The oppression of mass media

Following the idea that if you want to understand new media, you have to look at its history, that is also found in Manovich (2002), Creeber (2009) runs through the most important theories for the analysis of media texts from the twentieth century. Starting with modernism, he mentions the Frankfurt School who held a negative attitude towards the mass media that according to them oppressed the people, an idea that never really fully disappeared and which might hold truth. However, if someone likes Strictly Come Dancing it does not mean that he never engages in any more intellectually challenging activities.

Creeber (2009, p. 14) describes semiotics as a quasi-scientific method of analysis. Structuralism used this method to ground their opinion about the oppression of the masses. However, it should be realized that in semiotics the analysts can find the meanings they want to find, even unconsciously their primed attitudes might have effects on the results. Moreover, even if a certain underlying meaning seems obvious to the objective researcher, it does not mean that the audience will view it in this way, for "bias is very much in the eye of the beholder" (Cumberbatch et al, 1986, p. 15). This negative view on mass media was strengthened by the hypodermic needle view on media effects, which was also present among the audience ever since the radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds that had such a strong impact on its listeners (Sparks, 2011, pp. 56-57).

Postmodernism introduced a more positive way of looking at media effects. After a period with belief in a 'limited-effects' perspective on media in the 1960's (Sparks, 2011, pp. 63-64), an attitude that is less extreme than the hypodermic needle and the limited-effects came to rule the area of media analysis. An example of this is the use of Hall's (1975, pp. 1-19) encoding-decoding model that focusses on the reader. This gave way to the current more positive attitude towards new media enabling democratization.

Bibliography
Creeber, G. (2009). DIGITAL THEORY: Theorizing New Media & Cubitt, D. (2009) Case Study: Digital Aesthetics in Ed. Creeber, G. & Royston, M. (2009) Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media; Maidenstone, Open University Press.
Cumberbatch, G., McGregor, R., Brown, J., and Morrison, D. (1986). Television and the Miners' Strike. London: BFI Broadcasting Research Unit.
Hall, S. (1975). Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse. Birmingham: University of Birmingham
Manovich, L. (2002). The Language of New Media. MIT Press.

Sparks, G. (2011). Media Effects Research - a basic overview. Stamford: Cengage Learning.