Carah and louw media and society

Contents Companion Website Introduction

How is meaning made? How is power made and maintained? What does today’s culture industry look like? How do interactive media utilize and structure our participation? What is the role of professional communicators in the exercise of power? Engaging with critical debate about media production, content and participation Engaging with academic debate

Journal articles and academic publication 1 Meaning, Representation and Power

Defining meaning The power to influence meaning making

What is the relation between power and social elites? Where does power come from? What is the relationship between being embedded within a power relationship and free agency?

The struggle over meaning: introducing hegemony The more legitimacy dominant groups have, the less violence they need to employ Defining hegemony

The control of meaning: introducing ideology and discourse Ideology Discourse

Representation and power Control over representation

Mediatization and media rituals Conclusion Further reading

2 The Industrial Production of Meaning Controlling who makes meaning and where meaning is made Defining different types of culture industry

Privately-owned media State-licensed media Public service broadcasting State-subsidized media Communist media

Development elites and media The industrial production of meaning Mass communication The culture industry

Narrowing what we think about Narrowing what can be said Thinking dialectically: arguing for a contest of meanings

The liberal-democratic culture industry The culture industry in the interactive era Conclusion Further reading

3 Power and Media Production Meaning and power Becoming hegemonic

How do groups become hegemonic? Feudalism and early capitalism Managerial to global network capitalism

Hegemony and the art of managing discourses Managing the structures of meaning making Managing the meaning makers Regulating meaning-making practices Adapting and repurposing meanings Monitoring and responding to shifting meanings

Discursive resistance and weakening hegemonies Regulating and deregulating the circulation of cultural content

Generating consent for the regulation of the circulation of cultural content Using the legal system to prosecute pirates and criminals Using the political system to adapt the old rules or create new rules Negotiations with the new organizations to craft a new consensus

Shifting hegemonies A new hegemonic order

New communication technologies New communication channels undermined mass production and communication The emergence of niche markets and publics

Political leaders and new coalitions Conclusion Further reading

4 The Global Information Economy

The emergence of a global information economy The information communication technology revolution The end of the Cold War The emergence of the Pax Americana as an informal empire A globally networked elite Communicative capitalism

Reorganizing capitalism Conceptualizing networks

The internet as a distributed network Networked and flexible organizations and workplaces Networks in networks: the social web and everyday life

Flexible and networked capitalism Building domination Conclusion Further reading

5 Media and Communication Professionals Professional communicators

Controlling who can make meaning Professional communicators and power relationships Producing professional communicators

Immaterial and creative labour Hierarchies of communicative labour Freedom and autonomy ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ work

Professional ideology and the meaning of labour Identity and communication work: flexibility, networking, entrepreneurialism

Self-promotion Below-the-line work

Internships Conclusion Further reading

6 Making News The emergence of professional journalism The sites of news making Routinizing news making

News is a window on the world Formulas and frames Contacts Induction into newsroom procedures

The presentation of news Symbiotic relationships in news making

News and public relations News and power relationships News making in the interactive era

Data and journalism Witnesses with smartphones

Conclusion Further reading

7 Politics and Communication Strategists The rise of communication strategists as political players

Why did a class of political communication professionals arise? Undermining the establishment media

What is strategic political communication? Spin tactics Managing journalists

Changes to the political process Strategic communication changes political parties Strategic communication changes political leaders Strategic communication makes politics more resource intensive Strategic communication makes popular culture central to political communication Strategic communication amplifies the affective and emotional dimension of political communication Strategic communication undermines deliberative modes of political communication Strategic communication undermines the power of the press within the political process Strategic communication turns politics into a permanent campaign

Barack Obama’s publicity machine Visual communication Managing data, audiences and participation Online ground game Using data Data drives content Decision making becomes pragmatic, incremental and continuous

Conclusion Further reading

8 Producing and Negotiating Identities Empowering and disempowering identities

What is identity? Identity is embedded within representation Identity is social and constructed Identity is relational and differential Identity is never accomplished

Making collective identity From the mass to the individual

Cultural imperialism Identity politics Using apology to position national identity within universal values of global network capitalism

South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Apology and branding Australia Using advertising to craft national identity

Acquiring visibility within the universal values of global network capitalism

Challenging mainstream media portrayals of identity Resisting the universal values of global network capitalism The power of identity within a global network Conclusion Further reading

9 Consumer Culture, Branding and Advertising What is a brand?

Brands and mass consumption Brands are social processes

Brands and culture The creative revolution

Brand value The labour of branding

Analysts, researchers and communication professionals Designers Front-line staff Cultural producers Consumers

Brands, social space and participation Brands at cultural events Brands and mobile media devices

Ethical brands and everyday life The ethical consumer The ‘ethicalization’ of everyday life

Conclusion Further reading

10 Popular Culture Popular culture and governing everyday life

Popular culture is a symptom of larger social formations Popular culture in neoliberal times

Popular culture and government at a distance Popular culture as lived social practices

Ordinary people and popular culture’s promises and practices Access to reality Participation and surveillance Rules, regulations and personal responsibility Producing commercially valuable and politically useful identities

Personal responsibility on talk shows and reality TV Performing our identities

Popular culture’s explanation of social relationships Television drama and making sense of the global network society

Representing ‘real’ life? Critical apathy

Comedy news and political participation Powerful people making fun of themselves Cynical participation Profitable niche audiences

Conclusion Further reading

11 Social Media, Interactivity and Participation Interactivity, participation and power What are social media?

Users create and circulate content Commercialization of the web Media devices and everyday life Social media and social life Social media and the active user

Interactive media enable new forms of participation Considering the quality of participation

Interactive media are responsive and customized Customization Predictions and decisions Algorithmic culture Shaping how we experience space

Interactive media watch us What is surveillance?

Disciplinary and productive forms of surveillance Participation and public life

Blogging Social media and political events

Mapping out positions on interactivity Managing participation Conclusion Further reading

12 Mobile Media, Urban Space and Everyday Life Media and urban space A new geography of power

Global cities Relocating industrial areas Dead zones

Public and private life in media cities Smartphones Smartphones and images Smartphones and communicative enclosure Wearable and responsive media devices

Publicity and intimacy Publicity Intimacy

Work with mobile devices Mobile device factories Mobile professionals

Conclusion Further reading

13 Constructing and Managing Audiences Producing audiences

How are media organizations funded? How are audiences made and packaged? How do audiences make value? From mass to niche From representational to responsive control The work of producing audiences

Audiences and work The work of watching The work of being watched

Ranking, rating and judging Audience participation in the work of being watched

Creating networks of attention and affect Identifying with the promotional logic of the culture industry Articulating cynical distance

The watched audience The work of being watched is central to responsive forms of control

Predicting and discriminating To make predictions about us and our lives To discriminate between individuals

Conclusion Further reading

14 Managing Participation Meaning and power Decoding and debunking

Debunking reinforces dominant power relationships Meaning and power in the interactive era

Difference between speaking and being heard Difference between being a participant and managing participation in general Difference between decoding representations and managing representation Difference between being understood and being visible

Managing participation Flexible identities Giving an account of ourselves and recognizing others From television to the smartphone Conclusion Further reading

References Index

Media and Society

Media and Society Production, Content and Participation

Nicholas Carah Eric Louw

SAGE Publications Ltd

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© Nicholas Carah and Eric Louw 2015

First published 2015

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Introduction

How is Meaning Made? For a long time accounts of media and cultural production have used the encoding and decoding of meaning as a basic conceptual schema. This schema places the many moments in the process of mediated communication in relation to one another. Meanings are created or encoded in an institutional and social context, transferred by technical means, and received or decoded in another context. Each moment in the process has a bearing on the other moments, but no moment dominates the others completely. Media are social processes of transferring and circulating meaning. This process matters because it shapes how we understand the world and our relationships with others. How we understand the world organizes how we act in it. The process of sharing meaning is intrinsic to the exercise of power. Those who have the material and cultural resources to control, organize and regulate the sharing of meaning can shape how flows of resources and relationships between people are organized.

In the field of media and communication some accounts, and even some periods, have paid more attention to one moment or another. Political economy and production approaches have been charged with devoting too much attention to the process of encoding and determining that it shapes all the other moments in the process. Audience and reception approaches have been said to too easily equate the audience’s active decoding of meaning with having power. For the most part though the media and communication field is interested in both how meanings are created, encoded and disseminated and how they are received, decoded and recirculated. In this book we build on this encoding and decoding heritage by taking as a starting point the proposition that we can only understand moments in this process when we consider how they are related to each other. To understand meaning and power we have to understand how relationships between people are shaped within flows of meaning organized by institutions, practices and technologies. The book examines the relationships between powerful groups, the means of communication and the flow of meaning.

This is a book about meaning, power and participation. We use meaning to recognize one another. By making and sharing meaning we acknowledge the existence of others, their lives, their desires and their claims for a place in the world. Meanings are created via the negotiation we undertake with each other to create social relationships, institutions and shared ways of life. The process of maintaining relationships with each other is embedded in relations of power. We relate with each other because we seek to realize our will, our desires, our ways of life, in conjunction or competition with others. The sharing of meaning facilitates

both consensus and conflict. Groups aim to generate consensus for the social relationships and institutions they have established, and they generate conflicts and contests that might change social relationships or distribution of resources in ways that might benefit them.

How is Power Made and Maintained? Media and culture are central to generating consent and organizing participation. For much of the twentieth century, accounts of meaning and power focused on the industrialization of meaning making. One of the key institutions of the industrialized mass society is a culture industry. The culture industry is composed of the range of institutions that make meaning and use it to shape and manage mass populations. These institutions include schools, universities, government policy making, and importantly for this book, industries that produce media and popular culture. We trace the role of the culture industry in creating national identities and facilitating the management of industrial economies. The media and cultural industries that emerged in the twentieth century produced content for mass audiences. This was a result of a range of social, political, economic and technological factors. Mass media like radio, television and print could only produce one flow of content to a mass audience. Everyone in the audience watched the same television programme at the same time, or read the same newspaper. This system suited nation states and industries that demanded mass publics and markets. Nation states sought to fashion enormous populations into coherent collective identities; industrial factories could only produce a standardized set of products for a mass market.

The audience of the industrial-era culture industry was largely conceptualized as being on the receiving end of a standardized flow of meanings. There were a variety of accounts of the audience’s role in this process. Some critical and dystopian accounts saw the audience as passive recipients of meaning who were manipulated by the powerful groups that controlled cultural production. The importance of radio, cinema and other kinds of mass media propaganda in the rise of authoritarian fascist and communist societies seemed to demonstrate the power of industrial cultural production to direct enormous populations. More nuanced accounts developed too; these views pointed to the way that the industrial production of meaning shaped the cultural world within which people lived their lives. The media couldn’t tell people what to think, but it could tell them what to think about. Media industries played a critical role in creating the frame through which people viewed the world and providing the symbolic resources that people used to fashion their identities. While the audience actively decided what to do with the meanings and symbolic resources they had access to, they had little input into the broad cultural schema in which they lived. The culture industry was a key mechanism in establishing and maintaining this schema. It limited audience participation to a representational frame constructed and managed by powerful interests. These arguments were powerful because they articulated how the media controlled

populations even as they were actively involved in decoding and circulating meaning.

Over the course of the twentieth century, arguments developed that accounted for the active participation of audiences in the reception and circulation of meaning. Some of these accounts were functionalist and instrumental. They sought to explain to states or corporations how the management of populations depended on more than just creating and disseminating meanings. They also had to work to fashion the social contexts within which individuals interpreted and decoded meanings. Other accounts have been much more celebratory: they saw the audience’s capacity to interpret meanings as proof that the culture industry couldn’t exert as much power over populations as critics claimed. Audiences were always free to decode and create meanings offered by the culture industry. These accounts focused on the creative capacity of audience members to resist, rearrange and reappropriate mass- produced meanings to their own identities, wills and worlds. With the rise of interactive media technologies from the 1990s onwards, these celebratory accounts took on a life of their own. If the ‘problem’ with the industrial culture industry was the way it thwarted participation and relegated audiences to the reception and interpretation of pre-made meanings, then interactive technologies offered a solution. The audience could actively participate in the creation of meaning. This book considers several important rejoinders to these claims.