Mass Media Culture Research Articles

Celebrity versus Tradition: ‘Branding’ in Modern British Pantomime

British pantomime between 1985 and 2005 has undergone an evolutionary reconstruction based on practices of branding. Within this broad field, Martina Lipton distinguishes two competing pantomime models, investigating the contrasting ideological and cultural positioning of dominant representations of modern pantomime by a major production group, Qdos Entertainment, and the Nottingham Playhouse and York Theatre Royal repertory companies. She reads these models as identifying collective experiences and taste communities after the categories identified by Pierre Bourdieu as conferring ‘distinction’. While these companies both offer a somewhat similar mediatized product, they successfully co-exist within a dynamic and competitive marketplace by branding their pantomimes as respectively embracing and resisting the influence of mass-media popular culture. Both branding practices have succeeded in restoring the genre to high visibility and economic success. Martina Lipton is working on a PhD at the University of Queensland.

“Seoul—America” on America's “Soul”: South Koreans and Korean Immigrants Navigate Global White Racial Ideology1

Although students of race have produced impressive works on global Western racism, their mostly macro-level focus has not addressed how marginal groups respond to Western racial ideology and do so based on state and cultural influences. To capture Asians' localized responses to white- American superiority specifically, the author conducts a comparative case study of South Koreans and Korean American immigrants, fitting groups given US geopolitical dominance in South Korea since 1945 and large numbers of Korean immigrants in the USA. Drawing on 66 combined interviews (in-depth, open-ended, and focus group) in Seoul and in Los Angeles County, the author finds that while South Koreans and Korean Americans at times similarly adopt and resist white racial hegemony, their responses differ by way of state and cultural ideologies and practices. The US military presence in South Korea, supported by the Korean state, and imported American mass media culture centrally shape the residents' narratives. In the United States, the American “racial state” and attendant cultural ideologies (“democracy,” racial categories) figure centrally in Korean Americans' narrative responses to hegemony. The author concludes with the implications of localized analyses for global racism scholarship.

Cultural Studies, Media Spectacle, and Election 2004

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both . —James Madison Since the rise of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham England in the 1960s as well as in subsequent versions of cultural studies throughout the world, there has been a long-standing tradition of taking on the big issues of the era. The Birmingham School took on the assaults against working class culture by American and mass media culture. In this conjuncture, British cultural studies stressed the need for media literacy and critique, learning to read newspapers, TV news, advertisements, TV shows and the like just as one learns to read books (see Kellner, 1995). The project helped generate a media literacy movement, expanded the concept of literacy, and introduced a new, powerful dimension of pedagogy into cultural studies. Later, in the 1980s, British cultural studies took on the rise of Thatcherism and the emergence of a new rightwing conservative hegemony in Britain, by explaining how British culture, media, politics, and various economic factors led to the emergence of a new conservative hegemony (see Hall & Jacques, 1983). Larry Grossberg (1992), Stanley Aronowitz (1993), myself (Kellner & Ryan, 1988; Kellner, 1991 & 1995), and others engaged in similar work within the U.S. throughout the Reagan era of the 1980s, applying cultural studies to analyze the big issues of the time. Indeed, one of my major focuses of the past two decades has been the use of cultural studies and critical social theory to interrogate the big events of the time: The Persian Gulf TV War (Kellner, 1992), Grand Theft 2000: Media Spectacle and a Stolen Election (Kellner, 2001), From September 11 th to Terror War (Kellner, 2003b) on the September 11 th terrorist attacks and their exploitation by the Bush administration to push through rightwing militarism, interventionism, unilateralism and a hard-right domestic agenda, including the Patriot Act (Kellner 2003b), and Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy (Kellner, 2005), which demonstrated how the Bush administration consistently manipulated media spectacle during its first term and in the highly contested and controversial 2004 election. In my books Media Culture (Kellner, 1995) and Media Spectacle (Kellner 2003a), I use cultural studies to critically interrogate major phenomena of the day like Reagan and Rambo, Madonna and pop feminism, rap and hip hop, cyberpunk and the Internet, McDonald's and globalization, Michael Jordan and the Nike spectacle, and other defining cultural phenomena of the era. Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and counter- disciplinary approach that can be used to address a wide range of cultural phenomena from advertising to political narratives (see Kellner, 1995; 2003a). A

How Much Do Conservative Tort Tales Matter?

Distorting the Law: Politics, Media, and the Litigation Crisis (2004) is a pathbreaking study of the shaping of legal culture in contemporary, mediasaturated societies. It focuses particularly on the construction of a predominantly negative public image of the American tort law system. With impressive research and wit, William Haltom and Michael McCann show how and why the media has spread distorted antitort tales while neglecting sociolegal scholars' more realistic portrait of the system. One consequence, Distorting the Law indicates, is that conservative tort reformers have dominated the social construction of the tort law system in the mass media, mass culture, and political debate. My purpose in this article is not to question Distorting the Law's excellent account of how that negative image of the tort system was shaped but to raise a perennial question about the relationship between popular discourse and political and legal change. What has been the impact of that politically inspired, media-amplified disparagement of the tort system? How much has it actually changed public opinion, the behavior of litigants, lawyers and juries, the substance of tort law, and the litigation process? These questions are not the central empirical focus of Distorting the Law. The questions focus more directly on concrete political and legal consequences than does the book as a whole. Yet Haltom and McCann do offer a speculative argument regarding how the prevailing constructions of civil litigation in the mass media culture matter. (Haltom and McCann 2004, 29). Those constructions matter a great deal, they say in the book's final chapter, and imply the same

What risks are Chinese people concerned about?

The aim of this study is to investigate public perceived risk on various issues in present-day China. Two surveys were conducted in urban China in 1996 and 1998. In the first survey, risk perceptions of different occupational groups are compared. Gender differences within each occupational group are also analyzed. In the second survey, participants with diverse employment status were recruited. The overall risk rankings of both surveys indicate great concern with risks that threaten national stability and economic development, and less concern with high-technology risk such as threat from a nuclear power plant. It is also found that employees from high-profit firms are more concerned about macroscopic catastrophic risks, whereas laid-off workers and employees from money-losing enterprises are more concerned about daily life or self-concerned risks. The importance of actual exposure to risk, mass media coverage, culture, and psychometric dimensions are discussed.

The Author's Right to Intellectual Property

Increasingly in certain circles the idea is growing up that ‘intellectual property is theft’. With companies being concentrated into multimedia groups, literary works being captured electronically, products being created for a mass-media culture, commercial exchange on a worldwide scale, the legitimacy of the creator's literary and artistic property is being challenged. Originally the ‘droit d'auteur’ or copyright were mainly protective rules laid down by law to regulate the author's status. The legal system of literary and artistic ownership still ensures that creators receive revenue each time their works are reproduced, adapted or communicated to the public. In addition the droit d'auteur has another aspect through the existence of moral right, which establishes a personal link between author and work. It is true that moral right, which is sometimes seen as an obstacle to economic development, is almost non-existent in the systems of law recognizing copyright, which do not incorporate the same balance of interests as between the author and the company. On the other hand, in its formulation the droit d'auteur takes a more human approach and to say that intellectual property is theft would be equivalent to weakening, or even eradicating, a system that protects individual creators facing the reality of the exploitation of their work. This is why this criticism of legitimacy should, in my view, be considered in the context of a debate about the status of the author. The electronic capture of creative works has meant that the general public has easier access to them.

Performance Art as Critical Pedagogy in Studio Art Education

In rethinking studio art education, performance art represents the praxis of a postmodern theory that espouses the critique of cultural codes, the development of agency, and the production of new cultural images, ideas, and myths based on students' subjectivities. A pedagogy founded on performance art serves as the praxis of the postmodern ideals of progressive education. It serves as an ontological process through which students learn to challenge art historical assumptions, the ideologies of institutionalized learning, and the spectacle of mass media culture in order to facilitate agency and to develop critical citizenship.

Art and Technology: An Old Tension

This is not the first time the title ‘Art and Technology’ has been used, but to distinguish what I have to say from Walter Gropius's Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, I am subtitling my paper ‘an old tension’, where the architect spoke of ‘a new unity’. In a way, Gropius has been proved right; the structures of the future avoiding all romantic embellishment and whimsy, the cathedrals of socialism, the corporate planning of comprehensive Utopian designs have all gone up and some come down. We have a mass media culture also largely made possible by technology. Corporatist architecture, whether statist ‘social housing’ or freemarket inspired, films, videos, modern recording and musical techniques are all due to technological advances made mostly this century. Only in a very puritanical sense could what has happened be thought of as inevitably bringing with it enslavement. All kinds of possibilities are now open to artists and architects, which would have been imaginable a few decades ago. No one is forced to use these possibilities in any specific way.

Film Discussion Groups in China: State Discourse or a Plebeian Public Sphere?

The Chinese term criticism among {qunzhong yingping) refers to a system of loosely organized film discussion groups which have emerged in several Chinese cities in wake of economic reforms of 1980s. The term masses {qunzhong) belies political origins of this phenomenon in 1950s when new socialist state sought to bring about political self-education of what it called the and at same time, to create a basis of popular legitimacy for itself. It is therefore a historical irony that in 1980's revival of these film discussion groups, can be detected an emerging rupture between state and popular discourse, and a decline in hold of official messages on mass media audiences. In recent years there has been a renewed interest in interrelated notions of civil and Civil refers to structural and institutional dimension of a democratic society, where voluntary associations operate outside of and independent of state (Keane 1988ab; Taylor 1990). The public sphere, most thoroughly analyzed by Habermas for Western context, refers to discursive realm of social criticism and public opinion formed through public debates which are independent of state as well as market domination (Habermas 1989; Calhoun 1992). Sites for emergence of public sphere in 18th century Western Europe were coffee houses, salon societies, newspapers, magazines, and novels. First developed to discuss social changes at inception of capitalism in West, and as a way for new bourgeoisie of 18th century to band together against absolutist state, notions of civil and have recently been re-appropriated for a different historical and political context. They have witnessed a renewed vitality in Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union. From 1970s to 1990s, these notions have informed selfinterpretations of those seeking to liberate realm of society from totalizing socialist state (Arato 1981; Wojcicki 1981;Pelcynski 1988;Hankiss 1988;Kligman 1991). With regards to these social movements can be seen as efforts to free art from dual processes of what Benjamin called aestheticization of politics and politicization of art, which modernity had inaugurated by severing art from its traditional association with religion and cult values (1968). In this paper, I would also like to address question for post-Mao China of possibilities for a public sphere developing in context of statedominated production of mass media.' The economic reforms launched in China in 1980s have had effect of pluralizing culture and beginning dissolution or weakening of state at peripheries of its organizational apparatus (Yang 1989a). In this gradual retreat of state, what indications are there of social self-organization and new discourse-formation in realm of mass media culture? My paper is very much an in-progress report and reflection, based on six weeks of preliminary fieldwork visiting film discussion groups in cities of Xi'an and Shanghai in early 1992, and a perusal of two dozen film criticisms in print. While art in state socialist contexts seeks to extract itself from state politics, art and public culture are also

Mass Media and Teen Culture in Singapore: An Exploratory Study

Mass media have always been criticized for their negative influence on youth . . . manifested in the development of a youth culture, and its ensuing problems like drug abuse and violence. Is there a youth culture in Singapore? How does it relate to mass media?

The Mass Media and Musical Culture

The Mass Media and Musical Culture

Reference Sources in Photography

While the spread of mass media culture in the United States has often been measured in terms of the number of television sets in each home, the camera and the photograph have been almost as pervasive. Once the province of the professional photograher or the special studio, cameras of the same type are found today in all but a very few homes in the United States. Even rarer would be a home without its collection of photographs to record the family's events, joys, triumphs and tragedies as well as the everyday mundane record of events.

Chapter V: The Mass Media and Popular Culture

Chapter V: The Mass Media and Popular Culture

The Mass Media and Youth Culture

The immediate, direct influences of the mass media upon individuals are obscure. Here, the author argues that indirect effects are substantial, but that research upon them has only begun.

Media Texts and Readers

Don R. Pember's Mass Media in America (Chicago: Science Research Associates, 1977—price not given, paper) Michael R. Real's Mass-Mediated Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1977—$8.50, paper) Michael C. Emery and Ted Curtis Smythe, eds. Readings in Mass Communication: Concepts and Issues in the Mass Media (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm C. Brown, 1977—price not given, paper) Fredric Rissover and David C. Birch, eds. Mass Media and the Popular Arts (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977—price not given, paper) Thomas H. Ohlgren and Lynn M. Berk, eds. The New Languages: A Rhetorical Approach to the Mass Media and Popular Culture (400 pp., $7.95, paper) Leonard Sellers and William L. Rivers, eds. Mass Media Issues: Articles and Commentaries (384 pp., $7.95, paper) Peter M. Sandman, David M. Rubin, and David B. Sachsman, eds. Media Casebook: An Introductory Reader in American Mass Communications (288 pp., $6.95, paper)

Media Related Books

Samuel J. Archibald (ed.) The Pollution of Politics: A Research/Reporting Team Investigates Campaign Ethics (Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1971—$1.00, paper) L. Patrick Devlin (ed.) Contemporary Political Speaking (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1972—$3.95 (tentative price), paper) Don Allen's The Electric Humanities: Patterns for Teaching Mass Media and Popular Culture (Dayton, Ohio: Pflaum, 1971—$5.95, paper) 1971 Advertiser Commercial Code Guide: The Official Industry Standard Commercial Identification System (Skokie, Ill.: National Register Publishing Co., 1971— $6.50, paper) Roberto Bauer (comp.) The New Catalog of Historical Records: 1898-1908/09, London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1970—6.50 (approximately)

Towards a More Simplified Party System in France

La simplification du régime de parti en FranceDepuis 1958, la France délaisse les factions politiques irréconciliables en faveur d'une entente autour de deux blocs capables de former un gouvernement. Cette évolution est en partie dûe à la fin de la guerre d'Algérie aussi bien qu'à la décolonisation subséquente qui privèrent l'extrême droite de ses thèmes, La retrait de l'organisation militaire de l'OTAN et la politique de rapprochement avec les pays socialistes, effectués par la France, eurent pour effet de terminer l'affrontement est-ouest dans la politique intérieure de ce pays et d'y légitimer le parti communiste. Telle est la base de cette entente.De Gaulle et la nouvelle constitution imposèrent ce dualisme au pays: le premier, parce qu'il devint le principe majeur de division entre les partis; la seconde, parce que l'élection du président au suffrage universel réduit la confrontation aux deux candidats les plus sérieux. Ce passage, d'une culture politique de partis irrédentistes à une pratique sociale d'accommodement, ne peut s'expliquer que par l'avènement d'une consommation de masse, axée sur une technologie avancée: des doctrines abstraites, l'intérêt de la nation s'est reporté sur des problèmes concrets, susceptibles de solutions techniquement identifiables. Cette évolution est rendue explicite par la nouvelle tendance de l'opinion publique à accepter les communistes comme parti politique légitime. Entre les positions traditionnelles de la droite et de la gauche, l'écart diminue, alors que les accommodements sociaux s'accroissent en nombre et que la tradition cartésienne perd peu à peu de son emprise.