Media Culture
The media, culture, graphics sector covers a large range of
industries including internet, television, newspapers, magazines, books, film
and radio, and the companies and organizations involved in publishing,
producing, packaging and distributing media content to the public. Media Culture The sector
also covers live performances, video games, printing and the graphical
industries, as well as cinemas, professional sports, museums, amusement parks
and other entertainment activities.
The ILO's work in the sector deals with such issues as the impact of
information and communication technologies on work and employment, on
intellectual property rights, gender issues, employment relationships, social
protection, and promotion of employment in cultural and creative industries.
In cultural studies, media culture refers to
the current Western capitalist society that emerged and
developed from the 20th century, under the influence of mass media. Media Culture The
term alludes to the overall impact and intellectual guidance exerted by the
media (primarily TV, but also the press, radio and cinema), not only on public
opinion but also on tastes and values.
The alternative term mass culture conveys the idea
that such culture emerges spontaneously from the masses themselves, like
popular art did before the 20th century. Media Culture The expression media culture, on
the other hand, conveys the idea that such culture is the product of the mass
media. Another alternative term for media culture is "image culture."
Media culture, with its declinations of advertising and
public relations, is often considered as a system centered on the manipulation
of the mass of society. Media Culture Corporate media "are used primarily to
represent and reproduce dominant ideologies." Prominent in the development
of this perspective has been the work of Theodor Adorno since the
1940s. Media culture is associated with consumerism, and in this
sense called alternatively "consumer culture."
The news media mines the work of scientists and scholars and
conveys it to the general public, often emphasizing elements that have
inherent appeal or the power to amaze. Media Culture For instance, giant pandas (a
species in remote Chinese woodlands) have become well-known items of popular
culture; parasitic worms, though of greater practical importance, have
not. Both scholarly facts and news stories get modified through popular
transmission, often to the point of outright falsehoods.
Hannah Arendt's 1961 essay "The Crisis in Culture"
suggested that a "market-driven media would lead to the displacement of
culture by the dictates of entertainment." Susan Sontag argues
that in our culture, the most "...intelligible, persuasive values are
[increasingly] drawn from the entertainment industries", which has spelt
the "undermining of standards of seriousness." As a result,
"tepid, the glib, and the senselessly cruel" topics are becoming the
norm. Some critics argue that popular culture is "dumbing down":
"newspapers that once ran foreign news now feature celebrity gossip,
pictures of scantily dressed young ladies... television has replaced
high-quality drama with gardening, cookery, and other "lifestyle"
programmes [and] reality TV and asinine soaps," to the point that people
are constantly immersed in trivia about celebrity culture.
According to Altheide and Snow, media culture means that
within a culture, the media increasingly influences other institutions (e.g.
politics, religion, sports), which become constructed alongside a media logic. Since
the 1950s, television has been the main medium for molding public opinion.
In Rosenberg and White's book Mass Culture, Dwight
Macdonald argues that "Popular culture is a debased, trivial culture
that voids both the deep realities (sex, death, failure, tragedy)
and also the simple spontaneous pleasures... The masses, debauched by several
generations of this sort of thing, in turn come to demand trivial and
comfortable cultural products." Van den Haag argues that "all
mass media in the end alienate people from personal experience and though
appearing to offset it, intensify their moral isolation from each other, from
the reality and from themselves."
Critics have lamented the "replacement of high art and
authentic folk culture by tasteless industrialised artefacts produced on a
mass scale in order to satisfy the lowest common denominator." This
"mass culture emerged after the Second World War and have led to the
concentration of mass-culture power in ever larger global media
conglomerates." The popular press decreased the amount of news or
information and replaced it with entertainment or titillation that
reinforces "fears, prejudice, scapegoating processes, paranoia,
and aggression." Critics of television and film have argued that the
quality of TV output has been diluted as stations pursue ratings by focusing on
the "glitzy, the superficial, and the popular". In film,
"Hollywood culture and values" are increasingly dominating film
production in other countries. Hollywood films have changed from creating
formulaic films which emphasize "shock-value and superficial thrill[s]"
and the use of special effects, with themes that focus on the "basic instincts of
aggression, revenge, violence, [and] greed." The plots "often
seem simplistic, a standardized template taken from the shelf, and dialogue
is minimal." The "characters are shallow and unconvincing, the
dialogue is also simple, unreal, and badly constructed."r
More recently, scholars turned to the concept of the mediatization of
culture to address the various processes through which culture is influenced by
the modus operandi of the media. On one hand, the media are cultural
institutions and artifacts of their own, on the other hand, other domains have
become dependent on the media and their various affordances.
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