[lbo-talk] "Cultural" Imperialism and $784 Billion Net Transferfrom the South to the North

[Sean Andrews]

On 3/26/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
>
> [WS:] If memory serves, the uses and gratifications theory goes much further
> than claiming that "content is irrelevant."  I think the crux of their
> argument is that the contents is pretty much defined by the audience in
> accordance with their idiosyncratic needs and frames of reference, rather
> than pre-defined by broadcasters.  For example, a propagandistic flick
> 'reefers madness' intended to evoke negative stereotypes of weed smokers is
> adopted by weed smoking kids as a 'cult flick' to have a really good laugh
> at it.
>
> I think that uses & gratifications approach (as I understand it, at least)
> is a death blow to the cultural imperialism theory and any "hypodermic
> needle" theory of the media (i.e. claimed strong pre-programmed effect of
> the media contents).  It basically stipulates that the same recorded image
> played in two different cultural contexts produces two different contents,
> and consequently, two different works of art.
>

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.

s