Page 22 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Introduction 7
span, ‘offered a continuous fictional reality, operating in parallel to
viewers’ lives. For some, it may serve as mnemonic system for events
in their own life … For such visitors … visiting the set has a temporal
depth connected not just with the programme’s history, but with
their own lives’ (Couldry 2000: 76). In such readings, it is claimed
that the media provides mediation for the inevitably large amount of
para-social relations that exist in contemporary society and helps to
ground them in the audience’s lived experience.
This process is viewed by cultural populists as predominantly
positive – despite poor supporting evidence. The media’s construc-
tion of a whole realm of social discourse that provides much needed
sense and orientation in the disorientating flux of mass-media society
is, in terms of this book’s argument, part of the problem rather than
a comforting solution. The central point made throughout this book
is that à la Heidegger, Ellul, McLuhan et al., technological form is itself
content and this form/content hybrid has disturbing not reassuringly
constitutive powers. As Couldry himself acknowledges, ‘the media
process does not merely interact with the rest of society; it has a
major impact on how the rest of society understands and imagines
itself’ (Couldry 2000: 54). Critical theory throws into sharp relief
such concepts of empowerment as media-pilgrims, drawing as they do
upon group-models that are more obeisant, gullible and pliable than
meaningfully empowered.

2 Inadvertently counterproductive evidence

The misplaced optimism of uncritical media theorists is repeatedly
revealed in the use of evidence that is frequently counterproductive
and which critical theorists such as Adorno would be hard put to
better as illlustrative material for their own much darker critiques.
Couldry (2000), for example, seeks to show how pilgrims to the
actual site of media production sets are freshly empowered by the
fillip a physical ‘seeing it with their own eyes’ provides for their
deconstructive abilities. In making this argument, however, Couldry’s
rich fieldwork material provides strong evidence of stubbornly
disempowering attitudes. For example, there is the bathos/banality,
of a mother and daughter’s dialogue subsequent to a purportedly
enlightening tour of Granada Studios Coronation Street set:
Mother: … I just wish I could have met a star […] or if I’d
gone round a studio.
Daughter: It’d be nice if somebody came up the Street and
wandered around, one an hour, one an hour, one
an hour, a different one every hour.
Mother: Oh, it would have been lovely.

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