Media and Culture Flashcards
What are the functionalist, conflict and symbolic perspectives on the schoolies subculture?
Functionalism
Structural explanations for deviance
Subculture as a functioning component of the social system
Schoolies as a rite of passage
Conflict Theory
CCCS neo-Marxist take on subculture
Subculture constituted out of conflict with dominant culture (class struggle over limited resources)
Schoolies as an upper class event regulated by authority
Symbolic Interactionism
Emphasis on agency of individuals and their identity
Schoolies as a rich site for ethnographic research into identity performance
Define Non-material culture
Non-physical products of society
Define Symbols
Words, gestures, objects representing abstract and complex concepts (e.g. wedding rings)
Define Gestures
System of non-verbally communicated symbols differing by culture (e.g. body language, facial expressions)
Define Language
System of spoken and/or written symbols used to convey meaning and to communicate based on agreed conventions
Define Cultural Transmission
Intergenerational passing on of culture from one generation to the next -> language as vehicle for culture
Define Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis
The differences in the structure of language parallel differences in the thinking of the people who speak languages.
The structure of a language strongly influences the speaker’s worldview.
What are values?
System representing cultural standards based on agreed conventions
Value Pairs: values defined as opposites, e.g. ‘bravery’ vs. ‘cowardice’
Value Clusters: values that reinforce each other, e.g. ‘equality’ and ‘tolerance’
Value Conflict: values that are mutually exclusive, e.g. ‘equality’ and ‘racism’
What are norms?
Rules of behaviour to maintain values in everyday life, e.g. formal laws
what are sanctions?
Social consequences
Positive sanction: reward to abide by norms, e.g. praise
Negative sanction: punishment for the violation of a norm, e.g. exclusion from exam for cheating
Formal and informal sanctions reinforce a culture’s value system
what are Folkways?
Informal types of norms providing a framework for behaviour based on social expectations, e.g. mutual consideration in public spaces
What are Mores?
Informal types of norms representing a community’s most important values.
Taboo: socially unacceptable act (e.g. murder)
What is the material culture?
Items within a society that you can taste, touch or feel
Closely linked with non-material culture
– Reliance on or construction through non-material
elements of culture (remember ‘wedding rings’!)
Value of objects: use vs. exchange value
Use value: functional purpose of an item
Exchange value: additional meaning assigned to an item usually resulting in increased worth of an object
What are cultural epochs
Broad historical categorizations
Modernity: post-Enlightenment period industrialisation, capitalism, secularisation)
Postmodernity: decline of the ‘meta-narrative’ (universal truths)
Postmodernism: aesthetics beat function; exchange value beats use value; non-linear story-telling
What is commodification and Mass consumption?
Industrial Revolution hailed mass-production of consumer goods in Western societies
Objects become markers of identity: personal investment in objects
Objects of the dead: objects outlive the materiality of the body
How is material culture perpetuated through popular culture and everyday culture?
Constituted through ordinary social practices
Site for perpetuation and negotiation of social issues, i.e. class struggle
What are cultural industries and what do they do?
‘the cultural industries are involved in the making and circulating of products […] that have an influence on our understanding of the world’ (Hesmondhalgh 2007:3) -> Media
Entertainment texts
Informational texts
Text: ‘anything that can be analysed and produces meaning’ (Schlunke 2008: 261)
Multiplicity (number of available texts) vs diversity (extent to which texts are different from one another)
Quality (perception of perpetual decline)
Social justice: understanding of the production of texts within power relationships and their purpose of legitimating the existing social order
What is the Frankfurt school media theory?
Critical theory (building on Marxist theoretical tenets)
‘massification’ understood as a devaluation of culture, simplification of complex issues, de/recontextualisation
cultural norms secure the ascendancy of capital and the ongoing political and economic domination of the ruling capitalist class (-> commodification of culture)
‘This system of domination produces ‘mindless’ social subjects and a relentlessly amused mass society. The citizen turned consumer is suffering under a condition of false consciousness that blinds them to the injustices of the capitalist system and prevents effective political action’ (van Krieken et al. 2016: 85) -> Media effects?
Critique: inherent elitism
What is the Jürgen Habermas media theory?
- grounded in tradition of the Frankfurt School
Public Sphere: ‘a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is guaranteed to all citizens and a portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body’ (Habermas 2006: 73).
- based on communication between individuals (i.e. face-to-face)
- public communication processes mediate between society and state (i.e. media vital for democracies)
- capacity of the media to sustain democracy, public dialogue and political participation compromised through massified and commercialized communication
Critiques: idealisation of the past (i.e. one inclusive public sphere never existed and media never were completed free of commercial interests or trivial contents)
What is the Marshall McLuhan media theory?
The way we send information is more important than the message itself.
Processual understanding of social transformation through media:
printed language and communication gradually eroded oral modes of communication and story-telling
Change in the appearance and collective understanding of the world
Analytical distinction between media and the media!
Attribution of social and cultural effects to technologies that deliver ‘messages’
‘Media’ are extensions of ‘man’ and the mind
Global village: electronic media connecting distant parts of the globe, simultaneity of access to information
Critique: technological determinism (i.e. notion that technology shapes society and human behaviour neglecting decision-making, social relationships and individual agency)
What are audience ethnographies?
Media effects model imagines audiences as passive recipients of messages
Lacking empirical evidence for direct media effects
Audience ethnographies move beyond such limited understandings:
Reception of media messages is an active process
Media consumption is a situated social practice
Audiences and producers of media content are connected through feedback loops
Boundaries between producers and consumers of mediated messages increasingly fluid – albeit not irrelevant
What is Manuel Castells: Network society?
The internet is the technological foundation of the world we are living in
The network is the organisational form that makes the internet possible
Accelerated and intensified communication across time and space Social institutions (e.g. markets, political systems, media) adapt to the network, becoming more flexible and connected through nodes and hubs -> they become networked
Enabling a truly global capitalism
Reshaping our perception and understanding of time and space itself
Mass self-communication: blurs boundaries between producers and consumers of content: ‘self-generated in content, self-directed in emission, and self-selected in reception by many who communicate with many’
Potentially disruptive to formal politics and public institutions (e.g. WikiLeaks)
Critiques: overly optimistic for participatory potential of the network society (e.g. ‘digital divide’)
