Introduction to Media or Cultural Studies

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Bartholomew Robinson
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1 Session Four: Lecture on Media Studies Introduction to Media or Cultural Studies I. BACKGROUND, HISTORY, GOALS OF THE DISCIPLINE Media Studies is an interdisciplinary field it draws on concepts, theories, practices, and methods from all the following fields Communication, Film Studies, Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, Contemporary Critical Theory, Political Science, Literature, and more. Media Studies (sometimes called Cultural Studies) also grew from civil rights and women s rights and workers rights movements to some extent. These movements and a collection of theorists helped contemporary scholars and concerned citizens begin to ask how the status quo, with its unequal divisions of power and capital, is maintained, normalized, naturalized so we don t even see it, so it becomes a given. Media studies asks how does mass media participate in this process and how can we make this process visible? This means this field has an acknowledged political agenda. Most people in Cultural Studies see mass media as a primary place where cultural beliefs and values are reproduced and disseminated, sometimes negotiated, questioned, and critiqued. Cultural critics and scholars don t proceed as if there s a conscious and organized conspiracy of deceivers and con-men and women at work. Usually cultural critics think in terms of the institutions and systems at work. The work of reading media for its depictions of gender, race, age, class, sexual orientation, etc. is NOT about blaming and accusing. A primary goal of media studies is media literacy which means thinking about the mass media texts (billboards or magazine advertisements, movies, newspaper articles, etc.) around you as: texts systematically produced to make profits and sell products, texts with a collection of cultural beliefs and belief systems (ideologies) encoded in them and maybe debated in them, at least at play in them, texts which are received and interpreted differently from folks situated differently in the culture. The hope is that Media Literacy yields agency the more you know about what s coming at you, the more consciously you can decode and filter the contents

2 whether it s notions of female physical beauty, of racial identity, of masculine codes of conduct etc. II. THREE COMMON APPROACHES TO MEDIA STUDIES 1. Production Who has access to production of mass media texts? How did they get that access? Who gets a say in the content of the texts who has creative input, who has editorial control? Who doesn t? Whose interests are served by these choices? Whose money is behind production? Who makes money from these texts? What are the processes and procedures of production? (Kolker talks a lot about the Hollywood studio systems of production, for instance.) EXAMPLE Richard Butsch, in his article Ralph, Fred, Archie, and Homer, asks why TV programs include fewer and fewer working class characters and heroes. He considers several reasons including the formulas about risk that govern network decisions. He also notes that a fairly small pool of fairly socially isolated people actually write the programs the characters they create tend to reflect their own immediate world. 2. The product (text) itself Billboards, print ads, movies, web pages and pop-ups, television shows and commercials, radio programs, newspapers, music and CDs, video games these are some examples of texts/products What ideas does the text convey about race, class, ethnicity, gender, patriotism, consumerism, and on and on? How does this particular text participate in the ongoing public discourse about these topics? Does the text repeat status quo beliefs and images? Does it interrupt status quo beliefs and images? How do the various elements of the text encode these ideas?. 3. Reception How are these texts actually received or potentially received by various audiences and audience members?

3 What meanings and messages do a range of viewers perceive, resist, value in their viewing of a media text or of a particular genre? EXAMPLE Minu Lee and Cho, in Women Watching Together, note that, in their small study, watching soap operas together transgressed aspects of Confucian morality for Korean-American women and induced shame. However, this same activity also signaled independence and community for these women. III. IMPORTANT RELATED TERMS AND CONCEPTS Subject position the viewer is the subject in this case; the subject has a subjective experience of the media text which is the object. This concept of subject position means analyzing all the major aspect of the viewer s complex cultural identity that impact how he or she perceives, interprets, values, responds to both the world around him or her and to media texts. Race, class, gender, sexual orientation, age, regional origins, etc. all form a viewer s subject position literally where in the complex web of social markers and factors is the subject located. Dominant and oppositional readings yielding both/and understanding Dominant reading is reading with the grain of the film for its intended meanings and messages. The dominant reading is the ideas and messages most mainstream viewers would take away from film. We study how to do this when we study films in high school and discuss their themes, for instance. Oppositional reading is reading against the grain of the film, reading to uncover the naturalized, invisible, encoded messages and assumptions about race, class, gender, etc. Sometimes this means deliberately reading from a non-mainstream subject position. EXAMPLE: Disney s Pocahontas: the romance between John Smith and Pocahontas A dominant reading might go like this: this film accepts and celebrates interracial relationships we re warmed and reassured when these two come together, and we re pleased our children are receiving this message about diversity. (Who s we in this reading?) An oppositional reading might ask, why does the blond white guy get the prize the exotic princess in yet another mainstream film? Why is the heroic, handsome Native American suitor Kokoum so immediately rejected? Why does a

4 man of color have to conveniently die to make way for the white guy, the real hero? Both/and readings: Seeing both of these possible readings at work in the same text and showing how the text supports both these readings is doing a both/and reading. Polysemic as the Pocahontas example demonstrates, texts are polysemic; they have multiple meanings at work and at play in them. Semiotics is the study of systems of signs and symbols which create, assign, and communicate meaning. This includes languages of words AND of other systems like image systems. Think about all the layers of meaning conveyed in a Nike swoosh, for instance. In our work of reading films for their representation of our culture and of cultural identity, images, background music, camera angles, editing, and so on all make up the language system we have to attend to. Iconography the traditional or conventional images associated with a subject particularly a religious or legendary subject. Art historians talk about the multiple meanings encoded in the iconography of the mother Mary in medieval art. Film scholars and media studies scholars might talk about the encoded meanings in the image of the gun, a cigarette, the rain, etc. Intertextuality choices and depictions in an individual media text are connected to previous texts and their choices and depictions. Depictions of sexy blondes in clingy evening dresses striking alluring poses repeat, build on, and rely on earlier depictions of sexy blondes in these same kinds of dresses and poses for their immediate impact and meaning. Depictions of sexy lesbian blondes in these very same kinds of dresses and poses might talk back to earlier assumptions that these blondes are always and everywhere advertising their desire for and availability to men. IV. CONCLUSION For me, the ultimate goal of Media Studies is acquiring more questions to ask and more angles to consider when watching and reading media texts. Each new scholar I read introduces me to more paths I can take into the complexity of encoding and decoding the meanings of texts. I can hear some low groans as I write this. Does this mean I ll never get to just sit back and lose myself in a movie again?! Yes and no. At first it might seem this

5 way; all those media studies dendrites you ve just grown to connect more neurons in you brain will kick in even when not invited to, perhaps. I find I can watch a movie and enjoy it as intended AND come out with more to think about and question a both/and experience, in other words. Some of you might already enjoy and apply this approach to watching movies, TV, etc. You follow in the footsteps of a central 20 th critical theorist named Jacques Derrida you ll probably bump into him again if you continue on in humanities or social sciences. Derrida gives us a French word to help us think about Media Studies: jeu, which means game and play. The work of reading media texts for their representation of our culture is a mindful, useful game, and it can be fun. Jeu encourages us to read and write about media texts playfully, rather than adopting a judgmental, blaming tone. This word also helps us think about all the possible meanings at play in a text. So, one more term to deal with, representation. I ve woven this word into the assignment sheet for Session Four and into this lecture. You ve already studied the term, though, in your earlier readings of Kolker. Images and movies depict reality, but they don t capture reality because reality is itself a shared cultural concept. So media texts represent our culturally constructed ideas of reality they both reflect and project these shared ideas. Let s play with this word to represent or to re-present ala Derrida what are all the meanings at play in the word? The different meanings help us understand all the ways a media text depicts our world. We ll take up this question in Discussion. We ll also discuss and clarify this lecture as needed.

6 Session Four: Integrating Multiple Sources Integrating Multiple Secondary Sources Dropped Quotations: Avoid these! A dropped quotation occurs when you don t introduce your source at all in your sentence; instead you just name the author and page # in a parenthetical reference. EXAMPLE OF DROPPED QUOTATION: The Big Sleep captures much of the famed grimy worldview of hard boiled detective novels, visions of a dark, corrupt underworld of dopers and robbers, of sexual exploiters and an omnipresent immorality infiltrated by their cynical but morally secure detective characters (Kolker 242). Not Good! FIXED EXAMPLE: The Big Sleep captures much of the famed grimy worldview of hard boiled detective novels. In Film, Form and Culture, author Robert Kolker describes this perspective as visions of a dark, corrupt underworld of dopers and robbers, of sexual exploiters and an omnipresent immorality infiltrated by their cynical but morally secure detective characters (Kolker 244). (I don t really have to put Kolker s name in the parentheses, but I can just to be absolutely clear.) Next time I want to quote the same author, I can just signal attribution by reusing his last name: Kolker suggests these detectives barely surviv[e] their exploits with their moral centers intact (Kolker 245). If you quote this same author several paragraphs further along, it s wise to re-use his whole name: With femme fatales like the single-minded Agnes and with cheerful working women like the cabdriver, The Big Sleep, in Robert Kolker s words, disrupt[s] some Hollywood stereotypes about gender and the inevitability of sacrifice and suffering (243). SO, AS YOU MOVE BETWEEN SECONDARY SOURCES, just use attribution phrases like these in your actual sentences, usually before inserting the quotation, to signal who you re quoting. If this is the first time you ve quoted from the source in this essay, introduce the source by title, author, and maybe kind of text. In my fixed example above, we can tell Film, Form, and Culture is a book from the treatment of the title and the use of the word author. In the actual parenthetical reference, the most you ll include is the author s last name and the number of the page for that quotation. Don t include the title of the text quoted, the date of publication, or anything else in the parentheses this information goes in the Works Cited page.

7 Session Four: Streamlining Sentences Streamlining Your Sentences I. Active Voice: You can often make your sentences much more direct and vigorous using active voice instead of passive voice. Active voice shows the doer of the action actively doing it. It can also eliminate helping verbs and prepositions, so it s more direct and less wordy. Active voice: The dog ate my essay. Passive voice: My essay was eaten by the dog. There is and It is are also passive and can often be replaced by active voice. (Passive voice can still be useful. It can control emphasis and/or remove unnecessary or unwanted information. Six thousand civilians were killed. Here, passive voice emphasizes the victims rather than those doing the killing.) II. Finding the perfect verb in the noun of the verb phrase: puts the emphasis on in the noun emphasis lies a verb that can take the place of all four of these words: emphasizes! has an effect on affects! III. Editing out unnecessary repetition: sometimes you can just take out words and phrases because the sentence already conveys this information somewhere else. IV. Workshop! Here s a paragraph with some fairly savvy ideas, but they re hard to grasp as written. I get you started; see what you can do with the rest of it. (Note that this paragraph is more like an essay with no supporting evidence than one well-developed paragraph) In The Big Sleep, there are three specimens of the femme fatale cavorting and conniving their way through the movie. Three distinct specimens of the femme fatale cavort and connive their way through The Big Sleep. This use of three femme fatales is done to shine a spotlight on the thematic idea that an independent spirit in a woman can be seen as a good thing. Including three versions of the femme fatale spotlights the idea that an independent spirit in a woman can be a good thing. We are shown a variety of kinds of independence in the three characters of Carmen, Agnes, and Vivian. Carmen,

8 Agnes, and Vivian illustrate three very different kinds of independence. Carmen certainly takes actions outside the narrow, strict, traditional expectations of well-behaved women of that day and age. Carmen certainly acts outside the narrow expectations for well-behaved women of the 1940s. Rather than reading as independent actions and behavior, however, her actions are depicted as portrayals of mindlessness and willfulness, even as mental instability and illness. Agnes is shown to be a tougher and wilier example of womanhood than the traditional norm for a woman, but, in her case, it s her self-serving greed that taints her apparent self-reliance. And then there s Vivian. Vivian is a woman whose independent adventurous spirit sometimes is encoded by the movie as sexually alluring and attractive. We are also carefully informed that all of her moments of taking matters into her own hands are done for the right reasons, out of loyalty to her family. There s an emphasis put on what it is that motivates each femme fatale s behavior, then, in this film; pure and altruistic reasons for acting on her own initiative in turn earn a woman a little more breathing room for exploring and expressing her sexuality. (Here s how I d edit the rest: Rather than reading as independent actions and behavior, however, this reads as mindlessness and willfulness, even as mental instability and illness. The film depicts Agnes as a tougher, wilier woman than the traditional norm dictates, but in her case, her self-serving greed taints her self-reliance. And then there s Vivian. Her independent spirit is often encoded as sexually alluring. The film also carefully informs us that when she takes matters into her own hands, she does so for all the right reasons out of loyalty to her family. This film emphasizes what motivates each femme fatale s behavior, then; altruistic reasons for acting on her own initiative earn a woman a little more breathing room for exploring and expressing her sexuality.) So now when I write streamline? in the margins of your essay, you ll know what I m talking about. Check your handbooks for more information, too.

Encoding/decoding by Stuart Hall

Encoding/decoding by Stuart Hall The Encoding/decoding model of communication was first developed by cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall in 1973. He discussed this model of communication in an essay entitled