COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY THEORY

A flood of new communication technologies and their uses are changing the audience/media relationship in ways that can only be speculated on. The views of two foremost Media theorists: Harold Innis & Marshall McLuhan need to be forwarded here. The most central of their assumptions is that changes in communication technology inevitably produce profound changes in both culture and social order.

  

Harold Innis: Bias of Communication

In the 1950s, Harold Innis, a Canadian Political-Economist pointed out the possible linkages between communications media and the various forms of social structure found at certain points in history. He argued that in the early periods when the written word was dominant, empires expanded to the limits imposed by communication technology. Expansion did not depend as much on the skills of military generals as it did on the communication media used to disseminate orders from the capital city. It can be rightly stated that new communications media made possible the creation of empires.

Similarly, the structure of later social orders also depended on the media technology available at a certain point in time. For example, the invention of telephone and telegraph permitted conquerors to have more effective control over larger geographical areas.  Innis believed that newer forms of communication technology would make even greater centralization inevitable. He referred to this as the inherent ‘Bias of Communication’ .  The five bias that have been identified are:

*              Bias of Sense Experience:              Enable the experience of the world in more or less visual imagery.

*              Bias of Form & Representation:    With messages strongly coded (print) or essentially uncoded (photograph).

*              Bias of Message Content:               In terms of more or less realism or polysemy, more open or closed format.

*              Bias of Context of Use:                    Some media lending themselves to private/individualized reception , others

more collective and shared.

*              Bias of Relationship:                         Contrasting One-Way Relationship with Interactive Media.

He concluded that on account of these bias, the people and the resources of outlying regions that he called the periphery are inevitably exploited to serve the interests of elites at the center.

Marshall McLuhan: Medium is the Message and the Massage

Though Marshall McLuhan, another Canadian, borrowed freely from Innis’ Work, he didn’t dwell on issues of exploitation or centralized control. He was fascinated instead by the implications of Innis’ arguments concerning the transformative power of media technology. In his book “Understanding Media’ , published in 1964, he outlined his visions of the changes that were taking place as a result of the spread of radio and television. He proclaimed that the medium is the message and the massage. In other words, new forms of media transform (massage) our experience of ourselves and our society, and this influence is ultimately more important than the content that is transmitted in its specific message. He also argued that  the media were the extensions of man as they quite literally extend the sight, hearing, and touch through time and space. He envisioned that electronic media would open up new venues for mankind and will enable people to be everywhere, instantaneously. He suggested the term ‘Global Village’ , to refer to the new form of  social organization that would inevitably emerge as instantaneous, electronic media tying the entire world into one great social, political, and cultural system.

McLuhan’s observations concerning the Global Village and the role of electronic media in it continue to be prophetic. His theory is actually a collection of lots of intriguing ideas bound together by some common assumptions. He seemed ready to accept  whatever changes were dictated by and inherent in communications technology. He argued that  technology  inevitably causes specific changes in how people think, in how society is structured, and in the forms of culture that are created.

GLOBALIZATION THEORY

After the end of the Cold War, a new world order has begun to emerge. It is based on international capitalism and the unrestricted cross-border flow of capital and information. This flow is essential to the operational of multinational companies, but it also permits development of many other multinational organizations. Unlike the previous world order, the new order is being imposed through a quiet revolution that is widely referred to as globalization.

Globalization refers to the shift towards a more integrated and interdependent world economy. A fundamental shift is occurring in the world economy. National economies, which were relatively self contained entities and isolated from each other by barriers such as distance, time zone, language, culture, business system, and national differences in governmental regulations, are gradually moving towards cross-border trade and investment. The process through which this is occurring is commonly known as globalization.

In order to be competitive and to survive in the international arena, the national Mass Media must adopt similar strategies and become international. Mass Media have not only commercialized local cultures, but they have also internationalized  traditional and indigenous cultures in their efforts to become global businesses.

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Although globalization has many benefits, it is widely criticized. Small nations argue that their power is challenged and undermined by multinational corporations or by foreign media content that promotes alien norms and values. It is also charged that globalization undermines local cultures, which everywhere are said to be under siege by mass culture produced in Hollywood.

Benjamin R. Barber and Samuel Huntington (1995 & 1996), have argued that globalization of businesses had actually fueled the rise of traditional ethnic and cultural social movements. Critics like Morley and Robins (1995) had stated that mass media play an important role in creating and reinforcing national identities.  

CULTIVATION ANALYSIS THEORY

Cultivation:          A cultural process relating to coherent frameworks or knowledge and to underlying general concepts

cultivated by exposure to the total and organically related world of television rather than exposure to individual programs and selections. Cultivation occurs in two ways:  Mainstreaming and Resonance.

Mainstreaming:  The process, especially for heavy viewers, by which television’s symbols monopolize

and dominate other sources of information and ideas about the world. Here, the mainstream refers to a culturally dominant reality that is more closely aligned with television’s reality than with any objective reality.

                                Resonance:         When viewers see things on television that are congruent with their own everyday

realities, thus getting a double dose of cultivation, because what they see on the screen

resonates with their actual lives.

Developed by George Gerbner during the 1970s & 1980s, the Cultivation Theory addresses macroscopic questions about the media’s role in society. This theory representing a hybrid that combines aspects of both macroscopic and microscopic cultural theories, states that television cultivates or creates a world view, that although possibly inaccurate, becomes the reality simply because the people believe it to be so and base their judgments about their own everyday worlds on that reality.

Researchers have employed Cultivation Analysis to investigate the impact of television content on issues ranging from violence, crime, people’s perceptions of the justice system, fear of victimization, materialism, attitudes towards racism, affluence, divorce, working women, gender stereotyping, civil liberties, and so on.

George Gerbner had also identified the 3 Bs of Television. As per his statement, Television

1.             Blurs traditional distinctions of people’s views of their world

2.             Blends their realities into television’s cultural mainstream

3.             Bends that mainstream to the institutional interests of television and its sponsors.

GENDER AND MASS MEDIA THEORY

When the question of gender in relation to mass media is brought up, issues like under-representation of women in the media, stereotyping and sex-role socialization, and pornographic media content, are immediately visualized. Many feminist cultural researchers like Jacques Lacan, Nancy Chodorow, L. van Zoonen, Janice Radway, Linda Steiner, and Angela McRobbie, have focused especially on the role of gender in positioning the spectator in relation to film, television, & photographic images of male and female. They have also researched on the part played by the media in transmitting a patriarchal ideology concerning the place of women in society.

Nowadays, the question of gender touches almost every aspect of the media-cultural relationship. One concerns the fact that many media texts are deeply and persistently  gendered in the way they have been encoded, usually according to the view of the anticipated audience. Studies of media audiences and the reception of media content have shown that there are relatively large differences according to gender in the manner of use of media and the meanings attached to the activity. A good deal of the evidence can be accounted for by patterned differences in social roles, by the typical everyday experience and concerns of men and women, and by the way gender shapes the availability and use of time. It also relates to power roles within the family and the general nature of the relationships between women and male partners or of women in the wider family.

Different kinds of media content, their production, and their use are also associated with expressions of common identity based on gender, and with the different pleasures and meanings acquired. There may also be deep roots in psychological differences between male and female.

A gender-based approach also raises the question of whether media choice and interpretation can provide some lever of change or element of resistance for women in a social situation still generally structured by inequality. Differently gendered Media Culture, whatever the causes and forms taken, evokes different responses, and that difference of gender lead to alternative modes of taking meaning from media.

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POSTMODERN CULTURE AND MASS MEDIA THEORY

Mass Media can be regarded as one of the most powerful expressions of the ‘spirit’ of our age. Although there have been many achievements of science during the twentieth century, few touch our daily lives so frequently as the media. It is common to refer to this era of ours as ‘Postmodern’ in the literal sense that this period is the late stage of the ‘modern age’ characterized by unprecedented changes in our social systems, revolutionary industrialization, radical political upheavals, dramatic technological innovations, and dynamic improvements in economic conditions. As Morley had stated, the term ‘Postmodern’ implies a clear chronological and conceptual distinction from ‘Modernism’ . It refers more to the dominant ethos or spirit of the times and to certain aesthetic and cultural trends.

Postmodernism Theory implies that modern social order is not sustainable and will inevitably bring about their own destruction. As a social-cultural philosophy, postmodernism undermines the traditional notion of culture as something fixed and hierarchical. It favours forms of culture that are transient, of the moment, superficially pleasing and appealing to sense rather than reason. Postmodern Culture is volatile, illogical, kaleidoscopic, and hedonistic. Mass Media culture has the advantage of appealing to many senses as well as being associated with novelty and transience. Many features of popular media culture reflect postmodernist elements.

The idea of postmodernism has been easier to characterize in culture than in social terms, since the features of ‘modern’ society mentioned are still in evidence. As interpreted by Docherty, Postmodern Cultural and Social Philosophy is a response to the post 1968 reappraisal of revolutionary aspirations, which had, in their turn, been based on the premise of an end to capitalism and the birth of a new utopia. Postmodern stands for a retreat from political ideology, loss of faith in the gods or reason and science, thus shaping the contemporary Spirit of the Age under which people no longer share any fixed belief or commitment, and there is a tendency to hedonism, individualism, and living in the present moment.

As stated by Lyotard (1986), the cultural aesthetics of postmodernism involve a rejection of tradition, and a search for novelty, invention, momentary enjoyment, nostalgia, playfulness, and inconsistency.  The Postmodern ethos is much more favourable to commerce than were earlier cultural perspectives, since opposition to capitalism is undermined and commerce can be seen as responding to consumer wants or as actively promoting changes in fashion, styles, and products.