Page 194 - Culture Society and the Media

184 CULTURAL DEPENDENCY AND THE MASS MEDIA
This claim implicitly justified cultural penetration by more ‘developed’ societies,
and had a substantial intellectual heritage. Several studies had found a
relationship between mass media availability or exposure and other indices of
industrialization or ‘modernity’ (see Schramm, 1964). It was hypothesized
(Lerner, 1958) that the link was causal, that the mass media contributed to the
process of becoming ‘modern’. One possible link in the causal chain lay in the
area of attitude change and conceptual skill. This in turn could be related to some
studies of western industrialization which had attached considerable importance
to social-psychological variables such as in Weber’s (1965) description of the
‘protestant ethic’ and its associated syndrome of deferred gratification. (Weber’s
thesis was discredited by Trevor-Roper (1977), who argued, amongst other
things, that many Calvinist entrepreneurs lived far from frugal lives, and that
rational capitalism existed in southern Catholic Europe before the growth of
Calvinism.) A related application was McClelland’s (1961) concept of
‘achievement motivation’, propensity for which was associated with, among
many other factors, the content characteristics of traditional children’s stories.
Lerner (1958) in his study of development in the Middle East identified
‘empathy’ as the crucial modernizing component of the human psyche and
defined the concept in terms of a high capacity for rearranging the self-system at
short notice. The mass media were important facilitators of this process of
interior manipulation.
Elaboration of theory along lines such these was problematic. The model of
development, as we have seen, was ethnocentric. Not only did it obscure the
reality about some of the conditions of developing countries, but it even obscured
the reality of the nature of the so-called developed countries. For instance,
certain features that had been considered typical of ‘traditional’ societies and
inimical to ‘development’ were to be later identified in ‘developed’ societies. It
was not obvious that all or even most ‘traditional’ values were inimical to
development: in Japan they were very likely positive facilitators. Nor was it
obvious that supposedly ‘modern’ features necessarily facilitated development.
Lerner’s ‘empathy’ concept might, for example, appear to be a facilitating
quality, especially in relation to entrepreneurship and other innovative processes.
But it could also be seen as an obstacle in the way of cementing the kind of work
discipline ‘appropriate’ for the masses in developed industrial countries. High
‘empathy’ might have a destructive impact on industrial society by generating a
critical approach to authority and by kindling an impatience with the constraints
imposed by industrialism on certain possibilities for individual development.
One important way the media were seen as being able to promote economic
growth through attitude change was in their role as vehicles for the advertising
and the display of consumer goods. This, it was believed, would promote
consumption, which in turn would promote local industrialization, higher
incomes and yet further consumption. But this view was attacked by critics of
‘cultural imperialism’ on the grounds that it greatly underestimated the extent to
which, first, production of consumer goods continued to be controlled by or in