1. Part 4 Media and the Public Sphere

2. What is Media? Includes: Television, music, the internet, and magazines and newspapers. Media are the materials and techniques used by an artist to produce a work. It is a form of self expression of thoughts and ideas. Now a days this form of communication has become a world power and has the ability to change and shape cultures and societies.

3. 4.1 Television History of Television and its impact on culture 1964, British cultural studies was still developing. –TV was still developing as well –Pictures were black and white –British TV consisted of three channels In the 60s TV started to shape cultural events –The Beatles became international sensations partly because to TV. –Put Britain into the rock’n’roll age and internationalized its pop culture. In the US TV advertisements were effecting consumer choices –Disney persuaded consumers that color sets were worth buying –CBS introduced videotapes and gave consumers choice as to when to watch TV

4. Television was transforming and gaining power. TV contains 4 different elements that explain that growing power: 1.Content being broadcast: 2. The Set on which the content is watched 3. The means of distribution of that content 4. The industry which produced the content It is impossible to imagine contemporary politics, sports, music, film, and consumer culture without TV.

5. The Set “The TV set exists primarily in domestic space and for that reason television’s content and regulations have always had to address family values and lifestyle patterns.” Now a days One TV set is not enough and tends to cause disputes over programming and the need for several sets in a household has grown. Multiple sets tends to isolate family members from one another. The TV set has also become a part of public culture. You see TV sets at the movies and at concerts. “In many parts of the world television is watched mainly in public, in cafes or bars, and that alters its impact considerably.”

6. The Industry: Funding and Regulation “Television is an expensive medium in relation to print and even film, because of what is called ‘content exhaustion’” “Content exhaustion” is the way in which content is replenished, recreated, and reused. It is the creation of categories for TV shows and the recreation of shows with in the same category. EX. Reality TV, procedurals, and police shows. TV is funded differently in different countries. It maybe funded by government, advertising, periodic fees (in the case of cable and satellite) or by a mix of these. “Government tends to pay for programming either through the tax system (as in Australia), by selling off the right to use frequencies (selling off blocks of time on the air) or by charging licenses for ownership (as in the UK) (Charging fees for owning a program).” In the US there is no wholly government-funded television. There is though “public television” which is “television broadcast on frequencies reserved for non-profit stations who typically receive less that half of their funds from public sources (such as donations).”

7. Most other channels get their funding mainly from advertising. “Funding through advertising turns the medium into a system whose primary function is to sell potential consumers to advertisers, via the buyers of advertising time, set at prices determined by ratings.” There are now many TV channels that are aimed at different groups of people and each channel relates to that group of people’s interests and social structures and even culture. Ex. Channels based on ethnicity (black TV in the USA), age (Disney channel), level of education, gender, and political orientation. Should the ownership of media be restricted? Might be hard since many large media companies own not just one form of media but rather many. Ex. Time Warner and News Corp own news papers, publishing houses, sport teams, film studios, tourist attractions, and national periodicals etc. This concentrated ownership threatens free markets because these few companies control the content of the media forms they own. “It puts at risk the principals of balance, diversity and quality.”

8. Should Television content and programming be censored by regulations and rules and should they be self-censored? Many programs contains violence, encourage anti-social behavior and deteriorates family values. This has a major effect on children whose values and understanding of the world are shaped by the TV programs they watch. This means that TV pushed children towards violence, anti-social behavior and the loss of family values. TV and children’s TV “delivers the attention of children and their parents to toy manufacturers, confectioners and drink marketers, fast-food outlets, the recorded music and film industries as so on.” TV socializes Children and parents alike towards consumption. It takes them away form more physical play to violence and bullying. “As children grow up their memories of a childhood watching TV are often invested with a deep nostalgia.” There is a fear that television is becoming a substitute for parenting.”

9. The Audience Audience reception: The impact of programming on viewers and their reactions to those programs. “The study of reception has tried to figure out exactly the value and impact of television.” History of the development of audience reception: 1. Uses and gratifications approach: - During the forties statistical data were used to show that television viewing integrated viewers into capitalists society. It turned viewers into consumers. - Also, “it linked patterns of television viewing to gender, education, age, and economics and tried to view the impact of such viewing on ‘behaviors’”. 2. Critical theory: - Then it was argued that “Television reduces its audience’s capacities to reflect on and critique society and culture by providing powerful forms of distraction which transformed modern mass culture into a medium of psychological control.” - “ TV de-individuates people. It offers a profoundly standardized image (of the) world.” - “ It reinforces the false domination of private life over the public sphere; it creates fantasies and false satisfactions that allow capitalism to maintain itself.” - “ Television posses so grate a power of seduction that the distinction between its ‘dream world’ and reality becomes confused.”

10. 3. Encoding/Decoding Model: - A four stage theory of communication is introduced: production, circulation, use and reproduction. “Quality shows” for particular audiences began to be produced in the US after programmers began to pay attention to viewer demographics. “The media connect together different cultural domains for audiences, as well as creating a sense of the audience itself as community.” “What we need to acknowledge is that –while TV and the media do systematically structure society –and culture and have had an especially profound impact on their audiences, –nonetheless, in everyday life they remain at the sidelines for many, probably most, people.”

11. Content TV audiences are divided into groups called “demographics” These demographics or sectors of the audience are targeted by advertisers while they watch their specific shows. To keep particular demographics interested and viewing one program after another, shows are scheduled in “strips” or a string of one show after another. This “strip” of shows is called prime time. Special regulation govern when “prime time” is. It has to be scheduled around audience real life event such as meal and bed times. “Prime time” is usually geared towards family viewing and commercials during that time need to retain viewer’s attention for the string of programming to continue. Television has given rise to many genres or types of programs over the years. One of these genres is that of reality TV.

12. Reality TV is: “a genre of television programming that presents unscripted dramatic or humorous situations, documents actual events, and usually features ordinary people instead of professional actors, sometimes in a contest or other situation where a prize is awarded.” It started in 1990 with the “comic reality show” “America’s Funnies Home Videos”. Which drew “material from the real world, leaving behind all dramatic and fictional framing.” The most popular form of reality TV has been “competitive reality shows” such as “Big Brother” and “Survival”. These shows often use viewers feedback via the phone and Internet and elements of the game show. Some reality TV shows combine that aspect of real life situations but with the addition of scripts and direction to shape the outcome as desired. This is called the “Dramatic Reality Show” because the participants do some acting and drama. Ex. MTV’s “Real World”.

13. “TV is in competition with the educational system as a purveyor of information, knowledge and comment about the world.” “It is in competition with live sports events as a leisure choice.” “It is in competition with literature as a leisure choice.” It is also in a struggle over lifestyles and cultural values. “It is in competition with the Internet, not just at the level of information but as a technology of communication, and one which will probably swallow TV.” TV is “overriding all boundaries, blurring distinctions between the public and the private, between masculinity and femininity, childhood and adulthood, politicians and their electors.”

14. Television and the media after all are infused with everyday life. Ex. “TV produces reality as well as representing it. One way it does so is by generating celebrities who are often now famous for being famous (not for any accomplishments).” These celebrities’ “lives can be understood as real-time, lived experiments on the power of the media to shape a life as a spectacle.” Ex. Olsen twins: “media figures since they were nine months old (on Full House), stars of computer games and animated TV series, producers of a video series, brand names for a line of clothes, cosmetics, home furnishings, books and CDs, and web site and movie stars as well.” The countdown to their eighteenth birthday was a major media event in the US. Every aspect of their lives is made public. “The old understanding of the media- that it represents or comments on the world and that it exists on a different plane than life itself- has been completely undone by the broadcast media over the past century.”

15. 4.2 Popular Music It is “a spontaneous product of individuals (both musicians and fans) who come to it outside the highly capitalized recording industry itself, and have poached new technologies to make and listen to topics on their own term.” “Although popular music is genuinely popular, it is also troublesome, segmenting communities by generation, class, race, ethnicity, tastes and gender.” “The big multinational corporations that dominate the music industry themselves organize their music divisions into units each concentrating on a different genre and audience.” For example, “Black audiences are marked out from white, and certain genres (notably so-called ‘modern rock’) are given more attention because of their history of profitability.” Popular musicians “over the years have acquired significant clout.” Ex.”Bono of U2’s role in increasing US aid to the world’s poorest nations. The White House confirmed that lobbying from the rock star was significant in the USA’s unexpected change of direction, which led to the EU increasing its aid budget also.”

16. “The Street music of the disaffected young in the late seventies.” Punk Developed as a reaction to the following: –Highly industrialized and show-biz music such as the rock genres. –The faded utopianisms of the hippie movement of the sixties –The vain and self-obsessed “glam rock” (A style of rock music first popular in the early 1970s, characterized by male performers wearing flamboyant clothes and makeup.) Its urban, working-class, young and aggressively anti-establishment. Prefers a language of abuse and rebellion Borrowed from rock’n’roll. Punk followers’ style included the use of safety pins, bondage trousers, S&M paraphernalia, and ripped clothing. Punk and Reggae

17. Reggae Started in the seventies and eighties with a method that explored studio-based techniques for making new sounds This method is called Toasting –Toasting developed in the early fifties and involved the use of a “sound system” (a portable record deck, amplifiers and speakers used for street parties) These systems were mainly popular in the poorer neighborhoods. –Toasting DJs: Musicians who used the “sound systems “ to layer slang lyrics and sounds on to records and songs. Hip Hop developed from Toasting. Included fashion styles, graffiti art, break- dancing, scratching or turn-tabling and free- style (the improvisation of rhymes on top of rhythm tracks) Then Hip Hop became popular in Jamaica Hip Hop’s use of Toasting gave way to the creation of Reggae in Jamaica. Reggae was one of the most innovative, technologised music genres of the nineties.

18. Reggae incorporated a Jamaican religious cult called “Rastafarianism” –Rastafarianism’s followers believe that the last Ethiopian monarch (Haile Selassie) to be divine. –“Deepened a long-standing ethos of rebellion and disaffection among Jamaican youth, providing it with an everyday life ethic that wore its difference and refusals on the body and offered a spiritual and historical self- understanding.” Rastafarianism is also a style that characterizes Reggae: –Dreadlocks –Ganja-smoking (type of drug) –Patois-speaking (a unique version of English spoken by Jamicans) Some of the Ideals associated with reggae are: –A Back to Africa Idea and Black power –“In the music they found an alternative Africanist identity, ‘a black heart beating back to Africa on a steady pulse of music.’” –A rejection of the white man’s materialist world Reggae and Rastafarianism became popular in the eighties around the world after Bob Marley’s visit to New Zealand. Successful Reggae bands started to appear.

19. “Effectively music can form identities that have political and even spiritual dimensions.” “Music can form a bridge, a basis for sociability, between groups of fans with no ‘organic’ association with one another- including indeed academic and non-academic fans.”

20. Modern Folk Music or commercial Product? Folk Music has been defined in several ways: –as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers. –It has been contrasted with commercial and classical styles. It has become increasingly common to refer to this type of music as traditional music. –Since the middle of the 20th century, the term has also been used to describe a kind of popular music that evolved from traditional music. “The tension between music as an authentic, self-driven collective expression (as if it were a kind of folk music) against music as commodity or industry product.” “Music needs to be understood not from the fan’s point of view but institutionally and economically.” For example: Heavy Metal fans do not constitute a subculture on their own, but became popular as a result of its occurrence in a moment in the history of the music industry when it was controlled by only a few players. The emergence of FM radio stations and play lists met a suburban audience. Those few players help spread Heavy Metal music by playing it on the radio. “ Heavy metal was a uniform style which overrode local differences, partly as a result of centralized radio programming.”

21. The relation between commercialism and amateur expressivity. One genre that does that is Rap Rap Music “Has been extraordinarily commercially successful and has retained its connections with the street movement from which it emerged during the seventies.” Rap has replaced Reggae as the music which represents black resistance globally. Rap is poetic and verbal, many music genres are not. Its beats or rhythms are produced separately from the lyrics and vocals in what is effectively a different section of the industry. Street Marketing: helped popularize Rap. –“This was a form of retailing that replaced or supplemented radio and video promotion by swamping select sites in the young, urban, black public sphere- basketball games, local stores, schoolyards, clubs- with sales material.” –“Marketing and community merge here and street credibility becomes both a marketing tool and a commitment to a social sector and to ‘being real’.” –“This sophisticated marketing techniques have been key to the gangster rap which emerged in Los Angeles in the late eighties.”

22. “Over the last decade rap has itself split into numerous genres and audiences.” Such as fusions with reggae and other genres. Some ideals of Rap: –Scandalizes women, liberals, family values. –Performs rebelliousness –May express a crisis of masculinity among urban African Americans. Dance Music “Another genre that brings the tension between commerce and underground expressivity into the open.” “Like punk and rap, it begins with a marginal youth cultural formation” This formation is the “Rave Scene” –“Emerged simultaneously in Ibiza, the Spanish holiday resort, and in Manchester around 1987 when house music first met the drug ecstasy.” –The rave scene is associated with large parties and the use of drugs and of course dancing. –News of these huge parties was spread by word of mouth or on pirate radio stations and were illegal. –EX. In 1992, 40,000 people gathered in England’s West Country over a period of six days of illegal partying.

23. The rave scene, “unlike reggae, punk and Hip Hop, had no organic base, no community it could claim to articulate and express. It was drawn together by the music and the drugs.” Not the politics of identity but of pleasure and mood and spirituality. House Music –Developed out of disco in Detroit and Chicago and sampled all kinds of sounds by linking them through effects and percussion breaks. –Quickly spread to London and Germany and by the early 1990s was established in California and New York –It was played on large speakers by DJs in clubs. Dance Music which came about as a result of House Music helped shape the club music of the nineties and its star the DJ.

24. Art or Pop? “A certain aestheticism (or creativity) is integral to the popular music markets insofar as they are dependent on reviews and criticism. Reviews make value judgments to guide consumer choices.” So the creativity of a musical piece helps make that creation popular. “Popular music is crucial to cultural studies because it provides a strong example of how art forms nurture particular cultural formations through processes of division and attraction, and because music fandom crosses the border between academic and non-academic so easily.” “The discipline’s engagement with music does not have the political force that it does with topics such as gender, ethnicity, race and sexuality, because these are much more nearly political through and through.” “When it comes to music, cultural studies can celebrate, critique and try to understand and explain, but it does so at some distance from its topic, and necessarily with a limited political agenda.”

25. 4.3 The Internet and Technoculture Technoculture: “refers to the interactions between, and politics of, technology and culture.” It is “how successive technological developments have influenced (and continue to influence our lives).” In the eighties the internet was just starting and was then extremely limited. It was managed by the US Department of Defense and a research network called ARPNET. Internet access at that time meant a supper slow modem that took sometimes hours to connect through a phone line. “The difficulty with technoculture is that no one knows where it is heading or exactly what it is.” From 1990 on wards, the word “Web” meant something very specific within the larger Internet. It meant the World Wide Web and the user-friendly services and limited sites that contained bulletin boards and a bit latter pictures then sound. “Today the Web can signify the whole thing: it’s interchangeable with terms such as ‘Internet’ or ‘Net’.”

26. “The Web does not just belong to culture: it is as much a business, an administrative and a military tool as a personal, leisure one.” “It is not just a service either. It absorbs and transforms most of the old communication technologies- telephony, broadcasting, mail, publishing- and adds some new ones- audio down-loading, linking, and info-tracking.” “Because the web is still developing and because no one knows exactly what it will turn out to do or what its social effects will be, its critique and theory routinely lapse into speculation and prophecy.” “The digitization of information and communication is separate from the Internet. (It) is closely connected to the Net’s extension, since everything that can be digitized can be put on the Web. “At the moment however digitization has its own effects independently of the Web, including important implications for copyright, as in the case of MP3 sharing.”

27. The Web’s social and cultural impacts 1) “The uptake and use of the new technologies depend crucially on local context and don’t ‘undermine socially normative behavior’.” 2) “The fears and risks associated with new technologies are unevenly distributed in social terms.” 3) “Virtual technologies supplement rather than substitute for real activities.” such as online games and programs. 4) “The more virtual the more real, which means that the new technologies actually encourage more traditional activities.” Ex. “In the publishing industry, where digitalization of book production has made the process cheaper, quicker and more flexible, increasing the number of books published per year.” 5) “The more global the more local, which means that technologies which seem able to transcend location can actually produce its re-inscription.” Ex. “The community websites that provide an effective means of communicating images and attractions of, and activities in, particular localities.” “Connecting neighborhoods to the Web can increase local pride. Net usage can seem to confirm long-seated cultural practices.”

28. “The Web represents approximately 11 percent of total media consumer time in the USA and obviously much less that that globally.” In 1999, the United Nations Development Program reported that first world countries “constituted 19 percent of the world’s population but 91 percent of Internet users.” “This is the figure that measures the global digital divide, i.e. the massive inequality of Net access across regions.” “The Web means increased access to the mass of commodities. And information and the increased fragmentation of leisure activities: television, reading, movie-going have a real competitor in the Web- indeed there is now significant evidence that TV viewership is being hurt by Web browsing.” “Every act on the Web can be monitored and leaves its traces. This means that privacy is under jeopardy. Work and consumption are both more able to be monitored that previously.”

29. This “suggests the emergence of a new domain between the public and the private- the domain of the web log (or blog): web-posted diaries on individuated web sites.” “The blog radically democratizes web publishing since it makes it both easy and free.” There are many different types of blogs and “almost all of them fall into a strange space where they are lost in the vastness of the Web. They are neither secret nor public.” Social networks have also emerged that make communication between people very easy and fast and enable people to stay connected to each other and keep into touch. Ex. Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. “Time works differently on the Web than it has for traditional media and cultural forms.” “Digitization allows culture to exist in an eternal present. The temporality of print media and broadcast media where texts such as news programs are presented in regular intervals and at specified time.” Websites rarely mark time of origin, and are there as long as the server remains connected.”

30. “The increased capacity to communicate that comes with the Web actually functions to degrade democracy because it submerges the individual voice in a mass of information and communication without order.” “As the Web increasingly structures social and cultural relations, its effects will need to be carefully monitored, its risks guarded against, its pleasures and possibilities disseminated and critically expressed.” “The main dangers that the web poses seem to be the digital divide; its power to shrink the public geography of culture; and its capacity to turn online behaviors into action which is at once a commodity and an object for surveillance.” “The Web’s promises include the formation of new collective identities, new forms of online sociability and new ease of access for all kinds of information.”