Social differences
From WikiContent
The use of the term "manufactured" to describe the new media regime has two implications. First, unlike the artist with her hands on clay or the author scribbling the words as they come to mind, the new media include a technological element at the very genesis of the work that means it is physically manufactured. But increasingly, the twentieth century media became manufactured in a deeper sense that has crucial impacts on the filtering and altering of the original inspiration. Movie plots, characters, and dialog are designed by teams along well-defined parameters; textures and instrumental solos in songs are created as part of an architectural plan for the musical piece.
Unlike the earlier media, the brave new twentieth-century media were pushed by technical and economic factors toward centralization, and this centralization became more and more rigid as facilities grew and companies consolidated. Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and others have written roomfuls worth of books about the social effects. Broadcasting grabs the commanding heights of culture and takes on the role of an authority that expounds while others listen meekly. Movies and phonograph records are self-contained; that allows them to play a wonderful archival role but also fixes a performance permanently and allows for no further modification.
The new media certainly include some of the most enjoyable and moving artistic and documentary works humankind has produced, but in terms of the wider culture it has led to significant trade-offs.
The immediate effect of all these media are to suppress the ancient human "stories around the campfire" and parlor-room performances that kept culture close to individuals and small groups. The professionalization of art removed opportunities for developing artists to perform in local communities, while leaving every talented child aspiring to the pinnacle of stardom. It also overrode local cultures in favor of commercially chosen artifacts and cultural references having manufactured meanings.
An unfortunate characteristic of the centralization of twentieth-century media is that gaining entry has become such a difficult task that for many it turns into a lifelong struggle reminiscent of Kafka's story "The Great Wall of China." Before getting a hearing for a screen play or a song, before even gaining access to the decision-makers who control everyone's careers and offer the hearing, before even talking to the agents who control access to the decision-makers, you need to spend years networking and muscling your way into the elite.
Technology has brought down the cost of recording and editing audio and video, and the Internet has somewhat democratized access. This may be a prelude to the development of new Internet media.
The manufactured media are certainly moving to the Internet--and not simply because users are exchanging culture in ways that the large studios disapprove of. The studios' own experiments in putting trailers for movies and television shows on the Internet have evolved quickly into putting whole episodes online. CD sales are declining while music sales online are thriving. Media analysts and policy activists even worry about a mass-media takeover of Internet culture, such as described by Jeff Chester in his article [The Google YouTube Tango]. There's plenty of room for all content providers, big and small, on the Internet, and the new media that we will look at present a contrary trend that can reinvigorate the innovative power of small Internet users.
Mass media have earned the name because they reduce their audience to a passive mass. Ironically, while unifying its audience with a single message, it atomizes them because they interact increasingly with the media rather than with each other in communities. As Jerry Mander put it in his famous tirade, Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television:
- ...as we all watched from our separate living rooms, it was as if we sat in isolation booths, unable to exchange any responses about what we were all going through together. Everybody was engaged in the same act at the same time, but we were doing it alone. (Jerry Mander, Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television, 1978, p. 26.)
Just for the record, this article does not endorse Mander's radical views of the harmful consequences of television (or modern living in general), because it's not clear his criticisms can be tied down and verified. Are the masses of citizens less thoughtful than they were in pre-television days? Would they take different political positions without television? These are hard assertions to prove.
The social power of film, radio, and television were strengthened by their ability to tap into their audience at a deep emotional, subconscious level. These very different media share the trait of streaming. Unlike written text, they move inexorably forward and practically force the viewer or listener to engage without pausing to analyze or compare different viewing and listening experiences. So the change from medium to media has carried with it massive social effects.
Fan clubs emerging around popular TV shows have become a modest counterforce, allowing audience members to push back and express their views to content producers, and the Internet has enabled them to work together in a phenomenon called "brand communities." The TV show American Idol has been phenomenomally successful in harnessing this phenomenon by letting viewers vote for the winning pop singer. But ironically, while this innovative relationship to viewers boasts a form of democracy, the show's premise reinforces the modus operandi of the manufactured media stage: everything has to converge on a single winner who takes the prize and is mass marketed to a national audience.
A huge number of commentators complain that mass media offer one-dimensional and idealized views of important life experiences (people making love, getting shot, recuperating in hospitals) that are offered as if they reflect reality. And whether naively, or against their better judgment, recipients of these antiseptic views learn to treat them as reality.
It's easy to see why advertising (which became common in the 1920s) has always coexisted with mass media. The centralized control over the user's emotional response almost calls for a merging between mass media and advertising, a merger rapidly being consummated with infomercials, product placement, and government-sponsored media disinformation.
It is clear, also, that the centralization of film, phonographic, radio, and television companies led to an unprecedented power in the hands of their owners. Newspapers shaped attitudes in the past (and continue to do so), but rarely with the wide reach of the modern media, or with its advantages in the realm of emotions.
Only religious organizations have exceeded modern media companies in their hold over large populations. No wonder democracy nowadays is measured partly by the degree of separation of media and state.
Noam Chomsky and others have attributed mass media's political and social power not so much in its telling people what to think as in its shaping how they think--what people treat as a worthy issue for political discussion. In airing this analysis, fatalism and facile determinism must be rejected. For instance, the importance of quasi-religious "moral values" in many countries was a result of dedicated grassroots activism, not the mass media. At most, the mass media contributed to oversimplification and polarization by assigning facile labels such as a "culture" or "civilizational" war once the activists succeeded on getting their issues on the agenda.
Socially, media power can be seen in its influence over issues discussed and attitudes in the public. Financially, it can be seen in its advertising and lobbying budgets. But the legal aspects of power in media deserve special attention (discussed in the [next section]).
