Page 97 - Culture Society and the Media

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Messages and meanings

JANET WOOLLACOTT

Ideology is the final connotation of the totality of connotations of the sign
or the context of signs. (Umberto Eco, 1971, p. 83)

Interest in and discussion of the mass media has come from a variety of
theoretical and disciplinary sources. Within these wide-ranging and sometimes
contradictory approaches, the analysis of media messages has been seen as of
varying importance. American concern with mass communications has tended to
focus on a model of communication which stressed the relationships between the
individuals involved. In this tradition the communication process was conceived
of as a relationship between a sender of messages on the one hand and a receiver
of messages on the other. The mass communication process merely converted the
receiver from being one to being many individuals. Given this image of the
workings of the mass media, the attention of researchers was directed at the
psychological dispositions of the producers of mass media messages and at the
effects of the message on the members of the audience. The analysis of the
meaning of media messages came to be subsumed in these areas of study.
Moreover, early Marxist studies of the media, whilst based on very different
theoretical premises, tended to be more concerned with the overall ideological
role of the mass media in capitalist societies and less concerned with the meaning
of and the production of meaning within specific media messages. When such
questions were addressed they were inflected with a form of cultural pessimism.
Members of the Frankfurt School, for example, attempted to show that mass
culture, and particularly, American mass culture with which they had acquired a
forced familiarity, was a debased culture. Adorno and Horkheimer (1977)
suggested that the culture of a society under monopoly capitalism was peculiarly
repressive in that while bourgeois culture offered a better and more valuable
world realizable by every individual from within, mass culture produced a more
totalitarian state in which even the illusory advantage of inner freedom of the
individual was lost.

In the culture industry the individual is an illusion not merely because of
the standardization of the means of production. He is tolerated only so long