APPENDIX 4: MEDIA, POPULAR CULTURE AND THE NETWORKED … · Due to the dominance of ‘the media’ in our lives, the new network technologies of the internet and interactive media

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APPENDIX 4: MEDIA, POPULARCULTURE AND THE NETWORKEDSOCIETY

From: Holmes, D, Hughes, K and Julian, R (2007). Australian sociology: A Changing Society (2nd edition). Frenchs Forest, NSW: PearsonEducation Australia, Chapter 15.

Chapter Outline

� ‘The media’ is examined here in the context of newly emergingcommunication technologies which, taken together, are considered by somethinkers to be formative of a ‘second media age’. In the first media age, mediaproducts are created by relatively few producers and received by a greatmany who don’t have the same opportunity to produce and distribute media‘texts’. This system of media culture can be considered a form of socialintegration, an apparatus of control, or an industry in itself.

� As businesses that make money, broadcast media are sometimes referred toas a ‘culture industry’ aimed at producing ‘popular culture’ for massconsumption. Some thinkers regard this culture as having overtaken societyitself, and believe that forms of bonding and association can occur only viabroadcast culture.

� Due to the dominance of ‘the media’ in our lives, the new networktechnologies of the internet and interactive media are often hailed asredeeming the participation of audiences in media culture.

� Finally, the importance of media rituals, media events and habitual uses ofcommunication technology is examined.

Of all the agents of globalisation discussed in Chapter 14, perhaps the most visible isexpressed by the global reach of all kinds of media since World War 11. A number ofterms have emerged to convey this transformation, including ‘media society’ and the‘information society’, which, more recently, approximates to ‘postmodern society’. Infact, some thinkers have argued, information and communication mediated bybroadcast and network systems of various kinds have become more important inpost-industrial, postmodern societies than the workplace, which had a central role inthe industrial era.

Sociology Level 3 Module 2.5 Media 1

WHAT IS ‘THE MEDIA’?

Traditionally, the term ‘the mmeeddiiaa’ refers to forms of broadcast messages andinformation, and is sometimes also known as ‘mass communication’. Masscommunication or ‘mass media’ exists in society via a number of differenttechnical mediums (see Thompson 1995), the primary ones being print, cinema,radio and television. While there are some variations I the kinds of social effectsand properties of these technical mediums, the difference the basic forms ofmass communication and broadcast has been less significant for sociologiststhan the fact that they have such a powerful position in the representation ofour social world.

Traditional broadcast media differ from newer kinds of ‘interactive’ media,like the internet, in that they are not dialogical, there are relatively few sendersof messages, and there are a great many receivers of those messages. Inbroadcast systems there are only token exceptions to this, such as letters to theeditor or talkback radio. These exceptions are just substantial enough tolegitimise principles of liberal democracy or provide a justification for the factthat, in principle if not in practice, ‘everyone can have a say’. Thisoverwhelmingly one-way process of ‘mass communication’, which doesn’t allowthe masses a position to produce messages and information, is also the sourceof another meaning of ‘the media’. ‘The media’ also refers to the institutionsand corporate organisations in society with a virtual monopoly over thelegitimate production of discourses (ways of thinking and speaking) that can bebroadcast. Those who lack the means of broadcasting discourses are generallysubject to them.

This is why there is also so much interest today in alternative broadcastmedia – so-called ‘interactive media’ which, like telephones, have existed for along time but have become significant, with the establishment of the internetand the World Wide Web, as important agents of the mediation of social life(discussed later in this chapter). The importance of the internet incontemporary social life is said to be of such a magnitude as to have led to theheralding of a post-broadcast ‘second media age’ (Poster 1995; Gilder 1994;Holmes 2005).

At the same time, the fact that we can now so clearly contrast the internet withbroadcast allows sociologists to see more clearly exactly what ‘the media’ does insocial life, and what its effects are. This seeming inequality of the media, of the fewbeing able to speak to the many in an institutionalised and systemic way, is ofparamount concern to sociologists interested in questions of democracy, freespeech and the public sphere (see Thompson 1993; Jones 2000a).

THE MEDIA IN AUSTRALIAAustralia is one of the highest consumers of communications and informationtechnology in the world. On a composite index across telephone, television andpersonal computers, Australia has the fifth-highest density in the world. N2004, 97% of Australians watched television, 75% used the internet and over70% had mobile phones. As Table 15.1 also shows, Australians exhibit highdegrees of literacy with newspapers and magazines.

Despite the euphoria and vigorous marketing campaigns surrounding theinternet, broadcast media continues to be an anchor of modern existence.

media Mediums of broadcast

messages and information;

sometimes also known as

‘mass communication’. ‘The

media’ also refers to the

institutions and corporate

organisations in society with a

monopoly over the legitimate

production of discourse (ways

of thinking and speaking) that

are broadcast.


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Australians are insatiable consumers of broadcast media in the home: theaverage Australian watches 3 hours, 13 minutes of television each day. In anaverage lifespan this amounts to nine years of television, of which twoyears and three months are advertisements. In the over-55 age group theaverage rises to 4 hours, 24 minutes.

Outside the home we are everywhere bombarded by broadcast media.Advertising signage covers billboards, T-shirts and vehicles, even theproducts themselves. We are confronted with: news headline posters atnewsstands at train stations; dozens of magazines at the supermarketcheckout; hundreds more at the newsagent; radios and music in our cars,taxis, stores and institutions; being put on hold on the telephone; andeverywhere with television screens. We have screens while we are queuingup at the bank, or while recovering from being lost at a mega shoppingmall, screens that replay every highlight at a football match, screens thatadvertise a product for us at the hardware store; television is left on as a‘friend’ in the kitchen or the living room even when it is not being watched;lastly we have the institution of the video café.

In looking at the different kinds of media, a basic distinction needs to bemade between printed and electronic media. Print media or ‘the press’comprises daily and weekly newspapers with a high circulation, alongsidepopular women’s magazines such as Australian Women’s Weekly, Woman’sDay and New Idea. Specialist magazines catering to every kind of personalinterest take up most of the space at the newsstands but have lowercirculations. Print media also includes the wide variety of literature boughtat bookstores and borrowed at libraries, which corresponds to the variouslevels of education and literacy in Australia.

Whereas the print media is based on the ‘printing press’ and themechanical reproduction of type and images, the electronic media is ableto broadcast information in sound and image from the few to the many byway of the transmission of electromagnetic waves. Television and radio arethe dominant mediums in this and deliver a certain degree of complexitynot available to print.

Ownership and controlThe unequal relationship between senders and receivers of broadcastmessages results primarily from the asymmetrical, ‘one-way’ nature of themedium. This technical structure is the most important element of ‘massmedia’, and needs to be understood. An investigation into who owns


broadcast media and controls what is said within these technical mediums isalso highly relevant, as are the government regulations on how concentratedthis ownership can be. It is in the interest of the private owners of mediabroadcasting companies that the number of broadcasters in Australia belimited. This guarantees those owners the substantial audiences they needto generate profits from advertising revenues. Media companies are just likeother capitalist enterprises in their goal to make profits, yet different withregard to what they sell. When we buy a newspaper or turn on the televisionwe are helping media organisations generate profits in a way that is notimmediately obvious. Instead of these media selling something to theindividual, it is the other way around: the attention span and size of theaudience or the readership is sold to advertisers by the media organisation.This is why the magic ‘circulation’ figure of a newspaper is so important. Thehigher the circulation, the higher the fees charged to advertisers. Similarlywith electronic broadcasting and the importance given to ‘ratings’ weeks,where not only how many people tuned into a radio or television station butthe length of time spent tuned in is measured.

Australia has one of the highest concentrations of media ownership in theindustrialised world. The two companies that have consistently owned andcontrolled the largest portions of Australia media over the past decade areRupert Murdoch’s News Corporation and James Packer’s AustralianConsolidated Press. In Australian capital cities, 67.8% of weekday newspapercirculation is controlled by News Corporation (seven out of 12 dailies) and78.1% of Sunday papers are also owned by News Corp. The remaining shareof Sunday papers is almost totally owned by John Fairfax Holdings (20.4%),which also shares the remaining spoils of Monday-Saturday circulation withWest Australian Newspapers (21.6% and 8.9% respectively). The SeenTelevision Network (24% owned by Kerry Stokes) has, with five metropolitanstations and one regional, a potential audience reach of 71.38% of theAustralian population. The Nine Network, which is majority-owned by JamesPacker’s PBL (Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, a subsidiary ofConsolidated Press), with three metro stations and one regional, has apotential audience reach of 51.22%. While this is a smaller reach than Stokes’network, Packer’s PBL also has a 25% investment in Foxtel. Further, betweenthem, News Corp and PBL own 50% of the top 30 most profitable magazinesin circulation (Communications Law Centre 2005).

The acute ‘oligopoly’ described above has given rise to a relatively limitednumber of inquiries into the ownership structure of the Australian media inthe past 20 years, with the exception of the landmark petition signed in 1992by 137 of the 224 members of the Australian parliament (across all parties)opposing higher concentration of media ownership. However, the introductionin 1992 of cross-media ownership laws, restricting the concentration ofownership of different kinds of media in the one market, was seen by many tooffer considerable protection to media diversity. The degree of concentrationwould remain high, but it would not get substantially worse.

These laws prescribed that ‘media’ barons’ not have too high a stake indifferent kinds of media simultaneously. For example, under section 60 ofthe Broadcasting and Services Act 1992, a person must not control:

• A commercial television broadcasting licence and a commercial radiobroadcasting licence having the same licence area;

• A commercial television broadcasting licence and a newspaperassociated with that licence area; or

• A commercial radio broadcasting licence and newspaper associated withthat licence area.


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In addition, in relation to foreign investment, the maximum permittedaggregate (non-portfolio) interests in national and metropolitan newspapers is30%, with a 25% limit on any single foreign shareholder. The aggregate non-portfolio limit for provincial and suburban newspapers is 50%.

If anything, the government of the day would have a lot to fear from thecross-ownership prohibited in the above provisions, insofar as it might createa situation where just one company could conduct an organised campaignagainst a particular government on the eve of an election. Few politicianswould admit this, as they are more interested in keeping media owners onside.Sometimes it is only another proprietor envious of his or her lack of monopolywho might lobby for a dilution of media concentration. Such is the case ofRichard Branson, who has an 11% interest in the US cable service NTI and wasbeaten by Murdoch in a 2006 bid for ITV in Britain. Branson went on the attack,saying that Murdoch’s media empire was bad for democracy in Britain andought to be dismantled. Branson was quoted as saying: “All of us knowgovernments are scared stiff of Murdoch. If The Sun, The Sunday Times, TheTimes, Sky, The News of the World, just to name a few of the things Murdochowns, all come out in favour of a political party, the election is likely to be wonby that political party’ (London Telegraph Transcript 2006). Murdoch himself,in a 2006 interview, was reported to have said that when he visits the UK, thePrime Minister and the Chancellor compete to have breakfast with him.

Here in Australia the influence of the major media proprietors overgovernments and parties, particularly during election campaigns, has beenconsiderable. And there are questions as to whether such influence extends tochanging cross-media ownership laws themselves. On 18 October 2006 a newBill passed through federal parliament that has had far-reaching consequencesfor Australia’s media future. The new media laws allow for even greaterconcentration of ownership by removing the cross-media ownership provisionsand restrictions of foreign ownership. When the laws came into force in 2006they allowed media mergers to give a proprietor ‘two out or three’ mediabusinesses (TV, radio or newspapers) in a single market. Effectively this allowsNews Corp to buy a TV station of PBL to buy newspaper businesses. The degreeof concentration can be in the 90% range, with a token provision to protect‘diversity’ – that there must be five independent proprietors in city markets andfour in regional Australia (technically each could have only 1% of the market).

The bonanza created for existing owners became immediately obvious. Justa day before the Bill passed thought the Senate, James Packer, the managingdirector of PBL, met the only person who could have blocked it, the independentsenator Steven Fielding. Fielding presented no opposition. Within hours of theBill being passed, PBL had sold half its interests in TV and magazines to aEuropean equity firm, CVC Asia Pacific, while keeping controlling shareholdingin those interests. This freed up almost 4.6 billion dollars in cash for other PBLacquisitions. Kerry Stokes made the next move, buying a 15% share in WestAustralian Newspapers, a very strategic asset to have that could be sold for anextremely high price to anyone wanting to monopolise the newspaper market inAustralia. Then Rupert Murdoch made a 7.5% investment in John FairfaxHoldings, which gave him bargaining power in further acquisitions in 2007.

The new media laws specify that all media takeovers must meet theapproval of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACC).However, the power of the ACCC to prevent anti-competitive takeovers hasitself been restricted because of changes that have been made to the 1974Trade Practices Act. One of the amendments gives the ACCC only 40 days inwhich to respond to a takeover bid.


Public and community broadcastingThe high level of private ownership in the Australian media needs also to beplaced in the context of the alternatives provided by public and communitybroadcasting. Established in 1924, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation(ABC) provides publicly funded television, radio and online services acrossAustralia without the need for advertising. The Special Broadcasting Service(SBS), established in 1978, provides television and radio, but has had tosubsidise itself with some advertising. Together with community radio and theless=developed advent of community television, such services offer for manya welcome alternative to the packaged and stylised programming of thecommercial networks and their constant interruptions of loud advertising.

The charters of the ABC and SBS have their roots in the Public ServiceBroadcasting philosophy behind the founding of the BBC in the 1920s. Its firstdirector general, John Reith, saw the BBC as having a moral, cultural andeducative role in the formation of a strong public culture. The ABC’s currentcharter, dating from 1983, defines its main function as to provide high-qualityprogramming: ‘that contribute[s] to a sense of national identity and inform[s] andentertain[s], and reflect[s] the cultural diversity of, the Australian community; andbroadcasting programs of an educational nature’ (ABC Charter 6, 1).

The ABC’s educative role sets it apart from commercial broadcastersmore than any other feature. The sheer range of formats and topics that goto air is impressive. Programs specifically dealing with law, politics, health,the arts, science, nature, contemporary philosophy, Asia-Pacific issues, sport,media/film, Australian history, children’s learning programs, and then manygeneral current affairs and documentary programs, make the ABC acentrepiece in the Australian public sphere.

However, the alternative that public broadcasting provides to the loomingmonopolisation of commercial media is itself subject to political pressurefrom prevailing governments. Recent years have demonstrated that the ABCis open to politicisation by governments. Many have heralded the ABC aseither offering a much broader coverage of political views than one finds oncommercial broadcasters or an alternative to the corporate ideologies of themainstream broadcasters. But there are numerous ways in which the ABCcan be politicised in a structural sense. One is to appoint a managing directorand members of the board who identify politically with the government ofthe day. Another is to threaten budget cuts – a feature of the former Keatinggovernment; a much newer method involves attempts to censor and auditcontent or take shows off air if they are too critical of the government.

IN FOCUS

Regulating bias and opinion – the case of Australia’snational public broadcaster

Controversy over the appointment of Mark Scott as managing directorof the ABC in July 2006 followed when he released ‘Editorial Policies2007’, which took effect in March 2007. Scott, a former liberal partyadviser, has a special interest in editorial control, as his previous job wasas editorial director for Fairfax Holdings.

Scott’s measures for change include: appointing a director-general ofeditorial policies to audit individual programs; establishing a newcategory of programming called ‘Opinion’ (which implies that otherprogramming should be discouraged from opinion), which reiterates arequirement that all ABC programming demonstrate impartiality; andthat the new editorial policies be extended to all sections. Scott first


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announced these measures in a speech to conservative thinktank The SydneyInstitute in October 2006. In that speech he summarised what he saw as the‘highlights’ of the policy:

There is a requirement for impartiality at the content of program level.Each news and current affairs story and program must be impartial.Now for opinion programs or programs of topical and factual content,individual items of content can take a particular perspective, but theABC must be able to demonstrate that it has provided audiences witha range of different perspectives on the subject under considerationon each platform, be it radio, television, or online. On contentiousmatters, we need to hear the full range of views. The ABC has to bethe place for the contest of all ideas. Across the range of ABC content,audiences must not be able to reasonably conclude that the ABC hastaken an editorial stand on matters of contention and public debate(Scott 2006)

Scott’s new policies attracted considerable criticism from journalists andacademics not connected with the ABC. The major criticism was that there arealready elaborate guidelines (147 pages of them) within the ABC for ensuringimpartiality, and that because Scott was unable to actually name breaches ofsuch a principle, the need for new policies was never substantiated; the effectwas simply to intimidate staff at the ABC to program material that satisfied theboard (the majority of whose members are Liberal appointees) and themanaging director. Moreover, to the extent that Scott was acting for thegovernment, no government has insisted that the same or similar guidelines beimposed on the regulation of commercial broadcasters. In his own speech,Scott even referred to the fact that of the 170 000 communications the ABCreceives each year from audiences, only 0.5% ARE CONCERNED WITHPOLITICAL BIAS. Unlike commercial broadcasters, the ABC had conductedquarterly surveys since 1997 that measure ‘accuracy, objectivity andimpartiality’ with strong results (Ricketson 2006).

However, what is new in the 2007 guidelines is that ABC is now required tobe balanced in matters of ‘opinion’ on news and current affairs programs. Tothis end, Scott announced the establishment of a new program (which began in2007), ‘Difference of Opinion’, which he said would redress bias at the ABC.This requirement has been seen by analysts as farcical. Following the release,Sharon Beder, a professor in Social Sciences, Media and Communications at theUniversity of Wollongong, wrote: ‘A story that supports the status quo isgenerally considered to be neutral and is not questioned in terms of itsobjectivity while one that challenges the status quo tends to be perceived ashaving a “point of view”. Statements and assumptions that support the existingpower structure are regarded as “facts” while those critical of it tend to berejected as “opinions” (Beder 2006). Beder argues that insinuating bias at theABC without actually producing any ‘facts’ to prove it is more likely to damageimpartiality than ensure it. This is because ‘too much emphasis on objectivityin news and current affairs can lead journalists to leave out interpretations andanalysis’, because journalists are hypersensitive that their stories may offendor be construed in personal terms. Also, she argues:

the enforcement of impartiality tends to give powerful industryspokespeople guaranteed access to the media, no matter how flimsytheir arguments or how transparently self-interested. No such accessis guaranteed to critics (Beder 2006).


Philip Bell, professor of Media and Communications at UNSW, also weighedinto the debate, arguing that measuring bias is impossible. How does one‘control the uncontrollable linguistic and visual meanings that people takefrom television programs’ (Bell 2006)? Bell argues that the pluralism ofinterpretation is already inherent in the audience rather than the messagedelivered, and the political meanings of texts are so much more nuanced thanan editorial policy could ever regulate. Like Beder, he argues that:

The threat of post hoc examination of the obvious or literalcontent of a program, asking whether it is ‘balanced’ or ‘biased’, islikely to induce timidity and result in the tokenistic inclusion ofalternative points of view merely for the sake of placating afaceless auditor (Bell 2006).

For Bell, the main concern is that a program contains factual content andthat it is presented in good faith. Attempting to include a broad range ofviewpoints in a program that aren’t even relevant to what it is about willusually lead to inaccuracy and confusion (Bell 2006).

Q: What is bias? How does it differ between public broadcaster andcommercial broadcaster?

Media regulation and diversityAustralia has a number of statutory authorities that participate in the regulationof ownership and licensing of media, the main one being the AustralianCommunications and Media Authority (formerly the Australian BroadcastingAuthority). The ACMA provide television and radio licences and sets standards forthe content that goes to air. All forms of broadcasting, commercial, community andpublic, are limited to a fixed number of licences, as is the amount of advertisingpermitted in each type of broadcasting. Community stations are allowed only self-promotion, while commercial interests have ceilings placed on amounts ofadvertising per hour. Australia has the second-highest volume of advertising perhour in the Western world, currently set at 13 minutes in the hour. This means thatin an average evening of programming, beginning with the news and staying onuntil the end of the evening movie or block of serials, the average viewer will havewatched one hour of advertisements. In order to achieve this, commercialtelevision stations are characteristically similar in the lengths that they go to inorder to achieve viewer loyalty for a given evening. The crucial factor here isaggressive promotion of their news service with ‘promos’ telling you how they arefirst, how they have the most glamorous team and are ‘the one to watch’. On thebasis of ratings, which show that a significant proportion of viewers stay with thechannel they have tuned into for the news, such media competition becomes quitefierce in the quest for the highest price from advertisers.

In their attempt to provide content that will attract viewers, commercialbroadcasters are drawn to buying US soap operas and situation comedies.Produced by the massive American ‘dream factory’ (Hollywood), these aregenerally much cheaper to buy than it is to make programs here. The Broadcastingand Services Act 1992 thus sets minimum requirements that 10% of programsdistributed by a network must comply with rules on ‘Australian’ content. Thisleaves considerable latitude to maintain a very high level of US content. Theeconomics of this are seductive for the profit-seeking broadcasters: a new episodeof NCIS might cost only $40 000 and attract 2.3 million viewers in an evening,


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which is obviously more economical than the roughly $100 000 it mighthave cost to make an episode of McLeod’s Daughters for only half thataudience. In fulfilling requirements for Australian content, electronicbroadcasters also look to low-cost programming, which generally involvesjust pointing a camera (e.g. in televising sport or ‘talking heads’ chat shows).It is because of these decidedly economic realities that a culture ofAmerican programming has been able to dominate in Australia. Withaggressive marketing and promotion of American TV and cinema contentand little in the way of alternative programming, US content soon came todominate individual habits of using the media as a ‘reference point’.Generations of Australians have grown up being able to recite theme songsfrom American television series, and liken people they meet to TV or filmcharacters.

One way in which diversity can be encouraged in Australia is to open upthe number of television licences. However, the new media laws passed in2006 prevent the granting of further commercial TV licences.Communications minister at the time Helen Coonan justified this witharguments that digital media have radically changed the total mediaenvironment. Coonan claimed that anyone can produce their own weblog,and that this fact should not be underestimated as a source of mediadiversity and free public opinion. Some have pointed out that the problemwith the weblog argument is that 60% of the top 10 websites in Australia aresimple mirror sites of mass media, such as Nine MSN, Yahoo7, News, Fairfaxand the ABC. Also, the move to the digital transmission of television allow for‘multicasting’ – the ability of the one provider to broadcast (or simulcast)more than one signal has not allowed for the entry of new broadcasters.

THEORIES OF THE MEDIA

The mass media as a form of social integrationCorresponding to the rise of various forms of broadcast media in the 20thcentury, a number of sociological perspectives in communications theoryand media studies have emerged to explain and analyse its role in society.Given the growing centrality of media in modern social life, it is notsurprising that each of the different perspectives in sociology discussed inChapter 2 have something to say about the media.

A concept central to an appreciation of the need for sociology toformally study media was that of ‘mass society’. From the beginning of the1930s, when cinema and radio were rapidly emerging and in Europe,America and Australia a massive sector of unintegrated unemployedworkers was growing, the postulation of ‘the masses’ as a social entity inmodern industrial society took shape. The idea of a vast body of isolatedand alienated individuals, assembled in cities, was powerfully epitomisedby Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times. Conservatives, of course,lamented the rise of the masses: they saw in this movement the decline of‘high culture’ and of the aesthetic and moral standards that had forcenturies been transmitted by the institutions of the ruling classes, in art,painting, higher learning and courtly society. Apparatuses such as cinemaand radio had their own power of transmission, one which theconservatives thought could debase these ‘higher values’.

In conjunction with the mass society thesis, before the monopolisation ofmedia ownership of media ownership that can be witnessed today, some earlymedia analysts in Europe and America held out great hope for it as ademocratising and stabilising influence in modern industrial societies. Forthese thinkers, the media was an institution entirely appropriate to the age of


‘the masses’. In the view of sociologists like Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons,the media had the capacity to strengthen social ties and to enhance individuals’need to belong to a society, community or nation. In this sense the media wasviewed positively in the face of the kinds of ‘dysfunctions’ that modern societyconfronted, in the transition from traditional societies closely knit by religion toindustrial, fragmented societies based on a highly detailed division of work.

Merton’s and Parson’s theories echoed Durkheim’s optimism thatemployer associations would provide a group context that would overcomethe effects of the ‘anomie’ prevalent across society. Such anomie resultsfrom what Durkheim called a ‘weak conscience collective’ (see Chapter 2),and any institution that can step in and fulfil the functional role ofstrengthening this conscience collective is welcome. The strength of theconscience collective can vary according to the many material bases, or‘material social facts’, on which it relies, such as urban design, architecture,and ‘the number and nature of channels of communication’. In this argumentthe tendency towards fragmentation via a detailed division of labour thatoccurs in contemporary ‘organic’ society needs to be weighed up in relationto the degree of volume and intensity of communication that occurs betweenmembers of that society. If communication and media are strong in people’slives, they are able to act as an important foundation for social solidarity.

The highpoint of functionalist theory was reached in America in the 1940sand 50s with the popularity of ‘effects analysis’ (Lasswell 1948; Lazarsfeld &Merton 1948). Lasswell’s most famous paper, ‘The Structure and Function ofCommunication in Society’, presents three great functions by whichcommunication processes stabilise society:

1 Society’s value consensus can be monitored to prevent deterioration.

2 The various subsystems and institutions of society can be betterintegrated.

3 Better historical transmission of culture and tradition can reinforcesocial solidarity in a sense of shared history.

Lasswell attributed the maintenance of the social whole to the influence ofmass communication. His checklist for understanding these structures was:who says what, in which channel, to whom, and with what effect? Lasswellwas almost exclusively interested in the technical and social nature of themedia as medium. Content, control, audience and impact were all implicatedin these questions, as was a basic ‘society’ versus the ‘individual’ dualism.

THE MEDIA AS AN IDEOLOGICAL STATEAPPARATUSUnlike functionalist accounts of the media premised on the realisation of abroad value consensus within society, Marxist studies of the media traditionallyfocus on how the media becomes a heavily contested site of social power andideology. As discussed in Chapter 2, in the Marxist framework ideology refersto the everyday discourses that assist in the reproduction of class division andother kinds of inequality. Therefore the issue of the ownership and control ofmedia by private interests has enormous implications for the control of theelite (or ruling class) over society as a whole.

The ‘dominant ideology thesis’ is critical of the functionalist perspective,insofar as the media reproduce both existing social relations and theinequalities of these relations. This is so for class divisions, but also for thedivisions of gender, ethnicity and race. These inequalities are reproducedeither by media narratives which deny that they exist or by narratives thatnaturalise and normalise the fact that they exist.


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According to Marx and Engles, the class that owns the means of producingcommodities in a capitalist society is also in a position to shape the social,political and ideological culture of that society, in ways in which thecontradictions of capitalism – for example, the fact that wealth is distributedaway from its producers – are concealed.

The following is a list of some of the ideologies that Marxists have suggestedact to maintain and ‘naturalise’ the ‘status quo’.

MMaajjoorr iiddeeoollooggiieess ooff ccaappiittaalliisstt ssoocciieettyy cciirrccuullaattiinngg iinn tthhee mmaassss mmeeddiiaa

• Individualism – An ideology that promotes the idea that society is composed

of autonomous individuals who each have an opportunity to achieve what they

can through application. Such an ideology attributes a unique ‘essence’ to

each individual, which is said to be independent of his/her social environment.

This ideology is promoted by conservative politicians in particular, such as one-

time British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who famously proclaimed

‘There is no such thing as society – only individuals’. This ideology also denies

the existence of class differences/

• Possessive individualism – A type of individualism that defines persons by

acquisitiveness and what they have. This ideology assumes that the basic

unit of society is the person as ‘rational maximiser’ – The individual trying to

get the most from society with the least effort.

• Consumerism – An ideology that holds that happiness and freedom are

possible only by buying them. In resorting to the market in some way,

whether this be for packaged holidays, gambling or fast food, individual

behaviour is shaped by buying commodities rather than self-production

• Racism – An ideology that divides populations on the basis of ethnicity and

race. Many Marxists argue that this ideology is most powerfully promoted

among workers during times of immigration. Workers become divided over

job security rather than united in their struggle with the employing class.

Recently arrived immigrants are often held responsible for taking jobs away

from those migrants who are already here.

• Sexism – An ideology based in the sexual division of labour: the idea that men

belong in the public sphere where they are pressured to ‘perform’, while

women should undertake only domestic labour in the private sphere. In the

20th century it was promoted as being of benefit to men in the protection of

male workers’ jobs. However, socialist-feminine scholars have pointed out that

sexism is much wider than the industrial situation, and cannot be reduced

simply to the dynamics of class. In relation to the media in particular, feminist

scholars have pointed out that a major outcome of sexism is to objectify

women as passive ‘sex objects’ to be gazed at, while men are portrayed as

‘subjects’, as taking control and positioned in the role of observer, as the

author of initiatives or as metaphorically ‘behind the camera’.

Following theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser (see Chapter 12),

contemporary Marxists do not argue that individuals are ‘brainwashed by these

ideologies and are therefore acting in ‘false consciousness’ (or self-deception).

Rather, employing many of the analyses that came out of the study of signs and


language called ‘semiotics’, it is contended that ‘discourse’ – ways of thinking and

speaking – is more significant in setting the limits and terms of what individuals

think about the world than in positively defining what they think.

In line with this argument, the media theorist Stuart Hall (1979; 341-2)

argues that the media have three great cultural functions in capitalist society:

1 ... the provision and the selective construction of social knowledge,

of social imagery, through which we perceive the ‘worlds’, the ‘lived

realities’, of others, and imaginarily reconstruct their lives and ours

into some intelligible ‘world-of-the-whole’, some ‘lived totality’.

2 ... to reflect on this plurality (a plurality which is itself constructed

by the media), and provide a constant inventory of the lexicons,

lifestyles and ideologies which are objectivated there.

3 ... organise and bring together what is selectively represented and

selectively classified ... in a way in which consensus and legitimacy is

produced.

IN FOCUS

Mixed messages: decoding advertisements

Next time you are watching advertisements, see if you can find examples

of the above ideologies. Advertisements are about selling products, but

they are also important examples of the portrayal of social life.

Q. How do the advertisements you viewed support inequality? Can you

find examples of advertisements that expose inequalities in Australian

society?

TERRORISM AND THE MEDIABritish Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once quipped that media coverage isthe oxygen of terrorism. The way to manage terrorism, according to this view,is to withdraw reportage of it. One suspects there may be something to thisthesis when, following the news of fatalities in a bombing incident, we read ofmultiple groups all wanting to take responsibility.

However, to suggest that media attention is a singular source of motivationfor terrorist groups is rather simplistic. Two economists, Bruno Frey andDominik Rohner, in a recent study of high-profile press coverage, suggest thatthere is at least a two-way set of interests involved in the media/terrorismrelationship. They argue that mass media and terrorist groups help each otherout. For every act of terror, circulation and profits of newspapers increase andterrorist groups get publicity, feeding further acts of terror in an escalatingcycle of violence and spectacle (Frey & Rohner 2006).

The study concentrated on two well-respected international broad-sheets, TheNew York Times and Neue Zuercher Zeitung, a high-quality Swiss newspaper.Their methodology was simply to count references to ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism’between 1998 and 2006 while measuring such journalism against actualoccurrences of international terror. Frey and Rohner’s conclusions, arrived at afterputting these figures through some very clinical equations used by economists,was that representation and reality interact in a more or less mechanical way: thatis, that media coverage unambiguously causes terror and vice versa. The study


S O C I O L O G Y40

makes no attempt to contextualise the possibility that acts of terror may beresponses to other political or military events (e.g. the election of a militaristicleader or the invasion of sovereign territory).

Figure 15.1 demonstrates that post-9/11, while the incidents ofinternational terrorism have increased, the coverage of such events hasgrown disproportionately, at times three-or fourfold the degree of coveragethat would have obtained for the same number of terrorist fatalities pre-9/11.

When we add electronic media into the equation, where our screens canbe interrupted by blanket-feed coverage from CNN for days about anincident, mass media certainly raise the tempo of insecurity and induce fearsabout personal and collective safely. This of course legitimises the need fora more stringent security state, and encourages us all to forfeit more of ourcivil liberties, for example at the places we can assemble, being searched atairports and public venues. It can also bolster individual commitment tonational sovereignty. The fear of ‘outsiders’ coming into Australia hasheightened since 9/11. The commercial network reality series Border Controlwas the highest-rating television program of 2006.

THE MEDIA AND THE INDUSTRIALISATION OF CULTUREWhile ‘the media’ can be viewed as a powerful apparatus for the maintenance ofeither social solidarity or inequality, it is also, significantly, an industry itself – onethat sells cultural products. In Australia, the ‘culture industry’ is big business. Itemploys over 200 000 workers and is larger than wheat, wool and beef combined,with a turnover of $14 billion (Cunningham & Turner 1997: 155).

In 1946, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were the first to analyse themedia as a ‘culture industry’. They argue that the development of the newcommunication technologies of the press, radio and film, and the limits to growthexperienced in the production of subsistence commodities, together forcecapitalists to turn to selling products that have potentially unlimited demand(Adorno & Horkheimer [1946] 1993).


What is represented by the culture industry is nothing less than theindustrialisation of culture itself. Such a massification of culture entails theincreasing separation of individuals from the social and practical conditionsin which they might make their own culture in mutual circumstances.Instead, in an abstract, urbanised world of mass production and massconsumption, individuals increasingly look to the media to acquire the stockof meanings on which to build a lifestyle and an identity, just as individualsmust go to the marketplace to procure what they need for their subsistence.

Writing in the wake of post-World War 11 propaganda, Adorno andHorkheimer argue that the culture industry represents a powerful apparatusfor manipulating working-class needs. Most significantly, it inculcates‘obedience to hierarchy’ (1993: 38). In the very structure of the fewproducing on behalf of the many, it discourages the masses from takinginitiative or from questioning the initiative being taken by the elite. Underthese circumstances, they argue, it is little wonder that the culture industryproduces a loss of individuality (1993: 41)

IN FOCUS

The importance of ratings

In the engine room of the culture industries lies the economic power ofratings and circulation. The number of people watching a televisionprogram, or buying a newspaper, feeds directly back into its content. Thisis because part of the ‘circuit of value’ on which the culture industry isbased is the sale of audiences to advertisers (and the attention span theydevote to a given media). In turn, the media organisations have to providethese audiences with an attractive media product – a program, a catchyheadline or lead story – which will determine the price they can ask ofadvertisers for the audience they attract. To complete this circuit, it isexpected that audiences will be transformed into consumers of theadvertised products, and part of the price of this product pays for the costof advertising. Which means that consumers are, in a sense, ‘sold’ thecommodity twice. They pay for the material product, as well as for the costof persuading them that they should have it in the first place.

So there is huge pressure on media organisations to capture audienceshare; the better they do this the higher the revenues they can ask fromadvertisers. This dynamic can be seen very clearly in Australian free-to-airtelevision. As there are only three commercial and two public televisionchannels, competition for audience share is fierce. This can lead commercialstations to conduct well-crafted campaigns to deliver maximum audienceshare at prime time, when television audiences are at their peak.

A spectacular case of this was the fight between Channels 7 and 9 overrights to the stories of Todd Russell and Brandt Webb, the two survivorsof the Beaconsfield mine collapse. The epic story of survival had built upsuch a following in the news media that being able to secure the rights tothe personal stories from the two miners would be an extremely profitablecoup for a broadcaster. There was basic agreement that negotiationswould not begin until the miners were actually safe, but both 9 and 7made their interest known to the miners’ families. The two networkseulogised the miners as ‘heroes’ in anticipation of their rescue.

On the day the miners were rescued, more Australians watchedtelevision than on any other weekday in 2006. A few days later they madea ‘free’ appearance on Channel 9’s Footy Show, which conducted a benefitconcert set in Beaconsfield, and attracted two million viewers nationwide.


S O C I O L O G Y42

During the show Eddy McGuire attempted to get an anecdote about theirexperience, to which Russell replied: ‘Tell me how big your cheque book isand we’ll talk’. The audience cheered at this, ridiculing the attempts of bigmedia to exploit their misfortune.

In the end, Channel 9 beat 7 to the lucrative ‘exclusive two-hour interview’with the miners, for which they were paid $2 million. The interview, ‘TheGreat Escape’, was programmed for a Sunday evening, traditionally thehighest-rating audience evening of the week. As soon as the deal was signedAustralia’s biggest media buyer, Harold Mitchell, had major advertisersjostling for a slot in the program. In turn, Channel 9 pounded audiences withpromo ads in the days leading up to the big night. It was risky in one sense:there was only a week for Channel 9 to line up advertisers for the show.

Steve Allen, a prominent analyst of competition in the television market,argues that the coupe to get the interview was not about short-termprofitability but regaining the leading position in market share. For 9 it wasa bonanza. Across the five largest capital cities it peaked at 3.037 millionviewers, the second most popular program of the year (after the openingceremony of the Commonwealth Games).

Allen estimated at the time that the advertising revenue for the two-hourspot was $5.6 million. Given that production costs were very low, turning acamera on in a studio, the return on investment was spectacular. Further,Publishing and Broadcasting Limited, the owner of Channel 9, also signedthe miners up for Australian Women’s Weekly and Women’s Day. A fewweeks later Todd and Brandt were watched on the US program Good MorningAmerica by 5.2 million viewers and signed a book contract to tell their storyto complete the media package.

Q: Who are the winners and losers out of the deal to broadcast ‘The GreatEscape’?

THE MEDIA AS POPULAR CULTUREIn the 1970s a departure from the Frankfurt School, which developed out of arejection of the high culture/mass culture distinction, emerged in the work of theCentre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. The CCCS rejected theidea that mass culture is homogeneous and without depth. The industrialisation ofculture and meaning in the considerably diversified products of the culture industrythat were apparent by the 1970s was seen to be an integral part of modern life. Thecontent of media apparatuses might be consumed en masse but such practices ofconsumption are not uniform: they involve audiences in actively interpreting,resisting, appropriating and obtaining pleasure from texts on their own terms. Tounderstand culture is to understand the range of genres, icons and narratives bywhich audiences live their relation to social reality. Media products themselvesbecome particularly important in this reading. Those sociologists who take popularculture as their starting point for analysing society argue that to understandpopular thinking, the sociologist is better off referring to a blockbuster movie or afashionable TV series than, say, doing a survey. Sociologists in this tradition presentpapers at conferences on the intricacies of the latest McDonald’s or Microsoftadvertising campaign, or look at the systems of symbolic exchange surrounding thehamburger or a pair of jeans.

These media products are cultural points of reference owned or licensed bymedia corporations, but are also quasi-symbolically ‘owned’ by audiences. Theyprovide a record of cultural values and meanings which in a sense cannot be learnedin any other way. And, of course, while these texts might purvey all kinds of


discriminatory ideologies that help reproduce social relations of inequality,at the same they are the basis for social relations of inequality, at the sametime they are the basis for social identification and the possibility of a sharedcommon culture. This latter function, and the concomitant claim about thesacredness of such meanings to audiences, is sometimes heralded bycultural studies as being more important than the former function.Alternatively, the social reality of popular culture is heavily parodied by‘postmodern’ culture – by way of over-celebrating its identifiable ‘kitsch’ andexcessive expressions to the point of often mocking its sociality.

Moreover, the almost exclusive emphasis on consumption as active ratherthan passive has today become a foundation for the study of popular culture,which incorporates a wide range of research into audience, taste, texts,ideology, industry, genres, codes, and ‘semiotics’ (the study of meaning).‘Semiotics’ as a field of analysis is interested in the cultural construction ofmeaning with media texts and narratives. These texts can be realised in themediums of film, literature, magazines, newspapers, television, radio, or asimages on billboards or in magazines and newspapers. These texts contain arange of narratives, styles and ideologies representing differentiated formsof cultural meaning – from dominant popular meanings to subculturalmeanings (e.g. youth culture, surfie culture, rock culture, drug culture, mobileculture, ‘extreme’ risk-taking culture). In turn, each kind of text can display avery wide variety of genres. To take television, programming is composed offilms, news, documentaries, serials (drama, comedy), talk shows (head-to-head, or ‘trash’ audience confessionals), spectacle freakshows (likewrestling, or world’s dumbest criminals), sport, youth music and quiz shows.

It can be argued that such differentiation mirrors the degree of ‘productdifferentiation’, the degree to which the same basic product can be marketedwith slightly different images attached to it. Thus the dozens of kinds ofsoaps that one might see on the supermarket shelves actually come out ofvery few factories – it is just that some have different colours and perfumesand glamorous packages added, to create a range from ‘budget soap’ tosoaps that make the consumer feel s/he is distinctive or ‘individual’.Advertising encourages individuals to buy commodities totally on the basisof a label. At some level, every consumer knows that buying a popular labelwill cost a lot more, but the functional value or ‘use value’ of the product isof little interest. What is important is that, in buying a label, the individualregisters his/her belonging to a status group, a subculture or a ‘tastecommunity’ (see Bennett, Emmison & Frow 1999).

THE MASS MEDIA AS ‘SIMULACRA’ – JEAN BAUDRILLARDIn August 1997, on the Gold Coast, there was a robbery of a credit institutionat a large shopping mall, Australia Fair. The armed robbers were successfulthat day, entering the building in balaclavas and reportedly escaping with amodest sum. As it is a substantially crowded shopping mall it was not difficultfor local television networks to find witnesses – or, as they say in the vision-dominated industry, ‘eye’ witnesses.

A teenage girl was able to give an account that was broadcast ontelevision that night: ‘It was amazing, there was this shouting coming out ofthe bank and everyone was looking around. Then these two guys came outwearing balaclavas, one fired a shot which hit the bottom of a window andthen they ran – it was just like real life’.

French sociologist Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) had worked on unpackingthe implication of such statements for 40 years. Separating representationfrom ‘the real’, according to Baudrillard, has become no easy task in the age


S O C I O L O G Y44

of mass media, and as we shall see he takes us through all manner ofcontortions, reversals and inversions in placing the hyperreal carnival of themedia at the centre of contemporary culture.

Clearly, the eye witness’s statements about the media indicates thatsomething is happening that cannot be provided for in Adorno andHorkheimer’s 1946 statements that, with the culture industry, ‘real life hasbecome indistinguishable from the movies’ (1993:34). The eye witness claimsthat the movies are somehow more real than the everyday, and that it is notevery day that you witness something you would normally see only in amovie. To complete the circular referentiality that makes this bank robbery aspectacle, the young teenager’s reflections on hyperreality are of coursebroadcast on television.

So what is it about contemporary culture that makes the movies morereal than life outside TV and the cinema? How can it be that in beingpersuaded to buy a commodity off the shelf, an appeal can be made to thelegitimacy of its being ‘as seen on TV’? What forces are at work when,following the success of the ABC’s television series SeaChange, about anidyllic seaside town, Pearl Bay, the residents of Barwon Heads in Victoria,where the series was set, were considering changing the town’s name toconform to the series?

These phenomena are examples of what Baudrillard sees as the power of‘simulacrum’ (Baudrillard 1994). Simulacra refer to the way in which what weconsume from media, especially image-based media, becomes more realthan what it supposedly refers to. Indeed the referent becomes, according toBaudrillard, increasingly excluded from our field of experience. Everythingbecomes so mediated by screens that images begin to refer more to eachother than to the ‘real’ world. The connection to the referent can becomelost altogether – something which is indicated by the emergence of thenumber of devastatingly telling genres like ‘real TV’. (The fact that we haveto be persuaded it is ‘real’ gives away the fact that the real has been lost.)

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE– MARSHALL MCLUHANA perspective on broadcast media that received a lot of attention was that ofMarshall McLuhan (see Meyrowitz 1994; Levison 1999; Jones 2000b).McLuhan, a Canadian media theorist from the 1960s, is hailed as the principalexponent of what has been labelled ‘medium theory’. McLuhan’s theory hasthe value of being able to connect the understanding of broadcast media withnetwork media, analyses which today are in embryonic form.

McLuhan describes the eclipse of older mechanical media such as print bytechnologies of ‘automation’ (radio and television). The Gutenberg era of theprinting press is replaced by the ‘cybernation’. The instantaneity of radio andTV (and, as we shall see, the internet) is a quality that possesses a power quitedistinct from older, mechanical technologies of reproduction (McLuhan 1972).

The significant feature of broadcast is that it is ‘live’. For information to be‘live to air’ and live for the audience, rather than live at the point ofproduction, shapes and positions the nature of the audience in a particularway. For example, when we hear a news presenter exclaim that ‘The world isin shock because Princess Diana has just died’, the power of this statementis, for McLuhan, located in the medium rather than in the information given– or the ‘message’. Individual viewers, or listeners, might well be in shock atthe information if they did indeed follow the news about the Princess and feltthat somehow, even as a stranger, they ‘knew’ her. However, McLuhan is farmore interested in the fact that from those who didn’t have any particular


attachment tot eh represented person of Princess Diana, There is still theelement of shock, because, after all, the world is in shock. Thus it is not thedirect interaction between a viewer or listener that is important but the factthat each individual’s reception of the media is mediated by the fact thatsimultaneously a mass is receiving such information. The medium via the massmakes this phenomenon possible; this is what he meant when he said later: ‘Themedium is the message’ (McLuhan & Fiore 1967).

Notably, McLuhan’s analysis suggests that an electronic assembly need notbe interactive like the internet or even have ‘high participation’ for some senseof mutual presence to be guaranteed. In this light, television and radio can beseen as precursors to the idea of the vviirrttuuaall ccoommmmuunniittyy.

THE NETWORKED SOCIETYThere has certainly been much rapture surrounding the internet since it becamefully available in 1991, particularly the claim that it would bring about the death oftelevision. In 2007, two thirds of Australian homes have access to the internet.While there has been no decline in TV usage, the excitement about the internetlooks more justifies when some of its properties are considered. First of all, unlikebroadcast, the internet is a point-to-point network of communication, which meansthat it has the capacity to connect individuals. Like television, the connections itmakes can convey complexity in text and image (unlike the telephone); unliketelevision, the internet is ‘dialogical’, capable of a two-way dialogue.

Trevor Barr (2000: 118) usefully breaks down the different kinds of interactionon the internet into categories:

• one-to-one messaging (e.g. e-mail);• one-to-many messaging (e.g. ‘listserv’);• distributed message databases (e.g. USENET news groups);• real-time communication (e.g. ‘internet relay chat’);• real-time remote computer utilisation (e.g. ‘telnet’); and • remote information retrieval (e.g. ‘ftp’, ‘gopher’ and the World Wide Web)

Significantly, while the internet may not touch as many individual lives asbroadcast, it provides the possibility for more ‘electronic interaction’ betweenpersons than broadcast has ever been capable of. This is significant because,whereas broadcast generates an instant ‘international context’ of socialconnection, there are few ways in which individuals can achieve meaningfulinteraction to make these global connections tangible. There are telephonesand so-called ‘narrow-band’ ways of communicating, but none of these is quiteable to provide a multimedia context for any given interaction. The internetchanges all of that, argue its promoters.

In accounting for the growth of computer-mediated communication via theinternet, both Australian and global statistics become significant. Given that theexperience of community on the internet is not limited to Australia as a nation, theshape and structure of this virtual community becomes significant. In 1996, fiveyears after it became fully commercially available, only 5 % of Australian homeshad connected to the internet, while by 1998 the domestic connection figure hadalmost tripled, to 19%. By 2001, 53% of households had connected, with a slowingof connection to 54% in 2003 and 61% in 2006.

The number of internet users over the age of 15 worldwide in July 1995 was25 million. This had increased sixfold by the end of 1998 to 148 million, ofwhich 52% were American. By 2006 worldwide internet usage had grown inabsolute terms, even though its rate of growth had begun to slow. In March2006 it stood at 694 million, with a shift in the worldwide equation towardsAsia, which made up 25% of usage, surpassing the usage by Americans (seehttp://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=849).

VViirrttuuaall ccoommmmuunniittyy As internet

guru Howard Rheingold defines

it (1994:5), virtual communities

‘are social aggregations that

emerge from the Net when

enough people’ interact for

‘long enough, with sufficient

human feeling, to form webs of

personal relationships in

cyberspace’.


S O C I O L O G Y46

Besides being hailed as a technology that can deliver the ‘globalvillage’, the internet is celebrated as a medium that allows fordemocratised processes not previously possible in the era of broadcast.This has to do with the technological conditions of the internet. Theinternet is the product of a decentred system of sending information,originally devised by the Rand Corporation to avoid computers inAmerica being hit by nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War. Randworked on a way of storing and sending information that would meanthat any given message could be broken up into ‘packets of information’,which would always be ‘on the way’ to another computer. For this reason,material on the internet is vey hard to control and censor, which is why itis heralded as a bastion of free speech (see Rheingold 1994; Poster 1997).

A SECOND MEDIA AGE?The internet is not the only communication technology pointing tochanges in mediated social integration. Innovations based on optic fibre,with its ability to convey ‘wide-band’ complexity, as well as thecolonisation of domestic culture by computerised or computer-mediatedtechnology, have become widespread. With cable television, it is possibleto ‘interact’ to the extent that the viewer can surf and broader range ofchannels. The rapid take-up of TV-based video games has also modifiedthe traditional functions of television.

But television styles and genres are themselves changing. As SherryTurkle argues, in the past 10 years television genres have become muchmore hyperactive in ways resembling the random travelling that occurs inccyybbeerrssppaaccee – ‘quick cuts, rapid transitions, changing camera angles, allheighten stimulation through editing’; this hyperactive style is epitomisedby MTV (Turkle 1995: 238). Television viewers’ increased tolerance forfreneticism has made rapid-cycle sequencing commonplace to nearlyevery television advertisement we watch. Bruce Owen argues thattelevision is beginning to change at the same pace as computer networks(1999).

These changes in the style and medium of broadcast technologieshave, together with the rise of the internet, led to claims thatinformation-rich countries like Australia have entered a ‘second mediaage’. Mark Poster argues that ‘a second media age of mass media is onthe horizon’. In it ‘the integration of satellite technology with television,computers and telephone, [becomes] an alternative to the broadcastmodel, with its severe technical constraints’ (Poster 1995: 3).

This argument claims that ‘interactivity’ is to overtake broadcast kindsof communication as the dominant mode through which individualsestablish a sense of belonging in society. Whereas the ffiirrsstt mmeeddiiaa aaggee eraof broadcast is about images, being largely excluded from publiccommunication and left to identify with famous celebrities and mediapersonalities, the sseeccoonndd mmeeddiiaa aaggee is purportedly one of high volumesof interaction, freedom of speech and ‘virtual assembly’ in computer-mediated discussion groups, and a decentred system for exchanginginformation rather than a reliance on a single source.

ccyybbeerrssppaaccee A computer-

mediated world in which

(predominantly text-

based) communication can

occur. Sometimes defined

as a space because it is a

place where two or more

interlocutors can meet in

a virtual environment.

FFiirrsstt mmeeddiiaa aaggee ((bbrrooaaddccaasstt))

Historically, the first media

age denotes the period of

the predominance of

broadcast media as an

apparatus of social

integration in industrial

societies. Broadcast

apparatuses make possible

the ‘culture industry’ – an

industry that manufactures

images, icons and

discourses for mass

consumption.


THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE FIRST AND SECOND MEDIA AGESInsofar as system-like qualities can to be attributed to the second media age,it can also be seen as a reaction to the first media age – to the constraintsimposed by an ‘undemocratic’ system of communication, where the relativelyfew speak to the many. By this argument, the second media age arises fromthe conditions produced by the first. The formation of indeterminate mass bybroadcast, the continued disconnection of individuals from the means of fullyparticipating in public communication and the breakdown of the traditionalgeographical community are all said to be resolved by the internet.

Whereas ‘In film, radio and television, as small number of producers sentinformation to a large number of consumers’ (Poster 1995:3), the internetprovides ‘above all a decentralised communication system’:

Like the telephone network, anyone hooked up to the Internet mayinitiate a call, send a message that he or she has composed, andmay do so in the manner of the broadcast system, that is to say,may send a message to many receivers, and do this either in ‘realtime’ or as stored data or both. The Internet is also decentralisedat a basic level of organisation since, as a network of networks,new networks may be added so long as they conform to certaincommunications protocols.

However, the first and second media ages cannot be considered to bemutually exclusive. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter,broadcast media remain dominant in Australian culture. The point of thesecond media age thesis is that communications apparatuses that providean alternative to this dominance have emerged in a way that presentschoices for consumers, communications policy makers and administrators.

One of the buzzwords in communications policy is ‘convergence’ – howthese technical apparatuses can operate together and what this means interms of media technology providing a ‘service’ to community.Convergence can be thought of at a ‘media product’ level, where it is nowpossible to watch TV on computer as well as surf the Net on television; orat an infrastructure level, where the optic fibre and database networks ofinformation service providers can combine to provide home shopping,banking, bulletin boards, cable TV, World Wide Web and e-mail services.What isn’t really changing is the fact that consumers of either kind oftechnology pay for it in some way or another, which represents a‘commodification’ of the processes of communication that did not existpreviously. The more people become dependent on internetcommunication or telephones to communicate, as well as on traditionalbroadcast to acquire the cultural codes by which to act, the more themarket flourishes, whether in advertising or in the time charged forcommunication.

The as-advertised utopia of the virtual community comes at a cost, asthey need to communicate in highly urbanised settings is increasingly soldto individuals. This can happen only under the conditions of the increasedprivatisation of urbanised settings. The strongest commonality betweenbroadcast and interactive communication technologies therefore is thatboth enable an intensification of the suburbanisation process.

SSeeccoonndd mmeeddiiaa aaggee ((nneettwwoorrkk))

Sometimes also referred to as

‘cybersociety’ or the era of

network integration, this age

coincides with the rapid

emergence of networks of

interactive technologies made

possible by optic fibre and

packet-switching computers.

Interactive technologies like the

telephone predate the second

media age by almost a century.

However, in the first media age

the significance of interactive

technologies was conditioned,

subordinated and made over in

terms of the dominance of the

culture of broadcast media. In

the second media age the

extension of social relations by

communications technologies

substantively becomes its own

reality.


The burgeoning growth of old and new media in social life is adevelopment that stands at the forefront of sociological inquiry. Thefact that in advanced industrial nations like Australia individuals areincreasingly turning to forms of media to gain the symbols and senseof ritual and routine with which to feel a sense of belonging andcommunity is itself a strong indication of the failure of moderninstitutions (like education, the family and the workplace) to providemoral integration.

At the same time, modern forms of media displace older forms ofcommunity and social integration with ever more global senses of a‘virtual community’. It is debatable whether this is a good or baddevelopment. From the point of view of studying inequality, however,the newer forms of community demand greater scales ofcommodification – of paying for community. Is it possible thatcommunity, the need for social integration that Durkheim once triedto theorise, will itself become a commodity?

S O C I O L O G Y48

RITUALS OF MEDIAA recent perspective in the sociology of media is the ritual approach (seeCarey 1989; Couldry 2003; Holmes 2005). Media provide us withimportant information about the world, but also, argue the ritualtheorists, confirmation of our relationship to the world. Seen in this way,tuning in, or logging on, is a ceremony by which we renew thisrelationship. Couldry (2003:7) argues that:

The exceptional sense of togetherness we may feel in mediaevents is just a more explicit (ritualised) concentration oftogetherness, which in a routine way, we act out when we switchon the television or radio, or check a news website, to find outwhat’s going on.

We become very attached to media, both old and new. We don’t want tomiss our regular soap operas, and for many of us, being disconnectedfrom the places we visit online can be unbearable. According to thisperspective therefore, it is necessary to look beyond the functionalexplanations of media, as ‘entertainment’ or ‘information’, to see mediaas central to modern identity. For example, soap operas are very popularbecause they ‘Provide a surrogate family and social life, a stable networkof friends and neighbours’ (Rosen 1986:45).

It matters little from which kind of media individuals draw their sense ofconnection. What is important is the extraordinary intimacy of ourengagement with media, whether this is ‘curling up’ in front of our favouriteTV program or bookmarks on our WEB browser. When we watch the news,for example, we expect a familiar format that is anything but new. Whateverkind of day we have had, it can be concluded with a formulaic dosage ofimages and narratives that are delivered to us in a very familiar idiom. Thisusually begins with stories about violence (car crashes or murder),especially if there are images of the events, followed by doorstopinterviews with national politicians, a brief roundup of world news, then 10minutes of sport, the weather, followed by an uplifting ‘human interest’story about a rescued animal. As Carey argues, news should be views as notinformation but a form of drams that represents shared beliefs.

CONCLUSION


Documents

APPENDIX 4: MEDIA, POPULAR CULTURE AND THE NETWORKED … · Due to the dominance of ‘the media’ in our lives, the new network technologies of the internet and interactive media