Hegemony & Power

Hegemony & Power

1. Gramsci

   • ruling by consent
     • capitalist and dominant classes rule over subordinate and working classes
     • intellectual and moral influence

2. The Media

   • TV injects messages to capitalist casses
     • 'drugging' audience
     • messages have encoded meanings
       • if message is received and decoded (Cashmore 1994)
         • preferred reading - audience agrees with ideology
         • negotiated reading - audience accepts ideology but doesn't necessarily agree with it
         • oppositional reading - audience rejects ideology
     • media messages advantage certain groups
       • create collective identities
         • "he who seeks to manipulate public opinion must always heed it" - Bernays (1928)
   • technological media available to more people
   • constructing and circulating discourses to attain consent
     • intellectual, moral leadership
   • media embodies production & dissemination of media messages
     • Chandler (2012)
   • reflects & constructs reality
     • reinforces existing powers in our society
   • politicians are performing media personalities
     • Louw 2010

3. Common sense - take fro granted, not open to questrion

   • natural, self-evident truth
     • Van der Pijl (1998)
   • common sense: valid knowledg

4. Propaganda

   • Freud - psychoanalysis
     • conscious/subconscious
     • unconscious feelings repressed
   • Weston
     • unpleasant information activates part of brain associated with negative emotions
       • brain tries to rationalize conlict to emotionally satisfactory conclusion

5. Social Representation Theory

   • when threatened/trying to understand, we take cues from media and social environment
   • "the mass media plays a critical role in feeling the dialogue between people which establish their social representation" - Joffe (1999)
   • social representation
     • "systems of values, ideas, and practices adopted by members of a particular society"
       • terms in which social events are explained

6. The 'Other'

   • we manage risk by attributing responsibility to Other
     • group emerges from:
       • identification with group ideal
       • external enemies
   • what we are not
   • Orientalism
     • enlightenment
       • decline of superstition, irrationality, religion
       • rise of: science, reason, rationality, technology development
       • it united Europe
         • Other = Orient
           • orientals, as West understood them, were social construct

7. works by dominant ideology

   • "cement in social foundation " - (Hall 1977)

8. Human culture is MATERIALISED in PRODUCTION, EMBODIED in SOCIAL ORGANISATION, ADVANCED through DEVELOPMENT of PRACTICAL, THEORETICaL technique, PRESERVED in and TRANSMITTED through LANGUAGE

   • Hall