Page 305 - Culture Society and the Media

MEDIA, ‘REALITY’, SIGNIFICATION 295
behaviour of the so-called deviant towards an examination of the social and
cultural processes whereby the attribution of the label of deviance is made to
some acts but not to others and of the functions which the nomination of such
acts as deviant fulfils in relation to the wider social order.
These developments within sociology have been influenced by and, in turn,
contributed to parallel developments in the field of historical scholarship.
Particularly relevant here are those studies of witch persecutions—witches being
the deviants par excellence of earlier, theological universes—undertaken by
English and American historians (see, for example, Macfarlane, 1970). These
suggest that, in periods of disorientating social, political and economic crisis, the
responsibility for such crises will be projected onto vulnerable groups of
‘outsiders’ who, by virtue of their divergence from dominant social norms, are
structurally well placed to serve as scapegoats. Dramatized in the form of show-
trials, their behaviour serves, in a way that conforms with the Durkheimian logic
of the social function of deviance, to reinforce, by negative example, the
threatened power of dominant consensual norms.
Whilst it might be tempting to argue that such irrational forces play no part in
modern political processes, recent experiences preclude any such sanguine
conclusion. The treatment of Jews in Hitler’s Germany; the Moscow show-trials
of the 1930s; the persecution of communists in the McCarthy era; Powellism—
all of these are contemporary instances which may be cited. Sociologists working
at the meeting point of media theory and deviance theory have argued that the
presentation of deviance by the media in recent years has exhibited a similar
logic in producing, through their symbolization and dramatization of the
behaviour of ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’, drug users, soccer hooligans, political
extremists and so on, a gallery of ‘folk-devils’, a modern demonology. By the
devices of exaggeration and stereotyping, by wrenching such forms of behaviour
from any societal context that might help to explain them, it is argued that social
tensions have been signified within a semiology of law and order which has
served to reinforce the strength of dominant consensual norms. Involved as the
unwilling participants in a kind of modern morality play in which they serve as
the negative symbols of disorder, thereby pointing to the need for society to
mount a permanent patrol along its normative boundary-lines, the behaviour of
such ‘deviant’ groups is so defined that they appear both to crystallize and to be
responsible for the acute instability that has characterized British society since
the 1960s.
It may be objected that the obvious difficulty with theories of this nature is
that they are couched at such a level of abstraction as to render either their
confirmation or disconfirmation difficult. Indeed, it may further be argued that
there is a real difficulty in imputing any effectivity of whatever kind to the media
if, as is often argued, the influence they exert on the social world is necessarily
an indirect one determined by the influence they exert on the actions of
individual members of the audience via their impact on their consciousness. For
it is by no means easy to know how one might sift out, in both quantitative and