These slides are intended for level 4 cultural studies students at COLT at PNU

1. Part 4
Media and the Public
Sphere

2. • 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 4.1
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. •
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.
•
“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).”

7. •
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.
•
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.”

8. •
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.”
•
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.”

9. 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’”.
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.”

10. 3. 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.”

11. 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.
•
“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.

12. •
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.”
•
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”.

13. •
“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.”

14. •
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.”
•
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.”

15. Popular Music 4.2
•
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.”
•
“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.”

16. 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.

17. 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)
•
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.

18. •
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 selfunderstanding.”
•
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.

19. • “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 anotherincluding indeed academic and non-academic
fans.”

20. ?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.”
•
“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.”
•

21. •
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.
•
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 spherebasketball 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.”

22. •
•
“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.
Dance Music
• “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.

23. 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.

24. ?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.”
•
“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.”

25. The Internet and Technoculture 4.3
•
Technoculture: “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 technoculture is that no one knows where it is heading or
exactly what it is.”
•
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’.”

26. •
“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.”
•
“It is not just a service either. It absorbs and transforms most of the old
communication technologies- telephony, broadcasting, mail, publishingand 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.
•
“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.”

27. 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.
- “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.”

28. •
“The Web represents approximately 11 percent of total media consumer
time in the USA and obviously much less that that globally.”
•
In 1999, the United Nations Development Program reported that first
world countries “constituted 19 percent of the world’s population but 91
percent 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.”
•
“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.”

29. •
•
•
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.”
•
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.”