Media Effects: Passive vs. Active Audience, Slides of Introduction to Sociology

Download Media Effects: Passive vs. Active Audience and more Slides Introduction to Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Chapter 18 INFORMING: MEDIA docsity.com Media Effects Are We Passive or Active? (1) 1. The audience is seen as passive, a mass of spectators who are manipulated by the owners of media institutions as they pursue their own ends. 2. The audience is seen as active force, who can select from media images and texts and reinterpret them according to their own wants and needs. docsity.com High to Media Culture Literary critics, such as Frank Leavis (Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow ,1962), were more concerned with the erosion of “high culture” by the spread of “mass culture”, especially through the “lies and deceit” of advertising and commercialized media systems that debased human emotion and confused value with the possession of material goods – a process that is irresistible to the average media consumer. docsity.com Actively Constructing Meaning ‘A homogeneous, externally produced culture cannot be sold ready-made to the masses: culture simply does not work like that. Nor do the people behave or live like the masses, an aggregation of alienated, one-dimensional persons whose only consciousness is false, whose only relationship to the system that enslaves them is one of unwitting (if not willing) dupes. Popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry. All the culture industries can do is produce a repertoire of texts or cultural resources for the various formations of the people to use or reject in the ongoing process of producing their popular culture.’ Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 1989, p. 23 docsity.com Texts: Open and Closed Stuart Hall (Encoding/Decoding’ In Culture, Media, LanguagI, 1980) for example suggests that a preferred reading for a text may exist, where various techniques (the cropping of photographs, editing of news footage and so on) are used by media producers to influence the perceptions of the audience. The distinction can therefore be made between open and closed texts, where it is recognized that all texts are open to a variety of interpretations, but in a closed text there is one reading intended by the producer. docsity.com Postmodernism (2) 1. The first order of simulacra: The relationship between the meaning of a sign and a copy, or counterfeit, is seen as natural, albeit wrapped in relations of power; 2. The second order of simulacra: The Industrial Revolution and the ability to reproduce goods and signs in large numbers as copies of an original form. 3. The third order of simulacra: The advent of hyperreality, where the relationship between a sign and its referent break down completely, to the point where signs exist only as copies, referring to other copies, which in turn refer to other copies, and so on. docsity.com Media Ownership Instrumentalist Perspectives Associated with Marxist-influenced work this approach is similar to the hypodermic needle model of audience effects, described earlier, in that that the audience is seen as a passive conduit for ideological messages. Media are part of an ideological state apparatus, together with religious institutions, and legal and education systems. Their function is to legitimate the ideology of the ruling class, maintain the class structure of capitalism, and marginalise alternative perspectives. docsity.com Media Ownership Pluralist Perspectives At the other end of the spectrum, and emphasising the role of an active audience in the production of media content, the pluralist perspective conceives of society as made up of a number of different competing interest groups that struggle for prominence through the media. Who actually owns the media is almost irrelevant in terms of media content, as it is ultimately the consumer who is sovereign and who determines the nature of media output. docsity.com