Mass Medium: The new(TM) versus the Old(TM).
Kiegan Vallely 07839062 Mass Medium: ‘The new’ versus ‘the Old’. My intention is to probe into the world of media and discuss various theoretical and conceptual frameworks used across media and cultural studies. I will explore work of different key theorists in media and cultural studies. I shall also examine the different approaches to textual and audience analysis and study how sport is represented through the media, as well as looking at the cultural and ideological issues that operate through these representations. I shall summarise key points of my chosen title and implement current issues/theories into my selected sport - football adjacent to the theme ‘The champions League so far’. It is apparent that sport and the mass media have a particularly strong association going back to the eighteenth century (Rowe 2004). Horne (2006, pg 41) states how the media helped to construct what is sport, and how governing bodies for various sport came into effect after newspapers started publishing league tables during the late 19th century. Sport and media was further strengthened during mid 20th century by the arrival of televisions and today it is quite difficult to imagine sport without television. But, what is Sport? Nicholson.M (2007, p.4) notes that sport is best understood as having three core dimensions (Guttman 1978). First, it has a physical dimension Second, it is competitive. Third and finally, it must be structured and rule bound and Nicholson. M (2007, p.4) further adds “that it is worth nothing because mediated sport is almost exclusively highly structured highly competitive and very physical. In fact, sports such as football, which empathise, if not exaggerate sport’s tripartite definition, tend to dominate media coverage generally and television coverage in particular.” Nicholson (2007, p.10) also states “A cumulative total of 28,800 million people through-out 213 countries watched the 2002 tournament in Korea and Japan.” From this we can establish that masses of people are consuming masses of products within sport. A staggering 28,8000 million throughout the world watching the media, this is where I begin my exploration into how the media is represented and perceived by such a substantial audience. It should be noted that studying media is not a homogenous subject. Rowe (2004,p.65) ‘ the media are both the driving economic and cultural force in sport because they provide (or attract) most of the capital that in turn creates and disseminates the images and information which then generate more capital and more sport…’We can ascertain that within the 213 countries, there would be a vast range of cultures. Culture is “at the very least, means industries and practices like design, architecture, multimedia, film, broadcasting, publishing and fashion” (Redhead. S, 2004). Amongst the different cultures will be different codes. For example, English as a language can vary amongst the different regions like slang, also the different contexts and styles within ethnic groups to specialised vocabularies – work or sport related. The code containing message(s) is often described as being "encoded" from the sender and then "decoded" by the receiver. Within media the encoding process works on multiple levels and plays an integral part within the various cultures, how we make sense of ourselves and others, our experience of time and space, how power circulates and is contained and how meanings are exchanged, to put it better, “The Media does not reflect reality, The media constructs reality”. Redhead.S (2008). So what is media? Bignell.J (2002) refers it to all things which are channels for communicating something and further explains how simply walking down a street, various messages are being generated for us, by signs, posters and traffic lights.
Bignell (2002, p.3) stated five basic assumptions which may underlie meanings of the media. They are: Patterns and structures of signs in media texts which condition the meanings which media can be communicated and understood. The signs in media texts are understood in relation to other signs and other texts in social and cultural contexts. Each medium has features specific to it and features which are shared with other media. Texts and media position their audiences in particular ways, and audiences understand and enjoy the media in different and diverse ways and finally, the negotiation of meanings between media and ...
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Bignell (2002, p.3) stated five basic assumptions which may underlie meanings of the media. They are: Patterns and structures of signs in media texts which condition the meanings which media can be communicated and understood. The signs in media texts are understood in relation to other signs and other texts in social and cultural contexts. Each medium has features specific to it and features which are shared with other media. Texts and media position their audiences in particular ways, and audiences understand and enjoy the media in different and diverse ways and finally, the negotiation of meanings between media and audiences is important in understanding the ways that we think about ourselves and our culture. David Rowe (2004,p.8) states” A trained capacity to decode media sports texts and to detect the forms of ideological deployment of sport in the media is, irrespective of cultural taste - a crucial skill.”A skill to studying media is using semiotics, which came from ancient Greek word semelion, Modern semiological analysis was started by two men – Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce (1839-1914). “Semiology, literally the science of signs, but more precisely the study of meaning production, examines the process whereby language, whether visual, verbal or a combination of the two, produces meanings” (Horne et al, 1999, p.167). So how is meanings generated and conveyed? Boyd-Barrett.O et al supports one of Bignell’s assumption by (2002, p.134) stating “The essential breakthrough of semiology is to take linguistics as a model and apply linguistic concepts to other phenomena – texts – and not just language itself...we treat texts as being like languages, in that relationships are all important, and not things per se.” What Boyd-Barrett is saying is that linguistics comprises of different codes and messages and varies within different cultures hence meanings are may be interpreted or perceived in different ways – different signs. Semiogological analysis is primarily concerned with meaning in texts and that meaning stems from relationships amongst signs. A sign, Saussure tells us, is a combination of a concept and a sound-image, a combination that cannot be separated, he further explains how there is no logical connection between a word and a concept or a signifier and signified. For example, if ‘champion’ was the signifier, the signified image could range from ‘trophy’, ‘best team/individual’ or ‘glory’ to name a few. It is based on associations we learn and the relationships are arbitrary and changing all the time. Real Madrid have won the champion’s league the most times with nine, however the audience/media do not represent Real Madrid being a ‘champion’ team having not achieved any ‘glory’ or participating in the final since they last won it eight years ago in 2002. Bignell.J (2002) explains if we ‘denote’ something, we label it. The linguistic sign ‘Manchester United’ denotes a particular football team, and along with the denotative or labelling function of these signs to communicate a fact come extra associations which are called ‘connotations’. Because ‘Manchester United’ are the latest ‘Champions League’ and Premiership winners, they can be used to connote signifiers of best or most successful football team. From the Telegraph(2008) on 16th September Richard Bright Headlines reads “English clubs will dominate Champions League predicts Karl-Heinz Rummenigge (chairman of Bayern Munich)” Telegraph[2008]. The word ‘dominate’ signifies power, ruler, in control and status or importance. English teams are getting a ‘representation’ of being superior in The Champion’s league after the last final in May 2008 comprised of three English clubs in the semi finals and two in the final and the fact an English team has made every final since 2005.Representation refers to the construction in any medium of aspects of ‘reality’ such as teams, people, places, objects, events, cultural identities and other abstract concepts. “Semiotic approaches consider the construction of meaning, language and systems of representation. There are varying traditions, approaches, definitions and applications of semiotic analysis. The work of Saussure, Pierce, Barthes and Hall have been influential in the ways in which semiotic approaches have been developed as a key approach to textual analysis and within cultural studies” (Chandler,2002,p.7 Hall, 1997). Having already looked at Saussure, let’s look into works of other theorists leading up to Barthes and Hall. Various media analysts, during the last century have developed theoretical explanations of how audience receives, associates, reads and responds to a text or ‘sign’ by media texts and the influences they may induce – ‘constructing reality’.The Hypodermic Needle Model, dating from the 1920s was a theory suggesting that audiences passively absorb information transmitted via a media text without any attempt to process or challenge the data. Governments then had just discovered the power of advertising to communicate a message and created propaganda in persuading the public to their way of thinking.During the 1960s, as the first generation to grow up with television became adults, it became increasingly evident to media theorists that audiences made choices about what they did when consuming texts. Far from being a passive mass, audiences were made up of individuals who consumed texts for different reasons and in different ways. In 1948 Lasswell suggested that media texts had the following functions for individuals and society: surveillance, correlation, entertainment ,cultural transmission. Blulmer and Katz expanded this theory and published their own in 1974, expressing that individuals might select and use a text for the following purposes (i.e. uses and gratifications): Diversion - escape from monotonous routines. Personal Relationships - using the media for emotional and other interaction, e.g. Supporting your football team. Personal Identity - finding yourself mused within texts, copying behaviour and values from texts like spitting casually because your footballer hero does it. Surveillance - Information which could be useful such as weather forecasts, ticket/plane prices to for a coming fixture. Since then, the list of Uses and Gratifications has been extended, due to new media forms existing such as video games, digital television and the internet. Extending the concept of an active audience even further, during the 1980s and 1990s, an approach into the way individuals received and interpreted a text, and how their individual attributes such as gender, class, age and ethnicity affected their reading. This work was based on Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model of the relationship between text and audience. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text and that an element of activity becomes involved. The person negotiates the meaning of the text and the meaning may hinge on the cultural background of that individual. Brunt, R (1992) writes of Stuart Hall’s development, “whereby media codes were analysed, not in terms of complete ideological closure, but according to ‘preferred’ or ‘dominate’ meanings which could be decoded by views from within similar frameworks or, along lines suggested by the sociologist Frank Parkins’s (1972) scheme of ‘value systems,’ ‘negotiated’ or ‘opposed’ in various ways.”. One more theorist that should be noted is Roland Barthes. In 1957, Roland Barthes published a book called ‘Mythologies’. According to Bignell.J (2002) Barthes used semiotics as the predominate means of analysing aspects of everyday culture. Barthes declares ‘Myth is a type of speech’ and way of thinking which closely resembles ideology. The notion of myth explained a particular process through which historically determined circumstances were presented in some ‘natural’ manner. Having probed into the works of various theorists within media, let’s examine the different types of media: ‘Old Media’ comprising of magazines, newspapers and televisions and ‘New Media’: Internet and interactive television.Magazines generally offer more comprehensive, indepth coverage of a subject than newspapers. They are usually aimed at particular groups, genders and age brackets using specialised communication. We can differentiate the type of magazine by the encoding on the front medium and decoding the signs, ideologies, messages conveyed.Newspapers comprises of news and Bignell, J(2002, p.81) suggests that ‘news is not just facts, but representations produced in language and other signs like photographs.’ There are different types of newspapers. Tabloids use lots of pictures, have short news items and write in short sentences. They focus on celebrity gossip and give lots of space to scandal and sport. Tabloid newspapers often adopt a written style which is casual and chatty and are aimed at a younger audience. They usually illustrate their stories with eye-catching headlines, pictures, and captions. They are may use slang, alliteration and puns in their writing. Broadsheets use more text than pictures. Their stories tend to be more in depth reportage. Broadsheets tend to treat their subjects more seriously, and they present their information in a style which uses more complex language and longer sentences. Broadsheet newspapers generally aim to be more factual and objective in the way they cover the news. They tend to pay more attention to politics, government, and international affairs - rather than to scandal and showbiz news.Looking at three different newspapers published on May 23rd 2008, two tabloids : The Daily Mail[2008] and The Daily Star[2008] plus one from a broadsheets The Guardian[2008] it is evident of the different messages and signs published. The Daily Mail headlines reads ‘Sir Alex's champagne cavaliers even put class of '68 in shade’ and shows three different pictures of Manchester United players exhilarated and celebrating their cup success. The other tabloid is quite the opposite in contrast and reads ‘Terry’s tearful miss’ with one picture of John Terry after he slipped crying emotionally. The Guardian reads ‘Ferguson driven on by the drug of domination’ and shows a picture of Sir Alex Ferguson smiling holding the cup. Each article denoted different signifiers from the same event which in turn produced different connotations. After studying all three, the one that sticks in my head was the one of John Terry in agony. I could ‘hear’ his cries from just observing the text. A Manchester United fan as opposed to me (Tottenham Hotspur fan) may see the same message and be grinning or laughing. Bignell.J (2002, p.96) states that Barthes proposes six procedures through which connotations are generated, they are trick affects – this is when the photograph has been altered specifically to produce a particular mythic meaning, ‘the pose’, objects, ‘aestheticism’ – where photographs borrow the coding system of another art form and finally ‘syntax’ which is a connotation procedure relating to the placing of one photograph next to another like placing of words next to each other according to the syntax of language.As opposed to newspapers TV news can be updated timely and frequently whereas the newspaper publication date is fixed. The TV media is more vivid than the newspaper and not only have the colorful moving pictures but also contain real audio. Television media (unless recorded or watching repeats) is usually watched once in one place whereas newspapers are easy to carry and can be stored in a bag and be read repeatedly. As for digital television, an abstract from The Times found by Boyle, R. et al (2004, p.138) sums it up best “If you’ve wondered about the point of digital television, this season’s screening of the Champions League is one answer. Never mind one or two matches live on the same night, the whole lot will be shown this season.”Let’s now take interactivity even further than the previous types of media and explore the depths of the internet. The internet can fulfill all the expectations of previous media, even play the part of the newspaper which can be stored in the bag, all it takes is a laptop and an internet connection. It is also becoming a massive online database with efficient search tools which make it possible for everyone to find the kind of entertainment they are looking for and to figure out which bits are popular. We have entered a ‘new cultural state’ Redhead.S (2004) which began gathering its ‘creative modernity’ since the mid 1990’s. Redhead argues that there is “something new in the ‘knowledge economy’ which radically differentiates it from previous economic eras, the state and culture are involving, themselves in modernity in new formations and that this process deserves taking seriously, theoretically and politically”. Since the booming of the internet, culture is changing; we can now download movies and soundtracks illegally free and obtain whatever knowledge, data, sport, news, texts, blogs we search for, It is even possible to watch any Champions League match free over Peer to Peer networks (could be a problem for old media and TV rights in the future).A theorist from the ‘new media’ age : Charles Leadbetter explores the new phenomenon of mass creativity exemplified by web sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and MySpace. His website which is a ongoing version is open to public opinions, criticisms and revisions, argues that participation, rather than consumption or production, will be the key organizing idea of the future society. Already, many web users, just putting their blogs, thoughts, ‘out there’ for anyone to decode and getting some momentum may possible create their own community or culture . Some find that new media projects take on a life of their own, and the content creator becomes stewards, librarian, editors and captain of their own new media ship, without the qualifications of being a journalist or a newsreader. People can read your blog, and get in touch with you. It may take time, but you could create a brand new community of like-minded readers, the future is blurry and frightening as the ‘new cultural state’ picks up momentum within this ‘new media’ era.words 3,036 Bibiliography Media and Communications Studies Website : http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/ Barthes, R. (1973) Mythologies. 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(2004) Creative Modernity: The New Cultural State: Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy, Volume 2004, Number 112, Rowe, D. (2004) Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity. Open University Press Telegraph[2008] available at : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/european/championsleague/2965816/English-clubs-will-dominate-Champions-League-predicts-Karl-Heinz-Rummenigge.html The Guardian[2008] available at : http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2008/may/23/manchesterunited The Daily Mail[2008] available at : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1021334/Sir-Alexs-champagne-cavaliers-class-68-shade.html The Daily Star[2008] available at : http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=37767 Williams, K. (2003) Understanding Media Theory. London, Arnold Ch6