Page 67 - Culture Society and the Media

CULTURE, SOCIETY AND THE MEDIA 57
revolts, counter-cultural upheavals and anti-war movements of the late 1960s.
But, for a time, it prevailed. It became a global ideology, backed by the credentials
of social science. It was exported with a will around the globe. Some of its force
arose from the fact that what, in theory, ought to be the case, could be shown so
convincingly and empirically to be, in fact, the case. The American Dream had
been empirically verified. A whole number of decisive interventions in
developing countries were made in the name of hastening them along this
modernizing pathway. It is sometimes asked what a moment of political
settlement and theoretical hegemony looks like: this would certainly be one good
candidate.
The media were articulated to this general social scientific model in,
principally, two ways. In the campaign/decision-making framework, its
influences were traced: directly, in behaviour changes amongst individuals;
indirectly, in its influences on opinion which led, in a second step, to empirically-
observable behavioural differences. Here, media messages were read and coded
in terms of the intentions and biases of the communicators. Since the message
was assumed as a sort of empty linguistic construct, it was held to mirror the
intentions of its producers in a relatively simple way. It was simply the means by
which the intentions of communicators effectively influenced the behaviour of
individuals receivers. Occasionally, moves were announced to make the model
of media influence more fully societal. But these, largely, remained at the level
of unfulfilled programmatic promises. The methods of coding and processing a
vast corpus of messages in an objective and empirically-verifiable way (content
analysis) were vastly sophisticated and refined. But, conceptually, the media
message, as a symbolic sign vehicle or a structured discourse, with its own
internal structuration and complexity, remained theoretically wholly
undeveloped.
At the broader level, the media were held to be largely reflective or expressive
of an achieved consensus. The finding that, after all, the media were not very
influential was predicated on the belief that, in its wider cultural sense, the media
largely reinforced those values and norms which had already achieved a wide
consensual foundation. Since the consensus was a ‘good thing’, those reinforcing
effects of the media were given a benign and positive reading. The notion of
selective perception was subsequently introduced, to take account of the fact that
different individuals might bring their own structure of attention and selectivity
to what the media offered. But these differential interpretations were not related
back either to a theory of reading or to a complex map of ideologies. They were,
instead, interpreted functionally. Different individuals could derive different
satisfactions and fulfil different needs from the different parts of the
programming. These needs and satisfactions were assumed to be universal and
trans-historical. The positive assumption arising from all this was, in sum, that the
media—though open to commercial and other influences—were, by and large,
functional for society, because they functioned in line with and strengthened the
core value system of society. They underwrote pluralism.