essay about culture media

Chapter 1 Media and Culture

The lost cell phone.

A New York City woman lost her cell phone in the back of a taxi cab. Sasha Gomez, 16, of Queens, ended up with the phone. She decided to keep it and use it. She did not realize the consequences. She was humiliated, harassed, and arrested. And she became the subject of a public shaming ritual only possible by today’s media in today’s culture.

The phone was an expensive model, a T-Mobile Sidekick that sold for $350. Sasha began using the phone to take photographs and send instant messages to friends and family. The woman who lost the phone thought she would never see the phone again. She bought another Sidekick, logged onto her account and found that the old phone was being used. She saw photographs and messages by Sasha. The woman wanted her old phone back. She had a media-savvy friend, Evan Guttman. Evan was able to track down Sasha by her instant messages. He contacted Sasha and asked her to return the phone to his friend. “Basically, she told me to get lost,” Evan later told The New York Times . Nicholas Confessore, “Tale of a Lost Cellphone, and Untold Static,” The New York Times, June 21, 2006. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/21/nyregion/21sidekick.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=evan+guttman&st=nyt

Evan decided to fight for his friend’s phone—through the media. He put up a web page that told the story of the lost cell phone. He put up the pictures of Sasha and her family. The story spread. Evan began getting dozens and then hundreds of sympathetic emails from other people who had lost phones and understood his frustration with Sasha. Two technology blogs, Diggs and Gizmodo, linked to the story and web page. Evan then got thousands of emails, some from as far off as Africa and Asia. Lawyers and police officers contacted Evan about property law and told him how to approach the police. Some people went further than writing supportive emails. They found Sasha’s MySpace page. They sent Sasha and her friends messages demanding the return of the phone. Other people learned her home address in Queens, drove by her apartment building and shouted “thief.”

Sasha and her family were outraged and alarmed. They contacted Evan. Sasha still refused to return the phone. Her brother too communicated with Evan. He said he was a military policeman, and he warned Evan to leave Sasha alone. Evan posted those comments online. He soon heard from others in the military. They told him that the brother’s threats were a violation of military policy. They said they would report the threats to the brother’s superiors.

Armed with all this information, Evan contacted Sasha one more time. He said he and his friend would next go the police. Evan said he was threatened again. He and his friend went to the police who then arrested Sasha. The charge was possession of stolen property. Sasha’s mother came forward and said she had bought the phone for $50 on a subway platform and given it to Sasha. Police confiscated the phone for the original owner. And Evan became a minor cultural celebrity. The story appeared in The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune and was broadcast on MSNBC and other outlets. It was a modern morality tale caused by, and then made possible by, the intersection of media technology and culture.

I thought the story of the lost cell phone would be a great introduction for a text on understanding media and culture and used The New York Times story to write the previous paragraphs. Long after, when I showed the introduction to a colleague, he looked at me and said, “Are you kidding?” He showed me a then-recent book by media scholar Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody , a book on the power of organizing through new media. Shirky begins his book—with the same story of the lost cell phone. With some wry amusement over fate, I decided that I would keep my introduction as well. In some ways, the movement of the lost cell phone story from Evan’s website through The New York Times through MSNBC through Clay Shirky’s text through my book on understanding media and culture is symbolic, as we will see, of the multitude of flows between media and culture.

Understanding Media and Culture

This book’s title tells its intent. It is written to help you understand media and culture. The media and culture are so much a part of our days that sometimes it is difficult to step back and appreciate and apprehend their great impact on our lives.

The book’s title, and the book itself, begin with a focus squarely on media. Think of your typical day. If you are like many people, you wake to a digital alarm clock or perhaps your cell phone. Soon after waking, you likely have a routine that involves some media. Some people immediately check the cell phone for text messages. Others will turn on the computer and check Facebook, email, or websites. Some people read the newspaper. Others listen to music on an iPod or CD. Some people will turn on the television and watch a weather channel, cable news, or Sports Center. Heading to work or class, you may chat on a cell phone or listen to music. Your classes likely employ various types of media from course management software to PowerPoint presentations to DVDs to YouTube. You may return home and relax with video games, television, movies, more Facebook, or music. You connect with friends on campus and beyond with text messages or Facebook. And your day may end as you fall asleep to digital music. Media for most of us are entwined with almost every aspect of life and work. Understanding media will not only help you appreciate the role of media in your life but also help you be a more informed citizen, a more savvy consumer, and a more successful worker. Media influence all those aspects of life as well.

The book’s title also has links to a highly influential book in media studies, Understanding Media , by the social theorist and critic, Marshall McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man . New York: McGraw Hill, 1964. In the midst of the 20th century and the rise of television as a mass medium, McLuhan foresaw how profoundly media would shape human lives. His work on media spanned four decades, from the 1950s to his death in 1980. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the height of television’s popularity and the emergence of computers, he became an international celebrity. He appeared on magazine covers and television talk shows. He had a cameo appearance in the Woody Allen film, Annie Hall . Wired magazine listed him on its masthead as “patron saint.” In universities, however, McLuhan was often dismissed, perhaps because of his celebrity, his outlandish style, and his broad and sweeping declarations. Yet as media continued to develop in ways anticipated by his writings, McLuhan again found an audience in media studies.

In Understanding Media , McLuhan offered some provocative thoughts. He said that the media themselves were far more important than any content they carried. Indeed, he said, each medium, such as print or broadcast, physically affects the human central nervous system in a certain way. Media influence the way the brain works and how it processes information. They create new patterns of thought and behavior. Looking back over time, McLuhan found that people and societies were shaped by the dominant media of their time. For example, McLuhan argued, people and societies of the printing press era were shaped by that medium. And, he said, people and societies were being shaped in new ways by electronic media. Summing up, in one of his well-known phrases, he said, “The medium is the message.”

This book’s title uses McLuhan’s title—and adds culture. McLuhan well understood how media shape culture. However, one weakness in McLuhan’s work, especially his early work, is that he did not fully account for how culture shapes media. Culture can be a vague and empty term. Sometimes culture is defined in a very narrow sense as “the arts” or some sort of fashionable refinement. Another definition of culture is much more expansive, however. In this broader sense, culture is a particular way of life and how that life is acted out each day in works, practices, and activities. Thus, we can talk about Italian culture, Javanese culture, or the culture of the ancient Greeks. Another communication theorist, James Carey, elegantly captures this expansive view of culture. In “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” Carey wrote the following:

“We create, express, and convey our knowledge of and attitudes toward reality through the construction of a variety of symbol systems: art, science, journalism, religion, common sense, mythology. How do we do this? What are the differences between these forms? What are the historical and comparative variations in them? How do changes in communication technology influence what we can concretely create and apprehend? How do groups in society struggle over the definition of what is real?” James Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society . 2nd ed. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006, p. 24.

That large sense of culture will be used in this book. The chapters to come will provide an in-depth look at the relationship of media and culture. We will look at many kinds of media and how those media shape and are shaped by culture. Media and culture shape each other around the globe, of course. The focus in this book primarily will be on the United States. This focus is not because U.S. media have such global reach but because understanding media and culture in one setting will allow you to think about media and culture in other settings. This intellectual journey should be interesting and fun. You live, study, work, and play with media in culture. By the book’s end, you should have a much deeper appreciation and understanding of them.

1.1 Intersection of American Media and Culture

Learning objectives.

• Distinguish between mass communication and mass media.
• Define culture.
• Pose questions that will be explored in the rest of the text.

Mass Communication, Mass Media, and Culture

We use all kinds of terms to talk about media. It will be useful to clarify them. It will be especially important to distinguish between mass communication and mass media, and to attempt a working definition of culture. You likely are reading this book as part of a class dedicated to mass communication, so let’s start with mass communication first. Note that adjective: mass . Here is a horrible definition of mass from an online dictionary: Of, relating to, characteristic of, directed at, or attended by a large number of people. But the definition gets the point across. Communication can take place just between two people, or among a few people, or maybe even within one person who is talking to himself. Mass communication is communication of, relating to, characteristic of, directed at, or attended by a large number of people. That’s pretty ugly. Let’s try the following: Mass communication Communication transmitted to large segments of the population. refers to communication transmitted to large segments of the population.

How does that happen? The transmission of mass communication happens using one or more of many different kinds of media Means of communication and transmission; as the plural of medium, a means of communication and transmission, media refers to a number of such means, such as print, digital, and electronic media. (people sometimes forget that media is the plural of the singular, medium ). A medium is simply an instrument or means of transmission. It can be two tin cans connected by a string. It can be television. It can be the Internet. A mass medium is a means of transmission designed to reach a wide audience. It is not tin cans on a string, unless you have a lot of cans, but it can be television or the Internet. Media are more than one medium. So mass media Those means of transmission that are designed to reach a wide audience; some examples are radio, newspapers, magazines, books, and video games, as well as Internet media such as blogs, podcasts, and video sharing. refers to those means of transmission that are designed to reach a wide audience. Mass media are commonly considered to include radio, film, newspapers, magazines, books, and video games, as well as Internet blogs, podcasts, and video sharing.

Lastly, let’s define culture a bit more. All this mass communication over mass media takes place among people in a particular time and place. Those people share ideas about reality and the world and themselves. They act out those ideas daily in their lives, work, and creative expressions, and they do so in ways that are different from other people in other places and other times. We can use culture to refer to the acting out of these shared ideas.

One of the great scholars of culture, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, offered this definition. He said, culture is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life” (1973, 89). That’s difficult language, but you can get the idea—culture is historically transmitted knowledge and attitudes toward life expressed in symbolic form. Or perhaps more simply, culture The expressed and shared values, attitudes, beliefs, and practices of a social group, organization, or institution. is the expressed and shared values, attitudes, beliefs, and practices of a social group, organization, or institution. It is OK if that still seems broad and fluid. Scholars too wrestle with the term because it must capture so much. Culture should not be easy to define.

What this book will do is bring together media and culture in the context of the American experience. Throughout American history, evolving media technologies have changed the way we relate socially, economically, and politically. Here’s one example from long ago that is still talked about today. In 1960, the first televised presidential debates changed American history forever. The young senator, John F. Kennedy, looked wonderful on television. He appeared energetic, crisp and at ease, while Vice President Richard Nixon looked nervous and uncomfortable. His makeup was caked on. He hunched and slouched. People who listened to the debate on the radio considered it a tie. But most people who watched the debate on television believed that Kennedy crushed Nixon. Kennedy upset Nixon and won the presidency. A few months later, the newly-elected president gave credit to technology for changing public perceptions and enabling his win. He claimed that “it was TV more than anything else that turned the tide.” Louis Menand, “Masters of the Matrix,” The New Yorker , January 5, 2004. Ever since Kennedy, American presidential hopefuls have had to be increasingly television-ready and media savvy. Indeed, evolving technology has helped change what the American public wants out of its leaders.

In today’s wired world of smartphones and streaming satellite feeds, our expectations of our leaders, celebrities, teachers, and even ourselves are changing in drastic ways. This book aims to provide you with the context, tools, and theories to understand changes brought about by the commingling of media and culture. Rather than telling you what to think, this book hopes to provide you with a framework to consider some of the crucial issues affecting media and culture in today’s world. The following are some questions to consider now and to keep in mind as you move forward in this book:

• The second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century saw a huge growth of media forms, including radio, cinema, television, the Internet, and cell phone. Understanding the evolution of media technology can help you understanding not only the media of today but also the media of tomorrow. What then are the roots of media in U.S. history? What were the dominant forms of media present in the United States during the Revolution? The Industrial Revolution? World Wars I and II? How did these forms of media differ from the ones we have today? How did they help shape the way people interacted with and understood the world they lived in?
• Contemporary Americans have more means of getting information and entertainment than ever before. What are the major media present in the United States today? How do these forms of media interact with one another? How do they overlap? How are they distinct?
• What is the role of media in American culture today? Some people argue that dramatic and controversial events help fuel the demand for 24-hour news access. In June 2011, people around the world spent hours glued to coverage of the Casey Anthony trial. More recently, in November of 2011, sports coverage moved from football scores to the Penn State football sex-abuse scandal. What are some other ways that culture affects media? Conversely, how do media affect culture? Do violent television shows and video games influence viewers to become more violent? Is the Internet making our culture more open and democratic, or more shallow and distracted?
• Though we may not (yet) have space-age technology, such as time travel, hover cars, and teleportation, today’s electronic gadgets would probably stun Americans of a century ago. Will we be stunned by future media? How can today’s media landscape help us understand what might await us in years to come? What will the future of American media and culture look like?

Key Takeaways

• Mass communication refers to a message transmitted to a large audience; the means of transmission is known as mass media. Many different kinds of mass media exist and have existed for centuries. Both have an effect on culture, which is a shared and expressed collection of behaviors, practices, beliefs, and values that are particular to a group, organization, or institution. Culture and media exert influence on each other in subtle, complex ways.
• The 1960 election is an example of how changes in media technology have had a major impact on culture. But the influence goes both ways, and culture shapes media in important ways, even how media evolve.

Reread the previous questions about media and culture. Write down some of your initial responses or reactions, based on your prior knowledge or intuition. Keep the piece of paper somewhere secure and return to it on the last day of the course. Were your responses on target? How has your understanding of media and culture changed? How might you answer questions differently now?

1.2 How Did We Get Here? The Evolution of Media

• Discuss events that impacted the adaptation of mass media.
• Explain how different technological transitions have shaped media industries.
• Identify four roles the media perform in our society.

“Well, how did I get here?” a baffled David Byrne sings in the Talking Heads song, “Once in a Lifetime.” The contemporary media landscape is so rich, deep, and multifaceted that it’s easy to imagine American media consumers asking themselves the same question. In 2010, Americans could turn on their television and find 24-hour news channels, as well as music videos, nature documentaries, and reality shows about everything from hoarders to fashion models. That’s not to mention movies available on-demand from cable providers, or television and video available online for streaming or downloading. Half of American households receive a daily newspaper, and the average person holds 1.9 magazine subscriptions. Journalism.org , The State of the News Media 2004 , http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2004/ (accessed July 15, 2010); Jim Bilton, “The Loyalty Challenge: How Magazine Subscriptions Work,” In Circulation , January/February 2007. A University of California San Diego study claimed that U.S. households consumed around 3.6 zettabytes of information in 2008, the digital equivalent of a 7-foot high stack of books covering the entire United States, including Alaska—a 350 percent increase since 1980. Doug Ramsey, “UC San Diego Experts Calculate How Much Information Americans Consume.” University of San Diego News Center, December 9, 2009. Americans are exposed to media in taxicabs and busses, in classrooms and doctors’ offices, on highways and in airplanes.

Later chapters will offer in-depth explorations of how particular media developed in different eras. But we can begin to orient ourselves here by briefly examining a history of media in culture, looking at the ways technological innovations have helped to bring us to where we are today, and finally considering the varied roles the media fill in our culture today.

A Brief History of Mass Media and Culture

Until Johannes Gutenberg’s 15th-century invention of the movable type printing press, books were painstakingly handwritten, and no two copies were exactly the same. The printing press made the mass production of print media possible. Not only was it much cheaper to produce written material, but new transportation technologies also made it easier for texts to reach a wide audience. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Gutenberg’s invention, which helped usher in massive cultural movements like the European Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. In 1810, another German printer, Friedrich Koenig, pushed media production even further when he essentially hooked the steam engine up to a printing press, enabling the industrialization of printed media. In 1800, a hand-operated printing press could produce about 480 pages per hour; Koenig’s machine more than doubled this rate. (By the 1930s, many printing presses had an output of 3000 pages an hour.) This increased efficiency helped lead to the rise of the daily newspaper.

As the first Europeans settled the land that would come to be called the United States of America, the newspaper was an essential medium. At first, newspapers helped the Europeans stay connected with events back home. But as the people developed their own way of life—their own culture —newspapers helped give expression to that culture. Political scientist Benedict Anderson has argued that newspapers also helped forge a sense of national identity by treating readers across the country as part of one unified group with common goals and values. Newspapers, he said, helped create an “imagined community.”

The United States continued to develop, and the newspaper was the perfect medium for the increasingly urbanized Americans of the 19th century, who could no longer get their local news merely through gossip and word of mouth. These Americans were living in an unfamiliar world, and newspapers and other publications helped them negotiate the rapidly changing world. The Industrial Revolution meant that people had more leisure time and more money, and media helped them figure out how to spend both.

In the 1830s, the major daily newspapers faced a new threat with the rise of the penny press—newspapers that were low-priced broadsheets. These papers served as a cheaper, more sensational daily news source and privileged news of murder and adventure over the dry political news of the day. While earlier newspapers catered to a wealthier, more educated audience, the penny press attempted to reach a wide swath of readers through cheap prices and entertaining (often scandalous) stories. The penny press can be seen as the forerunner to today’s gossip-hungry tabloids.

The penny press appealed to readers’ desires for lurid tales of murder and scandal.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the first major non-print forms of mass media—film and radio—exploded in popularity. Radios, which were less expensive than telephones and widely available by the 1920s, especially had the unprecedented ability of allowing huge numbers of people to listen to the same event at the same time. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge’s preelection speech reached more than 20 million people. Radio was a boon for advertisers, who now had access to a large and captive audience. An early advertising consultant claimed that the early days of radio were “a glorious opportunity for the advertising man to spread his sales propaganda” thanks to “a countless audience, sympathetic, pleasure seeking, enthusiastic, curious, interested, approachable in the privacy of their homes.” Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).

The reach of radio also further helped forge an American culture. The medium was able to downplay regional differences and encourage a unified sense of the American lifestyle—a lifestyle that was increasingly driven and defined by consumer purchases. “Americans in the 1920s were the first to wear ready-made, exact-size clothing…to play electric phonographs, to use electric vacuum cleaners, to listen to commercial radio broadcasts, and to drink fresh orange juice year round.” Digital History, “The Formation of Modern American Mass Culture,” The Jazz Age: The American 1920s , 2007, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?hhid=454 (accessed July 15, 2010). This boom in consumerism put its stamp on the 1920s, and, ironically, helped contribute to the Great Depression of the 1930s. Library of Congress, “Radio: A Consumer Product and a Producer of Consumption,” http://lcweb2.loc.gov:8081/ammem/amrlhtml/inradio.html (accessed July 15, 2010).

The post-World War II era in the United States was marked by prosperity, and by the introduction of a seductive new form of mass communication: television. In 1946, there were about 17,000 televisions in the entire United States. Within seven years, two-thirds of American households owned at least one set. As the United States’ gross national product (GNP) doubled in the 1950s, and again in the 1960s, the American home became firmly ensconced as a consumer unit. Along with a television, the typical U.S. family owned a car and a house in the suburbs, all of which contributed to the nation’s thriving consumer-based economy.

Broadcast television was the dominant form of mass media. There were just three major networks, and they controlled over 90 percent of the news programs, live events, and sitcoms viewed by Americans. On some nights, close to half the nation watched the same show! Some social critics argued that television was fostering a homogenous, conformist culture by reinforcing ideas about what “normal” American life looked like. But television also contributed to the counterculture of the 1960s. The Vietnam War was the nation’s first televised military conflict, and nightly images of war footage and war protestors helped intensify the nation’s internal conflicts.

Broadcast technology, including radio and television, had such a hold of the American imagination that newspapers and other print media found themselves having to adapt to the new media landscape. Print media was more durable and easily archived, and allowed users more flexibility in terms of time—once a person had purchased a magazine, he could read it whenever and wherever he’d like. Broadcast media, in contrast, usually aired programs on a fixed schedule, which allowed it to both provide a sense of immediacy but also impermanence—until the advent of digital video recorders in the 21st century, it was impossible to pause and rewind a television broadcast.

The media world faced drastic changes once again in the 1980s and 1990s with the spread of cable television. During the early decades of television, viewers had a limited number of channels from which to choose. In 1975, the three major networks accounted for 93 percent of all television viewing. By 2004, however, this share had dropped to 28.4 percent of total viewing, thanks to the spread of cable television. Cable providers allowed viewers a wide menu of choices, including channels specifically tailored to people who wanted to watch only golf, weather, classic films, sermons, or videos of sharks. Still, until the mid-1990s, television was dominated by the three large networks. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, an attempt to foster competition by deregulating the industry, actually resulted in many mergers and buyouts of small companies by large companies. The broadcast spectrum in many places was in the hands of a few large corporations. In 2003, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) loosened regulation even further, allowing a single company to own 45 percent of a single market (up from 25 percent in 1982).

Technological Transitions Shape Media Industries

New media technologies both spring from and cause cultural change. For this reason, it can be difficult to neatly sort the evolution of media into clear causes and effects. Did radio fuel the consumerist boom of the 1920s, or did the radio become wildly popular because it appealed to a society that was already exploring consumerist tendencies? Probably a little bit of both. Technological innovations such as the steam engine, electricity, wireless communication, and the Internet have all had lasting and significant effects on American culture. As media historians Asa Briggs and Peter Burke note, every crucial invention came with “a change in historical perspectives.” Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005). Electricity altered the way people thought about time, since work and play were no longer dependent on the daily rhythms of sunrise and sunset. Wireless communication collapsed distance. The Internet revolutionized the way we store and retrieve information.

The contemporary media age can trace its origins back to the electrical telegraph, patented in the United States by Samuel Morse in 1837. Thanks to the telegraph, communication was no longer linked to the physical transportation of messages. Suddenly, it didn’t matter whether a message needed to travel five or five hundred miles. Suddenly, information from distant places was nearly as accessible as local news. When the first transatlantic cable was laid in 1858, allowing near-instantaneous communication from the United States to Europe, The London Times described it as “the greatest discovery since that of Columbus, a vast enlargement…given to the sphere of human activity.” Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005). Celebrations broke out in New York as people marveled at the new media. Telegraph lines began to stretch across the globe, making their own kind of world wide web.

Not long after the telegraph, wireless communication (which eventually led to the development of radio, television, and other broadcast media) emerged as an extension of telegraph technology. Although many 19th-century inventors, including Nikola Tesla, had a hand in early wireless experiments, it was Italian-born Guglielmo Marconi who is recognized as the developer of the first practical wireless radio system. This mysterious invention, where sounds seemed to magically travel through the air, captured the world’s imagination. Early radio was used for military communication, but soon the technology entered the home. The radio mania that swept the country inspired hundreds of applications for broadcasting licenses, some from newspapers and other news outlets, while other radio station operators included retail stores, schools, and even cities. In the 1920s, large media networks—including the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)—were launched, and they soon began to dominate the airwaves. In 1926, they owned 6.4 percent of U.S. broadcasting stations; by 1931, that number had risen to 30 percent. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005).

The 19th-century development of photographic technologies would lead to the later innovations of cinema and television. As with wireless technology, several inventors independently came up with photography at the same time, among them the French inventors Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre, and British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot. In the United States, George Eastman developed the Kodak camera in 1888, banking on the hope that Americans would welcome an inexpensive, easy-to-use camera into their homes, as they had with the radio and telephone. Moving pictures were first seen around the turn of the century, with the first U.S. projection hall opening in Pittsburgh in 1905. By the 1920s, Hollywood had already created its first stars, most notably Charlie Chaplin. By the end of the 1930s, Americans were watching color films with full sound, including Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz .

Television, which consists of an image being converted to electrical impulses, transmitted through wires or radio waves, and then reconverted into images, existed before World War II but really began to take off in the 1950s. In 1947, there were 178,000 television sets made in the United States; five years later, there were 15 million. Radio, cinema, and live theater all saw a decline in the face of this new medium that allowed viewers to be entertained with sound and moving pictures without having to leave their homes.

How was this powerful new medium going to be operated? After much debate, the United States opted for the market. Competing commercial stations (including the radio powerhouses of CBS and NBC) owned stations and sold advertising and commercial-driven programming dominated. Britain took another track with its government-managed British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Funding was driven by licensing fees instead of advertisements. In contrast to the American system, the BBC strictly regulated the length and character of commercials that could be aired. U.S. television, propelled by prosperity, advertising and increasingly powerful networks, flourished. By the beginning of 1955, there were 36 million television sets in the United States, and 4.8 million in all of Europe. Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2005). Important national events, broadcast live for the first time, were an impetus for consumers to buy sets and participate in the spectacle—both England and Japan saw a boom in sales before important royal weddings in the 1950s.

In the 1960s, the concept of a useful portable computer was still a dream; huge mainframes were required to run a basic operating system.

For the last stage in this fast history of media technology, how’s this for a prediction? In 1969, management consultant Peter Drucker predicted that the next major technological innovation after television would be an “electronic appliance” that would be “capable of being plugged in wherever there is electricity and giving immediate access to all the information needed for school work from first grade through college.” He said it would be the equivalent of Edison’s light bulb in its ability to revolutionize how we live. He had, in effect, predicted the computer. He was prescient about the effect that computers and the Internet would have on education, social relationships, and the culture at large. The inventions of random access memory (RAM) chips and microprocessors in the 1970s were important steps along the way to the Internet age. As Briggs and Burke note, these advances meant that “hundreds of thousands of components could be carried on a microprocessor.” The reduction of many different kinds of content to digitally stored information meant that “print, film, recording, radio and television and all forms of telecommunications [were] now being thought of increasingly as part of one complex.” This process, also known as convergence, will be discussed in later chapters and is a force that’s shaping the face of media today.

Why Media? What Do Media Do for Us?

Even a brief history of media can leave one breathless. The speed, reach, and power of the technology are humbling. The evolution can seem almost natural and inevitable, but it is important to stop and ask a basic question: Why? Why do media seem to play such an important role in our lives and our culture? With reflection, we can see that media fulfill several basic roles.

One obvious role is entertainment . Media can act as a springboard for our imaginations, a source of fantasy, and an outlet for escapism. In the 19th century, Victorian readers, disillusioned by the grimness of the Industrial Revolution, found themselves drawn into books that offered fantastic worlds of fairies and other unreal beings. In the first decade of the 21st century, American television viewers could relax at the end of a day by watching singers, both wonderful and terrible, compete to be idols or watch two football teams do battle. Media entertain and distract us in the midst of busy and hard lives.

Media can also provide information and education . Information can come in many forms, and often blurs the line with entertainment. Today, newspapers and news-oriented television and radio programs make available stories from across the globe, allowing readers or viewers in London to have access to voices and videos from Baghdad, Tokyo, or Buenos Aires. Books and magazines provide a more in-depth look at a wide range of subjects. Online encyclopedias have articles on topics from presidential nicknames to child prodigies to tongue-twisters in various languages. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has posted free lecture notes, exams, and audio and video recordings of classes on its OpenCourseWare website, allowing anyone with an Internet connection access to world-class professors.

Another useful aspect of media is its ability to act as a public forum A social space that is open to all, and that serves as a place for discussion of important issues. A public forum is not always a physical space; for example, a newspaper can be considered a public forum. for the discussion of important issues. In newspapers or other periodicals, letters to the editor allow readers to respond to journalists, or voice their opinions on the issues of the day. These letters have been an important part of U.S. newspapers even when the nation was a British colony, and they have served as a means of public discourse ever since. Blogs, discussion boards, and online comments are modern forums. Indeed, the Internet can be seen as a fundamentally democratic medium that allows people who can get online the ability to put their voices out there—though whether anyone will hear is another question.

Media can also serve to monitor government, business, and other institutions . Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle exposed the miserable conditions in the turn-of-the-century meatpacking industry. In the early 1970s, Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovered evidence of the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up, which eventually led to the resignation of then-president Richard Nixon. Online journalists today try to uphold the “watchdog” role of the media.

Thinking more deeply, we can recognize that certain media are better at certain roles. Media have characteristics that influence how we use them. While some forms of mass media are better suited to entertainment, others make more sense as a venue for spreading information. For example, in terms of print media, books are durable and able to contain lots of information, but are relatively slow and expensive to produce. In contrast, newspapers are comparatively cheaper and quicker to create, making them a better medium for the quick turnover of daily news. Television provides vastly more visual information than radio, and is more dynamic than a static printed page; it can also be used to broadcast live events to a nationwide audience, as in the annual State of the Union addresses given by the U.S. president. However, it is also a one-way medium—that is, it allows for very little direct person-to-person communication. In contrast, the Internet encourages public discussion of issues and allows nearly everyone who wants a voice to have one. However, the Internet is also largely unmoderated and uncurated. Users may have to wade through thousands of inane comments or misinformed amateur opinions in order to find quality information.

As mentioned at the start of this chapter, the 1960s media theorist Marshall McLuhan took these ideas one step further, with the phrase “the medium is the message.” A phrase coined by media theorist Marshall McLuhan asserting that every medium delivers information in a different way, and that content is fundamentally shaped by the medium of transmission. McLuhan emphasized that each medium delivers information in a different way and that content is fundamentally shaped by that medium. For example, although television news has the advantage of offering video and live coverage, making a story come vividly alive, it is also a faster-paced medium. That means stories get reported in different ways than print. A story told on television will often be more visual, have less information, and be able to offer less history and context than the same story covered in a monthly magazine. This feature of media technology leads to interesting arguments. For example, some people claim that television presents “dumbed down” information. Others disagree. In an essay about television’s effects on contemporary fiction, writer David Foster Wallace scoffed at the “reactionaries who regard TV as some malignancy visited on an innocent populace, sapping IQs and compromising SAT scores while we all sit there on ever fatter bottoms with little mesmerized spirals revolving in our eyes…Treating television as evil is just as reductive and silly as treating it like a toaster with pictures.” David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (New York: Little Brown, 1997).

We do not have to cast value judgments but can affirm: People who get the majority of their news from a particular medium will have a particular view of the world shaped not just by the content of what they watch but also by its medium . Or, as computer scientist Alan Kay put it, “Each medium has a special way of representing ideas that emphasize particular ways of thinking and de-emphasize others.” Alan Kay, “The Infobahn is Not the Answer,” Wired , May 1994. The Internet has made this discussion even richer because it seems to hold all other media within it—print, radio, film, television and more. If indeed the medium is the message, the Internet provides us with an extremely interesting message to consider.

• Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press enabled the mass production of media, which was then industrialized by Friedrich Koenig in the early 1800s. These innovations enabled the daily newspaper, which united the urbanized, industrialized populations of the 19th century.
• In the 20th century, radio allowed advertisers to reach a mass audience and helped spur the consumerism of the 1920s—and the Great Depression of the 1930s. After World War II, television boomed in the United States and abroad, though its concentration in the hands of three major networks led to accusations of conformity. The spread of cable and subsequent deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s led to more channels, but not necessarily more diverse ownership.
• Technological transitions have also had great effect on the media industry, although it is difficult to say whether technology caused a cultural shift or rather resulted from it. The ability to make technology small and affordable enough to fit into the home is an important aspect of the popularization of new technologies.

Media fulfill several roles in culture, including the following:

• Entertaining and providing an outlet for the imagination
• Educating and informing
• Serving as a public forum for the discussion of important issues
• Acting as a watchdog for government, business, and other institutions

Choose two different types of mass communication—radio shows, television broadcasts, Internet sites, newspaper advertisements, and so on from two different kinds of media. Make a list of what role(s) each one fills, keeping in mind that much of what we see, hear, or read in the mass media has more than one aspect. Consider the following questions: Does the type of media suit the social role? Why did the creators of this particular message present it in the particular way, and in this particular medium?

1.3 How Did We Get Here? The Evolution of Culture

• Define cultural period, and give examples of recent cultural periods.
• Discuss particular characteristics of the modern era, and explain how it was shaped by the Industrial Revolution.
• Explain the ways that the postmodern era differs from the modern era.

We have spoken easily of historical eras. Can we speak of cultural eras ? It can actually be a useful concept. There are many ways to divide time into cultural eras. But for our purposes, a cultural period A time marked by a particular way of understanding the world through culture and technology. is a time marked by a particular way of understanding the world through culture and technology. Changes in cultural periods are marked by fundamental changes in the way we perceive and understand the world. For example, you may have had readings about the “Middle Ages,” a marker for European history from the 5th to 15th Century. In that era, technology and communication were in the hands of authorities like the king and church who could dictate what was “true.” The Renaissance, the era that followed the Middle Ages, turned to the scientific method as a means of reaching truth through reason. This change in cultural period was galvanized by the printing press. (In 2008, Wired magazine’s editor-in-chief proclaimed that the application of Internet technology through Google was about to render the scientific method obsolete. Chris Anderson, “The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete,” Wired , June 23, 2008, http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory (accessed July 15, 2010). ) In each of these cultural eras, the nature of truth had not changed. What had changed was the way that humans used available technology to make sense of the world.

Using technology to make sense of the world? You likely can anticipate that for the purpose of studying culture and mass media, the modern and postmodern ages are some of the most exciting and relevant ones to explore, eras in which culture and technology have intersected like never before.

The Modern Age—Modernity

The Modern Age The post-Medieval era; a wide span of time marked in part by technological innovations, urbanization, scientific discoveries, and globalization. It is also referred to as modernity. is the post-Medieval era, beginning roughly after the 14th century, a wide span of time marked in part by technological innovations, urbanization, scientific discoveries, and globalization. The Modern Age is generally split into two parts: the early and the late modern periods. Scholars often talk of the Modern Age as modernity.

The early modern period began with Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press in the late 15th century and ended in the late 18th century. Thanks to Gutenberg’s press, the European population of the early modern period saw rising literacy rates, which led to educational reform. As noted earlier, Gutenberg’s machine also greatly enabled the spread of knowledge, and in turn spurred the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. During the early modern period, transportation improved, politics became more secularized, capitalism spread, nation-states grew more powerful, and information became more widely accessible. Enlightenment ideals of reason, rationalism, and faith in scientific inquiry slowly began to replace the previously dominant authority of king and church.

Huge political, social, and economic changes marked the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the late modern period . The Industrial Revolution, which began in England around 1750, combined with the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789, indicated that the world was undergoing massive changes. The Industrial Revolution had far-reaching consequences. It did not merely change the way goods were produced—it also fundamentally changed the economic, social, and cultural framework of its time.

The Industrial Revolution doesn’t have clear start or end dates. However, during the 19th century, several crucial inventions—the internal combustion engine, steam-powered ships, and railways, among others—led to other innovations across various industries. Suddenly, steam power and machine tools meant that production increased dramatically. But some of the biggest changes coming out of the Industrial Revolution were social in character. An economy based on manufacturing instead of agriculture meant that more people moved to cities, where techniques of mass production led to an emphasis on efficiency both in and out of the factory. Newly urbanized factory laborers no longer had the skill or time to produce their own food, clothing, or supplies and instead turned to consumer goods. Increased production led to increases in wealth, though income inequalities between classes also started to grow as well. Increased wealth and nonrural lifestyles led to the development of entertainment industries. Life changed rapidly.

It is no coincidence that the French and American Revolutions happened in the midst of the Industrial Revolution. The huge social changes created changes in political systems and thinking. In both France and America, the revolutions were inspired by a rejection of a monarchy in favor of national sovereignty and representative democracy. Both revolutions also heralded the rise of secular society, as opposed to church-based authority systems. Democracy was well-suited to the so-called Age of Reason, with its ideals of individual rights and its belief in progress.

Media were central to these revolutions. As we have seen, the fusing of steam power and the printing press enabled the explosive expansion of books and newspapers. Literacy rates rose, as did support for public participation in politics. More and more people lived in the city, had an education, got their news from the newspaper, spent their wages on consumer goods, and identified themselves as citizens of an industrialized nation. Urbanization, mass literacy, and new forms of mass media contributed to a sense of mass culture that united people across regional, social, and cultural boundaries.

A last note on the terminology for the cultural era of the Modern Age or modernity: A similar term—modernism—also has come into use. However, modernism is a term for an artistic, cultural movement, rather than era. Modernism An artistic movement of late-19th and early-20th centuries that arose out of the widespread changes that swept the world during that period, and that questioned the limitations of “traditional” forms of art and culture. refers to the artistic movement of late-19th and early-20th centuries that arose out of the widespread changes that swept the world during that period. Most notably, modernism questioned the limitations of “traditional” forms of art and culture. Modernist art was in part a reaction against the Enlightenment’s certainty of progress and rationality. It celebrated subjectivity through abstraction, experimentalism, surrealism, and sometimes pessimism or even nihilism. Prominent examples of modernist works include James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness novels, cubist paintings by Picasso, atonal compositions by Debussy, and absurdist plays by Pirandello. It’s not too confusing—modernism was an artistic movement taking place during the modern age.

The Postmodern Age

If you go on to graduate study in almost any field in the humanities or social sciences, you will eventually encounter texts debating the postmodern era . While the exact definition and dates of the postmodern era A cultural period that began during the second half of the 20th century and was marked by skepticism, self-consciousness, celebration of difference, and the reappraisal of modern conventions. are still debated by cultural theorists and philosophers, the general consensus is that the postmodern era began during the second half of the 20th century, and was marked by skepticism, self-consciousness, celebration of difference, and the reappraisal of modern conventions. Modernity—the Modern Age—took for granted scientific rationalism, the autonomous self, and the inevitability of progress. The postmodern age questioned or dismissed many of these assumptions. If the modern age valued order, reason, stability, and absolute truth, the postmodern age reveled in contingency, fragmentation, and instability. The aftermath of World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, the digitization of culture, the rise of the Internet, and numerous other factors fed into the skepticism and self-consciousness of the postmodern era.

Modernity’s belief in objective truth is one of the major assumptions turned on its head in the postmodern era. Postmodernists instead took their cues from Schrödinger, the quantum physicist who famously devised a thought experiment in which a cat is placed inside a sealed box with a small amount of radiation that may or may not kill it. (Remember, this is a thought experiment, and is not real.) While the box remains sealed, Schrödinger proclaimed, the cat exists simultaneously in both states, dead and alive. Both potential states are equally true. Although the thought experiment was devised to explore issues in quantum physics, it appealed to postmodernists in its assertion of radical uncertainty. What is reality? Rather than being an absolute objective truth, accessible by rational procedures and experimentation, the status of reality was contingent, and depended on the observer.

“The postmodern” affected fields from philosophy to political science to literature. Novelists and poets, for example, embraced this new approach to reality. While Victorian novelists took pains to make their books seem more “real,” postmodern narratives distrusted professions of “reality” and constantly reminded readers of the artificial nature of the story they were reading. The emphasis was not on the all-knowing author but instead on the reader. For the postmodernists, meaning was not injected into a work by its creator, but depended on the reader’s subjective experience of the work.

Another way postmodernity differed from modernity was in its rejection of what philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard deemed “ grand narratives Large-scale theories that attempt to explain the totality of human experience. .” The Modern Age was marked by different large-scale theories that attempted to explain the totality of human experience, including theories of capitalism, Marxism, rationalism, Freudianism, Darwinism, fascism, and so on. But the postmodern era called into question the sorts of theories that claimed to explain everything at once. Such thinking, postmodernists warned, led to 20th-century totalitarian regimes, such as Hitler’s Third Reich and the USSR under Stalin. The postmodern age, Lyotard theorized, was one of micro-narratives instead of grand narratives—that is, a multiplicity of small, localized understandings of the world, none of which can claim an ultimate or absolute truth. The diversity of human experience also was a marked feature of the postmodern world. As Lyotard noted, “eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general culture; one listens to reggae, watches a Western, eats McDonald’s food for lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and retro clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.” Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

Postmodernists even mistrusted the idea of originality—the supposed arrogance of thinking one had a “new thought”—and freely borrowed across cultures and genres. William S. Burroughs gleefully proclaimed a sort of call-to-arms for his postmodern generation of writers in 1985: “Out of the closets and into the museums, libraries, architectural monuments, concert halls, bookstores, recording studios and film studios of the world. Everything belongs to the inspired and dedicated thief.…Words, colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them. Loot the Louvre! A bas l’originalité (down with originality), the sterile and assertive ego that imprisons us as it creates. Vive le sol (long live the sun)-pure, shameless, total. We are not responsible. Steal anything in sight.” Burroughs’s words embodied the mixed skepticism and glee that marked the postmodern era. As the new millennium began, Bob Dylan’s album, “Love and Theft,” carried on Burroughs’s tradition. Its title and many of its lyrics are taken from numerous sources across cultures, eras and fields.

• A cultural period is a time marked by a particular way of understanding the world through culture and technology. Changes in cultural periods are marked by fundamental changes in the way we perceive and understand the world. The modern era began after the Middle Ages and lasted through the early decades of the 20th century, when the postmodern era began.
• The modern era was marked by Enlightenment philosophy, which focused on the individual and placed a high value on rational decision making. This period saw the wide expansion of capitalism, colonialism, democracy, and science-based rationalism. The Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the American and French Revolutions, and World War I are all significant events that took place during the modern era. One of the most significant, however, was the Industrial Revolution; its emphasis on routinization and efficiency helped society restructure itself along those terms as well.
• Postmodernity differed from modernity in its questioning of reason, rejection of grand narratives, and emphasis on subcultures. Rather than searching for one ultimate truth that could explain all of history, the postmodernists focused on contingency, context, and diversity.

Draw a Venn diagram of the two cultural periods discussed at length in this chapter. Make a list of the features, values, and events that mark each period. Is there any overlap? How do they differ?

1.4 Media Mix: Convergence

• Define convergence and discuss examples of it in contemporary life.
• Name the five types of convergence identified by Henry Jenkins.
• Examine how convergence is affecting culture and society.

Each cultural era is marked by changes in technology. What happens to the “old” technology? When radio was invented, people predicted the end of newspapers. When television was invented, people predicted the end of radio and film. It’s important to keep in mind that the implementation of new technologies does not mean that the old ones simply vanish into dusty museums. Today’s media consumers still read newspapers, listen to radio, watch television, and get immersed in movies. The difference is that it’s now possible to do all those things and do all those things through one device—be it a personal computer or a smartphone—and through the medium of the Internet. Such actions are enabled by media convergence The process by which previously distinct technologies come to share content, tasks, and resources. , the process by which previously distinct technologies come to share content, tasks and resources. A cell phone that also takes pictures and video is an example of the convergence of digital photography, digital video, and cellular telephone technologies. A news story that originally appeared in a newspaper and now is published on a website or pushed on a mobile phone is another example of convergence.

Kinds of Convergence

Convergence isn’t just limited to technology. Media theorist Henry Jenkins has devoted a lot of time to thinking about convergence. He argues that convergence isn’t an end result but instead a process that changes how media is both consumed and produced. Jenkins breaks convergence down into five categories:

• Economic convergence is the horizontal and vertical integration of the entertainment industry, in which a single company has interests across and within many kinds of media. For example, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation owns numerous newspapers ( The New York Post , The Wall Street Journal ) but is also involved in book publishing (HarperCollins), sports (the Colorado Rockies), broadcast television (Fox), cable television (FX, National Geographic Channel), film (20th Century Fox), Internet (Facebook), and many others.
• Organic convergence is what happens when someone is watching television while chatting online and also listening to music—such multitasking seems like a natural outcome in a diverse media world.

Cultural convergence has several different aspects. One important component is stories flowing across several kinds of media platforms—for example, novels that become television series ( Dexter or Friday Night Lights ); radio dramas that become comic strips ( The Shadow ); even amusement park rides that become film franchises ( Pirates of the Caribbean ). The character Harry Potter exists in books, films, toys, amusement park rides, and candy bars. Another aspect of cultural convergence is participatory culture A culture in which media consumers are able to annotate, comment on, remix, and otherwise respond to culture. —that is, the way media consumers are able to annotate, comment on, remix, and otherwise talk back to culture in unprecedented ways.

Nigeria’s Nollywood produces more films annually than any other country besides India.

• Global convergence is the process of geographically distant cultures influencing one another despite the oceans and mountains that may physically separate them. Nigeria’s “Nollywood” cinema takes its cues from India’s Bollywood, which of course stemmed from Hollywood; old Tom and Jerry cartoons and newer Oprah shows are popular on Arab satellite television channels; successful American horror movies like The Ring and The Grudge are remakes of Japanese hits; the hit television show, “American Idol” was a remake of a British show. The advantage of global convergence is worldwide access to a wealth of cultural influence. Its downside, some critics posit, is the threat of cultural imperialism The theory that certain cultures are attracted or pressured into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of a different culture, one that generally wields more economic power. , defined by Herbert Schiller as the way that developing countries are “attracted, pressured, forced, and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating centre of the system.” That is, less powerful nations lose their cultural traditions as more powerful nations spread their culture through their media and other forms. Cultural imperialism can be a formal policy or can happen more subtly, as with the spread of outside influence through television, movies, and other cultural projects.
• Technological convergence is the merging of technologies. When more and more different kinds of media are transformed into digital content, as Jenkins notes, “we expand the potential relationships between them and enable them to flow across platforms.” Henry Jenkins, “Convergence? I Diverge,” Technology Review , June 2001, p. 93.

Effects of Convergence

Jenkins’ concept of “organic convergence”—particularly, multitasking—is perhaps most evident in your own lives. To many who grew up in a world dominated by so-called old media, there is nothing organic about today’s mediated world. As a New York Times editorial sniffed, “Few objects on the planet are farther removed from nature—less, say, like a rock or an insect—than a glass and stainless steel smartphone.” Editorial, “The Half-Life of Phones,” The New York Times , Week in Review section, June 18, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/opinion/20sun4.html?_r=1 (accessed July 15, 2010). But modern American culture is plugged in as never before, and many students today have never known a world where the Internet didn’t exist. Such a cultural sea change causes a significant generation gap between those who grew up with new media and those who didn’t.

A 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that Americans aged 8 to 18 spend more than 7.5 hours with electronic devices each day—and, thanks to multitasking, they’re able to pack an average of 11 hours of media content into that 7.5 hours. Tamar Lewin, “If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online,” The New York Times , Education section, January 20, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/education/20wired.html (accessed July 15, 2010). These statistics highlight some of the aspects of the new digital model of media consumption: participation and multitasking. Today’s teenagers aren’t passively sitting in front of screens, quietly absorbing information. Instead, they are sending text messages to friends, linking news articles on Facebook, commenting on YouTube videos, writing reviews of television episodes to post online, and generally engaging with the culture they consume. Convergence has also made multitasking much easier, as many devices allow users to surf the Internet, listen to music, watch videos, play games, and reply to emails and texts on the same machine.

However, this multitasking is still quite new and we do not know how media convergence and immersion are shaping culture, people, and individual brains. In his 2005 book Everything Bad Is Good for You , Steven Johnson argues that today’s television and video games are mentally stimulating, in that they pose a cognitive challenge and invite active engagement and problem-solving. Poking fun at alarmists who see every new technology as making children more stupid, Johnson jokingly cautions readers against the dangers of book reading: it “chronically understimulates the senses” and is “tragically isolating.” Even worse, books “follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you.…This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.” Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You (Riverhead, NY: Riverhead Books, 2005).

A 2010 book by Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains is more pessimistic. Carr worries that the vast array of interlinked information available through the Internet is eroding attention spans and making contemporary minds distracted and less capable of deep, thoughtful engagement with complex ideas and arguments. He mourns the change in his own reading habits. “Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words,” Carr reflects ruefully. “Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Carr cites neuroscience studies showing that when people try to do two things at once, they give less attention to each and perform the tasks less carefully. In other words, multitasking makes us do a greater number of things poorly. Whatever the ultimate cognitive, social, or technological results, though, convergence is changing the way we relate to media today.

Video Killed the Radio Star: Convergence Kills Off Obsolete Technology—Or Does It?

When was the last time you used a rotary phone? How about a payphone on a street? Or a library’s card catalog? When you need brief, factual information, when was the last time you reached for a handy volume of Encyclopedia Britannica ? Odds are, it’s been a while. Maybe never. All of these habits, formerly common parts of daily life, have been rendered essentially obsolete through the progression of convergence.

But convergence hasn’t erased old technologies; instead, it may have just altered the way we use them. Take cassette tapes and Polaroid film, for example. The underground music tastemaker Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth recently claimed that he only listens to music on cassette. Polaroid Corporation, creators of the once-popular instant film cameras, was driven out of business by digital photography in 2008, only to be revived two years later—with pop star Lady Gaga as the brand’s creative director. Several iPhone apps promise to apply effects to photos to make them look more like Polaroids.

Cassettes, Polaroids, and other seemingly obsolete technologies have been able to thrive—albeit in niche markets—both despite and because of Internet culture. Instead of being slick and digitized, cassette tapes and Polaroid photos are physical objects that are made more accessible and more human, according to enthusiasts, because of their flaws. “I think there’s a group of people—fans and artists alike—out there to whom music is more than just a file on your computer, more than just a folder of mp3s,” says Brad Rose, founder of a Tulsa-based cassette label. The distinctive Polaroid look—caused by uneven color saturation, under- or over-development, or just daily atmospheric effects on the developing photograph—is emphatically analog. In an age of high resolution, portable printers, and camera phones, the Polaroid’s appeal has something to do with ideas of nostalgia and authenticity. Convergence has transformed who uses these media and for what purposes, but it hasn’t run them out of town yet.

• Twenty-first century media culture is increasingly marked by convergence, or the coming together of previously distinct technologies, as in a cell phone that also allows users to take video and check email.

Media theorist Henry Jenkins identifies the five kinds of convergence as the following:

• Economic convergence, when a single company has interests across many kinds of media.
• Organic convergence is multimedia multitasking, or the “natural” outcome of a diverse media world.
• Cultural convergence, when stories flow across several kinds of media platforms, and when readers or viewers can comment on, alter, or otherwise talk back to culture.
• Global convergence, when geographically distant cultures are able to influence one another.
• Technological convergence, in which different kinds of technology merge. The most extreme example of technological convergence would be the as-yet hypothetical “black box,” one machine that controlled every media function.
• The jury is still out on how these different types of convergence will affect people on an individual and cultural level. Some theorists believe that convergence and new media technologies make people smarter by requiring them to make decisions and interact with the media they’re consuming; others fear that the digital age is giving us access to more information but leaving us shallower.

Which argument do you find more compelling, Johnson’s or Carr’s? Make a list of points, examples, and facts that back up the theory that you think best explains the effects of convergence. Alternatively, come up with your own theory of how convergence is changing individual and society as a whole. Stage a mock debate with a member of the class who holds a view different from your own.

1.5 Cultural Values Shape Media; Media Shape Cultural Values

• Name and discuss two limitations on free speech that are based on cultural values.
• Identify examples of propaganda in mass media.
• Define gatekeeper, and explain the role of the gatekeeper in mass media.

In a 1995 Wired magazine article, Jon Katz suggested that the Revolutionary War patriot Thomas Paine should be held up as “the moral father of the Internet.” The Internet, Katz wrote, “offers what Paine and his revolutionary colleagues hoped for—a vast, diverse, passionate, global means of transmitting ideas and opening minds.” In fact, according to Katz, the emerging Internet era is closer in spirit to the 18th-century media world than the 20th-century’s so-called old media (radio, television, print). “The ferociously spirited press of the late 1700s…was dominated by individuals expressing their opinions. The idea that ordinary citizens with no special resources, expertise, or political power—like Paine himself—could sound off, reach wide audiences, even spark revolutions, was brand-new to the world.” Jon Katz, “The Age of Paine,” Wired , May 1995, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.05/paine.html (accessed July 15, 2010).

As we continue our introduction to understanding media and culture, Katz’s impassioned defense of Paine’s plucky independence reminds us of how cultural values shape media. Paine’s values led to his books and pamphlets that helped lead to a new nation. In all eras, cultural values shape the way media are created, used, and controlled. Keeping Katz’s words in mind, we can ask ourselves further questions about the role of cultural values in our media today. How do cultural values shape our media and mass communication? And how, in turn, do media and mass communication shape our values? We’ll start with a key American cultural value: free speech.

Free Speech as Cultural Value

The value of free speech is central to American mass communication, and has been since the nation’s revolutionary founding. The U.S. Constitution’s very first amendment guarantees the freedom of speech and of the press. Thanks to the First Amendment and subsequent statutes, the United States has some of the broadest protections on speech of any industrialized nation. We can see the value that American culture places on free speech. However, speech and the press are not always free—cultural values have placed limits and those limits, like values, have shifted over time.

Obscenity, for example, has not often been tolerated. Indeed, the very definition of obscenity Indecency that goes against public morals and exerts a corrupting influence. Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. has shifted over time with the nation’s changing social attitudes. James Joyce’s Ulysses , ranked by the Modern Library as the best English-language novel of the 20th century, was illegal to publish in the United States between 1922 and 1934. The 1954 Supreme Court case, Roth v. The United States , tried to lessen restrictions and defined obscenity more narrowly. It allowed for differences depending on “community standards.” Obscenity became even more of an issue during the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Cultural changes of that era made it even more difficult to pin down just what was obscene and what was meant by “community standards.” Today, obscenity continues its tug-of-war with cultural values. Sexually explicit magazines, such as Playboy , are available in nearly every U.S. airport, but pornography on the Internet is still a subject of concern.

Artist Shepard Fairey, creator of the iconic Obama HOPE image, was sued by the Associated Press for copyright infringement; Fairey argued that his work was protected by the fair use exception.

Copyright law Law that regulates the exclusive rights given to the creator of a work. also puts limits on free speech. Here we see a conflict between cultural values of free speech and the right to protect your creative rights. Intellectual property law was originally intended to protect just that—the proprietary rights, both economic and intellectual, of the originator of a creative work. Works under copyright can’t be reproduced without the authorization of the creator, nor can anyone else use them to make a profit. Inventions, novels, musical tunes, and even phrases can all be covered by copyright law. The first copyright statute in the United States set 14 years as the maximum term for copyright protection. This number has risen exponentially in the 20th century; some works are now copyright protected for up to 120 years. In recent years, an Internet culture that enables file sharing, mixing, mash-ups, and YouTube parodies has raised questions about copyright. Can you refer to a copyrighted work? What is fair use of a copyrighted work? The exact line between what expressions are protected or prohibited by law are still being set by courts; and as the changing values of the U.S. public evolve, copyright law—like obscenity law—will continue to change as well.

Persuasion and Cultural Values

Cultural values also shape mass media messages when producers of media content have vested interests in particular social goals. The producers offer media content that promotes or refutes particular viewpoints. Governments, corporations, nonprofits, colleges, indeed most organizations, all try to shape media content to promote themselves and their values. In its most heavy-handed form, at the level of government, this type of media influence can become propaganda Communication that intentionally attempts to persuade its audience for ideological, political, or commercial purposes. , communication that intentionally attempts to persuade its audience for ideological, political, or commercial purposes. Propaganda often (but not always) distorts the truth, selectively presents facts, or uses emotional appeals. In war time, propaganda often includes caricatures of the enemy.

During World War I, for example, the U.S. government created the Creel Commission to act as a sort of public relations agency for the American entry into the war. The commission used radio, movies, posters, and in-person speakers to present a positive slant on the American war effort and demonize the opposing Germans. George Creel, chairman of the commission, acknowledged the committee’s attempt at influencing the public, but he shied away from calling its work propaganda:

In no degree was the committee an agency of censorship, a machinery of concealment or repression.…In all things, from first to last, without halt or change, it was a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise in salesmanship, the world’s greatest adventures in advertising…We did not call it propaganda, for that word, in German hands, had come to be associated with deceit and corruption. Our effort was educational and informative throughout, for we had such confidence in our case as to feel that no other argument was needed than the simple, straightforward presentation of the facts. George Creel, How We Advertised America (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920).

World War I propaganda posters were sometimes styled to resemble movie posters in an attempt to glamorize the war effort.

Of course, the line between the selective (but “straightforward”) presentation of the truth and the manipulation of propaganda is not an obvious or distinct one. (Another of the commission’s members was later deemed “the father of public relations” and authored a book titled Propaganda .) Advertisers craft messages so viewers want to buy their products. Some news sources, such as cable news channels or political blogs, have an explicit political slant. For our purposes, we simply want to keep in mind how cultural values shape much media content.

The Cultural Value of Gatekeepers

In 1960, journalist A. J. Liebling wryly observed that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Although he may not have put it in those terms, Liebling was talking about the role of gatekeepers in the media industry, another way in which cultural values influence mass communication. Gatekeepers The people who help determine which stories make it to the public, including reporters who decide what sources to use, and editors who pick what gets reported on, and which stories make it to the front page. are the people who help determine which stories make it to the public, including reporters who decide what sources to use, and editors who pick what gets published and which stories make it to the front page. Media gatekeepers are part of culture and thus have their own cultural values, whether consciously or unconsciously. In deciding what counts as newsworthy, entertaining, or relevant, gatekeepers use their own values to create and shape what gets presented to the wider public. Conversely, gatekeepers may decide that some events are unimportant or uninteresting to consumers. Those events may never reach the eyes or ears of a larger public.

In one striking example of how cultural values shape gatekeeping, journalist Allan Thompson points to the news media’s sluggishness in covering the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Almost one million people were killed in ferocious attacks in just 100 days. Yet, as Thompson notes, few foreign correspondents were in Africa, and the world was slow to learn of the atrocities in Rwanda. Instead, the nightly news was preoccupied by the O. J. Simpson murder trial, Tonya Harding’s attack on a fellow figure skater, or the less-bloody conflict in Bosnia (a European country, where more reporters were stationed). Thompson argues that the lack of international media attention allowed politicians to remain complacent. With little media coverage, there was little outrage about the Rwandan atrocities, which contributed to a lack of political will to invest time and troops in a faraway conflict. Richard Dowden, Africa Editor for the British newspaper The Independent during the Rwandan genocide, bluntly explained the news media’s larger reluctance to focus on African issues: “Africa was simply not important. It didn’t sell newspapers. Newspapers have to make profits. So it wasn’t important. Cultural values by gatekeepers on the individual and institutional level downplayed the genocide at a time of great crisis, and potentially contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.” POLISMedia, “The Media and the Rwanda Genocide,” Lecture Delivered at The Crisis States Research Centre and POLIS at the London School of Economics, January 17, 2007, http://www.polismedia.org/rwandatranscript.aspx (accessed July 15, 2010).

Gatekeepers had an especially strong influence in old media, in which space and time were limited. A news broadcast could only last for its allotted half hour, 22 minutes with commercials, while a newspaper had a set number of pages to print. The Internet, in contrast, has room for infinite news reports. The interactive nature of the medium also minimizes the gatekeeper function of the media by allowing media consumers to have a voice as well. News aggregators like Digg.com allow readers to decide what makes it on to the front page. That is not to say that the wisdom or cultural values of the crowd is always wise—recent top stories on Digg have featured headlines like “Top 5 Hot Girls Playing Video Games” and “The girl who must eat every 15 minutes to stay alive.” Media expert Mark Glaser noted that the digital age hasn’t eliminated gatekeepers; it’s just shifted who they are: “the editors who pick featured artists and apps at the Apple iTunes store, who choose videos to spotlight on YouTube, and who highlight Suggested Users on Twitter,” among others. And unlike traditional media, these new gatekeepers rarely have public bylines, making it difficult to figure out who makes such decisions and on what basis. Mark Glaser, “New Gatekeepers Twitter, Apple, YouTube Need Transparent Editorial Picks,” PBS Mediashift , March 26 2009.

Observing how distinct cultures and subcultures present the same story can be indicative of those cultures’ various cultural values. Another way to look critically at today’s media messages is to examine how the media has functioned in the world and in the United States during different cultural periods.

• American culture puts a high value on free speech; however, other cultural values sometimes take precedence. Shifting ideas about what constitutes obscenity, a kind of speech that is not legally protected by the First Amendment, is a good example of how cultural values impact mass communication—and of how those values change over time. Copyright law, another restriction put on free speech, has had a similar evolution over the nation’s history.
• Propaganda is a message that attempts to persuade its audience for ideological, political, or social purposes. Some propaganda is obvious, explicit, and manipulative; however, advertising and public relations also are persuasive strategies that try to influence audiences.
• Gatekeepers influence culture by deciding what stories are considered newsworthy. Gatekeepers can promote cultural values either consciously or unconsciously. The digital age has lessened the power of gatekeepers somewhat, as the Internet allows for nearly unlimited space to cover any number of events and stories.
• Find an advertisement—either in print, broadcast, or online—that you have recently found to be memorable. Now find a non-advertisement media message. Compare and contrast the ways that the ad and the non-ad express cultural values. Are the cultural values the same for each of them? Is the influence overt or covert? Why did the message’s creators choose to present their message in this way?
• Go to a popular website that uses user-uploaded content (YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Metafilter, etc.). Look at the content on the site’s homepage. Can you tell how this particular content was selected to be featured? Does the website list a policy for featured content? What factors do you think go into the selection process?

1.6 Mass Media and Popular Culture

• Define tastemakers, and give examples of their influence in traditional media.
• Examine the ways the digital age is undermining the traditional role of tastemakers.
• Analyze how Internet culture now allows creators to bypass gatekeepers, and discuss the potential effects of this.

Source: Used with permission from Getty Images.

In 1850, an epidemic swept America—but instead of leaving victims sick with fever or flu, this was a rabid craze for the music of Swedish soprano Jenny Lind. American showman P. T. Barnum (who would later go on to found the circus we now know as Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus), a shrewd marketer and self-made millionaire, is credited with spreading “Lindomania” through a series of astute show-business moves. Barnum promised Lind an unprecedented thousand-dollar-a-night fee (the equivalent of close to $30,000 in today’s dollars) for her entire 93-performance tour of the United States. Ever the savvy self-promoter, Barnum turned this huge investment to his advantage, using it to drum up publicity—and it paid off. When the Swedish soprano’s ship docked on U.S. shores, she was greeted by 40,000 ardent fans; another 20,000 swarmed her hotel. Congress was adjourned during Lind’s visit to Washington, DC, where the National Theater had to be enlarged in order to accommodate her audiences. A town in California and an island in Canada were named in her honor. Enthusiasts could purchase Jenny Lind hats, chairs, boots, opera glasses, and even pianos.

A little more than a century later, a new craze transformed American teenagers into screaming, fainting Beatle-maniacs. When the British foursome touched down at Kennedy Airport in 1964, they were met by more than 3,000 frenzied fans. Their performance on The Ed Sullivan Show was seen by 73 million people, or 40 percent of the U.S. population. The crime rate that night dropped to its lowest level in 50 years. Beatlemania was at such a fever pitch that Life magazine cautioned that “A Beatle who ventures out unguarded into the streets runs the very real peril of being dismembered or crushed to death by his fans.” Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs, “Beatlemania: Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” In The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis (New York: Routledge, 1992). The BBC helpfully pointed out that there was plenty of paraphrenalia for true fans to spend their money on: “T-shirts, sweat shirts, turtle-neck sweaters, tight-legged trousers, night shirts, scarves, and jewellery inspired by the Beatles” were all available, as were Beatles-style moptop wigs.

In the 21st century, rabid fans could actually help decide the next pop stars through the reality television program American Idol . Derived from a British show, American Idol hit the airwaves in 2002 and became the only television program ever to earn the top spot in the Neilsen ratings for six seasons in a row, often averaging more than 30 million nightly viewers. Rival television networks quaked in fear, deeming the pop behemoth “the ultimate schoolyard bully,” “the Death Star,” or even “the most impactful show in the history of television.” Bill Carter, “For Fox’s Rivals, ‘American Idol’ Remains a ‘Schoolyard Bully,’” The New York Times , February 20, 2007, Arts Section. Newspapers put developments on the show on their front pages. New cell phone technologies allowed viewers to have a direct role in the program’s star-making enterprise through casting votes. Fans also could sign up for text alerts or play trivia games on their phones. In 2009, AT&T estimated that Idol -related text traffic amounted to 178 million messages.

An important consideration in any discussion of media and culture is the concept of popular culture . If culture is the expressed and shared values, attitudes, beliefs, and practices of a social group, organization, or institution, then what is popular culture? Popular culture The media, products, and attitudes considered to be part of the mainstream of a given culture and the everyday life of common people; it is often distinct from more formal conceptions of culture that take into account moral, social, religious beliefs and values; it ia also distinct from what some consider elite or high culture. is the media, products, and attitudes considered to be part of the mainstream of a given culture and the everyday life of common people. It is often distinct from more formal conceptions of culture that take into account moral, social, religious beliefs and values, such as our earlier definition of culture. It is also distinct from what some consider elite or high culture. For some people, American Idol is pop culture and opera is culture.

Pop culture and American media are inextricably linked—it’s no coincidence that Jenny Lind, the Beatles, and American Idol were each promoted using a then-new technology—photography for Lind; television for the Beatles; the Internet and text messaging for American Idol . For as long as mass media have existed in the United States, they have helped to create and fuel mass crazes, skyrocketing celebrities, and pop culture manias of all kinds. Whether through newspaper advertisements, live television broadcasts, or integrated Internet marketing, media industry “tastemakers” help to shape what we care about. Even in our era of seemingly limitless entertainment options, mass hits like American Idol still have the ability to dominate the public’s attention.

“The Tastemakers”

Historically, popular culture has been closely associated with mass media that introduce and encourage the adoption of certain trends. We can see these media as “tastemakers”—people or institutions that shape the way others think, eat, listen, drink, dress and more. Similar in some ways to the media gatekeepers discussed above, tastemakers People or organizations who exert a strong influence on current trends, styles, and other aspects of popular culture. can have huge influence. For example, The New York Times’ restaurant and theater reviews used to be able to make or break a restaurant or show with their opinions. Another example is Ed Sullivan’s variety show, which ran from 1948 to 1971, and is most famous for hosting the first U.S. appearance of the Beatles—a television event that was at the time the most-watched television program ever. Sullivan hosted musical acts, comedians, actors, and dancers, and had the reputation of being able to turn an unknown performer into a full-fledged star. Comedian Jackie Mason compared being on The Ed Sullivan Show to “an opera singer being at the Met. Or if a guy is an architect that makes the Empire State Building.…This was the biggest.” John Leonard, “The Ed Sullivan Age,” American Heritage , May/June, 1997. Sullivan was a classic example of an influential tastemaker of his time. American Idol ’s Simon Cowell had similar influence as his show helped turn unknown local performers into international stars. Television hosts and comics Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert can be understood as tastemakers of progressive national politics.

Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert at Comedy Central’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”.

Source: Photo by Jeff Snyder/PictureGroup via AP Images

Along with encouraging a mass audience to keep an eye out for (or skip) certain movies, television shows, video games, books, or fashion trends, tastemaking is also used to create demand for new products. Companies often turn to advertising firms to help create a public hunger for an object that may have not even existed six months previously. In the 1880s, when George Eastman developed the Kodak camera for personal use, photography was the realm of professionals. Ordinary people simply did not think about taking photographs. “Though the Kodak was relatively cheap and easy to use, most Americans didn’t see the need for a camera; they had no sense that there was any value in visually documenting their lives,” noted New Yorker writer James Surowiecki. James Surowiecki, “The Tastemakers,” The New Yorker , January 13, 2003. George Eastman’s advertising introduced the very idea of photography to everyday Americans. Kodak became a wildly successful company not because Eastman was good at selling cameras, but because he understood that what he really had to sell was photography.

Tastemakers can help keep culture vital by introducing the public to new ideas, music, programs, or products. But the ability to sway or influence the tastes of consumers can be worth millions of dollars. In the traditional media model, media companies set aside large advertising budgets to promote their most promising projects. Tastemakers are encouraged to buzz about “the next big thing.” In untraditional models, bribery and backroom deals also have helped promote performers or projects. For example, the Payola Scandal of the 1950s involved record companies paying the disc jockeys of radio stations to play certain records so those records would become hits. Payola is a combination of the words “pay” and “Victrola,” a record player. Companies today sometimes pay bloggers to promote their products.

A Changing System for the Internet Age

In retrospect, the 20th century was a tastemaker’s dream. Media choices were limited. Many cities and towns had just three television channels, one or two newspapers, and one or two dominant radio stations. Advertisers, critics, and other cultural influencers had access to huge audiences through a small number of mass communication platforms. However, by the end of the century, the rise of cable television and the Internet had begun to make tastemaking a much more complicated enterprise. While The Ed Sullivan Show regularly reached 50 million people in the 1960s, the most popular television series of 2009— American Idol —averaged around 25.5 million viewers per night, despite the fact that the 21st century United States could claim more people and more television sets than ever before. The proliferation of television channels and other, competing forms of entertainment meant that no one program or channel could dominate the attention of the American public as in Sullivan’s day.

Table 1.1 Viewings of Popular Television Broadcasts

The very concept of a “tastemaker” is undergoing a transformation. While the American Idol season five finale was reaching 36 million viewers, a low-tech home recording of a little boy acting loopy after a visit to the dentist (“David After Dentist”) garnered more than 37 million YouTube viewings in 2009 alone. The Internet appears to be eroding some of the tastemaking power of the traditional media outlets. No longer are the traditional mass media the only dominant forces in creating and promoting trends. Instead, information can spread across the globe without any involvement of traditional media. Websites made by nonprofessionals can reach more people daily than a major newspaper. Music review sites such as Pitchfork.com keep their eyes out for the next big thing, whereas review aggregators like RottenTomatoes.com allow readers to read hundreds of reviews by amateurs and professionals alike. Mobile applications like Yelp allow consumers to get individual reviews of a restaurant while they are standing outside it. Blogs make it possible for anyone with Internet access to potentially reach an audience of millions. Some popular bloggers transitioned from the traditional media world to the digital world, but others became well known without formal institutional support. The celebrity gossip chronicler Perez Hilton had no formal training in journalism when he started his blog, PerezHilton.com , in 2005; within a few years, he was reaching millions of readers a month.

Email and text messages allow for the near-instant transmission of messages across vast geographic expanses. Although personal communications continue to dominate, email and text messages are increasingly used to directly transmit information about important news events. When Barack Obama wanted to announce his selection of Joe Biden as his vice-presidential running mate in the 2008 election, he bypassed the traditional televised press conference and instead sent the news to his supporters directly via text message—2.9 million text messages, to be exact. Nic Covey, “Flying Fingers,” Nielsen, http://en-us.nielsen.com/main/insights/consumer_insight/issue_12/flying_fingers (accessed July 15, 2010). Social networking sites, such as Facebook, and microblogging services, such as Twitter, are another source of late-breaking information. When Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest in 2009, “RIP Michael Jackson” was a top trending topic on Twitter before mainstream media first reported the news.

Thanks to these and other digital-age media, the Internet has become a pop culture force, both a source of amateur talent and a source of amateur promotion. However, traditional media outlets still maintain a large amount of control and influence over U.S. pop culture. One key indicator is the fact that many singers or writers who first make their mark on the Internet quickly transition to more traditional media—YouTube star Justin Bieber was snapped up by a mainstream record company, and blogger Perez Hilton is regularly featured on MTV and VH1. New media stars are quickly absorbed into the old media landscape.

Getting Around the Gatekeepers

Not only does the Internet allow little known individuals to potentially reach a huge audience with their art or opinions, but it also allows content-creators to reach fans directly. Projects that may have not succeeded as part of the established pop culture/mass media machine may get a chance in the digital world. For example, the media establishment has been surprised by the success of some self-published books: First-time author Daniel Suarez had his novel manuscript rejected by dozens of literary agents before he decided to self-publish in 2006. Through savvy self-promotion via influential bloggers, Suarez garnered enough attention to land a contract with a major publishing house.

Figure 1.10

E-readers offer authors a way to get around the traditional publishing industry, but their thousands of options can make choosing hard on readers.

Suarez’s story, though certainly exceptional, points to some of the questions facing creators and consumers of pop culture in the Internet age. Without the influence of an agent, editor, or public relations firm, self-published content may be able to remain closer to the creator’s intention. However, how then does the content reach the public? Does every artist have to have the public relations and marketing skills of Suarez? And with so many self-published, self-promoted works uploaded to the Internet every day, how will any work—even great work—get noticed?

It’s not impossible. Critic Laura Miller spells out some of the ways in which writers in particular are able to take control of their own publishing: Writers can upload their works to services run by Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, she notes, “transforming them into e-books that are instantly available in high-profile online stores. Or they can post them on services like Urbis.com , Quillp.com , or CompletelyNovel.com and coax reviews from other hopeful users.” Miller also points out that many of these companies can produce hard copies of books as well. While such a system may be a boon for writers who haven’t had success with the traditional media establishment, Miller notes that it may not be the best option for readers, who “rarely complain that there isn’t enough of a selection on Amazon or in their local superstore; they’re more likely to ask for help in narrowing down their choices.” Laura Miller, “When Anyone Can Be a Published Author,” Salon, June 22, 2010, http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/06/22/slush (accessed July 15, 2010).

The commingling of the Internet and popular culture poses many intriguing questions for our future: Will the Internet era be marked by a huge and diffuse pop culture, where the power of traditional mass media declines and, along with it, the power of the universalizing blockbuster hit? Or will the Internet create a new set of tastemakers—influential bloggers or Tweeters? Or will the Internet serve as a platform for the old tastemakers to take on new forms? Or will the tastemakers become everyone?

More Reviewers=More Accurate Reviews…Right?

In 1993, The New York Times restaurant critic Ruth Reichl visited one of Manhattan’s snootiest restaurants, Le Cirque, first as herself, a fashionable New Yorker, and then, one week later, in the guise of a frumpy Midwesterner. In her shocking review, the critic lambasted the restaurant’s rude treatment of “Midwestern Molly”—an early battle in the fight for democratic reviews. Part of the point of Reichl’s experiment was to find out how ordinary people were treated in restaurants. Now ordinary people can tell their own tales. The Internet, which has turned everyone with the time and interest into a potential reviewer, allows those ordinary people to have their voices heard. In the mid-2000s, websites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor boasted hundreds of reviews of restaurants, hotels, and salons provided by users. Amazon allowed users to review any product it sells, from textbooks to fertilizer to bathing suits. The era of the democratized review was upon us, and tastemaking was now everyone’s job.

By crowd-sourcing The act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an individual, and delegating them to a (usually unpaid) crowd. the review process, the idea was, these sites would arrive at a more accurate description of the service in choice. One powerful reviewer would no longer be able to wield disproportionate power. Instead, the wisdom of the crowd would make or break restaurants, movies, and everything else. Anyone who felt treated badly or scammed now had recourse to tell the world about it. By 2008, Yelp boasted four million reviews.

However, mass tastemaking isn’t as perfect as some people had promised. One determined reviewer can overly influence a product’s overall rating by contributing multiple votes. One study found that a handful of Amazon users were casting hundreds of votes, while most rarely wrote reviews at all. Online reviews also tend to skew to extremes—more reviews are written by the ecstatic and the furious, while the moderately pleased aren’t riled up enough to post online about their experiences. And while traditional critics are supposed to uphold ethics, there’s no such standard for online reviews. Savvy authors or restaurant owners have been known to slyly insert positive reviews of themselves, or have attempted to skew ratings systems. In order to get an accurate picture, potential buyers may find themselves wading through 20 or 30 online reviews, most of them from non-professionals. Consider these Amazon user reviews of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”: “There is really no point and it’s really long,” “I really didn’t enjoy reading this book and I wish that our English teacher wouldn’t force my class to read this play,” and “don’t know what Willy Shakespeare was thinking when he wrote this one play tragedy, but I thought this sure was boring! Hamlet does too much talking and not enough stuff.”

Such unhelpful reviews have begun to remind people of the point of having reviews in the first place—that it’s an advantage to have certain places, products, or ideas examined and critiqued by a trusted source. In an article about Yelp, The New York Times noted that one of the site’s elite reviewers had racked up more than 300 reviews in 3 years, then snidely pointed out that “By contrast, a The New York Times restaurant critic might take six years to amass 300 reviews. The critic visits a restaurant several times, strives for anonymity and tries to sample every dish on the menu.” Donald G. McNeil, “Eat and Tell,” The New York Times , Dining & Wine section, November 4, 2008. Whatever your vantage point, it’s clear that old-style tastemaking is still around and still valuable—but the democratic review is here to stay.

• Traditionally, pop culture hits were often initiated or driven by the active support of media tastemakers. When mass media are limited in number, people with access to platforms for mass communication wield quite a bit of power in what becomes well-known, popular, or even infamous. Ed Sullivan’s wildly popular variety show in the 1950s and 1960s served as a star-making vehicle and a tastemaker extraordinaire of that period.
• The digital age, with its proliferation of accessible media, has undermined the traditional role of the tastemaker. In contrast to the traditional media, Internet-based mass media is not limited by time or space and allows bloggers, critics, or wannabe stars to potentially reach millions without the backing of the traditional media industry.
• However, this democratization has its downsides as well. An abundance of mass communication without some form of selection can lead to information overload. Additionally, online reviews can be altered or biased.

Find a popular newspaper or magazine that discusses popular culture. Look through it to determine what pop culture movements, programs, or people it seems to be covering. What is its overall tone? What messages does it seem to be promoting, either implicitly or explicitly? Next, find a website that also deals with popular culture and ask yourself the same questions. Are there differences between the traditional media’s and the new media’s approach to popular culture? Do they focus on the same subjects? Do they take similar attitudes? Why or why not?

1.7 Media Literacy

• Define media literacy, and explain why it is relevant to today’s world.
• Discuss the role of individual responsibility and accountability when responding to pop culture.
• List the five key questions that can be asked about any media message.

In Gutenberg’s age and the subsequent modern era, literacy—the ability to read and write—was a concern not only of educators but also of politicians, social reformers, and philosophers. A literate population, many reasoned, would be able to seek out information, stay informed about the news of the day, communicate with others, and make informed decisions in many spheres of life. Because of this, the reasoning went, literate people made better citizens, parents, and workers. In the 20th century, as literacy rates grew around the globe, there was a new sense that merely being able to read and write was not enough. In a world dominated by media, individuals needed to be able to understand, sort through and analyze the information they were bombarded with every day. In the second half of the 20th century, a name was finally put to this skill of being able to decode and process the messages and symbols transmitted via media: media literacy The skill of being able to decode and process the messages and symbols transmitted via media. . According to the nonprofit National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), a person who is media literate is able to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate information. Put another way by John Culkin, a pioneering advocate for media literacy education, “the new mass media—film, radio, TV—are new languages, their grammar as yet unknown.” Kate Moody, “John Culkin, SJ: The Man Who Invented Media Literacy: 1928–1993,” Center for Media Literacy, http://www.medialit.org/reading_room/article408.html (accessed July 15, 2010). Media literacy seeks to give media consumers the ability to understand this new language.

Why Be Media Literate?

Culkin called the pervasiveness of media “the unnoticed fact of our present,” noting that media information was as omnipresent and easy to overlook as the air we breathe (and, he noted, “some would add that it is just as polluted”). Our exposure to media starts early—a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 68 percent of children aged two and younger spend an average of two hours in front of a screen (either computer or television) each day, while children under six spend as much time in front of a screen as they do playing outside. As previously noted, U.S. teenagers are spending an average of 7.5 hours with media daily, nearly as long as they spend in school. Media literacy isn’t merely a skill for young people, however. Today, Americans of all ages get much of their information from various media sources. One crucial role of media literacy education is to enable all of us to skeptically examine the often-conflicting media messages we receive every day.

Advertising

Many of the hours people spend with media are with commercial-sponsored content. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) estimated that children aged 2 to 11 saw, on average, 25,629 television commercials a year, or more than 10,700 minutes of ads. Adults saw 52,469 ads, or about 15.5 days worth of television advertising. Debra Holt, Pauline Ippolito, Debra Desrochers, and Christopher Kelley, “Children’s Exposure to TV Advertising in 1977 and 2004,” Federal Trade Commission Bureau of Economics Staff Report, June 1, 2007. Children (and adults) are bombarded with contradictory messages—newspaper articles about the obesity epidemic are side by side with ads touting soda, candy, and fast food. The American Academy of Pediatrics maintains that advertising directed at children under eight is “inherently deceptive” and exploitative because young children cannot tell the difference between programs and commercials. Donald Shifrin, “Perspectives on Marketing, Self-Regulation and Childhood Obesity,” Remarks given at Federal Trade Commission Workshop July 14–15, 2005, Washington, DC.

Advertising raises other issues as well. It often uses techniques of psychological pressure to influence decision making. Ads might appeal to vanity, insecurity, prejudice, fear, or the desire for adventure. This is not always a negative thing—antismoking public service announcements may rely on disgusting images of blackened lungs to shock viewers. Nonetheless, media literacy attempts to teach people to be informed and guarded consumers, and to evaluate claims with a critical eye. Do “four out of five doctors” really endorse the product?

Bias, Spin, and Misinformation

Advertisements may have the explicit goal of selling a product or idea, but they’re not the only kind of media message with an agenda. A politician may hope to persuade potential voters that she has their best interests at heart. An ostensibly objective journalist may allow his or her own political leanings to subtly slant articles. Magazine writers might avoid criticizing companies that advertise heavily in their pages. Broadcast news reporters may sensationalize stories in order to boost ratings—and advertising rates.

An important part of media literacy is remembering that mass communication messages are created by individuals, each with a set of values, assumptions, and priorities. Accepting media messages at face value could lead to head-spinning confusion, thanks to all the contradictory information that’s out there. For example, in 2010, a highly contested governor’s race in New Mexico led to conflicting ads from both candidates, Diane Denish and Susana Martinez. Each claimed that the other agreed to policies that benefited sex offenders. According to the media watchdog site Factcheck.org , the Denish team’s ad “shows a pre-teen girl—seemingly about 9 years old—going down a playground slide in slow-motion, while ominous music plays in the background and an announcer discusses two sex crime cases. It ends with an empty swing, as the announcer says: ‘Today we don’t know where these sex offenders are lurking, because Susana Martinez didn’t do her job.’” The opposing ad proclaims that “a department in Denish’s cabinet gave sanctuary to criminal illegals [ sic ], like child molester Juan Gonzalez.” Both claims are highly inflammatory, play on fear, and distort the reality behind each situation. Media literacy attempts to give people the skills to look critically at these and other media messages—to sift through various claims, and to make sense of the often-conflicting information we face every day.

The Center for Media Literacy’s Five Core Concepts

• All media messages are constructed.
• Media messages are constructed using a creative language with its own rules.
• Different people experience the same media message differently.
• Media have embedded values and points of view.
• Most media messages are organized to gain profit and/or power. http://www.medialit.org

New Skills for a New World

In the past, one goal of education was to provide students with the information deemed necessary to successfully engage with the world. Students memorized multiplication tables, state capitals, famous poems, and notable dates. In today’s world, however, vast amounts of information are available at the click of a mouse. Even before the advent of the Internet, noted communications scholar David Berlo foresaw the consequences of expanding information technology: “Most of what we have called formal education has been intended to imprint on the human mind all of the information that we might need for a lifetime.” Changes in technology necessitate changes in how we learn, Berlo noted, and these days “education needs to be geared toward the handling of data rather than the accumulation of data.” David Shaw, “A Plea for Media Literacy in our Nation’s Schools,” Los Angeles Times , November 30, 2003.

Online technology surely has changed how we learn. For example, Wikipedia, a hugely popular Internet encyclopedia, is at the center of a debate on the proper use of online sources. In 2007, Middlebury College banned the use of Wikipedia as a source in history papers and exams. One of the school’s librarians noted that the online encyclopedia “symbolizes the best and worst of the Internet. It’s the best because everyone gets his/her say and can state their views. It’s the worst because people who use it uncritically take for truth what is only opinion.” Meredith Byers, “Controversy over use of Wikipedia in academic papers arrives at Smith,” Smith College Sophian , News section, March 8, 2007. Or as comedian and satirist Stephen Colbert put it, “any user can change any entry, and if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true.” In 2007, CIA computers were used to make edits on the site’s article about the President of Iran. The Vatican allegedly doctored the entry for Irish activist and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams. A computer registered to the U.S. Democratic Party changed the site’s page for Rush Limbaugh to proclaim that he was “racist” and a “bigot.” Jonathan Fildes, “Wikipedia ‘shows CIA page edits.’” BBC News , Science and Technology section, August 15, 2007. Media literacy teaches today’s students how to sort through the Internet’s cloud of data, ferret out reliable sources, and be aware of bias and unreliable sources.

Individual Accountability and Popular Culture

Ultimately, media literacy teaches that messages and images are constructed with various aims in mind and that each individual has the responsibility to evaluate and interpret these media messages. Mass communication may be created and disseminated by individuals, businesses, governments, or organizations, but they are always received by an individual, even if that individual is sitting in a crowded theater. Education, life experience, and a host of other factors allow each person to interpret constructed media in different ways; there is no “right answer,” or one way to read the media. But media literacy skills help us to function better in our media-rich environment, enabling us to be better democratic citizens, smarter shoppers, and more skeptical media consumers. As a means to this end, NAMLE has come up with a list of five questions to ask when analyzing media messages:

• Who created this message?
• What creative techniques are used to attract my attention?
• How might different people understand this message differently?
• What values, lifestyles, and points of view are represented in, or omitted from, this message?
• Why is this message being sent? Center for Media Literacy, MediaLitKit, http://www.medialit.org/pdf/mlk/14A_CCKQposter.pdf (accessed July 15, 2010).

With these questions as a starting point, we can ensure that we’re staying informed about where our information comes from, and why—important steps in any media literacy education.

• Media literacy, or the ability to decode and process media messages, is especially key in today’s media-saturated society. Media surrounds contemporary Americans to an unprecedented degree, and from an early age. Because media messages are constructed with particular aims in mind, a media literate individual will interpret them with a critical eye. Advertisements, bias, spin, and misinformation are all things to look out for.
• Individual responsibility is crucial for media literacy because, while media messages may be produced by individuals, companies, governments, or organizations, they are always received and decoded by individuals.

The following are NAMLE’s five questions that can be asked about any media message:

• Why is this message being sent?

Find a media message of any kind and apply NAMLE’s five questions to it. Did your impression change? How does this piece of mass communication attempt to get its message across? Do you think it’s successful? Why or why not?

End-of-Chapter Assessment

Review Questions

Questions for Section 1.1 "Intersection of American Media and Culture"

• What is the difference between mass communication and mass media?
• What are some ways that culture affects media?
• What are some ways that media affect culture?

Questions for Section 1.2 "How Did We Get Here? The Evolution of Media"

• List four roles that media plays in society.
• Identify historical events that shaped the adoption of various mass communication platforms.
• How have technological shifts impacted the media industry over time?

Questions for Section 1.3 "How Did We Get Here? The Evolution of Culture"

• What is a cultural period?
• How did events, technological advances, political changes, and philosophies help shape the modern era?
• What are some of the major differences between the modern and postmodern eras?

Questions for Section 1.4 "Media Mix: Convergence"

• What is convergence, and what are some examples of it in daily life?
• What were the five types of convergence identified by Jenkins?
• How are different kinds of convergence shaping the digital age, on both an individual and a social level?

Questions for Section 1.5 "Cultural Values Shape Media; Media Shape Cultural Values"

• How does the value of free speech influence American culture and media?
• What are some of the limits placed on free speech, and how do they reflect social values?
• What is propaganda, and how does it reflect or influence social values?
• Who are gatekeepers, and how do they influence the media landscape?

Questions for Section 1.6 "Mass Media and Popular Culture"

• What is popular culture and how does it differ from traditional notions of culture?
• Who are tastemakers and what are some key examples?
• How have tastemakers changed with changes in technology?

Questions for Section 1.7 "Media Literacy"

• What is media literacy, and why is it relevant in today’s world?
• What is the role of the individual in interpreting media messages?
• What are the five questions that NAMLE suggests should be asked of any media message?

Critical Thinking Questions

• What does the history of media technologies have to teach us about present-day America? How might current and emerging technologies change our cultural landscape in the near future?
• Are gatekeepers and tastemakers necessary for mass media? How is the Internet helping us to re-imagine these roles?
• The idea of cultural periods presumes that changes in society and technology lead to dramatic shifts in the way people see the world. How has the Internet and digital technology changed how people interact with their environment, and with each other? Are we changing to a new cultural period, or is contemporary life still a continuation of the postmodern era?
• U.S. law regulates free speech through laws on obscenity, copyright infringement, and other things. Why are some forms of expression protected and others aren’t? How do you think cultural values will change U.S. media law in the near future?
• Does media literacy education belong in American schools? Why or why not? What might a media literacy curriculum look like?

Career Connection

In a heavily mediated world, almost every organization, from a university to a multinational corporation, employs media specialists. Many organizations also use consultants to help analyze and manage the interaction between their organizations and the media. Independent consultants develop projects, keep abreast of media trends, and provide advice based on industry reports. Or, as writer, speaker, and media consultant Merlin Mann puts it, the “primary job is to stay curious about everything, identify the points where two forces might clash, then enthusiastically share what that might mean, as well as why you might care.”

Read the blog post “So what do consultants do?” at http://www.consulting-business.com/so-what-do-consultants-do.html .

Now explore the site of Merlin Mann at http://www.merlinmann.com . Make sure to take a look at the “Bio” and “FAQs” sections. These two pages will help you answer the following questions:

• Merlin Mann provides some work for free and charges a significant amount for other projects. What are some of the indications he gives in his biography about what he values? How do you think his values influence his fees?
• Check out Merlin’s “Projects.” What are some of the projects that Merlin is or has been involved with? Now look at the “Speaking” page. Can you see a link between his projects and his role as a prominent writer, speaker, and consultant?
• Check out Merlin’s FAQ section. What is his attitude about social networking sites? What about public relations? Why do you think he holds these opinions?
• Think about niches in the Internet industry where a consultant might be helpful. Do you have expertise, theories, or reasonable advice that might make you a useful asset for a business or organization? Find an example of an organization or group with some media presence. If you were this group’s consultant, how would you recommend that they better reach their goals?

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

13.6 Globalization of Media

Learning objectives.

• Identify three ways that technology has helped speed globalization.
• Explain how media outlets employ globalization to their advantage.
• Describe some advances that can be made in foreign markets.

The media industry is, in many ways, perfect for globalization, or the spread of global trade without regard for traditional political borders. As discussed above, the low marginal costs of media mean that reaching a wider market creates much larger profit margins for media companies. Because information is not a physical good, shipping costs are generally inconsequential. Finally, the global reach of media allows it to be relevant in many different countries.

However, some have argued that media is actually a partial cause of globalization, rather than just another globalized industry. Media is largely a cultural product , and the transfer of such a product is likely to have an influence on the recipient’s culture. Increasingly, technology has also been propelling globalization. Technology allows for quick communication, fast and coordinated transport, and efficient mass marketing, all of which have allowed globalization—especially globalized media—to take hold.

Globalized Culture, Globalized Markets

Much globalized media content comes from the West, particularly from the United States. Driven by advertising, U.S. culture and media have a strong consumerist bent (meaning that the ever-increasing consumption of goods is encouraged as an economic virtue), thereby possibly causing foreign cultures to increasingly develop consumerist ideals. Therefore, the globalization of media could not only provide content to a foreign country, but may also create demand for U.S. products. Some believe that this will “contribute to a one-way transmission of ideas and values that result in the displacement of indigenous cultures (Santos, 2001).”

Globalization as a world economic trend generally refers to the lowering of economic trade borders, but it has much to do with culture as well. Just as transfer of industry and technology often encourages outside influence through the influx of foreign money into the economy, the transfer of culture opens up these same markets. As globalization takes hold and a particular community becomes more like the United States economically, this community may also come to adopt and personalize U.S. cultural values. The outcome of this spread can be homogenization (the local culture becomes more like the culture of the United States) or heterogenization (aspects of U.S. culture come to exist alongside local culture, causing the culture to become more diverse), or even both, depending on the specific situation (Rantanen, 2005).

Making sense of this range of possibilities can be difficult, but it helps to realize that a mix of many different factors is involved. Because of cultural differences, globalization of media follows a model unlike that of the globalization of other products. On the most basic level, much of media is language and culture based and, as such, does not necessarily translate well to foreign countries. Thus, media globalization often occurs on a more structural level, following broader “ways of organizing and creating media (Mirza, 2009).” In this sense, a media company can have many different culturally specific brands and still maintain an economically globalized corporate structure.

Vertical Integration and Globalization

Because globalization has as much to do with the corporate structure of a media company as with the products that a media company produces, vertical integration in multinational media companies becomes a necessary aspect of studying globalized media. Many large media companies practice vertical integration: Newspaper chains take care of their own reporting, printing, and distribution; television companies control their own production and broadcasting; and even small film studios often have parent companies that handle international distribution.

A media company often benefits greatly from vertical integration and globalization. Because of the proliferation of U.S. culture abroad, media outlets are able to use many of the same distribution structures with few changes. Because media rely on the speedy ability to react to current events and trends, a vertically integrated company can do all of this in a globalized rather than a localized marketplace; different branches of the company are readily able to handle different markets. Further, production values for single-country distribution are basically the same as those for multiple countries, so vertical integration allows, for example, a single film studio to make higher-budget movies than it may otherwise be able to produce without a distribution company that has as a global reach.

Foreign Markets and Titanic

Figure 13.5

The movie Titanic , which became the highest-grossing movie of all time, made twice as much internationally as it did domestically.

Scott Smith – Best In Film: American Film Institute Showcase – CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Worth considering is the reciprocal influence of foreign culture on American culture. Certainly, American culture is increasingly exported around the world thanks to globalization, and many U.S. media outlets count strongly on their ability to sell their product in foreign markets. But what Americans consider their own culture has in fact been tailored to the tastes not only of U.S. citizens but also to those of worldwide audiences. The profit potential of foreign markets is enormous: If a movie does well abroad, for example, it might make up for a weak stateside showing, and may even drive interest in the movie in the United States.

One prime example of this phenomenon of global culture and marketing is James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic . One of the most expensive movies ever produced up to that point, with an official budget of around $200 million, Titanic was not anticipated to perform particularly well at the U.S. box office. Rather, predictions of foreign box-office receipts allowed the movie to be made. Of the total box-office receipts of Titanic , only about one-third came from the domestic market. Although Titanic became the highest-grossing film up to that point, it grossed just $140 million more domestically than Star Wars did 20 years earlier (Box Office Mojo). The difference was in the foreign market. While Star Wars made about the same amount—$300 million—in both the domestic and foreign markets, Titanic grossed $1.2 billion in foreign box-office receipts. In all, the movie came close to hitting the $2 billion mark, and now sits in the No. 2 position behind Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster, Avatar .

One reason that U.S. studios can make these kinds of arrangements is their well-developed ties with the worldwide movie industry. Hollywood studios have agreements with theaters all over the world to show their films. By contrast, the foreign market for French films is not nearly as established, as the industry tends to be partially subsidized by the French government. Theaters showing Hollywood studio films in France funnel portions of their box-office receipts to fund French films. However, Hollywood has lobbied the World Trade Organization—a largely pro-globalization group that pushes for fewer market restrictions—to rule that this French subsidy is an unfair restriction on trade (Terrill, 1999).

In many ways, globalization presents legitimate concerns about the endangerment of indigenous culture. Yet simple concerns over the transfer of culture are not the only or even the biggest worries caused by the spread of American culture and values.

Key Takeaways

• Technology allows for quick communication, transport, and mass marketing, greatly contributing to a globalized marketplace.
• Media economies of scale achieve much larger profit margins by using digital technology to sell information instantly over a global market.
• Foreign markets offer excellent profit potential as they contribute to media companies’ economies of scale. The addition of new audiences and consumer markets may help a company build a global following in the long run.

Think of a U.S. product that is available throughout the world, such as an athletic brand like Nike or a food product like Pepsi or Coca-Cola. Now go online to the different country-specific branches of the company’s web site.

• What differences are there?
• How might the company be attempting to tailor its globalized product to a specific culture?
• What advances into the foreign market does this use of the Internet allow the company to make?
• What advantages does this globalization of its products give the company?
• In what other ways has technology helped speed this globalization?

Box Office Mojo, “All Time Domestic Box Office Results,” http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic.htm .

Mirza, Jan. “Globalization of Media: Key Issues and Dimensions,” European Journal of Scientific Research 29, no. 1 (2009): 66–75.

Rantanen, Terhi. The Media and Globalization (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005).

Santos, Josefina M. C. “Globalisation and Tradition: Paradoxes in Philippine Television and Culture,” Media Development , no. 3 (2001): 43–48.

Terrill, Roman. “Globalization in the 1990s,” University of Iowa Center for International Finance and Development , 1999, http://www.uiowa.edu/ifdebook/ebook2/contents/part3-I.shtml#B .

Understanding Media and Culture Copyright © 2016 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Social Media: Influences and Impacts on Culture

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Advanced technologies of communication have brought influences and impacts on cultures. There are views that the influences and impacts are brought forward by social media which has been a powerful tool that can affect and form human behaviors as well as culture. Social media may have crossed the boundaries of culture due to the concept of borderless. Facebook may have been the social media that connects people around the world with massive cultural backgrounds to meet at the platform. The media content uploaded may spark the invasion of culture. There are many other social media which come with influencers that may shout about different values and practices around. Local cultures had therefore slowly lost their identities and replaced with a cross-cultural phenomenon. The cultural values invaded may include human behaviors, beliefs, values or even fashion and lifestyle. This research is to examine the factors of cross cultural communication, the reasons of culture being influenced by foreign countries through social media and the possibility of cultural invasion through social media. Social Influence theory is used in this research. Social influence occurs when a person’s emotions, opinions or behaviors are affected by others intentionally or unintentionally. Online survey Google Form is used at the target of 150 respondents aged between 18 to 25 years old. There is a contradicting view that people will lose their own culture after viewing too much of online content. The online activities and actions will slowly lead them to the change without their realization.

The authors acknowledged the raw material provided by Khoo Rose Lyn and Yong Zheng Wai.

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Section B – Culture

In your opinion, how has the local culture been influenced?

□ Overseas media/social media content through internet

□ Foreign culture is better than local culture

□ Did not practice own culture well

□ Other than the above:   _______________________

Section C – Social Media and Culture

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□ It is good if we accept other culture

□ It is more educational

□ Other cultures are better

□ Others:   ________________________________________________________

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□ Culture makes us who we are in identity

□ Culture is important

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Tang, M.J., Chan, E.T. (2020). Social Media: Influences and Impacts on Culture. In: Arai, K., Kapoor, S., Bhatia, R. (eds) Intelligent Computing. SAI 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1228. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52249-0_33

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The French Journal of Media Studies

Accueil Numéros 5 Media and Diversity The Concept of Culture in Media S...

The Concept of Culture in Media Studies: A Critical Review of Academic Literature

This study examines the way culture has been researched in media studies and suggests how critical intercultural communication could contribute to the field. A literature review was conducted and articles (N=114) published in peer-reviewed journals between 2003 and 2013 were collected. Results show that studies dealing with media and culture do not systematically define the concept of culture. Findings also indicate that culture is oftentimes taken for granted instead of being problematized and addressed as a source of struggle. Advantages of using a critical intercultural communication framework to examine culture are discussed.

Entrées d’index

Keywords: , texte intégral.

• 1 Debra L. Merskin, Media, Minorities, and Meaning: A Critical Introduction (New York: Peter Lang Pub (...)
• 2 Robert M. Entman, “Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power,” Journal of Communication 57, (...)
• 3 Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes, “The Dangers of Normativity – The Case of Minority Languag (...)
• 4 Isabelle Rigoni, “Intersectionality and Mediated Cultural Production in A Globalized Post-Colonial (...)

1 Recent directions in the field of media studies have turned culture into a significant object of study. Strong emphasis has been put on representations of minorities in media 1 and their potential biases, 2 minority-language media 3 and ethnic media. 4 However, the increasing attention given to culture has not gone hand in hand with an overall clarification of the concept itself. Defining culture remains a difficult exercise, especially because of its multifaceted nature. The importance of the concept in media studies and its blurry theoretical grounds highlight the need to look back at how it has been used in studies. The present article is built around three main questions. First, it looks at how culture has been researched in media studies . Second, it examines possible limitations of these approaches. Third, it investigates ways in which a critical intercultural communication framework can be beneficial to media studies dealing with culture. For this purpose, this study explores recent academic discourse on media and culture by reviewing studies dealing with issues of cultural diversity, representations of culture, and discourse of culture. In addition to examining approaches to culture and their potential limitations, this article also presents ways in which critical intercultural communication can be used by researchers from different disciplines interested in culture.

2 This article starts by presenting some of the main arguments raised in discussing the use and conceptualization of culture. The way critical intercultural communication contributes to this discussion is presented, followed by reasons why it can be a relevant framework for media studies. This article then looks at previous reviews of academic discourse, especially focusing on the fields of communication and media. Methods for collecting data are detailed before discussing the findings and main implications of this study .

The Concept of Culture

• 5 Robert Brightman, “Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification,” Cultural Anthropolo (...)
• 6 William H. Sewell Jr, “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Histori (...)
• 7 Ingrid Piller, Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Universit (...)
• 9 Fred Dervin, “Approches dialogiques et énonciatives de l’interculturel : Pour une didactique des la (...)
• 10 Fred Dervin, “A Plea for Change in Research on Intercultural Discourses: A “Liquid” Approach to the (...)
• 11 Sylvie Poirier, “La (dé)politisation de la culture? Réflexions sur un concept pluriel, ” Anthropolog (...)
• 12 Ryuko Kubota, “Critical Approaches to Intercultural Discourse and Communication,” in The Handbook o (...)

3 Culture is a concept that has been discussed extensively, giving rise to multiple approaches and uses of the term across fields of study. As the concept of culture became increasingly important and pervasive, it also became increasingly questioned. Across different fields of studies, scholars discuss whether to keep, change or altogether discard the concept of culture. Brightman brought together some of the main criticisms addressed to culture. 5 His work reveals the variety of arguments used against the concept and the lack of convergence on how to revise it or what to use instead. Sewell also goes through some of the cornerstone issues in conceptualizing culture. 6 The first distinction he mentions, and which he argues is not always explicitly made by researchers, is the one between the use of culture and cultures . The singular use refers to the theoretical approach used for research while the plural use refers to the object of study . Culture is used in contrast to other academic disciplines or analytical tools (e.g. politics, economics) whereas cultures is used when examining different forms of culture and is therefore more concrete (e.g. regional culture, hipster culture). Another distinction which has had a strong impact on the study of culture is the understanding of culture as practice or culture as a system of symbols and meanings . Critical intercultural scholars regard culture as a discursive construction, emphasizing the role played by individuals in performing culture. Inherited from constructionism, this approach emphasizes culture as something people do rather than something people have. 7 Regarding culture as practice is the dominant approach in critical intercultural communication, which tends to be used in opposition to culture as a system of symbols and meanings. This latter approach to culture is often associated with essentialist and positivist views that describe culture as an identifiable and fixed item. 8 Essentialist views of culture have been criticized for pinpointing aspects of cultures (typically reduced to the idea of national cultures) and presenting such characteristics as truths rather than constructions. 9 On the other hand, critical intercultural scholars argue for an approach to culture that is largely embedded within social constructionism. 10 Such an approach emphasizes culture as constructed, political, intertwined with ethics 11 and related to power both within and between societies. 12 From that perspective, culture is understood to be situated rather than objective, and ever changing as opposed to stable.

• 13 Stuart Hall, “Introduction,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices , (...)

14 Shi-Xu, A Cultural Approach to Discourse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–13.

• 15 William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “Media discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Con (...)
• 16 Nancy K. Rivenburgh, “Media Framing of Complex Issues: The Case of Endangered Languages,” Public Un (...)
• 17 Ulrika Olausson, “Global warming – Global Responsibility? Media Frames of Collective Action and Sci (...)

4 As Hall stresses, culture is about meaning and as such “permeates all of society.” 13 Representations, practices, values and identities have cultural meanings that are discursively constructed and tap into previous cultural discourses to be meaningful. Critical intercultural communication casts light on ways in which meanings echo cultural knowledge and are therefore difficult to identify and question – even for researchers themselves, hence a strong emphasis placed on reflexivity. 14 The importance of “cultural resonance” has also been pointed out by scholars examining media frames. 15 Rivenburgh stresses the way “media frames that reflect cultural common sense, values, or ideology are both instinctually employed by journalists and easily accepted by the public”. 16 Tapping into cultural resonance may be done consciously or out of habit by journalists and editors who see their cultural environment as natural. The use of culturally resonant frames in media discourse increases their taken-for-grantedness, which enhances their power. Cultural markers create a sense of common sense because of their presence in everyday life experiences which contributes to normalizing them, making them “well-nigh impossible to recognize, question, or resist”. 17 The emphasis that critical intercultural communication puts on culture as having the propensity to normalize representations and practices thus appears especially relevant to media studies.

• 18 Marianne Jørgensen and Louise J. Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage Pu (...)

19 Chris Barker, The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 64–65.

5 Another aspect where interests of both disciplines meet is the extent to which discursive practices can be ethnocentric. To different extents, critical scholars agree on the idea that discourses construct the way societies represent themselves. 18 Media discourse is probably one of the discursive practices most often cited as constitutive of people’s worldviews, representations of themselves and others. One question put forward by critical intercultural communication is the extent to which such discourses rely on ethnocentric representations. Ethnocentrism refers to people’s tendency to use the standards of their own culture to judge other cultural groups, which is concurrent with people’s tendency to regard their culture as superior to others. 19 Ethnocentrism thus refers to the way cultural standards can pass as implicit norms for people identifying with that culture. As much emphasis is now put on ethnic media, cultural diversity and the effects of globalization on developing transnational media spaces, it is important not to overlook the extent to which national media discourse can still be limited and convey ethnocentric representations. The emphasis put on ethnocentrism in media has strong practical implications for professionals and audiences by encouraging them to be more critical towards news content.

Examining Academic Discourse

• 20 Keith V. Erickson, Cathy A. Fleuriet and Lawrence A. Hosman, “Prolific Publishing: Professional and (...)
• 21 Michael W. Kramer, Jon A. Hess and Loren D. Reid, “Trends in Communication Scholarship: An Analysis (...)

22 Jørgensen and Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method , 175–177.

• 23 Maggie MacLure, Discourses in Educational and Social Research ( Buckingham: Open University Press, 2 (...)

6 Conferences and publications are the main venues for academics to discuss the latest developments and findings from all disciplines. Nowadays, academic debate mostly takes place in journals, whose number has kept on increasing throughout the last decades. 20 It is through these journals that most ideas are expressed, hence the importance of examining their content. Publishing is central for scholars, not only as a way of contributing to the development of their fields of study but also to the development of their career. The notorious “publish or perish” phrase provides an efficient summary of what publications nowadays represent in the academic world. 21 As journal articles have become the main venue for academic discourse, they have also turned into common and natural venues. Such development can be problematic if academic discourse comes to be granted too much legitimacy instead of having its status, form and content constantly challenged. Like other discursive practices, journal articles create and validate certain meanings that progressively become the norm and can, as such, easily pass as natural instead of constructed and contingent. 22 Knowledge expressed in academic discourse is therefore not objective but is, like any other form of knowledge, “‘situated’ – that is, produced by and for particular interests, in particular circumstances, at particular times”. 23 Reflexivity, a central ethical component of research, is therefore especially important when looking at academic discourse as a whole.

• 24 Ronald D. Gordon, “Beyond the Failures of Western Communication Theory,” Journal of Multicultural D (...)
• 25 Molefi Kete Asante, “The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication, (...)
• 26 Yoshitaka Miike, “Non-Western Theory in Western research? An Asiacentric Agenda for Asian Communica (...)
• 27 Yoshitaka Miike, “An Asiacentric Reflection on Eurocentric Bias in Communication Theory,” Communica (...)

28 Asante, “The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication,” 10.

• 29 Shi-Xu, “Reconstructing Eastern Paradigms of Discourse Studies ,” Journal of Multicultural Discourse (...)
• 30 Hui-Ching Chang, Rich Holt and Lina Luo, “Representing East Asians in Intercultural Communication T (...)
• 31 Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Chicago: African American Images, (...)
• 32 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routl (...)
• 33 Eric Kit-Wai Ma, “Rethinking Media Studies: The Case of China,” in De-westernizing Media Studies , e (...)

7 Recently, increasing attention has been paid to cultural bias in academic discourse. Some scholars especially criticize the general lack of attention paid to such bias. Gordon, for instance, has looked at communication theories, which he describes as an example of a Western-oriented or Eurocentric approach to research. 24 Gordon highlights the way communication theories have typically been elaborated by Caucasian researchers from the United States who mostly used university students as participants. Western-oriented theories have been criticized for being taken as universally valid despite being anchored in European academic traditions, especially the heritage of the Enlightenment period. In response, some scholars have suggested using different approaches. Asante has, for instance, put forth Afrocentricity as an ideological and methodological approach to conduct research from an African standpoint. 25 Similarly, Miike encourages using Asiacentricity to examine Asian contexts from an Asian perspective. 26 Miike details ways in which the concept of “communication” is defined differently by Asiacentric and Eurocentric approaches, as different aspects and outcomes are emphasized. 27 Afrocentricity and Asiacentricity illustrate ongoing efforts to diversify analytical tools that would help research human activity and capture its plurality. These approaches are meant to open up new perspectives in research by providing scholars with different outlooks on their objects of study. For some scholars, developing new approaches is also meant to create legitimate alternatives to Western theories. Back in 1983, Asante, for instance, pointed out the difficulty for some African scholars to be published in Eurocentric journals because of their different, and non-valued, academic tradition. 28 Shi-Xu advocates the emergence of various academic paradigms that would work “as equal but distinctive interlocutors” and help “redress this cultural imbalance”. 29 However, other voices among academics are more reserved when it comes to developing culture-specific approaches, fearing that it will only turn the problem around instead of solving it. Chang, Holt and Luo raise the question as they discuss Asiacentricity: “If every version of a cultural writing of other is at the same time also the construction of self , might our call for an Asiacentric perspective in explaining communication not fall into the same trap as the often-blamed Eurocentric perspective? Might the reversal of the situation – prioritizing Asians – encounter the same predicament?” 30 Supporters of culture-specific approaches, however, embrace this criticism. From their perspective, culture-specific approaches are beneficial because they are explicitly situated and do not try to reach universal validity. They point out that it is not so much Western-oriented theories being biased and situated that triggered critics as the lack of reflexivity about these limitations. 31 Similar debates are also taking place among media scholars, with issues of “de-Westernizing” media studies being increasingly discussed. 32 Critics claim that Western-oriented media theories are too limited as they are based on European and North American political, economic and media models. Looking specifically at China, Ma argues for a compromise. 33 He questions the benefits of new theories that would risk “essentializing and exoticizing the Asian experience” and proposes adjusting existing theories to fit the Chinese context.

Methods and Results

8 A literature review was conducted in fall 2013 using the academic search engines EBSCO and Web of Science. The keywords “media representation”, “media discourse”, “diversity”, and “cultur*” (the asterisk was used to include other possible endings in the data search) were used to collect peer-reviewed articles published in English between 2003 and 2013. Only articles dealing with issues of cultural diversity and media were included. Some articles in which culture was understood from an agricultural perspective were, for instance, left out. The search was ended once saturation was reached, that is when the same keywords used in different search engines brought up the same articles. In total, 114 articles were collected and reviewed for the purpose of this study. The literature review was conducted inductively and kept as open as possible. The search was not limited to any specific journals because the scope of topics covered by media studies on cultural diversity was expected to be very wide. One aim of this literature review being to see what types of issues were encompassed, it would have been detrimental to limit the search to certain journals.

• 34 See for example Gordon, “Beyond the Failures of Western Communication Theory,” and Miike, “An Asiac (...)
• 35 Annelies Verdoolaege, “Media representations of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissi (...)
• 36 Jawad Syed, “The Representation of Cultural Diversity in Urdu-Language Newspapers in Pakistan: A St (...)
• 37 Yasmin Jiwani, “War Talk Engendering Terror: Race, Gender and Representation in Canadian Print Medi (...)
• 38 Fabienne Darling-Wolf, “Sites of Attractiveness: Japanese Women and Westernized Representations of (...)
• 39 Maria Andrea Dos Santos Soares, “Look, Blackness in Brazil!: Disrupting the Grotesquerie of Racial (...)
• 40 Anna Bredström, “Gendered Racism and the Production Of Cultural Difference: Media Representations a (...)
• 41 Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, “Ghetto Kids Gone Good: Race, Representation, and Authority in the Scri (...)

9 Short descriptions were written about each article to describe their content, which later helped identify recurrent themes, similar approaches and unusual topics. Articles were collected within a 10-year time frame in order to get an overall picture of the state of recent research. No particular evolution or trends were noticed, however, regarding approaches or topics tackled. Oftentimes, authors used eclectic theoretical and/or methodological approaches that, for instance, combined cultural studies and critical discourse analysis (CDA) or feminist theories and CDA. Among studies that explicitly presented their theoretical and/or methodological frameworks, CDA (9%), feminist theories (10%) and cultural/critical frameworks relying on Foucault’s, Gramsci’s or Hall’s theories (29%) were recurrent approaches. As regards analytical tools from journalism or media studies, results indicated that framing theory (10%) was often used as opposed to gatekeeping or agenda-setting theory (2%). Similarly to results from previous reviews of academic discourse, 34 studies from this data set appeared to be mainly conducted from a Western-oriented perspective. This was the case even for strongly situated studies that focused on particular cultures and were published in specific journals. For instance, the article “Media Representations of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Their Commitment to Reconciliation” 35 was published in the Journal of African Cultural Studies using CDA, and the article “The Representation of Cultural Diversity in Urdu-Language Newspapers in Pakistan: A Study of Jang and Nawaiwaqt” 36 was published in the South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies and used Hodder’s approach. In comparison, articles looking at representations of women were found to use various trends of feminist theories such as standpoint theory, 37 postcolonial theory 38 and black feminism. 39 Similarly, articles explicitly dealing with race, for instance, used postcolonial theory 40 and Jackson’s (2006) theory of scripting and media framing of black bodies. 41

42 Kathryn Woodward, Identity and Difference (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 35.

10 As regards the scope of topics tackled, results indicated that the majority of articles investigated representation of minorities in the media (67%), most often dealing with ethnic or religious groups. Articles within this category oftentimes raised the issue of media stereotyping and othering minorities. That is, studies investigated ways in which media discourse sometimes supports the construction of minorities as “Others”, which can emphasize differences between groups and convey negative stereotypical representations. 42 Among articles exploring representations of minorities, several studies dealt with sport and representations of athletes (8%). A significant number of studies examined discourses of diversity (23%), with some focusing exclusively on European discourses of diversity (3%). Other studies investigated what diversity stands for in the media and how it can be approached by newsrooms. On the other hand, some topics appeared to be scarcely tackled, which was the case of foreign-news coverage (4%), newsroom diversity (2%) or integration and acculturation issues (2%). Regarding the type of media investigated, the majority of studies examined newspapers and television (70%), while entertainment and advertisement (19%) were less considered.

Culture: Between Main Focus and Transparent Background

11 Despite explicitly dealing with culture, many articles did not provide a clear definition of the term. Nor did many researchers position themselves as regards the different schools of thought on culture. Instances of culture taken for granted particularly occurred in the literature when (1) culture was associated with nations or (2) the so-called Western world, or (3) when the concepts of race or ethnicity were used.

43 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 6.

• 44 Rona T. Halualani, S. Lily Mendoza and Jolanta A. Drzewiecka, “‘Critical’” Junctures in Intercultur (...)

12 Results from the literature review conducted for this study indicate the recurrent association of culture with that of nation. However, the use of countries as cultural contexts and embodiments of cultures can be problematic for several reasons. A main pitfall is the homogeneous and reduced picture of culture that it conveys. Culture is a multilayered notion and reducing it to the single aspect of nationality can be detrimental to both the idea of nation and culture. Nations are multicultural, in the literal meaning of the word: that is, made out of multiple cultures. Studies that use nation as the unit of reference to talk about culture, language and identity tend to homogenize national cultures and therefore increase chances of being stereotypical instead of deconstructing stereotypes. A second important drawback is the way national culture tends to be presented as normal instead of artificial. This contributes to discourses of “banal nationalism” where individuals are brought up with the idea that the world is divided between nations. 43 It also overlooks the fact that culture is constructed and thus intertwined with power and struggle. When culture is understood as the equivalent of nation, it typically hints at the culture of the dominant group within that nation. Such representation leaves out or even marginalizes other forms of culture within that country, therefore maintaining existing hierarchy instead of deconstructing it. Halualani, Mendoza and Drzewiecka point out the danger of blurring the lines between the concepts of culture and nation: “To accept cultures as nations as inherently and naturally truthful and accurate at a surface level would be to risk reproducing external framings of cultural groups advanced by colonialist governments, dominant nationalist parties, and ruling power interests that benefit from such ‘status quo’ thinking.” 44

45 Piller, Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction , 66–69.

46 Dervin, “A Plea For Change in Research on Intercultural Discourses,” 41.

13 Associating culture to nation thus tends to sustain hierarchy between cultural practices and those who practice or identify to them. By maintaining hierarchical order between cultures, the nation approach implicitly contributes to preserving the persistent dichotomy between “us” and “them”, whether within or between nations. The nation approach to culture is tightly related to essentialist views of culture in that it provides a static and homogeneous picture of culture. Essentialism regards culture as a one-dimensional concept and therefore leaves out issues of race, religion, gender, social status and larger historical and political structures. Critical intercultural communication endeavors to go beyond such limitations by taking into account the multidimensional, constructed, contingent and dynamic facets of culture. The critical intercultural communication approach does not dismiss nations as possible instances of cultures. However, it focuses on exploring which representations of culture and nation are associated, through which processes, and whether such associations vary in time or depending on the context. Critical intercultural scholars emphasize culture as raising questions rather than providing answers that would help predict people’s behaviors. 45 Through its conceptualization of culture, a critical intercultural communication framework helps focus on ways in which people construct their sense of cultural belonging and identity. 46 This approach is relevant to media studies in many ways. It is strongly related to research exploring the relation individuals make between their media consumption and their identity, or research dealing with the way media discourse is intertwined with discourses of (national) identity. The emphasis put on constructing cultural identity and belonging can also help focus on who is represented as “belonging” and who is not, which is a significant aspect of studies on minority media and cultural diversity.

• 47 Malcom D. Brown, “Comparative Analysis of Mainstream Discourses, Media Narratives and Representatio (...)
• 48 Margarida Carvalho, “The Construction of the Image of Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in Two Portu (...)

14 As mentioned beforehand, results indicated that culture can be taken for granted when it is about “us”. In many cases, “our” culture is used as a background for research, making it look normal and neutral. “Our” culture also appears homogeneous because examining diversity oftentimes consists of examining the “Other”. For instance, the article entitled “Comparative Analysis of Mainstream Discourses, Media Narratives and Representations of Islam in Britain and France Prior to 9/11” examines the construction of Islam, notably referring to the switch from exoticism before 9/11 to terrorism afterwards. 47 The article, however, does not discuss the construction of “British” and “French” but uses them as taken-for-granted cultural representations. Similarly, the article “The Construction of the Image of Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in two Portuguese Daily Newspapers” discusses the way “their” image is fabricated and thus artificial but does not discuss the construction of the “Portuguese” identity. 48 Of course, focusing on minorities’ identities is highly relevant, but it could be beneficial to consider both majorities’ and minorities’ identities and cultures. Such an approach could help examine diversity among “us” rather than embodied only by “them”. Examining both majority and minority could enable researchers to go beyond this dichotomous opposition and not only look at differences but also cast light on shared cultural representations, practices or identities. Looking at differences and similarities, as well as how those are negotiated, can also help examine the way cultural meanings and identities are constructed in relation to one another. Overall, it would be a way to put all cultural practices and representations on an equal footing by explicitly defining them as constructed and contingent. This could in turn contribute to challenge taken-for-granted perceptions we have of ourselves as well as of others.

49 Anthony P. Browne, “Denying Race in the American and French Context,” Wadabagei 12 (2009): 83.

15 Findings also indicate that the concept of culture tends to be used in different ways depending on whose culture is examined. The “us” is often associated with nationality and presented as legitimate, neutral, acultural, aethnical and aracial while the “them” is often referred to in terms of religious or ethnic denominations. Oftentimes, culture is not directly problematized when the concepts of race and ethnicity are used. Eventually, this paints a picture where “we” seem to be acultural and unproblematic while “they” are described in terms of struggle, race, ethnicity or religious affiliations. The imbalance in such representations is problematic in that it reproduces stereotypical representations of minorities even though most studies intend to deconstruct them. Using alternatives to Western and Eurocentric approaches in media studies could help dismiss such a vicious circle. Enhancing geographical diversity as regards research location could also encourage study of various minority groups. Indeed, findings suggest that numerous studies are located in Europe, North America or Australia: parts of the world that embody the idea of “Western culture”. The lack of diversity in the location of research is a strong shortcoming of academic discourse, especially when it examines representation of minorities. Going through numerous articles dealing with ethnic or religious minorities living in the so-called Western world nourishes the idea that majority and dominant groups are white Europeans while struggling minorities are black, Asians or Muslims. Using a critical intercultural communication framework can discourage researchers from using or describing, even implicitly, certain groups or practices as acultural and neutral and others as only racial or ethnic. This issue has also been raised by scholars working on colorblind ideology. Browne, for instance, argues that in both the United States and France, being white is “the invisible norm against which all other cultural and racial groups are defined and subordinated”. 49 The notion of invisible norm raised by Browne is particularly relevant when it comes to seeing oneself as aracial or acultural and seeing others mostly through their skin color, religious affiliations or cultural practices. The way concepts of race and ethnicity can sometimes be used instead of the one of culture conveys the idea that they refer to different aspects. Nevertheless, race and ethnicity are forms of culture, as gender, nationality or social class can also be. Dismissing culture and using only race and ethnicity can be a drawback in that it contributes to presenting culture as unproblematic and natural, while race and ethnicity are sources of struggle. Using a critical intercultural communication framework is a way to be inclusive and critically tackle all aspects of culture. Bridging the gap between culture, race and ethnicity is also a way to bring together schools of thought (for instance, scholars from the United States and scholars from Europe) that have different stances on the concept of race itself. Examining critically the way race, ethnicity, social status, religious, sexual and gender identities are constructed and conveyed can thus enrich our understanding of culture. Generally speaking, using a critical approach to the concept of culture would help address problematic representations of minority/majority and us/them in academic discourse. Understanding culture as a construction that involves power relations and struggle contributes to include every individual, group and practice, since all aspects and members of societies are cultural. This therefore takes away the pervasive and implicit idea that some people or practices are neutral to some extent. Reflexivity is a central component in order to be able to detach oneself from ethnocentric representations and look at oneself, one’s culture, practices and values as cultural and therefore constructed and ideological. Focusing on cultural identity as constructed is also an asset in decreasing ethnocentrism or cultural bias in academic discourse. Encouraging researchers to be reflexive about their cultural backgrounds can help them problematize what they could otherwise take for granted about their own cultural identities and belongings. As Rorty points out, no one is ahistorical or acultural and therefore “everybody is ethnocentric when engaged in actual debate”. 50 The best way to overcome ethnocentric representations is to make them and the way they are constructed salient. Ethnocentrism in academic discourse is particularly problematic because research aims at being, if not entirely unbiased, at least critical towards its inherent subjectivity. Ethnocentrism as a form of bias is difficult to overcome if not addressed directly. Researchers should therefore aim at being critical towards their personal background as well as their philosophical, theoretical and methodological heritage. Cultural baggage has to be reflected upon at the individual level, that is, in the way personal choices affect the way researchers tackle a topic or analyze data, but also at the academic level, that is, the way they can be blind to the overall schools of thought to which they belong.

16 The concept of culture is regarded by many as ambiguous, difficult to conceptualize, and even non-operational by some scholars. In spite of its difficult reputation, culture remains a prominent object of study. Influences from critical theories and social constructionism make critical intercultural communication a relevant framework for examining representations and discursive constructions of culture. The premise that culture is constructed provides a solid ground to examine ways in which certain representations seem more powerful or natural than others. It also emphasizes the fact that we live in webs of cultural discourses – some invisible to us, depending on contexts – that are intertwined with other discourses. The main aim of using a critical intercultural communication framework is not to uncover what culture really is but to uncover what representations of culture come to appear real, and through which processes. Studies therefore primarily focus on the way we navigate these webs and make sense of them, the way they are constructed, interrelated and empowered. The main asset of this framework is its emphasis on problematizing culture, which reduces risks of taking it for granted. As such, critical intercultural communication also encourages researchers to be reflexive about their academic and cultural background. This can help one be aware of the extent to which one’s knowledge is situated, and therefore contributes to decreasing cultural bias in academic discourse. Generally, being aware of the representations we have of ourselves and others, as well as the reasons why these representations are constructed and conveyed, is central to developing understanding and tolerance towards others. This is especially relevant now that more and more people cross borders and that communication between cultures is faster, easier, and therefore increasingly common.

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Note de fin

1 Debra L. Merskin, Media, Minorities, and Meaning: A Critical Introduction (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011).

2 Robert M. Entman, “Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power,” Journal of Communication 57, (2007).

3 Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes, “The Dangers of Normativity – The Case of Minority Language Media,” in Dangerous Multilingualism: Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity And Normality , ed. Jan Blommaert et al . (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 194–204.

4 Isabelle Rigoni, “Intersectionality and Mediated Cultural Production in A Globalized Post-Colonial World,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35 (2012).

5 Robert Brightman, “Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification,” Cultural Anthropology 10, (1995).

6 William H. Sewell Jr, “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn , ed. Gabrielle M. Spiegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 76–95.

7 Ingrid Piller, Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 15.

9 Fred Dervin, “Approches dialogiques et énonciatives de l’interculturel : Pour une didactique des langues et de l’identité mouvante des sujets,” Synergies Roumanie 4 (2009): 166–167.

10 Fred Dervin, “A Plea for Change in Research on Intercultural Discourses: A “Liquid” Approach to the Study of the Acculturation of Chinese Students,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 6 (March 2011): 38.

11 Sylvie Poirier, “La (dé)politisation de la culture? Réflexions sur un concept pluriel, ” Anthropologie et sociétés 28 (2004): 10 – 13.

12 Ryuko Kubota, “Critical Approaches to Intercultural Discourse and Communication,” in The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication , ed. Christina Bratt Paulston et al . (Malden, USA: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 95.

13 Stuart Hall, “Introduction,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices , ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 3.

15 William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “Media discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 95 (1989): 5.

16 Nancy K. Rivenburgh, “Media Framing of Complex Issues: The Case of Endangered Languages,” Public Understanding of Science 22 (2011): 706.

17 Ulrika Olausson, “Global warming – Global Responsibility? Media Frames of Collective Action and Scientific Certainty,” Public Understanding of Science 18 (2009): 423.

18 Marianne Jørgensen and Louise J. Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 175–177.

20 Keith V. Erickson, Cathy A. Fleuriet and Lawrence A. Hosman, “Prolific Publishing: Professional and Administrative Concerns,” The Southern Communication Journal 58 (Summer 1993): 328–329.

21 Michael W. Kramer, Jon A. Hess and Loren D. Reid, “Trends in Communication Scholarship: An Analysis of Four Representative NCA and ICA Journals over the Last 70 Years,” The Review of Communication 7 (July 2007): 229–230.

23 Maggie MacLure, Discourses in Educational and Social Research ( Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003), 175.

24 Ronald D. Gordon, “Beyond the Failures of Western Communication Theory,” Journal of Multicultural Discourse 2 (2007).

25 Molefi Kete Asante, “The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication,” Journal of Black Studies 14 (1983).

26 Yoshitaka Miike, “Non-Western Theory in Western research? An Asiacentric Agenda for Asian Communication Studies,” The Review of Communication 6, (2006).

27 Yoshitaka Miike, “An Asiacentric Reflection on Eurocentric Bias in Communication Theory,” Communication Monographs 74 (2007).

29 Shi-Xu, “Reconstructing Eastern Paradigms of Discourse Studies ,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 4 (2009): 33.

30 Hui-Ching Chang, Rich Holt and Lina Luo, “Representing East Asians in Intercultural Communication Textbooks: A Select Review,” The Review of Communication 6 (2006): 325–326.

31 Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Chicago: African American Images, 2003), 61.

32 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994); James Curran and Myung-Jin Park, De-westernizing Media Studies (London: Routledge, 2000).

33 Eric Kit-Wai Ma, “Rethinking Media Studies: The Case of China,” in De-westernizing Media Studies , ed. James Curran et al . (London: Routledge, 1994), 32.

34 See for example Gordon, “Beyond the Failures of Western Communication Theory,” and Miike, “An Asiacentric Reflection on Eurocentric Bias in Communication Theory”.

35 Annelies Verdoolaege, “Media representations of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and their Commitment to Reconciliation,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 17 (2005).

36 Jawad Syed, “The Representation of Cultural Diversity in Urdu-Language Newspapers in Pakistan: A Study Of Jang And Nawaiwaqt,” Journal of South Asian Studies 31 (2008).

37 Yasmin Jiwani, “War Talk Engendering Terror: Race, Gender and Representation in Canadian Print Media,” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 1 (2005).

38 Fabienne Darling-Wolf, “Sites of Attractiveness: Japanese Women and Westernized Representations of Feminine Beauty,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004).

39 Maria Andrea Dos Santos Soares, “Look, Blackness in Brazil!: Disrupting the Grotesquerie of Racial Representation in Brazilian Visual Culture,” Cultural Dynamics 24 (2012).

40 Anna Bredström, “Gendered Racism and the Production Of Cultural Difference: Media Representations and Identity Work among ‘Immigrant Youth’ In Contemporary Sweden,” Nora: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies 11 (2003).

41 Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, “Ghetto Kids Gone Good: Race, Representation, and Authority in the Scripting of Inner-City Youths in the Urban Debate League,” Argumentation & Advocacy 49 (2012).

44 Rona T. Halualani, S. Lily Mendoza and Jolanta A. Drzewiecka, “‘Critical’” Junctures in Intercultural Communication Studies: A Review,” The Review of Communication 9 (January 2009): 24.

47 Malcom D. Brown, “Comparative Analysis of Mainstream Discourses, Media Narratives and Representations of Islam in Britain and France Prior to 9/11,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 26 (2006).

48 Margarida Carvalho, “The Construction of the Image of Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in Two Portuguese Daily Newspapers,” Portuguese Journal of Social Science 9 (2010).

Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity,” in Knowledge and Inquiry. Readings in Epistemology , ed. K. Brad Wray (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), 432.

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Référence électronique.

Mélodine Sommier , «  The Concept of Culture in Media Studies: A Critical Review of Academic Literature  » ,  InMedia [En ligne], 5 | 2014, mis en ligne le 17 octobre 2014 , consulté le 18 juin 2024 . URL  : http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/768 ; DOI  : https://doi.org/10.4000/inmedia.768

Mélodine Sommier

Mélodine Sommier is a doctoral student in intercultural communication at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. She has particular interests in migration and acculturation issues as well as discourses of culture in the media.

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Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-NC 4.0 . Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

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More Americans now see the media’s influence growing compared with a year ago

Americans’ views about the influence of the media in the country have shifted dramatically over the course of a year in which there was much discussion about the news media’s role during the election and post-election coverage , the COVID-19 pandemic and protests about racial justice . More Americans now say that news organizations are gaining influence than say their influence is waning, a stark contrast to just one year ago when the reverse was true.

When Americans were asked to evaluate the media’s standing in the nation, about four-in-ten (41%) say news organizations are growing in their influence, somewhat higher than the one-third (33%) who say their influence is declining, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted March 8-14, 2021. The remaining one-quarter of U.S. adults say they are neither growing nor declining in influence.

To examine Americans’ views about the influence of the news media, Pew Research Center surveyed 12,045 U.S. adults from March 8 to 14, 2021. Everyone who completed the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology . See here to read more about the questions used for this analysis and the methodology .

This is the latest report in Pew Research Center’s ongoing investigation of the state of news, information and journalism in the digital age, a research program funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

By comparison, Americans in early 2020 were far more likely to say the news media were declining in influence . Nearly half (48%) at that time said this, compared with far fewer (32%) who said news organizations were growing in influence.

The 2021 figures more closely resemble responses from 2011 – the next most recent time this was asked – and before, in that more Americans then said the news media were growing in influence than declining. Views could have shifted in the gap between 2011 and 2020, but if so, they have now shifted back. (It should be noted that prior to 2020, this question was asked on the phone instead of on the web.)

What’s more, this shift in views of the media’s influence in the country occurred among members of both political parties – and in the same direction.

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are about evenly split in whether they think news organizations are growing (40%) or declining in influence (41%). This is very different from a year ago, when Republicans were twice as likely to say their influence was declining than growing (56% vs. 28%).

And Democrats and Democratic leaners are now much more likely to say news organizations are growing (43%) than declining in influence (28%), while a year ago they were slightly more likely to say influence was declining (42% vs. 36% growing).

Overall, then, Republicans are still more likely than Democrats to say the news media are losing standing in the country, though the two groups are more on par in thinking that the media are increasing in their influence. (Democrats are somewhat more likely than Republicans to say news organizations are neither growing nor declining in influence – 29% vs. 19%.)  

Trust in media closely ties to whether its influence is seen as growing or declining. Those who have greater trust in national news organizations tend to be more likely to see the news media gaining influence, while those with low levels of trust are generally more likely to see it waning.

Americans who say they have a great deal of trust in the accuracy of political news from national news organizations are twice as likely to say the news media are growing than declining in influence (48% vs. 24%, respectively). Conversely, those who have no trust at all are much more likely to think that news organizations are declining (47% vs. 33% who say they are growing).

Black Americans are far more likely to think that the news media are growing in influence rather than declining (48% vs. 19%, respectively), as are Hispanic Americans though to a somewhat lesser degree. White Americans, on the other hand, are about evenly split in thinking the news media are growing or declining in influence (39% vs. 37%, respectively). And while men are about evenly split (39% growing vs. 38% declining), women are more likely to say news organizations are growing (43%) than declining (29%) in influence.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology .

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Naomi Forman-Katz is a research analyst focusing on news and information research at Pew Research Center .

Americans’ Changing Relationship With Local News

Introducing the pew-knight initiative, 8 facts about black americans and the news, u.s. adults under 30 now trust information from social media almost as much as from national news outlets, u.s. journalists differ from the public in their views of ‘bothsidesism’ in journalism, most popular.

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Learning Objectives

• Classify culture media

Culture medium or growth medium is a liquid or gel designed to support the growth of microorganisms. There are different types of media suitable for growing different types of cells. Here, we will discuss microbiological cultures used for growing microbes, such as bacteria or yeast.

NUTRIENT BROTHS AND AGAR PLATES

These are the most common growth media, although specialized media are sometimes required for microorganism and cell culture growth. Some organisms, termed fastidious organisms, need specialized environments due to complex nutritional requirements. Viruses, for example, are obligate intracellular parasites and require a growth medium containing living cells. Many human microbial pathogens also require the use of human cells or cell lysates to grow on a media.

The most common growth media nutrient broths (liquid nutrient medium) or LB medium (Lysogeny Broth) are liquid. These are often mixed with agar and poured into Petri dishes to solidify. These agar plates provide a solid medium on which microbes may be cultured. They remain solid, as very few bacteria are able to decompose agar. Many microbes can also be grown in liquid cultures comprised of liquid nutrient media without agar.

DEFINED VS UNDEFINED MEDIA

This is an important distinction between growth media types. A defined medium will have known quantities of all ingredients. For microorganisms, it provides trace elements and vitamins required by the microbe and especially a defined carbon and nitrogen source. Glucose or glycerol are often used as carbon sources, and ammonium salts or nitrates as inorganic nitrogen sources. An undefined medium has some complex ingredients, such as yeast extract, which consists of a mixture of many, many chemical species in unknown proportions. Undefined media are sometimes chosen based on price and sometimes by necessity – some microorganisms have never been cultured on defined media.

There are many different types of media that can be used to grow specific microbes, and even promote certain cellular processes; such as wort, the medium which is the growth media for the yeast that makes beer. Without wort in certain conditions, fermentation cannot occur and the beer will not contain alcohol or be carbonated (bubbly).

COMMON BROADLY-DEFINED CULTURE MEDIA

Nutrient media – A source of amino acids and nitrogen (e.g., beef, yeast extract). This is an undefined medium because the amino acid source contains a variety of compounds with the exact composition being unknown. These media contain all the elements that most bacteria need for growth and are non-selective, so they are used for the general cultivation and maintenance of bacteria kept in laboratory-culture collections.

Minimal media – Media that contains the minimum nutrients possible for colony growth, generally without the presence of amino acids, and are often used by microbiologists and geneticists to grow “wild type” microorganisms. These media can also be used to select for or against the growth of specific microbes. Usually a fair amount of information must be known about the microbe to determine its minimal media requirements.

Selective media – Used for the growth of only selected microorganisms. For example, if a microorganism is resistant to a certain antibiotic, such as ampicillin or tetracycline, then that antibiotic can be added to the medium in order to prevent other cells, which do not possess the resistance, from growing.

Differential media – Also known as indicator media, are used to distinguish one microorganism type from another growing on the same media. This type of media uses the biochemical characteristics of a microorganism growing in the presence of specific nutrients or indicators (such as neutral red, phenol red, eosin y, or methylene blue) added to the medium to visibly indicate the defining characteristics of a microorganism. This type of media is used for the detection and identification of microorganisms.

These few examples of general media types provide some indication only; there are a myriad of different types of media that can be used to grow and control microbes.

• Culture media contains the nutrients needed to sustain a microbe.
• Culture media can vary in many ingredients allowing the media to select for or against microbes.
• Glucose or glycerol are often used as carbon sources, and ammonium salts or nitrates as inorganic nitrogen sources in culture media.
• culture : The process of growing a bacterial or other biological entity in an artificial medium.
• lysogeny broth : Lysogeny broth (LB) is a nutritionally-rich medium; primarily used for the growth of bacteria.

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111 Popular Culture Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

Popular culture is a fascinating and ever-evolving aspect of society that influences our thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors. From music and movies to fashion and social media, popular culture shapes our daily lives in countless ways. If you're looking for inspiration for your next essay on popular culture, we've got you covered with 111 topic ideas and examples to get you started.

• The impact of social media influencers on consumer behavior
• The evolution of hip hop music and its influence on society
• The portrayal of mental health in popular culture
• The rise of reality TV shows and their effects on viewers
• The cultural significance of memes in the digital age
• The representation of gender and sexuality in popular culture
• The influence of celebrity endorsements on consumer choices
• The role of fashion in popular culture and self-expression
• The impact of streaming services on the music industry
• The cultural appropriation of minority cultures in popular culture
• The influence of video games on youth culture
• The representation of race in Hollywood films
• The phenomenon of binge-watching TV shows and its effects on mental health
• The popularity of true crime documentaries and podcasts
• The rise of K-pop and its global impact
• The portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters in popular culture
• The influence of technology on popular music production
• The nostalgia trend in pop culture and its appeal to millennials
• The role of fan communities in shaping popular culture
• The impact of social media on celebrity culture
• The representation of women in superhero movies
• The influence of TikTok on music trends
• The phenomenon of viral challenges on social media
• The portrayal of mental illness in TV shows and movies
• The popularity of superhero movies and their cultural significance
• The evolution of online dating and its portrayal in popular culture
• The cultural significance of tattoos in modern society
• The impact of streaming platforms on the film industry
• The representation of disability in popular culture
• The influence of gaming culture on mainstream media
• The rise of eco-friendly fashion in popular culture
• The portrayal of drug use in popular music
• The influence of celebrity fashion on trends
• The cultural significance of sports in popular culture
• The representation of body image in advertising
• The impact of cancel culture on celebrities and public figures
• The influence of political satire in comedy shows
• The portrayal of mental health in music lyrics
• The popularity of true crime podcasts and their appeal to audiences
• The role of nostalgia in marketing and advertising
• The representation of technology in science fiction movies
• The influence of social media on beauty standards
• The evolution of dance trends in popular culture
• The cultural significance of food trends
• The impact of social media on body image
• The representation of race and ethnicity in TV commercials
• The influence of celebrity endorsements on fashion trends
• The role of fan fiction in popular culture
• The portrayal of LGBTQ+ relationships in TV shows
• The popularity of ASMR videos and their effects on viewers
• The influence of Instagram on travel trends
• The representation of women in advertising campaigns
• The impact of streaming services on the film industry
• The cultural significance of street art
• The evolution of language in popular culture
• The influence of reality TV shows on beauty standards
• The portrayal of mental health in young adult literature
• The popularity of conspiracy theories in popular culture
• The role of nostalgia in music trends
• The representation of gender in video games
• The influence of social media on fashion trends
• The cultural significance of emojis in communication
• The impact of celebrity scandals on public perception
• The portrayal of addiction in TV shows and movies
• The influence of social media on body positivity movements
• The phenomenon of influencer marketing in the beauty industry
• The representation of race and ethnicity in fashion advertising
• The popularity of true crime documentaries on streaming platforms
• The evolution of internet slang and its impact on language
• The influence of gaming culture on fashion trends
• The cultural significance of street style photography
• The portrayal of LGBTQ+ characters in young adult literature
• The impact of social media on mental health awareness
• The role of nostalgia in music festivals
• The representation of disability in children's literature
• The influence of celebrity chefs on food trends
• The popularity of DIY culture in the digital age
• The evolution of online dating apps and their impact on relationships
• The cultural significance of drag culture
• The portrayal of race and ethnicity in social media influencers
• The influence of social media on travel destinations
• The phenomenon of viral challenges on YouTube
• The representation of mental health in comic books
• The impact of streaming services on the TV industry
• The role of fan art in popular culture
• The influence of celebrity fashion on street style
• The cultural significance of dance trends
• The evolution of slang in rap music
• The popularity of wellness trends in popular culture
• The portrayal of LGBTQ+ relationships in romantic comedies
• The representation of race and ethnicity in beauty advertising
• The impact of celebrity endorsements on skincare trends
• The role of fan fiction in shaping TV show narratives
• The cultural significance of streetwear fashion
• The evolution of language in pop music lyrics
• The influence of social media on body image
• The phenomenon of influencer marketing in the fitness industry
• The representation of mental health in young adult novels
• The popularity of true crime podcasts and their appeal to listeners

These are just a few examples of the many ways popular culture influences our lives and shapes our society. Whether you're interested in exploring the impact of social media on beauty standards or the representation of race in Hollywood films, there's no shortage of topics to explore in the world of popular culture. So pick a topic that interests you, do some research, and start writing your next essay on popular culture today!

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Media And Culture (Essay Sample) 2023

Table of Contents

Media And Culture

How Can I Get Essay For Free and Is it realistic to expect a low-cost, High-Quality Essay from a Cheap Paper Writing Service ?

Media and Culture

Introduction.

Media is the joint communication tools or outlets that are used for storing and delivering data or information. It is either related to communication media, or the established mass media businesses like broadcasting (television and radio), cinema, advertising, photography, the press, publishing, and print media. The word media is defined as “as one of the channels or means of common communication in the community, as television, radio, and newspapers. Culture on the other hand is the norms and social behavior that are found in human communities. Culture is a common subject in anthropology that encompasses the span of phenomena that are conveyed through social education in human communities. Some characteristic of social practices, like human behavior and culture conveying forms like rituals, music, religion, dance, and advancement such as shelter, clothing, cooking, and tool usage are referred to be cultural universals, that are found in all human communities. The subject of material culture is covering the physical assertions of culture like architecture, art, and technology, whereas the immaterial features of culture such as essentials of social organizations (includes practices of social institution and political organizations), literature (both oral and written), mythology, philosophy, and science comprising the untouchable cultural heritage of a community. In the liberal arts, one perception of culture as a trait of the individual has been the level to which they have improved a specific degree of sophistication in the education, sciences, manners, or arts. This paper seeks to describe media and culture and the significance of each in the modern society.

History of Media and Culture

The origin of human communication through outlined channels such as not gesture or vocalization, traces back to ancient drawn maps, writing, and cave paintings. The Persian Empire (focused on modern day Iraq) was playing a crucial role in the area of communication. It possesses the real postal system or mail, which is regarded to have been made by the Persian Emperor Cyrus after his subjugation of media. The work of the system as an intelligence gathering device is well recorded and the resource was later called angariae, a word that in time had been turned for indicating a tax system. The term communication is rooted from the Latin term communicare because the Roman Emperor had also devised what might be said to be a postal system or mail in order for central control of the territory from Rome. This postal system enabled for personal mails and for Rome to be gathering the information about events in its many extensive provinces. The present day term of culture is founded on a word that was used by Cicero, an ancient Roman when he was writing about the cultivation of soul or better known cultura animi, by using an agricultural symbol for developing a philosophical soul, acknowledged teleologically as the highest attainable model for human development. The term culture is stated by the Cambridge English wordbook as “the manner of life” especially the common beliefs and customs, of a certain group of individuals at a certain time.

Impacts of Media in the Modern Society

Media advancements have become an important feature of modern society. Each and every day, individuals are interacting with media of various kinds. Media advancement has established viewing progressively easier as time goes by throughout the history. For instance, children today are inspired to be using media devices in schools and are required to be having a general knowhow of the different advancements availed. The internet is probably one of the most effectual devices in media for disclosure, such as e-mail, skype, Facebook, and so forth, has caused individuals to draw closer simultaneously and creating new online societies (Berger, 2012). However, some individuals may debate that certain forms of media can be hindering face to face interaction and therefore can produce problems like identity theft. In a huge user driven community, print media such newspaper and electronic media such as television, are crucial for the distribution of the advertised media. More technologically developed communities are accessing goods and services through up to date media than less technologically developed communities. Additionally, the role of advertising media is nowadays a channel of sharing knowledge all across the globe. Because of media, the society can know what conflicting views are through press freedom and this is opens the space for debating and discussing, all of which help robust functioning of a democratic community (Geber, Scherer, & Hefner, 2016).

Impact of Culture in Modern Society

Technically, culture is consistently in the news and not only in the entrainment page of the newspapers and arts. It is like air one breathes or habitat water for fish. Yet lately culture has been a plain subject of debating. No matter what one is doing, culture is and will always be part of the community one lives in, whether it is one’s culture of the new nation one is residing or one’s culture by birth. One is born with a special fingerprint that comprises of ethnicity of that individual which contains the DNA of either parents, the next is the culture of both parents and finally, the kindness which is inborn in humanity at birth. Culture is a place or country that is having its own way of life and beliefs. One of the fascinating things in this modern society is connectivity where individuals of various cultures are intertwined by technology such as the World Wide Web. Technology and media have brought people of different cultures together and this evident on social media, online forums, and discussions. Culture is also one way of entertainment where people come to learn and appreciate the cultures of other societies and country in general. When culture is used as a lens in explaining the failures and successes, it is also obscuring extensive biological and socioeconomic factors. Understanding culture’s part in shaping one, one must comprehend that culture is not only the unmoving deposit of customs and ideas one lives with but it as well is shaped by diverse aspects like behavior (innate and learned), and circumstance (Van, 2017).

In conclusion, Media is the joint communication tools or outlets that are used for storing and delivering data or information and culture is the norms and social behavior that are found in human communities. Media and culture has become an important feature of modern society. One of the fascinating things in this modern society is connectivity where individuals of various cultures are intertwined by media technology. The media is a tool that is used to advertise various cultures and culture is one way of entertainment where people come to learn and appreciate diverse beliefs, customs, and artistry of other societies.

• Geber S. Scherer H. Hefner D. (2016). Social Capital in Media Societies: The Impact of Media Use and Media Structures on Social Capital. International Communication Gazette, 78(6), p493-513.
• Berger A. (2012). Media and Society: A Critical Perspective.
• Van G. (2017). Part 1: What Is Culture and How Does It Affect Our Daily Lives? HUFFPOST. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gabriella-van-rij/part-1-what-is-culture-and-how-does-it-affect-our-daily-lives_b_9607312.html

Culture Media as a Helpful Instrument

Culture media can be a helpful instrument in detecting and identifying the functions of various microorganisms. An ability to determine a purpose leads to a better understanding of what can be useful or harmful for the human body. This paper provides an overview of the definition, classification, and importance of culture media in microbiology laboratories.

Culture media are the media that are used in microbiology laboratories to grow various microorganisms. They are important as media help growing particular microorganisms, which allows exploring how they function. According to Marx (2016), such understanding can help to reveal “which bacterial species are key to a newborn’s immune system or coral reef health, have pathogenic traits, or might be healthful in a probiotic drink.” (p. 37). Therefore, culture contributes to the development of various fields of medicine and grows awareness of how certain microbes influence the individual’s body.

According to the composition or use, media can be divided into several categories. The two primary types of culture media are liquid culture media, which is also known as “broth,” and solid culture media, which is called “agar.” Liquid media does not contain gelatine or other gelling agents as “agar” does. Their primary function is the proliferation of a large number of microorganisms. Another purpose is various tests and fermentation studies that can be performed.

The liquid media can be divided into several categories depending on the functions they serve. Growth media are used to grow heterotrophic microorganisms; enrichment media serve to multiply the number of specific microorganisms and selective growth media. The last media is used to identify an organism, which is achieved by inhibiting the growth of the selected one.

Behera and Varma (2017) state that solid media can help microorganisms to grow in “physically informative or useful ways (e.g., as colonies or in streaks)” (p. 48). Solid medium helps to isolate bacteria or to determine the characteristics of an organism. There are also semi-solid media that are prepared with agar of concentration of 0.5 or less, compared to the solid agar with 1.5-2% concentration. The primary function of the semi-solid media is to cultivate microaerophilic bacteria. The type of use can also classify media. This classification includes defined, complex, minimal, supplementary, selective, and differential media.

Culture media should include specific criteria, and various tests can be performed to determine physical characteristics, depending on the type of media. For instance, visual tests for color and quality are one of the most common tests. Visual test for color means that the color of a sterilized medium is compared to a non-sterilized medium. Visual test for clarity identifies various optical artifacts. In determining physical characteristics, scholars should also make sure that the gel strength is not over-soft and that plates or bottles do not have defects. According to Sandle (2014), the pH of the finished media is the most critical test, as incorrect pH can lead to the inhibition of specific microbes. The inhibition can result in an inability to grow an intended microorganism, which can interfere with the experiment.

Culture media help to grow and examine various microorganisms that can help researchers to discover how they interact with the environment. Understanding the classification of different types of culture media can be useful in practice. To achieve the correct results and grow an intended microorganism, one needs to make sure that it corresponds to the most important criteria.

Marx, V. (2016). Microbiology: the return of culture . Nature Methods .

Sandle, T. (2014). Assessment of Culture Media in Pharmaceutical Microbiology. Bio Product Laboratory Ltd .

Behera, B. K., & Varma, A. (2017). Microbial biomass process technologies and management . Basel, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

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Cultural Diversity in Media and Gender Prejudices Essay

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Over the last two decades, media industry has played a huge role in determining how people socialize in our communities. Media can significantly influence how individuals in our societies relate and understand one another (Barker 1999). There is a mismatch between how different genders, particularly women, are portrayed in the media and how they appear in real life. Because of this, the media have been condemned for compromising on the intention of realising gender equality. Similarly, they have been blamed for propagating undesirable gender prejudices. According to women activists, the media misrepresent and portray women as sexual objects. The article below analyses an advert called Are You Beach Body Ready (Hackman 2015). Protein World Inc. produced and publicized the billboard. The poster presents a petite, curvy, blond-haired, and light-skinned female in a bright yellow swimsuit.

I have a weight of 59 kg and height of 167cm. I am quite tall, fit, and healthy. I have dark brown hair, athletic body, and ruddy facial appearance. Even though I am physically fit, the advert persuades me to buy protein weight loss to match my body shape with that of the model displayed on Are You Beach Body Ready . Notably, the advert objectifies women. As such, the media content distorts the perception of women in the society by portraying them as sexual objects (Margolin & Martiniello 2015).

Similarly, the advert’s portrayal of women depicts a standard of attractiveness, which is impractical and unachievable for many females. The poster suggests the model it portrays has an ideal healthy body weight. The above illustrations send an influential message that a woman should do whatever it takes to attain a model’s body to be perceived attractive by the society (Margolin & Martiniello 2015). If women are constantly exposed to such distorting media, they will increase their chances of suffering from eating complications.

According to the producers of the advert, the strategy was used as an efficient means of connecting with the marketplace (Barker 1999). However, it should be noted that the method disadvantages women with average appearance because they will feel less superior to the model portrayed in the media. Considered that posters have the capability to influence and shape peoples’ perceptions, the portrayal of women as sexual commodities will affect the manner in which the society perceives and treats them (Barker 1999). Based on the above illustrations, it is apparent that such advertisements are forcing the community to set impractical prospects of how women should appear and act.

Whereas men may accept that women are underprivileged, Peggy McIntosh’s suggests that males are often reluctant to acknowledge that they are over-advantaged (Margolin & Martiniello 2015). She asserts that although men support the initiatives aimed at empowering women, they do not support the concepts of decreasing the privileges enjoyed by men. She believes that men benefit from women’s hindrances. Based on McIntosh’s arguments, I think the advert’s text convinces women to be used as sexual objects and to be misrepresented (Margolin & Martiniello 2015). For instance, the producers of the poster did not use a male model in their commercial. I believe they did not do so because it would have misrepresented men in the society. Unlike when men are parodied, the society finds it okay when women are misrepresented.

I do not agree with the message being passed in the advert. I believe that all women are beautiful in their bodies. As such, overweight, medium sized and undersized women should feel comfortable and confident with their body sizes (Horner 2015). Therefore, I believe no woman should feel lesser or more superior than the model depicted on the advertisement because we are all uniquely different. If women accept the misrepresentation being passed by the portrait, they would have accepted that they are less equal compared with their male counterparts.

As indicated above, the advert presents a petite-yet-curvy, blond-haired, and light-skinned female in a bright yellow swimsuit. Even though I am physically healthy, the advert persuades me to buy protein weight loss to match my body shape with that of the model. Therefore, the advert’s text suggests that I am under privileged with the culture it depicts. Indicated below are some of these under privileges:

• I do not know how to swim.
• I cannot fit into swimming suits such as those depicted in the advert.
• I am not beach ready.
• I do not have an ideal body size.

Notably, the above under privileges are not necessarily correct as portrayed by the media content. They should be treated as mere assumptions propagated by the poster’s creators. The media content makes other women who are unlike the model feel less confident, less comfortable, and isolated. Based on this, the use of such adverts is misleading.

Are You Beach Body Ready confirms that women are prejudiced and underrepresented in the advertisement industry. In the past, women activists have claimed that underrepresentation of women in the sector has not only stereotyped them but also limited their roles (Margolin & Martiniello 2015). According to these campaigners, the industry preserves specific roles in the advertisements for female models. For instance, in most famous posters female actors are allocated few minor roles as compared to their male counter parts. As such, women models are usually used on advertisements that contain sexual content like Are You Beach Body Ready.

Through these posters, women are portrayed as submissive and promiscuous individuals (Margolin & Martiniello 2015). A disadvantage associated with the underrepresentation of women in advertisements is that their potentials and opportunities have been limited. Similarly, the inherent risks of portraying false traits about women have been enhanced through underrepresentation.

In conclusion, it should be noted that the media content influences the manner in which people perceive women. In spite of the women’s vital role in the contemporary society, it is surprising to note that they are not symbolized in the media contents according to their population and to communal participation. There is a mismatch between how women are portrayed in Are You Beach Body Ready advert and how they appear in real life. In the recent past, the media has been condemned for meddling with the intention of realizing gender equality and propagating undesirable gender prejudices. Are You Beach Body Ready has propagated adverse gender prejudices.

As such, it has misrepresented and portrayed women as sexual objects. The media should adopt policies or acts that will result in greater happiness for all women regardless of their body sizes to address such issues. Similarly, the media should end women misrepresentation. As such, women in adverts should be given more appealing roles other than being portrayed as sexual commodities.

Barker, C 1999, Television, globalization and cultural identities ,Open University Press, Buckingham. Web.

Hackman, R. (2015). Are you beach body ready? . Web.

Horner, D 2015, Understanding media ethics / David Sanford Horner , Sage, Los Angeles. Web.

Margolin, L & Martiniello, M 2015, ‘Unpacking the invisible knapsack: The invention of white privilege pedagogy’. Cogent Social Sciences , vol.1, no. 1, pp.105-106. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, May 14). Cultural Diversity in Media and Gender Prejudices. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cultural-diversity-in-media/

"Cultural Diversity in Media and Gender Prejudices." IvyPanda , 14 May 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/cultural-diversity-in-media/.

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IvyPanda . 2020. "Cultural Diversity in Media and Gender Prejudices." May 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cultural-diversity-in-media/.

1. IvyPanda . "Cultural Diversity in Media and Gender Prejudices." May 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cultural-diversity-in-media/.

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IvyPanda . "Cultural Diversity in Media and Gender Prejudices." May 14, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/cultural-diversity-in-media/.

• DOI: 10.1080/1462317x.2024.2366579
• Corpus ID: 270539861

Social Media Algorithms, Christian Extremism, and Catholic Ethics for Faith-Based Advocacy to Build a Culture of Encounter

• Published in Political Theology 14 June 2024
• Political Science, Philosophy

27 References

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