Society and media
Grand theory/mega-speculation
Grand questions
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What is the nature of society?
How do societies come into existence?
How do they evolve?
What brings about change, expansion/success
and/or contraction/failure?
• How does social structure/culture maintain or
undermine society?
• How do the phenomena above affect human
experience?
Consensus v. conflict
• Scholars debate over whether society is held
together by consensual values, self-interest or
exploitation
• Significant examples include structuralfunctionalism, exchange theory and Marxism
Structural-functionalism
• Conceives of society as a system that exhibits
many of the same features as either an
organism or a machine
– Lasswell’s presentation likens society to an
organism
• Structures are repetitive behaviors that
characterize the system
• Functions are contributions to the
maintenance and survival of the system
Equilibrium
• S-F theorists tend to portray systems as
existing in a state of equilibrium, with a
number of forces maintaining the system at a
satisfactory state
– When the system is not performing in a
satisfactory manner, internal sensors identify the
unacceptable performance and changes in the
level/intensity of outputs from structures are
brought to bear
• If we use the analogy of the human body, then
our organs/systems maintain the body in a
satisfactory state
• Should the body become sick or an organ fail,
internal systems will adjust as feedback systems
indicate that the ‘desired’ equilibrium is not being
maintained
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White blood cells
Increased blood flow
Interferon
Lymph system
How is change accounted for?
• Change occurs as a result of external shock—
invasion or attack from outside the system
• Later versions of the approach also looked at
conflicts between systems operating at
different levels
– What may be functional for a subsystem may be
‘dysfunctional’ at a higher level, etc.
What is the role of culture?
• New members of the society (young,
immigrants) are taught to adjust their
behavior to fit within the larger social system.
They are ‘socialized’ to accept the norms and
mores of the society, which are crucial to the
non-violent maintenance of society.
What is the role of culture?
• The beliefs, values and attitudes shared by
members of society act as a form of cement
that binds together the individual members of
society
– Socialization
– Habits
– Role assignment/role expectations
– Institutional maintenance
– Property distribution
What is the role of culture?
• Provide knowledge/information useful to
more effectively produce needed
goods/services
• Lasswell’s functions:
– Surveillance of the environment
– Correlation of the components of society in
making a response to the environment
– Transmission of the social inheritance
Sources of solidarity
• Affective bonds
– Family
• Common culture/belief systems
– Religion
– Acceptance of authority
• Economic and political self-interest
– Specialization of function (efficiency)
– Merit-based advancement/power
Sources of solidarity
• Power/force
– Police force
– Military
– Legal/prison system
• Authority
– Inherited
– Institutional
– Acquired
Structural functionalism today
• While the more formal theory of structural
functionalism, and use of its terms, no longer
dominate social theory, some of its ideas and
concepts are retained in a range of current
social thought
– Systems theory without the assumption of
equilibrium is more common
– Symbolic interactionism and reality construction
are both competitive and complementary to S-F
Reflection in democratic theory
• Liberal-pluralist democratic theory shares much
of the structural-functionalist approach to society
– When society goes off course, change is initiated
through the electoral structure
– News media provide information necessary for selfcorrective processes to work (functions of
communication)
– Analysis of media as structures and the quality of their
performance (based on supposed functions they are
expected to perform)
Conflict theory
• Argues that society is not a projection of the
true interests of all (or nearly) of its members
but is structured in dominance and
exploitation
– All societies generate a relatively small and
privileged group of people who are able to exploit
the larger population
Visions of society and media
Consensual society
Self-interest society
Conflict society
Shared beliefs and myths
Economically and politically Class-inflected ideology
valuable information
Controlled by cultural
authorities
Controlled by audiences
through markets
Controlled by economic
and politically powerful
Support for church and
state as carriers of shared
values, norms, etc.
Support of the public
interest, critiquing social
groups, institutions
Support for powerful social
groups, especially
economic elites
Maintenance of social
solidarity arising from
normative/cultural
consensus
Generation of incremental
social change
Maintenance of social
structure through false
consciousness, yet with
revolutionary potential
Which of the three visions has
dominated media/comm studies?
• Self-interest society
• Note:
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Individualist bias
Focus on ‘transmission’
Information rather than ‘stories’
Individual reception/behavior rather than community
impact, etc.
– Politics (with individual self-interest as the defining
characteristic) rather than cultural or religious
identification
Crucial issues within cultural
approaches
• Identity
– What is the nature of our ‘self’—our ‘ego’
– Often determined by our ‘identification’ with
groups
• May not be up to us to decide
• Myths, beliefs, worldview
– What is the popular ontology?
– What is our view of the nature of humankind?
• Social epistemology
– How do we make sense of our world?
• Intellectual and social authority
• How are beliefs passed on to children, etc.?
• The role of kinship, friendship, etc.
• The social structure/culture relationship
• Social control
– In the interest of the many or the few?
• The sources and forms of culture
– High culture (elite culture)
– Folk culture
– Mass culture (popular culture)
Chicago School
• Loose conglomeration of significant social
thinkers with some relation to the University
of Chicago
– Concerned with the disintegration of traditional
small town communities
– Saw mid-nineteenth century American small town
as a sort of ideal community
• Democracy itself was only meaningful, workable within
such a context
Chicago School
• Massive social changes of the late nineteenth
century had undermined the basic
cornerstone of American democracy and
society—the small town community
• No habit of intercommunication (separation
into ethnic communities/no shared language),
no shared ideals or religious faith
• Social change:
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Industrialization
Urbanization
Immigration
Class/economic differentiation
• Leads to breakdown of community:
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Anomie
Self-interest
Multiple, separate ethnic, class groups
Social problems
Breakdown of democracy
Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929)
• Received a PhD (1894) in economics from the University of Michigan,
where he taught beginning in 1892.
• Cooley used the term the "looking glass self" to convey the idea that the
self concept reflects the evaluations
of other people. In other words, we see
ourselves as others see us.
• Works
• Human Nature and Social
Order (1902)
• Social Organization (1909)
• Social Process (1918)
• “It is not too much to say that these changes
(development of modern communication
technologies) are the basis, from a mechanical
standpoint, of nearly everything that is characteristic
in the psychology of modern life.
• They make it possible for society to be organized
more and more on the higher faculties of man, on
intelligence and sympathy, rather than on authority,
caste, and routine. They mean freedom, outlook,
indefinite possibility. The public consciousness,
instead of being confined as regards its more active
phases to local groups, extends by even steps with
that give-and-take of suggestions that the new
intercourse makes possible, until wide nations, and
finally the world itself, may be included in one lively
mental whole.”
Newspapers
• “The essential function of the newspaper is, of
course, to serve as a bulleting of important news and
a medium for the interchange of ideas”
• “The bulk of its matter, however, is . . . organized
gossip. This sort of intercourse that people formerly
carried on at cross-road stores or over the back
fence, has now attained the dignity of print and an
imposing system.”
Impacts of “enlargement of gossip”
• Promotes a widespread sociability and
sense of community
– People across the country are laughing at
the same jokes, thrilling to the same
football games and “absorb(ing) a
conviction that they are good fellows much
like ourselves”
Public opinion
• “In politics communication makes possible public
opinion, which, when organized, is democracy.
The whole growth of this, and of the popular
education and enlightenment that go with it, is
immediately dependent upon the telegraph, the
newspaper and the fast mail, for there can be no
popular mind upon questions of the day, over
wide areas, except as the people are promptly
informed of such questions and are enabled to
exchange their views regarding them.”
• “The enlargement affects not only thought
but feeling, favoring the growth of a sense of
common humanity, of moral unity, between
nations, races and classes. Among members
of a communicating whole feeling may not
always be friendly, but it must be, in a sense,
sympathetic, involving some consciousness of
the other’s point of view.”
The social system is ‘sick’
• Social change has acted as a disease
• How to make the system well again?
• Reconstruct the small town on a grand scale—
build the “Great Community” (Dewey).
John Dewey
• One of the greatest intellectuals in American
history
– Philosopher
– Educational psychologist
– Political theorist
– Social commentator
Dewey and communication study
• Though Dewey placed communication at the
very heart of his philosophical and social
concerns, his actual theoretical work on
communication is fragmented and, at times,
frustratingly difficult if not obscure
– “Of all things, communication is most wonderful”
– ‘Society can be said not only to live by
transmission, by communication, but in
transmission, in communication.’
Dewey’s idea of the role of communication
in society
• Societies are based on shared sentiments,
meanings, beliefs, norms, etc.
• For a society to exist, the members must have
a feeling of communion with other members
– Shared self-interest, knowledge of the law, even
agreement to rules of democracy are not enough
– Difference between the “Great Society” and the
“Great Community”
Community
• In any true community, individuals have a
feeling of fellowship with all the other
members
– Concern over the fate of all members, but
especially those in greatest need, is a natural part
of the community
– All members share equally in the feeling of
fellowship even if material wealth, etc. is unequally
distributed
• The machinery of democracy is created to help carry
out the natural policy of a true community
– It cannot create a community
– It cannot substitute for a community
– In the absence of a true community, the machinery of
elections, universal suffrage, and on and on is simply an
empty husk which will only forward the interests of the
most powerful or the most adept at its manipulation
• Community can only be created through
communication
– Of all things communication is the most wonderful
• One is socialized into humanity through
communication
– “To learn to be human is to develop through the
give-and-take of communication an effective
sense of being an individually distinctive member
of a community; one who understands and
appreciates its beliefs, desires and methods, and
who contributes to a further conversion of organic
powers into human resources and values. But this
translation is never finished.”
Communities small and large
• The ideal of community is the small town
– Like Dewey’s native Burlington, Vermont
• People know each other and come to share powerful
bonds of affection and understanding through their
face-to-face communication, shared religious
experience (communication), gossip, shared culture
and all the other myriad ways they communicate
– People internalize the goal of promoting the good of the
community
Effects of lost community
• Political chicanery, social disintegration,
immorality and economic abuse were largely
due to a loss of the communitarian spirit that
was part of true democracy—the community
How to recapture community?
– Must construct a mass community—the “Great
community” that would replace the “Great
Society”
• Because of the society’s grand scale, communication
would need to be on an equally grand scale—harness
the mass media to provide communication widely and
relatively uniformly to the differing groups that make up
the nation (or the city)
• “Thought News” project (enlightened social intelligence)
Robert Park
Park
• Social control is “the central fact and the
central problem of society”
– “Society is everywhere a control organization. Its
function is to organize, integrate, and direct the
energies resident in the individuals of which it is
composed.”
• Ecological (biotic) community
– An aggregate of individuals characterized by
symbiosis, the division of labor and competitive
cooperation
• Society
– A community of persons organized through
communication, socialization and collective
behavior
Park
• “What does communication do and how does
it function in the cultural process? It seems to
do several different things. Communication
creates, or makes possible at least, that
consensus and understanding among the
individual components of a social group which
eventually gives it and them the character not
merely of society but of a cultural unit.
• “It spins a web of custom and mutual
expectation which binds together social
entities as diverse as the family group, a labor
organization, or the haggling participants in a
village market. Communication maintains the
concert necessary for them to function, each
in its several ways.”
• Transmits tradition of any group over time and
from generation to generation
– “The function of communication seems to be to
maintain the unity and integrity of the social
group in two dimensions—space and time”
The economic
• Competition, inevitable in human society
brings about a distribution of occupations
and, following, a division of labor.
– “As a matter of fact, competition and
communication operate everywhere within the
same local habitat and within the same
community, but in relative independence of each
other.”
– The area of competition is inevitably larger than
the area of communication
– The area of competition is inevitably wider than that of
communication
• Division of labor is limited by custom, and
“custom is a product of communication”
– “But the main point is that communication, where
it exists, invariably modifies and qualifies
competition, and the cultural order imposes
limitations on the symbiotic.”
Louis Wirth
Louis Wirth’s address (1948)
• “Man” had developed technical capabilities that
outstripped his ability to control them through
reason and ‘consensus’ and this was a terribly
dangerous state to be in. This condition made the
study of sociology critically important so that
man’s ability to rule with reason could control the
danger of nuclear holocaust.
• Wirth, Louis (1948). Consensus and mass communication. American
Sociological Review. 13(1) 1-15.
• Consensus “provides both an approach to
the central problem of sociology and to the
problems of the contemporary world.” (2)
– “Because the mark of any society is the
capacity of its members to understand one
another and to act in concert toward common
objectives and under common norms, the
analysis of consensus rightly constitutes the
focus of sociological investigation.” (2)
Characteristics of the mass
• Great numbers
• Aggregates of men widely dispersed over the face of
the earth
• Heterogeneous members
• Anonymous individuals
• Does not constitute an organized group
• No common customs or tradition
• Open to suggestions
– Behavior is “capricious and unpredictable”
• Consists of unattached individuals
– Do not play roles in a group
• Conditions that led to mass society have
combined to “disintegrate local cohesion and to
bring hitherto disparate and parochial cultures
into contact with each other. Out of this ferment
has come the disenchantment of absolute faiths.”
(7)
• --“skepticism toward all dogmas and ideologies”
• --substitution of rational grounds for believing
Consensus
• Consensus is to society as mind is to the
individual
– “Consensus is the sign that such partial or complete
understanding has been reached on a number of issues
confronting the members of a group sufficient to entitle it
to be called a society.”
• Not imposed by coercion
• Not fixed by custom
• Therefore, “always partial and developing and has
constantly to be won” (4)
– Consensus . . . is the established habit of
intercommunication, or discussion, debate, negotiation
and compromise, and the toleration of heresies, or
even of indifference, up to the point of “clear and
present danger” which threatens the life of the society
itself. Rather than resting on unanimity, it rests upon a
sense of group identification and participation in the
life of society, upon the willingness to allow our
representatives to speak for us even though they do
not always faithfully represent our views, if indeed we
have any views at all on many of the issues under
discussion, and upon our disposition to fit ourselves
into a program that our group has adopted and to
acquiesce in group decisions unless the matter is
fundamentally incompatible with our interests and
integrity.” (9-10)
• “If men of diverse experiences and interests are to
have ideas and ideals in common they must have the
ability to communicate. It is precisely here, however,
that we encounter a paradox. In order to
communicate effectively with one another, we must
have a common knowledge, but in a mass society it
is through communication that we must obtain this
common body of knowledge.” (4-5)
Two major aspects of modern society
• Organized groups
• Detached masses
– “held together, if at all, by the mass media of
communication”
Public opinion
• “formed in the course of living, acting and
making decisions on issues” (8)
• Individuals’ role is determined by “their
power, prestige, strategic position, their
resources, their articulateness, the
effectiveness of the organization and
leadership.” (8)
• “Decisive part of public opinion . . . is the
organization of views on issues that
exercise an impact upon those who are in a
position to make decisions.”
• unorganized masses leave the decisionmaking to those who are organized
• “It is . . . the consensual basis that already
exists in society which lends to mass
communication its effectiveness.” (6-7)
James Carey
Carey
• Carey is reacting to the dominance of the
structural functionalist/effects paradigm
reflected in Lasswell’s and Lazarsfeld’s view of
communication over that of the Chicago
School
• “Transmission” view of communication
– “imparting, sending, transmitting or giving
information to others”
– Metaphor of geography or transportation
• “The center of this idea of communication is
the transmission of signals or messages over
distance for the purpose of control.”
– Derives from “one of the most ancient of human
dreams: the desire to increase the speed and
effect of messages as they travel in space.”
Religious roots
• Puritan movement to New World, etc.
based on the “belief that movement in
space could itself be a redemptive act”
– “The moral meaning of transportation,
then, was the establishment and extension
of God’s kingdom on Earth.”
• “Communication was viewed as a process and
as a technology that would, sometimes for
religious purposes, spread, transmit, and
disseminate knowledge, ideas information
further and faster with the end of controlling
space and people.”
• Over time the view became more secularized
but it continues to dominate current thinking
Ritual view of communication
• Older of the two views
• “Sharing, participation, association, fellowship, and
the possession of a common faith”
• “A ritual view of communication is not directed
toward the extension of messages in space but the
maintenance of society in time; not the act of
imparting information but the representation of
shared beliefs.”
• “If the archetypal case of communication
under a transmission view is the extension of
messages across geography for the purpose of
control, the archetypal case under a ritual
view is the sacred ceremony which draws
persons together in fellowship and
commonality.”
Definition of communication
• “Communication is a symbolic process whereby
reality is produced, maintained, repaired and
transformed.”
• “Reality is not given, not humanly existent,
independent of language and towards which
language stands as a pale refraction. Rather reality is
brought into existence, is produced, by
communication; that is, by the construction,
apprehension, and utilization of symbolic forms.”
• “It does not see the original or highest
manifestation of communication in the
transmission of intelligent information but in
the construction and maintenance of an
ordered, meaningful cultural world which can
serve as a control and container for human
action.”
• “This projection of community ideals and their
embodiment in material form—dance, plays,
architecture, news stories, strings of speech—creates
an artificial though nonetheless real symbolic order
which operates not to provide information but
confirmation, not to alter attitudes or change minds
but to represent an underlying order of things, not to
perform functions (my emphasis) but to manifest an
ongoing and fragile social process.”
• “The model here is not that of information
acquisition, though such acquisition occurs, but of
dramatic action in which the reader joins a world of
contending forces as an observer at play.”
• “a presentation of reality that gives to life an overall
form, order, and tone”
• “Under a ritual view, then, news is not
information but drama: it does not describe
the world but portrays an arena of dramatic
forces and action; it exists solely in historical
time; and it invites our participation on the
basis of our assuming, often vicariously, social
roles within it.”