Page 64 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CULTURAL STUDIES

important as the broadcast era gives way to the interactive era, since
the old assumptions that production is determining, causal and also the
locale of power and profit, are ever more plainly at odds with the facts,
especially in the cultural economy. Producers (from farmers to film-
makers) are mere satellites of those who really rule the economic roost,
namely distributors. And consumers no longer passively absorb
standardised products (if they ever did) – they are users, and have a
direct influence on the further customisation of what they select to
interact with.
Cultural ‘populists’ recognised that ordinary pleasures, such as
watching television, contained clear elements of civic education – a
public good (Hartley, 1999: 43–44). Furthermore, audiences and
consumers are increasingly able to use previously exclusive technol-
ogies such as video-cameras as little more than pens – instruments of
any form of communication they choose, from doodling and self-
expression to art and even political intervention (see for example
culture jamming).

CULTURAL STUDIES

The study of:
. the nexus between consciousness and power – culture as politics;
. identity-formation in modernity – culture as ordinary life;
. mediated popular entertainment culture – culture as text;
. the expansion of difference – culture as plural.

Cultural studies developed in the UK out of Marxism, structuralism
and feminism in the intellectual sphere, and from literary, sociological
and anthropological studies in the disciplinary domain. It took culture
to be the sphere in which class, gender, race and other inequalities
were made meaningful or conscious, and lived through either by
resistance (subcultures) or some sort of ‘negotiated’ accommodation
(audiences). Culture understood in this way was the terrain on which
hegemony was fought for and established.
Clearly this approach to culture differed markedly from that of the
traditional literary and art critics for whom culture was the sphere of
aesthetics and moral or creative values. Cultural studies sought to
account for cultural differences and practices not by reference to
intrinsic or eternal values (howgood?), but by reference to the overall
map of social relations (in whose interests?). The ‘subject’ of cultural

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