CHAPTER COMMENTARY

Communication the transfer of information from one group or individual to another is a

core element of social life and this chapter places great emphasis on recent developments in
information and communications technologies, considering the impact of these within a
global context. Are we, as McLuhan foresaw, now inhabitants of a global village? A broad-
brush description of these changes opens the chapter boundaries have been eroded
between types of media, and the Internet is at the heart of these changes, as newspapers,
video clips and radio can all be accessed through it, in addition to millions of other
information sources. Mass media are so called because they address a mass audience. Often
they have been discussed in the context of entertainment but equally they are important in
the formation of public opinion and increasingly as sources of information on which social
activities depend. Brief overviews are given of the development over time of the Internet
and worldwide web, film, television, music and newspapers.

Starting with digitization and the Internet aims to engage students, most of whom are under
25, by encouraging reflection on a form of communication they may well take for granted
and every day in a variety of different contexts such as home, work and pace of study. The
Internet gives access to millions of pages of information and new online communities are
formed through chat rooms. Rheingolds study of virtual community is used to illustrate
these developments. It also offers new opportunities for identity formation; you can choose
to be whomever you like in cyberspace. As with all technologies, there are two broad
responses to these developments. The positive view stresses the opportunities presented by
increased access to information, new ways of keeping in touch with others and forming
online communities and creatively transforming working life. The negative view sees
increased isolation and atomization, a reduction in human contact, a blurring of the
distinction between home and work with a consequent erosion of personal quality time.
The recent development of cloud computing, whereby computing resources are delivered
as a service/utility direct to users, is discussed and looks set to revolutionize how we use IT.

Film is discussed in relation to the dominance of Hollywood in the production and global
marketing of films and its cultural consequences. Indias Bollywood is held up as a larger
producer of films but with less global distribution and appeal. Television has become
ubiquitous in the developed world and as Silverstone points out, although people have had
to learn how to incorporate the medium into their lives, new generations take it entirely for
granted as a feature of modern life itself. In the UK for instance, individuals over the age of 4
spend, on average, 25 hours per week watching television. The work of both Postman and
Putnam offer pessimistic accounts of televisions social consequences. For Postman, the era
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dominated by print media was one in which rational and complex argument could be
popularized, developed and sustained. Television, by contrast, encourages the superficial
and transient, amusement rather than sustained thought. Putnam offers a correlation
between the growth of television in the US and the decline in membership of social
networks that encourage mutual obligations and trust. A counter argument is developed in
Using Your Sociological Imagination Box 18.1 (pages 780-1) which suggests that television
may be losing young people to games consoles, iPods, Internet chatrooms and radio. A
discussion of digital television rounds off the section.

The section on music includes Adornos ideas on jazz, Attalis theory of the prophetic role of
music in societies, Petersen and Bergers production of culture perspective, and DeNora on
music in everyday life, which students may be encouraged to use in relation to other forms
of media. The work of Held et al and Wikstrm is included to show how the digitization of
music is leading to severe problems of ownership and copyright in the music industry,
notably through the phenomenon of illegal online downloading. A brief history of the
development of newspapers follows and the shifting balance between news and
entertainment is debated.

Four very different and influential theories of the media are considered. Functionalist
accounts of the media as agents of social cohesion are discussed and presented in the
context of recent work arguing that the media does function to support continuity and
cohesion. Both Chomsky and the Frankfurt School are considered as conflict theorists.
Habermas is placed in the context of the Frankfurt School and their generally gloomy
assessment of mass culture. The Glasgow Media Groups research programme is presented
as a Classic Study, exploring the systematic production of bias and ideology in bad news
reporting. GMGs work is seen as one form of discourse analysis in which, texts of all kinds
are dissected and analysed. Whilst the active and interpretative nature of viewing is stressed
throughout the chapter, the role of ideology provides a necessary link between the creation
of meaning and the exercise of power. Two contrasting uses are identified: the neutral
conception, which views ideology as simply the study of ideas and their influence, and the
critical conception, derived from Marx and used by many conflict theorists, which equates
ideology with the exercise of symbolic power, distortion which acts in the interests of
powerful groups. Whilst mass communications could act to open up the public sphere of
political debate, enabling greater and more informed participation, Habermass Classic Study
sees a public sphere cluttered up by media events and image management which act to
lessen the possibility of rational discussion and turns politics into vacuous entertainment.

John Thompsons symbolic interactionist approach identifies three forms of communication

which coexist in the everyday lives of people today: face-to-face interaction, mediated
interaction and quasi-mediated interaction. Habermas, he argues, treats individuals as too
passive, failing to recognize the extent to which even the messages of quasi-mediated forms
such as television are actively read by viewers and carried into other forms of interaction
where they are discussed and reread. So-called reality television shows are examples of this
process. In contrast to Habermas, the struggle to save the Enlightenment Project has no
place in the world of Jean Baudrillards postmodern theory. For him, questions of accuracy,
distortion and rationality fundamentally misunderstand the nature of contemporary life,
where the boundaries between the social and the cultural, reality and representation, have
been dissolved. Television does not represent the world; it constitutes it. There is no reality
external to the hyperreality of television, where messages are constructed with reference
only to other messages simulacra, whereby signs derive their meaning not from their
relationship to real things or events but from their relationship to other signs.

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Now the text turns from the production of media content to its consumption in the sub-field
of audience studies. One of the first theories of the impact of media on the audience is the
simple hypodermic model in which content is passively imbibed. This idea has largely been
rejected and today emphasis is placed upon the active part played by viewers in constructing
and interpreting the material they view. For example the gratification model looks at how
audiences use media content to their own ends. Later reception theories explore the way
that peoples socio-economic and cultural backgrounds have differential impacts on the way
they make sense of media content. Even studies into the effects of television violence upon
young viewers have produced conflicting findings. Children, like adults, are sophisticated
viewers who actively read the text.

Television provides an endless stream of images into our living rooms in constructing this
stream as meaningful, a key element of interpretation is the understanding of genre. Genre
acts as a grammar, providing both structure and predictability to programmes. Soap opera
or continuing drama is considered, its enduring popularity across the globe is seen as a
mechanism by which individuals deal with universal properties of emotional and personal
life. The representation of major social divisions in film and television soaps class, gender,
ethnicity and disability is also discussed.

Today media extend beyond national boundaries. This poses particular problems for media
regulation. National governments find it increasingly difficult to promote particular values or
political agendas through the media or to limit information flows, as exemplified by Chinas
attempts to limit its citizens access to parts of the Internet (Global Society Box 18.2, pages
811-2). This globalization of the media is further considered, drawing upon the work of David
Held, which identifies five major shifts bringing about the global media order: increasing
concentration of ownership, a shift from public to private ownership, transnational
corporate structures, diversification over a variety of media products and a growing number
of corporate media mergers. Music and cinema are both products with global reach where
output predominantly flows out from the US, but world music and Indian cinema show that
the flow is in both directions between the developing and developed world. The merger of
Time Warners content with AOLs Internet distribution capabilities provides another
example of the double-edged nature of the new media.

Simplistic accounts of media imperialism are rejected; consumers are not simply cultural
dopes. Islamic states have shown a range of responses to cultural invasion but those seeking
to ban the material are losing ground but at the same time the reach of the distinctive voice
of Al-Jazeera is growing. Other attempts to counter global media empires by using new
technologies to facilitate alternative forms of news gathering include Indymedia, a global
collective of independent media outlets associated with the anti-globalization movement,
creating open access online platforms, enabling political activists and citizens to upload their
own videos, images and reports as well as live streaming of protest events.

The social implications of technological change are hard to predict, but so far the worst fears
of the pessimists have not been realized. However, it is safe to say that those of us alive
today are currently experiencing a digital revolution that is changing the media landscape
forever. But that revolution is not just happening somewhere out there. We are all part of
it, and how we respond to and make use of the new technologies and media outlets will be
just as important in determining their social impact.

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TEACHING TOPICS
1. Making sense of television
Television delivers into our homes an endless stream of images and sounds which we are all
so used to interpreting and rendering meaningful that we barely notice we are doing it. The
chapter stresses that viewing is not a passive activity that messages are constantly
interpreted and decoded both through the viewers understanding of the conventions of
television grammar and through their wider understandings and lived experience. This topic
encourages students to become aware of just how sophisticated they are at decoding media
messages.

2. Public opinion and public debate

The selectivity of media news coverage has long been debated within sociology and provides
an interesting case study in the debates between modernist and postmodernist critics. This
topic links the discussion of the study of TV news to some of the larger questions posed by
Habermas and Baudrillard.

3. New technologies and social life

The final sections of this chapter consider the development of new information technologies
and their possible social consequences. This issue is also touched upon in Chapter 8, Social
interaction and everyday life, and Chapter 20, Education, and offers an opportunity to pull
those threads together and link them via John Thompsons model of interaction.

ACTIVITIES
Activity 1: Making sense of television

Read the section Audiences and media representations.

A. At three different times during a day, spend a few minutes sitting in front of the television
with a remote control channel hopping. Record the answers to the following questions:

1. What types of programme did you find? (e.g. soap operas, costume drama, detective
mystery )
2. When you hopped to a new channel, how long did it take you to realize what sort of
programme you were watching?
3. Were you already expecting different sorts of programme because of the time of day?
4. What cues made you realize what sort of programme you were looking at?

B. Christine Geraghty has analysed the genre of the soap opera in terms of the way it
handles time, space and character. Her analysis forms the basis of the following exercise:

Compare a single episode of a British soap (e.g. Eastenders, Hollyoaks, Coronation Street)
with a single episode of a series (e.g. Holby City, Doctors, Glee) and with a single episode of a
serial (recent examples have been Call the Midwife, Mad Men, Homeland) by answering the
following questions:

1. The programme actually lasts for an hour or less, but what time-span does the story
cover?
2. How many different plot lines are running through the episode?

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3. How many of those plot lines had been established in an earlier episode?
4. How many of those plot lines will be carried over into future programmes?
5. Has the main story been resolved in this episode?
6. How many different locations does the episode visit?
7. How many of these locations are already familiar to regular viewers?
8. Does the main plot revolve around regular characters or new characters who will only
appear in this episode?
9. When do you expect to find the resolution of the main story-line?

Answering these questions should give you a clear idea of the rules of the soap, the series
and the serial. You will see that they share some things in common: many series now contain
elements of soap within them by keeping a running narrative about the personal lives of the
regular characters which develops across the whole series, whilst individual main stories are
resolved in each episode.

C. Take any genre soap, series, serial, game show, quiz show, current affairs series,
documentary series, cookery programme, reality show and write an outline proposal for a
new programme.

Activity 2: Public opinion and public debate

The section covering conflict theories and bias in the media (pages 789-95) describes the
work of the Glasgow Media Group. In one study Greg Philo interviewed people some time
after the end of the miners strike and found that key images and phrases from the news
coverage of the dispute had become incorporated into peoples own accounts of that time.

Here is an extract from a piece Philo wrote about this study. It is followed by some questions
which ask you to think about your own knowledge of that dispute, which will depend very
much on your age, and also to apply the same questions to a current series of disputes:

It is clear that we can bring a great deal of our own history, culture and class
experience to our reception of media messages. But we should not underestimate
their power and especially that of television to influence public belief. Most of the
people in this study did not have direct experience of the events of the strike and
did not use alternative sources of information to negotiate the dominant message
on issues such as the nature of picketing. Over half the people interviewed for our
main sample believed that picketing was mostly violent. Both television and the
press were given as key sources of information, but people spoke of the special
power of television, saying that its images were more immediate and stuck more.
As one resident of Glasgow put it, Seeing is Believing.

This was apparently so for a large number of people, at least in relation to their
beliefs about picketing. In all, 54% of the main sample had believed that most
picketing was violent. The source of this belief seems very clearly to have been the
media. It is something of an indictment of news journalism that after coverage
virtually every day for a year, such a large proportion of people had apparently no
idea what a typical picket line was like. In the course of the interviews for this
research, I sometimes read out the eye-witness accounts which had been given by
the police and others of experience on the picket lines. These were greeted with
genuine surprise by many in the groups, who were convinced that what they had
seen on the news was typical. Sometimes there was a sense of shock that they had

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been misled. As one woman from a group of workers in London commented:

People always say dont believe what you hear in the media, but this really gives
you something to think about.

(Greg Philo, Seeing Is Believing?, Social Studies Review, May 1991, pp. 1747)

1. What do you know about the miners strike?

2. Where have you got this information from?
3. How does your own history, culture and class influence the knowledge you have about
this event?
4. Recent years have witnessed a number of street protests by anti-capitalism or anti-
globalization groups associated with meetings of the International Monetary Fund and
the World Bank. Ask yourself the same three questions again about these protests.
5. Do you think you could make an informed decision about the issues surrounding these
protests?
6. Articles about these protests can be found on the Internet sites of all the leading
newspapers. Access some of these to get a flavour of the coverage. A starting point
would be www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive.
7. Read the Classic Study 18.2 on Habermas on pages 794-5 of Sociology. Do you think the
media coverage of the anti-globalization protests enhances public debate of these issues?
8. Read the section on Baudrillards postmodern theory on pages 798-800. How might it be
argued that The anti-globalization protests did not happen?

Activity 3: New technologies and social life

Types of interaction
Interactional Face-to-face Mediated Mediated quasi-
characteristics interaction interaction interaction

Spacetime Context of co- Separation of Separation of

constitution presence; shared contexts; contexts; extended
spatial-temporal extended availability in time
reference system availability in and space
time and space
Range of symbolic Multiplicity of Narrowing of the Narrowing of the
cues symbolic cues range of symbolic range of symbolic
cues cues

Action orientation Oriented towards Oriented towards Oriented towards

specific others specific others an indefinite range
of potential
recipients

Dialogical/ Dialogical Dialogical Monological

monological

(Source: John B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity, Cambridge: Polity, 1995, p. 465]

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This table (Table 18.2 on page 797 of Sociology) offers a very compact version of Thompsons
model of interaction: in making it that concise, though, it relies on quite difficult and
sometimes quite technical language.

1. Read the section on Thompson on pages 796-7 of Sociology and construct a new version
of the table that uses everyday language and gives an example for each cell of the table.
Your version will be much bigger than the original.

Now read the section Media in a global age, pages 768-88. Also look at the section The
future of education (pages 909-13) from Chapter 20.

2. Make a list from these sections of all of the different types of media discussed and their
possible uses.
3. Choose three examples from your list and write a paragraph on each which uses
Thompsons model to analyse them.

REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Making sense of television
What kind of evidence of the social effects of violence on television would be
conclusive?
Is the BBC a good thing?
How much work do we do interpreting media messages?
What is real about reality TV?

Public opinion and public debate

Whats the point of reading a newspaper?
Should the media be regulated by government?
How is the presentation of television news on the rolling news channels different from
its presentation in news bulletins on BBC1 and ITV?
How interactive is interactive television?

New technologies and social life

What are we interacting with when we use interactive media?
What is the global village going to be like?
Can too much information be a bad thing?
How can new information technologies support families and friendships?

ESSAY QUESTIONS
1. How do different communications media influence the social experience of space and
time?

2. How significant is the ownership of the institutions of the mass media in analysing their
content and social influence?

3. To what extent do Albert Square, Weatherfield and Emmerdale have a real social
existence?

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4. Will the global village necessarily mirror existing global inequalities?

5. How real are online communities?

MAKING CONNECTIONS
Making sense of television
The discussion of genre could be used as a case study in the social construction of reality
discussed in Chapter 8. Also from that chapter there are links to the ordering of time and
space and ethonomethodology as reading genre could be treated as an ethnomethod. The
possibility of gender affinities with particular genders links well to the discussion of gender
socialization from Chapter 8 and the social construction of gender and sex from Chapter 15.

Public opinion and public debate

Habermass views on the relationship of television to the public sphere could be examined
further by referring to the outline of Habermas as a contemporary theorist in Chapter 3. The
chapter also links Putnams account of the decline of social capital to the growth of
television: Putnams broader arguments are presented in Chapter 19. Students may well
benefit from a wider discussion of democracy to contextualize arguments about the
importance of the public sphere, this can be found in Chapter 22.

New technologies and social life

The impact of new information and communication technologies is discussed at a number of
points in the text. Chapter 5 considers social interaction in cyberspace, Chapter 17 touches
on the spread of religious ideas through new media, Chapter 20 explores the implications of
new technologies for education and Chapter 21 for cybercrime.

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SAMPLE SESSION

Public opinion and public debate

Aims
To consider the role of the news media as a source of information and opinion.
To explore the notion of the public sphere.

Outcome: By the end of this session students will be able to

1. Describe Habermass concept of the public sphere.
2. Identify sources of information about recent anti-capitalism events.
3. Reflect on their information seeking skills.
4. Locate their skills as accomplishments of a particular socio-historical moment.
5. Discuss the role of the media in the context of the notion of the public sphere.

Preparatory tasks
Read the sections Theorizing the media (paying particular attention to conflict theories)
and Classic Study 18.1 on the Glasgow University Research Group.

Classroom tasks
1. Tutor introduces session and puts definition of the public sphere on board for
reference throughout the session. (5 minutes)
2. Tutor takes feedback from group on their sources of information about the anti-
capitalist protests and records these on the board grouping them into print media,
broadcast media, Internet and personal contact with participants. Link this back to
Philos research on the miners strike. (10 minutes)
3. Divide the group into three small groups and distribute the articles which students have
brought with them. Each group to consider which voices are reported in the articles,
which voices are seen as authoritative and what conclusions the articles draw. (25
minutes)
4. Report back from groups. (20 minutes)

Assessment task
You are members of an anti-capitalist group and have been asked to plan a strategy to gain
maximum publicity for your cause. Write a report outlining your strategy and explaining
the considerations which have influenced your decision (e.g. Might you consider direct
action or attempt to gain fair representation in the news media?)

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