Reading The Media- The Sociology Of Mass Communications
Selected Perspectives on Mass Communications.
As I briefly indicated earlier each of the current paradigms within Sociology has a particular tradition of involvement in media studies.
The early researchers such as Cantril or even Katz and Lazarsfeld who operated with a largely quantitive methodology also arrive at the subject area with a perspective rooted within American Academic Sociology with a concomitant Functionalist epistemology.
Their concerns are essentially with the transmission of value consensus or by the failure to do so. The simplicity of the model used by Cantril or amended by Katz & Lazarsfeld does have some resonance in the systems approach that is inherent in Structural Functionalism. The central concern of such early work is an examination of the potential benefits and dangers to wider society of the content of mass communications. At best the media can be used to reinforce the social and cultural integration of each generation into wider society. At worst the sensationalism, violence, and prurient content of much of the mass media output can be seen as a danger to society as a whole.
The mass media is accepted as an effective agent of the socialisation, an agency that transmit a culture to individuals who must then internalise the culture in order to function within the society around them.
The mass communications industry can contribute to the process as an agent of socialisation process just as the family or the education system does. Media products that appear to subvert the current social order will then require regulation. In common with the school's overall epistemology the notion of a critique of the structure of the media of mass communications is eschewed but the content of individual programming or even the overall attitudes promulgated by the media may be seen as invidious (See M. Medved "Hollywood versus America" 1993).
Structural functionalism, in particular as promoted by Talcott Parsons, was the dominant School of thought in Sociology until the 1960s still has a great deal of influence in the American Academic establishment and in the field of Cultural Studies, outside academia.
It would be wrong, however, to suggest that every American commentator, within and outside academia operates within a broadly functionalist perspective, or even accepts the validity of the Hypodermic syringe model of media receptivity. Indeed there is just as much evidence of the power of this value system in Britain and elsewhere, even though the school has been largely discarded by the discipline of Sociology itself. Indeed some of this theoretic has entered into "commonsense" thinking within which Mrs Whitehouse reminds us "that the screening of violence, horror, shock and obscenity into the home can have nothing but a destructive effect upon our sensitivities and our society" ( Glover 1984 p20).
Within the discipline of Sociology thorough going critiques of functionalism have forced it's replacement as dominant perspective first in the 1960s by a revitalised Marxism (of which more next week) by the various feminisms (ditto) and by the now dominant School of Neo-Weberianism, or the "interpretive perspective".
The primary criticism of Functionalism and it's perspective on the mass media originates in the interpretive tradition of social thought is course related to the pseudo- scientific notion of causality- it is asserted that since humans attach meaning to their actions then a simplistic notion of cause and effect in not appropriate for an analysis of human behaviour. The general perspective of media analysts from within the interpretive tradition, whether Interactionist ethnomethodological, or Neo-Weberian, concentrates heavily on the reception of media products and the meaning that people attached to them. Consequently analyses that seek to connect the structure of ownership and control of the mass media to the content of its production such as is common within the Marxist tradition or some of the variants of feminism, are rejected. The model of reception of the media used by theorists within the interpretive tradition, it follows, is generally some version of cultural effects theory.
More recently the work of a highly influential group of French post war philosophers (notably M. Foucault, J. Derrida and R Barthes) has begun to have some impact in social theory. Post structuralist or post modernist thought, in common with the interpretive tradition, eschews analyses that rely on an "overarching meta-narrative". Within media and cultural studies this school of thought has emphasised a particular methodology known as "deconstruction".
Indeed beyond purely technical imperatives drawn from others (from Hegel and Marx via Althusser the discourse/dialectic and from Nietzsche the genealogical technique) post modernist analysis seems insubstantial. This is not to say that post modernist cultural analysis is clearly written or easy to follow.
Of central concern is the concept of power and it's relationship to knowledge. One of post modernism's most influential figures, though he disclaimed the post modernist label, Michael Foucault perhaps set this particular agenda. His conception of power is however borrowed wholesale from Nietzsche and is therefore neutral at best or at worst positive or amoral.
In the work of Pierre Bourdieau France's most celebrated analyst of culture there is in addition a concentration on "Art" or "High Culture" which since it lacks a popular constituency is not part of the remit of this module. Bourdieau does however, unlike many of his contemporaries, utilise some quantitive data but largely in relation to the socioeconomic status of the media's audience than its ownership and control.
Amongst the ambitious claims made for Bourdieau is that he has solved the objectivity/subjectivity paradox in sociology (see N. Garnham & R Williams in Media Culture & Society p119). He seeks to neither fetishize the structure of society (as he claims all structural analyses do) nor so focus on the experiential nature of social action as to ignore its historical and economic context.
One point of commonality between Bourdieau and the rest of the caucus of French post modernist writers, apart from the conceptual content, is purely stylistic- as will be evident in reading any of his work. Most Post modernism is so obtusely written and self contradictory that like Nietzsche almost any interpretation can be overlaid on the original text.
The influence of post modernists thought on popular culture has been considerable with elements of the schemata (if there is such a thing) feeding into a diversity of media from popular music (see U2's "Zoo TV" tour/album) to film and literature (eg Jeanette Winterson's "Art and Lies") where techniques of "playfulness and irony" have been lauded by media critics. Indeed media criticism itself has taken on board much of the conceptual apparatus of post modernist thought, as can be illustrated by regular reading of the arts and culture pages of the "quality" daily and Sunday newspapers.
One other imperative from post modernism that has met with some resonance within media studies and in particular with some variants of feminism is an imperative to listen to and pay heed to "other voices" that is to women, to the people of the majority world and to the marginalised in the Advanced industrial world, with the same weight as to the academic establishment.
Radical perspectives which explicitly link the content of the media's output to it's ownership and control do however exist but have developed broadly within two linked but separate perspectives in sociology - Marxism and Radical/Socialist Feminism whose work on the mass media is examined elsewhere.
Brian Mulrine Bradford College. 2003
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