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MediaSpace Wiki | Introduction To Media Criticism |
We live in an extraordinarily rich media environment. We use dozens of media, including radio, television, telephones, cellular phones, newspapers, magazines, mail, e-mail, the web, instant messaging, and others, on a daily basis. Any one of these media is capable of filling every waking hour of our day with new messages and information. Its not unusual for satellite or cable television subscribers to have a choice of a hundred or more channels, all of which provide a steady supply of messages, twenty-rour hours a day. While we may only watch one television channel at a time, we often combine our media, reading the newspaper or a book while we watch television, surfing the web while we listen to the radio, or talking on the phone while listening to music and chatting with a half a dozen different friends using instant messaging. There are so many messages available to us in so many media that there are very real concerns that the sheer volume of messages can overwhelm us. Message overload is a reality of the information society.
We learn, and continue to find new ways, to manage this message glut. Much as we are able to focus on the conversation we are in even as a dozen other conversations swirl around us at a party, so we are able to ignore some messages altogether, provide minimal and hopefully adequate scans of others, and give focus to those messages we think are important. Our ability to do this matters, as the messages we attend to provide much of our knowledge of our world. We depend upon messages created by others both for descriptions of events which we cannot observe with our own eyes and detailing of useful ideas that spring from the imaginations of others. It is inevitably up to us, however, to make good decisions about which messages we pay attention to and which we ignore; which we use as the basis for decision making and which we reject; which we believe and which we don't.
These decisions are not simple. Messages are inevitably colored by the perceptions and biases of others, by the influence of the cultures that they were socialized and educated in, by the the capabilities of the medium that the messages were created in, and by the intentions of those who create the message. A message may be created simply to provide useful information. It may also shape the presentation of that information to guide us towards particular evaluations of that information, the people it concerns, and the people who have created the information. People, in short, sometimes lie and mislead, sometimes with impunity. It is ultimately up to us to intelligently process those messages and make good judgments, but we often fail to do so. Indeed, our processing of messages is also colored by our own perceptions and biases, by the cultures that we live and work in, by our understanding of the media that we consume messages from, and by our purposes in selecting particular messages for processing.
These perceptions matter at least in part because messages are not something that we passively receive. We actively create messages. Not all of us write newspaper articles, act in plays, create radio and television content, or even create web pages or blogs, but we all talk to each other using a variety of media including face to face interaction, the telephone, e-mail, letters, text messages, and other means. Much as the messages we consume shape us, so the messages we create shape others, including our family, friends, communities, societies, and even the media we create our messages in. We actively consume messages. Our interpretation of a message may have little in common with the what the original creator of the message intended. The medium may be, as Marshall McLuhan (1963) has suggested, the message (or at least a part of the message), but we ultimately create our own messages within whatever limitations the media we choose enable. In so doing, we also shape the media we use.
This course is intended to help you to explore communication systems (e.g. media) and the messages they both shape and enable by introducing you to the tools of "media criticism". Media criticism describes a set of methods that provide insight into the the capabilities, uses, effects, and practices associated with different media, into the varied meanings, perceptions, biases, and purposes associated with the messages we create in those media, into the cultures that produce and consume those messages, the ideologies that frame those messages, and into ourselves as both products and producers of those messages.
The tools of media criticism are a path to a kind of enlightenment that we sometimes call "media literacy." There are reasons why we use different media to produce and consume different kinds of messages: television for some messages, radio for others, the telephone, the web, Internet chatrooms, test messaging, books, and face to face interaction for still others. It is likely, when we understand the ways in which media shape the possibilities inherent to messages, that we will make better decisions about the media we choose to frame our messages. It is likely, when we understand the ways in which messages can be shaped to manipulate our ideas and emotions, that we will be less manipulable.
There are many ways to measure the value of being "media literate", of understanding a range of ways in which the media we use enable, support, and shape the messages we create and consume. If you:
Media criticism, at its most fundamental, the systematic examination of the workings and effects of communication media. It is possible to examine media from a variety of perspectives using a variety of methods, but the methods of media criticism are most generally regarded as a set of "qualitative" methodologies, that allow us t examine media, the messages that are hosted by those media, the ways in which messages are produced fo that medium, the ways in which messages are consumed from that medium, and the effects, especially social effects, that can be reasonably associated with use of the medium. While the methods presented here will hardly cover all of the possibilities for examining media and their effects, they will provide systematic means of examining media from a variety of perspectives.
Indeed, there is no single best way to use the methods of media criticism that will be presented in coming readings. Different people will find different methods useful for different purposes; are likely to use the same methods in very different ways. Methods that might be used by a scholar to rigorously test that which we might otherwise assume can be used by critics to structure sensible reviews of media content, by content creators to enrich their messages with layers of meaning, and by content consumers to recognize the ways in which they are often manipulated by messages and media. Each of the methods presented here can be used formally or informally, rigorously or loosely, as a structure and/or as a process.
What matters, for each of the methods that will be presented here, is that each enacts a theoretical approach to the analysis of messages and the media which shape those messages. The approaches are very different from one other. They represent very different ways of thinking about messages and media. Some focus strongly on observable aspects of messages and media over which there is unlikely to be a high level of disagreement. Others focus on interpretation and attributions that people with different perspectives are likely to disagree strongly over. It is possible to position these theoretical approaches relative to one another and we do so below, but it is important to understand that these methods care about different aspects of messages and media and that they are generally approached with somewhat different methodologies.
The methods themselves, however, are often strongly interdependent in ways that provides one of the structural principles of this course. Methods that are introduced early in the course will often be reused, combined, and extended in the methods that are presented later in the course. This development will represent, at least to some extent, a move from more empirical methods to more interpretive methods. But it will also represent a move from understanding the detailed structure of messages to understanding the effects of messages and media on cultures and social systems. The grounding of interpretive methods in empirical observations make interpretations more credible. Building evidence of macroscopic effects using methods that observe detailed effects makes social effects real and observable.
All of the tools that will be introduced here are "qualitative" tools. They differ from "quantitative" methods in that they don't depend on measurement of quantities, the use of statistical methods, or the formal testing of hypotheses. These differences can be important. Quantitative methods provide a stronger type of evidence for some purposes, and media managers often depend on such measures, including ratings information, when making decisions. Quantitative methods often gloss over what can be important details, however, and qualitative methods often provide a stronger form of evidence when those details matter. In their fundamentals, however, there is no real difference between qualitative and quantitative methods. Both depend on careful observation and thoughtful interpretation, with the observations of qualitative methods often providing the hypotheses and, in many cases, the data associated with quantitative methods.
Indeed, quantitative methods are in many ways simply another layer of analysis that can be added to what, at its fundamentals, remains qualitative observation. Consider, as an example, the readily observable difference in the media used to let someone know that they've been hired for a job and to let other candidates know that they haven't been hired. When we get a job (and they don't let us know on the spot during the interview), the medium of choice for letting us know is the telephone. When we don't get a job and we get any formal notice of the decision, the news most typically arrives in the mail.
Almost anyone who has ever looked for a job has observed this difference, at least informally. If we get a phone call from an employer that we've interviewed with the good feelings start even before we are told the news. The simple fact of getting a call is a message that is implicit the the medium that the employer has selected. If, by contrast, we get mail from the employer, we know that there is no rush to open it. The message of the medium the employer has selected is that the envelope almost certainly contains bad news.
We can measure this if we want to. We can construct a formal hypothesis, perhaps that "Employers are more likely to use more interactive media when informing job candidates that they have been hired; less interactive media when informing them that they have not." We can identify a pool of 100 subjects who are looking for employment and ask them to log all the places they apply for jobs, the response they receive from application, and the medium through which they were contacted with the response. Using that log data we can test the hypothesis to see if the differences in the medium selected exceed the differences that might be expected based on chance. Indeed, it is almost certain that someone has done this "quasi-experiment". It remains that each subject, in the course of taking notes in their log, is doing qualitative observation. It remains that almost every subject will observe roughly the same pattern. The quantitative study simply collects those qualitative observations and tests them together.
The point here is that qualitative observation is not about judging the quality of things, good or bad, desirable or undesirable, etc. It is about observing the qualities of things; their attributes, their characteristics, their uses, their effects, and the practices that form the aggregate patterns of human behavior. In the quasi-experiment outlined above we are asking people to observe qualities of their job search: where they applied, the responses they received, and the medium through which they received it. The quantitative analysis will inevitably discard much of the detail of those observations such that, at the end of the analysis, we will end up with a hypothesis that has either been supported (likely in this case) or not along with some inevitably qualitative observations about why the result was obtained, the implications of the result for our knowledge of the real world, and the future research and theoretical directions the result suggests.
If we care about that lost detail, we will necessarily need to turn to the kinds of qualitative methods that will be presented in coming readings. The hiring process is, from the perspective of this course, a complex ecology of media ecology. For most job applicants, that process will require them to use a diverse range of media including newspapers (job advertisements), resumes, letters (of application, rejection, and, for some categories of jobs, data collection), forms (formal job applications, statistical data collection), signs (help wanted signs, street addresses, office numbers), the telephone (networking about job possibilities, interview scheduling, positive job decisions), teleconferencing (phone interviews), online newsletters and bulletin boards (job postings), e-mail (personalized job notices, letters of application, interview scheduling), and face to face interaction (interviews).
If our focus is the medium through which hiring decisions are rendered, quantitative methods are a good choice. If we want to understand the way we use media throughout the hiring process, we will need to use qualitative methods before it will make any sense to apply quantitative methods. The qualitative methods associated with media criticism can help us to better understand the messages we receive, construct messages more effectively for particular audiences and purposes, understand the reasons we select a particular medium for a particular purpose, and better understand the effects a medium has on our on personal lives, our families, our communities, and our society.
Regardless of the method we choose, the goal of media criticism starts with the identification and confirmation of recurring patterns and extends to the application of those patterns to our use of the media. It is possible to identify many kinds of recurring patterns in our use of communication systems. The diversity of methods that we will explore in this course reflects these many kinds of patterns. Figure One presents a model of the communication process that describes this diversity at a fairly high level.
The model summarizes the key relationships between six key constructs that are associated with almost any communicative act. Indeed, five of the constructs - creators, consumers, messages, languages, and media - can be considered necessary to any communicative act. Our communication is instantiated in messages. Those messages are built using languages within media. Message creators build those messages. If they do not there are no messages. Message consumers observe and interpret those messages. If they not, the messages do not matter. A sixth element, culture, is not absolutely necessary to communication, but communication rarely occurs outside of the context of culture or the patterns of meaning, language use, and media use that are associated with different cultures.
| Figure One: A variation on the Ecological Model of Communication that incorporating Culture. |
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This model provides a structure for the rest of this course. Hence there will be value in compactly describing the model and the relationships it entails. The reader may recognize similarities between this model and other, more widely used, models of the communication process, but the model is more notable for the ways in which it differs from other models, starting with the assertion that consumers of messages (what other models call recipients or audiences) actively consume messages rather than passively receiving them. This presumption is somewhat obvious on the web, which neatly packages the three primary "stages" of this model.
In the first of these stages, a message on the web is created or performed by a message creator (a person) or a consortium of creators (writers, page designers, and programmers are just three common members of such groups). Once it has been created, usually with some combination of tools on a PC, it becomes "mediated" when it is posted to a web site. In this second stage the message is available through the web medium for consumption from whomever may be interested in viewing the page, but there is never any guarantee that anyone other than the pages creator will ever look at it. One imagines that there are a fair number of isolate web pages that no one has ever seen fit to view or even to index, and an even larger number that people have opened only to immediately back out without bothering to do much more than scan the message. While it is certainly true that there are many web pages that are regularly viewed by hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people, the simple act of creating a web page provides no assurance that the message it contains will be viewed by anyone. Such success depends on the third stage of the communication process, the willingness of someone to pay attention to the page by finding it and consuming its content.
This act of "attending" to the message is a necessary element of any successful communication transaction. A book, newspaper, or magazine has to be read in order for its message to matter. A movie or television show has to be watched in order for its message to matter. A recipient of a letter has to, at minimum, pay attention to the envelope in order for the letter to matter, and there is no assurance that even that level of attention is enough. People have to take the time to really listen to a musical performance for that performance to matter for anyone but the performers. Paintings and sculptures need to be viewed in order for them to transcend expression. And participants in telephone calls, small group discussions, and face to face interaction need to pay attention in order for a message count for much more than vibrations in air currents.
There is, in each of these general cases, an act of message creation. The message has, in each case, been pushed out into the medium where others could attend to it. It is necessary, however, in any of these media, for a consumer of messages to decide to pay attention if that message is to count as anything more than a creative act. It is a fundamental of "media criticism" that "messages reside in media." A message may be transient, as is generally the case in face to face communication, telephone calls, and most forms of live performance. A message may be long lived, as it generally is in books, movies, and other recorded media. The messages reach may be feet, as is usually the case in face-to-face media, tens to hundreds of miles, as it generally is in broadcast media, or tens of thousands of miles, as it frequently is frequently the case in electronic media. It may be possible for someone to react to the message in real time. It may not be possible for consumers to react to a message at all.
These characteristics of a message are all a function of the medium of communication, which brings us to the second distinctive element of the model: its depiction of the relationship between messages, language, media, and culture. The medium is not, of course, the only source of a messages characteristics. Other message characters reflect the languages selected for encoding the message, the audiences that the message is created for and the meanings that the creator would like to convey, and the culture within which the medium and languages are selected; within which normal patterns of message creation have evolved over time. We will explore some of the relationships between message, language, medium, and culture in one of the next sessions readings in more detail, and explore methods that focus on these elements individually in subsequent readings. For the moment, we will simply summarize the more important relationships:
"The medium is the message" is only a partial truth. It is certainly the case that the medium used to create a message is inevitably embedded in that message in ways that, in aggregate, change the culture in which that medium is used. The same can be said, however, for the languages that the message is created with and and the culture that the message is created in and for. Language choices, some of them constrained by the choice of medium and others constrained by the culture in which the message is created, have aggregate impacts on a society. The languages are, in a very real and important sense, the message. So too is the culture a message that is implicated in every message associated with that culture.
Beyond that, even the creator and consumer are embedded in the message. The consumer is embedded in the message adaptations that customize the message to an individual or audience. Those adaptations, which we will later treat systematically in a discussion of genre, occur as a function of a largely tacit negotiation between creators of messages and consumers of messages. Consumers decide which messages they will and will not attend to, which messages they will and will not respond to, and the ways in which they interpret those messages. Creators of messages will reuse those message strategies that are effective in both attracting consumers to their messages and invoking desired responses and interpretations. Genre, as we will see, is a place where the consumer becomes the message in communication structures that change as media and consumer reactions change.
This is a third way in which this model differs from other models of the communication process. It insists that we don't just create and consume messages. Messages are just the most dynamic tip of a deeper creative process in which we structurate (collaboratively invent, adapt, and evolve) communication structures and processes, including languages, media, genres, and culture, to meet our changing communication needs. We don't just consume messages. We consume, learn, and are socialized into our use of languages, media, and culture. We don't just create messages. We create and modify the structures in which we create messages. We just do slow slowly through a generally tacit process of social negotiation.
Indeed, even the roles of creator and consumer are structurated into media. Some media, like the telephone and face to face interaction, barely differentiate the roles. Consumers of synchronous interactive messages who are genuinely paying attention provide fairly continuous message feedback to the "creator", and the role of creator and consumer switches constantly. Other media, like newspapers, magazines, books, radio, and television, strongly differentiate these roles. Only a few people get to create messages and feedback, if it occurs at all, occurs in other media and at relatively low speeds such that it generally has no effect on the messages created. Recently developed Internet media are creating a middle ground between these positions that allows anyone to create messages that may be seen by many people and that enables fairly rapid near-synchronous feedback. We will return to this theme in a coming reading when we explore the McLuhan prove "Everyone a Publisher" and the evolution of Warhol's "15 minutes of fame" into the reality, all to obvious on websites like Myspace, of "15 pages of fame".
Finally, our experience, as consumers, of others messages allows us to form perspectives of and make attributions about message creators. These perspectives and attributions inevitably influence our interpretation of their messages. Sometimes these perspectives are locally focused on individuals, but we all to often form impressions of entire groups of people. These stereotypes can be a useful convenience in the course of message interpretation, but they can also create social and ideological divides that prevent us from seeing the things that we hold in common.
A medium of communication is, in short, the product of a set of complex interactions between its primary constituents: messages, people (acting as creators of messages, consumers of messages, and in other roles), languages, media, and culture. Four of these constituents are themselves complex systems and the subject of entire fields of study, including psychology (which focuses on people), sociology and anthropology (which maintain a focus on culture), linguistics (which focuses on language), media ecology (which focuses on media), and communication (which takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of messages, language, media, and culture). It should not be surprising then that some of the methods that will be briefly summarized in coming readings comprise entire fields of study. The overviews that we will provide here will be bare introductions to these methods. You'll have to find other resources (we will provide pointers) to explore these methods in more detail.
The classic approach to presenting the methods of media criticism groups them into three broad categories, including production-oriented methods, audience-oriented methods, and message-oriented methods. Production-oriented methods would generally include Auteur Theory, Production Context Analysis, and Media Ethics. Audience-Oriented methods would generaly include Cultural Studies, Audience-Oriented Criticism, Ethnography, Ideological Analysis (including Marxist and Feminist Criticism), and Psychoanalysis. Text-Oriented Methods would generally include Narrative Theory, Semiotics, Genre Studies, Postmodern Theory and Deconstruction, and Rhetorical Criticism. More recent presentations have sometimes included a media-oriented approach based on the work of such figures as Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, Walter Ong, Neil Postman, Paul Levinson, and Joshua Meyrowitz.
This course will organize things somewhat differently, using the six major constructs of Figure One to order the presentation of methods. We will begin with a reading on "Message Ecology" by considering the constituents of a message, formalizing and expanding the relationships between constituents introduced in this reading and presenting a novel, if somewhat trivial form of critical analysis that should help you to understand the ways in which language, the message consumer, the message creator, the medium, and culture influence the content of a message. The method will be simple, compared with some of the methods we will encounter later in the course, but it will introduce a generalized analytical structure, the five paragraph essay, that will be used throughout the course. We will then proceed to discussions of language, consumers, creators, and, finally, media and culture.
Chapters 1 and 2 in the Allen text will focus on "language", a term that we will use here to describe any reasonably consistent system that allows for the representation of a diverse range of meaning and the organization of those representations into meaningful sequences. Chapter 1 will focus on Semiotics, a generalized methodology for describing language systems and the meanings that are represented by them. The languages of semiotics will include obvious ones like English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Korean, and the over 1000 other spoken languages that people in different cultures use to exchange messages with each other. They include only somewhat less obvious codes of non-verbal communication, which include gesture, touch, facial expression, proxemics, chronemics, and perhaps a dozen other widely recognized variant of non-verbal expression. They will include much less obvious production oriented languages like lighting (and shadow), color, montage, and other components of the aesthetics of composition. Chapter 2 will extend our dicussion of one aspect of Semiotics, paradigm, to Narrative Theory, which describes the story structures that encapsulate Semiotic structures into coherent stories.
Chapter 3 in the Allen text will focus on consumers of messages, which will sometimes be described as audiences, readers, or viewers. It will introduce the reader to Audience-Oriented criticism, a generally reflective method in which the critic interrogates their own experience of messages and media. The chapter will focus on what the "phenomenological approach to such criticism, but will also introduce psychological vocabulary that can be helpful in sorting out conflicting reactions. It will also turn outwards in describing an ethnographic approach to understanding audience responses to messages. Audience-response theory, as this approach is sometimes called, requires the critic (you) to act as a "participant observer"; to engage the message and your own reactions to it as you observe the audience and its reactions. A third consumer-focused mode of analysis, Reception Theory, doesn't just ask how consumers react to content, but what, in the message and medium, encouraged them to react that way.
Several readings focus on message creators and the process of message production, including the motivations of message creators and production tools they use to translate those motives into messages. The focus here will be on the contexts associated with message production, and the ways in which those contexts influence messages. We will examine the production-context within which messages are created. The focus of that context will be the many roles associated with the production of, in particular, mass media messages, the financial constraints that surround that production, and the trade-offs that often occur in the complex, and costly, world of mass media content production. Mass media messages, more so than others, are produced by ensembles of expert specialists, each of whom influences the final form of the message. Chapter 4 of the Allen text looks at Genre Theory and the ways in which message creators structure messages to be attractive to audiences. We will extend that reading with a web reading titled "Medium as an Ecology of Genre." We will, in conjunction with our discussion of Genre theory, introduce Auteur Theory and the influence that individuals can have on messages.
Media theory will play a role in most readings in Allen, but we will attempt to supplement those readings with additional "probes" used by Marshall McLuhan in his seminal work in media theory. We will revisit media theory through consideration of the characteristics of media and the implications of those characteristics for messages in the medium. We will explore McLuhan's final contribution to media theory, his laws of media, along with a method that can be useful in understanding why and how content changes as it is repurposed from one medium to another.
Finally, chapters Chapters 5 through 9 in the Allen text consider the impact of culture on messages and of messages, languages, and media on culture. Chapter 6 we considers cultural theories; the obstacles that culture presents to achieving McLuhan's global village and the obstacles that global media present to preserving culture. In Chapter 5 introduces Ideological Theories and their approach to distribution of power within cultures. There are a broad variety of ideological theories, starting with Marxist criticism and extending to feminist criticism (Chapter 7), but any systematic movement that claims that a group is being disadvantaged by a privileged elite can be regarded as ideological in focus; is likely to adopt the kinds of strategies that are described in this chapter. Chapter 9 extends these cultural methods with the notion of postmodernism, which asserts a variety of dysfunctional relationships in the communication systems of information intensive post-industrial cultures.
Our approach, in introducing each of these methods (or more correctly, families of methods) will be to make the method as accessible as possible. Articles that use these methods will frequently use what may seem like unusual and difficult words that make little sense. This course will introduce you to at least some of this vocabulary, only some of which will be shared across these methods. Almost every family of methods here has an associated jargon, or specialized vocabulary, that allow people who use the method to summarize important recurring ideas quickly. In these these methods are no different than medicine, dentistry, or carpentry, each of which has a specialized vocabulary that practitioners use regularly but which makes little sense to the rest of us. We won't avoid using the most important terms associated with these jargon's, but the goal is to make the method accessible to you. Hence we will most often use examples and ordinary language to describe the method and its theoretical underpinnings.
To the extent that we introduce and use special vocabularies, they will be flagged as such. Each special term that we use will be described in a manner that we hope you'll understand, but it should be understood that this course quickly introduces a large number of methods. We won't come close to introducing the jargon's that are routinely used in association with many of these methods. It is presumed that the reader will, when they encounter such terms, try to work out the meanings of the vocabularies on their own, using dictionaries and other resources. The web, especially online tools like Wikipedia, can be a particularly powerful tool for finding definitions for obscure words, but each reading will point you at other resources that explain these methods in more detail.
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