Media and Culture

Question 1

What are the functionalist, conflict and symbolic perspectives on the schoolies subculture?

Answer 1

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

Question 2

Define Non-material culture

Answer 2

Non-physical products of society

Question 3

Define Symbols

Answer 3

Words, gestures, objects representing abstract and complex concepts (e.g. wedding rings)

Question 4

Define Gestures

Answer 4

System of non-verbally communicated symbols differing by culture (e.g. body language, facial expressions)

Question 5

Define Language

Answer 5

System of spoken and/or written symbols used to convey meaning and to communicate based on agreed conventions

Question 6

Define Cultural Transmission

Answer 6

Intergenerational passing on of culture from one generation to the next -> language as vehicle for culture

Question 7

Define Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis

Answer 7

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.

Question 8

What are values?

Answer 8

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’

Question 9

What are norms?

Answer 9

Rules of behaviour to maintain values in everyday life, e.g. formal laws

Question 10

what are sanctions?

Answer 10

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

Question 11

what are Folkways?

Answer 11

Informal types of norms providing a framework for behaviour based on social expectations, e.g. mutual consideration in public spaces

Question 12

What are Mores?

Answer 12

Informal types of norms representing a community’s most important values.
Taboo: socially unacceptable act (e.g. murder)

Question 13

What is the material culture?

Answer 13

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

Question 14

What are cultural epochs

Answer 14

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

Question 15

What is commodification and Mass consumption?

Answer 15

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

Question 16

How is material culture perpetuated through popular culture and everyday culture?

Answer 16

Constituted through ordinary social practices

Site for perpetuation and negotiation of social issues, i.e. class struggle

Question 17

What are cultural industries and what do they do?

Answer 17

‘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

Question 18

What is the Frankfurt school media theory?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What is the Jürgen Habermas media theory?

Answer 19

• 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)

Question 20

What is the Marshall McLuhan media theory?

Answer 20

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)

Question 21

What are audience ethnographies?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

What is Manuel Castells: Network society?

Answer 22

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’)