Page 306 - Culture Society and the Media

296 CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA
qualitative terms, the discrete and differential impact that the media might have
in influencing our view of social reality and hence our actions within it. To show
that the media propose certain definitions of reality is one thing; but it cannot be
inferred from this that such definitions are necessarily accepted in the sense that
they are effectively taken for real and acted upon. One cannot, in other words,
infer ‘audience response from the nature of the message they receive’ (Hall et
al., 1976, p. 52).
This is clearly a general problem; indeed, it is perhaps the most important
single outstanding theoretical difficulty in need of exploration in media
sociology. Currently, far from being resolved, there are few signs that the
problem has even been adequately conceptualized (a notable exception being
David Morley’s work on the ‘Nationwide’ audience—see Morley, 1980). So far,
inquiries in this area have largely taken the form of audience research based on
sampling and questionnaire techniques. Whilst clearly helpful in some areas—
the impact of the media on voting behaviour, for example—it is equally clear
that there are some questions, vital and important ones, which cannot be tackled
in this way. For, in speaking of the impact of the media on the terms in which we
see the world, we are speaking of an ideological process which, in so far as it
concerns the formation of consciousness, is one which those subjected to it—you,
me, all of us—tend to be unconscious of. It escapes our consciousness inasmuch
as it constitutes the framework within which our consciousness is produced. This
is not to say that the operations of ideology are necessarily invisible; but it is to
say that their invisibility is a condition of their effectiveness. They have to be
made visible. It therefore follows that the proposition that the media are
influential in proposing certain ideologically derived definitions of reality is one
that cannot be dependent for its validation solely upon the subjective reports of
those whose consciousness is said to be produced, without their being aware of
it, by this process. It is a proposition that would automatically lose its theoretical
power were it to be operationalized in this way.
A further difficulty with such approaches consists in the methodological
individualism they exhibit in according priority to the study of the individual and
her or his consciousness over the study of groups, group formation and the
institutional structure of society. Much of the more general theoretical and
methodological value of recent studies concerned with media representations of
deviance consists in the fact that they are not liable to this criticism. For they
have addressed the question of media effects not solely or even primarily as an
issue that concerns the consciousness of individual members of the audience but
have sought rather to theorize the media-society connection in terms of the
impact which this area of media practice has exerted on the practices of law-
enforcement agencies.
Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and
Rockers—a study of the local political reactions to the media sensationalization
of the ‘mods’ and ‘rockers’ incidents of 1964—offers a useful illustration of some
of the issues involved here. Cohen argues that, in the seaside resorts concerned,