Mass Media Products Research Articles

Mass media communication at the beginning of the twenty-first century

This paper identifies and analyses current dimensions of change in mass media communication and in particular changes in mass media news transmitted via the Internet. In comparison with traditional media such as newspapers, Internet mass media products rely increasingly on a hypertext structure and on the integration of different channels of communication (hypermedia). In addition, they seek to convey the impression of personal, almost private communication. Audiences are carefully targeted, and media products can be customised to the personal needs and preferences of individual consumers. Online news media are also more interactive, requiring choices by users who activate some links and ignore others, and allowing users to “talk back” to the producers and interact with other users. The life span of information is changing as information is published as news in increasingly shorter time spans. Reception patterns are also changing: television and radio broadcasts available on the Internet can be received in a selective and asynchronous manner, like newspapers. Finally, online media differ from their traditional predecessors in their immediate world-wide availability, and in a reduction in the fixity of their texts.

Ethnicizing the Media: Multicultural Imperatives, Homebound Politics, and Turkish Media Production in Germany

The past fifteen years have witnessed a veritable explosion of mass media productions aimed at immigrant populations in Germany. Facilitated by new communication technologies, television channels and radio stations from former “home countries” and elsewhere have become available to immigrants via satellite and the internet. Daily newspapers produced in Ankara, Belgrade, or Warsaw can be bought at German newspaper stands. There has also been a proliferation of mass media venues created locally, by and for immigrants themselves, and nowhere is this landscape of immigrant media more evolved than in the case of Turkish-language media in Berlin.

Bell hooks: Ethics From the Margins

This article explores much of the body of bell hooks’s work. It analyzes her long trajectory from her opening salvo, Ain’tIaWoman, to her latest books and essays in a framework that contextualizes her explicit and implicit ethical stances in terms of issues of multiculturalism, feminism, and the media. Using a multipronged approach that questions central ethical questions of community, autonomy, voice, inclusion and exclusion, access, and representation, bell hooks challenges us to construct a transnational, feminist, and multiculturalist project that will allow us to interpret and criticize the contemporary situation and its popular culture. bell hooks stands out as an unflinching critic and contributor to a body of work that reminds us that much of our received intellectual traditions as well as new and current scholarly work, popular debates, and mass media products remain embedded in a framework of analysis, production, and representation that serves to oppress and not to liberate.

SYMBOLIC REALITY BITES: WOMEN AND RACIAL/ETHNIC MINORITIES IN MODERN FILM

Criticisms of mass media productions often include a discussion of how women and minorities are systematically excluded and/or relegated to minor roles, or roles that match traditional stereotypes. These types of portrayals are important factors in the social construction of reality among the general public, and therefore may perpetuate racism and sexism on a larger scale. Using a content analysis of fifty popular films in 1996 the present study explores the demographic composition of the leading actresses and actors. The goal is to gauge the strength of female and minority presence and to provide an assessment of character representations through an analysis of labor force participation, sex-roles of occupation, prestige of occupation, and gender. Findings indicate that although both women and minorities have made some advancement in their film portrayals, compared to earlier studies, they still are under-represented in leading roles in Hollywood, and their portrayals are often consistent with traditional stereotypes.

The situation with cancer control in Vietnam.

Vietnam is one of the poor, developing countries. Malnutrition and infectious diseases are still major health problems. Cancer ranks in a relatively modest position of priority. The reason is partly explained by a shortage of treatment facilities and poor quality of health and vital statistics. The leading cancers in the country are lung, liver, stomach, colon-rectum and nasopharynx in males and breast, cervix, stomach, liver, colon-rectum and lung in females. Although the country has some common patterns of cancer such as a relatively high incidence of nasopharynx, liver and stomach and a relatively low incidence of breast and prostate cancer compared with international data, the geographical distribution of cancer is not homogenous within the country. The most remarkable difference is observed in cancer of the cervix uteri, of which the incidence in the South is, at least four times higher than that in the North. Other less extensive differences are observed in cancer of the lung, stomach, nasopharynx and breast, the incidence of which seems to be higher in the North than in the South, and the liver, which seems to be more frequent in the South than in the North. It was estimated that in 1990 the cancer incidence in Vietnam was about 133 per 100 000 in males and 91.7 per 100 000 in females and that the mortality was 105.9 and 58.5 per 100 000, respectively (standardization to the world's population). In that year, Vietnam had at least 52 700 new cancer cases and 37 700 dead from cancer. Although the National Cancer Control Program is still in preparation, some efforts by the government have already been made with tobacco control, improving the cancer treatment net, mass media education and production of vaccine against HBV. Cancer control in Vietnam still has to deal with challenges such as poor quality of cancer morbidity and mortality data, shortage of resources for establishing a comprehensive cancer control network from the center to the peripheries, lack of data for an anti-tobacco program and misunderstanding or limited knowledge of general practitioners and the public about the disease.

Consuming history and memory through mass media products

The representation of the past through products of the ‘culture industry’ bears the history of a long debate between detractors and optimists. This controversy becomes especially significant in a time where commercial audiovisual media affect in unprecedented ways the content and the form in which massive audiences relate to the events of the past. Even more so in a so-called postmodern moment in which public confidence in the real is overall in decline. In this context, the debate on the representation of the history and memory of the Holocaust – the paradigmatic example of limitations and imperatives to representational practice – has become a contemporary battlefield regarding the legitimacy and propriety of mass media products. By examining contemporary Holocaust representations that are at the intersection between the world of commercial mass media and the conventional nonfiction culture and documentary tradition (such as high-tech museums and Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation), this article will reflect upon the diverse implications of the mass media–history relation.

News Production in Contemporary Russia

This article offers a new approach to power relations in the sphere of mass media production in Russia. The analysis focuses on television news - an object of the fiercest struggle among various agents of power (including news producers themselves). Unlike previous works, mostly done as institutional analysis, the proposed approach emphasizes the informal and dynamic character of these power relations, and describes the practices through which they shape the news. This approach avoids the normative categories widely used in previous studies. The empirical research based on this approach reveals a certain set of practices of influence on news production; their most striking difference from those in the `West' is in their explicitness. This suggests, however, not only that Russian journalists are more controlled than their western colleagues, but also that they seem less dominated.

Stereotypes in cyberspace: writing an anti‐racist website

ABSTRACTThis article deals with some of the difficulties and dilemmas of writing and producing an educational website about ‘race’ and racism (www.britkid.org). With a ‘cast’ of fictionalized characters exploring a wide range of issues relating to racism in the UK, the site is arguably closer to being a mass media product than conventional school materials, and the white, male author had to negotiate complex dilemmas about stereotyping and representation in both the initial drafts and in responding to prepublication feedback. These are explored, together with some reflections upon the relationship between research and a ‘product’ such as this.

Star Trek and History: Race-ing toward a White Future.

An original and insightful exploration of a major component of contemporary American -H. Bruce Franklin, author ofWar Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination boldly goes where no scholar has gone before and discovers racial anxiety at the center of the Star Trek story. This careful reading of commercial culture's quintessential mega-text provides invaluable insight into how mass media productions help shape us into the people we are. -George Lipsitz, author of Time Passages Bernardi's thoughtful and provocative analysis of race in Star Trek is wholly original; it challenges viewers to see the series in a new light, and challenges its creators to be more mindful of the implicit messages in their work. -Rene Echevarria, co-supervising producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Bernardi has dissected the history of a myth. If we are ever to track down and expose our semi-conscious racist evasions and dissemblings, we need more books like this one. -Mike Budd, Florida Atlantic University would have sworn that there was little new any scholar could say about Star Trek. I was wrong. Bernardi opens up a rich new set of issues for scholarly examination, centering around the contradictory expression of race within the series and the fan culture that surrounds us. His analysis is bold, provocative, and challenging, yet consistently fair-minded. He combines a fan's detailed knowledge of the program's universe with the theoretical sophistication necessary to make this book a cutting-edge contribution to the cultural studies of race. -Henry Jenkins, author of Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture Star Trek and History examines the representational and narrative functions of race in Star Trek and explores how the meaning of race in the science fiction series has been facilitated and constrained by creative and network decision-making, by genre, by intertextuality, and by the audience. The author interprets how the changing social and political movements of the times have influenced the production and meaning of Trek texts and the ways in which the ongoing series negotiated and reflected these turbulent histories. Most significantly, he tells us why is it important for readers to better understand the articulation of race in this enduring icon of American popular culture. Daniel Leonard Bernardi is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Film and Television at the University of California-Los Angeles. He is the editor of The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of United States Cinema.

El Kiosko Budweiser: The Making of a “National” Television Show in Puerto Rico

Originally devised as a marketing tool for Budweiser beer in Puerto Rico, El Kiosko Budweiser is currently one of the most popular local television shows. An analysis of the production and reception of this show provides the basis for a discussion of its continued popularity and an evaluation of the processes by which mass media products become vehicles for the assertion and definition of contemporary identities. In this article I also question the nature of “national” television in the current transnational context through a discussion of the distinct role played by locally produced commercial programming in the promotion of local artists and shows, and in the imagining of Puerto Rico as a distinct national community. [Puerto Rico, popular culture, national identity, commercial television, advertising]

Commentary: On Arguing from Authority

The National Art Education Association has been involved in a major research effort for about 4 years (NAEA, 1996). Concerted and systematically structured research is a necessity for the future health and development of art education and art educators must hope that the efforts of the various research teams will be fruitful, as fruitful, for example, as Harvard's Project Zero, but more focused on the needs of education in the visual arts, rather than on the collection of psychological data (Lanier, 1987). While I am optimistic about the NAEA research teams' efforts, I wonder if there might be greater rewards if they were accompanied by an equally major push for philosophical investigation. I say this not because I have any delusions about own philosophical abilities-far, far from it!-but because I have noticed a strand in art education literature that I regard as a weakness and that I think might be overcome or at least lessened by a greater attention to philosophical grounding within the field. That is, a more thought-out philosophy of art education-distinct from philosophy of art or philosophy of education-is needed. Is this a rather pompous and perhaps vague quasi-proclamation? Maybe ego has fogged reason, but let me try to explain concerns further. I will start by issuing a challenge to readers of art education literature to estimate how many articles they have read in which the validity of the argument depended on acceptance of the notions of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, or various neo-Marxist theorists? Or perhaps on the writings of currently popular anthropologists, such as Dissanayake or Levi-Strauss? Or psychologists, including Gardner of Project Zero? I further challenge readers to analyze the contents of these articles. How many of them marshal a tremendous amount of theory from outside the field of art education to explain or scrutinize a small scale or even trivial event within art education? I call this using a Sherman Tank for a short ride around the block. The small scale is seldom well-explained by huge and dense theory. Unfortunately, one important area of art education research, participant-observer studies, is prone to this malaise. I say unfortunately because qualitative research seems to promise so much for art education and I often read articles based on this methodology. Participant-observer articles frequently make pleasant reading of a rather anecdotal sort, but the connection to prestigious, usually anthropological theory can seem tenuous if not strained. Perhaps well-reported anecdotes need to be collected and published without so much theory so that solid art educational theory can be developed from that data. Perhaps the grandiose borrowed theories need to be downplayed by art education researchers, editors, and reviewers. However, I am not arguing for know-nothingness but rather, a more lean and tight use of citations of theoretical sources, a little less saying my reasoning is justified by theoretician-flavor-of-the-decade. The most recent champion example of citation after citation of authorities as judgments was not a participant-observer study but an article analyzing an advertisement for the Getty Center of Education in the Art, (jagodzinski, 1997). In one way the analysis was fun. If one enjoys the intellectual equivalent of a Fantasia hippo ballet, then the trouncing of the advertisement's imagery through heavy, very heavyweight theory was amusing. If, however, the theory-ridden exercise is read from the Sherman Tank, or perhaps from the beating-a-butterfly-with-a-baseball-bat perspective, amusement may wear thin. Given the tendency to hyperfootnoteism and dense theorizing of such deconstructive enterprises, it is difficult to gauge whether this was a critique or a parody of a deconstructive analysis. Frankly, since I like jokes, I enjoyed it as a satire of this sort of jargon-loaded field of analysis. In another recent case, Duncum (1997), cited several authorities to the effect that there is no valid difference between the aesthetic experience one can gain from art and that from mass media products. …

Stevie Smith's resistant antics

This study of the writer Stevie Smith (1902-1971), portrays her as a well-connected literary insider who used many genres to resist domestic ideology in Britain. Perhaps best known for her poetry, Smith also produced novels, short stories, literary reviews, drawings and performance art. The book explores the connections between Smith's work and mass media production; 20th-century historical events; her romantic and Victorian predecessors; and such contemporaries as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, Aldous Huxley, and Evelyn Waugh.

A Theoretical and Methodoloical Critique of the Principle of Relative Constancy

This article revisits the theoretical assumptions of the principle of relative constancy (PRC). This principle, or hypothesis, holds that consumers spend a constant fraction of their income on mass media over time (constancy assumption), although they are expected to alter their spending patterns within mass media categories in response to the introduction of new mass media products or services (functional equivalence assumption). But application of demand theory to the PRC reveals that whereas the functional equivalence assumption can be phrased in economic terms, there is no such validation for the constancy assumption. That assumption was found to be inconsistent with the Engel law/curve in that this traditional microeconomic model of consumer choice does not posit, as does the PRC, a proportional relationship between expenditures on mass media and income. Furthermore, the empirical literature reviewed here suggests mixed support for the PRC, casting more doubts on the validity of the PRC as a theoretically grounded, empirically determined hypothesis. The article identifies and discusses five methodological factors that may explain why PRC studies offer conflicting evidence. Finally, it proposes a series of theoretical and methodological recommendations for conducting future research on consumer mass media expenditures.

Internationalization of the video industry: Unresolved policy and regulatory issues

The development of new technologies and the resulting restructuring of the international entertainment industry have accentuated the uniqueness of some mass media products, in particular film and television products. While the recently approved GATT agreement still lumps most forms of video products together as standard goods, the growing intangible/service aspect and the heightened concern for the cultural influence of video products call for nonstandard treatment. This article explores the industry's unique features and discusses characteristics that may justify a proposal for a specific sector agreement under GATT. The central question is whether video should be considered part of the larger mass media industry that includes cable, VCR, printed products/services, broadcasting and film. The authors call for the adoption of a real value perspective, whereby video products can be both goods and services, and explain the international trade implications of such a perspective.

Globalization of Mass Media Ownership

During the last decade, the United States lost its dominance as the owner and producer of mass communication, both domestically and around the world. The globalization of ownership of mass media content, production, and technology has major implications for audience definitions and theories about who controls these media, for what purposes, and with what effects. The articles in this special issue are the first collection to address the issues raised by these recent developments, not only in film but also for book / magazine publishing, record / television production, advertising, HDTV technology, and public broadcasting. The increasing importance of economic analysis is also explored, for the insights it provides in explaining the decline of American dominance and for the implications of redefining “news” when it is viewed as an economic product. This article sets out an overview of major research and conceptual issues that these developments raise for the field of mass communication.

Art and Culture as Central Place Functions

Data on artists by location in 1970 and 1980, and on the non-profit theatre sector in 1988-89, indicate that art and culture are pre-eminently central place functions. The concentration of performing artists into large metropolitan areas increased from 1970 to 1980, while that of painters and sculptors diminished. New York and Los Angeles are the top locations for performing artists, although Los Angeles is largely a centre for mass media production rather than live production. Other studies cited in this paper indicate that local market structure in the non-profit theatre strongly affects artistic policy, supporting Chinitz's emphasis on the importance of supply-side factors in urban studies.

Postface

Postface [What follows is a written exchange between the editors about the contents of this issue of Postmodern Culture. As a “postface,” it is meant to be read after the other items in the issue; we hope it will serve as a preface to discussion among other readers. Please send your comments on the issue to the discussion group, PMC-TALK@NCSUVM (PMC-TALK@NCSUVM.NCSU.EDU on the Internet).] John: Many of the works in the last issue of PMC were concerned in one way or another with that “crude particular,” the body: this concern seems to carry over into the second issue, focusing on the body as one pole—positive or negative—in the field of identity. As you might expect, the body brings with it some familiar metaphysical pitfalls— nostalgia for presence and for the unitary sense of self, especially. What’s interesting is the way a number of the works in this issue address these problems. Eyal: While body and voice are conventional opposites, several of the works here also bring out the slippage between them, the way one can become the other. For Howe body becomes voice: the figure of other is “thin as paper,” present in her own writing and so made concrete, part of “invincible things as they are.” For O’Donnell voice becomes body: he singles out the “Frigicom process” proposed as an invention in JR whereby voice is frozen, made portable. Both are kinds of transferal, bridging gaps, but one is redemptive and necessary to the identity of the present, the other threatening, potential ordinance. John: The technology of communication is directly implicated in both the redemptive and the threatening aspects of ‘language made portable’— redemptive for Ulmer, threatening for O’Donnell. Bernstein, talking about the way some postwar poets accept the materiality of language, makes a point which might be applied to many of these essays: he says that there is a “persistence of dislocation, of going on in the face of all the terms being changed” which nonetheless does not amount to a new “equilibrium grounded on repressing the old damage.” It is at least arguable that language or voice acquires materiality exactly in the moment of being dislocated from the body of the speaker, and though that dislocation is potentially dangerous (in that it makes it possible to commodify voice), it also makes it possible to break up and break into the authoritative monologues of history and identity, constructing a present out of the frozen (and shattered) voices of the past. Eyal: This dis-location, disjunction, and portability of language-as-body, material language, enables both openness and control. Because the self is disjunctive it can be reconstructed, reinvented (Trembath); poetry has a special claim on us because it is its own monument, because in it loss and presence coexist (Hart’s reading of Mills- Courts); and if we are to undertake a critical project that would disown what Bernstein calls the “nonbiodegradable byproducts” of logocentrism (as Ulmer urges us to do), such a project would have to acknowledge that nonbiodegradability and to contain the metaphors it deconstructs, the broken idols now made to dance in a godless pantheon. On the other hand, this disjunction stages language in the theater of mass-media production, making identity (as Dolan implies) especially susceptible to simulation and manipulation. John: These writers respond to disjunction in different ways, though. There’s Howe’s project of understanding how the past structures the present, which is the sort of project Bernstein; then there’s the activity of restructuring the manner in which we appropriate the past, which is a large part of what Ulmer wants us to do; there’s also a sort of reconstruction in bad faith (Dolan discusses this) where the present is justified with reference to a past reconstituted to suit the purposes of the moment; and finally, there’s the sense that one can never really adapt to disjunction. McCorkle’s “Combustion of Early Summer” is an example: Sorting things out, nothing really fits: The puzzle of mountains with pieces from a regatta, We have pieces from other lives, The difficulty is to remember them . . . . If these responses have anything...

Charisme, mass-media et religion populaire Le voyage du Pape au Canada

The mass-media production of pontifical charisma made of the papal voyage to Canada a veritable mass-communication celebra tion. But, it is precisely in this that the event has taken on its speci fic religious dimension, structuring into one single emotional communion the paradoxical identity of a public otherwise dis pensed.

White Media Rituals about Aborigines

Mass media ownership, control and production in Australia is in the hands of non-Aborigines. Entwined with the capitalist consumer orientation of the industry, there is a shared Anglo-European cultural orientation in terms of which the, mass media's products are constituted.

Using Popular Songs to Teach Sociology

One objective of using popular songs to teach sociology is to facilitate the identification, definition, and analysis of sociological concepts by providing the lyrics of selected songs as relevant examples of certain perspectives and topics. A second objective is to arouse the students' interest in the material. As E. Y. Harburg, the great lyricist of Broadway and Hollywood, once observed, Words make you think. Music makes you feel. Songs make you feel thoughts. A third objective is to show students how massmedia products such as popular songs-normally listened to in nonacademic settings-can enhance sociological understanding.