Page 86 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Genealogy of Cultural Studies 75

then manipulated through advertising, PR, control of news, changes to the ed-
ucational curricula, and by pressures brought to bear through financing of the
arts. In such circumstances, democracy amounts to little more than, to cite
Chomsky, a “necessary illusion.”
Contributing mightily to people’s self-conception as members of the
mass are, of course, the mass media. Listeners and viewers of mass media,
although separated and out of communication with one another, focus their
attention on the same commercial products. For Williams, capital-intensive
media are, by and large, “institutions of cynicism, of denial, and of divi-
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sion.” In a 1978 essay, he enlarged on the importance to elites of control-
ling the media:

Problems of social order and relationship . . . centre in issues of control of and
access to the developed means of amplification or duration. Characteristically
these are of direct interest to a ruling class; all kinds of control and restriction of
access have been repeatedly practised. 95

Williams understood broadcasting, in particular, to be a “powerful form of
social integration and control,” adding: “Many of its main uses can be seen as
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socially, commercially and at times politically manipulative.” For democ-
racy to be more than mere illusion, he wrote, “the [communication] system
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must be free.” To move toward an effective democracy, he counseled, cen-
tralization must be redressed by applying through public policy two princi-
ples: first, the right to transmit, and second, the right to receive. In western
societies, we often feel that our communication system is an instrument of de-
mocracy because the right to receive is widespread (albeit constrained by
government and corporate secrecy and often by user-pay requirements).
However, we tend to pay scant attention to the fact that there is little in the
way of a right to transmit. Williams noted that “the proprietors of [most] me-
dia retain the right to chose who may transmit messages via their media”—a
far from democratic situation, given the high concentration of media owner-
ship. Williams died before the Internet became a reality in millions of peo-
ple’s lives; one suspects he would have found much to rejoice over and to de-
spair about in contemplating this new medium.
Williams distinguished among three types of media: amplificatory media
(for example the megaphone) extend directly the spatial reach of messages
from senders; durative media (such as tape recordings) preserve messages
over time; and alternative or symbolic media (television, radio, film, the
printed page) require special skills of encoding and decoding (literacy, media
literacy). Often media entail large capital investments, and hence favor cen-
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tralized control. That in turn means that very large audiences are required to
sustain such media. For Williams, this was not necessarily a problem in itself;