Milestones in Communication Science (Chapters 5 – 12)
Lecture 4. Chapters 5 – 8
Chapter 5. Media, Mass Communication & Culture
CULTURAL THEORY
According to cultural theory, culture comprises ideas, customs, and social behavior of a specific group or
society – meaning that it is made up of shared experience, the outcome of communication. However, being
an umbrella term, it also involves various other aspects. Namely, it is collectively established and
maintained, open to symbolic expression, structured and differentially regarded, systematically patterned,
dynamic and unstable, spatially situated, and communicable over space and time via texts, symbols, and
ritual acts. But what is the role of people in relation to cultural theory, you ask? The role of people can be
summarized into two main categories: (1) the producers of culturally significant media publications and (2)
the consumers of these publications – media objects from which they take cultural meaning.
CULTURAL APPROACH: TWO SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
1. The first school of thought examines media content, namely the cultural aspects of media messages,
applying content analysis, and borrowing theories and methods from literature and art.
2. The second school of thought analyzes the act of signification, the process by which meaning is given,
utilizing audience studies, generally combined with content analysis, and borrowing theories and
methods from semiology, linguistics, and philosophy.
THEMES OF MEDIA-CULTURAL THEORY
1. The quality of mass communication: mass culture was largely seen in a negative light as it affected the
quality of culture; people as a mass lack culture.
2. The nature of popular culture: distinctive media culture caused a re-evaluation of popular culture; this
process caused the latter to be seen as an essential new branch of cultural creativity.
3. The impact of technology: the potential repercussions of new communication technology for one’s life,
including aspects such as experience, meaning-making, and human rights.
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,4. Political economy and culture: mass media industries’ representation of organized production of culture
involves political-economic aspects, promoting the commodification of culture.
5. Globalization: technological developments and marketization have caused an increase in the
internationalization of cultural production and distribution – a process with wide-ranging effects.
6. Identity: mass media and communication are essential for cultural identity; however, they can be both
advantageous and disadvantageous.
7. Ideology: how are different ideologies embodied in cultural production? How can they be perceived in
media publications? And how do they affect audiences? All of these questions relate to the unconscious
meaning-making of cultural context or the language / coding system utilized.
THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL & CRITICAL CULTURAL THEORY
The Frankfurt School was founded around 1930 to investigate the failure of revolutionary social change , as
Karl Marx predicted. Belonging to a Neo-Marxist school of thought, members of the Frankfurt School,
including Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, were highly critical of popular culture and thus opposed
the commercial background of cultural debasement. Accordingly, critical cultural theory was developed to
examine cultural products, their production, and analysis in a fault-finding way to disclose and object to the
powerstructure of society – that is, the prevailing ideologies of a specific period. The theory is considered to
be a more populist and radical version of critical theory.
In his unfinished manuscript, Grundrisse, Karl Marx develops the theory of commodification. According to
this theory, objects are commodified via obtaining an exchange value, not an intrinsic use-value. Moreover,
cultural products (or commodities) are produced and sold or exchanged by consumers in media landscapes
to receive short-term satisfaction, creating a false consciousness specifically among the working class.
In 1964, Herbert Marcuse described the mass consumption society as one-dimensional, being founded on
commerce, advertisement, and faulty egalitarianism. Namely, Marcuse critiqued mass culture due to its
uniformity, worship of technique, monotony, escapism, production of false needs, reduction of individuals to
mere customers, and removal of all ideological choices. This pessimistic approach to consumer society,
however, was soon replaced with an optimistic one.
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, THE BIRMINGHAM SCHOOL & STUART HALL
The Birmingham School, also known as the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), was founded
by Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall in 1964 at the University of Birmingham. Until being closed in 2002, this
school of thought analyzed popular culture, although not from a normative perspective. Rather, the CCCS
focused on examining cultural topics, such as one’s subjective opinions and the birth of popular culture. To
be specific, research conducted at the Birmingham School focused on reception analysis, meaning-making,
and audience decoding activities.
Stuart Hall is widely considered to be the protagonist of the Birmingham School. After all, he introduced a
new semiotic approach, the encoding-decoding model of communication, to investigate the different roles
of media publications. The theory provides a theoretical approach to understanding the ways media
messages are produced, transmitted, and interpreted. It does this by proposing that audience members,
relying on their social contexts, use differential decoding to interpret the contents of media publications in
different ways.
Hall does not deny that ideology is embedded into media messages. He simply provides a contrasting
viewpoint to the base-superstructure model by emphasizing the role of the recipient – particularly, the way
audience members interpret ideology in media texts. Ultimately, the works of Hall and the Birmingham
School (among others) prompted a re-valuation of popular culture, diminishing its stigma and introducing an
alternative view – one in which reception and ritual perspectives thrive: “Popular culture (…) is a hybrid
product of numerous and never-ending efforts for expression in a contemporary idiom aimed at reaching
people and capturing a market.” This change in perception is referred to as the redemption of the popular.
THE REDEMPTION OF THE POPULAR & THE (SEMIOTIC) POWER OF THE PEOPLE
As the change in perception regarding the role of mass culture or popular culture, the redemption of the
popular caused popular culture was seen as a significant component of most people’s lives, affecting
individuals in different ways, as proposed by members of the Birmingham School, particularly Stuart Hall.
Accordingly, popular culture was no longer regarded as a shallow and superficial thing, representing the
poor taste of the masses, as suggested by members of the Frankfurt School.
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