Communication Science Class 7 PDF

Communication Science Class 7 Dr. Elke Mahieu Lasswell’s formula (1948) What? To Whom? What content? What is Who is the public? To the meaning of the whom is the message message? addressed? What are the Who?...

Communication Science Class 7 Dr. Elke Mahieu Lasswell’s formula (1948) What? To Whom? What content? What is Who is the public? To the meaning of the whom is the message message? addressed? What are the Who? characteristics of the Which individuals audience? Which organisations? Why? What is the (intended and actual) effect of the message? What does the message (try to) achieve? And How? Which channels are being used? What technology is being deployed? How is the message conveyed?  07 Cultural studies The critique of culture, ideology, and media reception Recap: functionalism Media have a systemic function in society, and we can understand this function by studying the effects that media have on their subjects ○ E.g. the persuasive function of communication: media have a limited effect on their audience Origin of the dominant paradigm ‘Limited effect’ ○ Reaction to behaviourism & mass media theories which overestimate the effect and the impact of mass media communication (e.g. exaggerated worries about propaganda, the masses,…) Frustration with the short term, ‘administrative’ nature of functionalism ⇒ Focus on more long-term, complex effects and functions of communication, but within the constrains of functionalism and the dominant paradigm Cultural studies Also more interested in more long-term and large-scale questions, yet rather from the point of view of the critical paradigm Goal = understand how and why a group’s culture (practices, beliefs, customs,…) reproduces existing power relations (shared social meanings) or reversely contests the dominant social order Cultures can be found on various parallel or overlapping levels: from very broad and encompassing (national identity, religion) to highly specific and situated (sub-cultures). ○ Study of large cultures and their effect on communication: study of intercultural communication, international communication,… Mainly within the dominant paradigm ○ Study of various sub-cultures: film studies, fan studies, punk studies, Swift studies, porn studies,… Focus of cultural studies Cf. poststructuralist approach: signifying practices: meanings are generated through signs and language (not ‘neutral’) => understanding culture = understanding meaning production and representation CF. PST: key terms: ideology, hegemony, identity Heavy emphasis on audience’s agency (// functionalism !), on interpretation, and on power ( functionalism) Dominant vs critical Similarities to the dominant paradigm ○ Focus on audience agency (but far more: not just co-dependent and interactive, but active participation) ○ Highly empirical ○ Attention to long-term effects (// 2nd generation functionalism) However, significant differences with regards to ○ Methodology (quantitative vs qualitative) ○ Epistemology (positivist vs interpretative) ○ Ideology (administrative and neutral vs critical and partisan) ○ Research object (media as a research object vs culture as a research object) Culture Moment of culturalism Culture is not just ‘high’ culture, the canon (the collective of all art considered ‘legitimate’ and ‘qualitative’… …but comprises all forms of meaning-making including material and everyday practices ○ ‘the culture of the English working class’ (E.P. Thompson) ○ Giving a voice to subordinated groups Strongly inspired by post-structuralism and ‘continental philosophy’ Anti-essentialism: no ‘universal’ or ‘stable’ truths to be uncovered But the public is deemed more active (unlike structuralism, focusing on a systematic structure, not human agents) ○ More empirical: fe. focus on lived experiences Media no longer constitute an object of study in their own right (functionalist focus on the function and the role of media) but rather one of the places where the object of study (culture) can be found Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Richard Hoggart Uses of Literacy (1957): concern ‘impact’ of tabloid journalism and pulp fiction on working-class readers ○ Mass media create a mass culture: ‘drift’ from organic and bottom-up working-class culture to a ‘massified’ culture that is imposed top-down and universally by mass media Raymond Williams (Culture and society) ○ Cultural materialism analyzes how various political ideologies appropriate cultural artefacts and are reproduced within them Stuart Hall Jamaican origin: heavily invested in debates on: multiculturalism, (de)colonisation, critical race theory,… ○ Identity as hybridity and positioning ○ Postcolonial theory (Cf. Class 13) New Left Review, Marxism Today and the ‘New Left’: Combines a more modern Marxism focused on ideology and Gramsci’s concept of hegemony with communication science, semiotics, poststructuralist theory,… Optional: Documentary ‘The Stuart Hall Project’ - John Akomfrah (2013): https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=IM9eZYLvzTc&t=1745s Postcolonial theory (class 13) Building on poststructuralist notion of différence (Derrida): politics of difference (Spivak) Binary oppositions: contain power, superior vs. inferior (Fe. ‘Man’ vs. ‘woman’, ‘black’ vs. ‘white’, ’First World’ vs. ‘Third World’, ‘written’ vs. ‘oral’, ….) Deconstruction: undoing of binaries by exposing the ‘gaps’ in text, invisible assumptions Fe. Through critical discourse analysis (cf. PST) Location of culture (Homi K. Bhabha) ○ Culture is ‘a whole way of life’ located withing flexible but identifiable boundaries ○ However, globalization moves cultural elements from one place to another: translocal processes (re. Digital communications,…) ○ Hybridity: against essentialization and homogenization of ‘Third World’ countries and identities, places of borders Encoding/decoding Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse (1973) ○ criticizes linear models of communication (e.g. Shannon & Weaver, functionalism) for having a very simplistic account of meaning and message ○ replaces this simplistic account with the Encoding/Decoding model of communication which draws heavily on (post)structuralism ○ birth of the ‘interpretative’ paradigm: communication does not merely have a limited/complex effect on its audience, the meaning of the information contained in communication is actively negotiated and co-constructed by its audience From passive audience (behaviourism, mass media theory) to co- dependent audience (functionalism) to active participation of the audience Encoding/decoding Meaning of a message is not simply fixed or determined by the sender The message is never transparent or singular (multiple connotations, // poststructuralism) The audience is not a passive recipient of meaning, but actively re- interprets ⇒ Distortion is not a failure to communicate, but rather an inherent feature of the communicative act The ‘sender’ becomes the ‘producer’, the ‘receiver’ becomes the ‘consumer’  State is no longer a source of security and rights, but rather an ‘obstacle’ The rich are no longer the elite, instead the ‘socialist elite’ are young city dwellers No more compassion with the poor, they become ‘welfare scroungers’ Worker is no longer exploited and in need of help, but takes his ‘personal responsibilities’ seriously Workers does not want ’benefits’ but instead feels ‘overtaxed’ = old dichotomy between the Left and the Right completely upended by new meanings Encoding/decoding Messages do not have an inherent, given, stable effect that they cause in their own right (// poststructuralism), their effect depends on how the audience makes sense of this message ○ Messages are polysemic, and its consumers may not use the same codes to decode a message as its producers Producer and consumer may attach different signifieds and different connotations to a single signifier ⇒ The consumer can transform the message, becomes himself a producer ○ E.g. audiences may remember little about the concrete information or the specific content of communication; but they take away what they consider the ideological ‘definitions’ and ‘agendas’ embedded in the communication: “Tax the rich” becomes “the state wants to steal our money” “Encourage free enterprise to stimulate the economy” becomes “lowering wages and cutting social protection” Encoding/decoding Media do not constitute a closed system. The encoding and decoding of messages does not happen in a vacuum. Rather they are moments of a larger, communicative process that is embedded in a ○ material context (relations of production in Marxist jargon) ○ socio-cultural and socio-historical context (frameworks of knowledge) ○ technological context (technical infrastructure) ⇒ encoding/decoding is not undertaken by an abstract audience, but by real individuals with both a social background and significant agency ⇒ in order to understand encoding/decoding, need for empirical field research: interviews, focus groups, ethnography,… Audience studies: ‘Nationwide’ & ‘Family Television’ (1980s) David Morley’s ’Nationwide’ TV news show reporting on government budgetary matters ○ Managers likely to go along with reporting ○ Trade unionists less likely to go along with reporting ○ Black university students least interested in budgetary matters Morley on ‘family television’: ○ Men prefer watching television in silence ○ Women prefer combining television with another activity ⇒ Socio-economic factors (women need to be fulfilling household tasks in the evening) influence cultural codes ⇒ Agency: struggle over power (is television watched in silence or not?) Encoding/decoding Relations of production, technology, and frameworks of knowledge are places where power relations are constituted, reproduced, and contested Encoding/decoding and the production/interpretation of meaning are the means through which this happens, they are an opportunity for contestation and resistance ○ E.g. Dick Hedbige’s ’Subculture: the Meaning of Style’ on the punk movement Encoding/decoding There is no single, correct code for understanding a message. Instead a message can be encoded or decoded in a variety of ways Different ways of encoding: ○ Hegemonic or dominant encoding: the code is in line with the norms and values which are accepted as normal, common-sensical elements of society’s culture ○ Negotiated encoding: a code combining both the dominant social norms as well as elements drawn from (various) radical code(s) that oppose dominant social norms ○ Oppositional encoding: a code informed by norms and values that are antagonistic and opposed to the ones that are dominant in society Encoding/decoding There is no single, correct or preferential code for understanding a message. Instead a message can be encoded or decoded in a variety of ways Different ways of decoding: ○ Accepting or preferential reading: the message is decoded via the code used by the sender to encode the message; the meaning given by the consumer to the message is the one preferred by the sender ○ Negotiated reading: the consumer acknowledges the preferred reading, but does not completely go along with it. Some elements from the encoding are accepted, others are rejected ○ Alternative reading: the reader understands but rejects the preferential reading, and decodes the message in a manner that goes against the preferences of the producer of the message  Decoding Hegemonic Negotiated Oppositional Preferential reading, Negotiated reading, Alternative reproduction of the mild critique of the reading, Hegemonic status quo status quo problematization and criticism Negotiated reading, Preferential reading, Negotiated neutralization neutral and factual and reading, Encoding Negotiated professional account amplification of a mild critique, Alternative reading, Negotiated reading, Preferential neutralization of the mild critique of the reading, Oppositional opposition opposition confirmation of opposition and critique Hegemony Different possibilities regarding encoding and decoding does not mean that ‘anything is possible’ with regards to meaning-making Crucial concept to understand power in communication: hegemony Cf. Class PST: Originally associated with the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, brought into communication science in via the work of Louis Althusser in Hall’s’Encoding/Decoding’ (1980) and in Laclau and Mouffe’s’ Hegemony and Socialist Strategy’ (1985) Hegemony Question: why do certain codes/encodings/decodings prevail over others? E.g. why did fascism win out over socialism in the 1930s? E.g. why is the far-right on the rise and liberal democracy (seemingly?) in decline? ○ Physical control? ○ ‘False consciousness’ – fake news, lies, disinformation ○ Pork barrel politics ○ Ideological control Legitimacy, acceptance Normalization, common sense hegemony Consent Hegemony Ideology is ○ Material (e.g. church, taxes, class rooms, money…) ○ Inescapable ○ Imaginary as in: it has to do with how we imagine things, does not mean that hegemony is ‘not real’n it is in fact very real ○ A mechanism of social construction Hegemony Althusser: we are socialized in ideologies through Repressive State Apparatuses (police, court, government,…) and most Ideological State Apparatuses Ideological State Apparatuses ○ Family, religion, law, media ○ Multiple, distinct, autonomous, but all reproduce the dominant ideology Althusser very pessimistic, little room for agency ○ his ideas are a critical, Marxist form of functionalism: the function of ISAs is to sustain the status quo Hall instead sees ISAs as sites of struggle and contestation instead: counterhegemonic projects