MediaSpace Wiki

Critical Analysis S2010 S10

Cultural Studies

• Culture and communication is a major area of study in the field of communication
  • But it takes very different forms
  • Intercultural Communication
    • Variations between cultures
      • Language(s) used
      • Customs
      • Norms
      • Expectations for behavior
      • To some extent, different media
    • Questions include:
      • How communication differs within cultures
      • The problems inherent to communication between cultures
      • How communication works to produce culture
        • Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - language shapes culture
        • Media Ecology - media shape culture
        • Structuration - we negotiate culture
  • Digital Divide Studies are
    • Media differences between cultures
• Three cultural approaches to the study of media content
  • There are other approaches, but these merit particular mention
  1. Ethnography of Media
     • The best way to understand another culture is to live in it.
       • Clearly that isn't always possible.
     • We can of course read the ethnographys and cultural descriptions of others
       • We can even learn something about our out culture from such work
     • Another path is to live in its media.
  2. Culture as Message
     • What is the message that a culture imposes on messages
       • Clearly ideological theory gets at some of this
       • But the issues aren't simply questions of power
       • There are also questions of cultural preference
       • And of the human substrate on which culture is built
     • It is useful to borrow from linguistics here and talk about two kinds of culture
       • Deep Culture
       • The human concerns that are the substrate of all cultures.
         • The things everyone wants
         • The things everyone values
         • The hard coded relationship structures of husband and wife, parent and child, and more
       • Surface Culture
         • The thousands of very different cultures that we have evolved in response to those values, desires, and relationship structures.
       • The analogy is to deep structure and surface structure in language.
         • where the deep language structures of the brain cause all languages to be built with the same essential grammar
           • Chomsky's Transformational Grammar
         • but there are still thousands of very different languages (surface structure)
  3. British cultural theory (the focus of Allen)
     • in many ways a restrictive approach
     • Assumes:
       • Industrial societies
         • Mass media presume manufacturing industries
           • Manufactured media
           • Manufactured messages
         • Hence this approach should not apply to nonindustrial societies
           • In which meaning is generated and circulated differently
       • When messages are mass manufactured, culture becomes politics
         • Media support the politics of culture
         • And lose their focus on the aesthetic or humanist
       • Capitalist societies are divided societies
         • A complex network of groups
           • Divides include class, gender, race, nation, age, religion, occuation, education, and politics
         • Each group has divergent interests
         • Each has a distinctive relationship with the "dominant classes"
       • Culture is, by definition, ideology
         • We are what we believe
         • And in breaking people into groups, we divide beliefs as well as people
         • Class struggle (really group struggle)
           • Is a contest for social power
           • A struggle for meaning
         • Social power is
           • getting one's interests served by the social structure as a whole
         • Hence there is no "false consciousness"
           • All consciousness is "false"
           • "Truth" must be understood in terms of how it is created
           • "Reality" can only be comprehended through language or other cultural meaning systems
         • Naturalization of meaning
           • Managed by those in power
           • But is often unintentional
           • Rather a biproduct of expressing belief
     • Attribution theory is useful here
       • Natural patterns of thinking and behavior
       • "Standard" attribution errors

When	we are	others are
successful	we credit ourselves	we credit the situation
unsuccessful	we credit the situation	we credit them

• For groups in power this translates into

When	our group (the group in power) is	groups out of power are
successful, its because	we do the right things (work hard, etc)	evil people prevented the right things from happening
unsuccessful	they were lucky	they do the wrong things (are lazy, etc)

• Groups that are not dominant do the same thing
  • Groups in power become a situation that can be blamed for failure
  • Group success ratifies the groups beliefs as being superior
• All of which sets up conflict when no conflict is needed
  • The real problem is breaking people out into groups
• Ideology is produced dynamically via social institutions
  • such as
    • family
    • educational system
    • language
    • the media
    • political system
    • organizations
  • these institutions invite people to behave in socially acceptable ways
  • are an effective alternative to coercive alternatives like the police or law
  • they create and enforce social norms
    • which are realized in the day to day workings of these institutions
    • each is relatively autonomous
    • each reinforces power by naturalizing it into the commonsense
    • each presents itself as being principled
      • to treat individuals equally and fairly
    • Congruence between institutions reflects a web of interconnections
  • Media and language are a part of this web
    • act to construct and reproduce the dominant ideology via
      • Hailing (Althusser): Letting people know a message is for them
        • identifying and constructing a position for the addressee
        • e.g. "us", "Americans", "patriots"
      • Interpolation (Althusser): locating the audience in the message
        • How you may be affected
        • Interviews with representative people
      • Hegemony (Gramsci): exercising power via social means
        • cultural imperialism
        • winning the willing consent of the subordinate
• Culture realizes ideology in the words and other signs we select
  • They act to position or bias us
    • within the context of institutions and meanings that we maintain ourselves
• To get at this we have to look at three levels of meaning
  • The actual text (on television, for instance)
  • Supporting text (advertising, publicity, spin, talking points)
  • Our interaction about the text
    • conversation
    • letters
    • adoption of behavior that derives from the text (fashion, vocabulary, speech, even ways of thinking)
• Meaning is often contested within and between these levels
1. U.S. approaches to cultural analysis have focused less on struggle than emergent consensus
   • what do different groups have in common
   • but that started to change in the Reagan administration
     • with its systematic rollback of many such emergent consensus
   • the battle has accelerated in the George W Bush administration
   • British Cultural Theory makes more sense as we reinforce the divisions in our society
     • Conservative versus "liberal" (whatever that means these days)
     • Fundamentalist Christians versus Ethical Humanists (whatever that means these days)
     • Haves versus have nots
     • Gender divides
     • Racial and social divides