This is more like the audience studies approach taken by some cultural studies scholars in the 1980s and 90s, which is often conflated with a looser, more ethnographic version of uses and gratifications. This position has certainly been used to try to argue against the Cultural Imperialism argument by, for instance, John Tomlinson in the early 1990s, just as audience studies basically tried to undermine any structural effect of the mass media on people's understanding. Of course they, like the people cited in this article, totally misunderstand the actual cultural imperialism argument--at least as it is made by Schiller. I also don't know of many communication scholars that posit a blunt hypodermic model. Most of the propaganda models that administrative research was supposed to replace were far from hypodermic and were more interested in looking at the burgeoning industry of public relations of the time. Administrative Research proposed being more rigorous in its studies and said all propaganda models were speculative: their main goal, on the other hand, was to figure out how to improve upon the propaganda model in terms of its ability to deliver.
On the other hand, as Todd Gitlin pointed out in "Media Sociology: The Dominant Paradigm." Theory and Society 6, no. 2 (1979): 205-253, most of the dimissal of propaganda models occurred before the advent of the television and, more importantly, even the evidence that was produced by these widespread studies of "the Two-Step flow" pointed to a stark divide between the way people gather information about things like soap and fashion and the way they find out about news and political information from far off places. Basically, the two step flow that is supposed to refute all hypodermic models (which, again, are basically a big straw man argument on their part since they never really address propaganda models of communicaitons research as such) is premised on looking at the way people's minds are changed (more on this momentarily) and they found that, in most cases the people changed their minds based not on something they saw or heard via the mass media, but by talking with someone they trusted.
On balance this was the case, but when you look closely at their data, the things people changed their minds about based on talking with others were things like using a new soap or buying a new dress (it was the 1950s: TV was marketed as an appliance for women to have in the home thus this was important information for their advertisers); on news and politics, almost 60% of the time, seeing or hearing something on the news was enough to prompt a change of mind. In other words, the propaganda effect wasn't that strong in terms of a direct immediate change of mind about consumption, but it was still noticably strong when one was talking about economics or politics or other kinds of world news. In both cases, the goal of this research was to make it the propaganda more effective in one way or another. This model was applied at home and abroad in order to promote the post-war US life style as a global norm. Thus there is a fairly ugly history to say that "hypodermic models" are too deterministic: the people who were most committed to that outlook have often been the ones who were simply upset that it wasn't quite working as they'd hoped.
In early Cultural Studies research, the main critique they had of studies like this is that their main focus was on change: media effects were solely evidenced by a change of mind. No change was not an effect. In other words, if the content of major network television did little to challenge much less change people's minds about their expectations or understandings of the world, this was considered neither ideological nor propagandistic. This was the communications complement to the Parsonian theory of action, which said that the uniformity of action was basically evidence of a uniformity of belief.
Early Cultural Studies--in Birmingham, UK--was basically responding to the academic cultural imposition of these paradigms of thought and the questions they began asking were directed at undermining the hegemony understandings. Ethnographic research of subcultures, influenced in some part by work on deviance coming out of a renewed version of Chicago School sociology, provided a critique of the Parsonian paradigm and this was complemented by a renewed emphasis on the role of ideology in cementing social order and the mass media as one instrument of doing so. The emphasis here wasn't so much on whether or not people believed the ideology, but that it was such an overwhelming force that they would have to negotiate any alternative ideology in relation to that norm thus would opt for more atomized forms of subcultural resistance rather than trying to actually change anything at the broader social level. In other words, there was a dominant ideology and the mass media played a dominant role in explaining that ideology to people.
This eventually morphed into a championing of all sorts of audience and subcultural re-appropriations of mass media texts--the kind of thing you're talking about with the poststructuralist inflected "death of the author" belief "that the same recorded image
played in two different cultural contexts produces two different contents, and consequently, two different works of art." The caveat here is that, at the same time, they were also positing that there was no such thing as a cultural closure, that culture is always a free flow of meaning, sutured in no way by the boundaries of community or social structure. The canvas for these "two different works of art" are any two individual consciousnesses, which, is a classic "poetic truth of high school journal keepers" that is so ingrained in the American psyche of individualism that it is fairly easy to convince people that the straw man of the hypodermic model doesn't exist: our sense of personal uniqueness revolts at the idea of being a mass mediated clone (or at least my students do.) This isn't at all what the theory says, but no matter. Strangely enough, this is basically the dominant ideology of the neo-liberal economic paradigm that has been insinuating its way into mainstream culture for several decades, even as media producers have become even more scientific in targeting their messages and creating audiences to sell to advertisers. And, ironically enough, they seem even better at getting people to buy things just via the mass media; as the run up to the Iraq war proves pretty much categorically in my mind, propaganda is also still pretty effective in shaping opinion.
The Uses and Gratifications is really pretty unconcerned with content and is more concerned with defining uses along narrow categories, which is to say that media use does different things for different people. Some people may watch the news for information; other people may have it on as a sort of connection to the outside world or merely to have someone talking in the room. It is sort of a depressing set of theses because the way they often break down the uses makes one wonder why people are using media to fulfill some these needs.
Incedentally, it is along these lines that I think the most valuable cultural imperialism argument could be made--both in terms of the cultural objects themselves and the culture in which they are embedded. ON the latter point, how many people in the world owned TV sets in the world four decades ago? How many radio stations were in existence? How often and what percentage of Chinese people went to the movies? These may seem like pretty banal questions now, but there was a moment when they were pretty important, and not just to the manufacterers of Televisions and radios. Each of these communications devices and the distribution systems are included in most indexes of development--which now include internet users. It doesn't really matter what people are doing with these devices or what kind of content is on them, just so long as they have them and they use them. That is absolutely the first step in creating a cultural environment suitable for the distribution of, for instance, US media products. And the specific interpretation people have of these products is less important than their predominance. If people like Ross and Joey and Chandler then there is a better chance that they will have to think carefully about just what parts of America they want to declare "death to..." regardless of what personal disposition they have to adopt in order to make sense of this foreign media object.
It is much more basic and phenomenological (in a rough sense) than the idea that US media products are direct instruments of ideological indoctrination (though there are plenty that attempt to do so). And on a commercial level, it is far less significant that people have the correct interpretation of the latest episode of Desparate Housewives and much more important that they keep turning it on. The people at the top of these organizations obviously don't have a real handle on what will or will not work--just what is comfortably within the previous parameters of success. And the consumers may have to create all sorts of mediating narratives to make something they watch interesting and indentifiable. But the fact is that they are watching Desparate Housewives instead of doing something else that is most comforting to TV producers.
It is this simple fact that people who try to bring in complex arguments about environmental differences in the viewing situation or the unique composition of the individual consciousness seems to overlook: when people do a study of different interpretations of western media objects around the world; when they ask how different people interpret Dallas (as in a famous example) they rarely ask why people in a foreign country are watching Dallas. It is just something that people would naturally do because, hey, America is #1, right? And once this media product is incorporated into your cultural understanding, once it becomes shorthand for something else, which can be appropriated in some transcultural process: once it becomes something that communicates meanings to others in your culture-perhaps meanings that were very different from the original and quite local--who does it belong to? Why it belongs to the people who originally distributed it or who have subsequently bought the rights. They probably had nothing to do with the original production and have even less to do with the local work that was done to make it an effective cultural object: but they own that little part of your brain which associates those meanings and any subsequent product that could possibly act upon that part of your brain must be cleared, licensed, and paid for or else face severe penalties. And so long as they can still control the distribution channels, they can very likely continue to control the profits that come from any other new products, even if they are of foreign origin. This is why the piracy issue is so important: it is not really about content per se as much as the commodification of culture. It's because these industries have worked a long time generating the distribution network for these objects as well as the potential architecture for the commodification of future objects and processes. That we are at a sort of crossroads here means nothing more than that this is a potential moment to break down this form of imperialism. Unfortunately, in the past two decades, the forefront of cultural imperialism has been not in the distribution system or content per se but in the legal frameworks--largely the product of US lobbying efforts to install them in trade agreements--to protect them.
And it is here, as well as in the "cultural imperialism" argument, that I think Yoshi is pretty much on the money: it's a version of the Lincoln (?) quote: you can't convince all the people all the time, but as long as you have the top 5% of elites in your pocket and they have the top 25% in theirs, what happens in that state is pretty predictable. I suppose you could say that drafting the laws that govern the production of culture are also probably not going to be as effective as these media (and pharmaceutical) lobbyists hope, but as in the mid century, that hardly means they shouldn't get the credit for trying. I stand by the cultural imperialism argument now more than ever.
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