Page 115 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

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Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre
Stuart Hall

The Media Group is one of the longest-running Centre research groups, and Media
Studies has been a focus of Centre work and interest since its inception. This
area has developed through a series of stages, each taking a somewhat different
focus of analysis, on the basis of a series of related but developing theoretical
approaches. These are briefly resumed in this overview.
In the early days this area was heavily dominated by the mainstream traditions
and concerns of ‘mass-communications research’, as defined largely by
American empirical social science practice. This tradition was rooted in earlier
debates about the relationship between ‘mass communications’ and ‘mass
society’; but these ‘Frankfurt School’ concerns had been thoroughly reworked by
the methodologies and concerns of American empirical-based research of a
largely quantitative kind, based on the audience-survey method, quantitative
content analysis and a preoccupation with questions of the debasement of cultural
standards through trivialization, pinpointed in the issue of the media and
violence. Similar concerns can, of course, be discerned in the way the influence
1
of the media on working-class culture was analysed in Richard Hoggart’s Uses
of Literacy and in the early indications given of the Centre’s interest in this
question as they were outlined in his inaugural essay, Schools of English and
2
Contemporary Society. But in its actual practice the Centre, from a very early
point, challenged the dominant paradigms and concerns of this tradition and
redefined work on the media in the broader framework of Cultural Studies.
This ‘break’ can be summarized as follows. First, Media Studies broke with
the models of ‘direct influence’—using a sort of stimulus-response model with
heavily behaviourist overtones, media content serving as a trigger—into a
framework which drew much more on what can broadly be defined as the
‘ideological’ role of the media. This latter approach defined the media as a major
cultural and ideological force, standing in a dominant position with respect to the
way in which social relations and political problems were defined and the
production and transformation of popular ideologies in the audiences addressed.
This ‘return’ to a concern with the media and ideologies is the most significant
and consistent thread in Centre media work. It has profoundly modified the
‘behaviourist’ emphases of previous research approaches.