Table of Content
|
| The Concept of Ideology |
| Ideologies and power |
| Origins of the term: Marxist approaches |
| The mass media and ideology |
| Post-Marxism and critical pluralism |
| Discourses and lived cultures |
| Bias and ideology |
| Reflection |
The Concept of Ideology
The media represent the world to us and therefore it is important to study the ideas driving these representations. The view that these ideas serve the interests of dominant groups within society is basic to the concept of ideology. John B. Thompson argues that 'the concept of ideology can be used to refer to the ways in which meaning serves, in particular circumstances, to establish and sustain relations of power which are systematically asymmetrical - "relations of domination". Ideology, broadly speaking, is meaning in the service of power.' This approach to the concept is based then on the idea that social groups do not have the same amount of power in society because they do not have the same command over resources, and therefore do not receive the same level of rewards either in material terms (such as income) or in symbolic terms (such as respect).
Ideologies and power
The concept of ideologies is a key one for Media Studies, however is often now referred to as 'values' and as a result the term 'ideologies' gets reserved for 'fringe' or non-mainstream party political positions, such as environmental politics or extreme nationalisms.
Never the less ideology, refers to:
• sets of ideas which give some account of the social world, usually a partial and selective one
• the relationship of these ideas or values to the ways in which power is distributed socially
• the way in which such values and meanings are usually posed as 'natural' and 'obvious' rather than socially aligned with or against particular power groupings.
Some ideas, though they form a system and are quite rigid, are not classified as 'ideological'. Someone may have obsessive ideas about personal cleanliness, and relate them systematically to the fullness of the moon, but these would not necessarily be called ideological since they cannot be shown to relate to the distribution of social power.
Origins of the term: Marxist approaches
The concept of ideology is used currently to analyse a range of representations including gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity. Karl Marx used it initially however in his analysis of social class and capitalism. Marx argued that ideas in society are used to maintain social relationships based on inequalities of power. He asserted that the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. He stated very strongly therefore that ideas sustained and masked social inequalty and exploitation. Later writers, have wanted to retain the idea that the economy is the most important institution in society but they have placed more importance on the independence of ideas from the economy. As a result it is necessary to examine representations in society without assuming that they all serve the interests of a dominant class or classes.
The first time it was argued that ideas are not free-floating but instead systematically linked to social power was in France, in the period leading up to the 1789 Revolution. Most discussions of ideology in Media Studies comes out of the work of Marx, who, writing in the nineteenth century, questioned another, supposedly 'natural' but unequal order of things. He analysed the new profit- and market-dominated system- capitalism and the power of two classes within it, the rising industrial manufacturers (or capitalises) and the working class (or proletariat).
Marx emphasised the importance of class difference, or people's different relationships to the means of production, as key to the kinds of values and political ideas that they have. He was especially interested in capitalists' relationship to their employees, the working class, who, he argued, had the power to change history by its united action.
Three of his emphases have been particularly important for Media Studies:
• The dominant ideas (which become the 'common sense') of any society are those which work in the interests of the ruling class, to secure its rule or dominance. Those who own the means of production thereby, control the means of producing and circulating the most important ideas in any social order. This is the key to why the meaning-making bodies in any society represent political issues as they do.
• Related to this, he argued a base-superstructure model of the social role of institutions such as the media. The ways the basic needs of a social order are met (via industrial capitalist, or landlord-peasant, relations, for example) determine its superstructure, i.e. its 'secondary', less basic, ideological and political institutions, such as religion and cultural life. Such a model is also often called economic determinist,
• A final important step is the argument that, through these sets of power relationships, the dominant class is able to make workers believe that existing relations of exploitation and oppression are natural and inevitable. This power 'mystifies' the real conditions of existence, and how they might be changed, and conceals the interest it has in preventing change.
Antonio Gramsci was a Italian Marxist activist between 1891-1937, his theories showed a keen awareness of the need for complex struggles and negotiations. Gramsci's term 'hegemony' was a development of the Marxist model. It became a key way of thinking how dominant value systems change through struggle, and how they are related to everyday lived cultures and to 'common sense', which he suggests is a result of all kinds of historical 'traces'. Gramsci argued that particular social groups in modern democracies struggle for ascendancy or hegemony. Because of this, power is never secured once and for all but has to be constantly negotiated in a to-and-fro tussle. The key point from this for Media Studies is that people are not forced, or duped into a false consciousness of the world, but have their consent actively fought for all the time, nowadays almost exclusively through the media.
This, rather than simpler models of ownership or control, gives space for the ways in which appositional or alternative ideas struggle for and often obtain access to the media, or in which a corporation such as Disney experiences contradictions within its huge marketing successes. But the increasing concentration of power in the hands of a very few enormous media corporations, and of a very few executives within those, inevitably leads to:
• a decline in the range of material available as global conglomerates exclude or swallow up all but the most commercially successful operators (hence the obsession with ratings) or those remaining few which are state-funded.
• a tendency to exclude the voices of those lacking economic power, or wishing to argue against, say, high consumer capitalism and grossly unequal pay structures as ways of organising society.
• the prevalence of 'easily understood, popular, formulated, undisturbing, assimilable fictional material'.
• the dominance of corporate advertising and branding within culture generally.
The mass media and ideology
The media contribute to the ways in which people make sense of the world but media texts are not usually constructed to develop a coherent view of the world. They contain therefore many different elements, some of which are taken from the world outside the media and some of which relate closely to other media texts. In both fictional as well as non-fictional texts, however, the media can be seen as creating and sustaining meanings and working on the currently available meanings by producing re-combinations of them and variations on them. As a result the elements in any particular text might be contradictory: some of the elements might imply that change in society is required whereas others might suggest satisfaction with the status quo. The important point however is that so long as social inequalities that are a source of political contention exist there is a role for ideological criticism. Ideological analyses of media products will therefore by required to analyse representations of, for example, social class, gender, race, ethnicity or sexuality.
Post-Marxism and critical pluralism
Several recent changes in the world have affected the power of' classic' Marxist theories:
• the collapse of eastern bloc state socialism (often said to be the same as 'Marxism') from 1989.
• the renewed power of consumer capitalist 'free market' emphases
• the influence of some postmodern positions , which despite their 'deconstructive' charge often seem to have abandoned any kind of attempt at constructing an accountable or improvable world
• a growing scepticism about the claims of science to either absolute truth or necessarily benign consequences. (This matters, since Marxism had often claimed scientific status for its theories.)
These changes also involved and led to:
• the suggestion that to talk of one dominant ideology directly related to economic power implies an improbably coherent, argument-free ruling class, smoothly 'making' the rest of us go along with its interests. Such analysis often makes very patronising assumptions about anyone other than the person doing the analysing.
• the challenge of newer politics based on gender, ethnicity, sexuality, often seen as crucially 'affecting life chances' rather than being absolute determinants. These have tended to replace economic, class-focused Marxist analysis. Identity politics, as it is often known, has become a new way of analysing other kinds of inequality.
We still live in deeply unequal capitalist societies, driven by the needs and practices of profit and competition, but these now operate on a global scale, with relations of exploitation spread more emphatically than ever across and between continents. It is not surprising that Marxist interest in economic power, inequalities and their relationship to social transformation has continued to be highly relevant.
At the other extreme to Marxism, however, pluralist models have developed, seeing the media as floating free of power, rather as the 'free marker' suggests a realm of pure and equal exchange of goods for money. They emphasise the apparent diversity and choice of media forms and products. They argue that , if certain values or fiction forms are dominant, it is because they are 'genuinely popular' and have won our in this 'free market of ideas'. These voices include some of the biggest media corporations, such as Disney and AOL Time Warner, keen to down play the economic clout of their far-flung empires, or their control over copyright enforcement and labour policies.
Of course, in the media-dominated and 'deregulared' world we inhabit, it is obvious that many different ideas and identities circulate and mix in the media. But we still need an account of power to understand how some ideas and imaginings to circulate much more freely than others. Thus, developing the original Marxist and Gramscian emphases, others (such as Thompson 1995) suggest we now live in times of a complex play between several kinds of power:
• economic power
• political power
• coercive, especially military power
• 'symbolic power', i.e. the means of information and communication, including Churches, schools and universities, and the images circulated by the media.
Such approaches are sometimes called critical pluralism. These acknowledge that there may be a struggle between competing discourses or accounts of the world, bur insists that this is nor an amicable free-for-all. Some discourses are parts of powerful institutions and have easier access to material resources, legal power, publicity and legitimacy, access which will be fought for if necessary. An important example would be what has been called 'the commercial speech of the consumer system' (i.e. marketing and advertising) and the identities and desires it has vast powers to encourage.
Discourses and lived cultures
Even within the (still very influential) Gramscian emphasis on hegemony or struggles for dominance, the weighting given to 'dominant ideology' was challenged by writers such as Abercrombie, Hill and Turner (1980). They argued that, though dominant ideologies do exist, they are not the most important means for making social orders hang together. The fact that huge state bodies for surveillance and armed control exist suggests in fact that we do not inhabit unified social orders, running contentedly along. As well as the power of state force we need to understand the 'dull compulsion of the economic' (and, feminists argue, of domestic labour). This leaves us little room, time or power to challenge systems of values which most people either disagree with or feel to be personally irrelevant. This brings us to the terms 'discourses' and 'lived cultures', which suggest a more dispersed, less binary sense of how sets of power maintain themselves.
Media Studies tends now not to use the model of a single dominant and a single appositional set of ideas which can always be traced back simply to class struggle (a model going back to Marxism). Instead it has turned to ideas of powerful and not so powerful ideologies and identities connected to ethnicity, religion, disability, sexuality etc. as well as to class, which operate through lived cultures and powerful or marginalised discourses.
Discourses cultures
The term 'discourse' has a long history. For our purposes we can trace it emerging from the work of the French theorist Foucault and also from language study. Discourse analysis is interested in exploring what values and identities are contained, prevented or perhaps encouraged by the day-in, day our practices and (often unspoken) rules of a particular discourse. Though this usually refers to verbal language, which is key for media, it can of course also include visual 'languages'. 'Discourses' can be usefully understood as socially constructed knowledges. These 'knowledges' involve regulated systems of statements or language use, that is, their appropriate language operates rules, conventions and therefore assumptions and exclusions. Sometimes single words can highlight the power of dominant groups and their discourses to insist on some meanings and exclude others.
Lived cultures
An interest in 'lived cultures' comes partly out of the work of Gramsci. He argued that 'common sense', such an 'obvious' guide to many people's sense of the world, could be explored as being partly a complex set of traces rather than a simple class-based ideology. These traces may come from hundreds of years ago (for example in religious sayings) and may be somewhat contradictory but are also constantly changing.
He emphasised too the ways that hegemony is a lived process, never simply imposed or floating free in ideas alone. The power of common sense comes from the way it relates to dominant assumptions with material existence- in cultural practices, rituals and activities.
It's worth emphasising the danger of the tempting reliance on 'common sense' or the practices of news reporting at moments of crisis. Such routines can encourage some kinds of speedy assumptions and discourage others.
In summary, the Marxist emphasis on economics and class struggle as the basis of ideology has been replaced by an interest in other kinds of
• inequality
• power
• ways of circulating and changing dominant assumptions.
Likewise Media Studies' early focus on 'bias'-centred ideological studies of news processes, with the implication that the media 'conceal' or 'mask' the 'true' processes of class struggle, have been replaced by an exploration of fiction, entertainment and fantasy forms, and an interest in how audiences form an active rather than duped part of the processes of media. The pleasures of entertainment forms are no longer seen as simply the 'sugar on the pill' which helps the 'medicine' (ideology) go down.
Bias and ideology
Bias is the term used to describe the slanting of media coverage and portrayal towards a certain point of view. Any close text analysis is bound to come to conclusions which
indicate bias. The bias you find may tend towards your own views or you may disagree with it. You do not have to disagree with bias in order to identify it.
Bias may be found in all categories of media text. If photographs are taken from behind police lines during demonstrations or industrial action, bias will result. Language is not a neutral medium. If workers on strike are said to 'reject', 'demand' and 'threaten', whereas employers 'offer' or 'promise', the language used is loaded against the workers. News as a genre and in its methods of storytelling can be loaded against anyone who protests or takes action against those in power and authority.
Reflection
After my research into ideologies I now have a better understanding of the key concepts and the term itself. This will support and develop my short film as I have a better understanding of how audiences are perceived by media industries and how that then reflects in the media products that they produce. I will take these ideas and use them within my own short film to represent the societies and individuals that I feel are most suited towards the message that I am trying to convey.
References:
Books:
Bennett, J., Tanya, J., McDougall, J. (2002). A2 Media Studies for OCR: Second Edition. Hodder Arnold
Branston, G., Staffordd, R. (2003). The Media Student's Book. Routledge
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