and/or behav- preted in diff erent ways and at diff erent levels. iour in a desired way with relative frequency. Th e open text invites a sense of participation He/she is a type of informal leader. Opinion in the reader or viewer, and the interaction that leadership is earned and maintained by the indi- occurs between creator, creation and audience is vidual’s technical competence, sociability and one in which ‘right answers’ are less important conformity to the norms of the social system. than the possibility of a proactive response; and When such leaders are compared to their follow- this may be subject to fl ux in diff ering instances ers, several characteristics are of note: opinion and at varying times. propaganda would leaders are more exposed to all forms of external constitute closed text in that there is a rigorously communication; more cosmopolite; of a higher preferred reading: the decoder is expected to social status; and more innovative. receive the message, and register its meaning Opinion leaders are widely thought to play a as intended by the communicator. Any diver- vital role in the spreading of new ideas, values gence from acceptance would, to quote another and beliefs. As Paul Lazarsfeld has noted in term of Eco’s, represent aberrant decoding. See several studies, opinion leaders can be important anchorage; decode. intermediaries in the process of communication, Open source Works on the principle of free including mass communication, in that they access to information, including computer have the potential to infl uence reaction, among software and the practice of user participation those around them, to messages received. – a classic example of online open source being An opinion leader whose range of infl uence is wikipedia, which allows users to write their limited to one specifi c topic exercises monomor- own defi nitions and make adjustments or altera- phic opinion leadership. Th is type of leadership tions to existing entries without prior clearance. is thought to be typical of modern, industrial Such open platforms of communication have societies, as the complex technological base of been pioneered by, for example, Independent such societies results in a sophisticated division Media Centres (IMCs), generally referred to as of labour and considerable specialization of Indymedia. Th eir mission is to bypass traditional roles. Monomorphic opinion leadership can be mass media and the control mechanisms of related to what Randy Bobbitt and Ruth Sullivan governments and corporations, their working in Developing the Public Relations Campaign aspirations being the furtherance of equality and (Pearson, 2005) term N-step theory. This democracy. proposes that ‘individuals seldom receive infor- Existing regulation such as copyright rules are mation from only one opinion leader. Instead, rejected. Public interest is favoured over privacy they are likely to turn to diff erent opinion leaders rights and new technologies are regarded as for each issue on which they form an opinion’. tools of intervention. Open source is almost An opinion leader whose influence covers invariably the product and process of collabo- a wide range of topics exercises polymorphic ration in which committed people, usually opinion leadership. This is generally thought highly skilled in the use of new technologies, to be more common in traditional societies. A seek to inform, influence and activate public respected, elderly member of a village, for exam- opinion. The key is mobilization, which is ple, might be consulted on a variety of matters accomplished, writes Lea A. Lievrouw in Alter- ranging from marriage problems to methods of native and Activist New Media (Polity, 2011), ‘by harvesting. See one-step, two-step, multi- cultivating collective identities, shared values, step models of communication. and a sense of belonging among people linked Opinion poll Th e process or processes by which in diff use, decentralized social and community public opinion is researched, the findings of

214 Organization cultures

which are widely and regularly published and of opportunity and community relations (level A broadcast, and are seen not only as evidence 2); and Basic assumptions about organizational upon which governments, oppositions, public practices and relationships – these tend to be B bodes, etc. might act, but also as an infl uence unstated, not obvious and ‘taken-for-granted’ in their own right. For example, in election (level 3). It is these basic assumptions, Schein campaigns, poll results are seen as vital indica- argues, which constitute the organization’s C tors of the way the public intends to vote, but culture. the headlines such opinion polls produce are Huczynski and Buchanan (2007) discuss a D also seen to infl uence the electorate, particularly number of typologies of organizational cultures if the fi ndings suggest a consensus of opinion. that have been developed by various theorists. For this reason, some countries ban the publish- One well-known typology is that developed by E ing of poll results in the immediate run-up to Handy and Harrison and outlined by Charles elections. Handy in Understanding Organizations F Oppositional code See dominant, subordi- (Penguin, 1993). (1) Th e power culture depends

nate, radical; polysemy. upon a central power source, with ‘rays of power, G Optical fi bre cable See fibre-optic technol- infl uence’ (and communication) spreading out ogy. from the central fi gure. An example of such a Opus Latin for ‘work’, a term most often applied to culture could be found within the company of H musical compositions in order of their creation; a self-made businessperson (see berlusconi for example, Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is Opus phenomenon; murdoch effect). Without I 125. such a ‘spider’, the web structure of the culture Oral culture An oral culture or sub-culture would collapse. (2) The role culture is found JK is one in which essentially, most communication in the classic bureaucracy comprised of func- is by word of mouth. Pictures may also be used tional roles organized into a hierarchy. Here as a supplement but reading and writing play a the communication process following lines of L minor role in the communication process. authority is vertical and chiefly one-way. The Orality: primary and secondary In Orality BBC would be a good example of a role culture. M and the Technology of the Word (Cornell Univer- (3) Handy argues that the task culture is a skills sity Press, 1982) Walter Ong, in investigating or ability-oriented culture in which what a N the nature of the shift between oral and liter- person is capable of doing is more important ate cultures, differentiates between ‘primary’ than who they are in terms of position or role. and ‘secondary’ orality. Th e fi rst refers to and Th e culture is centred on task completion. Th e O describes preliterate societies; the second results model is net-shaped and made up of interde- from the introduction of electronic media into pendent strands. leadership is exchangeable P literate societies. according to the task in hand. (4) Th e matrix Order, visions of See visions of order. structure is characterized by very fl exible chan- R Organization cultures Andrej A. Huczynski nels of communication, horizontal rather than and David A. Buchanan in Organizational vertical in direction, and is responsive to change. Behaviour (Pearson Education, 2007) define Examples from the media world of a task culture S organizational culture as ‘the collection of would be a creative advertising agency, or the relatively uniform and enduring values, beliefs, kind of small company that produces DVDs or T customs, traditions and practices that are shared designs websites. (5) Th e person culture, in terms by an organization’s members, learned by new of business organizations, is the rarest of them U recruits and transmitted from one generation of all; here the organization exists only to serve the employees to the next’. Such cultures do however individuals within it. Th e model is a cluster, a change over time. It should be noted that not all galaxy of individual stars, without hierarchical V theorists accept there is such a thing as organi- structures, constantly interchanging in form. Cooperatives found in the creative arts sector zational culture. W Edgar H. Schein in Organizational Culture and can be examples of organizations that embrace Leadership (John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1985) devel- the person culture (see magnum). oped a widely known model of organizational In Th e Empty Raincoat (Arrow Books, 1995) XYZ culture. The model identifies three different Handy discusses a new model for organiza- levels of culture that interact with one another: tions, based on what he terms the doughnut Surface manifestations, such as organizational principle. This, he argues, reflects the way in rituals, legends, myths, norms or language (level which the traditional models and cultures have 1); Values, for example co-operation, equality changed and will continue to change in order to

215 Ordinariness

survive shifts in the technological and economic having totted up their own war dead, the Allies environment. Th e doughnut consists of a core saw it as no business of theirs to count those of surrounded by bounded space. It is ‘an inside-out the ‘enemy’, whether they were combatants or doughnut, one with the hole on the outside and innocent civilians. Ultimately, Orientalism is the dough in the middle’; a ‘conceptual dough- about valuing some ‘bodies’ over others. nut, one for thinking with, not eating’. Th e core In August 2005, when the Israeli army expelled contains ‘necessary jobs and necessary people’. illegally settled Israelis from the Gaza Strip, Th ese full-time employees often organize the massive publicity in the Western media focused activities of the bounded space that contains on the heart-rending sight of residents forced many other people working for the organization from their homes. It was pointed out by some as fl exible workers tied to the organization by observers that no comparable attention had flexible and often short-term contracts. Thus been paid to the expulsion of Palestinians and organizations will become much smaller in terms their families driven from their homes, often of the number of people they employ directly; without warning, and with no compensation, consequently it is likely that more people will be over a number of years. It could equally be self-employed or freelance workers. Within the pointed out, taking news values into account, television industry, for example, this method of that the extra newsworthiness of the story arose working is now well established (see casualiza- from the surprising or the unexpected – clear- tion; producer choice). ance of Israelis by Israelis. Lucy Kung in Strategic Management in the Orientation See spatial behaviour. Media (Sage, 2008) examines a range of cultures Other According to Edward Said in Orientalism and sub-cultures found within the media indus- (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), Western try. She argues, for example, that the successful cultural identity is often defi ned in relation to introduction of BBC News Online can in part be the ‘Other’ that is people from the ‘Orient’ and explained by the fact that the project resonated especially India and the Middle East. He called with ‘Pan-BBC cultural assumptions’ such as the this perspective Orientalism, a perspective that importance of meeting the needs of licence-fee defi nes the West as all that the ‘Orient’ is not: payers and remaining a ‘dominant media player superior, developed, modern, universalistic, in the UK’. rational and powerful. Th is perspective thrives ▶ Annet Aris and Jacques Bughin, Managing Media on stereotypical opinions about the ‘Other’. Th e Companies: Harnessing Creative Value (Wiley, 2009). concept is widely used not just to comment on Ordinariness See demotic turn; reality tv. representations of the ‘Orient’, but also of those Orientalism Concept posed by Edward Said seen as the ‘Other’ within Western societies. describing the stereotypical image of Asia held David Morley and Kevin Robins in Spaces of by those in European cultures. Representation Identity (Routledge, 1995) argue that the recent of the Orient arises from ethnocentric atti- trends of globalization and migration have tudes with an imperialist ancestry, and results resulted in a considerable number of those once in a projected image of Asia and Asians as being seen as the ‘Other’ now living within Western exotic (‘the lure of the Orient’), indolent, untrust- societies. This change has brought with it worthy and devious; in short a misrepresenta- challenges to the ethnocentric assumptions of tion by Western commentators and analysts, of ‘Orientalism’. other. In Orientalism (Routledge and Kegan In more general terms the ‘Other’ may be Paul, 1978), Said raises the question whether perceived simply as those who are not like anything can be truly or objectively represented. us – a person, group, community, ethnic group, See also Said’s Culture and Imperialism (Chatto gender or nation – and who are defi ned by their & Windus, 1993). diff erence from us; yet who by that diff erence Th e potency of the term has been reinforced contribute to our concept of self. ‘Other’ in by New Millennium events such as the war general media use represents, by and large, on (‘Arab’) terrorism conducted by the US in those we disapprove of, dislike, fear; and the Afghanistan and, following 9/11 in 2001, the popular media use of ‘Other’ works in binary invasion of Iraq in 2003 by US and British forces. fashion (see wedom, theydom). In everyday Th is was seen by many critics as underscored by communication, ‘Other’ plays a key role in Orientalist attitudes manifested by an ignorance jokes – Irish jokes, Scottish jokes, etc. – each one of the complexities of Arab culture and a seeming relying for its eff ect upon a consensus about indiff erence to the remonstrations of the Arab the negative qulaities of the butt of that joke (see world. A chilling example of this came when, ethnophaulisms).

216 Panopticon gaze

In tabloid press headlines, name-calling is a A favourite device to put down ‘Other’ and conse- P quently boost the sense of superiority of Us over Packaging Th e style and the framework within B Th em. When ‘Other’ is perceived as a threat, the which TV programmes are presented on our demarcation lines become more forcible; and screens: good-looking announcers or interview- of course in sport, ‘Other’ is always the opposi- ers, titling, music, the tailoring of programmes C tion – at which point Germans become ‘Krauts’ to suitable lengths; indeed any form of image- and the French become ‘Frogs’. ‘Other’, then, is making for a media product. The word gives D almost invariably those in opposition; those who emphasis to the connection between the manu- are diﬀ erent in appearance or culture and are facture and sale of goods and the making and seen in some way as a challenge to ‘our’ ways. presentation of media products. Stuart Hood in E Outer-inner directed See vals typology. Hood on Television (Pluto Press, 1980) refers to Out-take Piece of ﬁ lm that is not actually used in TV announcers as the ‘sales people of the air’. See F the completed version. lookism.

Overhearing Kurt H. Wolﬀ in Th e Sociology of Panopticon gaze A metaphor used by Michel G Georg Simmel (Free Press, 1950) uses this expres- Foucault (1926–84) in Discipline and Punish sion to describe how recipients of messages may (Penguin, 1979) to describe the exercise of proceed, usually below the level of awareness, to power through the numerous and often subtle H select certain parts for special attention, often disciplinary practices and technology embedded distorting them while at the same time overlook- within modern Western organizations and soci- I ing (‘overhearing’) other parts entirely. In short, eties. Th e Panoptican (see also surveillance

the human organism perceives to a considerable society) was originally a design, conceived by JK degree what it wants to perceive. See cocktail nineteenth-century social philosopher Jeremy party problem; perception; selective Bentham (1748–1832), for establishments in exposure. which people could be be kept under supervision. L Overkill signals See shortfall signals. Th e basic principle is that inmates, confi ned to Ownership and control of mass media See separate compartments or cells, can be observed M berlusconi phenomenon; globalization: at any time but have no way of knowing when three engines of; global media system: the and if they are being observed. Consequently the N main players; media control; murdoch feeling of being under constant surveillance is effect; press barons. See also topic guide produced, even though the observer will not in under media: ownership & control. fact observe any one inmate continuously. O Oz Trial Th e longest-ever obscenity trial in the As Foucault writes, the result is ‘to induce in UK, lasting twenty-six days in the summer of the inmate a sense of conscious and permanent P 1971 and centred on the Oz School Kids Issue visibility that assures the automatic functioning (Oz 28). The three editors, Richard Neville, of power. So to arrange things that the surveil- R Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson, were eventually lance is permanent in its effects, even if it is acquitted on the most serious charge, that of discontinuous in its actions; that the perfection conspiring to corrupt the morals of children, but of power should tend to render its actual exer- S a majority of ten to one of the trial jury found Oz cise unnecessary’. Foucault argues that the use of guilty of publishing an obscene article, sending surveillance in the exercise of power and control T such articles through the post and having such has become widespread and has helped to create articles for profi t and gain. ‘the disciplinary society’; further, that the use of U Oz Publications Ink Ltd received a total fi ne disciplinary practices to control the individual of 1,000 with costs of 1,250. Neville got a within prisons, organizations and societies share 15-month jail sentence and a recommendation common features. V that he be deported (he was Australian); Ander- Contemporary examples of such practices within organizations might include perfor- son received 12 months, and Dennis 9 months. W See censorship; spycatcher case. See also mance-related pay, targets, monitoring of phone topic guide under media: freedom, censor- calls, e-mails, deadlines and schedules. Th ese ship. practices arguably operate to produce a sense of XYZ a panopticon gaze, which in turn leads people to become self-disciplining through anticipation of the considerable degree of monitoring and surveillance of their activities. These practices are potentially powerful

217 Paparazzo

instruments of socialization, ensuring confor- the events they are fi lming. Th anks to networked mity and order, particularly as they may often be media, states Th ompson, ‘the capacity to outma- taken for granted. It is arguable that within the noeuvre one’s opponents is always present’. wider society much modern communications Th e social, cultural and political implications technology, especially computer technology, of two-way surveillance are far-reaching, provid- facilitates the operation of the panopticon gaze, ing a rich field for communications research. for example speed cameras and CCTV cameras. A phenomenon increased and diversifi ed as a Surveillance is also a recurrent theme running result of easy-access and available technology is through the mass media: the tabloid press ‘playing to the camera’, where the camera, what- surveys the activities of celebrities; on real- ever its form, is a performer in and sometimes ity tv shows like Big Brother, surveillance is the instigator of the event itself; the promise of presented as a form of entertainment whilst media notoriety often being the motive force, other programmes, for example Crimewatch, this in turn prompting ‘copycat’ behaviour. Th e focus on enrolling the public’s help in detecting new visibility in Thompson’s view is both an criminals. Such coverage can be seen to contrib- opportunity and a danger enabling users to bring ute to a general sense, among the public, of being down walls of censorship but also to invade watched, scrutinized; a situation accepted more privacy. and more as the norm. Paparazzo Aggressive, prying and often unscru- While the panopticon gaze is about the visual pulous freelance photographer who specializes relationships between authority and people, the in taking pictures of celebrities; pursuing them one subjecting the other to surveillance, what wherever they go, armed with thick skin and has come to be referred to as the new visibility zoom lenses. Th e word is an Italian – Calabrian is much more of a two-way process. Th is balanc- – surname. It was suggested by writer Ennio ing (to a degree) of surveillance has been made Flaiano as a name for a character in Federico possible by the availability to the public of digital Fellini’s fi lm La Dolce Vita (Th e Sweet Life), made technologies making reception and transmission in 1960. Paparazzi were accused of hounding of information and images instant and global (see Diana, Princess of Wales, to her death in 1997 facebook; mobilization; online campaign- and the press at that time made a number of ing; twitter). In an article entitled ‘Th e new resolutions to curb the use of ‘intrusive’ pictures. visibility’ in the periodical Th eory, Culture and Paradigm (paradigmic) Commonly used in the Society (Vol. 22, 2005), John B. Th ompson writes social sciences, the term refers to a framework of of ‘a new world of mediated visibility’ in which explanation within which theories from various ‘spatial distance is irrelevant, communication schools of thought in a discipline are located instantaneous’. He examines the way in which and from which research operates. In linguistics, modern-day politicians can manage their public paradigm describes the set of relationships that performance to maximum public effect, yet a linguistic unit, such as a letter or a word, has that management – stage-management – now with other units in a specifi c context. Th e word is meets with a public visibility brought about by applicable in all sign systems, verbal, numerical, multimedia technologies allowing swift, instant musical, etc. Th e alphabet is a paradigm, or set of and global transmission of texts and images, signs, from which a choice is made to formulate generated not so much by top-down authority as the message. A syntagm is a combination of the by bottom-up public activity. chosen signs, a chain that amounts to meaning. The network society has made possible In language we can describe the vocabulary we a public panopticon, an audio and visual appa- use as paradigmic, and the sentence that vocabu- ratus of record that turns the spyglass (or to be lary is formed into, syntagmic. more exact, the mobile phone linked to online All messages, therefore, involve selection from transmission) on statesmen, politicians and the a paradigm and combination into a syntagm. All old guardians of the traditional panopticon, the the units in a paradigm must share characteris- police and surveillance services. tics that determine the membership of that para- Multimedia equipment now allows us to digm, thus letters in the alphabetic paradigm, actually witness, in real time, events as they numbers in the numerical paradigm, notes in the are happening – hijacked planes hurtling into musical paradigm. the skyscrapers of New York or London police Each unit within the paradigm must be beating G20 protestors: they are on camera, clearly diff erentiable from other units; it must on record, no longer the business of the mass be characterized by distinctive features. Just as media alone, but of individuals participating in the paradigm is governed by shared character-

218 Participant observation

istics and distinctive features, so the syntagm is individuals to exercise a form of informal control A determined by rules or conventions by which over the state. the combination of paradigms is made – rules This tradition has, however, been subject B of grammar and syntax or, in music, rules of to much criticism for its failure to address the harmony. See paradigms of the media; semi- narrow social base from which media profes- ology/semiotics. sionals are often drawn, resulting in those from C Paradigms of the media James Curran in working-class and/or ethnic backgrounds being ‘Rethinking the media as a public sphere’ in under-represented; and the degree to which D Communication and Citizenship (Routledge, the political economy of media ownership, the 1991), edited by Peter Dahlgren and Colin culture of media organizations, and the place Sparks, has identified three paradigms (see of these organizations in the political economy E previous entry) that seek to explain the relation- of a society inﬂ uence the content and reading of ship between the mass media and the power media artefacts. F structure of societies in which they operate: the Th e Radical Democratic paradigm, according

Marxist or Neo-Marxist, the Liberal-Pluralist to James Curran, oﬀ ers a synthesis between the G and the Radical Democratic paradigms. other two. Whilst this paradigm acknowledges The Marxist or Neo-Marxist school argues the links between the ownership and control of that it is those who own and control economic media institutions and that of other key institu- H capital who are at the heart of a society’s power tions, and the fact that the free market tends to structure, and that such a position allows them be skewed in favour of the dominant class, it I to exercise power over cultural institutions such does not perceive the links to be so close that the

as the mass media in order to better pursue their media could be conceived as an arm of the ruling JK economic goals. Media professionals may view class. Rather, the media is seen as ‘caught in the themselves as autonomous but, it is argued, they crossfire’, providing ‘a battleground between have been socialized into and have internalized contending forces. Th e way in which the media L the norms and values of the dominant class. responds to and mediates this confl ict aff ects Th us from this perspective, a key ideological the balance of social forces and, ultimately, the M contribution made by the mass media is that distribution of rewards within society’. it provides the audience with frameworks for Journalists and media professionals are viewed N interpreting messages which encourage it to as having day-to-day autonomy that allows them construct readings that are consistent with the to make a diff erence and opens up the possibil- interests of the dominant class. Critics of this ity for the committed radical journalism which O tradition have argued, though, that it overlooks would allow the media to act as a countervailing the degree of leeway which does exist for jour- force and to further the cause of the less power- P nalists to ask awkward questions, as well as the ful. It also recognizes that not all journalists and need to consider the audience and the audi- media professionals work in media organiza- R ence’s role in constructing the meaning of mass tions which have one dominant owner, and media messages. argues that those working in broadcasting A competing paradigm is that off ered by the and in commercial media where ownership is S Liberal-Pluralist tradition of media research, dispersed among a number of shareholders, which argues that the mass media is and should may enjoy considerable freedom to criticize the T be composed of a number of competing groups powerful. Th e structure of the media, however, is operating within a free market, though subject seen as being in need of reform if it is to achieve U to state intervention when this is deemed in the its potential for providing diverse debate within public interest. Groups within the mass media a democratic society. See democracy and tend to be seen as in competition for power and the media. See also topic guide under media V infl uence within society. institutions. Media professionals, such as journalists, are Paralanguage See non-verbal vocaliza- W seen to enjoy a considerable degree of autonomy tions. over the production of media artefacts. Within Parental Guidance (PG) See certification of this tradition, some perceive the media to films. XYZ have a responsibility within society to behave Participant observation Some research as a watchdog whose role it is to provide an evidence is collected by the researcher becom- arena for wide public debate about civil issues, ing a member of the group or social situation facilitating the articulation of a plurality of views under observation. Th e researcher participates and values and, in so doing, to allow private fully in the situation, and those being observed

219 Partisan

may be unaware that he/she is a researcher. Th e take time away from personal relationships or advantage of this method of data collection is participation in community activity. that the greater involvement of the researcher An August 2010 report by Ofcom entitled may facilitate an increased insight into and ‘Consumers spend almost half their waking greater understanding of the behaviour being hours using media and communications’ pres- investigated. The role of participant observer ents a picture of a population getting their exer- may require the researcher to have the compe- cise by pressing buttons: people are sending four tence and experience to undertake a professional times as many texts a day than in 2004. Th e use role within the context being observed. David of smart phones has accelerated this trend, and Deacon, Michael Pickering, Peter Golding and not just among the under-25s, for ‘the over-55s Graham Murdock in Researching Communica- are catching up, with half now having broadband tions: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media at home – the fastest growing age group’. and Cultural Analysis (Hodder Education, 2007) Busy as we are on our mobiles, we still, says the note that this has been the case with a number report, have time to watch TV for an average 3 of studies of journalistic practice. See ethno- hours and 45 minutes a day, ‘consumers being as graphic (approach to audience measure- attached to their TVs as they ever were and [are] ment). See also topic guide under research hungry for more channels and better picture methods. quality’. See audience: active audience; ▶ Philip Schlesinger, Putting ‘Reality’ Together: BBC audience measurement; effects of the News (Routledge, 1992). mass media; empowerment; interactivity; Partisan An adherent of a particular party or pleasure: active and reactive; resistive cause. Th e term is also used to describe actions as reading. well as allegiances. Within media studies, much Patch A community-specifi c news and informa- research has focused upon the political partisan- tion platform initiated in February 2009 by the ship of the press and TV companies, that is upon AOL company (America On Line), with plans the degree to which they may support one or to create 500 communities within a year across other political party or faction, and colour their the US. Professional editors and freelancers form political coverage accordingly. If such coverage a local nucleus which makes use of contribu- gives space to the views of two factions or parties tions by people in the locality – comments, it is generally described as being bi-partisan; if stories, photographs; participation in one form its tone is one of general disinterest, of being or another (blogging, for example). Warren above party politics, it is described as being Webster, President of Patch Media, celebrating anti-partisan. Partisan perspectives may not, the launch of the one-hundredth site in August though, permeate political coverage only; they 2010, told the press, ‘We believe that Patch is a may pervade media presentations generally. See revolutionary and effi cient approach to produc- effects of the mass media. ing relevant, quality local journalism.’ www. Participatory journalism See genre. patch.com Passivity One influential and widely held Paternity of the text See text: integrity of perception of the mass audience is that it is the text. largely passive and unrefl ective. Th ere is little Patriarchy Society ruled by or dominated by evidence for this, though assumptions carry men; patriarch means father, thus patriarchal weight, and are noticeable in content selection relates to a culture shaped and governed in the and approach, regardless of evidence. Modern interests of men, with women in a subordinate, media commentators insist on the diversity and in some cases, subject, role. Patriarchy is of response of audiences. Determinants of refl ected in customs, norms and values, the response are complex and largely unpredictable, law, education, commerce, industry, the arts, infl uential factors being age, culture, social class sport and, not least, language. Many commen- and status, gender, race, belief and education, tators have also identifi ed patriarchy as being sickness and health, not to mention wealth (or assertively alive in the media, though at least at the lack of it) and a multitude of other distrac- the operative (rather than the managerial) level, tions. substantial advances have been made by women At the same time commentators have in journalism and broadcasting. See news: expressed concern at the amount of time the ‘maleness’ of news. members of the public spend in front of TV Patriot Act (US), 2001 See usa-patriot act and computer screens, raising questions as to (2001). whether computer gaming and surfi ng the Net Pauper press See underground press.

220 Performatives

Paywall The internet created a tradition of tion, by distorting information, by overwhelm- A freely available information and content; and ing people with overloads of information, or by though the press charged for copies of the obstructing people’s access to communication B newspapers it published, online information channels’. In consequence the Charter urges services were generally free. In July 2010 Rupert support to enable people to develop their own Murdoch’s News International introduced communication channels through which they C charges for previously free access to the UK can speak for themselves. Under General Stan- Times, Sunday Times and News of the World with dards, Article 1 declares the ‘conviction that all D the intention of turning a proﬁ t from Net provi- people are entitled to the respect of their dignity, sion and the hope that the rest of the British integrity, equality, and liberty’. Article 2 asserts press would follow suit. freedom of expression, but aligned with that E Decisions to charge for what has been previ- ‘there should be free and independent channels ously free reﬂ ect a number of major changes in of communication’ on the basis that ‘Free media F the media scene: newspaper sales are in decline are pluralist media’.

(indeed in many cases their online news is Article 3 speaks of the right to receive infor- G sampled by more readers than the paper-and-ink mation ‘about matters of public interest’ and versions); the prime funding source of the press, ‘this includes the right to receive information advertising, is itself in diﬃ culties if not reces- which is independent of commercial and politi- H sion; and the availability of news, etc. on mobile cal interests’. Article 7 concerns the right of devices and tablets is perceived as a growing reply; Article 8 speaks of the need to nurture I threat to the industry. In particular, the teen and a ‘diversity of languages’ and the need to ‘create

twenties generation, brought up in the Network provisions for minority languages in the media’. JK Society, make online data their fi rst, and some- Article 9 argues for the protection of people’s times only, point of call. cultural identity. See mediapolis. See also PeaceNet See teledemocracy. topic guide under media ethics. L ‘Pencil of Nature’ Title of the fi rst book ever Perception Th e process of becoming aware and illustrated with photographs, published in making sense of the stimuli received from our M England in 1844, the work of William Henry environment by the senses: sight, hearing, smell, Fox Talbot (1800–77), inventor of the calo- taste, and touch. Social perception refers to the N type process of photo-printing. Th e range of application of this process to our attempts to photographs pasted into Th e Pencil of Nature explain, understand, make judgments about and was extraordinary and included intimate, infor- predict the behaviour of other people. O mal studies of Talbot’s household at his home, Perception is selective. We are surrounded by Laycock Abbey. See photography, origins. many sensations but we tend to direct our atten- P People’s Communication Charter Proposed tion to only a few of these. Our decision as to by Cees Hamelink in World Communication: what to attend to can be infl uenced by environ- R Disempowerment and Self-Empowerment (Zed mental and personal factors: for example, envi- Books, 1995) in the light of his vision that the ronmental factors can include the intensity, size, globalization of communication threatens motion or novelty of the stimuli whilst personal S to further divide the information-rich from the factors can include present needs and drives, information-poor, at the personal, community physiological features, past experiences and T and national levels. The Charter provides a learning – perceptual set – as well as personality. valuable text in which issues are highlighted and The influence of personal factors explains U rights and responsibilities spelt out. why individuals may pay attention to differ- Th e preamble to the Charter opens with the ent stimuli, to diff erent messages or parts of a affi rmation that ‘communication is basic to the message. See attitudes; culture; empathy; V life of individuals and peoples and that commu- expectations; first impressions; halo

nication is crucial in the issues and crises which effect; labelling process (and the media); W aﬀ ect all members of the world community’. It male-as-norm; mores; motivation; norms; is mindful ‘that communication can be used to projection; sapir-whorf hypothesis; support the powerful and to victimize the power- selective exposure; self-concept; self- XYZ less and that communication is fundamental to fulfilling prophecy; stereotype; sub- the shaping of the cultural environment of every culture; values. society’. Performance See self-presentation. Disempowerment is seen as a major trend; and Performance capture See animation. it occurs through the ‘withholding of informa- Performatives Action words that indicate the

221 Periodicity

nature of action through talk: announce, insist, media reportage. Where a potential news item declare or denounce. In the reporting of speech can be personalized it has a greater chance of in news, performatives often embody evaluative being included than if it is diffi cult to translate connotations, indicating approval or disapproval into personality terms. Th e preference is for elite on the part of the encoder. ‘Th e Prime Minister personalities (see news values). declined to comment’ carries with it marginally John Lloyd in an article entitled ‘Th e death less disapproval than the statement ‘Th e Prime of privacy: J’accuse!’ (New Statesman, 5 March Minister refused to comment’. Th e word say may 1999) argues that this emphasis on the personal be classifi ed as a neutral performative unless it is has been at the expense of an exploration of contrasted with a performative used disapprov- policy and issues. He acknowledges that within ingly; thus ‘Th e Management say their pay-off er TV news and current affairs it is ‘a received is fi nal, while the unions claim their actions will wisdom that only by personalizing a story can bring about further concessions’. it be given meaning for a mass audience. Th us a Periodicity Describes the timescale of the sched- story about public spending must fi nd someone ules of news organizations; thus a daily news- in pain on a hospital waiting list’. Lloyd warns, paper has a 24-hour periodicity. Th e more the ‘the hazard of such stories is that the feeling timescale of a potential item of news coincides swamps the understanding’. See journalism: with the periodicity of the news organization, phone-hacking. the more likely it is that the story will ‘make the Personalization, involvement, contiguity, headlines’. Information that can be gathered, ‘kick-outs’ See yaros’ ‘pick’ model for processed and dramatized within a 24-hour multmedia news, 2009. cycle (such as bombings, assassinations, clashes PEST This is a well-used device for analysing with the police, the speeches of politicians) aspects of a company’s operating environment stands a better chance of breaking through the which could have a potential impact on its activi- news threshold than news which is gradual and ties: Political, Economic, Social and Technologi- undramatic. See news values. cal. Political aspects of the environment could Persistence of vision Th e realization that the include government attitudes towards private eye retains an image for a split second after the enterprise, whilst economic aspects might object has passed gave birth to the cinema. Th e include the rate of infl ation. Social aspects of the principle was fi rst illustrated, and proved market- environment could include, for example, a trend able, with toys of the nineteenth century such as towards an ageing population, and the wide- the thaumatrope, a disc with images on each spread use of facebook would be an example of side; when the disc was spun round, the images a technological aspect. merged into a single action. Th e zoetrope was pest analysis can be used to scan factors a drum with illustrations of fi gures inside which, within the current situation and also to consider when spun round, conveyed the impression of possible future developments, to anticipate movement. See cinematography, origins. the following: changes in the market; emerg- Persona See parasocial interaction; self- ing environmental issues that might aff ect an presentation. organization’s reputation; the need for the repo- Personal idiom Or idiosyncratic language; sitioning of a product; and consequent changes occurring in interpersonal relationships; serves in promotional strategies. See epistle. the function of building relationship cohesive- Phatic (language) Derives from the Greek, ness. Results of research into the use of personal ‘phasis’, meaning utterance. The term finds idiom were published in an article, ‘Couples’ its modern connotation in the phrase ‘phatic personal idioms: exploring intimate talk’ in the communion’ coined by anthropologist Bronislaw Journal of Communication (Winter, 1981) by Malinowski (1884–1942), meaning that part of Robert Hopper, Mark L. Knapp and Lorel Scott. communication which is used for establishing Such idioms, they found, take the form of a range an atmosphere or maintaining social contact of idiomatic exchanges: partner nicknames; rather than for exchanging information or ideas. expressions of aff ection; labels for others outside Phatic words and phrases have been called ‘idiot the relationship; for use in confrontations; to salutations’ and, when they comprise dialogue, deal with requests and routines; sexual refer- ‘two-stroke conversations’. Comments about the ences and euphemisms; sexual invitations and weather, enquiries about health, and everyday teasing insults (or ‘kidding’). exchanges including nods, smiles and waves are Personal space See spatial behaviour. part of the phatic communion essential for ‘oiling’ Personalization One of the chief conventions of or maintaining channels of communication.

222 Photography, origins

Phatic language is central to human relation- up with Louis Daguerre (1789–1851), theatrical A ships; its signiﬁ cance can be best noted by its designer and co-inventor of the diorama. Th e absence: you give a cheery ‘hello’ to a friend death of Nièpce three years later left Daguerre B passing in the street, only to be greeted by stony to lead the ﬁ eld in France. He discovered that an silence; you halt your car to permit another almost invisible latent image could be developed motorist to go ahead of you, and he/she does using mercury vapour, thus reducing exposure C not acknowledge your gesture. From such phatic time from around 8 hours to between 20 and 30 neglect might spring responses out of all propor- minutes. D tion to the meaning of the exchange, or lack His daguerrotype was taken up by the of it. See jakobson’s model of communica- French government in 1839, and elicited from tion. Paul Delaroche the immortal line, ‘From today, E Phoneme Th e smallest unit in the sound system painting is dead!’ In the UK, astronomer Sir John of a language. Each language can be shown Herschel (1792–1871) read a paper entitled ‘On F to operate with a relatively small number of the art of photography’ to the Royal Society,

phonemes, some having as few as fi fteen, others accompanied by twenty-three photographs. In G as many as fi fty. Phonemics is the study of the 1840 he was the fi rst to use the verb to photo- basic sounds of language. graph and the adjective photographic, to identify Phone-tapping See journalism: phone- negative and positive, and twenty years later to H hacking; privacy. use the term snap-shot. Phonetics Th e science of human sound-making, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–77) won I especially sounds used in speech. Phonetics fame and fortune with his Calotype (1841), the

includes the study of articulation, acoustics true technical base of photography because, JK or perception of speech, and the properties of unlike the Daguerrotype, its negative/positive specifi c languages. principle made possible the making of prints Phonodisc First-ever video recording, devel- from the original photographs. Th e inventions L oped by John Logie Baird (1888–1946) in 1928. and discoveries that followed helped to improve This was a 10-inch 78rpm record, in every the eff ectiveness of the photographic process. M way similar to the acoustic discs already being Frederick Scott Archer’s collodion or wet-plate produced for conventional sound recording. process, details of which were published in 1851, N Despite its novelty, the Phonodisc, coming so greatly increased sensitivity; the use of gelatine early in the age of the development of TV, failed silver bromide emulsion, invented in 1871 by to succeed commercially. Dr Richard Leach Maddox, and later improved O Phonograph See gramophone. upon by John Burgess, Richard Kennett and Phonology A branch of linguistics which Charles Bennett, proved a considerable advance P studies the sound systems of languages. Its aim is on the collodion method, and ushered-in the to demonstrate the patterns of distinctive sound modern era of factory-produced photographic R in spoken language, and to make as general material, freeing the photographer from the statements as possible about the nature of sound necessity of preparing his/her own plates. systems in languages throughout the world. Celluloid was invented by Alexander Parkes S Photographic negativization See visions of in 1861 and roll fi lm made from celluloid was order. produced by the Eastman Company in the US T Photography, origins Joseph Nicéphore Nièpce from 1889. By 1902, Eastman, manufacturers of (1765–1833) and his brother Claude were the fi rst Kodak, were producing between 80 and 90 per U to fi x images of the camera obscura by chemi- cent of the world’s output. Very swiftly photog- cal means in 1793, though the light sensitivity raphy became the hobby of the man in the street. of silver nitrate had been known and written Every tenth person in the UK – 4 million people V about as early as 1727 when Johann Heinrich – was estimated to own a camera by 1900. Colour film photography hit many techni- Schulze, Professor of Anatomy at the University W of Altdorf, published a paper indicating that the cal snags in its development. A colour screen darkening of silver salts was due not to heat but process was patented as early as 1904 by the to light. Lumière brothers. Th ey introduced their Auto- XYZ 1826 is generally recognized as the year chrome plates commercially in 1907, when good in which the first photographic image was panchromatic emulsion was available. However, captured. Joseph Nièpce’s reproduction of a exposure was about forty times longer than that roof-top scene, on a pewter plate, he called for black and white fi lm. Heliographie – sun drawing. In 1830 he teamed Modern methods based on multiple-layer fi lm

223 Photogravure

and coupling components were simultaneously Margaret Bowke-White, in You Have Seen Th eir introduced by Kodak and Agfa. In 1935, Koda- Faces (1937), portrayed the conditions in the chrome, created by two American amateurs, South of the US, in particular the negro chain- Leopold Godowsky and Leopold Mannes, was gangs. Suppression of the photo-reportage of marketed, a year ahead of Agfacolor. In both, Bert Hardy from the Korean War (1950–53) by transparencies were obtained suitable for projec- the proprietors of Picture Post led to the resignation as well as reproduction. Electronic flash tion of the magazine’s outstanding editor, Tom was invented in 1931 by Harold E. Egerton. See Hopkinson. camera, origins; filmless camera; high- Talented, fearless and concerned photo- speed photography; photo-journalism; journalists continue to the present, even in the photomontage; time-lapse photography. age of TV and the closure of photo-papers. Don See also topic guide under media history. McCullin has photo-reported war, oppression, Photogravure Engraving by photography, for hardship and carnage all over the world in a purposes of printing, was invented by English- vast array of unforgettable images. He was, man William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–77) in incidentally, one of the photographers refused 1852. It was not until 1947 that the fi rst machine permission by the Ministry of Defence to cover to do a complete typesetting job by means of the Falklands War (1982). photography was invented. In A Concise History of Photography (Th ames Photo-journalism Despite the popularity of & Hudson, 1965; 3rd edition by Helmet, 1986), photography among the general public, the press Helmet and Alison Gernsheim write, ‘No other were curiously slow to realize the possibilities medium can bring life and reality so close as of photographs. Th e Daily Mirror was fi rst in does photography and it is in the fi elds of report- the fi eld in the UK at the turn of the twentieth age and documentation that photography’s most century, but the use of photographs did not important contribution lies in modern times.’ become commonplace till the end of the First Not the least of their achievements, photography World War (1914–18). In June 1919, the New York and photo-journalism have proved powerful Illustrated Daily News at last fully acknowledged agents in the awakening of social conscience. a vital means of communication thirty-nine Th ey place images in the collective conscious- years after the feasibility of printing a half-tone ness which resonate across cultures and time. block (reproducing light and shade by dots of Examples are Joe Rosenthal’s picture of marines different sizes and densities) alongside type raising the Stars and Stripes at Iwo-Jima; Nick had been demonstrated by Stephen H. Horgan Ut’s image of the Vietnamese girl, her shoulders in the New York Daily Graphic. It was not until burning with napalm; and Eddie Adams’s photo- the 1920s that photo-journalism in the modern graph of an offi cer executing a Vietcong prisoner sense began, with the introduction of the with a pistol to the head. Ermanox camera and ultra-rapid plates. Photo-journalism records images that people Among the fathers of photo-journalism were prefer not to see; images that upset and depress. Erich Saloman, Felix H. Man and Wolfgang At the same time there are powerful arguments Weber. With a camera hidden in his top hat, that photograph serves as an antidote to war and Arthur Barrett secretly took court photographs violence. Loup Langton in Photojournalism and of the suffragettes, and, in February 1928, Today’s News (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008) writes: Saloman took sensational pictures of a Coburg ‘Visual images inform people about the world murder trial. Man pioneered the picture story in, and about life in ways that words cannot. And for example, A Day in the Life of Mussolini, 1934, the best images can motivate people to work and it was Man who founded Weekly Illustrated towards a better world.’ in the same year. He became chief photographer In his preface to a Committee to Protect Jour- for Picture Post, founded in 1938, a position he nalists (CPJ) report, ‘Attacks on the press, 2009’, held until 1945. Fareed Zakaria writes: ‘Unable to aff ord foreign Photo-journalism was given increasing status bureaus, more newspapers and magazines are over the years by many outstanding photogra- relying on freelancers abroad. Th ese stringers phers. Henri Cartier-Bresson photo-reported look just as suspicious to dictators and military visits to Spain (1933) and Mexico (1934); Robert groups – and they are distinctively more vulner- Capa won undying fame with his war photog- able.’ Photographers have ranked among the 847 raphy, especially his pictures taken during journalists killed worldwide between 1992 and the Spanish Civil War (1936–9); Bill Brandt 2010. Zakaria points out that as ‘publications photographed the English at Home (1936) while and TV networks continue to shed staff and

224 Picture postcards

look for ways to cover confl icts more aff ordably’ ment Information and Communication Service A the number of journalist deaths, beatings and (GICS) was considered ‘no longer fit for [its] imprisonments is ‘going to grow’. purpose’ and ought to be disbanded. B Today photo-journalism competes with The report criticized the lobby system (see pictures of altogether diff erent genres – fashion lobbying; lobby practice) in which some and celebrity. Fewer newspapers and TV stations media are favoured over others, chiefl y because C now go to the expense of sending their report- they can be relied on to provide the government ers and photographers to areas of confl ict, to with a ‘good press’. It urged more transparency, D the point where freelancing seems, for many more openness, as against briefi ngs in ‘a closed, photo-journalists, the only way forwards in secretive and opaque insider process’ behind their careers. See documentary; journalism: closed doors. E citizen journalism; mediasphere. Th e report also voiced serious concern about ▶ John Hartley, Th e Politics of Pictures: Th e Creation the role of the civil service in the communica- F of the Public in the Age of Popular Media (Routledge, tions process, perceiving an erosion of impartial-

1992). ity brought about by government pressure. As G Photomontage Process of mounting, super- for the response of government information imposing, one photograph on top of another; services to the public, the Phillis Review urged a method almost as old as photography itself. a speeding-up of the official response rate to H Th e Dadaists and Surrealists experimented with enquiries by members of the public, citing a case photomontage to produce visionary pictures. in which the Ministry of Defence took six years I Laslo Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946) combined to respond to a query.

several picture components in the production Th e public should, recommended Phillis, be JK of a new work and termed his approach ‘photo- guaranteed a reply to enquiries within twenty lastics’. Malik of Berlin were the fi rst publishers days of receipt, a move the report believed could, to use photomontage for book jackets. Most along with other measures – such as reducing L extensively, the process has been employed in the power of ministers to veto the provision of advertising, though the British artist Peter information – address the problem of the lack M Kennard has created many unforgettable – and of trust on the part of the public, and its current satirical – images using photomontage. See disenchantment with government information N picture postcards. services. Phototypesetting Method that bypassed the In its Media Manifesto, 2005, the campaign traditional metal-type stage of print production for press and broadcasting freedom O by printing type photographically from an describes the government’s response to Phillis as optical or electric store of individual characters. ‘lamentable’, failing to act on the recommenda- P Th ough the fi rst photocomposing machine was tion to cap the number of political advisers or created as early as 1894, it was not until it could limit their powers; ‘in the face of opposition R be ‘manned’ by computers, in the 1960s, that the from political correspondents at Westminster, process became widespread. Modern typeset- the Downing Street press office has backed ting allows operators to lay out pages on VDUs: away from changing the rules in order to allow S this means that the same person can enter copy, lobby briefi ngs to be televised’. See freedom of make up the pages and check errors; then, one information act (uk), 2005. T touch of a button and a high-quality proof is Picture postcards German Heinrich von produced. See topic guide under media: Stephan is generally considered to have thought U technologies. up the idea of a postcard, in 1865, though Phillis Review of Government Communica- Emmanuel Hermann ran him close, persuading tions (UK), 2004 Examined the relationship the director-general of the Austrian Post to issue V between British government information the fi rst government postcard, in 1869. It was

services, the media and the public, identifying called a ‘Correspondence Card’. In 1870 the ﬁ rst W a lack of trust on the part of the public in the government postcard was issued in the UK; 70 communications performance of government. million such cards were sold in the ﬁ rst year. Th e The report by an independent committee US government followed suit in 1872. XYZ chaired by Bob Phillis, Chief Executive of the Since then the picture postcard has provided a Guardian Media Group, declared that favourit- treasure house for the analysis of contemporary ism, partisanship, collusion and distortion have interests and attitudes: art, fashion, new tech- become the key features of the relationship nology, warfare, royalty, exploration, history, between government and media. Th e Govern- travel; ideas of patriotism and Empire, of family,

225 Pidgin

entertainment, comedy, etc. Th e title Mail Art Pilkington expressed disquiet at the portrayal has been given to a practice widespread in the of physical violence in TV programmes and late 1970s and 1980s of artists exchanging visual of a ‘comprehensive carelessness about moral ideas by postcard. standards generally’. During the same period the postcard became Most of the Report’s recommendations were popular in a propagandist role, especially ignored, yet it did have its eff ect, giving the BBC, among protest groups of the Left. A classic staggering from the impact of ITV competi- piece of photomontage in postcard form is Peter tion, a shot in the arm. And it was through Kennard’s version of the painting by the nine- Pilkington that the BBC was the fi rst to receive teenth-century British painter, John Constable, a second channel (BBC2, 1964). John Whale in The Haywain. Kennard superimposes cruise Th e Politics of the Media (Fontana, 1977) says missiles on the horse-drawn wagon as it passes Pilkington ‘aimed at large effects and missed through a tranquil Suff olk landscape. Such cards them’. Nevertheless, Pilkington established a use cartoons, photographs, photograffiti and set of judgmental criteria, albeit elitist-cultural, quotations. which have formed a rallying point ever since Inevitably cards of past ages have become for broadcasting reformers. See topic guides collectors’ items; the word Deltiology (from under commissions, committees, legisla- the Greek, deltion, small picture) was coined by tion; media institutions. American Randall Rhoades for picture-postcard Pilot study A preliminary testing or ‘experimen- collecting and study. See cigarette cards: tal experiment’ in which the researcher seeks cultural indicators; posters. to try out a new idea, system or approach; to Pidgin See communication: intercultural determine whether an intended study is feasible, communication. to clarify assumptions and improve instruments Piggybacking See internet: wireless inter- of measurement. net. Pirate radio Th e monopoly of radio broad- PIE chart A model proposed by Randy Bobbitt casting held in the UK by the BBC was and Ruth Sullivan in Developing the Public colourfully challenged in the 1960s by ‘pirate’ Relations Campaign (Pearson, 2005) to outline stations broadcasting from ancient forts and the three-step process required for the develop- ships anchored in the North Sea. Th ey played ment of a public relations campaign. Th ese are non-stop popular music, collected advertising as follows: ‘Planning. Research and analyse the revenues, paid no royalties on the music they problem in order to determine how to most played and thus made substantial profi ts. effectively respond to it. Implementation. In 1964 Radio Caroline, from a ship called the Execute the response. Evaluation. Measure the Caroline, took to the air on 28 March, one of a effectiveness of the response and determine long line of pirates. Founder Ronan O’Rahilly what needs to be done next.’ received over 20,000 letters in the fi rst ten days Pilkington Committee Report on Broad- of broadcasting. Th e Duke of Bedford was the casting (UK), 1962 Set up under the chair- fi rst advertiser, for Woburn Abbey – his adver- manship of Sir Harry Pilkington in 1960, the tisement brought in 4,500 people the next day. Committee’s chief concern in a strongly worded War on the pirates was initially conducted in 297-page deposition was the nation’s cultural the Council of Europe. Th e European Agreement and intellectual life, and the eff ect upon these for the Prevention of Broadcasts transmitted of broadcasting now that commercial television outside National Territories, signed by member had been on the scene since 1954: ‘Our conclu- states in Strasbourg in 1965, sought to outlaw sion,’ declared the Committee, ‘is that where it pirate broadcasting throughout the countries of prevails it operates to lower general standards of the Common Market. enjoyment and understanding.’ This was followed, in the UK, with the Th e BBC emerged unscathed, and not a little Labour government’s Marine, etc. Broadcasting praised, from the Committee Report: ‘Th e BBC (Off ences) Act, which became law in 1967. Among knows good broadcasting and by and large they sections of the broadcasting and political estab- are providing it.’ Th e ‘villain’ of the scenario was lishment there was fear that the pirates might not ITV. So dissatisfi ed with ITV programmes were only undermine existing systems of broadcasting, the Committee that one of their recommenda- but also have an ‘undesirable’ cultural and even tions (never put into practice) was that the Inde- political impact. Th e 1967 Act made it an off ence pendent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) take on to direct unlicensed broadcasts into the UK and responsibility for the planning of programmes. to buy advertising time on illegal channels.

226 Pleasure: active and reactive

With the apparent defeat of the pirates, and the the structure of our brain.’ See digital natives, A dismantling of their stations, there was clearly a digital immigrants. gap to be fi lled in the pattern of offi cial broad- Play theory of mass communication In Th e B casting services. At the end of 1966 the Labour Play Th eory of Mass Communication (University government issued a White Paper containing of Chicago Press, 1967), William Stephenson proposals that opened the way for the creation counters those who speak of the harmful eff ects C of Radio 1. of the mass media by arguing that first and That was not the end of pirate radio. A foremost the media serve audiences as play- D widespread enthusiasm for radio broadcast- experiences. Even newspapers, says Stephenson, ing independent of the duopoly was sustained are read for pleasure rather than for information through the 1970s, and in the 1980s pirates began and enlightenment. He sees the media as ‘a E popping up all over, making illegal broadcasts buffer against conditions which would other- from unlicensed transmitters in woodlands, on wise be anxiety producing’. Th e media provide F hilltops, in back bedrooms, in garages or even communication-pleasure.

on the move. Today’s pirates continue, with no Stephenson argues that what is most required G less ingenuity, to evade the eff orts of authority by people within a national culture is something to curtail their activities, though the majority for everyone to talk about. For him, mass of today’s ‘piracy’ is only an internet website communication ‘should serve two purposes. H away. See blogging; commercial radio; It should suggest how best to maximize the community radio; podcasting. See also communication-pleasure in the world. It should I topic guide under broadcasting. also show how far autonomy for the individual Pistolgraph See camera, origins. can be achieved in spite of the weight of social JK Plagiarism From the Latin, ‘plagiarius’, meaning controls against him’. kidnapper; the act of stealing from others their The theory finds ready connection with thoughts or their writings and claiming them as practices and reception in the online age of L one’s own. information. In the words of Graeme Turner in Plasticity: neuroplasticity and the Internet Ordinary People and the Media: Th e Demotic M Refers to the way in which stimuli can work on Turn (Sage, 2010), ‘entertainment has become and alter the activity of the brain. In relation the most pervasive discursive domain in twenty- N to media, concern has been expressed by a fi rst-century popular culture’. Th e burgeoning number of writers that the internet can, with trend has been to equate pleasure with public prolonged and intensive use, rewire the circuits participation, to reposition information as enter- O of the brain. American neuroscientist Gary tainment by stressing audience engagement Small with Gigi Vorgan published an infl uential and interactivity largely within the frame of P but much-challenged treatise on the eff ects on consumption. See consumerization. See also plasticity of Net use in iBrain: Surviving the topic guide under communication theory. R Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind ▶ Johan Huzinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play (HarperCollins, 2008), stating that ‘perhaps not Element in Culture (Paladin, 1970); Pat Kane, The since early man fi rst discovered how to use a tool Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Diff erent Way of Living S has the human brain been aff ected so quickly (Macmillan, 2004). and so dramatically’. Th e authors’ view is that, Pleasure: active and reactive Mary Ellen T ‘As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards Brown in Soap Opera and Women’s Talk (Sage, new technological skills, it drifts away from 1994) speaks of the active and reactive pleasure U fundamental social skills.’ of women viewers of soap operas. She argues The case was taken up in 2010 by another that ‘active pleasure for women in soap opera neuroscientist, Nicholas Carr, in Th e Shallows: groups affi rms their connection to a woman’s V How the Internet Is Changing The Way We culture that operates in subtle opposition to

Think, Read and Remember (Atlantic Books). dominant culture’. It is this ‘cult of the home and W Carr writes: ‘Dozens of studies by psychologists, of women’s concerns,’ says Brown, ‘recognized neurobiologists, and educators point to the but devalued in patriarchal terms, that provides same conclusion: When we go online, we enter a notion of identity that values women’s tradi- XYZ an environment that promotes cursory reading, tional expertise’. hurried and distracted thinking, and superﬁ cial On the other hand, reactive pleasure, ‘while learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy not rejecting the connection women often access to vast amounts of information, it is turn- feel towards women’s cultural networks and ing us into shallower thinkers, literally changing concerns, also recognizes that these concerns

227 Pluralism, pluralist

often arise out of women’s inability to completely choices and many interpretations of meaning. control their own lives’. Consequently they are It follows that the Internet is a pluralist medium, able to ‘recognize and to feel at an emotional at least for the present. In recent years it has level the price of oppression’. been the target for conglomerate ownership Key to resistive soap opera groups is talking, ambitions; in the view of some commentators the very act of which ‘indicates the importance of putting the freedoms enjoyed by the Net at risk connectedness to others’. Brown acknowledges through acquisition and control based on the that soaps are a genre ‘designed and developed to search for profi tability. appeal to women’s place in society’ and largely to Operators in media services seek control keep her in that place, yet ‘although soap operas by extending ownership. This allows for a work at isolating women in their homes and wide range of cost benefi ts – TV, for example, keeping them busy buying household products, supporting an organization’s press, its online in fact many observations indicate that they services drumming up publicity for its TV actually bring women together’; thus, it would channels. Cross-promotion, bundling of content seem, paradoxically undermining hegemony (a newspaper to go with a TV subscription) while aiming to underpin it. and favourable advertising terms constitute Pluralism, pluralist The view that modern vital benefits in highly competitive markets. industrial societies have populations that are See british sky broadcasting (bskyb); increasingly heterogeneous, that is different murdoch effect. in kind, divided by such factors as ethnic, Podcasting ‘Pod’ derives from the apple macin- religious, regional and class diff erences. Such tosh iPod downloading music system. A heterogeneity, it is argued, produces a diversity podcast is a radio equivalent of blogging. It of norms, values interests and personal allows individuals and groups to run their own perspectives within such societies. Technologi- radio broadcasting service, downloadable onto cal developments, such as those fostered by the the internet. As Ken Young points out in a digital revolution, make it increasingly possible UK Guardian article, ‘One-man band’ (21 July for the media and cultural industries to address 2005), ‘with podcasting, the one man radio and access the heterogeneous nature of audi- station was born’. Podcasts can be delivered by ences, niche advertising being but one example an automatic news feed system known as Really of this. Simple Syndication (RSS) enabling broadcasts to It can also be argued that a plurality of groups be automatically downloaded whenever a station compete for power and infl uence within society. is being broadcast. Problems concern copyright Power is seen, therefore, as being increasingly on music and the risk that the authorities will diff use in terms of its distribution within these seek to impose licensing regulations. societies. Th is perspective is not without its crit- Polarization Refers to the tendency to think ics. Some groups are likely to have more power and speak in terms of opposites (see wedom, than others and will be in a better position to theydom) or what have been termed binary impose their values upon other groups. As far oppositions. Th e English language abounds with as the fi eld of media studies is concerned, recent terms denoting opposition. Reality, however, is concentrations in media ownership throw some more complex, and arguably few things can be doubt on the degree to which power is becoming seen meaningfully in terms of polar opposites. more diff use in its distribution. Our language then may tempt us into mislead- However, as populations increasingly embrace ingly simple perspectives. the digital age and communicate with potentially As Gail and Michele Myers in Th e Dynamics vast audiences via the internet, as they post of Human Communication (McGraw-Hill, 1985) comments and news on facebook, set up argue, ‘Our language supports dividing the blogs, tweet comments on twitter or transmit world into false opposites. Polarization consists their images on youtube, bypassing traditional of evaluating what you perceive by placing it at modes of interchange, it could be argued that the one end of a two-pole continuum and making Net – at least potentially – serves the advance the two poles appear to be mutually exclusive ... of pluralism (see blogosphere; mobilization; If you are honest, you cannot be dishonest.’ net neutrality). Whilst there are situations in which genuine Th e term pluralist means many modes, many opposites are found, what we should be wary of alternatives; in media terms, diversity – of is applying this perspective when it is not appro- ownership, style, content and standpoint. A priate; and in so doing denying the complexi- pluralist society is one in which there are many ties of a situation, or debate, and the range of

228 Popular culture

alternatives that can or may exist. See visions (see audience: active audience; dominant, A of order. subordinate, radical). Th ere is consensus Politics of accommodation (in the media) among researchers that the extent of polysemy is B Potential confl ict between various individuals to be viewed with caution. and groups within media corporations and Th e use of this term in media and communica- between these corporations and a central social tion analysis arguably refl ects the infl uence of C authority is seen by some commentators to be theoretical approaches from the fi eld of cultural mediated by what Tom Burns in Th e BBC: Public studies, and particularly those from theorists, D Institution and Private World (Macmillan, 1977) such as John Fiske, who argue that the meaning calls a ‘politics of accommodation’. This is a of a text is produced in the act of reception and negotiated compromise in which notions such that it is essentially subject to diff ering inter- E as professional standards and the public interest pretations. Th us most, if not all, texts would be are used as trading pieces. Negotiations of this polysemic in nature. As Denis McQuail notes in F type can be conducted at several levels: between Mass Communication Th eory (Sage, 2010), from

the professionals and the management; between this perspective, ‘mass media content is thus in G one corporation and another; and between a principle polysemic, having multiple potential corporation and the government. readings for its “readers” (in the generic sense of Even between rival media empires there can audience members)’. It is also the case that texts H exist, temporarily at least, what might be termed can be intentionally constructed to be more or reciprocal silence, an agreement to censor infor- less open to interpretation, that is to have the I mation that may be, if publicized, damaging to capacity to be more or less polysemic. See open,

one or other sides. A case in point is the silence closed texts; opinion leader; significant JK exercised by the UK Daily Mail and its sister others. paper the Mail on Sunday over the controversial ▶ John Fiske, Television Culture (Methuen, 1987). take-over of the Mail’s rival, Express newspa- Pool system Practice, particularly in wartime, of L pers by porn-king Richard Desmond, head of governments channelling media access to news the Northern and Shell company. Th e Labour events through a regulated ‘pool’ of reporters; M government’s approval in 2002 of this takeover and consequently the ‘pooling’ of information was explained by some commentators – though for publication or broadcasting. Th is strategy of N not in the Mail, among Labour’s harshest crit- news management eff ectively censors jour- ics – as being linked with Desmond’s 100,000 nalists by corralling them, while at the same time contribution to Labour Party funds. claiming to off er prompt and reliable informa- O Associated Newspapers (AN), owners of the tion on events. Th e fi rst Gulf War (1991) off ered Mail and Sunday Mail, turned out to have a legal a classic example of control through pooling. For P agreement with Northern and Shell – a pact of a similar exercise in the control of war reporting, reciprocal silence – not to report the controversy this time during the second Gulf War (2003), see R in return for the Express group’s silence concern- embedded reporters. ing allegations about the Rothermere family, Poor Man’s Guardian Title of perhaps the most owners of AN. Margaret McDonagh, the-then infl uential radical newspaper in Britain during the S Labour Party General Secretary who banked nineteenth century, edited by Bronterre O’Brien, the 100,000 for Labour, joined Northern and published by Henry Hetherington. It appeared T Shell shortly afterwards. See consensus; elite; between 1831 and 1835, and was described by establishment; hegemony; media control; George Jacob Holyoake, a campaigner against the U mediation; regulatory favours; strategic Taxes on Knowledge levied by government on bargaining. See also topic guides under the press, as ‘the fi rst messenger of popular and media institutions; media: politics & political intelligence which reached the working V economics. classes’. Other radical papers of this turbulent Polysemy Has a number of meanings; broadly period were Richard Carlile’s Gauntlet (1833–34), W used, the term describes the potential for many Robert Owen’s Crisis (1832–34), James Watson’s interpretations in media texts, or the capacity Working Man’s Friend (1832–33) and Fergus of audience to read into such texts their own O’Connor’s Northern Star (1837–52), principal XYZ meanings rather than merely the preferred organ of the Chartist movement. See stamp reading of the communicators. For some duty; underground press. See also topic commentators, audience is the ‘victim’ of media guide under media history. messages; for others, it is perceived as being Popular culture See culture: popular capable of making its own diverse responses culture.

229 Populism

Populism According to some theorists, one of passed a civil rights law enabling female victims the distinguishing features of a Mass Society is of pornography to bring civil rights actions its populist nature. Legitimacy is given to those against the pornographers. However, the law was persons, ideas or actions that are thought to vetoed by the mayor and never implemented. A best express the popular will or meet the most similar situation arose in Indianapolis, where widely shared expectations. One result, such pornographers claimed they were being denied theorists claim, is that a premium is placed upon their constitutional right to free speech (under the capacity of those in leadership positions, the First Amendment). Th us, in the courts, free to both create and placate popular opinion. speech took precedence over women’s equality Th e mass media tend to be seen as the agents and safety from physical abuse. through which such leaders control and exploit In a UK New Scientist article, ‘Flesh and blood’ the masses. (5 May 1990), on the eff ects on men of pornogra- Pornography Word originates from the Greek, phy, Mike Baxter writes, ‘Th e weight of evidence ‘writing of harlots’. Two sorts of pornography is accumulating that intensive exposure to soft- are usually diff erentiated: erotica, concentrating core pornography desensitizes men’s attitudes on physical aspects of heterosexual activity; and to rape, increases sexual callousness and shifts exotica, focusing on abnormal or deviationist their preferences towards hard-core pornogra- sexual activity. Attitudes to pornography refl ect phy. Similarly, the evidence is now strong that a society’s permissiveness, its current ‘tolerance exposure to violent pornography increases men’s threshold’, and also cast a light on prevailing acceptance of rape myths and of violence against social values. women … Many sex off enders claim they used Tolerance of pornography only makes sense if pornography to stimulate themselves before there is no felt risk; if pornography is thought to committing their crimes.’ be linked with the abuse of women and children Th e arrival and expansion of the internet, and the degradation of human relationships and with its relative freedom from control and family life, pornography will be fought against overview, has off ered global opportunities for whether the link is proved or not. In any case, pornography, along with the pornography of race pornography itself often makes the link between hatred. Any system that combines the privacy sexuality and violence: hard porn is, by general of output and input with potentially universal defi nition, a discourse in dominance expressed access will be abused. It has been argued that for through violence which, at the very least, poses women exercising their right to explore the Net, examples of possible behaviour. there is as much danger from online predators as Of interest and concern is the indisputable there is on the streets at night. fact that in many countries pornography is big In Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our business. Civic concern about the possible link Sexuality (Beacon, 2010), US sociology profes- between porn and violence was registered by the sor Gail Dines sees porn as having entered the Minneapolis City Council in 1983. Exhaustive mainstream of contemporary culture, aff ecting public hearings took place to provide a basis of ‘the way women and girls think about their information for a decision whether or not to add bodies, their sexuality and their relationships’. pornography as a ‘discrimination against women’ She argues that rather than sexually liberating to existing civil rights legislation. Th e transcript or empowering us [as the highly profi table porn of the Minneapolis hearings was published in industry presents itself as doing], porn off ers us 1988 and has ongoing relevance. a plasticized, formulaic, generic version of sex Quoting evidence from academic and clinical that is boring, lacking in creativity and discon- research on the eff ect of pornography on ordi- nected from emotion and intimacy’. nary men, the report stated that, exposed to Dines believes that ‘in today’s image-based pornography, men become desensitized; they culture, there is no respite’ from the power of see themselves as more likely to commit rape, porn ‘when it is relentless in its visibility’. She less likely to respond sympathetically to women fears that women today ‘are still held captive who are victims of rape, or more likely to be by images that ultimately tell lies about women’, lenient in their response to men who commit the biggest of these being that conformity to a rape. According to the Minneapolis transcript, ‘hypersexualized image will give women real pornography which portrays women enjoying power in the world … not in our ability to shape rape or violence or humiliation is the most the institutions that determine our life chances damaging kind. but in having a hot body that men desire and As a result of the hearings the City Council women envy’. In much of today’s popular culture,

230 Postmodernism

women’s pleasure ‘is derived not from being a history, dating from the 1870s when the perfec- A desiring subject’ but a ‘desired object’. tion of techniques in colour lithography ﬁ rst A particular concern of Gail Dines is the aﬀ ect made mass production possible. Posters have B porn has on young lives; the way it is in danger been described as the art gallery of the street, of becoming the main form of sexual education and indeed the form has appealed to many for boys who are at risk of being desensitized by artists, such as Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864– C degrading images. Indeed porn is seen as being 1901), members of the Art Nouveau movement damaging to the point where it has become a and the graphic designers of the Bauhaus and D public health issue. the De Stijl group. Posters have served every In a UK Guardian article ‘All authentic desire mode of propaganda, social, political, reli- is rendered plastic by this multi-billion dollar gious, commercial. Th e arresting clarity of their E industry’ (5 January 2011), Dines says that ‘the images, combined with words used dramatically, porn business is embedded in a complex value emotively, humorously have often continued to F chain, linking not just film producers and impress long after the ideas, events or products

distributors, but also bankers, software produc- they relate to have faded from attention. G ers, credit card companies, internet providers, So immediate and memorable are posters, and cable companies, and hotel chains’, and that it is so widely recognized, that they have formed a ‘no accident’ that the International Consumer regular inspiration for image-makers: they have H Electronics Show takes place in Las Vegas ‘at been imitated, reproduced, turned into cult exactly the same time’ as the Adult Entertain- objects, transmuted into other meanings. For I ment Expo, the world’s biggest porn conven- example, many diﬀ erent uses have been made

tion: ‘Porn has helped drive the technologies of Alfred Leete’s famous poster of 1914, ‘Your JK that expand its own market.’ See censorship; Country Needs You’, in which Lord Kitchener desensitization; lookism; mobilization; points out towards the audience, offering a regulation of investigatory powers act formidable challenge to all those who have not L (ripa)(uk), 2000; stereotype; synergy. yet volunteered for the First World War. Postcards See picture postcards. In peacetime, between elections, advertis- M Post-Colonial theory Focuses on an examina- ing dominates the poster contents of the tion and exploration of the cultural production, billboards, sometimes with bold, witty and N activities and experiences of those societies that memorable images such as the Guinness adverts were, until recently, colonies – that is, subject or Benetton’s striking socio-political images. to European colonisation. Th e term can be used Posters come into their own in times of protest O broadly, but in Th e Post-Colonial Studies Reader or revolution; some of the fi nest posters were (Routledge, 2005) Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffi ths designed and printed during and after the P and Helen Tiffi n, eds, argue ‘that post-colonial Russian Revolution of 1917, while the Spanish studies are based in the “historical fact” of Civil War (1936–39) stimulated the production R European colonialism, and the diverse material of hundreds of hard-hitting, passionate and eff ects to which the phenomenon gave rise’. Th ey often tragic images. See topic guide under note that this varied fi eld of study encompasses media history. S ‘discussion about experience of various kinds: Postmodernism Term referring to cultural, migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, social and political attitudes and expression T representation, difference, race, gender, characteristic of the 1980s and 1990s, following place, and responses to the infl uential master the modernist period of psychoanalysis, func- U discourses of imperial Europe’. Th ey also remind tional, clean-line, machine-inspired architecture, us that the impact of colonialism is not just to abstract art and stream-of-consciousness fi ction. be found in the past: ‘All post-colonial societies Wendy Griswold in Cultures and Societies in a V are still subject in one way or another to overt Changing World (Pine Forge Press, 1994) writes,

or subtle forms of neo-colonial domination, ‘Many people believe that society has entered W and independence has not solved this problem.’ this new stage beyond modernity, a postindus- See globalization; glocalization; media trial stage of social development dominated by imperialism; orientalism. media images, in which people are connected XYZ ▶ Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Vintage with other places and times through proliferat- Books, 1994); Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and ing channels of information.’ Helen Tiﬃ n, Post-Colonial Studies: Th e Key Concepts If hope and anxiety were features of modern- (Routledge, 2007). ism, says Griswold, ‘the postmodern person Posters Printed posters have had a short but vivid is characterized by a cool absence of illusion.

231 Postmodernism

Modern minds were sceptical, Postmodern to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism minds are cynical’. Th e prevailing cynicism is (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993) says of Baudril- wary of traditional attempts at explaining the lard, ‘Personally I find many of his insights evolution of society. It discards the affi rming or stimulating and provocative but, generally, his ‘grand narratives’ (metanarratives) of the past position is deplorable. In Baudrillard’s world that subscribed to the view of the inevitability truth and falsity are wholly indistinguishable, a of human progress; what might be described position which I fi nd leads to moral and political as the Enlightenment position. Reality itself nihilism.’ Th e danger for a postmodernist world is an uncertainty: being a creation of language resides in a view expressed by Lyotard: that and existing in socially produced discourse, it power has increasingly become the criterion represents an infi nitely movable feast. of – the synomym for – truth. Marxism, for example, has been rejected by A key and resonating criticism of post- postmodernist thinkers such as Michel Foucault, modernist writers focuses on the density and Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and complexity of their language; to the point where Jean Baudrillard as having ‘totalizing ambitions’, some commentators view it as meaninglessly that is off ering grandiose explanations of reality obscure (or obscurely meaningless!). Th e case is which cannot be sustained. Th ey therefore reject summarized by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont the central tenet of Marxism, its belief in the in Intellectual Impostures (Profi le Books, 1998). emancipation of humanity. First published in French, the book makes a The postmodernist position derives much full-frontal attack on both the language and the of its vision from the German philosopher meaning of aspects of postmodernism. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), in particular Professors of physics, Sokal and Bricmont his profound antipathy to any system and his direct their critique at the postmodernists rejection of the view expressed by an earlier specifi cally in terms of their invoking concepts German thinker, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel from physics and mathematics. For example, (1770–1831), of history as progress. Instead they target the French philosopher Lacan as of such totalizing, postmodernism embraces follows: ‘ … although Lacan uses quite a few fragmentation (and this includes views on the key words from the mathematical theory of fragmentation of time itself, and therefore of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and concepts of the past and present). It hones in without the slightest regard for their meaning. on micro-situations; the stress is on the local. His “defi nition” of compactness is not just false: Taking a deeply sceptical position, postmodern- it is gibberish’. ists declare that progress is a myth. If there In a review of Sokal and Bricmont’s book, are no unities, then nothing fi gures; if nothing ‘Postmodernism disrobed’ (Nature, 9 July 1998), fi gures, nothing matters, and if nothing matters Richard Dawkins wonders whether ‘the modish then anything goes. French “philosophy” whose disciples and expo- Th us in architecture postmodernism scorns nents have all but taken over large sections of traditional forms while unapologetically plagia- American academic life, is genuinly profound rizing them. It has varyingly been described as or the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and a culture of surfaces, of self-aware superfi ciality charlatans’. See sokal hoax. characterized by the ephemeral and by discon- ▶ J.F. Lyotard, Th e Postmodern Condition (Manches- tinuity. In the postmodernist approach, writes ter University Press, 1984); David Harvey, Th e Condi- Norman K. Denzen in a review, ‘Messy methods tion of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of communication research’ in the Journal of of Cultural Change (Blackwell, 1990); Frederic Communication (Spring, 1995), all ‘criteria are Jameson, Postmodernism Or Th e Cultural Logic of doubted, no position is privileged’. Late Capitalism (Verso, 1991); Christopher Norris, Taken to a logical conclusion, such a stand- Uncritical Th eory: Postmodernism, Intellectuals and point facilitates cultural freedom and unshack- the Gulf War (Lawrence & Wishart, 1992); Angela led pluralism; it could also unhinge freedom McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture from responsibility on the grounds that a defi ni- (Routledge, 1994); John Hartley, Popular Reality: tion of responsibility could only be arrived at on Journalism, Modernity, Popular Culture (Arnold, a personal, micro-level; hence the accusation 1996); Stuart Sim, ed., The Routledge Companion made in some quarters that postmodernism to Postmodernism (Routledge, 2001); Christopher is the cultural arm of the commoditization of Butler, Post-Modernism: A Very Short Introduction information and knowledge. (Oxford University Press, 2002); Richard Appigna- Madan Sarup in An Introductory Guide nesi and Chris Garrett, Introducing Postmodernism

232 Power

(Icon, 2004); Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture kind is thought to encourage a positive and A and Postmodernism (Sage, 2nd edition, 2009). friendly encounter. Whilst postural and gestural Post-synchronization Or dubbing. In film- echo occur naturally within a good relationship, B making, the process of adding new or altered in other situations attempts may be made to dialogue in the original language to the sound manipulate such mirroring activity: for example, track of a film after it has been shot. See to build a false sense of rapport when trying to C synchronous sound. persuade another person. Alternatively, eﬀ orts Postulates of communication To deﬁ ne the can be made to destroy rapport by deliberately D fundamental attributes of the communica- displaying mismatched postures and gestures. tion process is possibly a more fruitful area of There are some culturally specific uses of analysis than struggling for an all-embracing posture. Desmond Morris in People Watching E and acceptable definition of communication. (Vintage, 2002) notes that in some cultures – C.D. Mortensen in Communication: Th e Study those found in Germany and Japan, for example F of Human Interaction (McGraw-Hill, 1972) poses – bowing is still used in greeting rituals. Roger

a single, basic postulate, that ‘communication E. Axel in Gestures: Th e Do’s and Taboos of Body G occurs whenever persons attribute signifi cance Language Around the World (John Wiley & Sons to message-related behaviour’. He then follows Inc., 1998) notes that in several countries, show- this up with fi ve secondary postulates. ing the soles of your feet to others is considered H These are: (1) Communication is dynamic. off ensive – in Arab countries, Nigeria, Malaysia, (2) Communication is irreversible. (3) Commu- Pakistan, India and Turkey, for example – and I nication is proactive (as opposed to reactive). thus care needs to be taken with the posture

Mortensen says here, ‘Th e notion of man as a adopted when seated. JK detached bystander, an objective and dispas- ▶ Allan and Barbara Pease, The Definitive Book of sionate reader of the environment, is nothing Body Language (Orion, 2004). more than a convenient artefact. Among living Power Th is has been defi ned, and written about L creatures man is the most spectacular example at length, by many theorists in many diff erent of an agent who amplifi es his environment’. We disciplines, but a useful working definition M are shapers, not mere recipients. (4) Commu- is that provided by John B. Th ompson in Th e nication is interactive. (5) Communication is Media and Modernity: A Social Th eory of the N contextual. See topic guide under communi- Media (Polity Press, 1995): power is ‘the ability cation models. to act in pursuit of one’s aims and interests, the Postural echo See posture. ability to intervene in the course of events and to O Posture A range of messages, especially those aff ect their outcome. In exercising power, indi- about emotional states and relationships, can viduals employ the resources available to them; P be communicated through posture. Michael resources are the means which enable them Argyle in Bodily Communication (Methuen, to pursue their aims and interests eff ectively’. R 1988) provides some examples: fear, depression, Whilst the individual may be the basic building- dominance, submission, confi dence and happi- block of the power structure of any society, some ness. Optimism, confi dence and dominance, for blocks are arguably a lot bigger than others, S example, are often associated with an upright since some individuals have considerably more posture, whereas depression tends to be associ- personal resources than others. T ated with a slouching, shrinking posture. Posture Further, as Th ompson argues, ‘While resources can play a role during interaction regulation and can be built up personally, they are also U can be used to provide feedback. Positive feel- commonly accumulated within the framework ings towards others are often shown by leaning of institutions, which are important bases for the forwards in conversation and by postural exercise of power. Individuals who occupy domi- V echo. Conversely negative feelings can be nant positions within large institutions may have

indicated by leaning back from others during a vast resources at their disposal, enabling them W conversation and may indicate a desire to end it. to make decisions and pursue objectives which Shifts in posture can be used to mark stages in a have far-reaching consequences.’ conversation. A concept closely related to that of power is XYZ Postural and gestural echo occur during inﬂ uence. Charles B. Handy in Understanding interaction when the participants enjoy a good Organizations (Penguin, 1993) describes the rapport and signal this, typically without being relationship between power and inﬂ uence thus: aware that they are doing so, by mirroring each ‘Influence is the process whereby A modifies other’s postures and gestures. Mirroring of this the attitudes and behaviour of B. Power is that

233 Power elite

which enables him to do it.’ As well as resources, cians to a wide audience, in power-broking, has the exercise of power and infl uence requires a resulted in their being referred to as the fourth power base and at the same time the selection estate; that is, they rank alongside the judiciary, of appropriate methods of influence. In turn the church and government as exercizers of this is predicated to a considerable extent on the power and infl uence. Indeed it is the media who acceptance of, or acquiescence in, the exercise of play an essential role in communicating to the power by those subjected to it. public the nature, location and distribution of John B. Th ompson off ers a distinction between power in the community and the power-rela- the diff ering sources of power and categorizes tionships operating within it; hence the central these into four main types: economic, political, interest among media analysts and researchers coercive and symbolic. Of course these often in the media’s capacity to infl uence, shape, rein- overlap, and the way in which they do so is in force or undermine the exercize of power at all itself an indication of the often complex and at levels of society, and the degree to which public times mutually supportive relationships that attitudes and behaviour may be infl uenced. See exist within the overall power structures. democracy and the media; effects of the Varying forms of power are often concentrated mass media. See also topic guides under in institutions. Economic power is based in media: issues & debates; media: ownership ownership or control of those resources required & control; media: politics & economics; for the productive activity involved in trans- media: power, effects, influence; media: forming human, material and fi nancial resources processes & production; media: values & into goods and services, for sale or exchange in ideology. a market in order to generate a means of subsis- Power elite Term used by C. Wright Mills in tence. Th is might also be described as corporate his seminal analysis Power, Politics and People power. (Oxford University Press, 1963) to describe those Political power stems from the authority, members of a society who combine social and usually of governments and those bodies political privilege with power and infl uence. See invested with authority, to organize the activi- cultural apparatus; elite; establishment; ties of individuals, groups or organizations and hegemony. nations. Coercive power expresses itself through PR See public relations (pr). the use of force and can be found in a diverse Pragmatics Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coup- range of power relationships. Most states, what- land in Th e Discourse Reader (Routledge, 2006) ever their form of government, have resources note that ‘closely related to semantics, which that underscore their political power with the is primarily concerned with the study of word ability to employ physical force when the exer- and sentence meaning, pragmatics concerns cise of power by persuasion seems likely to fail. itself with the meaning of utterances in specifi c Very diff erent, but not necessarily less eff ec- contexts of use’. Numerous factors within the tive, is symbolic power, which Th ompson defi nes context of a communicative act can affect as stemming from ‘the activity of producing, its meaning: for example, the purpose of the transmitting and receiving meaningful symbolic interaction; expectations as regards relevant or forms’. He sees such activity as being ‘a funda- suitable topics for conversation; the nature of mental feature of social life … Individuals are the relationships between the communicators; constantly engaged in the activity of expressing and expectations concerning politeness. See themselves in symbolic forms and in interpret- assertiveness; facework; communication: ing the expressions of others; they are constantly intercultural communication. involved in communicating with one another Predatory pricing In relation to the press, and exchanging information and symbolic reduction in the price of a newspaper in order to content’. undercut the competition, and in the long run to To do so, individuals draw upon the various put the competition out of business. ‘means of information and communication’, such Preferred reading Stuart Hall poses this concept as access to the channels of communication, in ‘The determination of news photographs’ communicative competence, knowledge and in Stanley Cohen and Jock Young, eds, The acknowledged expertise in areas of symbolic Manufacture of News (Constable, 1973). Here the exchange. Th e mass media serve as key opera- preferred reading of a photograph – preferred, tors of symbolic power. that is, by the transmitter of the photograph Th e pivotal role that the media play in trans- – is one, Hall believes, that guides us to an mitting information about politics and politi- interpretation which lies within the traditional

234 Press barons

social, political and cultural values of the time, the Finger: Islam and Muslims in the British Media A symbolizing and reinforced by the interests of (One World, 2011). the dominant hierarchy. Press See journalism; news values; news- B Th e framing, cropping, captioning and juxta- papers, origins; northcliffe revolution; position of the photograph with text all serve photojournalism; press barons. See also to close-oﬀ the reader from lateral, or indepen- topic guides under audiences: consump- C dent, interpretations of the picture – from aber- tion & reception of media; media history; rant decoding of the message. Th us closure media institutions; media issues & D is achieved. Th e term has come to be applied debates; media: power, effects, influence; to message systems generally. See dominant, news media. subordinate, radical; mediation; poly- Press barons As early as 1884, Scots-American E semy. See also topic guide under audiences: steel magnate Andrew Carnegie headed a consumption & reception of media. syndicate that controlled eight daily papers and F Prejudice Phillip G. Zimbardo and Michael R. ten weeklies. In the UK Edward Lloyd owned

Leippe in The Psychology of Attitude Change the mass-circulation Daily Chronicle and the G and Social Infl uence (McGraw-Hill, 1991) defi ne blockbuster Sunday paper Lloyd’s Weekly, the prejudice as ‘a learned attitude towards a target fi rst periodical to sell a million copies. As the object that typically involves negative affect, costs of founding and running newspapers grew, H dislike or fear, a set of negative beliefs that leaving ownership a privilege of none but the support the attitude and a behavioural intention very rich, or joint stock companies, the trend I to avoid, or to control or dominate, those in the towards chain ownership accelerated.

target group’. Such an attitude may be directed In The Life and Death of the Press Barons JK towards ideas, objects, situations or people. (Secker and Warburg, 1982), Piers Brendon Prejudice is arguably of greatest concern when it points out that ‘the press barons of the New is negative and directed towards other people. In World, stimulated by the tradition of freedom L this instance prejudice is often accompanied by and protected by constitutional guarantees, were negative stereotypes of its targets. wilder beasts than their Old World counter- M The targets of prejudice tend to be those parts’; but they shared characteristics with UK who are the relatively powerless members of press barons, being ‘vicious, unstable, despotic N groups, organizations, or societies as well as …’ and sharing a ‘ruthless quest for wealth, power those who are perceived as being deviant. It is of and independence’. However, in Brendon’s view, course possible to be both. One aspect of media ‘their refusal to endure restraints on journalistic O research is the exploration of whether or not freedom was a real boon’, despite their being the media plays a role in promoting prejudice ‘armour-plated sabre-toothed behemoths’. P against some groups, cultures or nationalities. James Gordon Bennett (1795–1872), perhaps Gordon Allport in The Nature of Prejudice the first press baron, compared himself to R (Addison-Wesley, 1954) identifies five stages Moses, Seneca, Socrates and Martin Luther, and in the behavioural component of prejudice: ranked his own genius as a newspaper baron anti-locution, avoidance, discrimination, with Shakespeare, Scott, Milton and Byron. He S physical attack and extermination. Examples handed over the New York Tribune in 1868 to his of anti-locution include insults and so-called son of the same name: James Gordon Bennett Jr T jokes (in which the intention is to denigrate the matched his father’s outrageous eccentricity as subject). Avoidance of communication, though well as demonstrating, in Brendon’s words, ‘fl air, U a more passive demonstration of prejudice, enterprise and decision’. will tend to ensure that negative beliefs and Th en came the heavyweight contestants Joseph attitudes are unchallenged by contact. Th e term Pulitzer (1847–1911), proprietor of the New York V discrimination is normally used to describe the World, referred to as His Majesty by his staff , acting-out of prejudice, which often shows itself and William Randoph Hearst (1863–1932) whose W in communicative behaviour. Rejection shown Journal and other newspapers, spreading as they in communicative behaviour may be a precursor did throughout America, made their owner ‘the to physical attack and extermination. See devi- most vilifi ed press baron in history’. XYZ ance; ethnocentrism; folk devils; gender; Generous supplies of egotism, eccentricity and labelling process (and the media); moral paranoia were to be found in UK press barons, panics and the media; norms; other; such as Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord North- racism. cliff e (1865–1922), whose admiration for Pulitzer ▶ Julian Petley and Robin Richardson, eds, Pointing was reciprocated to the point where Pulitzer

235 Press barons

off ered Harmsworth editorship of the World for fell into fewer hands, circulation expanded one day, 1 January 1900. Harmsworth produced a dramatically. Between 1920 and 1939 the circula- twelve-page four-column ‘tabloid’, about half the tion of national dailies went from 5.4 million to World’s normal size. Of this publication, William 10.6 million, while Sunday paper circulations Randolph Hearst confessed, ‘We all thought it rose from 13.5 million to 16 million. In the US, was a clever stunt, but few of us realized the vital Hearst, by 1942, ran seventeen daily and twelve importance of the principle’; and this was – by Sunday papers, at the time the biggest media any means – to provide reading material that business in the world. would attract and hold the interest of the masses. Almost to a man, the press barons were In 1888 Harmsworth had launched a weekly autocratic, eccentric and immensely ambitious, journal, Answers, modelled on George Newnes’s exerting far-reaching editorial control and Tit-Bits, comprising jokes, puzzles, ‘sound-bites’ involving themselves minutely in the day-to-day of odd news and information but, advancing running of a newspaper business. Competition on Tit-Bits, encouraging reader involvement, in was savage and unrelenting. Politics were impor- particular, with competitions for prizes. In 1890, tant, but profi ts came fi rst. In fact the British Answers, which had now reached a circulation of political establishment viewed the press barons over 200,000, was supplemented by Comic Cuts, with dislike and suspicion, for they were not as followed by Illustrated Chips, Home Chat, Th e easily ‘bought’ or persuaded as their predeces- Marvel, Wonder and Union Jack. Harmsworth sors had been. bought and rejuvenated the Evening News in Of course this did not stop them meddling in 1898, and in 1896 he founded the Daily Mail, politics. Between 1919 and 1922 Rothermere and following the ‘Harmsworth way’, containing Northcliff e put all their press backing behind condensed news, gossip, sports reports and policies advocating public-spending cuts. Th eir striving to prove through rising circulation Anti-Waste League won three parliamentary Harmsworth’s dictum that ‘most of the ordinary by-elections in 1921. During the 1930s Rother- man’s prejudices are my prejudices’. mere’s papers the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail Harmsworth was a publicist of genius but he supported the British Union of Fascists for a owed much to the business acumen of his brother brief period and were rabidly anti-Red. Patrio- Harold, later Lord Rothermere, who eventually tism, a deep emotional attachment to Empire, inherited and continued the Northcliff e media ill-concealed racialism, hatred of foreigners; stable. For his services to the Conservative party, these – along with their inveterate antisocialism in particular the support offered the Tories – characterized the ‘voice’ of press baronage in by the Daily Mail, Harmsworth was off ered a the inter-war years. peerage, becoming Lord Northcliff e in 1905. By Th e post-war period saw new styles of press 1921 he controlled Th e Times, the Daily Mail, the leadership as the one-product newspaper Weekly Despatch (later a Sunday paper) and the tycoons gave way to multi-marketing trends, London Evening News. Brother Harold controlled conglomerate ownership and more self-eff acing, the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Pictorial, the Daily though no less far-reaching, control. Today, Record and several other papers. Together they ‘baronialism’ is more powerful because it is owned the large magazine group Amalgamated more global in reach and infl uence, and barons Press, while brother number three, Sir Lester such as Rupert Murdoch think and act glob- Harmsworth, owned a string of papers in the ally, aiming to extend ownership and control southwest of England. Between them these baro- across the whole fi eld of mass communication, nial brothers owned papers with an aggregate including the internet. In addition to owning circulation of over 6 million. Th eir dominance newspapers worldwide, the Murdoch empire was rivalled by another larger-than-life press counts among its portfolio of ownership film baron, Lord Beaverbrook (1879–1964). His Daily studios, publishing houses, TV stations such as Express led all its competitors in the late 1930s. Sky TV, and satellite broadcasting. Compared His four papers reached a joint circulation of 4.1 to Murdoch’s holdings in 175 newspapers world- million by 1937. wide, nine TV networks and an estimation that Regional newspaper chains displayed similar his media reach one in three of the world’s popu- baronialist tendencies. The Berry brothers, lation, the imperialism of Hearst and Northcliff e Lords Camrose and Kemsley, pushed their tally (with whom Murdoch developed a close friend- from four daily and Sunday papers in 1921 to ship) pale in comparison. See berlusconi twenty daily and Sunday papers by the outbreak phenomenon; commanders of the social of the Second World War in 1939. As newspapers order; conglomerates; global media

236 Primacy, the law of

system: the main players; media control; usually seek formal political office, although A newspapers, origins. See also topic guide some pressure groups do sponsor elected under media history. individuals. Pressure groups can be usefully B ▶ Roy Greenslade, Maxwell’s Fall (Simon & Schuster, divided into two main types: those which act to 1992); Nicholas Coleridge, Paper Tigers (Heinemann, protect their members’ interests, and those that 1993); Tom Bowyer, Maxwell: The Final Verdict are concerned to promote a cause which they C (HarperCollins, 1996); Gillian Doyle, Media Owner- believe will be in the general interests of society. ship: Concentration, Convergence and Public Policy Pressure groups vary not only in the focus D (Sage, 2002); James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power of their concern, but also more crucially in the Without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the degree of influence they have. In some cases E Internet (Routledge, 7th edition, 2010). a government may consult relevant pressure Press commissions See topic guide under groups before introducing or amending legisla- commissions, committees, legislation. tion or policies, and some groups enjoy relatively F Press Complaints Commission (UK) Body easy access to government.

created by the UK newspaper industry, begin- According to Wyn Grant in Pressure Groups, G ning its duties on 1 January 1991, and replacing Politics and Democracy in Britain (Harvester the Press Council – Lord McGregor being Wheatsheaf, 2000), pressure groups involved in appointed the Commission’s ﬁ rst chairman. Th e lobbying activities can be divided into Insider H PCC operates on the basis of a Code of Practice, and Outsider groups depending on their relative the ‘five commandments’ of which concern ease of access to government. An example of an I privacy, opportunity for reply, prompt correc- Insider group would be the Confederation of

tion and appropriate prominence, the conduct of British Industry, whereas the National Union JK journalists and the treatment of race. Th e Code of Students could be considered as an Outsider warns newspapers against publishing ‘inac- group. Insider groups usually have better access curate, misleading or distorting material’ as well because they have expertise, influence and L as recommending them ‘to distinguish clearly resources valued by a government and thus the between comment, conjecture and fact’. groups are seen as potentially useful contribu- M The PCC’s effectiveness as an independent tors to that government’s activities. As David regulator of the press has been subject to ongo- Miller and William Dinan warn in a A Century N ing criticism; arguably its biggest failure relates of Spin (Pluto Press, 2008), such access may, to the phone-hacking scandal in 2011 involving however, lead to undue inﬂ uence and corrup- news corp’s News of the World. Th e PCC, in tion. With less access, Outsider groups are more O face of revelations by the Guardian, insisted that likely to use public appeals and protest in order there was insuﬃ cient evidence to take action. A to put pressure on those in power. P scandal that quickly became an issue of national To be successful, pressure groups need and international concern led the leader of the well-planned strategies of communication, or R UK Labour opposition, Ed Miliband, to call the campaigns. Th e methods used vary but include PCC a ‘toothless poodle’. letter-writing, gaining interviews on local or Public and parliamentary outrage at the NoW’s national radio, using radio ‘phone-in’ slots, S systemic phone-hacking (see journalism: the distribution of literature, advertisements, phone-hacking) and the paper’s dramatic demonstrations and gaining television cover- T closure in July 2011 led to the establishment age. Th e internet has proved a key means of by Prime Minister David Cameron of a public disseminating information by pressure groups. Its U inquiry to be headed by Lord Justice Leveson, capacity for interactivity in particular has facili- part of whose remit would be an investigation tated planning and organization across national into press and broadcasting regulation. The borders, often bypassing traditional channels of V future of a watchdog created and funded by the mass communication. See lobbying. industry it was supposed to watch over was in ▶ Spinwatch: www.spinwatch.org. W the balance. See calcutt committee reports Primacy, the law of Th e view that whichever on privacy and related matters, 1990 and side of a case or argument is presented first 1993; ofcom: office of communications will have greater impact on an audience than XYZ (uk). anything which follows. F.H. Lund is considered Pressure groups Also known as interest groups to have been the first to advance this theory or lobbies, pressure groups aim to influence in ‘Th e psychology of belief’ in theJournal of central and local government and its actions Abnormal and Social Psychology (1925). Th ere in certain, limited areas of policy. Th ey do not are those, however, who espouse the law of

237 Primary groups

recency, asserting that that which is most recent Today zinc or aluminium sheets are used and the is the more likely to have greatest impact and design to be printed is applied to the plates by a retention. photographic process. Primacy puts its faith in first impressions, Off -set lithography, the main process of plano- recency in last impressions; both are marginal graphic printing employed today, came about as factors in the real context of debate where who a result of an accident by American printer Ira goes fi rst or last, and what is said fi rst or last, W. Rubel who had allowed the rubber cover- in what situation and by what means, are more ing of the impress cylinder to become inked. fundamental criteria. He discovered that the perfect impression it Primary groups See groups. transferred to the sheet of paper was of better Primary, secondary definers In relation to quality than that produced by direct contact events, primary defi ners are those such as the with the plate. Th e fi rst patent for a system of police who are in a position to speak authori- printing using photocomposition was taken out tatively in matters of crime and public order; by William Friese-Greene in 1895, though type- who are structurally dominant in terms of their setting by photography was not in commercial potential for defining reality. The media are use until the early 1950s. See cylinder press; secondary defi ners, either re-presenting, inter- linotype printing; monotype printing; preting or rejecting the dominant defi nition. Th e newspapers, origins; underground press. position becomes complicated when the fi eld of See also topic guide under media history. defi nition is occupied by rival defi ners, such as ▶ Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the when employers and unions are in confl ict. Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Polity, 2002). Primary, secondary texts See tertiary text; Prior restraint Legal term describing the rights text. in some countries for censorship to be exer- Prime time US term to describe the peak TV cised before publication. In the United States, viewing period: generally between 8pm and where the Second Amendment of the Constitu- 11pm. tion protects freedom of speech, there is no such Printing John of Gutenberg (c.1400–68) intro- thing as prior restraint. In the UK, however, it duced printing using movable type in 1450, was prior restraint, on the grounds of confi den- though the Chinese had developed print tech- tiality, that prevented the publication of Peter nology centuries before. Printing made the mass Wright’s book, Spycatcher (see spycatcher production and dissemination of knowledge and case). information possible for the fi rst time, and had a In February 1999 New Labour’s Home Secre- revolutionary impact on the conduct of business, tary, Jack Straw, attempted to impose prior commerce, government, learning, literature, restraint on the Sunday Telegraph when he politics, the recording of history, the advance of received information that the paper intended technology and the sciences. to publish extracts, three days before its offi cial Gutenberg’s system, still widely practised release, of the Macpherson Report into police today despite sophisticated advances in conduct in the case of the murdered teenager, computer-generated texts, worked by the Stephen Lawrence. Justice Rix at fi rst imposed application of ink, and subsequently paper, to a court order, then 24 hours later removed it a raised surface, a process called relief printing. again. A Guardian leader, headed ‘A very British Other methods are planographic and intaglio farce’, declared prior restraint ‘as fundamentally or gravure. With the former, the design to inimical to free speech’. See super-injunction. be printed and its background are in one fl at See also topic guide under media: freedom, surface; in intaglio printing the part to be censorship. printed is etched or cut into the plate, the exact Privacy A keenly debated issue of our time is the reverse of relief printing. perceived threat to, or indeed loss of, individual Bavarian actor/playwright Alois Senefelder privacy. Our privacy is at risk from those in in 1798 found that some kinds of stone absorb authority who hold information about us, and both oil and water. He drew on the stone with from the media, part of whose mission is to a greasy crayon and then dampened the stone, make public the private; to uncover dark secrets, which absorbed the water only where there was to bring illumination to facts held from view. Th e no crayon design. He then made an ink of wax, right to privacy obviously clashes with the right soap and lamp-black which stuck to the crayon to know, and there is a long and colourful history and came off on paper, producing a print. Lithog- of actions by those in the public eye, from politi- raphy, from the Greek ‘lithos’, stone, was born. cians to celebrities, who wish to protect their

238 Privacy

privacy (when it suits them) at the same time traditionally been shielded from public gaze – is A seeking publicity (when it suits them). now more visible to the public than ever before. What might be deemed of public interest is John B. Th ompson in Th e Media and Modernity: B often simply mistaken for what interests the A Social Th eory of the Media (Polity, 1995) says public. We may be indiff erent to matters of this that ‘the development of communication media kind until we experience our own loss of privacy. provides a means by which many people can C As never before, the privacy of ordinary citizens gather information about a few and, at the same is seen by many commentators as being at risk time, a few can appear before many; thanks to D from surveillance on the part of those who the media, it is primarily those who exercise hold data on us (see surveillance society); power, rather than those over whom power is a risk in the New Millennium compounded by exercised, who are subjected to a certain kind E the so-termed ‘war on terror’. With the declared of visibility’. Thompson believes the visibility objective of targeting suspects, governments made possible by communication media makes F have extended their powers to monitor the it ‘more diffi cult for those who exercise politi- population as a whole. cal power to do so secretively, furtively, behind G Th e French philosopher Michel Foucault, in closed doors’. Discipline and Punish (Pantheon, 1990), refers The power of intrusion remains, however, to ‘technologies of power’ which reach into with those in authority. Th e results of a survey H the very hearts of our lives; while Mark Poster of conditions of privacy conducted by Privacy in Th e Mode of Information: Poststructuralism International and the Electronic Privacy Infor- I and Social Context (Polity, 1990) fears that the mation Centre, US, and published in 2002, cited ‘populace has been disciplined to surveillance UK government and authorities as one of the JK and to participating in the process’ willingly, most ineff ective of fi fty countries in protecting without coercion: ‘Social security cards, drivers’ rights to privacy. Th e UK government in recent licences, credit cards, library cards and the like years has not only increased practices of surveil- L – the individual must apply for them, have them lance in Britain, but has also been instrumental ready at all times, use them continuously. Each in pushing the European Community in the M transaction is recorded, encoded and added to same direction. According to Simon Davies, databases. Individuals themselves in many cases director of Privacy International, government N fi ll out the forms; they are at once the source of ministers in the UK have mounted a ‘systematic information and the recorder of the information.’ attack’ on the right to privacy by introducing Home networking constitutes ‘the streamlined laws extending mass surveillance. His belief O culmination of this phenomenon: the consumer, is that ‘the UK demonstrates a pathology of by ordering products through a modem antagonism towards privacy’, declaring that, for P connected to the producer’s database, enters example, the UK Data Protection Act ‘is almost data about himself or herself directly into the useless in limiting the growth of surveillance’. R producer’s database in the very act of purchase’. Personal privacy is at its most vulnerable In this sense, the population participates in ‘the online, yet for the pleasure of social networking disciplining and surveillance of themselves as (see networking: social networking) many S consumers’. users of networking bases such as facebook and A practice that came dramatically to the fore in myspace are happy to disclose facts about them- T 2011 was phone tapping, in particular the secret selves in the ready knowledge that those facts and illegal extracting of information by journal- might be exploited. In the age of mobilization, U ists in pursuit of headlines (see journalism: loss of privacy would seem to be a price well paid phone-hacking). Revelations of the systemic for connecting and interacting with others. See hacking of the phones of people in the news led blogosphere; calcutt committee reports V to the closure of the Murdoch Sunday paper, the on privacy and related matters, 1990 and News of the World, and the debate about public 1993; data protection act (uk), 1984; defa- W and private, about inadequate legal protection mation; digital economy act, uk (2010); and redress (see press complaints commis- freedom of information act (uk), 2005; sion) became a pressing issue for government human rights act (uk), 2000; new visibil- XYZ and the UK press. ity; privacy: press complaint’s commission It must be acknowledged that surveillance and code of practice (uk), 1997; regulation of the loss of privacy are not entirely one-way. Th e investigatory powers act (ripa), uk, 2000; performance of a nation’s leaders, civil servants, super-injunction; usa – patriot act, 2001; business people – people whose activities have wikileaks; youtube. See also topic guides

239 Privacy: Press Complaint’s Commission Code of Practice (UK), 1997

under media: freedom, censorship; media privatization of information itself; or as some issues & debates. commentators have put it, the commoditization Privacy: Press Complaint’s Commission of information. In fact the process commenced Code of Practice (UK), 1997 Following the with the expansionism of multi-national, multi- death of Diana, Princess of Wales in a car crash product corporations after the Second World in Paris, and the widespread belief that this had War. been caused in part by the hounding of her by It was soon perceived that in the developing paparazzi, the UK Press Complaints Commis- Age of Information, information was profi table. sion issued in December 1997 a Code of Practice Corporations which were not already owners of concerning privacy and press harassment. media, bought into media. Private ownership Clause 3 of the Code declares that ‘everyone and its dominance of cultural and social expres- is entitled to respect for his or her privacy and sion, whether in the arts, education, the muse- family life, home, health and correspondence. A ums service, libraries, sport or entertainment publication will be expected to justify intrusion generally, came up against a major competitor: into any individual’s life without consent’. Taking the public sector. In this domain, information pictures of people ‘in private places without their was treated as a public right available to all consent is wholly unacceptable’, a private place rather than essentially a saleable commodity. being ‘public or private property where there is a Such rivalry in an increasingly competitive reasonable expectation of privacy’. world was considered bad for private business. On harassment, Clause 4 urges that journal- It became, then, corporate policy to pressurize ists and photographers ‘must neither obtain nor governments into dismantling the public sector. seek to obtain information or pictures through Rightist governments in the 1980s and 1990s intimidation, harassment or persistent pursuit’ (the US under Ronald Reagan and George Bush and this extends to ‘telephoning, questioning, Sr, the UK under Margaret Th atcher and John pursuing or photographing individuals after Major) made privatization the driving-force of having been asked to desist’. Th e Code also sets political and cultural change. Notions of ‘public out rules concerning intrusion into the lives of good’ or ‘public interest’ were to become condi- children, banning press payment to minors. tional upon the requirements of ‘market forces’; Th e Code is self-regulatory, without the power as was social responsibility. See communica- of law, being the creation of the newspaper tions act (uk), 2003. industry. It draws upon the European Conven- At a global level, privatization has been linked tion for the Protection of Human Rights and with financial and technical aid. The World Fundamental Freedoms, Article 8 of which, Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), having asserted the right of the citizen to respect for example, have refused economic assistance for his/her privacy and family, home and corre- to developing nations wishing to update their spondence, then lists the exceptions to the rule telecommunications systems unless these have of personal privacy: ‘Th ere shall be no interfer- fi rst been privatized. Telmex, the Mexican state- ence by a public authority with the exercise of owned telecommunications system, privatized this right except such as is in accordance with in 1990, increased the local telephone rate by the law or is necessary ... in the interests of over a thousand percent in the next decade. national security, public safety or the economic Th e chief benefi ciaries of cross-world priva- well-being of the country, for the prevention of tization of previously state-run systems have disorder or crime, for the protection of health been American-owned tele-corporations. Th ese or morals, or for the protection of the rights and hold substantial and increasing investments in freedoms of others.’ operations in more than thirty-six countries. An unenforcible code is a code that can Corporate ambitions have made substantial be conveniently broken. The most notorious headway in the world of the internet, which recent case of this was the involvement of the itself has given burgeoning life to corporate UK News of the World (a Murdoch newspaper) giants (see google; facebook). What incom- in a phone-hacking scandal (see journalism: ing corporations are not happy about is the phone-hacking). tradition of the Net to supply most services to Privatization Dominant trend in media organi- users free of charge. Commentors express fears zation throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in which that gradually, cyberspace will echo to the sound public-owned media utilities were sold off into of cash-tills (see paywall). private hands; specifi cally into those of the great Support in the European Community for transnational companies (TNCs); and with it the public service broadcasting (psb), and

240 Product placement

indeed the competitive edge which PSB and in clear focus – and pay programme-makers A services have demonstrated in the face of the considerable sums for the privilege of doing so. commercial sector, have checked if not stayed In the movie Days of Th under (1990), Tom Cruise B the hand of privatization – for the moment, wore black Levi 501s throughout and sales of the though the inﬂ uence of the power elite in the garment went up considerably. Perhaps the clas- private sector will continue to bring pressure on sic coup in terms of product placement in movies C governments to serve private media interests occurred when, in Independence Day (1996), Jeﬀ over public interests. See commanders of Goldblum saves the world, threatened by an D the social order; cross-media ownership; invasion of aliens, using his Apple Power Book. democracy and the media; deregulation; Once an artefact is featured ‘in shot’, the mediapolis; network neutrality; ofcom, company then draws further publicity by adver- E office of communications (uk); public tising the fact in its commercials. As the worlds sphere; regulatory favours. See also topic of big business and entertainment grow closer F guides under global perspectives; media and interlock – synergize – and as budgets for

institutions; media issues & debates; fi lms and TV grow tighter, product placement G media: ownership & control. threatens to become more assertive throughout Pro-con, con-pro In capturing the attention the media. It has been estimated that in the US, of an audience, is it best to put good news or companies’ expenditure on product placement H good points (pro) before the bad (con), or after exceeds the GDP of Paraguay; some US 10 them? Researchers have indicated that pro-con billion a year, and growing. I generally works best. See primacy, the law of. Product placement was forbidden in UK Producer choice Th e term used to describe the public broadcasting until 2005, when the Offi ce JK operation of an internal market system within, of Communications (ofcom) signalled a future for example, the BBC for the purchase of the loosening of regulation with a consultation services and facilities needed in programme- paper. In December 2010 the organization L making. Since 1993 producers have had control published ‘Rules for product placement on TV over their budgets and have been free to buy and paid-for references to brands and products M the services and facilities they need, such as on radio’. Th e Audiovisual Media Services (Prod- post-production, from the most cost-eff ective uct Placement) Regulations of 2010 amended N provider. Th e BBC’s previous in-house providers the 2003 Communications Act, the case being of such services and facilities thus have had to put that the Rules for TV and radio ‘will enable compete with other providers for contracts from commercial broadcasters to access new sources O programme-makers. Th e designer of the scheme, of revenue, whilst providing protection for audi- Sir John Birt, then Director General of the BBC, ences’. Th e new regulations came into force in P argued that the system would create a more cost- February 2011. eff ective and less bureaucratic organization and Restrictions are placed on the types of prod- R thus enable more resources to be channelled into ucts that can be placed, the types of programme creative areas. in which products can be placed, and the limits Criticisms of the system are that it has of ways in which products can be seen and S contributed to a reduction in staffi ng levels; that referred to in programmes. Product placement it has accelerated the trend, partly attributable is permitted in films (including dramas and T to the increasing use of independent producers, documentaries), TV series (including soaps), towards freelancing and casualization of entertainment shows and sports programmes, U employment in the TV industry; that it threatens but not in children’s and news programmes or in the long-term prospects of in-house providers UK-produced current aff airs, consumer aff airs and thus ultimately of the BBC itself as an orga- or religious programmes. V nization concerned with making programmes Prohibited is product placement of alcohol, gambling, tobacco, food or drinks that are high as opposed to commissioning them; and that it W may eventually result in a considerable loss of in fat, salt or sugar, medicines and baby milk expertise within the organization, thus a lower- banned by UK legislation. Th e ban extends to ing of standards in programme-making. See products and services not permitted in UK TV XYZ independent producers. advertising. Th e rules state that ‘product place- Product placement A branch of modern ment must not impair broadcasters’ editorial advertising, especially in the US, where agen- independence and must always be editorially cies place, in films and TV programmes, the justifi ed. Th is means that programmes cannot be products of clients – brightly lit, facing camera created or distorted so that they become vehicles

241 Produser

for the purposes of featuring product placement’. having uttered aloud a well-known and fairly Promotion and endorsement are not permit- strong profanity. ted and a logo at the beginning and end of a Professionalization (of political communi- programme will signify the use of product place- cation) Describes the ways in which government. Programme sponsors will in future be ments and political parties have adopted the able to include their own products and services practices of professionals in media communica- in those programmes which they sponsor, while tion, especially practices from the fi elds of public sponsors’ logos ‘will be able to appear as brief relations, advertising and marketing. Indeed sponsorship credits during programmes’. a signifi cant number of such professionals are Commercial references are now permitted to now employed in the transmission of policies, be ‘integrated within programming’ on radio. the nurturing of favourable images in the minds ‘However, broadcasters will have to ensure that of the public and of putting a ‘spin’ on aspects listeners are always aware when promotions are of news. In short, news management – slick paid-for.’ See www.ofcom.org.uk. presentation, use of the latest communication Produser Th at is, prod-user: in the age of network technologies; not just at times of elections but communication, a term coined to describe how as elements of a permanent, ongoing campaign. users also produce and transmit online material. Leon Mayhew (1997) comments in ‘Th e new See youtube. public: professional communication and the Profane language The Latin derivation of means of social influence’ in Ralph Negrine profane is pro fana, meaning ‘outside the temple’. and James Stanyer, eds, Th e Political Commu- Profanity referred to anyone refusing to be initi- nication Reader (Routledge, 2007) that political ated into the ways of the temple, thus showing communication can be seen as dominated a contempt for that which is sacred. Profane by these professional specialists and their language takes three main forms: religious, tactics of ‘civic persuasion’, such as ‘sound-bite excretory or sexual; and the questions asked journalism, thirty second political advertising, about such language are, why do people use one-way communication, evasive spin control profanities, and what are the eff ects upon audi- by public figures who refuse to answer ques- ence of the use of profanity? tions’. David Farrell, Robin Kolodny and Stephen J.D. Rothwell in ‘Verbal obscenity: time for Medvic (2001) in an article entitled ‘Parties and second thoughts’ in Western Speech, 35 (1971) campaign professionals in a digital age’, also to be lists fi ve reasons for using profane language: (1) found in Negrine and Stanyer (ibid), argue that it to create attention; (2) to discredit someone or is of some concern that the replacement of ‘party something; (3) to provoke confrontations; (4) to bureaucrats’ by such specialists is at the expense provide a type of catharsis or emotional release of party philosophy and the involvement of for the user; and (5) to establish interpersonal ordinary members. identifi cation. Profanity depends for its impact Such professionalization of communication on who is actually using it and in what circum- risks public cynicism, a factor which inevitably stances. leads to fraught re-examinations of current Geoff rey Hughes in Swearing: A Social History strategies of persuasion and a hunt for new ways of Foul Language, Oaths and Profanity in English to win public trust. See news management (Penguin, 1998) argues that there has been a shift in times of war. See also topic guide under in the focus of swearing in Western societies, media: politics & economics. from the use of words linked to religion to those ▶ Brian McNair, An Introduction to Political Commu- associated with sexual and bodily functions and nication (Routledge, 2007); Nick Davies, Flat Earth the use of national and racial insults – although News (Chatto & Windus, 2008); David Miller and the latter are not generally tolerated now. Th is William Dinan, A Century of Spin (Pluto Press, 2008); trend, he argues, is a refl ection of ‘the increas- Spinwatch – www.spinwatch.org. ing secularization of Western society’. Attitudes Programme fl ow ‘In all developed broadcasting to the use of such language have become systems,’ writes Raymond Williams in Television: more relaxed and he comments that there is a Technology and Cultural Form (Fontana, 1974), ‘profusion of foul language and swearing in ‘the characteristic organization, and therefore modern times’. Of course tolerance for the use the characteristic experience, is one of sequence of such language does depend to some extent on or fl ow.’ Williams believed fl ow to be a chief prin- context. John Berger recounts in a recent work, ciple of programming; the process of organizing Bento’s Sketchbook (Verso, 2011), that in 2008 a pattern of programmes, each one leading on he was asked to leave the National Gallery for to the next; each one being a ‘tempter’ for the

242 Propaganda

audience to stay tuned to a particular channel. Th ompson refers to the ‘project of self’ in rela- A Programme boundaries, Williams points out, tion to how members of the audience for media are constantly being obscured by advertise- connect their personal development – the story B ments and/or trailers for other programmes, to of themselves – to lived and mediated experi- counteract the itchy fi nger on the remote control ence. Equally, media practitioners – journalists, button and the much-feared viewer indulgence broadcasters or internet bloggers – experi- C in zapping. However, the major obstacles to ence a constant process of self-formulation, eff ectively managing programme fl ow in recent negotiating a passage between personal needs D years are the diversity of competing channels and aspirations and the pressures and demands and the empowerment, through new technolo- of the media world and those of the real world. gies, of audiences to select and record and view Thompson writes, ‘Individuals increasingly E at their own convenience. draw on mediated experience to inform and Proiaretic code See codes of narrative. refashion the project of self … The growing F Projection A throwing outwards or forwards; availability of mediated experience thus creates

term commonly used within several areas of new opportunities, new options, new arenas for G communication and media studies. Th e ability to self-experimentation.’ project oneself is an important communication Above all, the Net has not only created possi- skill. Here projection has been achieved when bilities for the development of self, but has also H a person, in giving a talk, making a speech or allowed self to become a multiplex of identities; acting a part on stage, has reached the whole the emphasis often becoming projection, that is I audience both with words and with his/her the use of new media technologies to launch one’s

personality. Voice, posture, eye contact, facial image, persona, ambitions, passions, creativity as JK expression, gesture combine in creating eff ec- well as one’s opinions, beliefs, prejudices through tive projection. innumerable social networking platforms – even Th e term can be used in a psychological sense: to the point where the project of self relies more L when people tend to project on others – transfer on the mediated than the real world for its to others – their own motives for behaviour, in defi nition and recognition. See blogosphere; M particular those which cannot be gratified or facebook; myspace; networking: social which are regarded as unacceptable; in other networking; self-concept; self-identity; N words, to assume in others the same motives. twitter; web 2.0; youtube. We may be more inclined to make such assump- Prolefeed Th e rubbishy entertainment and spuri- tions about those we like and perceive as being ous news piped to the proletariat by the Party O similar to ourselves. Clearly projection can lead in George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to errors in perception and to misunderstand- (1949). P ings in the communication process. Propaganda Usually deliberate manipulation Projection of pictures A German Jesuit, by means of symbols (words, gestures, images, R Athanasius Kircher (1601–80), professor of flags, monuments, music, etc.) of thoughts, mathematics at the Collegio Romano in Rome, behaviour, attitudes and beliefs. Th e word origi- is generally thought to have been the fi rst person nates with the Roman Catholic Congregation S to project a picture on to a screen. His apparatus for the Propagation of the Faith, a committee of was crude but eff ective, containing all the essen- cardinals in charge of missionary activities of the T tials – a source of light with a refl ector behind church since 1622. Propaganda works through it and a lens in front, a painted glass slide and a emphasizing some factors and excluding others, U screen. Kircher’s astonished audience spoke of often emotively appealing to anxieties, fears, black magic. Undaunted, the inventor published prejudices and ignorance of the true facts. a description of his fi ndings. Propaganda can be blatant (see radio death) V Th e projection of moving pictures was fi rst or work by stealth, often using entertainment as

demonstrated by Baron Von Uchatius (1811–81) a means of ‘sugar-coating’ messages. W in 1853. He used a rotating glass slide, a rotating In the world of contemporary politics, propa- shutter and a ﬁ xed lens. An improved version ganda takes the form of news management contained a rotating light source, fixed slides or spin; and a profession of spin-doctors now XYZ and a series of slightly inclined lenses whose ‘doctor’ facts in ways intended to favourably optical axes met on the centre of the screen. See propagate to the public the ideas, policies and cinematography, origins. performance of government. Propaganda, Project of self In Th e Media and Modernity: A whether it is that of governments, companies, Social Th eory of the Media (Polity, 1995), John B. institutions, charitable organizations or the

243 Propaganda model of mass communication

world of sport, aims to create in the public mind Propaganda model of mass communication a favourable impression; this might be termed See consent, manufacture of. white propaganda. In contrast, propaganda Property: intellectual property See culture: that sets out to create in the public mind a bad copyrighting culture. impression – of other countries, for example, or Propinquity A signifi cant determinant of group other ethnic groups, foreigners, asylum seekers membership, propinquity is liking through prox- and minorities, defi ning them as ‘enemy’ – might imity; when people are close together physically be termed black propaganda. there is a strain towards amicability which aids Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell in group formation, more reliably than with physi- Propaganda and Persuasion (Sage, 1999) identify cally distant persons. See groups. three forms of propaganda: white, black and Propp’s people In a study of Russian folk tales, grey. ‘White propaganda comes from a source Vladimir Propp classifi ed a range of stock char- that is identifi ed correctly, and the information acters identifi able in most narratives (see his in the message tends to be accurate … Although Morphology of the Folk Tale published in 1968 what listeners hear is reasonably close to the by the University of Texas Press). These may truth, it is presented in a manner that attempts be individualized by being given distinguishing to convince the audience that the sender is the character traits, but they are essentially func- “good guy”. tionaries enabling the story to unfold. Propp ‘Black propaganda on the other hand,’ explain describes a number of archetypal story features: the authors, ‘… is credited to a false source and the hero/subject whose function is to seek; the spreads lies, fabrications and deceptions. Black object that is sought; the donor of the object; the propaganda is the “big lie”, including all types of receiver, where it is sent; the helper who aids the creative deceit.’ disinformation would be an action; and the villain who blocks the action. example of black propaganda. Grey propaganda Thus in one of the world’s best-known folk lies ‘somewhere between white and black. Th e tales, Red Riding Hood (heroine) is sent by source may not be correctly identifi ed, and the her mother (donor) with a basket of provisions accuracy of the information is uncertain’. (object) to her sick granny (receiver) who lives in Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber in Weap- the forest. She encounters the wolf (villain) and ons of Mass Deception: Th e Uses of Propaganda is rescued from his clutches – and his teeth – by in Bush’s War on Iraq (Constable & Robinson, the woodman (helper). 2003) write, ‘Whereas democracy is built upon Th is formula can be added to and manipulated the assumption that “the people” are capable of in line with the requirements of the genre, but it rational self-governance, propagandists regard does allow us to diff erentiate between story level rationality as an obstacle to efficient indoc- and meaning level, between the denotive and trination. Since propaganda is often aimed at the connotive, between the so-termed mimetic persuading people to do things that are not in plane (the plane of representation) and the semi- their own best interests, it frequently seeks to osic plane (the plane of meaning production). bypass the rational brain altogether and manipu- See codes of narrative. late us on a more primitive level, appealing to Prosodic signals Timing, pitch and stress of emotional symbolism.’ utterances to convey meaning. Th e authors talk of ‘corporate spin doctors, Proxemics See spatial behaviour. think tanks and conservative politicians’ who PR: Public relations See public relations have ‘taken up the rhetoric of fear for their (pr). own purposes’. See advertising; consent, PSB (Public Service Broadcasting) See manufacture of; demonization; effects public service broadcasting (psb). of the mass media; lobbying; news: rage Pseudo-context In his sharply critical assess- inducement; psyops; public relations ment of the impact of TV on society, in Amusing (pr); rhetoric; radio ‘shock-jocks’. See also Ourselves to Death (Methuen, 1986), American topic guide under language/discourse/ author and communications professor Neil narrative. Postman says of a pseudo-context that it is ▶ David Miller, ed., Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and ‘a structure invented to give fragmented and Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq (Pluto Press, irrelevant information a seeming use’. However, 2003); Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, the pseudo-context offers us no useful func- Propaganda and Persuasion: New and Classic Essays tion for the information in terms of action, (Sage, 2006); Noam Chomsky & Gilbert Archer, problem-solving or change. TV is the culprit in Perilous Power (Penguin, 2007). this fragmenting process. All that is left for what

244 Public opinion

Postman calls the ‘decontextualization of fact’ and occupation of Iraq in 2003 by American A by the non-print media, particularly TV, is to and British forces; alluding in particular to the amuse. All knowledge, having been fragmented, ‘evidence’ put forward to the public of weapons B is reduced to a trivial pursuit. See effects of of mass destruction that posed a threat to the the mass media. invading nations – weapons which were never PSI Para-social identifi cation; that is, members of found. C an audience associate with fi ctitious characters In the digital age, such propagandist activity as portrayed in the media, or with well-known is increasingly diffi cult to sustain in face of the D personalities whom they regularly ‘meet’ internet’s capacity to expose previously secret through the mediation of radio, TV, etc. See data and to broadcast that data instantly and parasocial interaction. globally. See wikileaks. E Psychographic analysis See demographic Public Aff airs See lobbying. analysis. Public cues See barnlund’s transactional F Psycholinguistics The study of the interplay models of communication, 1970.

between language acquisition, development and Public Interest Disclosure Act (UK), 1999 See G use and other aspects of the human mind. whistle blowing. Psychology Th is discipline seeks to explore the Public Occurrences Both Foreign and way in which individual behaviours are linked Domestic Title of the ﬁ rst American newspa- H together to form a ‘personality’. Its focus is upon per, founded in Boston on 25 September 1690 the experience and behaviour of the individual, by Benjamin Harris. The paper survived one I upon the individual’s reaction to certain physi- issue only, being immediately suppressed by

ological and/or social conditions. Some areas the Governor and Council of the-then British JK of social psychology are concerned with the colony. behaviour of individuals in small groups or Public opinion Th e Greek agora is tradition- crowds; here there is some overlap between this ally seen as the birthplace and location of public L discipline and that of sociology. opinion. It was an open space where free citizens ▶ Valerie Walkerdine and Lisa Blackman, Psychology gathered to discuss and ideally shape the aff airs M and the Media (Macmillan, 1999); Nigel Benson, of state. By its nature, public opinion lacks the Introducing Psychology (Icon Books, 2007); Richard structure of, for example, elite opinion and N Cross, Psychology (Hodder Education – Hodder there are diffi culties both of defi nition and iden- Arnold, 6th edition 2010); Pamela Regan, Close Rela- tifi cation. Th e modern-day opinion poll tests tionships (Routledge Academic, 2011). samples of the whole public; market and audi- O Psychological Reactance theory See Cogni- ence research have pursued increasingly sophis- tive Consistency theories. ticated, technology-aided modes of opinion P Psyops US shorthand for ‘psychological opera- measurement. For such research, measurement tions’; the equivalent UK term, ‘information is of tastes, expectations, needs, values and R support’; an arm of propaganda. Psyops behaviour as well as opinions. For the student of work in a number of ways to promote ‘fact’ media, the public is examined from the point of and ‘truth’ in support of state action, especially view of how the media represent public opinion, S times of confl ict and war. David Miller in ‘Th e purport to speak for it, indeed, to defi ne it; and propaganda machine’, a chapter in the book he to shape it especially in the light of perhaps the T edited entitled Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and most important and specifi c expression of public Media Distortion in the Attack on Iraq (Pluto, opinion – voting. U 2004), writes that such operations are ‘entirely Susan Herbst and James R. Beniger in ‘The outside of democratic control’. Th ey appear ‘not changing infrastructure of public opinion’ to be constrained by adhering to any standard published in Audiencemaking: How the Media V of truthfulness’, operating ‘on the basis that Create the Audience (Sage, 1994), edited by

anything goes so long as it is calculated that it James S. Ettema and D. Charles Whitney, explore W can be got away with’. the connections between the concept of public Th e author is of the view that the use of psyops opinion and the means by which public opinion shows contempt for the process of democracy, is measured, the one being infl uenced by the XYZ ‘since the lies are constructed to misinform and other; thus what public opinion is in any situa- persuade – in part – the electorate of the US tion is to a degree defi ned by how it is defi ned and UK as well as world opinion’. He is referring and measured. Th e authors say that ‘both poll- in particular to the techniques and processes ing and voting embrace a conception of public of persuasion which supported the invasion opinion as the aggregation of individual opinions

245 Public radio

and both provide means for elite management of frequently drawing the media in its wake. See those opinions’. blogosphere; demotic turn; information They identify three historical phases in the commons; mediasphere. evolution of public opinion infrastructures. Th e Public radio Term used in Australia to refer to fi rst was located in the salons of mid-eighteenth- community radio. century France (see salon discourse). Here Public relations news (PRN) See news: the political and intellectual elite gathered public relations news (pr). socially to discuss all matters from art to philoso- Public relations (PR) According to the Char- phy, not least the aff airs of state and the nature of tered Institute of Public Relations website government. Th is elite model of public opinion (2005), ‘Public Relations is about reputation found a modestly downmarket parallel in the – the result of what you do, what you say and coff ee houses of London, presided over by such what others say about you … Public Relations is ‘agorans’ as Dr Samuel Johnson (1709–84). Th ese the discipline which looks after reputation, with ‘spaces’ for discourse were only one aspect of the aim of earning understanding and support the infrastructure; what formed an extension of and infl uencing opinion and behaviour. It is the them were the writings of those novelists, poets, planned and sustained eff ort to establish and scientists and philosophers who attended the maintain goodwill and mutual understanding salons or met in the coff ee houses. between an organization and its publics.’ Towards the middle of the nineteenth century Many companies and institutions in both the the press became the dominant residence public and private sector have PR departments of public opinion, but the newspapers were dedicated to creating and sustaining their increasingly refl ecting, both in the UK and the good image and reputation with a variety of US, the development of political parties. Herbst publics: for example, shareholders, taxpayers, and Beniger believe that ‘in concert with the clients, customers and employees. Public rela- newspapers that shared their ideologies, politi- tions personnel may work alongside those in cal parties were a critical component of the late- advertising and marketing but their role is 19th century American infrastructure of public essentially focused on building relationships and opinion expression and assessment’. In fact fostering the two-way communication channels pressure groups of all kinds, including trade required to achieve this aim. unions, contributed to the group-based model of Shirley Harrison in Public Relations: An Intro- public opinion. duction (Routledge, 1995) writes that ‘the most New media technology such as radio and common public relations activities undertaken more effi cient measurement practices contrib- by practitioners are media relations, publicity uted to what Herbst and Beniger term ‘a shift and publications, corporate public relations from publics to audiences’. What had, until the and provision of information’. See bernstein’s emergence of audience-measurement tech- wheel; epistle; grunig and hunt model, niques (such as the Audimeter-based nielsen 1984; johnson and scholes: stakeholder ratings in the States), been an aggregate of mapping; lobbying; opinion leader; pest; opinions was now a profi le of diff erences, leading pie chart; public affairs; publics; stake- to what in advertising terms was to become holders; swot; professionalization (of segmentation. The ability to discriminate political communication); propaganda. between shades of opinion as far as this audi- ▶ David Miller and William Dinan, A Century of Spin: ence model is concerned indicates advancing How Public Relations Became the Cutting Edge of degrees of rationalization, and this, state Herbst Corporate Power (Pluto Press, 2008); Sandra Cain, and Beniger, ‘works best for those at the top of a Key Concepts in Public Relations (Palgrave Macmil- given system’. lan, 2009); Bob Franklin, Mike Hogan, Quentin With the advent of internet communica- Langley, Nick Mosdell and Eliot Pill, Key Concepts in tion, and particularly social networking (see Public Relations (Sage, 2009); Ralph Tench and Liz networking: social networking), opinion Yeomans, Exploring Public Relations (Pearson Educa- is varyingly to be found on platforms such as tion Limited, 2009). facebook, where public issues are not only Publics A term used within public relations aired but campaigns launched free of initiation (pr) practice to refer to specific groups that by the power elite. In this sense, the Net are or might become an intended audience for has become the most interactive of public communication activities: pressure groups, spaces, the agora of the twenty-first century, customers, competitors, local communities, and often challenging traditional media but just as opinion leaders. As Paul Baines, John Egan and

246 Public service broadcasting (PSB)

Frank Jefkins note in Public Relations: Contem- audience as constituting citizens, members of A porary Issues and Techniques (Elsevier Butter- communities and individuals rather than merely worth-Heinemann, 2004), ‘the identifi cation of consumers. PSB is essentially the creation of B the “publics” of public relations is fundamental government in the fi rst instance, though for this to the planning of a PR programme, for unless reason safeguards are built into the system so the publics are defi ned it is impossible to select that its operation is (relatively) free of govern- C the media that will best convey our messages to ment control and infl uence. Financing of PSB is them’. usually through some form of taxation or licence, D Relevant publics will vary from one organiza- subject to periodic revision by government; or in tion or individual client to another and from the case of commercial television, by means one programme or campaign to another; they of advertising. E will also vary over time. As with any commu- Th e BBC in the UK represents for many the nication activity, knowledge of the public classic example of public service broadcasting F (audience) is crucial when making decisions (see bbc, origins). It was created by act of

about the construction as well as the delivery Parliament and is subject to regulation laid down G of messages. A PR activity may, of course, have by Parliament. Th e importance of John Reith’s a number of publics, each of which might need tenure as first Director General of the BBC to be approached, to some extent, in a diff erent is that, arguably, he forged the philosophy of H manner. Th e concept can also be used in identifi - public service broadcasting. As noted by Paddy cation of potential future publics. Scannell and David Cardiff in A Social History of I A number of researchers have proposed British Broadcasting: Volume 1, 1922–39: Serving means of classifying publics. James Grunig the Nation (Blackwell, 1991), the core principles JK and Todd Hunt in Managing Public Relations of this philosophy were set out by Reith in a (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984) note the four memorandum written to the Crawford Commit- categories derived from James Grunig’s studies. tee in 1925. L Grunig divided up publics in terms of their levels They can be summarized as follows: that of likely activity as regards a PR programme, broadcasting should serve the interests of the M and identifi ed four main types: (1) publics that general public; that it should be accountable to are active on all of the issues; (2) publics that are the public but independent from government N apathetic on all issues; (3) publics interested in whilst being subject to government regulation; single issues; and (4) publics that are active only that audiences should be treated as citizens, on issues that involve nearly everyone in the usually of a democracy; that it had a duty to not O population, that is controversial topical issues. only entertain but also to inform and educate the Any one individual’s position may of course audience and contribute to public debate within P change over time, and one aim of a campaign, for society in an impartial and balanced manner; example, might be to convert apathy into some that broadcasting should offer a mixture of R form of active engagement. programmes; that broadcasting activities should Ralph Tench and Liz Yeomans in Exploring be publicly funded; and that it should foster and Public Relations (Pearson Education Limited, reinforce national identity. S 2009) point out that there have been a number Commercial TV in the UK has been equally of criticisms of Grunig and Hunt’s typology; one subject to regulation, but will cease to have a T such is that it does not suffi ciently take account PSB obligation once the broadcasting services in of variables like cultural diff erences or power Britain switch completely to digital transmission U relationships, both of which have considerable (see communications act (uk), 2003). potential to aff ect communicative behaviour. See Regulation aims, for example, to achieve bernstein’s wheel, 1984; grunig and hunt: balanced programming, that is balance V four models of public relations practice, between information and entertainment, 1984; opinion leader. preserving the one against the possible W ▶ Allen H. Center and Patrick Jackson, Public Rela- encroachment of the other. Regulation serves tions Practices (Prentice-Hall, 2003); Scott M. Cutlip, to guarantee a balance between the serious and XYZ Allen H. Center and Glen. M. Broom, Eff ective Public the popular, between programmes that appeal to Relations (Prentice Hall, 2006). minorities and programming designed to attract Public service broadcasting (PSB) Term mass viewing. refers to any broadcasting system whose fi rst Since the 1990s PSB has suffered diminish- duty is to a public within a democracy, serving ment in the face of commercial competition, to inform, educate and entertain, and to regard greater diversity of provision brought about by

247 Public sphere

new technology and dominant ideologies work- (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Richard Rudin, Broad- ing towards the privatization of the airways, casting in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, to the point at which some commentators fear 2011). for its future. Public sphere With the development of capital- Pressure on governments by multi-national ism in the mid-seventeenth century, argues corporations seeking to extend their media Jürgen Habermas, a public sphere of debate portfolios (see murdoch effect), and viewing and communicative interchange was opened PSB as an obstacle to their ambitions, has been up, mainly among the bourgeoisie, in Western unrelenting (see british media industry society. Economic independence provided by group). As long ago as 1991, Peter Golding and private property, the expansion of published Graham Murdock in ‘Culture, communications, literature such as novels that encouraged critical and political economy’ in Mass Media and reflection, and the growth of a market-based Society (Edward Arnold, 1991), edited by James press created a new public awareness of politics Curran and Michael Gurevitch, were writing and involvement in public debate. that assaults on PSB are ‘part of a wider histori- Th e public sphere existed between the econ- cal process whereby the state in capitalist societ- omy and the state and represented a nascent ies has increasingly assumed a greater role in form of supervision of government. However, managing communicative activity’. Th is process, Habermas believed that from the middle of the the authors point out, has occurred hand in nineteenth century the public sphere came to be glove with big business: modern communication dominated by the expanded state and organized media are signifi cant for their ‘growing incorpo- economic interests. The media ceased to be ration into a capitalist economic system’. agencies of empowerment, surrendered much Th at PSB continues to be defi ned as an issue of their role as a watchdog and became a rather than a crisis is partly due to a determina- further means by which the public were sidelined tion to maintain a central place in audience use and public opinion manipulated. According of broadcasting, and this has meant matching to Habermas, the public sphere ceased to be a the commercial sector in terms of programme ‘neutral zone’. popularity and thus of ratings (see audience Today, commentators see the internet as a measurement). The fear is that quality welcome extension of the public sphere, while at programming (a vital principle of PSB) will be the same time expressing doubts as to how long sacrifi ced in the pursuit of quantity. Debate over this agora will remain a space of free exchange what has been termed the dumbing-down of PSB for communities of interest in the face of has been lively but generally inconclusive. corporate ambitions to occupy – to commercial- What might be seen as the greatest opportu- ize – that space. At the same time that space is nity and at the same time the greatest hazard seen as being increasingly subject to government facing PSB have been the profound changes surveillance. See blogging; blogosphere; brought about through digitization and the information commons; mediasphere; energy with which PSB has carried the battle mediapolis; surveillance society. with private sector broadcasting on to the ▶ Jürgen Habermas, Communication and the internet. Th e online services off ered by the Evolution of Society (Beacon, 1979); Habermas, Th e BBC led the fi eld until cutbacks were forced on Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere the Corporation in 2011. (Polity, 1989); Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks, eds, Th e degree to which governments support PSB Communication and Citizenship: Journalism and in future, and the degree to which governments the Public Sphere (Routledge, 1993); John Hartley, concede to the demands of media corporations, Popular Reality: Journalism, Modernity, Popular will continue to dominate the scenarios of broad- Culture (Arnold, 1996); Michael Bromley, ed., No casting throughout the European community. News is Bad News: Radio, Television and the Public See audience fragmentation; democracy (Longman, 2001); Bob Franklin, ed., British Television and the media; deregulation, five myths Policy: A Reader (Routledge, 2001); James Watson, of; mcquail’s accountability of media Media Communication: An Introduction to Th eory model, 1997; mediasphere; mediapolis; and Process (Palgrave Macmillan, 3rd edition, 2008); ofcom: office of communications (uk); (Zizi Papacharissi, ed., Journalism and Citizenship: public sphere; radio broadcasting. See New Agendas in Communication (Routledge, 2009). also topic guide under broadcasting. Pulitzer prizes for journalism American ▶ Petros Iosifides, ed., Reinventing Public Service awards made annually for breaking news, Communication: European Broadcasters and Beyond national reporting, criticism, editorial writing

248 Racism

and feature photography; named after Joseph Questionnaires A popular method of data A Pulitzer (1847–1911), Hungarian-born newspa- collection, a questionnaire basically consists of per proprietor and rival of William Randolph a series of questions designed to obtain factual B Hearst (1863–1932), model for Orson Welles’s information and/or information about people’s ﬁ lm Citizen Kane, 1943. attitudes, values, opinions, or beliefs about a particular subject or issue. A questionnaire can C also be constructed so as to contain questions Q about a range of topics or issues. Th ey are regu- D Quadrophony See gramophone. larly used as a tool of market research and are Quality press See broadsheets. central to audience measurement. Queer theory Views sexual identity as essentially Because it is not usually possible to give a E fluid, ambiguous and unstable. In examining questionnaire to all those who make up the the dynamics of sexual identity it explores, as group in which you are interested, question- F Annamarie Jagose notes in Queer Theory: An naires are normally given to a sample (see

Introduction (New York University Press, 1996), sampling); care needs to be taken to ensure G the ‘mismatches between sex, gender and desire’. that the sample represents the total population, Queer theory challenges the view that hetero- that is the total number of people in that group sexual desire is ‘natural’, unproblematic and to be in all significant respects. Questionnaires are H regarded as the norm. Indeed it challenges the useful for gathering large amounts of data but view that there can be any ‘natural’ and stable may be less useful for investigating an issue I sexual identity or orientation. in depth; here participant observation

Its concerns include not only lesbian and gay or interviews may be more useful. Further, JK sexual orientations but, according to Jagose, constructing an unambiguous, unbiased and ‘cross-dressing, hermaphroditism, gender ambi- productive questionnaire is not easy, nor is the guity and gender-corrective surgery’. Further, impartial analysis of the responses collected. See L according to Paul Burston and Colin Richardson, topic guide under research methods. editors of A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men QWERTY Arrangement of letters on the tradi- M and Popular Culture (Routledge, 1995), it ‘seeks tional typewriter and computer keyboard, to locate Queerness in places that had previ- devised in 1873 to overcome jamming problems N ously been thought of as strictly for straights’. on the world’s first production machine, a In A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory Remington. (Edinburgh University Press, 2003) Nikki Sulli- O van discusses examples of ‘queer’ readings of a number of texts ranging from Batman Forever R P to Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery. Rachel’s Law See defamation. An influential perspective informing the Racism Discrimination against individuals or R development of the theory is that provided by groups of people on the basis of assumed Judith Butler in Gender Trouble: Feminism and racial differences. The term is problematic in the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990, that there is some argument as to whether the S 1999). Butler argues that gender categories and concept of race is useful anyway in describing notions of identity and sexual orientation associ- biological diff erences between people. Racism, T ated with them are not natural, but rather are though, rests on the belief that diff erent races social constructs which rely heavily upon every- with specifi c characteristics can be meaningfully U day performances and interaction with others. identifi ed. At an individual level such discrimi- Such performances are often repeated and typi- nation takes the form of prejudice, whereas the cally are framed by social expectations of what term racism is often used to describe the way in V constitutes appropriate behaviour. It is through which such discrimination is embedded into the the repetition of performances that notions of structure of a society. Cultural racism refers to W gender and gender identity are constructed. Th e the perpetuation, consciously or unconsciously, process of ‘performativity’, not nature, is at the of such discrimination and the beliefs and heart of gender categories. Butler’s theory of values on which it rests through the cultural XYZ performativity facilitates examination of a range institutions of a society, for example education of possibilities that may exist as regards gender, and the mass media. identity and sexual orientation. As Stuart Hall notes in ‘Th e whites of their ▶ Iain Morland and Annabelle Willox, Queer Th eory eyes: Racist ideologies and the media’ in The (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Media Reader (BFI Publishing, 1990), edited by

249 Racism

Manuel Alvarado and John O. Th ompson, ‘the analyses the contribution news coverage in the media are ... part of the dominant means of press makes to new racism, which opts for a ideological production. What they “produce” more subtle negative portrayal of ethnic groups is precisely representations of the social world, rather than the more obvious and open racism of images, descriptions, explanations and frames the past. Van Dijk writes that ‘most mentions of for understanding how the world is and why “terrorists” (especially also in the US press) will it works as it is said and shown to work. And, stereotypically refer to Arabs. Violent men who amongst other kinds of ideological labour, the are our friends or allies will seldom get that label. media construct for us a defi nition of what race ‘For the same reason, “drug barons” are always is, what meaning the imagery of race carries, and Latin men in South America, never the white what the “problem of race” is understood to be. men who are in the drugs business within the US Th ey help to classify out the world in terms of itself.’ New racism extends to selection of stories the categories of race’. for news coverage, and van Dijk argues that as In Learning the Media (Macmillan, 1987) regards news about immigrants and ethnic Manuel Alvarado, Robin Gutch and Tana Wollen minorities, there is ‘a preference for those topics pose four main categories in which black people that emphasize Th eir bad actions and Our good are portrayed on television. (1) Th e exotic, for ones’. The consequence, he concludes, is that example coverage of tribal dancing used to ‘systematic negative portrayal of the Others, thus welcome members of the Royal Family when vitally contributed to negative mental models, visiting various Commonwealth countries. stereotypes, prejudices and ideologies about the (2) The dangerous, for example coverage of Others, and hence indirectly the enactment and immigration as an issue that presents coloured reproduction of racism’. immigrants and asylum seekers as a threat. (3) Another fairly recent study reported in Race in Th e humorous, where humour may well serve the News by Ian Law (Palgrave, 2002) examined to reinforce notions of racial diff erences to the coverage of race news across radio, television detriment of coloured people. (4) Th e pitied, for and the press during six months from 1996 example media coverage of famines in Africa and and 1997. Th e study found that there had been of Western attempts to provide aid, which tend a shift towards an anti-racist stance in news to represent famine as resulting from the inad- coverage, a willingness to expose racist attitudes equacies of the people and their governments and behaviour and a more inclusive representa- rather than as a legacy of Western colonialism. tion of British identity, one that acknowledged One important focus of current media research the multi-cultural and multi-ethnic nature of is the role that the media play in shaping and contemporary British society. However, in a perpetuating racism and racist stereotypes. later publication entitled Racism and Ethnicity: Research suggests that negative and stereo- Global Debates, Dilemmas, Directions (Pearson, typical images of ethnic minorities abound and 2010) Law points to continuing concern over the present an image of them as inferior, marginal representation of race in media coverage of such and a potential source of social problems. Simon topics as inner-city gangs and violence, educa- Cottle in Ethnic Minorities and the Media (Open tional performance, dysfunctional families, University Press, 2000), edited by Cottle, argues unemployment, sport, Muslim issues, Gypsies, that ‘Over recent decades a considerable body Travellers and asylum seekers. of research conducted in both the UK and the The limited ethnic diversity among media US has examined the media’s representations of practitioners also continues to be an issue. ethnic minorities. Law points to a recent report published by the ‘Th e collective fi ndings of this research eff ort Committee for Racial Equality entitled Why generally make depressing reading. Under- Ethnic Minority Workers Leave London’s Print representation and stereotypical characteriza- Media (CRE, 2006), which found numerous tion within entertainment genres and negative examples of racism and discrimination towards problem-orientated portrayal within factuality journalists from ethnic-minority backgrounds and news forms, and a tendency to ignore struc- within the print news media. See bigotry; tural inequalities and lived racism experienced compassion fatigue; ethnocentrism; by ethnic minorities in both, are recurring media imperialism; other. See also topic research fi ndings.’ guide under media issues & debates. Tuen A. van Dijk in ‘New(s) racism: A ▶ Steve Fenton, Racism, Class and Culture (Macmil- discourse analysis approach’, published in lan, 1999); Sarita Malik, Representing Black Britain: Cottle’s Ethnic Minorities and the Media, Black and Asian Images on Television (Sage, 2001);

250 Radio broadcasting

Norman K. Denzin, Reading Race (Sage, 2002); not lifted until 1919, but in February 1920 the A John Downing and Charles Husband, Representing Marconi Company in the UK began broadcast- Race (Sage, 2005); Kjartan Sveinsson, A Tale of Two ing from Writtle/Chelmsford, though later in B Englands, Race and Violent Crime in the Media the year the Post Oﬃ ce withdrew permission for (Runnymede Trust, 2008); Rosalind Brunt and these broadcasts. However, on 14 February 1922 Rinella Cere, eds, Postcolonial Media Culture in Brit- the ﬁ rst regular broadcasting service in Britain C ain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Gilbert B. Rodman, was again beamed from Writtle, organized by Th e Race and Media Reader (Routledge, 2010). the Experimental Section of the Designs Depart- D Radical press See media activism; open ment of Marconi. Th eir London station, 2LO, source; underground press. began broadcasting on 11 May of the same year. Radical suppression of potential (technol- The Post Office, faced with nearly 100 E ogy) See supervening social necessity. applications from manufacturers who wanted Radio See radio broadcasting. to set up broadcasting stations, and realizing F Radio ballads Form or genre of musical docu- the need to have some sort of control of the

mentary inspired in the UK by radio producer airways, proposed a consortium of companies G Charles Parker, and compiled by folk-singers to centralize broadcasting activity: the British Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger, beginning in Broadcasting Company was born, and John 1958 with Th e Ballad of John Axon. Th e introduc- Reith appointed its Managing Director (see bbc, H tion of high-quality portable tape recorders to origins). The BBC, set up by Royal Charter, the BBC enabled Parker and his team to create came into existence 1 January 1927. It was to I new patterns of vocal sound, interlaced with hold a monopoly of broadcasting in the UK until

sound eff ects (real, not studio-simulated) which commercial radio was legalized in the sound JK served as an ‘impressionistic’ means of describ- broadcasting (uk) act, 1972 (see commer- ing the lives and work of ordinary people. John cial radio, uk). Axon was a train driver, killed in a crash, and From its beginning, radio broadcasting in L the nature of his life was re-created in ballad and the US was fi nanced by advertising; from its recollection. Singing the Fishing (1960), taking beginning, radio broadcasting in the UK was free M for its theme the hard life of the North Sea of advertising; the one was predominantly local, fi sherman, won the Italia Press award. Th e BBC the other a national public service and eventually N withdrew fi nancial support from this pioneer- a national institution. No study of the evolution ing team in 1964. See radio drama; web or of broadcasting in the UK can avoid also being online drama. an analysis of the philosophy, vision and prac- O Radio broadcasting The First World War tices of the BBC’s Managing Director and later (1914–18) had given impetus to the development Director General John (later Sir John) Reith. P of radio for military purposes, and the training of Varyingly called the Napoleon of Broadcasting, wireless operators. Visionaries of the age saw the and Prospero, the all-powerful magician, Reith R possibility of wireless programmes as an exciting disliked politics and politicians, and viewed extension of wireless messages – a ‘household commerce with disdain (and commercialism utility’ which would create a world of sound, with contempt). He forged a defi nition of public S of voices and music; which would annihilate service broadcasting (psb) that dominated distance and off er undreamed-of opportunities broadcasting, both radio and TV, for generations T for culture, entertainment and information. and which, even in the age of the dispersal of With the ending of the war, crystal sets tuned control, aff ects us still. U in by their ‘cat’s whisker’ became immensely Radio newsreaders wore dinner jackets and popular. Th e valve, called the ‘magic lantern of bow-ties to read the news, a symbol of the radio’, developed between 1904 and 1914, soon aloofness and distancing characteristic of Reith V usurped the crystal. and much of the output of the BBC. There was even a Pronunciation Committee. Yet the Th e fi rst ‘broadcast’ of music and speech was W made by an American, R.A. Fissenden, in 1906. Corporation resisted criticisms from the popular The American Radio and Research Company press that its tastes were too elitist. It was to was broadcasting concerts twice and three times give drama and classical music, as well as many XYZ a week as early as 1916, though KDKA of Pitts- other forms of music, a new structure and a new burg won the earliest renown as a pioneer in the popularity. Equally, there was room for develop- fi eld (on air, 1920). ing the potential of radio in outside broadcasts, A ban imposed on ‘amateur’ radio in Britain drama documentary, discussion programmes, at the outbreak of the First World War was and fi reside talks.

251 ‘Radio Death’

Th e greatest fear of the broadcasters was, and radio in a land almost without TV and with an continues to be, government interference. Reith’s illiteracy rate of over 50 per cent of the popula- caution was as monumental as the extent of his tion. A broadcast in April 1994 claimed that ‘by control. His desire to render the BBC beyond the 5th May the elimination of the Tutsis should political reproach led to the Corporation often be fi nished’. In the fi rst week of the killing spree, censoring itself so as to be one step ahead of upwards of 200,000 people were murdered as being censored. Th e risks to the BBC were not Hutu militia combed the countryside. imagined. During the General Strike of 1926 In 1995 reporters sans frontières Winston Churchill wanted the government to (Reporters Without Borders), a Montpellier- commandeer the Corporation, a move Reith based group of journalists set up in 1987 to managed to resist – but at a price: during the defend press freedom worldwide, initiated a strike no representative of organized labour civil law suit in Paris against the founders and was permitted to broadcast, and the leader of organizers of Radio Death alleging their respon- the Opposition, Ramsay MacDonald, was also sibility for genocide, violation of humanitarian banned. law and crimes against humanity. With the introduction and swift public take- In response to the torrents of hatred emerging up of television, radio lost dominance and for a from RTLM, Radio Gatashya was formed and time looked as if it would be displaced as a major took to the air for the fi rst time in August 1994 player on the stage of mass communication. In in Goma. Its own nickname was ‘Humanitarian the 1990s and into the New Millennium, both Radio’, and it provided an information service of the BBC and commercial radio responded to the help and support for the thousands of refugees. challenge, diversifi ed, took audience tastes into In June 2000 a Belgian-born announcer on account as never before, introduced new chan- ‘Radio Death’, Georges Ruggiu, was sentenced nels, new programme modes, adopting digital by an international criminal tribunal to twelve broadcasting with alacrity. Radio acquired a years’ imprisonment on two counts of inciting dynamic new profi le, not only for music but also the Hutu massacres of Tutsis in Rwanda. for talk programmes, sport, the arts, drama and Radio drama The first ever radio play was comedy. See wireless telegraphy. See also Richard Hughes’s Danger (1923), about a couple topic guide under broadcasting. trapped in a mine, but the play that appears to ▶ Asa Briggs, Th e History of Broadcasting in the United have had the most substantial impact as a work Kingdom (Oxford University Press, four volumes, in a new medium was Reginald Berkeley’s Th e 1961, 1965 and volumes 3 and 4, 1979); P.M. Lewis and White Chateau, broadcast by the BBC to an J. Booth, Th e Invisible Medium: Public Commercial audience of over 12 million on Armistice Day, and Community Radio (Macmillan, 1989); Paddy 1925 and telling an extremely harrowing story of Scannell and David Cardiff , A Social History of British the trench-war. Broadcasting: Vol. 1 1922–1939: Serving the Nation Since that time hundreds of writers have been (Blackwell, 1991); Andrew Crissell, Understanding given a start in their professional lives by radio, Radio (Routledge, 1994) and An Introductory History one of whose many virtues is cheapness: today, of British Broadcasting (Routledge, 1997); Stephen a 30-minute radio play requires one day’s studio Barnard, Studying Radio (Arnold, 2000); Caroline time; an hour-long play, two days. The radio Mitchell, ed., Women and Radio (Routledge, 2000); playwright need not concern him/herself with Michele Hilmes, ed., Radio Reader: Essays in the the massive costs of scene-changes; there is little Cultural History of Radio (Routledge, 2001); Asa need to keep costs down by writing plays for two Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: people and an armchair. Th e whole world of time From Gutenberg to the Internet (Polity, 2002); Guy and space is at the writer’s command. Starkey and Andrew Crisell, Radio Journalism (Sage, Most importantly, there is the awaiting imagi- 2008); Hugh Chignell, Key Concepts in Radio Studies nation of the listener. Th e best radio plays take (Sage, 2009). listeners on a journey into their imagination, ‘Radio Death’ Or ‘Hate Radio’; nickname given where the play is given its own unique setting, to Rwanda’s Radio Television Libre des Milles the characters a unique appearance – all with the Collines (Thousand Hills Television Radio) help of voices, sound eff ects and silence; an art which, following the assassination of President form, as the poet W.H. Auden once said, that is Juvenal Habyarimana, conducted an intensive ‘not spoiled by any collision with visual reality’. campaign of hatred against the minority tribe, Radio drama possesses the characteristic of the Tutsis (9 per cent of the population as against intimacy: it has made the interior monologue, 90 per cent Hutu). RTLM proved the power of the soliloquy, a dramatic device perhaps more

252 Radio ‘shock-jocks’

convincingly acceptable than on the stage; at the stations ‘under the general supervision of an A same time, because its stage is contained by no independent broadcasting authority’. proscenium arch or screen-frame, because its Radio 1, Radio 2, Radio 3, Radio 4, Radio 5 B ‘stage-set’ is actually the mind of the listener, Live (BBC) Radios 1 to 4 have broadcast in their radio also lends itself successfully to epic drama: present form since 1967; Radio 5 took to the air Shakespeare can be marvellous on radio. in August 1990, to be revamped into Radio 5 C Among writers who took an early interest in Live in March 1994. Prior to 1967 there was the radio as a serious art form was the Irish poet Home Service, catering for news, plays, talks, D Louis MacNeice (1907–65). His verse plays comedy shows and magazine programmes – the broadcast during and after the Second World Talk channel; the Light Programme, largely for War, such as Th e Story of My Death (1943) and popular music and entertainment; and the Th ird E Th e Dark Tower (1946), impressively explored Programme serving the world of classical music the potential of radio, while in 1953 another poet, and drama. During the 1960s pirate radio F Welshman Dylan Th omas (1914–53), gave to the invaded the airways with pop music, which

world one of the best known and most loved attracted large audiences; the Marine Broadcast- G plays for radio, Under Milk Wood. Th e play was ing (Offenders) Act, 1967 made such stations ﬁ rst broadcast on 25 January 1954, with a distin- illegal. BBC’s Radio 1 was created to meet the guished all-Welsh cast and produced by Douglas new demand and successfully competes with H Cleverdon. commercial radio stations for the attention of For thirty years Val Gielgud as Head of popular music fans. I Radio Drama at the BBC guided the evolution Radio 2 took on a similar if not identical role

of the radio play, himself producing and writ- to that of the Light Programme, Radio 3 that JK ing. Throughout its history, radio drama has of the Th ird Programme, and Radio 4 became witnessed a strong tradition of able producers Britain’s premier talk radio channel. For its such as Cleverdon, Lancelot Sieveking, Donald richness, diversity and sheer quality of output, L McWinnie and Alfred Bradley, nurturing writers Radio 4 must rank among the world’s fi nest radio who later became famous: Harold Pinter, Stan services. Faced with competition from classic M Barstow, Giles Cooper, Allan Prior, Alun Owen, fm Radio, Radio 3 has proved itself responsive to William Trevor, Henry Livings, Peter Terson, audience needs without sacrifi cing quality. N Alan Plater, David Rudkin and Tom Stoppard. Radio 5 was to be a speech-led service catering Despite its creative potential, radio as a for the needs of children and young people, shar- dramatic medium has acquired less status, and ing airtime with news and sport. Just when this O been paid less attention than other, more glam- pioneering new channel was beginning to win orous, media; and less than it deserves. However, listeners and produce programmes of original- P the BBC continues to broadcast between 200 ity, the BBC abandoned it and opted for Radio and 300 radio plays a year, classical drama as 5 Live, more general in orientation, often cross- R well as new works. See television drama; ing lines with Radio 4 but in terms of its sports ‘war of the worlds’; web or online drama. coverage, unexcelled. See bbc digital. See also Radio: Independent radio; Radio Luxem- topic guide under broadcasting. S bourg; Radio Normandy See commercial Radio: Rokker Radio The UK’s first radio radio: origins. programme for gypsies and travellers, broadcast T Radio Northsea pirate radio station, UK, by the BBC’s Three Counties Radio, covering which began broadcasting off the coast of Essex Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and Bucking- U immediately prior to the General Election of hamshire and then extending to BBC Radio 1970. Mindful of the Labour government’s Cambridgeshire, BBC Radio Essex and BBC antipathy to commercial radio and the Conser- Radio Norfolk. Rokker Radio closed in 2008, but V vatives’ support for it, Radio Northsea broadcast traveller news and views are still obtainable at

pro-Tory propaganda at an election in which the Travellers’ Times Online launched on Interna- W 18–21 age group were voting for the ﬁ rst time. tional Roma Day, 8 April 2009. Many constituencies in London and the Radio ‘shock-jocks’ Populist radio talk hosts south-east were marginal seats. Labour lost the trading in strong, sometimes sensationalist XYZ election; in the constituencies nearest Radio opinions, generally taking Rightist viewpoints Northsea, the swing against Labour was great- and purporting to speak on behalf of ordinary est. At the Royal Opening of Parliament on 2 citizens; to be heard mostly in the US and July 1970, the Queen’s Speech conﬁ rmed that Australia, where public service broadcast- legislation would be introduced for local radio ing (psb) regulations are less restricting than,

253 Random sample

for example, in European broadcasting. a Text: Writing, Reading and Th inking About Visual Following the removal from radio regula- and Popular Culture (Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2009); tion of the ‘Fairness Doctrine’ in the US by the John Fiske, Henry Jenkins, Kevin Glynn, Jonathan Reagan administration in 1987, the green light Gray and Pamela Wilson, Reading the Popular (Rout- was given to the kind of talk radio exemplifi ed by ledge, 2011). Rush Limburgh (nicknamed ‘Th e Most Danger- Realism Th at which is portrayed as ‘reality’ in art, ous Man in America’). His show is broadcast literature, theatre, fi lm fi ction or documentary on over 600 radio stations nationwide with an and photography. It constitutes an imitation of estimated 20 million listeners. Prejudiced, often perceived reality, a simulation. Because it is the intolerant of contrary opinions, demagogic and result of a range of choices concerning subject- frequently anti-democratic in tone, shock-jock matter and aesthetics, realism is a construct of radio has displaced other journalistic formats reality rather than a reproduction of it, infl u- such as current aff airs, at the same time having enced by value and ideology and convention. marginalized traditional principles of balance Socialist realism in Russian cinema, for instance, and objectivity in content and presentation. focused on the realities of the lives of workers, Random sample See sampling. on the land or in factories, but such portraits of Ratings See audience measurement. reality were highly charged with the ideology of Reaction shot When a person is being inter- the Soviet system in the ways that labour was viewed on television there are regular in-cuts idealized rather than portrayed by means of a where the viewer is off ered a glimpse of the reac- critical reading of the system. tions of the reporter or interviewer – nodding, Susan Strehle in Fiction in the Quantum smiling, acknowledging. When interviews take Universe (University of Carolina Press, 1992) place on location rather than in the studio, such suggests the use of the term ‘actualism’ rather reaction shots are usually fi lmed separately and than ‘the old mechanistic reality’ because it edited-in later. See shot. has ‘its roots not in things [or facts] but in acts, Readership See mediasphere. relations and motions’. Th e term corresponds Reading Just as, in modern usage, we refer to to actuality, an approach pioneered by early text as any human-made artefact, rather than radio documentary-makers to allow real situ- merely a printed text, so we refer to reading as ations to be communicated with a minimum of a process which is a response to all texts. Use intervention from the programme-maker. Yet of this term suggests a more positive, attentive however absent seems to be the hand of media- and interpretative reaction to a text rather than tion, it is (in actuality) ever-present. merely looking. We read critically; we analyse, Peter Dahlgren in Television and the Public while at the same time modern usage accepts Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy and the Media the more open nature of ‘readings’ – their (Sage, 1995) says of TV texts that ‘realism’ (his polysemy (or many-meaningness). A work, as inverted commas) is a ‘very central feature’ but Roland Barthes has defi ned it, emanates from a one which is highly problematical. We should creator, an encoder – writer, artist, composer, constantly remind ourselves, Dahlgren believes, for example – but the text belongs in the sphere that ‘all representation involves construction’. In of reading and thus becomes, as it were, the discussing TV, the author talks of the ‘pleasure property of the decoder. So readers may produce of verisimilitude’. Essentially TV is ‘mimetic’, different interpretations, different texts from imitating reality rather more than interpreting the same work, and their interpretations may all it. In Dahlgren’s view this limits the potential TV diff er from that intended by the author. has for polysemy and thus, in this context, the It does not necessarily follow that all read- representation of alternative realities. ings are of equal value, for inevitably there In ‘Reading realism: audiences’ evaluations of are informed as contrasted with uninformed the reality of media texts’, Journal of Commu- readings. Recognition of competence has to be nication (December 2003), Alice Hall poses six considered, and this would involve what Noam tests of the authenticity of realism – whether the Chomsky has termed ‘linguistic competence’, text is plausible; whether it it typical and factual; as well as knowledge, experience, training whether it convinces in terms of emotional and a degree of empathy. Th e study of media involvement; whether it achieves narrative communication is largely about learning to read consistency; and whether it is sufficiently competently, with perception and understand- persuasive of audience perceptions of what is ing. See topic guide under textual analysis. real. See topic guide under representation. ▶ Jonathan Silverman and Dean Radar, Th e World is Reality TV Perhaps best described as ‘live docu-

254 Reality TV

mentary’; a prime example being, in the UK, ‘symbolic deaths’ of contestants serve as ques- A Channel 4’s Big Brother, versions of which have tionable therapy for the watchers (or voyeurs?): been produced in many other countries world- we return to ‘our lives feeling somehow better’ B wide. While participants in Reality TV are real knowing that we ‘are “survivors” of our own real- people (rather than actors), and while the story ity show called Life’. of their interactions is unscripted and not known On the other hand, in a London Evening Stan- C in advance, such programmes are essentially dard online article (3 July 2009), Brian Sewell contrivances of reality – highly mediated by the argues that Reality TV ‘is the modern equivalent D TV production team, and highly manipulated of Aesop’s Fables … in drawing morals from such from start to fi nish. programmes they are every bit as instructive The participants are painstakingly vetted as examples of how we should behave in what E prior to selection. Once chosen, although they is left of our still fundamentally Judo-Christian are ‘real’ people, they are placed into a situation society’. We obtain glimpses of ‘society as it now F that requires performance. Th ey become actors really is’. in front of cameras and millions of viewers, When we turn to actual research evidence G knowing full well that the performance of the rather than cursory impression, as exemplifi ed realities of self-presentation will be judged by a by broadcaster John Humphrey’s view expressed ‘participatory’ audience. at the Edinburgh Festival that Reality TV is H Such programmes as Big Brother, the BBC’s ‘mind numbing, witless vulgarity’, we encounter Castaway or ITV’s Popstars have been described a diff erent picture. Annette Hill, author of Real- I as docu-soaps with gameshow appeal, and they ity TV: Audiences and Popular Factual Televi- chiefly target younger-generation audiences. sion (Routledge, 2005), countered Humphrey’s JK Their popularity, the unscripted sensation- opinion in a New Humanist article, ‘Witless seeking of many participants, and the encour- vulgarity’ (November/December 2004). Hill’s agement of such sensationalism on the part of research indicated that audiences for Reality TV L the popular press, have provoked criticism and a were often proactively questioning. Th ey ‘gossip, degree of righteous indignation, in part because speculate and judge how far people can portray M they take up so much TV time. themselves and stay true to themselves in the Generally, Reality TV shows such as American spectacle/performance environment’. N Idol, Th e X Factor, Survivor, Wife Swap and Hell’s Hill states that viewers are well aware ‘of how Kitchen are cheap to produce (the participants far the reality shows are planned and directed. queue in thousands to take part, for the lure of And if they are aware of the constructed nature of O fame and fortune). Th ey are about success and these formats, they are also aware of the staging failure; success for a few and failure, and very of reality in other types of factual programmes, P often audience derision, for the many. such as documentary, or even news. In other Reality TV is a classic bad eff ects/good eff ects words, these audiences are truly media literate’. R scenario, giving rise to questions such as what She argues that ‘if the debunkers of reality TV exactly is meant by ‘success’; and for those who actually listened to the people who watch such achieve it, what is the long-term future for what programmes they’d realise that rather than “mind S have been called ‘nonebrities’ or ‘Z-list celebri- numbing, witless vulgarity”, Big Brother, I’m a ties’? Critics argue that the price of failure is both Celebrity ... and even Too Posh to Wash can actu- T damaging to the participant and brings out the ally foster a new kind of intellectual engagement’. worst in audences. Media analyst Tom Alder- The treatment of women in Reality TV U man has written that ‘there is a subset of Reality programmes is a keen focus of attention for TV that can only be described as Shame TV analysts. In ‘Outwit, outlast, out-fl irt? Th e women becauses it uses humiliation as its core appeal’. of Reality TV’ published in Featuring Females: V In a blog posted to SF Gate website of the San Feminist Analyses of Media (American Psycho- Francisco Chronicle (31 January 2011) entitled logical Association, 2005), edited by Ellen Cole W ‘Reality TV is NOT Reality’, psychiatrist Jim and Jessica Henderson Daniel, Laura S. Brown Taylor, focusing on US Reality TV, argues that writes, ‘Reality shows do a remarkable job of ‘Reality TV has become the public executions of refl ecting the social construction of gender within XYZ our times. We sit on the edge of our seats waiting dominant culture. In that regard, no matter how eagerly for the guillotine to fall, yet don’t want contrived the story lines, the stereotypes of the end to come too quickly. We want to savour women on reality shows appear highly consistent the lingering death of humiliation and rejection’. with those seen in other aspects of popular It would seem, according to Dr Taylor, that the media. Th ese images arise from the decision of

255 Received Pronunciation (RP)

producers and editors about who will appear and Record player See gramophone. how they will appear’’ See effects of the mass Redundancy In communication terms, redun- media. See also topic guides on media issues dancy refers to that which is conventional or & debates; media: power, effects, influ- predictable in any message. Its opposite is ence; media: values & ideology. entropy, that which is unexpected and surprising, ▶ Richard Kilborn, Staging the Real: Factual TV of low predictability. John Fiske in Introduction Programming in the Age of Big Brother (University of to Communication Studies (Methuen, 1982; see Manchester Press, 2003); Mark Andrejevic, Reality 3rd edition, Routledge, 2010) says ‘the English TV: Th e Work of Being Watched (Rowan & Littlefi eld, language is about 50 redundant. Th is means we 2004); Annette Hill, Restyling Factual TV: Audiences can delete about 50 of any utterance and still and News, Documentary and Reality Genres (Rout- have a usable language capable of transmitting ledge, 2007). understandable messages’. Received Pronunciation (RP) That mode Redundancy is established through frequent of pronunciation in English which is free of use until it becomes a convention – both techni- regional accent and aspires to a generally cal, in terms of correctness, and social, in terms accepted standard; derives from the speech of of general acceptability. It is essential if the the court and of public schools; traditionally the meaning of messages is to have wide currency ‘vocal sign’ of the educated person, adopted as and be ‘on wave-length’ with the codes and refer- the norm for BBC broadcasters, and eventually ence tables of the receiver. being termed ‘BBC English’. RP no longer has the Th e entropic challenges these codes and refer- prestigious status or the dominance it once had. ence tables with novelty – new expression, new Regional accents have been ‘in’ since the 1960s, thought, overturning predictability and prob- though RP has retained a substantial foothold in ability. Th e art of the avant-garde is entropic; at national broadcasting. least in its initial phase, it speaks in a language Receiver See sender/receiver. the general public fi nd diffi cult to understand, Recency effect See first impressions; and it is often provocative. Of course the shock primacy, law of. of the new passes: yesterday’s outrage is today’s Reception studies In recent years, particular fashion; yesterday’s entropy is today’s redun- research emphasis has been placed upon dancy. the ways in which audiences receive media A scan of the popular arts reveals their reli- messages; how they react to their reading, listen- ance on the conventional forms and practices ing and viewing; and what audiences do with that make up redundancy – the predictable that experience, what meanings they make of rhymes and metres of pop songs, for example, or it. Such reception studies have, as far as televi- the repetitive refrains of folk songs. Fiske writes, sion is concerned, shifted from a prime focus on ‘Redundancy is generally a force for the status audience response to news and current aff airs quo and against change. Entropy is less comfort- to the investigation of audience reception of able, more stimulating, more shocking perhaps, popular genres, such as reality tv and soap but harder to communicate effectively.’ See operas. Of particular interest is the way online phatic language; shannon and weaver’s activity links with TV viewing experience: does model of communication, 1949. one detract from the other, or does a process of Referent Th e actual object, entity in the external synergy take place? See audience measure- world to which a sign or linguistic expression ment. See also topic guide under audiences: refers. The referent of the word ‘table’ is the consumption & reception of media. object, ‘table’. ▶ Tony Wilson, Watching Television: Hermeneutics, Referential code See codes of narrative. Reception and Popular Culture (Polity Press, 1995); Refl exivity Self-monitoring in terms of cogni- Sonia Livingstone, Making Sense of Television: Th e tive practice; but more significantly for the Psychology of Audience Interpretation (Routledge analysis of the individual’s self-positioning paperback, 1998); Pertii Alasuutari, ed., Rethinking within a fast-changing society in which norms, the Media Audience (Sage, 1999); Nick Couldry, values and practices are rendered less certain, Inside Culture: Reimagining the Method of Cultural less distinct. Reflexivity is central to the Studies (Sage, 2000); Nick Couldry, Sonia Living- construction of identity. It operates intuitively stone and Tim Markham, Media Consumption and and aesthetically as well as cognitively, and Public Engagement (Palgrave, 2007). mass communication is seen to be an agency in Reconfiguration; remediation See media- the control or liberation of self-interpretation tion. in relation to the reading of and reaction to

256 Reinforcement

media texts. Refl exivity makes critical use of never heard of, about whom you know nothing. A narratives, personal and collective, through Th e fact that information about you has been which sense is forged out of experience. See gathered and stored is kept secret from you, and B self-identity. you will not know how that information is to be Refutation The employment of counter- used or for what purpose. arguments, evidence and proof to dispute the Sections 21 to 25 of the Act grant the state C arguments of another person. Strictly speaking, powers to gather data from Internet traffic to disprove allegations. where the following might be considered to D Register Term describing the compass of a be at risk: national security, the detecting or voice or instrument, the range of sound-tones preventing of crime, matters of disorder, traffi c produced in a particular manner. Th e soprano which may be deemed to be in the interests of E and the bass sing in different registers. The the UK’s economic well-being, public safety, word also describes the structures of language public health, the levying/collecting of taxes, and F used in varying social contexts: its levels of for any purposes the Secretary of State specifi es,

vocabulary, sentence construction, tones and subject to parliamentary approval. G infl exions. Th us the register adopted by an infant Th e initial question, widely asked, has been, school teacher in his/her class will diff er from will RIPA succeed in its stated aim of catching the register selected for the staff room, just as terrorists and criminals? Equal concern has H a scientist will adjust his/her register between been expressed about the widespread practice conversations held with scientifi c colleagues and of subjecting individuals and families to surveil- I with casual acquaintances in the local pub. In lance by local government. Th e Conservative-

printing, register refers to the exact adjustment Liberal Democrat coalition government elected JK of position, as of colours in a picture, or letter- in May 2010 announced its intention of requir- press on opposite sides of the page. ing local authorities to seek the permission of Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act magistrates to conduct covert electronic or L (RIPA) (UK), 2000 One of the most far-reaching manual surveillance. pieces of government surveillance legislation, RIPA remains a target of human rights M RIPA extends blanket powers of interception on groups in the UK such as Big Brother Watch telephone and internet traffi c not only to and Spy Blog (‘Watching them, watching us’), N the police and security agencies such as MI5, but the Convention on Modern Liberty and the also to a broad spectrum of government depart- website of campaigning journalist Henry Porter ments as well as local government. In 2002 what (Henry Porter on Liberty). See usa – patriot O had initially been claimed to be a means of track- act, 2001. See also topic guide under media: ing online crime was suddenly opened out to be freedom, censorship. P what a UK Guardian leader, ‘British Liberty RIP’ ▶ Rosemary Bechlor, The Convention on Modern (11 June 2002), called ‘a mockery of the right to Liberty: Th e British Debate on Fundamental Rights R privacy that the Human Rights Act is supposed and Freedoms (Imprint Academic, 2010). to protect’. RIPA was seen to ‘have profound civil Regulatory favours In an age when multina- liberty implications’. tional corporations have acquired local, national S The Act opens up all telephone messages and global voice by investing in media, it comes and e-mails to offi cial scrutiny; in addition it as no surprise to observe them using that voice T empowers employers to monitor the e-mail to promote corporate interests, to employ those exchanges of their employees. It obliges Internet media to pressurize government to grant them U service providers (ISPs) to install ‘black boxes’ favours. Jeremy Tunstall and Michael Parker in which record all server traffi c. It makes illegal Media Moguls (Routledge, 1991) use the term any encryption that might deny access by the regulatory favours that governments cede to V authorities. Refusal on the part of individuals or big media-owning companies in return for a

groups to declare keys to encryption is punish- ‘good press’. Th ese favours principally constitute W able by up to two years’ imprisonment. Unwit- the abolition or waiving of media regulations tingly, ISPs become the snouts of government that might hinder expansionist interests. See and its agencies. conglomerates; global media system: the XYZ Th e ‘spy-in-the-wire’ has access to who you main players; murdoch effect; politics of talk to, when, what you talk about and where you accommodation (in the media); privatiza- have been talking from. It can accumulate vast tion; strategic bargaining. See also topic amounts of information about you which will guide under media: politics & economics. be made available to people you have never met, Reinforcement Th ere has been much argument

257 Reithian

over the role of the mass media in reinforcing, more subtle negative attitudes. For example, in underpinning, certain social and political Simon Cottle in Ethnic Minorities and the values and structures. Considerable atten- Media (Oxford University Press, 2000), edited tion has been given to two areas: the media’s by Cottle, concludes from his study of regional portrayal of violence, and the role of the mass TV news programmes in the UK that despite media in political communications. attempts to present a multiculturalist perspec- Th ere are those who claim that the frequent tive, ‘such “multiculturalist” representations … incidence of violence in the media has contrib- may actually serve to reinforce culturally sedi- uted to an increase in acts of violence in society. mented views of ethnic miniorities as “Other” Research evidence, however, gives few clear and simultaneously appear to give the lie to pointers as to the nature or extent of any media ideas of structural disadvantage and continuing influence. One school of thought rejects the inequality’. notion that the media directly encourage violent Another area of concern is that celebrity behaviour in all viewers, but argues that the culture may endorse or reinforce certain values media violence may reinforce already existing at the expense of others: the importance of tendencies to violence in some viewers. appearance, charisma, fame, wealth, glamorous Th is position is open to question. As Sonia lifestyles, and self-promotion as opposed to Livingstone comments in an article, ‘On the modesty, loyalty, charity and thrift, for example. continuing problem of media eff ects’, published Celebrity culture permeates and is arguably in Mass Media and Society (Arnold, 1996), driven by the media. Celebrities can serve as edited by James Curran and Michael Gurevitch, role models. According to Hamish Pringle in ‘It is diffi cult to know what beliefs people might Celebrity Sells (John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2004), have espoused but for the media’s construction ‘Very large numbers of people use stars as role of a normative reality, and diffi cult to know what models and nowhere is this more evident than role the media plays in the construction of those in the area of personal appearance.’ It is not needs and desires which in turn motivate view- then surprising that they are frequently used to ers to engage with the media as they are rather reinforce messages promoting products used in than as they might be.’ self-presentation, like cosmetics and clothes. See Paul H. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and audience: active audience; effects of the Hazel Gaudet in a classic study of the eff ects of mass media; politics of accommodation political communication by the mass media on (in the media); resonance; role models. voting behaviour, Th e People’s Choice (Columbia ▶ P. David Marshall, ed., Celebrity Culture Reader University Press, 1948), were of the opinion that (Routledge, 2006). the media’s main eff ect is to reinforce existing Reithian Attitudes to broadcasting as typi- political preferences. The notions of selective fi ed by the fi rst Director General of the BBC, perception, selective exposure and selective Sir John Reith (1889–1971), who dominated the recall are used to explain how the same output rise of broadcasting in the UK like a colossus. can reinforce the diverse views, values and Dour, high-principled, autocratic, paternalist beliefs of a mass audience. It is suggested that the and a Scottish Presbyterian to boot, Reith was audiences, rather than being passive receptacles appointed General Manager of the newly formed for media output, select from the output those British Broadcasting Company in December messages which are in accordance with their 1922. His philosophy was that broadcasting own prior dispositions, and give attention to was a heaven-sent opportunity to educate and these – a point confirmed by Garth J. Jowett enlighten the people in the ways of quality, and and Victoria O’Donnell reviewing research into that ‘giving the people what they wanted’ was the the effects of persuasion and propaganda in way to perdition. their work, Propaganda and Persuasion (Sage, Th is ‘Tsar of Savoy Hill’, as the press called him, 1999). Th ey state: ‘Selectivity in the perception believed, in the words of the New Statesman on of messages is generally guided by preexisting Armistice Day 1933, ‘in the medicinal effects interests and behaviour patterns of the receivers of education – a cultural dictatorship’. Th ough … mass communication eff ects tend to take the George Lansbury MP said of Reith, ‘I have form of reinforcement rather than change.’ always felt that Sir John Reith would have made Whilst in recent years there has been a a very excellent Hitler for this country’, Clement tendency to adopt a more multiculturalist Attlee saw advantages: ‘He puts up a splendid perspective in many areas of broadcasting, this resistance to vested interests of all kinds.’ may result in the inadvertent reinforcement of Elitist, imperious and sabbatarian, Reith

258 Resistance (of audience to media)

nevertheless created in the BBC an organization ate. Rapport-talk is used for establishing and A resistant to commercialism, favouring the arts, reinforcing intimacy. Th ese diff erences refl ect serious debate and notions of public responsi- the diff erent genderlects that Tannen believes B bility. Reith strove for impartiality but never men and women use, which in turn refl ect one achieved balance: coverage of Royal activities in main difference in their use of conversation: the 1920s and 1930s was not in any way matched men using conversation to establish status and C by coverage of the activities of the Labour move- control, women to establish intimacy. See topic ment and the unions and, during the General guide under gender matters. D Strike of 1926, the BBC remained strictly Representation A core function of media is to ‘neutral’: it stayed silent. Reith, the Napoleon ‘re-present’ to audiences the realities of ‘the of Broadcasting, as Colonel Moore Brabazon world out there’. Most of our knowledge of that E called him, resigned as ‘DG’ (Director General), world is brought to us via the media; and our as his own staff spoke of him, in 1937. See bbc, perception of reality is mediated by newspa- F origins. See also topic guides under media pers, TV, advertisments, fi lms, etc. Th e media

history; media institutions. image the world for us. Th ey do this by means G Relationship marketing See marketing. of selection and interpretation which operate Relic gestures Th ose physical gestures that have through gatekeeping and according to agen- outlived their original situation, yet continue to das which are suff used by ideology. Th e media H be used to eff ect even though their derivation is represent to us the past as well as the present, no longer obvious or explicable. Such gestures and representations – or interpretations – of the I survive not only from historical past, but also past aff ect our perceptions of the present. Out of

from a human’s infantile past – for example the such representations arise issues concerning, for JK rocking to and fro of disaster victims in the face example, the representation of women, of race, of intolerable grief. asylum seeking, poverty, minorities. Remediation; reconfiguration See media- What we as audience know of Africa and L tion. Africans, of Serbs and Albanians, of Israelis and Repertoire of non-verbal behaviour See Arabs, of Moslems or Sikhs, is what we have M non-verbal behaviour: repertoire. experienced through the reports and pictures Reporters: embedded reporters See embed- brought to us by the media. Th e study of media N ded reporters. representation, therefore, is central to cultural, Reporters Sans Frontières (Reporters media and communication studies. Because Without Borders) Montpellier-based group it is impossible to represent the world in all its O of journalists set up in 1987 to defend press massive complexity, media representation has to freedom worldwide, and campaign on behalf of be viewed as a ‘version’ of reality, in which fram- P journalists in trouble. Produces valuable data on ing has taken place according to criteria such the plight of reporters, photographers and fi lm- as news values or pressures to propagandize, R makers – those injured, imprisoned or killed in sensationalize, binarize (that is, divide ‘us’ from bringing home the news. ‘them’ – see wedom, theydom) or a desire to Report-talk, rapport-talk Th is is one way in impose meaning upon webs of complexity. S which men and women’s conversational style Representation is essentially about defi nition, and diff ers, according to Deborah Tannen in You Just media representation tends to be about promot- T Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conver- ing certain defi nitions, and therefore meanings, sation (Virago Press, 1992). Men, she argues, are over others; thus endeavouring to affect the U confi dent with public speech or what she calls preferences of the public. See discourse. See report-talk, whether this be in a formal or an also topic guide under representation. informal situation where several people are in Representation, machinery of See machin- V conversation. ery of representation. Representation of crime on screen In these situations, when the company is See W mixed, men typically participate more in crime: types of crime on screen. conversation than women and in part their Representative sample See sampling. performance may be a way of establishing status Repressive state apparatus See ideological XYZ and control. In a more private setting, though, state apparatuses. this diff erence in the participation rate between Repressive use of the media See emancipa- men and women may change or even reverse. tory use of the media. Here rapport-talk, with which women, Tannen Resistance (of audience to media) See domi- argues, are more comfortable, is more appropri- nant, subordinate, radical; polysemy.

259 Resistive reading

Resistive reading Occurs when audience theydom, Militant and Moderate, Order and chooses not to accept without question the Disorder, Black and White, Management and preferred reading of media messages. Unions, Dries and Wets. See news values; Considerable research has been conducted into other. See also topic guide under language/ the capacity of audiences, and of segments of discourse/narrative. audiences such as women, to react indepen- Rhetoric of the image See image, rhetoric dently to dominant discourses: hence the of. active-audience thesis. See audience: active Rhetoric of numbers Phrase used by Itzhak audience; dominant, subordinate, radi- Roeh and Saul F. Feldman to describe how cal; empowerment. the press, the popular press in particular, use Resonance Occurs when messages match the numbers and amounts for rhetorical rather expectations of the receiver, when they are in than factual purposes. Th e authors’ analysis of alignment with or confirm the experiences, the headlines of two Hebrew dailies, one elite, perceptions, values, beliefs or attitudes of the one popular, is reported on in ‘Th e rhetoric of receiver. For example, Garth S. Jowett and Victo- numbers in front-page journalism: how numbers ria O’Donnell, in Propaganda and Persuasion contribute to the melodramatic in the popular (Sage, 1999), note that propaganda messages press’, published in Text 4/4 (1984). In the UK, are more likely to succeed if they resonate with broadsheets and tabloids both use numbers, the audience’s existing viewpoints. See effects statistics and charts to reinforce news texts; and of the mass media; mainstreaming; mean the rhetoric is extended to pictures: for example world syndrome. printing whole pages of the faces of British Reterritorialization According to James Lull military personnel killed in Afghanistan, the aim in Media, Communication and Culture (Polity to bring home varying messages concerning the Press, 1995), reterritorialization means ‘... fi rst cost of armed interventions. that the foundations of cultural territory – ways Right of reply A long-established practice in of life, artefacts, symbols and contexts – are all continental countries, the right of reply in the UK open to new interpretations and understandings’, press has been argued for long, hard and gener- and secondly, ‘implies that culture is constantly ally unsuccessfully. Such a right would require reconstituted through social interaction, newspaper editors to publish within a given time sometimes by creative uses of personal commu- the replies of individuals or organizations who nications technology and the mass media’. Th us allege serious press misrepresentation, or to face cultural territory is potentially dynamic and a special court and a fi ne if found to be in error. changing, so reshaping is constantly possible. It is argued that such a right would act as a deter- Rhetoric Traditionally, the theory and practice of rent to editorial bias and unethical practices. eloquence, whether spoken or written; the use Newspapers do publish apologies, but these are of language so as to persuade others. Th e word usually for printing factual errors that might is almost always used today as a term of criti- land them with libel actions. See campaign for cism: rhetoric is the style in which bare-faced press and broadcasting freedom; people’s persuasion – politicking – is used. It is emotive; communication charter. it belongs to speeches; and while it is very often Rights and the media See cultural or citi- resounding, it is rarely eloquent because it trades zen rights and the media. in empty phrases and endless repetitions. It is Riley and Riley’s model of mass commu- essentially redundant in that it tells supporters nication, 1959 John W. Riley Jr and Matilda what they already know and antagonists what White Riley in ‘Mass communication and the they know and don’t want to hear. social system’, in Sociology Today: Problems Rhetoric is the stock-in-trade of the press, and and Prospects (Basic Books, 1959; Harper Torch of the popular press in particular. Practically Books, vol. 2, 1965), edited by R.K. Merton, every front-page headline is rhetorical in that it L. Broom and L.S. Cottrell Jr, pose a model in is soaked-through with the ideological attitudes which the process of communication is an inte- of the newspaper, not least the belief in what gral part of the social system. For Riley and Riley, sells newspapers, what commands attention, both the Communicator (C) and the Recipient what readers want to be told. Indeed it might (R) are aff ected in the message process of send- be said that one of the prime functions the ing, receiving, reciprocating, by the three social popular press sets itself is to translate actuality orders: the primary group or groups of which C into rhetoric: complex issues are translated and R are members; the larger social structure, into the simplifying mode of myth, of wedom, that is the immediate community – social,

260 Rogers and Dearing’s agenda-setting model, 1987

cultural, industrial – to which they belong; Communication, McQuail and Windähl, eds, A and the overall social system. All of these are (Longman, 2nd edition, 1993), this development in dynamic interaction, with messages ﬂ owing by E.M. Rogers and J.W. Dearing of previ- B multi-directionally. ous agenda-setting models is a welcome The mass media audience Riley and Riley acknowledgment of the competing agendas perceive as being neither impassive nor isolated in the public sphere. In their Yearbook article, C but ‘a composite of recipients who are related to ‘Agenda-setting, where has it been, where is one another, and whose responses are patterned it going?’ the authors see the public agenda as D in terms of these relationships’. See topic guide existing separately, though locked between, under communication models. the policy agenda, of the state, of government, RIPA See regulation of investigatory and the media, each subject to inﬂ uence by the E powers act (ripa) (uk), 2000. others. ★Rogers and Dearing’s agenda-setting The triad of agendas is itself influenced by F model, 1987 Published in the Communica- a number of contextual factors ‘out there’, for

tion Yearbook 11 (Sage, 1987) and examined in example spectacular news stories. There are G Communication Models for the Study of Mass substantial factors that shape one, two or all

Rogers and Dearing’s agenda-setting model, 1987 S

XYZ

Tripolar model of competing agendas

261 Rokker Radio

agendas but which may also temper, or restrict, action between group members. Many roles, the effectiveness of those agendas, such as however, are well established, such as the role of personal experience or what Rogers and Dearing police offi cer, and there are widely held expecta- call ‘real world indicators’ of the importance of tions about how the roles should be performed. an agenda issue. In this sense, reality remains We may have stereotypical images regarding something other than what is constructed in the typical role occupants and the behaviour media, or ‘fed to’ the public as reality by those expected of them. Some roles may be specifi c to who promote the policy agenda. a particular social group whilst others, like the One problem with the model is its linear- role of teacher, may be found almost universally. ity, in that it does not suffi ciently indicate the However, the behaviour expected in these interactive nature of competing agendas. It also more universal roles may vary across time and presents the public agenda as being in the same cultures. league, in terms of power, as the other agendas. Behaviour identifi ed with a role is not neces- Lastly, the model could arguably have a fourth sarily rigidly prescribed. Through interaction agenda added to it, the corporate agenda, in with others, individuals can change the expecta- order to refl ect the increasingly dominant role tions that determine a particular role. To some in all aspects of policy, public debate and media extent roles can be negotiated within a social operation, played by transnational companies on context; within small, informal groups roles are the global stage. often arrived at through interaction alone. It is Th e Dictionary’s authors would pose here a therefore possible for an individual to choose a modest alternative to Rogers and Dearing, which persona through which they will play the role; emphasizes the interactive nature of the domi- thus people can to some extent play the same nant agendas while shifting the public agenda role diff erently whilst still keeping within the into no less central a position, but one which is core expectations. by its nature less defi ned, inevitably more diff use Role expectations can influence our use of and thus more open to infl uence. See regula- language. slang might be appropriate when tory favours. See also topic guide under talking with friends in the pub but not when communication models. advising customers in a bank. For those who are Rokker Radio See radio: rokker radio. multi-lingual, moving from one role to another Roles A social role consists of the expected behav- may involve a change of language – for example, iour associated with a particular social position. English for talking with fellow students but Urdu Th us the social position of a ‘journalist’ identifi es for talking with grandparents. a body of behaviours expected of a journalist, This multiplicity of roles tends to generate that is the role of the journalist in society. ‘Role’ problems of confl icting demands, known as role is a relational term: people play roles within a strain. Th e individual may often have to adjust context in which other people are also playing his/her communication pattern, non-verbal as roles, and these constitute the ‘role set’. Roles well as verbal, to suit each particular role. Role within society or a social group carry with them strain occurs when our communication patterns responsibilities, obligations and rights. cut across each other; when unexpected encoun- Most people play a variety of roles in everyday ters take place between people from diff erent life; for example a woman may play the roles of role situations or, more seriously, when the role daughter, surgeon, sister, niece, mother, aunt and is deeply unnatural to us – an apparent denial of friend. Roles can be seen to constitute what Eric ‘true’ self. M. Eisenberg, in his article entitled ‘Building a Th e concept of role is used not only to describe mystery: toward a new theory of communica- the position of individuals within a social struction and identity’, published in the Journal of ture, but also that of groups or organizations. Communication, September 2001, describes as In this sense commentators write of the role or our ‘multiplicity of selves’ and they can infl uence roles of the mass media in society; hence the role the way in which we choose to communicate in of the press as watchdogs, defenders of the a given situation. We may not always welcome public good. Roles played by media in society some of the roles that others assign to us but vary according to who is defining such roles, play them anyway in order to remain within the but regular classifications include definers of group. reality, a nation’s conscience, public entertain- Roles carry with them expectations about how ers, policers of deviance, defenders of tradition, the role occupant should behave. In some cases and guard dogs of hegemony. See eisenberg’s these expectations arise through everyday inter- model of communication and identity,

262 Salience

2001; groups; mother tongue; role model; channels by word of mouth. Rumour has the A self-presentation. following characteristic features: it can rarely if Role model Albert Bandura, among other ever be traced back to its origin; it can spread B theorists, identiﬁ ed that we may under certain (almost) at the speed of light; it will only spread conditions model our behaviour on those of if the rumour has the momentum of credibility others. A role model is a person on whom others (even if this credibility is only the size of a pinch C model their behaviour in some respect (see for of salt); and it thrives in close-knit communities example: ‘Influence of models’ reinforcement that have either no regular or formal channels D contingencies on the acquisition of imitative of communication, or channels which are inef- responses’, Journal of Personality and Social ﬁ cient or not recognized as important. Psychology, 1965, 1, 589–595). Role models may A process of mediation occurs at most or E be those we know and admire in everyday life; all points of telling, the original narrative being they can also be those we learn about through exaggerated and usually decorated with envy, F the media. Th ere are a number of reasons why spite or resentment. Good news rarely travels as

someone may be a role model. quickly as bad news. In organizations, rumour G Erwin P. Bettinghaus and Michael J. Cody in often circulates most strongly in sub-cultures Persuasive Communication (Thomson Learn- of those people generally well down in the ing, 1994) refer to a number of studies that have hierarchy and who tend to be last in the queue H identifi ed factors which tend to result in a role when information is passed through formal model being infl uential, for example: the model channels. I is seen as similar to the observer; the model is Th e only antidote to rumour is effi cient, full

observed to receive mostly positive rewards for and open, participative communication, with JK given behaviour; the model is viewed as compe- strong lines of horizontal as well as vertical tent, reliable and knowledgeable; the model is interaction. The impact of rumour is rarely seen to behave in a consistent manner and to beneficial; in the main, rumour is corrosive L have high status. One or more of these factors of relationships, fuels suspicion and bad feel- may account for a role model’s infl uence in any ing. Its favourite habitat is a communication M given situation. Bandura, though, points out that vacuum. One dubious compensation is that the the potential infl uence of the role model will also subjects, or ‘victims’, of rumour are generally the N depend on whether we are motivated to obtain last to hear of it; unless, of course, they started the rewards associated with the role model, and the rumour themselves. See interpersonal whether we believe that such rewards will be communication; loony leftism. O achievable for us. Running story See spot news. The influence of role models may be found Rushdie aff air See fatwa. P in any situation. Th e potential of role models Rushes In fi lm-making, prints of ‘takes’ that are to influence behaviour has not been lost on made immediately after a day’s shooting; these R professional persuaders, and a number of studies are examined by the fi lm team, led by the direc- have shown that the use of role models can be tor, before the next day’s shooting. Produced at an eff ective tool in advertising. Celebrities can a ‘rush’ from negative, they are also known as S serve as role models for consumers, and this is ‘dailies’. one of the reasons why celebrity endorsement T is used as a tactic in the promotion of a wide range of products and services. Hamish Pringle S U in Celebrity Sells (John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2004) Salience All messages are not given equal atten- provides an example: ‘Very large numbers of tion by the receiver; some messages, or parts of a people use stars as role models and nowhere is message, appear more prominent, more salient, V this more evident than in the area of personal to the receiver. This predisposition towards appearance.’ No wonder, then, that they are certain messages, or parts of a message, can be W frequently used to promote cosmetics, fashion the result of a complex range of factors such as and related products. life experience, attitudes, values and interests. Rotary press See cylinder press. Th ere has been considerable research into the XYZ Royal Commissions on the media See topic role of the media in the formation of salience, guide under commissions, committees, particularly in the fi eld of current aff airs. legislation. Th e focus of investigation here is the extent Rumour Indirect and unsubstantiated informa- to which media coverage of certain issues leads tion; hearsay; transmitted along informal the audience to perceive those issues as being

263 Salon discourse

politically significant. See agenda-setting; sampling is to be able to use what is discovered attribute dimension; mccombs and shaw’s about the sample group as a basis for inference agenda-setting model of media effects, about the behaviour of the population. The 1978. reliability of such inferences depends upon how Salon discourse According to Susan Herbst and far the sample is representative of the popula- James R. Beniger in ‘Th e changing infrastructure tion. A representative sample is constructed in of public opinion’ in Audiencemaking: How such a way that it contains members of various Media Create the Audience (Sage, 1994), edited signifi cant categories and classifi cations in the by James S. Ettema and D. Charles Whitney, the same proportion as they appear in the popula- fi rst use of the term ‘public opinion’ was made tion. by Jacques Necker, the fi nance minister to the Not all samples are representative, or quota, French King Louis XIV (1638–1715). Necker was samples: random sampling techniques are also referring specifi cally to the salons of the day, used. A random sample is selected in such a generally if not always presided over by women way that every member of the population has of high birth and attended by intellectuals, poets, an equal chance of being chosen. Such a sample statesmen and philosophers. is used when it is felt that the population is not Here, among many things, matters of state were divided into particularly signifi cant categories freely discussed and later diff used by the writings or classifications. See topic guide under of those who attended the salons. Herbst and research methods. Beniger refer to this as the elite model of public Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypoth- opinion infrastructure: ‘Th e public in the model is esis Developed by two notable linguists, Edward composed only of the most highly educated and Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf infl uential members of society, while the bulk of (1897–1941). Succinctly stated, the hypothesis the people are purposely excluded because their proposes that ways of thinking and patterns of opinion is thought to be uninformed, and are in culture (and also to some extent social any case irrelevant – most people have no politi- structure) are determined by the structure of cal power.’ Th e authors argue that this model of the language used in a particular culture. An public opinion held sway until the American and individual’s or group’s thought and discourse French revolutions. about life generally can only be expressed in Salutation display Means by which we demon- language and is thus constrained by the language strate that we wish someone well, or at the very structure available. least do not ostensibly wish them harm: greeting Satellite transmission There are three main them when we meet and when we part company. types of satellite: (1) weather and observational Salutation display varies according to such satellites; (2) communications satellites; and factors as the nature of our relationship with (3) space probes. Sputnik in 1957 was the fi rst the greeted person, the context of the encounter observational satellite; Telstar, in 1962, the fi rst and the length of prior separation. See gesture; communications satellite. Working off solar- shortfall signals. powered batteries, satellites have equipment Samizdat Russian, meaning ‘self-published’, a for monitoring the conditions in and around secret publication during the Soviet-Communist themselves and sending data back to earth for era, circulated by hand, usually printed on a control purposes. Also, they carry reception duplicator or simply on a typewriter with carbon equipment for control signals from earth for copies, by dissident writers, at great personal correction of orbital travel, etc. Satellites orbit- risk of reprisals by the authorities. The First ing the earth have generally given way to geo- Circle (1968) by Russian novelist Alexander stationary operation, that is satellites stationed Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) began life in Samizdat. some 23,000 miles out in space at a constant Th e word Tamizdat described work produced by altitude and keeping pace with the revolutions Russians in the West, published there and then of the earth. smuggled into the Soviet Union. Dr Zhivago Signals from ground stations are beamed to (1957) by Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) is an the geo-stationary communications satellites example of this. See glasnost. and refl ected by them to receiving stations that Sampling A statistical method of selecting a then relay the signals by cable for recording or group for analysis, from a larger social group transmission, or to receiving ‘dishes’ or anten- known as the population; the statistical term nae. Most communication satellites receive and for all those persons, events or entities that are transmit simultaneously from a number of earth relevant to the subject of the enquiry. Th e aim of stations.

264 Schramm’s models of communication, 1954

TV pictures were fi rst transmitted via satel- is placed between ‘bankers’, trusting to the A lite on 10 July 1962 when Telstar was launched inheritance factor. Conversely there is the at Cape Canaveral, USA, and circled the earth so-called ‘pre-echo’ eff ect where anticipation of B every 157.8 minutes, enabling live TV pictures a really popular programme can induce viewers transmitted from Andover, Maine, to be received to switch on earlier and thus watch a programme at Goonhilly Down, Cornwall and in Brittany (11 with less popular appeal. C July). In 1964 the unmanned Syncom relayed Scheduling techniques assume a high degree pictures of the Olympic Games from Tokyo. Th e of passivity on the part of an audience, and D fi rst commercial communications satellite was might be said seriously to underestimate Early Bird, which marked the beginning of regu- audience potential for variety and challenge. lar TV transmission via satellite (2 May 1965). Competitive scheduling above all reduces the E The UK franchise for a three-transponder range of choice open to the viewer simply by direct-broadcast satellite (DBS) was granted in making risk-taking more diffi cult. In any case, F 1986, with a start date of 1990. After fi nancial and the ability of viewers to decide their own view-

investment doubts which led to early backers ing schedules by video and DVD recording G such as the BBC withdrawing from DBS plans, complicates the best intentions of program- the contract for Britain’s ﬁ rst two DBS channels mers, though custom and habit continue to was awarded to British Satellite Broadcasting serve as vital allies of planning. H (BSB). Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Satellite arrived Schema (plural, schemata) A schema is ahead of BSB, beginning programme transmis- basically a framework or pattern, stored in I sion in the UK in March 1989. the memory, which preserves and organizes

Between them, the rival companies are information about some event or concept. Th e JK estimated to have spent 1.25 billion, yet by framework may be expanded as new informa- October 1990, such were the colossal start-up tion about the event or concept is acquired. It expenses that British Satellite Broadcasting was is argued by several researchers concerned with L forced into a merger with Sky. Th e ‘squarial’ dish, learning and memory that existing schemata created to bring BSB programmes into the home, aff ect our perception of new information, and M suddenly became scrap. Th e founding principle that there is a tendency for us to try and fi t new of the free market – that competition is the basic information into our existing frameworks, at N dynamic of success – was itself ‘squarialized’. Sky least initially. took on the initials of BSB, becoming British Schemata themselves can form cross-linkages Sky Television. Corporate monopoly of satellite to provide a wider mental or conceptual map O transmission joined that of those other ‘free of an area of knowledge or experience. This enterprise’ industries in the UK – rail transport, perspective on the way in which we receive and P gas, water and electricity. process information has important implications Murdoch’s ambition to make news corp for the analysis of the way in which we send and R a global provider of TV programming was receive messages in the communication process. marked in the 1990s with the acquisition of Star ★Schramm’s models of communication, Television in Asia. In November 1995 News 1954 Wilbur Schramm built on shannon and S Corp joined with the Globo Organization of weaver’s model of communication, 1949 Brazil, Grupo Televisa of Mexico, and Telecom- (Th e Mathematical Th eory of Communication), T munications Inc. of the US to set up a satellite but was more interested in mass communica- TV service for Latin American and Caribbean tion than in the technology of communication U markets with estimated total launch costs of US transmission. In ‘How communication works’ 500 million. See communications act (uk), in Wilbur Schramm, ed., Th e Process and Eff ects 2003; cross-media ownership. See also topic of Mass Communication (University of Illinois V guide under media: technologies. Press, 1954) the author poses three models (see Scheduling Process by which programmes or fi gure). Shannon and Weaver’s ‘Transmitter’ and W types of programme are ‘timetabled’ in order ‘Receiver’ become ‘Encoder’ and ‘Decoder’, and to attract maximum audiences, and to keep their essentially linear model is restructured in them attracted in the face of competition from Schramm’s second model to demonstrate the XYZ rival programmes. Th e aim of the programme overlapping, interactive nature of the communi- scheduler is to minimize the danger of audiences cation process and the importance of what the switching off , or even worse, over. Low-appeal Encoder and Decoder bring with them to the programmes are usually placed against weak communication situation – their ‘Field of Expe- opposition, or they are ‘hammocked’, that rience’. Where that fi eld of experience overlaps

265 Scripts

Schramm’s models of communication, 1954

is the signal. Schramm’s third model emphasizes meaning basic fl aw) and Non-winning (or banal) feedback, and in doing so points up the circu- scripts. A ‘winner’ is an individual who achieves larity of the communication process. See topic the goals he/she has set for him/herself. It is also guide under communication models. implied that these are met ‘comfortably, happily Scripts These are described by Eric Berne in and smoothly’. What Do You Say After You Say Hello? (Corgi A loser does not achieve set goals, or does but Books, 1975) as ‘a preconscious life plan’ by is unhappy or damaged as a result. Th e losing which an individual structures ‘longer periods of script may resemble ancient Greek drama, when time – months, years or his whole life’. Scripts the basic fl aw seems to lead inexorably to tragic are developed in our early years but then have finale. A non-winning or banal script is one the capacity to infl uence and shape our transac- focused on playing safe and not taking risks. It tions with others. A script contains within it an may result in small gains and losses but the indi- individual’s self-concept and his/her general vidual will remain a ‘non-winner’. It seems that perception of and orientation towards other many people have a mixture of scripts: winning people and the world. It thus forms a basis for in some aspects of life whilst losing in others. action. Berne identifies a number of possible Berne’s ideas have been applied to the devel- scripts individuals may have as a result of their opment of interpersonal communication skills in early experiences. a range of fi elds such as management, therapy One example is the ‘You Can’t Trust Anybody’ and customer relations. See life positions; script. An individual with this script would transactional analysis. obviously be suspicious and distrustful of others ▶ Claude M. Steiner, Scripts People Live: Transac- and act accordingly. Such a script has obvious tional Analysis in Life Scripts (Grove Press, 1990); implications for communication with others. Graeme Burton and Richard Dimbleby, Between Berne argues that individuals tend to seek proof Ourselves: An Introduction to Interpersonal Commu- that their scripts are valid, by behaving in a way nication (Hodder Arnold, 2006). or interpreting behaviour in a manner that will Secondary viewing Term describing the reinforce them. So to a greater or lesser extent, circumstances in which TV viewing forms behaviour might be script-driven. Scripts can an accompaniment to other activities such as obviously be limiting but can, of course, be homework and reading. changed. Segmentation Refers in a specific sense to In TA Today (Lifespace, 1987) Ian Stewart and the constituent nature of TV – chopped up Vann Joines discuss three main types of script: into segments, of news, comedy, drama, Winning, Losing (or hamartic, from the Greek, commercial, documentary, quiz shows, etc.

266 Self-disclosure

John Fiske in ‘Moments of television’, in Ellen them. Individuals also attempt to inﬂ uence the A Seiter et al, Remote Control: Television, Audi- ideas others have, by controlling the impressions ence and Cultural Power (Routledge, 1989), they create in self-presentation. Th e feedback B writes, ‘Segmented texts are marked by abrupt received from self-presentation enables the transformations from segment to segment that individual both to evaluate and to shape his/her require active, experienced, televisionally literate self-image. C viewers to negotiate.’ Messages concerning the self abound in the In a wider sense, and in relation to advertis- content of interpersonal communication, D ing and the targeting of audiences for the whilst intrapersonal communication also sale of goods and services (not to mention the plays a vital role, not only in the generation of marketing of images, ideas, ideologies, political ideas about ourselves – some of which we may E parties, etc.), segmentation relates to current incorporate into the self which we present to practices dividing consumers into lifestyle others for feedback – but also in the decoding F categories. Segmentation indicates a recognition and evaluating of messages that we receive from

that audiences are heterogeneous (character- others and in deciding whether or how to act on G ized by difference) rather than homogeneous them. (characterized by sameness). Classification of How we see ourselves affects the way we audience into socio-economic groupings has communicate. If, for example, we see ourselves H become an industry in its own right. See topic as popular and sociable, we are likely to be guide under advertising/marketing. conﬁ dent and outgoing in our communication I Selective exposure Individuals have a tendency with others. Excessive concern over self-esteem

to attend to – expose themselves to – messages can lead to self-consciousness. People who are JK that are consistent with their existing attitudes self-conscious are often shy, easily embarrassed and beliefs. Equally they practise selective percep- and anxious in the presence of other people. tion – reading messages in accordance with their It should be remembered that the self-concept L existing attitudes. Th us they may either ignore is not fi xed, but rather is subject to continuing or misinterpret those messages, or parts of a modifi cation and change; it can alter according M message, which confl ict with or are dissimilar to to the situations we are in, the people we are held attitudes and expectations. Sometimes also with, and over time; it may also be found in N referred to as selective negligence. See disso- mass communication, for example in images nance; reinforcement. of idealized men and women found in adver- Self-actualization See maslow’s hierarchy tisements. See assertiveness training; O of needs. confirmation/discomfirmation; deviance Self-concept A person’s self-concept is the total amplification; impression management; P view that person has of him/herself. It includes johari window; labelling process (and such elements as an individual’s view of his/ the media); lookism; self-disclosure; R her character, body image, abilities, emotions, self-fulfilling prophecy; self-identity; qualities and relationships with others. Th e self- self-monitoring; self-presentation. concept is commonly seen as being composed ▶ Brian Morris, Anthropology of Th e Self: eTh Indi- S of the self-image and self-esteem. Th e self-image vidual in Cultural Perspective (Pluto 1994). can be seen as the descriptive part of the self- Self-disclosure Process by which, through T concept; it is the picture we have of ourselves. statements verbal and non-verbal, we transmit Self-esteem on the other hand is the evaluative new information about ourselves to others. U part; how we feel about ourselves. Self-disclosure is based on honest, open The self-image can be further divided into interaction between people. Our decision to three elements: ‘the self as I think I am’; ‘the self disclose information about ourselves is usually V as I think others see me’; and ‘the self I would related to the development and intimacy of a

like to be’ (the ideal self-image). Discrepan- relationship. Usually when we self-disclose to W cies between the ideal self-image and ‘the others, they reciprocate and in this way a deeper self as I think I am’ can result in a low level of understanding and relationship may develop. As self-esteem, as our self-esteem is usually based Steve Duck notes in Human Relationships (Sage, XYZ on our perceived successes and failures in life. 2007), ‘people feel they should reveal personal Other people are clearly very influential in information about themselves as appropriate to shaping any individual’s conception of self, as an the script for stages’ in the development of that individual’s self-concept depends in part upon relationship. his/her perception of the ideas others have about Of course we have to make careful choices in

267 Self-fulﬁ lling prophecy

the fi rst place about those to whom we will self- of an ongoing debate concerning the relative disclose, at what rate, to what extent, on what importance of structure (societal infl uences) and topics and in what situations. Self-disclosure agency (an individual’s thoughts and actions) in usually requires trust, as it involves an element the formation of the self. of risk; if, for example, we self-disclose too much Charles H. Cooley in Human Nature and too soon in a relationship, the result may be a Social Order (Shocken, 1902) developed the rebuff . notion of the ‘looking-glass self’. For Cooley, Through self-disclosure we not only learn an important infl uence on the development of more about others, we also learn more about the self is the responses that others make to us ourselves, in that others’ disclosures can contain and to our behaviour. These responses serve views about us. It is also a means by which we as a looking-glass from which we learn to see can come to terms with the positive and negative ourselves as we imagine others see us. This aspects of our self-image. See johari window; feedback aids us in understanding who we are. scripts; self-concept; self-presentation. Building on Cooley’s work, George H. Mead ▶ Kathryn Dindia and Steve Duck, eds, Communica- in Mind, Self and Society (University of Chicago tion and Personal Relationships (John Wiley & Sons, Press, 1934) argues that the self is made by a 2000); Sandra Petronio, Boundaries of Privacy: reflexive process involving self-interaction Dialectics of Disclosure (State University of New York between the ‘I’ and the ‘Me’; the ‘I’ being the act Press, 2002). of experiencing and the ‘Me’ the socialized part Self-fulfilling prophecy This effect occurs of the self, the object with which the ‘I’ experi- when the act of predicting that certain behav- ences and interacts. Th e ‘Me’ is the view of the iour will take place helps cause that behaviour self that an observer might have. to occur and the prediction or prophecy is Language is seen as a crucial medium by fulfilled. The expectations people have of an which the individual represents itself to itself. individual’s behaviour can, if communicated to Self-interaction enables the human being to the individual, help create a situation in which develop the self, to defi ne and interpret his/her the individual conforms to the expectations and world and to organize actions based on such fulfi ls the prophecy. Th ere is a clear link between interpretations; in short to be an active social labelling and the self-fulfi lling prophecy eff ect agent. It is through interaction with others, espe- in that the act of applying a label can be the fi rst cially role-playing, that the individual learns the step in ensuring a self-fulfi lling prophecy. ability to see him/herself as others do, an ability Th e eff ect may be found particularly in situa- which aids awareness and identifi cation of the tions where individuals have diff ering amounts self, and allows the ‘Me’ to expand. of power, and where one or more individuals are In particular, through developing the mecha- involved in the evaluating of others. Clearly the nism of the ‘generalized other’, the individual message contained in interpersonal and mass acquires the ability to predict how people in communication may often carry labels and thus general might evaluate him/her in the light of have the potential for triggering self-fulfi lling his/her behaviour. For Mead, ‘it is this general- prophecy effects, but it is largely through ized other in his experience which provides him intrapersonal communication that an with a self’. Mead’s ideas highlight the role that individual decides whether or not to conform others can play in construction of self-identity. to the expectations of others. Further, the self- Erving Goff man in Th e Presentation of Self in fulfi lling prophecy eff ect is only one of many Everyday Life (Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1959) infl uences on our behaviour and it may not be highlights the way in which the self-concept is relevant in all cases. See deviance amplifica- developed through a process by which the indi- tion; labelling process (and the media); vidual presents aspects of the self to others on self-concept. See also topic guide under which he/she then receives feedback. Th e degree communication theory. of calculation in acts of self-presentation, Self-identity Stella Ting-Toomey in Communi- though, will usually vary with the situation. cation Across Cultures (Guildford Press, 1999) Goff man argues that the sustaining of everyday comments that ‘individuals acquire their identi- performances is important both to the develop- ties via interaction with others’. Th eorists from a ment and maintenance of the self-concept, and number of intellectual traditions have explored thus also to self-identity. Disturbances in such the connections between social interaction and performances constitute, therefore, a threat: ‘Life the development and maintenance of the self- may not be much of a gamble, but interaction is.’ concept and self-identity. These form part Competent performances require considerable

268 Self-identity

day-to-day control and the appropriate employ- Symptoms and Defence Mechanisms. We are A ment of personae. In a similar vein, Eric M. not usually aware of the operation of these Eisenberg writes of ‘the “multiplicity of selves” processes. The Defence Mechanisms (for B that each one of us may perform at any given example: Repression, Denial, identification, moment’ (‘Building a mystery: toward a new Sublimation, projection) in particular can be theory of communication and identity’, Journal seen to have consequences for the study of social C of Communication, 534–52, 2001). interaction and for the analysis of responses to As Kath Woodward comments in Understand- mass media messages (see transactional D ing Identity (Arnold, 2002), ‘identity involves analysis). the interrelationship between the personal and Another perspective offered by Anthony the social; between what I feel inside and what Giddens in Modernity and Self-Identity (Polity E is known about me from the outside’. Psycho- Press, 1991) considers the impact of societal analytic theories such as those of Freud and infl uences upon the formation of self-identity. F Jung focus more on internal processes and the Giddens defi nes self-identity in the conditions confl ict between inner desires and the demands of late modernity as ‘the self as reflexively G of others, of society. Th ese theories view much understood by the person in terms of his or of our behaviour as infl uenced by forces within her biography’. Whilst self-identity is seen as the unconscious. Self-knowledge is therefore normally having a degree of continuity, it is ‘such H limited and self-identity partial, provisional and continuity as interpreted refl exively by the agent’. vulnerable to fracture. Self-identity also involves cognitive awareness I For Freud there is an inevitable conflict of the self: ‘To be a “person” is not just to be a between what he argued are the three compo- refl exive actor, but to have a concept of a person.’ JK nents of an individual’s personality: the id, the Self-identity is an integral element of the self- ego and the superego. The id reacts to basic concept. biological instincts and operates on the Pleasure Further, Giddens agues that ‘a person’s identity L Principle, in that it encourages behaviour that is not to be found in behaviour, nor – important seeks pleasure and avoids pain. though it is – in the reactions of others, but in M The ego, according to Richard D. Gross in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going’; Psychology: Th e Science of Mind and Behaviour a narrative that enables us to make sense of N (Hodder Arnold, 2005), can be ‘described as ourselves. intrapersonal communication the “executive” of the personality, the planning, clearly also plays a crucial role in this process as decision-making, rational and logical part of us’. we refl ect on our everyday encounters. O Th e ego operates on the Reality Principle. It is Giddens identifi es four infl uences evident in concerned with the social consequences of our the structure of post-traditional societies which P behaviour and the resulting judgments others create the plurality of choices that make diffi cult would make. Th us it seeks to control infl uences the struggle of maintaining a coherent self- R from the id that would, if acted on, result in identity, and which make necessary a project social criticism or rejection. of self. Identities can only be achieved through Th e superego contains our ideas about what is choice – ‘we have no choice but to choose’ – S morally right or wrong. It also seeks to control given that much of the tradition which allowed infl uences from the id, through the ego, if they them to be ascribed or indicated has lost its hold. T are likely to result in behaviour of which our own Individuals inhabit a ‘pluralization of life- superego would disapprove. The ego may on worlds’ in which they have to present a number U occasions counsel against behaviour in line with of different identities as they move from one the superego’s demands. social sphere to another, often negotiating diff er- Richard Gross comments, ‘the ego, the person’s ing expectations of their behaviour as they do so. V conscious self, is caught in the middle of oppos- What Giddens terms ‘methodological doubt’ is ing sets of demands, it is the battleground on yet another feature of late modernity; certainty W which three opposing factions (reality, the id and is seen as fragile as truth is seen as contextual the superego) fi ght for supremacy’. Th e id lies in and authority and reason provisional. ‘Mediated the unconscious part of the mind, whilst parts of experience’ is seen to be at the heart of social life. XYZ the ego and superego are in the conscious and Th rough the mass media and travel, a vast range parts in the unconscious mind. of ‘lifeworlds’ are presented to audiences, thus Th e ego mediates between these factions to increasing the range of options available in the obtain a compromise and, according to Freud, construction of identities. is aided by three processes: Dreams, Neurotic Further, such identities have to be adjusted

269 Self-image

to cope with the range of changes that an indi- online game. She was so enraged that she hacked vidual is likely to encounter in such a society; the into his computer and ‘erased his carefully change to self-identity that usually accompanies constructed digital character’. She was arrested a divorce being but one example. Giddens argues on the charge of illegally using his password that little help is available to individuals in and ID, not for virtual murder. See eisenberg’s making such choices, although artefacts within model of communication and identity, consumer culture may promise guidance – 2001; impression management; maslow’s self-help manuals, for example. Th e ability to hierarchy of needs; self-concept; self- control self-presentation and in doing this monitoring; virtual reality; secondlife. to actively construct and reconstruct bodily com. appearance is seen by Giddens as essential to Self-image See self-concept. maintaining a coherent self-identity. Self-monitoring Th is term refers to the degree Don Slater notes in Consumer Culture & to which people are sensitive to, and able to Modernity (Polity Press, 1997) that another infl u- respond to, the demands of social situations with ence on late modernity – ‘commercialization’ regard to their own behaviour. Richard D. Gross – has resulted in ‘a greater fl uidity in the use of in Psychology: the Science of Mind and Behaviour goods to construct identities and lifestyles’. It has (Hodder Arnold, 2006) identifi es high and low also resulted, arguably, in individuals perceiving self-monitors. High self-monitors are motivated themselves, in part, as consumers; a perception to and able to assess the demands of diff erent which would reinforce the notion that individu- situations and adjust their self-presentation als must make choices. and general behaviour accordingly. Th ere are, of course, innumerable attempts to Low self-monitors on the other hand tend appeal to aspects of the self in advertising and to behave in a similar fashion regardless of the marketing. Th e danger, warns Giddens, is that situation, and their behaviour is more likely to ‘the project of self becomes translated into one be infl uenced by their own internal states. High of possession of desired goods and the pursuit of self-monitors appear much more able to conceal artifi cially framed styles of life ... Th e consump- their own moods, feelings and so on. Evidence tion of ever-novel goods becomes a substitute suggests that high self-monitors have better for the genuine development of self’. social skills; for example, they can interpret non- Eric M. Eisenberg in ‘Building a mystery: verbal communication more accurately than low toward a new theory of communication and self-monitors. identity’, Journal of Communication (2001) Self-presentation Term used to describe the echoes Giddens’s view that awareness of uncer- way in which we behave and communicate in tainty, whilst not unique to modern times, pres- diff ering social situations. It carries with it the ents a signifi cant challenge to the narrative and implication that to some degree, we consciously development of self-identity – especially to the present ourselves to others in any given situation. development of the fl exible self-identity needed The feedback we gain from self-presentation to effectively deal with such uncertainty. He plays a role in shaping and changing our self- also, among others, argues that for those in the concept. Erving Goff man in Th e Presentation Western world, the self is often viewed as resting of Self in Everyday Life (Anchor, 1959; Penguin, in the uniqueness of the individual; whereas in 1971) employs the dramaturgical perspective to the Eastern world it is more often seen as located analyse social interaction. Goff man writes, ‘Life within and subject to the collective identity. itself is a dramatically enacted thing. All the In the digital age it is now possible to also world is not, of course a stage, but the crucial construct a second-life identity and virtual ways in which it is not are not easy to specify ... relationships. Th is raises the question of whether In short, we all act better than we know how.’ the line between online and offl ine identities can Goff man puts forward several useful concepts become blurred, and to what extent one can seep that have become infl uential in analysing self- into the other. Th ere is certainly some evidence presentation. A key concept is that of persona. that people can become very engrossed in online Th e persona is the character we take on to play identities and relationships. David McNeill a part in a particular social situation. Diff erent writing in the Independent (‘Virtual killer faces situations will usually require us to play diff erent real jail after murder by mouse’, 24 October parts and therefore to adopt diff erent personas. 2008) tells the story of a Japanese woman whose So, for example, the persona an individual would second-life character was ‘divorced’ by the adopt when visiting a folk festival with friends second-life character of a man she ‘married’ in an might be very diff erent from the persona he/she

270 Selsdon Committee Report on Television (UK), 1935

would adopt in carrying out his/her work role as the privacy of the individual a legal right in A a High Court judge or an attorney. Britain for the fi rst time. Th e persona is part of our way of dealing with However, the most recent scandal concerning B diff erent people and the demands of diff erent the conduct of the press broke in July 2011, and social situations. Once chosen for a particular focused on alleged phone-hacking activities by situation, it infl uences how we communicate in the News of the World – although a number of C that situation. Th e ability to choose an appropri- other newspapers are also suspected of being ate persona for a situation and to communicate involved in such activities. Th e scandal prompted D accordingly can be seen as an important commu- widespread discussion of the perceived failure of nication skill, as can the ability to shift from one self-regulation under the auspices of the Press persona to another as situations demand it. Also, Complaints Commission. The Prime Minster, E it is likely that the role a person is playing may David Cameron, ordered an inquiry into the dictate the kinds of persona it would be appro- regulation of the press with a view to introduc- F priate to adopt in any given situation. ing more robust procedures. See calcutt

Goffman uses the term performance to committee on privacy and related G describe the act of self-presentation, and in matters, 1990 and 1993; phone-hacking. See many cases these performances can be seen as also topic guide under broadcasting. staged. In staging a performance in everyday life ★Self-to-Self model of interpersonal H we would use props just as actors would on a communication, 2007 Published at the theatre stage; obvious examples here are dress, conclusion of a chapter on models, ‘Communi- I cars and furnishings. A well-established pattern cation by design’ in Key Th emes in Interpersonal

of action that may be used as part of a perfor- Communication (Open University, 2007) by JK mance is known as a routine. An example here Anne Hill, James Watson, Danny Rivers and would be a characteristic display of temper. Mark Joyce, this model assembles and connects According to Goff man we also perform from constructs of, and infl uences upon, people in L behind a front, which he defi nes as ‘that part of communication. Th e chapter, by James Watson, the individual’s performance which regularly cites a previously illustrated model posited by M functions in a general and fixed fashion to Eric M. Eisenberg (see eisenberg’s model of defi ne the situation for those who observe the communication and identity, 2001), where N performance’. Standard parts of the front are the identity and circumstance are seen in a rela- setting, for example one’s home, and the personal tionship where the latter constantly infl uences front – age, dress, sex. See confirmation/ the nature and activity of the former. In the O discomformation; impression manage- Self-to-Self model, key factors of self-awareness, ment; project of self; self-monitoring. self-concept, self-image and self-belief operate P See also topic guide under interpersonal in relation to such variables as communicative communication. competence and awareness of other. R Self-regulation Although broadcasting in the Th is process is varyingly infl uenced by events UK has traditionally been regulated by acts of and circumstances outside of our interaction Parliament and governing charters, the press has with others and those which are part of what we S been self-regulating. Th e Press Council was an bring to every interaction, such as our education, advisory body, set up by the newspaper industry; ethnicity, culture and motivation (see interven- T its successor, the press complaints commis- ing variables (ivs)). We recognize the vulner- sion, which started work on 1 January 1991, abilities – the uncertainties – concerning our U has similarly no statutory powers. Th e question self-identity as we do with that vital contributory often asked is whether the press, dominated by a factor, confi dence. In Note 7 of the chapter in Key handful of media barons, can be left to regulate Th emes, the author writes how ‘in encounters V itself – that is, be judge of its own malpractices. and interactions communicators use strategies to reduce uncertainty about each other, a key In the wake of the death of Princess Diana W of Wales in 1997, issues of self-regulation were aim being to increase the ability to predict the widely discussed, and the UK newspaper indus- behaviour of self and other in communicative try responded to public concern by agreeing situations’ and to react accordingly. XYZ to bide by criteria for respecting privacy and Selsdon Committee Report on Television curtailing media intrusion. In any event, the UK (UK), 1935 Th e task of Lord Selsdon’s Commit- Labour government’s incorporation into British tee was ‘to consider the development of Televi- law of the European Convention on Human sion and advise the Post-master-General on the Rights (see human rights act, 2000) made relative merits of several systems and on the

271 Semantic code

Events Environment Culture Contextual Influences ARENE ARENE AW SS AW SS

Competence

I B

I M B

M E

L A

encode L

I I G G

E SELF SELF E

F E decode F E

Awareness of other

C P T C P T O N C E Variables O N C E Age Sex Gender Education Class Ethnicity Attraction Relationship etc MOTIVATION

Self-to-Self model of interpersonal communication, 2007

conditions under which any public television Semantics A major branch of linguistics in which should be provided’. Th e Report recommended the meaning of language is analysed. Th e study that the BBC be made the initiating body, and of the origins of the form and meaning of words that the cost of TV broadcasting be borne from is Etymology, a branch of Semantics. Th e crucial the revenue derived from the existing 10 shil- point about the study of Semantics is that it is ling radio licence fee. See topic guide under an exploration of change – how the context of commissions, committees, legislation. usage, historical, social, cultural, etc. – alters the Semantic code See codes of narrative. meanings of words and expressions used. When Semantic diff erential Th e analysis of semantic King James II observed that the new St Paul’s diff erential is one of three traditional empirical Cathedral was ‘amusing, awful and artifi cial’ he methods of measuring audience response to did not intend to be derogatory about Sir Chris- the media, the others being content analysis topher Wren’s masterpiece; rather he meant and the investigation of uses and gratifi cations that it was ‘pleasing, awe-inspiring, and skilfully (see uses and gratifications theory). In achieved’. exploring semantic – or meaning – diff eren- Th e diff erences are, of course, far from merely tials, analysts concentrate on people’s attitudes, evolutionary. What, for example, is the meaning feelings and emotions towards certain concepts of the word ‘equality’? Its defi nition is modifi ed and values as actuated by media performance. by the perceptions and values of all those who The values under scrutiny are presented in use it, and the situation in which it is used. As preliminary form by words or statements. Simeon Potter points out in Our Language Th ese are then selected and expressed as bina- (Penguin, 1950), ‘Men frequently fi nd themselves rily opposed concepts (Off ensive-Not Off ensive, at cross-purposes with one another because for example) on a five- or seven-point scale. they persist in using words in diff erent senses. Binary opposition is the most extreme form of Th eir long arguments emit more heat than light signifi cant diff erence possible. A sample audi- because their conceptions of the point at issue, ence, or selected group, is tested on the scale whether Marxism, democracy, capitalism, the or scales, and the results averaged. Th e method good life, western civilization, culture, art, inter- was given currency by Charles Osgood in Th e nationalism, freedom of the individual, equality Measurement of Meaning (University of Illinois of opportunity, redistribution of wealth, social Press, 1967). See topic guide under research security, progress, or what not, are by no means methods. identical. From heedless sloth, or sheer lack of

272 Semiotic power

intelligence men do not trouble to clarify their language with a wider-angle lens, conceiving A conceptions.’ Semantics, therefore, must lie at semiotics (the term preferred in the US) as the heart of any serious study of communication being an interdisciplinary science in which sign B processes. See topic guide under language/ systems manifested in structures and levels could discourse/narrative. be analysed from philosophical, psychological Semiology/semiotics Word derives from the and sociological as well as linguistic points of C Greek, semeion, meaning sign, and semiology is view. Peirce and other philosophers such as the general science of sign systems and their role Charles Morris and Rudolph Carnap saw the D in the construction and reconstruction of mean- ﬁ eld as divisible into three areas: semantics, the ing. All social life, indeed every facet of social study of the links between linguistic expressions practice, is mediated by language conceived as a and the objects in the world to which they refer E system of signs and representations, arranged by or which they describe; syntactics, the study of codes and articulated through various discourses. the relation of these expressions to each other; F Sign systems, believes the semiologist, have no and pragmatics, the study of the dependence of

ﬁ xed meaning. Th e perception of the sign system the meaning of these expressions on their users G rests upon the social context of the participants (including the social context in which they are and the interaction between them. used). Semiology examines the sign itself, the codes The terminology of semiology/semiotics is H or systems into which the signs are organized, complex and daunting, but the names Peirce and the culture within which these codes and gave to his categories are worth quoting here: I signs operate. Th e primary focus of semiology is the sign he called an icon resembles the object

upon the text, preferring the term reader (even it wishes to describe, like a photograph; an index JK of a painting, photograph or fi lm) to receiver establishes a direct link between the sign and because it implies a greater degree of activity, its object (smoke is an index of fi re); fi nally, the and that the process of reading is socially and symbol where there is neither connection nor L culturally conditioned. The reader helps to resemblance between sign and object. A symbol create the meaning and signifi cance of the text communicates only because there is agreement M by bringing to it his/her experience, values and among people that it shall stand for what it does emotional responses. (letters combined into words are symbols). N Th ere is special emphasis on the link between Semiology has come to apply, as a system of the reading and the ideology of the reader. analysis, to every aspect of communication. ‘Wherever a sign is present,’ writes V.N. Th ere is practically nothing that is not a sign O Volosinov in Marxism and the Philosophy of capable of meaning, or signifi cation. Th e work Language (Seminar Press, 1973), ‘ideology is of the French philosopher Roland Barthes P present too. Everything ideological possesses a (1915–80) has exercised particular influence semiotic value’; or as Umberto Eco says, ‘Semiol- on our understanding of areas such as music, R ogy shows us the universe of ideologies arranged eating, clothes and dance as well as language. in codes and sub-codes within the universe of See paradigm; myth. See also topic guides signs’ (in ‘Articulations of the cinematic code’ in under communication theory; language/ S Cinematics 1, undated). discourse/narrative. ▶ Th e theories of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Elliot Gaines, Media Literacy and Semiotics T Saussure (1857–1913) provided the foundation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). stone of Semiology. His lectures, Cours de Semiosic plane See mimetic/semiosic planes. U Linguistique Générale (1916), were published Semiotic power Th e power, by members of the after his death by two pupils, Charles Bally public – audience, consumers – to turn the and Albert Sechehaye. De Saussure set out to consumerist signs and symbols which dominate V demonstrate that speech is not merely a linear contemporary life to their own uses. Th e case sequence like beads on a string, but a system is put by John Fiske who, while acknowledging W and structure where points on the string relate the power of advertising and consumerist to other points on the string in various ways (the propaganda generally, gives substantial credit so-called syntagmic structure) and operate in to individuals to exercise a ‘semiotic power’ – XYZ a network of relationships with other possible resistance – of their own. points which could substitute for it (the paradig- Our initial impression of the public flock- mic structure). ing, for example, to an enticing new shopping Th e American logician and philosopher C.S. mall might be to see it as a clear indicator of Peirce (1834–1914) approached the structure of corporate influence at work. However, Fiske

273 Sender/receiver

argues in his chapter ‘Shopping for pleasure’ in and the diverse ways in which such messages Reading the Popular (Unwin Hyman, 1989) that are interpreted. At the same time they refl ect ‘the department store was the fi rst public space the shift of emphasis away from a preoccupation legitimately available to women’ and the ‘fashion- with sending to a fuller recognition of the power able commodities it off ers provide a legitimated that rests in reception; hence the importance public identity and a means of participating in of research into audience uses of media. See the ideology of progress’. decode; encode; semiology/semiotics. For Fiske ‘the meanings of commodities do not Sensitization Th e process by which the media lie in themselves as objects, and are not deter- can alert the public, and specifi c social groups, mined by their conditions of production and to the fact that certain social actions are taking distribution, but are produced fi nally by the way place, or to the possibility that certain social they are consumed’. While he readily agrees that actions might take place. Stanley Cohen, for resistance from the bottom up in society is diffi - example, concludes in ‘Sensitization: the case of cult and rarely likely to be eff ective beyond the the Mods and Rockers’ in Th e Manufacture of micro-level of everyday life, this is not a reason News: Deviance, Social Problems and the Mass to deny its existence. He writes, ‘Scholarship that Media (Constable, 1973; 3rd edition, 2002), neglects or devalues these practices seems to me edited by Cohen and Jock Young, that media to be guilty of a disrespect for the weak that is coverage of the Bank Holiday activities of the politically reprehensible.’ Mods and Rockers gangs, at certain southern Big companies may make style, in clothes or holiday resorts in the mid-1960s, played a more broadly in lifestyle, but such styles are not signifi cant role in ‘reinforcing and magnifying a followed slavishly. Rather they are appropri- predisposition to expect trouble: “Something’s ated: ‘Women, despite the wide variety of social going to happen”’. formations to which they belong, all share the Cohen argues that once this perception had experience of subordination under patriarchy been established, there was a tendency to inter- and have evolved a variety of tactical responses pret new, similar incidents in the same manner that enable them to deal with it on a day-to- so that fairly trivial events, normally overlooked, day level. So, too, other subordinated groups, received media attention. Thus, ‘through the however defi ned – by class, race, age, religion, or process of sensitization, incidents which would whatever – have evolved everyday practices that not have been defi ned as unusual or worthy of enable them to live within and against the forces attention ... acquired a new meaning’. In this that subordinate them.’ particular case sensitization was the fi rst step Fiske refers to people as forging their own in a process of media coverage which, Cohen meanings out of the signifi ers available to them, argues, signifi cantly aff ected the course of real exerting semiotic power, and though working events. See moral panics and the media. only at the micro-level of society ‘may well act Sentence meaning, utterance meaning In as a constant erosive force upon the macro, his two-volume work, Semantics (Cambridge weakening the system from within so that it is University Press, 1977), John Lyons makes a useful more amenable to change at the structural level’. distinction in the matter of ‘meaning’ versus ‘use’ See agora; audience: active audience; in our employment of language. Sentence mean- networking: social networking. ing is directly related to the grammatical and Sender/receiver In early transmission models lexical (choice of words) meaning of a sentence, of the communication process, a message was while utterance meaning includes all ‘secondary’ seen to be conveyed, simply, from a sender to aspects of meaning, particularly those related to a receiver. Transmitter was also used, while the the context in which a linguistic exchange takes linguist Roman Jakobson preferred Addresser place. It is this distinction, between sentence and and Addressee (see jakobson’s model of utterance meaning, that allows a person to say communication, 1958). The terms author/ one thing and actually mean something else. reader and encoder/decoder recognized both the Set A state of mental expectancy which is complexity and the interactive nature of commu- grounded in pre-formed ideas about some nication, and the role of codes and encoding in future event. Th e impact of a message is always that process. In these cases due weight was given infl uenced, to some extent, by the mental set of to the text which was encoded and decoded the receiver. See schema (plural, schemata). as well as the context in which the encoding/ Seven characteristics of mass communica- decoding took place. Such terms acknowledge tions See mass communications: seven the critical nature of the reception of messages characteristics.

274 Shortfall signals

Sexism Discrimination against people on the improvements at Levels B and C. A grounds of assumed diﬀ erences in their qualities, Shannon and Weaver stressed the importance behaviours and characteristics resulting from of redundancy in telephonic communica- B their sex. Such discrimination may be targeted tion, that is the practice of inserting words, against men as well as women, but generally salutations, phrases, expressions not strictly women are seen as its main victims. Sexism relevant to the central message. Such a practice, C may manifest itself in an individual as a form of conducted by all of us in everyday conversation, prejudice or bigotry, but more fundamentally serves a vital purpose. As far as exchanges on D concern focuses on the degree to which such the telephone are concerned, Shannon and discrimination is embedded within the structure Weaver estimated that as much as 50 per cent and language of a society. In this respect the role of the conversation can be lost, say as a result of E that the media may play in generating or perpet- crackle on the line, yet the gist of the message uating this discrimination has been a theme of would still be understood. See channel capac- F considerable recent research. See feminism; ity; cybernetics. See also topic guide under

gender; male-as-norm; pornography; communication models. G stereotype. See also topic guides under Shawcross Commission Report on the Press gender matters; media issues & debates. (UK), 1962 The five-member Commission S4C Th e Welsh counterpart of channel 4 (UK) chaired by Lord Shawcross, lawyer and former H – Saniel Pedwar Cymru. Approximately half the Labour minister, declared that the real enemy of channel’s output is in Welsh to serve the 500,000 good-quality newspapers was competition; and I Welsh-speakers in Wales. competition threatened diversity. ‘Within any Shadowing See cocktail party problem. class of competitive newspapers,’ said the Report, JK Shannon and Weaver’s model of commu- ‘the economies of large-scale operation provide a nication, 1949 Developed by Claude Shannon natural tendency for a newspaper which already and Warren Weaver to assist the construction has a large circulation to fl ourish, and to attract L of a mathematical theory of communication still more readers, whilst a newspaper which has which could be applied in a wide variety of a small circulation is likely to be in diffi culties.’ M information-transfer situations, whether by Shawcross off ered no radical solution to the humans, machines or other systems. It is problems his Committee had delineated, trust- N essentially a linear, process-centred model in ing in the free market, albeit reluctantly: ‘Th ere which an information source is conveyed by a is no acceptable legislative or fi scal way of regu- transmitter (communicator) by means of a signal lating the competitive and economic forces so as O to a receiver, the activity being subject to a ‘noise to ensure a suffi cient diversity of newspapers.’ source’ (interference). Th e Report put forward an idea for a press P Shannon and Weaver were engineers working amalgamations court which should scrutinize for the Bell Telephone Laboratories in the US proposed mergers of all daily or Sunday papers R and their objective was to ensure maximum with sales over 3 million, and to give the go-ahead efficiency of the channels of communication, only if the court considered such mergers to be of in their case telephone cable and radio wave. no threat to public interest. In 1965 the Monopo- S However, in Mathematical Th eory of Commu- lies Commission was created by the Labour nication (University of Illinois Press, 1949), they government under Harold Wilson, by means of T claim for their theory a much wider application the Monopolies and Mergers Act, which ruled to human communication than solely the techni- that issues were to be decided by government, U cal one. not the courts. See topic guide under commis- Within the framework of their model of sions, committees, legislation. transmission, the authors identify three levels ‘Shock-jocks’ See radio: ‘shock jocks’. V of problems in the analysis of communication: Shortfall signals In interpersonal contact, a

Level A (technical); Level B (semantic – the shortfall signal is, for example, a smile of greeting W meaning as emanating from the Transmitter’s that disappears too soon; in other words it fails mode of address); and Level C (effectiveness to carry conviction as a true smile of greeting. In in terms of reception or understanding on the the main, shortfall signals consist of simulated XYZ part of the Receiver). Shannon and Weaver’s warmth in salutation. Th e evasive glance, the model was constructed mainly to tackle Level A pulled-away glance, the frozen smile, the smile problems, and the assumption seems to be that of mouth without eyes – all of these and many to sort out the technical problems by improv- more are indicators of personal unease about ing encoding will, almost automatically, lead to the encounter.

275 Showbusiness, age of

Th e explanation may be because the person you greet is someone you dislike or fear, though the shortfall signal may have as much to do with personal mood, and preoccupation, as anything else. Conversely, there is the so-called overkill signal, where the greeting is too friendly, too eff usive, the handshake too forcible. Th e overkill signal may be a simulation of sincere greeting; on the other hand, when people of diff erent cultures or nations meet, one person’s shortfall may be another’s overkill. See gesture; proxemics. the process of it becoming a mental concept Showbusiness, age of The present age of (interpretant), or what de Saussure named the advancing communications technology has signifi ed. been given many titles – the Age of Informa- The point to emphasize here is that the tion, the Telecommunications Age, the Age of sign depends for its meaning on the context the Global Village. Neil Postman in Amusing in which it is communicated. Edmund Leach Ourselves to Death (Methuen, 1986) calls it the in Culture and Communication (Cambridge Age of Showbusiness, a period in which TV University Press, 1976) says that signs do not dominates the lives of the community, turning occur in isolation; ‘a sign is always a member of people, in his view, into a population ‘amusing a set of contrasting signs which function within ourselves to death’. In the Age of Showbusiness, a specific cultural context’. Also, a sign only Postman argues, all discourses are rewritten in conveys information when it is combined with terms of entertainment; substance is translated other signs and symbols from the same context. into image and the present is emphasized to the ‘Signs signal’, writes Donis A. Dondis in Contact: detriment of historical perspectives. Human Communication and its History (Th ames Postman’s criticism is targeted at the commer- & Hudson, 1981), edited by Raymond Williams, cial TV of his native America. He believes it ‘they are specifi c to a task or circumstance’. ‘does everything possible to encourage us to Of course there are not only diff erent kinds watch continuously. But what we watch is a or levels of meaning (or signifi cation), there are medium which presents information in a form also many diff erent kinds of sign. Peirce divided that renders it simplistic, non-substantive, signs into three categories: the icon, the index non-historical and non-contextual; that is to and the symbol. Th ese, like the triangular sign- say, information packaged as entertainment’. It object-interpretant, are interactive, and they is doubtful whether Postman would have been are overlapping. Th e icon is a resemblance or any more sanguine about the eff ect of today’s a representation of the object – a photograph burgeoning rival to TV ratings, online entertain- or a map would constitute an iconic sign. An ment and interactivity. See consumer sover- index is a sign connected or associated with its eignty; effects of the mass media; main- object – an indicator: smoke is an index of fi re, streaming; pilkington committee report for example. on broadcasting (uk), 1962; networking: The symbol may have no resemblance social networking; pseudo-context. whatever to the object or idea. It is arbitrary. It Sign In communication studies, a little word that comes about by choice, it exists by convention, triggers complex explanations. Father of semi- rule or assent. It means something beyond ology/semiotics, Swiss linguist Ferdinand itself. As Dondis neatly points out, ‘signs can de Saussure (1857–1913) regarded language be understood by animals as well as humans; as a ‘deposit of signs’; he viewed the sign as a symbols cannot’. Th ey ‘are broader in meaning, phenomenon comprising an ‘acoustic image’ less concrete’. Raymond Firth, in Symbols, Public and a concept (the thing signifi ed). A word or and Private (Allen & Unwin, 1973), adds a fourth combination of words in a language refers to, is sign type to Peirce’s three – signal, a sign with an indicator of, some externally existing object an emphasis on ‘consequential action’, a stimulus or idea. requiring some response. Charles Peirce (1834–1914), the American Signs combine to form systems, or codes, from philosopher and logician, posed a triangular the basic Morse Code or Highway Code to, for relationship involving the activation of the sign: example, the complex codes of musical notation. the object is that which is described by the sign, See langue and parole; jakobson’s model but the sign only signifi es – has meaning – in of communication, 1958; triggers. See also

276 Silence

topic guide under language/discourse/ determines meaning. Th us meaning is an active A narrative. force, subject to constant change, the result of Signal Th e physical manifestation of a message dynamic interaction. See semiology/semiot- B which allows it to be conveyed. See shannon ics. and weaver’s model of communication, Signifi cation spiral Stuart Hall and co-authors 1949. in Policing the Crisis: Mugging, Th e State and C Signifi cant others Th e analysis of the eff ects Law & Order (Macmillan, 1978) use this term of a media message, of its impact, relies on the for the process by which discrete, local problems D response not only of the direct respondent, and occurrences are linked by the media into a but also of those persons close to, infl uential framework of news coverage in such a way as upon, the respondent – relatives, friends, work to suggest the existence of a more widespread E colleagues. Th ese are ‘signifi cant others’. In the and serious social problem. They argue that, case of a child watching TV commercials, his/ for example, during the 1970s there emerged a F her response may be conditioned and modifi ed signifi cation spiral in which problems previously

by parents, brothers and sisters, and friends. presented as atypical or parochial – such as G See intervening variables (ivs); opinion student protests, industrial unrest, and mugging leader; other. – were presented by the media as part of a wider Signiﬁ cant symbolizers G.H. Mead in Mind, concern: the breakdown in law and order. H Self and Society (University of Chicago Press, Th e term has been widely used since. In Moral 1934) uses this term to indicate how the social Panics (Routledge, 1998) Kenneth Thompson I organization of a society, human or animal, notes that a signification spiral – ‘a way of

needs the support of reliable, regular and publicly signifying issues and problems which JK predictable patterns or signs if it is not to be is intrinsically escalating’ – by the media plays destroyed by accumulating discrepancy and a crucial role in the generation of a moral panic. misinformation. The symbol or symbolizer, Panics over the breakdown of law and order L whether vocal sound, gesture or sign, achieves are perhaps perennial. Another contemporary meaningful defi nition only when it has the ‘same panic is arguably that focused on the eff ects of M eff ect on the individual making it as on the indi- migration and immigration, and links are being vidual to whom it is addressed’. Th us, according made in some areas of the media with issues N to Mead, a person defi nes him/herself by ‘talking such as unemployment and social cohesion. See to himself in terms of the community to which demonization; folk devils; moral entre- he belongs’. Th rough contact with ‘signifi cant’ preneurs; moral panics and the media; O (meaningful) objects of the social world, a sensitization. person develops a coherent view of him/herself Significs Enquiry into questions of meaning, P and of his/her relations with others. See inter- expression and interpretation, and the infl uence personal communication; intrapersonal of language upon thought. R communication. Silence In certain circumstances, silence is as Signifi cation One of the most valuable contri- eff ective a means of communication as speech. butions made by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de In The Dynamics of Human Communication S Saussure (1857–1913) to the study of language (McGraw-Hill, 1985), Gail and Michele Myers was his idea of diff erentiating between the name, state: ‘Silences ... are not to be equated with the T the naming and the meaning of what has been absence of communication. Silences are a natu- named. Th is process enabled the linguist more ral and fundamental aspect of communication, U eff ectively to examine the structural elements of often ignored because misunderstood.’ Silences communication. Saussure contrasted the signifi - are used to give meaning to verbal communicant (or signifi er) with signifi é (or that which is cation but can also communicate a range of V signifi ed). information in their own right, such as feelings

Th e relationship between these, the physical of anger, a state of mourning or preoccupation W existence of the sign, and the mental concept with one’s own thoughts. Th ere are many kinds it represents, becomes signifi cation which, for of silence and we often need other non-verbal Saussure, is the manifestation of external reality or verbal cues to help us identify what is meant XYZ or meaning. Signifi cation, it is important to real- when someone is silent. ize, is culture-specifi c, as is the linguistic form Being aware of the range of meanings that of the signifi er in each language. Saussure terms silence may convey, and the ability to accurately the relationship of signs to others in the sign interpret them and react sensitively to them, is system, valeur, and it is valeur that primarily an important communicative skill, as in the abil-

277 Silence, spiral of

ity to fi ll an embarrassing gap in a conversation. Th e best sitcoms have a long and recurring Th ere is a tendency in our culture to perceive screen life: The Phil Silvers Show and Dad’s silence caused by lapses during a conversation Army have been introduced and reintroduced as awkward. Myers and Myers point out that to succeeding generations of audience. Notable masking behaviours, which include coughing, sitcoms from the UK stable have been Till Death whistling and sighing, are often employed to Us Do Part, Steptoe and Son, Th e Likely Lads, cover up such lapses until someone thinks of Rising Damp, Th e Good Life, Fawlty Towers, Last something to say. Th e use and acceptability of of the Summer Wine, Birds of a Feather, Father silence does vary from one culture to another. Ted, Goodness Gracious Me and Th e Offi ce; from See apache silence; communication, non- the US, a few of many notable sitcoms have verbal (nvc); silence: strategic silence. been Bewitched, Rhoda, Taxi, Cheers!, Cybill, Silence, spiral of See noelle-neuman’s spiral Roseanne and Frazier. of silence model of public opinion, 1974. Brett Mills in Th e Sitcom (Edinburgh Univer- Sipdis (secret Internet protocol router sity Press, 2010) talks of the ‘comic impetus’, network distribution) US military electronic a force which ‘drives sitcom as an industrial database run by the Defence Department in product and as a genre’. Over the years it has Washington, also serving American embassies been characterized by fl exibility, hybridity, and worldwide. In 2010 Sipdis proved itself vulner- is a ‘form of programming which foregrounds able to hacking when the contents of ambas- its comic intent’ by its length, domestic settings, sadorial reports and exchanges were revealed to character types, shooting style and use of the public view in vast quantities. See wikileaks. laugh track. ‘Promotional material and open- Sitcom Situation comedy on TV, the comedy ing titles for sitcoms,’ writes Mills, ‘signal comic growing out of context and recurringly gener- intentions before the narrative of the programme ated or fuelled by amiable antagonism of is encountered.’ one kind or another. Where the soap opera They tell us what the sitcom is not, that is demands a substantial range of characters, the ‘not-news, or not-documentary, or not serious, sitcom generally focuses upon narrow circles of as much as they mark them as comic’. Th ere has acquaintance and relationship, such as families been much talk of the ‘death of the sitcom’ (the or groups of friends. Rarely does the narrative UK’s Channel 4 broadcast a documentary Who of one instalment of a sitcom continue from Killed the Sitcom? in 2006), but in Mills’s view it the previous one or continue to the next, again is ‘likely to remain a potent force within televi- contrasting with the soap whose narrative key is sion for as long as communities want to come balancing a number of ongoing stories and spin- together to enjoy laughter. Th at is, it’s going to be ning these along over days and weeks. around for some time’. Each instalment of a sitcom begins with a situ- ▶ Gerard Jones, Honey, I’m Home! Sitcoms: Selling the ation that is resolved within a single timescale. American Dream (St Martin’s Press, 1992); Nick Lacey, Characters may be rounded, even complex, but Narrative and Genre: Key Concepts in Media Studies rarely do they, or the situations they are involved (Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); John Byrne and Marcus in, develop or change. Th is does not mean that Powell, Writing Sitcoms (A & C Black, 2003); Mary M. they are sealed against the events of the real Dalton and Laura L. Linder, eds, Th e Sitcom Reader: world; indeed they often refl ect real-world condi- America Viewed and Skewed (University of New York tions and make use of current issues and trends. Press, 2005); Glen Creeber, ed., Th e Television Genre For example, the UK sitcom Men Behaving Badly Book (British Film Institute, 2nd edition, 2008). explored, amusingly and wittily, the ‘gender war’ Site The theoretical or physical space where a of the 1990s in which men had to adjust to the struggle over meaning and the power to rein- threat to their traditional dominance by women force a particular meaning occurs. confi dent that the future is theirs. Situational proprieties Erving Goffman in Writers of sitcoms have succeeded in creat- Behaviour in Public Places (Free Press, 1963) ing diverse themes, from comedy in prison – employed this phrase to describe rules of Porridge, to comedy in space – Th e Red Dwarf, behaviour common to interpersonal and group to aliens on earth – Th ird Rock from the Sun. Th e situations which oblige participants to ‘fi t in’; to Korean War was the setting for one of the best accept the particular normative behaviour suit- and most incisive sitcoms, MASH, starring Alan able for a successful, dissonance-free interaction. Alda, while the zany antics of New York’s thirty- Such properties might be to avoid making a somethings in Friends proved a worldwide scene or causing a disturbance; to refrain from success. talking too loudly or too assertively; to hold back

278 Slider

from attempting to dominate proceedings or, lawsuits, focusing on accusations of defama- A in contrast, to check oneself from withdrawing tion, invasion of privacy and interference with from what is going on. business. B S-IV-R model of communication Derives from Julian Petley in an article ‘SLAPPS and Chills’ general theories of learning/communication, in Index on Censorship, 1 (1999), writes, ‘Th ese where the relationship between stimulus (S) and cases ... are a form of strategic legal intimidation C response (R) is regarded as providing the key to or gamesmanship, designed to frighten, harass both learning and communication. Actually it is and distract actual critics, and to discourage D a teaching-orientated model rather than learner- potential ones from even voicing their views in centred, and implies a predominantly one-way the ﬁ rst place.’ Most cases do not reach court, traffic of information from teacher to pupil. nor are they intended to. E The IV stands for intervening variables However, for Helen Steel and Dave Morris, (ivs), those factors in the communication situ- distributors of a leaﬂ et entitled ‘What’s Wrong F ation that help, hinder or modify the response With McDonald’s?’ there was to be no escape

to the intended message. These variables are from libel proceedings. Their trial was the G innumerable: noise (technical or semantic), longest in British history and took every penny lack of motivation or concentration, personal the defendants possessed (defendants are problems and, very importantly, the inﬂ uence of ineligible for legal aid in defamation cases); H other people – peer groups, friends, parents, etc. they squared up to a company that spends an See mediation; other; significant others. estimated US 2 billion a year on advertising (see I See also topic guide under communication John Vidal’s McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial,

models. Macmillan, 1997). JK Slander A false or malicious report by spoken In June 1997 it was revealed that a TV docu- word or by sign or gesture. In law, slander mentary made by Franny Armstrong, McLibel: may constitute defamation – of character or Two Worlds Collide, had been rejected by both L reputation – and may be subject to heavy ﬁ nes. the BBC and Channel 4 because of the risk of libel However, no legal aid is granted in the UK for action. Existing, well-established programmes M defamation cases. libel is the written or printed such as the BBC’s Newsnight, Panorama and equivalent of slander. Watchdog have stirred up choruses of protest N Slang Colloquial language whose words and from multinationals such as British Aerospace, usages are not generally acceptable within Ford, Dixons, Hotpoint and Proctor and formal modes of expression. Th e word was not Gamble. See censorship; mcdonaldization. O used until about 1756. Prior to that it was called See also topic guides under media: freedom, cant, and referred to the secret language of the censorship; media issues & debates. P underworld, of thieves and rogues; also termed Sleeper eff ect Researchers into the responses argot. Slang usually begins as in-group language, of audiences to messages have noted how these R then moves into popular use. For example, the responses can be delayed and only become criminal world’s slang nouns for policemen manifest some time after exposure. Th is is the (coppers, rozzers, bluebottles, the fuzz), for ‘sleeper’ effect. See effects of the mass S magistrates (beaks), for prison (stir time, bird, media. porridge) and for youth (chaz, gothics) have Slider Many experiments have been conducted T achieved broad currency. to investigate the eﬀ ect of group pressure upon Rhyming slang, associated with London the individual and the manner in which such U cockneys, uses slang words that rhyme with the pressure manifests itself in the interpersonal intended word. Th us ‘apples and pears’ means communication of the group. In a typical stairs, ‘trouble and strife’ means wife. Th e point experiment, one member of the group may take V of rhyming slang is to conceal the meaning of on the role of slider, that is he/she will initially

the language used from unwanted listeners. See disagree with the majority of the group on a W colloquialism; dialect; jargon. matter but is persuaded to agree with them. Th e SLAPPS Strategic Lawsuits Against Public member of the group who takes on the role of Participation; a practice originating in the US deviant, however, consistently disagrees with the XYZ but spreading globally, in which big corporations majority. Of those in the experimental situation, put legal frighteners on critics of their activities. some may be naïve, that is unaware of what is to Wherever corporate interests – whether in take place in the experiment, and some members the environment, in foodstuﬀ s, in publicizing may be confederates, that is in league with the information – are deemed at risk, out come the experimenters.

279 Slow-drip

Slow-drip Term sometimes used to describe the coordination with other groups.’ regular, long-term coverage of certain issues by Of course protest groups are not the only the media with a view to infl uencing the forma- example of a smart mob; governments and tion of opinion; a softening-up process that their military strategists also make use of such builds evidence and feelings in preferred direc- technology. Governments can also call upon tions. See effects of the mass media. companies to curtail the use that might be made Slow motion Has been used varyingly in the of mobile phones by protesters. In an article in cinema to convey dream-like or fantasy situ- the Independent on Sunday (13 February 2011) ations, to emphasize reactions such as grief or entitled ‘What are the business ethics of revolu- bewilderment, or to concentrate attention upon tion 2.0?’, Margaret Pagano notes that during the happenings which in real life would be here protests in Tunisia and Egypt which were current and gone before the full visual impact has been at the time, the governments were successful in made. In contrast, accelerated motion has been persuading some mobile operators and Internet generally used for comic eff ects, especially by the service providers to shut down their networks. early silent-movie comedians whose own actors’ However, it seems that quite a few protesters timing was rendered even more remarkable by managed to fi nd ways round this. the speeded-up action. Smartphone What is usually considered to Reverse motion is another technique by which mark the diff erence between the mobile phone the cinema defi es time: that which can happen and the smartphone is the latter’s capacity to can unhappen. In October (1927), for instance, key into the internet, plus the availability of Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948) uses the magic innumerable ‘apps’ (or applications). Th e video of reverse motion to show a statue of the Tzar, as well as photographic capacity enables users previously smashed to pieces, miraculously to join the ranks of citizen journalists (see restored, thus portraying with impressive journalism: citizen journalism), be their symbolism the restoration of the old order. own feature and short documentary fi lm-maker, Lastly, there is stopped motion, using either participate in social networking (see network- still photographs or stopping the action of an ing: social networking), post contributions otherwise moving sequence by repeating the to YouTube and download music, fi lms, radio same frame when editing the fi lm. Th e freezing and TV. Th e smartphone allows users to operate of action may signal transition from one time- across informational, entertainment and social zone to another, or may be used for special platforms. It has been judged a powerful weapon emphasis or sometimes to underscore comic of communication and record in assisting the eff ects or impressions. See shot. mobilization of popular political protest (see Smart mobs Term used by Howard Rheingold smart mobs). (2002) to describe protest groups that mobilize By 2011 smartphones were outselling desktop support for demonstrations through the use of computers, largely because these handheld the mobile phone and the social networks that devices can do most things that computers can these give access to. He argues that President do. The smartphone can translate words and Joseph Estrada of the Philippines was the fi rst signs, tell you where you are and where your head of state to be ousted by a ‘smart mob’ in friends are, give you the menu of the restaurant 2001. Other instances of the eff ective use of the up the road or in Hong Kong or San Francisco, mobile phone to organize protests include the and keep abreast of the latest exchanges on 1999 demonstration held outside a meeting of facebook and twitter. the World Trade Organization in Seattle, and the Whether the smartphone actually improves Fuel Protests in Britain in 2000. the quality of communication in all ways and The mobile phone facilitates not only the at all levels is seriously open to question. It mobilization of support for a protest, but also makes it easier, facilitates greater diffusion, the progress of a demonstration, for example the is infi nitely faster than pen on paper, but it is eff ective deployment of ‘swarming’ strategies in capable of proving an instrument of distraction a protest. In Smart Mobs: Th e Next Social Revo- especially in face-to-face communication. See lution (Basic Books, 2002) Rheingold describes apple macintosh; google; media activism; ‘swarming’ strategies with reference to the microsoft windows; podcast; technol- ‘Battle of Seattle’: ‘Individual members of each ogy: the consumerization of technology. group remained dispersed until mobile commu- SMCR model of communication See berlo’s nications drew them to converge on a specifi c smc model of communication, 1960. location from all directions simultaneously, in Smiling professions Namely, the media, and

280 Soap opera

TV in particular. John Hartley in Th e Politics of interaction). Th e gap between one episode of A Pictures: Th e Creation of the Public in the Age a soap and the next may be used by members of of Popular Media (Routledge, 1992) writes that the audience to mull over latest developments, B smiling ‘has become one of the most public talk about these to members of the family, fellow virtues of our times, a uniform that must be workers, friends, thus heightening anticipation worn on the lips of those whose social function and enjoyment and making the viewer a more C is to create, sustain, tutor, represent and make active ‘reader’ of the text. images of the public’. Hartley asserts that ‘smil- Because most soaps distribute interest among D ing, in fact, is now the “dominant ideology” of numerous characters, no single character is the “public domain”, the mouthpiece of the indispensable. Of key importance is the commu- politics of pictures’. nity of characters in their situation. As Robert C. E Snap-shot Term invented by astronomer Sir Allen writes in ‘Reader-orientated criticism’ in John Herschel (1792–1871), writing in 1860 of Channels of Discourse: Television and Contem- F ‘the possibility of taking a photograph as it were porary Criticism (Methuen, 1987; Routledge,

a snap shot’. He may well have been referring 1990), edited by Allen, ‘anything might happen G to Thomas Skaife’s Pistolgraph of 1858. See to an individual character, but, in the long run, camera; photography, origins. it will not aﬀ ect the community of characters as Soap opera radio or TV domestic drama series; a whole’. H the term emanates from the US, where such In a European Journal of Communication programmes were initially sponsored by big soap article, June 1998, entitled ‘European soap I companies who had the housewife viewer in operas: the diversiﬁ cation of the genre’, Tamar

mind. Of the long-running soap opera in the UK, Liebes and Sonia Livingstone identify three JK Coronation Street, poet laureate John Betjeman types, or models, of soap opera – the Dynastic, once announced, ‘At half-past seven tonight I the Community and the Dyadic. Th e fi rst focuses shall be in paradise.’ on one powerful family with a number of satellite L Traditionally soaps have been characterized outsiders. Th e American soapDynasty was an by an immediately identifi able set-up, a stereo- example of this model, while the UK soaps Coro- M typical cast of characters and a distancing from nation Street and EastEnders typify the commu- contemporary reality and anxieties. However, nity model. Th ese are characterized by a number N the end of the 1980s saw the arrival of soaps of interconnecting and interrelating families ‘all exploiting social problems for all they were living within one geographical neighbourhood worth. From the BBC, EastEnders, featuring and belonging to one community’. O abortion, rape, illegitimacy, murder, robbery, The dyadic model concerns a ‘destabilized incest and unemployment; from Channel 4, network of a number of young people, densely P Brookside, demonstrating that Merseyside can interconnected, mostly unigenerational, vie problem for problem with London’s East interchanging couples, with past, present and R End, featuring rape, stabbings, euthanasia, future romantic ties, continually absorbed in homosexuality and, of course, unemployment. the process of reinventing kinship relations’. Th e Th e BBC’s import from Australia, Neighbours, authors cite the American soap Th e Young and S proved it could do more than hold its own, with the Restless as a prime example of the dyadic beatings-up, meningitis, divorce et al. model; to this we might add This Life, which T In a sense, soaps have become a paradigm won something of a cult status in the UK until in for television itself. In terms of texts they take 1998 the BBC decided not to commission further U up a staggeringly large amount of viewing time episodes. and occupy centre-stage in the minds of vast Community soaps, Liebes and Livingstone and international audiences. Critical theory has say, ‘have been produced in the spirit of public V located in soaps rich seams for investigation, broadcasting, indicating certain pedagogic aims’ especially in an age when the way meaning is and ‘constitute a type of public for debating W read into texts by audience and the ways audi- social issues’. A notable example of a soap which ences use media have come to dominate critical has proved both pedagogic and a source of public thinking and much media research. debate is the highly popular Spanish drama, XYZ Generally soaps are less concerned with action Cuentame Como (Tell Me How It Happened), than with interaction, primarily between fi rst produced in 2002. the characters on the broad socio-cultural Th e soap revisits – and retrieves – Spanish canvas but also, in a proactive way, between the history, its characters and situations being cast characters and the viewers (see parasocial in the period of Fascist rule under General

281 Soaps: docu-soaps

Franco. An era which, to a modern generation, A pluralist society, of competing ideologies and had seemed a closed book, closed off by offi cial varying, changing defi nitions of truth and mean- reluctance to examine a past of terror following, is acknowledged by social action analysis, ing the Spanish Civil War, had the curtains of as are the complex influences at work upon forgetfulness drawn back; all at once, the nation media and media audiences and the interaction focused on its past as never before. between them. See functionalist (mode of Elizabeth Nash, writing from Madrid, in a media analysis); marxist (mode of media news report entitled ‘Spain gripped by soap set analysis); pluralism. See also topic guide in dark years of Franco’s rule’ (UK Independent, under research methods. 9 August 2002), says ‘Th e series has caught the Social action broadcasting A broad term imagination of all generations of Spaniards: those describing radio and TV programming that who remember Franco relish the authenticity of sets out not only to analyse current social every detail; youngsters who never knew him problems and issues and bring them to public are fascinated by this window on their otherwise attention, but to encourage people to take action silent and invisible history.’ See empowerment; in response to what they have heard or seen. In feminism; gender; gendered genre; gossip the UK such programmes range from the BBC’s networks; narrative. adult literacy series On the Move or Crimewatch ▶ Mary Ellen Brown, Soap Opera and Women’s Talk UK to Capital Radio’s Helpline. (Sage, 1994); Robert C. Allen, To Be Continued: Soap Th e culinary broadcaster Jamie Oliver exem- Operas Around the World (Routledge, 1995); Ian Ang, plifi ed this social action with a Channel 4 series Watching Dallas: Soap Operas and the Melodramatic in 2005 set in Kidbrooke School, East London: Imagination (Methuen, 1985; Routledge paperback, he went into partnership with the school dinners 1996); Charlotte Brunsdon, Screen Tastes: Soap manager with the aim of encouraging pupils to Opera to Satellite Dish (Routledge, 1997); Dorothy eat more varied and nutritious food. Th e series Hobson, Soap Opera (Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); Lesley was popular, prompting government action Henderson, Social Issues in Television Fiction (Edin- to bring about healthier eating in schools, and burgh University Press, 2007); Sam Ford, Abigail De gave social action broadcasting added status and Kosnik and C. Lee Harrington, eds, Th e Survival of impetus. Soap Opera: Transformations for a New Media Era Social anthropology Th e study of the evolution (University of Mississippi Press, 2010). of human communities and cultures. Soaps: docu-soaps Popular variant of the Social class See class. fi ctional soap, presenting documentary series in Social infl uence theory See identification. the fashion of soaps with the same emphasis on Socialization Th e shaping of human behaviour characters the audience can readily identify with, through experience in and knowledge of certain real-life situations intercut with parallel situa- social situations: the process by which indi- tions in the typical manner of soaps. Examples viduals are made aware of the expectations in the UK have been Airport, Driving School and others have of their behaviour; by which they Hotel. acquire the norms, mores, values and beliefs Such programmes have tended to supplant of a social group or society; and by which the serious, probing documentaries and are largely culture of a social group or society is transmit- the result of the intense pressures of competi- ted. Socialization continues throughout life as tion. Their fascination lies in the actuality of individuals change their roles and membership the mini-dramas and their sense of immediacy. of social groups. Where docu-soaps are diff erent from fi ctional There exist what are commonly known as soaps is in the freedom the ‘characters’ are given agents of socialization. In modern industrial to comment on the mini-dramas that fi ll their societies, the family, school and friendship working days. groups are thought to be the most signifi cant Social action (mode of media analysis) agents in shaping the behaviour of the individual. Stresses the role of the individual as a potent Th e mass media are also agents of socialization force within a dynamic social system. It sees and are considered to be particularly infl uential confl ict as central to the process of change, in in transmitting awareness and expectations particular conflict between groups seeking concerning a wide range of societal behaviour. infl uence, power and status. Social action analy- Individuals and societies may undergo radical sis concentrates on the media as a special group change; if so, re-socialization may occur – the both reflecting and involved in the conflicts peeling away of learned patterns of behaviour that concern social change, or resistance to it. and their replacement with quite diff erent ones.

282 Sokal Hoax, or Sokal Scandal

Th ere is interest as to the media’s potential role research as well as debates within sociolinguis- A in this process: its capacity as a disseminator tics are of relevance to the study of interpersonal of propaganda, for example, could be of communication. See topic guides under B signifi cance. Additionally, media organizations interpersonal communication; language/ are themselves social institutions and as such discourse/narrative. have their own patterns of behaviour, attitudes Sociology French philosopher Auguste Comte C and beliefs into which their members are social- (1798–1857) was the fi rst to use the word. Th e ized. Th e degree to which the culture of media discipline attempts a scientific and system- D organizations aff ects their output is a consider- atic study of society, employing precise and able source of interest. See topic guide under controlled methods of enquiry. It is concerned media: values & ideology. with social structure; social systems; social E Social lubricators Richard Hoggart in Speaking action; the various groups, institutions, catego- to Each Other (Chatto & Windus, 1970) uses this ries and classes which go to make up a society F term to describe those people involved in the or social system; the culture and lifestyle of a

research, design and presentation of material society and the groups of which it is composed; G aimed at aiding the smooth running of a tech- the processes of socialization by which such nologically advanced society: communications cultures are communicated and maintained; and experts, public relations oﬃ cers and advertising the types and allocation of social roles. Social H executives, for example. See public relations groups, their inter-relationships and interac- (pr). tion, and their conditioning of individual I Social networking See networking: social behaviour could be seen as the building-blocks

networking. of the discipline. JK Socially unattached intelligentsia See ▶ Gregory McLennan, Story of Sociology: A First impartiality. Companion to Social Th eory (Bloomsbury Academic, Social perception See perception. 2011). L Social system Consists of a collective of people Sociometrics (and media analysis) Socio- who undertake diff erent types of tasks in order metrics is the analysis of small groups, their M to achieve common goals and solve common coherence and the interpersonal relationships problems. Th e term can be applied to a group of and communication within them. This mode N two or more individuals, complex organizations of analysis has been extended and applied or whole societies. For the members of a social within media studies to ascertain the nature system to cooperate, there must be a shared of the relationships between owners of media O language and some cultural similarities between organizations and owners of other industrial or them, although within the overall system there commercial concerns and the degree to which P may be a variety of sub-cultures and language they are interlocking. The purpose of such a codes, as well as other individual diff erences. All sociometric map of capitalism is to discover R social systems are liable to undergo transition, a whether or not shared positions in and patterns process by which the structures and functions of social and economic life produce recognized are altered. One focus for research has been the shared interests and a common cluster of beliefs, S role of the communication of innovation in the values and perspectives which feed back into process of social change. See socialization. and influence media organizations and their T Societally conscious See vals typology. products. Sociolinguistics Th e study of the way in which Increasingly, owners of communications U an individual’s linguistic behaviour might be concerns are also owners of other businesses, infl uenced by the social communities to which and these contacts are reinforced by overlapping he/she belongs. It investigates also the linguistic directorships. Board members of top media V variations found between groups and their iden- corporations have been found to hold member-

tifi cation through language. ship of elite London clubs also favoured by direc- W Richard A. Hudson in Sociolinguistics tors of leading fi nancial institutions and some (Cambridge University Press, 1996) comments business corporations. Of course evidence of that ‘in sociolinguistics … the social questions points of contact does not necessarily constitute XYZ are in full focus’. Areas within the fi eld include evidence of shared values, beliefs and perspec- the study of dialects, codes, registers, Pidgins, tives, or deliberate infl uence of media products. Creoles, the relationship between language and See convergence. See also topic guide under thought, and gender diff erences in the use of research methods. language. A number of aspects of contemporary Sokal Hoax, or Sokal Scandal New York

283 Sound-bite

professor of physics Alan Sokel, outraged by Hallin cites three reasons for the sound-bite what he saw as the ‘gibberish’ of postmodernist revolution, as apposite in the twenty-fi rst century texts (see postmodernism) and with tongue as when he was writing: the technological one fi rmly in cheek, wrote a paper in 1996 entitled already mentioned; the weakening in political ‘Transgressing the boundaries towards a trans- consensus and authority following Vietnam formative hermeneutics of quantum gravity’. and watergate; and the discovery by the TV It has been described as ‘a carefully crafted industry in the States that news was big business parody of postmodern twaddle’. Th e paper was – if, that is, presentation was ‘punchy’ enough to submitted to the US journal Social Text and was attract and retain audience attention. Ironically, accepted and published – not as a hoax, but as the approach derives from the very people jour- the real thing. nalists often accuse of manipulating the media Commenting afterwards on his hoax, Sokal – political campaign managers – so-called ‘spin acknowledged deliberate half-truths, falsehoods doctors’ whose techniques of packaging candi- and non sequeteurs and confessed that his article dates have centred around sound-biting images, contained ‘syntactically correct sentences that one-liners, the use of triumphalist music, etc. have no meaning whatever’. Dan Hallin acknowledges that modern news ▶ See Alan Sokel and Jean Bricmont, Intellectual is far more ‘professional’, far more varied, slicker Impostures (Profi le Books, 1998); also published by than in the past, but he identifi es serious worries. Picador in the US, with the title Fashionable Nonsense ‘First and simplest, it is disturbing that the public (1998). never has the chance to hear a candidate – or Sound-bite Term originally derives from radio anyone else – speak for more than 20 seconds’, but has come to apply equally to TV; describes especially as showing ‘humans speaking is a fi lm or tape segment within a news story, in something television does very eff ectively’. Also which a reporter talks to a source such as a poli- the modern pace of exposition raises questions tician or an eyewitness. With the advent of more concerning audience comprehension, the abil- sophisticated technology for handling news ity of viewers to understand what is coming at reports, the use of jump-cutting has added to the them at such speed. Not the least concern is that complexity and the drama of the sound-bite. Th e sound-bite journalism emphasizes techniques ellipsis jump-cut splices two or more segments over substance: the very sin the journalist of the same person speaking in the same setting: accuses the spin doctor of committing. See these are classifi ed as single sound-bites. Th e journalism; news management. See also juxtaposition jump-cut places together contrast- topic guide under news media. ing segments, usually from diff erent settings, in ▶ David Stayden and Rita Kirk Whillock, eds, Sound- such a way as to make evident the discontinuity. bite Culture: Th e Death of Discourse in a Wired World Th ese tend to be treated as separate sound-bites. (Sage, 1999). Research into the nature and degree of sound- Sound broadcasting See radio broadcast- bites in news broadcasting in the US indicates ing. that contemporary news employs far more, Sound Broadcasting Act (UK), 1972 Gave the and far shorter sound-bites, than in the past. In go-ahead to commercial radio in the UK. ‘Sound-bite news: television coverage of elec- The name Independent Television Authority tions, 1968–1988’ in Journal of Communication, (ITA) was changed to Independent Broadcasting Spring, 1992, Daniel C. Hallin reports that the Authority (IBA), and the IBA was empowered average sound-bite has been shrinking, from to create a new group of contractors in up to more than 40 seconds in length in 1968 to less fi fty British cities to run local commercial radio than 10 seconds in the 1980s. Th e conclusion stations and collect advertising revenue in a Hallin draws from this is that the news is much manner similar to that of the TV programme more mediated than the TV news of the 1960s companies. Th e fi rst commercial radio stations and 1970s. went on the air in October 1973. He writes, ‘Today’s television journalist Sound, synchronous See synchronous displays a sharply diff erent attitude towards the sound. words of candidates and other newsmakers. Source An individual, group or institution that Today, those words, rather than simply being originates a message. In media terms, source reproduced and transmitted to the audiences, is where information starts, and it is an axiom are treated as raw material to be taken apart, of good reporting that the material supplied by combined with other sounds and images, and source is reliable and true. Best practice suggests reintegrated into a new narrative.’ that single sources be checked against other

284 Spatial behaviour

sources. It is also a matter of journalistic prin- friends; everyday encounters usually take place A ciple that in some cases the source of informa- within the personal zone; in a more formal tion, especially if it is of a particularly sensitive, context, such as that of a workplace meeting, B or sensational, nature, is kept secret; that the the social zone is more likely to apply, whilst the provider of information is assured of anonymity public zone operates in very formal situations (see deep throat). and refers to the distance kept between the C Where the information provided by source key fi gures and members of an audience or the is perceived to impugn those in authority, by public. Hall noted that the usual distances kept D suggesting corruption or other wrong-doing, by middle-class European Americans in each reporters may be charged with criminal off ences zone were: intimate, 6–18 inches; personal, 18 if they refuse to divulge their sources. If they inches to 4 feet; social, 4–12 feet; and public, E give in to pressure, retreat from the guarantee of over 12 -25 feet. confi dentiality, it is unlikely that they will ever be Desmond Morris in People Watching (Vintage, F trusted with sensitive information again; on the 2002) argues that for Western Europeans,

other hand, they may end up in jail, as happened from the outstretched arm to the fi ngertips is a G to New York Times journalist Judith Miller in comfortable distance for an everyday conversa- 2005 after she refused to reveal the source of an tion, whereas for those from Eastern Europe enquiry into the leaking of the name of a CIA the distance is from the outstretched arm to the H undercover agent. wrist. For people from the Mediterranean area it Th e mass media are often criticized for over- is the stretch from the upper arm to the elbow. I reliance on offi cial sources, or failing to question Stella Ting-Toomey in Communicating Across information which has been supplied to them Cultures (Guildford Press, 1999) also comments JK by those in authority. Equally they are seen to that in several cultures – Latin American, Carib- pay selective attention to sources, valuing some, bean and Arab cultures, for example – people ignoring others. At worst, they serve the interests sit or stand closer to one another in everyday L of the powerful by transmitting propaganda as conversations than would be the norm among if it were news. See news values. Western Europeans. In culturally diverse societ- M Source domination See primary, secondary ies, however, it could be expected that a range definers. of practice would be found depending on the N Spatial behaviour Michael Argyle in Bodily cultural heritage of the communicators. Such Communication (Methuen, 1988) notes that cultural diff erences have the potential to be a ‘proximity, orientation and territorial behav- source of noise in everyday encounters. O iour’ are the main aspects of spatial behaviour. Th e term personal space is often used to proxemics is the study of the distance people denote the space within which an individual feels P keep between themselves and others within easy and which, if encroached upon, causes anxi- an encounter. Th is distance can depend upon ety, tension or resistance. Personal space is fl uid R a number of factors, such as the nature of and mobile, a kind of bubble around the indi- relationships, culture and the social context. vidual. Stanford M. Lyman and Marvin B. Scott It seems that individuals generally sit or stand in ‘Territoriality: a neglected social dimension’ in S closer to those whom they like and those whom Social Problems 15 (1967) refer to personal space they perceive as being similar. However this as ‘the most private and inviolate of territories T norm can be deliberately disregarded in order belonging to an individual’. When our personal to intimidate or dominate others by standing space is violated we respond, argues Morris U too close to them. In certain circumstances, in (2002), with a reduction in our social signals: we crowds for example, individuals seem able to may, for example, avoid eye contact, and reduce tolerate much closer proximity to others than is the number of body movements and facial V usually preferred. expressions. Th ere are, however, cultural diff erences in the way in which individuals respond There appear to be definite norms that W mark the appropriate distance people observe to such incursions. According to William B. between each other in communicative encoun- Gudykunst and Stella Ting-Toomey in Culture ters, although these norms vary from one and Interpersonal Communication (Sage, 1988), XYZ culture to another. According to Edward Hall people from individualistic cultures tend to in The Hidden Dimension (Doubleday, 1966), deal with encroachments in an assertive, if not these distances relate to four main zones. Th e aggressive, manner, whereas people from collec- intimate zone is for those with whom we have tivistic cultures tend to adopt a more passive, the closest relationships, typically family and withdrawn manner.

285 Spatial zones

territoriality, that is the human need to Special eff ects (SFX) Th e ‘real’ gorilla in King establish, defi ne and defend territory, is also an Kong (1933) was just 18 inches high – that is aspect of spatial behaviour. Th ree diff erent kinds special effects. Simulations of earthquakes, of territory are noted by Morris (2002): personal, explosions, fl oods, fi res, storms, of the interior family and tribal. Personal territories include of Hell, of war in space or 40 fathoms deep are such spaces as an individual’s house, car or what SFX wizards specialize in, while in the case favourite chair. Individuals often mark what they of Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009), audiences are consider to be their personal territory as a means treated to the destruction of the world (or as the of defi ning and defending it. Th us a bag may be director put it, ‘you see the whole world going left on a favourite chair in the sitting room. to shit’). Th e home and garden are often the key areas Tim Dirks’s fi lmsite.org webpage provides a of territory for the family, and people may useful listing of outstanding examples of SFX devote signifi cant amounts of time and energy down the years, noting the particular areas of on activities such as gardening and DIY in order eff ects innovation. In his introduction to Visual to customise and mark it. Non-family members Special FX Milestones Dirks writes, ‘Th e earli- usually enter this territory by invitation only. est effects were produced within the camera Morris (2002) notes the way in which the family (in-camera eff ects), such as simple jump-cuts may extend its notion of family territory. A family or superimpositions, or were created by using trip to the beach usually involves fi nding a space miniatures, back projection, or matte paintings. that can be used throughout the stay; once the ‘Optical eff ects came slightly later, using fi lm, spot is secured, several markers may be placed to light, shadow, lenses and/or chemical processes defend this territory such as windbreaks, towels, to produce the film effects. Film titles, fades, beach chairs and a picnic hamper. dissolves, wipes, blow ups, skip frames, blue- In certain situations displays of tribal territory screen, compositing, double exposures, and can also be seen. According to Morris (2002), zooms/pans are examples of various optical groups, gangs, communities and nations are all eff ects. Cel animation, scale modelling, clayma- capable of generating tribal identities. These tion, digital compositing, animatronics, use identities can be displayed and communicated of prosthetic makeup, morphing, and modern by various ‘territorial signals’, such as national computer-generated or computer graphics fl ags, logos, styles of dress, football club strips, imagery (CGI) are just some of the more modern and the face-painting found among some sports techniques that are widely used for creating fans. incredible special or visual eff ects.’ orientation, that is the angle at which people In fact, ‘trick’ photography goes back to such sit or stand in relation to one another, is also an photographic pioneers as Oscar Rejlander, who aspect of spatial behaviour. Orientation can be produced allegorical multi-photo compositions used to convey a range of messages about rela- (The Two Ways of Life, 1857), and Eadweard tionships, status, mood, personality and social Muybridge (Th e Horse in Motion, 1878). Among context. According to M. Cook (1970) in ‘Experi- moving picture experimenters were Georges ments on orientation and proxemics’, Human Méliès (Th e Vanishing Lady, 1896, and La Voyage Relations 23, if people are in a potentially hostile Dans La Lune, 1902) and Edward S. Porter (Th e or competitive situation they usually face each Great Train Robbery, 1903). other head on, whereas when in a co-operative Th roughout cinema history SFX have proved relationship or situation, people tend to sit next the stimulus to innovation, the allurement of to or adjacent to each other. Ting-Toomey (1999) mass audiences and the generation of profi ts as notes that there are cultural diff erences here: for well as sky-high costs: James Cameron’s Avatar example, people from high-contact cultures tend (2009) cost an estimated US 300 million, but to prefer a more direct orientation. Orientation it also made more money than any other fi lm in can also be employed in interaction regulation: history. when circulating at a crowded party, for example, Landmarks of SFX have been Stanley we would signal our intention to move on by Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), George moving our body round towards new conversa- Lucas’s Star Wars series (from 1977) and Steven tional partners (Argyle, 1988). See communica- Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Th ird Kind tion: intercultural communication. (1977). Computer generated imagery (CGI) soon ▶ Allan & Barbara Pease, Th e Defi nitive Book of Body became the key creator of eff ects, the fi rst movie Language (Orion, 2004). to be made entirely by computer being Disney’s Spatial zones See spatial behaviour. US18 million Tron (1982), to be followed by

286 Sponsorship of broadcast programmes (UK)

Spielberg’s ground-breaking Jurassic Park (1993), made possible by the sponsoring company. Th us A the Pixar/Disney animation Toy Story (1995, and culture comes to us through the arch of sponsor- later sequels), Cameron’s Titanic (1997) and the ship. At the same time the company will benefi t B Wactowski brothers’ Th e Matrix (1999). by association (see synergy). In 2004 Robert Zemeckis’ Th e Polar Express To sponsor Mozart or Rembrandt is somehow introduced performance capture, a system that to be touched by their greatness; their quality C digitally captures an actor’s live performance rubs off on the sponsor. Th e danger is for Mozart using computerized cameras. This provides to be hijacked from the public domain and trans- D a blueprint for creating virtually all-digital formed into yet another device for selling goods characters. Zemecki took the process further in – processed, packaged and ‘profi tized’. Such is Beowolf (2007). the awareness in public bodies of this danger E Special effects pose two problems: by their that codes are written to regulate the degree of often amazing achievements, they raise audience sponsorship, as well as its nature. See product F expectations, succeeding eff ects arguably having placement.

to be more amazing than the last; and, perhaps Sponsorship of broadcast programmes (UK) G more importantly, there is the danger that eﬀ ects Responsibility for establishing rules concerning become the main player in the narrative – a the sponsorship of broadcast programmes in the case of style dominating content, as a number of UK, and monitoring its practice, rests with the H critics pointed out when reviewing Star Wars: Oﬃ ce of Communications (Ofcom; see ofcom: Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002). office of communications (uk)). Sponsor- I Speed photography See high-speed photog- ship is dealt with in Section 9 of the Ofcom

raphy. Broadcasting Code. The BBC does not come JK Spin: spin doctor See news management; under Ofcom regulation in this matter. sound-bite. Th e Code states that sponsorship may occur Spiral of silence See noelle-neumann’s subject to certain conditions: there must be L spiral of silence model of public opinion, transparency, separation and editorial inde- 1974. pendence. It must be made clear that while a M Spiral model of communication See dance’s sponsor may have financed a programme, or helical model of communication. materially supported that programme, it has not N Spoiler Device used by one or more newspapers infl uenced the programme’s content and that the to detract from a rival paper’s scoop story; acknowledgment of sponsorship makes clear the usually by running a different version of the diff erence between itself and the programme. O story as told by lesser characters. Excluded from any form of sponsorship are news Sponsorship Th ere is scarcely any fi eld of the bulletins and newsdesk presentations on radio, P arts, sport, entertainment or media that is and news and current aff airs programmes on not to a greater or lesser extent dependent on TV. R sponsorship; and this sponsorship originates Ofcom’s position on sponsorship and prod- for the most part from industry, business and uct placement has been one of conceding commerce. However, it could be said that ground on initial safeguards, bearing in mind S sponsorship is as old as the pyramids; indeed the that its mission has been not only to uphold pyramids constitute one of the most impactful standards of broadcasting, but also to encour- T examples of state sponsorship. Tombs, yes, but age profitability. After lengthy consultations also symbols of the pharaohs’ will to dominate in 2009–10, Ofcom amended regulations U the lives of their subjects: the pyramids were a contained in the Communications Act (2003), constant reminder to the Egyptians that ‘We issuing the Audiovisual Media Services (Product are here’. Similarly, sponsorship of the arts by Placement) Regulation which came into force in V monarchs and the church was at base born of a February 2011. Th is allowed sponsorship credits to be broad- desire to enthrone the sponsor in the minds and W memories of the people. cast during programmes (‘internal credits’), Some powers of monarchy and the church have though with limitations on their content. Th ese been inherited by big business, as well as certain internal credits would not be permitted in XYZ duties within the community. A company or programmes, such as children’s programmes, corporation will sponsor a major art exhibition which barred product placement; all sponsor- designed to give pleasure and illumination to ship credits must make clear the relationship thousands. And those thousands will in turn, so between the sponsor and the sponsored content. it is hoped, acknowledge the communal benefi t See www.ofcom.org.uk.

287 Spot news

Spot news Term used to describe unexpected litigation and its claims that it is for government or unplanned news events, such as natural alone to judge what information must remain disasters, aircrashes, murders or assassinations, confi dential. An estimated 3m was spent by the often referred to as breaking news, and to be government on court proceedings. distinguished from diary stories, which are This triumph for free speech was followed known well in advance and can be planned-for by government measures to revise the Offi cial by the newspaper, radio or TV news team – for Secrets Act in order to achieve the kind of example news conferences, state visits, elections censorship which had been so conspicuously or budgets. Th e running story is that which is rejected in the Lords’ judgment. See topic ongoing and may stretch over several days or guides under media: freedom, censorship; weeks, such as strikes, wars and famines; all media history; media: politics & econom- stories that transcend the newsday cycle. ics. Sputnik First artificial satellite launched into Stages in audience fragmentation See audi- space by the Russians in 1957. See satellite ence: fragmentation. transmission. Stakeholders A term used in public relations Spycatcher case A book by former British (pr) practice to refer to those who have an inter- Secret Service employee Peter Wright, first est or stake in, and thus are likely to be aff ected published in the US in 1987 and banned from by, the activities and plans of an organization or publication in the UK, became the centre of the individual client. Stakeholders may not always most celebrated case of attempted government be aware of their potential involvement. Paul censorship in the 1980s. Spycatcher: Th e Candid Baines, John Egan and Frank Jefkins in Public Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer Relations: Contemporary Issues and Techniques (Viking/Penguin, 1987) was not dissimilar in its (Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann, 2004) revelations about the activities of MI5 to other identify four categories of stakeholders, based books that had been permitted to appear, but on their relative levels of power and interest as Wright, having signed the official secrets regards a particular situation. act (uk), was deemed to have breached confi - Firstly there are the ‘key players’ who have dence and arguably set a precedent for other considerable power to aff ect the activities of a secret agents to ‘spill the beans’ on security. company or industry sector. Secondly, there are Th e Conservative government was determined stakeholders with low levels of power but a high not only to prevent publication of Spycatcher in degree of interest in the situation, and who will the UK, but also to block the intentions of news- look to be kept informed of activities. Th en there papers such as the Guardian, the Observer, the are those stakeholders with a high level of power Independent and the Sunday Times to publish but a low degree of interest in activities, but extracts from Wright’s book. At the same time, who should still receive a satisfactory amount government law officers pursued the book of information. Fourthly are those stakeholders across the world to the courts in Australia and who have both low levels of power and inter- Hong Kong, stirring publicity and interest that est: consequently relatively less eff ort may be made it a worldwide bestseller. Only the British expended to keep them informed. people were to remain in the dark about Wright’s A key media example of stakeholder infl uence revelations. in practice is broadcasting regulation. ofcom, Th e government did not prosecute under the the UK regulator of broadcasting, is required to Offi cial Secrets Act but pushed their case on the consult stakeholders in its formulation of policy grounds of confi dentiality; that members of the and is subject to pressure from agencies with Secret Service, having sworn never to divulge vested interests in broadcasting and advertising information about their work, must in law be (see product placement; sponsorship of held forever to that allegiance. Eventually the Law broadcast programmes (uk)). Thanks in Lords deliberated on the saga of Spycatcher and part to stakeholder influence, Ofcom opened in October 1988 rejected government demands the doors of British broadcasting to product for a blanket injunction against the publishing in placement in February 2011. See johnson and the UK of extracts from Wright’s book. scholes: stakeholder mapping; publics. ‘In a free society’, said Lord Goff , one of the Stamp Duty A government tax on newspapers in five Law Lords, ‘there is a continuing public late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, interest that the workings of government should with the express intention of controlling the be open to scrutiny and criticism.’ The Law numbers of papers and access to them by the Lords attacked the government’s conduct of the general public. With news of the French Revolu-

288 Stereoscopy

tion (1789) across the water, Stamp Duty was an individual has (see cultural capital). A raised to two pence per newspaper copy, with an Occupation or the ownership of property may additional Advertising Tax at three shillings per bestow status or require attributes such as a B advertisement. In 1797 Stamp Duty was raised high level of education – hence the link between to three-and-a-half pence, and the hiring-out of status and class. Status may be ascribed, that papers was forbidden. In the year of the Battle of is based on ﬁ xed criteria over which a person C Waterloo, 1815, the Duty went up to four pence may have no control – such as ancestry, ethnic and the Advertising Tax was also raised. aﬃ liation or sex – or achieved, that is gained by D These Taxes on Knowledge, as they were endeavour or luck. Status given may not coincide described, eventually provoked the ‘War of the with an individual’s perception of his/her status. Unstamped’ – the struggle of papers unable or Status must normally be endorsed by behav- E unwilling to pay the duties. William Cobbett iour, such as the possession of status symbols, (1763–1835) dropped news from his Political accent, manners, and social skills consistent F Register so as to evade tax, and concentrated with the status position. Much communicative

on opinion. Unstamped, and costing two pence, behaviour is involved in the display of status, for G Cobbett’s periodical achieved sales of 44,000. example the use of accent and dress. Th e mass ‘Here, in these critical years’, writes Raymond media carry many images of status. Advertisers Williams in Th e Long Revolution (Penguin, 1965), in particular appeal to status-consciousness as H ‘a popular press of a new kind was emerging, a way of selling a wide range of products and wholly independent in spirit, and reaching new services. I classes of readers.’ Status quo As things are: the way in which things

Two of the six Acts of 1819 were directed are done or were done in a period of time under JK against the press, and the 1820s and early 1830s discussion. Within the social-science disciplines featured clashes, fines, imprisonments and the term is often used to mean the prevailing or heroic defi ance. In 1836 Stamp Duty was reduced recent social, economic or political system – the L from four pence to one penny, three years after way it works, usually by tradition, and who in the the Advertisement Tax had been reduced from community works it. M three shillings and sixpence to one shilling and Th ere is some controversy within media stud- sixpence per insertion. In 1853 the Advertising ies as to whether or not the mass media generally N Tax was fi nally abolished; in 1855 the last penny play an important role in reinforcing the status of the Stamp Duty was removed; and in 1860 quo by presenting it as the ‘natural’ or ‘real’ the duty imposed on paper was abandoned. state of things, and by rarely, in their presenta- O ‘Th e era of democratic journalism had formally tion of aspects of human life, calling it into arrived,’ writes Joel H. Wiener in Th e War of the question. For example, Denis McQuail in Mass P Unstamped (Cornell University Press, 1969), Communication Th eory (Sage, 2010) argues that ‘and the daily newspaper became the cultural within critical political-economic theory rests R staple of the social classes.’ See newspapers, the proposition that ‘opposition and alternative origins; press barons; underground press. voices are marginalized’ within the mass media. See also topic guide under media history. If this is the case, media output clearly services S Standards and practice in advertising See the maintenance of the status quo. See common advertising standards authority (asa). sense; consensus; establishment; ideol- T Status The concept of status derives from the ogy; power elite. work of the sociologist Max Weber, who argued Stereophonic sound See gramophone. U that status, though linked to class, is a distinct Stereoscopy Th e creation of the visual illusion of dimension of social stratifi cation. Status is the relief or three dimensions. Th e stereoscope was social evaluation of an individual or group; the invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–75) in V degree of prestige or honour accorded to him, 1838. Th e process has had many applications. In

her or it by society. Wealth and high income photography, two separate photographs, taken W may confer status, but do not necessarily do so. from minimally diﬀ erent angles and correspond- The reasons why individuals or groups may ing to the position of two human eyes, are enjoy considerable status within a community mounted side by side on a card. Viewed through XYZ or society are complex, subject to change and the angled prisms of the stereoscope, they inter- derive from many sources, such as the degree of act to give the appearance of depth or solidity. power or authority a person or group may have, In the cinema, experimental processes of the perceived social usefulness of the abilities of stereoscopy were demonstrated as early as the an individual or group, or the level of education 1930s. Th e technique was developed as Natural

289 Stereotype

Vision, or 3D, in the early 1950s, but never Stopwatch culture See immediacy. caught on – mainly perhaps because members of Storyboard Sequence of sketches or photographs the audience had to wear special glasses. Only in used by the director or the producer of a fi lm to Russia has a stereoscopic process that does not sketch out, scene by scene, and sometimes frame require the wearing of glasses been developed, by frame, the fi lm’s progression; its sight and yet even there it does not appear to have been sound. widely adopted. However, 3D (with glasses) was Storyness See narrative. brought experimentally to TV screens in the UK Strategic silence See silence: strategic by ITV in 1982–83. It took on a new lease of life silence. with the sensational special eff ects of the movie Strategy A term sometimes used to describe Avatar (2009) directed by James Cameron. a communicative act that has been planned to Some commentators in 2010 and 2011 predicted some extent beforehand, which is deliberate that the TV of the future would be 3D. See and which has a clear purpose. Strategies can holography. become a matter of habit: an example here might Stereotype Oversimplifi ed defi nition of a person be the strategy used by a door-to-door salesper- or type of person, institution, style or event; to son. Th ere are many diff erent kinds of strategies stereotype is to pigeon-hole, to thrust into tight used in interpersonal communication, and slots of defi nition which allow of little adjust- we learn to use them through experience. Some, ment or change. Stereotyping is widespread like the greetings strategy, are commonly used because it is convenient – unions are like this, by many people; some we invent for ourselves to Jews, Muslims, teenagers, women, gays, asylum- deal with particular situations; and some may be seekers are like this. Stereotyping is often, though specifi c to certain groups or circumstances. See not always, the result of or accompaniment to tactics and strategies. prejudice. It serves the media well because they Streaming The process by which data is are in the business of instant recognition and compressed for transmission over the internet, ready cues. It is very rare that we actually know then recompressed for consumption by the user. any stereotypes: we only read of them, hear of Th e audio or visual content reaches the recipient them or have them ‘framed’ for us on TV. See in a continuous stream, played in real time on halo effect; labelling process (and the arrival, thus avoiding delay caused by download- media); self-fulfilling prophecy. See also ing. Special software is required to facilitate the topic guide under media issues & debates. process of uncompression and the directing of ▶ Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of data for consumption. Representation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Street view (Google Maps) Massive data bank Stigma According to Erving Goff man in Stigma: of images of the urban scene, surveillance Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity on a universal scale: countries, regions, cities, (Penguin, 1963), stigma denotes ‘undesired towns, villages, streets, houses, shops, people, diff erentness’ and may result in the individual cars, bicycles; all are on google camera. Having becoming ‘reduced in our minds from a whole your front door online is not compulsory; and usual person to a tainted, discounted one’. requests for removal from the database can be Th e sources of stigma are varied, but once the registered in an online form, and sophisticated information is in the open it has the potential technology blurs human faces and car registra- to damage reputations and trigger social rejection plates. Such ‘intrusion’ nevertheless prompt tion. Consequently an individual may feel ongoing concerns over privacy. apprehensive about disclosing information that Stringer Name given in the news reporting busi- is perceived to have the potential to confer a ness for a non-staff reporter. stigmatized identity. Goff man comments that Structuralism A twentieth-century term of the individual concerned is faced with numerous wide defi nition to describe certain traditions of dilemmas: ‘To display or not to display, to tell analysing a range of studies – linguistics, literary or not to tell, to let on or not to let on, to lie or criticism, psychoanalysis, social anthropology, not to lie; and in each case, to whom, how, when Marxist theory and social history. Swiss scholar and where,’ so there are clearly implications for Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique communicative behaviour. Of course the indi- Générale (1916), translated as Course in General vidual may not always have much choice here, Linguistics (1954), is probably the initial key work as others may control access to and disclosure in this movement, later developed and diversi- of the information. See impression manage- fi ed by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes. ment; johari window; self-disclosure. Structuralism is something of an umbrella term

290 Sub-culture

linked with the study of sign systems or semi- thus style represents the outer part of a whole A ology/semiotics. structure that is made up of personality, experi- Structuralists would argue that language has ence, learning, theory, belief – and fused, if B both a natural and a cultural source. Th e natural the style is successful. Th ose coming after may source refers to language as a genetic endow- slavishly imitate the style of the master or, like ment of the human race, and this is framed the Cubists in the case of Cézanne, assimilate C within a network of meanings derived from the the style and then re-create it, thrusting it in new culture of society. Structuralism explores the directions. See culture; dress; folk devils; D deep and often unconscious assumptions about label libel; labelling process (and the social reality that underlie language and its use. media); sub-culture; youth culture. See In particular, it examines the way language is also topic guide under representation. E employed to construct meaning from social Sub-culture Alternatives to the dominant events. However, assumptions about social culture in society, sub-cultures have their F reality are themselves also a product of social own systems of norms, values and beliefs and

conditioning. Th us diﬀ erent cultures and sub- in some cases their own language codes. Such G cultures, and indeed individuals, may generate systems are often expressions of rejection of or different patterns of meaning from the same resistance to the dominant culture. Members of objective event or situation. See postmodern- sub-cultures are frequently those to whom the H ism. See also topic guide under communica- dominant culture awards low, subordinate and/ tion theory. or dependent status: youth, for example. Each I Style A means by which the individual or group sub-culture represents the reactions of a particu-

expresses identity (see identification; self- lar social group to its experience of society. JK identity), attitudes and values, about self, Some sub-cultures and their members may be about others and about society. Style takes many labelled deviant by others in society. It has been forms – hair style, dress style, aesthetic style, argued that because of the fragmented social L or a complete pattern of living: lifestyle. Styles nature of modern society, the mass media play may enable the individual to secure a sense of an increasingly important role in relaying images M personal identity; to acquire a sense of belong- of such sub-cultures both to their own members ing, of being ‘in’ with a favoured group; to make and to members of the dominant culture. Dick N a gesture of rebellion (against the conventional Hebdige in Subculture: The Meaning of Style style of parents, for example, or the older genera- (Methuen, 1979, reissued 2002) writes that tion in all shapes and forms); and to achieve in doing so, the media tend to accommodate O status, that is a status awarded him/her by the sub-cultures within the framework of the others in the favoured group, and by his/her dominant culture, thus preserving the consen- P peers generally. sus; a procedure which he calls the ‘process of Defi ance of society at large is often cited as a recuperation’. R reason why certain styles are adopted. Th is may The postmodern (see postmodernism) or may not be true in all cases, but what is certain perspective is that the solidarity of sub-culture is that society often interprets such styles as acts has given way to a more fl uid and fragmented S of defi ance or rejection, and the arbiters in this sense of association; an association that might process of interpretation (or mediation) are the be more transitory, with styles and experiences T mass media. Coverage by the media, research- drawn from a diverse range of influences – ers have found, tends to overdramatize the including those found in cyberspace. Contem- U signifi cance of style, to create stereotypes and porary groupings, it is argued, are more likely to summon up exaggerated fears in the community. resemble small tribes than the larger youth sub- In the world of the arts, style is that particular cultures of the past. Further, it can be argued V set of characteristics of approach and treatment that the media, fashion and cultural industries now play a more signifi cant role in shaping and which gives a work its identity. As with styles W in hair or dress, styles are first created, then marketing youth culture and associated identi- imitated. In painting, the style of Paul Cézanne ties. (1839–1906) is highly distinctive and instantly As regards style, in Ted Polhemus and UZi XYZ recognizable by anyone with a particular interest PART B, Hot Bodies, Cool Styles: New Techniques in art. in Self-Adornment (Th ames and Hudson, 2004) However, it took Cézanne many years to Polhemus argues that whilst there are still sub- develop that style, which was a visible manifesta- cultures that express their group membership tion of everything he believed about visual art; through style, the emphasis for many young

291 Subliminal

people is now focused on communicating a scripts are required, subtitles are projected onto sense of personal identity, and they adopt a DIY separate screens at the sides and bottom of the approach to personal appearance as a means of main screen. declaring ‘I am here’. An individual’s style can Super-injunction A legal block in the UK to the be assembled using a diverse range of artefacts publication of information – the ‘super’ element ‘borrowed’ from numerous cultures and sub- being that even the publication of information cultures, past and present. Speaking of Western that a block has taken place is banned. The culture, Polhemus argues, ‘What you look like is super-injunction hit the headlines in 2011 when no longer strictly determined by social situation an anonymous twitter user posted details and culture or even fashion. Free from rules, of legal injunctions taken out by celebrities in appearance is now a matter of personal creativ- ‘kiss-and-tell’ stories. According to CNET UK ity.’ Individuals may frequently change their news, Twitter broke all visitor records in May, as personal style. ‘gossip hungry users fl ocked to the site’. ▶ David Muggleton and Rupert Weinzierl, eds, Th e In the UK Sunday Mirror (15 May) Vincent Post-subcultures Reader (Berg, 2003). Moss, defining super-injunctions as ‘gagging Subliminal Signals that act below the threshold orders [that] wealthy celebrities use to hide of conscious reception. Most familiarly we use their indiscretions’, reported that a survey by the the word in reference to subliminal advertis- paper found that eight out of ten members of ing – the trick of fl ashing up on the screen, or the public believed such injunctions ‘are only for recording on tape, messages so rapid that they the rich’. See defamation; prior restraint; are not consciously recorded but which may privacy. subsequently aff ect future attitudes or behaviour. Supervening social necessity Notion that In the UK, subliminal advertising is illegal and social or cultural pressures give the impetus its use in other media is banned by the Institute to technological development, serving as of Practitioners in Advertising. In the US there accelerators in the process of change. Brian is no such control. Many department stores use Winston suggests this feature in ‘How are subliminal seduction to counteract shoplifting. media born?’ in Questioning the Media: A Messages such as ‘I am honest, I will not steal’ Critical Introduction (Sage, 1990), edited by are mixed with background music and continu- John Downing, Ali Mohammadi and Annabelle ally repeated. One retail chain reported a drop of Sreberny-Mohammadi. He cites the arrival of one-third in thefts in nine months as a result of TV in the US as being accelerated by the ‘rise of its subliminal conscience-coaxing. the home, the dominance of the nuclear family, Computer games escape rules concerning and the political and economic need to maintain subliminal messages. The UK Sunday Times full employment’ after the Second World War. published a major story, ‘Children “drugged” by Winston argues that ‘supervening social neces- computer games’ (8 October 1995), concerning sities are at the interface between society and the Time Warner game Endorfun. Th e messages technology’. Th ey may operate as a result of the are there, admit the manufacturers, but they needs of corporations, or because of new or rival are positive, one message being ‘I forgive myself technologies. completely’. Randeep Ramesh, author of the As well as accelerators, social necessities may article, quotes the opinion of Howard Shevrin, serve as brakes upon technological develop- Professor of Psychology at the University of ments, which ‘work to slow the disruptive impact Michigan: ‘It does not pay to fool around with of new technology. I describe the operation of subliminal messages. The results may not be these brakes as the “law” of the suppression of good if you are the wrong person for the wrong radical potential, using “law” in the standard message.’ See sleeper effect. See also topic social science sense to denote a regular and guide under media: processes & produc- powerful general tendency’. In this case, new tion. technology, though available, is resisted, checked Subtitle Or striptitle, a text near the bottom of the or even suppressed. Says Winston, ‘the brakes projected image, usually providing a translation ensure that a technology’s introduction does not of foreign-language dialogue. Th ese days it is disrupt the social or corporate status quo’. possible with foreign-language fi lms screened Winston is of the view that while TV had been on TV to generate subtitles electronically so that ‘accelerated’ after 1945, it had been ‘braked’ prior the words are not actually on the fi lm itself. In to the war: ‘Th us in the case of TV, the existence some multilingual areas, such as Cairo, where of facsimile systems, the rise of radio ... and the three or more titles in diff erent languages and need not to destroy the fi lm industry all acted

292 Surveillance society

to suppress the speed at which the new medium In particular, the French philosopher Michel A was introduced, to minimize disruption.’ Foucault (1926–84) has focused on the ‘all- Winston returns to, and expands on, his analysis seeing’ Panopticon (see panopticon gaze). In B of the development of media technologies in his Discipline and Punish (Penguin, 1977) he likens book Media Technology and Society: A History the Panopticon to the Christian God’s inﬁ nite from the Telegraph to the Internet (Routledge, knowledge, and to computer monitoring of indi- C 1998). See technological determinism. See viduals in advanced capitalism. He argues that also topic guide under media: technologies. surveillance as represented by the contemporary D ▶ M. Hank Hausler, Media Facades: History, Technol- Panopticon creates subjects responsible for their ogy and Media Content (AVEdition, 2009). own subjection (see privacy). Surround See eisenberg’s model of commu- We are subject to surveillance not only as E nication and identity, 2001. citizens but also as audience for media. In an Surveillance Keeping watch; used in a media article entitled ‘Tracking the audience’, in Ques- F sense, the word indicates the way in which tioning Media: A Critical Introduction (Sage,

listeners, viewers or readers employ the media 1990), edited by John Downing, Ali Mohammadi G with the aim of gleaning information from them: and Annabelle Srebemy-Mohammadi, Oscar ‘TV news provides food for thought’ or ‘I like Gandy Jr remarks how the fragmentation of to see how big issues are sorted out.’ Equally audience for media, rendered possible by new H surveillance implies the process of authority and technology, has resulted in a desperation among its agencies keeping watch on the public. See programme-makers that has led to two strate- I uses and gratifications theory. gies aimed at survival. Surveillance society New technology has vastly Th ese, Gandy identifi es as rationalization, that JK increased and speeded up access to personal is ‘the pursuit of effi ciency in the production, data by those in authority, or those individuals or distribution, and sale of goods and services’, and organizations involved in fi nancial, administra- surveillance which ‘provides the information L tive or commercial transactions with members necessary for greater control’. Increasingly, says of the public. Each time we use a switch card; Gandy, ‘the surveillance of audiences resembles M each time we dial a telephone number, drive past police surveillance of suspected criminals’ and a CCTV camera (or even leave our front door), people are less and less aware that their behav- N we off er notifi cation of our activities, our where- iour as audience is being measured. abouts, and our lifestyle. David Lyon in The In A Report of the Surveillance Society for the Electronic Eye: Th e Rise of Surveillance Society UK Information Commissioner (2006), edited O (University of Minnesota Press, 1994) identifi es by David Murakami Wood, the team of authors four domains of surveillance in contemporary write of ‘massive surveillance systems that P life – government administration, policing underpin modern existence’. While acknowledg- and security, the workplace and the consumer ing that surveillance has benefi ts to society, the R market place; and for Lyon, a key characteristic proliferation of modes of surveillance is produc- of surveillance is that it operates across boundar- ing ‘situations where distinctions of class, race, ies. gender, geography and citizenship are currently S Th e concept of a surveillance society is not being exacerbated and institutionalized’. new. Th e English philosopher, social and legal A danger identifi ed by the Report is that we T reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), in a ‘may become accustomed to being surveilled’, proposal for the humanitarian treatment of our ‘activities and movements tracked and also U prisoners, suggested the construction of what he anticipated, without our noticing it, and – espe- called a Panopticon. Th is was a circular building cially in the public services – without the ability of cells with a central watchtower from which to opt in or opt out, or to understand fully what V constant surveillance of the prisoners would take happens to our data’. The Report, freely available as a download, place, without their being certain at any given W time that they were being directly observed. explains in detail a range of devices and develop- Th ey would be well aware, of course, of the pres- ments in surveillance, touching on social sorting, ence of surveillance and this knowledge would, function creep and location technology. The XYZ without coercion, rule their behaviour until, so editors warn that ‘technologies are at their most Bentham theorized, their good behaviour would important when they become ubiquitous, taken become self-regulating. for granted and largely invisible’. For several commentators the Panopticon Of course in the age of social networking has become a metaphor for our own times. (see networking: social networking),

293 SWOT

surrendering privacy rather than guarding it has Journal of Communication, Autumn, 1985, become the online fashion. Th rough facebook, writes of ‘shared fantasies’ which ‘provide youtube and twitter, etc. we post details of group members with comprehensible forms for ourselves for all to read; we risk surveillance explaining the past and thinking about the future (some call it stalking) because it is a two-way – a basis for communal and group conscious- process, an opportunity for interactivity, regard- ness’ (see narrative paradigm). less of the dangers of ‘consorting with strangers’. Bormann posits a three-part structure to the See biometrics; cctv: closed-circuit tele- theory: (1) the part which deals with the discovery vision; echelon; internet: monitoring of and arrangement of recurring communicative content; regulation of investigatory forms and patterns that indicate the evolution powers act (ripa) (uk), 2000; journalism: and presence of a shared group consciousness; phone-hacking; usa – patriot act, 2001. (2) the part which consists of a description of See also topic guides under media: freedom, the dynamic tendencies within communication censorship; media issues & debates. systems ‘that explain why group consensuses SWOT Analytical approach widely used to scan arise, continue, decline, and disappear’, and the and evaluate the internal and external environ- eff ects such group consensus has in terms of ment of an organization. It can also be employed meanings, motives and communication within to evaluate specific organizational activities, the group: the basic communication process is for example the design of new products, as the dynamic of people sharing group fantasies; well as in planning marketing and public and (3) that part of the theory which consists of relations campaigns. Th e approach taken is the factors which explain why people share the to analyse Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportuni- fantasies they do, and when. ties and Th reats. In Exploring Public Relations By ‘fantasy’ Bormann means the creative and (Pearson Education, 2009), Ralph Tench and imaginative shared interpretation of events ‘that Liz Yeomans provide some examples: strengths fulfi l a group psychological or rhetorical need’. may include brand loyalty and well-motivated What the author terms ‘rhetorical fantasies’ are employees, whilst a limited range of products the result of ‘homo narrans in collectives sharing or an ageing customer-base may be identifi ed narratives that account for their experiences and as weaknesses; potential opportunities could their hopes and fears’. Such rhetorical fantasies include new markets and threats can include may include ‘fanciful and fictitious scripts of the possibility of political instability aff ecting imaginary characters, but they often deal with operations. Th ey further comment that whilst things that have actually happened to members the organization itself can often determine its of the group or that are reported in authenti- strengths and weaknesses, ‘opportunities and cated works of history, in the news media, or in threats, are generally external to the organiza- the oral history and folklore of other groups and tion and can be derived from wider environ- communities’. mental analysis … but are usually related to Th e sharing of fantasies brings a ‘convergence those factors that have a direct impact on it’. See of appropriate feelings among participants epistle. ... when members of a mass audience share Sykes Committee Report on Broadcasting, a fantasy they jointly experience the same 1923 See bbc, origins. emotions, develop common heroes and villains, Symbol Any object, person or event to which celebrate certain actions as laudable, and inter- a generally agreed, shared meaning has been pret some aspect of their common experience in given, and which individuals have learned to the same way’. accept as representing something other than Th is Bormann names symbolic convergence. itself: a national fl ag represents feelings of patri- Whilst the ‘rational world paradigm’ claims otism and national unity, for example. Symbols that there is an objective truth which speakers are almost always culture-bound. See iconic; can mirror in their communication, and against metaphor; myth; semiology/semiotics; which its logic and argument can be tested and sign; signification. evaluated (and therefore regards myth and ‘Symbolic annihilation of women’ (by the fantasy as untrue, as the recounting of false- media) See norms. hoods), for those giving credence to shared Symbolic code See codes of narrative. fantasies, ‘the stories of myths or fantasy themes Symbolic convergence theory Ernest G. are central’. Bormann in his article ‘Symbolic convergence An underlying assumption of the theory seems theory: a communication formulation’ in the to be that fantasies are not only creative but also

294 Synchronous sound

benign. It would be interesting to apply symbolic cians, vaudeville and radio stars. As a technical A convergence theory, the notion of homo narrans, possibility, synchronous sound had been inviting to fantasies entertained about racial superiority, interest from movie makers from as early as B where fantasy becomes a nightmare. See topic 1902. In that year Monsieur Gaumont gave an guide under communication theory. address to the Société Française de la Photog- ▶ Ernest G. Bormann, Communicative Th eory (Holt, raphie, on film and employing synchronous C Rinehart & Winston, 1980); The Force of Fantasy: sound. Indeed, two years earlier Herr Ruhmer Restoring the American Dream (Illinois University demonstrated what he called ‘light telephony’ to D Press, 1985). record sound directly onto the ﬁ lm itself – the Symbolic interactionism Term associated ﬁ rst soundtrack. with the ideas of American scholar Herbert Following the inventions of the thermionic E Blumer and crystallized in his book Symbolic valve by John Fleming in 1904 and the audion Interactionism: Perspective and Method (Univer- vacuum tube by Lee De Forest in 1907, ampli- F sity of California Press, 1969; first paperback fication of sound by comparatively simple

edition, 1986). Blumer sees ‘meaning as arising electric methods was feasible: the studios were G in a process of interaction between people’. Th e simply not interested, fearing, perhaps, the meaning of an object or a phenomenon for one impact language diﬀ erences might have on the person ‘grows out of the ways in which other universal appeal of ﬁ lm as mime, whose only H persons act towards the person with regard verbal language was easily translatable titling to the thing’, that is the thing’s symbolic value. (see reference to suppression of radical potential I Symbolic interactionism sees meaning as a in supervening social necessity).

social product, as a creation ‘formed in and Though Lee De Forest’s Phonofilm of 1923 JK through the defi ning activities of people as they demonstrated how light waves could synchro- interact’. All meanings, emphasizes Blumer, are nize sound and image, and though the Germans subject to a constant and recurring ‘interpreta- had developed the finest early sound system L tive process’; and this is a ‘formative process in of all, Tri-Ergon, the continuing profitability which meanings are used and revised as instru- of the silent movie blinded the studios to two M ments for the guidance and formation of action’. signifi cant facts: the potential of silent fi lm had See self-concept; self-identity; semiol- practically been exhausted; and audiences were N ogy/semiotics; semiotic power. becoming bored. Symmetry, strain towards Concept posed Lights of New York (1928) was the first all- by Th eodore Newcomb in ‘An approach to the talking picture and within a year thousands of O study of communicative acts’, Psychological cinemas had been equipped for sound. Warner’s Review, 63 (1953). Th e act of communication is vitaphone disc was soon replaced by optical P characterized, believes Newcomb, by a ‘strain sound systems where images and sound were put towards symmetry’, that is towards balance and together on the same fi lm, to make the married R consistency. See congruence theory; inter- print where sound synchronization with the personal communication; newcomb’s abx picture could not be lost. As sound recording model of communication, 1953. techniques developed, dialogue, sound eff ects S Synchronic linguistics See linguistics. and music were recorded separately, using a Synchronous sound In film, sound effects magnetic sound process, and then mixed at a T synchronized with the visual image were fi rst later stage, thus allowing latitude for changes used commercially in 1926, in Don Juan, but and creative editing. U it was Th e Jazz Singer in November 1927 that Th e introduction of sound did not rescue the caused the sensation among audiences and cinema from the general economic slump that marked the birth of the ‘Talkies’. Warner Broth- followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929. During V ers had been heading for oblivion in the cut- 1931, cinema attendances in the US dropped by 40 per cent and in 1932 the movie business throat world of the hollywood studios when W the company adopted a system developed by the lost between US 4 and 5 million. However, it Bell Telephones Laboratories which reproduced was probably the new dimension of sound in sound from large discs, matching sound and the cinema that enabled the industry to rally so XYZ picture by mechanical linkage. Nothing in the quickly. cinema was ever the same again. The ‘Talkies’ interacted substantially with Th e ‘Talkies’ marked the end of many careers radio, the one drawing technical and creative made in the silent era, but created new opportu- ideas as well as talented personnel from the nities for actors from the theatre, writers, musi- other. By 1937, 90 per cent of US-sponsored

295 Synergy

national radio programmes in the US were commercial requirements’, whilst on the macro transmitted from Hollywood. See topic guides level it ‘can be seen as a social phenomenon both under media history; media technologies. instigating and symbolizing major changes to Synergy The establishment of relationships the constitution of society’. between differing areas and/or organizations Esser’s study focuses on the micro level of the within the cultural and media industries that tabloidization process, meaning ‘a change in the allow for greater efficiency in the production range of topics being covered (more entertain- and promotion of two or more cultural/media ment, less information), in the form of presenta- artefacts. An example of synergy is when the tion (fewer longer stories, more shorter ones with launching of a new fi lm is accompanied by the pictures and illustrations) and a change in the promotion of a wide range of related merchan- mode of address (more street talk when address- dise. Conglomerates (see conglomerates: ing readers)’. He argues that the nature, evolution media conglomerates) are in an enviable and relative predominance of tabloidization position to take advantage of the benefits of varies between America, the UK and Germany; synergies. thus it is an ‘extremely problematic term’ and can Examples of synergic partnerships have ‘therefore only be analysed with reference to the multiplied until they have become a norm, and respective media cultures and journalistic tradi- involve a range of sponsors and benefi ciaries; tions’ of the countries in question. thus McDonald’s burgers and fries synergize For example, tabloidization has never taken with Disney movies while Coca-Cola synergizes hold in Germany to the extent that it has in with Harry Potter books and fi lms. Perhaps the the UK; in part because, as far as sex scandals classic synergic relationship is between sport are concerned, Germany has a strong privacy and big business, though the arts and business law that ‘also protects public fi gures’. He cites are not far behind. See product placement. research evidence showing that extensive cover- Syntactics A branch of semiology/semiotics; age of scandals can increase public disillusion- the study of the signs and rules relating to signs, ment with public life, hence the fears which without reference to meaning. many commentators have ‘that a shift towards Syntagm See paradigm. sensation, emotion and scandal may have some Syntax Th e combination of words into signifi cant negative eff ects on democracy’ (see journal- patterns; the grammatical structure in sentences. ism: phone hacking). Currently the term tabloidization is used to describe what many critics see happening both T to the serious, broadsheet newspaper, and to TV Tabloid, tabloidese, tabloidization In news, in the sense that they are ‘getting more ‘“Tabloidization” of news: a comparative analysis and more like the tabloids’, matching them for of Anglo-American and German press journal- populist content and design, and demonstrat- ism’ (European Journal of Communication, ing the same fascination for covering the lives September 1999) Frank Esser writes that the and antics of celebrities. In other words, the term ‘tabloid’ orginally referred to a pharma- accusation is that while the tabloids – in the UK ceutical trademark for the concentrated form of referred to as the ‘red tops’ – are already dumbed medicines as pill or tablet: ‘Th is narcotic tabloid down, the dumbing-down process is actually eff ect and the fact that it is easy to swallow have what is happening to traditionally serious media. been readily transferred to the media.’ See topic guide under language/discourse/ Th e term, in the UK, is used to refer to the narrative. size of a newspaper (in comparison with the ▶ Rodrigo Uribe and Barrie Gunter, ‘Research note: broadsheet format), but in general ‘tabloidese’ the tabloidization of British tabloids’, European Jour- describes the nature of news content and style. nal of Communication (September, 2004); Martin Esser quotes Marvin Kalb, Director of the Conboy, Tabloid Britain (Routledge, 2005); Anita Shorenstein Centre on the Press, Politics and Biressi and Heather Nunn, eds, Th e Tabloid Culture Public Aff airs at Harvard University: tabloidese Reader (Open University Press, 2008). is characterized by ‘a downgrading of hard news Tactics and strategies Th ese terms are used in and upgrading of sex, scandal and infotainment’. a number of contexts within the media, culture At the micro level, states Esser, tabloidization and communication fi eld. Th e term tactics refers ‘can be seen as a media phenomenon involving to the varying activities that can be undertaken the revision of traditional newspaper and other within a strategy. A strategy refers to the media formats driven by reader preferences and intentional co-ordination of activities; tactics,

296 Taste

to achieve a desired, often long-term, goal. the speaker, and weakens the impact of what is A Numerous tactics may be employed within a said. However, there is some debate here. Tag strategic plan: for example, a public relations questions can serve a range of functions, some B (pr) practitioner may use tactics such as press relating to the content of speech, others relating conferences, press releases or launch events to the facilitation of interaction and the relation- within a long-term strategy of raising the proﬁ le ships and attitudes of the participants to one C of a client. another. Michel de Certeau in Th e Practice of Everyday When used to facilitate interaction, tag D Life (University of California Press, 1984), when questions do not seem to be associated with analysing everyday cultural consumption, draws tentativeness; indeed, the tendency here is for a distinction between the strategies of the tags to be associated with powerful speakers. E powerful controllers of the cultural industries Several studies suggest that women use more tag and the tactics of the relatively powerless ordi- questions than men when acting as facilitators in F nary consumers in ﬁ nding their own space for an interaction.

creating meaning, by adapting to their own use Take See shot. G mass-produced cultural artefacts. Talkies See synchronous sound. Some of these tactics subvert or resist the Talloires Declaration, 1981 Concerned at the intentions and intended messages of the power- attempts by the United Nations Educational, H ful. De Certeau’s distinction, whilst acknowledg- Scientiﬁ c and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) ing that audiences/consumers may be active in seemingly to impose upon world information I their consumption, does not imply that they have systems a ‘New Order’ which would be charac-

by any means the degree of power over cultural terized by far-reaching controls, representatives JK consumption exercised by those who own and from news organizations of twenty countries control the cultural industries. met in the French village of Talloires in May 1981. A more recent example of the use of such Th ey issued a Declaration which insisted that L strategic power by those who own or control journalists sought no special protected status, as companies within the media, culture and was perceived to be UNESCO’S intention, and M communications sector can be seen in the use that they were united in a ‘joint declaration to of social media within the protests that occurred the freest, most accurate and impartial informa- N in 2011 in areas of the Middle-East. Margareta tion that is within our professional capacity to Pagano in the 13 February 2011 edition of Th e produce’. The Declaration asserted that there Independent on Sunday, commenting on the- could be no double standards of freedom for O then current protests in Egypt, noted that some rich and poor countries. See macbride commis- mobile operators and Internet service providers sion; media imperialism. See also topic P bowed to pressure from the Egyptian govern- guide under global perspectives. ment and closed down their services for several Tamizdat See samizdat. R days, despite their obligations to their custom- Taste In a media sense, the notion of good or bad ers. However, this government strategy was taste generally relates to decisions about how undermined by a tactical response from those much and how far; the answers to these ques- S protesters able to use their technical knowledge tions depend upon audience expectations and to circumvent the shutdowns and continue readiness, and the degree of access and imme- T mobilization of support for the protests. See diacy. A photograph of an execution, reproduced audience: active audience; semiotic in a newspaper or magazine, is sufficiently U power; smart mobs. controlled by the frame of print and the fact that Tag A key word or phrase used for quick and the event took place in the past, to escape the convenient identiﬁ cation in online postings; a accusation of bad taste. V pointer to the nature of the content or theme. However, there were vigorous protests when, on

Take, for example, a posting on the topic of TV news, a Vietcong prisoner had a pistol put to W news values. The following tags might be his head, and the trigger pulled. Th is was bringing, employed to attract the attention of users/ as it were, too much reality into the sitting room. visitors: amplification, frequency, familiarity, It may have been the truth, ran the argument, XYZ correspondence, etc. but somehow the reproduction and presentation Tag questions Th e addition of phrases such as turned reality into theatre, indeed into macabre ‘Isn’t it?’ or ‘Don’t you think?’ at the end of a entertainment. As such it appeared an insult to statement as tag questions, according to some human dignity, to that of the victim and to that of linguists, suggests tentativeness on behalf of the audience cast in the role of voyeurs.

297 Taxes on knowledge

Taste can also be used to refer to the cultural exclusion. See audience differentiation; or aesthetic tastes of an individual or group, and audience measurement; vals typology. such tastes can be used as signifi ers of economic Technique: Ellul’s theory of technique In and cultural capital and used as a means of a number of books written between the 1950s social distinction. Th is perspective on taste owes and 1990, Jacques Ellul saw contemporary much to the work of Pierre Bourdieu outlined society as being dominated by technological in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment advances, each aiding the mediating power of of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1984). He mass communication; and together leading to argued that an individual’s taste was signifi cantly a society in which effi ciency and consequently infl uenced, though not totally determined, by conformity become the key determinants of his/her class background, and thus aspects of human aff airs. Ellul uses the term ‘technique’ to taste could be read as both a product and a signi- suggest the generality of attitudes to, and uses fi er of class affi liation. of, machines in everyday life, applying equally to Bourdieu uses the term habitus to refer to social production as to material production. the collection of unconscious dispositions that His view is a bleak one, seeing efficiency, individuals may have as a result of their location brought about by the wholesale adoption by within the class structure; these may then infl u- those who rule and those who are ruled, as being ence tastes, body image and bodily communica- both authoritarian in tendency and beyond the tion: a person might buy an Armani suit but he/ control of governments: ‘Technical advance,’ she will also need to look at ease wearing it, to says Ellul in Th e Technological Society (Knopf, carry off the statement it may make about his/ 1964), ‘gradually invades the state, which in turn her social position. is compelled to assume forms favourable to this Bourdieu’s view that class signifi cantly infl u- advance.’ Politicians, Ellul sees as ‘impotent satel- ences an individual’s tastes has been criticized, lites of the machine, which with all its parts and in part because some commentators argue that techniques, apparently functions as well without class distinction in modern-day society is less them’. However, the politicians do not step down. easy to defi ne than in the past, and generally Instead they create an illusion of politics and considered of diminishing importance. However, political leadership. this is not to say that people are unaware Ellul anticipates the response that the Infor- of the signs of distinction located in some mation Age has brought about a more involved tastes. See communication, non-verbal public in the political process. For him the (nvc); consumption behaviour; culture: sheer volume of information works to reinforce consumer culture; culture: popular the technological society by overwhelming the culture; object language; self-identity. citizen. In a detailed analysis of Ellul’s theory of ▶ Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Post- technique in ‘Hegemony, agency, and dialectical modernism (Sage, 1991); Fran Martin, ed., Interpreting tension in Ellul’s technological society’ in the Everyday Culture (Edward Arnold, 2003); David Bell Journal of Communication (Summer 1998), Rick and Joanne Hollows, eds, Ordinary Lifestyles: Popu- Clifton Moore writes: ‘This is not to say that lar Media, Consumption and Taste (Open University all of the blame for the political illusion must Press/McGraw-Hill Education, 2005); Jean-Pascal be laid at the feet of the state and the media. Daloz, Th e Sociology of Elite Distinction (Palgrave Ellul’s orientation suggests the complicity of Macmillan, 2010). the citizens themselves ... Th e modern citizen is Taxes on knowledge See stamp duty. much too willing to accept the comfortable route Taxonomic conquistadors Term used by Bill of technique, rather than make diffi cult choices Nicholls in Blurred Boundaries: Questions of that would require humanness.’ Meaning in Contemporary Culture (University Th e public, in Ellul’s view, is subject to, and of Indiana Press, 1994) to describe the agencies, in thrall to, the ‘spectacle-orientated society’ in sociological and marketing, that subject humans which everything is ‘subordinated to visualiza- to classification or segmentation. Nicholls tion’ and ‘nothing has meaning out of it’. In admits the dangers inherent in placing people today’s society, Ellul says, there are many, and into (often stereotypical) slots, but concedes powerful, deterrents of human freedom. A key that ‘with no categories at all culture itself would question is whether, in societies where ‘covet- disappear’. Th e use of the term conquistadors ousness and the desire for power’ are human suggests that such taxonomies – lists of classifi - constants across all cultural boundaries, there cation – have an enforcing and shaping capacity is suffi cient agency among citizens to achieve through powers of persuasion and of inclusion/ freedom. See hegemony; ideological state

298 Teledemocracy

apparatuses; ideology; internet; mcdon- Despite problems of competing formats and A aldization; semiotic power; surveillance divergent standards, consumption through society; web 2.0. See also topic guide under economies of scale has turned niche markets into B media: technologies. a global industry fed by an insatiable appetite for Technological determinism Th e view that if new and better applications (termed apps). Such something is technically feasible, then it is both all-embracing comsumerization raises questions C desirable and bound to be realized in practice. concerning the interplay between leisure and Evidence points to the fact that such determin- work: should companies permit or forbid their D ism is only partly convincing. Much technology employees from, for example, surﬁ ng the Net usage is a by-product of technology devised for during working hours; or should they embrace other purposes. radio became an ‘inevitability’, the practice as potentially – being essentially a E for example, largely because its determinant was social medium – of integral value in business radar, required to fulfil military needs, while operations? See mobilization; web 2.0. See F satellites had a long record of military/political also topic guide under media: technologies.

functions before they began to beam sporting Telecommunication Tele means far off, at a G events to the peoples of the world. distance; a telecommunication is communication Set against notions of technological determin- by telegraphy or telephone, with or without ism is a second theory, symptomatic technology, wires or cables. In telephony and telegraphy, H which argues that technology is a by-product signals are transmitted as electric impulses along of a social process which itself has been other- wires. In radio and TV the signals are transmit- I wise determined. In Television: Technology ted through space as modulations of carrier

and Cultural Form (Fontana, 1974), Raymond waves of electromagnetic radiation. See tele- JK Williams says that basically both theories are text; wireless telegraphy; world trade in error because in different ways they have organization (wto) telecommunications ‘abstracted technology from society’ instead of agreement, 1997. L examining the crucial interaction between them. Teledemocracy Term used to describe theories Of course part of that interaction is the belief that telecommunications serve to advance M in technological determinism, and the risk of it democracy by the rapid transmission of infor- becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. mation across boundaries, the openness of N Dwayne Winseck in ‘Pursuing the Holy Grail: debate, interactive exchange and participation information highways and media reconvergence in the digital age. Optimistic commentators in Britain and Canada’ in the European Journal see the Internet as a powerful agent of change, O of Communication, September 1998, argues likening it to the agora, where citizens are that contrary to ‘the belief that technological better informed about what is going on locally, P factors determine how media are organized’, the regionally, nationally and globally, and better primary drivers of media evolution ‘are machi- able to take part in democratic action. R nations between governments and industries, It has become increasingly diﬃ cult for govern- visions of how markets should evolve, and ideas ments to suppress information or to prevent about whether communication constitutes citizens from diﬀ using that information across S just another commodity or is something more the population, and thus easier for popular pres- imbued with cultural consideration and public sure to grow and shift from online platforms to T service values’. See internet; supervening the streets. Th e 30-year absolutist rule of Hosni social necessity. See also topic guide under Mubarak in Egypt appeared to be toppled in U media issues & debates. February 2011 by mass demonstrations which, Technology: the consumerization of at least in part, were inspired by computer- technology A neat definition is offered by facilitated information and calls by any teleco- V Wikipedia: ‘In many ways, consumerization is municative means to assemble and demand an

the process by which the IT industry is being end to authoritarian rule and progress towards W transformed from its roots as a business tool democracy. into primarily a social medium. Its consequences A sober word of caution is oﬀ ered by Timothy are expected to grow sharply in the future.’ Th e Garton Ash in a UK Guardian article written at XYZ shift from a base of business and industry to one the time of Mubarak’s fall, ‘Not 1989. Not 1789. of individual use has been driven by popular But Egyptians can learn from other revolutions’ demand, which has run neck and neck with (10 February 2011). Th e author, referring to the technological development: today’s device is perceived power of communication technolo- tomorrow’s museum piece. gies, says that while they ‘matter enormously …’

299 Telegenic

they ‘did not prevent popular protest movements able boost of publicity to telegraphy: in 1845 being crushed in Belarus and Iran’. Th ey have a a suspected murderer was spotted boarding a catalytic eff ect but ‘they do not determine the London-bound train at Slough; the news was outcome … we must remind ourselves that these telegraphed to Paddington and the man was moments are always transient. Th e hard grind of arrested on arrival and later found guilty and consolidating liberty is all ahead’. hanged. As for the specifi c impact of online ‘people In the US, Samuel Morse’s first working power’, a similar warning was issued by Ron telegraph of 1837 depended on the making and Deibert in ‘Blogging dangerously’ (Index on breaking of an electric current: an electromag- Censorship, Vol. 39. No. 4, 2010). He writes, ‘In netically operated stylus recorded the long and no other time during the internet’s history has short dashes of Morse Code on a moving strip of it been as dangerous to publish on the web as paper. After much persuasion, the US Congress, it is now …Whereas once governments were in 1843, voted to pay Morse (1791–1872) to build either incapable of, or chose not to, regulate the the fi rst telegraph line in America, from Balti- internet, today they are reasserting themselves more to Washington. It was in the following year, dramatically and forcefully’ by ‘the implementa- using the Morse Code on this line, that Morse tion of new and more rigid laws around slander, transmitted his famous message: ‘What hath libel and copyright’. God wrought!’ Diebert believes it is important to remember Development of telegraphy was swift. By that ‘cyberspace is owned and operated by the 1862 the world’s telegraph system covered some private sector. Decisions taken for market 150,000 miles, including 15,000 in the UK. A reasons can end up having major consequences, method of printing the coded telegraph messages though often without public accountability or had been invented in 1845 and was developed in transparency’. the US as ‘House’s Printing Telegraph’. In 1850 a Social networking has ‘led to a proliferation telegraph cable had been laid across the English of voices’ but has ‘also produced a much deeper Channel. In 1858 the Atlantic was spanned exposure of personally incriminating informa- by telegraph cable. The duplex telegraphy of tion’. See blogosphere; censorship; democ- Th omas Alva Edison (1847–1931) made it possi- racy and the media; digital optimism; ble to transmit two messages simultaneously effects of the mass media; facebook; over the same line; soon, four- and fi ve-message internet: denial of service; mobiliza- systems followed, and ultimately the teleprinter. tion; networking: social networking; Picture transmission by telegraphy resulted from twitter. See also topic guide under media: the development work of English physicist Shel- politics & economics. ford Bidwell, the fi rst such transmissions taking Telegenic Looking good on TV – a factor that has place in 1881. See telex. had particular signifi cance in the domain of poli- ‘Th e signifi cance of telegraphy,’ writes James tics, but also applies in many other walks of life, W. Carey in Communication as Culture (Rout- including working on TV, where the telegenic ledge, 1992) ‘is that it led to the selective control is associated with youth and ageing, especially and transmission of information. Th e telegraph among women broadcasters. See lookism. operator was able to monopolize knowledge, if Telegraphy Only after the discovery of the only for a few moments, along a route; and this magnetic effect of electric current was teleg- brought a selective advantage in trading and raphy possible. The first telegraph consisted speculation.’ It also ushered-in a new language of a compass needle that was defl ected by the of journalism, what Ernest Hemingway magnetic field produced by electric currents called ‘the lingo of the cable’ – terse, precise; which fl owed through the circuit whenever the as Carey puts it, ‘a form of language stripped transmitting key was depressed and contact of the local, the regional, and colloquial ... established. Th e fi rst patent for an electric tele- something closer to a “scientific” language, graph was taken out by William Fothergill Cooke a language of strict denotation in which the and Charles Wheatstone in June 1837, and later connotative featurers of utterance were under in the same year they demonstrated a fi ve-needle rigid control’. telegraph to the directors of the London and Telegraphy continues to be widely used by Birmingham railway. news services, the Stock Exchange telex service, A year later the Great Western Railway public message services, certain police and fi re connected Paddington and West Drayton by alarm systems and private-line companies for telegraph line, which soon gave a consider- data transmission. See telephone; wireless

300 Television

telegraphy. See also topic guide under network inﬁ nitely more versatile than could have A media history. been envisaged by the pioneers’. ▶ Brian Winston, Media, Technology and Society: A Now telephone lines serve complex computer B History: From the Telegraph to the Internet (Rout- data systems; documents are transmitted via ledge, 1998). telephone – a scanning head records the light Telematics Term referring to the merging of tele- and shade of the document as it turns on a rotat- C communications and computers, brought about ing drum, translating intensity of tone into elec- by digitization. Th e 1s and 0s of the computer trical impulses for transmission over the wire to D are converted into tones relayed over telephone be retranslated at the receiving end. Telephone lines and then reconverted at the other end of lines also carry telex services. the line by another computer. Thus informa- Microwave transmission techniques now E tion can be held centrally, dispatched rapidly, allow telephone calls through air, free of wires, updated easily and networked internationally. poles or underground conduits. Transmitting F Th is trans-border data ﬂ ow (TBDF) is enhanced from point to point, tall towers now beam as

by satellites, the advantage of whose use is many as 1,500 calls on a single carrier wave. Th e G that transmission costs do not rise in relation to London Post Oﬃ ce Tower has a potential load the distance being covered (as is the case with capacity of 150,000 telephone calls and capacity microwaves and cables); as long, that is, as the to transmit 100 TV channels. H communication falls within the ‘footprint’ of the Mobile phones (see mobilization) can same satellite. be said to be the technological advance that, I Telephone In his early years a Scotsman, Alex- more swiftly than any other, became a means

ander Graham Bell (1857–1922), knew Charles of communication on a mass scale, to the point JK Wheatstone (1802–75), co-inventor of teleg- where their use began to be seen as a public raphy, and also Alexander John Ellis, an expert nuisance. Th eir increasing sophistication (and in sound. Ellis showed Bell that the vibration of the fact that they had become a style accessory) L a tuning fork could be infl uenced by an electric created a new crime – mobile mugging, setting current. He was able to produce sounds very the manufacturers the challenge of making the M like those of a human voice. Bell, teaching deaf- devices inoperable except by the legitimate mutes in Boston, Massachusetts, experimented owner. Today, in addition to phoning in the N on a musical telegraph (1872). He produced traditional way, and text-messaging, users of artifi cial ‘ear-drums’ from sheets of metal and mobiles can tune into the internet as well as linked these with electric wire. radio and TV broadcasts, download music and O In 1876 Bell succeeded in passing a vocal play computer games. message along a wire to an assistant in another Belatedly, in the summer of 2002, justice was P room. The first telephone switching system done to the memory of the Florentine, Antonio was installed in New Haven, Connecticut, in Meucci. Th e US House of Representatives voted R 1878. However, while claiming credit for ‘his’ in favour of recognizing Meucci as the true invention, and being acknowledged down the father of telecommunications, 113 years after his years as the inventor of the telephone, Bell must death. See topic guides under media history; S surrender the accolade to an unknown Italian, media: technologies. Antonio Meucci (1808–89), who demonstrated Telephone tapping See journalism: phone- T his ‘teletrofono’ in New York in 1860. Alas, hacking; privacy. Meucci’s poverty (he could not aff ord the US Teletext Data in textual or graphic form trans- U 250 needed to patent his ‘talking telegraph’) and mitted via the TV screen; the broadcasting his failure to secure fi nancial backing left the version of viewdata, which is telephone-linked. way open for Bell – who had shared a laboratory In the UK, the BBC provides its CEEFAX V with Meucci and thus had access to his fi ndings information service; the commercial television

– to ﬁ le a patent and pursue a lucrative deal with equivalent was, until 1993, the Oracle service. W Western Union. In the auction for such services, empowered A hundred years later, the US telephone by the broadcasting act (UK), 1990, the system, largely the monopoly of the company licence-winner was Teletext UK, a consortium XYZ Bell founded, was handling an average of over headed by Associated Newspapers and Philips, 240 million phone conversations a day and, the electronics company. Th e name of the new as Maurice Richards points out in Th e World service from 1993 is Teleview. Communicates (Longman, 1972), the telephone Television See television broadcasting. See system had ‘developed into a communications also topic guide under broadcasting.

301 Television Act (UK), 1954

Television Act (UK), 1954 Gave birth to that a public demonstration was made by the commercial television in the UK; the Act set up National Broadcasting Company (NBC). the Independent Television Authority (later to be Th e BBC’s nascent TV service closed down named the Independent Broadcasting Author- during the Second World War (1939–45), which ity with the advent of commercial radio). A also hampered TV development in America, rigorous set of controlling rules was imposed on though by 1949 there were a million receivers the Authority, requiring ‘that nothing is included in the US and by 1951, 10 million. In the UK, in the programmes which off ends against good TV transmission resumed in June 1946. Swiftly taste or decency or is likely to encourage or incite TV became, in terms of reach, diversity and to crime or to lead to disorder or to be off ensive popularity of content, the most infl uential and to public feelings or which contains any off ensive most powerful form of mass communication. representation of or reference to a living person’. Th e arrival of colour, transmission by cable and Required were a proper balance in subject- satellite, the possibilities of video recording and matter, a high general standard of quality and due eventually digitization confi rmed and carried ‘accuracy and impartiality’ in the presentation forward the Age of Information while at the of any news given in programmes, in whatever same time turning it into the Age of the Image. form. Th ere were also to be ‘proper proportions’ While TV has displaced, and sometimes in terms of British productions and performance marginalized, other forms of communication, it in order to safeguard against the dumping of has also proved their willing customer, borrow- American material. ing and adapting forms from print, radio and Of vital significance in the Act were the cinema, in turn proving for them a constant elaborate precautions that were made to prevent source of material: how, for example, would advertisers gaining control of programme popular newspapers survive without ‘stories’ content. Th e governing body of ITV as set up by from TV dramas such as soaps? TV fact and the Act was similar in size and function to that of fiction have become so much a part of the the BBC, with seven to ten governors each serv- culture of the modern age that they have become ing for fi ve years and dismissible at the behest its benchmarks and its reality. of the Postmaster-General. Like the BBC, the What’s real is what is on TV; who appears on ITA was to have a limited period of existence, TV is deemed real. If an event does not appear followed by parliamentary review and renewal. on TV it is argued (at a metaphysical level) that See sound broadcasting act (UK), 1972. the event has really not taken place. Because Television broadcasting Technical develop- of the nature of the medium, TV accentuates ments in the UK, the Soviet Union and the US the image over the word, the dramatic over the combined to make TV a feasibility by 1931, when analytical, and critics such as Neil Postman, in a research group was set up in Britain under Amusing Ourselves to Death (Methuen, 1986), Isaac Shoenberg (1880–1963), who had had claim that TV transforms all things into pure considerable experience in radio transmission entertainment. technology in the Soviet Union. He furthered TV delivers audiences to advertisers; in turn the evolution of a practical system of TV advertisers use TV to reinforce the dominance broadcasting based on a camera tube known as of the image, in their case the image arising from the Emitrion and an improved cathode-ray tube imperatives of consumerism. TV news is seen to for the receiver. Shoenberg elected to develop a be a window on the world, a view attracting criti- system of electronic scanning which proved far cal attention from media analyists, who see in superior to the mechanical scanning method its underlying intentions frameworks essentially pioneered by Scotsman John Logie Baird Western in orientation, highly selective and thus (1889–1946), who had first demonstrated his off ering a skewed vision of the world. system publicly in 1926. TV is where partnerships are forged, between Th e BBC was authorized by government to sport and business, fashion, food, health and adopt Shoenberg’s standards (405 lines) for the property and business. It is the venue of lifestyle, world’s fi rst high-defi nition service, which was the route to celebrity, and for these and many launched in 1936; a system that proved suffi- other reasons it is a battleground between ciently successful to continue in the UK until those who are ambitious to control it, the axis 1962, when the European continental 625-line of the ongoing struggle being the tussle between system was introduced. In the US, TV was public and private ownership. The study of slower to develop. It was not until 30 April 1939, the eff ects, infl uence, impact and power of the at the opening of the New York World’s Fair, media largely centres on TV and the questions

302 Television drama

prompting answers are legion: does TV and its don’t want to kick and elbow their way on to it A blizzard of images confuse rather than clarify? must be disowning something in themselves.’ Does it distract rather than aid attention? Does While the pilkington committee report on B it fulﬁ l the fears of those who (subscribing to the broadcasting (uk), 1962 found that the chief notion of a so-termed three-minute culture) rob ‘crime’ of TV was triviality, much of TV drama viewers of the ability to concentrate for more (from the very ﬁ rst drama production on experi- C than a few moments at a time? Does its constant mental TV, the BBC’s Th e Man with a Flower in plethora of images of violence desensitize audi- his Mouth by Luigi Pirandello on 14 July 1930) D ences to examples of violence in the real world? has been a striking exception to that judgment. Will the onward march of online rivals for the In fact, few might argue with the claim that attention of people to TV fragment audiences, TV’s most substantial achievement has been E with implications for culture and community? to encourage generations of quality dramatists Most important of all, in an age of multimedia working specially for the medium, and a canon F provision, what future lies in store for public of plays and drama series, from the BBC and

service broadcasting (psb)? See: catch- commercial TV companies, and, particularly G up tv; dab: digital audio broadcasting; in the US, the cable company HBO (Home Box demotic turn; displacement effect; face- Offi ce), to rival anything produced in the live book; mediapolis; mobilization; network- theatre during the same post-Second World War H ing: social networking; podcast; web 2.0; period. youtube. In the early days of TV drama, plays were I ▶ Anthony Smith, ed., and Richard Patterson, associ- stage-bound, or more accurately, studio-bound, ate ed., (Oxford Television: An International History both in concept and execution, taking for their JK University Press, 1998); Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, model the theatre rather than the cinema; but A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the the ideas of young directors making their mark Internet (Polity, 2002); John Fiske, Reading Television during the 1960s, excited by the possibilities of L (Routledge, 2004); Toby Miller, Television Studies fi lming on location, prevailed. Nell Dunn’s Up (Routledge, 2009); John Fiske, Television Culture (Rout- the Junction (BBC, 1965) marked the fi rst occa- M ledge, 2011); Michael Kackman et al, Flow TV: Televi- sion when virtually the whole story was told on sion in the Age of Media Convergence (Routledge, 2011). fi lm. Th e camera was seen to be as important N Television: catch-up TV Th e majority of broad- as the pen; indeed the camera in many ways casting services in the UK, Europe and the US became the pen. The social and sometimes provide a catch-up TV service enabling viewers political themes favoured by many writers and O to retrieve programmes that have been missed, directors took the cameras more and more out usually in the last seven days. For the most part of the studio and into ‘real life’, and many plays P internet-based, catch-up facilities generally looked like, and had the impact of, documentary. only allow viewers to watch content created by Produced by Tony Garnett, written by Jeremy R the specific broadcaster. BBC TV and radio Sandford and directed by Ken Loach, Cathy shows, for example, can be tuned into free of Come Home (BBC, 1966) detailed the decline charge via the BBC’s iPlayer on Windows, Mac into tragedy of a homeless family in affluent S or Linux; content from ITV shows via the ITV Britain. Th e sense of reality was almost unbear- Player; from Channel 4 via 4 on Demand; from able: the camera was often hand-held, the scenes T Channel Five via Demand Five; and from Sky staged so realistically that the audience was programmes via the Sky Player. tempted to forget it was watching something U Catch-up is also available on the TV set using constructed, not something happening before Digitial TV Services: BT Vision off ers BBC, ITV, their very eyes. 40D and Demand 5 via the TV Replay service. The intimacy, the close scrutiny of humans V Other services such as Virgin Media, Sky, under stress at which fi lm and TV can excel, has rarely been used to more disturbing eff ect than TalkTalk TV, Top Up TV and Fetch TV offer W selective access. Currently no catch-up is off ered with John Hopkins’ quartet of plays Talking to via Freeview. a Stranger (BBC, 1966), described as the fi rst Television drama In an interview printed in authentic masterpiece of television. Th e imme- XYZ The New Priesthood: British Television Today diacy of the medium was stunningly demon- (Allen Lane, 1970), edited by Joan Bakewell strated in Colin Welland’s epic Leeds United! and Nicholas Garnham, TV playwright Dennis (BBC, 1974) about Leeds clothing workers who Potter (1935–95) said of TV, ‘It’s the biggest struck spontaneously in 1970 for an extra ten platform in the world’s history and writers who pence an hour: the camera became part of the

303 Television news: inherent limitations

ongoing action to such an extent that it was Pride and Prejudice, 1995; ITV’s Downton Abbey, impossible to detect what had been scripted and 2010–11). what was happening for real. Crime has dominated the drama airwaves, Much of this kind of drama obviously grew HBO’s Th e Sopranos (1999–2007) being judged from the opportunities of the moment, and from by a panel of UK Guardian journalists in 2010 as improvisation, a method used most notably by the best TV drama series of all time. Also in their Mike Leigh (Hard Labour, 1973; Abigail’s Party, Top 50 came ITV’s Prime Suspect (1991–96) with 1977), who works with actors for long periods a woman in the traditionally ‘male’ lead (DCI before fi lming, encouraging them to become the Jane Tennyson). characters and eventually invent or improvise Hospitals have proved popular locations for their speech and actions. TV drama produced TV drama (BBC’s Casualty from 1996; Holby a host of talent, writers and fi lm-makers never City from 1999), as have schools (BBC’s Grange afraid to deal with challenging subjects, ever- Hill, 1978–2008). Th e world of the supernatural ready to push the boundaries of their chosen has been well-served (CBS’s Th e Twilight Zone, genre. 1959–64; Fox’s The X Files, 1993–2002; WB/ In the UK these included Peter Watkins (Th e UPN’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997–2003), War Game, 1965), Tony Parker (No Man’s Land, though the doyen of all has to be the BBC’s Dr. 1972), Alan Plater (Land of Green Ginger, 1973), Who, the longest-running TV drama of its kind. Alan Bennett (Sunset Across the Bay, 1975), First screened on 23 November 1963, Dr. Who Alan Bleasdale (Boys From the Blackstuff , 1982), commanded the early-evening airwaves until Don Shaw (The Falklands Factor, 1983), Troy 1983. It was relaunched in 2005 and has, at the Kennedy Martin (Edge of Darkness, 1985) and time of writing, chalked up eleven doctors. Stephen Potter (Th e Singing Detective, 1986). It Matching crime has been literary adaptation. is diffi cult to compare the quality of much of ITV’s Brideshead Revisited was based on the the drama output of the 1960s and early 70s and novel by Evelyn Waugh, since when class and that of today, because so little was recorded and, costume have proved staple escapist fare. See where it was, productions were often wiped. web or online drama. Th e one-off play eventually hit the buff ers of ▶ John Tulloch, Television Drama: Agency, Audience economic necessity. In a 1982 publication for the and Myth (Routledge, 1990); David Paget, No Other IBA, Television and Radio, David Cunliff e, then Way to Tell It: Dramadoc/Docudrama on Television Head of Drama at Yorkshire TV, wrote: ‘The (Manchester University Press, 1998). inescapable fact is that over the last few years the Television news: inherent limitations In television single play has spiralled in production analysing the degree of ‘informedness’ between costs and plummeted in popularity.’ Having viewers of TV news and readers of newspapers, moved from the studio to location, plays had two American researchers found that TV makes become ‘nearly Hollywood-size movies’. Cunliff e for less effective retention than the printed cited dramas such as Stephen Potter’s LWT page. John P. Robinson and Dennis K. Davis in series, Rain on the Roof, Blade on the Feather and ‘Television news and the informed public: An Cream in My Coff ee as works that, despite their information-processing approach’, Journal of quality as drama, appealed to ‘relatively small Communication (Summer 1990), found that in sections of viewers’. none of their studies ‘do viewers of TV news Th ere was to be no dearth of drama series, programmes emerge as more informed than which have more over-time impact and are newspaper readers’. more saleable commodities on the international Th ey identify seven inherent limitations of TV programme market. Drama on both sides of as an information medium: (1) a TV newscast the Atlantic proved broad-ranging, from the has fewer words and ideas per news story than portrayal of the lives of the elite (ITV’s Brides- appear in a front-page story in a quality news- head Revisited, 1981; CBS’s Dallas, 1978–1991; paper; (2) attention to a newscast is distracted ABC’s Dynasty, 1981–89) to those at the bottom and fragmented compared to attention when of the heap (BBC’s Boys From the Blackstuff, reading; (3) TV newscasts provide little of the 1982), from crime series (ITV’s The Sweeney, repetition of information, or redundancy, neces- 1975–78; NBC’s Hill Street Blues, 1981–87) to spy sary for comprehension; (4) TV viewers cannot series (BBC’s Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, 1979), ‘turn back’ to, or review, information they do not from the lives on the street (ITV’s Coronation understand or that they need to know to under- Street from 1960; the BBC’s Eastenders, from stand subsequent information; (5) print news 1985) to the stately homes of England (the BBC’s stories are more clearly delineated, with head-

304 Terrorism as communication

lines, columns, etc; (6) TV news programmes the ‘commandments’. A pre-existing code must A fail to coordinate pictures and text; and (7) TV not be imposed on a situation; rather, the situ- has more limited opportunity to review and ation must be examined in the light of evolving B develop an entire story. and changing approaches to moral dilemmas. It is the authors’ view that ‘while TV has the See mediapolis. See also topic guides under power to evoke empathy and interest, time and media issues & debates; media: values & C other constraints prevent this power from being ideology. exercised’. Clearly a number of these limita- Tenth art See video games. D tions has been circumvented by developments Terrestrial broadcasting Th at which is trans- in media technology (the availability of news mitted from the ground and not via satellite. online, on mobile and on iPad) and as a result Territoriality See spatial behaviour. E of the growth in the number and variety of news Terrorism: anti-terrorism legislation (UK) services, not the least the arrival of 24-hour TV Following the destruction of New York’s World F news. Th ese factors do not necessarily under- Trade Centre’s twin towers on 11 September

mine Robinson and Davis’s theory, but they do 2001, the UK government hastened to tighten G raise questions about the current practice of the Terrorism Act of 2000 with the 125-clause newspaper reading in the age of the internet. Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act of 2001, See topic guide under news media. parts of which directly aff ect media communica- H ▶ Steven Barnett, Th e Rise and Fall of Television Jour- tion. Th e Act allows for the arrest and intern- nalism: Just Wires and Lights in a Box? (Bloomsbury ment for up to six months of suspected terror- I Academic, 2011). ists. It permits confi dential information about ‘Television without frontiers’ See european an individual held by any government agency to JK community and media: television with- be disclosed to the intelligence services and the out frontiers. police – for any criminal investigation, not just Telstar Communications satellite launched on 10 for investigations of alleged terrorist off ences. L July 1962; transmitted the fi rst live TV pictures Detention without charge was brought in for between the US and Europe. See satellite foreign nationals suspected of being terrorists or M transmission. considered to be planning terrorist attacks. Ten commandments for media consum- Clause 93 makes it a punishable off ence for N ers In ‘Ethics for media users’ published in the anyone to refuse a police request to remove a European Journal of Communication (December disguise, such as a mask, or face paint. Following 1995), Cees J. Hamelink discusses the role the the terrorist bombs on the London Underground O viewer, reader and listener should adopt in in July 2005, the Prevention of Terrorism Act relation to the ‘quest for freedom, quality and (2005) introduced control orders for suspects, P responsibility in media performance’, arguing based on suspicion not proof, and prohibited that the consumer must not only be aware of the the ‘glorification’ of terrorism. The Counter- R nature of media messages, but also be proactive Terrorism Act (2008) amended the defi nition of in responding to them. The ten ‘command- terrorism by inserting a racial clause. ments’ Hamelink suggests in order to assist In March 2010 a committee of MPs chaired S the consumer with moral choices concerning by Labour MP Andrew Dismore urged that all the media are: Th ou shalt – (1) be an alert and anti-terrorist legislation be reviewed, prompting T discriminating media consumer; (2) actively the response from government that the threat fight all forms of censorship; (3) not unduly of terrorism ‘remains real and serious’. With the U interfere with editorial independence; (4) guard election to power of the Conservative-Liberal against racism and sexist stereotyping in the Democrat coalition government in May 2010, media; (5) seek alternative sources of informa- a decision was taken to abandon the previous V tion; (6) demand a pluralist supply of informa- government’s plans to introduce identity cards (IDs) for the British population, as much on the tion; (7) protect thine own privacy; 8) be a W reliable source of information; (9) not participate grounds of cost as removing a broadly held view in chequebook journalism; and (10) demand that IDs were a curtailment of liberty and would accountability from media producers. have little impact on the war on terrorism. See XYZ The author, however, cautions against regulation of investigatory powers act over-reliance on such a code of user response, (ripa) (uk), 2000; usa – patriot act, 2001. for moral issues and dilemmas ought to be Terrorism as communication Th e main aim of addressed according to situation and context, a terrorist activity in liberal democracies is public- point well made when we take a global view of ity. Th e existence of a free press, and TV and

305 Text

radio companies independent of government of the reader. Th e central concern of semiology authority within societies which subscribe to the is to discover the ways in which given texts can sanctity of the individual’s right to life, provides generate a range of meanings. fertile ground for headline-seeking by acts of Occupying the special attention of analysts in terror such as hijacks, abductions, assassinations recent years is the relationship between texts, and bombings. the way they interconnect, interweave and Publicity for terrorism, and the means to interact upon one another. Intertextuality oper- plan, organize and manage it, was given global ates essentially in the perception and experience momentum with the development of the of audience. A TV movie tells the story of a internet (see mobilization). Th e experience serial killer; TV news reports carnage caused of modern-day terrorism can be instant. Within by a madman loose with an axe; newspaper minutes of 9/11 – the most devastating act of billboards report the latest gang stabbing; and terrorism in history, the destruction of New an art historian claims that the Mona Lisa was York’s Twin Towers on 11 September 2001 – the actually a man. What does the individual make world was witness to the vulnerability of the of all this; how does one text infl uence another most powerful nation on earth. in the mind’s eye; and what part is played by the Suddenly in countries suff ering the carnage response of other individuals? of terrorism, security takes precedence over In a basic sense, intertextuality works at the citizen rights. Th e terrorist draws satisfaction level of simple publicity and promotion. A fi lm from seeing states (often egged on by the media) may be writ large in our consciousness, but rush to curtail rights (such as free speech) and perhaps not only because of the power of the liberties (such as freedom of movement and individual text: there will have been trailers, assembly) which may have taken centuries to publicity material, interviews with the stars on establish. Even the most well-set communities, TV; there will have been conversation about it. confi dent of their values and ways of life, can The power of intertextuality is to blur the be destablized by terrorism. In a democracy, boundaries between individual texts, sometimes the ultimate danger is that the state will answer to morph them. For example, which is the text terrorism with terror: in such a situation, the in a promotional DVD – the chart-busting song role of the media (as watchdog or guard dog) of the rock group, their live TV performance at becomes immensely important. Glastonbury, or memories audiences cherish of Further, as happened in the case of the US, not earlier gigs, earlier recordings, juxtaposed with only were the rights and liberties of American those of predecessors and rivals? Roland Barthes, citizens reined in by legislation (see usa – the French media philosopher, was of the view patriot act, 2001), the country also converted that culture is a web of intertextuality and that the (ungrounded) suspicion that Iraq was texts tend to refer essentially to one another behind the 9/11 atrocity into military invasion, rather than anchor their referral in reality. See aided and abetted by Britain, which incurred codes; decoder; encoder; message; narra- its own version of 9/11 in July 2005. See topic tive. See also topic guide under language/ guides under media issues & debates; media: discourse/narrative; textual analysis. power, effects, influence. Text: integrity of the text With the coming Text According to Tim O’Sullivan, John Hartley, of the internet, two major issues concern the Danny Saunders and John Fiske in Key Concepts producers of texts – books, articles, scripts, in Communication (Methuen, 1983), text refers photographs, music, etc.: the questions of integ- to ‘... a signifying structure composed of signs rity of the text, and of paternity. Copyright laws and codes which is essential to communication’. have until now protected the work of an author. Th is structure can take a variety of forms: fi lm, While a book can be quoted from, it cannot speech, writing, painting, records, for example. be reprinted, reproduced in any way or altered O’Sullivan et al argue that the word text usually without due permission. Th e Net, as yet an open ‘... refers to a message that has a physical existence space for the communication of items of all of its own, independent of its sender and receiver kinds, uncontrolled by traditional regulation and and thus composed of representational codes’. so far evasive of what controls, legal and techni- Text is the focal point of study in semiol- cal, might be applied, has threatened to rob texts ogy/semiotics. Texts are not normally seen of integrity and to ignore their paternity (that as being unproblematic but as capable of being is, the right of the author, composer, artist or interpreted in a variety of ways, depending on performer to command ‘ownership’ of the text). the socio-cultural background and experience In short, networking is open to the abuse

306 Three-dimensional (3D)

of source; indeed texts often soar through divorced from connection with the original A cyberspace with little or no acknowledgement until, arguably, they become primary texts in of source. Released from the tie of ownership, their own right. Where texts interact, intercon- B possibly doctored in whole or in part for what- nect and are interdependent we have what is ever reason, are texts reliable any more? Does termed intertextuality. authorship continue to have any meaning? Theatre censorship See lord chamberlain. C The moral rights of paternity and integrity Theories and concepts of communication

are enshrined in the Berne Convention. Th ey See topic guides under audiences/consump- D are central to the UK’s Copyright Designs and tion & reception of media; communica- Patents Act (1988). Th e right of paternity is the tion theory; communication models; right to be identiﬁ ed as the author of a copyright language/discourse/narrative; media: E work, and that includes adaptations, ﬁ lm rights, power, effects, influence; media: values & etc. Th e major exception in the Berne Conven- ideology; representation. F tion is authorship of the ‘news of the day’. Th e 38 Degrees See online campaigning.

UK Copyright Act also excludes from protec- Three-dimensional (3D) For the early days G tion all work made for the reporting of current of three-dimensional technology, see stere- events, and this includes articles in newspapers oscopy. We associate 3D with the cinema and journals. and television, and speciﬁ cally with the 1950s H A major legal curtailment of the ‘free’ use (and onwards. Th e aim of creating for audience an sometimes abuse) of texts online was passed experience that springs, three-dimensionally, I into law in 2010, in the form of the digital from the screen to add to the thrill and wonder

economy act (uk); a measure deemed by many of cinema has had surges and recessions caused JK to be in its turn an abuse of freedom by permit- by technical problems, expense brought about ting surveillance methods not altogether by the need to either convert cinemas to 3D or, diff erent from stalking. See topic guide under in the case of imax cinemas, to purpose-build L media issues & debates. them, and the volatility of audience interest. Not Texts See open, closed texts. the least of 3D’s problems has been the need for M Text: tertiary text The primary text is that audiences to wear special tinted-lens glasses, which is produced and transmitted –the paint- and reports that prolonged use of these to view N ing, the poem, the poster, the fi lm, what Roland the pyrotechnics of 3D has health hazards. Barthes terms the ‘work’; the secondary text is The anaglyph method of 3D projection that which members of an audience receive, employed two projection systems angled O what is perceived as the text. Th e tertiary text towards the screen. The polarized method results when the fi rst two texts are translated projects images at right-angles to each other. P into conversation between members of the audi- Th e active-shutter method exposes each eye to ence, their families and friends. John Fiske uses alternating images; in this case the 3D glasses, R the term in Television Culture (Methuen, 1987) linked to hardware, open and close the shut- to denote the many uses media messages can be ters over the eyes, enabling each eye to see the put to – interpretative, analytical, affi rmative or correct image. Autostereoscopy, still largely at a S rejective. stage of experiment and development, avoids the Th e existence of the tertiary text indicates that use of glasses altogether. T audience has within its capacity the potential Synchronization of images proved a major to be independent of the preferred reading headache, less so once a single-strip format U residing in the primary text or work (see audi- was introduced, giving 3D cinema popular ence: active audience; empowerment; momentum from the 1970s. Th e imax company, response codes). projecting on 70mm fi lm, carried the fl ag of 3D V A more general use of the terms primary and during the 1980s. Polaroid glasses were introduced in 1986, but the biggest boost to 3D came secondary is current. The primary text is that W which is produced; the secondary text, arising out with the introduction of computer animation, of the fi rst, may take many forms – publicity, trail- digital projection and digital video capture (see ers, critiques, interviews with the author or direc- special effects). XYZ tor, documentaries, translations into other creative James Cameron’s fi lmless Ghosts of the Abyss forms (a novel into a movie or a TV series). (2003) anticipated his highly innovative 3D Secondary texts at least begin as dependants feature Avatar (2009), which illustrated the upon the primary text; they are its satellites. wonders of modern cinema technology but However, these may become more and more also exemplifi ed a longstanding criticism of 3D

307 Third-person eff ect

cinema, the dominance of eff ects over content: and suffi ciency resource in Internet use’, Journal of if what is told on screen does not shock, startle Communication (September, 2008); Ye Sun, Zhong- or amaze audiences in some way, then that dang Pan and Lijiang Shen, ‘Understanding the third- content does not properly serve the nature of the person perception: evidence from a meta-analysis’, medium. Journal of Communication (June, 2008). A glance at the 3D industry, at its many innova- Tie-signs Any action – gesture or posture tory companies dedicated to bringing to the TV – that indicates the existence of a personal rela- screen the wonders of cinema 3D, indicates that tionship is termed a tie-sign: linked arms, held the quandary of eff ects/content is a challenge to hands, body closeness (or proximity), comfort- be met and overcome. Th ere is a proliferation of able silence between two people, instinctive systems with competing brand names such as reciprocal movements. Symbolic tie-signs are Dolby 3D, RealD, TD Vision Systems, XPAND wedding rings, lovers’ tree engravings, etc. See 3D as well as imax. Competing manufacturers of communication, non-verbal (nvc); prox- 3D television are Mtsubishi, Panasonic, Philips, emics. Sony and Toshiba, all chasing the possibilities Time-lapse photography See high-speed of autostereoscopic (glasses-free) screening photography. that has presented serious problems concerning Time-shift viewing Made possible by the focus, fi eld of vision and judder. introduction of the video or DVD recorder. In 2008 the Japanese cable channel BS11 began By recording TV programmes, viewers are broadcasting regular 3D programmes, while in released from the schedules of the broadcasting the US Cablevision launched a subscriber 3D companies to watch programmes of their choice channel in 2010. 3D TV programme projection whenever and as often as desired. came online in Australia, France, Russia and Tor An internet routing network enabling users South Korea. In the UK, Channel 4 ran a short to conceal their identity and protect them from season of 3D fi lms in 2009. British Sky Broad- traffi c analysis. First created by the US Naval casting (BskyB) was the fi rst station to screen a Research Lab, it is currently produced by the football match in 3D, Manchester United versus Tor Project, a United States NGO. Tor blocks Arsenal on 30 January 2010 to public houses attempts by governments, police and all agencies across the country. of surveillance to ‘spy’ on what is being trans- In the US, 3net, a joint venture of major media mitted by whom and to whom. It defends users organizations (Discovery Communication, against the scrutiny by authority and commerce imax, Sony) was launched on direct tv in of patterns of exchange; that is, it serves to resist February 2011. Faith in the continuing viability of unwanted or unknown intruders tracking the 3D can be gauged by ambitious announcements data trails of users. See cryptography; data of future productions, including Star Wars proj- footprint. ects and Avatar 2. Touch Commonly used to communicate intimacy At the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona and friendship, for example in displaying aff ec- in February 2011, LG’s 4.3 inch touchscreen, tion, giving reassurance and comfort and off er- glasses-free Optimus 3D mobile phone was ing congratulations. Touch can be employed to demonstrated to delegates. On sale shortly reinforce attempts to persuade others during afterwards from Carphone Warehouse, Network interpersonal encounters; on occasion it can also 3, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodaphone, it not only be employed to express aggression and domi- provides the usual batch of apps, but also allows nance. Th e rituals of interaction found within users to view and fi lm in 3D, play back through ceremonies may also involve touch. Touching is 3D TV and supplement visits to YouTube 3D commonly used, across many cultures, in rituals with video games. of greeting and farewell. Th ose of higher social Third-person effect Where we judge the standing often initiate touch. status and roles impact/influence of the media to be stronger are inextricably involved in touch-permission or on others than ourselves; and this effect is touch-prohibition: a nurse may touch a patient, countenanced largely when the media message but it is unusual for the patient to touch the is negative or when persuasion by the message nurse, where it constitutes a trespass. is perceived to be less than desirable. In other Th ere can be signifi cant cross-cultural diff er- words, we might not be affected, but others, ences in the rules for the degree and display of usually differentiated from us by cultural or touch, and these can lead to embarrassment social diff erence, are more likely to be. and misunderstanding within social encoun- ▶ Xigen Li, ‘Third-person effect, optimistic bias ters between people from different cultural

308 Transactional analysis

backgrounds. A number of researchers have are produced by a playback of recorded data A identified high-, moderate- and low-contact of events in the past involving real people, real cultures. Stella Ting-Toomey in Communica- times, places and decisions and real feelings. B tion Across Cultures (Guildford Press, 1999) Everyone is seen as carrying these voices inside provides some examples: high-contact cultures them. We interact out of these ‘ego states’. are to be found in Russia, France and Italy, The Parent is much influenced by the C whilst moderate-contact cultures are located in pronouncements of and examples set by our Northern Europe, Australia and the US and low- own parents and other authority ﬁ gures, early in D contact cultures in Japan and China. Th ose from our life. It is concerned with our responsibility high-contact cultures tend to make frequent use towards ourselves and others. It can be critical of touch in conversations – behaviour that might and set standards but it can also be protective E prove disconcerting to those from low-contact and caring. Th e Adult within us is the part of us cultures. An example of a cultural difference that rationally analyses reality. F in the rules for the display of touch is that in The Adult collects information and thinks

Latin American countries it is more common it through in order to solve problems, reach G for males to fully embrace one another in public conclusions and judgements, and make deci- than it is in Britain. See communication, non- sions. Th e Adult develops throughout life and verbal (nvc); eye contact; gesture; inter- can arbitrate between the Parent and the Child. H personal communication; non-verbal Th e Child is one of our most powerful states; it behaviour; repertoire; spatial behaviour. contains our feelings and carries our ability to I ▶ Michael Argyle, Bodily Communication (Methuen, play and act creatively. It can be spontaneous 1988); Desmond Morris (Vintage, People Watching and risk-taking. It can also be rebellious or alter- JK 2002); Allan and Barbara Pease, Th e Defi nitve Book of natively compliant and servile. Body Langauge (Orion, 2004). A transaction is a two-person interaction in Tracks In fi lm-making, tracks are the portable which an ego state of one person stimulates an L ‘railway lines’ along which the camera, mounted ego state of another. Transactions are analysed on a dolly, moves. Th e term is also used to iden- by assessing out of which ‘ego state’ people are M tify separate sound reels accompanying a fi lm. speaking. We can distinguish these states in Th ese are harmonized into one at the dubbing ourselves and others by such non-verbal cues N (see dub, dubbing) stage of fi lm production. as tone of voice or facial expression, as well as Traffi c data Information about a message sent by the verbal content of the transactions. One of electronically – by whom, to whom and when the chief values of transactional analysis is that it O (excluding contents of the message itself). Refers has the capacity to help clarify communication to e-mails, websites and telephone calls. Phone problems. P bills include all traffi c data, time, destination and Other concepts commonly employed in TA are length of call. In the case of mobiles, the data games, life positions and scripts. Eric Berne R includes the base station used. in Games People Play (Penguin, 1964) describes Transactional analysis Originally an approach a game as ‘an ongoing series of complementary to psychotherapy introduced by Eric Berne, ulterior transactions progressing to a well- S transactional analysis is now more widely used defi ned, predictable outcome’. Games are recur- as a technique for improving interpersonal ring sets of transactions, identifiable by their T communication and social skills. In essence hidden motivations and the promise of psycho- it aims to increase the individual’s awareness of logical payoff s or gains for the game players. U the intent behind both his/her own and others’ Th e victim of the game is called a mark, and communication, and to expose and eliminate, or it is the known weakness of the mark, known deal with, subterfuge and dishonesty. as the gimmick,which allows the game player V Th e details of the framework are fairly complex to hook his/her victim and achieve his/her desired payoff. Every game, Berne believes, and readers are referred to the works recom- W mended below for an introduction to this area. whether played consciously or unconsciously, is Basically, however, transactional analysis investi- essentially dishonest, generally taking the form gates any act of interpersonal communication by of a defensive strategy in communication as far XYZ considering what are called the ‘ego states’ of the as the manipulator is concerned. Examples of communicators. such games played in everyday life, identifi ed Th e hypothesis is that we are all able to func- by Berne, are ‘If it weren’t for you’ and ‘See what tion out of three ‘ego states’ that Berne identifi ed you made me do’. as the Parent, the Adult and the Child. Th e states ▶ Th omas A. Harris, I’m OK, You’re OK (Harper &

309 Transculturation

Row, 1969); Eric Berne, What Do You Say After You Print’ was taken out in the UK as early as 1714, Say Hello? (Corgi Books, 1975); Ian Stewart and Vann but the fi rst practical typewriter working faster Joines, TA Today (Lifespace, 1987); Claude M. Steiner, than handwriting was probably that of American Scripts People Live: Transactional Analysis in Life Christopher Latham Sholes (1868) who, after Scripts (Grove Press, 1990); Amy and Th omas Harris, several improvements to his machine, signed Staying OK (Arrow Books, 1995); Abe Wagner, Th e up with E. Remington & Sons, gunsmiths of Transactional Manager (The Industrial Society, New York. Th e fi rst Remington machines were 1996); Graeme Burton and Richard Dimbleby, marketed in 1874. Between Ourselves: An Introduction to Interpersonal 1878 saw the introduction of the shift-key Communication (Hodder Arnold, 2006). typewriter, followed by machines that for the Transculturation The movement of cultural first time allowed the typist to actually see forms across geographical boundaries and what he/she was typing (1883). Th at jack-of-all- periods of time resulting in cross-cultural inter- trades among inventors, Th omas Alva Edison action that may give rise to new cultural forms. (1847–1931), produced an electrically operated See hybridization. machine containing a printing wheel, in 1872, Transmission model of mass communica- though it was many years before a commercially tion See attention model of mass commu- viable electric machine was produced (by James nication. Smathes in 1920). Trigger events See agenda-setting. IBM introduced the famous ‘golf-ball’ electric Truth, visualization of See visions of order. typewriter in 1961, allowing for diff erent type TV: catch-up TV See television. faces and type sizes to be used with the same TV: independent producers See television: machine. Today electronic typewriters (and even independent producers. manual machines) continue to be manufactured Twitter A social networking (see networking: and sold despite being to all intents and purposes social networking) and microblogging displaced by the computer. See topic guide service, launched in the US in 2006. Th e ‘tweet’ under media history; media: technologies. is a message restricted to 140 characters. You can post tweets and follow them. Celebrity tweeters (called Twitterati) can prompt thou- U sands if not millions of subscribers. Encap- U-certifi cate See certification of films. sulating a message in 140 characters or fewer UK Gold Launched on 1 November 1992, UK Gold can be said to encourage succinctness. On the is a satellite channel run jointly by BBC Enter- downside, triviality prevails, with side-orders prises and Thames Television based on their such as narcissistic self-promotion on the one combined programme libraries. hand and highly contentious declarations on Ullswater Committee Report on Broad- the other. casting, 1936 This government-appointed Twitter has varyingly been described as committee under the chairmanship of Viscount ‘diabolically addictive’, a ‘shout in the darkness Ullswater was given the task of making recom- hoping someone is listening’, twitterers being in mendations on the future of the BBC once its a constant process of ‘self-affi rmation’. Search- fi rst charter expired on 31 December 1936. Th e ing the dictionary for an appropriate word to Report praised the BBC for its impartiality describe the essence of Twitter-to-be, founder and catholicity, but chided it for the heaviness Jack Dorsey ‘came across the word “twitter”, of its Sunday entertainment. The Charter of and it was just perfect’, the term describing ‘a the BBC was renewed following the Report for short burst of inconsequential information’; or another ten years; the number of governors was what the San Antonio market research fi rm Pear increased from five to seven and the ban on Analytics in 2009 termed ‘pointless babble’. advertisements was to continue, though spon- Two-step flow model of communication sorship was to be permitted in the case of TV (a See one-step, two-step, multi-step flow right the BBC only seldom exploited). models of communication. Like reports before and after it, Ullswater made Typewriter A patent for an ‘Artifi cial Machine clear the very serious public responsibility of or Method for Impressing or Transcribing of broadcasting: ‘Th e infl uence of broadcasting Letters Singly or Progressively one after another, upon the mind and speech of the nation’ made it as in Writing, whereby all Writing Whatever an ‘urgent necessity in the national interest that may be Engrossed in Paper or Parchment so the broadcasting service should at all times be Neat and Exact as not to be distinguished from conducted in the best possible manner and to

310 Underground press

the best possible advantage of the people.’ Two tion alone. Edited by people close to the working A other matters elicited concern. Th e ﬁ rst related class, they reﬂ ected the chief perspectives of the to criticisms of the monolithic nature of the BBC vanguard of the working-class movement and B (under the rigorous direction of Lord Reith – see directed themselves to its increased politiciza- reithian) and the Committee recommended tion. more internal decentralization of control, espe- What beat the radicals of the nineteenth C cially towards the national regions. century was competition by papers more Th e second concern, published in a Reserva- dedicated to entertainment and sensational- D tion written by Clement Attlee (1883–1967), ism; papers expanding through the power of future Labour Prime Minister, called into advertisements and sensitive to the values and question the BBC’s ‘impartiality’ at the time of requirements of the advertisers. The radicals E the General Strike (1926): ‘I think,’ wrote Attlee, found themselves faced with a challenge: remain ‘that even in war-time the BBC must be allowed true to principles and thus risk being trapped F to broadcast opinions other than those of the in a ghetto of reduced readership, or attempt to

Government.’ See public service broadcast- marry principles with popularization. G ing (psb). See also topic guide under commis- Radicalism retreated during the twentieth sions, committees, legislation. century but never surrendered. However, the Ultra-violet/ﬂ uorescent photography Used costs of publishing and the reliance upon adver- H in the examination of forged or altered docu- tising proved increasingly formidable barriers to ments, identifying certain chemical compounds, underground, radical or alternative newspapers I and in the examination of bacterial colonies. See and periodicals in the post-Second World War

holography; infra-red photography. period (from 1945). In the 1960s there was a brief JK Underground press Or radical, alternative or renaissance of protest: periodicals such as Oz, samizdat; those newspapers that are commit- IT, Frendz and Ink in one way or another got up tedly anti-establishment, opposing in part or the nose of Authority, the Oz Schoolkids Issue L entirely the political and cultural conventions of earning for itself the longest-ever obscenity trial the time; often publishing information or views (see oz trial). M seen as threatening by those in authority, and Distribution proved yet another hazard for the likely to incur censorship. small radical press. In the UK this has been prac- N In the UK the so-called ‘pauper press’ of the tically a duopoly of W.H. Smith and Menzies, nineteenth century, fi nding its readership in the whose hesitancy over providing the radical press increasingly literate working class, was subject with distribution outlets has been rather more O to harshly repressive measures by government. to do with a view that radicals are just not good Editors such as William Cobbett, Henry Heth- business rather than for ideological reasons. P erington, William Sherwin, Richard Carlile and With the advent of the internet dissent- James Watson courted arrest and imprisonment ing voices found new platforms for comment R and the shutting-down of their presses as a and debate, further threatening the viability of routine professional hazard. Wooler’s Black newspapers, especially the local press (already Dwarf stirred the government to wrath with its challenged by free papers and the burgeoning S criticism of the authorities in their handling of growth of local council newsletters). See blog- the Peterloo Massacre (1819). Wooler escaped ging; indy media; journalism: citizen T libel action on the plea that he could not be said journalism; mobilization; podcasting. See to have written articles which he set up in type also topic guide under media history. U without the interventions of a pen. ▶ Patricia Hollis, Th e Pauper Press (Oxford University Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register had a Press, 1970); Stanley Harrison, Poor Men’s Guardians: substantial circulation despite the crippling A Survey of the Struggles for a Democratic Newspaper V stamp duty that forced him to charge one Press, 1763–1973 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1974); Stephen Koss, Th e Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain shilling and a halfpenny per copy. Carlile’s W Republican was both republican and atheist; the (Collins 1990); Elisabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Chartist Oracle of Reason incurred blasphemy Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge University XYZ prosecutions, while Bradlaugh’s National Press, 1999); Chris Atton, Alternative Media (Sage, Reformer declared itself ‘Published in Defi ance 2001); Jeremy Black, The English Press 1621–1861 of Her Majesty’s Government’. (Sutton, 2001); John D.H. Downing (with Tamara As long as radical newspapers could fight Vallareal Ford, Geneve Gil and Laura Stern), Radical off the need to win advertising, they could Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Move- survive, despite prosecutions, relying on circula- ments (Sage, 2001); Kevin Williams, Get Me a Murder

311 Unitary, pluralist, core-periphery, breakup models of audience fragmentation

a Day! A History of Mass Communication in Britain Blumler and Elihu Katz, in the book of which (2nd edition, Bloomsbury Academic, 2009). they are editors, Th e Uses of Mass Communica- Unitary, pluralist, core-periphery, breakup tion (Sage, 1974), emphasize the social origin models of audience fragmentation See of the needs that the media purport to gratify. audience: fragmentation of. Th us where a social situation causes tension and Universality Principle that public services such confl ict, the media may provide easement, or as education, health and justice must be avail- where the social situation gives rise to questions able to all within a society; applies equally to about values, the media provide affirmation the notion of public service broadcasting and reinforcement. (psb). Uses and gratifications theory has been USA – Patriot Act, 2001 Surveillance measure subjected to criticism by a number of commen- that became law within a month of the terror- tators. In Th e Export of Meaning: Cross-Cultural ist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, 11 Readings of Dallas (Polity Press, 1993), Tamar September 2001. Under its full title – Strength- Liebes and Elihu Katz state, ‘Th e idea that read- ening America by Providing Appropriate Tools ers, listeners, and viewers can bend the mass Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism media to serve their own needs had gone so far – the Patriot Act, all 342 pages of it, provides the [with gratifi cationists] that almost any text – or US government and its agencies with a formi- indeed no text at all – was found to serve func- dable armoury of new powers to rein-in civil tions such as social learning, reinforcing identity, liberties. Basically, security agencies are granted lubricating interaction, providing escape etc. But extended powers to intercept wire, oral and elec- it gradually became clear that these functions tronic communications relating to terrorism; were too unspecifi ed.’ In other words, theorizing to share criminal investigation information; to about use has to be linked to the texts that are seize voice-mail messages pursuant to warrants; judged to fulfi l audience needs. to use DNA identification of terrorists and Th e internet has opened up new and excit- other violent off enders; to demand disclosure of ing avenues for uses and gratifi cations research, educational records; and to confi scate the assets and the four main categories suggested decades of organizations suspected of planning or carry- ago by McQuail, Blumer and Brown continue ing out terrorism. to serve, at least as a useful starting point of Uses and gratifi cations theory View that mass enquiry into the many reasons users surf the Net. media audiences make active use of what the See cognitive (and affective); facebook; media have to off er, arising from a complex set identification; maslow’s hierarchy of of needs which the media in one form or another needs; mobilization; networking: social gratify. Broadly similar uses have been catego- networking. See also topic guide under rized by researchers based on questionnaires or communication theory. interviews. An example is the compensatory use Utterance meaning See sentence meaning, of the media – to make up for lack of education, utterance meaning. perhaps, lack of status or social success. Where the media have a supplementing use, the audience may be applying what they see, hear and V read in social situations as subject-matter for VALS typology Arnold Mitchell’s Nine American interpersonal exchange. Lifestyles: Who We Are And Where We’re Going In ‘Th e television audience: a revised perspec- (Macmillan, 1983) describes a landmark in the tive’ in Dennis McQuail, ed., Sociology of the documentation of human needs – a massive Mass Media (Penguin, 1972), McQuail, Jay research project funded and carried out in G. Blumler and J.R. Brown define four major America in 1980 by SRI International. The categories of need which the media serve to principle on which the research was based, and gratify. (1) Diversion (escape from constraints of which Mitchell’s infl uential book articulates, is routine; escape from the burdens of problems; that humans demonstrate their needs in their emotional release). (2) Personal relationships lifestyle, and that both needs and lifestyle fl uctu- (companionship; social utility). (3) Personal ate according to circumstance and ‘drive’. VALS identity (personal reference; reality exploration; stands for Values and Lifestyle. value reinforcement). (4) Surveillance (need for The VALS approach, and its typology of information in our complex world – ‘Televi- categories of lifestyle, pigeon-holes people on sion news helps me to make up my mind about an all-embracing scale. It has given a signifi cant things’). boost to marketing trends that have increasingly

312 Values

been preoccupied with segmenting people into of products and services. Strivers have yet to A consumer categories. VALS links the pursuit of achieve their goals. Th ey see nancialfi success as lifestyle with personal growth: ‘With this growth important, like to have a good time and to keep B comes change, so that new goals emerge, and in up with the latest trends. Th ey seek approval support of these new goals come new beliefs, from others and try to demonstrate success new dreams, and a new constellation of values,’ through their purchases, particularly of the C writes Mitchell. kinds of consumer goods associated with those Th ough the main focus of research – ongoing who are more successful. D rather than a one-off exercise – was upon the Self-expression is a primary motivator for population of the United States, what Mitchell both Experiencers and Makers, but Experiencers terms ‘side spurs’ of research explored VALS in have more resources. Experiencers are younger, E fi ve European countries – France, Sweden, Italy, more impulsive, seek variety and are inclined West Germany and Britain. The VALS typol- towards novel and even risky experiences, but F ogy to a considerable degree refl ects Abraham move on quickly from one trend to another. Th ey

Maslow’s notion of a hierarchy of needs (see are enthusiastic consumers, particularly in the G maslow’s hierarchy of needs) and gives fashion and leisure markets. Makers are more support to his categorization. traditional, wary of new ideas and large organi- Th e VALS typology has been updated since zations, and value self-suffi ciency and individual H the 1980s and is currently owned by Strategic rights. Makers find self-expression through Business Insights. Th ere are now eight segments practical activities centred on homemaking, I that refl ect the psychological and demographic such as DIY, and are mostly interested in practi- profiles of consumers. The segments are cal, value-for-money products and services. See JK arranged across two dimensions according to the topic guide under advertising/marketing. resources (education, income, health, energy and See www.strategicbusinessinsights.com. consumerism) and primary motivations (ideals, Values Each society, social group or individual L achievement needs and drive for self-expression) has certain ideas, beliefs, ways of behaving, of consumers. At the top are the Innovators – upon which is placed a value. A collection of M successful people with high self-esteem. Th ey are these values, the criteria for judgement of one likely to be change leaders and active consumers often acting as reinforcement for others, may N particularly of premium and niche products or amount to a system of values. Such a system, if services. Survivors are at the bottom and their it is not to cause dissonance in a person, has reduced circumstances mean that they focus either to be generally consistent or perceived as O on meeting the more basic needs of safety and generally consistent. security, on value for money, on trusted brands Values are not merely systems of personal P and on getting by. belief; they represent shared attitudes within Ideals are the primary motivators for both social groups and society at large, of approval R Th inkers and Believers, but of the two, Th inkers and disapproval, of judgments favourable and have more resources and therefore more choices. unfavourable towards other individuals, ideas, Th inkers are fi nancially comfortable, educated objects (such as the value placed on property), S and well-informed. They tend to support the social action and events. Like norms, values status quo but are also open to new ideas. vary from one social group or society to another; T Th ey are fairly conservative consumers who look and they change over time and in different for both quality and good value. Believers are circumstances. U conservative and traditional in outlook and thus An individual’s perception and interpretation have considerable respect for traditional institu- of reality will be infl uenced by the values of the tions and beliefs. Their lives focus on family social groups or society to which he/she belongs. V and community. Th ey are classed as predictable Th e pervasiveness of such values ensures that consumers favouring familiar and established they are enmeshed in all aspects of communica- W brands. tion processes. Th e images and codes which are For both Achievers and Strivers the need the stock-in-trade of the mass media are shaped for achievement is a primary motivator, but by value systems and in turn can be used to XYZ Achievers have more resources than Strivers. support certain values. Senders of communica- Achievers have a goal-oriented lifestyle and are tion messages, the mass media being no excep- fairly conventional and conservative. Th ey are tion, also need to consider the values of receivers active, image-conscious consumers who like to if they wish to avoid causing noise. Success in demonstrate their success through their choice persuasion, for example, often rests on a skilful

313 Vamp

appeal to the values of the target audience. See government legislation (see video recordings culture; ideology; myth; news values; acts, 1984, 2010). See audience: fragmenta- vals typology. tion of. See also topic guide under media: Vamp Early word for sex-star in the movies. In technologies. 1914 producer William Fox (1879–1952) created ▶ Sean Cubbitt, Timeshift: On Video Culture (Come- a star by going to the farthest extreme away from dia/Routledge, 1992). screen-idol Mary Pickford, symbol of purity and Video/DVD games Like so many examples of innocence, and imposing a parody of sensuality popular culture, the video/DVD game has and eroticism on Th eda Bara in the fi lm adapta- incurred condemnation for being anti-social, tion of the Kipling poem, A Fool Th ere Was. Th e a threat to the minds and mentality (not to word ‘vamp’ was used in the publicity for the mention the eyesight) of the young, who are seen fi lm, whose fi nancial success helped Fox set up to be the main players, and loaded with harmful his own studio, among the most important of the features. However, games have also achieved 1920s. cultural status and have been claimed by some V-discs In 1943, during the Second World War critics as amounting to an important art form, (1939–45), record companies and musicians while ‘cult status’ is awarded to some of the agreed to waive fees and contractual rights to a protagonists of such games. series of very high-quality musical off erings to A key trend in marketing has been the cross- the US forces. Such recordings, many of them pollination between films and games and the by giants of the jazz world such as Benny Good- opportunity games-players have to read the man, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, are ‘the novel of the game’. With the convergence of now prized by collectors. digital technologies, games feature on the menus Verbal devices in speech-making Max of palmtop computers and mobile phones (from Atkinson in his illuminating study of the speech- 2011 in 3D), though manufacturers have become making techniques of politicians and other sensitive to the use of the word ‘games’, prefer- well-known contemporary orators, Our Masters’ ring to market their products as multimedia Voices: The Language and Body Language of entertainment centres. Politics (Methuen, 1984), analyses various forms Video nasties A market that developed in the of what the Shorter Oxford English Diction- 1980s of specially-made-for-video films of ary terms claptraps – linguistic or non-verbal a singularly nasty, brutal and sexist nature. devices to catch applause. Particularly successful, Court action in the UK in 1982 against several says the author, is the list of three, which stimu- of these fi lms led to their enforced withdrawal lates audience response, reinforces that stimulus from circulation, but, to the considerable and then pushes it to the climax. Antithesis is disgust of Mary Whitehouse and the National also an eff ective claptrap (‘I come to bury Caesar, Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association – among not to praise him’). Atkinson cautions the many others – there was no order made for would-be orator that these devices require skill, their destruction. However, the Conservative timing and judgment to be eff ective, and that government brought in rigorous controls of claptrap ‘always involves the use of more than video nasties with the Video Recordings Act, one technique at a time’. See topic guide under 1984 (see next entry). language/discourse/narrative. In 1994 there was dramatically renewed inter- Video Wikipedia defi nes video as ‘the technology est in the possible eff ects of video nasties on of electronically capturing, recording, process- behaviour following the Jamie Bulger case, in ing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a which two 11-year-old boys were convicted of sequence of still images representing scenes in murdering the small boy they had abducted. Th e motion’. Cassette tape video dominated the late judge in the trial, Mr Justice Morland, conjec- 1970s and 1980s until overtaken by the DVD (see tured that the boys may have been infl uenced by digital video disc). seeing Child’s Play 3, whose plot paralleled, to a For audiences, video recording equipment degree, the real actions of the killers. made time-shift viewing possible, while video Th ough this connection was dismissed by many cameras made fi lm-making a viable proposition in the TV and fi lm industry, there was support for all (see youtube). Video recording on tape from child psychologists, in particular from or on disc has benefi ted every aspect of public Elizabeth Newson, Professor of Development communication, though confl ict over formats Psychology at the University of Nottingham, who has occurred in highly competitive markets, spoke of the need for special concern when chil- and an intruder into free expression has been dren – or indeed, adults – are repeatedly exposed

314 Violence on TV: the defence

▶ to images of cruelty in the context of entertain- Barrie Gunter and Jackie Harrison, Violence on A ment. See moral panics and the media. Television. An Analysis of Amount, Nature, Location Video Recordings Acts (UK), 1984, 2010 and Origin of Violence in British Programmes (Rout- B Passed through Parliament in the UK with all- ledge, 1998); Karen Boyle, Media and Violence (Sage, Party support, MP Graham Bright’s measure, 2005). the ﬁ rst VRA (1984), was designed to restrict Violence on TV: the defence The portrayal C the access of young persons to video nasties, of violence on screen, whether in the cinema many of which eluded the usual vetting process or on TV, has long attracted controversy and D of the british board of film censors. is an ongoing issue of our time. Th e dominant Th e Act established by statute an Authority tendency among commentators is to deplore it, (initially the BBFC) whose purpose was to clas- its nature, its extent and its amount. Simulated E sify video cassettes as suitable for home viewing violence is seen to prompt some members of the and to censor those deemed unsuitable. Fines audience to re-enact that violence in real life; F of up to 20,000 were liable for dealers and and violence is judged to desensitize viewers to

distributors breaking the law. All video works the real thing. G were to be submitted for scrutiny, classiﬁ cation Taking issue with these perspectives is Jib and certiﬁ cation unless they were educational or Fowles. In The Case for Television Violence concerned with sport, religion or music. (Sage, 1999), Fowles argues that contrary to the H However, if such videos ‘to any extent’ were notion that screen violence breeds real violence, deemed to portray ‘human sexual activity’ it is more likely to inhibit or reduce it: ‘Televi- I or ‘mutilation, torture or other acts of gross sion violence is good for people.’ Recognizing

violence’ or to show ‘human genital organs’, they in human beings an in-built violent impulse, JK too had to be submitted to the censors. Fowles says that society requires ‘outlets’ for this It came to light in 2009 that the Act was impulse. Violence is ever-present and has to be invalid, being in breach of European Union managed: ‘In isolation, television violence may L law. By this time over seventy fi lms were on the seem reproachable and occupy the foreground Director of Prosecution’s list of banned videos. with a menacing intensity, but with a longer M Dozens of prosecutions had to be dropped: good perspective it can seem comparatively like an news for free expression? Not exactly. Without improvement – a purer distillation of the age- N delay, the UK government revoked VRA 1984 old processes for containing and redirecting and re-enacted it in identical form as VRA 2010. violence.’ Th e Department of Culture, Media and Sport We have to remember, says Fowles, ‘that O announced that previous prosecutions would television violence is symbolic only … Nobody stand. See censorship; moral panics and actually suff ers for our pleasure’. For the author, P the media; youtube. ‘the assault on television violence is absolutely Viewers: light, medium and heavy Research unwarranted’. It is ‘simply the most recent and R into the amount and nature of TV viewing least damaging venue for the routinized working discriminates between the light viewer, generally out of innate aggressiveness and fear’. Th e fuss classifi ed as watching TV for two hours or fewer over TV violence Fowles describes as a variant S a day; the medium viewer, watching for between on the moral panic (see moral panics and two and three hours a day; and the heavy viewer, the media), which is usually accompanied T watching for four hours or more a day. In the by the fervour and ‘extreme righteousness of analysis of viewer response, special attention has the condemners as they lash out at conjured U been paid to the diff erences of attitude to issues or magnifi ed transgressions’; and the response and controversies that can be detected between ‘is always out of proportion to whatever insti- light and heavy viewers, and thus the infl uence gates it’ (see third-person effect). Fowles V TV programmes may have on attitude forma- concludes: ‘Perhaps, to give television violence its due, we need fi rst to respect ourselves more tion and attitude change. See cultivation; W mainstreaming; mean world syndrome; fully, to have greater regard for the complex, resonance. semiviolent creatures that we are.’ Violence and the media See violence on tv: As in addressing all theories, a cautionary note XYZ the defence. See also topic guides under is perhaps required here, for cases occur from audiences/consumption & reception of time to time in which the enactment of real media; media: freedom, censorship; media violence echoes and sometimes directly simu- issues & debates; media: power, effects, lates screen violence. Th e UK Observer (9 June influence; representation. 2002) reported under a headline, ‘Murder linked

315 Virtual reality

to horror trilogy’ that French authorities were and the myriad experiences available online. blaming the savage stabbing in Saint-Sebastien- It has become a matter of widespread concern sur-Loire by a teenager of a girl he had invited that so many users seem to prefer life as it can for a walk on the youth’s seeming obsession with be realized online. Mark Slouka in War of the Scream movies. Worlds: Cyberspace and the High-Tech Assault Two similar murders, by teenagers, had alerted on Reality (Basic Books, 1995; Abacus, 1996) the authorities to the possible infl uence the fi lms talks of a ‘culture of simulation’ that blurs ‘fi ction exerted on impressionable young people. An and reality’; and this in his view risks creat- Observer listing of what seemed to be copy-cat ing in the public a fear ‘of unmediated reality’, off ences between 1999 and 2002 indicated that especially considering our willingness to buy it was not only teenagers working out fantasies in to the virtual, that ‘we’re buying in to a fake’. of violence on real-world victims, but older men It follows that reality itself ‘is beginning to lose too, or in the case of a murder in Massachussetts its authority’. See cyberspace. See also topic in 2000, a woman and two men wearing Scream guide under media issues & debates. masks. Virtuous circle Term used by researchers into In his Observer report, Paul Webster quoted how media use links with active participation psychiatrists worried ‘about the inability of some in politics, and vice-versa: users who take an young people to distinguish between reality interest in news reporting on politics are likely and fi ction’. Dave Grossman, American expert to complete the ‘virtuous circle’ by being more on the psychology and physiology of killing, likely to take some part in political activity. would plainly challenge Jib Fowles’s assertions. Recent research indicates that the most likely His belief, reported by Webster, was that ‘repeti- direction is from interest to activity. tion, desensitization and escalation reduced the Visibility See global scrutiny; privacy. normal human unwillingness to kill’. Visions of order A notion long associated with Virtual reality Simulation of the real by techno- the role and function of the journalist is that of logical means, using multi-media inputs – head- ‘bringer-of-light’, of enlightenment. Th e French mounted display, data gloves, three-dimensional writer Jacques Derrida in Writing and Diff erence audio system and magnetic position tracker (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978) posed the ‘helio- (to name the basics); what has been termed a logical metaphor’, describing the journalist as a ‘technological cluster’. Generally, the simulation human version of the heliograph, recorder and of the real exists in that ‘window of realities’, the transmitter of light, of revelation to audience. TV monitor. Th e process is one of envisioning – off ering a In a paper entitled ‘Th e ultimate display’ for the vision of the world: light for others to see by. Proceedings of the IFIPS Congress 2, published In Th e Politics of Pictures: Th e Creation of the as early as 1965, Ivan Sutherland defi ned the VR Public in the Age of Popular Media (Routledge, dream: ‘Th e screen is a window through which 1992) John Hartley takes up this theme in a chap- one sees a virtual world. Th e challenge is to make ter entitled ‘Heliography: journalism, and the that world look real, act real, sound real and feel visualization of truth’. What journalism brings to real.’ light, what it renders visible are, Hartley argues, Virtual reality technology is three-dimensional ‘distant visions of order’. It is not so much the (see 3D) and interactive. It is extensively used in actual truth that is brought to light as the vision engineering and architectural design, in medi- of truth as visualized in terms of order. cine and telecommunications. It is potentially a ▶ Richard V. Ericson, Patricia M. Baraneh and Janet vital component in reconstructing the past. At B.L. Chan, Representing Order: Crime, Law And the fi rst Virtual Reality Heritage conference in Justice in the News Media (Open University, 1991). Bath, UK, November 1995, IBM’s Brian Collins Vitaphone Trade name of the first success- described the VR reconstruction of a church that ful synchronous movie sound, introduced in no longer exists, the Frauenkirche in Dresden, 1926 by Warner Brothers. On 6 August at the fifty years after its destruction by bombing. Warner Th eatre in New York, John Barrymore Using the few drawings and plans and colour starred in Don Juan, to the accompaniment of photographs taken by the Nazis, VR technology a Vitaphone 16-inch 33⅓ rpm disc recording of provided a detailed reconstruction enabling the voice and music. Curiously Don Juan caused less original to be rebuilt. audience excitement than the Vitaphone shorts A more general application of the term ‘virtual that accompanied it, such as the New York reality’ centres on the worlds ‘out there’ as Philharmonic playing Wagner’s Tannhauser brought to users of the computer, the internet Overture. Th e real sensation of the ‘Talkies’ was

316 Watchdogs

Warners’ next picture, The Jazz Singer (1927) Knightley writes, ‘Comparing the leader with A starring Al Jolson. Th ere were, in fact, only 281 Hitler is a good start because of the instant words spoken in the fi lm, all of them ad-libbed images that Hitler’s name provokes’ (see B by Jolson. See synchronous sound. See topic historical allusion): ‘Th e crudest approach guide under media history. is to suggest that the leader is insane’ and those Vlog Video blog (see blogging; youtube). who publicly question any of this ‘can expect an C Vocal cues All the oral aspects of speech except even stronger burst of abuse’. the words themselves: pitch – the highness The simplest way of demonizing a whole D or lowness of voice; rate – rapidity of expres- people, says Knightley, is the atrocity story: ‘Take sion; volume; quality – the pleasantness or the Kuwaiti babies story. Its origin goes back unpleasantness of voice tone or delivery; and to the fi rst world war when British propaganda E enunciation – pronunciation and articulation. accused the Germans of tossing Belgian babies See paralanguage. into the air and catching them on their bayonets. F Voiceover In film and TV film production, a Dusted off and updated for the Gulf War [1991]

framing device in which a commentator off ers this version had Iraqi soldiers bursting into a G explanation of what the audience is seeing on modern Kuwaiti hospital, fi nding the premature screen. In feature fi lms, voiceover is often that of babies ward and then tossing the babies out of the chief character in a story, though the docu- incubators so that the incubators could be sent H mentary approach of an unidentifi ed narrator back to Iraq.’ is also common. Voiceover plays a signifi cant Th is story, as well as others, was a fabrication, I role in shaping the meaning of a fi lm text. It but it had served its propagandist function. See

signals the way in which audience is expected news management in times of war. See also JK to read what is seen and heard. In this sense, topic guide under news media. voiceover closes down a text to a prescribed ▶ Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War meaning, allowing the viewer little room for Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the L interpretation. See narrative; open, closed Crimea to Kosovo (Prion paperback, revised edition, texts. 2000; John Hopkins paperback, 2004; fi rst published M Vox popping Collecting the opinions of large 1975 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, entitled The numbers of the general public (vox populi is First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The N Latin for ‘voice of the people’) in order to gauge War Correspondent as Hero-Propagandist and Myth public reaction to a current issue or topic. Maker). War of the Unstamped See stamp duty; O underground press. W Watchdogs The media pride themselves on P War of the Worlds Title of the American CBS their role as watchdogs of injustice, abuse and network radio adaptation by Howard Koch, corruption; champions of public interest. Th e R produced and narrated by Orson Welles (1938), watchdog barks on behalf of the people, in their of H.G. Wells’s famous story. Conveying the defence against the powerful, whether these are immediacy of a combat report from a war corre- in government, business, industry or any walk S spondent, the production actually convinced of life where the interests of the public can be many listeners that an interplanetary war had aff ected. Th e role of the watchdog may be seen as T broken out. However, reports to the effect key to media functions, and a guiding principle. that Orson Welles’s radio ‘hype’ had caused Research tends to point to the media being U panic in the streets have taken on the magic of rather less than wholly eff ective in this capac- legend, and become somewhat exaggerated in ity; generally to follow rather than initiate the the telling. See identification; para-social investigation of abuse; indeed to be guilty of V interaction. omission as much as commission (see guard War: four stages of war reporting According dog metaphor). W to Phillip Knightley in a UK Guardian article True ‘watchdoggery’ can only come about ‘Th e disinformation campaign’ (4 October 2001), through genuine media independence – from Western media coverage of military confl icts is advertising and sales revenue, from the infl u- XYZ highly predictable, passing through four stages: ence of capital or institutional control. Fulfi lling (1) the event is described as a crisis; (2) the the role of watchdog becomes problematic when enemy leader is demonized; (3) the enemy as a that role is seen to trespass upon the vested whole is demonized; while stage (4) focuses on interests of those who own and control the atrocities. watchdogs in question.

317 Watergate

An arms manufacturing company with a Web or online drama Th e internet has proved portfolio that includes newspapers, radio and fertile ground for made-for-the-web drama, TV stations is unlikely to smile benignly on these usually in serial form, each episode (or webi- media if, in the interests of the public, they wish sode) of a few minutes’ duration. Online drama to challenge arms manufacture and export. Th e was made possible with the arrival of broadband, result, usually, is not overt censorship, but and was soon being tuned into, via computer self-censorship. With the trend in recent years or mobile phone, by hundreds of thousands of convergence of ownership, the risks of self- and occasionally millions of fans. The first censorship, of failing to fulfi l the role of public advertisement-supported web drama, indeed the watchdog, have inevitably increased. fi rst web soap, is considered to be ad-executive It is for this reason, among others, that media Scott Zakarin’s Th e Spot (1995), a drama based commentators express concern about conver- on movie clips and photos of the day-to-day gences of media ownership worldwide, fearing activities of the characters. that watchdogs will be ‘seen off ’ by guard dogs. Viewers were encouraged to e-mail writers See conglomerates; democracy and the and cast with advice for storylines. Another media; hegemony; journalism: citizen early web drama from the US was Homicide: journalism; news values; watergate. Second Shift which was tied into the TV series Watergate Scene of one of history’s most famous Homicide: Life on the Street. Started in 1997, it break-ins, and source of one of modern history’s ran into fi nancial diffi culties soon afterwards. most dramatic scandals that eventually led to the In 1999 Muscle Beach took to the airwaves in resignation of the US President. Th e apartment eight-minute weekly instalments. Th is combined block called Watergate in Washington DC was drama with a fi tness programme. the 1972 election campaign headquarters of the Audiences soon began to top the million mark National Committee of the Democratic Party. with often short-lived web dramas – Red v Blue, It was broken into in June by agents of the Soup of the Day, Sam Has 7 Friends and Lonely- rival Republican Party’s Committee to Re-elect girl 15 which, during its 26-month run, attracted President Richard Nixon. Th ey were caught in 100 million views and stretched over 500 the act as they were removing electronic bugging episodes. Kate Modern (2007) picked up on this devices. success, while Roommates attracted the spon- The ensuing cover-up was penetrated and sorship of the Ford Motor Company. By 2008 the revealed by two reporters on the Washington corporate media giants had become interested Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, fed in web drama. From NBC came Gemini Division with significant information by a mysterious and from Warner Brothers, Sorority for Ever. deep throat within government and close to In the same year the International Academy of the President. A Senate investigation committee Web Television was founded, initiating in 2009 pushed fearlessly against presidential closed a range of annual awards – the Streamy Awards. doors. Eventually the Supreme Court forced the A UK contribution to the oeuvre, Toyboize, White House to give access to tape recordings broadcast on YouTube was nominated for a made, at Nixon’s command, over a long period in Bafta Award in 2009 in the Interactive Creative the President’s offi ce. Th e tapes proved Nixon’s Contribution Category. Th e drama was acquired complicity in the Watergate Aff air. by the UKTV network and was broadcast on the He was the fi rst President of the US to resign; Dave TV channel from March 2009. Other UK if he had not resigned, he would have been notables have been Kirill, Th e Gap Year and Cell, impeached by Congress. His successor, Presi- all from the Endemol company. dent Ford, extended a blanket pardon to Nixon, Web drama has prospered – at least in terms but not to his associates, several of whom ended of viewer popularity – in Ireland, where Radio up in jail (and most of whom wrote successful Television Eire (RTE) launched Storyland, a books on their experiences). Watergate is vary- competition for web dramas which progressed ingly cited as a supreme example of investigative or bit the dust according to viewer preferences. journalism, a classic case study of offi cial corrup- Th e winner of the fi rst ever Storyland award was tion and an alarming illustration of the paranoia Hardy Bucks (2009). Zombie Bashers was the that sometimes comes with power and author- 2010 winner. ity. However, it is perhaps most importantly Web radio See community radio. a breathtaking glimpse of the nature of open Web 2.0 A term that has been contested but government and the potential of the democratic which has proved useful in describing a signifi - process. See spycatcher case; wikileaks. cant watershed in the development of internet

318 Wesley and MacLean’s model of communication, 1957

communication and the growth of the network in 1992 by Tim Berners-Lee at the European A society. First use of the term is considered to Nuclear Research Centre as a computer network be by Dale Dougherty, Vice-President of the capable of delivering information more swiftly B O’Reilly Media corporation in 2004, during and comprehensively than any previous delivery a team discussion ahead of an international system. Darin Barney in Prometheus Wired: conference of web operators and participants, a Th e Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network C think-tank gathered to point the way ahead for Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2002) global networking. writes, ‘Information on the Web is organized as a D Tim O’Reilly, the driving-force behind the massive, searchable database of “pages” existing, notion of Web 2.0, published an influential not in just a single computer somewhere, but paper in 2005, ‘What is Web 2.0: design, patterns in all the computers linked to the network via E and business models for the new generation servers.’ Th us the Web is a network that ‘is itself of software?’ This included reference to key a giant expanding database’ capable of linking F features of Web 2.0, such as participation, with documents, etc. to any number of other Web

the emphasis on the Net user as contributor. documents, brought about by hypertexting. G O’Reilly’s prime focus was the multiplication The Web, Barney points out, ‘accentuates of Net uses driven by the possibilities of new the capacity of networks to enmesh with one technology in the context of the incursion of another and become networks of networks in an H powerful corporate and government players, this exponentially increasing matrix of connectivity’. raising far-reaching issues concerning the public See cyberspace; internet. See also topic I and private domain. guides under digital age communication;

Inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim media technologies. JK Berners Lee, sees the factors that characterize ▶ David Gaunlett and Ross Horsley, eds, Web Studies Web 2.0 as simply an extension of the original (Arnold, 2004). ideas and direction of the Web. However, 2005 Wedom, Theydom Version of ‘Them-and-Us’. L and the name Web 2.0 mark a lift-oﬀ in the ways John Hartley uses the term in The Politics of users interact with each other, typical of those Pictures: Th e Creation of the Public in the Age M ways being blogging – user-generated content of Popular Media (Routledge, 1992) to describe (UGC), interactivity, syndication, multi-media the binary nature of popular journalism. Hartley N sharing, data transmitted and received on an sees the practices of popular journalism as being epical scale, and openness as never experienced determinedly adversarial in nature, deﬁ ning the previously in the world of communications. world in terms of opposites – private and public, O Paul Anderson in a paper for JISC Technol- reality and illusion, allies and enemies. He speaks ogy and Standards Watch, ‘What is Web 2.0? of a tradition of ‘foe creation’ which is related to P Ideas, technologies and implications for educa- notions of order, and the upholding of it. tion’ (2007), sees a crucial element of Web 2.0 What the press does, he argues, is operate a R as harnessing ‘the power of the crowd’. In his ‘process of photographic negativization, where conclusion he writes that collective power will the image of order is actually recorded as its own become ‘more important as the Web facilitates negative, in stories of disorder’. In Visualizing S new communities and groups. A corollary to this Deviance: A Study of News Organizations (Open is that online identity and privacy will become a University Press, 1989), Richard Ericson, Patricia T source of tension’. Further, ‘the growth in user or Baraneh and Janet Chan had come to the same self-generated content, the rise of the amateur conclusion: ‘In sum,’ they argue, ‘journalists are U and a culture of DIY will challenge conventional central agents in the reproduction of order.’ thinking on who exactly does things, who has ★Wesley and MacLean’s model of commu- knowledge, what it means to have élites, status nication, 1957 In their article ‘A conceptual V and hierarchy’. model for communications research’ in Jour- New technology, Anderson stresses, has in the nalism Quarterly, 34, B.H. Wesley and M.S. W age of Web 2.0, ‘lowered the barrier to entry’ in MacLean develop newcomb’s abx model of Net communication: ‘Collaboration, contribu- communication, 1953 with the aim of encapsu- tion and community are the order of the day, and lating the overall mass communication process. XYZ there is a sense in which some think that a new To Newcomb’s A (communicator) B (communi- “social fabric” is being constructed before our cator) X (any event or object in the environment eyes.’ See network neutrality; network- of A, B which is the subject of communication), ing: social networking. Wesley and MacLean add a fourth element, C. Web: World Wide Web (www) Formulated This represents the editorial communicating

319 Western

Wesley and MacLean’s model of communication, 1957

functions – the process of deciding what and significant others. See also topic guide how to communicate. under communication models. Newcomb’s model represented chiefl y inter- Western Hollywood’s most popularly successful personal communication; it was a triangular transformation of the past into myth, with the formation, with A, B and X interacting equilater- enshrining of heroic values: self-help, individually. Wesley and MacLean indicate that the mass alism, the legitimization of violence in the name media process crucially shifts the balance, bring- of timeless (though rarely analysed) notions of ing A (in this case the would-be communicator) Law and Order, and of human rights equated and C (the mass communication organization with access to and possession of the earth. Th e and its agents who control the channel) closer Western has held a fi rm grip on the imagination together. C is both channel and mediator of A’s of every generation of film-goer since 1903, transmission of X to B (now classifi able as audi- when Edwin S. Porter’s Th e Great Train Robbery ence), and B’s contact with X is more remote set the genre off at a brisk gallop. than in the Newcomb model, if it exists at all Much of the fascination in studying the genre save through the combined ‘processing’ of AC. of the Western lies in relating its ideological feedback is represented by f. shifts to cultural and political changes taking It can be seen from the model that X need not place in America. Several commentators see the go through to B via A and C but can go via C Western as a metaphor for American values, or alone. Th e role of C as intermediary has a dual ‘Americanness’: confi gurations of the lone hero, character, purposive when the process involves the community threatened by lawlessness, the conveying a message through C from an ‘advo- appeal of the frontier and the sense of old values cate’, a politician for example, and non-purposive and lifestyles being overtaken by the urban when it is a matter of conveying the unplanned and the corporate, continue to prompt serious events of the world to an audience. research and analysis. Writing in Westerns: Th e main thrust of the model appears to be Aspects of Movie Genre (Secker & Warburg, emphasizing the dependency of B upon A and C. 1973), Philip French says of the Western that it What is missing from the model, and what later is it is among the most didactic of fi lm genres; thinking about mass media processes insists as he memorably puts it, ‘For every Showdown upon, are the numerous message sources and at Wichita there’s a little teach-in in Dodge City.’ infl uences that work upon B other than AC, and Westernization of Media Studies See media counter-balance the infl uence of AC – family, studies: the internationalization of friends, members of peer groups, workmates, media studies. colleagues, or wider infl uences such as school, ★Westerstähl and Johansson’s model of church, trade unions, etc. An interesting analyti- news factors in foreign news, 1994 A useful cal variant would be to ‘splice’ C into two parts, complement to galtung and ruge’s model of one traditional mass communication, the other, selective gatekeeping, 1965 and the rogers the internet. See intervening variables and dearing’s agenda-setting model, 1987, (ivs); networking: social networking; this model is featured in an article, ‘Foreign

320 Westminster view

Westerstähl and Johansson’s model of news factors in foreign news, 1994 I

JK news: news values and ideologies’ by Jorgen was severely curtailed by news management on Westerstähl and Folke Johansson, published in the part of the military authorities and by ideo- the European Journal of Communication, March logical pressures requiring the activities of the L 1994. Just as the environment or context is the ‘home team’ to be presented in the best light (See centre and axis from which communicative embedded reporters; news management M action springs in the andersch, staats and in times of war). bostrom’s model of communication, 1969, Westerstähl and Johansson use their model N ideology is the central ‘generator’ of news to illustrate how coverage might run counter coverage according to Westerstähl and Johans- to traditional news values. Th ey cite the case of son. the West’s interest in Poland during strikes and O The prevailing ideology of national interest protests mounted by the Polish trade union Soli- works through four primary criteria for news darity in the 1980s. Th e events were dramatic, P selection: proximity, importance, drama and yet Poland was neither near nor ‘important’. Th e access. The first refers to perceived closeness key to this special attention was, in the view R to ‘us’ varyingly in terms of geography, culture, of the authors, ideology. Solidarity’s actions politics, the economy and language. While the threatened the chief ideological rival to capital- US is distant geographically from the UK, it is ism – communism. S nevertheless important – an elite nation. Th e If performed in the West, Solidarity’s actions Netherlands, in contrast, while being geographi- would have incurred critical media attention: T cally close, is less ‘important’. Events occurring in strikes are bad for business. However, such strike the US are therefore more likely to be reported action taking place in an Iron Curtain country, U than events in Th e Netherlands, unless those and in the context of the Cold War, led to events have a direct relevance to the UK. Solidarity’s trade unionists being cast as heroes We recognize the news values as identiﬁ ed fighting for freedom against Soviet socialist V by Galtung and Ruge here – ethnocentrism and totalitarianism. elitism in particular. The notion of is drama ‘In our view,’ write Westerstähl and Johansson, W obvious enough but access is a welcome crite- ‘ideologies are the main source of deviation in rion: where reporting is possible, where report- news reporting from a standard based on more ers have access, there is greater likelihood that or less objectiﬁ ed news values.’ See discourse XYZ foreign events will be covered. Th e nature of that of power. See also topic guide under access is also critical. Th ere was massive cover- communication models. age of the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, but access Westminster view Opinion that the media to the kind of information reporters wanted if in the UK take their cue from and align their a full picture of events was to be transmitted perspectives to the standpoint of the activities

321 Whistleblowing

of parliament. Th is produces the simplistic equa- in mass communication. David M. White in an tion – politics equals parliament, and can result article entitled ‘Th e “Gatekeepers”: a case study in a less-than-adequate coverage of political in the selection of news’, in Journalism Quar- events which take place away from Westminster; terly, 27 (1950), applied Lewin’s idea in a study this has been referred to as the ‘airless and inces- of the telegraph wire editor of an American tuous “Westminster bubble”’. See politics of non-metropolitan newspaper, whom he called accommodation (in the media). Mr Gate. ▶ Mike Wayne, Julian Petley, Craig Murray and Lesley Today the model is only acceptable as a starting Henderson, Television News, Politics and Young point for analysis of the gatekeeping process; People: Generation Disconnected? (Palgrave Macmil- indeed it is a handy exercise for the student to lan, 2010). build on the model by adding important factors Whistleblowing Whistleblowers are most which White does not include, such as the orga- usually individuals within an organization nizational elements of the mass communication – industrial, commercial, governmental, etc. – process that constrain and direct it. Th e model who can no longer keep silent about practices in also indicates only a single gate and a single gate- that organization; perhaps because they perceive keeper, where in practice news passes through them as unsafe, corrupt, dishonest or mislead- many gatekeepers, offi cial and unoffi cial, direct ing. Almost invariably whistleblowers act out of and indirect. White’s model should be studied conscience. Th eir need for security is outweighed in relation to mcnelly’s model of news flow, by a higher-order need, to square behaviour with 1959 and galtung and ruge’s model of a sense of values (see maslow’s hierarchy selective gatekeeping, 1965. See also topic of needs): they must speak out against the guide under communication models. perceived abuse, even though their ‘going public’, Wi-fi See internet: wireless internet. by leaking information to the media, may result Wikileaks A non-profi t-making website created in dismissal. in 2007 by Australian Julian Assange and dedi- In the UK a degree of protection is off ered to cated to leaking information to the public which whistleblowers in the Public Interest Disclosure has been withheld from it by governments, orga- Act of 1999. Substantial compensation may be nizations and institutions. Th e website’s mission granted to whistleblowers who have suffered statement says, ‘We believe that transparency in victimization, or dismissal, as a result of their government activities leads to reduced corrup- raising concerns about fi nancial malpractices, tion, better government and stronger democra- breaches of contract, or cover-ups generally. cies. All governments can benefi t from increased ▶ Kathryn Bolkovac with Cari Lynn, The Whistle- scrutiny by the world community, as well as their blower: Sex Traffi cking, Military Contracts and one own people.’ Th at scrutiny requires information, Woman’s Fight for Justice (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). much of it highly embarrassing to the authorities ★White’s gatekeeper model, 1950 The that have tried to conceal or suppress it. existence of ‘gate areas’ along channels of Though starved of funding and with only a communication was identifi ed by Kurt Lewin small team of full- and part-time staff , Wikileaks in ‘Channels of group life’ in Human Relations, has commanded global headline news, for exam- 1 (1947). At such points, decisions are made to ple by making public the operating procedures select out information passing through the gate at the Guantanamo Bay US military camp. Th is areas. Lewin’s particular study was concerned stirred a reaction from the US authorities which with decisions about household food purchases, prompted Assange to comment, ‘Th ey want me but he drew a comparison with the fl ow of news dead!’

White’s gatekeeper model, 1950

322 Wireless telegraphy

Wikileaks was also responsible for posting the Wikipedia is what thousands of contributors A dramatic video footage of a US helicopter worldwide have assembled. Wiki had become so attack on unarmed civilians in Baghdad, July popular by 2005 that 400 delegates attended the B 2007. Th e website’s issue of an 18-minute fi lm fi rst Wikimania Foundation conference in Frank- entitled Collateral Murder attracted worldwide furt, Germany. ‘What we are doing,’ Wales told attention, as did the ‘War Logs’, 400,000 fi eld Sean Dodson of the UK Guardian (‘Worldwide C reports detailing the practice by coalition forces Wikimania’, 11 August 2005) is building a world in Iraq of turning over prisoners to teams of Iraqi in which every person on the planet is given free D torturers, notably the so-called Wolf Brigade, access to the sum of human knowledge.’ By the under the control of the Iraqi Ministry of the time of the conference, the Wikipedia contained Interior. over a million-and-a-half entries in 200 diff erent E If the leaks already listed were not enough, languages, all contributed by ‘wikipedians’. Wikileaks soon broke the bank in November ‘Never has such an anarchic idea produced F 2010 with the airing of 251,287 secret dispatches such a democratic outcome as the Wiki,’ writes

from more than 250 US embassies, described in Iranian blogger journalist Hossain Derakhshan G one paper as ‘an unprecedented picture of secret in a posting on the OpenDemocracy website (3 diplomacy by the planet’s sole superpower’. Th e August, 2005). Entries are made by specialist cables made transparent what hitherto had been volunteers, but its pages are open to contribu- H going on behind locked doors. Referred to as the tions from members of the public, for the use of US Embassy Cables, they revealed often dramat- the public: pose it, write it, alter it or any other I ically frank comments concerning foreign states- entry: ‘It’s as if for every single change in an

men and politicians, royalty and public fi gures. entry, a referendum is taking place.’ JK Regarded as the biggest security breach in Subject to constant addition, rewriting, altera- diplomatic history, the ‘outed’ cables caused high tion, Wikipedia has incurred criticism concern- dudgeon in the States from the American Presi- ing accuracy and reliability; by the nature of L dent downwards, the White House condemning such a vast, open and free compendium of the the leaks as an attack not only on the US but also world’s knowledge, this is inevitable. Used along M the international community. with other sources, Wikipedia is nevertheless In December a request from Sweden for the an invaluable fount of instantly summonable N extradition of Lasange on the grounds that he information. had been reported for sexual assault led to him Windows See microsoft windows. being taken into custody in Britain and denied Wireless network See internet: wireless O bail, even though ample surety had been off ered internet. by friends and well-wishers. Concurrently, Wireless telegraphy In the 1870s, James Clark P companies such as eBay, Pay-Pal and amazon Maxwell (1831–79), first Professor of Experi- either froze Wikileaks assets or refused to do mental Physics at the University of Cambridge, R business with the organization. Th is prompted argued that wireless telegraphy would be possible ‘Operation Payback’, described as a cyberwar, by employing electro-magnetic waves. In 1885, where supporters of Lasange and Wikileaks Welsh electrical engineer Sir William Preece S targeted the refusants online in a number of (1834–1913) sent currents between two insulated damaging ways. squares of wire a quarter of a mile apart. Two T Further sensational and embarrassing revela- years later Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857–94), tions concerning the treatment by US authorities German physicist, proved the existence of radio U of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay became public waves and in 1894 English physicist Sir Oliver knowledge through the pages of the New York Lodge demonstrated how messages could be Times and the UK Guardian (their information transmitted and received without wires. V obtained from Wikileaks) in the spring of 2011, Similar pioneer work had been conducted one story claiming that an an Al-Qaeda ‘assas- by Italian Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), W sin’ had actually worked for the British MI6. See who arrived in England to further his ideas. islandic modern media initiative; sipdis. Supported by Preece – then Engineer-in-Chief XYZ ▶ David Leigh and Luke Harding, WikiLeaks: Inside of the Post Offi ce – Marconi fi led an application Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy (Guardian Books, for a wireless patent (1896) and was soon send- 2011). ing long-distance messages by Morse Code, fi rst Wiki, Wikipedia Th e brainchild of Jimmy Wales, across the Bristol Channel and then the English and started up in January 2001, the Wiki is a Channel. His telegraph was used to save a ship website everyone can contribute to and edit; in distress in the North Sea and it was rapidly

323 Wireless Telegraphy Act (UK), 1904

accepted that radio equipment was essential Media companies expand in reach but also on board all ships. Th e British Admiralty paid seek to economize on labour. In-house work, if Marconi 20,000 a year for the use of his system its costs threaten profi t-growth, is replaced by in the Royal Navy. outsourcing (to low-wage economies),whether By 1901, wireless messages were being trans- or not that harms effi ciency or standards or puts mitted from Cornwall to Newfoundland, tapped people out of work. out in Morse. A year later R.A. Fissenden of the Worker rights and protection that may have University of Pittsburg transmitted the sound of been established within nation states risk a human voice over a distance of a mile. Further being ignored or actively resisted by employers progress was made possible by the invention of working across international boundaries. The the thermionic valve or electron tube, by English hazards are numerous: workers fi nd themselves electrical engineer John Ambrose Fleming at the mercy of ‘take it or leave it’ new contracts (1904). Th is device served to change the minute demanding more for less, impacting on job alternating current of a radio signal into a direct security in contexts where traditional union current, capable of actuating a telephone protection can no longer be guaranteed. receiver or the needle of a meter. American As never before the dynamics of information physicist Lee De Forest improved the valve by capitalism shape labour globally, undermining making amplifi cation possible. In 1910 De Forest worker power and control. In response, orga- fi tted what he named a ‘radio-phone’ on the roof nizations representing the interests of commu- of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, nication and media workers are reconstituting enabling listeners to hear the voices of the sing- themselves as global operators by converging in ers 100 miles away. alliance with like-minded institutions – the aim, The First World War (1914–18) accelerated worker protection and worker mobilization. developments in radio, where it received For example, the International Federation of baptism as a weapon of propaganda, by the Journalists (IFJ) represents over half a million Germans. The future possibilities for radio journalists worldwide and comprises more than were encapsulated by American engineer David 160 member unions in over a hundred coun- Sarnoff when in 1916, he declared, ‘I have in tries. Th e recently established Union Network mind a plan of development which would make International (UNI) serves workers in electronic a radio a “household utility” like the piano or communication and has proved itself eff ective in electricity. Th e idea is to bring music into the pressurizing global companies on its members’ house by wireless.’ See radio broadcasting. behalf. See also topic guides under broadcasting; Such alliances work for the maintenance and media history; media: technologies. extension of worker rights. Th ese prominently Wireless Telegraphy Act (UK), 1904 Th e result include defence of women workers, who are of a meeting of the major international powers particularly vulnerable in harsh global climates. held in Berlin in 1903 to prepare an international A product of the global activity of labour orga- plan for the regulation of wireless telegraphy at nizations is the Global Framework Agreement sea. The UK government required legislation (GLA), still in its infancy, where a communica- in order to sign the ensuing agreements that tions company operating worldwide agrees stan- enforced uniform rules of working. The Act dards of employment that apply to all workers in established universal wireless licensing in Brit- its employ, ensuring minimum labour standards, ain, shore and sea, granted by the Postmaster- health and safety and training opportunities. General with the consent of the Admiralty and Vincent Mosco and David O. Lavin conclude Army Council and the Board of Trade. their chapter, ‘The labouring of international Workers in communications and media So communication’ in Internationalizing Media diverse is the labour market for the communi- Studies (Routledge, 2009), edited by Daya cations industry that the vast aggregate size of Kishan Thussu, ‘rather than asking again and labour in communications worldwide is often again “what will be the next new thing?” it may overlooked in study and research. Yet whether be time to ask a more important question: will it is journalists, broadcasters, telecommunica- communication workers of the world unite?’. tion engineers, operatives in the knowledge and World Trade Organization (WTO) Telecom- publishing industries or workers in New Media munications Agreement, 1997 Signed by that are being focused on, similar pressures and sixty-eight countries, this agreement to abolish challenges are being encountered in the age of national and regional barriers to free trade in globalization. A key trend is convergence. telecommunication services was, as the WTO

324 Yahoo!

believed, ‘an important step towards fully A competitive markets’. Th is radical move towards Y deregulation was widely challenged by critics Yahoo! Or in its early days, ‘Jerry’s Guide to B who argued that more freedom actually meant the World Wide Web’, renamed after ‘rude, more American dominance; and that fully unsophisticated, uncouth’ and pretty despicable competitive markets were likely to reward the characters in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels C strong and punish the weak. (1776), on the grounds that it was an eye-catch- Edward Herman and Robert McChesney ing title. Th e global internet service was the D write, in Th e Global Media: Th e New Missionar- creation of Jerry Yang and David Filo, Stanford ies of Corporate Capitalism (Continuum, 1997), University graduate students. Its headquarters ‘It may be worth noting that the United States are in Sunnyvale, California. E is home of ten of the sixteen largest telecom- One of the most visited sites (3–4 billion munications fi rms in the world, and these are hits a day), Yahoo! provides a wide range of F the fi rms that are the major benefi ciaries of free online services, its development characterized

trade.’ Th e authors believe that while this and by diversification, acquisition and alliances G other liberalizing measures in global markets while at the same time fi ghting off bids to buy have ‘improved services for business and the it out (such as Microsoft’s failed takeover affl uent in the developing world, the principle bid, 2008). It was incorporated in 1995 and H of universal access has been compromised, if was soon absorbing other enterprises that not abandoned’. Also, such measures have ‘led would contribute to Yahoo’s growth: in 1997 I to numerous episodes of large-scale graft and Rocketmail became Yahoo!Mail, ClassicGames corruption’. became Yahoo!Games. A marketing alliance JK Th e liberalization (meaning privatization) with google followed. In 2005 Yahoo! acquired of telecommunications has encouraged merg- the photo-sharing service, Flickr. Then came ers, partnerships and joint ventures among the Yahoo!Maps (setting the competition nerves L decreasing number of giant players, leading jangling with google) and social media sites to what the UK Financial Times (2 April 1996) (My Web, Yahoo!Personal, Delicious and M termed ‘a handful of giants, straddling the world Yahoo!Buzz). market’. See global media system: the main As with other online providers, Yahoo! has N players; network neutrality. See also incurred widespread criticism and not incon- topic guides under global perspectives; siderable litigation. The organization’s global media issues & debates. ambitions, in particular its business in China, O have been the target of accusations that collusion took place with the Chinese government, P X namely concerning Yahoo!’s identification of X-certifi cate See certification of films. Chinese dissidents using the Yahoo! platform to R Xerography Reprographic process using a communicate their opinions. photo-electric surface that converts light into Following the jailing of journalist and dissident an electronic charge. Documents can be repro- Shi Tao for ten years in 2005, the British and S duced in black and white and in colour to a very Irish National Union of Journalists (NUJ) called high standard, and reduced in size or enlarged. for a boycott of Yahoo!’s products and services as T Th e electrostatic image of a document attracts a result of the organization’s activities in China. charged ink powder, which in turn is attracted A ten-year sentence awaited another ‘outed’ U to charged paper. A visible image is formed and dissident, Wang Xiaoning. In 2007 Wang’s wife fi xed permanently by heating. Yu Ling, supported by the World Organization Xenophobia Fear of foreigners; from the Greek, for Human Rights USA, sued Yahoo! in a San V xeno – strange, foreign, guest, and phobos, fear. Francisco court. Speaking for the human rights organization, The media’s role in cultivating xenophobic W tendencies in the public has a long, and often Morton Sklar stated that ‘Yahoo! had reason to tragic, history. Th e speed at which such tenden- know that they provided China with the identifi - cies can be provoked and manipulated is a vital cation information that these individuals would XYZ area of media research. See demonization; be arrested’. Th e issue proceeded as far as the US effects of the mass media; folk devils; House Foreign Aff airs Committee, Yahoo! being moral panics and the media; radio death; criticized for failing to provide full information, stereotype; wedom, theydom. this being described as ‘at best inexcusable negligence’ and at worst ‘deceptive’.

325 Yamousoukrou declaration

A further questionable connection with China much, too little; or quite simply the existence was the revelation that Yahoo! held a 40 per cent and persistence of advertisements distracting share in Alibaba, a company trading in crocodile from news content (see noise). products. In its defence, the organization argued Yaros defi nes personalization as ‘the degree that 40 per cent ownership of the company to which content is tailored for an individual precluded it from exerting control over Alibaba’s for consumption’, web research indicating that trade in China. user responses are usually more positive the Yamousoukrou declaration Issued by African more personalized the content and presentation: leaders in 1985, the declaration states that ‘one the more users can personalize their choice, of the main keys to solving Africa’s development the more they become their own information problems lies in mastering the national manage- gatekeepers. ment of information in all its forms’. Th e text of Th e author sees Involvement as made up of the declaration that appeared in an International two elements, interest and interactivity. Web Bureau of Information report (1986) argued that browsing is largely swift and cursory; a user information management and control are ‘not might spend only fractions of a second with a text only a positive force for regional and continental before moving on. Th is will depend on what Yaros integration but also an essential condition for terms ‘individual interest’: something users bring the survival of Africa within the community of with them to new texts, knowledge and interest nations in the twenty-fi rst century’. See core which ‘develops over time’. ‘Situational interest’ nations, peripheral nations; develop- on the other hand comes about as a result of an ment news; information gaps; mcbride encounter with text, pictures, sound or video commission; media imperialism. communication. User engagement will depend ★Yaros’ ‘PICK’ model for multimedia news, on a number of factors, including well-written 2009 ‘PICK’ stands for three linked processes: and easily comprehended text with helpful and Personalization, Involvement and Contiguity; attractive aids such as pictures, graphs, anima- the fourth, ‘Kick-out’, indicates that P, I and C tions, colour and attractive page design. have not worked. Th e model posed by Ronald The PICK model defines interactivity as A. Yaros relates to news reception in the ‘the degree to which content assists citizens to multi-media world of the internet; its theo- input choices, responses or content ... any abil- retical intention ‘to maximize interest in and ity for citizen journalists to serve as the source understanding of complex news by non-expert of content – through blogs, forums, uploaded citizens’. video, etc. – represents more meaningful inter- In ‘Producing citizen journalism or produc- activity because the model focuses on the user’. ing journalism for citizens: a new multimedia Contiguity ‘is the extent to which the combi- model to enhance understanding of complex nations of hypertext, photos, animation, slides, news’ published in Journalism and Citizenship: links, blogs, video and audio relate to each other New Agendas in Communication (Routledge, to maximize coherence of the single message 2009), edited by Zizi Papacharissi, Yaros notes while preventing cognitive overload’. Quite the ‘overwhelming complexity in news’ which simply, do all the elements of a page ‘relate to ‘appears to be growing exponentially’. He raises each other to form one coherent message’? For the question, ‘why and how should citizens with example, the closer pictures are to the text they limited expertise engage in complex news issues illustrate, the more effective their contiguity, on a medium that off ers so many other choices’? the greater will be user understanding; equally, Yaros’ model ‘attempts to answer with the ‘contiguity within the structures of text and hypothesis that more citizens might better under- hypertext is important’. stand complex news if the content was presented The Kick-out element of the PICK model with more personalization, involvement and ‘addresses those elements that threaten engage- coherent multimedia structures’. Th e process the ment’. Yaros states, ‘if news is not personalized author sees as an interactive one between profes- enough for the user’s experience, prior knowl- sionals and news-consuming citizens. edge or interest, or is not interactive enough for Th e elements of the model work together; and citizen involvement or is not contiguous enough where they don’t enhance interest and under- to quickly form a coherent message, the content standing it is because kick-outs have occurred, itself will likely “kick out” citizen engagement’. that is consumer switch-off or switch-over. Kick- Yaros argues that in a world of ‘overwhelm- outs might be technical diffi culties, information ing content’ and characterized by a media seen to be outdated, confusing, irrelevant, too environment that is ‘increasingly fragmented’,

326 Youth culture

PERSONALIZATION “KICK-OUTS” B (preferred content)

INVOLVEMENT CONTIGUITY F (interest and (of text, graphics, interactivity) animation) G

Yaros’ ‘PICK’ model for multimedia news, 2009 I

JK multimedia journalism will have to accept that purchased Journal. The gap-toothed Kid in traditional ways to structure the news text ‘are his yellow smock, whose grin was recognized now only a subset of all the important variables throughout the city on billboards and sandwich L to be considered when producing multimedia boards, joined the Journal as cartoon and news’. promotional image. Soon Hearst was organizing M At the macro-level of the website and the the Yellow Fellow Transcontinental Bicycle Relay micro-level of the news story, the operation of followed by a bike carnival in New York’s Central N the components of the PICK model will ‘be para- Park. mount if the audience member is to be retained’. In response, Pulitzer hired Richard Buks Yaros puts the case that ‘concepts in the PICK to continue the original cartoon strip, and in O model will be the determining factors that sepa- 1895 two Yellow Kids were in competition. rate mediocre content with content that will be ‘For contemporaries,’ writes Andrew Wernick P truly worth the time for the audience to engage’. in Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology Yellow journalism Phrase used in the US to and Symbolic Expression (Sage, 1991), ‘the Kid’s R describe newspapers involved in the internecine colour became emblematic of the effects of (dog-eat-dog) warfare of the popular metropoli- intensiﬁ ed consumerization on the whole char- tan press empires of the late nineteenth century; acter of the popular press’. S a battle which has continued to the present day Visual appeal had become central to the with mass-circulation tabloids competing for process of promotion. When Hearst followed T readership with all sorts of exploitative oﬀ ers, Pulitzer in issuing a full-colour Sunday supple- lurid revelations and blockbuster bingo. ment, the Journal announced its own ‘eight U Yellow Kid Newspaper cartoon character, the pages of irridescent polychromous effulgence possession of whose widely popular image – and that makes the rainbow look like a lead pipe’. It is the use of that image – was fought over by New perhaps more than a coincidence that the most V York’s press barons, Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911) popular TV comic strip, Th e Simpsons, contin-

and William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951). Th e ued with the effulgence of yellow. See topic W pictorial image was fast dominating the pages guide under media history. of newspapers at the beginning of the twentieth Youth culture Since the Second World War century, proving a circulation-booster and a (1939–45), considerable attention has been paid XYZ marketing device. Pulitzer’s New York World ﬁ rst to the cultures and sub-cultures of young people featured Richard B. Outcault’s cartoon, Shanty- – to their symbols, signs, philosophies, mores, town (renamed Hogan’s Alley). Hearst ‘raided’ norms, language, and music. Music is an essen- the World’s Sunday edition, buying-in the entire tial part of all youth cultures and sub-cultures, a production team of the paper for his own, newly mode of self-identiﬁ cation (see self-identity),

327 YouTube

and diff erent groups favour diff erent musical diverse takes on political reality’. styles and use music in diff erent ways. It provides ‘an opportunity for expression Youth cultures and sub-cultures diff er not only different from conventional mobilization, over time but can also vary between class, sex opinion expression, or protest’. This explains and racial groups. Whilst they manifest signifi - why YouTube suff ers frequent blocking in many cant diff erences, there are some links between countries, a practice that will spread as the range them and individuals may move from one to of languages becomes increasingly interna- another. Th ey adopt and adapt aspects of each tionalized, and content and language localized, other’s cultural style and those of past youth that is tailored to both international and local cultures and sub-cultures. Th e more dramatic consumption. See facebook; myspace. sub-cultures have attracted attention from the ▶ Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online media and academics. Th eir often spectacular Video and Participatory Culture (Polity Press, 2009); modes of expression off er contrast and challenge Michael Strangelove, Watching YouTube: Extraor- to society, usually communicated by style – the dinary Videos by Ordinary People (University of hairstyle of the Punks, for example. Toronto Press, 2010). Th e media have been a notable mediator of society’s reaction to such challenges, and this role has been a focus of media research. Essen- tially, youth culture is seen as deviant, or poten- Z tially deviant; and since a function of media is to Zapping, zipping Th e practice of TV channel- patrol the boundaries between the norm and the switching, especially when the commercials deviant, particular interest is expressed in youth come on, is referred to as ‘zapping’; made culture, often leading to demonization and a worryingly easy – as far as the advertisers are tendency to work up concern that threatens the concerned – with the arrival of remote control. social order. See folk devils; moral panics In France, an anti-zapping strategy designed and the media; sensitization. to keep viewers glued to the commercials was YouTube An audio-visual network platform introduced in the late 1980s: individual numbers launched in February 2005 to which millions placed in the corner of the screen off er viewers post their videos. Its slogan is ‘Broadcast Your- bingo-style competition. A full line of numbers self’ and it has been described as a ‘speakers’ wins a cash prize. ‘Zipping’ is fast-forwarding corner’. It limits submissions by individuals to 15 through recorded programmes, again most minutes. Part of the google empire since 2006, generally to escape the commercials. YouTube is easy to use, observes no criteria for Zinoviev letter, 1924 Probably forged by selection, is anarchic in the sense that there are Russian émigrés and used as a ‘Red scare’ tactic no classifi cations of order, and is virtually impos- by the UK Daily Mail to put the frighteners on sible to regulate, monitor or censor. It renders the electorate immediately before the 1924 elec- copyright protection of content extremely tion. Labour lost the election and the Zinoviev problematic. letter probably made some diff erence, if not a In ‘Alternative modes of civil engagement’ substantial one. It was a 1,200-word document in the book she also edited, Journalism and marked Very Secret, bearing the address of the Citizenship: New Agendas in Communication 3rd Communist International, the organiza- (Routledge, 2009), Zizi Papacharissi writes that tion in Moscow responsible for international the ‘main draw is that YouTube user generated communist tactics. content serves a variety of purposes, ranging The letter was addressed to the Central from catching a politician in a lie to impromptu Committee of the British Communist Party karaoke, with no restrictions’. and its tenor was the need to stir the British ‘Where blogging provides the pulpit,’ proletariat to revolutionary action against their Papacharissi writes, ‘YouTube provides the irrev- capitalist masters. Among other recommenda- erence, humour, and unpredictability necessary tions, the letter urged the formation of cells in for rejuvenating political conversation trapped the armed forces – the ‘future directors of the in conventional formulas’ and serves as a potent British Red Army’. vehicle for citizen journalism (see journalism: Th e impact of the forged letter was due to its citizen journalism). She states that ‘YouTube timing. It was ‘intercepted’ by the Conservative content completes the media and news sphere Daily Mail just a few days before the election that the monitorial citizen scans while surveying of October 1924 and published four days before the political environment, by adding various and Polling Day. The Mail used a seven-deck (or

328 Zoopraxography

lines) headline, topping the deck with ‘Civil War politics & economics; media: power, A Plot By Socialists’ Masters’. With the exception effects, influence. of the Daily Herald, the entire British press Zoetrope Or ‘wheel of life’. Early nineteenth- B swallowed and regurgitated the story. Th e Times century ‘toy’ in which pictures inside a spinning discovered ‘Another Red Plot in Germany’ and drum, viewed from the outside through slits, on voting day the Daily Express warned, in red appear to be in motion. Invented in 1834 by C ink, ‘Do Not Vote Red Today’. Labour lost fi fty Englishman W.G. Horner, the zoetrope simply seats but gained more than a million votes. but eff ectively demonstrated the phenomenon D Eventually (but always too late) the truth will of persistence of vision, the realization of out; and in February 1999 Gill Bennett, Chief which opened the way for the birth of cinema. Historian at the UK Foreign Offi ce, produced Zones In Th e Hidden Dimension: Man’s Use of E a 126-page report, commissioned by the-then Space in Public and Private (Bodley Head, 1966), Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, pointing a sure Edward T. Hall identifies four distinct zones, F finger of accusation at Desmond Morton, an or territorial spaces, in which most men and

MI6 offi cer and friend of Winston Churchill, as women operate. These are intimate distance; G the offi cial who supplied the Mail with its sensa- personal distance; social distance; and public tional disclosure. Also named is Major Joseph distance, each with its close and far phases. See Ball, an MI5 offi cer who joined the Conservative proxemics. H Central Office in 1926. Bennett reported that Zoopraxography Pioneer photographer the forged letter was ‘probably leaked from SIS Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) was not I [the Secret Intelligence Service, alias MI6] by the inventor of cine-fi lm, but he made the fi rst

somebody to the Conservative Party Central photographic moving pictures, a process he JK Office’. See disinformation; freedom of called Zoopraxography, fifteen years before information. See also topic guides under Lumière’s fi rst fi lms. Muybridge described his media: freedom, censorship; media: power, Zoopraxiscope as being ‘the fi rst apparatus ever L effects, influence. used, or constructed, for synthetically demon- Zircon aff air In 1986 in the UK, New Statesman strating movements analytically photographed M journalist Duncan Campbell made a series of from life’. six TV programmes for the BBC entitled Secret In 1878 he set up an experiment at Palo Alto, N Society. Th e fi rst of these was about a Ministry California, to ascertain by photography whether of Defence project – Zircon – to put a spy all four hooves of a galloping horse were ever satellite into space, at an estimated cost of 5m. simultaneously clear of the ground (they are). O On 15 January 1987, Alisdair Milne, the BBC’s Twenty-four cameras were aligned along the soon-to-be-dismissed Director-General, banned running track, each triggered off by the horse as P the Zircon programme on grounds of national it galloped past. security, a decision the Observer made public on The Zoopraxiscope consisted of a spinning R 18 January. glass disc bearing the photographs in sequence Th e most notorious aspect of the Zircon aff air of movement. The disc, when attached to a was the police raids. Special Branch descended central shaft, revolved in front of the condens- S upon the New Statesman offi ces – upon Camp- ing lens of a projecting lantern parallel to and bell’s home as well as the homes of two other close to another disc fi xed to a tubular shaft that T Statesman journalists; and fi nally there was a encircled the other, and round which it rotated raid on the Glasgow offi ces of BBC Scotland, in the opposite direction. U where all six of the Secret Society films were By 1885 Muybridge had produced an encyclo- seized. Two days before, Milne had been sacked paedia of motion: men and women, clothed and as the BBC’s Director-General. unclothed, performed simple actions such as V Th e irony of the case is that Zircon was not running, drinking cups of tea or shoeing horses; and a massive and varied study of animals and really a closely guarded state secret; indeed W the position of the proposed satellite was fi led birds in movement. His carefully catalogued by the Ministry of Defence at the International work was published in 1887. See topic guide Communications Union, an institution of which under media history. XYZ the former USSR was a member. Eventually the Zircon programme was transmitted by the BBC in September 1988, by which time the Zircon project had been cancelled. See topic guides under media: freedom, censorship; media:

329 A chronology of media events

Th is Chronology is drawn from many sources, but 1484 Caxton prints Morte D’Arthur. our best thanks go to Patrick Robertson whose 1494 John Tate of Stevenage is the fi rst to manu- Th e New Shell Book of Firsts (Headline, 1994), a facture paper in England. Tate produced the remarkable piece of historical detective work, has fi rst-known watermark in the UK – a star and been immensely helpful. UK is used in a general- circle. ized sense as a composite reference to England, 1513 Nicolo Machiavelli’s Th e Prince published. Britain and the United Kingdom. 1517 Martin Luther nails his 95 Th eses, protesting AD 105 Paper produced from pulp; invention against the sale of indulgences, on the church attributed to Ts’ai Lun, China. door at Wittenberg. Th e printing and distribu- AD 704 First printed book, the Dharani Sutra, tion of his works ignites the Reformation, and created in Korea from woodblocks on a scroll, the division of Europe between Roman Catholic and discovered in the foundations of the Pulguk and Protestant faiths. Sa pagoda in Kyongju, South Korea, October 1526 William Tyndale’s translation of the New 1966. Testament into English is published by Peter 1174 First evidence of woodblock printing in Schoeff er in Worms, Germany. Europe, by Benedictine monks at Engelberg, 1527 Leipzig: printer Hanz Hergot executed Switzerland, used to print capital letters in illu- for twice publishing On the New Direction of minated manuscripts. Christian Life, a pamphlet advocating common 1234 Compendium of Rites and Rituals, fi rst book ownership of land and goods. printed using movable type comprising 50 chap- 1536 Myles Coverdale’s complete translation of ters, 28 copies of which were published in Korea. the Bible into English published, probably in Th e type was made using a sand-moulding tech- Cologne. Th is was printed in London by James nique developed in 1102 for casting coins. Nicholson the following year. 1451 Donatis Latin Grammar, two leaves of a 1559 Roman Catholic church promulgates the 27-line publication, the fi rst evidence of the use Index Librorum Prohibitorum, a list of prohib- of movable type in Europe, possibly the same ited books; and in 1571 the Index Expurgatoris, of type as that used by John of Gutenberg in his books permitted after censorship. 42-line Bible believed to have been printed at 1588 Dr Timothy Bright introduces the first Mainz between 1451 and 1454, 48 copies of which recorded system of shorthand. His system survive, 36 printed on paper, 12 on vellum. appeared under the title Characterie; the art of 1454 Gutenberg prints the fi rst calendar. short, swift, and secret writing. 1461 Albrecht Pfi ster of Bamberg publishes the 1608 Th e civil authorities of Norwich open the first books in the vernacular: Ulrich Boner’s first municipal public library, chiefly for ‘the Edelstein and Johann von Tepl’s Ackermann aus use of preachers’. In 1656 Chetham’s Library in Böhmen. Manchester became the fi rst to employ a librar- 1474 In Bruges, the Englishman William Caxton ian. Chetham’s was open to all. As late as 1849 publishes Th e Recuyell of the Histories of Troye, it remained the only substantial collection of a translation from original French text. Caxton books fully accessible to the public. Manchester moved to London where he printed in 1477 Th e also took the lead with the lending of books. In Dictes and Sayengis of the Philosophres, a work 1852 the Manchester Free Library instituted a of 74 leaves ‘drawn out of frensche into our lending system, issuing over 70,000 books in its Englisshe tonge’ by Anthony Earl Rivers. fi rst year. Th is followed the Public Libraries Act 1475 Jodocus Pfl anzmann of Augsburg prints the of 1850. fi rst illustrated Bible. 1611 Issue in the UK of the Authorized Version

330 1619 – 1776

of the Bible (called the King James Version), the to secure the rights of authors and publishers composite work of 46 translators and revisers. by offering legal protection against ‘pirating’ 1619 State of Weimar becomes the fi rst to intro- of texts. A similar act was passed in France in duce compulsory education for all between the 1793 and in the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar ages of 6 and 13. In the UK similar legislation had in 1839 (the fi rst to employ the 30-year term of to wait until 1870. protection after an author’s death). Th e principle 1621 First Corantos published in London, of international reciprocity of rights was estab- followed in same year by first Proclamation lished in the Berne Convention of 1886. against Corantos. 1712 In Britain, fi rst ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ intro- 1637 Star Chamber Decree regulating printing, duced – duties on newspapers and advertising followed in 1643 with Ordinance for regulating and excise duty on paper. printing, and in 1649 the fi rst Printing Act. 1720s Benjamin Franklin begins successful 1642 The Mayflower arrives in America from publishing career with Pennsylvania Gazette. Plymouth, England, with a printing press on 1725 Stamp Act in Britain applies 1712 regulations board. to all newspapers, whatever their size or format. 1644 Publication of John Milton’s Areopagitica 1739 Scotsman William Ged devises method of presenting the case for the freedom of the press. preserving pages of type for future reprints, 1649 UK: Charles I beheaded. During the period using a mould made from plaster of Paris from in power of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, which metal plates were made. In fear of their and until the restoration of the monarchy in livelihoods, Scottish printers wrecked the inven- 1660, under Charles II, England becomes a tion; 60 years later it was revived by Firmin hotbed of radical, chiefl y religious, publications. Didot who reversed the process by creating the John Lilburne issues England’s New Chaines metal plate from sunken surfaces. Eventually Discovered. stereotyping, as the process came to be known, 1650 At Leipzig, the first daily newspaper, the was made a commercial proposition by amateur Einkommenden Zeitungen, is published by inventor Lord Stanhope, in 1805, at the Claren- Timotheus Ritzsch. In the UK the Perfect Diur- don Press, Oxford. nall was published daily, except Sunday, between • In 1829 the plaster and metal plates gave way February and March 1660, though British read- to papier mâché, reducing time, weight and bulk ers had to wait till 1702 for the fi rst successful – innovations happening at virtually the same daily, the Daily Courant. time in Italy, France and England. Stanhope 1651 Publication of Th omas Hobbes’ Leviathan. also improved the printing press by replacing 1657 First classifi ed advertisement in a UK paper the wooden press with an iron structure and by printed in Th omas Newcombe’s Publick Adver- increasing the bed of the machine in order to tiser, the fi rst English paper devoted entirely to produce one-pull larger-scale sheets. advertising. 1741 First magazines, in US, Andrew Bradford’s 1660–1 Parliament prohibits publication of its American Magazine, followed by Benjamin proceedings. Franklin’s General Magazine. 1680 Royal Proclamation suppressing all news- 1757 UK: increases in taxes on newspapers; books except those under licence from the increased again in 1776, 1780, 1789 (the year of authorities. the French Revolution), 1797 and 1815. 1693 In UK, the City Mercury is the fi rst giveaway 1764 London: prosecution of firebrand editor/ newspaper. journalist John Wilkes for seditious libel • London bookseller John Dunton issues the fi rst published in the North Briton. women’s magazine, the Ladies’ Mercury. 1770s Th omas Paine in America. His Common 1695 Parliament does not renew the Licensing Sense (1776), arguing powerfully for the separa- Act. tion of the States from English rule, will prove an 1701 First provincial newspaper in the UK, the immensely infl uential bestseller. Norwich Post, a weekly, with an approximate 1771 Press permitted to report the proceedings of circulation of 400–500 copies. the House of Commons, followed by those of the 1702 First daily newspaper in Britain, the Daily House of Lords (in 1775). Courant, is published in London. • Th e Morning Post published in London. 1704 John Campbell publishes Boston Newsletter, 1776 Publication of Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the fi rst newspaper in the US not to be a one- the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. issue failure. • Publication of Tom Paine’s Common Sense: 1709 English Copyright Act, the fi rst enactment Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, a

331 1780 – 1829

summons to the people of America to rise up in His example was emulated by Th e Times in 1808 battle and overthrow British rule. As one English when Henry Crabb Robinson was commissioned historian believed: ‘It would be diffi cult to name to cover the Peninsular War. any human composition which had an effect 1798 France, at the Essonne mill: Nicolas Robert at once so instant, so extended, and so lasting.’ introduces the first paper manufacturing 120,000 copies of Common Sense were sold machine; the first in England established at within three months of publication. Frogmore, Hertfordshire, in 1805 by brothers 1780 UK: fi rst Sunday newspaper published – the Henry and Sealy Fourdriner, and at St Neots, British Gazette and Sunday Monitor. Huntingdonshire, by John Gamble. Paper output 1785 Founding of Th e Times newspaper followed increased tenfold. by the Observer in 1791. • Prime Minister William Pitt increases the • Paris: fortnightly Le Cabinet des Modes is tax on British newspapers from 1½ pence to published, the fi rst fashion magazine. 2½ pence and bans the import into the UK of 1787 First recorded advertising agency formed in foreign newspapers. London by William Tayler, who for a handling 1800 Bavarian Alois Senefelder takes out English fee booked advertisements in the provincial patent for lithographic process, printing from press. the surface of a specially prepared stone. 1788 UK: publication of fi rst daily evening news- Photography is incorporated into the printed paper – Star and Evening Advertiser. page, using lithography, from 1840. 1789 Revolution in France: the Declaration of the 1802 Founding of the Weekly Political Register by Rights of Man and Citizens is promulgated 27 William Cobbett, one of the outstanding jour- July; the key to this being the notion of popular nalist/editors of the nineteenth century. Paper sovereignty. The principles of the Revolution survives until 1835. were to be an inspiration to radicalism in Britain 1805 Lord Stanhope’s improved stereotyping and a guiding light of the Radical press. machine set up at Oxford’s Clarendon Press. • In turn events in France provoked the authori- 1811 Th omas Bensley makes fi rst use in the UK of ties in Britain to take repressive measures against the Frederick Koenig steam-driven press to print the Radicals and the causes they advocated. in London 3000 sheets of the Annual Register. 1790 Orator and conservative theorist Edmund 1814 Th e Times installs the Koenig press, the most Burke publishes Refl ections on the Revolution in significant technological advance in printing France condemning the uprising of the common since the age of Gutenberg. Th e steam-driven people. press made mass production of newspapers a 1791 Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man Part 1 reality and, in the company of other inventions published, a stirringly eloquent riposte to Burke’s in paper manufacture and stereotyping, ushered Refl ections. in the first age of mass communication. The • English philosopher Jeremy Bentham designs a initial run was 1100 sheets per hour. Th e fi rst ‘panopticon’, (the all-seeing one) for the central book to be printed on the power press in the UK inspection of convicts; an idea given new life was Johann Blumenbach’s Physiology, in 1817. in the twentieth century in an age of electronic 1821 In Britain, the Six Acts passed, including surveillance. two targeting the radical press. • First Amendment to the American Bill of • Manchester Guardian founded. Rights guarantees the freedom of the press. 1822 Invention of the camera by Frenchman 1792 First Libel Act becomes law in Britain. Joseph Nièpce who produced the fi rst photo- • Part 2 of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man published. graph (1826). Also in 1822, William Church’s Also Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the letter-founding machine makes for reductions Rights of Women, demanding equal educational in production costs. Hand-assembly could cast opportunities for women. between 3,000 and 7,000 letters a day, Church’s 1793 John Bell, Yorkshire-born founder of the machine between 12,000 and 20,000. Oracle or Bell’s New World becomes the fi rst- • Sunday Times founded. ever foreign correspondent, reporting to his 1826 Leipzig publisher F.A. Brockhaus applies own paper the fi ghting between the British and Koenig’s steam press to the printing of books. French in the Low Countries. He chose to march • First permanently fi xed photograph created by with the French rather than with the forces of the Nicéphore Nièpce. Th is was taken from an upper Duke of York. He reported on the British victo- storey at Nièpce’s home at Gras, Chalon-sur- ries at Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Villiers-en-Cauche Saône. and Troixelle as well as the defeat at Tournay. 1829 Four-cylinder steam press, invented by

332 1830s – 1848

Augustus Applegarth and Edward Cowper for Becher, a political economist. Th e Times, speeds the delivery of print, allow- • Th ough some 1500 patents had by 1900 been ing 4,000 sheets per hour. Th e same inventors registered in the US for composing machines follow this up in 1848 with the rotary press, those invented by Robert Hattersley and Charles which printed 8,000 sheets per hour. Kastenbein dominated. With each, the chief 1830s UK: the ‘War of the Unstamped’ waged by problem was the need to justify the lines by hand, the radical, unstamped press against the Taxes a problem resolved by Linotype and Monotype on Knowledge. machines, and the punch-cutting machine of 1831–5 Publication of Henry Hetherington’s Poor Linn Boyd Benton of Milwaukee in 1885. Man’s Guardian, one of the outstanding radical • A Saxon weaver, Friedrich Gottleb Keller, papers of the nineteenth century. produces paper from wood pulp, another inno- 1832 W.E. Weber and K.F. Gauss construct the vation suggested much earlier but not developed needle telegraph in Grottingen. or taken up. • Th e Penny Magazine of London becomes the • Th e fi rst public telegraph service is introduced fi rst mass-circulation paper selling over 100,000 following the completion of the Great Western copies. Railway telegraph line from Paddington to 1833 Advertising Duty reduced, followed in 1836 Slough. William Cooke who had patented the with the reduction of Stamp Duty and Excise system transferred the licence, for an annual fee, Duty on paper. It was not until 1853 that Adver- to Th omas Home and the fi rst paid telegrams tising Duty was abolished. 1855 saw the abolition were sent by Cooke’s double-needle electro- of Stamp Duty and 1861 Paper Duties. magnetic telegraph along a 20-mile wire. Even- • US: New York Sun, concentrating on stories tually the Electric Telegraph Company took up of sex and violence, published by Benjamin the licence and pioneered nationwide telegraphy. Day. Th is was followed in 1835 by the New York By 1847 two systems, north and south, were in Herald, published by John Gordon Bennett, with operation, linking major towns and cities. Unifi - specifi c pages dedicated to sport and fi nance. cation of the regions took place in November. 1835 Henry Fox-Talbot, British pioneer in the • Foundation of the News of the World, the Econ- development of photography, publishes a omist and, in Newcastle, the Miners’ Journal. description in the February edition of the Liter- 1844 Transmission of the first press telegram, ary Gazette of the positive–negative process, from a Congress reporter in Washington DC which would enable the reproduction of photo- to the editor of the Baltimore Patriot, by Morse graphs in any number. telegraph. In the UK the fi rst press telegraph was • Fox-Talbot’s work coincided with that of the sent in the same year, from Windsor Castle to Frenchman Louis Daguerre, who was the fi rst Th e Times via the Slough-Paddington telegraph, to commercially exploit photography. The announcing the birth of Prince Alfred to Queen Daguerrotype used only the one-off positive, but Victoria. it advanced exposure time from eight hours to • William Fox-Talbot’s Th e Pencil of Nature is the only 15 to 30 minutes. Th e French government fi rst book in the UK to be published with photo- acquired the rights from Daguerre and Isidor graphs. Th is was issued by Longman in six parts. Nièpce, heir of Nicéphore Nièpce (died 1833) • Society of Women Journalists founded in who had gone into business with Daguerre. Th us London. the process became public property for all to 1846 London: Daily News founded, with Charles use. Daguerre’s own cameras were on sale before Dickens (briefl y) as editor. the end of the year. 1847–8 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels produce 1836 US: Samuel Morse builds his fi rst telegraph. Th e Communist Manifesto. Having settled in the 1838 Th e Times of India founded. UK Marx produced his monumental work, Das • Publication of the radical Northern Star (until Kapital (Capital ) in 1859. 1852). • Paris: the photographic journal Le Daguer- 1839 In Paris, Alphonse Giroux manufactures for rotype published. sale the fi rst Daguerrotype camera. 1848 In Havana, Cuba, Italian Antonio Meucci 1842 Illustrated London News is founded. creates instrument with which he communicates • Samuel Morse lays fi rst submarine telegraph between apartment fl oors with his invalid wife. cable, New York Harbour. However, it is 1860 before there is a public 1843 Giuseppe Mazzini obtains patent for a demonstration of the telephone, by Johann composing machine, though the idea had Philipp Reis of Germany, using a violin-case for originated as early as 1682 with Johann Joachim a resonator, a hollowed-out beer-barrel bung

333 1850 – 1877

for a mouthpiece and a stretched sausage skin developing radio commercially before his death for a diaphragm. In 1861 Reis demonstrated an in 1886. In the UK David Edward Hughes proved improved version to the Frankfurt Physical Soci- a signifi cant pioneer into the phenomenon of ety, transmitting verses and songs – albeit with radio waves, but he met with little encourage- very poor clarity – over a 300-foot line. ment. It was left to Heinrich Hertz, the German • The editor of the UK Morning Chronicle electrical scientist, to convince the scientific employs Eliza Lyn Linton to write features and community of the existence and signifi cance of reviews. She later became the paper’s Paris radio waves, thus making possible the develop- correspondent. On her return to the UK she ment of radio telegraphy and broadcasting. became Fleet Street’s fi rst-ever full-time woman 1867 Invention of the typewriter by American journalist. She became known for her antipathy Christopher Sholes. to women’s suff rage. 1868 London, Press Association founded. 1850 UK: Public Libraries Act. • New York: Staats Zeitung fi rst newspaper to be • Philadelphia: Frederick Langenheim patents printed on wood-pulp paper. fi rst photographic slides. 1870 UK: Education Act inaugurates systematic 1852 J.W. Brett lays first submarine telegraph primary school education for all. cable between Dover and Calais. 1870–1 Jessie White Mario becomes world’s fi rst • UK: House of Commons Press Gallery opens. woman war correspondent, covering the Franco- • Surgeon John MacCosh is first British war Prussian War for several US and British papers. photographer; 47 studies survive of his photo- 1872 Issue of fi rst illustrated daily newspaper, the coverage of the Second Burma War. New York Daily Graphic. 1853 Liverpool: the Northern Daily Times 1873 The New York Daily Graphic is first to becomes England’s fi rst daily provincial paper. publish a half-tone photograph, 2 December 1854 Paris: Le Figaro founded. – an illustration of the city’s Steinway Hall 1855 Englishman Alexander Parkes invents cellu- appeared on the back page. loid. 1874 American writer Mark Twain becomes the • Foundation of the Daily Telegraph. fi rst author to possess a typewriter – made by • In UK, newspaper tax abolished. Remington. By 1890 in the US there were 30 1858 First transatlantic telegram sent by John manufacturers producing typewriters. In the UK Cash, American name-tape manufacturer, from none were on sale until 1889, from the Maskelyne London to his New York representative. At 1 a British Typewriter & Manufacturing Company. word, it read: ‘Go to Chicago’. • In the same year George C. Blickensderfer’s 1860 Antonio Meucci demonstrates, in New Connecticut company produced the first York, his ‘telefono’ but has insufficient funds portable, the Blick. Th e introduction of the type- to patent his invention. Only in 2002 was he writer into business created new employment acknowledged, by the US House of Representa- opportunities for women. tives, as the true originator of the telephone 1876 Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell success- (rather than Alexander Graham Bell who had fully initiates telephonic communication. Bell, of access to Meucci’s materials and had shared a Edinburgh, patented the telephone on 9 March, laboratory with him). However, it was Bell who and on 10 March, in Boston, US, the fi rst truly patented a version of Meucci’s device in 1876. coherent transmission took place – a message 1865 Father Giovanni Caselli developed the fi rst from Bell to his assistant, Thomas Watson: fax machine between 1857 and 1864. It was intro- ‘Come here, Watson, I want you.’ The speak- duced for public service over the Paris-Lyons ing telephone was demonstrated by Bell at the telegraph line in May 1865. However, the fi rst Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 25 June. offi ce fax did not become commercially available In July of the following year the fi rst telephone until the Xerox LDX was demonstrated in the line between two separate buildings was laid, company’s showroom in New York, May 1964. in London, between the Queen’s Theatre and The Japanese firm Sharp introduced the first Canterbury Hall. In the same year the first colour fax in 1984. telephone exchange was created on behalf of the 1866 Mahloon Loomis of Washington DC, having New England Telephone Company by Isaac D. described a system of radio signalling in a paper Smith. of July 1866, succeeds in October in broadcasting 1877 Th omas Alva Edison of America patents the messages over a 14-mile distance. He was granted Phonograph, the fi rst sound-recording system. the world’s fi rst wireless patent in 1872. Lack of The prototype being completed by Edison’s funds in a period of recession prevented Loomis mechanic, John Kruesi at West Orange, New

334 1878 – 1888

Jersey, on 6 December, Edison proceeded to peared; a mystery that remains unsolved. make history by reciting into the recording 1886 New York Herald Tribune installs the fi rst apparatus, ‘Mary had a little lamb’. Th e Edison Linotype machine, the invention of Ottmar Speaking Phonograph Company began produc- Margenthaler. tion in April 1879. Th e tin-foil cylinder provided • Paris: Le Petit Journal becomes fi rst paper to so short a duration that public interest in the reach 1 million circulation. Phonograph declined. 1887 German Emile Berliner working in the US • Th e wax-cylinder Graphaphone developed by applies for a patent for the first gramophone Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter was or disc-recorder player. He demonstrated his patented in 1886, to be countered by Edison, his invention at the Franklin Institute in Philadel- interest in recording renewed, with the Improved phia in the following year. The hand-cranked Phonograph. Edison Laboratories were the fi rst gramophone was initially produced as a toy by to record music by an accredited musician, the Kammerer & Rheinhardt, Germany, using a fi ve- boy pianist Josef Hofman, in 1888. Th ere was no inch vulcanized rubber disc at an approximate means of duplicating wax discs before 1892. speed of 70rpm. Electrically operated machines 1878 Th e microphone, demonstrated in London were marketed by the United States Gramo- by Professor David Edward Hughes. phone Company in Washington in 1894, using 1880 The Radiophone, devised by Charles seven-inch records. Sumner Tainter and Alexander Graham Bell, • First overseas edition of a newspaper – New successfully transmits speech between the top York Herald in Paris. of Franklin School, Washington DC, and Bell’s • The Berliner Gramophone Company of laboratory on 14th Street. Philadelphia produced the fi rst shellac records • Telephony without wires had been the inven- in 1897. Th is company was also the fi rst to create tion of A.C. Brown of the Eastern Telegraph a recording studio and record shop. Double- Company two years earlier. Reginald Fessenden sided discs were fi rst manufactured in 1904 by produced the fi rst conventional system of radio the International Talking Machine Company, telephony capable of transmitting speech across Germany, under the imprint Odeon Records. distances regardless of obstacles between trans- • San Francisco: William Randoph Hearst takes mitter and receiver. He demonstrated his system command of his father’s paper, the Examiner, for the fi rst time, over a distance of a mile, 23 initiating a career as press baron to out-rival December 1900. His words were addressed to and out-live all his contemporaries. In 1895 he his assistant, ‘Is it snowing where you are, Mr bought the New York Journal, which became the Th iessen?’ star and exemplar of Yellow Journalism. • In UK Titbits founded, followed in 1888 by • Also in 1887, monotype printing invented in Answers – two immensely popular weeklies. the US by Tolbert Lanston. Commercially estab- 1883 In US, Joseph Pulitzer starts up the New lished by 1897, the Monotype had the advantage York World. over Linotype in that it cast each letter sepa- 1884 Lewis Waterman in the US creates the fi rst rately instead of in a compact line, thus making it fountain pen. easier to correct the text. 1885 Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, French- 1888 George Eastman of Rochester, New York, born but living in the US, projects the first produced the first snapshot camera – the moving pictures – on to a wall at the Institute for Kodak – for use by the general public. Th is used the Deaf, New York, applying in November 1996 pre-loaded paper-roll fi lm. It took 100 circular for an American patent for an ‘Apparatus for pictures 2.5 inches in diameter. Mass produced producing Animated Pictures’. Th is was granted by the Eastman Company, Kodak No. 1 proved in January 1888 but reference to cameras and an immediate success in the US and worldwide. projectors was disallowed because of Dumont’s • In the same year John Carbutt of Philadelphia British patent of 1861 (though this involved an introduced celluoid fi lm. Th is was made from arrangement of glass plates to form the facets of celluloid sheets one-hundredth of an inch thick, a prismatic drum and had nothing to do with the and obtained from the Celluloid Manufacturing reproduction of moving images on a screen). Company. However, the fi rst celluloid roll fi lm • On the point of going into commercial produc- to be manufactured commercially was another tion in 1890, Le Prince boarded a train in Dijon, Eastman coup. Th e Eastman Dry Plate Company bound for Paris where it was his intention to produced roll fi lm for its Kodak cameras, begin- demonstrate his invention to the secretary of ning in August 1889. Th e fi rst colour roll fi lm the Paris Opera. He – and his apparatus – disap- came much later, and was invented by Robert

335 1889 – 1900

Krayn in Germany in 1910. Amateurs had a the fi rst-ever fi lm on to a screen – Workers Leav- longer wait – until Kodrachrome produced ing the Lumière Factory, 22 March, to members three-colour roll fi lm in 1936. of the Société d’Encouragement a L’Industrie • UK: Financial Times founded. Nationale, at 44 rue de Rennes, Paris. On 28 1889 UK’s fi rst Offi cial Secrets Act. December the Lumières entertained a paying • Kansas City undertaker Almon B. Stowger audience at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des patents the fi rst automatic telephone exchange. Capuchines: cinema was born. Th e fi rst exchange was opened at La Porte, Indi- • William Randolph Hearst buys up the New York ana, in November 1892. Dial telephones were Journal having built up the San Francisco Exam- introduced in 1896. iner, given to him by his father, with sensational 1890 Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliff e, stories of gangsters and Hollywood sex scandals. publishes the fi rst comic, the eight-page Comic 1896 First permanent cinema, the 400-seater Cuts, edited by Houghton Townley. Nearly Vitascope Hall, opened in New Orleans, 26 June, 120,000 copies of the fi rst edition were sold and by William T. Rock. Admission was 10 cents, this rose to 300,000 within a month. In October plus another 10 to view the Edison Vitascope 1890 a rival to Comic Cuts, Funny Cuts appeared projector. The 5,000-seater Gaumont-Palace, with the fi rst-ever front-page strip cartoon. formerly the Hippodrome Th eatre, opened in • Telephoto lens invented by New Zealand Paris in 1910. Th e largest cinema ever built was geologist Alexander McKay. the Roxy Th eater in New York, with 6,200 seats. • London evening Star prints the fi rst front-page In Berlin 300 cinemas were opened during 1908. newspaper headline, 16 July. Th is read: ‘Many In the UK by 1912 there were 4,000 cinemas. Happy Returns of the Day – Wedding of Profes- • J.H. Rigg of Leeds manufactures the first sor Stuart MP’. motorized cinema projector. An electrically 1891 Peep-show projector, the Kinetoscope, powered model was demonstrated at the Royal developed by William Dickson at the instigation Aquarium, London, 6 April. of his employer, Th omas Alva Edison, has fi rst • UK Daily Mail founded by Alfred Harmsworth, public showing in Edison’s workshops in West later Lord Northcliff e. Orange, New Jersey, to 147 representatives of the 1897 First wide-screen fi lm on 70mm stock intro- National Federation of Women’s Clubs. duced by Enoch J. Rector of the Veriscope Co., • The first commercial showing took place at New York. Holland Bros’ Kinetoscope Parlor, Broadway, 1898 The Telegraphone, the first magnetic in April 1894. Th e fi lms were produced by the recorder, is patented by Danish engineer Edison Co., which was thus the fi rst-ever fi lm Valdemar Poulsen employed by the Copenhagen production company. In the same year Greek Telephone Company. Demonstrated in public showman George Trajedis installed six kineto- for the fi rst time at the Paris Exposition of 1900, scopes in a converted Old Bond Street store in the Telegraphone used magnetized piano wire London, October, charging 2 pence per fi lm. running between spools at 7 feet per second. 1893 UK: fi rst issue of the Sketch. • Commercial production began in America in 1894 Th e fi rst commercially viable radio commu- 1903. An improved model was used by Lee de nication was the work of the Italian Guglielmo Forest for experiments in talking fi lm. Th e use of Marconi of Bologna. Experiments conducted in metal tape instead of wire came in 1929 with the 1894 and 1895 led Marconi to off er his invention Blattnerphone, again used in fi lm production, at to the Italian Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs. Elstree Studios. Failing to elicit interest, the inventor moved to • The use of plastic tape originated in Berlin England where customs offi cials broke open his with the Magnetophon produced by the firm equipment, suspecting him of being an anar- AEG. Th is proved the archetype for all recorder chist. Undaunted, Marconi settled in London developments from that time. and in 1896 applied for a patent for a method by 1900 Film: sound on disc demonstrated to a which ‘electrical actions or manifestations are paying audience at the Paris Exposition. The transmitted through air, earth or water by means first sound-on-film process was patented by of electrical oscillations of high frequency’. French-born Eugene Lauste of Brixton in 1906. • The first public demonstration of Marconi’s His fi rst successful experiment in recording and wireless took place on 12 December 1896. In the reproducing speech on fi lm came in 1910. He following year the Marconi Wireless Telegraph was ready to exploit his system commercially, & Signal Company was formed. only to be interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1895 Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière project 1914. He crossed the Atlantic with his idea but

336 1901 – 1924

met with the same lack of interest as America opened on Sunset Boulevard by David Horsley. itself entered the war. 1912 Foundation, initially as the Herald, of the 1901 Marconi transmits messages by wireless Daily Herald. telegraph from Cornwall to Newfoundland. 1913 Th e British Board of Film Censors, formed 1902 Canadian-born Reginald Fessenden of the in 1912 by the Kinematograph Manufacturers’ US introduces the fi rst radio-telephone; makes Association, begins operation. the fi rst transmission of speech by wireless. 1914 Price of Th e Times reduced to one penny. • UK: Arthur Pearson founds the Daily Express. • First full-length feature film in colour, The • Alfred Harmsworth founds the Daily Mirror. World, the Flesh and the Devil, shown to the trade 1906 Fessenden makes the fi rst radio broadcast, in February, and opened at the Holborn Empire using the 420-foot-high radio mast of the in April. Kinemacolor was a two-colour system. National Electric Signalling Company’s radio Gaumont Chronochrome (1914) produced three station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. On 24 colours, but three-colour processing was costly December the programme began with Fessen- and slow in development. den playing Gounod’s ‘O, Holy Night’ on the • Technicolor successfully produced, in 1932, the violin, followed by him singing and reciting from Disney cartoon Flowers and Trees; while the fi rst St Luke’s Gospel. Th e fi rst gramophone record to feature-length fi lm in Technicolor was Rouben be broadcast came next, a recording of Handel’s Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp, released in 1935. ‘Largo’. Th e transmission ended with Fessenden 1914–18 First World War. wishing his listeners a happy Christmas. The 1915 UK: Daily Express bought by Max Aitken, audience for the broadcast turned out to be ships’ Lord Beaverbrook, for 17,500. operators within a fi ve-mile radius. Fessenden’s 1916 Film, Th e Battle of the Somme – fi rst-ever second broadcast, on New Year’s Eve, in better war documentary. atmospheric conditions, was received as far • Clydeside workers are supported in their away as the West Indies. refusal to make munitions by the Labour paper • In the UK the first radio broadcast came in Forward. It is suppressed. the following year – from the radio room of 1918 UK: first Film Society, the Stoll Picture HMS Andromeda. It was initiated by Lieutenant Theatre Club, opens with a presentation by Quentin Crauford RN and transmitted to other Baroness Orczy of Th e Laughing Cavalier. ships at Chatham. News of the broadcast was 1919 UK: Arthur Mee founds the Children’s not made known, for the Admiralty saw the Newspaper. possibilities of radio in military use, in particular 1920 The Marconi Company begins radio as aiding communication between submarines transmission from its Chelmsford works on 19 and shore and other vessels. January. On 15 June Dame Nellie Melba gives a 1907 First regular experimental broadcasts 30-minute recital, from Chelmsford, sponsored conducted by Lee De Forest’s Radio Telephone by Lord Northcliffe. Her fee was 1,000. In Company from the Parker Building, New November transmissions from Chelmsford were York. Two years later De Forest introduced his suspended on the grounds that they interfered mother-in-law Harriet Stanton Black to listen- with radio communication to aircraft and ships. ers. She gave the world’s fi rst broadcast talk; her Broadcasts resumed from Marconi’s Station theme was women’s suff rage. 2MT at Writtle, February 1922. 2MT was the • Lord Northcliff e purchases Th e Times. fi rst regular broadcasting station in the UK. • In UK foundation of National Union of Jour- 1922 Marconi’s new station 2LO broadcasts from nalists (NUJ). Marconi House in the Strand, London. Along • First patent, in London, Berlin and St Peters- with three other radio stations, 2LO was merged burg of all-electric television cathode-ray tube into what was to become the British Broadcast- receiver, by Russian Boris Rozing. On 9 May 1911 ing Company Ltd., created in December 1922, Rozing succeeded in transmitting by wireless licensed to broadcast from January 1923. over distance ‘a distinct image … consisting of 1923 First programme of sound-on-fi lm produc- four luminous bands’. tion at Berlin’s Alhambra cinema using the 1909 In US, National Board of Censorship of Tri-Ergon process developed by Joseph Engl, Motion Pictures established. Joseph Massolle and Hans Voght. In the US Lee 1911 UK Copyright Act requires copies of all De Forest’s Phonofi lm process is demonstrated British publications to be supplied to the British to the fi rst paying audience, at the Rialto Th eater Museum and to fi ve other copyright libraries. in New York. • First Hollywood studio, the Nestor Studio, 1924 UK: Sykes Committee Report on Broad-

337 1925 – 1931

casting, followed in 1925 with the setting up of Reginald Berkeley’s The White Chateau, 11 the Crawford Committee from which emerged November. the prime principles governing public service 1927 Royal Charter establishes the non-commer- broadcasting in the UK until the coming of cial British Broadcasting Corporation, licensed commercial TV – monopoly, funding by licence, to broadcast from 1 January. Th e BBC grew to be administration by an independent public corpo- the largest public service broadcasting organiza- ration. Th ese remain the guiding principles of tion in the world. public service broadcasting. • Th e Jazz Singer, using the Vitaphone synchro- • Publication in the Daily Mail of the notorious nized disc system, opens at the Warner Th eater Zinoviev Letter, a fake, now considered to have on Broadway, 6 October. Directed by Alan emanated from the UK’s own secret service, Crosland and starring Al Jolson, the film is MI6. generally acknowledged to have inaugurated • Felix the Cat becomes the fi rst fi lm character the age of sound cinema and marked the death to be merchandized. Licences issued on behalf knell of silent movies. Th ere are only two talking of Felix’s creator Pat Sullivan for Felix to ‘feature’ sequences in the fi lm and 281 words spoken, but on packaging and later as a soft toy. the reception the fi lm received on both sides of 1925 Using a mechanical scanner for transmitting the Atlantic was phenomenal. and receiving, Scotsman John Logie Baird (with • The Lights of New York, also from Warner others) creates the fi rst television pictures on 30 Bros, was the fi rst all-talking feature fi lm. It was October. Baird transmitted an image with grada- premiered at New York’s Strand Th eater, 6 July tions of light and shade using a primitive amal- 1928. Fox Movietone’s In Old Arizona, a Western gam of parts, including an empty biscuit-box directed by Raoul Walsh, screened in December for the lamphouse. For test purposes a dummy’s 1928 in Los Angeles, was the first all-talking head was used, to be replaced shortly afterwards sound-on-film feature. The first all-talking by 15-year-old offi ce boy William Taynton, who colour fi lm was Warner Bros’ On With the Show, consented to be the fi rst star of TV for the fee of screened at New York’s Wintergardens, 1929. half a crown. 1928 On 9 February John Logie Baird makes the • Baird demonstrated his invention to the press first international TV transmission, sending on 7 January 1926, and gave a public demonstra- 30-line images of his own face from London by tion on 27 January for members of the Royal land-line to the transmitting station G2KZ at Institution. Baird’s mechanical system was soon Coulsdon, Surrey, and then across the Atlantic to be overtaken by electronic TV transmis- to a receiving set manned by his assistant, Ben sion, fi rst developed in Los Angeles by Philo T. Clapp, at Hartsdale, New York State. On 3 July Farnsworth in July 1929, though a more practical Baird became the fi rst to transmit television in system developed by Russian-born Vladimir colour. Employing a Nikow scanning-disc with Zworykin of Westinghouse showed the way red, blue and green fi lters he screened red and ahead. All modern TV systems derive from blue scarves, a lighted cigarette and red roses. Zworykin’s Kinescope and the Ionoscope, the Baird was to be the fi rst to demonstrate high- camera tube he developed in 1933. definition colour – at the Dominion Theatre, • Lionel Guest and H.O. Merriman of London London, on 4 February 1938. apply their electrical recording process to record • Walt Disney release Steam Boat Willie, the fi rst the burial service of the Unknown Warrior at animated fi lm using synchronous sound. Westminster Abbey, proving that it was possible 1929 Radar invented, by Scotsman Robert to substitute a microphone for the studio horn, Watson-Watt. thus location recording was born. Th e process • UK: fi rst issue of the Communist Daily Worker. was not pursued commercially, but location 1931 Experiments in electronic high-defi nition recording was set in progress in both the US and TV transmission are carried out by an EMI the UK in the same year. Th e all-electric record research team at Hayes, Middlesex, under the player, with loudspeaker amplifi cation instead of direction of Russian-born Isaac Shoenberg. the usual horn, was the Brunswick Panatrope, Th e EMI system was demonstrated to the BBC made by the Brunswick Company of Iowa. Th is in the following year – a fi lm of the Changing year also saw the introduction of the automatic of the Guard at Buckingham Palace, viewed on record-changer, built by 20-year-old Eric Water- a 130-line cathode ray receiver with a fi ve-inch worth of Hobart, Tasmania. square screen. • First issue of the New Yorker. • RCA Victor launches the 33⅓rpm long-playing • BBC broadcast fi rst full-length play for radio, record. Th e fi rst recording was of Beethoven’s

338 1932 – 1949

Fifth Symphony. However, the radiograms 1939–45 Second World War. required to play the long-player were expensive 1939 US: William C. Huebner introduces photo- in a time of acute recession and the venture was setting of type. not a success. Th e LP did not come into its own • Premiere of Gone with the Wind. until 1948 when Columbia issued microgroove 1940 UK: statutory newsprint rationing intro- records developed by Peter Goldmark – vinylite duced; ended 1956. discs with a playing time of 23 minutes per side, 1941 Release of Orson Welles’ fi lm masterpiece and 224–300 grooves to the inch. Citizen Kane, based on the life and lifestyle 1932 Stereophonic cinema sound patented by of American media baron William Randoph French film-makers Abel Gance and André Hearst. Debrie. Gance’s eight-hour silent 1927 epic • USSR: Tamara Lobova becomes fi rst woman to Napoléon Bonaparte was re-edited with added shoot a feature fi lm, Suvarov, released in January. dialogue and sound-eff ects, and screened at the • John Logie Baird demonstrates 3D television Paramount Cinema, Paris, in 1935. Warner Bros’ in colour, a 500-line system, 18 December, at House of Wax (1953) was the fi rst feature fi lm Sydenham. with complete stereo sound. • Th e Communist Daily Worker is suppressed in • The first stereophonic disc recordings are the UK. made by Arthur Keller of the Bell Telephone 1944 Automatic digital computer, by American Laboratories. Made on wax masters at 78rpm, Howard Aiken, is followed in the next year by they were not produced commercially but were the electronic computer invented in the US by J. demonstrated at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1933. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly. Th e fi rst stereo discs to be manufactured for sale 1945 BBC launches the Light Programme, were produced by Emory Cork of Stamford, US, now Radio 2; and the following year, the Th ird in 1957. Programme, now Radio 3. 1933 Chief of the German Navy’s Signals Research 1946 Th e Southwestern Bell Telephone Company Department, Dr Rudoph Kühnold produces of St Louis, US, off ers the fi rst commercial car the first working radar system. Radar in the phone service. UK was the brainchild of Robert Watson-Watt, 1947 Polaroid camera introduced by Edwin Land, superintendent of the radio research laboratory US. at Ditton Park. Experiments with radar in Febru- • Soviet Union: first 3D colour feature film, ary 1935 led to the establishment of a number of Robinson Crusoe, directed by A.N. Andreyevsky. air-defence radar stations which were to prove Special spectacles were not required. critical in the Second World War (1939–45). • US: Private Commission on Freedom of the 1934 Th e Emitron electronic camera is an advance Press, founded by publisher Henry Luce and on the system developed by Shoenberg in 1931. chaired by the chancellor of the University of In the following year Shoenberg inaugurated the Chicago, Robert Hutchens, to ‘examine areas 405-line system and on 1 November 1936 the and circumstances under which the press of the EMI–Marconi system became standard as the United States is succeeding or failing; to discover BBC television service began operation from where freedom of expression is or is not limited, Alexander Palace. whether by government censorship, pressure 1935 Berlin: fi rst television mobile unit comes into from readers or advertisers or the unwisdom of operation, employed at the opening of the Berlin its proprietors or the timidity of its management’. TV station of the Reichs Rundfunk, 22 March. Th e Commission report broached, formally for Th e fi rst mobile units in the UK, designed by the fi rst time, the concept of social responsibility T.C. Macnamara, were used in the BBC’s fi rst and listed criteria for its fulfi lment. major outside broadcast, of the Coronation, May 1947–9 First UK Royal Commission on the Press 1937. – the Ross Commission. 1936 First full-length animated fi lm, Snow White 1948 Th e Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Seven Dwarfs from the Disney Studios. is adopted by the United Nations Assembly in 1938 Russian hypnotist, sculptor and journalist Lazlo Paris, 10 December. Biró constructed a prototype ball-point pen with • NBC of America screens first TV Western quick-drying ink. Having acquired British rights, series, Hopalong Cassidy, starring Bill Boyd. Biró began manufacture in a disused RAF hangar 1948 Bell Telephone Company scientists John in 1944. In 1953 Baron Bic, in France, introduced the Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley fi rst ‘throwaway’ ball-point. In the UK priced at 1 introduce the fi rst transistor. shilling, sales during 1959 totalled 53 million. 1949 Xerography invented by Chester Carlson,

339 1950 – 1969

US, the same year as Peter Goldmark of the US • The American Telephone & Telegraph introduces the fi rst long-playing record. Company makes the fi rst transatlantic satellite • CBS launches fi rst TV thriller series, Suspense. transmission on 11 July, from Andover, Maine, to 1950 Yoshiro Nakamats of the Imperial Univer- Goonhilly Downs, Cornwall, via Telstar. sity, Tokyo, develops the fl oppy disc. • America launches fi rst communications satel- 1952 First video recorder demonstration lite, Echo 1. conducted in the US by John Mullin and Wayne • UK: death of the News Chronicle; fi rst issue of Johnson at the Bing Crosby Enterprise labora- the Sunday Telegraph. tories in Beverly Hills, California, 11 November. 1962 UK: Pilkington Committee Report on A colour video was demonstrated by the same Broadcasting and the Shawcross Commission company in September of the following year. Report on the Press. Neither was developed commercially. Ampex • First nights on UK TV for Z Cars, Steptoe and was the first to go into production, its initial Son and the satirical series Th at Was Th e Week production model being acquired by CBS. Th at Was. In the following year, Dr Who and • In the UK the BBC’s VERA came into opera- World in Action. tion in April 1958 with a recording of Panorama. 1963 Founding of International Publishing Sony brought out a transistorized video recorder Corporation (IPC); following year, IPC launches in 1961, while the fi rst domestic video recorder, the Sun, replacing the Daily Herald. also from Sony, was launched in the US in July • UK: BBC ends its ban on the mention of 1965. It was not until 1972 that Sony launched, in religion, politics, royalty or sex in comedy Japan, its fi rst video cassette recorder. programmes. • In Europe Philips introduced the fi rst domestic • University of Michigan scientists Emmett Leith video cassette recorder in 1974. Th e VHS format and Juris Upatnicks develop the fi rst hologram. was introduced in 1976 by JVC of Japan; and in 1964 BBC launches new channel, BBC2, in April. the same year JVC produced the fi rst camcord- • UK starters: Match of the Day and Crossroads. ers for amateur use. • Radio Caroline, the fi rst British pirate radio 1953 Inauguration of the British Press Council. station goes on air. • BBC demonstrates colour TV. An outside 1965 Via the Early Bird satellite on 2 May 300 broadcast of the Coronation procession was million viewers in nine countries sample the relayed by closed circuit at Great Ormond Street fi rst transatlantic programme relay; 15 days later Hospital for Sick Children. America’s NBC was fi rst with a colour transat- • Th e fi rst movie in Cinemascope, 20th Century lantic satellite programme transmission. Fox’s The Robe, is premiered at Grauman’s • Infl uential drama-documentary, Cathy Come Chinese Th eater, Hollywood, and in the same Home, about Britain’s homeless is broadcast by month, September, Th is is Cinerama opened in the BBC. New York. • Smoking advertisements are banned from UK 1954 In the UK in July, the Television Bill is given television. royal assent, creating the Independent Television 1966 Lord Th omson buys Th e Times. Authority. Commercial TV began broadcasting • China: Chairman Mao launches the Cultural in Britain in September 1955. Revolution against ‘reactionary bourgeois ideas • Eurovision is inaugurated on 6 June when TV in the sphere of academic work, education, art services in eight European countries linked and theatre and publishing’. together with a 4,000-mile chain of relays. Th e 1967 First colour TV broadcast in the UK, BBC2, fi rst programme to be screened was the Festival 1 July. of Flowers from Montreux, Switzerland. • Marine Broadcasting Offences Act UK is 1955–6 First daily TV soap broadcast in Britain passed and outlaws pirate radio stations. – Sixpenny Corner, running for 15 minutes daily. • BBC Radio 1 is launched, 30 September. It failed even though it was transferred by ITV to • The Postmaster-General, Edward Short MP, an evening slot. opens BBC Radio Leicester, the fi rst local radio 1959 The Manchester Guardian becomes the station in the UK. Guardian. 1968 In UK fi rst broadcast of comedy series Dad’s 1960 Bell Telephone’s Touch-Tone telephone is Army. successfully tested and becomes commercially 1969 First commercially produced micropro- available in 1963. cessor developed by Edward Hoff of the Intel • ITVs Coronation Street opens its record- Corporation of California. breaking run. • Australian Rupert Murdoch buys the Sun and

340 1972 – 1988

the News of the World. Murdoch acquires the British newspapers, Th e • Denmark: fi lm censorship is abolished. Times and Sunday Times, having been exempted • UK: York University launches fi rst university from a monopolies enquiry by the Conservative radio station. government, led by Margaret Th atcher. 1972 US: fi rst pre-recorded video tapes off ered • The microprocessor makes possible the for hire by Sears, Roebuck. Pre-recorded tapes introduction by the IBM company of the fi rst were not available in the UK until 1979, supplied personal computer. initially by Intervision who acquired 200 fi lm 1982 UK: Hunt Committee on Cable Expansion titles from United Artists for 250,000. By the and Broadcasting Policy. end of the year they had franchised some 150 • UK: Channel 4 television begins transmission. outlets. Such was the immediate competition 1983 Breakfast TV starts on the BBC; the CD that Intervision soon went under despite the player, the pocket TV and the first cordless increase in the sales of VCRs and rental outlets. telephone are introduced to the UK. • The UK Sunday Times is banned on 17 1984 UK: first satellite TV channel – Rupert November from publishing a series of articles on Murdoch’s Sky – begins transmission, 16 Janu- Th alidomide, a drug taken by expectant mothers ary. and causing horrifi c deformities in babies. • Civil servant Clive Ponting is acquitted by • Cable TV transmission starts in UK. a jury of breaking the Offi cial Secrets Act. His 1973 London Broadcasting (LBC) is the first relevation to the press of details concerning the commercial radio station in mainland UK, on air British sinking of the Argentine battleship Th e 8 October. Belgrano were justifi ed in court as being in the 1974 UK: BBC inaugurates Ceefax, the UK’s fi rst public interest. Later the Act was redrafted to teletext service. exclude public interest as a defence. 1975 Angela Rippon becomes fi rst regular female • Robert Maxwell takes over the Daily Mirror newsreader on British terrestrial television group. (BBC). ITN’s News at Ten waited until 1978 • Apple launch the Macintosh personal before employing Anna Ford to front the news. computer. 1977 UK: Annan Commission Report on Broad- 1985 Rupert Murdoch buys American film casting and the McGregor Commission Report company 20th Century Fox. on the Press. • Panasonic of Japan introduces to the UK the 1978 UK: fi rst series of the comprehensive school- first VHS camcorder in January, and in May set series Grange Hill. Sony launches the digital video-recorder. • First video cassette recorder introduced in the • British Board of Film Censors issues age clas- UK. sifi cation for videos, following the passing of the • Japan: the Sony Walkman is launched. Video Recordings Act (1984). • 1979 UK: Williams Committee Report on 1986 Eddy Shah’s Today newspaper, published Obscenity and Film Censorship. in the UK, is the fi rst to use on-the-run colour. • First digital recording, by Decca, of a New Launched on 4 March the 44-page paper carried Year’s Day concert in Vienna; recorded live by 16 pages in colour. the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and issued • Australian TV soap Neighbours is introduced in April. to UK on BBC. 1980 The compact disc (CD), developed by • USSR: Michail Gorbachev announces new Philips over several years, is demonstrated at the policy of Glasnost, ‘openness’. Salzburg Festival in April. By agreement with • Wapping, London: thousands of print work- Philips, the Japanese fi rm Sony launched the fi rst ers picket Murdoch’s new premises, protesting CD in 1982. With a playing time of 75 minutes, about computerization and the loss of jobs. the CD used a grooveless miniature 12cm disc • Czechoslovakia: the Jazz Union is closed down using a laser beam to read digitally encoded for urging the freedom of the arts. information. 1987 Sydney, Australia, September: British • MacBride Commission Report for UNESCO. government is rebuff ed in its courtroom appeal • UK: ITV documentary Death of a Princess against the decision to permit the publication of causes offence to the government of Saudi Spycatcher. Arabia; millions of pounds in trade orders are 1988 Th e fi rst transatlantic optical fi bre cable is lost as a result. Th e British government apolo- laid, costing 220 million, between the US and gizes to the Saudis, 22 April. UK/France, able to carry simultaneously 40,000 1981 UK: Australian media baron Rupert telephone calls.

341 1989 – 2002

1989 Th e Iron Curtain that divided eastern Euro- London, the BBC begins first experiments in pean nations – Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting). and East Germany etc. – from the West, is drawn 1994 BBC converts generalist service, Radio 5, aside. Th e trades union Solidarity is permitted to which featured programmes for young listeners, contest elections in Poland; in Hungary border to Radio 5 Live dedicated to sports, news and troops tear down the barbed-wire frontier with chat. Austria. Most signifi cantly, the Berlin Wall is 1998 UK: Sky TV launches digital television dismantled. However, in June, freedom protests service, 1 October. in Beijing are crushed in Tiananmen Square. Th e 1999 A jury in Oregon, US, fi nes anti-abortionist rest of the world watches events on TV. campaigners for publishing on their Internet • In Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini condemns as website a ‘wanted’ list of abortion doctors, their blasphemous the novel Th e Satanic Verses by clinics and addresses, seeing it as a thinly veiled British writer Salman Rushdie and issues a fatwa, death threat. or edict, calling on all Muslims to strike down • During the war for Kosovo, NATO bombers the offender. Despite worldwide protests, the target TV stations in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade. death sentence remained active until September • UK: Greg Dyke is appointed new director- 1998 when the government of Iran distanced general of the BBC in succession to Sir John Birt. itself from, without rescinding, the Khomeini 2000 UK: Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act edict. (RIPA), extending offi cial surveillance to Inter- • Tim Berners-Lee, British inventor of the World net communication. Wide Web, fi rst scrawls the following on a black- • US: merger of the world’s biggest media giant, board: w.w.w. Time Warner, with AOL (America On Line). 1990 UK: Broadcasting Act separates control • Launch of Women’s Enews, Internet news of commercial television (ITC, Independent service. Television Commission) and radio (the Radio • Ukraine: campaigning journalist Georgi Authority). Gongadze abducted, murdered and beheaded, • The Northern Echo edited in Darlington allegedly with the connivance of government becomes the fi rst UK newspaper on CD-ROM. authorities. • The first tapeless answering machine, the • Google becomes the world’s biggest search ADAM (All-Digital Answering Machine), stor- engine. ing messages on a silicon chip, launched in the 2001 11 September: TV viewers across the world US by PhoneMate. witness the terrorist destruction of the twin • Iraq: Farzad Barzoft, journalist on the UK towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Observer, is executed in Baghdad after ‘confess- • Italy: Silvio Berlusconi, media magnate, ing’ to spying. becomes Italy’s Prime Minister for the second • UK: Calcutt Committee reports on its delib- time. erations concerning ‘a wide public aversion to 2002 Labour government issues Communica- newspaper intrusion’, and recommends ‘reform tions Bill proposing the loosening of broadcast- by self-regulation’ and a Code of Practice. Th e ing regulations and abandoning rules concern- Press Complaints Commission emerged from ing cross-media ownership. With modifi cations, Calcutt recommendations. becomes Act of Parliament, 2003. 1991 Robert Maxwell, British media tycoon, dies • ITV Digital services go bust, but a consortium in a drowning accident. led by the BBC steps in to off er over 20 digital 1992 Los Angeles: street riots after screening of channels (freeview). New digital services from police beating up a black motorist, Rodney King. the BBC: CBBC (for children, aged 6–13), • UK: fi rst land-based national commercial radio Cheebies (for under 6s) BBC Four (art, history, station – Classic FM – launched 7 September. current aff airs), BBC Th ree (drama, entertain- • Canada: government Bill C-128 bans the ment, music). At the same time, BBC radio goes depiction of under-18s engaging in any form of digital (BBC Digital, Asian Network, 6Music, ‘explicit sexual activity’, including kissing. 1Xtra, Five Live Sports Extra and BBC7 (comedy, 1993 UK: carried via London Interconnect cable drama and children’s programmes). network, the fi rst black TV service – Identity • China: analysts estimate that the state employs TV – begins, 13 July, with estimated audience 30,000 people to monitor and control informa- of 150,000, and on 1 September BSkyB launches tion. fi rst women’s TV channel. • Gulf Cooperation Council, meeting in Oman, • Transmitting from coaches driving round warns satellite TV station al-Jazeera to make

342 2003 – 2004

programmes ‘more respectful’. • During 2003, 42 journalists were killed world- • Poland: Church-run Radio Maryja is shut down wide, 766 arrested, 1,460 physically attacked or on the orders of the Catholic primate, Cardinal threatened and 501 media censored, according Josef Glemp. to Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans • US: Iranian fi lm-maker Abbas Kiarostami is Frontières). denied a visa permitting him to enter the country 2004 Hutton Report, UK, examines the circum- at the invitation of the New York Film Festival to stances surrounding the alleged suicide of lecture at Harvard University. government weapons expert Dr David Kelly who • UK: David Shayler, former M15 offi cer, is jailed was the source of an early morning BBC radio for six months for breaking the Offi cial Secrets report by Andrew Gilligan suggesting govern- Act by leaking documents concerning alleged ment claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass malpractice in the UK secret service. destruction had been exaggerated. Th e Report, • Announcement of plans for a 2.6b merger exonerating the government of any blame in the between Granada (seven ITV licences) and Carl- ‘outing’ of Kelly, resulted in the resignation of the ton Communications (fi ve ITV licenses), subject Chairman of the BBC, Gavyn Davies, the Direc- to approval by the UK office of Fair Trading. tor General, Greg Dyke, and Gilligan. Th e merger leaves only three independent UK • Rupert Murdoch’s BskyB wins contract, in face franchises – Grampian, Scottish and Ulster TV. of competition from Independent Television • Report on human rights in 50 countries by News (ITN), to supply news to UK’s Channel the Electronic Privacy Information Center Five. and Privacy International declares that post-11 • Butler Report subjects government claims September 2001 ‘many new anti-terrorist laws concerning weapons of mass destruction adopted by national governments … threaten (WMD), and the performance of the security political freedom’. services in monitoring the true situation in Iraq, 2003 Federal Communications Commission to highly critical scrutiny. However, fi nds no one (USA) initiates major shift towards loosening intentionally to blame for claims which proved regulations concerning the delivery of TV and unfounded. radio news, considering that many in-place rules • Phillis Review of Government Communica- are ‘antiquated’; that is, standing in the way of tions. further media mergers. • Facebook website is launched. • Global publics fi nd their voice in protesting • By now Blogging has become a mainstream against war in Iraq, but million-strong marches online activity. do not prevent US and UK forces going into • Russia: journalist Anna Politkovskaya is battle despite the failure to obtain a United poisoned on her way to cover the school Nations mandate for military action. massacre in Beslan; later, she is murdered in the • Natalie Maines, lead singer of the Dixie Chicks stairwell of her block of fl ats. tells fans in London that the prospect of the • UK: Piers Morgan, editor of the tabloid invasion of Iraq makes her ashamed to be newspaper Daily Mirror, resigns following the from the same state as President Bush. Radio publication of pictures – later declared fake – stations part of the conglomerate Clear Channel purporting to show British soldiers ill-treating Communications (which had off ered fi nancial Iraqi civilians. sponsorship and on-air promotion for pro-war • US: Th e Disney company blocks distribution of ‘Rallies for America’) pull the Dixie Chicks from Michael Moore’s documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11 their playlists. Clear Channel suspends two DJs exposing links between the American President in Colorado Springs for defying the ban. Cumu- George W. Bush and prominent Saudi-Arabian lus Media, owning 262 radio stations, bans the families, including that of Osama bin Laden. Country Chicks from all of its country stations. • 14th Press Freedom Day. Reporters Without • UK: Merger between independent television Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières) announce broadcasters Carlton and Granada. that ten journalists and media assistant were • 29 December in the UK the responsibilities of killed between January amd May, 431 journalists the Broadcasting Standards Commission (BSC), arrested worldwide, 366 physically attacked or the Independent Television Commission (ITC), threatened and 178 media censored. In 22 coun- the Offi ce of Telecommunications (Oftel), the tries, 133 journalists are imprisoned, including 73 Radio Authority and the Radiocommunications ‘cyber-dissidents’, 61 in China. Agency pass to the new regulatory body, the • Birmingham, UK: the depiction of a rape scene Offi ce of Communications (Ofcom). in a Sikh temple sparks a riot outside the city

343 2005

Repertory Th eatre in protest at Gunpreet Kaur building; press comments link the action with Bhatti’s play, Behzti (Dishonour). Despite the the New Labour government’s anti-terrorism play being written by a Sikh (or perhaps in a way bill passing through Parliament. because it was written by one of the faith) the • The same unease concerning terrorism and action against the play – 400 protestors battling legislation aimed at stifling it, is highlighted with riot police – leads to its closure. during the annual Labour Party conference in • Launch in the UK of Spinwatch, a collaborative Brighton in October: an elderly party member, venture between practising investigative jour- Walter Wolfgang, once a refugee from Hitler’s nalists and academics with the aim of countering Germany, was forcibly ejected from the confer- government and corporate ‘spin’. ence hall for shouting ‘Rubbish!’ during a speech 2005 Freedom of Information Act (UK) comes in by the foreign secretary Jack Straw justifying the to force. Iraq war. Mr Wolfgang, 57 years a party member, • Somalia: BBC correspondent Kate Peyton is was held by the police under the Prevention of fatally wounded on her way to interview the Terrorism Act and later released; the event forc- speaker of the country’s transitional parliament. ing apologies from Labour ministers and causing According to Reporters Without Borders 38 of a press furore. the 636 journalists killed since 1992 have been • The BBC announces plans to open a new women. In the same month, journalist Raeda World Service broadcasting channel directed Mohammed Wageh Wassan was found dead in to the Arab region, and in competition with the Mosul, northern Iraq, after being kidnapped by 24-hour Arabic news channel, al-Jazeera. masked men. • China: 400 million viewers – the largest TV • In the run-up to the UK General Election in audience in history – tune in to see 21-year-old May, the Association of Gypsy Women releases a Li Yuchun, without make-up, with spiky hair, statement protesting at laws that ‘are being used singing songs aggressively, including songs to target Gypsies and Travellers’, with the open written for men, win the Mongolian Cow Sour encouragement of the popular press. ‘We cate- Yogurt Supergirl Concert award. Within days the gorically reject the terrifying image of Gypsies shopping malls of Shanghai were heaving with Li that is being promoted by the Daily Mail, Sun Yuchun mugs, keyrings and T-shirts. A concert and Daily Express. We call on the British Press sponsored by the Better Posture Equipment Council to intervene’. Company in the city’s largest, 39,000-seater • UK: 3rd reading of bill to ban incitement to stadium, was sold out in hours. religious hatred passes through the House of • Percentage of UK households with digital TV Commons. has grown from 15.5 in 2000 to 61.9 in 2005. • New York Times journalist Judith Miller impris- • Turkey: best-selling author Orhan Pamuk faces oned for refusing to declare a source; spends 85 trial for ‘denigrating the Turkish identity’ for days behind bars for breach of a law forbidding speaking out concerning the Armenian genocide the revealing of the names of secret service of 1915, when almost a million Armenians were (CIA) agents. killed in the Ottoman Empire. • al-Jazeera journalist Taysir Alouni is jailed for • British playwright, poet, actor, scriptwriter and seven years by a Spanish court after being found political protester Harold Pinter (b. 1930), author guilty of collaboration with the terrorist group, of Th e Birthday Party, Th e Caretaker, Th e Dumb al-Qaeda. Waiter and The Homecoming, is awarded the • Rania-al-Baz, a TV announcer with Saudi- Nobel Prize for Literature. Arabian TV, in order to publicize domestic • Following harassment by the authorities in violence in her country, publishes pictures of Uzbekistan, the BBC closes its World Service her disfigured face after being beaten up by operation. her husband. To avoid reprisals, she escapes to • YouTube, an audio-visual network platform, is France. launched. • UK: Channel Four television launches new • US search engine Google resists request ‘adult entertainment’ channel, More4. by American Department of Justice to provide • Frankfurt, Germany: fi rst international Wiki- a list of every website address operating mania conference (see entry, wiki, wikipedia). through Google for June and July 2005; but then • Six students at the University of Lancaster are announces net link with China, off ering a service charged by the University authorities with aggra- available to 110 million online users. Th is agree- vated trespass after protesting against a ‘corpo- ment is subject to Google’s willingness to operate rate venturing’ event in University’s George Fox as a fi lter – a censor – of information exchange.

344 2010

In short, Google subscribes to the Great Firewall • Media mogul Silvio Berlusconi again becomes of China, restricting access to many Western Italy’s Prime Minister. websites and blocking words such as ‘freedom’ • Th e BBC launches a new Arabic TV channel and names such as ‘Tiananmen Square’. (BBC Arabic TV), estimated to cost 25m a year. • In a US Congress House international rela- • The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism tions committee meeting Yahoo! Cisco Systems, is won by 24 year old Palestinian Mohammed Microsoft and Google are accused of collusion Omer. On his return from the London prize- with a repressive regime (China). giving he was arrested by Shin Bet, Israel’s • Following publication in Danish and Norwe- security organization, emerging after 12 hours’ gian newspapers of cartoons satirizing the detention in need of hospital treatment. prophet Mohammed, widespread Muslim • After a nine-year legal battle, the European protests occur across the arab world, the Danish Court of Human Rights rules that UK govern- and Norwegian embassses in Damascus being ment phone-tapping practices violate citizens’ burnt to the ground. Crowds of protestors also right to privacy. burn Danish flags in several other countries. • Indian Space Research Organization launches Violent demonstrations take place in Lebanon record 10 satellites in one fl ight. and Afghanistan. In Jordan, two newspaper • Times of India group acquire British Virgin editors who published the cartoons are charged Radio, renaming it Absolute Radio. with off ences. • The BBC refuses to transmit the Disasters • UK House of Commons votes to reinstate the Emergency Committee Gaza Appeal in case it ‘glorifi cation of terrorism’ clause in new anti- would be seen to be ‘unbalanced’ in terms of its terrorism legislation; this shortly following on professed neutrality. from parliament’s assent to New Labour plans to • Former KGB agent Alexander Lebedev introduce ID cards for British citizens. becomes owner of the UK London Evening Stan- • Mexican goverenment admits that it staged a dard which shortly becomes a free sheet. kidnap and rescue operation as proof that it is • PolitiFact.com, online news and comment winning the war on organized crime. service of the St. Petersburg Times, Florida, • Australia: Dateline, current aff airs programme becomes the first website to be awarded the of the Special Broadcasting Service, publishes prestigious Pulitzer prize for journalism. images, previously unseen by the public, of 2010 March. For 1 Lebedev purchases the titles abuse of Iraqi prisoners by American military of the UK Independent, Independent on Sunday. personnel at the Abu Ghraib jail. In October, the Independent launches a new • al-Jazeera, the Arab news station, begins news daily, entitled ‘i’, a condensed version of the Indie service in English. British broadcaster Sir David for readers in a rush. Frost is contracted to front a one-hour daily • April. Th e Apple Company of the US launches programme. the i-Pad, described by Apple’s chief executive, • UK: Government White Paper announces Steve Jobs, as ‘our most advanced technology that the BBC licence will be extended to 2016. in a magical and revolutionary device and at an Th e govenors will be replaced by a trust with unbelievable price’. sovereign control of the corporation, leaving • America On Line (AOL) sells off Bebo, the responsibility for the day to day running of the social networking platform, for a fraction of the BBC to an executive board. Th e White Paper 850m it paid for it in 2008. urges that entertainment be placed at the heart • December. Coronation Street (UK ITV), the of the corporation’s broadcasting mission. world’s longerst-running TV soap opera, cele- • Twitter is launched. brates its 50th anniversary, while BBC Radio’s • Reuters merges with the Th omson Organisa- Th e Archers reaches 60. tion in an 8.7 billion deal. • Kuwait shuts the offi ces of the news network • Iran: Launch of English-speaking TV chan- al-Jazeera and removes its accreditation for nel, Press TV; with British journalist Yvonne having broadcast news of an opposition member Ridley employed to host live political show, Th e of the country’s National Assembly, and its use Agenda. of film footage of police beating opposition • July: Rupert Murdoch’s News International members and supporters gathered to discuss acquires Wall Street Journal. December, government crackdowns on public freedom. Murdoch makes over his newspaper empire to • UK: Th e Video Recordings Act of 1984, having his son James; including control of Sky Italia and been found to be in breach of European Union Law the Star TV Network in Asia. in 2009, is reeneacted in one parliamentary day.

345 2011

2011 Popular uprisings in a number of north of the media. Rupert Murdoch, his son James, African and Middle Eastern countries are seen chairman of News International, and the orga- to have been aided by Internet and mobile nization’s chief executive (until her resignation) communication. Rebekah Brooks, are summoned for question- • US: Jill Abramson becomes the first female ing by House of Commons select committees. editor of the New York Times in the paper’s Their connections with the Murdoch press 160-year history. made public, the Commissioner of the London • UK: Engulfed in a phone-hacking scandal, the Metropolitan police, Sir Paul Stephenson, and 168-year-old News of the World, part of Rupert his deputy John Yates resign. Murdoch’s News International (UK wing of • Italy: November. Financial crisis in Eurozone News Corp), is shut down, its ﬁ nal issue appear- brings to an end the premiership of media mogul ing on Sunday 10 July. The UK government Silvio Berlusconi, the country’s longest-serving sets up a public inquiry chaired by Lord Justice Prime Minister. Leveson to investigate hacking and regulation

346