This blog is Assignment writing onPaper 205A: Cultural Studies assigned by Professor, Dr. Dilip Barad sir, Head of the English Department of Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
- Name: Nidhi Dave
- Roll no: 16
- Enrollment no: 4069206420210005
- Email ID: davenidhi05@gmail.com
- Batch: 2021- 23( MA Semester 3)
- Submitted to: Department of English Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University.
Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture:
Introduction
Cultural studies of different societies reveal how media culture brings forth common norms, socio-political ideologies and issues in the current period. For instance, media in different countries are often expressing their views in a liberal or conservative manner. Notably, one can deduce the identities and opinions of the world from the media performances and actions.Some of the media platforms that instill cultural behaviors on their audiences include films, radios, newspapers, and televisions. Media have significant influence on society, as they influence people’s understanding, interpretation, and criticism of different messages; they help in giving meanings to different information.
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. MCS courses draw on a broad range of cultural theories spanning a spectrum of concerns all centrally relevant to the functioning of sound and screen media in a diverse and globalizing cultural environment.
Definitions of Culture
Different sociology scholars have tried to come up with various definitions of culture, with many of them having a lot of contradictions. The media has been instrumental in explaining to the public its meaning and enabling everyone to have a cultural identity. The well-being of people can only be guaranteed if they have a strong and definite identity that influences their sense of self and their relationship with other people who have a different cultural identity.
The difference in beliefs and backgrounds helps people from different societies to relate and negotiate well. Intercultural relations have continued to fail because many people are not aware of their cultural identity. The internet and mass media have been instrumental in promoting globalization which has led to many positive influences on the culture of different societies and races across the world.
Many societies have been able to add new aspects to their cultures as a result of globalization that is greatly facilitated by the internet and the mass media (Purvis 67). Globalization enables us to have an overview of different cultures across the world and in the end be in a position to copy some positive aspects. These papers will highlight the importance of media in culture construction and how the media has led to intercultural socialization.
Multiculturalism, and Media Culture:
Radio, television, film, and the other products of media culture provide materials out of which we forge our very identities; our sense of selfhood; our notion of what it means to be male or female; our sense of class, of ethnicity and race, of nationality, of sexuality; and of "us" and "them." Media images help shape our view of the world and our deepest values: what we consider good or bad, positive or negative, moral or evil. Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through the appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture. Media spectacles demonstrate who has power and who is powerless, who is allowed to exercise force and violence, and who is not. They dramatize and legitimate the power of the forces that be and show the powerless that they must stay in their places or be oppressed.
Evidently, the media gives suggestions on one’s view or perception of the world even though there is indispensable need for thinking for oneself or independent thinking. Through cultural studies, one is able to critically examine and scrutinize issues from different cultures without anticipated discrimination.
Currently, the media have promoted the concept of multiculturalism where all cultures have their worth and the same recognition. In terms of gender and race, cultural studies have ensured that people alter their earlier perceptions on these groups. For example, media culture has made it possible for equal representation of female-gendered members and other marginal voices among the divergent races of the world.
Clearly, cultural studies sensitize all persons on how to encode discriminative acts, thus empowering individuals to develop resistance to such operations. Since media encourage divergent opinions, it has informed society on all frameworks and components of life.
On production and political economy, media firms have tended to produce systems in a specified format. For instance, they have inculcated special features like talks and shows, which have dominated the US television production. On the political economy, Capital Cities, GE, and Tisch Financial Group adopted Reagan’s slogan of conservatism and military adventures in managing their newly acquired media houses in the 1980s.
In this context, media culture reflects the ideologies of the ruling economic class, albeit intense struggle among the social classes. On textual analysis, media culture assigns different symbols and tags to their films and comedies.
In, practices, and institutions. Consequently, the gaining of critical media literacy is an important resource for individuals and citizens in learning how to cope with a seductive cultural environment. Learning how to read, criticize, and resist socio-cultural manipulation can help empower oneself in relation to dominant forms of media and culture. It can enhance individual sovereignty vis-a-vis media culture and give people more power over their cultural environment.
The potential contributions of a cultural studies perspective to media critique:
In recent years, cultural studies has emerged as a set of approaches to the study of culture and society. The project was inaugurated by the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies which developed a variety of critical methods for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of cultural artifacts. Through a set of internal debates, and responding to social struggles and movements of the 1960s and the 1970s, the Birmingham group came to focus on the interplay of representations and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, including media culture. They were among the first to study the effects of newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular cultural forms on audiences. They also focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media culture differently, analyzing the factors that made different audiences respond in contrasting ways to various media texts.
Those who uncritically follow the dictates of media culture tend to "mainstream" themselves, conforming to the dominant fashion, values, and behavior. Yet cultural studies is also interested in how subcultural groups and individuals resist dominant forms of culture and identity, creating their own style and identities. Cultural studies insists that culture must be studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed, and that thus study of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and economics. Cultural studies shows how media culture articulates the dominant values, political ideologies, and social developments and novelties of the era. It conceives of U.S. culture and society as a contested terrain with various groups and ideologies struggling for dominance (Kellner 1995). Television, film, music, and other popular cultural forms are thus often liberal or conservative, or occasionally express more radical or oppositional views.
Type of Cultural Studies
Components of a Critical Cultural Studies
At its strongest, cultural studies contains a three-fold project of analyzing the production and political economy of culture, cultural texts, and the audience reception of those texts and their effects. This comprehensive approach avoids too narrowly focusing on one dimension of the project to the exclusion of others. To avoid such limitations, I would thus propose a multi-perspectival approach that (a) discusses production and political economy, (b) engages in textual analysis, and (c) studies the reception and use of cultural texts.
Production and Political Economy
Because it has been neglected in many modes of recent cultural studies, it is important to stress the importance of analyzing cultural texts within their system of production and distribution, often referred to as the political economy of culture.Inserting texts into the system of culture within which they are produced and distributed can help elucidate features and effects of the texts that textual analysis alone might miss or downplay. Rather than being antithetical approaches to culture, political economy can actually contribute to textual analysis and critique. The system of production often determines what sort of artifacts will be produced, what structural limits there will be as to what can and cannot be said and shown, and what sort of audience effects the text may generate.
Textual Analysis
The products of media culture require multidimensional close textual readings to analyze their various forms of discourses, ideological positions, narrative strategies, image construction, and effects. There have been a wide range of types of textual criticism of media culture, ranging from quantitative content analysis that dissects the number of, say, episodes of violence in a text, to qualitative study that examines images of women, blacks, or other groups, or that applies various critical theories to unpack the meanings of the texts or to explicate how texts function to produce meaning. Traditionally, the qualitative analysis of texts has been the task of formalist literary criticism, which explicates the central meanings, values, symbols, and ideologies in cultural artifacts by attending to the formal properties of imaginative literature texts ã- such as style, verbal imagery, characterization, narrative structure and point of view, and other formal elements of the artifact. From the 1960s on, however, literary-formalist textual analysis has been enhanced by methods derived from semiotics, a system for investigating the creation of meaning not only in written languages but also in other, nonverbal codes, such as the visual and auditory languages of film and TV.
Audience Reception and Use of Media Culture
All texts are subject to multiple readings depending on the perspectives and subject positions of the reader. Members of distinct genders, classes, races, nations, regions, sexual preferences, and political ideologies are going to read texts differently, and cultural studies can illuminate why diverse audiences interpret texts in various, sometimes conflicting, ways. It is indeed one of the merits of cultural studies to have focused on audience reception in recent years and this focus provides one of its major contributions, though there are also some limitations and problems with the standard cultural studies approaches to the audience.
Toward a Cultural Studies that is Critical, Multicultural, and Multiperspectival
To avoid the one-sidedness of textual analysis approaches, or audience and reception studies, I propose that cultural studies itself be multiperspectival, getting at culture from the perspectives of political economy, text analysis, and audience reception, as outlined above. Textual analysis should utilize a multiplicity of perspectives and critical methods, and audience reception studies should delineate the wide range of subject positions, or perspectives, through which audiences appropriate culture. This requires a multicultural approach that sees the importance of analyzing the dimensions of class, race and ethnicity, and gender and sexual preference within the texts of media culture, while studying as well their impact on how audiences read and interpret media culture.
Conclusion:
In short, a cultural studies that is critical and multicultural provides comprehensive approaches to culture that can be applied to a wide variety of artifacts from pornography to Madonna, from MTV to TV news, or to specific events like the 2000 U.S. presidential election (Kellner 2000), or media representations of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and the U.S. response. Its comprehensive perspectives encompass political economy, textual analysis, and audience research and provide critical and political perspectives that enable individuals to dissect the meanings, messages, and effects of dominant cultural forms. Cultural studies is thus part of a critical media pedagogy that enables individuals to resist media manipulation and to increase their freedom and individuality. It can empower people to gain sovereignty over their culture and to be able to struggle for alternative cultures and political change. Cultural studies is thus not just another academic fad, but can be part of a struggle for a better society and a better life.
Work Cited
- "Cultural Studies, Multiculturalism, and Media Culture." IvyPanda, 30 Aug. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/cultural-studies-multiculturalism-and-media-culture/.
- "How Does Media Influence Culture and Society?" IvyPanda, 1 Aug. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/how-our-culture-is-affected-by-the-media/.
- Kellner, Douglas . "CULTURAL STUDIES, MULTICULTURALISM, AND MEDIA CULTURE." https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/SAGEcs.htm. pages.gseis.ucla.edu. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022.
- "Department of Communication Arts." https://commarts.wisc.edu/graduate/media-cultural-studies/. commarts.wisc.edu. Accessed 5 Nov. 2022.
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