Role of Media as an agent of Social Change

Prof. Swapna Mukherjee Memorial Lecture

Women’s College, Kolkata

29th November, 2011

The subject, assigned to me, deliberately affirms the contemporary media operation toward a definite social change. The referent or external area of the subject i.e. ‘social’ or precisely ‘social change’ assures multi-dimensional emergence of facets in our ‘social’ lives caused chiefly by the media operation or at least defined in such a manner. If we watch the revolutionary upsurge in Egypt and other neighbouring West Asian nations, a very popular note still reigns in popular psyche almost a ruling that the Facebook posts of someone Asma Mahfooz initiated the upsurge. Whatever the actual base would be, this very popular notion hits the global attention quite easily through popular mediation. So what we see here that the notion mediated becomes more catchy attractive and reduced than the actual upsurge and many such parallel reasons or connotations. And this very catchy, attractive and reduced notion becomes a slogan in popular media, which beyond proper reasoning have made it a ‘public opinion’. It now makes you believe that the Facebook posts by Lady Mahfooz created the upsurge that ended the 30 years of tyranny and dictatorship in Egypt. It appears like a headline of a news story which often in most cases comes down to be arbitrarily produced by the journalists according to his/her house policy than readers’ choice. Here my point is by any means not to establish the absurd ‘readers’ choice’, but the journalists’ policy that is not also one of readers’ very own. So making of social or social change happens and you expect me to tell you the story of how assuredly media do this change. I will tell you the story accordingly.

Before moving into details of the stories let me ask you a very old and unpopular question; what do media do to its people? Denis McQuail has quite interestingly identified some categories of functioning that media perpetrate for its audience. These are:

(i) media exert power and inequality;

(ii) national integration;

(iii) social change;

(iv) controlling mass;

You can now safely remove the tag of ‘national integration’ from all global media houses operating in India. Gone are those days of public service broadcasting with Akashbani and Doordarshan and ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’. Media at that time at least for a decade until 1990 never worked as an ‘agent’ but its being was well acclaimed as a developmental tool for Indian people.

Media as an agent…

Do we really have an idea of our media to be acting as an agent? What does an agent do specially to its society or social? Does this ‘agent identity of media’ mean everything but responsibility? Commonly a human or an institutional agent looks after everything professionally without having any emotional, ideological, or cultural attachment to the society or institution. Cultural Anthropology defines ‘agent’ as a concept related mostly to the power…deployed between individual and social structures…act for power. 

Did we mean such a functioning of media? Your subject then clearly suggests that mass media perpetrates the social change as just an agent not as a pillar of democracy or your very own and old friend as fourth estate or watch dog. Why the media is to be treated as a confirmed agent of social change…for its affirmed freedom? 

As and when we try to build an appropriate understanding with media in terms of its operation in our region or national territory, it always becomes our sacred duty to affirm the freedom of media, educating value of media, as an instrument of making public opinion, our agenda-setter, and our cultivator. Do we have any space remaining to accept media in other way as our very own? Do we nevertheless see media from public sphere? 

We do always better to portray our past relationship with media which commonly describes a very social relationship with our own mass media, sometimes as a family member. But difficulty arises when it comes to the contemporary media operation. If media acts as an agent, we have a functional relationship with it, may be a needful relationship. Now for a needful and empowered media it is subsequently very easy to organize any form of social change as it anyway appears to be more powerful, authoritative, and maker of popular opinion. Objectivity of news is now an index of not just mere social credibility but a commercial credential of every media house for simply to sustain as a corporate identity to its political and corporate authority. 

It is however very difficult to judge whether media or popular media act as a social agent although a mass consent would affirm every media house as an empowered corporate body that produces news story and other contents for its targeted audience or consumers to earn and maximize profit. Some quotes may however endorse my point:

(i) We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective.

— Michael Eisner, CEO, The Walt Disney Co., (Internal Memo). Quoted from Mickey Mouse Monopoly-Disney, Childhood & Corporate Power

(ii) We are here to serve advertisers. That is our raison d'etre.

— the C.E.O. of Westinghouse(CBS), Advertising Age, February 3, 97

I can also recall a very interesting quote a media representative on a television channel during 2006 Cricket World Cup: We don’t serve people; we only have a professional relationship with the advertisers to run the programme for revenue.

You may safely differ and rule out my opinion. You may even conform to the notion that media do much to us as an agent and we do not expect media doing something more than this. This is the way to initiate critical media studies and debate on operational philosophy of the contemporary media.

Social Change…

Now what do we mean by social change? Is it something related to the social transformation? In media and cultural studies, we have two types of social change:

(i) major or macro social change that often appears to be revolutionary, as earlier seen in socialist revolutions; but recently in 

(a) Egypt and other West Asian nations including newly born South Sudan;

(b) Obama’s win over many traditional rifts and questions within US territory;

(c) significant socio-political change in many Latin American countries, like, Brazil, Nicaragua, Uruguay;

(d) demolition of Iraq and Afghanistan in the name and tag-line of liberation; and 

(e) live telecast of Gulf War;

(f) massive religious upsurge;

(g) ethnic and subaltern political outbursts as seen in UP and many other Indian states etc. 

(h) information revolution through social networking sites and media; complete dissolution of information, its institutional base, and the notion of public opinion; as we can count people voting on an opinion and hardly sustain.

(ii) minor or micro social change that appears to be quite subtle but can exert enough power to change the existing social order. Minor social changes often deal with ethnicity, individuality, social and cultural categories like, languages, emotions, conventions, rituals, hierarchies, deliberate praxis, exterior and interior behavioural expressions, milestones, traffic signals and all possible mundane exercises that affect life.

Mass media through programmes like mega soap operas, reality shows, news bulletins put a control over the above minor but significant categories that subtly cause a social change. Media were however also directly involved in disclosure of Watergate scam in late 70s, Jessica Lall murder case some years back and many such issues of investigation.

How do media perpetrate social change…

It is now quite interesting to watch that media mostly deal with all minor categories of social change to influence its audience except in some regional cases where media are seen quite polarized to a specific political stance. 

In all repetitive contents, like, news bulletins, mega soap operas, newer reality shows media while reiterating selective social categories cultivate its audience to change the behaviour in the long run. Noted communication theorist George Gerbner stated that “television acts as a ‘socializing agent’ that educates viewers on a separate version of reality. The concrete base behind the cultivation theory states that viewers tend to have more faith in the television version of reality the more they watch television. ‘Television world dramatically overemphasizes the prevalence of law enforcement jobs in the real world (Chandler).

So if now the cultivation power of media is instrumental to how media perpetrate social change, it involves certain procedural aspects or features media usually perform. It should also be noted at the same time that now we are not talking about the traditional developing agenda of mass media as a state machinery or organ. We are now in a situation where media conglomerates control the global media operation from phone tapping to providing necessary political backing. In such a situation all pervasive media operation leaves a very scant space for people’s participation in public sphere.

From the initial phase of global media operation with the collapse of Soviet Union people had an opportunity to observe the live media operation in the first Gulf War in 1990. Noted media theorist Douglas Kellner rediscovered the whole story behind the war declaration. US’s foremost official channel CNN publicizing two satellite photographs claimed that an ‘amass of 100,000 Iraqi soldiers gathered at the Qatar border. President George Bush in no further delay declared the deadliest war against Iraq. Later within two months it was further discovered that the yellow stretch was actually a line of sand bags and other materials delimitating the Iraq-Qatar border. An unprecedented social change comprising not only the destruction of a nation and huge public property but an afresh reach of global media through it also.

Media however, as analyzed so far, perform certain chronologically structured functions for every genre of its contents or programmes. US media theorists though found media audience very much willing to accept all media operations, have nevertheless restructured all aspects of media effect toward both major and minor social change. These are: 

(i) Priming: propagating before context;

(ii) Framing: how to prepare the message capsule;

(iii) Agenda Setting: short term media effect on both individual and mass audience; media set people’s agenda;

(iv) Media Cultivate: media in the long run change audience’s behaviour and ideology;

And in this manner media perform its duty to change the socio-political or socio-economic order.

Media spectacle and package…

But things are gradually becoming very complicated in the contemporary global mediation. With the growth of mediation and the globalization of media mass consumption of media contents is becoming the social order that has outlined the traditional notion of development. Today’s world and region receive mediational development much before territorial development. They receive advertisement of a product much before the produced one. Most of our population even does not have that opportunity to see the product for buying although they have enough exposure through popular media. But all industrial attentions converge to the centre of capital accumulation thus marginalizing peripheries and thus creating a havoc social change in favour of affordability and affluent exposure.

Media contents, i.e. advertisements, news, reality shows, mega soaps have gradually become distinct packages that broadcast everything but the truth of the product-message. A massive fictionalization of all above contents moves beyond the common head and judgements. Noted French theorist Jean Baudrillard comments interestingly: media practices have rearranged our senses of place and time. Television is the real world; television is dissolved into life and life is dissolved into television. The fiction is realized and the real becomes fiction…no freedom beyond this activity. We are proletariatized regardless of class, a function of the spectacle.

Cultural Studies and Schools: A Perspective

As we gradually move into the core of communication theories the whole discourse, we have observed, has been so far analyzed in terms of pluralist cultural dimensions both in macro [the social] and micro [the individual] aspects of life. In an almost inextricable relationship human cultural stance and its communicability are conjugally simulated about the emancipation of social and individual self toward rediscovering the society and the social. So the modernist discourse of development of ‘social’ had tried to elevate all the social indices like, national employment, national standard of living, minimize overall cost of living index, reducing poverty and unemployment in the national sector, uplift national integration and unity, and national socialism. Extensive surveys had been tried out to explore such indices toward formation of a social culture that would cater every individual. Structural semiology can define this progress as a determinate development of sign from its first order [denotivity] meaning to further meaning orders that would definitely replace the earlier meanings of that sign. If a photograph of a road in a context of a shiny horizon reflects the meaning of ‘journey to the life’ in its second order signification that would definitely mediate its audience the known traditional ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ and while identifying an ordered meaning the audience would then be rewarded doubtlessly for complying with the established social or cultural order.

But the notion of cultural studies came from the idea that such ‘signs’ and ‘sign-self’ must be liberated from its contextual determinacy and from the traditional ‘social’  that on the other hand dominates the context with a false consciousness of culture or social culture. If the capitalist class exploits the working class then may be they exploit female workers more than its male counterpart thus abusing the traditional separation of male and female empowerment or exploitation syndrome. Cultural studies thus release every sign from its traditional bondage but leave no sign unrecognized or undefined. So cultural studies not only develop communication context but giving a suitable identity justify it as an open-ended discourse. Noted theorist Douglas Kellner defines cultural studies as, ‘that project of approaching culture and society from a critical and multidisciplinary perspective...’ that rejects any binary oppositional means or parameters of communication or understanding between culture and the corresponding society. Cultural studies therefore moves into the core of a utopia like, slogan, or empowered statement, a caption, a myth [story-telling], an ordered connotation of signification [Barthes’ 1st or 2nd order of...], a traditional or social or cultural self and override them. Thus cultural studies while having rediscovered the independence of a text, at most recognize and promote the individual social praxis and justify so, the social order, instead of following it as a utopia. One of the most powerful proponents of cultural studies Raymond Williams has once stated that: the human energy of long revolution springs from the conviction that men can direct their own lives by breaking through the pressures and restrictions of older forms of society, and by discovering new common institutions [economy, polity]. However new but might be not common, institutions are being created somewhere replacing the older institutions, like feminism, dalit awareness, black awareness etc. Ioan Davis writes in this context, ‘the idea that revolution would be long depended on a sense that there were roots of a common culture that had to be nurtured to grow. It did not take into account the possibility that counter-revolutions happen overnight, and that when they happen they hack away at those roots.’

Thus the quintessence of cultural studies transcends categorically the utopian essence of commonality of culture and establishs on the other hand the multi-textual plurality and extension of ideological struggle. This extension of new left studies is as penetrative to analyzing the core of the growing complexities of life toward so called industrial development as it moves into the underlying facets of cultural identities of human being than the fancied sense of commonality.

Early Days:

However cultural studies theories had their common birthplace in Marxian studies womb though originated in different geo-social contexts, specially British cultural studies, French cultural studies and Frankfurt (German) cultural studies. Theorists had studied extensively the Marxian thought notionally having a natural transcendence, as they called, releasing it from the ‘reductionism, and economism of the base-superstructure metaphor’ [Hall, 1989]. Thus in the Marxian light of struggle for human identity, a new academic movement diaspora started based on education, literature, new theatre, race relations and science [Davis, 1996] in Britain following other schools specially Frankfurt and French cultural studies. They perpetrated a rope-balancing network between popular culture and popular style of writing and the theoretical ones. Quite naturally this movement fed quite effectively and essentially the intellectual middle class academia to make a very close to the reality of identity-struggle of human beings. But though stemmed from the core of Marxian theoretical outlook, almost all the roots cultural studies were suffered from a serious aristocratic national cultural syndrome. In between 1930s and early 1960s there were lots of new left journals emerged as very critical to the national culture and of course Communist ideologies, all of them were filled and fed by the intellectuals migrated from other European countries like Germany etc. to Great Britain. They mostly did a judgement about British culture in the light of Frankfurt critical theories, French poststructural theories, Italian Post-Gramscian Marxist theories.

In its first editorial, New Left Review, the pioneer journal of British cultural studies, wrote about not only the mere objective but the theoretical destination of cultural studies also: The labour movement is not in its insurrectionary phase: we are in our missionary phase. The Left Clubs and New Left Centres — the new left in general — must pioneer a way forward by working for socialism as the old missionaries worked:  as if consumed by fire that is capable of lighting the darker places in our society. We have to go out into the towns and cities, universities, and technical colleges, youth, clubs and Trade Union branches, and... make socialists there [New Left Review, 1960 1 (Jan-Feb): 2].

But in soon this movement was naturally dried up until the establishment of Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at University of Birmingham by Richard Hoggert along with Stuart Hall reassessed the essence of cultural studies in not only British society but for the world context. The whole new left outlook gradually was shifted to a notion where ‘culture’ is again possible and the theorists were duely appropriated by the British dominant culture and Knighthood. Thus movement in its very early stage became secondary to the state-empathy. Davis innately wrote that the ultimate problem was that cultural studies would move from being part of a social movement to being an appendix of academe, so institutionalized that it became simply a continuation of the classics and humanities traditions which had for long acted as the basis of a critique against the disciplinariness of the universities and government of traditionally older countries, just as classics had roots in the Church, Temples, Mosques and, as Davis mentioned, in the imperial civil service.

The later Narratives:

However later with the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary cultural studies the stream had to change its track from all kinds of patriarchy [the British Society] in the societies, academic disciplines and conventional wisdom (Davis, 1996) of media, empowered political and state apparatus etc. Later narratives of cultural studies defined culture and cultural praxis independent of the social structure and dominant social narratives. In this course theorists made Gramsci’s notion of counter-hegemony as point of action. They concentrated mostly on three notional themes:

Aesthetics: as they talk much about judgement and distinction of ‘text’;

Representation: as they speak of power and the reading of hegemony;

Popular culture: as speaking of politics of the everyday [Davis, 1996].

With the above streams and principal cultural studies theorists like Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, E.P. Thompson, and Perry Anderson, tried out the cultural studies on such a destructured base, in terms of socialization where the ‘feminist’ critique evolved independent of all sorts of male-dominated [structurally empowered] social requisites thus became known as the champion dissidents to the elites of the British culture. At this point cultural studies were very close to be affiliated by the works of French poststructuralists but initiated an alternative stream of praxis toward a plausible consequence and reaction. On the other hand at this same juncture they sharply but constructively criticized the Frankfurt cultural studies, i.e. critical theories also while alongside transcending classical Marxist economistic argument. However Stuart Hall while justifying cultural studies established this point of contention with Marxism: “the encounter between British cultural studies and Marxism has first to be understood as the engagement with a problem — not a theory, not even a problematic. It begins and develops through the critique of a certain reductionism and economism, which I think is not extrinsic but intrinsic to Marxism; a contestation with the model of base and superstructure, through which sophisticated and vulgar Marxism alike had tried to think the relationships between society, economy and culture. It was located and sited in a necessary and prolonged and as yet unending contestation with the profound Eurocentrism of Marxist theory...The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency”.

Narrative three: The Genealogy

Not only with the classical Marxism [Communism] on the one hand, cultural studies stood also against the American media effect studies, like, dependency to the media, uses & gratifications, as these were very much quantitative in category, content oriented and largely authoritarian in nature. So in all terms, both Frankfurt and British cultural studies though were committed grossly to the core Marxist perspective but made a sufficient extension of it combating the farthest extension of social power and all empowered narratives toward restoring individuality of concepts and narratives of life.

However the genealogy of cultural studies can be identified in the works of two different schools of philosophical thought, Institute of Social Research, University of Frankfurt, popularly known as Frankfurt cultural studies in the 1930-40s; and Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, under University of Birmingham in the 1960-70s. Both schools of thought essentially emphasized the critical studies, as opposed to the traditional developmental ones, while releasing perspectives [texts] of human lives from its dominant traditional one dimensional base, as it was determinated in Marxian studies by two binary opposed elements like ‘capitalist’ and ‘working class’.

According to the Marxian analytical overview, working class people sell their labour and of course surplus labour to the capitalist and become exploited to the core. Then they will revolutionize their future and would share a better life among the class members overriding private or uneven appropriation of wealth and property. This seminal political philosophy had doubtlessly shaped the political and social lives of Europe and other parts of the world in nineteenth and twentieth century though critical theorists of Frankfurt school and British cultural studies sharply criticized such formulation of social progress and proposed a number of pluralist models.

Frankfurt Critical Narratives

Resting on Marx’s core idea of mass production, revolution and emancipation of working class, critical theorists extended their analyses in another sense-making toward mass production of cultural goods [such as, media forms and contents] that changed the course of modern lives fundamentally and became far more divergent in twentieth century. The development of industrial capitalism in twentieth century challenged traditional patterns of life and assured deeper penetration into cultural life through newer forms of entertainment, leisure and communication techniques. Max Horkheimer and Theodre Adorno, two of the foremost proponents of critical theories, termed, while in their exile in America, this phenomenon ‘the culture industry’ which according to them as exploitative in nature as Marx’s conviction toward perpetration of exploitation in mass capitalist production. At that time they closely observed the concentration of ownership in Hollywood production centre and the mass cultural productions, American Press and Broadcasting (Lorimer, 1997). They successfully identified how media were dominating to its audience when moreover fed by revenues from advertising sources having thus least responsibility to the audience and the society. ‘Whether the products were popular songs, or broadcast soap operas, they were all the same: they were mass produced according to standard formulae and were vehicles for the promotion of capitalism’ (Lorimer, 1997). Mass audience could not resist the glossy appeal of the Hollywood movie, the stardom, the easy exploitation of emotions in melodramas or gangster movies (Horkheimer, 1972). They also had a strong opinion of implausibility of any mass resistance to such mass mediated culture. Rowland Lorimer argued, ‘most generally the Frankfurt school theorists saw these developments, along with the growth of monopoly capitalism (transnational corporations distributing their products all over the world) and of the strong, centralized, modern state, as tending to increase the domination of social institutions over individual lives. The culture industry in their view, destroyed individuality, created uniformity, and conformity, and made resistance well-nigh impossible’.

During the inter-war period Frankfurt school developed this transdisciplinary research specially to cultural and communication studies along with Marxian political economy, textual research and ideological rediscoveries. So by the term ‘culture industry’ they signified the industrialization of mass-production of cultural elements and commercial imperatives [Kellner, 1989] that provided ideological legitimation of capitalist societies and homogenization of individual cultural imperatives and praxis. But in this course of theoretical derivation Frankfurt theorists, chiefly Adorno, Horkheimer, Leo Lowenthal, most importantly studied the commercial integration of working class into capitalist consumerist societies, sundering them from Marxist revolutionary struggle. Thus capitalist societies through technological revolution and industrialization found new strategic way-out for political and social change.

Douglas Kellner explained beautifully the genealogy the Frankfurt theoretical stance.  Victims of European Fascism, the Frankfurt school experienced first hand the ways that Nazi used the instruments of mass culture to produce submission to Fascist culture and society. While in exile in the United States the members of the Frankfurt school came to believe that American “popular culture” was also highly ideological and worked to promote the interests of American capitalism. Controlled by the giant corporations, the culture industries were organized according to the strictures of mass production, churning out mass produced products that generated a highly commercial system of culture which in turn sold values, life-styles, and institutions of “American way of life”.

However the critical theories were countered by Walter Benjamin, one of the associates of the Frankfurt school, who, in his book “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1969), found rather rediscovered the progressive or positivist aspects of new technologies and mass cultural productions. He established that new growth mass media replaced older forms culture and by mass reproduction through filming, recording, photography, an “aura” of the work of art of an earlier era of originality. While working with Bertolt Brecht on production of films, radio dramas, Benjamin argued that progressive cultural movements had have the power to reassure the ‘apparatus’[media, communication] of cultural production for intended political purpose. So they believed in progressive use of film, drama etc. that could also be used for social change.

Horkheimer and Adorno on the other hand answered Benjamin’s notion in their book “Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1948, 1972) that the system of mass cultural production [film, radio, newspapers, magazines] was ruthlessly dominated by the advertising corporations and commercial imperatives [Kellner]. This domination created a system of high consumerism creating a monolithic identity of the traditionally most divergent and dynamic working class.

Another most celebrated theorist Jurgen Habermas historicized Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry and mass production of cultural perspectives taking 18th and 19th centuries into consideration. He pointed out in his seminal work “The structural transformation of the public sphere” that the rise of bourgeois society in last two centuries as a public sphere between civil society and the state power and its transformation in the late 20th century from liberal identity to a media dominated public sphere what he has called “welfare state capitalism and mass democracy”. He basically established the domination of largest industrial corporations over the mediation and the public sphere thus justified Adorno and Horkheimer’s notion of culture industry.

Theorist Douglas Kellner elaborated that ‘the culture industry thesis described both the production of massified cultural products and homogenized subjectivities. Mass culture for the Frankfurt School produced desires, dreams, hopes, fears, and longings, as well as unending desire for consumer products. The culture industry thus produced cultural consumers who would consume its products and conform to the dictates and the behaviours of the existing society’.