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10/29/2019 Chapter 3: Culture and Media

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Media Among the most pervasive and visible forms of culture in modern societies are those produced by the mass media. We might define media as any formats or vehicles that carry, present, or communicate information. This definition would, of course, include newspapers, periodicals, magazines, books, pamphlets, and posters. But it would also include wax tablets, sky writing, web pages, and the children’s game of telephone. We’ll first discuss the history of the media and then tackle theory and empirical studies.

From the Town Crier to the Facebook Wall: A Brief History When we talk about the media, we’re generally talking about the mass media. The first form of mass media was the book. Before the invention of the printing press, the media did exist—the town crier brought news, and royal messengers traveled by horseback, every now and then hopping off to read a scroll—but they did not exactly reach the masses. People passed along most information by word of mouth. After the 1440s, when Johannes Gutenberg developed movable type for the printing press, text could be printed much more easily. Books and periodicals were produced and circulated at much greater rates and began to reach mass audiences. Since that time the terms media and mass media have become virtually synonymous.

Innovations in mass media include the invention of the

printing press and movable type in the fifteenth century,

the creation of moving pictures at the turn of the

twentieth century, and the adoption of the scrolling ticker

by today’s 24-hour news channels.

The innovations didn’t stop there, however. In the 1880s along came another invention: the moving picture or silent film. Its quality was not the best at first, but it improved over time. In the 1920s sound was added to films. For many, this represented an improvement over the radio, which had come along about the same time as the silent film. Television was invented in the 1930s, although this technology didn’t make its way into most American homes until after World War II. During the postwar period, new forms of media technology quickly hit the market, and the demand for media exploded: glossy magazines; color televisions; blockbuster movies; Betamax videos, then VHS videos, then DVDs; vinyl records, then 8-track tapes, then cassette tapes, then CDs—and once the Internet came along, the sky was the

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limit! In 2016, 73 percent of the American population had broadband internet at home, with access clustered among the younger, wealthier, and better educated, while more than 10 percent used their smartphones in place of high-speed internet service (Pew Research Center, 2017a). You’re well aware of all the forms the media come

in, but let’s stop for a minute and contemplate the impact certain forms, such as television, have had on society. Again, televisions didn’t become household items in the United States until after World War II. From 1950, the year President Harry S. Truman first sent military advisers to South Vietnam, to 1964, when Congress approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution calling for victory by any means necessary, the share of American households with television sets increased from 9 to 92 percent. During the Vietnam War, the American public witnessed military conflict in a way they never had before, and these images helped fuel the antiwar movement. Likewise, television played a large role in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It was one thing to hear of discrimination secondhand, but quite another to sit with your family in the living room and watch images of police setting attack dogs on peaceful protesters and turning fire hoses on little African American girls dressed up in their Sunday best.

In 1963, for the first time, televisions beamed images

such as this photo of police officers attacking a student

in Birmingham, Alabama. How did television influence

the reaction to events such as the civil rights

movement?

Hegemony: The Mother of All Media Terms All of us might be willing to agree that, on some level, the media both reflect culture and work to produce the very culture they represent. How does this dynamic work? Antonio Gramsci, an Italian political theorist and activist, came up with the concept of hegemony to describe just that. Gramsci, a Marxist, was imprisoned by the Fascists in the 1920s and 1930s; while in jail, he attempted to explain why the working-class revolution Marx had predicted never came to pass. He published his

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findings in his “prison notebooks” of 1929–35 (Gramsci, 1971). In this vein, then, hegemony “refers to a historical process in which a dominant group exercises ‘moral and intellectual leadership’ throughout society by winning the voluntary ‘consent’ of popular masses” (Kim, 2001). This concept of hegemony stands in contrast to another of Gramsci’s ideas, domination. If domination means getting people to do what you want through the use of force, hegemony means getting them to go along with the status quo because it seems like the best course or the natural order of things. Although domination generally involves an action by the state (such as the Fascist leaders who imprisoned those who disagreed with them), “hegemony takes place in the realm of private institutions...such as families, churches, trade unions, and the media” (Kim, 2001). For example, if free-market capitalism is the hegemonic economic ideology of a given society, then the state does not have to explicitly work to inculcate that set of principles into its citizenry. Rather, private institutions, such as families, do most of the heavy lifting in this regard. Ever wonder why children receive an allowance for taking out the trash and doing other household chores? Gramsci might argue that this is the way capitalist free-market ideology is instilled in the individual within the private realm of the family. The concept of hegemony is important for

understanding the impact of the media. It also raises questions about the tension between structure and agency. Are people molded by the culture in which they live, or do they actively participate in shaping the world around them? As we discussed earlier in the chapter, it’s not an either/or question. Later in the chapter we’ll talk about some of the debates between structure and agency in regard to the media, look at some examples of hegemony in practice, and discuss the possibilities for countercultural resistance.