Page 152 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The culture of celebrity 137
Here Lowenthal clearly prefigures two crucial aspects of the contem-
porary mediascape that the remaining chapters address in detail:
1 A decreasing amount of media content can validly claim to be informa-
tion in any substantive sense. This point is particularly marked for
Lowenthal by the fact that a significant part of his research was
conducted during a period of two world wars – yet the media’s
output was still dominated by trivial content.
2 This loss of informational content is exacerbated by the tautologically
enframed nature of the data that is provided. The sort of distance
needed to assume a critical perspective upon what one is
interpreting is curtailed by its systematic focus upon consumption
to the exclusion of other cultural values.

Lowenthal is once again explicit in his emphasis upon the
hermetically sealed, self-serving nature of the frame of reference so
produced:

Our content analysis not only revealed impressive regularities in
the occurrence, omission, and treatment of certain topics, but
also showed that these regularities may be interpreted in terms
of the very same category of consumption which was the key to
the selection of the biographical subjects. Consumption is a
thread running through every aspect of those stories. The
characteristics … can all be integrated around the concept of
the consumer.
(Lowenthal 1961: 118)
Cultural populism frequently either fails to notice the tightly circum-
scribed nature of this severely limited frame of reference, or
alternatively, recognizes it but fails to see it as a problem. The
Introduction highlighted Barker’s uncritical use of such commercial
terms as investment to describe audience engagement. Elsewhere he
also provides an admirably frank account of the extent to which,
unlike critical theory, he values consumption for its own sake.
Explaining his personal selection methods of holiday reading, Barker
celebrates shallowness over depth:
The novels all have one characteristic – they are fat enough (I
buy by the inch thickness) and narratively driven enough, that
I ‘consume’ them at great and undemanding speed … the
manner of my consumption is such that I can’t even remember
their titles. I am in real danger of re-buying the same books –
though it would hardly matter since I probably could re-read
most of the book and not recall even that I had read it before,
let alone how it went. To ‘consume’ in this sense is to retain as
little as possible.
(Barker in Dickinson et al. 1998: 186)

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