Study Guide/ Revision No

MEDIA STUDIES SPRING 2010. INSTITUTE OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION.

Ways of seeing:

Publicity images stimulate our imagination with either memory or expectation.

They belong to the moment- as we pass by them and as they need to be updated regularly.

They may refer to the past but they speak of the future.

One publicity image, may not have any impact on you, however, the whole system of publicity is now an accepted part of life.

Publicity images make us feel as if we are static and they are dynamic- although this is not true.

Publicity is related to freedom- of choice and of enterprise. We are free to buy any publicized good or to publicize the goods we manufacture.- as such they represent the free world.

They all may be related to different products but they make one common suggestion- that your life will be transformed/improved by buying stuff.

They do this by showing us how models have been transformed and have now become enviable. Envy= glamour.

The image cannot tell us about the joy of the product as that may create a distance between you and the object- instead they tell us about your future self and what that will be like once you have the product. So publicity tells us not about pleasure but about happiness. And that too a happiness as judged by others outside of yourself.

Once you become an object of envy you have to be disinterested in those who are watching and envying you- this is part of the glamour too.

The images thus have an impact on our self esteem and our love for ourselves.

Oil painting

The oil painting tradition impacted European vision for over 4 centuries- so naturally publicity drew upon this visual culture.

1- Publicity images borrow a lot of references from European art

2- Use art images for their relation to wealth, class and culture

Using art in publicity makes the object more classy, and also somewhat spiritual as well as cultural.

Paintings used to be used by rich people to show how wealthy they were.

In Pakistan we tried to use this rich cultural past in the following:

-Anarkali the video by Shoaib Mansur (they even speak Persian- so courtly they are)

- Amla shampoo used to run an ad’ that showed how in the purana zamana ladies used to pound herbs etc- thus creating a link between the wisdom of the past and this product

-similarly, Gogo pan masala used to run an ad that showed little kids in the past stealing paan from their dadi’s paan daan. Again creating a link between paan masala and a old established classy tradition of paan daans.

So these ads rely on a common cultural understanding of the audience- and on half learned, unclear memories of some glorious past.

ANXIETY

Publicity makes us feel like if we don’t have enough money to buy buy buy, the we are nothing. So it works on the anxiety of not being enough.

The message this culture or system of publicity promotes is that:

Money = the ability to do/acquire/enjoy

So power to spend = power to live.

This is also connected to sexuality. The power to buy makes a person sexually desirable. i.e if you can buy AXE deo then women will be drawn to you.

Oil paintings were a record of wealth- so they referred to the past-i.e if you ever go into a museum – accidentally (the Punjab museum next to NCA maybe?) you’ll see paintings depicting partition- obviously you will read this as an event that took place in the past. Or if you see a Gandhara relief carving- then surely you will know that this refers to a past event.

but publicity images refer to your future. What you will be like once you get that blackberry, or zong or uth package.

You will become desirable.

When publicity speaks to the working classes (bus drivers, labourers) it promises transformation. Gorah making cream, thicker hair, slimming pills, fresh breath.

To the middle class publicity promises transformed relationships- tea and the good wife. Cooking oil and the energetic husband. Cell phones that allow kids studying abroad to stay in touch with the family.

So if publicity keeps speaking of a deferred future- one that never actually materializes, How does it remain relevant? Because publicity is judged according to how well it works on and connects with our fantasies. Fairness cream girls already have the Cinderella fantasy, wives are already imagining that a tea tray will bring harmony into the household.

Publicity plays on that gap between what we are and what we want to be. Publicity mirrors that space between what I am and what I want to be. Publicity does not manufacture the dream but it suggests to us that we are not enviable but we can be.

Publicity substitutes democracy- we cant change our systems but we can change ourselves- by buying.

So materialism is the only possible pleasure in a capitalist society. Even education becomes a material achievement.

Topics and concepts:

-Introduction:
You should have a working definition of media. Understand that media
are plural and can comprise a wide range of communication tools.

- Constructions of reality:
In what ways do media construct reality? the minute a camera is pointed in a certain direction it begins
to choose, and hide, and decide and lie.
Similarly, we discussed how different words have different and at
times loaded meanings- Lippman points out the limitations of language and vocabulary. 
Finally, Berger tells us that reality is constructed by a Capitalist
society to encourage materialism by playing on envy. What kind of
media do you think you’d find in a socialist society? What kind of media does Adorno want?

Think about ways that different types of media construct different realities.
How did Control Room construct a reality?
 Did it propose one kind of reality?
And now think about Rashomon- did that film reflect any kind of
reality or was it a construction of a fantasy realm? How were the codes and conventions of this film different from Hollywood or Bollywood?

- Audience and society


What effects, affects and influences do media have on audiences?

The Frankfurt school had a definite idea about how media and cultural productions impacted society, but you have been introduced to other models: Direct effects, Reinforcement, uses and gratifications.

Remember we spoke about how over the years ideas about audiences changed. What did Lazarsfeld say about media effects?

What is propaganda?

How do media create meanings? Fiske explained how camera distances convey villainy or intimacy because of the codes and conventions in society, look at the other codes he explains, lighting, gender representation, make up, ethnicity.

In what other ways do media impact society? Berger says they make us more materialistic via envy and glamour. This
is especially true of the labour classes who are encouraged to buy buy
buy a better life. Publicity images (or ads) make a false promise-
that we will be more loveable more enviable, more glamorous if we buy
buy buy. So we are perpetually chasing after this better self with
each new product and each new fad. More Berger notes later.

Lippman says they fail democracy.

We have also looked at how media represent certain social groups in a society, by doing so they may be either reflecting prejudices and stereotypes already existing in society and by reproducing these ideas they may be rejected. What does this say about ideology and power?

Who are others? Silverstone speaks about others extensively and recommends that proper distance is a form of morality and of humanity. Why does he advocate media literacy as a way to make the media space more moral? Why does Silverstone say that the media environment has a hole in its ozone layer? Why does he think the internet is so important? And why does he say the internet encourages narcissim?

Similarly we studied various research methods used to measure media’s
effects on society:

Cultivation, Agenda Setting, are some theories that
talk about how media affect viewers. The reading you were set also
talks about how effects theory perspectives have changed with time
from the idea in the 1940s that media have massive effects to the idea
in the 60s or thereabouts that media have very limited effects to the
current idea that media have moderate effects. The idea basically is
that scholars react to the trends that are current in their day. This
is because they are reading each other’s published works and staying
abreast of the latest in the field. What usually happens is that a few
well-known and respected scholars set the trend and everyone takes a
cue from the most well known, best funded and best reviewed work to
design their own. So for example Entman has become a well know scholar
working with Framing theory and almost anyone who does any further
research about framing will definitely cite Entman. Similarly Gerbener
is best known for introducing cultivation theory so anyone who wants
to conduct surveys or carry out experiments dealing with cultivation
will read up on and cite Gerbner in his work.

What you should know about effects work is:

Causality is different from casualty. Only experiments prove causality.
 Agenda setting is a theory for which causality was demonstrated via an
experiment. Cultivation theory does not typically include experiments
but relies largely on surveys – this is because the theory posits that
it takes a long time for the effect to have an effect.

Remember that experiments lack external validity because they are
generally conducted in artificial environments unlike the real world
and because the sample size is generally too small for us to be able
to generalize the results.
Phew.

Now that we have spent some time thinking about how media impact
society- lets switch gears and look at what impacts media.

Here too you have a number of ideas to think about- that we have
discussed over the course of the semester.

The uses and gratifications model

The socialization of journalists

What else drives media? Ideology? Codes and conventions? Commerce? Regulation? How does regulation drive media?

First, the model –profit versus public service.

Should media be profit driven for efficiency or should they be driven
by a desire to serve the public good? Your reading does mention some
advantages of each type of media and you should think about these.

In this topic you should be clear on the following concepts:


Public sphere,
Public opinion,
Public good.

It bears repeating on my part that public opinion is not simply to go
around asking people what they think about issues. Public opinion is a
more dynamic PROCESS. Whereby democratic theory assumes that media
will do the following
1- educate the public about key issues
2- to make these often boring issues interesting for the public by
dealing with them creatively
3- then, inform the public and those in power about what the public
thinks about issues. Media are suppose to give space and time to a
variety of views and ideas including the issues that affect
minorities, unpopular ideas and other less heard of views.
4- Media are suppose to be a space where various groups of people can
debate. This is why media seems full of shows where different parties
fight on air. However fighting is not what is required by the public
sphere model. What we need is informed debate.

Lippman of course thinks this is impossible and that democratic theory
is asking media for too much especially as the media is run on a
profit model and as people are not as smart as democratic theory
imagines them to be.
What do you think?

Also as part of this topic we discussed corporations.

The Business model of media says that in capitalist systems there is a
lot of competition and so a lot of voices including the minority
voices will automatically get heard because business owners will try
to give the audiences what they want. So, for example in the USA if
you consider African Americans as a minority group then, that group is
served by media as there are a number of movies, shows and books that
feature African American experience. However you might argue that such
shows are niche shows and are watched by niche audiences (in this case
black Americans) and that it is the mainstream media (think Friends)
that needs to include minority voices. Think about mainstream American
media- how inclusive of minority voices and opinions are these?
America includes significant Pakistani, Chinese, Spanish/Mexican and
non Christian origin citizens. Do you feel like these are accurately
and sufficiently represented on mainstream media?

The other issue with the business model is vertical and horizontal
integration. On the face of it the US has a number of media outlets :
websites , TV Channels, movies, newspapers etc. But if about 5
companies own a 1000 outlets then can we term that as competition?

And what can we do to escape the big bad corporations? Well here’s
where regulation comes in. For a long time PEMRA did not allow TV
channels to also own newspapers. That is why GEO which was launched by
Jang group- was forced to air all of their broadcasts out of Dubai-
this rule of PEMRA was known as “conflict of interest,” and was later
changed so that now Aaj TV, Express and Geo all of which have sister
newspapers, Business Recorder, Express and Jang – can operate both
types of media. Similarly the change in regulation allowed Hum Tv to
launch a radio channel.
So you can see that the trend of horizontal integration is also true
for Pakistan. Although so far vertical integration has not taken
place. If Geo buys a cinema and also starts selling you cable instead
of worldcall then we will have vertical integration as well.

Concepts you should know in this topic include:
Objectivity.
Integration
Regulation versus censorship
Freedom of speech

Objectivity in journalism is a very tricky concept. By now you have
seen in various films like Control Room that journalists are not
robots and that they have feelings, emotions, ideas and opinions.
Should journalists try to suppress their own subjectivities when
covering a story that may be as important as war? Or should they
perhaps tell us how they feel so that we are not fooled into thinking
we are reading impartial news? How should journalists achieve
objectivity?
One way journalists try to do this is by giving all the sides of a
story. So they would tell us that the President wants to go to war
however the opposition thinks this is a bad idea.
In reality, sometimes, news comes out biased.

Again market theory would say that if we de-regulate the business
environment to allow any and everyone to have a media platform then
all the voices would get heard. This too does not happen in practice
because media costs money and advertisers follow the majority.

Now think about freedom of speech. It’s a big issue today especially
as the freedom of speech of some countries allows them to publish
cartoons that upset large segments of the world population. This in
fact is a problem of globalization. Freedom of speech is rarely in
practice infinite. Even in the US and Europe pro Nazi voices for
instance would not be allowed to spread hatred and violence. It is for
individual societies to decide what will be included and won’t be
included in freedom of speech. However globalization has complicated
this issue- because although the Danish people might think that
certain cartoons are acceptable- those cartoons had an impact
thousands of miles away in our country. Think about this issue. How
would we react if the Danish told us that it was no longer okay for us
to print a certain topic? We would probably argue that Pakistan is a
sovereign state with a right to make its own laws about what we can
and cannot talk about. And in a previous era before Internet perhaps
we wouldn’t even have heard about the cartoons. Now we have heard and
have opinions about the issue.

Media globalization is interesting for this reason. Now think about
the public sphere and public opinion obligations of media and try to
figure out if global media can possibly achieve this. Imagine trying
to give time and space to all the various voices in the globe- fairly. Lippman’s ideas are very interesting if you think about them in a
global sense. And Silverstone has thought about these issues in a global sense. Meanwhile Clifford Bob has discussed how there is no global meritocracy or issue but a harsh Darwinian market place. What implications does this thesis have for a global public sphere? What implication do major corporations have on the global public sphere? What about representation issues?

TRUTH:

Our ruminations about objectivity lead us very naturally onto the next
topic we discussed. Truth with a capital T. We looked philosophically
at the question: are we capable as humans of coming close to Truth and
Objective reality? Plato says no, we are like prisoners in a cave- we
believe only what we see and hear. The idea is that our senses give us
information about the world and with this information we develop a
sense of Reality. So what happens if our senses are limited or
inaccurate or relative? Is reality too then limited, inaccurate and
relative? Plato tells us that Reality with a capital R does not change
-- it is outside the cave- and just because we cannot perceive it does
not mean that it is not real.

This leads us to Rashomon, which asks a lot of questions about the
nature of reality. The murdered man speaks to us, everyone tells a
different story, and we hear it all from an unreliable woodcutter who
seems to have stolen something from the victim. It sets up a nice
puzzle for us to think about objective reality.

Who is concerned with objectivity apart from philosophers and
religious people? Courts of law, journalists and scientists are. And
although we as humans may be too limited by our imperfect senses we
still need to have a working definition of what is objective so that
we can have trials for criminals and report on the working of
government and figure out if jumping from a high building will always
kill us in the real world (sorry Matrix fans) because of a thing
called gravity.

This discussion nicely leads us to Lippman and of Lippman we have
talked at length so I will not go on here.

I should clarify the press agents concept though as this one seemed to
leave a lot of you confused. Press Agent is just Lippman’s fancy way
of saying public relations officer. The guy who writes press releases
and faxes them to newspapers. A lot of these press releases end up in
the garbage by the way. Most actors have a PR guy- he’s the person who
speaks to the press after Brad Pitt divorces Jennifer Aniston. The PR
person won’t tell you stuff like, Aniston threw a shoe at Pitt or she
had a nervous breakdown but is more likely to say something like “both
are still on good terms, it was a natural evolution of their
relationship and they mutually decided to part but are still the best
of friends.”
Similarly, if two political party leaders met over lunch and one threw
water in the other’s face while the other was lying through the teeth
the whole time, the press agent will have a prepared statement ready
to say something like, “there were some disagreements but both parties
agreed that such talks go a long way in improving relations. At this
time we feel that more meetings are necessary to establish trust on
both sides.”

Finally I want you to think about ethics. Where do ethics come from?
Should ethics be law? What kind of ethics should journalists and othermedia professionals i.e the press agent have? Silverstone has some suggestions for us.

Why should we study the media?

What are the functions of Mass Media according to Lazarsfeld?

Monopolization canalization supplementation

What is two step flow?

What is Cultivation theory?

What was the Frankfurt School?

Marshall McLuhan (what did he say in one of your readings?)

Semiology- why should we study semiology? What the point?

What is the difference between inscribed reader and actual reader? What difference does it make?

What are the methods used to research audiences? Shaughnessy reading?

What is the uses and gratifications model?

Three models: Direct effects, reinforcement, uses and gratifications.

Preferred readings, negotiated readings, alternative/oppositional readings

What are codes and conventions and Genres- why should we study them?

What is cultural imperialism? Can you think of any examples?

What is the CNN Effect and when does it work? What does it tell us about who has power on the media agenda?

What options do global publics have for getting onto media agendas?

Think about how Al Jazeera fits in with Clifford Bob’s suggestions.

What is proper distance?

How can democracy be replaced by publicity?

What is Yellow journalism?

What’s the church state wall?

How do advertisers seek to overcome inattention from reluctant audiences?

What is publicity?

Why does Piers Robinson say that the CNN Effect is overstated?

What are the examples Robinson gives for the CNN Effect in the real world?

What is Berger's central premise about consumerism and materialism?

What are the advantages and disadvantages of commercial broadcast vs public broadcast systems?

Why do the prisoners in Allegory of the cave find it so hard to understand their friend when he returns from the outside world? What is an allegory? What is Plato trying to say? (Luckily wikipedia is not banned) also check out spark notes etc for Plato study guides.

Why is news unlike truth according to Lippman?

What are schemas?