Page 99 - Culture Society and the Media

MESSAGES AND MEANINGS 89
advantages for the systematic investigation of a wide range of material. Cantril’s
original study of the impact of The Invasion from Mars, for example, simply
reproduced the script of the radio play, but if a researcher wanted to look at 200
plays this was no longer feasible (Cantril et al., 1940). At the same time,
however, content analysis has usually proved to be quite limited in conveying the
meaning of specific media messages.
More recent research has tended to conceptualize the problems of
understanding media messages rather differently. Semiological or structuralist
studies, deriving many of their theoretical premises from linguistics, reasserted a
concern with media messages as structured wholes rather than with the
quantified explicit content of fragmented parts of messages. Semiology as
Burgelin points out, is not only rarely quantitative but also contains an implicit
critique of the quantitative pre-occupation of content analysis.

But above all there is no reason to assume that the item which recurs most
frequently is the most important or the most significant, for a text is,
clearly, a structured whole, and the place occupied by the different
elements is more important than the number of times they recur. Let us
imagine a film in which the gangster hero is seen performing a long
succession of actions which show his character in an extremely vicious
light, but he is also seen performing one single action which reveals to a
striking degree that he has finer feelings. So the gangster’s actions are to be
evaluated in terms of two sets of opposites: bad/good and frequent/
exceptional. The polarity frequent/exceptional is perceptible at first sight
and needs no quantification. Moreover we clearly cannot draw any valid
inferences from a simple enumeration of his vicious acts (it makes no
difference if there are ten or twenty of them) for the crux of the matter
obviously is: what meaning is conferred on the vicious acts by the fact of
their juxtaposition with the single good action? Only by taking into
account the structural relationship of this one good action with the totality
of the gangster’s vicious behaviour in the film can we make any inference
concerning the film as a whole. (Burgelin, 1972, p. 319)

This fairly familiar gangster plot, Burgelin contends, cannot be understood in
terms of the quantification of its manifest content but necessitates an examination
of the relationship of the different parts of the plot and the way in which they are
articulated to form a specific and complex message with various levels of
signification.
Some of the early sound gangster films such as Public Enemy (1931) aroused
considerable official concern because of their violence. Similarly later television
programmes on crime and other genres such as Westerns or spy films have
aroused the kind of concern that led researchers (who in many ways knew better)
to conceptualize the mass communications process in terms of a behaviourist
model in which representations of violence were seen to effect in an unmediated