New Media/ Mass Culture

New Media is more readily available and more largely produced than ever before. It is created as quickly as we the audience can take it in and enjoy it. This mass culture that we are so use to and live by today was not favoured by some in its early days.

The Frankfurt School fled Germany during the Second World War to America and once there they were confronted with the mass culture that was engulfing America which was not to their tastes. The Frankfurt School was shocked when they arrived to discover how "... American mass culture shared many similarities with the products of mass production." (Creeber, 2009, p.12). They likened it to how Henry Ford was successful to produce his automobiles in mass quantities. They believed that as this culture was being mass produced it would have serious negative effects on the mass audiences who consumed this media.

Moreover on the belief that the Frankfurt School saw mass culture as being  negative influence on the mass audience that ingested it. The hypodermic needle theory was that, "...as wholly defenceless and constantly 'injected' by media messages, as if it were some form of mind-altering narcotic." (Creeber, 2009, p.13). Mass culture no matter what form it was packaged in was seen to be of no use or benefit to its audience but more of a nuisance.

Furthermore those who condemned mass culture were themselves consumers of high culture ans so therefore saw this new mass culture a threat to their way of life. The first direct General of the BBC, John Reith believed, "... Broacasting should be used to defend 'high culture' against the degrading nature and influence of mass culture." (Creeber, 2009, p.13). Even if mass culture is a threat to high culture or even if it is a negative influence on its audience the 'medium is the message' (Creeber quoting McLuhan, 2009, p.15) and therefore it should speak for itself on these issues and we can interrupt in our own way.

Bibliography

Creeber, G. and Martin R. (2009) Digital Cultures (Maidenhead:Open University Press)

Goggling the Gogglebox

When a theorist studies different forms of ideals and theories they inclose their ideals into small groups relating to their time, whilst thinking about where their proposals can go. Such as Modernists look at, the improvement of the production line and industrial revolution. Post-modernists look at the "changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution" (Creeber, 2009, p15).  Here each set of theorists use their corresponding era's to identify the audience/reader in which they use as evidence to their ideals.

Modernism is identified with a ruthless nature towards mass culture with it's structural high standards. Providing a hostile environment to any form of art other then high art, creating a tension that develops "modernism's reaction to the media's early development during the twentieth century"(Creeber, 2009, p12). One aspect of modernism's disdain is found through the studies of 'The Frankfurt School'. The School looks upon media as a rotating production line that processes the same tried blueprints, which revealed mass cultures gullibility.

If we take this brief understanding of modernism and apply it to the ideals of the television show Gogglebox (2012, television programme, Channel 4, UK) we soon find out that mass cultures gullibility no longer identifies with the lower class state, but uses the emergence of the classes to pinpoint the unending growth of post-modernism.

"If the “post- modernism” of the 1980s was the first, preliminary echo of this shift still to come—still weak, still possible to ignore—the 1990s’ rapid transformation of culture into e-culture" (Manovich, 2002, p32) changed our belief in the construction New media.

The new form of e-culture lead the change by letting the viewer goggle upon the gogglebox, in which the user of the medium could view all that goes on behind and in front of the screen. With connections with the collective community found inside the online sphere. We can now find that the productive nature behind modernism only found theoretical states, allowing post-modernism to power above the psychical territory and preform along side the goggle crazed society.

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; Maidstone, Open University Press. 
Manovich, L (2002) What is New Media and Principles of New Media from the Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass :London MIT Press)

From changing media to changing theories

In order to understand the world, it is necessary to understand the media. More specifically, we need to understand that media are changing and that, as Manovich (2001, p.43) states, we are in the middle of a new media revolution. This change of media implies the need for a new theoretical framework to analyse the specific characteristics of the media.  

In the past, media were analysed differently. During the period of modernism, the dominant theoretical approach reflected the pessimist ideology of the ‘Frankfurt School’. It represented media as producers of a mass culture that influenced a passive and powerless audience. This vision was also reflected in the formulation of the ‘hypodermic needle’ model. According to this model, a media message will exert powerful and relatively uniform effects on everyone who processes it (Sparks, 2012, p.58). However, this is a questionable statement since little attention is paid to the fact that people differ greatly and that they can respond in different ways to the same message.

This pessimistic approach was reinforced by the quasi-scientific method of semiotics, introduced by the structuralist movement. Creeber (2009, p.14) describes semiotics as “a clear and coherent methodology by which the meaning of any text could be read objectively as a system of ‘signs’.”. Based on this, Hall (1973) formulated his encoding/decoding model. It focused not only on the encoding of a media product, but also on the decoding by an active audience, where each individual has the chance to construct its own meaning.

Hall’s model reflected the vision of postmodernists and meant a shift towards the current more positive view of the media. Creeber (2009, p.21) describes this as technological utopianism, since it suggests that New Media will improve society. However, we have to bear in mind some negative examples, such as the fact that not all New Media participants are created equal (Jenkins, 2008, p.3), the decrease in cultural identities and the invasion of the private sphere.

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; Maidstone, Open University Press.
Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media. MIT Press.
Sparks, G. (2012). Media Effects Research: A Basic Overview, 4th ed. Stamford: Cengage Learning.

The cultural changes of New Media

The ideas of New Media were not simply created by new technologies alone but though cultural changes in society, changes such as Modernism. As Creeber notes, "Modernism is the umbrella term we give to the way that human society responded to the changes that took place during the industrial revolution", (Creeber, 2009, pg.11). A world transformed by ideas of a beneficial and progressive industrial society, diminishing previous societal structures such as a religious monopoly of dominance.

The faith of the masses now invested in technological advancement and material goods to help deal with the stresses of daily life rather than relying on spiritual guidance, "A triumph of consumerism, commercial culture"(Manovich, 2002, pg.31). The Fordism production line ethic resonated this change across all layers of society, the same product replicated cheaply, quickly and with little collective thought, as the "Modernists came to perceive  industrialization as the enemy of free thought and individuality", (Creeber, 2009, pg.12). Manovich notes this practice in today's media production, where "modern media follows the factory logic", dividing a singular project into repetitive jobs such as an artist who only colours backgrounds for an animation, (Manovich, 2002, pg.51).

In Post-Modern society, focus changed from the consumption of material goods to that of information. Leading to the rise of "information technologies, the globalization of  financial markets, the growth of the service and the white-collar", an information age, (Creeber, 2009, pg.15). The Frankfurt school feared the "ideological influence of the media on a gullible and powerless audience", the masses drooling over their mass produced, mind numbing, popular culture? (Creeber, 2009, pg.15). The elites who dismissed popular culture as a low brow mind control underestimated the complex relationship between the reader and the text. Audiences are not mere puppets of media but "active  participants in the production of meaning", they can interpret the meaning of texts using their own cultural means (Creeber, 2009, pg.16).

Identifying how elements such as popular culture cannot be categorised as high or low brow, "as the 'real' and 'unreal', the 'authentic' and 'inauthentic'", as the meaning  lies within the cultural view of the reader (Creeber, 2009, pg.17). This is identified in today's culture where the meaning and status of media is being blurred, using multimedia mediums such as YouTube. Where low brow mash-ups such as the "What does the wolf say?" become more significant than professional industry standard media. The masses now hold more power and influence over the media they consume, sharing, choosing, participating and driving New Media.

Bibliography
Creeber, G. Digital Theory: Theorizing New Media (Maidstone: OUP)

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.

Understanding New Media

In order to understand and theorise New Media, Creeber takes us on a journey, beginning with the notion of modernism and how it relates to "old media", before going on to look at post-modernism and its links with New Media, as well as looking at structuralism and post-structuralism along the way.

To begin with, modernism is defined as an umbrella term, describing "how human society responded to changes of industrial revolution" and how, through science, it challenged the traditional "theocratic, God-centred notion of society" (Creeber, 2009, pp.11). Originally providing optimism through its potential to advance society, industrialisation came to be described as "the enemy of free thought and individuality" due to the negative effects well documented, for example, in the First and Second World Wars (Creeber, 2009 pp.12). In an attempt to capture this hypocrisy, the modernist art movement sought to "represent the fragmentation of this new world" (ibid.).

Another notable example of those sharing an antipathy for the media would be The Frankfurt School. Their perception of the media being "a standardised product of industrialisation" led to the development of what they called "The Culture Industry" with the simple the idea that every part of mass culture was the same; TV shows, magazines, films etc. and were simply consumed passively by the masses. (Creeber, 2009 pp.13) This idea was further developed in the structuralist movement which employed the use of semiotics to "decode media texts as signs (to show that) "individuals are shaped by structures over which they have no control" (Creeber, 2009 pp.14).

This ideology is effectively reversed when applied to the notion of post-structuralism, brought about by post-modernism, which is described as being associated with "changes that have taken place after the industrial revolution" (Creeber 2009, pp.15). In comparison to its modernist equivalent, post-structuralism "takes a less deterministic view about the nature of the media as a whole" (Creeber, 2009, pp.15) and this could be due to the fact that, within such a society, there exists a "distrust of a stable and fixed notion of the 'real'"(Creeber, 2009 pp.18).

Creeber, G. (2009) Digital Theory: Theorising New Media (Maidstone: OUP)

Cubitt, D. (2009) Case Study: Digital Aesthetics in Creeber, G. (2009) Digital Theory: Theorising New Media (Maidstone: OUP)

Digital Media On The Production Line

Modernism, as Creeber puts it, 'is the umbrella term we give to the way that human society responded to he changes that took place during the industrial revolution' (2009: p.11). This came about around the mid 20th century, as the world was repairing itself from one war, and preparing to go to another. Industrialisation was perceived by many modernists 'as the enemy of free thought and individuality' (Creeber, 2009: p.12)

Industrialisation really only benefited the producers of products, beginning with Henry Ford's T. Fords. This was a way to cut costs, through production and staff, but also a way that companies could produce the same product on a large scale in half the time. The birth of the production line, as apposed to single product work, revolutionised the secondary sector. However, Theodor Adorno, a member of the Germany-fleeing intellectuals from the Frankfurt School describes the way that the music industry is just simply producing the same music over and over again, and selling it to make money.

Post-Modernism comes along slightly after the industrial revolution. Post-industial (or Post-Fodist) was an 'economic transition [...] from a manufacturing based economy to a service-based economy' which saw the 'decline of heavy industry' (Creeber 2009: p.15) Audience interactivity with this new post-modern idea was first thrown about as ideas by Marshall McLuhan, this is highlighted in Paul Levinson's Digital McLuhan (1999) where McLuhan sees the audience as transforming from 'Voyeurs to participants' (Levinson, 1999: p.65-79)

McLuhan really was stumbling across something which years later, is pretty accurate. Television audiences, don't just watch what is happening on the screen, but can also play along, influence and find about more about what they are watching. From the introduction of voting on (originally) Channel 4's 'Big Brother' and ITV's 'X Factor', to the mobile game which rang along side Channel 4's 'Million Pound Drop', to programs such as BBC's 'Children In Need' showing live tweets on-screen.

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; Maidstone, Open University Press.
Levinson, P. (1999) Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millenium. Routledge, London.