Communication, Culture and Power - Essay Example

The media and the experts determine how we see the rest of the world" (Said 1997) How far could public opinion resist the influence of the political and economic elites. Introduction: Communication, culture and power Power make things change or prevent thing changing. Whether defined as the ability to make decisions and to have those decisions carried out, to influence hearts and minds, to alter states of being or simply to hire and fire workers, power is the key factor in the dynamics of any culture. John B.Thompson identifies four forms of power exercised in the society - economic, political, coercive and symbolic. Economic power emanates from the possession of wealth or the means by which wealth is generated; political power rests in decision making arising from being in a position of elected, appointed or inherited authority; coercive power springs from the use of or potential use of superior strength. Invasion of one country by another is an example of coercive power. Symbolic power works through images (linguistic, pictoral, aural) to create and mobilise support for a cause and it is integral to the operation of the other power forms. Other classifications include position, resource and charismatic (or personality) power, each overlapping with Thompson's categories and each one some how connected with communication processes. A case can be made for recognising technological power, what Karl Marx refereed to as the means of production, as a category in its own right. John of Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in around 1450 was not substantially the result of either economic or political imperatives, but it soon proved to be a winner economically. Politically and culturally it brought about profound changes. By symbolising knowledge as something potentially accessible to all and rendering the act of reading an exercise in individualism and a possible source of subversion, printing transformed the known world by becoming a power in the land. In easily reproducible and permanent form, it spread knowledge and ideas beyond the traditional boundary fence of the privileged to the 'common people'. In doing so, it offered them glimpses of their own potential power. Yet the media have never been either separate from or independent of the forces which create them and which in turn they shape and influence. They work, as Thompson points out, within institutional frameworks. As such they operate as forms of cultural apparatus, part of the machinery of state or of powerful interest groups within the state. Historically the media have more often served as the voice of powerful than of the people. They have been classified by the French philosopher Louis Althusser as one of the prime ISAs, Ideological State Apparatuses, along with religion, family structures, and education: that is, they are crucially important channels for the transmission of 'rules of conduct' in society; the guardians of a culture's dominant norms and values. They play a part in all the power forms, including in a contributory sense - coercive power. Coercion, the exercise of power by force, manifests itself through what Althusser terms RSAs, Repressive State Apparatuses - army, police, prisons. It is ever physically absent but it is in the culturally concealed. Its visible and tangible presence depends on whether the other power forms are considered to be under threat. In war time of course, coercive power moves from the back region to the front region of our lives; and at no other time is symbolic power exercised by the media, so graphically, so blatantly or so persuasively. The media in time of war - with exceptions- become the trumpeters of conflict with the enemy. They do not fire the guns but their clamour for the guns to be fired is an essential part of the process of gathering the people's support for the war effort. ISAs and RSAs conflate, become one and the media speak with a single voice; their task to create consensus and unity at home, to identify and target the enemy; their role that of mobilisers of opinion and, boosters of national morale. Hegemony - how power and economic elites influence opinion Discussion of cultural apparatuses, the shaping of norms and values and the forging of consensus brings us to one of the most important concepts in the theory of culture and the exercise of power. For most people, life can be lived quite happily and fulfillingly without their ever having the slightest idea what hegemony might mean. Yet the word, and what the word stands for, what it attempts to explain, is critical to the study of culture, communication, history, anthropology, sociology, politics and economics. Hegemony is working when there is general consensus, that is when the mass of the population, or most of it, accepts the controlling influence and decision-making of that part of society termed by the American writer C.Wright Mills, the Power Elite - those members of a community who hold or influence the holding of the reins of power. Hegemony is rule by won consent. Of all the agencies of hegemonic control the media are generally perceived to be most powerful, hence the requirement for the Power Elite to exert pressure if not control over the media: better still, to own it. Hegemony works through ideological state apparatuses and operates best when those apparatuses are speaking in harmony with one another. The theory of hegemony is attributed to Antonio Gramsci who argued that a state of hegemony is achieved when a provisional alliance of certain groups exerts a consensus which makes the power of the dominant group appear natural and legitimate. It can only be sustained by the won consent of the dominated. Hegemony works most smoothly when there is a substantial degree of social, economic, political and cultural security in a society. When security is undermined, social division rampant, hegemony is at risk and Althuser's repressive state apparatuses are brought into action. Hegemony serves to provide the Power Elite with the consent of the ruled. Edward Said, Orientalism and Hegemony Edward Said's publication of Orientalism made such an impact on thinking about colonial discourse that for two decades it has continued to be the site of controversy, adulation and criticism. Said's intervention is designed to illustrate the manner in which the representation of Europe's 'others' has been institutionalised since at least the eighteenth century as a feature of its cultural dominance. Orientalism describes the various disciplines, institutions, processes of investigation and styles of thought by which Europeans came to 'know' the 'Orient' over several centuries, and which reached their height during the rise and consolidation of nineteenth-century imperialism. The key to Said's interest in this way of knowing Europe's others is that it effectively demonstrates the link between knowledge and power, for it 'constructs' and dominates Orientals in the process of knowing them. The very term 'Oriental' shows how the process works, for the word identifies and homogenises at the same time, implying a range of knowledge and an intellectual mastery over that which is named. Since Said's analysis, Orientalism has revealed itself as a model for the many ways in which Europe's strategies for knowing the colonised world became, at the same time, strategies for dominating that world. But despite the complexity and variety of Orientalist disciplines, the investigations of Orientalist scholars all operated within certain parameters, such as the assumption that Western civilisation was the pinnacle of historical development. Thus, Orientalist analysis almost universally proceeded to confirm the 'primitive', 'originary', 'exotic' and 'mysterious' nature of Oriental societies and, more often than not, the degeneration of the 'non-European' branches of the IndoEuropean family of languages. In this respect, Orientalism, despite the plethora of disciplines it fostered, could be seen to be what Michel Foucault calls a 'discourse': a coherent and strongly bounded area of social knowledge; a system of statements by which the world could be known. There are certain unwritten (and sometimes unconscious) rules that define what can and cannot be said within a discourse, and the discourse of Orientalism had many such rules that operated within the area of convention, habit, expectation and assumption. In any attempt to gain knowledge about the world, what is known is overwhelmingly determined by the way it is known; the rules of a discipline determine the kind of knowledge that can be gained from it, and the strength, and sometimes unspoken nature, of these rules show an academic discipline to be a prototypical form of discourse. But when these rules span a number of disciplines, providing boundaries within which such knowledge can be produced, that intellectual habit of speaking and thinking becomes a discourse such as Orientalism. This argument for the discursive coherence of Orientalism is the key to Said's analysis of the phenomenon and the source of the compelling power of his argument. European knowledge, by relentlessly constructing its subject within the discourse of Orientalism, was able to maintain hegemonic power over it. Focusing on this one aspect of the complex phenomenon of Orientalism has allowed Said to elaborate it as one of the most profound examples of the machinery of cultural domination, a metonymy of the process of imperial control and one that continues to have its repercussions in contemporary life. Orientalism, then, pivots on a demonstration of the link between knowledge and power, for the discourse of Orientalism constructs and dominates Orientals in the process of 'knowing' them. Messages received -the anatomy of public opinion Democracy is a system of government that involves some form of election by the people. It has a ideological aspect too, as it is seen as a valued feature of modern societies (Lawson and Garrod, 1996). Browne (1996) lists the competing views on the media in a modern democracy. The following factors are those that he considers promote democracy: 1. The media are not controlled by the state, so government censorship is limited and free speech is upheld. Journalists are therefore free to publish and comment, within the legal limits. 2. A wide range of media mean a wide range of opinions. Because the media are able to comment on government policies and actions, the media play an important 'watchdog' role. 3. The media provide impartial accounts of news and current affairs. 4. the media accurately reflect public opinions that already exist in the society rather than creating new ones. People make conscious choices about what media they use. 5. Anyone can put across their views by setting up a newspaper, distributing leaflets and using other media. A democratic society can only work properly if there is a well informed electorate. In modern societies, political information is mainly provided by the mass media and they have been seen to take on the position of 'watchdog of the constitution' or 'fourth estate' (Newton, 1990). However any bias or misinformation presented by the media may have an adverse influence on the voting public. 'The media have failed democracy. We live in a political society in blinkers. The information society is a myth. What we have is the misinformation society' (Golding 1993). In this statement Golding presents a very pessimistic view of modern societies and the role media within them, but it is possible to argue that there has never really been a 'golden age of democracy'. The coverage of general elections world wide by different media brings into sharp focus the major concerns about the political influence of mass media. There are two main concerns here and both can be seen as focussing on the role of the mass media in a democratic society. The first is whether the media do influence the electorate as a result of their coverage of general election campaigns and the second the ways in which the media might affect wider political struggles and debates. Many empirical before and after studies have examined the influence of media campaigns on actual voting behaviour. The People's Choice by Lazarfield et.al (1948) on the American presidential election of 1940 showed the existence of a considerable amount of interaction between the social characteristics of voters, what they select and use from the political propaganda presented by the media and their ultimate voting choice. This study was first to discover the influence of opinion leaders on other people's attitudes. These well-informed members of the audience were influential and were able to advise and inform others les interested in media coverage. This was the two step flow hypothesis. Several writes on media in the 1960s and 70s, including Denis McQuail and Jay Blumler, countered the critical theory view that audiences were easily brainwashed, that they always believed what they are told and seemed, somehow, to have no mind of their own. What came to be termed Uses and Gratifications Theory shifted attention from the message-makers of the mass communication process to the massage-receivers: the audience. How, the dominant question became, did audiences use the media to gratify their needs This gratifications approach worked from the premise that there is a plurality of responses to media messages; that people are capable of making their own minds up, accepting some messages, rejecting others, using the media for a variety of reasons and using them differently at different times. A cultural factor, given especial emphasis by Jay Blumber and Elihu Katz in The Uses of Mass Communication, published in 1974, is the influence upon members of the audience of the cultural and social origins from which their needs arise. The nature of these needs had been examined in 'The television audience: a revised perspective', published in Sociology of the Mass Media. Blumler, Denis McQuail and J.R. Brown posed four major categories of need which the media serve to gratify; diversion, personal relationships, personal identity, surveillance. Observers of audience reaction to the mass media during the 1950s brooded over the power of the media to create in the public mind a degree of dependency; and Dependency theory has had considerable influence on attitudes since that time. If we are truly in the age of mass-produced information, well into Marshall McLuhan's definition of the world as an electronic 'global village', becoming Netizens as well as citizens, media analysis will be constantly attempting to measure the degree to which we, as audience, are dependent upon media for the information, and possibly guidance-clarification- with which to from our concepts of the world. In an article 'A dependency model of mass media effects' in Inter-media: Interpersonal Communication in the Media published in1979, two American researchers, Sandra J. Ball-Rokeach and Melvyn De Fleur cite the followng media role functions in relation to audience dependency. The resolution of ambiguity or certainty - but in the direction of closing down the range of interpretations of situations which audiences are able to make; attitude formation, agenda setting, expansion of people's system of beliefs and clarification of values - but through the expression of the value conflicts. Audience can also be a nuisance. They are prone to doing things which the communicators do not wish them to do; to be more precise, what the communicators wish audiences to do with their publications or their programmes is not always what audience actually do with them. The editorial team of a newspaper would clearly wish readers to follow the paper's agenda, that is like note of the major stories of the day as signaled by the front-page headlines. However, many readers may have their own agendas-their own priorities. They may turn straight to the sports page or the TV schedules. They ignore the preferred reading and by ignorance, cussedness or inadvertence, aberrantly decode the messages aimed at them. Television has been better able to impose its own agenda on audiences because of its unavoidable sequencing in time: there is no turning to the sports report till the sports report is broadcast. The audience is obliged to toe the agenda-line of the programme; or is it Once again, we experience the phenomenon in audiences of selectivity. Conclusion Newman et el. (1992, p.xv) while explaining new 'constructionalist' approach says that 'the subtle interaction between what the mass media convey and how people come to understand the world beyond their immediate life-space'. According to Negrine (1996, p.128), the constructionist approach proposes the view that 'individuals make sense of media's menu of issues by "framing" them in ways which draw on past personal, and other, experiences'. Thus it can be concluded that the public opinion cannot be easily manipulated. References 1. Ashcroft, B. (2000) Edward Said., Florence, KY, USA: Routledge. 2. Boyd-Barrett, Oliver (1977) Media Imperialism: Towards an International Framework for the Analysis of Media Systems. In Gurevitch et al.(eds) Mass Communication and Society. London: Oxford 3. 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Boston: Beacon. 15. Smith J. (1995).Understanding the Media: A sociology of mass communication. New Jersey: Hampton Press Inc.. 16. John B.Thompson . (1997). The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. London: Metheun. Read More