H409 Mariam Exam Blog

Fans act as ‘textual poachers’ – taking elements from media texts to create their own culture. The development of the ‘new’ media has accelerated ‘participatory culture’, in which audiences are active and creative participants rather than passive consumers. They create online communities, produce new creative forms, collaborate to solve problems, and shape the flow of media. This generates ‘collective intelligence’. From this perspective, convergence is a cultural process rather than a technological one. Jenkins prefers the term ‘spreadable media’ to terms such as ‘viral’, as the former emphasises the active, participatory element of the ‘new’ media.

Hall’s ‘encoding-decoding’ model argued that media producers encode ‘preferred meanings’ into texts, but these texts may be ‘read’ by their audiences in a number of different ways:  The dominant-hegemonic position: a ‘preferred reading’ that accepts the text’s messages and the ideological assumptions behind the messages  The negotiated position: the reader accepts the text’s ideological assumptions, but disagrees with aspects of the messages, so negotiates the meaning to fit with their ‘lived experience’  The oppositional reading: the reader rejects both the overt message and its underlying ideological assumptions.

Exposure to television over long periods of time cultivates standardised roles and behaviours. Gerbner used content analysis to analyse repeated media messages and values, then found that heavy users of television were more likely, for example, to develop ‘mean world syndrome’ – a cynical, mistrusting attitude towards others – following prolonged exposure to high levels of television violence. Gerbner found that heavy TV viewing led to ‘mainstreaming’ – a common outlook on the world based on the images and labels on TV. Mainstreamers would describe themselves as politically moderate.

The media can influence people directly – human values, judgement and conduct can be altered directly by media modelling. Empirical evidence best supports direct influence rather than the alternative models of media effects: two-step flow, agenda-setting, no effects, or the media reflecting existing attitudes and behaviour. Media representations of aggressive or violent behaviour can lead to imitation. The media may influence directly or by social networks, so people can be influenced by media messages without being exposed to them. Different media have different effects. The ‘new’ media offer opportunities for self-directedness.

Cultural industries follow the normal capitalist pattern of increasing concentration and integration – cultural production is owned and controlled by a few conglomerates who vertically integrate across a range of media to reduce risk. Risk is particularly high in the cultural industries because of the difficulty in predicting success, high production costs, low reproduction costs and the fact that media products are ‘public goods’ – they are not destroyed on consumption but can be further reproduced. This means that the cultural industries rely on ‘big hits’ to cover the costs of failure. Hence industries rely on repetition through use of stars, genres, franchises, repeatable narratives and so on to sell formats to audiences, then industries and governments try to impose scarcity, especially through copyright laws. The internet has created new powerful IT corporations, and has not transformed cultural production in a liberating and empowering way – digital technology has sped up work, ...

Livingstone and Lunt studied four case studies of the work of Ofcom. Ofcom is serving an audience who may be seen as consumers and/or citizens, with consequences for regulation: consumers have wants, are individuals, seek private benefits from the media, use the language of choice, and require regulation to protect against detriment; citizens have needs, are social, seek public or social benefits from the media, use the language of rights, and require regulation to promote the public interest. Traditional regulation is being put at risk by: increasingly globalised media industries, the rise of the digital media, and media convergence.