Page 65 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 55
In the approach which succeeded the European critique, the main focus was on
behavioural change. If the media had ‘effects’ these, it was argued, should show
up empirically in terms of a direct influence on individuals, which would register
as a switch of behavour. Switches of choice—between advertised consumer
goods or between presidential candidates—were viewed as a paradigm case of
measurable influence and effect. The model of power and influence being
employed here was paradigmatically empiricist and pluralistic: its primary focus
was the individual; it theorized power in terms of the direct influence of A on
B’s behaviour; it was preoccupied (as so-called ‘political science’ in this mould
has been ever since) with the process of decision making. Its ideal experimental
test was a before/after one: its ideal model of influence was that of the campaign.
Political campaign studies conceived politics largely in terms of voting, and
voting largely in terms of campaign influences and the resulting voter choices.
The parallel with advertising campaigns was exact. Not only was a great deal of
the research funded for the purpose of identifying how to deliver specific
audiences to the advertisers—loftily entitled ‘policy research’—but the
commercial model tended to dominate the theory, even in the more rarified
atmosphere of Academia. Larger historical shifts, questions of political process
and formation before and beyond the ballot-box, issues of social and political
power, of social structure and economic relations, were simply absent, not by
chance, but because they were theoretically outside the frame of reference. But
that was because the approach, though advanced as empirically-grounded and
scientific, was predicated on a very specific set of political and ideological
presuppositions. These presuppositions, however, were not put to the test, within
the theory, but framed and underpinned it as a set of unexamined postulates. It
should have asked, ‘does pluralism work?’ and ‘how does pluralism work?’
Instead, it asserted, ‘pluralism works’—and then went on to measure, precisely
and empirically, just how well it was doing. This mixture of prophecy and hope,
with a brutal, hard-headed, behaviouristic positivism provided a heady theoretical
concoction which, for a long time, passed itself off as ‘pure science’.
In this model, power and influence were identical and interchangeable terms:
both could be empirically demonstrated at the point of decision making.
Occasionally, this reductionism was projected on to a larger canvas and the
impact of the media was discussed in terms of ‘society’ as a whole. But this
connection was made in a very specific way. And society was defined in a very
limited manner. A largely cultural definition of society was assumed. Class
formations, economic processes, sets of institutional power-relations were
largely unacknowledged. What held society together it was agreed were its
norms. In pluralist society, a fundamental broadly based consensus on norms was
assumed to prevail throughout the population. The connection between the media
and this normative consensus, then, could only be established at the level of
values. This was a tricky term. In Parsons’s ‘social system’ (Parsons, 1951) such
values played an absolutely pivotal role; for around them the integrative
mechanisms which held the social order together were organized. Yet what these