INTRODUCTION:
A GUIDEBOOK FOR MEDIA STUDY
A child sits in front of a televison set. Look more closely. You recognize the child, the clothes, the setting. It is you, as a child sitting absorbed in the television program. It is as if you the child have climbed inside the television set to inhabit its imagined world, as you would climb into a closet or a bathtub. What is going on in this unique, continuous experience as you enter and inhabit the space of media culture? These pages introduce methods for examining the particular discourse that is media culture, especially as it is found in the English-speaking world today. The goal is not to give answers but, at the risk of sounding trite, to empower readers to find their own answers with the assistance of tools suggested here. Each chapter introduces a technique, or set of tools, for analyzing culture and media as they are experienced in daily life. Applying these techniques empowers the reader to better cope with media culture, that is, to understand and take charge of that crucial point of intersection between communication technologies and the meanings we make from them. To accomplish this, the book is addressed to students, professors, and the public alike.
Understanding Media: Getting Inside Our Culture
Like the child absorbed into the television set, we have come to inhabit media culture as a space rich in stories, information, and meanings. Research on media culture has shifted away from a focus on one obvious mass medium, television, coming from "out there" to affect us, and has shifted toward today examining a range of media which we enter into in our daily life, a shift from sociological mass communication to personal media experience. Media invade our living space, shape the taste of those around us, inform and persuade us on products and policies, intrude into our private dreams and public fears, and, in turn, invite us to inhabit them. Notice how a child watches television, how s/he becomes oblivious to the rest of the world. Later the same happens with movies, popular music, books, the Internet, and the range of media we become absorbed into. What is this "media culture," and how can we explore it with appreciation and critical understanding?
The first task of this introductory text is to provide a digest or overview of critical techniques, a synthesis of the most important and useful approaches to understanding media culture today. In this, the book is eclectic, drawing from a wide range of authors, concepts, and theories, particularly from works in recent years in the cultural studies tradition. Our sources are wide-ranging but our focus is selective and unique, zeroing in on the relation between media and identity. The original contribution of these pages is the distinct roadmap blended from multiple traditions. Media literacy, critical theory, social science research, formalism, industry data, popular journalism, phenomenology--these and other creative sources combine with cultural studies to provide the critical techniques suggested and applied here.
The second task is to identify commonly shared experiences of media culture. Modern media make it possible for people living continents apart to know and experience the same cultural products: the Olympics, Disney, film noir, Madonna, video games, aerobics, quiz shows, and the other goodies spilling out of the cornucopia of media. The cases explored here are international in their availability to all of us, although there is some emphasis on "the heart of the beast," Hollywood, as cultural producer. In these explorations of commonly shared cultural experiences, the purpose is different than the normative study of classical culture where one is led upward to "better" cultural products. These explorations instead call us to re-examine and come to terms with what we already share experientially as our given culture. Not so much new knowledge but self-knowledge is the goal. The third task is to present a case study approach that combines the techniques and insights developed by critical media studies with the everyday experience that we have of our media environment. Ideas are fleshed out with examples; examples propel us to new syntheses of understanding. Each chapter takes a familiar example (or several examples), examines it with developed techniques of analysis, and makes of it a case study of media culture. In the process, we both critically understand our media culture in more depth and develop our abilities for interpreting other cases. We use multiple case studies because the size and complexity of media culture prevents us from extracting a single test tube sample of our culture and measuring it with the intent of generalizing to the totality with scientific certitude. Instead, we more modestly select significant typical cases of cultural products and practices in order to clarify the basic general outlines, dynamics, and tendencies of the larger culture and our relationship to it. In the process we hone techniques for exploring, evaluating, and enjoying our media experiences and meanings in context.
The organizational structure of each chapter is simple. € An imaginative scenario sets the tone for the chapter's topic and method. € The investigative method introduces interrelated concepts, ideas, and theories and the questions they suggest. € A case study, in the form of a prominent example, takes us inside the cultural practices and products. € Interpretations, ethnography, criticism, and meanings are suggested and evaluated. € Major points are summarized. € A series of exercises is suggested to apply this method of study to the reader's own experience of media culture.
This book provides an introductory exploration of media, but it is not a traditional mass communication textbook. Such texts have been aimed primarily at those planning professional careers in journalism, television, and mass media. In the United States, they typically present a historical review of the development of media with a chapter on early American newspapers and magazines, other chapters on the history of radio and television, and perhaps one on film. They present the professional codes of journalists, broadcasters, and filmmakers, and they review a selection of findings of social science research on media effects and audience gratifications. Those are useful to know, but they are typically couched in such a way as to serve primarily the interests of media professionals and the media industries, rather than the interests of media users and the public at large.
Exploring Media Culture concerns the experience of users of media, not producers or researchers. This is a guide for those who expect to attend to film, television, popular music, and similar media, whether or not they may also actively produce such media culture or conduct formal research on media. As a handbook for media consumers, the presentation of "methods" of study is quite distinct from the usual methodology text for media research. Those methods are the formal methods of science with requirements for research instruments, funded personnel, sampling methods, stringent controls, limited questions, and empirical measures. Those methods contribute to the growth of an academic discipline, but they are not accessible to the average person. Instead, instruments of "research" are proposed here that borrow from the humanities, arts, and sciences but in ways that are available to anyone willing to think and pay attention. These methods both enhance appreciation and provide critical understandings. These are, in effect, research methods for the "lay" person encountering everyday media and creating meaning from cultural products and practices.
Four factors especially motivate this exploration of media culture. First, requests for a second edition of Super Media: A Cultural Studies Approach (and not all requests were from my blood relatives!) brought home how quickly this field of study is developing. Too much had happened to merely revise that earlier book. A new book would be necessary to focus and integrate the current explosion of insights into media study and to present tools for exploring it. A second factor shaping the book came from the opportunity to teach film courses and media aesthetics in addition to courses with a more social science approach to mass communication. Film is art, broadcasting is commerce, or so one might conclude from reviewing the polarized literature on each. Film study forces certain reconceptualizations of what media theory and methods are all about and reconfirms the necessity of cultural studies as a balance to social science research. A third motivation for this exploration of media culture came from the challenge of incorporating the extensive development of feminist media theory and criticism. A fourth motivation concerned the numerous contributions of "postmodernism" to cultural criticism, and the necessity to incorporate these into any analysis of contemporary media. For better or for worse, the issues in postmodern theory engage many of the conditions we live in more directly than any other critical perspective today.
Still, the underlying motivation for creating this book is the same as for most who read and use it--a sense of the importance of media culture and its pleasures and dangers, coupled with a desire to better grasp and appreciate it. Media culture today is significant both because of its size and invasiveness and because of its "signifying" power. Other significant institutions today--the family, economics, education, religion, politics, the arts, and the rest--are sometimes set against media, as if each exercises power separately. Yet, in the media age it is clear that all power is exercised, not independently, but in interaction with, and through, media culture. Media incorporate and standardize the sign systems available for us to grasp and change the world with. Media culture plays a personally invasive and culturally decisive role in the contemporary world.
Amazingly, given the distances between, there is more than the English language shared among the cultures of Canberra, Wellington, Ottawa, New Delhi, London, Washington, Lagos, and others in the English-speaking world and beyond. We all know broadcast sports, rock 'n' roll music, Anthony Hopkins and Holly Hunter, CNN and live war coverage, Guess jeans, and Fish and Chips (even if we call them "fries"). We follow similar news, hear simplistic sound bites, worry about crime and family life, gripe about taxes and television--whether we call it the tube or the telly, a sacred national trust or the idiot box.
Yet, perhaps more amazing than the commonalities that make us alike are the differences that distinguish us--not so much the huge historical or geographical differences but the differences within a single locality. In one neighborhood, even one family, we find side-by-side a person whose tastes are relentlessly classical, from preset radio stations to art films and literature, and a person whose tastes are aggressively alternative, from low-hanging skater clothes to gangster rap to heavy metal magazines. Next door a country western line dancer shares a roof with a video game whiz and a football fanatic. Very often each such taste entails a range of associated media habits, cultural preferences, life styles, and worldviews, making these individuals seem as different as people from separate centuries and continents.
Still more amazing, and confusing above all, is how any one of us contains within us simultaneously a similarly jumbled set of contradictory tastes and associations. We change from nylons to jeans, from reggae to oldies, from homemade meat pies to apple pie, from fast food tacos to Indian carry-out. We shift unthinkingly at warp speed among a postmodern pastiche of taste cultures, negotiating among the schizophrenia of multiple split personalities without thinking twice about it.
Who is it we are, at once so similar and so different, as groups and within ourselves?
In academic terms, the approach here is phenomenological, employing "thick description" and grounded theory. We seek an "ethnography of practices" and an "exegesis of texts" that connect our experience of media with the best of cultural theory and media studies. The phenomenology and existentialism of our approach appears not in abstract debates over Husserl or Merlou-Ponty but in our concrete emphasis on "the immediate experience" of media culture. This approach attempts to work through points of convergence with British cultural studies, American popular culture analysis, social science research, film studies, and the many theoretical and methodological approaches cited throughout the following chapters. These sources cannot be simply combined, for their differences and even disagreements are many. But their divergences are most extreme in the abstract, theoretical range and less so in the phenomological range, grounded close to our immediate experience of media culture. A goal here is the development of theory itself, but more emphasis is given to how theory relates to experience, to clarifying and shedding light on our lived experience. By staying close to texts, narratives, interpretations, and rituals of actual people, we can "lay open" great ranges of media culture without getting lost in the most esoteric, though important, of scholarly debates today. This is, after all, an introduction to media studies, not its conclusion.
A somewhat unique emphasis in these pages is on co-authorship. Each of us, as what is inadequately labelled an audience-member or media consumer or user or reader or netsurfer, is a co-author of our media culture. The co-author theme rejects the notion of audience members as cultural boobs, as couch potatoes passively receiving whatever is injected into them by the hypodermic needle of mass media. Rather as a media user co-author, you or I select from what is given by our media creator co-author(s) and work up from that our own "meaning." Extending the idea of the active audience, the "co-author" thesis places responsibility squarely on the shoulders of both media producers and consumers. Our co-authors who create media content bear great responsibility--they are public agenda-setters, celebrity-makers, and enforcers of social norms--but each of us also bears responsibility for our selection and use, our "creation," of media culture as well.
To repeat, our central purpose here is to provide tools--in the form of concepts, methods, theories, applications-- for analyzing media and culture, tools which move us closer to comprehending the meanings, purposes, and ideologies infusing our media-saturated lives. The sought-for result is the reader who is empowered to create, sustain, or change that very media culture in his or her own best interest and the best interest of all.
€"Media, Culture, Identity" (chapter 1) are defined in the opening chapter as we experience them today. What are the issues in the wars raging around culture and media today, and how do popular music and culture theory help to explain each other and our personal identity?
€"Participation" (chapter 2) examines how we ritually participate in media activities from sporting events to aerobic exercise to video games. Far from being detached and passive, we enter into, inhabit, and interact with our experiences of media culture in daily life. What can ritual theory explain about our relationship to media culture?
€"Reception" (chapter 3) asks how we receive, interpret and apply what is presented in media. Different people may take the same media message in quite different ways. Can media make us violent, sexually indulgent, and Madonna wannabes? How does reception theory account for the peculiar dynamics of media culture?
€"Text" (chapter 4) concerns the message content itself in the media experience. The text is the organized content of images, sounds, and words in the form of narrative, genre, signs, and intertextuality that we encounter at the point of intersection between media production and media reception. Why do Disney and film noir engage our attention so differently? What has been put into a television program, film, book, advertisement, website, or other cultural product that elicits attention, understanding, and involvement?
Many of the terms and relationships in Hall's model are applied in the following pages. The model has an attractive self-explanatory quality. Everyone today has lived with media all her or his life and has a gut level sense of meanings produced by oneself (meaning structures 2) and others (meaning structures 1). There is also a sense that these meanings develop within a larger social context, dependent on what many people already know, how they work together, and how technology is being employed. The less obvious meanings have been explained by Hall himself (1980, 1994) and others. Among the wide variety of books that have utilized Hall's schema are The Nationwide Audience (Morley, 1980), Fields in Vision: Television Sport and Cultural Transformation (Whannel, 1992), and Feminist Media Studies (Van Zoonen, 1994).
(Insert figure 0.2 about here)
The first chapter maps the basic terrain, and the next four chapters explore fundamental components or "moments" in our experience of media: our ritual participation in media, our differential reception and interpretation of media, the text itself of the media product, and the industry that produced it.
The order of presentation of these concepts (chapters) starts with the experience of the receiver of media and works backwards toward its origins. As a consequence, the numbering of concepts is the reverse of the direction of the solid arrows which represent the order of media transmission. In traditional chronological order, the first five above, the "moments" of media culture, would be: first production, next text, and finally reception and participation and their effects on identity. The music video is produced, it appears on television as a text, we view and interpret it, and we participate by dancing to it, memorizing it, buying the CD, playing air guitar with it, singing it as karaoke, fantasizing our own stardom, or otherwise. Here we have chosen not to present the moments in that order because that would evoke too much of the old bullet, one-way, effects model of mass communication. Instead, we begin with our decoding of texts as we watch, listen, or read, and work back toward the encoding of those texts by creative, commercial teams.
The next four concepts (chapters) above, the "problematics" of gender and ethnicity, history and ethics, postmodernism, and co-authorship occur across all stages in the communication sequence. For example, racism and sexism in media employment patterns are paralleled by biased images in the media and by bias in the reception and interpretation of audience members. The concepts are "problematic" because they are among the major sources of injustice, confusion, and power manipulation in our media culture.
The entire process of media making and receiving occurs within a larger shaping context. This context, as Hall insisted, includes the inherited frameworks of knowledge we employ, the relations of production that determine who does what in creating meaning, and the technical infrastructure of equipment and procedures that further constrain what meanings are possible and likely.
If all this appears impossibly dense at this point, be assured that the model is really one that should be appreciated after completing the chapters, at a time when the applications and implications of the concepts and their interrelationships should be clear. For now, it may be enough to merely see a sequencing in the concepts and chapters and to sense what one hopes is there, an underlying logic in the sequencing.Media Culture, Identity, and Difference
But are there not insurmountable distances and differences between what people experience as media culture around the world, differences that preclude a common examination of even one nation's experience today?
CRitical Analysis as a Step Toward Power Over Media Culture
As we see cumulatively in these pages, we share central tendencies, a kind of "dominant culture," through our global media, and here we tease out the meaning of its dominant tendencies, not to prove a single thesis but to suggest interrelated insights. Our media culture also displays awesome variety, a "cultural pastiche," and exploring that too is our task here.
What we seek most of all here, though, is to propose techniques of analysis through which we can come to understand all that is at work in our lives as constructed by media culture, as mainstream or oddball as our choices may be. To put it pedantically, what have years of collective scholarship discovered to be effective concepts and methods for exploring and comprehending media culture. More mundanely, how do people go about uncovering the glories and depravities of our personal experience of pop media? We inhabit our media culture like a virtual home and, whether we resist or celebrate its dominant ideology, we find "fun" in the culture and even fun in the analysis of it!
Chapter Sequence: A Guide to ExploringMedia Culture
The concepts in these pages and their sequencing are meant to build cumulatively an improved ability to explore with awareness, understanding, and critical facility the world of media culture. The techniques and concepts presented focus successively on distinct "moments" in cultural analysis or on specific "problematics." These include the following.
€"Production/Hegemony" (chapter 5) looks at how social power is exercised through media. What difference does it make that dominant cultural products and practices are produced and distributed by large commercial institutions within the capitalist system? How does the dominance by Hollywood of world movie screens exercise hegemony over the values and ideology of film viewers?
€"Gender," (chapter 6) like "ethnicity," considers how group identity is represented in media culture. How do patriarchy and the male gaze structure our media messages and reception? The historic exclusion, stereotyping, and under-representation of females in media illustrates how unequal power in sex, race, or class groups affects media culture.
€"History and Ethics" (chapter 7) asks how a (mis?)reading of the past is used to configure right and wrong in the present. Media reconstruct historical events, persons, and controversies, such as the American quiz show scandal in the early days of television. How are views of history, evolution, and current ethical choices influenced by media reconstructions?
€"Postmodernism" (chapter 8) foregrounds the unique characteristics of where current media culture has come from, is, and is going. How are aesthetics and self-identity renegotiated in the new age of pastiche, fragmentation, excess, and consumption under late capitalism? What characteristics of MTV, the modern Olympic Games, and the films of David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino characterize the postmodern condition?
€"Constructing the Self" (chapter 9) considers how we co-author our media and ourselves as we select and respond to cultural products and practices. The way Navajos react each year to a drive-in screening of Cheyenne Autumn clarifies issues of media, culture, and identity that carry throughout this book. How do we become and express our self within the world of contemporary media culture?
In addition to the above, there are, of course, other methods and tools for examining media culture. Many of these--structuralism, poststructuralism, political economy, experimentalism, ethnography, ethnomethodology, etc.--are incorporated at least implicitly in the methods above, but there is no claim that the above are an exhaustive list of analytic tools.
As a whole, these chapters suggest guideposts in our journey through contemporary culture. The encoding-decoding model of Stuart Hall (1980) suggests the relations between production, encoding, text, decoding, and reception. It underscores how the moments and problematics of media culture are embedded in historical and contextual relations of knowledge, production, and technology.
Hall's model and the work of many others have inspired the organizational structure of this book, a structure which is portrayed in figure 0.2
