Jour 485 Media & Society UNLV Professor Miller. For Final Quiz Review: A Quick Timeline Review of Theories:

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1 Jour 485 Media & Society UNLV Professor Miller For Final Quiz Review: A Quick Timeline Review of Theories: 1. Harold Lasswell, 1920s The hypodermic needle Chains of Iron vs. Chains of Silver The Transmission Model (One sender, many receivers, with occasional noise in between) The classic question of communication studies: Who says what to whom by what channel to what effect? 2. Lazarsfeld and Merton, 1940s Media does not easily change core beliefs; rather it canalizes existing ones (see below) Media often reinforces social conformity Narcotizing dysfunction 3. Lazarsfeld & Katz, 1940s-50s Two-step flow: We need media messages validated by peers and opinion leaders (see below) Some media scholars believe two-step flow lets Big Media off the hook too easily. They believe it underestimates the powerful effect that media outlets (particular under conditions of economic concentration of media power, as during the reign of the Big Three TV networks) shape our agenda (McCombs & Shaw, agenda setting) and frame our way of looking at the world (Entman, framing). 4. Max Horkheimer, 1940s A mass culture, even a market culture, peddles finalized ideas, stories and entertainment designed to appeal to the largest number of people (i.e. the lowest common denominator ) and ensure that they do not question the mechanisms of their society. As a background to understanding Horkheimer, it helps to know the old Marxian concepts: Use value: the value of a think is in our use of it in its quality and efficacy in achieving the end it was designed to achieve. Exchange value: In market conditions, we move from valuing a thing for its usefulness to valuing it for what it can be traded for. Sometimes, of course, this exchange value maps well onto the usefulness and quality of a thing, but not always. Can you think of things that are not particularly high-quality or useful but are highly valued in the marketplace? 5. C. Wright Mills, The Mass Society Mass: People are atomized individuals, alone in their attempts to deal with the overwhelming power of governments, markets, and big media.

2 Publics: People associate themselves into smaller, empowered groups, which discuss shared interests and politics and empower their members. Mills believed that different publics then communicated with one another, creating a community of publics that was the core of classic democracy. He believed that in the mid-20 th century the mass has thoroughly supplanted the public. Did the Web s demassification of media and its power to turn us all into not only media consumers but media producers transform us back from a mass into multiple publics? If so, did these new digital publics achieve Mills hopes for classic democracy? Have the new digital publics created a community of publics or a non-community of mutually loathing (or mutually apathetic) bubbles? 6. Marshall McLuhan, 1960s Electronic media will supplant the sequential world of print with a Global Village in which time and space are conquered and we have a true sense (full-field awareness) of the interconnectedness and simultaneity of events and phenomena in every far-flung outpost on the globe. During the long reign of print, knowledge was prioritized, divided into different stories on different pages, and delivered sequentially according to the judgment of authors and editors. Under electronic communication, we would gain the ability to know many things at once, using multiple senses, witnessing far-flung worlds in real time, seeing events in their rawest form, interfacing more directly with complex, interwoven reality and communicating more directly with one another. It would, to combine Wright s terms, create a global mass public the neighborhood writ large. The Medium Is the Message: McLuhan exhorts us to understand that the real power of media to reshape the pace, scale and pattern of our lives lies not in the content of any individual story or broadcast, but in the nature of the medium itself. Narcissus Trance (see below). The paradox of humanity: We are Followers Adaptors Believers Individuals Critics Skeptics/Verifiers Additional Thoughts on Audience Commodity (Dallas Smythe s theory): In the modern mediasphere, digital media commodifies our time and identity and sells it to advertisers, who then then essential sell us back to ourselves: We are expected to buy products that reinforce our online identities the very identities the advertisers bought in the first place. We are both the commodity itself and the consumer that devours the commodity. Not to be too graphic about it, but it s a sort of media autocannibalism. Audience commodity and the anxiety of not knowing : 24/7 online media offers you the opportunity to lessen your anxiety about not knowing in exchange for your time, attention and identity. Then the very same digital environment that promises to soothe the anxiety proceeds to create more of it. The minute you know something, you are told that there is something else that you simply must know. This is the arena of FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and ICYMI (In Case You

3 Missed It). The one commercial necessity is that the anxiety tub must be forever filled and overflowing. The digital media proposal is: You must know You must know now In order to know, you must provide you time, attention and identity. This type of media thrives and depends on your Narcissus Trance (McLuhan). It determines the pace, scale and pattern of your life, and depends on your not being aware of the degree it is shaping your waking hours. Can inhospitable art (Horkheimer) help wake us up from this trance? Or has it been baked into the media cake as just another diversion to keep us digitally engaged? Unitary narrative: A single media artifact, purposefully produced by an individual author or team. Media narrative: A narrative formed not by a focused author or team of authors but rather shaped by many media outlets of all types, focusing on particular phenomena or figures and pushing generic storylines. A unitary narrative can be written to fit into an existing broad media narrative. For instance, the since-discredited Washington Post story (a unitary narrative) on Prop or Not fit into the existing media narrative about Russian propaganda during the 2016 campaign. Conflict Inflation: The phenomenon, related to the Dictatorship of the Narrative, in which media outlets, in an effort to win and keep the audience s attention, must portray and even create ever greater levels of conflict. (Exhibit #1: The pre-cooked conflicts on Reality TV.) Since conflict=attention (Cernovich), harvesting audience attention through continual conflict inflation allows media outlets to more reliably deliver the audience commodity to advertisers. Some dangers of standard narrative thinking: 1. Conflict must be elevated and central 2. Protagonist and antagonist must be clear 3. Causation must be found and demonstrated 4. Correlation always = causation Some ideas invoked by SNL s The Bubble : Filter bubbles: In an environment characterized by political and media fragmentation, we tend to live digital lives isolated from opinions with which we might disagree, and from news that is inhospitable to our preconceived notions. Because of our own preferences and the way those preferences are reinforced by social-media algorithms, we may end up substantively isolated from any alternative viewpoints except those shared for the purposes of ridicule.

4 Narcissus Trance (McLuhan): We are often unaware of the degree to which media forms determine the pace, scale and pattern of our lives. Narcotizing Dysfunction (Lazarsfeld and Merton): We believe that consuming media about public affairs is the same as being active in public affairs, and hence are less likely to become truly involved. To Lazarsfeld and Merton reading is not the same as doing. The question for today is whether reading and sharing is the same as doing. Canalization (Lazarsfeld and Merton): We are guided toward news, ideas and products that build upon our existing profile. Media rarely changes core values, but it can build on and subtly shift our existing predilections our likes and guide us toward related products and ideas. In today s age, when modern analytics make it increasingly possible to identify targeted niches, canalization is perhaps more powerful than ever. Two-step flow (Lazarsfeld and Katz): Media itself does not change our views, but rather media as discussed later on with peer groups, in which an opinion leader has particularly strong influence in persuading us to accept or reject the view of things conveyed by media outlets. Today, these second-step peer groups often reside online. Confirmation Bias: The tendency to interpret evidence to confirm ideas we already hold. Dictatorship of the Narrative: The condition in which the world portrayed in art or media is tilted in misleading ways not necessarily because of bias, but because of the demands of traditional narrative. Under the Dictatorship of the Narrative, our picture of the world is warped by narrative itself: the need for a clear-cut protagonist and antagonist; the requirement for conflict; and the traditional arc in which a situation of equilibrium is disturbed, action rises, conflict reaches a climax and is resolved through a final dramatic showdown. Individual images, moments and ideas do not have their own intrinsic value but rather are commodities in an overall narrative economy or, to switch metaphors, cogs in the narrative machine. If they don t serve the needs of the machine developing and resolving the conflict they are omitted or deemphasized. Integrity of the Image: A possible antidote to dictatorship of the narrative, in which creators even when working within narrative formats take the time to focus on images, moments and ideas for their own value, without diminishing them because they don t fit into the overall narrative economy. Focusing on the integrity of inconvenient images complicates and enriches narratives, even if it sometimes makes them less efficient. (See: Trump, Putin and the New Cold War in The New Yorker). Love of the Game: Competitive, lawyerly essay-writing. The goal is to ring up the most points for your side. Often such pieces are structured either as argumentative essays or lists. The goal is to persuade the audience, without worrying too much about the inconvenient facts that might complicate your essay. The goal is to win rather than to present a nuanced portrait of reality. Additional Things to Brush Up On: C. Wright Mills: (Just the pages on WebCampus) Publics vs. Mass Roundup of Four Theories know the four models

5 Hutchins Report (Social Responsibility Theory) Morozov, Only Disconnect Car, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Marantz, Trolls for Trump (on Mike Cernovich, who says Conflict = Attention ) Stein, Why We re Losing the Internet to the Culture of Hate McLuhan, The Medium is the Message Know about his notion of the Narcissus Trance Know what he means by media controlling the pace, pattern and scale of our lives Know what he means by the extensions of man Lasswell: Know about Chains of Iron vs. Chains of Silver (the possibility that we must accept positive propaganda to fight totalitarian propaganda) and the hypodermic needle (media is so powerful that we have no defenses) Lazarsfeld implicit responses to Lasswell: Canalization (with Merton) Media cannot easily revise our core beliefs, but it can canalize existing tastes and beliefs that have some affinity with our message, creating a canal from the existing beliefs to the related beliefs espoused in the media message. Two-step flow Media messages usually change our views only after we ve discussed them in a with a peer or thought leader who endorses them. (Think about the implications of this concept for the social-media age, when there is as many lines online discussion of articles as there are articles themselves.) Real-world reinforcement of media messages (think: political rallies) Narcotizing dysfunction: We think we ve participated in the world simply because we read about it. Fabula vs. Syuzhet (Vladimir Propp & Russian Constructivists) Fabula : The actual events of a story, lined up in chronological order Syuzhet: The way we tell the story, with alterations to the fabula for structure, emphasis, drama, conflict, bias and point of view. The crucial question of our course is: What happens in the transition from fabula to syuzhet? How is that transition shaped by ideology, storytelling convention, and the biases of a given medium? Know: My formula for asymptotic objectivity. Objectivity is the goal we pursue but never reach. (Asymptote=A point we move toward, getting ever closer but never quite reaching it.)

6 Objectivity = Informed subjectivity + self-challenge If truth is unstable and unreachable, does that mean we should not try to get as close as we can? Is truth the lie we must believe in? Sample questions: What is the audience commodity? What is a public, and how is different from a mass? What might be a good way to find an audience for propaganda? Find the right public Canalize the opinions of its members Which writer uses digital tools to fight his addiction to digital tools? Morozov According to Morozov, what is the significance of early-20 th century noise laws? According to Carr, what is the significance of Frederick Winslow Taylor? Taylor: Maximize the efficiency of human movement in factories Digital media: Maximize the efficient harvesting of human attention Digital media consumption: How much info can I get and how fast can I get it? Which two theorists discussed the power of art as agency? McLuhan and Horkheimer