By Douglas Kellner
Radio, television, film,
and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge
our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be
male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of
sexuality; and of "us" and "them." Media images help shape
our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad,
positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths,
and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the
appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles
demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise
force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of
the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places
or be oppressed.
We are immersed from
cradle to grave in a media and consumer society and thus it is important to
learn how to understand, interpret, and criticize its meanings and messages.
The media are a profound and often misperceived source of cultural pedagogy:
They contribute to educating us how to behave and what to think, feel, believe,
fear, and desire -- and what not to. The media are forms of pedagogy which
teach us how to be men and women. They show us how to dress, look and consume;
how to react to members of different social groups; how to be popular and
successful and how to avoid failure; and how to conform to the dominant system
of norms, values, practices, and institutions. Consequently, the gaining of
critical media literacy is an important resource for individuals and citizens
in learning how to cope with a seductive cultural environment. Learning how to
read, criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipulation can help empower
oneself in relation to dominant forms of media and culture. It can enhance
individual sovereignty vis-a-vis media culture and give people more power over
their cultural environment.
Components of a Critical
Cultural Studies
At
its strongest, cultural studies contains a three-fold project of analyzing the
production and political economy of culture, cultural texts, and the audience
reception of those texts and their effects. This comprehensive approach avoids
too narrowly focusing on one dimension of the project to the exclusion of
others. To avoid such limitations, I would thus propose a multi-perspectival
approach that (a) discusses production and political economy, (b) engages in
textual analysis, and (c) studies the reception and use of cultural texts. [3]
Production and Political
Economy
Because
it has been neglected in many modes of recent cultural studies, it is important
to stress the importance of analyzing cultural texts within their system of
production and distribution, often referred to as the political economy of
culture. [4] Inserting texts into the system of culture within which they are
produced and distributed can help elucidate features and effects of the texts
that textual analysis alone might miss or downplay. Rather than being
antithetical approaches to culture, political economy can actually contribute
to textual analysis and critique. The system of production often determines
what sort of artifacts will be produced, what structural limits there will be
as to what can and cannot be said and shown, and what sort of audience effects
the text may generate.
Study of the codes of
television, film, or popular music, for instance, is enhanced by studying the
formulas and conventions of production. These cultural forms are structured by
well-defined rules and conventions, and the study of the production of culture
can help elucidate the codes actually in play. Because of the demands of the
format of radio or music television, for instance, most popular songs are three
to five minutes, fitting into the format of the distribution system. Because of
their control by giant corporations oriented primarily toward profit, film and
television production in the U.S. is dominated by specific genres such as talk
and game shows, soap operas, situation comedies, action/adventure series,
reality TV, and so on. This economic factor explains why there are cycles of
certain genres and subgenres, sequelmania in the film industry, crossovers of
popular films into television series, and a certain homogeneity in products
constituted within systems of production marked by rigid generic codes,
formulaic conventions, and well-defined ideological boundaries.
For more
https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/SAGEcs.htm
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