Media and the public Sphere , Simon During pp107-136

1. Bahir Dar University
Faculty of Humanities
Department of English Language and Literature
Post Graduate Program
English Literature Ph.D. Program
Presentation for the course Literary Theory and Criticism II:
Contemporary Debates/Cultural Studies (Lite- 702)
July, 2022
Bahir Dar, Ethiopia
Media and the public Sphere , Simon During pp107-136
By: Dawit Dibekulu Alem

2. Introduction
• What is Media?
• Includes:
Television,
music,
the internet, and
magazines and newspapers.
• Media are the materials and techniques used by an artist to
produce a work.
• It is a form of self expression of thoughts and ideas.
• Now a days this form of communication has become a
world power and has the ability to change and shape
cultures and societies.

3. Television
• History of Television and its impact on culture
• 1964, British cultural studies was still developing.
 TV was still developing as well
 Pictures were black and white
British TV consisted of three channels.
• In the 60s TV started to shape cultural events
The Beatles became international sensations partly because to
TV.
• Put Britain into the rock’n’roll age and internationalized its pop
culture.
• In the US TV advertisements were effecting consumer choices
Disney persuaded consumers that color sets were worth buying
 CBS introduced videotapes and gave consumers choice as to
when to watch TV

4. …cont’d
• Television was transforming and gaining power.
• TV contains 4 different elements that explain that
growing power:
1. Content being broadcast:
2. The Set on which the content is watched
3. The means of distribution of that content
4. The industry which produced the content
• It is impossible to imagine contemporary politics,
sports, music, film, and consumer culture without
TV.

5. The Set
• “The TV set exists primarily in domestic space and for
that reason television’s content and regulations have
always had to address family values and lifestyle
patterns.”
• Now a days One TV set is not enough and tends to
cause disputes over programming and the need for
several sets in a household has grown.
• Multiple sets tends to isolate family members from one
another.
• The TV set has also become a part of public culture.
• You see TV sets at the mall or at the university.
• “In many parts of the world television is watched
mainly in public, in cafes or bars, and that alters its
impact considerably.”

6. The industry: funding and regulation
• “Television is an expensive medium in relation to
print and even film, because of what is called
‘content exhaustion’”
• “Content exhaustion” is the way in which content
is replenished, recreated, and reused.
It is the creation of categories for TV shows and the
recreation of shows with in the same category.
EX. Reality TV, procedurals, and police shows.
• TV is funded differently in different countries.
It maybe funded by government, advertising, periodic
fees (in the case of cable and satellite) or by a mix of
these.

7. …cont’d
• “Government tends to pay for programming either
through the tax system (as in Australia),
 by selling off the right to use frequencies (selling off
blocks of time on the air) or
by charging licenses for ownership (as in the UK)
(Charging fees for owning a program).”
• In the US there is no wholly government-funded
television.
There is though “public television” which is “television
broadcast on frequencies reserved for non-profit stations
who typically receive less that half of their funds from
public sources (such as donations).”

8. ...cont’d
• Most other channels get their funding mainly from
advertising.
“Funding through advertising turns the medium into a
system whose primary function is to sell potential
consumers to advertisers, via the buyers of advertising
time, set at prices determined by ratings.”
• There are now many TV channels that are aimed at
different groups of people and each channel relates to that
group of people’s interests and social structures and even
culture.
 Ex. Channels based on ethnicity (black TV in the USA),
age (Disney channel), level of education, gender, and
political orientation.

9. ...cont’d
• Should the ownership of media be restricted?
• Might be hard since many large media companies own not
just one form of media but rather many.
Ex. Time Warner and News Corp own news papers,
publishing houses, sport teams, film studios, tourist
attractions, and national periodicals etc.
• This concentrated ownership threatens free markets
because these few companies control the content of the
media forms they own.
• “It puts at risk the principals of balance, diversity and
quality.”

10. …cont’d
• Should Television content and programming be censored
by regulations and rules or should they be self-censored?
• Many programs contain violence, encourage anti-social
behavior and deteriorates family values.
• This has a major effect on children whose values and
understanding of the world are shaped by the TV programs
they watch.
This means that TV pushed children towards violence, anti-social
behavior and the loss of family values.
• TV and children’s TV “delivers the attention of children
and their parents to toy manufacturers, confectioners and
drink marketers, fast-food outlets, the recorded music and
film industries and so on.”

11. …cont’d
• TV socializes Children and parents alike
towards consumption.
 It takes them away form more physical play to violence
and bullying.
• “As children grow up their memories of a
childhood watching TV are often invested
with a deep nostalgia.”
• There is a fear that television is becoming a
substitute for parenting.”

12. The Audience
• Audience reception: The impact of programming on
viewers and their reactions to those programs.
• “The study of reception has tried to figure out exactly the
value and impact of television.”
• History of the development of audience reception:
1. Uses and gratifications approach: - During the forties
statistical data were used to show that television viewing
integrated viewers into capitalists society.
It turned viewers into consumers.
 Also, “it linked patterns of television viewing to gender,
education, age, and economics and tried to view the impact of such
viewing on ‘behaviors’”.

13. …cont’d
• 2. Critical theory: - Then it was argued that “Television
reduces its audience’s capacities to reflect on and critique
society and culture by providing powerful forms of
distraction which transformed modern mass culture into a
medium of psychological control.”
• “ TV de-individuates people. It offers a profoundly
standardized image (of the) world.”
• “ It reinforces the false domination of private life over
the public sphere; it creates fantasies and false
satisfactions that allow capitalism to maintain itself.”
• “ Television posses so grate a power of seduction that
the distinction between its ‘dream world’ and reality
becomes confused.”

14. …cont’d
• Encoding/Decoding Model: - A four stage theory of
communication is introduced:
production,
circulation, use and
reproduction.
• “The media connects together different cultural
domains for audiences, as well as creating a sense of the
audience itself as community.”
• “What we need to acknowledge is that;
while TV and the media do systematically structure society
and culture and have had an especially profound impact on
their audiences,
nonetheless, in everyday life they remain at the sidelines for
many, probably most, people.”

15. Content
• TV audiences are divided into groups called
“demographics”
• These demographics or sectors of the audience are
targeted by advertisers while they watch their specific
shows.
• To keep particular demographics interested and viewing
one program after another, shows are scheduled in
“strips” or a string of one show after another.
This “strip” of shows is called prime time.
• Special regulation govern when “prime time” is.
 It has to be scheduled around audience real life event such as
meal and bed times.

16. ...cont’d
• “Prime time” is usually geared towards family
viewing and commercials during that time need to
retain viewer’s attention for the string of programming
to continue.
• Television has given rise to many genres or types of
programs over the years.
One of these genres is that of reality TV.
 Reality TV is: “a genre of television programming
that presents unscripted dramatic or humorous
situations, documents actual events, and usually
features ordinary people instead of professional actors,
sometimes in a contest or other situation where a prize
is awarded.”

17. …cont’d
• It started in 1990 with the “comic reality show”
“America’s Funnies Home Videos”.
Which drew “material from the real world, leaving behind all
dramatic and fictional framing.”
• The most popular form of reality TV has been
“competitive reality shows” such as “Big Brother” and
“Survival”.
 These shows often use viewers feedback via the phone and
Internet and elements of the game show.
• Some reality TV shows combine that aspect of real life
situations but with the addition of scripts and direction
to shape the outcome as desired.
This is called the “Dramatic Reality Show” because the
participants do some acting and drama.
 Ex. MTV’s “Real World”.

18. …cont’d
• “TV is in competition with the educational system as a
purveyor of information, knowledge and comment about the
world.”
• “It is in competition with live sports events as a leisure
choice.”
• “It is in competition with literature as a leisure choice.”
• It is also in a struggle over lifestyles and cultural values.
• “It is in competition with the Internet, not just at the level of
information but as a technology of communication, and one
which will probably swallow TV.”
• TV is “overriding all boundaries, blurring distinctions
between the public and the private, between masculinity and
femininity, childhood and adulthood, politicians and their
electors.”

19. ...cont’d
• Television and the media after all are infused
with everyday life.
 Ex. “TV produces reality as well as representing
it. One way it does so is by generating celebrities
who are often now famous for being famous (not
for any accomplishments).”
• These celebrities’ “lives can be understood as
real-time, lived experiments on the power of
the media to shape a life as a spectacle.”

20. ...cont’d
• Ex. Olsen twins:
 “media figures since they were nine months old (on Full House),
stars of computer games and animated TV series, producers of a
video series,
 brand names for a line of clothes, cosmetics, home furnishings,
books and CDs,
and web site and movie stars as well.”
The countdown to their eighteenth birthday was a major media
event in the US. Every aspect of their lives is made public.
• “The old understanding of the media- that it represents or
comments on the world and that it exists on a different
plane than life itself- has been completely undone by the
broadcast media over the past century.”

21. Popular muzic
• It is “a spontaneous product of individuals (both
musicians and fans):
 who come to it outside the highly capitalized
recording industry itself, and
have poached new technologies to make and listen to
topics on their own term.”
• “Although popular music is genuinely popular, it
is also:
 troublesome,
segmenting communities by generation, class, race,
ethnicity, tastes and gender.”

22. …cont’d
• “The big multinational corporations that dominate
the music industry themselves organize their music
divisions into units each concentrating on a
different genre and audience.”
• Popular musicians “over the years have acquired
significant clout.”
Ex. Bono of U2’s role in increasing US aid to the
world’s poorest nations.
The White House confirmed that lobbying from the
rock star was significant in the USA’s unexpected
change of direction, which led to the EU increasing its
aid budget also.”

23. Punk and Reggae
• “The Street music of the disaffected young in the late
seventies.”
• Punk
• Developed as a reaction to the following:
Highly industrialized and show-biz music such as the rock genres.
 The faded utopianisms of the hippie movement of the sixties
 The vain and self-obsessed “glam rock” (A style of rock music
first popular in the early 1970s, characterized by male performers
wearing flamboyant clothes and makeup.)
• Its urban, working-class, young and aggressively anti-
establishment.
• Prefers a language of abuse and rebellion
• Borrowed from rock’n’roll.
• Punk followers’ style included the use of safety pins, bondage
trousers, and ripped clothing.

24. Reggae
• Started in the seventies and eighties with a method that
explored studio-based techniques for making new
sounds.
• This method is called Toasting :
Toasting developed in the early fifties and involved the use of
a “sound system” (a portable record deck, amplifiers and
speakers used for street parties) These systems were mainly
popular in the poorer neighborhoods.
 Toasting DJs: Musicians who used the “sound systems “ to
layer slang lyrics and sounds on to records and songs.
• Hip Hop developed from Toasting.
• Included fashion styles, graffiti art, breakdancing,
scratching or turn-tabling and freestyle (the
improvisation of rhymes on top of rhythm tracks)

25. …cont’d
• Then Hip Hop became popular in Jamaica
• Hip Hop’s use of Toasting gave way to the creation of
Reggae in Jamaica.
• Reggae was one of the most innovative, technologised
music genres of the nineties.
• Reggae incorporated a Jamaican religious cult called
“Rastafarianism”
– Rastafarianism’s followers believe that the last Ethiopian
monarch (Haile Selassie) to be divine.
– “Deepened a long-standing ethos of rebellion and
disaffection among Jamaican youth, providing it with an
everyday life ethic that wore its difference and refusals
on the body and offered a spiritual and historical self-
understanding.”

26. ...cont’d
• Rastafarianism is also a style that characterizes
• Reggae:
 Dreadlocks
Ganja-smoking (type of drug)
Patois-speaking (a unique version of English spoken by Jamicans)
• Some of the Ideals associated with reggae are:
 A Back to Africa Idea and Black power
 “In the music they found an alternative Africanist identity, ‘a
black heart beating back to Africa on a steady pulse of music.’”
A rejection of the white man’s materialist world
• Reggae and Rastafarianism became popular in the eighties
around the world after Bob Marley’s visit to New Zealand.
• Successful Reggae bands started to appear.

27. Punk and Reggae
• “Effectively music can form identities
that have political and even spiritual
dimensions.”
• “Music can form a bridge, a basis for
sociability, between groups of fans with
no ‘organic’ association with one another
rincluding indeed academic and non-
academic fans.”

28. Modern Folk Music or commercial Product
• Folk Music has been defined in several ways:
as music transmitted by mouth,
as music of the lower classes, and
as music with unknown composers.
It has been contrasted with commercial and classical styles.
It has become increasingly common to refer to this type of
music as traditional music.
Since the middle of the 20th century, the term has also
been used to describe a kind of popular music that
evolved from traditional music.
• “The tension between music as an authentic, self-driven
collective expression (as if it were a kind of folk music)
against music as commodity or industry product.”

29. …cont’d
• “Music needs to be understood not from the fan’s point of view but
institutionally and economically.”
• For example:
Heavy Metal fans do not constitute a subculture on their own, but
became popular as a result of its occurrence in a moment in the
history of the music industry when it was controlled by only a few
players.
The emergence of FM radio stations and play lists met a suburban
audience.
Those few players help spread Heavy Metal music by playing it on
the radio.
 “ Heavy metal was a uniform style which overrode local
differences, partly as a result of centralized radio programming.”

30. ...cont’d
• The relation between commercialism and amateur
expressivity.
One genre that does that is Rap Rap Music
• “Has been extraordinarily commercially successful
and has retained its connections with the street
movement from which it emerged during the
seventies.”
• Rap has replaced Reggae as the music which
represents black resistance globally.
• Rap is poetic and verbal, many music genres are not.
• Its beats or rhythms are produced separately from the
lyrics and vocals in what is effectively a different
section of the industry.

31. ...cont’d
• Street Marketing: helped popularize Rap.
“This was a form of retailing that replaced or supplemented
radio and video promotion by swamping select sites in the
young, urban, black public sphere basketball games, local
stores, schoolyards, clubs- with sales material.”
“This sophisticated marketing techniques have been key to
the gangster rap which emerged in Los Angeles in the late
eighties.”
• • “Over the last decade rap has itself split into
numerous genres and audiences.” Such as fusions with
reggae and other genres. Some ideals of Rap:
Scandalizes women, liberals, family values.
 Promotes rebelliousness
May express a crisis of masculinity among urban African
Americans.

32. …cont’d
• “Another genre that brings the tension between
commerce and underground expressivity into the
open.”
• “Like punk and rap, it begins with a marginal youth
cultural formation”
• This formation is the “Rave Scene” – “Emerged
simultaneously in Ibiza, the Spanish holiday resort,
and in Manchester around 1987 when house music
first met the drug ecstasy.”
 The rave scene is associated with large parties and the use
of drugs and of course dancing.
News of these huge parties was spread by word of mouth
or on pirate radio stations and were illegal.
 EX. In 1992, 40,000 people gathered in England’s West
Country over a period of six days of illegal partying.

33. …cont’d
• The rave scene, “unlike reggae, punk and Hip Hop, had
no organic base, no community it could claim to
articulate and express. It was drawn together by the
music and the drugs.”
• Not the politics of identity but of pleasure and mood
and spirituality.
• House Music
Developed out of disco in Detroit and Chicago and sampled
all kinds of sounds by linking them through effects and
percussion breaks.
 Quickly spread to London and Germany and by the early
1990s was established in California and New York
It was played on large speakers by DJs in clubs.
• Dance Music which came about as a result of House
Music helped shape the club music of the nineties and
its star the DJ.

34. Art or Pop
• “A certain aestheticism (or creativity) is integral to the
popular music markets insofar as they are dependent on
reviews and criticism.
• Reviews make value judgments to guide consumer
choices.”
• So the creativity of a musical piece helps make that
creation popular.
• “Popular music is crucial to cultural studies because it
provides a strong example of:
how art forms nurture particular cultural formations through
processes of division and attraction, and
because music fandom crosses the border between academic
and non-academic so easily.”

35. ..cont’d
• “The discipline’s engagement with music does not
have the political force that it does with topics such
as gender, ethnicity, race and sexuality, because
these are much more nearly political through and
through.”
• “When it comes to music, cultural studies can
celebrate, critique and try to understand and explain,
but it does so at some distance from its topic, and
necessarily with a limited political agenda.”

36. Conclusion
• Popular music is crucial to cultural studies;
because it provides a strong example of how art forms
nurture particular cultural formations through processes
of division and attraction, and
because music fandom crosses the border between
academic and non- academic so easily.
• But popular music's aesthetics challenge reductive
forms of populism while the way that its
commercialism is so closely bound to its creativity
and rebelliousness also challenges analytic
structures that place the market in opposition to
authentic dissidence.

37. ..cont’f
• In a recent essay on cultural studies and popular music, Lawrence Grossberg
suggests that it is important their relations remain political (Grossberg 2002).
• His argument is that, under neo-liberalism, youth (i.e. American youth) are being
squeezed between policies which jeopardize their economic and social future
and policies that demand they take more and more responsibility earlier.
• in this situation, he contends, a theoretically informed understanding of youth
culture, and especially of music, will help scholars in the field act as advocates for
youth. t s an intriguing notion which chimes with some of my own arguments
for the role of cultural studies in this book. But still, wonder what outKast and
their fans, or Michael Jackson and his fans, or Avril Lavigne and her fans, would
make of it.
• Finally, for all cultural studies’ long intimacy wit pop music, they do belong to
different worlds and that difference is more essential to what energizes them
than any alliances. if that is the case, a cultural studies understanding of popular
music, although it may express fan ship or even a desire for advocacy, leans
finally towards being academic knowledge like any other.
• The discipline’s engagement (as in cultural studies is an engaged discipline) wit
music does not have the political force that it does with topics such as gender,
ethnicity, race and sexuality, because these are much more nearly political
through and through .when it comes to music, cultural studies can celebrate,
critique and try to understand and explain, but it does so at some distance from
its topic, and necessarily wit a limited political agenda.

38. ..cont’f
• In a recent essay on cultural studies and popular music is
important their relations remain political.
• His argument is that, under neo-liberalism, youth (i.e.
American youth) are being squeezed between policies which
jeopardize their economic and social future and policies that
demand they take more and more responsibility earlier.
• in this situation, he contends, a theoretically informed
understanding of youth culture, and especially of music, will
help scholars in the field act as advocates for youth.
• It’s an intriguing notion which chimes with some of my own
arguments for the role of cultural studies in this book.
• But still, wonder what out Kast and their fans, or Michael
Jackson and his fans, or Avril Lavigne and her fans, would
make of it.

39. ..cont’f
• Finally, for all cultural studies’ long intimacy with pop music,
they do belong to different worlds and that difference is
more essential to what energizes them than any alliances.
• if that is the case, a cultural studies understanding of
popular music, although it may express fan ship or even a
desire for advocacy, leans finally towards being academic
knowledge like any other.
• The discipline’s engagement (as in cultural studies is an
engaged discipline) with music does not have the political
force that it does with topics such as gender, ethnicity, race
and sexuality, because these are much more nearly political
through and through .
• when it comes to music, cultural studies can celebrate,
critique and try to understand and explain, but it does so at
some distance from its topic, and necessarily wit a limited
political agenda.

40. The Internet and Techno-culture
• Techno-culture: “refers to the interactions between,
and politics of, technology and culture.”
• It is “how successive technological developments
have influenced (and continue to influence our lives).”
• In the eighties the internet was just starting and was
then extremely limited.
• It was managed by the US Department of Defense and
a research network called ARPNET.
• Internet access at that time meant a supper slow
modem that took sometimes hours to connect through
a phone line.
• “The difficulty with techno-culture is that no one
knows where it is heading or exactly what it is.”

41. …cont’d
• From 1990 on wards, the word “Web” meant
something very specific within the larger Internet.
• It meant the World Wide Web and the user-friendly
services and limited sites that contained bulletin
boards and a bit latter pictures then sound.
• “Today the Web can signify the whole thing:
 it’s interchangeable with terms such as ‘Internet’ or
‘Net’.”
• “The Web does not just belong to culture:
it is as much a business, an administrative and a
military tool as a personal, leisure one.”

42. …cont’d
• “It is not just a service either.
It absorbs and transforms most of the old communication
technologies-
telephony, broadcasting, mail, publishing and adds some new ones-
audio down-loading, linking, and info-tracking.”
• Because the web is still developing and
• because no one knows exactly:
what it will turn out to do or
 what its social effects will be, its critique and theory
routinely lapse into speculation and prophecy.”
• The digitization of information and communication is
separate from the Internet.
• It is closely connected to the Net’s extension, since
everything that can be digitized can be put on the
Web.

43. …cont’d
• “At the moment however digitization has its own
effects independently of the Web,
including important implications for copyright, as in the
case of MP3 sharing.”
• The Web’s social and cultural impacts –
 “The fears and risks associated with new
technologies are unevenly distributed in social
terms.”
 “Virtual technologies supplement rather than
substitute for real activities.”
such as online games and programs.

44. …cont’d
• “The more virtual the more real, which means that
the new technologies actually encourage more
traditional activities.”
Ex. “In the publishing industry, where digitalization of
book production has made the process cheaper, quicker
and more flexible, increasing the number of books
published per year.”
• Connecting neighborhoods to the Web can
increase local pride.
• Net usage can seem to confirm long-seated
cultural practices.

45. …cont’d
• • “The Web represents approximately 11% of total media
consumer time in the USA and obviously much less that that
globally.”
• In 1999, the UNDP reported that first world countries
“constituted 19 % of the world’s population but 91 % of Internet
users.”
• “This is the figure that measures the global digital divide, i.e.
the massive inequality of Net access across regions.”
• “The Web means increased access to the mass of commodities.
• And information and the increased fragmentation of leisure
activities:
television, reading,
 movie-going have a real competitor in the Webindeed there
is now significant evidence that TV viewership is being hurt
by Web browsing.”

46. …cont’d
• Every act on the Web can be monitored and leaves its traces.
• This means that privacy is under jeopardy.
• Work and consumption are both more able to be monitored
that previously.”
• This “suggests the emergence of a new domain between the
public and the private- the domain of the web log (or blog):
web-posted diaries on individuated web sites.”
• “The blog radically democratizes web publishing since it
makes it both easy and free.”
• There are many different types of blogs and “almost all of
them fall into a strange space where they are lost in the
vastness of the Web.
• They are neither secret nor public.”

47. ….cont’d
• Social networks have also emerged that make
communication between people very easy and fast and
enable people to stay connected to each other and keep into
touch.
– Ex. Facebook, Twitter and Myspace.
• Time works differently on the Web than it has for
traditional media and cultural forms.
• “Digitization allows culture to exist in an eternal present.
• The temporality of print media and broadcast media where
texts such as news programs are presented in regular
intervals and at specified time.”
• Websites rarely mark time of origin, and are there as long as
the server remains connected.”