Informal Language And Its Influence On “Media”
The term “media” is getting very much confused by informal language. Many of us
will robotically add the suffix, the (media), causing misuse as a
singular noun and often immediate thoughts of negativity follow. Media
refers to numbers of different ways of physically reproducing and
carrying messages. Media is not only expressed
through newspapers, film, television and radio but the Internet,
digital media and other developing mediums. It is important to note
that ‘Media Studies’ is the art of analyzing these texts to uncover
their effect on society. It is an infinitely evolving field, thus one
fragment of its controversial nature, yet most overtly; media studies
is so immensely important to study as it is practically impossible to
live in the twenty first century without encountering some form of
media. A media studies course will output students as consumers with a
greater awareness in making sense of the political, economic and
cultural meaning of everyday life. As one student recapitulates, ‘It
gives you the power of choice, the power to question.’
Re-capping a typical day; I am rudely awoken by a shrieking radio
commercial demanding I take advantage of the managers’ crazy insane
bargain prices. My vulnerable semi consciousness already affected by
crude advertising before hand and eye are coordinated to slam the
snooze button. The Saturday Age greets me in a less intrusive,
although still attention-grabbing manner. The bold headlines demand
consideration, striking photos tantalize the imagination and
advertisements entice by sophistication, among other ploys. T.V Hits
hums in the background while I sift through the paper, now too
expansive to be rolled into one single cylinder. Just a regular
Saturday morning and the media inundation I am embraced with is taken
for granted before even stepping out of the comfort of my pajamas. How
is this bombardment of media affecting my everyday life?
As I flick through the sections it is clear that political issues
submerge the cultural, economic and general sections of the newspaper.
Particularly as terrorist hazards loom whilst contradicting theories
of the P.M and the leading party divide the nation in critical
pre-election hysteria.
Despite claims to objectivity, most mainstream media groups are
politically aligned, either to political parties, governments or to
some broad ideological position, around which they fashion their
journalistic approach. This is very common not only in developing
countries, also in Western liberal democracies.
We are fortunate that we as Australians are privy to well-rounded
journalism. Within the one newspaper I can hear an array of voices,
teaching me how to think rather than what to think. The media has a
fundamental role in intellectual reproduction in society. In other
words, it helps to shape, pass on and facilitate ideas and views among
people in a trans-cultural and sometimes trans-political way. But
increasingly, this has been undermined by the media monopolies, which
control television channels, newspapers and even radio stations. This
has a number of effects.
Firstly, it effectively diminishes people’s choices in terms of what
they receive; secondly, it leads to intellectual hegemony, where the
media selectively determines what we should know and what we shouldn’t
know; thirdly, it helps to reinforce dominance of a particular
political viewpoint representing political hegemony, especially in a
world increasingly dominated by the US and its few allies.
We must remember that the media is not an autonomous, objective and
innocent entity with a ‘god’s eye view’ of the world. They do not
always have the interest of humanity at heart.
Rather, in many cases, it is a struggling human institution, driven
and molded by the need for economic survival, political patronage and
public legitimacy. Journalists find themselves caught between these
powerful political and economic imperatives and have to juggle, jinx,
goose-step and wriggle their way through these to survive, let alone
succeed, as journalists.
For economic survival, the media has to ’sell’ itself using various
techniques such as news sensationalism, advertisement, market
competitiveness and business stratification such as mergers and even
monopoly. But how these are carried out may sometimes be ethically
questionable.
The media industry may not alienate the poorer classes intentionally,
it is just the unfortunate fact that poorer classes are generally more
susceptible to being ‘brainwashed’ by media, rather than having a
critical opinion to see the bigger picture.
The Italian theorist, Antonio Gramsci believed that
wealthy upper class achieved its power over the working class by
achieving its always resistant and unstable consent, rather than by
illusion or deception. Whereas his contemporaries believed that the
media induced ‘false consciousness’ through diversion and
misinterpretation, so that the working class never realized the
historical destiny which Marx predicted for it. Gramscis theory wasn’t
as simple as popular thought, his significant reformation made the
ideological critique of the media more socially complex and
conceptually refined. Challenging media studies to consider his idea
of ‘hegemony’ and the many messages contained within media messages-
as distinct from one ideological meaning.
Through Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, Western Marxism was able to
incorporate other important European interpretative traditions into
the study of media, namely semiology and structuralism.
Semiology being the study of signs. Structuralism was a broad
intellectual movement, largely based in France which linked
psychoanalytic and anthropological theory and semiology which together
as one propelled what is sometimes called the ‘linguistic turn’ in
cultural theory.
‘This refers to a turn away from the more sociological and political
economy modes of analysis found in the Marxist tradition and towards
the study of media representatives as such.’
The mainstream media in Australia, especially the widely circulated
tabloids and broadsheets, do not really have any sharply distinctive
ideological voices. They tend to swing between ‘left’ and ‘right’
politics. Australian television stations are much more politically
critical and ‘progressive’ than their US counterparts. The
Government-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has been
labeled by John Howard supporters as ‘left-wing’, and in need of
reform. The debate between pro-Bush/pro-Iraqi war ‘right-wing’
journalists and anti-Bush/anti-war ‘left-wing’ journalists has been
raging in the television and print media in the last few months in an
exciting way.
Having spent time in the U.S, it is obvious their media industries are
by and large politically and intellectually narrow, compared to their
Australian counterparts. It’s a reflection of the ideological
straight-jacket and political myopia of the ‘American Way’ and
‘American Dream’ thinking, where everything starts and ends in
America. Television news and programs for instance are exclusively
American in focus and the rest of the world does not exist except if
their half-literate president is visiting another part of the world
which most Americans don’t even know exists, or if their military
heroes are out bombing and liberating a terrorist hideout in a
far-away desert land. Therefore media industries are able to exert
direct and indirect control over the thoughts and actions of its
audience, in this case- the American public. To put this theory into
current events we just have to look at the frenzy of war-mongering by
Bush and the willingness taken up by the mainstream media to help
ferment and inflame collective irrational hysteria and mob blood-lust,
the ideological and moral cornerstones of American patriotism. ‘Death
to the enemies of America’ became the daily sound byte. Anyone opposed
to the killing of Iraqis was declared un-American, evil or insane.
Media studies inform us how to look at media institutions with a
critical eye, always questioning the source and motivation behind the
text, in a hope we do not become vulnerable proletariats!
With the influx of ‘new’ media comes feelings of excitement, anxiety,
tension, fear and anger. It can be difficult for some to accept this
‘new media’ (the digital age), rather these people tend to grasp to
the past and regard change as the cause of all social ills, political
problems and social degeneracy. We must embrace change because we can
rarely prevent it, nevertheless it is vital keep a barrier, a sieve
surrounding our minds to ensure we are not brainwashed by the powerful
media industry. We must be savvy ‘media readers’, especially in the
times in which we live. If not we may become ‘cultural dupes’ as has
recently happened in regards to the Iraqi War; media mogul, Rupert
Murdoch used his media empire to mobilize US and world opinion towards
the Iraqi ‘war of liberation’. The media in the US became the
propaganda institutions for deception and lies about the Weapons of
Mass Destruction and other myths.
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Tags: informal language, media