Haga clic para introducir el título del temaWeek 2
Media & Modernity
� Introduction � Assumptions
MEDIA THEORYM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
This work is under licencia de Creative Commons Reconocimiento-NoComercial-
CompartirIgual 3.0 España.
� Introduction
� Historical Context
� Main Authors
� Assumptions
� Key Concepts
� Arguments
� Critique
• Rise of mass media
• Radical change in the modes of
transmission of cultural contents
(Benjamin)
� Historical ContextM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
• Political context of incipient
democratization and market economy
• The term “culture” becomes ambiguous
�The cultural object enters into the economic
sphere to become commodity
Commodification of culture
– Process of change in society’s relationship with
culture/art
• In the 18th and 19th
• Bourgeois society began to use culture for its own
� Historical ContextM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
• Bourgeois society began to use culture for its own
particular purpose:
– Self-education
– Self-esteem
– Social position
• Culture was a “value”, a social commodity in
circulation, interchangeable for all sort of goods
Adorno y Horkheimer(Frankfurt School)
“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1947)
Concepts
MacDonals, Greenberg, Leavis
The Mass Culture’s Debate in 1950
AssumptionsAuthors
and SchoolsArgumentsDiscipline
“Mass Culture”
Mass culture
Culture Industry
Ideal-individualism
Rational-collectivism
Literature, Art Criticism
Sociology, Philosophy, Culture Critism
Mass culture against Art
Mass Culture = Commodity
Mar
ía L
ueng
oM
edia
The
ory
2013
Deception” (1947)
Benjamin “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1955).
Arendt
Hannah Arendt: The Crisis in Culture, Its social and political significance (1961)
Panofsky “ Meaning in the Visual Arts”
Williams (Birmingham School)
Culture, Mass Society
“Popular Culture
Mass Art
Popular Art
Non-rationalism
Racional-Collectivism
Idealism, rational-collectivism
Ideal-collectivism
Philosophy, Cultural Theory
Sociology, Literary Criticism
Philosophy, Culture Criticism
Art History
Mass Culture does not exist as such: Entertainment
Culture as Ideology
Mass Culture = politics
Mass Culture = new contemporary art
� The Frankfurt School
• Max Horkheimer• Theodor Adorno
� AuthorsM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
– Text “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1947)
� Walter Benjamin (a contemporary but not part of Frankfurt School)
� Jürgen Habermas (later)
M. Horkheimer & T. Adorno
– Second half of the twentieth century• Capitalism and industrialization
– Philosophical reference: K. Marx
� AuthorsM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
– Associated with the Frankfurt School (Critical Theory )
• Intellectual people migrated to USA– Critique of instrumental reason and empiricism
of social sciences• Saw themselves as ideological alternative
to mass communication research
• Cultural materialism
– A theoretical position that has its origins in Marx– Culture is determined by external forces ;
culture is not autonomous – Cultural activities respond mechanically,
� AssumptionsM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
– Cultural activities respond mechanically, objectively, and predictably to environmental stimuli – a given socio-historical and coercive context
– To explain cultural phenomena the researcher must look at the material forces that culture reflects
– Culture industry
• Reflection of economic rationalism
– The modern ethos or the prevailing social behavior
» How modern man chooses and justifies his choices
� Key ConceptsM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
» How modern man chooses and justifies his choices
and actions in his collective environment
• Actions based on analyzing and anticipating effects on consumer behavior
– Examples: pop music and film formulas
• Art becomes located in the orbit of consumption
ELITE ART MASS CULTURE
– Mass culture versus Art (with capital “A”)• For Adorno and Horkheimer, mass cuture is
the antithesis (the opposite of) Art (High Art)
� Key ConceptsM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
ELITE ART MASS CULTURE
Serious Light
Authentic Artificial
Original Copy/Derivative
Exclusive Repetitive
No profit motive Profit-seeking
– Mass culture versus art• Antagonistic view shared by other modern
authors– Point of departure is the Kantian idea of aesthetic
judgment» Uniqueness , universality , and
� Key ConceptsM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
» Uniqueness , universality , and disinterestedness
» These characteristics are applied to the work of art to be classified as Art
» Art is essentially X, and everything that is not X is not art
– Mass culture = entertainment, commodity
� From Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture industry” (pp. 66 and 68)
• Cultural product as commodity
� Key ConceptsM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
“Art becomes commodity, worked up and adapted to industrial production, saleable and exchangeable” (…) It is so completely subject tothe law of exchange that it is no longerexchanged; it is so blindly equated with use thatit can no longer be used”
The Role of Mass Media
• Instruments of social control through which economicpower manipulates individuals to accept theestablished social order
• Modern forms of ideological indoctrination through
� ArgumentsM
aría
Lue
ngo
Med
ia T
heor
y20
13
• Modern forms of ideological indoctrination throughsimplification and repetition of content
• Mechanisms that facilitate social stability modelingcollective behavior, so prevent any profound changein social relationships of production and consumption
• Instruments of cultural degradation
Media effects• Powerful, noxious, pernicious and alienating
� Arguments
The Cultural Industry
Mar
ía L
ueng
oM
edia
The
ory
2013
� Arguments
The Role of the Audience
• Individuals do not perceive the whole processof manipulation carried out by mass media
• Individuals can not fight against this process
Mar
ía L
ueng
oM
edia
The
ory
2013
– because they are not aware of it– if they were, there is a huge difference between the
strength of each individual and the socio-economicstructure
• Consumers become objects – and no subjects– of culture industry
Economic determinism- Materialist reduction of cultural sphere to the
market sphere
� Critique
Work of Art, Cultural Object and Commodity
Mar
ía L
ueng
oM
edia
The
ory
2013
WORK OF ART
CONSUMER GOOGS
CULTURAL OBJECT
Culture Sphere
Social Consumption Sphere
Capra film comedy
TV Fiction
Reality Show
• NETWORK: Commercial television in the U.S. or"neo-television" in Europe – a public service TV thathas accepted the free market rules –
– TV programing
Commodification of Culture: An application
Mar
ía L
ueng
oM
edia
The
ory
2013
Inserting contents into a rational “flow” to beconsumed by audiences
TV, TV, anan entertainmententertainment factoryfactory
Edward Murrow’s speech
Good Night, And Good Luck
by George Clooney
We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and
complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy
to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our
mass media reflect this. But unless we get up
off our fat surpluses and recognize that
television in the main is being used to distract,
Mar
ía L
ueng
oM
edia
The
ory
2013
television in the main is being used to distract,
delude, amuse and insulate us, then television
and those who finance it, those who look at it
and those who work at it, may see a totally
different picture too lateEDWARD R. MURROW
RTNDA ConventionChicago
October 15, 1958Downloaded from http://www.turnoffyourtv.com/commentary/hiddenagenda/murrow.html
María Luengo
Mar
ía L
ueng
oM
edia
The
ory
2013
Image courtesy of eliburfordon Flickr
How would you relate the image of Citizen Kane to
� the last edition of News of the World?
� modern theories of the media?
Orson Welles
Citizen Kane (Charles Forter Kane)
Williams Randolph Hearst (1863-1951)
(1941)
Real-life examples Theories of media & modernity
Mid-20th Century
Adorno and Horkheimer
Mar
ía L
ueng
oM
edia
The
ory
2013
Rupert Murdoch (News Corp’s Boss)
News of the World
(1931- )
� Mass media corporation and Economic/Political Power
� “Yellow Journalism” (News –Gossip, funny stories)
� The decline and fall of the old mass media conglomerates?
Culture industry Economic rationality applied to the cultural world
Cultural productentertainment, consumption, and escapism
Top Related