How to Do Media and Cultural Studies

Jane Stokes

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781446289471
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Second Edition of this student favourite takes readers step-by-step through the theories, processes and methods of each stage of research, from how to create a research question to designing the project and writing it up. It gives students a clear sense of how their own work relates to broader scholarship and inspires understanding of why studying the media matters.

Now 20% bigger, new features include:

• Brand new chapters on the how and why of researching media and culture

• All new case studies spotlighting the international media landscape

• Online readings showing how methods get used in real research

• Essential new material on ethnography, digital content analysis, online surveys and researching blogs.

Perfect for students of all ranges, How to Do Media and Cultural Studies continues to provide the clearest and most accessible guide to media and cultural studies as students embark on their own research.

PART 1

THINKING, THEORY AND PRACTICE

Part 1: Thinking, Theory and Practice, provides some context for the subsequent discussion of research methods in Part 2. Media, communication and cultural studies are all fields of study which focus on a very broad topic: the cultural and mediated world. These are not disciplines in the sense of having a single focus of analysis. For example, psychology is about the study of the mind; history, the study of the past; or English literature, the study of texts. Our areas of study are topics which encompass the diversity of all of these and many other fields besides. One of the exciting consequences of the renowned inter-disciplinarity of media, communication and cultural studies is a promiscuous attitude towards research methods. During your studies you are likely to come across work which uses many methods of research such as focus groups, semiotics or economic case studies of businesses. This plurality of approaches may seem overwhelming when you come to write your dissertation and find that you can do anything from textual analysis to industry interviews. This book serves to help you identify which research method is right for you – from how to choose a topic and design a question, to how to conduct your own research and present your dissertation.

It is precisely because the range of methods we can use is so diverse that we need to spend some time thinking about the underlying rationale behind research of any kind. Chapter 1 asks the reader to consider how we know anything about anything and addresses some fundamental questions related to the philosophy of knowledge or epistemology. Here we explore the social, cultural and temporal specificity of knowledge and justification in general terms, thinking about ideas of argumentation, proof and validity from a philosophical perspective. The ideas we discuss here are relevant to many areas of study and provide a generalist theoretical perspective to aspects of the philosophy of knowledge.

The second chapter of Part 1 provides a historical overview of the different approaches that have been taken by scholars of communication, culture and media. It presents a survey of some of the main research themes and offers a brief historical perspective to the methods and approaches discussed in subsequent chapters. Here we also consider the material nature of research – how and why research is undertaken, to help us understand the motivations behind much media and cultural work. The two chapters which make up Part 1 are intended to provide the reader with some fresh perspectives on the ideology and practicalities of research and analysis which, it is hoped, will encourage readers to produce original, creative and reflective work when they come to write their own dissertations. The following material is offered with the intention of empowering a new generation of researchers to create new paradigms of research and ways of thinking by which we can investigate the exciting changes in our cultural world.

1	HOW DO WE KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT ANYTHING?

Aims and Objectives

• In the following, we explore the basis of epistemology, or the science of knowing, by considering how we know anything about anything.
• In order to investigate the relationship between technologies of knowing and epistemology we consider four broad ‘ways of knowing’:
  • the ‘oral’ tradition and pre-literate ways of knowing;
  • the classical, Aristotelian system of logic and rationality;
  • the way of knowing associated with conventional scientific knowledge or ‘modernity’; and finally
  • post-modernism and discourse analysis.
• We offer some suggestions for further reading.
• Some follow-up activities are provided for you to take your studies further.

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter we look at how we know anything about anything, exploring issues around epistemology, logic and validity to investigate changing ideas of knowledge and understanding. Looking at the philosophical bases underlying ideas of knowledge and research will help you to appreciate the different traditions of epistemology which operate within the study of media and culture. We consider some of the key questions from philosophy: What constitutes knowledge? What is the relationship between knowledge and truth? How do we make a logical argument? How do we know whether a statement is ‘true’ or ‘false’? What is the relationship between reality and representation? How do we persuade other people that we are telling the truth? How does a researcher prove anything? These are questions about epistemology – the study of knowledge. They are the fundamental bases of how we know anything about anything.

The question of epistemology is crucial for students of media and culture as there is no prescribed method for us to use; no single way of knowing about media and culture. The research methods we use are borrowed from other disciplines, among them anthropology, economics, literary studies, psychology, political science and sociology. There are researchers studying the media in business schools, art departments, humanities and social science departments. The fact is that the way we know about media and cultural studies is not especially unique – many of the approaches we use could be applied to a host of other topics.

We could define research as the process of investigating the world to discover new things, and the goal of any research project is to add to our knowledge. Before we get down to the details of how to conduct your own research, this book begins by asking: What is knowledge?

WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?

This question goes to the heart of understanding any kind of research. Today we scarcely think about the processes by which we come to know anything – ‘It all seems so obvious; you just know’, I hear you say! However, one of the key ideas of communications, cultural and media studies is that it is precisely those things which seem most obvious – those things that we take for granted and that we don’t question – these are the very things which we most urgently need to unpack. For it is precisely the ideas which seem ‘obvious’, ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ that exercise the greatest power over us; this is where the essential truths of our society rest – in the way we think about the world. Our world view is embedded in the taken-for-granted ideas which attach to the concepts of reality, truth and knowledge. An appreciation of the ontological construction of knowledge itself is a prerequisite to understanding the research processes in any field. In the areas of communications, media and cultural studies, where matters of epistemology and ontology are central to so much of our endeavour, this is so much more urgent. In a field of study where there seem to be so many paradigms for research, and so many apparently equally valuable modes of study, it is important that we spend some time thinking about what constitutes knowledge and the various paradigms of knowledge and epistemology.

HOW DO YOU BUILD A TOASTER?

Knowledge comes in many forms. We all have ‘common knowledge’ – for example, that you need to connect the plug on your toaster to a power socket to make it work. But how many of us have the more ‘specialist knowledge’ that we would need if we were to build our own toaster? As societies have become larger and more complex, so the kinds of knowledge that each individual needs has changed. Work has become more specialized so that we each perform a relatively narrow range of tasks; the economic system in which we live allows us to pay someone else to make our toasters for us, while we earn money from performing other, perhaps equally specialized, tasks. We have acquired the necessary knowledge to be able to prepare our food using electronic technologies like toasters. However, we do all still ‘know’ that you can cook food using fire. Even though we may use a toaster every day, we do know that we could make toast under a grill or even over an open fire. The kinds of knowledge which we possess, about cooking and about many other things, differ through time. New technologies of food preparation, such as the grindstone or the blender, the microwave or the toaster, enable us to make different kinds of food, even rendering edible some things which were not so before, and changing how we think about food. Despite the fact that in the modern world we may use sophisticated technology and ‘know-how’ in conducting ordinary food preparation, we do still know that you can pick an apple off a tree and eat it when it is ripe. The old ways of knowing do not disappear: they linger still in our social memory or as the principles behind the new technology; they are there for us to draw on when needs must.

We can consider the different ways of knowing in general as somewhat analogous to technologies of food preparation. At different times, in different situations, particular kinds of knowledge are necessary and useful; it is great to be able to cook the perfect soufflé, but it is not going to help you prepare a meal on a camping trip.

FOUR WAYS OF KNOWING

In terms of culture and communication, we might consider how different kinds of media used for the distribution and dissemination of knowledge constitute different ‘technologies of knowledge’; thus, in the great evolutionary history of humankind, the technology which is deemed to separate humans from the beasts – language – is the single most important technology of all. The ability to verbally communicate is the foundation of every subsequent media technology. There are different ways of knowing which are in some regards successive, making older ways redundant: the keyboard may have replaced the pen for most writing tasks, but we will be teaching children to form the letters of the alphabet for a long time to come. We will see in the following discussion how different ‘ways of knowing’ are associated with successive media technologies and how they each play an important part in the processes by which we know anything about media and culture today.

In the following sections of this chapter we will look at four different ‘ways of knowing’. First of all, we will consider the ways of knowing associated with the ‘oral tradition’ – the epistemological foundations of the earliest civilizations before the introduction of writing (Ong, 1982). The second way of knowing, as writing was being introduced, is based on the know-how developed in the ancient Greek agora – a public space for decision-making by debate; we refer to this rhetorical method as ‘classical’. The birth of science and the spread of print technology are associated with our third period, the ‘modern’, which laid the foundation of many of our contemporary modes of discourse. To describe a fourth way of knowing, following from the disillusion with the modern, we use the term ‘post-modern’. These four broad ‘ways of knowing’ are very general and open to challenge, but are posed as four schematic categories which provide a useful way of thinking about how different epistemological systems operate. Although presented successively, it will become clear that they are cumulative, so that, for example, the principles of story-telling that we can identify in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales, are present in the highly complex media form of the Hollywood film and in the sophisticated oral culture of rap battles in Los Angeles street culture (see, for example, Alim, 2006). All four ways of knowing are used in media and cultural studies today; yet they are rarely expressly acknowledged. I contend that a lack of awareness of these different epistemological positions often blinds us to the insights of others working in our own field. Without an understanding of the specific ways of knowing that different scholars in our field employ, we are destined to be divided amongst ourselves at a time when the need to respect academic diversity seems to have never been more urgent.

WAYS OF KNOWING IN ORAL CULTURES

Let us consider first the way of knowing associated with the ‘oral tradition’ – a term used to refer to linguistic communication of the past before societies became ‘literate’, or to refer to societies which have yet to embrace writing. When we talk of ‘oral societies’ we are referring to societies in which history, science and belief are relayed exclusively through oral accounts and stories, passed down through generations. These are societies where the only repository of knowledge, culture and history is in the memory of its people. We can identify a strong oral tradition today when we tell a joke or recount a family story; it is present in our music – from classical lieder to contemporary rap. All human societies rely on language as a means of communication, and we do still learn a great deal about the world through oral forms.

Before we had computers, or books, or even writing, the main form of cultural transmission (of history, science or knowledge) was spoken language; there are some societies today where this is still the case. Walter Ong describes ‘primary oral cultures’ – those cultures ‘untouched by writing’ – and contrasts them with literate cultures (Ong, 1982: 31). An oral culture is bound by memory – human knowledge goes as far as one person can remember. The skill of remembering is highly valued in oral societies; the griots of Africa, for example, developed sophisticated mnemonic strategies for extending their memory and for being able to recall lengthy genealogies and stories (Ong, 1982).

There are still very high levels of illiteracy in some parts of the world; many millions of people can’t read or write. Many millions, too, who grew up in an oral society, have had to adjust to the literate world. One such person is the Ugandan President, Yoweri K. Museveni, who describes his education growing up as a member of the nomadic Banyankole Bahima people of Southern Uganda during the 1940s and 1950s in his essay about ‘The Power of Knowledge’ (Museveni, 2005). The culture of the people, the skills, the morality and the history were all transmitted from one generation to the next via speech (Museveni, 2005). Museveni describes how each evening the elders would tell stories for the children and adults. These ‘oftarama’, he says, are evidence of the way in which memory is so important to oral societies. He says of these evenings:

[They] were not only for the children to listen but for the adults to refresh and keep up the collective knowledge of the tribe, for example by scraping back together details remembered by different persons. (Museveni, 2005: 12)

Knowledge, among the Banyankole Bahima, as among other oral cultures, is verbally transmitted and is collective.

This point is also made by Bert Hamminga in his discussion of the differences between African epistemology and Western ideas of knowledge (Hamminga, 2005a). Hamminga argues that in Ugandan society knowledge is not something to be acquired by an individual, but is something shared by a community. People speak, not of what ‘I know’, but of what ‘we know’. According to African epistemology, Hamminga tells us, ‘the clan or the tribe is the knowing subject’ (2005b: 59). There is a great respect for authority, but authority is something which is also shared by the whole community. He uses an analogy from nature to describe African attitudes to truth and power:

All power, all truth comes up from the roots of the family tree, the dead ancestors, to the trunk, the elders, and passes up to the parents and children, the branches, leaves and flowers. (Ibid.: 61)

Power is not something external to us, nor is it associated with an individual; it is within the people as a collective. In pre-literate African society togetherness is a quality valued so highly that agreement is not just expected, it is required. Everyone has their own part to play and a group does not move without consensus – if someone veers from a point of view taken by the group, the rest of the group either wait until that person changes their mind or they all decide to follow; no action is taken until consensus is achieved. The idea that one would develop an argument to support a case is just foolishness: ‘From the African point of view, arguments are a sign of weakness, of lack of power and vitality … truth is not argued for but felt’ (Ibid.: 61). And here Hamminga makes the point that the Bantu word for ‘felt’ is also ‘heard’ – knowledge is understood as something which you hear, which comes from a community acting with one voice.

Daniel Everett is a cultural anthropologist whose work provides an illustration of the distinctive quality of the epistemology of oral cultures. Everett first encountered the Pirahã people of Amazonian Brazil as a Christian missionary, intending to translate the Bible into the indigenous language. He spent several years studying the language and culture of the Pirahã, an experience he recounts in his book, Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes (Everett, 2008). Living among the Pirahã he made many friends who helped him learn their language, but he made no converts and abandoned Christianity. Everett identifies several examples of the relationship between language and epistemology which challenged his literate, Western and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART 1: THINKING, THEORY AND PRACTICE
• PART 2: METHODS OF ANALYSIS
• PART 3: PRESENTING YOUR WORK
• Glossary
• References
• Index