Hall also believes that the Mass Media maintain the dominance of those who are already in the positions of power. Conversely, the media exploits the poor and powerless in a way that almost everything that is aired on the Television will not in by any means benefit the poor and powerless.
Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies is a neo-Marxist critique that sets forth the position that Mass Media manufacture consent for dominant ideologies.
Marxism is at
root a theory of economics and power. At the risk of oversimplifying, the
Marxist golden rule suggests that he who has the gold, rules. Because workers lack capital or the means of production, they must sell their
labor to live. Therefore, in a capitalistic society, people who own the means
of production gain more wealth by extracting labor from workers, who get no
extra benefit from the
wealth created
by their work. So the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Great wealth
comes to the privileged few who did little to create it.
According to Marx, as
the gap between the managerial class and the working class grows ever larger,
desperate workers will overthrow the owners and create a classless society.
Although Hall
is strongly influenced by Marxist thought, he doesn’t subscribe to the
hard-line brand of economic
determinism that sees all economic, political, and
social relationships as ultimately based on money. He thinks that’s an
oversimplification.
Economic Determinism
The belief that human behavior and relationships are
ultimately caused by
differences in
financial resources and the disparity in power that those gaps create.
Ideology
Ideology is the mental frameworks that different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of how the society works; the set of ideas and beliefs of a group or party.
Hall aims to unmask the power imbalances within the society, he says that the cultural approach is valid if it "deconstructs" the current structure of a mass media research establishment that fails to deal with ideology.
Obviously, critical theory and cultural studies
are close relatives. However, Hall places less emphasis on
rationality and more emphasis on resistance. As far as he’s concerned,
the truth of
cultural studies is established by its ability to raise our consciousness
of the media’s
role in preserving the status quo.
Hall is
suspicious of any cultural analysis that ignores power relationships.
That’s because
he believes the purpose of theory and research is to empower
people who
live on the margins of society, people who have little say in the
direction of
their lives and who are scrambling to survive.
Hegemony
usually
refers
to the
preponderant
influence or domination of one
nation over another;
the subtle sway of society’s haves over its havenots.
Hall says that emphasizes
that media
hegemony is
not a conscious plot, it’s not overtly coercive, and its effects are not
total. The
broadcast and print media present a variety of ideas, but then they
tend to prop
up the status quo by privileging the already-accepted interpretation
of reality.
The result is that the role of mass media turns out to be production of
consent rather than a reflection of consensus that already exists.
Recall that
Stan Deetz uses the term consent to describe how workers
unwittingly
accomplish the
desires of management in the faulty attempt to fulfi ll their
own interests.
They are complicit in their own victimization (see Chapter 21).
In the same
way, Hall believes that the consent-making function of the mass
media is to
convince readers and viewers that they share the same interests as
those who hold
the reins of power. Because the media’s hegemonic infl uence
has been
relatively successful, it’s played an important role in maintaining
worker unrest
at the level of moaning and groaning rather than escalating into
revolutionary
fervor.
