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Theories of Broadcast Media 43
8 The question of democracy in the first and second media age is discussed in Chapters 3
and 4.
9 For a 1990s text which empirically investigates the way in which modern audiences are
the product of the management and marketing efforts of media organizations, see
Ettema and Whitney (1994).
10 Ideology is thus identified with passages from Marx’s earlier work in The German
Ideology as a false, imaginary, upside-down, illusory representation of reality: ‘in all ide-
ology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura’ (Marx
and Engels, 1970: 47).
11 The literature on Marx and Engels’ concepts of ideology is vast and I will offer here a
summary of them to the extent that they are a useful background for examining the
media as a state apparatus. For a useful overview of Marxist theories of ideology, see
Larrain (1983) and Eagleton (1991).
12 The struggle for hegemony usually entails the manufacture of consensus by way of the
revival or construction of deviance. These may be internal to a particular nation-state,
such as criminality, counter-cultures and subcultures. External deviance might be pro-
jected as a threat posed by other cultures and other nations as either economically, mil-
itarily or culturally dangerous – culminating in the modern discourse of ‘terrorism’.
13 Given that this text is almost entirely grounded in an empiricist epistemology (see my dis-
cussion above), Boorstin manages to capture the import of spectacle in a persuasive way.
14 It is perhaps remarkable that Foucault did not write anything about the modern media,
even though he was writing throughout the heights of the society of spectacle. Certainly
his work is taken up by media studies and cultural studies in substantial ways, but
particularly in the discourse analysis perspective, as we have seen earlier in this
chapter.
15 The visibility of the few by the many was not always a matter of violent display, but
indeed a common form was also the ‘royal progression’ which continues today in
nations with a monarchical head of state. The regency would conduct routine and reg-
ularized regional tours to be visible to his or her subjects on a repetitive basis, as, for
example, the British monarch does today, in relation to the Commonwealth.
16 The view that the function of broadcast institutions is primarily to sell audiences to
advertisers was first put most strongly by the Canadian Marxist Dallas Smythe (1981).
17 ‘It is useless to wonder if it is the loss of communication which causes this escalation in
the simulacra, or it is the simulacra which is there first.’ There is no first term,
Baudrillard argues: ‘... it is a circular process – that of simulation, that of the hyperreal:
a hyperreality of communication and of meaning, more real than the real. Hence the real
is abolished’ (1983: 99).
18 Especially by the editors of Wired magazine.
19 For an excellent comparison of Baudrillard and McLuhan, see Smart (1992: 115–40) and
Huyssen (1995).
20 Recently this process which McLuhan describes has been taken up in the concept of
‘remediation’. See particularly Bolter and Grusin (1999).
21 However, McLuhan often gets these relationships between forms and content confused.
For example, in one passage in trying to explain how we positivize the content and ignore
the medium, he says: ‘The “content” of writing or print is speech, but the reader is almost
entirely unaware either of print or of speech’ (1964: 26). To be consistant, McLuhan must
surely mean, ‘the reader is almost entirely unaware either of print or of writing’.
22 See the next chapter for a critique of this distinction.
23 For example, McLuhan’s outlook is, even if in a limited sense, able to make some of the
basic connections which are being made today between ‘spaces of flow’ (Castells), be these
of bodies or messages. See, for example, Meyrowitz (1985), Morse (1998), Graham and
Marvin (1996), Calhoun (1992).
24 McLuhan declares his indebtedness to Innis on a number of occasions. In The Gutenberg
Galaxy (1967) he pronounces: ‘Innis was the first person to hit upon the process of change
as implicit in the forms of media technology’ (50).