Page 18 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Introduction 3
claim to know more than what is going on in the media than
the media allow for, however, is to be out of joint with the form
and content of the media. Critics of the media are exiles, or
else they are allowed to strut their brief moment among life’s
killjoys, as a reminder of those higher things for which we have
neither the time nor the taste.
(O’Neil 1991: 21)

Implicit in O’Neil’s complaint is a sense of the overwhelming
immediacy of the media environment that successfully displaces any
attempt to obtain a more considered vantage point. But, rather than
producing critical engagement with this situation, difficult as that
may be, the dominant response from current media theorists tends
to be one of excessively optimistic celebration. They laud the
media’s powerful ability to produce environments predicated upon
2
the untrammelled pervasion of immanent flows of information and
images but fail to consider how much genuine empowerment can be
gained from engagement with such heavily pre-processed content, no
matter how imaginative and proactive that engagement attempts to
be. This book’s assessment of the possibilities for empowerment is
much more straightforwardly pessimistic.
2 Critics of mass culture are often accused of being conservative,
out-of-touch elitists.

In relation to the vexed question of optimism versus pessimism,
this book seeks to:
+ rectify the situation whereby critical theory has been unfairly
neglected simply because of its downbeat tone – there seems little
intellectual basis for the common tendency to automatically prize
positive interpretations over more negative ones, especially if the
Old Testament (a foundational cultural text of then if ever there
was one) is correct in claiming: ‘For in much wisdom is much
vexation; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow’
(Ecclesiastes 1:18).
+ suggest that even amid theories generally accepted as optimistic,
there is frequently ample evidence for a more critical rereading.

Consistently, valid grounds for critical engagement with the media
seem to be unduly passed over in preference for Panglossian
analyses. At certain crucial points, commentators wilfully either step
around, or even over, those negative elements that early theorists did
in fact identify but which they thought could be overcome. Such
optimism is more understandable in the early days of the mass
media but our benefit of historical hindsight makes uncritical
repetitions of these interpretations, at best, untenable, and at worst,

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