By Fred Johnson (© 2002)

Sources

Bagdikian, Ben H. The Media Monopoly, Beacon Press, Boston 1992

Tim O'Sullivan, John Hartley, Danny Saunders, Martin Montgomery, John Fiske, Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies, Routledge, New York and London, 1994.

Garham, Nicolas. Capitalism and Communication: Global Culture and the Economics of Information, Sage Publications, London, 1990.

"For Years, Bell Atlantic Has Been Obsessed With Being More Than a Phone Company". John J. Keller, in the New York Times, 10/14/93.

Kellner, Douglas. Televison and the Crises of Democracy. Westview Press, Boulder. San Francisco, Oxford, 1990.

"Concentration: The Big Get Bigger". In Multichannel News, 11/28/94.

Notes for Facilitators

• IDEOLOGY: Ideology is MULTI-DISCURSIVE (it has many meanings depending on the context of its use). There are three frequently used definitions of Ideology:
  • A system of beliefs characteristic of a particular class or group.
  • A system of illusory beliefs - false ideas or false consciousness - which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge.
  • The general process of the production of meaning and ideas.
• HAILING: All communication addresses someone, and it places that someone in a social relationship by the way they are addressed. By recognizing a communication we are "Hailed"; by responding, we participate in our own ideological construction. We are constructed when we respond as predicted to a violent film or the walk of a woman wearing high heels. Even when we choose to resist reading a message from the dominant point of view, we still are engaged in ideological construction - - it is unavoidable.
• HEGEMONY: For our purposes hegemony is what happens when the dominant reading of communication re-creates the social relationships of the status-quo. Hegemony is a way of describing the processes by which we are brought by society to consent to our own exploitation. Hegemony must be constantly won, and resistance is possible on the basis of contradictory social experiences.
• CO-OPTING THE MARGINS: Incorporation, displacement (channeling an unwanted feeling / reading) into the point of view of the status quo, commodification.
• INTERSUBJECTIVITY: "Responses to communication that occur in individuals, but which are not, paradoxically, individual in nature. They are shared, to a degree, by all members of a culture or sub-culture". The "intersubjective" aesthetic responses to communication within a culture are frequently portrayed as "timeless" and "universal". A good balance to such ludicrous ideas is to keep in mind that many tribal people upon seeing their first film don't even see images, just lights and confusion.

Working Assumptions:

• Media Literacy is defined / expanded to include (1) critical thinking about media in its social context, and, (2) technical and aesthetic training, again in a social context.
• DEMOCRACY and LITERACY are inseparable, practically and historically.
• LITERACY and the TECHNOLOGY of literacy are inseparable, practically and historically.

Core Concepts

• Media Literacy: Knowledge is a relative, socially constructed set of relationships; anti-fundamentalist and concerned with empowerment.
• Images are social constructions, not objective.
• Education is a participatory activity and our job is to empower people by creating a learning environment where they can participate in their own learning.
• Closely related to the notion that knowledge is not something that is "taught" or a commodity that we give to people in a paternalistic way are:
• MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES: Learning styles are culturally and class bound (closely related or bound with CREATIVITY, DIVERSITY, DEMOCRACY, PUBLIC DISCOURSE & PARTICPATION IN PUBLIC LIFE).
• Every artistic medium is a social system, a way that social groups circulate and negotiate messages to create meaning. Communication is about PRODUCING MEANING. The meaning produced is influenced by all sectors of society, particularly the market and economic considerations.
• Every medium tends to have a unique bias or preference. When that medium becomes a dominant cultural system, its bias becomes the "Preference of an Age".
• Commercial Television's technical / aesthetic bias: VISUAL, BRIEF, UNCOMPLICATED, aimed at EMOTIONS and the SENSES.
• Commercial Television's market bias: focuses only on what is INTERESTING, ignores what is IMPORTANT.

Implications:

• TABLOIDIZATION (personal morality, conflict, corruption, scandal and oversimplified exposŽs);
• ENTERTAINMENT CULTURE, the media becomes news, particularly the entertainment being sold by the corporation that owns the news division of any given system;
• MARKET-DRIVEN NEWS (magnify fear, play on the irrational and focus on the concerns of everyday life); market-driven news constructs a social environment of unending mayhem and irrationality, which is relived only be commercial breaks;
• finally, MASS PRODUCED IMAGES, tend to move communication out of the realm of logic and into the realm of the senses: aesthetics. The question becomes not "is it true," but rather "didya like it"?
• A way of understanding Media Literacy: It takes... "materials that are directed at the emotions, and the senses and it repositions them within the framework of critical reason and thought."

Frequently encountered criticism of media

• Television as a drug
• The end of "Civilization as we know it" critique
• Mass media as inherently totalitarian
• Media as primary cause of violence and social decay

Resistance to Media Culture

• Intellectual critique and criticism, limited by the non-rational nature of media
• Radical content: artists and cultural jammers
• Media Literacy: Theory and Practice
• Cable Access: Alternative, non-commercial
• Media Arts: Radical form and aesthetic education
• Community media: Media practice with local or socially focused non-commercial approach
• "Communications Civil Disobedience" : Demonstration video, reverse surveillanc, Pirate radio, etc.

CRITICAL QUESTIONS

WHO is communicating, and why?

Advertisers? Producers? Television networks?

Keep in mind there may be more than one person or group speaking, and they may be doing so for different reasons.

WHAT TYPE of text (or medium) is it?

Is it television, film, a book, a photograph, magazine?

A combination?

[Think of a "text" in this way as any physical form media takes.]

HOW is it produced?

Videotape? Film? Desktop Publishing? Printing Press?

HOW do we know what it means?

What kinds of social and cultural images or communication patterns does it use to allow us to read the meaning? Fairytales? Detective stories? Clothing / fashion? Speech? Testimony?

WHO receives it and what sense do they make of it?

What kinds of different groups is the work targeted for? What other groups might wish to receive it?

What kind of different "readings" or understanding of the meaning of the work will these groups come up with?

How does it PRESENT its subject?

What styles and aesthetic codes are being used?

Ordering:

• Category
• Time
• Location
• Alphabet
• Continuum

Combining, Excluding or Highlighting Media:

• Text Words
• Voice Words
• Pictures
• Numbers

Shaping or Operating On:

• Metaphor
• Metonymy
• Contrast
• Comparison
• Condensation
• Displacement
• Dramatic escalation
• Sacrifice

Deconstructing:

• Appropriation
• Intertextuality
• Self-Reflexivity
• De-Centering: Fragmentation
• Non-Closure Narrative
• Collage

Core Assumptions

• Media production and the aesthetics of producing cannot be separated from their social context.
• There are no purely technical or aesthetic considerations. Every technical act is also an act of creating or constructing meaning within a social context.
• All communication is socially constructed.

This handout looks at "Social Aesthetics" from three different perspectives.

1) ELEMENTS OF MEANING: An outline of the social elements we combine to construct the meaning of a message or communication.

2) COMMERICAL media have THREE SOCIAL FUNCTIONS: An outline of the social context in which people use and own commercial, mass media.

3) ELEMENTS OF AESTHETICS: An outline of the applied aesthetic elements.

ELEMENTS OF MEANING

Level One: Representing or Denoting

This is the most simple level of communication where things portrayed can be recognized: A picture of a horse represents a horse, not a pig; one and one equal two not three. This is the level of communication where notions of accuracy and truth can be applied.

Level Two: “ The Realm of Aesthetics”

Connection: This is where the style of communication comes into play, the tone of language used, the expressive quality of a photograph all act to shape the meaning of any form of communication or program.

These elements of style are the aspects of how we communicate, not what we communicate. THIS IS MOST FREQUENTLY UNDERSTOOD AS AESTHETICS, in media, art and literature.
[See Elements of Aesthetics]

Myth: Myths are concepts often expressed in the form of stories or visual images complex enough to carry cultural meanings. Myths can be understood as chains of images and concepts used by members of a particular culture to make sense of their experience, to render the strange or unfamiliar into the already known.

Level Three: Ideology

The construction of communication (using simple representation, myth and expressive style) that fits together into a coherent pattern that "makes sense", that expresses the values of a group or culture. In the context of commercial media these values are commercial ones.

I. Aesthetics: Feeling

II. Major Elements

• Light
• Space
• Time-motion
• Sound

III. First Aesthetic Dimension: Light

• The nature of light sources
• Lighting emotional purposes and functions
• Shadows
• Outer orientation functions
• Inner orientation functions

Color: What is color?

• How we perceive color?
• How we mix color?
• How color is relative?
• How color influences perception?

IV. Space (Composition)

Area: Two-dimensional Field

• Aspect ration
• Object size
• Image size
• Inductive and Deductive approaches

IV. Space

Forces Within the Screen

• Main directions: Horizontal and Vertical
• Magnetism of the frame / Attraction of mass
• Asymmetry of the screen
• Figure-ground
• Psychological closure
• Vectors

Depth and Volume: Three Dimensional Field

• Volume duality
• Articulating the Z axis
• Z axis blocking
• Spatial paradoxes

V. Time (Fourth Dimension)

Overview

• Objective Time (clock)
• Subjective Time (Psychological time)
• Biological Time

Motion

• Primary Motion: Movement in front of the camera
• Secondary Motion (Camera Motion) : Pan, tilt, dolly, pedestal, truck, zoom, swish, rack focus, arc.
• Tertiary Motion: Sequences and transitional elements in editing

VI. Sound: Fifth Aesthetie Dimension

Overview

• Sound verses Noise
• Television and Film Sound
• Literal and non-literal sound
• Sound functions: Information, outer orientation, inner orientation, energy and structure.
• Aesthetic factors: Figure-ground, perspective and continuity

PRODUCING MEANINGS

• Media are constructed so as to make the interests of the powerful “transparent” (organized and made sense of in such a way as to render the interests of the power as natural, inevitable, eternal, unarguably in the general interest, with a claim on everybody).

Key Concept: Audiences negotiate meaning.

• There are no individuals who produce meaning; it is always actively negotiated by and between people in groups, cultures and sub-cultures.
• There is no such thing as a “mass audience” in the sense of atomized, individuals who are passive victims of totalitarian ideologies and propaganda.

Key Concept: Media have unique aesthetic forms that are closely related to content.

• Visual and Technical Bias:

(1) Visual images speak more to the emotions and senses than to critical reason;

(2) Visual pleasure becomes a critical editorial factor,

(3) Messages or programs tend to work best when brief and uncomplicated.

PRODUCING PROFITS

Key Concept: Media have commercial implications.

• Information economics tend toward concentrations of ownership and power.
• Unregulated media markets do not result in media that are diverse or democratic.
• Information is a particularly important kind of product in a world market that is glutted with more material goods.

Key Concept: Media have unique aesthetic forms that are closely related to content.

• Aesthetic styles and codes are frequently created in response to the way media is packaged for sale and distribution, creating a market bias or imperative:

(1) Focuses on what is interesting rather than what is important (personal morality, conflict, simple forms of corruption and scandal expressed in oversimplified exposés).

(2) Novelty becomes a critical issue in program decision making;

(3) Program forms that are cheaply produced tend to dominate;

(4) Issues of “Shelf Life” and secondary marketing strategies become more important to program decision makers;

5) Issues of “Shelf Life” and secondary marketing strategies become more important to program decision makers;

RE-PRODUCING THE STATUS-QUO

Key Concept: Media have social and political implications

• Mass media create a context of “feeling” or daily consciousness, the fabric of life, which tends to set the mood and agenda for political decisions.
  Key Concept: Media have ideological value messages
• The ideological and value messages of the mass media are the mass consumption values of the corporate sponsors.

Key Concept: Media have unique aesthetic forms that are closely related to content

• Media messages or programs use familiar kinds of communication such as myth-like stories and images that appeal to our senses or emotions to render unfamiliar or strange social experiences in terms of the already known, and experienced.

Information Economics

Concentration of Ownership/Control

Media and information industries are unique because they tend to high levels of:

• Concentration of ownership
• Cross Ownership
• Globalization

WHY?

The answer is the unique nature of information and media commodities, i.e.

books, TV programs, films, magazines, video and software etc.:

Assumption: UNLIKE CARS OR FOOD, INFORMATION, is not used up when you use it. The CD is still there, the book can be read by other people.

• THAT MEANS: Manufacturers of culture and information have to work to create media systems that emphasize novelty, otherwise their markets would disappear. Copyright laws and the "Daily News" are examples. No one buys yesterday's news.

Assumption: THE MAJOR EXPENSES associated with manufacturing media and information go into creating the first copy ("the master"). After creating the first "copy" the costs of reproducing or making other copies is very small relatively.

• THAT MEANS: The most successful corporations will be the ones who have plenty of money to invest before there is an opportunity to make any money in return.
• IT ALSO MEANS: Successful companies will be under intense pressure to sell the most copies of a work, to become the ones with the size and distribution systems to distribute the most widely; and promotion budgets become critical to success.

Assumption: IT IS VERY DIFFICULT TO PREDICT which media and information products will be successfully marketed or distributed even though you have to spend nearly full costs to find out. For example, only one in sixteen CD's makes a profit; 3% of the output of a record distributor will account for 50% of the gross revenues. In films and television the pattern is similar. It can be expected that around 10 out of 119 films will make over 30 % of the profit and the top 40 films out of 119 will make 80% of the profit.

• THAT MEANS: The most successful film and television companies will be the ones who afford to make and distribute a large number of media and information products, and to maintain on-going and frequent interaction with their audience, i.e. consumers.

RESULTS

Together these characteristics bring about a cultural industry in which the companies that are successful MUST BECOME BIG. They require huge supplies of money, and distribution outlets capable of reaching enormous numbers of people.

In the absence of government public interest regulations, media and information industries have a tendency to do the following:

• MERGE: To amass the enormous amounts of money needed and to put the distribution networks together that are need to reach the largest audience.
• CREATE CROSS OWNERSHIP ARRANGEMENTS: To acquire cheap distribution and programming.
• GLOBALIZE: To extend distribution to the farthest degree possible, and to create new markets for programming that has lost its novelty in the U.S.
• CREATE MONOPOLISTIC OR OLIGOPOLISTC CONTROLS OVER MEDIA DISTRBUTION CHANNELS: That will secure access to large audiences.
• SHIFT TO THE SALE OF MEDIA HARDWARE USING ADVERTISER SUPPORTED "FREE" PROGRAMMING: To allow investments in a product more stable and predictable than information or media programs. This leads to 'junk' programming.
• CREATE AUDIENCES AS A COMMODITY FOR SALE TO ADVERTISERS: To allow investment in products more stable and predictable than information and media programs.
• CREATE MEDIA THAT REQUIRES CONSTANT RECONSUMPTION: To assure that information and media are frequently and constantly in demand.
• CREATE MEDIA THAT FOCUSES ONLY ON WHAT IS INTERESTING WHILE OFTEN IGNORING WHAT IS IMPORTANT: To encourage the largest audiences possible.

WHY REGULATION OF MEDIA?

• There are over 750 million TV sets in more than 160 countries.
• 2.5 billion people watch television each day.
• Over 98% of the homes in the US have at least one television set, and it is on over 7 hours per day.
• Individuals spend more time watching television than any other leisure activity.
• People spend more time in front of the television than they spend cumulatively in school; only work absorbs more waking time.
• More people in the US depend on television for news and information than any other source and, the majority; consider it the most trusted source of news and information.

PROBLEMS WITH SIMPLE NOTIIONS OF FREE MARKET COMPETITION IN MEDIA

The "competition argument" is basically as follows: The free market is an unsurpassed mechanism for providing listeners, viewers and readers with as many alternative sources of information as possible. An impersonal rationing system of free market competition treats consumers as sovereign and the ultimate best judge of their own interests, thereby discovering by trial and error what consumers want, how these wants will be supplied at the least costs, and whether new and challenging ideas and tastes will catch their eye.

WHY DOES IT NOT WORK THAT WAY?

ADVERTISING

• Stimulates expectations it cannot satisfy.
• Creates or exacerbates barriers to market entry, i.e. large financial investment requirements, thereby reducing the number of speakers available to the public.
• Shifts programming away from social considerations like diversity and toward packaging of product lines and light entertainment.
• Unrestricted market competition tends to prevent producers from entering the market because a small number of large companies eventually will control dominant portions of the markets.
• Competing for the largest audience share, which companies must do in market competition, will exclude a diversity of people and ideas that do not attract numerically large audiences attracted by creating programs for the status-quo, mainstream groups and ideas.
• Information and media appliances tend to get marketed to the more affluent groups leaving the poor as consumers of second-rate communications media: cut-rate television, chaotic advertiser supported, cheaply produced radio and television (not to mention a limping postal system and the pay phone that is out of order half the time).