This blog is response of my thinking Activity. In this blog, l have discussed the importants of media and power .
What is Cultural Studies:
Cultural studies, interdisciplinary field concerned with the role of social institutions in the shaping of culture. It is nearly impossible to define Cultural Studies in definite terms. It is difficult because the concept of Culture itself has been made ambiguous. The pendulum of the definition of Culture ranges from Matthew Arnold's idea of "perfecting what was best thought and said" on one extreme to Raymond Williams and the likes of poststructuralist who would love to define it as "everyday life as really lived by one and all, including common-men".The second problem with Cultural Studies is its scope of study. As it aims to transcend all disciplines and breaks the difference between the high and the low, the elite and the popular culture, it encompasses almost everything under its umbrella. This makes it confusing and the student / teacher with lesser ability to dig deeper in the artefacts to connect it with the 'discourse', sometimes, fails Cultural Studies.
1, your understanding of Power in Cultural Studies (you can write about Michel Foucault's 'Knowledge and Power' also)
Ans, Michel Foucault, the French postmodernist, has been hugely influential in shaping understandings of power, leading away from the analysis of actors who use power as an instrument of coercion, and even away from the discreet structures in which those actors operate, toward the idea that ‘power is everywhere’, diffused and embodied in discourse, knowledge and ‘regimes of truth.Foucault uses the term ‘power/knowledge’ to signify that power is constituted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding and ‘truth’: ‘Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power.
Power is the ability to make others do what would have then do.
There are six main sources of civil power:
1.Physical Force:
Physical force is a kind of group and community of people. Which we find in the army and police of any country. Which is given a special power. Which also frightens people.
2, wealth:
Money creates the ability to buy results and to buy almost any other kind of power.
3, State Action:
This is the use of law and bureaucracy to compel people to do or not do certain things. In a democracy, for example, we the people, theoretically, give government its power through elections.
4, Social Norms:
Norms don't have the centralized machinery of government. They operate in a softer way, peer to peer. They can certainly make people change behavior and even change laws. Think about how norms around marriage equality today are evolving.
5, Ideas:
An idea, individual liberties, say, or racial equality, can generate boundless amounts of power if it motivates enough people to change their thinking and actions
6, Numbers:
The sixth source of power is numbers, lots of humans.A vocal mass of people creates power by expressing collective intensity of interest and by asserting legitimacy.
There are three laws of Power:-
1, Power is never static:
power is never static. It's always either accumulating or decaying in a civic arena. So if you aren't taking action, you're being acted upon.
2,Power is like water:
power is like water.It flows like a current through everyday life.Politics is the work of harnessing that flow in a direction you prefer. Policymaking is an effort to freeze and perpetuate a particular flow of power.
3,Power compounds:
Power begets more power, and so does powerlessness. The only thing that keeps law number three from leading to a situation where only one person has all the power is how we apply laws one and two.What rules do we set up so that a few people don't accumulate too much power,and so that they can't enshrine their privilege in policy? That's the question of democracy,
2,Why Media Studies is so important in our digital culture?
Ans, The Media and Cultural Studies (MCS) program emphasizes the study of media in their historical, economic, social, and political context. We examine the cultural forms created and disseminated by media industries and the ways in which they resonate in everyday life, on the individual, national, and global level. Focusing primarily on sound and screen media — television, new media, film, popular music, radio, video games — but reaching out across boundaries, MCS encourages interdisciplinary and transmedia research.
Instead, Chomsky argues in Manufacturing Consent—his 1988 critique of “the political economy of the mass media” with Edward S. Herman—that the mass media sells us the idea that we have political agency. Their “primary function… in the United States is to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector.” Those interests may have changed or evolved quite a bit since 1988, but the mechanisms of what Chomsky and Herman identify as “effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function” might work in the age of Twitter just as they did in one dominated by network and cable news.
Those mechanisms largely divide into what the authors called the “Five Filters.”
1. Media Ownership :
The endgame of all mass media orgs is profit. “It is in their interest to push for whatever guarantees that profit.”
2. Advertising:
Media costs more than consumers will pay: Advertisers fill the gap. What do advertisers pay for? Access to audiences. “It isn’t just that the media is selling you a product. They’re also selling advertisers a product: you.”
3. Media Elite:
“Journalism cannot be a check on power, because the very system encourages complicity. Governments, corporations, and big institutions know how to influence the media. They feed it scoops and interviews with supposed experts. They make themselves crucial to the process of journalism. If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins…. You won’t be getting in. You’ll have lost your access.”
4. Flack:
“When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: discrediting sources, trashing stories, and diverting the conversation.”
5. The Common Enemy:
“To manufacture consent, you need an enemy, a target: Communism, terrorists, immigrants… a boogeyman to fear helps corral public opinion.”
Chomsky and Herman’s book offers a surgical analysis of the ways corporate mass media “manufactures consent” for a status quo the majority of people do not actually want. Yet for all of the recent agonizing over mass media failure and complicity, we don’t often hear references to Manufacturing Consent these days.
3, Who can be considered as "truly educated person?
Ans, word as expression of inbuilt perfection of oneself. Similarly, according to Aristotle education is “the creation of a sound mind in a sound body”
Thus, a person may be considered to be educated if he develops his knowledge and skills in such a way which ultimately results into his positive contribution in community life. Acquiring knowledge and using it for the happiness and goodness of the society really makes a person educated. It is because of this reason that knowledge acquired through education is essential for any prosperous society.
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