Claims-making, Social Movements, and Social Control (FINAL) Flashcards
Claims making
The news media depicting menacing events and populations in a manner that aligns with and promotes the interests of media owners, politicians, and other social elites
Media logic
Practices of information distribution where a population of media resources hold the authority to frame and distribute information to audiences
Deviance amplification
Numerous reports focusing on a social issue or perceived threat
Claims-making involves:
- The creation of harm or injury
- Placing of responsibility on an individual or group
- Someone who has the power to have a social problem recognized
- Used as a control device
- The creation of a victim
Given that the process for the social construction of all deviance and the claims that are made in that process take place in a similar fashion, it is necessary to also evaluate:
the content of the claims that are made in order to understand how power is used
What is a social movement?
Organized activity that encourages or discourages social change
What are the 5 types of social movements?
- Alternative
- Redemptive
- Reformative
- Revolutionary
- Claims-making
Alternative
Least threatening, limited change for a limited number of members
(harm is for a limited number of individuals)
Redemptive
Selective focus, radical change
Reformative
Limited social change that targets all members of society
Revolutionary
Most severe, striving for basic transformation of society
Claims-making: the process of
trying to convince public and public officials of the importance of joining a social movement to address a particular issue
Claims-making and social movements
All talk is political, forwarding a desire account on how things reside in existence and how things should be.
By articulating the problem more and more in the public, the ideas around who are the victims, who are responsible for the trouble and what harm is being caused becomes more and more solidified in the minds of those who “by-in” to the claim
For a claim to be heard as a valid claim:
it must draw upon a previous articulated code (harm, victim, offender, etc,)
Pre-existing ideologies/code/values/beliefs in society used for claims-making are more successful because:
they make the claim more relatable to the public. This is seen in all claims-making.
Moral panics and social movements build on claims of:
socially regressive activities with the intention of creating a threat
Audiences identify with a crisis narrative on the basis of
their own prejudices and anxieties (consider role of media framing)
With social media, the framing of the narrative has changed:
those who are traditionally less powerful can use social media as a claims-making tool = counter narrative, which allows us to rethink who are the victims/offenders/etc.
Social movements come together over themes of topics rather than
other in-group/out-group dynamics
What are the stages in social movements?
- Emergence
- Coalescence
- Bureaucratization
- Decline
Emergence
Step 1: perception that something is wrong
Coalescence
Step 2: defines itself (memorable name of movement), recruit members, and devises strategies and tactics
Bureaucratization
Step 3: organizes rationally to get the job done (successful social movement groups are highly bureaucratized)
Decline
Step 4: is the movement in need of regrouping, is it time for its demise, or can it find new goals?
After the struggle for citizenship rights, what emerged?
“new social movements”
Social movements are considered “new” in terms of:
- Their goals
- The people they attracted
- The global focus
Functionalist Theories About Social Movements
Protests serve a social function
- Conflict increases social cohesion: the rebel, disconnected, plays a role that helps maintain the status quo
- Any conflict enhances social cohesion and group identity by creating a common cause for which people can fight
- Protests can also lead to economic mobilization and/or social change
Symbolic Interactionist Theories About Social Movements
The use of language is important in framing social protests
The media has an important role to play in this process
- In times of protests, people use a specific language to talk about and legitimize their actions, minimizing the emotional impact
- The stereotyping of others is a common way of dehumanizing them, making them an easier victim.
- Specifically, words/labels almost always strip away the folk devil’s humanity
Critical Theories About Social Movements
Protest, revolution, and terror occur when change can no longer be attained through discussion -> social quo is maintained, so social movements are pushed to emerge to ensure their claim/message is heard
Accordingly, groups/governments that try to prevent the expression of disagreement and conflict will often intensify those measures and produce more violent forms of politicking, including protest, rebellion, and even civil war
Understanding victimization
Socially construct victims as helpless, being harmed, absolved of responsibility for what happened to them
Collaborative accomplishment - acting out our social roles
We construct qualities and attributes to victims
Victim ideology vs agent ideology
The idea that victims lack agency in their circumstances
Organizations play a significant role in the construction of:
The characteristics of persons
Ideology of victimization (Best)
Victimization comes with a victim ideology
Characteristics of a “perfect victim”
What are the characteristics of a “perfect” victim?
- Victimization is widespread and consequential
- Relationships between the victim and victimizer are straightforward
- Victimization goes unrecognized
- Individuals must be taught to recognize their own victimization
- Claims of victimization must be respected
- The term victim has negative connotations
What are the responses to victimization? (Best)
- Legal
- Medical
- Education
- Mass media
- Recovery
Victimization at work
Victimization absolves persons of responsibility
Categorizing a person as a victim also instructs others to identify the sources of harm
- Troubles are typically described for the purpose of doing something about them
Many people also claim their own victimhood for self-preservation
- Victim assignments are always open-ended
Our understanding of victimization should consider their:
political, organizational, and rhetorical dimensions
First, victims must become absolved of all
responsibility for their position, second, their identity as a victim means that no other action is required of them
Victimization implies change is needed
Altheide and Snow: Media logic
Media logic was developed to explain the institutionalized assemblage of organizational tactics, formatting codes, and framing techniques that influence how mass media construct representations of social reality
No matter what the medium is, media logic assumes
A hierarchical structure to information selection, dissemination, and reception
McRobbie and Thorton’s deconstruction of classical moral panic theory argues for:
revisions to the stages of moral panic and the social relations that support it
- Classic formulations characterize public responses to the onset of moral panic as uniform, predictable, and uncritical of their role in reinforcing the empowerment of social elites/authorities
- Need to account for the different ways in which group are involved in and response to the onset of panic
- Instead, they draw attention to media sources, diverse social relations, and the voices the engender narratives designed to resist the demonization of targeted groups
McRobbie and Thorton aimed to
complicate the overly simplistic explanations for the construction of commercial media discourses
- This critique preceded advances in digital computing technologies
Crisis narratives
Assume the form of socially regressive claims-making activities that are deployed with the intention of drawing attention to threating others
The logic of digital mediation is continually reshaping how
crises are witness in, by, and through new traditional media
- # Ferguson highlights the changing ways that moral panics are mediated across digital networks
- Digital media provides an arena for counter-claims
As the audience becomes accustomed to the participatory architecture of digital media, it is also getting used to
new ways of making, disseminating, receiving, and acting on claims.
Alternative framing strategies and oppositional narratives
The networked participation that interactive digital media infrastructures require provides new
opportunities for ordinary people to circumvent the agenda-setting activities of elites, subvert the traditional gate-keeping role of mass media, and articulate a wide range of grievances against insult and injustice
