W6/WQ—Mass Media, Advertising, & Audiences
The Consumer Society: Myths & Structures — Jean Baudrillard (1970)
This technological process of mass communications delivers a certain kind of very imperative message: a message-consumption message, a message of segmentation and spectacularization, of misrecognition of the world and foregrounding of information as a commodity, of glorification of content as sign. In short, it performs a conditioning function (in the advertising sense of the term: in this sense, advertising is the 'mass' medium par excellence, and its schemata leave their stamp on all the other media) and a function of misrecognition.
This is true of all the media, even of the book medium, of 'literacy', which McLuhan makes one of the central linkages in his theory. He takes the view that the emergence of the printed book was a key turning-point in our civilization, not so much for the contents (ideological, informational, scientific, etc.) it passes down from one generation to another, as for the basic constraint of systematization it exerts by virtue of its technical essence. He takes the view that the book is, first and foremost, a technical model, and that the order of communication prevailing within it (visualized segmentation, letters, words, pages, etc.) is a more influential, more determining model in the long term than any particular symbol, idea or fantasy that makes up its manifest content: 'The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.'
Self-evidently, most of the time, the content conceals from us the real function of the medium. It presents itself as a message, whereas the real message, with regard to which the manifest discourse is perhaps mere connotation, is the deep structural change (of scale, of model, of habitus) wrought in human relations. Crudely put, the 'message' of the railways is not the coal or the passengers it carries, but a vision of the world, the new status of urban areas, etc. The 'message' of TV is not the images it transmits, but the new modes of relating and perceiving it imposes, the alterations to traditional family and group structures. And we may go even further and say that, in the case of TV and the modern mass media, what is received, assimilated and 'consumed' is not so much a particular spectacle as the potentiality of all spectacles.
This, then, is the truth of the mass media: it is their function to neutralize the lived, unique, eventual character of the world and substitute for it a multiple universe of media which, as such, are homogeneous one with another, signifying each other reciprocally and referring back and forth to each other. In the extreme case, they each become the content of the others - and that is the totalitarian 'message' of a consumer society.
Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media — Wendy Hui Kyong Chun (2016)
Habit + Crisis = Update also makes clear the ways in which networks do not produce an imagined and anonymous 'we' (they are not, to use Benedict Anderson's term, "imagined communities") but rather, a relentlessly pointed yet empty, singular yet plural YOU.
Instead of depending on mass communal activities, such as reading the morning newspaper, to create national citizens, networks rely on asynchronous yet pressing actions to create interconnected users. In network time, things flow noncontinuously. The NOW constantly punctures time, as the new quickly becomes old, and the old becomes forwarded once more as new(ish). New media are N(YOU) media; new media are a function of YOU. New media relentlessly emphasize you: Youtube.com; What's on your mind?; You are the Person of the Year.
Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole — Benjamin Barber (2007)
Infantilizing Consumers: The Coming of Kidults
Fast edits and jump cuts in films and videos as well as the instant popup ads that blitz the internet all exhibit the same frenzied obsession with speed. Compare Hollywood films of the 1930s where scenes could last for tens of seconds or even a full minute without a single edit or change in camera angle with today’s music videos and comic-book and digital-action films where no scene lasts more than a second or two without a snip here and an edit there.
In today’s film and video, multiple jump cuts per second are the norm for hyperactive directorial control freaks among whom faster has become a form of cinematic tyranny, imagining as they do that youthful audiences saddled with their media-induced attention deficits crave such speed—even as they themselves reinforce the addictive tendencies. Speed is a drug like any other that must be taken in ever higher doses just to maintain its hold over the psyche.
Digitalization encourages and facilitates both speed and nonlinearity, the latter a kind of artificial rupture in temporality in which our “normal” linear experience of time is deconstructed into nonsequential fragments. Ruptures in temporality may well catalyze art and creative innovation, to be sure (the Best Picture Oscar-winning film Crash is an example), but are corrupting to normal consciousness and to responsible and predictable behavior of the kind traditionally associated with mature adulthood.
Seen from the perspective of adulthood, speed has become the paramount modern form of youthful vanity: time whipped, time mastered, time accelerated, time overcome.
On the Audience Commodity and its Work — Dallas Smythe (1981)
What is the nature of the content of the commercial mass media under capitalism? […] We considered the many ways in which there is unity between the apparently advertising and the apparently nonadvertising content of the commercial mass media. Both types have the same features. But it would be a serious error to ignore the importance of the formal difference between the “advertising” and the “program” or “editorial” content.
The fiction that the advertising supports or makes possible the news, entertainment, or “educational” content has been a public relations mainstay of the commercial mass media. The professional esprit de corps of journalists hinges on it.
Marx’s Capital in the Information Age — Christian Fuchs (2017)
Information and communication technologies, including the computer, certainly play a key role in accelerating the circulation of commodities in space-time. This is however not their only role. Media also communicate ideologies, such as political ideologies and commodity ideology, in the form of commercial advertisements. Computers and computer networks are not only organisers of the circulation of commodities, but also the means of production for the creation of information products. They are furthermore the platforms for companies’ internal and external communication.
While trains, buses, automobiles, ships, lorries and airplanes transport people and physical goods, computer networks transport information, information products and flows of communication. The computer is a universal machine that is simultaneously a means of production, circulation and consumption.
Remediation: Understanding New Media — Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin (1999)
On the otherhand, a commercial is no simulacrum. Its force is lost unless the viewer connects it with the product itself and feels an urge to buy. "Every commercial is an implicit unanswered question — 'Will you buy?' — that calls for an action the commercial text cannot provide, because only real viewers can buy the very real commodities the commercials advertise" (Allen 1992, 125). The video commercial, the product, and the practices of buying and selling form themselves into a network in which each element relates to and completes the others.
Perhaps more than any other television genre, the commercial insists on the reality of television — not just its power as a medium, but its place in our physical and social world. When the viewer goes to a supermarket, she will see products labeled "as seen on TV," as if the presence of the commercial validates the product. The most intriguing form of advertising now, the infomercial, is particularly insistent on connecting the product to the world. It combines various techniques from television and film documentary with the traditional commercial, and, by its length and frank acknowledgment of its intention to sell, it further insists on the inseparability of the message and the product. Computer graphics and digital technology have so far done little to change this form, but they can contribute to the sense of authenticity and immediacy through the same techniques (text and graphics integrated with video) that we see in television news broadcasts.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media — Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky (1988)
A Propaganda Model
The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.
In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and the general community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance.
Digital Marx: Toward a Political Economy of Distributed Media — Andreas Wittel (2016)
We will probably get closer to an answer if we turn our attention to media technologies. In the age of mass media these technologies – the means of production – were expensive. Most people could not afford the ownership of all those assets necessary for print media or broadcast media.
As a consequence there were only a limited number of media organisations which produced and disseminated media content to a huge number of consumers/recipients. Thus mass media are characterised by a small number of content producers and a large audience. For societies that perceive themselves as liberal democracies this is a rather problematic starting point. In fact no other issue about mass media is as problematic as the ownership of means of production and processes of media concentration, the ownership of media technologies and media organisations in the hands of increasingly fewer ‘media moguls’. The limited appropriation of Marxist theory in the age of mass media results from a very specific historic reality, from historically unique concerns that were generated by mass media technologies.
Digital technologies have brought about a fundamentally different media landscape, where mass media are not the only show in town any more. They have been given company by distributed media and increasingly they seem to be replaced by this new kid on the block. Distributed media operate with a very different organisational logic. Whereas mass media are hierarchical, linear, with a control centre and one-way flow of media content from few producers to many recipients, distributed media are networked, non-linear, with multi-directional and reciprocal flows of media content from many producers to many consumers.
A Brief History of Neoliberalism — David Harvey (2007)
Thirty years of neoliberal freedoms have, after all, not only restored power to a narrowly defined capitalist class. They have also produced immense concentrations of corporate power in energy, the media, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and even retailing (for example Wal-Mart). The freedom of the market that Bush proclaims as the high point of human aspiration turns out to be nothing more than the convenient means to spread corporate monopoly power and Coca Cola everywhere without constraint.
With disproportionate influence over the media and the political process this class (with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News in the lead) has both the incentive and the power to persuade us that we are all better off under a neoliberal regime of freedoms. For the elite, living comfortably in their gilded ghettos, the world must indeed seem a better place.
On the Audience Commodity and its Work — Dallas Smythe (1981)
Perhaps the only conclusion to be drawn at this time on this point is that there is no free time devoid of audience activity which is not preempted by other activities which are market-related (including sleep which is necessary if you are to be fit to meet your market tests on the morrow). In any society, sleep and other nonwork activities are necessary to restore and maintain life and labor power. Work itself is not intrinsically oppressive. It is the inclusion in so-called leisure time of commodity-producing work under monopoly capitalism which creates the contradiction between oppressive liberating activity in time for which people are not paid.
The bitter reality for most Canadians and Americans is that the commodity rat race — as they call it — makes a mockery of free time and leisure, both during their years at the job and after retirement.
