Page 17 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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2 Critical Theories of Mass Media
1 The inhabitants of Plato’s Cave lacked the physical freedom to
see the unmediated reality beyond the cave entrance that was
causing the shadows on the wall. In the new mass-media cave the
constraints are all the more insidiously effective for their pre-
1
dominantly immaterial and frequently voluntary nature .To
paraphrase Marx – mankind is free yet everywhere he is in
chainstores.

We shall see in the following chapters that our mass-media
environment is permeated by ideological components that are
overlooked – not because they don’t exist, but rather because they
are an innate part of how the media functions. Familiarity not only
breeds contempt – it also sometimes makes it difficult to spot what is
under our noses so that:
2 Even when the mass media’s deeply ideological aspects are
recognized, instead of being seen as a source for concern,
uncritical theories of the media have a perverse tendency to
celebrate such ideological processes as evidence of the rude
health of cultural life and agency within mass media society.

In the following pages it is repeatedly pointed out how this
tendency constitutes a particularly disturbing variation upon Plato’s
allegory of the Cave. At least the original dwellers could claim the
mitigating circumstance of enforced imprisonment: frequently, their
counterparts in the contemporary media cave (and their apologist
theorists) appear to connive actively at their own oppression.

The trouble with being critical: in defence of pessimism

To complement the above two main political dangers, there are also
two basic problems faced by critical theories of mass media.
1 It is difficult to gain the necessary analytical distance to properly
understand the social implications of the mass media.

Marshall McLuhan compared the difficulty of seeking an objective
perspective upon the media to explaining the notion of water to a
fish, while Friedrich Kittler (1990, 1997, 1999) argues that we can
only begin to understand media configurations from a suitably long
historical perspective, thus questioning the possibility of meaningful
contemporaneous analysis. In Plato’s Cave (1991), John O’Neil
describes the additional problem of developing a critical perspective
in relation to the media:
One is either a player, a committed commentator, or a fan –
but hardly ever is a place kept for the contemplative mind. To

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