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We
live in a time when sources of information have, in theory, never
been more plentiful. The world wide web and the spread of digital
and satellite TV news channels around the globe mean that most
people, particularly in more developed societies, have access
to more information than they could ever absorb. As the physical
boundaries of mass media become global rather than regional or
national, the possibilities for inter-cultural and cross-cultural
communication are almost limitless.
If
knowledge is power, then the dawn of the "information age"
should be a cause for celebration, and yet one of the paradoxes
of the modern era is that the citizenry in "information rich"
societies appear neither to be more well informed or more engaged
in public affairs than hitherto. On the contrary, it may be that
the increasing range of media can watch, read, listen to or interact
with simply makes it easier for people to avoid information about
politics and public affairs. Thus it is often suggested that young
people are both the most "media savvy" and the least
engaged with contemporary politics. Inter-cultural communication,
meanwhile, is circumscribed by political economies that favour
(mainly U.S. based) transnational media corporations, while other
forms of cultural diversity - such as minority interested programming
or foreign news - are increasingly squeezed out.
This is hardly a trivial matter. The quality of a modern democracy
is necessarily dependent on the quality of information available
with which to make informed, rational decisions about matters
of public policy and debate, and the degree to which we can understand
and appreciate forms of cultural diversity. Without a well-informed
citizenry, elections become, in Murrey Edelman's terms, mere political
spectacles (Edelman, 1988). And whether or not we regard the public
opinion poll as a way of extending the public's role in democratic
decision making, or as a means of proscribing and limiting that
involvement, the meaning of the opinions expressed through such
apparatus depends entirely on the information available to people
with which to construct those opinions.
The
question of media and an informed (or, perhaps, uninformed or
misinformed) citizenry is partly an empirical one. What exactly
do we know and how do we know it? And, moreover, what do citizens
need to know in order to be able to make democratic decisions
broadly in line with their desires? Attempts to address such question
have, thus far, tended to be addressed by political scientists
or those interested in media policy, and they have thereby tended
to be limited by those domains. However, I would argue that if
we are really to explore the practicalities, the politics or the
possibilities of the "information age", then we need
to do media audience research of a kind that, as Jensen (1991)
and Raboy, Abramson, Prouix and Welters (2001) have argued, connects
audience research to policy discussions.
Some
would argue that the proliferation of media for an increasingly
global market makes this an "age of uncertainty" (Ang,
1996) in which cross-cultural audience responses to the growth
of global media are both unpredictable and varied across the plethora
of social and cultural contexts in which messages are received.
And yet, as Stromer-Galley and Schiappa (1998) argue, without
audience research any such claims are conjectural. Moreover, we
have now built up a body of quantitative and qualitative research
that suggests a series of processes and patterns, and which clearly
- though not simplistically - implicate, in fairly precise ways,
the role of media in the construction of social meaning (e.g.
Iyengar 1991; Philo 1990; Signorielli and Morgan 1990; Press 1991;
Gamson 1992; Jhally and Lewis 1992; Heide 1995; McCombs, Danielian
and Wanta, 1995; McKinley 1997; Lewis 2001). It therefore no longer
makes any sense to talk of "minimal media effects",
or to debate whether audiences display resistance or consent to
dominant media forms. They do both, depending on the discursive
conditions available to them. It is time to ask, given what we
know, how media audiences might become better informed citizens,
more appreciative of cultural diversity and more able to shape
their own history?
These
questions are made more urgent by the rapid transformation of
the media landscape across both the developing and developed world.
So, for example, the increasingly widespread adoption of advertising
as the dominant source of revenue for broadcasting - whether in
China, South America or Europe - may have significant ideological
consequences, both in promoting an ideology of consumerism and
by making the very act of asking questions about an informed citizenry
seem anachronistic. The consumers of an ad-based system are, after
all, advertisers rather than audiences, for whom questions about
citizenship and democracy are simply irrelevant.
The
broad exploration of what people learn from media would, in some
ways, be a new approach for audience researchers, particularly
in tracking the politics of what kinds of information "the
information age" makes more or less available. In so doing,
it is important to avoid some of the more traditional notions
of democracy, citizenship and knowledge, which tend to privilege
rather dry notions of civic or cultural literacy rather than thinking
through how citizens actually engage in politics and what they
need to know in order to be able to do so.
So,
for example, a Guardian/ICM survey, conducted in September, 2000,
attempted to establish the levels of "cultural literacy"
amongst various age groups in Britain. The survey suggested widespread
ignorance - especially amongst younger people - of a number of
traditional markers of cultural competence. A number of similar
studies have been carried out in the United States in order to
establish levels of "civic literacy" (generally levels
of knowledge of social and political systems and issues), reaching
similarly pessimistic conclusions. And yet it may be that the
information privileged by these studies of cultural or political
literacy would not be especially useful to most people in the
construction of practical political positions germane to their
needs and interests. Indeed, this kind of exercise may have more
to do with policing rather than extending the boundaries of culture
and civic society.
It
is, nonetheless, hard to escape the conclusion that most societies
have a very long way to go in terms of creating an informed citizenry.
As Neuman, Just and Crigler put it: despite "an intense and
virtually uninterrupted barrage of video, audio, and print information
on local, national and world events, one finds a conspicuously
large number of citizens with only marginal interest in and information
about public affairs" (1992, p. xiv). Delli Carpini and Keeter's
comprehensive study of political knowledge in the U.S. (1996)
indicates that the distribution of political knowledge is not
merely a matter of personal effort or predilection, but the consequence
of structural conditions like social class, race or gender. Like
Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of "cultural capital" (Bourdieu
1984), Delli Carpini and Keeter's data suggest that the power
and legitimacy that come with knowledge of contemporary politics
is linked to social position. The authors argue that the ability
to participate effectively in democratic decision making is dependent
upon one's access to accurate information, and that this information
is distributed unequally to disadvantage members of the least
powerful social groups. If this is so, it may be that the "information
age" is increasing these inequities.
Their
research also suggests that many people are not so much uninformed
as misinformed. So, for example, significant proportions of the
electorate appear to have voted for candidates (such as Bush or
Clinton) while assuming those candidates stood for policies that
were contrary to their actual positions or records (Lewis, 2001).
Similarly a MORI survey in 2000 in Britain on asylum seekers and
immigration revealed widespread misconceptions about these issues.
This implies that the utility and meaning of information depends
upon the availability of frameworks, contexts and assumptions.
So, while it may be possible to make rational democratic decisions
without knowing details of institutional politics (Page and Shapiro,
1992), absorbing verifiably correct information may contribute
to misleading conclusions. Indeed, recent research suggests that
patterns or frameworks of news coverage that, while neither technically
inaccurate nor deliberately misleading, may lead people to make
erroneous assumptions about public affairs (Lewis, 2001).
This
line of inquiry can illuminate research into the relationship
between media and public opinion, research which has repeatedly
suggested that media influence in modern democracies is less a
matter of overt forms of persuasion than a question of providing
a context in which opinions are formed (e.g. Philo 1990; Iyengar,
1991; Gamson 1992). Thus we tend to rely on media sources for
information, and, in turn, "one's store of information shapes
one's opinions" (McCombs, Danielian and Wanta, 1995, p.295).
In
the "information age", this is more than a question
of making information available, but exploring the kinds of information
required to generate interest and facilitate understanding. Audience
research suggests that this is a cyclical process: if people do
not feel they understand a news story or a cultural form, the
more disengaged they become from that story/cultural form. Conversely,
once provided with the information necessary to make connections
between these stories and their own understanding of the world
, interest and engagement increases. We need to make use of this
kind of audience research and bring it centre-stage. Stuart Hall
has lamented that his famous diagram of the encoding-decoding
model was incomplete, that he should have drawn it as a full circuit
in which decoding informs encoding (Hall, 1994). By the same token,
we need to view audience studies as not merely the fragmented
end product of an increasingly global media, but as integral to
discussions about the role of the media in democratic societies.
References
Ang,
I. (1996) Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern
World, New York: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment
of Taste, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Delli Carpini, M. and Keeter, S. (1996) What Americans Know about
Politics and Why It Matters, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Edelman, M. (1988) Constructing the political spectacle, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Gamson, W. (1992) Talking Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy
Press.
Hall, S. (1994) `Reflections upon the Encoding/Decoding Model:
An Interview with Stuart Hall' in Cruz, J. and Lewis, J. (Eds.)
Reading, Viewing, Listening, Boulder: Westview, pages 253-274.
Heide, M. (1995) Television, Culture and Women's Lives; thirtysomething
and the Contradictions of Gender, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Iyengar, S. (1991) Is Anyone Responsible?, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Jensen, K.B. (1991) 'Reception analysis: mass communication as
the social production of meaning' in Qualitative Methodologies
For Mass Communication Research, London: Routledge.
Jhally, S. and Lewis, J. (1992) Enlightened Racism: The Cosby
Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream, Boulder:
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McCombs, M., Danielian, and Wanta, W. (1995), `Issues in the News
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McKinley,
E.G. (1997) Beverley Hills, 90210: Television, Gender, and Identity,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Neuman,
W.R., Just, M.R. and Crigler, A.N. (1992) Common Knowledge,
University of Chicago Press.
Page,
B. and Shapiro, R. (1992) The Rational Public, Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Philo,
G. (1990) Seeing and Believing: The Influence of Television,
London: Routledge.
Press,
A. (1991) Women Watching Television, University of Pennsylvania
Press
Raboy,
M., Abramson, B., Prouix , S. and Welters, R. (2001) 'Media
Policy, Audience and Social Demand', Television and New Media
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Signorielli,
N. and Morgan, M. (1990) Cultivation Analysis, California: Sage.
Stromer-Galley
J. and Schiappa, E. (1998) 'The Argumentative Burdens of Audience
Conjectures: Audience Research in Popular Culture Criticism',
Communiation Theory (81), pp. 27-62.
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