Q15-Q21 Flashcards
- What do discussions on ‘celebrity politics’, soft-news and fiction have in common and how do they contribute to understand how news is produced and consumed?
celebrity politics
- change of traditional political conduct
- effect of commodification
CP1 and CP2
Soft news
-tabloids, gossip, disaster, scandal etc
Fiction
- self explanatory
CULTURAL STUDIES
How do they contribute?
- shows the range of shapes and forms media takes, depending on audiences
- shows the relaxation of the assumption that media needs to be USEFUL / OBJECTIVE to belong to the media
- establishes informal channels of exerting power, replicating ideology or fostering counter-culture
- bring the focal point to the user - what is meaningful to them? What RESONATES?
- shows how they can have a critical take of hegemonic discourse - without being objective / rational / formal
Redifines what COUNTS as news, as well as what is meaningful for the consumer;
Shows how non-serious news can prove to be counter-culture
POL ECONOMY
+++++++ DEPOLITISATION WHILE POLITISATION
- Recontextualise the example about the razor and explain how advertisement and marketing may contribute to hegemony.
Hegemony - intellectual and moral leadership; naturalised - does not look like ideology anymore because it is inscribed in the fabric of society
marketing and advertising - develop a product & its promotion strategy based on the characteristics and values identified with the targeted consumer group
Product itself - the materialisation of social discourse on targeted consumer category (e.g. gender)
Razor example
- male model (utilitarian design, mention of technological capabilities: capitalises on assumed male interest in technology)
Vs
- female model (no mention to shaving, aesthetic, no mention of technology, designed as a lipstick -> symbol of womanhood)
Thus, tech developed after internalization of discourse and serves to further reinforce it
Example: my brother’s Christmas gift - Clinique face cream compared to my skincare cream
- What is the conflict between representation and information function of media? Link w epistemological discussion and the notion of objectivity.
Rep & info function: one of the 3 roles of media in democracy
Information function
- media supposed to help citizens achieve the state of ‘monitorial citizenship’
- feed citizens ‘objective’, reliable, neutral info on which they can base their choices in times of political engagement
- requires a certain ‘objectivity’ on the side of the media
Representation function
- representing various interests among society
- accommodates wide ranging opinion
-the place where marginalised / oppressed / activists can represent their needs and wants
- accepts bias -> represents specific viewpoints and interests
The conflict between the two: the needs for media to be neutral but also partisan
HOWEVER, there is no such thing as objectivity
Positivism vs interpretivism
-> no cold truths; facts as constructed and dependent on interpretation
Objectivity
-> POL ECON: concentration, commercialisation of media, advertisement + sources, non- contextualisation
-> CULTURAL STUDIES: what ppl consume differs and within the same consumption patterns they still have a different experience of the news (for each user)
SO, nothing can be truly ‘objective’
- Discuss the different factors that influence the ‘construction of facts’ in the news, both form a production and a consumption perspective.
Construction of facts
Production
Pol econ
- who writes
- who owns the company
- who advertises
-sources
-context
Cultural studies
- what is worth mentioning
-what values are encouraged / discouraged in news
- which are the targeted audience
Consumption
- how do people make sense of the facts
- interpretation
- how reading a text interacts with prior experience + beliefs, culture
- Explain how structuration theory contributes to understanding media production and consumption and how this is a critique of orthodox Marxist political economy perspectives on the media.
Structuration theory
- structure of. rules and resources
- enabling and constraaining
- diff types of resources -> iiinterchangeable
- by performing daily actions and tasks, that reflect said structures of meaning, people reproduce the structure and modify it
Why critical of Marx?
- Marxism falls prey to economic reductionism
- Structuration theory: people’s own interpretation of facts, based on specific social context, and econ / pol / cultural relations of power, lead to actions and behaviours that reproduce the structure
-> more complex than Marxist economic generalisation
- Clarify Bourdieu’s field theory and explain how the notion of habitus can be applied to media consumption.
INVESTIGATION BETWEEN STRUCTURE AND AGENCY
Habitus - mental schemes that shape people’s perception and attitudes
bordieu field theory - identify 3 types of capital (econ, social, cultural - interchangeable between eachother)
Map peoples tastes based on their capital
Establish tension fields
Predict how patterns of levels of total capital (econ + cultural) influence people’s habitus and even their tastes
Applied to media consumption:
It explains the (not deterministic) cycle between structured structures of media consumption and structuring structures of media consumption. - bridges the gap between pol econ and cultural studies - connects social structures with individual structures -> both society and individual agency are important in decoding media
- Explain how the psychological concept of SCHEMATA fits into Bordieu’s theory of habitus and how this helps to understand how people decode media messages
- What is SCHEMATA
+ psychology insights into Habitus
- habitus as mental schemes: patterns, categories, connections established into our brains
- automatic associations based on prior experience (thus sensitive to culture, socialisation)
- resonate with similar patterns and schemes
+ adds onto the habitus theory and updates it
- that is why people strive towards familiarity and towards what they already agree with
