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A Propaganda Model
We tend to think of propaganda as a deliberate and calculated method of producing discourses and messages in order to influence, manipulate and control.
What is so provocative about Chomsky and Herman's propaganda model is that those discourses and messages, which influence, manipulate and control their audiences, are not deliberate and calculated. Actually, a natural and unpremeditated consequence of the nature of the media industry is that it self-censors, and thereby works to maintain the status quo.
The authors identify 5 'filters':
Ownership: The owners of media corporations appoint editors they like (even the BBC), and who will therefore take the 'company line' without the need for memos from the top.
Advertising: The need for advertising revenues results in self-censorship, not necessarily through conscious choice, but because outlets which are not favourable to advertisers cannot survive.
Flak: Fear of 'flak' means that discourse is curtailed, and 'safe' messages are produced.
Sources: The nature of society's predeliction for 'professionals' and 'status' means that 'reliable sources' are always institutionalised figures (lawyers, politicians, police, academics, experts, etc) who didn't get where they were by creating controversy.
Ideology: On top of all of this is the prevailing set of social norms - though at the time of writing (during the Cold War) Chomsky and Herman refer to 'anti-communism', we might think of the prevailing wind as liberal capitalism. No profit-oriented institution, such as a media corporation, is likely to campaign for, or even pay a great deal of attention to, drastic challenges to the status quo.
Chomsky is often written off as an 'anarchist' - the easy, wooly, uncritical insult given to those who think the world as it is is total pants. And the rest of us go 'oh he's an anarchist, he must be full of crap'. Propaganda in action...
Online at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Herman%20/Manufac_Consent_Prop_Model.html
Tags: anarchy capitalism censorship media media-corporations media-participation propaganda society
Popular culture is stupifying
This book contains the classic essay 'The Culture Industry', in which Adorno and Horkheimer argue that mass media or popular culture forms like film are a part of the commodification of entertainment, which itself is a manifestation of the pacification and stupifaction of the 'masses'.
Those poor working classes who console themselves after their hard day's labour by watching films that are so absorbing that they silence the imagination, and indoctrinate their audiences with pacified dreams of unreachable happiness.
The essay contains many useful insights into the commodification of art into 'entertainment', and the consequences of the industrialisation of the production of media forms, and the relation between capital and media production. But their attitude to the audience of these forms is pretty much about as elitist as it gets. That's Marxists for you, they really think we're stupid.
Tags: culture elitism imagination industrialisation marxism media-participation
Elitism and participation
Arnold was a poet, Oxford don, literary critic, and educational reformer. I have a love-hate attitude to him.
On one hand, his zeal to create a secondary education system which opened up learning to an ever wider group of citizens was admirable and had a significant impact on the development of the UK's secondary education system at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries.
On the other, one of the reasons he was so zealous was that he foresaw a culture industry catering to the masses, which he viewed as less valuable and less worthy than the rarified realms of poetry that he saw as the pinnacle of cultural achievement.
He was right on both accounts.. however if I don't appreciate poetry, surely I can nevertheless stake a claim to cultural value elsewhere? I love him for his foresight and commitment, but I reject his elitism.
Tags: anarchy culture education elitism media-participation poetry
What is culture?
According to Arnold, culture is:
the disinterested study and pursuit of perfection
not dogmatism (which he calls Hebraism)
harmonious and equalising
a guard against anarchy
I agree with the first 3 sentiments; however, in his condemnation of anarchy, he includes the common uneducated man (it was always a man, back in the 19th century) and his 'base' interests and pursuits:
'this and that man, and this and that body of men, all over the country, are beginning to assert and put in practice an Englishman's right to do what he likes, his right to march where he likes, meet where he likes, enter where he likes, hoot as he likes, threaten as he likes, smash as he likes.'
I know he was writing in 1869, but please!
The Active Reader
This reader contains a really useful section on 'Reading as Resistance' - the notion that the reader has interpretive freedom... 'Preferred' meaning, as perhaps intended by an author, can be 'ripped' by an 'active' reader.
This work is based partly on Stuart Hall's ideas of encoding and decoding, and ideas about the active reader/audience which came out of the Birmingam School.
These ideas are (sort of) parallel to the writerly text of Barthes (but, ironically, easier to read).
Tags: active-reader author authority birmingham-school media-participation
The Writerly Text
Barthes' classic close examination of Balzac's story Sarrasine is introduced through an exposition of 'what is in the practice of the writer and what has left it'.
'What can be written' is the 'writerly' text - the creative space in which the reader becomes the writer. Contrast with the 'readerly' - the meaning we can only recieve from an author, that closes off interpretation, and that demands our submission to the authorial voice...
This is an important moment in understanding the subversion of the author - and therefore of authority. And yet can we not overplay its significance? Is it not a paultry kind of freedom to produce meaning, merely when consuming another's text? Why not simply write our own?
Tags: author authority media-participation readerly writerly
Citizen Participation
This reader, which collates a number of classic texts about globalisation, informatics and urban theory, also includes Sherry Arnstein's paper "A Ladder of Citizen Participation".
Arnstein outlines 10 stages of citizen participation, ranging from 'manipulation' at the bottom of the ladder, to 'citizen control' at the top.
The paper is also online at http://lithgow-schmidt.dk/sherry-arnstein/ladder-of-citizen-participation.html
First ever entry in Biblipedia
And so it's got to be about Walter Benjamin, since everything in Biblipedia will be both a copy, and something that will be copied...
And even though all this knowledge and stuff is infinitely reproducible and plagiarisable, the words we write change how we think. Our minds mutate, through the creation of new things for others to copy...
Tags: copy inaugural technology