Key Themes in Media Theory
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Key Themes in Media Theory “Key Themes in Media Theory is wonderfully wide-ranging and deservedly destined to become a key text for students of Media Studies.” Professor John Storey, Centre for Research in Media and Cultural Studies, University of Sunderland, UK Key Themes What is media theory? How do media affect our actions, opinions and beliefs? In what ways do media serve powerful political and economic interests? in Is media consumerism unhealthy or is it empowering? Media Theory Key Themes in Media Theory provides a thorough and critical introduction Themes in to the key theories of media studies. It is unique in bringing together different schools of media theory into a single, comprehensive text, examining in depth the ideas of key media theorists such as Lasswell, McLuhan, Hall, Williams, Barthes, Adorno, Baudrillard and Bourdieu. Media Theory Using up-to-date case studies the book embraces media in their everyday cultural forms – music, internet, film, television, radio, newspapers and magazines – to enable a clearer view of the ‘big picture’ of media theory. In ten succinct chapters Dan Laughey discusses a broad range of themes, issues and perspectives that inform our contemporary understanding of media production and consumption. These include: Behaviourism and media effects Feminist media theory Postmodernity and information society Political economy Media consumerism With images and diagrams to illustrate chapter themes, examples that apply Dan Laughey media theory to media practice, recommended reading at the end of every chapter, and a useful glossary of key terms, this book is the definitive guide to understanding media theory. Dan Laughey is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. Dan Laughey Designed By Grosvenor (Northampton) Ltd. KeyThemes in MediaTheory KeyThemes in MediaTheory Dan Laughey Open University Press Open University Press McGraw-Hill Education McGraw-Hill House Shoppenhangers Road Maidenhead Berkshire England SL6 2QL email: [email protected] world wide web: www.openup.co.uk and Two Penn Plaza, New York, NY 10121–2289, USA First published 2007 Copyright # Dan Laughey 2007 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence from the Copyright Licensing Agency Limited. Details of such licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS. A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN–10: 0335 218 13X (pb) 0335 218 148 (hb) ISBN–13: 9780 335 218 134 (pb) 9780 335 218 141 (hb) Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data CIP data applied for Typeset by YHT Ltd, London Printed in Poland by OZGraf S.A. www.polskabook.pl Contents List of illustrations ix Acknowledgements xi 1 What is media theory? 1 What are media? 1 What is theory? 3 What is media theory? 4 How to use this book 5 2 Behaviourism and media effects 7 Introduction 7 Lasswell’s chain of communication and propaganda technique 8 Wertham: Seduction of the Innocent 12 Cantril: The Invasion from Mars 16 Cultivation theory 20 Agenda-setting and social functions of media 21 Two-step flow and the phenomenistic approach 23 Uses and gratifications theory 26 Summary 27 Further reading 28 3 Modernity and medium theory 30 Introduction 30 Innis: The Bias of Communication 31 McLuhan: the medium is the message 33 Benjamin: art and mechanical reproduction 38 The Leavises and the Lynds 41 Riesman and Hoggart: other-directed character and its uses of literacy 44 Williams: technology and cultural form 46 Habermas: media and the public sphere 48 Summary 52 Further reading 53 vi CONTENTS 4 Structuralism and semiotics 54 Introduction 54 Saussure and Barthes: language and myth 55 Hall: Encoding/Decoding, ideology and hegemony 60 Glasgow Media Group: the ideology of news 65 Williamson: the ideology of ads 67 Morley: the Nationwide audience 69 Hebdige: Subculture 71 Foucault: discourse and disciplinary society 73 Summary 76 Further reading 76 5 Interactionism and structuration 78 Introduction 78 Goffman: self-presentation 79 Meyrowitz: No Sense of Place 84 Horton and Wohl: personae and para-social interaction 86 Thompson: mediated quasi-interaction 88 Labelling theory and moral panics 91 Giddens: structuration theory 96 Summary 98 Further reading 99 6 Feminisms and gender 100 Introduction 100 Radical feminism 101 Mulvey: the male gaze 102 Modleski and Radway: mass-produced fantasies for women 105 McRobbie: the ideology of teenage femininity 107 Ang: pleasure and the ideology of mass culture 111 Butler: Gender Trouble 113 Postfeminism and the third wave 115 Masculinity in crisis 117 Summary 120 Further reading 120 7 Political economy and postcolonial theory 122 Introduction 122 Adorno: culture industry or cultural industries? 123 Media and cultural imperialism 127 Herman and Chomsky: Manufacturing Consent 130 Critical political economy 134 Said: Orientalism 138 CONTENTS vii ‘The postcolonial’ and race 142 Summary 144 Further reading 145 8 Postmodernity and the information society 147 Introduction 147 Baudrillard: hyperreality and simulation 148 Boorstin and Debord: the image and the spectacle 152 Jameson: pastiche and intertextuality 154 Lyotard: the decline of metanarratives 157 The information society 160 Ritzer: McDonaldization 165 Summary 167 Further reading 168 9 Consumerism and everyday life 169 Introduction 169 Fiske: consumer resistance 170 De Certeau: everyday tactics 173 Textual poachers and fandom 176 Silverstone: the cycle of consumption and mediated experience 179 The diffused audience and consumer authority 182 Bourdieu: the habitus and field theory 186 Summary 192 Further reading 192 10 Debating media theory 194 Glossary 199 Bibliography 206 Index 223 List of illustrations Figures 2.1 Lasswell’s chain of communication 9 2.2 WW1 British propaganda courtesy of Getty Images 11 2.3 Crime comic image 13 2.4 Agenda-setting role of the mass media 22 3.1 Characteristics of modernity and pre-modernity 30 3.2 Hot and cold media 34 3.3 Mona Lisa 39 3.4 Majority and minority audiences for popular music 45 3.5 Habermas’s history of news print production 50 4.1 Syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of semiotics 57 4.2 Saussure’s semiotic theory of language 57 4.3 Barthes’s semiotic theory of language and myth 57 4.4 The Encoding/Decoding model 62 5.1 Deviancy amplification model 93 5.2 Newspaper front page courtesy of Corbis Images UK Ltd 95 6.1 Jackie front cover courtesy of Carlton Books 108 7.1 Horizontal integration 136 7.2 Vertical integration 136 7.3 The West versus the Orient 139 7.4 Abu Hamza (aka Captain Hook), Islamic extremist courtesy of Getty Images 141 8.1 Postmodernity and the empowered masses: some reasons for the decline of modernism and elitist ‘high culture’ 148 9.1 Fiske’s two economies of television 171 9.2 Star Trek fan art courtesy of New Eye Studio 178 9.3 Silverstone’s cycle of consumption 180 9.4 Some occupational classifications based on levels of economic capital (EC) and cultural capital (CC) 188 Tables 3.1 McLuhan’s media history of modernity 35 4.1 Homologies of youth subcultures 72 8.1 Baudrillard’s three orders of simulation 149 8.2 Radical differences between the industrial and post-industrial societies 161 Acknowledgements This book has emerged from a course in ‘Contemporary Media Theory’ that I have taught since 2004 on the BA (Hons) Media and Popular Culture degree at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. Thanks to all those students who I’ve had the pleasure to converse with – and learn from – over the years. Further thanks to my colleagues, especially Kristyn Gorton, Lance Pettitt and Neil Washbourne, who read sections of the book and provided invaluable com- ments. I am also indebted to Nick Couldry, David Hesmondhalgh and Brian Longhurst for their insights. Chris Cudmore and Jack Fray at Open University Press deserve credit for their editorial expertise. Thanks also to Susan Duns- more and Suzanne Renny for copy-editing and marketing skills respectively. I’d like to acknowledge the generosity of the School of Cultural Studies at Leeds Met for arranging a period of research leave that enabled me to finish the book sooner than would have been otherwise possible. The companion- ship and steadfastness of my mum, dad, brothers and sister is unerring. Finally, my love to Nicky, Harry and Jamie, for sleepless nights and magical sights. 1 What is media theory? Before we begin to answer the question ‘What is media theory?’, we must ask two more basic questions: what are media and what is theory? What are media? We could think of a list: television, film, radio, newspapers and the internet, to name but a few. But a list tells us little about what commonly defines all these media. Perhaps the solution is to define media as technologies that communicate messages to audiences in different parts of a region, country or even the world. These media are the most obvious and familiar to us, but they are more accurately described as mass media. Mass media mean that ‘no interaction among those co-present can take place between sender and receivers’ (Luhmann 2000: 2). The term ‘mass’, in this sense, refers to the massive reception of media such as television, film, and so on. However, media do not have to be mass to be media. This fact draws our attention to an historical sense of a medium (the singular form) as an inter- vening substance or agency (Williams 1983a). Before the age of mass media, the term ‘medium’ referred to something or someone situated between an object (the message being sent) and a subject (the receiver of the message).