Communications and media have changed dramatically in recent decades. The document discusses several theoretical perspectives on how media influences culture and society. It analyzes the role of media through the lenses of functionalism, political economy, public sphere theory, and hyperreality. Scholars debate whether contemporary society reflects more of an Orwellian or Huxleyan vision of media control and the challenges it presents for democracy.

1. Communications
and New Media
March 2014
Early in life I had noticed that no
event is ever correctly reported in
a newspaper. George Orwell
In the long history of humankind those who
learned to collaborate and improvise most
effectively have prevailed.
~ Charles Darwin

2. Focus Topics
• How have communications changed in recent
decades?
• What role do the media play in shaping our
culture?
• How far are the media able to shape what we
think?
• How does sociology approach the media?
• Who controls the media and does this matter?
• How might bias be a problem for our
understanding of society?

3. Towers of Babel and the World Wide Web
3
Men in their
arrogance built
a tower into the
heavens.
God destroyed
it and created
all the
languages of the
world so man
would never
again attempt to
do the same
thing.

4. Theoretical Perspectives on Media
• Functionalism: Wright, C (1960); the media helps to
integrate and bind society. McQuail, D (2000) five stabilizing
functions
• Political Economy: Chomsky (1991); Philo & Berry (
2004); Frankfurt School (Horkheimer & Adorno 1947)
• Jürgen Habermas (1962): the Public Sphere
• Jean Baudrillard (1983;1991): Hyperreality
• John Thompson (1990; 1995): 3 kinds of
communication

5. Functionalism
Wright, C (1960); the media helps to integrate
and bind society.
McQuail, D (2000) five stabilizing functions:
• Information: lets us know what is happening in the world
• Correlation: interprets information around established social
norms and values
• Continuity: expresses common culture whilst recognizing
and incorporating new developments
• Entertainment: amusement and diversion reducing social
tensions
• Mobilization: encourage action to meet social and economic
goals

6. Conflict theory: Political Economy
Who owns the media and what influence does
that give them in society?
How does the media act to protect the interests
of those with wealth and power and to silence
critical voices and the voices of the powerless?
Two approaches:
Chomsky
Frankfurt School

8. Political Economy I: Chomsky
Chomsky, N. (1991) Media Control: The Spectacular
Achievement of Propoganda
Large media corporations:
• Control the information made available to the public
• Create a climate of fear from external threats
• Do not question the unaccountability of powerful
corporations
• Do not question the relationship between big business
and the state
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMStCHtUNeY

9. Ideology
• Destutt De Tracy (1700s) ‘a science of ideas’
– Implies neutrality
• Marx sees ideology as important in the reproduction of the
relations of class domination:
– Powerful groups circulate their ideas
– Justify their own position
• Discourse analysis; ‘text analysis is an essential part of
discourse analysis, but discourse analysis is not merely the
linguistic analysis of texts’ (Fairclough 2000:3)
• The Glasgow University Media Group: Bad News (1976)
– Words chosen reflected bias: ‘trouble’, ‘radical’, ‘pointless strike’
– Videos: focus on confrontations
– Bad News from Israel (Philo & Berry 2004) ( - 3.40)
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnJEYVxLXbY

10. Political Economy II:
The Frankfurt School
• ‘The Culture Industry: the tyranny of mass
consumption’ (Horkheimer and Adorno 1947)
• Cultural goods are mass produced in the same
way as other goods
• Film, pop music and so on become bland and
empty and dull the recipient
• Art and ‘high culture’ become debased and
lose their power to transform and challenge

11. Jürgen Habermas (1962)
• The public sphere
– arena of public debate; general issues can be discussed,opinions
can be formed
• The public sphere first developed as part of enlightened
philosophical and political transformations to enable
informed, democratic, public debate
• The media has the potential to extend and deepen the public
sphere
• The media actually promotes entertainment and spectacle
• Politics becomes reduced to photo opportunities and sound
bites – debasing the public sphere
• Habermas remains optimistic; it is still possible to have a
political community where issues can be openly debated

12. In 2006, George Galloway participated in
Celebrity Big Brother because, he claimed, it
was a way of reaching out to younger people
and engaging them in political ideas…

13. Jean Baudrillard (1983; 1991)
It used to be possible to think of a distinction
between the social world and the media which
represented and reported on it. Now:
• Modern media are everywhere and increasingly
define and constitute the social world: reality is
what is on TV
• Rolling news channels report on events before
and while they happen and therefore shape them
in real time
• In this ‘hyperreality’ images are constructed with
reference to other images – they are not
grounded in any external social reality
• This may be an explanation for ‘celebrity culture’;
success is appearing in Hello.

14. Jean Baudrillard (1983; 1991)
• Baudrillard :
– mass media is the most
profound change in
modernity
– TV does not merely
represent
– it also defines our world
• Baudrillard: the border
between reality and
representation has
collapsed.
• Media representation is
now part of a hyper-reality.

15. The Gulf War Did Not Take Place
(Baudrillard, J. 1991)
• George Bush and Saddam
Hussein both had to watch
CNN to see what was actually
happening. The war wasn’t real
until it was on TV.
• Hyper-reality
– the world is created from
simulacra
– images that get their reality from
other images and hence have no
grounding in external reality.
• Criticism:
– events fall outside the interest of
western media
– Darfour- there is still a world
outside post-modern hyper-
reality.

16. US THEM
We have...
Army, Navy and Air Force
Press briefings
They have...
A war machine
Propaganda
Our boys are...
Cautious
Dare-devils
Loyal
Brave
Theirs are...
Cowardly
Cannon fodder
Blindly obedient
Fanatical
Our missiles cause...
Collateral damage
Their missiles cause...
Civilian casualties
We…
Precision bomb
They…
Fire wildly at anything in the skiesAll the expressions above were used by the
British press during the 1991 Gulf War

17. Two authors, two visions of the
future…
• George Orwell 1984
• Aldous Huxley A Brave New World
• Themes in both:
– Media, the control of information, ideas and
ideologies

18. Two Visions of the Future:
• A brave new world (Huxley, A.,
1932)
• London Hatching Centre: Alpha,
Beta, Gamma, Delta or Epsilon
• Soma – drug; pain relief
• Reproductive rights controlled
through sterilization. Promiscuity
encouraged.
• Use of science and technology to
create a happy, superficial world
• Technology makes the citizens so
happy, they do not care about their
personal freedom
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
WuiaT0nX9ls
• 2.40
• 1984 (Orwell, G., 1949)
• Oceania; London
• Winston, member of The Party
• Everywhere he goes, he is
monitored; filmed
• Works at Ministry of Truth: altering
papers
• Newspeak- language
• Oceania has always been at war with
Eurasia, and allied with Eastasia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4rB
DUJTnNU

19. Amusing Ourselves to Death Postman,
N (1986)
• Orwell fears:
– Those who ban books
– Those who would deprive
us of information
– The concealment of truth
– We will become captured/
captive
– People are controlled by
pain or by fear
– What we hate will ruin us
• Huxley fears:
• Those who give us so
much information we
become passive
• That there is no one who
wants to read a book
• The truth will be drowned
in a sea of irrelevance
• What we love will ruin us

20. Amusing Ourselves to Death Postman,
N (1986)
• Postman argues that Huxley, rather
than Orwell, is correct in their
interpretation of the future
• TV trivialises, politics, education,
news, are all reduced to
entertainment.
• This is because TV as ‘the form’ is
incapable of sustaining serious
‘content’
• Printed word is capable of sustaining
complex and serious content
• Print creates a rational population
• TV creates an entertained
population

21. Bowling Alone Putnam, R (1995;
2000)
• Social capital: ‘ the social knowledge and connections that enable people to
accomplish their goals and extend their influence’ (Giddens 2009:817)
Example question:
Which, if any, of these things have you done in the past week? Discussed politics
– Had dinner in a restaurant
– Had friends in for the evening
– Went to the home of friends
– Saw a movie
• Bridging Social Capital (Outward-looking; inclusive, e.g. civil rights;
blacks/whites) Bonding Social Capital (Inward-looking; exclusive, e.g. church-
based women’s group)
• TV viewing is strongly negatively correlated to social trust and group
membership
– 1950 – 10% of Americans had a TV set
– 1959 – 90% had a TV set
• Heavy watchers of TV are unusually sceptical about the benevolence of other
people

22. Controlling the global media
• Held et al (1999) Global Transformations: Politics,
Economics and Culture:
– Increasing concentration of ownership:
• dominated by a small number of powerful corporations
– A shift from public to private ownership:
• Liberalization of the business environment; privatization
and commercialization of many media companies
– Transnational corporate structures:
• Media ownership rules loosened; cross-border investment
and acquisition
– Diversification over a variety of media products:
• Diversification and less segmentation (Time Warner – mix
media, music, news, print, TV programming)
– A growing number of corporate media mergers:
• Media becomes increasingly integrated

23. The question: whose vision of the
future is right?
• Orwell, or Huxley?
• Discuss with your partner, referring to:
– Putnam (1995; 2000)
– Held et al (1999)
– Postman (1986)
– Functionalism: Wright, C (1960); the media helps to integrate
and bind society. McQuail, D (2000) five stabilizing functions
– Political Economy: Chomsky (1991); Philo & Berry ( 2004);
Frankfurt School (Horkheimer & Adorno 1947)
– Jürgen Habermas (1962): the Public Sphere
– Jean Baudrillard (1983;1991): Hyperreality
– John Thompson (1990; 1995): 3 kinds of communication

24. THE IMPACT OF THE INTERNET AND
THE MEDIA

25. The Impact of the internet
• Virtual Communities
• Control and Surveillance
• The Network Society

26. The Virtual Community Rheingold, H
(2000)
• Virtual communities: social aggregations that emerge from
the Net when enough people carry on… public discussions
long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of
personal relationships in cyberspace’ (2000:5)
• Being part of the WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) is a
disembodied form of the real world:
– Argue
– Gossip
– Make plans
– Fall in love
– Make friends
– Lose friends
– In other words, we do the same, but leave our bodies behind

27. The Virtual Community Rheingold, H
(2000)
• There are positive sides to computer-
mediated communications:
– Supplement existing relationships
– Maintain contact with friends and relatives when
abroad
– Increased toleration of distance and separation
– New types of relationships; annonymous chat
– Expansion and enrichment of social networks

28. The Virtual Community Rheingold, H
(2000)
• There are negative sides to computer-mediated
communications:
– Commodity fetishism: gathering details and selling
detials
– Intensified surveillance; state monitoring:
– This last point is of course strongly related to Michel
Foucault’s thesis regarding power and surveillance…
– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVTKHI5ovyc&feature=re
sults_video&playnext=1&list=PLCA2759BD95C139E4

29. Discipline & Punish Foucault, M (1975)
• ‘Is it surprising that prisons resemble
factories, schools, barracks, hospitals,
which all resemble prisons?’
(1975:228)
• Principles of surveillance, observation
and correcting unwanted behaviour do
not stop at the prison gates:
– These are part of modernity itself
– Prisoners are compelled to behave
well, as they never know when they
are being observed
– This makes for a ‘carceral society’,
placing citizens under a managerial
gaze
• We now live in a ‘surveillance society’
(Lyon 1994)

30. State Cyber Control
• Likewise it offers new
opportunities for invasion of
personal privacy- vast
amounts of data are
collated, on things like
shopping –Amazon sending
you lists of similar types of
books to those you have
placed in your basket.
• Consider- US government’s
demand that ISPs keep all e-
mails for 2 years, so they
can be accessed by law
enforcement agencies.
30

32. Lull, J (1997) cited in Hogge (2005)
• 100 Chinese families:
– ‘Masters of interpretation’; reading between the lines
– Viewers were skilled at imagining the true situation,
knowing the government reports were bent or
exaggerated
– Access to TV and films showed images contrary to their
own way of life
• Google agreed to censor sensitive results for China
(2006):
– Tiananmen Square massacre (1989)
– Promotion of Taiwan independence
– Tibet
– This supports Hackett and Zhao (2005) (last week) profit
making rather than American values drives US media
companies

33. The rise of the Network Society
Castells, M (1996; 2001)
• It is impossible for organizations to survice without
being part of a network
• IT enables growth
• Organizational networking represents disintegration of
traditional, rational bureacracy (challenging Weber’s
thesis)
• For individuals, the Internet is:
– New combinations of work and self-employment
– Individual expression
– Collaboration and sociability
– Possibility of political activism
• ‘The network is the message’ not ‘The medium is the
message’

34. Media Imperialism (Herman &
McChesney 2003)
• The paramount position of the industrialized
countries (above all US) in the production and
diffusion of media:
– A cultural empire has been established.
– Less developed countries especially vulnerable
because they lack the resources to maintain their
own cultural independence.

35. Media Imperialism
• ‘hypodermic needle’ model
which tends to assume that
Western cultural products carry
Western values that are
‘injected’ into passive
consumers around the globe.
• Audience studies:
– consumers are active, not passive,
watchers and listeners
– may reject, modify or reinterpret the
messages in media products. Ien Ang’s
(1985) study of Dallas
• Glocalisation – Robertson, R (1995)

36. John Thompson (1990; 1995)
Three Types of Interaction:
1. face-to-face,
2. mediated,
3. quasi-mediated
The Frankfurt School underestimate the extent to
which the consumers of media messages (mediated
quasi-interaction) actively make sense of them
through other forms of interaction
Baudrillard overemphasises the dominance of
mediated quasi-interaction on social life

37. Conclusion
• To what extent is contemporary society is a
combination of an Orwellian/Huxley nightmare?
– To what extent doesmedia imperialism, especially
ownership, spreads the ideologies of the powerful, ensure
the public remain ‘entertained’ and dull to real situations.
• Or, new media has the potential for a Habermasian
public sphere of debate. As Thompson argues, face-to-
face communication and quasi-mediated interaction
enable criticism.
• You decide!

38. Set reading
• Crime:
– Giddens, Ch. 21.
– Macionis & Plummer, Ch. 17.