Silverstone-mediation - conceptualizing media

Silverstone-mediation - conceptualizing media

1. influence and effects

   • impotence-omnipotence pendulum
     • Strong influential: At times of : media innovation & society seen as vulnerable to propaganda or influences for specific historical or social reasons. Weaker effects: Times of: social and media stability ( postwar period of social reconstruction & 1970s/1990s Broadcasting was established and Western commodity culture achieved its particular hegemony.)
   • media and other power
     • media influence
       • media’s capacity to direct and deliver a malleable audience - vulnerable to direct/specific influence or to long-term ideological management
     • media is socially produced and consumed
       • > the media were only one component in a complex social reality enabling and constraining the production of meaning; enabling and constraining meanings themselves and their salience for different participants; this process of mediation in turn is the product of a more subtle process of social construction.
     • 举个栗子
       • Katz and Lazarsfeld (1995) - personal influence
         • Two-step flow of mediated communication social location of individual was part of a dynamic social environment crucially providing an ‘inter-mediation’, a breaking of the linearity and directness of media influence.
         • critic
           • silverstone, p.192 1.still, too linear and individual 2.failed fully to engage both with the substantively contextualized active audience; 3. longue duree of media and its intended and unintended consequences
       • Gerbner, 1980
         • consistency of both television content and their viewing behaviour over time
         • critic
           • Critique: 1)correlation does not equal to causation               2)television content is not as consistent as assumed or analyzed by Gerbner and his team that world-view do not necessarily translate into action, differences between denotational and connotational meanings, and … third factors (Livingstone, 1990) ⬆️Achievements: making some impression on the working of ideology as the media create it
           • The immeasurable presence of long-term and unacknowledged ideological formations in the structure of everyday life>让我们认识到有必要： a more dialectical theory of media effects and differently focused empirical work.
             • 这个方面的研究其实受Cultural critic的影响。
               • > the active role that readers or audiences are supposed to have in their relationship to mass-mediated texts. >所以在他们的研究中， media are seen to be part of a more widely and deeply embedded culture.. and so media becomes an essential component of the symbolic space - marks the distinctiveness of life in late modern society; product of engaged activity; Audience as empowered (Fiske, 1987, 1990)> contemporary media audience are neither cultural dopes nor dupes (Ang, 1986; Buckingham, 1987,2000; Morley, 1992)
   • 小总结：“Mediation as socially produced and politically effective” challenge the transmission model, shift to ritual model.

2. ritual and reflexivity

   • 1.carey对ritual的定义
     • Ritual: it directed not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs. (Carey, 1989)
   • 2.和influence model的区别
     • -Influences and affects model: focus on media as disturbances of the social order and on the manifest exercise of symbolic power. - Ritual model: media’s role in creating and sustaining social order.
     • 自我反思一下
       • 虽然这样划分显得misleading, clinical. 但是首先vital to acknowledge this double edge; 然后， to ensure both are held in tension, a tension that has to be socially and historically investigated.
   • 3.ritual is both macro & micro
     • Large-scale social structuring of nations and regions small-scale interactions that constitute the fabric of everyday life >同时在这两个维度里面，media 都提供了framework 来order time and space;   1)direct address of the programming and messaging   2) secondary discourses (Fiske, 1987) e.g. dreams, realities and imaginaries;
     • macro
       • media create bulwarks against anxiety, also provide frameworks for orientation and mobilization within both national and global cultures.
       • media events
         • Media events (Dayan and Katz, 1992) - key moments; highly ritualized; providing those momentary spaces and times, where the profane and ordinary world is put to one side and where the power of the albeit dispersed collective is mobilized in a project of mutuality and togetherness.
     • micro
       • everyday life
         • media’s role in creating and sustaining the ordinariness and normality of everyday life.      >> the mundane world is offered for reflection and reassurance.      >> the media have become part of the grain of everyday life
   • 4. reflexivity
     • modernity & reflexivity
       • Modern Twist: with modernity came reflexivity
       • definition
         • Anthony Giddens (1991) Reflexivity: ‘the susceptibility of most aspects of social activity, and material relations with nature, to chronic revision in the light of new information or knowledge ‘
       • role of media
         • Media is the sites where such reflexivity take place, but actually provide the terms under which it becomes possible at all.    Media are crucial institutions for any understanding of the reflexive capabilities and incapabilities of modernity.
       • role of audience
         • The role of audience in the process of mediation -fragmented in their identities  how are they to be perceived? ethnography (Seiter, 1999; Abercrombie and Longhurst, 1998) -reformulation of relationship between technologies, texts and receivers >audience as a verb -Fan culture >’diffused audience’- a product of a society of media saturation, of both wide-ranging performances and increasing narcissism (Lash, 1980; Sennett, 1977), as well as one in which the media are themselves constitutive of the social. - fan as performer