Page 140 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

MASS MEDIA

products. However, these conclusions tend to be based on political rather than
aesthetic criteria.
The critics of mass culture tend to over-emphasize aesthetics and the internal
construction of cultural products assuming audience reaction from an analysis of 117
texts. This is a position challenged by cultural studies research into cultural
consumption which argues that meanings are produced, altered and managed at
the level of use by people who are active producers of meaning. That is, rather
than being inherent in the commodity, meaning and value are constructed
through actual usage. In general, critics who stress the production of culture talk
of ‘mass culture’ while writers who stress consumption prefer to call it ‘popular
culture’.

Links Commodification, common culture, consumption, culture industry, popular culture

Mass media The mass media are those institutions of communication such as
newspapers, magazines, television and the film industry that produce and distribute
texts on a large scale in the context of capitalist modernity. The functions of the
mass media might be seen as those of providing information, entertainment and
education. In general the mass media can be understood in terms of texts (e.g.
programmes), the relationship between texts and audiences (audience research),
political economy (organizations/industry) and the wider patterns of cultural
meaning that they contribute to and are constituted by.
The mass media are at the centre of public life and culture within contemporary
Western societies. Indeed, the public sphere is now arguably a media-saturated one
in which the visual has gained in prominence over the verbal and mediated
relationships are more conspicuous than face-to-face encounters. In this mediated
sphere, not only does ‘the public’ enter the domestic sphere via the television set
but also the boundaries between the public and privates spheres are blurred. The
mass media are implicated in the selective provision of social knowledge and
imagery through which we grasp our own world as well as that of others and as
such are a significant global resource for the construction of identity.
Cultural studies has paid particular attention to the ‘ideologies’ constructed and
disseminated by the mass media and their role in the fabrication of cultural
hegemony. However, it has also been argued that mass media texts are polysemic,
that is, they contain many meanings that audiences can explore as active producers
of significance. Thus, the identification of ideology in texts is no guarantee that
they will be taken up by readers. Nor is the significance of the mass media confined
to textual meanings for it is situated and sustained within the activities of everyday
life and thus contributes to our cultural patterns of time, space and routine.
The first sociological studies of the mass media were in the context of ‘mass
society theory’ of the 1930s to 1950s and attributed a large degree of unwholesome
power to the media. Here the prefix ‘mass’ is a pejorative one in line with the
negative characteristics attached to the idea of ‘mass culture’. The mass media were
seen as catering to the lowest common denominator of standards in pursuit of
ratings maximization while the audience was understood to be a mass of passive