The Blackwell Companion to Sociology (8 page)

Harold Adams Innis and Lewis Mumford, who link basic media forms with

larger civilizational consequences. Though less precise, this more open definition is helpful for understanding current transformations in the social place of media and for broadening the historical and comparative vistas of media studies.

Standardizing and Localizing Trends

In broad strokes, the fundamental task of twentieth-century media sociology has

been to assuage the anxiety that modern communications homogenize culture

and society. Sociological research has repeatedly minimized fears of media

power. Although new communications media seemingly rupture social scale,

local community life does not disappear, say most sociologists; instead, it takes different shapes.

In the early twentieth century, the main challenge came from the anxiety,

deriving largely from crowd psychology and Tocqueville's notion of democratic

leveling, that modern communication, thanks to its contagious sweep and

increased radius of influence, would wash all personal, cultural, and geographic diversity into a standardized ocean of sameness. Cooley (1909, chapter nine)

responded by arguing that improved communications enhancè`choice'' and

weaken `ìsolation'' as the basis of individuation. His point, familiar in turn-of-the-century social thought, was that communication had superseded geography

as the chief constraint on human sociability. A community of isolation would

differentiate, like Darwin's finches, in idiosyncratic directions, but a community of choice, one united by the interests rather than location of its participants, was a harbinger of a renewed democracy. In a sense Cooley theorized virtual communities by suggesting that new forms of communication allowed for remote

associations based on interest rather than place. Thus Cooley, like his colleagues, identified countervailing tendencies against the supposed time- and space-destroying powers of new forms of communication. The first generation of

American sociology answered the specter of assimilation with the hope of the

great community.

Malcolm Willey and Stuart Rice, in a forgotten but highly suggestive early

study of new transport and communication media, made a similar argument:

``Contacts within the community are multiplied out of proportion to contacts at

a distance'' (Willey and Rice, 1933, p. 57). Rather than eviscerating local life, cars and telephones actually multiplied the intensity of contacts. Although new

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means offered an unprecedented opportunity to escape locality, they were more

often used to link familiar people and places. `Ìndividuals north, south, east, and west, may all wear the garments of Hollywood. At the same time each may hold

with undiminished vigor to certain local attitudes, traditions, and beliefs. An

increase in overt standardization may be accompanied by retention of inward

differences'' (Willey and Rice, 1933, pp. 213±14).

In a somewhat similar way, the tradition of work on media effects associated

with Columbia University sought to check the fear that media were bulldozing

collective bonds and individual judgment. The hallmark of the research done by

Paul F. Lazarsfeld and his students at Columbia in the 1940s and 1950s was the

proposition that media have strong influence only when mediated by such

psychological variables as selectivity or such sociological variables as interpersonal relations. Work at the Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research

focused more on the short-term attitudinal effects of media campaigns than on

the larger trends favored by the Chicagoans, although Lazarsfeld's blueprint, at least, of the mission of communications research did include the macro, long-term consequences of media for social organization.

The Columbia tradition's insight that the power of mediated messages is

constrained by extant social-psychological conditions has proved remarkably

influential and adaptable. Against the inflated fears (or hopes) of some propa-

ganda analysts, Lazarsfeld and Merton (1948) argued that mass communication

could be persuasive only under special conditions, such as the absence of coun-

ter-propaganda, the reinforcement of media messages by face-to-face discussion,

and the strategic exploitation of well established behaviors. The power of

unaided mass media to win wars, sway voters, or sell soap was, they argued,

overrated. In their 1955 Personal Influence, Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz argued

the priority of personal over mediated influence. People, not radio or news-

papers, turned out to be the key channels of communication. Opinion leaders

first expose themselves to media, then talk to friends and family, thus serving as links in the larger network of communication, by dancing ``the two-step flow'' of communication. Thè`discovery of people'' in the process of communication, as

Lazarsfeld and Katz whimsically called it, was not only empirical; it was a

gambit in the debate in 1950s sociology about whether postwar America had

become a mass society of lonely crowds, disconnected from each other but

connected by media. Personal Influence expounded people's immunity to

media-induced atomization and assimilation, thus fitting the broader American

legacy of understanding media as agents of social differentiation rather than

homogenization. Localizing factors were again deemed as important as

standardizing ones in the effects of mass communication.

The same argumentative logic appears in more recent work in the same

tradition. In a study of the worldwide reception of the television program Dallas, Tamar Liebes and Katz (1990) argue against the widespread fear that a new

imperialism of television, music, and film would lead to a global (American)

monoculture. Instead, Liebes and Katz showed that different groups used their

own cultural and ideological predispositions and resources to interpret Dallas in distinct ways. Russian Israelis, for instance, often read Dallas as a self-critical 20

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expose of American capitalism, while Israeli Arabs often focused on its intricate kinship structures and clan loyalties. Against the classic fear of a powerful media stimulus, updated here to an international setting, Liebes and Katz affirmed the inevitability of diverse and local responses to a homogeneously disseminated

text. (In this, they were in line with trends in the sociology of media audiences generally.) Although the context was different from the founding generation of

American sociology ± electronic media threatening national diversity worldwide

versus national railroads and newspapers threatening island communities ± the

sociological response is similar: outward (media) standardization, inward

(social) differentiation.

The equally venerable critical tradition of media sociology, whose chief archi-

tects were scholars of the Frankfurt School and whose classic statement is ``the culture industry'' chapter in Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), differs principally on this point. For critical theory, the standardization of culture cannot be separated from that of society. Whether cultural

industries are totalities or differentiated formations is one of the great theoretical fault lines in media sociology, not only in the mid-twentieth-century face-offs

between figures such as Lazarsfeld and Merton versus Adorno and Horkheimer,

but also in more recent debates in feminist research and cultural studies about

the interpretive autonomy of media audiences. For critical theory, the defense of popular autonomy serves as an apology for an invasive consciousness industry,

by placing the responsibility for media effects on the individual rather than the system; for mainstream sociology, to ignore audience interpretation is to ignore facts. Lazarsfeld's tradition, like that of the Chicago School, ultimately sees the media as agents of social integration; Adorno's tradition agrees that media

achieve integration ± a forced reconciliation in the interest of a few. The Frankfurt School insisted that any adequate analysis of modern media had to link the

social-psychological study of socialization, personality, and family with the

historical-economic study of cultural-making institutions; the rationalization

of culture went together with the duping of consciousness. A similar notion of

media as linking personal dreams and social structures is found in the thought

of Gramsci and Althusser and their disciples. Media sociology, whether critical

or mainstream, has turned on the question of social homogenization and

control.

Contemporary Issues

The National Frame

All complex societies, ancient and modern, organize communications in various

ways and to diverse ends. For much of the past century, communications gen-

erally and the mass media in particular have been designed to link the nation-

state with the household. In Habermas's language, media have been a chief agent

in coupling ``system'' (the market and the state) and ``lifeworld'' (civil society and the family). Modern media history, especially that of the press and broadcasting, Media and Communications

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is an open book of large-scale social integration. Modern media have had the

task of tying micro-level parts of social life (taste, consumption, the household) to macro-level cultural, political, and economic structures (corporations, the

nation). Raymond Williams (1974) coined the suggestive term ``mobile privati-

zation'' for the contradictory historical processes shaping the emergence of

broadcasting: increased mobility in goods, people, and ideas, together with the

solidification of the household as a site of entertainment and consumption.

(Note too the hint of political pathos: this was not public mobilization!) News-

papers, realist drama, brand names, opinion polling, mail-order catalogues, soap operas, call-in shows, or TV guides are diverse examples of practices that quite literally mediate feeling and structure, household and society. As media always

involve negotiations along the border of public and private, their study raises

explicit questions about the constitution of social order (Carey, 1989). What

is significant about twentieth and twenty-first century media is not only the

pervasiveness of their reach, but also the intimacy of the site in which they touch us.In Anderson's (1991) thesis, the modern newspaper, even with local circulation, invited its readers to imagine themselves members in a vast national

community. Network broadcasting, which did achieve national distribution,

likewise operated in the frame of the nation state. The national focus is clear

in such names as NBC, CBS, ABC, BBC, CBC, each of which indexes the polity:

National, Columbia, American, British, Canadian. Radio first established the

crucial arrangements in the two decades between the world wars: nationwide

distribution of programs to a domestic audience trained to simultaneous recep-

tion. Despite differences between the market-sponsored system in the United

States and the state-sponsored systems of Europe and elsewhere, something

sociologically remarkable was achieved in broadcasting: the coordination of

national populations over time and space. Perhaps what emerged earlier on

Sunday mornings in Protestant countries, with the whole population effectively

tuned to the samè`program'' (the vernacular Bible), was similar, but broad-

casting was new in its conjuring of a simultaneously co-oriented national popu-

lace and in its address of a listenership at home. Cinema too, from the First

World War through the 1960s or so, was organized nationally in production,

content, distribution, and exhibition. In their heydays, both broadcasting and

cinema were at once a mode of production, a set of stylistic conventions, and a

set of social relations involving audiences and cultural forms (though these, as we will see, were importantly different for the two media).

Due to technical, regulatory, and economic developments, the national frame

for cinema and television has been waning in the past quarter century. (Radio, in some regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, is still the medium of national integration, but in the 1950s United States, it became the medium of musically differ-

entiated taste cultures or ``formats.'') The domestic box office is only one

important source of revenue for Hollywood films today, along with foreign

box office, video sales, and merchandising. Instead of a studio system churning

out variations on well known genres for a national audience, one shift in the past quarter century has been to blockbusters (genres of one), such as Jaws or Titanic, 22

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for distribution (and merchandising) across the globe. Television audiences,

while often still huge in relative terms, are increasingly fragmented into demo-

graphic segments thanks to channel proliferation. And in the transition to digital encoding of all content, media are increasingly inseparable from communications. The air once carried radio and television programming, but increasingly

fiber-optic cables are the main medium for news and entertainment, just as the

air is becoming the prime medium of voice and data transmission thanks to

mobile telephony, in a rather stunning switch of the old order. In 1950, mails,

telephones, phonographs, radios, televisions, and movie theaters were all

separate channels with distinct content, such as print, interactive voice, sound, image, and money; now they are all carried on the Internet in digital form