Page 38 - Decoding Culture

THE WAY WE WERE 31

individual and society and hence between audience and communi­
cations media. Thus, even though some researchers refused to
accept the mainstream's consensus model of social order, propos­
ing instead a social world of media manipulation, social conflict
and power relations, they always retained some version of the
socialized actor as a central concept. Throughout effects research
individuals were (and are) conceptualized as 'at the receiving end'
with effects represented as general processes of socio-cultural con­
straint applied via the media of mass communications. This
commitment at the level of tacit social ontology inevitably restricts
capacity to conceptualize the complex interrelation of social agency
with the larger cultural context. And even though this longer-term
'cultural effect' (Tudor, 1979) is in principle the focus for
Cultivation Analysis (Gerbner and Gross, 1976; Gerbner et al. ,
1986; Signorielli and Morgan, 1990) with its interest in the 'culti­
vation of culture', in practice the promise of that approach is
undercut both by its empiricist epistemology and by its traditional
media research ontology. The heavy television viewers central to
Cultivation Analysis remain victims of culture rather than parties to
the constant construction and reconstruction of their cultural envir­
onments.
How can we summarize this now rather complicated picture?
One way of ordering things is to observe that the mass cul­
ture/media effects tradition has both a descriptive and an analytic
version. The descriptive version is that normally encountered in
public debate about mass culture and the media. both in the
heyday of the mass society thesis and in the context of more recent
moral panics about media effects. Here an array of often anecdotal
evidence is used to buttress empirical generalizations about the
power of the media to effect individual attitudes, values and behav­
iour. Such 'findings' are, in turn, marshalled in support of the
general mass culture diagnosis. Society is openly seen as in a state

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