GENERAL MEDIA EFFECTS

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Mass media effects: introduction
This introduction provides a brief overview of the principal 'traditions' in effects research. Bear in mind that it's a somewhat artificial approach as the various 'traditions' overlap with one another. However, it should help you to understand what are the main characteristics of each approach. Note, incidentally, that the term 'effects research' is often used solely to refer to the, predominantly American, empiricist approach. Here, I have decided to lump all the various approaches under the heading of 'effects research,' since they are all concerned, in one way or another, with the effects the mass media might have.

The Hypodermic Needle Model
Advertising and World War I propaganda
The 'folk belief' in the Hypodermic Needle Model was fuelled initially by the rapid growth of advertising from the late nineteenth century on, coupled with the practice of political propaganda and psychological warfare during World War I. Quite what was achieved by either advertising or political propaganda is hard to say, but the mere fact of their existence raised concern about the media's potential for persuasion. Certainly, some of the propaganda messages seem to have stuck, since many of us still believe today that the Germans bayoneted babies and replaced the clappers of church bells with the churches' own priests in 'plucky little Belgium', though there is no evidence for that. Some of us still cherish the belief that Britain, the 'land of the free', was fighting at the time for other countries' 'right to self-determination', though we didn't seem particularly keen to accord the right to the countries we controlled.
The Inter-War Years
Later, as the 'Press Barons' strengthened their hold on British newspapers and made no secret of their belief that they could make or break governments and set the political agenda, popular belief in the irresistible power of the media steadily grew. It was fuelled also by widespread concern, especially among élitist literary critics, but amongst the middle and upper classes generally, about the supposed threat to civilised values posed by the new mass popular culture of radio, cinema and the newspapers.
The radio broadcast of War of the Worlds seemed also to provide very strong justification for these worries.
Concern also grew about the supposed power of advertisers who were known to be using the techniques of behaviourist psychology. Watson, the founding father of behaviourism, having abandoned his academic career in the '20s, worked in advertising, where he made extravagant claims for the effectiveness of his techniques.
Political propaganda in European dictatorships
1917 had seen the success of the Russian Revolution, which was followed by the marshalling of all the arts in support of spreading the revolutionary message. Lenin considered film in particular to be a uniquely powerful propaganda medium and, despite the financial privations during the post-revolutionary period, considerable resources were invested in film production.
This period also saw the rise and eventual triumph of fascism in Europe. This was believed by many to be due to the powerful propaganda of the fascist parties, especially of Joseph Goebbels. Goebbels had great admiration for the propaganda of the Soviet Union, especially for Eisenstein's masterpiece Battleship Potemkin. Though himself a fanatical opponent of Bolshevism, Goebbels said admiringly of that film: 'Someone with no firm ideological convictions could be turned into a Bolshevik by this film.' The film was generally believed to be so powerful that members of the German army were forbidden to see it even long before the Nazis came to power and it was also banned in Britain for many years.
After the war, Speer, Hitler's armaments minister, said at his trial for war crimes:
[Hitler's] was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country ... Through technical devices like the radio and the loudspeaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man.
quoted in Carter (1971)
While bearing in mind that Speer was concerned to save his own skin, we have to recognise that this view of the manipulative power of propaganda was fairly typical.
Post-War and the present day
With the development of television after World War II and the very rapid increase in advertising, concern about the 'power' of the mass media continued to mount and we find that conern constantly reflected in the popular press. That concern underlies the frequent panics about media power. In the popular press, Michael Ryan was reported to have gone out and shot people at random in Hungerford because he had watched Rambo videos, two children were supposed to have abducted and murdered Jamie Bulger because they had watched Child's Play. After the 1992 General Election, The Sun announced 'It's the Sun what won it' - a view echoed by the then Conservative Party Treasurer, Lord McAlpine, and the defeated Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock.
Horror comics
This kind of concern has a long history. Even the Greek philosopher Plato was prepared to exclude dramatists from his ideal republic lest they corrupt the citizens. He wasn't prepared to have any truck with new music either: 'one should be cautious in adopting a new kind of poetry or music, for this endangers the whole system .... lawlessness creeps in there unawares,' he wrote in his Republic, in terms depressingly familiar to anyone who has heard what our guardians of public morality have had to say about Elvis, Hendrix, Sid Vicious, Madonna and the rest, not to mention the waltz and the tango!In the 1950s there was a sustained campaign in Britain against American horror comics, a campaign which saw an unlikely alliance of the morally outraged right and the British Communist Party, concerned about the American, anti-Communist messages in the comics (Barker 1984a)) an alliance reminiscent of the rather odd anti=pornography alliance today between some radical feminists and the religious right. The campaign resulted in the Children and Young Persons Act 1955, which is still in force today; the 1958 film The Wild One with Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin was banned because it might lead to juvenile delinquency; Alan Watkins' brilliant The War Game was banned because it might unduly alarm the public (though most likely because it told some unpalatable truths about nuclear warfare). The concern is always with the effect the questionable messages might have on those who are most susceptible - children, adolescents, the mentally unstable - and, of course, those who express the concerns are not themselves corrupted by those messages. The prosecuting counsel in the trail on obscenity charges of D H Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover famously asked the jury if it was the sort of thing they would 'want their servants to read'. Would the servants be corrupted by the use of the word 'fuck' while their masters wouldn't? I suspect that the unspoken question was whether they would perhaps be corrupted by the tale of a servant 'fucking' a master (mistress in this case). It's not difficult to see how a concern with moral standards can be close to a concern with keeping people in their place.
Today those concerns would probably strike most of us as laughable when we read the comics and watch the movies that were banned. Will it seem silly in twenty years' time that in the '90s the sale of hard-core porn was limited to licensed sex shops, that various European governments tried to ban the Red Hot Dutch Channel and that software was available to screen out rude words on the Net?
Video nasties
It might, but there was a re-run of the horror comics campaign during the 1980s with the video nasties campaign, which led to the Video Recordings Act. Just as the 1955 Act had been supported by an unlikely alliance of the right and the CPGB, so we find that the video nasties campaign was spearheaded by the Conservative MP, Winston Churchill, with the support of many feminists (Barker (1984b)).
Whether or not these concerns will strike us as silly at some time in the future, they are used by the 'moral entrepreneurs', such as Mrs Whitehouse of National VALA, Winston Churchill MP, or Nicholas Alton MP, or feminists like the American Andrea Dworkin, to determine what limitations there should be on what you and I see, read and listen to. And those people are in part responsible for the existence of the BSC, BCC, ITC, the various Royal Commissions on the Press, the BBFC, National VALA, the Video Recordings Act, the ASA, the Obscene Publications Act and all the other regulations which make Britain's media one of the most restricted in the 'free world'.

The 'empiricist' tradition
The empiricist researchers were concerned to find out as much as possible about media audiences, in much the same terms as advertisers today would seek information from, say the NRS: number of people, age, sex, social status, occupation, leisure and so on.
By and large these data tended to be used to support studies into the effectiveness of communication, rules for mounting effective campaigns and so on.
Contemporary commentators on media research are frequently dismissive of the 'scientific', experimental methods often employed in early empiricist 'Effects Research'. Whilst there is much to criticize in this approach, the critics often unfairly overstate their case, disregarding the methodological diversity which did exist at the time. Such diversity was often forced upon the researchers by the realization that their 'scientific', 'positivistic' approach was based on a transmission model of communication which conceives of a message being sent from sender to receiver, disregarding institutional, psychological, cultural and other factors which contribute to any possible effects the media may have.
Hovland
Very important amongst these researchers was Carl Hovland of Yale whose carefully controlled experiments were designed to test the separate variables in the communication process. The main focus of his research was persuasion. Many of the principles he established are generally accepted today - one finds them being repeated, in one form or another, by, for example, political spin doctors, PR people, advertisers. However, it's worth bearing in mind that such people are trying to sell their services and so may be making greater claims for Hovland's principles than they deserve. Certainly, as mentioned above, many contemporary critics would criticize the unashamedly positivist approach adopted by Hovland, an approach which implies that it is possible to discern general 'rules' for effective and persuasive communication.
Please click here for more details of the Hovland approach:
Lazarsfeld
Paul Lazarsfeld was also a very important researcher who contributed much to the development of empirical methods in the social sciences during his work at the Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research. The most famous of the studies he conducted was that into voting behaviour carried out in the 1940s and which led him to develop the highly influential Two Step Flow Model of mass communication.
As a result of his research, Lazarsfeld concluded that the media actually have quite limited effects on their audiences. This view of the media is common to many of the researchers in the US. Hovland, for example, whilst showing what variables can be altered to make a communication more or less effective, also places considerable emphasis on those factors, especially social factors such as group membership, which limit the persuasiveness of the message. Consequently, this view of the media is often referred to as the 'limited effects' paradigm or tradition
Katz and Lazarsfeld: Two-Step Flow
The study of the 1940 election campaign
In 1940, Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet conducted the first full-scale investigation of the effects of political mass communication. Their research focused on the 1940 Presidential election campaign and their findings were published in 1944 in The People's Choice after more research had been conducted.
The importance of social influence
Their research was originally based on something like the simplistic hypodermic needle model of media influence, whereby it was assumed that a message would be transmitted from the mass media to a 'mass audience', who would absorb the message. However, their investigations suggested that media effects were minimal, that the conception of a 'mass audience' was inadequate and misguided and that social influences had a major effect on the process of opinion formation and sharply limited the media's effect.
Limited effects
The study by Lazarsfeld et al concluded that only some 5% of people changed their voting behaviour as a result of media messages. Their exposure to election broadcasts turned out to be a relatively poor predictor of their voting behaviour, particularly when compared with other factors such as their interpersonal communication with friends, union members, business colleagues and the political tradition they had grown up in. This view of media effects was confirmed n a variety of other investigations and came to be known as the 'limited effects paradigm' of media influence.
Two-Step Flow: general conclusions
Consequently Lazarsfeld and his colleagues developed the notion of a 'two-step' flow of media messages, a process in which opinion leaders played a vitally important rôle.
This was later developed by Katz and Lazarsfeld and presented in their book Personal Influence (1955). A number of significant conclusions follow from their research:
our responses to media messages will be mediated through our social relationships, the effects of media messages being sharply limited by interpersonal relationships and group membership (this is confirmed also by Hovland who identifies our adherence to group norms as a major factor; see also the more general sections on Social Influence)
it is misleading to think of receivers as members of a 'mass audience' since that implies that they are all equal in their reception of media messages, whereas in fact some play a more active rôle than others
receiving a message does not imply responding to it; nor does non-reception imply non-response (since we may still receive the message via interpersonal communication)
there are some people amongst the media audience who act as opinion leaders - typically such people use the mass media more than the average, mix more than the average across social classes and see themselves and are seen by others as having an influence on others
Reasons suggested for the greater effectiveness of personal influence over media influence include the following:
The content and development of a conversation are less predictable than mass media messages. Consequently, the receiver cannot be as selective in advance as (s)he is able to be when choosing which media messages to attend to.
In a face-to-face conversation, the critical distance between the partners is less than in mass communication.
By direct questioning of the partner in the conversation, the assumptions underlying the conversation can be rapidly and accurately established, which is not so with mass communication.
In face-to-face interaction the communicator can rapidly adjust to the receiver's personality. (S)he has direct feedback as to the success of the communication, can correct misunderstandings and counter challenges.
Criticisms
The model is often presented graphically as shown on the right. In fact, that is somewhat misleading as it suggests that mass media messages flow first to opinion leaders and from them to the rest. Obviously, that's not the case, since you and I can both receive messages directly. The point is that the messages we receive are then modified through the pattern of our social contacts.
Katz and Lazarsfeld are perhaps also somewhat misleading when they suggest that individuals with certain characteristics are opinion leaders. It may be the case that many opinion leaders will have the characteristics they mention, but we also know that some opinion leaders in some subject areas will not have those general characteristics. However, I should mention that Katz and Lazarsfeld certainly did not take the view that opinion leaders were necessarily those formally recognized as such (e. g. celebrities, politicians etc.) Thus, their studies showed that top-down influence was relatively slight. Influence tended to be horizontal across a particular socio-economic class, except that in the 'higher' social classes there was a tendency for people to find opinion leaders in the next class up. No opinion leader was an opinion leader in all aspects of life. For example, the car mechanic in your local pub may not use the media much at all because he's always working late. Nevertheless, he knows a lot about cars and so what the rest of those in the pub 'know' from the media about different makes of car will be influenced by his views. Similarly, your Politics lecturer may not use the media anything like as much as you do, but her reading and viewing is targeted on political issues. Together with her broad knowledge of political theory and history, that is likely to make her an opinion leader as far as your Politics class is concerned. Allowing for those differences from one class to another and from one subject area to another, we probably can recognize in opinion leaders the characteristics which Katz and Lazarsfeld suggested, in particular that opinion leaders will be more active users of the mass media than others.
Katz and Lazarsfeld may also be misleading in suggesting that people are either active opinion leaders or passive followers of opinion leaders. Apart from the evidence that people can be opinion leaders on some matters and not on others, there is also the objection that some people may be neither leaders nor followers, but quite simply detached from much media output.
Much depends also on the accessibility of countervailing opinions. In the 1940s the general public would have had access to far fewer sources of information than they have today and may, broadly speaking, have had less time to access those sources. Under such circumstances it is likely that an opinion leader in the community may be especially influential. This was recognized by the Nazi party in its gradual rise to power during the 1920s and 1930s. Nazi agitation and propaganda became increasingly successful at forcing themselves onto the front pages of newspapers, thus becoming an everyday topic of conversation. They were particularly keen to capitalize on that attention, directing it in the right direction through influencing the leading members of the various small associations which were spread throughout German communities.
Where local leaders, enjoying respectability and influence, were won over, further converts often rapidly followed. In the relatively homogeneous villages in Schleswig-Holstein, where feelings about the 'Weimar system' were running high on account of the agrarian crisis, the push from one or two farmers' leaders could result in a local landslide to the NSDAP [the Nazi Party].
Kershaw (1999 : 321)
Katz and Lazarsfeld's Influence
Despite those and other criticisms, the fact remains that Katz and Lazarsfeld's research is widely accepted and still highly influential. Advertisers and spin doctors recognise that 'the best form of advertising is word-of-mouth advertising'. So, for example
in the 1992 General Election campaign both parties were keen to present 'facts' and 'true stories' in their TV campaign materials. Their aim was not really to persuade their opponents (they would very probably not watch the broadcasts anyway), but rather to provide the opinion leaders amongst their supporters with ammunition in support of their arguments down the pub, at work and so on
in preparation for the launch of the 'Poll Tax', the Conservative Party was keen to make contact with local councillors and other local opinion leaders in addition to the conventional media campaign
in the 1997 British election campaign it was apparent that the two main British parties were concerned to address their arguments to the small number of voters in winnable constituencies. Thus the election campaign was in effect addressed to around a quarter of a million voters only
face-to-face communication is ideally also organised to support the mass media message - for example, in third world education programmes, people are brought together to watch a film, listen to a radio broadcast etc. The evidence from anti-smoking campaigns, synthesized by Flay (1987 in Gauntlett (1995)) is that, whilst they are highly successful in providing information, with the result that most people are now ell informed of the dangers of smoking, they are not, by and large, successful in effceting permanent changes in behaviour. Gauntlett refers in this connexion to the unmistakable consensus that 'the mass media may be effective for providing information and creating awareness, but that face-to-face channels are essential for behaviour change to be produced' (1995 : 79).
the current buzz about 'viral marketing' via the Net focuses on 'word of mouse' communication. One of the best examples from the eraly days of the Web was Hotmail. Tim Draper, one of the founders, insisted that each free Hotmail mail sent should end with the words 'Get your free Web-based email at Hotmail' in the form of a hyperlink. Without any advertising, Hotmail had ten million registered users after a year - and was then bought up by Microsoft. If you'd like to follow up the notion of 'viral marketing', check out Seth Godin's e-book



Limited effects
In Towards a Sociology of Mass Communication (1971), McQuail summarises some of the main findings of the research which confirms this 'limited effects' view:
'persuasive mass communication is in general more likely to reinforce the existing opinions of its audience than it is to change its opinion' (from Klapper (1960))
'people tend to see and hear communications that are favourable or congenial to their predispositions' (from Berelson & Steiner (1964))
'people respond to persuasive communication in line with their predispositions and change or resist change accordingly' (from Berelson & Steiner (1964))
Consequently:
'political campaigns tend to reach the politically interested and converted', as shown for example in Lazarsfeld's research
'mass media campaigns against racial prejudice tend to be unsuccessful', as demonstrated in Kendall and Woolf's analysis of reactions to anti-racist cartoons. The cartoons featured Mr Biggott whose absurdly racist ideas were intended to discredit bigotry. In fact 31% failed to recognise that Mr Biggott was racially prejudiced or that the cartoons were intended to be anti-racist (Kendall & Wolff (1949) in Curran (1990)).
'effects vary according to the prestige or evaluations attaching to the communication source', as demonstrated by Hovland
'the more complete the monopoly of mass communication, the more likely it is that opinion change in the desired direction will be achieved' - as in totalitarian societies, such as Nazi Germany, for example
'the salience to the audience of the issues or subject matter will affect the likelihood of influence: "mass communication can be effective in producing a shift on unfamiliar, lightly felt, peripheral issues - those that do not much or are not tied to audience predispositions"' (from Berelson and Steiner (1964)). This is also supported by the recent research of Hügel et al, who confirm other studies' findings that media agenda-setting effects are limited to unobtrusive issues. (Hügel et al (1989))
'the selection and interpretation of content by the audience is influenced by existing opinions and interests and by group norms', as suggested by Hovland's research
'the structure of interpersonal relations in the audience mediates the flow of communication content and limits and determines whatever effects occur', as suggested by Katz and Lazarsfeld's research.
(For more comment on limited effects, see the conclusions of the more recent research conducted on behalf of the BBFC)
Powerful effects
Schramm (1982) points to three powerful effects which the media can exert and which are pointed to by the research of the Columbia Bureau:
the media can confer status on organisations, persons and policies. As Schramm suggests, we probably work on the assumption that if something really matters then it will be featured in the media; so, if it is featured in the media, it must really matter;
the media can enforce social norms to an extent. The media can reaffirm social norms by exposing deviation from the norms to public view - this connects with British research by Cohen into folk devils and moral panics;
the media can act as social narcotics; sometimes known as the narcotising dysfunction, this means that because of the enormous amount of information in the media, media consumers tend not to be energised into social action, but rather drugged or narcotised into inaction.
Violence and Delinquency
As mentioned above, the empiricist vein of research in the US was funded to a large extent by major corporations concerned to investigate the influence of their advertising and public relations and by political parties which wished to devise the most effective campaigns. Another important impetus came from the government which responded to widespread public concern about media (especially film and then, later, television) portrayals of violence and their possible link with juvenile delinquency. The nature of the assumed links was then and continues to be unclear and confused. Klapper (1960) reduced the assumptions to six basic forms: mass media messages containing the portrayal of crimes and acts of violence can
be generally damaging
be directly imitated
serve as a school of crime
in specific circumstances cause otherwise normal people to engage in criminal acts
devalue human life
serve as a safety valve for aggressive impulses
In essence, it is these assumptions which continue to underlie public concern over the media's possible harmful effects, notably on children. This concern has been reflected in the government funding of research into media violence and delinquency, both here and abroad. It is also reflected in the very extensive legislation in the UK (see the sections on regulation), and in frequently stated media assumptions that violent media messages cause violence. Because it is a matter of such widespread concern, there is a separate section on research into violence.
Cultural effects: overview
We are using the term 'cultural effects' here as shorthand for the investigation of social, political and cultural effects.
Broadly speaking, those analysts who are concerned with cultural effects fall into two camps:
somewhat élitist literary critics who are distressed by the spread of popular culture, which they see as diluting and undermining the values enshrined in high culture
Marxist critics whose 'critical' perspective derives from the work of Karl Marx and from the Frankfurt School. Their main concern is with the way that the mass media are used to spread and legitimate the dominant ideology.
Professor Halloran who himself works within the 'empiricist' tradition expresses the difference between his approach and the 'cultural effects' approach this way:
The debate has been carried on by the moralizing literati, social philosophers, moralists, artists, and educators, who, judging from their comments, often feel that the social scientists are so preoccupied with research techniques and methodological devices that their works lack immediate social relevance and that they suffer further because they are unrelated to the general intellectual discussion of mass culture on the one hand and its historical development on the other. The social scientists reply to this by questioning the whole nature of the evidence produced by these writers and by criticizing the undisciplined nature of the generalizations, interpretations and speculations which abound in this field.
Halloran (1964)
In other words, according to Halloran, there are social scientists who are concerned with empirical studies of mass media effects. These social scientists are criticized by those who want to get on with discussing the impact of mass culture. As Halloran sees it, such people simply don't provide the empirical evidence to support the generalizations they make about mass culture.
On the other side of the fence, there are those critics of mass culture who would criticize Halloran and other empiricists for failing to make any kind of worthwhile progress. Curran, for example, puts it this way:
we wanted to resist the American domination of the field, with what seemed to many of us at the time its sterile consensus, its endless flow of repetitive and inconclusive 'effects' studies ....
Curran (1990)
Mind you, 1964 was a long time ago and there have been considerable shifts on either side of the debate since then. The sections which follow will give you a broad outline of various aspects of the cultural effects approach. Please choose from the two below:
Cultural effects - Marxist approach
The Marxist view is referred to by a variety of terms. Fairly common are the terms 'critical' and 'radical'. In Britain and Europe Marxist approaches to the mass media and, more generally, to culture as a whole ('cultural studies') were dominant from the mid '60s to the mid 80s (approximately). Although less dominant now, Marxism still colours much media research.
Generally, the Marxian view of media influence depends on an understanding and elaboration of the operation of the notion of ideology. Although perhaps in everyday parlance, the term 'ideology' refers to a set of (especially 'political') beliefs and values which is not necessarily related to any particular social class (for example: Marxist ideology, Anglican ideology, proletarian ideology, Conservative ideology, socialist ideology, free market ideology), in the Marxian literature the term is generally used ina an entirely negative sense to refer to a supposedly dominant ideology which supports the interests of the dominant class (see, for example, the quotations). Various thinkers (Mannheim, for example) have examined ideology from a class-neutral point of view, but it is this crucial notion of domination which is central to the Marxian understanding of ideology. Ideology is seen as a tool of the dominant classes, misleading and illusory. For a selection of quotations from major commentators on the operation of ideology, please click here.
Today, it is by no means self-evident that class-relations are the fundamental cause of domination and exploitation. Important though they may be, relations of gender, ethnicity, of the state to the individual, of one nation or nation-bloc (e.g. North/South) to another also need to be taken into account.
As I hope you will understand from what follows, it is not even self-evident what classes are and where their boundaries lie. For Marx, it was pretty clear that classes were determined by objective relations of production and other primarily economic factors. The 'Marxists' in cultural and media studies were generally concerned to develop therories of how relations of domination were developed and maintained, not only or even primarily by economic forces, but by cultural forces. They thus paid far more attention than Marx himself to the way that the circulation of symbolic goods was in itself constitutive and supportive of relations between individuals. (Further comments on ideology)
The Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School is a school of neo-Marxist critical theory, social research, and philosophy. The grouping emerged at the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany when Max Horkheimer became the Institute's director in 1930. The term "Frankfurt School" is an informal term used to designate the thinkers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research or influenced by them. It is not the title of any institution, and the main thinkers of the Frankfurt School did not use the term to describe themselves
The Frankfurt School gathered together dissident rebellious Marxists, severe critics of capitalism who believed that some of Marx's followers had come to parrot a narrow selection of Marx's ideas, usually in defense of orthodox Communist or Social-Democratic parties. Influenced especially by the failure of working-class revolutions in Western Europe after World War I and by the rise of Nazism in an economically, technologically advanced nation (Germany), they took up the task of choosing what parts of Marx's thought might serve to clarify social conditions which Marx himself had never seen. They drew on other schools of thought to fill in Marx's perceived omissions.
An important source of the left-wing critique of mass culture is the Frankfurt School. Developing Marx's view that the dominant class in society not only owns the means of material production, but also controls the production of the society's dominant ideas and values (dominant ideology), the 'critical theorists' of the Frankfurt School examined the industrialisation of mass-produced culture and examined the economic imperatives behind what they dubbed the 'culture industries'. They saw the products of the culture industries as providing the ideological legitimation of existing capitalist societies and were the first to recognise the importance of the culture industries as significant agents of socialisation. Thus, what is sometimes referred to as 'vulgar Marxism' was developed by the Frankfurt School theorists beyond its rather mechanistic materialism and economic determinism to include consideration of culture as a vehicle of ideology, as well as a critique of science and technology as tools of social domination within capitalism.
The work which is often considered characteristic of the Frankfurt School is Dialectic of Enlightenment (1969/1944) by Adorno and Horkheimer, in which they develop their critique of Enlightenment rationality and of the 'culture industries'. Developing not only Marx's ideas on ideology and domination, but also Max Weber's thoughts on bureaucratization and purposive rationality (Zweckrationalität), they portrayed Enlightenment as 'totalitarian':
For Enlightenment whatever does not conform to the rule of calculability and utility is suspect ... Enlightenment is totalitarian
(1969/1944 : 12)
Human beings pay for the increase in their power with alienation from the things over which they exercise that power. Enlightenment behaves towards things as the dictator towards people. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them.
(1969/1944 : 15)
As Enlightenment rationality leads to domination of nature, so it leads also inevitably to domination over human beings. Adorno and Horkheimer were writing in the last year of the Nazi terror which they had fled in the thirties, so it is not surprising that they argue that that rationality, with its principles of calculability, quantifiability, order and control leads to fascism, but their arguments that Enlightenment leads to the 'totally administered society' applied equally to the United States where they had sought refuge, in part no doubt because the USA of the New Deal and the struggle against Hitler was subjected to methods of propaganda, regimentation and social control not dissimilar in principle from Goebbels's .The totally administered society produces the 'end of the individual' and encourages conformity; where authentic culture once cultivated the individual, the mass production of the 'culture industries' now eradicates the individual and produces mass society which tolerates only 'pseudo-individuality':
"Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates under the sign of disaster triumphant" (DE 1, translation modified). How can this be, the authors ask. How can the progress of modern science and medicine and industry promise to liberate people from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop lethal weapons of mass destruction? Reason, they answer, has become irrational.
From the standardized jazz improvisation to the original film personality, who has to hang a curl over her eye so that she can be recognized as such, pseudo-individulaity is everywhere. Individuality is reduced to the generality's power to stamp the accidental detail so firmly that it is accepted as such. Precisely the defiant reserve or the sophisticated appearance of the individual on show is mass-produced like Yale locks.
(1969/1944 : 163)
an opinion of media products which Adorno maintained later:
I consider .... that the average television entertainment is fundamentally far more dangerous politically than any political broadcast has ever been
(1971/1963 : 56)
claiming that TV entertainment drummed false consciousness and 'disguising of reality' (Verschleierung der Wirklichkeit) into viewers, 'injecting' (einimpfen) them with ideology.
From The Dialectic of Enlightenment onwards, Adorno and Horkheimer gradually moved away from Marxian categories, a move which Horkheimer completed totally in his later life. However, although they shift the focus away from production, labour and political economy, in Dialectic of Enlightenment they still see society in class terms, capital against the masses using the commodification and reification(reification The process of misunderstanding an abstraction as a concrete entity) of culture as a means of the social control of the masses. However, they express little faith in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, largely because capitalist modernity has succeeded in dominating and mystifying the individual via advertising, mass communications media and new forms of social control; indeed the term 'proletariat' is generally replaced by 'masses' in their work.
The relative élitism of their viewpoint is, nowadays at least, problematic for media and cultural studies. They appeared to distinguish between what they considered 'authentic art' on the one hand and the products of a supposedly debased mass culture on the other, though they did abandon the term 'mass culture', which appears to make the masses themselves responsible for the debasement of culture, replacing it by the term 'culture industries'. This approach is not unproblematic. I might appreciate some of the music which Adorno would accept as authentic, but when I put the B Minor Mass back on the shelf and put on a Henry Rollins CD it doesn't feel to me as if I am suddenly the culture industries' dupe. In any case the emancipatory, revolutionary potential which the Frankfurt School saw in high modernist art has hardly fulfilled its potential when Duchamp's and Dali's works are just another corporate investment. Adorno later discusses (1971/1963 : 145-6) the possibilities of media education which must have appeared quite radical in 1963: a teacher taking his class to the cinema and revealing to his pupils the deception ('Schwindel') in the film, a teacher analysing the 'happy music' of Sunday morning radio, analysing a magazine, showing them how pop music is 'incomparably worse' than a quartet by Mozart or Beethoven or an authentic piece of modern classical music. Here, of course, we say 'Oh, really? Who says?' I suppose we could just accept that Adorno was a highly accomplished classical musician and take his word for it, but that certainly goes against the grain. I can't claim to be any too keen on pop music myself, but his constantly repeated attacks on jazz's 'pseudo-originality' grate with me. Can he really have listened to Parker and found him less original than Mozart? Certainly Parker was churning out music to eke out a living (or buy heroin), but so was Mozart - and as for 'mass production', I know which one's music sounds more like the product of the production line to me. And which one produced music primarily for, commissioned by, and listened to exclusively by, the bourgeoisie? Not Parker at any rate. And even where music does use standardized musical forms and types it can still express rebellion against standardization and commodification. Such oppositional and contestatory uses of popular cultural forms (as examined for example in the 'New Audience Research') are simply not allowed for in Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique of the 'culture industries'. From what I know of Adorno's work, whenever he mentions popular culture, it's always treated as junk, always the culture industries' snare for the false consciousness of the mass public. It's tempting to wonder whether it's not Adorno, rather than a class of students, whose media literacy could do with being improved. From Pound, Eliot, Leavis through Adorno to Baudrillard the same doom-laden jeremiad about the effects of the cyberblitz of modern media. Come on, Theo, lighten up.
One might also disagree with Adorno and Horkheimer over whether or not society is 'totally administered'. Is it more or less 'administered' now than it was when they wrote? Was it more or less 'administered' when they wrote than it had been, say, a hundred years before? And, even supposing it is, in the sense of greater bureaucratization, does it necessarily follow that that leads to the 'death of the individual' and increasing conformity? It's not at all clear to me how you could begin to determine that, but it certainly doesn't seem to me that, say, the apparent increase in uniformity which one finds with globalization is entirely unidirectional. We may well find MacDonald's in Moscow and Coca-Cola in Shanghai, but it doesn't follow that all sources of social instability and all voices of dissent have been smothered, nor is it apparent to me that individuals in modern societies are necessarily more integrated than they were a hundred or two hundred years ago. Certainly, to conclude that individuals are more fully integrated because of their reception of the messages of the culture industries is too simplistic.
The failure to differentiate between individuals in the so-called mass is also often a shortcoming of the 'cultural effects' approach to mass media influence, whether in the Marxian or lit-crit tradition. Commonly, such commentators highlight the linearity of communication flow in the mass media, emphasizing that the receivers of mass media messages are not generally in a position to reply. But it does not follow from this inability to reply that the receivers have no control over media messages and that the act of reception is not participatory. There is a wealth of research to suggest that audience members actively choose which messages they attend to and how they interpret them. Further, their experience of media content can be participatory in two senses: first, in the sense that media reception is not entirely linear, audience's reactions are fed back to the media producers, if not directly through 'phone-ins and surveys, then at least through the ratings; secondly, and perhaps more importantly, experience of media messages is participatory in that it is a social activity, even for those who receive the message on their own. The messages are elaborated on and interpreted through social interaction and the scope for such elaboration and interpretation is arguably much greater than it was before the development of mass media.
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=575289
commodity fetishism







The marketing, advertising and media industries promote a way of thinking where everything, even social relations are objectified in terms of money.
This explains the insane lust for brand name products people have, all the Tommy Hilfiger and Nike shit you can buy and everything that revolves around that culture.
People love things just because they are expensive.








The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof is the fourth section of the first chapter of the first volume of that huge freaking book, Das Kapital. Written by Karl Marx and edited by Friedrich Engels, Fetishism is one of the more accessible bits of Marx, and remains compelling even for many capitalist critics of Marx's work. It is also a favorite section of literary theorists, and helped inspire the social criticism of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, and Louis Althusser.
Before delving into Marx's arguments, it's important to get some terms straight. Semantics might be boring, but without it we might as well be speaking different languages. So, according to Marx:
· Product:
An object becomes a product when human labor is applied to it. For example, a tree is simply a raw resource, but if a person cuts it down, splits it into planks, and makes a bookshelf, that bookshelf is a product. Marx has no problem with products; in fact, he likes it when people go and make things for their use, or the use of people they know.
· Commodity:
A commodity, on the other hand, is a perverted product. An object becomes a commodity when human labor is applied to it, making it a product, and the worker who created the product is severed, divorced, alienated, etc. from the result of their labor. For example, a worker on an automotive assembly line is not making cars for their own use, or for any specific, knowable person. As a result, the worker is alienated from the result of their labor, and the car is a commodity rather than a product.
· Use-value:
The utility of any given object, the physical properties that make it fit for serving a human need or want -- all of this is bound up under the term use-value. A watch has use value because we can use it to tell time. Complicating this term is Marx's willingness to fold aesthetic appreciation -- our emotional liking of beauty -- into his concept of utility. So a diamond can have use-value entirely apart from its monetary worth if we simply like the way it sparkles.
· Exchange-value:
If, on the other hand, we're concerned with the amount of money we can get for the diamond, then we are talking about its exchange-value, which is its value on the market. Exchange-value does not necessarily have anything to do whatsoever with the physical properties of an object. That the diamond is hard and sparkly doesn't affect its exchange-value; that it is a diamond and diamonds are valuable does. Further complicating matters, exchange-value and use-value are often completely different for the same object. For most people, a diamond is almost useless, but you'd be mighty angry if someone stole yours from you. When reading Marx, it's helpful to know that when he says "value," he almost always means "exchange-value."
· Fetishism:
When we desire an object based on its exchange-value and not its use-value, we in fact desire it for something entirely outside itself. This desire is called fetishism, and though it should not be confused with "fetishism" in the sexual sense, it does share certain similarities, most notably that the locus of desire (the location upon which the desire is focused) is not the object but on the exchange-structure surrounding the object (much like the locus of desire in sexual fetishism is not one's sexual partner or even the sexual act but rather the object of the fetish: the whip, high-heel, specific body part, and so on).
The Argument
The noncontentious part: when we look at an object, we tend to assume that its value is something intrinsic to it, like its size or shape. In reality, the worth we attach is based on exchange-value, and is not at all inherent in the object as such. Pretty much everyone agrees with this line of thought, which isn't surprising since it has a long philosophical lineage. Philosophy geeks might be reminded of Kant's take on beauty in his Critique of Judgment, which states that beauty is not a property of an object as such, but rather of our response to an object. Substitute "worth" or "value" for "beauty," and you have Marx's point, albeit with a completely different justification.
The most contentious part of Fetishism is Marx's claim that capitalism necessarily leads to commodification, since the means of production under capitalism -- mass production in factories -- always leads to a disassociation of the laborer from the product of labor. And just as capitalism necessarily separates the producer from the produced, it also necessarily separates the use-value of a commodity from its exchange-value. Consequently, capitalism causes the fetishization of commodities. In Kapital, this is simply another tick mark on the scoresheet against capitalism, and not even a particularly large one. Capitalists, however, are likely to dismiss commodity fetishism entirely as simply the way the world works, and say that it is only a necessary consequence of capitalism because capitalism embraces natural law.
Why Is Commodity Fetishism a Bad Thing?
Depends on who you ask. According to Marx and the bevy of social critics he influenced, it's bad because it separates us from a real experience of and appreciation for the world. The market becomes the defining factor for our judgments of worth, and when that happens it tends to eradicate more human(e) concerns. According to the maintainers of capitalism, isn't a bad thing at all, since the market is every bit as real and as a tree or gravity. From that point of view, the market doesn't distort reality; it is reality, and to align our perceptions with the market is to bring them into tune with nature.
Social critics and literary theorists don't generally buy this "market as natural" line, preferring instead to see it as one possible social structure among many, and viewing our concept of it being "natural" as a social construction. It's actually critics and theorists, and not economists, who make the most hay out of commodity fetishism, and not for reasons Marx would have expected. Many of these theorists are not so concerned with simply reiterating Marxist critiques against capitalism, but instead focus their energies on the larger questions of how social systems come into being, operate, and perpetuate themselves. Commodity fetishism is a valuable idea here, since it shows how value operates in exchange, the material intercourse between individuals or groups. Theorists like Althusser, Adorno, and Bourdieu also extend this idea to the field of aesthetics, in their attempts to explain how art is valued, by whom, and what the effects of its value are -- in other words, how art operates as a mechanism of social control.
Culture Industry

Theodor Adorno identified the concept of a culture industry; industries that produce massive amounts of unsophisticated, sentimental products that have replaced true Art. In effect, products of the culture industry are the opposite of art. True art forces people to think, and question social life whereas the junk produced by the culture industry dumbens and mutes the masses.


Cultural effects versus the American 'empiricist' tradition
At the time that the Frankfurt School were developing their ideas in exile in America, at the prestigious Columbia Bureau American investigation of media effects was largely in what we might refer to as the empiricist tradition. That was generally concerned with laboratory experiments or field experiments to try to establish, say, the effects of media violence on behaviour or the influence of political campaigns in the media on voting behaviour. Inevitably, although some experiments or surveys may have been large-scale, they tended to be limited in their time-scale and could at best establish only short-term effects.
If mass culture does have the effect of, say, replacing spiritual values by consumerist ones or undermining the values of the 'Great Tradition' and supplanting them with superficiality and sentimentalism (the sort of effect claimed by critics coming from the direction of literary criticism), then empirical research in the American tradition is unlikely to pick up those effects. In fact, given that research in American universities was often commissioned by political parties or major companies, who wanted to know whether their campaigns were having an effect, then it's unlikely that most empiricist research would be designed to pick up such longer term cultural effects.
In Great Britain, the non-empirical work of the Leavises (see the section on literary criticism) did not go unnoticed, but the fact that the Frankfurt School's work was mainly written in German coupled with the fact that their work was non-empirical and therefore out of sympathy with the American traditions meant that they went largely unnoticed in the USA and Britain until the late 60s and 70s.
Some of the Frankfurt School's conclusions are not dissimilar from the Leavises, though the Frankfurt sociologists were naturally more concerned with genuine art as a redeeming force for a revolutionary socialism, rather than for an intellectual élite.
In recent years something of a split has opened up between students of 'communication' and students of 'cultural studies'. By 'communication' I am referring to more empiricist approach and by 'cultural studies' I mean a more culturalist approach. I think it is fair to say that the Frankfurt School largely avoided that split, analysing as they did cultural artefacts within the context of industrial production, introducing the results of reception studies and so on and integrating these within their overall framework of critical theory. I think it is safe to say that their work represents the first major project in communication studies to attempt to bring the 'empiricist' and 'culturalist' approaches together. Unfortunately, however, it seems that their very introduction and development of the concepts of a culturalist approach has led to a later split. A shortcoming of the Frankfurt School's analysis is that encoding (if we assume they are right in their understanding of what was encoded) and decoding are isomorphic. It is quite possible for the decoding of a cultural artifact to differ radically from the author's intentions. We now see a recognition of that, as well as a welcome move towards the re-integration of the empiricist and culturalist approaches in the New Audience Research.
One of the conclusions of the Frankfurt School was that the consumer society certainly offered a better material standard of living and certain comforts and gratifications which were welcomed by the workers. However, in their view, it also in fact encouraged social and political apathy. That apathy is to the advantage of the groups who control capitalist society. From this perspective, then, the mass media are seen as the instruments of oppression and social control wielded by the groups who control society.
Marcuse
Marcuse was a member of the Frankfurt School who, unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, retained his analysis of society through Marxian categories as well as his commitment to revolution. He accepted that capitalism had succeeded in raising the living standards of most of the population. However, in his view, the manipulation of false needs established by capitalist advertising is repressive. It leads to one-dimensional thought. It blocks people's ability to realise that they are being controlled. Thus, in the United States at least the proletariat has lost its revolutionary potential, whereas in France and Italy, where the standard of living has not reached the same level as in the US, the proletariat retains radical potential. A great supporter of student movements of the 1960s, Marcuse considered that the coming revolution of the twentieth or twenty-first century would not be primarily motivated by material need, but rather by the general dehumanization, disgust with waste and the overproduction of the consumer society. While reforms should be attempted and achieved, reforms would eventually cut into the roots of capitalist production, namely the profit motive. At that point, where the system is forced to defend itself to ensure its own survival, revolution becomes necessary. (1971 : 17-18)
His view was that one of the most important mechanisms of control in capitalist societies is the manipulation of the conscious and unconscious. New needs have to be created to encourage people to buy the new goods which are produced. People have to be convinced that they really do have a need for these goods and that possession of the goods satisfies the needs they have. Thus, in attempting to satisfy their needs people reproduce the capitalist system. The false need to purchase these goods sustains social controls over a life of toil and fear.
Generally, Marcuse tends, like the other Frankfurt School members, to portray audiences as passive victims and, like them he laments the decline of the individual and the demise of authentic culture, a demise promoted by the rubbish produced by commercial radio and television. The central problem in the analysis provided by such theorists as the Frankfurt School is that they must base their condemnation of consumer society on something, some kind of values, which they consider to be authentic. Marcuse, as we have seen, bases his critique on the distinction between false and authentic needs. There is a double bind here in that the critic establishes his own notion of authenticity as somehow outside society, presenting a concept of the human being which is ahistorical and essentialist. The double bind, of course, is that this is just as ideological a project as the project of the supposedly dominant culture. Post-structuralism and post-modernism would certainly criticize such a totalizing project and treat it with considerable suspicion since we have seen in the command economies of the former eastern bloc just what a supposedly scientific recognition of authentic human needs can lead to.
Opposition to functionalism
What we have referred to above as 'empiricism' and the 'American approach' to media effects research might also be referred to as a 'pluralist' approach.
Sociologists might broadly refer to it as a 'functionalist' approach (though note that I am no sociologist). Functionalism seeks to explain social institutions in terms of their cohesiveness within an interconnected social system. Thus, there is little room in functionalism for explanation of social conflict. Since functionalism sees society (my apologies to any sociologists who consider I've got this wrong) as something like a very large person replete with needs and desires which need to be kept in equilibrium, then, from a functionalist point of view, ideology would be seen as operating to fulfil those needs.
The American researchers tended to see American society as having reached a broad consensus. What they were investigating boiled down to the question of how much the media might threaten that consensus, for example through the possible contribution of media violence to 'juvenile delinquency'. By and large they came to the conclusion that the media did not pose a strong threat.
Marxists come at the problem from a very different angle. They ask the questions: where does the consensus come from? whose purposes does it serve? what rôle do the mass media play in creating and sustaining it? Looked at form this angle, the media may be examined from the point of view of the rôle they play in class conflict and in constructing a view of the world which suits the powerful. From this point of view, the media may be seen as having very powerful and far-reaching effects.
Despite the criticisms I have made of Adorno's, Horkheimer's and Marcuse's views of the operation of the 'culture industries', their importance in cultural studies is not in doubt. They had a considerable influence on New Left thought (Marcuse especially), whose investigation of the consumer society and commodity culture influenced and was influenced by the work in France of Barthes, Lefebvre, de Certeau, Baudrillard and others who have contributed to the indictment of commodification and the impoverishment of everyday life. Nevertheless, the fact remains that
One major flaw of many neo-Marxist theories of the consumer society, evident sometimes, but not always, in Critical Theory, is a totalizing view and denunciation of the commodity, consumer needs and consumption. On this view all commodities are uniformly seductive instruments of capitalist manipulation, which engineer homogeneous false needs and consciousness. ..... Commodity fetishism and false needs, then, supposedly enchain willing consumers into the institutions, practices and values of consumer capitalism. .... Commodities and consumption are negatively presented, simply as means of class domination, and the model also assumes a magical, diabolical power on the part of capital to create unreal false needs which it is then able to manipulate in its own interest.
Kellner (1989b : 158-9)
This does not mean, though, that Critical Theory is a dead end. Far from it. As already remarked, the work of the early Critical Theorists fed into and informed into much of the later work of cultural studies and the current work of Jürgen Habermas has developed Critical Theory further. Kellner observes that
the theoretical framework, categories and methods of Critical Theory make it especially appropriate to addressing such issues as new technologies and their impact on social and class structure, politics and culture and the crises of techno-capitalism. Every era must develop its own radical social theory and politics, and I believe that the tradition of Critical Theory provides an excellent starting point for a new theory of today's techno-capitalism, its crisis tendencies and its potential for emancipatory social transformation.
Kellner (1989b : 231)
For a glimpse of where Critical Theory might be going from here, take a close look at Douglas Kellner's excellent Illuminations website
Althusser: ISAs
There are many different institutions in our society which socialise us into acceptance of these dominant ideas and values . The mass media are one such institution. The French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser referred to such institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which operate alongside the Repressive State Apparatus of courts, police, prisons, military and so on. Althusser argued that all of these ISAs are bits of apparatus for the state to use in order to manage the consent of society's members, to persuade us to accept as legitimate for the whole society that ideology which in fact best serves the interests of the dominant class. According to him, the ISAs are:
the religious ISA (the various churches)
the educational ISA
the family ISA
the legal ISA
the political ISA
the trade-union ISA
the communications ISA (the mass media)
the cultural ISA (literature, the arts, sports, entertainment etc)
The fact that many of the organs within these apparatuses are within what we would normally think of as the private (rather than state) domain is no objection since any ISA can perfectly well function as a state apparatus, whether it is owned by the state or not; as Althusser see it, they all communicate and support the ideology of the dominant class, which exercises control over the ideological state apparatuses
Althusser developed the classical Marxist notion of a dominant ideology, breaking away from the concern with the economic base and arguing that ideology is the medium through which we experience the world. Ideology is seen as a determining force in its own right. Althusser's focus was on questions of how we come to 'internalize' ideology, how ideology 'interpellates' subjects and constructs 'subject-positions' for them. This focus fed into marxist-oriented psychoanalytic interpretations of the operation of ideology.
Although Althusser was highly influential in the development of Marxist approaches to the media, he does come close to suggesting that virtually nothing other than the 'dominant ideology' could ever be reproduced in discourse. To some extent as a result of Althusser's influence there was a tendency in cultural studies during the 1970s for theorists to concentrate on the analysis of media texts, uncovering the ideological meanings within them and assuming that readers (despite the activity implied in the term 'readers') as compliant victims of ideology. The focus on culture as a site of social struggle was to enter cultural and media studies through the influence of Gramsci.
Althusser's thoughts on the 'individual' in society are complex and so we shall not deal with them here. If you are studying Communication Studies, then his ideas are also important for an understanding of the notion of the 'self' and we have therefore dealt with his ideas under that heading. If you wish to follow those up, please click here:
Cultural effects - literary criticism
This is generally a deeply pessimistic view of the supposed triviality of mass culture, which is seen as irredeemably commercial, and the pernicious effects of media systems, which are seen as permeated by lies and deceit. It dates back at least as far as Matthew Arnold's warnings in Culture and Anarchy of 1869 of the extension of 'philistine culture', which he considered to be spreading with the development of literacy and democracy
The Leavisites
Perhaps the strongest attack among British critics who present this view of mass culture are the 1930s to 1960s literary critics, Frank and Queenie Leavis. They saw the only salvation from mass culture as lying in the 'Great Tradition' of Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Keats and so on. Contemporary America seemed to fill Frank Leavis with dread:

.... the vision of our imminent tomorrow in today's America: the energy, the triumphant technology, the productivity, the high standard of living and the life-impoverishment - the human emptiness, emptiness craving alcohol - of one kind or another.
Leavis FR (1962)
He regularly used 'journalism' as a standard term of abuse for the 'impoverished' form of English he seemed to come across everywhere and seemed to feel little but contempt for every form of mass culture. His wife Queenie in Fiction and the Reading Public

stigmatized the 'emptiness and meaningless iteration of suburban life', as well as the 'inflexible and brutal' idiom of suburban people, ascribable to newspapers and radio. Life for the suburban dweller is, she reported, 'a series of frivolous stimuli'.
Carey (1992)
Frankly (no pun intended), the Leavises get up my nose with their pompous self-righteous conviction that they know what has quality and the rest of us poor, benighted, barbarian suburbanites haven't a clue. But the Leavises were not alone. Ezra Pound laments that he can't get people to understand the 'indignation that a decay of writing can cause men who understand what it implies' (Pound (1934)) - and of course it goes without saying that he's one of the few men who do understand. T S Eliot proclaimed that the true artist's work transcended time, was eternally valid, unlike the productions of popular culture. He claimed that throughout the world a very small number of people belonged to an 'intellectual aristocracy' (Eliot (1932))
Leavis on advertising
Leavis was particularly critical of advertising, whose language, he claimed, permeated mass culture. The result of this, according to them, is that the language used to describe genuine emotions is debased and values which are important to a civilised culture (such as love, friendship, neighbourliness, pleasure, happiness and sexual attraction) become confused with, or transferred to, the possession of things. Gold is for lovers, A diamond is forever, 'I love my new Hygiena kitchen, Id love a Babycham. Leavis complained that advertising depended on a corruption of feelings, a debasement of language, exploitation of peoples emotional needs and fears. Advertisements, he warned, encouraged choosing of the most immediate pleasures got with the least effort, encouraging greed, snobbery and social conformity.
Contrast between American and European approaches
That is something of a caricature of the Leavises' views and I should certainly emphasise that, although their elitism annoys me, the Leavises were probably not motivated by snobbery (though I have little doubt that many who shared their views were), but by a passionate desire to preserve what they saw as being of value in our culture from what they believed to be the trivialising, soul-destroying silliness of mass culture.
With the example of the Leavises we see quite clearly the divergence between what we might call the American and European traditions in the investigation of mass media effects. This is something of an oversimplification, admittedly, because we find representatives of each approach on both sides of the Atlantic, but, in essence, the dominant tradition in American research has been a concern with persuasion, attitude change and behaviour modification. The emphasis has been on empirical - and often experimental - research into those issues
The European concern has been much more with 'culture', with communication as a process through which a shared culture is created, modified and transformed. Critics of mass culture such as the Leavises are impatient with the careful measuring and experimenting of the social scientists. 'You cannot demonstrate imaginative debility' says Richard Hoggart, underlining his view that many of the issues raised in this debate are simply not susceptible to the methods of the social scientists. On the other side, the social scientist retorts that 'the use of words such as '"alienation", "packaged", "processed", "neutered", "castrated", "invidious levelling" is not a substitute for clearly defined terms and reliable methods of assessment.' (The Effects of Mass Communication Halloran, 1964).
If the inescapably élitist Leavises were alive today, there is no doubt which side they would have been on. Those who agreed with the Leavises would necessarily be superior in taste and discrimination to those who didnt. They saw mass culture as mediocre and saw themselves as part of an enlightened élite responsible for conserving true values against the falseness and vulgarity of mass culture.
Since the Leavises, there have certainly been different approaches to literature. In part this has involved a redefinition of the purpose of literary criticism. It has also involved an opening up of the literary 'canon' to include more works by women and writers from ethnic minorities, as well as, in some cases, a readiness to consider popular culture as a valid area of study. There have also been some empirical studies of the effects of literature.
The empirical study of such effects, however, was never a main task of literary studies. By and large they were simply taken for granted.
Jensen and Rosengren (1994)
Criticism of mass culture today
For the past year or so a fierce debate has been popping up again and again in the arts pages and arts programmes focusing on the question of whether John Keats is 'better' than Bob Dylan. In effect, the names dont matter. They could be Mozart versus Rage Against the Machine or Wordsworth versus Danzig. The debate centres on the so-called relativism which is nowadays said to be so widespread, i.e. the view that its all a matter of taste and that there are no objective standards, that a 'work of art' is as good or as bad as a product of 'mass culture'. Various critics are taking a stand against this view and are arguing that the products of mass culture are trivial in comparison with the works of art of high culture. It seems likely to be a debate that will run and run.
Uses and Gratifications
Gratifying needs
The choices which people make are motivated by the desire to satisfy (or 'gratify') a range of needs. Hence the uses and gratifications approach is concerned to identify how people use the media to gratify their needs.
Generally, the needs which audiences seek to gratify are taken to be as summarized by Denis McQuail, namely:
surveillance
personal identity
personal relationships
diversion
As McQuail points out, it's very difficult to connect a particular need with a particular type of media content, 'since media use may be considered to supply at one time or another all the benefits named'. In the sections which follow, you will find a brief discussion of each of the needs mentioned and some brief suggestions as to how the media might be used to gratify them. However, you should bear in mind that those are only suggestions.
Research has shown that a distinction needs to be made between ritualistic and instrumental media use. Instrumental TV viewing involves using TV
in a purposive fashion to satisfy certain needs and may direct the viewer towards specific areas of television content which can best provide whatever it is he or she is looking for from television. Ritualistic use of television, on the other hand, tends to embody broader sets of needs such as to be entertained or amused, to relax or to be aroused, which are less often associated with watching particular types of programmes.
(Gunter and Svennevig (1987) p. 57)
Uses and gratifications research has developed in a variety of different directions over the years. At present it begins to look as if effects research and uses and gratifications are beginning to combine. Jensen and Rosengren summarise these new developments thus:
recent 'uses and effects research' has been able to show in some detail how media use of particular content types by particular categories of individuals under particular conditions calls forth effects of particular types, which in its turn calls forth mass media use of a particular type - and so on, in long, perhaps never-ending spirals of uses and effects.
Jensen & Rosengren (1994)
A third definition equates pop culture with Mass Culture. This is seen as a commercial culture, mass produced for mass consumption. From a U.K. (and European) point of view, this may be equated to American culture.