1. Theoretical Perspectives – Cultural Studies
Media Culture and Technology
Spring term

2. Outline Cultural Studies Ideology and Communication
The Encoding/Decoding model
Media as technology
McLuhan – Social Uses of technology

3. What culture? CCCS – 1963 Birmingham University
Richard Hoggard and Raymond Willians
Working-class culture
Working-class culture was the ”culture of no culture” (Scannell, 103)

4. The culture and the masses
19th century British literature did not relate to working-class readers
Economic growth 1950 – disposable income and time – how would they be spent?
Classic literature vs. Radio and newspapers

5. Shifting meaning of culture
Culture in the daily lifes of ordinary people
Everyday experience

6. ”Them” and ”Us”
’They’ are the agents of the official culture that looms over and above working class life; the doctors, teachers, vicars, policemen and magistrates who bos you about and tell you what to do. They are ’the vast apparatus of authority as it intrudes on working class life.
Literature – media as registers of historical and social life

7. Democratic view of culture
Culture – not only special privileged kinds of things and practices as if they and they alone where expressive embodiments of ’culture’
Definition of Culture – not only arts and literature
Culture is a way of life

8. Raymond Williams’ Marxism
Williams’ refused to recognize himself as a Marxist untill the 1960s
He criticized burgeois Marxist intellectuals for speaking too condescendingly about the masses.
He refused the view that the only culture to speak of was the culture of the burgeoisie.

9. Communication and community
Common culture is a collective open-ended conversation
Emphasis on willingness to listen
Democratic system of communication

10. Participation
’Communication is something that belongs to the whole society and depends on the maximum participation by individuals in the society’
’We have to think of ways which would disperse the control of communications and truly open the channels for participation’ (Williams, 1961)

11. Stuart Hall Director of CCCS from 1968 – 1974
’the media’ – press, radio and television
Television – most popular source of entertainment and political information for most British people

12. Ideology
Critical Theory – alienation and reification capture the false consciousness
Hall has a different take on ideology
Refusal to use mass culture
’How the rulling class ideas actually get into the heads of individuals and, once there, how effective they might be securing their acceptance?’
View of critical theory – to pessimistic, over deterministic.

13. Social relations of cultural production
How television ’works’?
Rejection of the idea of powerful media which injected passive media consumers with their messages
Production of media output, transmission and reception.

14. Encoding/decoding Response to media effects research
American mass communication sociology at the time was criticized for being to positivist and too focused on quantitative studies of the mass media
Commmunications between the elites (producers) and audiences is a form of ’systematically distorted communication´

15. Models of communication process
Hall criticized these models for being too linear and focusing on message exchanges

16. Hall’s Alternative A model based on Marx’s commodity production
Stages of production, circulation and distribution/consumption and reproduction
Notion of mass media as content –producing organizations

17. Encoding/Decoding

18. Research Current affairs, news programmes: Nationwide, Panorama
No access to the BBC for academics
Only the ’decoding’ part of the model was tested then

19. Readings
Preferred reading
Negotiating reading
Oppositional reading

20. Audience studies Social conditions and circumstances of readings
Participant observation
The question of encoding disapeared from sight
Study of television as a part of daily life – uses, rituals, power relations.

21. Thaïs Machado-Borges
Only for you – Brazilians and the Telenovela Flow

22. Social uses of technology
Global significance of the new medium – television
Oral cultures, written and print cultures, global electronic communication
Relationship between communication, technology and society.

23. The Medium is the Message
McLuhan was more concerned with the characteristics of new media as means of communication than with their content.
Media are extensions of our senses
Non-judgemental approach to media impact

24. The global village
Tribalized and de-tribalized societies, the communal and the individual
Electronic media retribalize the world into a single global village
Rise of the computer and global spread of TV

25. Criticism Not very scientific Ideologue of corporate America
No research
Deterministic

26. Future teller? Cable television, broadband, satellite transmission
Internet
Convergence and hypertext

27. Technological determinism
McLuhan focused on the impact of media in the contexts of daily life and the ways in which they restructured our perception and experience
Technological determinism argues that machines make history

28. Technologies and social change
Is there some direct cause-effect connection between new technologies and social change?
Are technologies the direct agents of social change ?

29. Raymond Williams – Television. Technology and Cultural Form
Deterministic view – development of technologies is an internal process of scientific invention that creates new societies and new social relations.
Symptomatic view – technological innovation is the product of already existing social processes.

30. Communicative affordances
Human beings respond to things that they encounter in the world in terms of their affordances
Useable properties of natural or man-made things
”Potential” of technologies is realized by human beings