Page 39 - Decoding Culture

32 DECODING CULTURE

of moral decline, epitomized by the contrast between the inferior
products of mass culture and the authentic qualities of 'high' cul­
ture. These claims are presented as self-evident, the kind of
knowledge that should be inductively apparent to any properly dis­
criminating observer.
The analytic version, most often encountered in an academic
social science context, is morally similarly disposed, but less
absolute in its claims to privileged insight. Here, the assertion of
powerful media effects is legitimated by the apparatus of 'science',
in particular by some version of the hypothetico-deductive model.
Conceptually informing such claims is the mainstream sociological
commitment to a socialization model, wherein culture is the source
of the key norms and values internalized by individual actors and
institutionalized in the social structure. Hence, if the forms of cul­
ture are changing with the rise of mass society, then this will have
far-reaching social consequences via the mechanisms of internal­
ization and institutionalization. In principle, of course, in an
approach like this that holds to an instrumental view of theory,
such claims are methodologically recognized to be incomplete and
partial, products of specific theoretical frameworks. But in practice,
analysts all too often fall into the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,
assuming that their necessarily limited knowledge-claims some­
how exhaust all significant features of the reality to which they
relate. Thus, although the analytic version of the mass culture/
media effects tradition should in principle be more open to rational
debate than the descriptive version, in the event it often falls back
into a similar mode of theoretically unreflective assertiveness.
Both versions share certain key assumptions, above all a belief
in the extraordinary power of mass-communicated cultural mate­
. rials. In this respect they subscribe to what I earlier referred to as
a 'top-down' model, one in which individual social agents are
largely conceptualized as passive 'victims' of forms of transmitted

Copyrighted Material